November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  With this “rational treatment,” the antisuicide laws were finally erased. If suicide was the product of psychological disturbance, punishment was obviously inappropriate. In England, although a statute prohibiting burial of suicides in the highway was passed in 1823, confiscation of property was not abolished until 1870, and attempted suicide was punishable by up to two years in prison well into the twentieth century. When attempters regained consciousness in the hospital, they usually found a policeman at their bedside, waiting to interview them. Until World War I, suicide attempters were often sent to prison, particularly after a second or third attempt. The sentence was considered to be, as one prosecutor observed, “in the interests of the defendant’s health”—behind bars he might be prevented from trying again. By the 1950s, prosecution and imprisonment were rare “unless there is some outstanding feature only a prosecution might cure, or if there have been repeated attempts at self-destruction,” as Lilian Wyles explained in her 1952 book, A Woman at Scotland Yard. “A severe lecture on their stupidity is mostly delivered to the offenders by a senior officer.” In 1955, of 5,220 attempted suicides known to the police, only 535 came to trial. Most of these were discharged, fined, or placed on probation. Forty-three were sentenced to prison, the majority for less than six months. In 1961, under pressure from doctors, lawyers, and clergymen, the Suicide Act was passed, abolishing the law that made suicide a crime and attempted suicide a misdemeanor. Shortly afterward, London’s Ministry of Health declared that attempted suicide was to be regarded as a medical and social problem, and cases were to be referred to a psychiatrist. In the United States, only Texas and Oklahoma retain laws against attempted suicide, and these have not been enforced for many years.

  Suicide remains a sin in Roman Catholic canonical law. “Intentionally causing one’s own death, or suicide, is therefore equally as wrong as murder; such an action on the part of a person is to be considered as a rejection of God’s sovereignty and loving plan,” reiterated the Vatican’s 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia. “Furthermore, suicide is also often a refusal of love for self, the denial of the natural instinct to live, a flight from the duties of justice and charity owed to one’s neighbor, to various communities or to the whole of society—although, as generally recognized, at times there are psychological factors present that can diminish responsibility or even completely remove it.” Except for the last phrase, the declaration essentially echoes the words of St. Augustine fifteen centuries earlier. But the verdict of insanity that is still invoked to ensure suicides a Christian burial now seems a firm belief rather than a tender mercy. (And even that verdict is not always sufficient. A few members of the clergy still refuse to officiate at funeral services for a suicide, and as late as 1969 a pregnant woman who killed herself in Chicago was denied full religious rites.) The fierce moral debate that dominated the discussion of suicide for centuries has quieted. The handful of twentieth-century theologians who have written on suicide plow familiar ground—duty to God, state, and family—although most tend to emphasize the spiritual value of suffering rather than the sin of suicide.

  “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” began Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1940. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to the fundamental question of philosophy.” Apparently, few agree. In a 2,100-item bibliography on suicide covering the years 1897 to 1957, only twenty-five entries were listed under the category “Religious-Philosophical.” The rest were psychological, sociological, or medical titles. Yet the sociological study of suicide, too, has become increasingly muted. Although hundreds of studies have been published since Durkheim’s Le Suicide, the majority of them are reformulations of Durkheim’s work. In a variation on his theme of anomie, for example, Andrew Henry and James Short examined fluctuations in rates and concluded that people who are deeply involved with others are at low risk for suicide, while people who are isolated from meaningful relationships are at high risk. Sociologists Jack Gibbs and Walter Martin refined Durkheim’s concept of “social integration” into what they called “status integration.” Every individual, they said, belonged to several categories in which he played a clearly defined role. For instance, a man might belong to these statuses: male, black, plumber, married, and parent. The more frequently a person’s combination of statuses conformed to the combination common in the population to which he belonged, the higher his “status integration”—and the lower his chances of suicide. Departing from Durkheim, Jack Douglas, in The Social Meanings of Suicide, questioned the accuracy of suicide statistics, pointing out that suicide has many different definitions and meanings, and insisted that rather than sift through statistics to find those meanings, we try to “determine the meanings to the people actually involved.”

  The psychological study of suicide, too, has gradually been eclipsed by the biological. After Freud’s exploration of the unconscious, it was no longer possible to attribute suicide to simple causes such as poverty, loss of a job, or disappointment in love. Suicide was instead understood to be the end result of a complex variety of forces, conscious and unconscious. In Man Against Himself, psychoanalyst Karl Menninger offered an illustration:

  A wealthy man is one day announced as having killed himself. It is discovered that his investments have failed, but that his death provides bountiful insurance for his otherwise destitute family. The problem and its solution, then, seem simple and obvious enough. A man has bravely faced ruin in a way that benefits his dependents.

  But why should we begin our interpretations only at this late point in such a man’s life, the point at which he loses his wealth? Shall we not seek to discover how it came about that he lost it? And even more pertinently, shall we not inquire how he made it, why he was driven to amass money, and what means he used to gratify his compulsion, what unconscious and perhaps also conscious guilt feelings were associated with it and with the sacrifices and penalties its acquisition cost him and his family? And even those who have money and lose it do not in the vast majority of cases kill themselves, so we still do not know what this man’s deeper motives were for this particular act. All we can really see from such a case is how difficult and complex the problem becomes as soon as we take more than a superficial glance at the circumstances.

  As for the “deeper motives,” different theorists have emphasized different components. In Man Against Himself, Menninger cataloged a multitude of self-destructive activities from “chronic” or “partial” suicides such as alcoholism, asceticism, and antisocial behavior, to “focal suicides”—self-mutilation and purposive accidents. He interpreted all of these as expressions of the death instinct described by Freud. Menninger believed that three elements must be present for someone to express the most extreme self-destructive behavior by committing suicide: the wish to kill, the wish to be killed, and the wish to die.

  Freud’s “death instinct” has not been widely accepted by psychiatrists, however, and as an explanation for suicide it is so broad as to be virtually useless. “To say that the death instinct gains the upper hand over the life instinct,” observed Zilboorg, “is merely an elaborate way of stating that man does die or kill himself.” Freud’s formulation of depression, on the other hand, has become the basis for the psychoanalytic understanding of suicide, with the result that subsequent therapists—in the attempt to cast suicide as inverted murder—have underestimated other possible factors: grief, love, fear, hopelessness, rigid thinking, frustration, low self-esteem, magical belief in immortality, desire for reunion with a lost loved one. Even Zilboorg conceded that most suicides combine a strong unconscious hostility with an unusual inability to love others.

  Trying to reduce all suicides to a psychological common denominator has provided some far-fetched results. Psychiatrist Maurice Farber concocted a mathematical formula describing the likelihood of suicide for a given person, in which DEC represents Demands for the Exercising of Competence, DIG represents Demands for Interpersonal Giving, TS is Tolera
nce of Suicide, Su is Availability of Succorance, and HFT is Degree of Hope in the Future Time Perspective of the Society:

  Despite such painstaking logic, suicide remains an enigma. Indeed, despite the strides made in the biological understanding of self-destruction over the past several decades, most suicidologists would undoubtedly agree with Karl Menninger, a lifelong student of suicide who, at a conference in 1984, confessed, “It’s a durn mystery, you know, in spite of all we’ve written about it.”

  3

  THE RANGE

  OF SELF-DESTRUCTIVE

  BEHAVIOR

  I

  WINNER AND LOSER

  LIKE RICHARD CORY, the handsome, wealthy gentleman in the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem known to generations of high school English classes, Peter Newell seemed to lead an enviable life. At fifty-four he was a good-looking man with a full head of graying hair and a beard. He was a skier, golfer, and sailor. He held a well-paying job with a major corporation. He had two healthy and loving daughters and a two-year-old grandson. Amicably divorced for five years, he was living with an intelligent, attractive woman whom he planned to marry. Yet, like Richard Cory, who, “one calm summer night / went home and put a bullet through his head,” Peter Newell chose to end his seemingly enviable life. One Sunday evening, he sat down in his favorite chair, placed a gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. On his desk he left a note, in his careful, boyish hand:

  The world is composed of winners and losers. The winners get stronger and the losers get weaker. As the winners get stronger, the losers just shine their shoes, load their dishwashers, and walk the dog for them. . . . It’s innate, it’s inborn. It’ll never change, ever. Well, right on, winners, go ahead. But here’s one loser you won’t have to kick around anymore. I’m going to stop right now!

  The disbelief that follows almost every suicide was especially pronounced after the death of Peter Newell. The word used most often to describe him was gentleman. He had a firm moral sense—what a colleague at his funeral referred to as “the Quaker-like principles that dominated his life.” Suicide seemed the antithesis of those principles. Peter was also a truly “gentle” man who could not bear to argue or fight. It was difficult to believe that such a meticulous and considerate person had chosen such a violent way to die. Several people close to him, in fact, insisted that his death must have been a murder and, even after they saw his suicide note, were convinced he had been forced to write it.

  And yet, looking back, one can tease out several strands of discord and unhappiness that reached into his childhood. Peter was the second son of well-to-do parents who, he felt, considered him an unexciting “good little boy” as compared to his brilliant and difficult older brother. His father died when Peter was thirteen. Adolescence was an uncomfortable time for him. He was chubby and uncoordinated, and he often preferred to stay alone in his room at boarding school, listening to music and thinking melancholy thoughts instead of socializing with his classmates. At Yale, he was on the verge of flunking out when he enlisted in the navy. This, too, was a disappointment. It was the height of World War II, and Peter dreamed of being a fighter pilot, but he was such a fine aviator that the navy felt he was more valuable as an instructor, and he was sent to Texas to teach cadets how to fly. What was intended as a high compliment was experienced as a crushing blow.

  Peter was still in the navy when he married Barbara Spires, whom he had met on the beach in the Connecticut town where her family spent the summers. She was a student at Smith College and he was in the service, so much of their courtship was carried out by letter. They married after Barbara’s graduation. After Peter was discharged, he finished at Yale, graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering. Like so many young postwar couples, they settled down to raise a family in the suburbs.

  Outwardly, their early years in Darien, Connecticut, seemed an American idyll. They lived in a comfortable house with a half-acre yard in a quiet upper-middle-class neighborhood. Peter commuted to nearby Stamford, where he worked as a graphic engineer for Time Inc., while Barbara settled into her role as housewife and mother. Peter was a playful, affectionate father to their two daughters. At the beach he splashed for hours in the water with his children and later was a patient swimming teacher. His younger daughter remembers how each time she washed her hair, her father would sniff her head and tell her how good she smelled. A gifted carpenter and handyman, Peter loved to work around the house, and as his daughters watched him painstakingly rebuilding a boat, remodeling the den, or taking apart the engine of his MG, they were proud of their father’s skill.

  Two years after the birth of their eldest child, Ruth, another daughter, Kathy, was born severely retarded and deaf. Peter was devastated. Once when Kathy was very sick and crying uncontrollably, Barbara sat in one room praying for her to live, and Peter sat in another room praying for her to die. When Sally was born, Peter and his wife felt that they could not handle all three children, so when Kathy was five, her father drove her to an institution near Hartford. Peter brought Kathy home for the holidays, but she would pull out all the pots and pans and books and scream through the night. After a few years they no longer brought her home. Although Barbara continued to visit her, Peter refused. “Having a retarded child hit him fifty times harder than it did my mother,” Sally would recall, “because he had this thing about failure—he just couldn’t tolerate it—and I think he saw this as a failure on his part.”

  Although Kathy certainly needed help, institutionalizing her was consistent with Peter’s character. He preferred things to be as neat and controlled as an engineering problem. “We were not an emotional family,” says Sally. “There wasn’t much hugging and kissing, and crying was done in private. My father never wanted to hear negative things. If I came to him upset by something at school, he’d never sympathize, he’d always wonder if it was my fault and say, ‘Can’t you stop complaining?’” Peter himself rarely complained; he seemed to assume that any mishap was his fault. Nevertheless, what mistakes he made, he preferred to hide. “He would never tell us about his failures,” says Sally. “It would have been such a comfort if he had, especially when I started having problems at school. He was always on time, always prepared, always conscientious. He was the paragon, the brain, and we could never live up to him.” Not until she was in her twenties did Sally find out from her mother that her father had had troubles in school himself, that he had, in fact, nearly flunked out of Yale.

  One of the things Peter hid from his children was the growing tension in his marriage. He and Barbara had not known each other well before marrying. Gradually, they learned that they had little in common. Peter was active and athletic; his wife was uninterested in sports. On one of their first sailing trips, she got sick and asked to be taken ashore. She never went sailing again. He loved music of all kinds—jazz, classical, Broadway—and spent much of his time in the basement playing the harmonica or listening to records as he worked. She had little feeling for music. He loved to work outdoors; she spent much of her time indoors, reading. Their marriage roles divided along traditional lines. He handled the yard work; she handled the children. He handled the bills; she handled the cooking. He liked a clean house; she tended to be a little sloppy. He believed in disciplining the children; she was more permissive. He was acutely sensitive and occasionally depressed; she had little tolerance for his melancholic moods, and when she found him lying on the living-room floor, listening to sad music, just as he had as an adolescent, she would tell him with annoyance to get up.

  This tension, however, was kept under wraps. “I never saw my parents fight,” says Sally. “I always thought they deliberately postponed arguments until we were asleep.” Although they presented a smooth facade to the outside world, their marriage deteriorated to the point where they were staying together only for the sake of their children. Ruth was a quiet, well-mannered girl, but Sally was as wild and anarchic as her father was orderly and scrupulous. She had never done well in her studies, and in high school she w
as in danger of being kicked out. She skipped classes and sneaked out of the house at night to go to parties, driving with her friends across the border to New York where the drinking age was lower. She got heavily involved with drugs. At various times Sally was arrested for possession of marijuana, for shoplifting, and for criminal trespassing in a church.

  At first her father set curfews, devised elaborate reward systems based on her grades, picked her up at the police station, and paid her fines. He sent her to a psychiatrist, but Sally was sullen and resistant, and after six months she stopped going. When Peter forbade her to drive his car, she took her mother’s and immediately had an accident. He grounded her, but she would slip out her bedroom window. He lost his temper with her; she would scream right back. The more he tried to control her, the more out of control she became. It was the suburban parent’s nightmare, and Peter felt he was a failure as a father. “I don’t think he ever imagined something like this could happen,” says Sally. “He had mapped out his life, and this didn’t fit in.” When Sally turned seventeen, Peter seemed to give up. From then on she came and went as she pleased. When she ate meals with her parents, the air was thick with tension. “Once, my father had to pick me up at the station after the police had brought me in, thinking I was a runaway,” says Sally. “When he walked in, he looked like a beaten man.” One evening Sally passed her parents’ bedroom and saw her father weeping, his head down on the dresser. It was the first time she had ever seen him cry. But communication between them had broken down long ago, and she just walked by.

  Peter’s younger daughter was not the only source of pain in his life. That year, Time Inc. closed its Connecticut lab. Although he was told the company would find a position for him in its New York office, Peter was devastated. His wife remembers him coming home every night and crying. He became increasingly depressed, which put even more strain on their marriage. Although Peter and Barbara had planned to stay together until Sally finished high school, even that now seemed ludicrous, since she had dropped out. When Sally was eighteen, they divorced. In keeping with his lifelong feelings of guilt and responsibility, Peter asked for so little in the settlement that the lawyer they shared had to urge him to take more. Barbara kept the house and most of their possessions; Peter moved into a nondescript one-bedroom apartment in a modern high-rise in downtown Stamford.