To achieve chiaroscuro it is necessary to introduce some dark shading, so you may find today’s subject depressing.
You can start at the shallow end with Kingsley Amis’s first novel (1954, a bad vintage in France) Lucky Jim. The book is dedicated to Amis’s friend Philip Larkin and the eponymous Jim Dixon takes his name from Larkin’s address in Leicester; 12 Dixon Drive. Jim, you will recall, is a probationary lecturer in medieval history at an un-named provincial university. He is struggling to complete a thesis entitled The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485.
A real medieval historian and Oxford don, Alexander Murray, tackled an equally esoteric subject. After a lifetime of research it was published in three volumes as Suicide in the Middle Ages. The first volume was published in 1998 with Psalm 139, v 8, on the title page: “If I go down to Hell, thou art there also.” He was confronted with a central problem when researching suicides. They were often covered up as bringing shame on family members, it was often unclear if it had been suicide and and if it was deemed to be suicide burial was forbidden in consecrated ground. To reach any conclusion his research took him from Britain to France, Italy and Germany scouring chronicles, judicial records and other documents to demonstrate that suicides were prevalent in the Middle Ages. They included rich and poor, townsmen and peasants, men and women, married and unmarried. Their motives were physical and mental illness, chronic or sudden poverty, arrest, disgrace, heartbreak in love and depression – though the condition was unknown at the time.
Sandy Murray’s book is a scholarly tome and not a light read. Try Montaillou for that and I see that my copy of the latter is a present from Sandy. Here is what Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in the Sunday Times.
A fascinating sociological study of medieval life. But it is also far more. It is a Chaucerian galley of vivid medieval persons. No wonder it hs been a best-seller in France.
It seems very little has changed today. Until 1961 suicide was classified as a crime and the law still demands as a level of proof “beyond reasonable doubt” rather than on the “balance of probabilities”. As in the Middle Ages suicides are being covered up to spare family feelings. The stigma of suicide is preventing it being better understood. Our attitudes to so many things have changed but not in this area.
I suppose our reluctance to talk about suicide flows from a compound of the unpleasantness of death and of depression. I think we are getting much better about talking about the “good” death of assisted suicide, and are getting better about depression, too. Suicide will presumably take longer to come in from the cold because it is just so much about hopelessness. The suicide decided after all that either no-one wants to help him, or is able to. That becomes an indictment of the rest of us, and that variously saddens or angers us.
Also, I wonder if it isn’t the case that suicide runs in families (on the face of it, not a very adpative evolutionary trait). That thought alone would add to the stigma attached to it.
BTW: the medieval suicide book sounds marvellous. It reminds me of a very interesting study I read once, into the case histories of people who had thrown themselves into the Seine.
BTW: do you mind if I point yr readers at a new poem of mine about a boy-suicide in 1872? The poem may be no more than so-so, but the boy is worth commemorating, I think.
Do point me in the direction of your poem.
Sorry, I was being cute. The poem is on my website richarddnorth.com. Or Google “Richard D North + suicide poem”.
Thanks for bothering. Please please do not feel obliged to comment in the poem. Poetry is such a hit and miss affair. But I did want to memorialise the boy himself. So this is all about him, I hope.
I meant to write “comment on the poem..”