‘Sing the song of sorrow, but let good prevail’. The terrible beauty of a book that while looking for the ‘perfect therapeutic mantra in the face of suicidal despair’, sometimes finds itself ‘somehow taking over from the central actors the role of communicating a tragic subjectivity and trying to find relief in psychological candour’.[1] This blog tries to explain the sometimes hidden depth of a book that is beautiful only because of its ability to deny its primary practical purpose: to give practical guidance to survivors of the suicide of a loved one. It talks about Edith Hall’s (2024) Facing Down The Furies: Suicide, The Ancient Greeks, and Me, New Haven & London, Yale University Press.
There is no doubt something of concern in anyone finding an author’s work to be at its most fulfilling where it seems to act in contradiction to its stated intentions, and that may be more the case when the author lays open some incidents in her own and past family’s experience of suicidal ideation, planning and completion. But that is where I am with this splendid, and in my eyes beautiful book of open discussion of the most taboo of subjects: suicide. It is why too I use it to answer this prompt. In the photograph above, I find a picture of Edith Hall as a writer as I have always felt I sensed in her writing. On the surface is a prose that looks directly at its object, noting its grandeur but also its humour (I refer to the sleeping feral cat). Behind her the shadow of the Acropolis casts the city of Athens in deep shade, as if night had descended out of the very ferocity of the sun – a symbol of the blinding and fragmenting, perhaps even Dionysiac elements of the tragedies brought out into the light of an Apollonian sun. I found that, even in a book where I examined the shadows Hall casts by her work only in myself, as a naïve reader, in her book on class and the classics in British working-class educational history (use the link to access that blog if you wish but it is not so pertinent to my theme).
Edith Hall’s work has always been focused on the excluded from history – even in her study of the classics. Her doctoral thesis should still be a beginning text in a more open way of looking at the identity of Classical Greece, for it attempts to look closely at the sun that is Greek identity through the things that identity cast to its margins. Its title itself tells us much: Inventing The Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy, in which heroic histories speak through the reflected image of cruel and violent colonization, or intra-city political hegemony in Greece (for if ‘barbarians’ are so often ‘portrayed as the opposite of the ideal Greek’, so are the Thebans as the opposite of the ideal Athenian).[2] In this book, autobiographical only tangentially it seems, she tells incidentally and vis-à-vis her mental state, of her unhappiness with the ‘social side’ of the ‘university’ community’ at Oxford and her preference her friends who were ‘local Oxfordshire people, mostly met through left-wing political activism; … I drank in the working-class pubs in Cowley Road’.
The attachment to ‘the barbarian’ and / or the underdog, which Hall’s ‘barbarians’ in her first book really were, shone through: despite ‘the elocution lessons compulsory for scholarship pupils at Nottingham High School for Girls’.[3] There is a sense of this social preference creating subliminal alienation from a family that hang on to relatively high social status in provincial terms, despite her great grandfather’s rise from working-class origins to being an icon of bourgeois self-reliance against a class of its origin whose ‘poverty-stricken’ he would later treat in ways ‘far from “lenient”’ when he assessed ‘who among them deserved parochial support’. The working-class man, at least as a servant of the local state, could treat members of the class he had clawed himself out of as ‘being debased and ignorant’. [4]
Of course my reading of this is highly subjective and fills in many cracks in the account as Hall actually gives it. The main aim of chapters 4 to 7 is after all to, in large and with huge divergences that to me matter, tell the story of succeeding generations of her family in terms of their completed (‘successful’) suicides in terms of her great-grandfather and his daughter-in-law, her grandmother and of the relationship of her mother and herself to the ideation of suicide and their human response to it. In each chapter, analogues are found of the primary human subject of it to one or more works of Classical literature (one in which she made a career writing about and in sponsoring their reception as relevant to our and her time, such as her collaboratively edited book on Medea in Performance 1500 – 2000 published in 2000. A simple listing will show how that works:
- Chapter 4 tells of the life and suicide of Robert Masterton in terms of Sophocles great tragedy Ajax, which allows many reflections on the fragile egos o apparently heroic men, but with the purpose of posing alternatives to suicide and hiding one’s plans for it.
- Chapter 5 tells of Edith Henderson (née Henderson) in part through The Women of Trachis and Antigone, but with a major divergence into consideration of Goethe’s birthing of the Romantic myth of suicide in The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the major failures of men are reflected on the women in their lives.
- Chapter 6 tells of Edith’s daughter, Brenda Hall (née Masterton) who was Edith Hall’s mother, naming her daughter after her mother almost in atonement, in terms of (mainly) Alcestis, and the failure of men unable to give up their social power.
- Chapter 7 tells the ‘Author’s Tale’ sing analogies with Philoctetes and Heracles Mad, with a major divergence into the life of poet Stevie Smith.
The first 3 chapters give the rationale of the book, which are comprehensive in explaining the contexts of the modern study of suicide across a number of domains of science and therapy but also introduce the rationale of using classical texts to address these matters, especially in Chapter 3, with a major concentration on the way tragedy can form a ‘run in the family’, starting with Euripides prequel Iphigenia in Aulis (it isn’t really a prequel but you get my point – it tells a story less fully told by Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ The Oresteia), where a form of negative social experience cycles through generations and decades of the same family and is associated with the unappeased and misunderstood Furies, which for the Athenian patriot Aeschylus eventually get channelled into good as The Eumenides in the Athenian state. The analogy with the books placement of suicide is there nailed almost completely, with various explanations for why runs occur, from DNA to the kind of imitative reinforced behaviour that passes between generations as elders model life for the younger to the faulty handling of family dynamics that never stops because it is never addressed and seen as fundamental to family self-definition.[5]We will return to the play the first play of The Oresteia, namely Agamemnon later and to the function of its chorus.
I want first though to try and state why I think this book a divided one, in which stated intentions are often belied, to its advantage by its beautiful humane content made up of the selective biographies (selective in that they concentrate on suicide as process and act) of the author’s family and self In an recent portentous blog, I recorded that I had just began reading (and had only just completed Chapter 1 by then) the book I summarise here
Having fun, leisure or rest is not a ‘waste of time’ unless spent in forms which even the ones who do so know JUST to filling up empty time, that remains in reflection ’empty’ time. However, even some of the latter moments can be seen as full if they educate in concepts of what fulfils and what empties life of value (or spirit if you like – it is not a word I am comfortable with). For life only becomes so in its reflected nuance and is why I suppose Socrates felt an ‘unexamined life’ to be an empty one and to be avoided, even, if it has to be so, with hemlock.
I will probably return to my last statement for I am just reading Professor Edith Hall’s new book (2024), Facing Down the Furies, which aims to be a book about the ethics of completed suicide, including those in her family, and excoriates Socrates for not taking the option of life in being found guilty of crimes against the state in Athens and drinking hemlock to complete his self-execution, that Aristotle did.
But that will wait. Reflected life is never wasted, whatever the intensity of the reflection, and even when the reflection has negative affect attached to it. For life is not just meant to be lived but lived in the spirit of the word not just its letter.[6]
My assumptions about the book may be justified by statements of authorial intention about the book’s purpose that continue throughout. Hall often seems to tie the purpose of the book to her earlier book on Aristotle that ‘offered a practical guide to self-scrutiny’. That book (Aristotle’s Way) is by far my least favourite of Hall’s work, perhaps because of what I feel to be its rational pragmatism in the conduct of asking questions about psychology and behaviour and I took this as what this book continued to do if with a focus on suicide. Hence, I felt wary of the comparison Hall makes between Socrates and Aristotle’s practical approach, focused on the greater good of community, to life (and death). It seemed to prefigure an intention aimed at a wider and less subjective grasp of suicide as act and process, a kind of therapeutic rationalism based on communally asserted truths. I felt uncomfortable with Hall’s direct comparison of responses to what both Socrates and Aristotle saw as state oppression leading to their charging and sentence by a state afraid of their unbounded thought. Aristotle chose the option of exile, rather than state-sponsored ‘autothanasia’ (I like this term for ‘bringing death on oneself’ in the book to characterise the subject in the thought of Greek philosophers), both options offered to both men, if in rather different circumstances.[7]
It seemed to me then as if Hall oversimplified the difference in the circumstances of both men, the constitution of the political state at each time and the comparative stable resources open to each man to build a life in exile, though she mentions the delightful villa available to Aristotle. Moreover, this seemed convenient to the author in order to render the book a simple comparison of more self-centred male thinking (in Socrates) and thought about those who survived the person who took their own life in Aristotle, although the quotation she uses to support this from The Nichomachean Ethics is ambiguous to say the least, saying that suicide is an ‘injustice to the state’.[8] On this and on apocryphal stories of Aristotle’s later life she pursues his example as a justification of a book that considers all she knows about suicide in Ancient thought (not just Greek thought – she contrasts Job and Confucius),[9] the continuing history of the idea in Western history with much dwelling on the Romantic movement, which takes in the favourable assessment of rational suicide in Montaigne, its rebuttal by Rousseau, and a tradition of philosophy that returned to favouring its acceptability as a response in certain circumstances in Richard Burton, John Donne, David Hume, the romantic movement from Goethe onward and the existentialist favouring of it as an existential choice in Nietzsche and Sartre.[10] Stopping to consider sociology, she discusses Durkheim and followers.[11]
However, the intention of the book turns out to be not so simple as I had imagined. When it delves into the lessons of literature which are often treated as discussions between real people rather than textual constructs, its remit is wider. In Euripides’ Hippolytus suicide is discussed in terms of understanding the subjective grounds of Phaedra’s suicide, when her lust for her stepson leads to his death. We have to understand, she says (and Phaedra seems a living individual in her account) that ‘Phaedra had already felt suicidal for weeks’ given the exposure of her secret love, that she was concerned with the effect of her continued life on her sons reputation, and the emotional wreckage and suicidal ideation of her husband, Theseus. Meanwhile Euripides makes it clear that to have died by one’s own hand is, as Theseus says, to have ‘destroyed more than yourself’. Euripides balances it all she tells us but come out for continued life, like Aristotle not Socrates.[12]
The use of the plays as a dramatised therapy is even more apparent in the treatment of Heracles Mad, where Thesus, representing Amphitryon and Theseus, representing Athenian values. Heracles’ adoptive human father becomes a kind of guru therapist, together with a supportive community (the Chorus of men disabled by age but wise). See this excerpt:
The suicidal crisis recedes. Heracles’ adoptive father and best friend have seen him through it. They have deployed a combination of nonjudgementalism, physical support, affirmations of loyalty, acknowledgement of the scale of his suffering, disdain for the superstitious shunning of those involved in violence, expressions of deep sympathy, reminders of how much he is loved and needed, and extensive quiet listening.[13]
It is all good advice based on sound mutual communion rather than that arrogant beast of modernity, self-help. Its aim so to stand against Goethe. It invokes though the need to embrace suicidal ideation and not to shy away from it, as likely to lead to more rather less suicide as a depressed person is aided to overcome the power of habituated and deeply patterned thoughts. Hall is at her best in defending her own suicidal ideation, seeing its processing as a defence against the movement into actually planning a suicidal act. Hence, I think the Romantic articulation of suicide is not condemned. At one point Hall shows that contemplation of the suicide of Werther by Charlotte, the practical Romantic soul of The Sorrows of Young Werther, might have saved her grandmother Edith Masterton as she embroidered the figure. Tennyson, who Hall clearly loves, is not condemned for rehearsing the thoughts of a failed suicidal man, whose wife succeeded in completion by drowning, in his 1881 poem Despair. [14] In that poem the hero contrasts the ‘transient trouble of drowning’ with “the pains / Of the hellish heat of a wretched life rushing back thro’ the veins’.[15] For even in 1881, the poem could be read, as in this excerpt from an article in that year’s The Spectator says as dismissive of modern suicidal tendency:
Doubtless, then, Mr. Tennyson’s delineation of despair is meant as a medicine for despair ; and a powerful medicine it is. But none the less it shows Mr. Tennyson in the poetic attitude in which he has, to our mind, always been at his best, not reflecting the “confident optimism” of any day, but rather “rowing hard against the stream” of false assumptions and degrading creeds.[16]
All that aside, I feel that the aim of achieving a practical guide is established mainly in the insistence that suicide is not est thought about as a moral issue for individuals, depressed or otherwise, alone, but is a social subject, one concerning everyone. Why then was I antagonistic at first to its message. Looking back at the early book I think it was because of this phrase applied to Socrates in consideration of his ability not to think of the effect of his suicide on others, his wife Xanthippe and ‘little children’, besides I might add the countless young men, like Alcibiades, who adored the rather ugly man. Hall assesses the situation with respect to his family alone, summing up her response to the episodes of his behaviour to them by the simple statement: ‘I was appalled …’. [17] There is something wrong in saying ‘appalled’ that is so unlike the balanced views taken from the drama above, which at least try to understand the actors of suicide without overt judgementalism like Theseus and Amphitryon with Heracles. And this is where I find a deep structure of thought in the work that in fact makes it much more beautiful, and human in its possibly intended, at a deep level, crack in its structure.
Hall, and not only in the chapter about ger own suicidal ideation and failed attempts at withdrawal, is a woman of sensibility, with strong responses to the music with which she peppers the book.[18] She realises the pain of class alienation in her great-grandfather as a driving but repressed motive, the problems of a necessary, but bad, marriage of her grandmother. Her hero is a man who did not complete suicide but might have done, her grandmother’s brother Jock, who excised his pain and trauma in theatre as an impresario of drama.[19] Her issue I think comes with the generation that reacted to suicide irrationally, in a way she attempts to redress. Her mother Brenda was obviously formidable, but when you finish the book, you realise from whence that word ‘appalled’ describing Hall’s reaction to Socrates come from, for Brenda was, though so moulded by family experience, had an ‘intense rage’ against suicide as an idea or the suicidal as social actors. Her response to her first cousin’, Alexander Adam Kidd’s (‘wicked Cousin Alex’), suicide made her fear any association to it and the place it occurred, Thame, and was projected onto Edith Hall when unknowingly she and her husband moved there, after securing her first job. Her hatred of suicide was pathological but nevertheless , and perhaps because of that she gave her own daughter her own mother’s name despite the latter’s death by suicide, Edith. Hall writes about that movingly about this, as if, that act of naming was another means by which family curses run in families.[20]
As I think about that I think I over-reacted to Hall’s use of the word ‘appalled’ but I also sense within the book this deeper sense of contradiction. I refer to it in my blog title. There I cite this, regarding the search in the book for an unattainable (in my view given the variants) ‘perfect therapeutic mantra in the face of suicidal despair’. For in describing the Chorus in Agamemnon she says it finds itself ‘somehow taking over from the central actors the role of communicating a tragic subjectivity and trying to find relief in psychological candour’.[21] Correctly I note that is the feel of the narrator of this book, who instead of commentary often takes over the role of the actors in Chapters 4 to 7, including that autobiographical imago of herself, and dramatises the subjectivity that she otherwise, perfectly correctly in ant any mantra on suicide, facilitates the suicidal consciousness in taking on a wider social perspective. I feel moments of pain in this book where the Furies escape from the flaw in their role as Eumenides – helpers of the state to regulate its function.
And it does sensitively but not without irony against actors. Robert the great-grandfather drowns in a huge seaside pool, Seafield Pond. Hall returns to it to see it surrounded by new life. But she admits that nobody ‘fully understands why another person chooses suicide’.[22] Her grandmother Edith might have had the grandeur of Evadne in Euripides Suppliant Women who decides to hurl herself ‘from this rock, / leaping into the fire, / mingling my remains / with my husband in the gleaming flames’.[23] Instead she leaps from a hotel window not high enough to kill her and, wounded, dies of exposure. There is that of bathos here though only communicated in the everyday story of the fate of that hotel and a photograph of its inadequate height.
Death is everywhere and death is common and responses to it are multiple. Sometimes there is, in the circumstances of another somethings that cannot be understood but neither can they be rendered awesome. This is why this is such a good book. Its only theme is ‘to hold despairing loved ones close and dissuade them from voluntary destruction’, but not by minimising their experience as they live through it or ignoring how they see it. Hence, she thinks the wisdom of Agamemnon’s chorus, which Hall translates: ‘‘Sing the song of sorrow, but let good prevail’. I still can’t, however, really think that Aristotle really helped to get us here, and prefer the Hall who performs drama in multiple voices.
With love
Steven xxxx
[1] Edith Hall’s (2024: 174) Facing Down The Furies: Suicide, The Ancient Greeks, and Me, New Haven & London, Yale University Press.
[2] Edith Hall (1989: 1) Inventing The Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy Oxford, The Clarendon Press
[3] Cited Hall (2024) op.cit: 178
[5] For explained examples of genetic explanations see ibid: 23
[6] https://livesteven.com/2024/06/24/wasted-time-is-the-time-you-spend-not-appreciating-having-time-to-live-life-with-varied-pace-and-productivity-including-the-unproductive-moments-of-rest-and-recuperation/
[7] For autothanasia see Hall (2024) op.cit: 11
[8] Ibid: 36
[9] Ibid: 28
[10] Ibid: 40 – 52
[11] Ibid: 56f.
[12] Ibid:; 66- 69
[13] Ibid: 189
[14]:ibid: 176
[15] See the poem, these lines from Stanza XI at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tiresias,_and_Other_Poems/Despair
[16] Anon (1881) ‘MR. TENNYSON’S POEM ON DESPAIR. In The Spectator (5th Nove. 1881, 9-10) Available at:
https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/5th-november-1881/9/-mr-tennysons-poem-on-despair
[17] Hall 2024, op.cit: 30
[18] Ibid: 199f
[19] Ibid: 120f.
[20] Ibid: 194
[21] ibid: 174
[22] ibid: 102.
[23] Ibid: 69f.
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