Let us practise to ‘Sing the song of sorrow, but let good prevail’. Advice from Edith Hall (2024) ‘Facing Down The Furies: Suicide, The Ancient Greeks, and Me’.
‘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 the Apollonian. 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 persuading the academy to adopt 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 for her friends who were ‘local Oxfordshire people, mostly met through left-wing political activism’. She concludes: ‘I drank in the working-class pubs in Cowley Road’.
The attachment to ‘the barbarian’ and / or the underdog (not a comment on Cowley by the way), 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. He made himself in contradiction to the class of his origin, whose ‘poverty-stricken’ members 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 other present 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. The latter included her great-grandfather and his daughter-in-law, her grandmother. But also important are the ‘uncompleted’ suicides: bound up in complex discourses that animate the underlying relationship between Edith and her mother. Also significant though is the relationship Edith herself had and has to the ideation of suicide and 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 of 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 own mother almost in atonement, in terms of (mainly) Alcestis, and the failure of men unable to give up their social power for their professed love.
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.
Ajax prepares his autothanasia
The first 3 chapters give the rationale of the book. It is a comprehensive rationale in that it explains the contexts of the modern study of suicide across a number of domains of science and therapy but also introduces reasons for using classical texts to address these matters, especially in Chapter 3, with a major concentration on the way tragedy can ‘run in the family’> It starts its case 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 unappeasable and misunderstood Furies, which for the Athenian patriot Aeschylus eventually get channelled into good spirits, The Eumenides, as guardians of the law that sustains the Athenian state.
The analogy in Euripides’ with the books placement of suicide is there nailed almost completely, with various explanations for why ‘run in families’ occur, from the contributions of DNA to the kind of imitative reinforced behaviour that passes between generations as elders model life for the younger and mishandle delicate family dynamics. Such ‘runs’ never stop until, and if, they are addressed directly. The worst fault laid down by the Greeks is to see such ‘runs’ as fundamental to family self-definition, whether in the House of Atreus or the House of Laius, wherein the ‘run’ stems from the eponymous figure naming each House doing unspeakable things to children [5] We will return to 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 Hall’s book is a divided one, in which stated intentions are often belied, though I think to its advantage (though admittedly I always find ambiguity beautiful). The beautiful and essentially humane content that makes up of the selective biographies (selective in that they concentrate only on suicide as process and act) of the author’s family and self and things that pertain to suicide’s completion or otherwise. 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 Edith Hall’s book may be justified by statements of authorial intention about the book’s purpose that continue throughout but I doubt that Professor Hall ever thinks in such straight lines as that implies. 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. Having only reach her Chapter 1 at the time of that last blog, I took this as the argumentative line this book, if with a focus on suicide, without having read the complex case studies to which classical texts keep getting applied.
It is for this reason that 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 being legally charged of crimes against the state and their sentence to ‘autothanasia’ (I like this term for ‘bringing death on oneself’ in the book to characterise the subject in the thought of Greek philosophers) by political states (a democratic and a monarchical autocratic state respectively) afraid of these philosophers’ unbounded thought processes. Aristotle chose the option of exile, rather than state-sponsored ‘autothanasia’ , 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 does mention the delightful villa available to Aristotle that no-one would have provided for Socrates. Moreover, this seemed convenient to the author, I thought then, 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, in that all it says is 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] and in the continuing history of the idea in Western history with much dwelling on the Romantic movement. That history 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 Amphitryon and Theseus both represent Athenian values against those of barbarian values. Heracles’ adoptive human father becomes a kind of guru therapist, together with a supportive community (the Chorus of men disabled by age but still 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 from the play based on sound mutual communion rather than that arrogant beast of modernity, self-help. Its aim in Hall’s hands is to stand against Goethe’s Romantic thought processes. This strategy invokes 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 process as he optimal kind of defence against the movement into actually planning a suicidal act. Hence, I think the Romantic articulation of suicide is not condemned, as it appears to be with regard to Socrates. 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 that figure on linen.
Tennyson, whom 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 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 best 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 this phrase was 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’, OR, I might add, the countless young men, like Alcibiades, who adored the rather ugly older 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 those of Theseus and Amphitryon with Heracles. 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 conceptual structure in negotiating the idea of suicide philosophically.
From p. 197
Hall, and not only in the chapter about her own suicidal ideation and failed attempts at withdrawal, is a woman of sensibility; with a strong response to the musical pieces, whose names pepper the book.[18] She realises the pain of class alienation in her great-grandfather as a driving but repressed motive. Likewise, the problems of a necessary, but bad, marriage by her grandmother, creates other alienation that seemed unavoidable at the time. 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]
Hall’s issue with suicide, I think, becomes more complex as she tells of the generation of her past family 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 came. Brenda Hall was moulded by family experience, and had an ‘intense rage’ against suicide as an idea and against 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 in which it occurred, the town of Thame. These feelings we know, because we are told so, were projected onto Edith Hall when unknowingly Edith and her husband moved to Thame, after securing her first job. Brenda’s hatred of suicide may have been pathological but nevertheless , and perhaps because of that, Brenda gave her own daughter her own mother’s, Edith Masterston’s, name despite the latter’s death by suicide. Edith Hall writes about her first name movingly, as if, that act of naming was another means by which family curses ‘run on’ in families, no less the Hall family as the House of Atreus.[20]
As I think about all this, I realise that 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, regarding the search in the book for an unattainable (in my view given the variants between people who come to the brink of suicide or its ideation) the ‘perfect therapeutic mantra in the face of suicidal despair’ suggested by Hall from Greek tragedy. In describing the Chorus in Agamemnon she says that the Chorus 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]
I note mow that this is he stategy I feel in the narrator of Edith Hall’s beautiful book, who instead of commentary often takes over the role of the actors in Chapters 4 to 7, including that autobiographical imago of herself. She dramatises the subjectivity of each actor that she might, perfectly correctly in any mantra on suicide, facilitate the suicidal consciousness in them 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 (or repository of public good) to regulate its function.
And it does so extremely sensitively but not without irony against actors. Robert the great-grandfather drowns in a huge seaside pool, Seafield Pond. Hall returns to this huge water feature, hardly conveyed by the word ‘pond’, to see it surrounded by new life. But she admits that nobody ‘fully understands why another person chooses suicide’.[22] Her grandmother Edith might as she leapt from a hotel window, 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] However that grandeur is truncated in that the hotel window from which she leaps could never be thought high enough to kill her. Wounded and unobserved over a long cold night, he dies of undramatic 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.
From page 127The leap to death of Edith Masterton was from this hotel
Death is everywhere and death is common and responses to it are multiple. Sometimes there is, in the circumstances of another, something that can not 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 that oft contradict each other.
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
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