from ”The Art of Suicide”
Yet her [Sylvia Plath’s] actual suicide, like Lowell’s breakdowns or the private horrors of Berryman and Hughes, is by the way; it adds nothing to her work and proves nothing about it. It was simply a risk she took in handling such volatile material. Indeed, what the Extremists have in common is not a style but a belief in the value, even the necessity, of risk. They do not deny it like our latter-day aesthetes, nor drown it in the benign, warm but profoundly muddied ocean of hippy love and inarticulateness. This determination to confront the intimations not of immortality but of mortality itself, using every imaginative resource and technical skill to bring it close, understand it, accept it, control it, is finally what distinguishes genuinely advanced art from the fashionable crowd of pseudo-avant-gardes. On these tenns, an artist could live to be as old as Robert Frost or Ezra Pound and yet still, in his work, be a suicide of the imagination.
I am suggesting, in short, that the best modem artists have in fact done what that Hiroshima survivor thought impossible: out of their private tribulations they have invented a public “language which can comfort guinea pigs who do not know the cause of their death.” That, I think, is the ultimate justification of the highbrow arts in an era in which they themselves seem less and less convinced of their claims to attention and even existence. They survive morally by becoming, in one way or another, an imitation of death in which their audience can share; to achieve this the artist, in his role of scapegoat, finds himself testing out his own death and vulnerability for and on himself.
It may be objected that the arts are also about many other things, often belligerently so; for example, that they are preoccupied as never before with sex. But I wonder if sexual explicitness isn’t a diversion, almost a form of conservatism. After all, that particular battle was fought and won by Freud and Lawrence in the first quarter of this century. The old guard may grumble and occasionally sue, but in a society where Portnoy’s Complaint is a record-breaking best seller sexual permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, the facts not of life but of death and violence, absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified and inescapably part of the society we have created. “There is only one liberty,” wrote Camus in his Notebooks, “to come to terms with death. After which, everything is possible.”
—A. Alvarez
—found in Partisan Review (1970; Vol. 37, No. 3)