Her hair, which she usually wore in a tight, school-mistressy bun, was loose. It hung straight to her waist like a tent, giving her pale face and gaunt figure a curiously desolate, rapt air, like a priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult. When she walked in front of me down the hall passage…her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal’s.
Her apartment was spare and cold, barely furnished and with little in the way of Christmas decorations for her children. “For the unhappy,” Alvarez wrote, “Christmas is always a bad time: the terrible false jollity that comes at you from every side, braying about goodwill and peace and family fun, makes loneliness and depression particularly hard to bear. I had never seen her so strained.”
They each had a glass of wine, and following their habit she read to him her latest poems. They were dark. The new year came and the weather grew even worse. Plath feuded with her ex-husband. She fired her au pair. She gathered her children and went to stay at the house of Jillian and Gerry Becker, who lived nearby. “I feel terrible,” she said. She took some antidepressants, fell asleep, then woke up in tears. That was a Thursday. On Friday she wrote her ex-husband, Ted Hughes, what he would later call a “farewell note.” On Sunday she insisted that Gerry Becker drive her and her children back to their apartment. He left her in the early evening, after she had put her children to bed. At some point over the next few hours, she left some food and water for her children in their room and opened their bedroom window. She wrote out the name of her doctor, with a telephone number, and stuck it to the baby carriage in the hallway. Then she took towels, dishcloths, and tape and sealed the kitchen door. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the oven, and took her own life.
2.
Poets die young. That is not just a cliché. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.1
Plath was obsessed with suicide. She wrote about it, thought about it. “She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self-pity,” Alvarez wrote. “She seemed to view death as a physical challenge she had, once again, overcome. It was an experience of much the same quality as…careering down a dangerous snow slope without properly knowing how to ski.”
She fulfilled every criterion of elevated suicide risk. She had tried it before. She was a former mental patient. She was an American living in a foreign culture—dislocated from family and friends. She was from a broken home. She’d just been rejected by a man she idolized.2
On the night of her death, Plath left her coat and her keys behind at the Beckers’. In her book on Plath (everyone who knew Plath, even tangentially, has written at least one book about her), Jillian Becker interprets that as a sign of the finality of Plath’s decision:
Had she supposed that Gerry or I would come after her during the night with her coat and keys? No. She had not expected or wanted to be saved at the last moment from self-inflicted death.
The coroner’s report stated that Plath had placed her head as far inside the oven as she could, as if she were determined to succeed. Becker continued:
She’d blocked the cracks at the bottom of the doors to the landing and the sitting room, turned all the gas taps full on, neatly folded a kitchen cloth and placed it on the floor of the oven, and laid her cheek on it.
Can there be any doubt about her intentions? Just look at what she was writing in the days before she took her own life.
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment…
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
We look at Sylvia Plath’s poetry and her history and catch glimpses of her inner life, and we think we understand her. But there’s something we’re forgetting—the third of the mistakes we make with strangers.
3.
In the years after the First World War, many British homes began to use what was called “town gas” to power their stoves and water heaters. It was manufactured from coal and was a mixture of a variety of different compounds: hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and, most important, the odorless and deadly carbon monoxide. That last fact gave virtually everyone a simple means of committing suicide right inside their home. “The victims in the great majority of cases are found with their heads covered with coats or blankets, and with the tube from a gas tap brought under the edge of the covering article,” a physician wrote in 1927, in one of the first accounts of the lethal properties of town gas:
In several instances persons have been found sitting in a chair with the gas tube close to or in the mouth, and still held in position by the hand; or they have been found lying on the floor with the head in a gas oven. In one case a woman was found with a mask which she had made out of a tea cozy tied over her face, the gas tube having been introduced through a hole in the top of the cozy.
In 1962, the year before Sylvia Plath took her own life, 5,588 people in England and Wales committed suicide. Of those, 2,469—44.2 percent—did so as Sylvia Plath did. Carbon-monoxide poisoning was by then the leading cause of lethal self-harm in the United Kingdom. Nothing else—not overdosing on pills or jumping off a bridge—came close.
But in that same period, the 1960s, the British gas industry underwent a transformation. Town gas was increasingly expensive—and dirty. Large reserves of natural gas were discovered in the North Sea, and the decision was made to convert the country from town gas to natural gas. The scale of the project was immense. Natural gas had markedly different chemical properties than town gas: it required twice as much oxygen to burn cleanly, the flame moved far more slowly, and the pressure of the gas needed to be greater. Those facts, in combination, meant the size and shape of the gas ports and burners on the stoves inside virtually every English household were now obsolete. Every gas appliance in England had to be upgraded or replaced: meters, cookers, water heaters, refrigerators, portable heaters, boilers, washing machines, solid-fuel grates, and on and on. New refineries had to be built, new gas mains constructed. One official at the time, without exaggeration, called it “the greatest peacetime operation in this nation’s history.”
The long process began in 1965 with a pilot project on a tiny island thirty miles from London, with 7,850 gas customers. Yorkshire and Staffordshire were next. Then Birmingham—and slowly every apartment, house, office, and factory in the country was converted, one by one. It took a decade. By the fall of 1977, the process was finally complete. Town gas—hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide—was replaced with natural gas: methane, ethane, propane, small amounts of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and no carbon monoxide at all. After 1977, if you stuck your head in an oven and turned on the gas, the worst that could happen to you was a mild headache and a crick in your neck.
Take a look at how the number of gas suicides changed as town gas was slowly phased out over the 1960s and 1970s.
So here is the question: once the number-one form of suicide in England became a physiological impossibility, did the people who wanted to kill themselves switch to other methods? Or did the people who would have put their heads in ovens now not commit suicide at all?
The assumption that people would simply switch to another method is called displacement. Displacement assumes that when people think of doing something as serious as committing suicide, they are very hard to stop. Blocking one option isn’t going to make much of a difference. Sylvia Plath, for example, had a
long history of emotional instability. She was treated with electroshock therapy for depression while still in college. She made her first suicide attempt in 1953. She spent six months in psychiatric care at McLean Hospital outside Boston. A few years later, she deliberately drove her car into a river—then, in typical fashion, wrote a poem about it:
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
She meticulously blocked every gap in the doorway, turned the gas taps full on, and stuck her head as far as possible into the oven. She was determined. If she couldn’t have used her oven to kill herself, wouldn’t she have just tried something else?
The alternative possibility is that suicide is a behavior coupled to a particular context. Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions. My father read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to me and my brothers when we were children, and at the very end, when Sydney Carton dies in Charles Darney’s place, my father wept. My father was not a weeper. He was not someone whose emotions bubbled over in every emotionally meaningful moment. He didn’t cry in sad movies. He didn’t cry when his children left for college. Maybe he got stealthily misty-eyed from time to time, but not so anyone other than maybe my mother would notice. In order to cry, he needed his children on the sofa listening, and he needed one of history’s most sentimental novelists. Take away either of those two factors and no one would ever have seen his tears. That’s coupling. If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.
So which is it—displacement or coupling? The modernization of British gas is an almost perfect way to test this question. If suicide follows the path of displacement—if the suicidal are so determined that when you block one method, they will simply try another—then suicide rates should have remained pretty steady over time, fluctuating only with major social events. (Suicides tend to fall in wartime, for example, and rise in times of economic distress.) If suicide is coupled, on the other hand, then it should vary with the availability of particular methods of committing suicide. When a new and easy method such as town gas arrives on the scene, suicides should rise; when that method is taken away, they should fall. The suicide curve should look like a roller coaster.
Take a look.
It’s a roller coaster.
It goes way up when town gas first makes its way into British homes. And it comes plunging down as the changeover to natural gas begins in the late 1960s. In that ten-year window, as town gas was being slowly phased out, thousands of deaths were prevented.
“[Town] gas had unique advantages as a lethal method,” criminologist Ronald Clarke wrote in his classic 1988 essay laying out the first sustained argument in favor of coupling:
It was widely available (in about 80 percent of British homes) and required little preparation or specialist knowledge, making it an easy choice for less mobile people and for those coming under sudden extreme stress. It was painless, did not result in disfigurement, and did not produce a mess (which women in particular will try to avoid).…Deaths by hanging, asphyxiation, or drowning all usually demand more planning, while more courage would be needed with the more violent methods of shooting, cutting, stabbing, crashing one’s car, and jumping off high places or in front of trains or buses.
There is something awfully matter-of-fact about that paragraph, isn’t there? Nowhere in Clarke’s article does he speak empathetically about the suicidal, or dwell on the root causes of their pain. He analyzes the act the way an engineer would look at a mechanical problem. “The whole idea wasn’t very popular at all amongst psychiatrists and social workers,” Clarke remembers:
They thought it was very superficial, that these people were so upset and demoralized that it was sort of insulting to think you could deal with it by simply making it harder to commit suicide. I got quite a lot of pushback here and there from people about that idea.3
This simply isn’t the way we talk about suicide. We act as if the method were irrelevant. When gas was first introduced into British homes in the 1920s, two government commissions were created to consider the new technology’s implications. Neither mentioned the possibility that it might lead to increased suicides. When the official British government report on the gas-modernization program came out in 1970, it stated that one of the positive side effects of the transition to natural gas would be a decline in fatal accidents. It didn’t even mention suicide—even though the number of people who killed themselves deliberately with gas dwarfed the number who died from it accidentally. In 1981, the most comprehensive academic work on the subject, A History of the British Gas Industry, was published. It goes into extraordinary detail about every single aspect of the advent and growth of gas heating and gas stoves in English life. Does it mention suicide, even in passing? No.
Or consider the inexplicable saga of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Since it opened in 1937, it has been the site of more than 1,500 suicides. No other place in the world has seen as many people take their lives in that period.4
What does coupling theory tell us about the Golden Gate Bridge? That it would make a big difference if a barrier prevented people from jumping, or a net was installed to catch them before they fell. The people prevented from killing themselves on the bridge wouldn’t go on to jump off something else. Their decision to commit suicide is coupled to that particular bridge.
Sure enough, this is exactly what seems to be the case, according to a very clever bit of detective work by psychologist Richard Seiden. Seiden followed up on 515 people who had tried to jump from the bridge between 1937 and 1971, but had been unexpectedly restrained. Just 25 of those 515 persisted in killing themselves some other way. Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only at that given moment.
So when did the municipal authority that runs the bridge finally decide to install a suicide barrier? In 2018, more than eighty years after the bridge opened. As John Bateson points out in his book The Final Leap, in the intervening period, the bridge authority spent millions of dollars building a traffic barrier to protect cyclists crossing the bridge, even though no cyclist has ever been killed by a motorist on the Golden Gate Bridge. It spent millions building a median to separate north- and southbound traffic, on the grounds of “public safety.” On the southern end of the bridge, the authority put up an eight-foot cyclone fence to prevent garbage from being thrown onto Fort Baker, a former army installation on the ground below. A protective net was even installed during the initial construction of the bridge—at enormous cost—to prevent workers from falling to their deaths. The net saved nineteen lives. Then it was taken down. But for suicides? Nothing for more than eighty years.
Now, why is this? Is it because the people managing the bridge are callous and unfeeling? Not at all. It’s because it is really hard for us to accept the idea that a behavior can be so closely coupled to a place. Over the years, the bridge authority periodically asked the public to weigh in on whether it supported the building of a suicide barrier. The letters generally fell into two categories: Those in favor tended to be people whose loved ones had committed suicide, who had some understanding of the psychology of the suicidal. The balance—in fact, the majority—simply dismissed the idea of coupling out of hand.
Here is a small sample:
“If a physical barrier on the bridge were to be erected, it would not surprise me if after three months, a suicide prone individual would walk to the north tower with a pistol and put the gun to his head in frustration of not being able to jump. What then of the millions to erect a physical suicide barrier?”
“People bent on suicide will find many ways to do away with themselves—pills, hanging, drowning, cutting arteries, jumping from any other bridge or building. Wouldn’t it be much better to spend th
e money on mental health care for many people instead of worrying about the few that jump off bridges?”
“I oppose the construction of a suicide barrier because it would waste money and achieve nothing. Anyone who was prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge would find another, more destructive, way of killing himself or herself. Someone who jumps off a tall building would be much more likely to kill someone who is walking in the street than someone who jumps off the bridge into the water.”
“All it will do is cost money and deface the bridge. There are many ways to commit suicide. You take one away from someone it will only be replaced by another.”
In one national survey, three quarters of Americans predicted that when a barrier is finally put up on the Golden Gate Bridge, most of those who wanted to take their life on the bridge would simply take their life some other way.5 But that’s absolutely wrong. Suicide is coupled.
The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.
4.
Talking to Strangers Page 21
