This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings by William Styron

Author:William Styron [Styron, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-05-04T07:00:00+00:00

[New York Times Op-Ed Page, May 10, 1987]

Why Primo Levi Need Not Have Died

WHY DID THE EMINENT ITALIAN WRITER Primo Levi die in the shocking way he did?

In the depths of a clinical depression, Mr. Levi, an Auschwitz survivor who had written eloquently of his ordeal under the Nazis, jumped down a stairwell in Turin in 1987.

The question appeared to haunt—indeed, nearly dominate—a recent symposium held at New York University and dedicated to Mr. Levi and his work, according to an article in The New York Times. Some participants reacted with simple incredulity.

Alfred Kazin, a distinguished literary critic, was quoted as saying: “It is difficult for me to credit a will to blackness and self-destruction in a writer so happy and full of new projects.”

A friend, rejecting the idea that the writer had planned to kill himself, saw the death as the result of a “sudden uncontrollable impulse”—as if rational deliberation might have somehow colored the act with wrongdoing. In this and other statements, there was at least a tinge of disapproval, an unspoken feeling that through some puzzling failure of moral strength Mr. Levi had failed his staunchest admirers.

Apparently not expressed at the symposium, though quoted in the article, was the harshest example of such a viewpoint: a suggestion in The New Yorker that “the efficacy of all his words had somehow been cancelled by his death.” This idea leaves the implication that the force and fervor of a writer’s work is rendered invalid if, instead of expiring of natural causes, he takes his life.

What remains most deeply troubling about the account is the apparent inability of the symposium participants to come to terms with a reality that seems glaringly obvious. It is that Mr. Levi’s death could not be dissociated from the major depression with which he was afflicted, and that indeed his suicide proceeded directly from that illness.

To those of us who have suffered severe depression—myself included—this general unawareness of how relentlessly the disease can generate an urge to self-destruction seems widespread; the problem badly needs illumination.

Suicide remains a tragic and dreadful act, but its prevention will continue to be hindered, and the age-old stigma against it will remain, unless we can begin to understand that the vast majority of those who do away with themselves—and of those who attempt to do so—do not do it because of any frailty, and rarely out of impulse, but because they are in the grip of an illness that causes almost unimaginable pain. It is important to try to grasp the nature of this pain.

In the winter of 1985-86, I committed myself to a mental hospital because the pain of the depression from which I had suffered for more than five months had become intolerable. I never attempted suicide, but the possibility had become more real and the desire more greedy as each wintry day passed and the illness became more smotheringly intense.

What had begun that summer as an off-and-on malaise and a vague, spooky restlessness had gained gradual momentum

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