Page 119 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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