'That Gravity Stayed Him Somehow'

In the second volume of his Johnsonian Miscellanies (Clarendon Press, 1897), George Birkbeck Hill collects anecdotes from the writer and clergyman Thomas Campbell, including this:

“Talking of suicide, Boswell took up the defence for argument’s sake, and the Doctor said that some cases were more excusable than others, but if it were excusable, it should be the last resource; ‘for instance,’ says he, ‘if a man is distressed in circumstances . . .  he ought to fly his country.’ ‘How can he fly,’ says Boswell, ‘if he has wife and children?’ ‘What Sir,’ says the Doctor, shaking his head as if to promote the fermentation of his wit, ‘doth not a man fly from his wife and children if he murders himself?'’”

The glibness of Johnson’s response surprises me. Boswell reports a similar conversation in his Life, on April 21, 1773:

“We talked of the melancholy end of a gentleman who had destroyed himself. JOHNSON: ‘It was owing to imaginary difficulties in his affairs, which, had he talked with any friend, would soon have vanished.’ BOSWELL: ‘Do you think, Sir, that all who commit suicide are mad?’ JOHNSON: ‘Sir, they are often not universally disordered in their intellects, but one passion presses so upon them, that they yield to it, and commit suicide, as a passionate man will stab another.’ He added, ‘I have often thought, that after a man has taken the resolution to kill himself, it is not courage in him to do any thing, however desperate, because he has nothing to fear.’”

The most severely emotional wreckage I have ever seen was suffered by the families of two suicides. In neither case did the survivors suspect so profound a despair. All were shocked. Both families fractured – divorce, psychiatry, medication, crime, alcoholism. Ben Downing published “Suicides” in The Yale Review in 2013:

“I’ve known a few. Found one, in fact.

Surprising there aren’t more,

 

“when you stop to think of it.

I mean, it’s not hard to do,

 

“really, if one is intent,

and we are an impulsive species –

 

“what’s more natural than at some moment of great pain

to just say ‘Screw it’ and duck out?

 

“And yet it would seem that most of the time

there’s something holding us to life,

 

“a kind of gravity that stills or thwarts

all but the most determined.

 

“The one I found, he talked of it.

I didn’t try to dissuade him –

 

“he had his reasons.

But that gravity stayed him somehow,

 

“kept him in place through wave after wave of temptation,

until, quite suddenly, it didn’t.”

 

Downing discovered the body of his friend Tom Disch after the poet and science-fiction writer killed himself with a handgun on July 4, 2008.