Volume 18, Number 9 · May 18, 1972
The Doomed in Their Sinking
By William H. Gass
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
by A. Alvarez
Random House, 299 pp., $7.95
Suicide
by Jacques Choron
Scribner's, 182 pp., $7.95
Crane went sudden as a springboard. The Gulf gave nothing back. My mother, I remember, took her time. She held the house around her as she held her bathrobe, safely doorpinned down its floorlength, the metal threads glinting like those gay gold loops which close the coat of a grenadier, though there were gaps of course…unseemly as sometimes a door is on a chain…so that to urinate she had to hoist the whole thing like a skirt, collecting the cloth in fat pleats with her fingers, wads which soon out-oozed her fists and sprang slowly away…one consequence…so that she felt she had to hover above the hole, the seat (clouds don't care about their aim), unsteadily…necessarily…more and more so as the nighttime days drew on, so that the robe grew damp the way the sweater on a long drink grows, soggy from edge to center, until I found I cared with what success she peed when what she swallowed was herself and what streamed out of her in consequence seemed me.
Review, 2857 words
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