A Alvarez's book is over twenty years old but still one of the most penetratating studies of suicide:

. . the sociologists and psychologists who talk of [suicide] as a disease puzzle me now as much as the Catholics and Muslims who call it the most deadly of mortal sins. It seems to me to be somehow as much beyond social or psychic prophylaxis as it is beyond morality, a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves,

A. Alverez, whom I quoted earlier, did make a serious attempt to end his own life. In his 1970 book, The Savage God, Alverez said:

It is not for me. Perhaps I am no longer optimistic enough. I assume now that death, when it finally comes, will probably be nastier than suicide and certainly a great deal less convenient.

Alvarez ends his book with this quote from Henry James: Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever, we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.