A few years ago I was with my daughter Rosa at a football match - a big FA Cup game - and there was the usual assumption on behalf of the crowd of 30,000 that the future of the world rested on the outcome. In the 41st minute an opposition player suddenly went down. Perhaps there was the jovial cry of “get up!”; I don’t remember. But this guy lay on the pitch and suddenly other players were signalling to the referee and the physios that something was badly wrong. Within a minute or two we realised that we might be watching a young footballer die in front of us. I have never experienced a collective will at work as I did that day - just let him live, nothing else matters. The match was abandoned and the young player, Fabrice Muamba, survived despite his heart stopping for over an hour.
This sudden and total change of perspective is what many of us will have felt on hearing about the death of Jason Arday. There we all were having a happy, angry, interested time debating his actions, from plagiarism to baroque embellishment and what it all meant, and then we had the most brutal kind of reality check shoved in our quarrelsome faces. There was a man there, and what had happened to him - whatever his own responsibility for some of it - may have been simply too much; he stopped being our public plaything and took back control in the most terrible way. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.
Not everyone can manage the business of simply being sad. Many have had to pray his death in aid of their own arguments, in the way they did his life. Someone had to take the fall for the tragedy and broadly, on the Left people were blaming the press for hounding him to his death and on the Right, with even less credibility, they were blaming Cambridge University for putting him in a position from which he was bound to fall.
This desire to blame someone specific for a suicide or to attribute it to a single cause is irresistible, until you know something about suicides, at which point you realise that our vulgar attempts to encompass a life and a death in a single accusation, are self-serving and usually wrong. That’s why I feel for someone like the ex-student of his who wrote last week about what a bad teacher he was. It was a bad piece to commission (were there other students who enjoyed Arday’s classes? Did anyone even ask?), but she should know that what has happened wasn’t her fault. The gap between his claims and the truth were bound to come out in the end, and the question (we now realise) was whether he could live with the consequences. All the fabulists I mentioned in last weekend’s piece brazened it out somehow, or just retreated from view. It looks like Arday just couldn’t.
The public Jason Arday was a combination of self-invention and the projections of others. These constituted the wings of wax with which he flew towards the sun. We live in an unkind moment. Even so, let’s forget the blaming of others: let’s allow ourselves to grieve instead, and account this (in Auden’s words) “an important failure”.
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