Authors: John Berryman

Recovery (20 page)

BOOK: Recovery

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âYOU'VE never even levelled with
me
.' This charge of Keg's had perplexed Alan for days, after astonishing him. He thought his feelings, admittedly not simple, were clear enough, and that he had made them plain enough: admiration, grateful affection, healthy fear, trust. But he had
never yet, except once in Mini-group in a detail, found Keg wrong about anything, whereas bitter experience had accustomed him to being wrong about everything himself. He went inside.

Finding Keg just ahead of him, among three patients moving slowly down the hall toward the Group-room on Wednesday morning, he took hold of the young man's thin arm. âI think I've finally seen,' he said hurriedly, âwhat you meant by saying I'd never levelled with youâ'

âSave it for Group,' Keg grinned back at him, and began, sure enough, when they were all assembled and looking nervously about at each other or at nothing, with âWell, Alan?'

Severance swallowed. Confronting a counsellor was not unknown, just as Kanchenjunga had been climbed once or twice. Everybody waited, with no idea that an assault on the summit was in prospect. âYou said last week,' his voice stronger than he expected, âI'd never really told you how I felt about you. That's not entirely true. There are all sorts of strong good feelings towards you that you know very well.' He named half a dozen. âThere's also, of course, envy, I mean of your sobriety and your insights about delusion. But I wonder if you don't get a charge out of torturing people. You've got a killer instinct, which just happens to be employed on the side of health. I admit I feel some aversion. You use Vin's method but I don't think you have his warm heart.' Well, it was outâand Alan, who felt sorry already, would have felt worse if he had known, as he did not know until he was thinking Group over that evening, that he was âattacking' not levelling.

Nobody said anythingâKeg looking at his shoesâuntil Harley's soft, âHow does that make you feel, Keg?'

âHurt.' The tone was dejected, inward.

âI'm
sorry
,' Alan said stricken. âI may be wrong. I generally am, lately.'

Then everybody was all over him, with âsqueamish' and
âa bully yourselfâyou're projecting,' and he made a sorry spectacle for twenty minutes, defending, shifting, sarcastic, belligerent (âI'm an expert in the English language'), attacking even the nurse Leta, who was sitting in, for her description of his impatience the day before as âalcoholic behaviour.' But Leta was very calm, besides having the invaluable credential of an alcoholic ex-husband, and nobody supported Severance's objection to the phrase as ânon-professional' from a nurse to a patient. He felt more and more isolated, finally saying, from a silence, âI'm wasting the Group's time.'

âIt's your words,' said Harley.

It was little enough, but it touched Alan. âYou mean not yours. That's a lifeline, anyway.'

âYou threw me one,' Luriel said suddenly, warmly.

The atmosphere changed, with this. Confrontation switched to Jeree, and then to Hutch, and by the time HutchâHutch!âhad crouched over with his face in his big hands sobbing, Severance felt back at home with everybody but Wilbur, absolutely silent throughout. Hutch was in agony over his children. âI never show my love for any of them,' he groaned at one point, and, âI take food-money for booze. With seven kids! How could I love my children and do that to them?'

âMaybe you don't love them,' Harley suggested.

âNo, he loves them,' Severance said strongly. âHutch, right now you know where you are:
you love your children
. Otherwise you wouldn't feel the way you do.'

âNot like my brother loves his!' Hutch half-cried.

What followed was more like Mini-group than confrontation.

âHow do you feel about your brother?' This was Keg.

âHe's a wonderful man. He's better in every way than I am.'

âBetter how?'

âWell, he's bigger.'

âYou're a big man yourself.'

âYou ought to see him. Six-four, two-thirty.'

âEver have a fight with him?'

âGod no. I was always scared of him. Once he almost killed me.'

âHow was that?'

âI'd done something. I forget what. He picked me up and threw me on the floor.'

âAnd you felt?'

âI was scared shitless. I couldn't get my breath back.'

âWhat happened them?'

âNothing, He just stood looking down at me. He said, “Next time I'll kill you,” and walked out of the room.'

âNo other trouble between you?'

âNo. I believed him.'

âHow do you feel about that time now?'

âWell, it was so long ago. We were kids.'

âIt seems pretty fresh in your mind.'

âI haven't thought about it for years.'

âI don't believe it.'

Hutch glared, and twisted in his chair. Silence. He looked down at his hands twisted together. âMaybe I do.'

âWhen drinking.'

âSometimes.'

âAnd how do you feel about it?' Keg persisted.

âMaybe a little resentful.'

âBut you've forgiven him, of course.'

âNo I haven't!' Hutch flared out.

âWhat would you think about somebody who picks up his younger weaker brother and nearly kills him?'

âHe'd be a damn bully!'

âWho is the main person in your life, Hutch?'

âMy brother.'

âSo you've got a damn bully for the central person in your life. How do you feel about that?'

âIt sounds crazy.'

âIt is crazy,' Harley came in. âWho ought to be the main person in your life?'

Hutch looked lost. âI don't know. My wife?'

âNo. You. You are the main person in your life.'

âI've always felt like Number Two.'

âAfter who?'

âAfter everybody.'

âSo you can feel sorry for yourself and drink.'

âI guess so.'

VIII

THE
JEWISH
KICK AND THE FIFTH STEP

[UNWRITTEN]

Selah

[UNWRITTEN]

Higgaion

E
VERY LIGHT in the house seemed to be on. At the same time there was a great deal of darkness aboutâin horizontal bands between bright bands. It puzzled him. He knew he was standing in his entry-hall. Wife facing him, cold eyes, her arm outstretched with a short glassâa little smaller than he likedâin her hand. Two cops to his left. His main Dean and wife off somewhere right, beyond the couch; no doubt others. His baby (qualm sickâhe hadn't thought of the baby in six days while they were looking for him as far away as Zurich and Paris) must be asleep upstairs. It must be nine o'clock, it was Sunday night, no doubt about it. The girl had gone. He was looking into his wife's eyes and he was hearing her say: âThis is the last drink you will ever take.' Even as somewhere up in his feathery mind he said âScrew that,' somewhere he also had an unnerving and apocalyptic feeling that this might be true. Wonder whether to shout with relief or horror. His fingers closed round the glass. Not feeling like making any noises whatever, very tired.

John Berryman

BY SAUL BELLOW

He wrote in one of his last letters to me, “Let's join forces, large and small, as in the winter beginning of 1953 in Princeton, with the Bradstreet blazing and Augie fleecing away. We're promising!”

The Bradstreet was indeed blazing then; Augie was not nearly so good. Augie was naive, undisciplined, unpruned. What John liked was the exuberance of its language and its devotion to the Chicago streets. I had, earlier, published two small and correct books. He did not care for them. In Augie there was a Whitmanesque “coming from under” which he found liberating. I admired the Bradstreet. What he said was true; we joined forces in 1953, and sustained each other.

The Princeton John was tallish, slender, nervous, and gave many signs that he was inhibiting erratic impulses. He wore a blue blazer, a button-down shirt, flannel trousers, cordovan shoes. He spoke in a Princeton mutter, often incomprehensible to me. His longish face with its high color and blue eyes I took to be of Irish origin. I have known blue-eyed poets apparently fresh from heaven who gazed at you like Little Lord Fauntleroy while thinking how you would look in your coffin. John was not one of these blue-eyed serpents. Had you, in a word-association test, said “Devil” to him, he would have answered “John Webster.” He thought of nothing wicked. What he mainly thought about was literature. When he saw me coming, he often said, “Ah!” meaning that a literary discussion was about to begin. It might be
The Tempest
that he had on his mind that day,
or
Don Quixote;
it might be Graham Greene or John O'Hara; or Goguel on Jesus, or Freud on dreams. There was little personal conversation. We never discussed money, or wives, and we seldom talked politics. Once as we were discussing Rilke I interrupted to ask him whether he had, the other night, somewhere in the Village, pushed a lady down a flight of stairs.

“Whom?”

“Beautiful Catherine, the big girl I introduced you to.”

“Did I do that? I wonder why?”

“Because she wouldn't let you into the apartment.”

He took a polite interest in this information. He said, “That I was in the City at all is news to me.”

We went back to Rilke. There was only one important topic. We had no small-talk.

In Minneapolis one afternoon Ralph Ross and I had to force the window of a house near Seven Corners to find out what had happened to John. No one had seen him in several days. We arrived in Ross's Jaguar, rang the bell, kicked at the door, tried to peer through the panes and then crawled in over a windowsill. We found ourselves standing on a bare gritty floor between steel bookstacks. The green steel shelves from Montgomery Ward's, meant for garages or workshops, for canned peaches in farmers' cellars, were filled with the elegant editions of Nashe and Marlowe and Beaumont and Fletcher which John was forever importing from Blackwell's. These were read, annotated, for John worked hard. We found him in the bedroom. Face down, rigid, he lay diagonally across the double bed. From this position he did not stir. But he spoke distinctly.

“These efforts are wasted. We are unregenerate.”

At the University of Minnesota John and I shared an office in a temporary wooden structure to the north of the School of Mines. From the window we saw a gully, a parking lot, and many disheartening cars. Scorched theology books from a fire sale lined one of the walls. These Barths and Brunners looked as if they had gone through hell. We had no particular interest in them but they helped to furnish forth a mental life in the city of Minneapolis. Minneapolis was the home of Honeywell, of heart surgery, of Pillsbury, of the Multi Phasic test, but it was
not celebrated as the home of poems and novels. John and I strolled sometimes, about a pond, through a park and then up Lake Street, “where the used cars live!” What on earth were we doing here! An interesting question. We talked about Yeats. The forces were still joined. We wrote things

Drop here, with honor due, my trunk and brain
among the passioning of my countrymen
unable to read, rich, proud of their tags
and proud of me. Assemble all my bags!
Bury me in a hole, and give a cheer,
near Cedar on Lake street, where the used cars live.

He was proud of the living of these cars. That, he said, was “Delicious!” a favorite expression. My offering to him at that time was a story called “Leaving the Yellow House.” This, too, he declared delicious, though he found it faulty, inconclusive. (We told each other exactly what we thought.)

Tense, he stood at his desk as I entered the office. He was greatly excited. He said, “Pal, I have written some new verses. They are
delicious!
”

When he broke a leg and Dr Thomes was called in the middle of the night John said, as the splint was being applied, “You must hear this new Dream Song!” He recited it as they carried him to the ambulance.

I would visit John at an institution (not the one in this novel) called, I believe, The Golden Valley. He was not there because he had broken his leg. The setting of The Golden Valley was indeed golden. It was early autumn, and the blond stubble fields shone. John's room was furnished simply. On the floor was the straw
tatami
mat on which he performed his Yoga exercises. At a collapsible bridge table he wrote Dream Songs. He said, “As you can see they keep me in a baby crib. They raise the sides at night to keep me from falling out. It is Humiliating! Listen, pal, I have written something new. It is,” he assured me, raising hands that shook, “Absolutely a knockout!”

He put a finger to the bridge of his glasses, for nothing was steady here. Things shook and dropped. Inside and outside they
wavered and flew. The straw of Golden Valley swirled on the hills.

John had waited a long time for this poet's happiness. He had suffered agonies of delay. Now came the poems. They were killing him.

Nitid. They are shooting me full of sings.
I give no rules. Write as short as you can, in order, of what matters.

Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabilizer. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity. Perhaps it replaced the public sanction which poets in the Twin Cities (or in Chicago, in Washington or New York) had to do without. This sanction was not wickedly withheld. It simply did not exist. No one minded if you bred poodles. No one objected if you wrote Dream Songs. Some men of genius were fortunate. They could somehow come to terms with their respective countries. Others had women, the bottle, the hospital. Even in France, far from the Twin Cities, a Verlaine had counted heavily on hospitals and prisons.

John drank, of course, and he took refuge in hospitals, but he also studied and taught. The teaching was important. His lectures were conscientiously, even pedantically prepared. He gave them everything he had. He came in from Golden Valley by cab to address his Humanities class.

He walked up the stone stairs of the University building looking very bad. He wore a huge Western sort of hat. Under the flare of the brim his pale face was long and thin. With tremulous composure, shoulders high, he stalked into the classroom. While the taxi waited, he gave his lecture. His first words were shaky, inaudible, but very soon other instructors had to shut their doors against his penetrating voice. He sweated heavily, his shaky fingers turned the numbered cards of his full and careful lecture outline but he was extremely proud of his dependability and of his power to perform. “Henry” was indeed one of the steadiest men on the block, as faithful to his schedule as Kant, as precise and reliable as a Honeywell product. His talk
ended. Then, peanut-faced under the enormous hat and soaked in sweat, he entered the cab and was returned to The Golden Valley, to the
tatami
mat and the bridge table, to the penitential barrenness of the cure. No wonder after these solitary horrors that he was later grateful for group therapy, submitting democratically and eagerly to the criticisms of wacky truckers, graceful under the correction of drinking plumbers and mentally disturbed housewives. In hospitals he found his society. University colleagues were often more philistine, less tolerant of poets than alcoholics or suicidal girls. About these passioning countrymen he did not need to be ironical. Here his heart was open.

But everything went into his poems. His poems said everything. He himself said remarkably little. His songs were his love offerings. These offerings were not always accepted. Laid on the altar of, say, an Edmund Wilson, they sometimes were refused. Wilson, greatly respected by John, had written him a harsh letter about his later poems and John was wounded by this the last time I saw him. I read Wilson's letter. John sat at my table, meteor-bearded like John Brown, coughing softly and muttering that he couldn't understandâthese were some of his best things. Then he snatched up the copy of
Love & Fame
which he had brought me and struck out certain poems,
¹scribbling in the margins, “Crap!” “Disgusting!” But of one poem, “Surprise Me,” he wrote shakily, “This is certainly one of the truest things I've been gifted with.”

I read it again now and see what he meant. I am moved by the life of a man I loved. He prays to be surprised by the “blessing gratuitous” “on some ordinary day.” It would have to be an ordinary day, of course, an ordinary American day. The ordinariness of the days was what it was all about.

He had arrived during a sub-zero wave to give a reading in Chicago. High-shouldered in his thin coat and big Homburg, bearded, he coughed up phlegm. He looked decayed. He had been drinking and the reading was a disaster. His Princeton mutter, once an affectation, had become a vice. People strained to hear a word. Except when, following some arbitrary system of dynamics,
he shouted loudly, we could hear nothing. We left a disappointed, bewildered, angry audience. Dignified, he entered a waiting car, sat down, and vomited. He passed out in his room at the Quadrangle Club and slept through the faculty party given in his honor. But in the morning he was full of innocent cheer. He was chirping. It had been a great evening. He recalled an immense success. His cab came, we hugged each other, and he was off for the airport under a frozen sun.

He was a full professor now, and a celebrity.
Life
interviewed him. The
Life
photographer took ten thousand shots of him in Dublin. But John's human setting was oddly thin. He had, instead of a society, the ruined drunken poet's God to whom he prayed over his shoulder. Out of affection and goodwill he made gestures of normalcy. He was a husband, a citizen, a father, a householder, he went on the wagon, he fell off, he joined AA. He knocked himself out to be like everybody elseâhe liked, he loved, he cared, but he was aware that there was something peculiarly comical in all this. And at last it must have seemed that he had used up all his resources. Faith against despair, love versus nihilism had been the themes of his struggles and his poems. What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit. He drew it out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive. Forces were not joined. The cycle of resolution, reform and relapse had become a bad joke which could not continue.

Towards the last he wrote

It seems to be
dark
all the time.
I have difficulty walking.
I can remember what to say to my seminar
but I don't know that I want to.

I said in a Song once: I am unusually tired.
I repeat that & increase it.
I'm vomiting.
I broke down today in the slow movement of K. 365.

I certainly don't think I'll last much longer.

BOOK: Recovery

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