“Bhain” is Robert Bhain Campbell,
a poet and friend of B.’s when he was younger. Campbell died in 1940, age 29,
of cancer, his life and promising career cut off early. William Butler Yeats,
and Dylan Thomas, of course, are famous poets. Whether Campbell had the
illustrious future the other two attained awaiting for him can’t be known, but Berryman
was a fan of his work and so was James Dickey; they both felt he was underrated.
The point here is that he’s with Henry in the afterworld, who here is not
simply speaking and moldering from his pine box, but out exploring and meeting the
other denizens of the Underworld as one might expect. The three poets mentioned
all died in different ways, but all their deaths were marked by physical decay.
Campbell by the ravages of a fast-moving cancer, Yeats by old age, and Dylan
Thomas was an irrecoverable alcoholic who died in New York in 1953 at age 39.
Alcohol poisoning was a contributing factor to his demise, but he was ill to
begin with. These are the “violent dead”, the violence being done to the body
by illness, age and abuse. B. was a kindred spirit: alcoholic, famous poet, and
of course, undergoing a kind of decay of his own through Henry’s being dead for
the time being. They’re all a clan, Henry claims. No women, I notice. B.
alludes to Sylvia Plath’s work once earlier; maybe she could be one of the
guys? Her decay was in the form of mental illness, so maybe she rounds out the
group nicely. But probably B. was only looking at people who looked like him.
In the end, maybe it’s ironic, he’s grouped with Plath and Ann Sexton in the
literary canon—the great suicide confessionals—not
with his friends and heroes.
I read somewhere once that when
Ann Sexton heard that Sylvia Plath had ended her own life, instead of being
saddened, shocked, something like that, her response was, Damn. I’ve been
scooped, figuring now that when her turn came it would pale, look derivative,
seem like a copycat move, some lame appeal for post-life attention. This all
has me thinking more than I have been about suicide and what it means. I’m aware
of what depression and mental illness can trigger, and in cases like that, suicide
is a tragic symptom of a mental illness. My cousin, who is trained in
counseling and social work, has told me several times how dangerous clinical
depression for men in their twenties can be. It’s so for young women as well,
but men, according to her, can be quite decisive in acting on their suicidal
impulses. I had a student in a class some years ago who started floundering,
eventually disappeared, and then the news came around not long after of what
had happened to her. It hit me hard, and for what it’s worth, it taught me to
be more proactive in my response to students who look to be struggling with
depression. I had to examine if there was something I might have done
differently. I concluded there was, and I’m sorry. In Berryman’s case, the
depression was deep and irrecoverable, stemming as it did from his father’s
suicide and the resultant psychological shock he never was able to overcome.
You just get the idea that he was determined to make something happen, make
something of his life before this all caught up with him. And then it did. The
videos of B.’s interviews and the readings recorded near the end of his life
are startling because of the contrast between his younger, stronger, more
confident self, and the place to which he had arrived, which seems so played
out. There is something quite disturbing about it. He was only two years older
than I am now when he died, but in spirit he was much, much older, having
expressed what he had to express, made the proper friends, and won the awards
that established his reputation, and he just seems finished. Me, I still haven’t
gotten started. If Ann Sexton really entertained the notion of self-destruction
as a career move, then I couldn’t understand that and I wouldn’t have much sympathy
for it. Much more likely is that such attitudes in her were attendant to other
more conventional suicidal impulses. I don’t mean to sound flip about it. A
number of other poets of the time drank themselves to death or struggled with
dangerous depression. What is it with that? Nearly 7% of Americans are
clinically depressed, so the numbers are there. Maybe we just notice once it
has happened and are twisted enough to celebrate suicide as a gesture by the
artist rather than the something else it really is. I have some doubt about the
overall good mental health of American society at large, so a misapprehension
of the struggles of depressed poets would fit squarely into the diseased patter
of American life. Maybe that’s not fair. Sylvia Plath asphyxiated herself in an
oven, and that’s part of her image and her legacy, but her novel, The Bell Jar. is about her struggle against
mental illness; it’s hardly a glorification of it. It’s a novel that many
people read and learn from, and there is nothing about that that is prurient or
stupid. I think B. struggled against his severe depression as well, though as I’ve
remarked before, he had enough self-awareness to realize it would overcome him
one day. His imaginative foray into the Underworld was an exploration of the
way out of the impasse his depression had forced him into. His art was
following from his life and mental state, drawing off of it. But if life had
thrown him into an unfair and cruel position, he could take his art—based off
of that position in life—and turn it, even with the idea that turning the art
would also turn his life. The tail wagging the dog. I believe we’ll see him
working toward understanding and forgiveness, of both his father and of the
cosmos, the impersonal vastness of which can seem so unfeeling. If that’s the
case, we’ll see, and whether or not it worked, we’ll see about that as well.
For now, the foray into the strange life-after-life will be drawing to a close.
Like Orpheus, the great musician, he’ll re-emerge, though the Eurydice he means
to go rescue is the boy he was at 11, killed at the same time his father killed
himself. Like Eurydice, the boy doesn’t make it out either. It was a Hell of a
journey, though.
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