http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3623
The poet Randall Jarrell died in
1965, struck by an auto. The incident was determined to be an accident, but a
previous suicide attempt, some issues with mental health, and side effects of some
powerful prescription psychiatric drugs made most friends close to him assume it
was a suicide, and while the general consensus seems to be that it was, it’s
not clear. More important is that he died, no matter the reason, and DS 90 is a
eulogy to Jarrell, who was B.’s friend. It comes in a moment when Henry is also
dead, with Jarrell in the afterworld, considering whether or not to leave the
living world permanently behind. The “panic” is probably a reference to the
mental state of Jarrell before the drugs settled him down a bit, but maybe not settled
down to the end he would have preferred.
Jarrell had enlisted in the US
Army Air Corps during the war, and during his time serving as a pilot trainer, and
afterwards, he wrote a number of poems about WWII. “The Death of the Ball
Turret Gunner” is a short poem anthologized in every Intro. to Literature
textbook ever published, because it makes such a powerful, shocking statement:
From
my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in
its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from
earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black
flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they
washed me out of the turret with a hose.
That’s what war is.
I had an interesting talk with my
friend, Jennifer, today, about Berryman. Yesterday I sort of sidestepped
addressing DS 89 directly because the images triggered a poetic response
instead, and that felt like a more effective approach for me at the moment. A
number of people have remarked in person and online, though, about the images
in that one and what they say about how Berryman views women. I told another
friend, Judit, that the whole poem reminded me in an odd way of those idiotic
game shows where fifteen women compete to be the bride of some millionaire. Who’s
gonna be the lucky girl?!!!! In this
case, what lucky girl gets to seduce Henry from the confines of his coffin? I’ll
write more about this when the next opportunity arises, but it doesn’t sit
well. Same with the race stuff, which I have dealt with (and also stepped
around when I wasn’t comfortable or didn’t feel up to it). But when it comes to
warfare and geopolitical power politics, Berryman and I, we’re a lot more in
sync.
It wasn’t always like that, only
because as a kid, I was a—well, not a dumbass about that kind of thing particularly
(though I was an inexcusable dumbass about a lot of other things), but just
young and romantic. I’ve always loved toys that fly: kites, gliders, parachutes,
model rockets, those totally, totally cool Cox gas-powered models that zoom
around the operator in circles, controlled by a pair of strings. My family
moved to Dayton, Ohio in 1969, when I was already building model airplanes in
much of my spare time at night (if I wasn’t reading books—I read constantly). Probably
my brain was more than a little addled from glue, paint fumes, and model airplane
dope. I was already an airplane buff, a plane-obsessed kid. I was 10.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is located in Dayton, and in 1969 there was a squadron
of B-52s based there. I have this vivid-as-yesterday memory of looking up one
afternoon just after we moved in and seeing this great B-52 bomber flying in a
low, banking circle around our new house, like they did all the time, and completely
blowing my stack. Most of the B-52s based out of Dayton were painted a
high-altitude silver and white, but this one had the Vietnam, night-raid camouflage
scheme, black on the bottom and sides, green, brown and black-green on the top.
It was flying low, in a wide turn, with the sun behind me so I could see the
paint scheme. Oh my goodness, was that ever the coolest thing I had EVER seen. Airplane
obsession stayed with me for a long time. When I grew old enough to even imagine
this, I occasionally hitchhiked across town to the Air Force Museum at
Wright-Pat, which is one of the truly great airplane museums in the whole
world. No Navy planes, of course, but if the Air Force or the Army Air Corps
flew it, an example is on display there, as well as most of the planes flown by
allies and enemies. It is a spectacular museum if you’re into that kind of
thing, and even if you’re not, you walk out thinking to yourself, man, that’s a
spectacular museum. I grew up, went to college, took literature courses, and
ran into “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—which planted a seed. It
sprouted sometime not long after, when I was still in college, home for the
weekend. I went to the Air Force Museum, as familiar and comfortable a place as
my own bedroom by then, to be honest, and found myself standing in front of an
RAF Spitfire, an airplane famous for helping fight off the German Luftwaffe
during the Battle of Britain. It’s such a famous airplane that I can’t imagine
that many people haven’t at least heard of a Spitfire—and it’s also a beautiful
machine, with aggressive, elegant lines. It’s gorgeous like a wasp is gorgeous:
Impressive, dangerous, don’t mess with it. It stings. Then it just hit me that a
Spitfire was designed to kill people. That’s what it was for. Many thousands of
people have died by the guns of Spitfires. On one level, of course, I knew
this, but I’m talking about an emotional breakthrough. These airplanes are not romantic. I had to have a breakthrough in
maturity, and I had to have lived enough life to understand at least a little
what life means in order to understand what a sick thing a Spitfire is. (In its defense, obviously, the Brits,
Americans and Russians had to win that war. Our
P-51 Mustang or P-38 Lightning are just as famous, just as elegant, and just as
deadly—and just as necessary. But the whole concept of a fighter plane is still
sick. Blame Hitler and his Messerschmitts.) That was a moment for me when
something moved, not only about the coolness of warplanes, but about war in
general. Propaganda, macho posturing, Patriotism and all manner of hawkish
horseshit too often linger as infections in the minds of young men from when
they were boys. I remember being roused, at age 7 or 8, about 1966, by
commercials for “The New Action Army” with stirring martial music, marching
soldiers, and a really catchy theme song. The “action”, of course, was war in Vietnam.
It’s hard for me to even believe.
So, we grow up, and we change our
beliefs, sometimes by confronting the passionate nonsense bequeathed to us by
posters, airshows, and TV commercials. Randall Jarrell, with this one small
poem he left ringing through the canon of our literary culture, helped me take
a step toward a saner adulthood. If Berryman grieved his loss, then I can
extend a full empathy on that and grieve with him.
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