A little online research turned
this up: While it’s tempting to consign the second last line as the poem’s
having lapsed “delicately into gibberish,” as one critic (John Bayley) puts it,
another critic, Brendan Cooper, notes that the gibberish-seeming line is
actually a transliteration, from Hebrew, of Job’s first speech: “Perish the day
wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child
conceived.” I would never have gotten this one myself, so bravo and thanks for
that to the alert and learned scholar. B. will have something to say about literary
critics down the line (he breaks wind as a comment, in fact), but in this case,
a critic produces the key that clicks open an otherwise un-pickable lock.
Unless, I suppose, the reader knows Hebrew well enough to apprehend the phonetics
buried in a blackface parody of Hebrew. Whew!
Job, we may recall, was wealthy
and righteous, with scads of camels, sheep, oxen, donkeys, servants, and
offspring. Jehovah held him up to Satan as an example of a righteous man, and
Satan answered, sure, because you’ve protected him and made him wealthy. Take
away his stuff and his comfort and watch what happens. Which Jehovah let Satan
do through a series of attacks, robberies and natural disasters, yet Job kept
it together. When that didn’t produce the desired result, Satan struck Job with
leprosy, which I know from seeing Ben Hur
is the worst thing that could befall somebody in those days. His wife suggested
he should go ahead and curse God and die, get it over with, but Job stayed
true. When his friends came to visit and lament with him, he uttered the
despairing line above, but ultimately he kept his faith and eventually was
rewarded with twice the camels, sheep, asses, and oxen and 10 more children—7
sons and 3 daughters, the optimal number and ratio, it seems, since that’s how
many he started with.
The other business going on here
is a reference to Shakespeare, the “Goya of the Globe & Blackfriars”. Goya,
the Spanish artist, looked the disasters of the Napoleonic wars in the face and
produced his series of paintings called The
Disasters of War in response, which I have always found extraordinarily
disturbing. (Along with poets like Randall Jarrell, Wilfred Owen, writers like
Heller and Pynchon, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, painters like Géricault
and Goya, these artists all helped steer me away from the glorification of war
that my culture saddled me with as a youngster. I’ve mentioned some of them
before.) Anyway, Shakespeare had his moments of delight in comedies, but there
was a lot of dark, weird stuff in Shakespeare for sure. There shouldn’t be any
doubt of that, but go read MacBeth or
Othello or Richard III again if you’re not convinced.
So B. invokes Job and Shakespeare
as kindred spirits. Job and Shakespeare strike me as pretty fast company. It’s
maybe even a bit presumptuous, but he did win that Pulitzer. More to the point, if B. is suffering as much as he
claims in his confessional work—and there’s no reason to doubt that—it speaks
to the magnificence of suffering. Suffering of sufficient magnitude clears away
some of the checks on the ego that health and well-being set in place—shame,
guilt, dignity, humility, decency, laws & rules. A corollary is that in
most cases, suffering is also debilitating, often fatal. If the sufferer finds
he’s not debilitated, then the way opens for something great, sometimes for
something monstrous. Thus, B. makes the comparison. It’s pretty clear that a
monstrous figure like Stalin was insane, so maybe we should have relegated him
to history’s padded room, and it’s to the discredit of Russia and the rest of
the world that we couldn’t manage that. I think he became an instrument of
something broad, deep and dark in the collective human psyche. Hitler may have
had moments of glee, diabolical delight, etc., but he was never happy, and at
the end I have no doubt that he was utterly terrified. I believe he suffered
badly, and his suffering may well have been the impetus that conceived his
monstrousness. He wasn’t insane. But he was such a monster, and he spread his
suffering to such an unimaginable extreme, that there is no excuse. For all the
magnificence of suffering there may be, no matter the isolate and gargantuan heights
it causes the egotistical self to swell to, we are bound, I declare, to
maintain an awareness of our participation in the human community, who also,
all of them, suffer. Choose finally to abandon that and you deserve
condemnation for it. If there’s anything of magnificent suffering monstrousness
at all in Berryman, it’s small potatoes in comparison to the two figures I just
mentioned, though it’s clear enough he hurt himself and likely those close to
him. But what he did just as well is take that condition he found himself in
and make something else with it. Something more positive. He was an artist, and
that means something. He was American, so he knew that to deal deeply and
honestly with life as an American, you have to address race. It is America’s
foundational burden. He farts in its face and goofs off with it, too, which
would seem to disparage the seriousness of the whole concept, but that’s all
superficial buffoonery. He knows what he’s up to and why. Same with sex. Given
the way women have been treated in the West for the past 3 or so millennia, men
have inherited another burden as well. He handles that in an analogous way. I
don’t think it holds up too well historically, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway, the oddly coded reference
to Job does a couple things: It declares B.’s kinship with Job, with some
overtones of ego puffing itself up, sure, but it also reminds of the point of
Job’s story, which is that participation in the human condition, which yes will
always feature suffering, must finally be the last word. Don't give up, in other words. One last thing: If God
is some kind of an externalized authoritarian Jehovah, as the Old Testament
gives us in Job’s story, then I don’t think I’m on board. But if some manifestation
of spirit is inherent in what I’ve called the human condition, part and parcel of creation, inseparable from it, rather
than spirit as creation’s overlord—then, okay, I’m still listening. And in
truth, you can still hear it.
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