“Whitman on his tower” is a
reference again to Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed a tower at the
University of Texas with a rifle and other weapons and started shooting. He killed
14 people from the tower and had killed his wife and mother earlier. Some 30+
were wounded. He was eventually gunned down by a policeman who climbed up the
tower to take him out. Whitman’s name ought to be forgotten, and it mostly is,
but B. brings it up here—fresh after the incident, obviously—because of the
comparison he makes between Whitman and his father.
B.’s father, of course, died when
B. was 11. Suicide was the official conclusion from the police, and B. is
careful all through The Dream Songs
to call it only that and gauge his heavy emotional responses accordingly. But
the details pretty clearly point at something else, a murder, either by B.’s
mother, or her boyfriend, or both. It happened on the day they were to finalize
a divorce, that B.’s father didn’t want—his
mistress had stolen all the money she could get from him and taken off—and the
night before they had had a loud, angry fight. She was most certainly afraid of
him, for herself and for her children, because he had threatened to drown the
boys and had been carrying a gun around. It seems quite plausible that the
mother or her boyfriend took action and put a stop to the threats. Berryman
must have known all this on some level, and in psychotherapy, this possibility
had come out and was discussed. So he did know, but chose not to address it in
the work.
There is an odd sense of empathy for
the shooter in the tower, that arrives through a sense of empathy with the
father he is being compared with. One can imagine that Hitler, in the last days
of the war he started, cowering in his Berlin bunker with the Russian army
approaching from one side and the British, French and American armies from the
other, was absolutely terrified. Doesn’t change what we think of him one bit,
does it? Not after what he caused. Empathy, forgiveness and understanding, even
as the noble and necessary emotions they are, still get overwhelmed by a comprehension
of the evils that led to the predicament that sparks the empathy. Empathy for such
a monster’s suffering is tough to maintain. B. does it for just a moment,
noting how bad the shooter in the tower must have felt, even as he kept
murdering. The father is separated from this by the simple acknowledgement that
he didn’t do what he had threatened. The sons lived on, to deal with the wreckage
left behind. That shooter in the tower knew he was on a suicide mission; he
just tried to do all the damage he could, inflict all the woe he could, while
he could. And, gosh, he must have felt pretty awful about it.
The stance of the poet here is
that the father did what he had to do, which included taking out himself before
he accomplished something even worse. To not swim into the Gulf with his sons
in his arms arises as an act of love, and B. seems to be treating it that way.
The real situation, that B. doesn’t treat at all, tells a different and
actually less complicated story. The father didn’t stop himself. He got
stopped.
I’m aware at the moment of how
much literature has taught me. I don’t deal with wretchedness all that much in
my life. I’ve been afraid, I’ve experienced pain that exhausted me so that I
couldn’t resist any longer, and I’ve had to face the consequences of my bad
behavior and bad choices. But that’s just being human. I’ve always experienced
this as something that will go away if I take action, or wait it out, or get
help, because nothing bad enough can really get below the root of my
self-esteem or my sense of well-being. It’s the gift a more or less healthy
body and a loving family. These sufferings are anomalies. I know that this
could change. But I have known people in genuine distress, several who have
come to the edge of suicide, and some who have gone over the edge. That was all
just baffling. Books have taken me, myself, over. Stories of real people,
characters made up, poems. Well, here is a story of a real person. Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus struck me so hard when
I read it in college, with its characterization of the suffering of the damned
in hell manifesting as laughter. Not a mirthful chuckle, obviously, no gleeful
belly laughs here. The manic, crazed laughter of the tormented who can never
even dare hope for relief, not even through death. That’s an extreme, melodramatic
conception, and I fear something facile about relating it to any real life, but
I think Berryman plays that conception out in his work. Probably it’s
deliberate. The strategy seems to have worked.
I can’t pin down something, and I’m
not sure I can articulate the question. If you only approach the poems from the
inside, then they tell one story: My father committed suicide when I was a boy,
the psychological and emotional blow was so severe that my subsequent emotional
development was stymied, causing me to fuck up my life and at the same time I
have used the pain as a wellspring for championship books of poetry. I live at
both extremes. But when we readers poke around outside of the poetry, into the
life that ostensibly supports it in pretty fine detail, we find a different story.
Clearly, the hurt is real. The father is dead. Don’t people get over it after
40 years, though? No, not get over, but emplace it, build a fence around it,
cover it in wax like honeybees do with the invading mouse they stung to death.
But, this story has some shelf life, so he runs with it instead, and to justify
it, he doubles down, time and again through questionable behaviors. People live out artificial personas all the time. His eased
the way into emotional crimes. It greased one outrage after another and one
triumph after another.
This is the problem that adheres
to all autobiography. Even the most boring life is too complex to fit into a
book, or series of books, or 385 desperate poems. So the author chooses to
include this and exclude that, and so in the process rewrites his life—he isolates
a thesis, chooses to support it, leaves out details that don’t support it. I
teach exactly this to developing writers every day. So, this is what we have to
expect. St. Augustine, John Stuart Mill, Dorothy Wordsworth, Rousseau—just a
few of the great autobiographers—choose their details carefully, honestly, and derive
a compelling thesis from them to which readers respond. Thomas Wolfe, D.H.
Lawrence, others, fictionalize it, which gives them a bit more room for
creative invention. I tend to think that B. probably goes even a bit further,
and I think he knew it. So how seriously do we take the psychological insights
that arise from the work? To the same extent we respond to fiction: Since a
thinking human being wrote it, somehow, there will arise something of value if
it’s any good and if we recognize it. I’m to the point now where questions of
whether the psychological insights are real or not need to subside. Do they
resonate with a reader? Great! Join company with Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary
and, as well, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Makes no difference. Does it feel like
horse hockey? Okay, well: Has Dick Cheney written an autobiography yet?
The poems are tight, or not,
often they’re linguistically inventive and clever, and they engage with a
broader world that has receded into history now. Vietnam, the Soviet Union, the
Civil Rights Movement, Eisenhower and the Kennedys—history. Lots to learn there.
About the poet’s emotional, psychological struggles and social missteps? If
something valuable seems to arise, cool. If not, there’s no point worrying
about it. And if Dick Cheney does write an autobiography, I have no intention
of reading it, because a liar lies, and who cares about that? Unless it’s well
done, and the liar is honest about his lies, like all fiction writers, then
okay, show me what you’ve got. In the end, I don’t think we have a liar of Dick
F***ing Cheney’s grandmaster caliber here. It doesn’t seem that way, if for no
other reason than that the work has an almost irresistible draw. I’m hardly the
first person to feel it. I know also that the subject matter of the poems has
put off some friends—the sexism and racism in one case, and the desperate tone
of the struggling in another, and the just the general obscurity in several
friends who don't feel the need to summon the patience for poetry it takes to open up
some of these. But I find them gripping and sometimes a bit repulsive, but not enough
to make me turn completely to writing poems about butterflies every day.
So, I’m not quite sure where this
ramble led, exactly, only that I’m not taking the “confessional” poet so much
at his word anymore. You’re not fooling me, John Berryman! But show me what you’ve
got anyway, and we’ll see. And I’m not getting suckered, and I don’t have to
get sucked in. I declare that I will write butterfly poems in response to your
suicide poems if that’s what I feel like. At any rate, this poem ends Book V of
The Dream Songs. Something different may
yet arise!
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