Sylvia Plath is of course the
famous and much-loved poet/suicide, and it’s pretty obvious that her suicidal
example is infiltrating the mind of B. here, “though the screams of orphaned
children fix me anew”—a pretty powerful statement about the hold that love and responsibility
can have on people. I can’t help noting something else, though, the inclusion
of the narrative voice of “stricken Henry with his sisters & brothers / suddenly
gone pauses to wonder why he / alone breasts the wronging tide.” It’s about the
inclusion of the self with the pantheon of famous and accomplished poets who
seem to be one-by-one passing away. Perhaps calling him on this isn’t fair,
since his awards, accolades, and the literary social circles he moved in must
have planted some awareness of a legacy through his work. But he certainly
invested a lot in that legacy and investment in it crops up all the time in the
poems, that the legacy of the work is the overall point of his life beyond momentary
struggle for relief from his torments. In the meantime the life itself is a
shambles, in spite of his occasional attempts to wrest things back onto the
straight and narrow. Alcohol addiction is a bad addiction, though, a notoriously
difficult one to shake
Sylvia Plath was found dead with
her head in an oven, the infamous and terrible image of the desperate woman
crawling away from her life—away from her literary success, her family, all the
accolades and accomplishments, all the satisfactions waiting if she had found a
way to pull through. She didn’t though, and that’s that. Once it’s over, it’s
over. From the vantage of some sixty years later, her literary reputation has
thrived, to the extent that I’ve always seen her as one of the figures that
young writers have to deal with. Hemingway
is another. That was the case with me at any rate. I do have trouble fathoming,
in Berryman’s case, how the abstract and notoriously fickle continuance of
reputation, in which he seems to be investing so much of his ego, compensates
for an actual life and its actual satisfactions. The answer, I guess, is that
the life was screwed up anyway, damaged beyond repair before it ever really
even got started, so a reputation that has some chance of enduring arises as compensation
as much as anything.
For Plath, the mental illness and
the depression that came with being alive amounted to torment. It’s expressed in
frank terms in “Lady Lazarus,” http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/ll.html
one of the poems that nearly every young romantic English major stews over,
sometimes obsessively, in my case at 3 and 4 am, crouched under an umbrella in
the rain, sitting on a low stone wall in Belleview Park, looking over the
spectacular and terrifying spectacle of a great city laid out at my feet.
Fortunately for me, the depression and bewilderment that are often parts of
life, or parts of one particular stage of life, never swelled close to the
level of needing to check out. But I remember looking out and being astonished
at the insensible callousness, the coldness of it all. That’s a state of mind
that depression can bring one to. In my case, I also recognized it as a bit of
a pose. So here’s another college-era poem that deals with depression and
self-dramatization. It’s all a game, until you act on it. Then it’s not a game
anymore, and in fact you realize it never was.
The
Prowler
“I'm a prowler,”
I lie, “I walk the sleeping
streets at night with my hands
in my pockets.” I say this,
devising
the illusion of a lonely soul—
a romantic who pursues
his elusive spirit along
corridors
of quietly humming street-
lamps, among deserted city parks.
I state this with a twist
of regret, knowing well
that I'm happy enough. Until
I find myself in fact
walking the dark
avenues, past empty fenced-
in diamonds, and notice
how familiar it all seems.
I've come here before, under
lamp colonnades, seeking
a way past this creation.
KZ
So, an artifact from a long-ago
state of mind, but I feel okay looking back on it from here because there’s a
level of self-awareness in the guy that you don’t necessarily expect from
anyone that young, or from anyone at all for that matter. This poem arrived in
a single flash, I got up from my brooding 3 a.m. seat in the rainy park, went straight
home and wrote it down quickly, then went to bed.
David Wojahn has a terrific
article about Berryman, published in Blackbird,
and he has this to say about suicide and reputation, Berryman’s suicide, and
Ann Sexton’s almost inconceivable attitude towards Plath’s death:
Suicide, from a
bridge of all things: now there was a career move. And remember, the sixties
were scarcely over; these were the waning days of existentialism, of
live-fast-and-die-young, when suicide and early death possessed a cachet that
they hadn’t had since the days of the Romantics. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison,
James Dean and Plath: they were the new Chattertons and Young Werthers.
Self-destruction was hip, and it even had its protocols, not as elaborate as
those for hari-kiri, but nearly as ritualized. Anne Sexton, who would end her
own life shortly after Berryman, reacted to the death of Plath with a
horrifying competitiveness. As Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook writes,
Sexton was
frank about her anger with Plath for having “stolen” the finale Sexton planned
for her own career. “That death was mine!” Sexton told her doctor. Suicide was
a glamorous death, for an artist; the world would now pay more serious
attention to Plath’s poetry than was otherwise conceivable. . . . More, Sexton
knew that her own suicide, whenever it occurred, would seem like a copycat act.
This seemed unfair to Sexton, since she was older than Plath.
Well. My point, and Wojahn’s
here, is that suicide as a career move was in play. It seems crazy, and it’s
natural to condemn it. But it seems to be part of the mid-century artist’s kit,
for good or bad. “Glamorous”: What a word for it! I was raised Catholic, and I
hear at every baptism, and every renewal of baptismal vows that arise in church
now and then, about one’s promise to reject “the glamor of evil.” It’s an easy
step to turn this around and generate “the evil of glamor.” If suicide is
accomplished in service of glamor, then isn’t it perhaps evil as well? I don’t
know Sexton’s poetry well, but I find her response to Plath’s suicide at least repugnant.
Sorry, I just do. If B. is being seduced by such stuff, which it seems like,
then woe to him. But I would maintain that his attitude toward it is more
complicated than Sexton’s. (I’ll probably have to take her on and study her
life and work now. More on her, then, at some future date.) Plath seems to be much
more genuine in her suffering and her death, if that makes sense and doesn’t
come off as too callous.
Depression and suicide are not
happy concepts to deal with, especially on a bright, lush mid-June Sunday
morning, Father’s Day, with my family here giving me presents and cooking for
me, and with lots of promise not only in the day ahead but in life in general.
But in learning about what’s what in life, back when, and struggling with it, I
visited the states of mind that B. is engaging with in this poem, and that
Plath was overcome by. For me it was silliness, and I knew it, but young and
silly coexist naturally. It’s okay. Berryman eventually was overcome, like
Plath. It wasn’t a pose for Plath, and it wasn’t a game, and it wasn’t a
romantic phase some bright young twerp was flirting with. It was real, and it killed
her. Berryman? Same thing, but not so fast…. In either case, dead is dead.
Suicide is tragic if there’s anything
but a stretching for glamorous attention involved. I’ll try to remember to give
the guy a break. He may have engaged in self-dramatization, but you can’t read The Dream Songs and deny they arise out
of a real measure genuine suffering. A sober reflection, and a measure of grief
if they or their work mean anything to at all, seems appropriate to me.
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