#286

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One can read B.’s “struggles” as an existential contest, trying through art to find the meaning of suffering in life. To be fair, there is plenty of that. I perhaps tend toward the high-minded when it comes to this kind of thing, maybe naively so. But alcoholism was a component of B.’s struggle too, and if not at the root of his suffering, it was still a major factor in it. He and his family arrived in Ireland in the early fall, 1966, and I have to think that saving his life was a prime motivation for the move. But, Paul Mariani, his biographer, reports that by January of 1967, “He was tired of Dublin, having discovered no new genius to supplant Yeats.” And the drinking never even slowed down. While he made no real friends, “he did have all the pub acquaintances he needed to share a many few with him.” His Irish wife thus had him committed in January to a Dublin mental hospital called Grangegorman, ironic in that he had visited the place thirty years earlier and was horrified by what he encountered there. That’s where this poem is set. And as his biographer also reports, the Irish hospital was decidedly different from the hospitals and rehab facilities he had stayed in back in the States, which one imagines were relatively supportive and clinical. This in comparison was a tough place, and he was begging his wife after a week to sign the papers that would let him out. He was there for almost two months.

Grangegorman doesn’t engender much in the way of comforting poetic imagery. Someone, “Henry’s enemy,” has died of cancer, and while he’s not sure whether heaven or hell was the man’s fate, he sarcastically wonders if a bell regulates his every move, like the bell does in the hospital.

But B. is stuck there. While wandering the halls late one night, smoking and “drug-drunk” on Thorazine, he drops his cigarette and can’t find it:

            Nurses will deal hell if the ward wakes, croaking

            to smoke antic with flame.

            All the parts of this damned floor are the same.

            He scrabbled, worried hard, with half his mind.

It’s just such a remarkably awful moment—with powerful drugs erasing half of his mind, and what’s left of it marked by a paranoid fear of arousing the nurses while he sneaks a smoke like some delinquent middle schooler in the boys room.

            Like the breakfast bell on fire

            it brings, O ho it brings around again

            what miserable Henry must desire:

            aplomb

            at the temps

            of the tomb.

It’s vision of hell, a living hell in Dublin, Ireland, regulated by martinet nurses and jangling alarm bells. And of course, it incites that old longing for erasure and the dark, comforting quiet of the tomb.

It’s mid-October as I write this, with kitschy black-and-orange symbols already adorning practically every public and private space in anticipation of Halloween. Jack o’ lanterns, witches, ghosts, bats, vampires, spiders, all that. I’ve always felt that—the commercialization of it aside, which is simply vulgar and stupid, an opportunity to sell sugar and plastic—Halloween is a sane and healthy phenomenon. Things that we don’t understand, or that are dangerous, these scare us, and it’s okay to dredge them up and face them, and perhaps even laugh at them, because it undermines their power. But I’m not really afraid of all that much. Spiders and bats are cool, walking mummies, vampires, werewolves aren’t real. Ghosts—nah!—(even if they were to turn out to be real). Don’t invite devils into your life and they will probably leave you alone. But I do know there are things to be genuinely afraid of. Here’s one: For him, to look up one night, wandering the halls and smoking in the dark without your glasses, committed to a Victorian insane asylum, and then to look at yourself knowing that your wife, through genuine concern for your well-being, because she can’t think of what else to do, has put you there? It’s a Halloween-worthy nightmare. The poem ends on those three truncated, staccato lines, and the word “tomb.” It powerfully signifies that he wants out. I find it genuinely disturbing.