How justifiable is it to blame one’s problems on somebody or
something else? The first stanza of this poem is simple enough: Wife and child
sent downtown on a rainy day in Dublin, which gives the speaker an opportunity
to slip out to the pub—after two months drying out in the insane asylum, I
presume—and have another drink. “Pub-erty” indeed, and there is a clear vision
of how ridiculous the whole episode must seem: “I lapse like an Irish clown.”
We’re supposedly enlightened enough in 2015 to understand how really difficult
alcohol addiction is to shake. But it is still hard to fathom, because as the
alcoholic here is lapsing, he’s punning and telling bad jokes about it even as
he does it. The drive is powerful, but the victim isn’t unconscious as the
relapse is happening and as it’s moving him, and he has enough vision of
himself left to see how foolish it must seem.
A quick turn: B. is one who dreams out loud, with dreams as
vivid as poona horses—either a reference to Pune racetrack in Mumbai, or the
Poona Light Horse, a regiment of Indian cavalry from the 19th
century—and then another abrupt turn to a reference to his father. His father
would swim out to sea in Florida, out of sight of land, actually, and eventually
straggle back in, as he was going crazy from marriage and financial
difficulties, and he threatened to take his sons out with him and never come
back. His wife shot him soon after, after one last terrible shouting match,
though the shooting was ruled a suicide, and B. kept close to the suicide story
all his life. The father is the one in the poem who’s loveless, except for the
one son, Henry, who is “steept in Homer / & Timon & livid.” “Timon” is
from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,
likely. “Livid” is a pun on probably the Roman historian, Livy, and Ovid, the
Roman poet, and of course “livid” means furious, angry. So, he’s literate and
accomplished in the classics, and driven somewhat in his achievement by his
hurt and his need to let his father know that he was still loved, and angry
that he can’t, and angry with himself as well for a score of reasons. There’s a lot of meaning packed into that pun.
Well, as he admits, this Henry character was always a “crash
programme” anyway—a preordained wreck. Back in the pub, he does something honest.
Lays his silver on the bar and buys a drink with it. “He took back all his lies”
is not clear, but my suspicion is something along the lines of him saying, you
know all this literary accomplishment stuff? Not a word of it. Lies. Cover.
Compensation. Why do you think I was always so damn passionate about it? “Methinks
the drunk doth protest too much.” Fooled all of you people with it, too! I want
a drink. That’s who I really am and what I want. A smile then, even more terrible than the vision on the face of the shot father that haunts him so. So: “He went down chimneys”—it’s
hard not to think of Santa Claus after this line, inveterate chimney descender
as old Santa is, but even if there’s a different reference, there’s no
ambiguity about the last line: “Henry? a brick,” which oddly enough doesn’t end
with a period, but a comma, implying more to come, but with the heavy, clunking
dead stop of the brick as counterpoint. He gets a brick in his stocking because that is what he's earned. His
thick, senseless brickness, his alcoholism, will continue. Is he blaming
anybody? Not exactly. It is simply his fate, to have been hurt, to roar out of
that, and eventually to destroy himself. It’s hardly a glamorous moment. My
first instinct on reading this poem was to judge. Having walked through the
poem, an oddly shaped, painful poem, but not at all a difficult one, I now decline
to judge. Some things can’t be judged—they can’t even be understood. I can’t
really imagine heading back to the pub at that moment. I couldn’t do it. His
wife and daughter, out shopping, it’s such a bitter betrayal of their love for
him. It makes him feel like hell, too, which he expresses in bitter puns and a grotesque
laughter. But it does not stop him, even as he watches himself grinding himself
to nothing, and grinding away the love of his family. The path this man was on
gave him and the world something big, but the cost was appalling. Dumb as a
brick is where he was heading. Eventually dead as a brick. Here’s a bad pun
too, but what the hell: It’s a sobering moment. Some people don’t want to be
helped, and some cannot be helped. I
still don’t quite believe that. But he sure did.
I took "& the last voice in drawled; ‘Henry? a brick,’" as meaning the last person into the pub was describing B as a good guy, a "brick." As if he was (quickly) already well-loved at the place.
ReplyDeleteIt's an older way of complimenting someone, but B would have known it.
Still, the Santa Claus reference, if it is one, would support your reading.
Makes perfect sense--a meaning I hadn't thought of since I've never heard that word used that way. The point about the punctuation remains--he keeps on doing whatever it is he's doing.
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