#300 Henry Comforted

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Here’s the comfort: A reception, room filling with “Irish types,” including “one gorgeous girl” (of course), people smoking, “the accents are flying”—I’ve been to a thousand similar receptions, just without the Irish setting. “Unshaven, tieless, with the most expensive drink in the room, / I have recovered a little.” Why is Henry comforted/recovered? “Henry is feeling better, / owing to three gin-&-vermouths.” Oh…okay. Back then to the reception: the Irish are not neat, the skirts are as short here as in Minneapolis (fashion in the 60s featured a broad acceptance of mini-skirts), a guy with “monumental” shoes, a couple men “are giving it verbal hell.”

Three gin-&-vermouths. Alcohol is the comfort. Admitting, with direct candor, that he’d much prefer to deal with the reception with three stiff drinks in him than not. And moreover, the drinks are his comfort, without which he probably wouldn’t be able to cope with a social situation, or without which it would be unbearable. If your first day in Dublin is your worst, which he repeats here as the poem’s first line, his subsequent days are better, and the implication—jaded as I am at this point about the potential for anything like sanity or recovery—is that once he finds out where the bar is at the reception or which corner pub is the best one to sneak off to, that’s why his days in Dublin improve. It gets better after that awful first dry day. In other poems this realization is often accompanied by shame, weak jokes, piteousness, and self-loathing. Here, it’s comfort. Might as well admit it.

I’ve been talking this over with colleague, friend and former student, Anna Marie, and we’ve both noted the psychic split that looks to be operative here. I’ve commented on it before, when B. says, “I lapse like an Irish clown” (DS 292). There, it finally impressed itself on me that the compulsion of the addict operates separately from his conscious ego, and from his decision-making processes, to the extent that as he walks up the corner to the pub, in what he knows is a serious betrayal of his wife and daughter who are so invested in his health and healing, he still watches himself go, makes wry jokes and bitter self-deprecating remarks like calling himself a clown, is fully aware of how awful what he’s doing is—yet he keeps on going. He didn’t say it there, but once he got to the pub, the drink had to have been a comfort. Here, he admits it: Henry’s Comfort. And really, why argue one’s way around it? Why even bother with rehab? Probably only as a desperate measure to extend whatever remains of his life, mainly so he can have the comfort of another drink, though it’s also what’s killing him.

As far as alcohol or any other substance, I don’t relate. Put three martinis in me, and if I’m not actually out on the floor, you’ll know I’m buzzed. Probably the same with him or anyone, though he obviously didn’t care. For me, I wouldn’t be able to function at anything close to a normal level. Well, fine, but this isn’t about me. But, it’s also true I’ve experienced the lift of just the right drunk on just a couple occasions. Once drinking bourbon with Janine and Wendy in the lounge of the Intercontinental in Chicago. A couple nights in Athens, OH, before my brother’s graduation from OU. Hitting cruising altitude at a couple parties in college. But I can count the times on one hand. Almost always, it slows me down, fuzzes me out, blurs my focus, makes me stupid and lazy. But for B., it pepped him up, by all accounts. I get it, or got it, rarely, but for him, that was the way of it. Booze was energy. And because of that, he connected it with the writing process that was the foundation of his career. Well, it was a Faustian bargain. I’ve hinted at that before, but no more pussy-footing about that either. Demon Rum giveth, and Demon Rum do most certainly, Mr. Bones, taketh away. What does it give? It gives thirty years of artistic accomplishment. Fame. He gets the girls and gets to give free rein to his goatish disposition. It proffers as well a simulacrum of comfort, like here, but it is not genuine comfort. What did the bargain cost? Health. The body. The self-esteem that comes from pride in one’s body and one’s health and one’s spirit. And there was this: Adrian Leverkühn, in his bargain in Thomas Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus, is commanded by Mephistopheles himself (I’ve mentioned this before as well): Thou shalt not love. Not yourself, not your wife. In the novel, when Leverkühn does love some rosy-cheeked little angelic nephew, or somebody like that, the boy is taken from him by meningitis, the spirochete disease-cousin of Leverkühn’s metaphoric syphilis, the instrument of his demon. B. writes poems of appreciation for his wife, and we’ve seen love of his daughter. But he sent them shopping so he could slip away to the pub. He made his choice. Eventually, she will leave him.

Does he have a choice as he’s mingling amidst the Dublin literati? Not anymore. The self-awareness that knows what he’s doing is helpless to thwart the compulsion. In this poem, he doesn’t bother with jokes or self-disgust. He simply accepts the “comfort” of it and is grateful. As he was walking down the street toward the pub, did he have a choice? Not at that point. Though his self-disgusted consciousness may rage and sneer all it wants, it’s not in control. The deeper and stronger compulsion is what’s in control. It’s what he bargained for, and it’s something separate.

Did he ever have a choice? Ask The Dream Songs, and the answer you’ll get is no. He never had a choice. I’m leaving that up in the air for now, though. He knew what he was doing, I suspect, and he knew the connection he was forging with accomplishment and addiction, and what that would eventually cost. But it’s only a suspicion. I don’t know enough about the roots of addiction yet to decide. I’m still in the learning process.