YJHM: Clare Emily Clifford, "'Blazing Like Disease': John Berryman and the Dis-Ease of Suicide"

I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.
and she never could. She had my portrait
done instead.
….
They hung my portrait in the chill
north light, matching
me to keep me well.
Only my mother grew ill.
She turned from me, as if death were catching,
as if death transferred,
as if my dying had eaten inside of her.
-Anne Sexton, “The Double Image”

Suicidal literature is not necessarily depressing or morbid;
the writer, like the physician, is interested in illness
in the larger context of healing and health.
-Jeffrey Berman, “The Grief That Does Not Speak”

I’ve been thinking about John Berryman and suicide for years. Not his suicide, or his father’s or aunt’s suicides, or even his critics’ theories about how suicide affected his life. No, I’ve been thinking about suicide in John Berryman’s poetry for years. From his earliest book of poems, The Dispossessed (1948), his speakers have been trying to “learn / Compassion,” understand their suffering, and find “candour for [their] pain” (“A Point of Age” 61-2, 56)[1]. Within Berryman’s entire oeuvre, his speakers struggle to “master… the sorrow, the disease” in their lives and make sense of the suicidal “grave” that infects—and reinfects—their thoughts (75-6, 118). In my estimation, the compassion they are learning is for themselves. Berryman may have been considered the most revered elegist of his poetic generation and memorialized as “the obituary writer,” but Henry’s great subject of mourning is made plainly clear when he states that “It all centered in the end on suicide / in which I am an expert, deep & wide” (Davison, 136:17-8[2]).

Berryman critics are usually obsessed with his personal failures: the failed sobriety, the failed marriages, the failed life. Too often, when reading Berryman scholarship, his poetry is quoted as though it were a journal chronicling and explaining the frenzy of his life. The two biographies of Berryman haphazardly use his poetry to “speak for” his life—conflating, as often occurs, the lives of Henry & Berryman. In her review of these biographies Kathe Davis is understandably disappointed by their inept appropriation of his poetry:

The truth is that Berryman scholarship is frequently just that: scholarship about Berryman, not scholarship about his work. Instead of being elucidated, his poetry is “dissolved back into [his] life”. For as often as his critics sensationally mention Berryman’s own suicide—and they refer to it often—there is only passing critical attention to analyzing the role that suicide plays as a device in his poems.

I see John Berryman’s poetry about suicide as exemplary in giving what David Morris calls “voice to an otherwise often inarticulate discourse about pain” (Morris 3). Berryman’s work engages the painful subject of suicide, creating a space where language can speak about silenced subjects. The poet William Meredith reflects on how “Berryman helped a lot of us to find the language we needed to talk in poetry about what is new in our culture…. language that handles directly the anger and humor and violence of its time, with the traditional language of poetry” (qtd in Browne 72). The formulation of a new language creates a complex but generative space—one that discourses about pain, suicide, and words, which are all subjects mandating literal, personal, and cultural interpretation.

Morris argues that “pain [is] an event that demands interpretation. Pain not only hurts but more often than not frustrates, baffles, and resists us. It seems we cannot simply suffer pain but almost always are compelled to make sense of it” (18). Yet to “make sense of” pain, to “interpret” pain in the context of suicidality, we must do double-interpreting. A suicidal act is itself “a communication, an interpersonal” one that we struggle to make sense of as “we assign meaning to the logistics of the act”— hanging, shotgun, bridge-jumping (Sanderson 35, Jamison 130). So as we accrue these intersecting subjects, we complicate the levels of interpretive work to be performed: pain must be interpreted, suicide demands interpretation, and of course language is the vehicle of our communication, still open to interpretation as well. It is no wonder that Berryman’s speakers find themselves inundated with the work of so many interpretations “too many, blazing like disease” seeking a “magical tongue” to “mend” their ills, searching for a “strange recovery” (“At Chinese Checkers” 60, 119, 122, 127).

Conservative estimates show that we live in a country and culture where nearly twice as many individuals die each year from suicide as there are deaths by homicide—there are 83 suicides a day in the United States, one every 17 minutes—and yet we still struggle to speak about suicide openly. Edwin Schneidman declared, at the end of his forty-five year career in suicidology, that

Accepting Schneidman’s logic, there is no way to disassociate suicide from the entanglements of pain. By attending to this “discourse of pain” and examining the “vocabulary of suicide,” my work engages poetry about suicide as it responds to, constructs, and challenges our cultural understanding of the suicidal mind (Morris 3, Schneidman vii). Like Jeffrey Berman, I too “seek a fuller discussion of suicidal literature and its impact on readers and society,” and therefore my interest in John Berryman centers “in the end on suicide”—on the choices Berryman makes in textualizing suicide in his poetry, and how frequently Berryman’s context for suicide engages dis-ease and pain (SLS 44).

During a Harvard Advocate interview, John Berryman was asked to describe his process of composing: “Could you talk about how—physically—you write your poems? Do you do several drafts, start with a line, a page, or several drafts, just write them out? What is the process?”(13). Berryman’s response in no way addresses the process of writing, instead his reply explains only his reason for writing: “Well, you feel uneasy, and you get going with a pencil or pen” (13). If, for Berryman, the impetus to write is a feeling of unease—dis-ease, even—then “get[ting] going with a pencil or pen” is the first step of his palliative care. The term “disease” etymologically derives from a state of dis-ease denoting the absence of ease, the sensation of discomfort, or a pathological illness affecting ones health. Disease even means—in a more archaic and now obsolete usage—to decease, to die. Unquestionably, the work of John Berryman begins with and struggles with dis-ease, both real and “phantoming uneases” (“Not to Live” 4).

Dis-ease is the linguistic locus in Berryman’s poetry, because as it engages the uneasy reality of suicide as a subject of dialogic inquiry, it educates us on how to heal our cultural dis-ease with suicide. The Dream Songs, and more broadly the entire body of Berryman’s work, is famously littered with speakers who are quite literally in or just out of hospitals for treatment of various illnesses. They continually struggle with suicide and dis-ease; it’s not surprising to be reminded that even “the very word suicide elicits uneasiness” (Kimball 27). While I do not intend to imply that suicide is summarily a result of disease or diseased individuals, I do want to work with the language Berryman sets forth in his work.

In “Dream Song 67” Henry, the main character and speaker of Berryman’s 385 poem epic The Dream Songs, announces that he is “obliged to perform in complete darkness / operations of great delicacy / on [him]self” (13-5). Henry effectively becomes his own physician, he is “death-wounded on the mend,” a self-healer practicing his own palliative care (52:11-2). Yet his recovery literally occurs by embarking on a narrative of his encounters with suicide. Having been “bluffed to the ends of [his] pain” Henry explains that he “took up a pencil” to write, because it is “in the administration of rhetoric… [that] the thinky death consists” (30:8-9, 10:7-9). While Edward Neill believes “that Berryman’s is not an art that thrives on health,” his assessment arguably fails to consider Berryman’s poetry within the context of what Jeffrey Berman asserts in my quoted epigraph, that “the writer, like the physician, is interested in illness in the larger context of healing and health” (Neill 272, GDNS 48).

Even when Berryman’s speakers are figured in the throes of extreme suicidality, they continue to fight against a “world so ill arranged” that it wounds, a dis-eased world in which even language is “striving to recover” from “tortured syntax” (164:9, 165:14, Shapiro 124). Susanne Kimball proposes that “Perhaps the poet is the only member of society who deals with [suicide] in such a way as to stimulate the rethinking of conventional views on the subject,” and I agree that we must rethink suicide—we must revisit and revise it (27). The subject of suicide must be dissected with patience and skill, we must work attentively with a scalpel carving away the pained dis-ease and keep suicide from reaching its terminal end.

Berryman has claimed that “poetry is a terminal activity, taking place out near the end of things,” and Diane Ackerman describes Berryman’s work as “not so much ‘ill’ at ease as terminally ill at ease” (FP 312, Ackerman 146 author’s emphasis). The first Berryman poem that I read some fifteen years ago was a Dream Song offering an “ill… book” for perusal. Not coincidently, I would argue, the poem immediately following that one in The Dream Songs opens with a direct address of suicide itself: “Your face broods from my table, Suicide” (171:1, 172:1). Berryman’s speakers repeatedly contemplate suicide—philosophically, literally via the suicides of others, and personally as they ponder their own possible fate of suicide. Such contemplations nearly always occur in conjuction with instances of dis-ease, illness, and pain. Henry’s greatest need is to understand and make sense of his pain, even to the extreme of writing with the blood of his dis-ease: “Henry stabbed his arm and wrote” (74:4). Clearly Berryman’s poetry is, as Barbara Hardy writes, a “poetry of emergency and extremity” (46). It should not appear the least bit unusual that Hardy uses the language of medicine, since Berryman’s poetry engages suicide as though it is a terminal dis-ease, an illness threatening to consume, erode, metastasize, and kill.

One aspect quite central to Henry’s concern about suicide is the fact that he has, himself, suffered the “irreversible loss” of his father to suicide (TDS). Henry speaks from the unhealed wound of his father’s suicide, addressing himself in second person as he announces that “the wound talks to you” (174:8). Henry is a survivor of suicide, grieving for the loss of a loved one to suicide, and like other narratives of suicide survivorship Henry’s mourning seeks to make sense of his loss, grief, shame, guilt, and anger. More threatening, though, is Henry’s fear that the same fate of death by suicide awaits him as well. In fact, the “entire corpus of dreams songs” is an astonishing piece of work when viewed in the dual roles of suicide pathography and autopathography of suicide survivorship (Oberg 9). By writing through and about the difficult subject of suicide, Berryman communicates how the “transforming power of art can put anything to use, even pain” (Morris 195).

Richard Sanderson explains that “because suicide is a communication rather than an arbitrary natural event, the survivor seeks to decipher it” (36). In this respect, Sanderson sees pathography about suicide—particularly of suicide survivorship—as “didactic pathographies” that educate readers about suicidal individuals and the devastating effects of suicide for survivors of suicide (Sanderson 42). Subsequently, Henry’s suicidal ideation is also edifying, despite their clinical complexity. Whereas suicidology formally describes suicidal ideation as “thinking about suicide” and exploring “suicidal thoughts,” ideators also include “individuals who think about or form an intent to suicide of varying degrees of seriousness but do not make an explicit suicide attempt or complete suicide” (Jamison 35, CTS 20). Henry is both of these, he thinks about suicide, and the possible likelihood of his own suicide. His father’s death has left him with what Jeffrey Berman defines as “the legacy—or illegacy—of suicide,” waiting for “indifference [to] come” (GDNS 41, 384:10).

In an elegy for Hemingway Henry asks to be saved “from shotguns & fathers’ suicides,” pleading too late with his father: “do not pull the trigger / or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger / killing what you began” (235: 7, 16-8). Yet equally as often as Berryman’s speakers suffer from suicide’s dis-ease, no matter how often they proclaim in first person that “Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me,” asserting that “Of suicide I continually think” they are still not “entirely resign[ed]” to dying at their own hand (“Of Suicide” 1,29, 18). This is a succinct example of the “deepest ambivalence between the need to stop the pain and the concomitant wish for intervention and rescue” (Schneidman 52). This poem’s speaker considers “teach[ing] the Third Gospel” to his class later in the afternoon, and he exudes excitement about a journey to Mexico in the coming summer (13). The final line resolves the impending threat of suicide—at least for the moment—as the speaker closes by stating, “I’ll teach Luke” (30). It is nearly a saving grace that the speaker decides to teach the gospel of Luke. Luke is the apostle trained as physician and healer, whose narrative offers solace, comfort, relief to the ambivalent speaker narrating his own text of infirmity.

It is certain that the “despair & suicides” in Berryman’s poetry was dis-easing for his contemporaries to be confronted with (CP Sonnet 116: 11). Did they fear, like the mother in Anne Sexton’s poem “The Double Image,” that suicide was something to defend against like a contagious disease? Did they feel they should turn in silence from the reality of suicide, in case such a “death were catching” (89)? Indeed it is difficult for readers who know of Berryman’s fatal suicide to approach his work without having already concluded that it must be a failure. Because so many people have decided that a life ended by suicide is equivalent to a failed life, frequently without even engaging the content and craft of Berryman’s poetry about suicide they make the assessment that the poetry itself must have failed—in their estimation, quite literally—to save Berryman’s life.

I admire Steven Hoffman’s praise for poets like Berryman who he sees as “diligently attending to the diverse difficulties of living in this world,” concluding that “We can hardly ask more of our poets” (S. Hoffman 341). Equally as insightful, is a footnote of Camus’ in which he claimed that “To talk of despair is to conquer it. Despairing literature is a contradiction in terms” (Rebel 263). Though it may seem equally as contradictory to find vitality and affirmation for life in suicidal literature, I am grateful for John Berryman who claims his “Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort” (366: 16-7). By exposing the terror of suicide through Berryman’s poetry, he has nursed us to health and understanding. But I am most pleased with the comfort these poems offer—they are an anodyne for our pain, a poultice for our dis-ease, inspiration for our aspiration.

- - -. “‘The Grief that Does Not Speak’: Suicide, Mourning, and Psychoanalytic Teaching”. Self-Analysis in Literary Study: Exploring Hidden Agendas. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (ed). New York: NYU Press, 1994. 35-54.

Berryman, John. “An Interview with John Berryman.” Interview, Harvard Advocate. Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman. Ed. Harry Thomas. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. 3-17.

- - -. Collected Poems: 1937-1971. Charles Thornbury (Ed). New York: Noonday Press, 1989.

Browne, Michael Dennis. “Henry Fermenting: Debts to the Dream Songs.” Ohio Review. 15:2 (1974) 75-87.

- - -. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Davis, Kathe. “The Li(v)es of the Poet”. Twentieth Century Literature. 30:1 (Spring 1984) 46-68.

Jamison, Kay Redfield. Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Kimball, Susanne B. “Literary Death and Suicide.” Germanic Notes and Reviews. 31:1 (Spring 2000) 24-32.

Maris, Ronald W., Alan L. Berman, and Morton M. Silverman. Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology. London: Guilford Press, 2000.

Shapiro, Alan. “‘A Living to Fail’: The Case of John Berryman”. TriQuarterly. 58: (Fall 1983) 114-125.

Thornbury, Charles. “Introduction.” John Berryman: Collected Poems, 1937-1971. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. xii-lx.

[1] Quotations from Berryman’s Collected Poems: 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury (ed) will henceforth be cited parenthetically with poem titles and line numbers.

[2] Quotations from Berryman’s The Dream Songs will henceforth be cited parenthetically as “DS” followed by the Song number and quoted line numbers.

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