Recovery

by John Berryman

  ‘No other trouble between you?’

  ‘No. I believed him.’

  ‘How do you feel about that time now?’

  ‘Well, it was so long ago. We were kids.’

  ‘It seems pretty fresh in your mind.’

  ‘I haven’t thought about it for years.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  Hutch glared, and twisted in his chair. Silence. He looked down at his hands twisted together. ‘Maybe I do.’

  ‘When drinking.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And how do you feel about it?’ Keg persisted.

  ‘Maybe a little resentful.’

  ‘But you’ve forgiven him, of course.’

  ‘No I haven’t!’ Hutch flared out.

  ‘What would you think about somebody who picks up his younger weaker brother and nearly kills him?’

  ‘He’d be a damn bully!’

  ‘Who is the main person in your life, Hutch?’

  ‘My brother.’

  ‘So you’ve got a damn bully for the central person in your life. How do you feel about that?’

  ‘It sounds crazy.’

  ‘It is crazy,’ Harley came in. ‘Who ought to be the main person in your life?’

  Hutch looked lost. ‘I don’t know. My wife?’

  ‘No. You. You are the main person in your life.’

  ‘I’ve always felt like Number Two.’

  ‘After who?’

  ‘After everybody.’

  ‘So you can feel sorry for yourself and drink.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  VIII

  THE JEWISH KICK AND THE FIFTH STEP

  [UNWRITTEN]

  Selah

  [UNWRITTEN]

  Higgaion

  EVERY LIGHT in the house seemed to be on. At the same time there was a great deal of darkness about—in horizontal bands between bright bands. It puzzled him. He knew he was standing in his entry-hall. Wife facing him, cold eyes, her arm outstretched with a short glass—a little smaller than he liked—in her hand. Two cops to his left. His main Dean and wife off somewhere right, beyond the couch; no doubt others. His baby (qualm sick—he hadn’t thought of the baby in six days while they were looking for him as far away as Zurich and Paris) must be asleep upstairs. It must be nine o’clock, it was Sunday night, no doubt about it. The girl had gone. He was looking into his wife’s eyes and he was hearing her say: ‘This is the last drink you will ever take.’ Even as somewhere up in his feathery mind he said ‘Screw that,’ somewhere he also had an unnerving and apocalyptic feeling that this might be true. Wonder whether to shout with relief or horror. His fingers closed round the glass. Not feeling like making any noises whatever, very tired.

  John Berryman

  BY SAUL BELLOW

  He wrote in one of his last letters to me, “Let’s join forces, large and small, as in the winter beginning of 1953 in Princeton, with the Bradstreet blazing and Augie fleecing away. We’re promising!”

  The Bradstreet was indeed blazing then; Augie was not nearly so good. Augie was naive, undisciplined, unpruned. What John liked was the exuberance of its language and its devotion to the Chicago streets. I had, earlier, published two small and correct books. He did not care for them. In Augie there was a Whitmanesque “coming from under” which he found liberating. I admired the Bradstreet. What he said was true; we joined forces in 1953, and sustained each other.

  The Princeton John was tallish, slender, nervous, and gave many signs that he was inhibiting erratic impulses. He wore a blue blazer, a button-down shirt, flannel trousers, cordovan shoes. He spoke in a Princeton mutter, often incomprehensible to me. His longish face with its high color and blue eyes I took to be of Irish origin. I have known blue-eyed poets apparently fresh from heaven who gazed at you like Little Lord Fauntleroy while thinking how you would look in your coffin. John was not one of these blue-eyed serpents. Had you, in a word-association test, said “Devil” to him, he would have answered “John Webster.” He thought of nothing wicked. What he mainly thought about was literature. When he saw me coming, he often said, “Ah!” meaning that a literary discussion was about to begin. It might be The Tempest that he had on his mind that day, or Don Quixote; it might be Graham Greene or John O’Hara; or Goguel on Jesus, or Freud on dreams. There was little personal conversation. We never discussed money, or wives, and we seldom talked politics. Once as we were discussing Rilke I interrupted to ask him whether he had, the other night, somewhere in the Village, pushed a lady down a flight of stairs.

  “Whom?”

  “Beautiful Catherine, the big girl I introduced you to.”

  “Did I do that? I wonder why?”

  “Because she wouldn’t let you into the apartment.”

  He took a polite interest in this information. He said, “That I was in the City at all is news to me.”

  We went back to Rilke. There was only one important topic. We had no small-talk.

  In Minneapolis one afternoon Ralph Ross and I had to force the window of a house near Seven Corners to find out what had happened to John. No one had seen him in several days. We arrived in Ross’s Jaguar, rang the bell, kicked at the door, tried to peer through the panes and then crawled in over a windowsill. We found ourselves standing on a bare gritty floor between steel bookstacks. The green steel shelves from Montgomery Ward’s, meant for garages or workshops, for canned peaches in farmers’ cellars, were filled with the elegant editions of Nashe and Marlowe and Beaumont and Fletcher which John was forever importing from Blackwell’s. These were read, annotated, for John worked hard. We found him in the bedroom. Face down, rigid, he lay diagonally across the double bed. From this position he did not stir. But he spoke distinctly.

  “These efforts are wasted. We are unregenerate.”

  At the University of Minnesota John and I shared an office in a temporary wooden structure to the north of the School of Mines. From the window we saw a gully, a parking lot, and many disheartening cars. Scorched theology books from a fire sale lined one of the walls. These Barths and Brunners looked as if they had gone through hell. We had no particular interest in them but they helped to furnish forth a mental life in the city of Minneapolis. Minneapolis was the home of Honeywell, of heart surgery, of Pillsbury, of the Multi Phasic test, but it was not celebrated as the home of poems and novels. John and I strolled sometimes, about a pond, through a park and then up Lake Street, “where the used cars live!” What on earth were we doing here! An interesting question. We talked about Yeats. The forces were still joined. We wrote things

  Drop here, with honor due, my trunk and brain

  among the passioning of my countrymen

  unable to read, rich, proud of their tags

  and proud of me. Assemble all my bags!

  Bury me in a hole, and give a cheer,

  near Cedar on Lake street, where the used cars live.

  He was proud of the living of these cars. That, he said, was “Delicious!” a favorite expression. My offering to him at that time was a story called “Leaving the Yellow House.” This, too, he declared delicious, though he found it faulty, inconclusive. (We told each other exactly what we thought.)

  Tense, he stood at his desk as I entered the office. He was greatly excited. He said, “Pal, I have written some new verses. They are delicious!”

  When he broke a leg and Dr Thomes was called in the middle of the night John said, as the splint was being applied, “You must hear this new Dream Song!” He recited it as they carried him to the ambulance.

  I would visit John at an institution (not the one in this novel) called, I believe, The Golden Valley. He was not there because he had broken his leg. The setting of The Golden Valley was indeed golden. It was early autumn, and the blond stubble fields shone. John’s room was furnished simply. On the floor was the straw tatami mat on which he performed his Yoga exercises. At a collapsible bridge table he wrote Dream Songs. He said, “As you can see they keep me in a baby crib. They raise the sides at n
ight to keep me from falling out. It is Humiliating! Listen, pal, I have written something new. It is,” he assured me, raising hands that shook, “Absolutely a knockout!”

  He put a finger to the bridge of his glasses, for nothing was steady here. Things shook and dropped. Inside and outside they wavered and flew. The straw of Golden Valley swirled on the hills.

  John had waited a long time for this poet’s happiness. He had suffered agonies of delay. Now came the poems. They were killing him.

  Nitid. They are shooting me full of sings.

  I give no rules. Write as short as you can, in order, of what matters.

  Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabilizer. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity. Perhaps it replaced the public sanction which poets in the Twin Cities (or in Chicago, in Washington or New York) had to do without. This sanction was not wickedly withheld. It simply did not exist. No one minded if you bred poodles. No one objected if you wrote Dream Songs. Some men of genius were fortunate. They could somehow come to terms with their respective countries. Others had women, the bottle, the hospital. Even in France, far from the Twin Cities, a Verlaine had counted heavily on hospitals and prisons.

  John drank, of course, and he took refuge in hospitals, but he also studied and taught. The teaching was important. His lectures were conscientiously, even pedantically prepared. He gave them everything he had. He came in from Golden Valley by cab to address his Humanities class.

  He walked up the stone stairs of the University building looking very bad. He wore a huge Western sort of hat. Under the flare of the brim his pale face was long and thin. With tremulous composure, shoulders high, he stalked into the classroom. While the taxi waited, he gave his lecture. His first words were shaky, inaudible, but very soon other instructors had to shut their doors against his penetrating voice. He sweated heavily, his shaky fingers turned the numbered cards of his full and careful lecture outline but he was extremely proud of his dependability and of his power to perform. “Henry” was indeed one of the steadiest men on the block, as faithful to his schedule as Kant, as precise and reliable as a Honeywell product. His talk ended. Then, peanut-faced under the enormous hat and soaked in sweat, he entered the cab and was returned to The Golden Valley, to the tatami mat and the bridge table, to the penitential barrenness of the cure. No wonder after these solitary horrors that he was later grateful for group therapy, submitting democratically and eagerly to the criticisms of wacky truckers, graceful under the correction of drinking plumbers and mentally disturbed housewives. In hospitals he found his society. University colleagues were often more philistine, less tolerant of poets than alcoholics or suicidal girls. About these passioning countrymen he did not need to be ironical. Here his heart was open.

  But everything went into his poems. His poems said everything. He himself said remarkably little. His songs were his love offerings. These offerings were not always accepted. Laid on the altar of, say, an Edmund Wilson, they sometimes were refused. Wilson, greatly respected by John, had written him a harsh letter about his later poems and John was wounded by this the last time I saw him. I read Wilson’s letter. John sat at my table, meteor-bearded like John Brown, coughing softly and muttering that he couldn’t understand—these were some of his best things. Then he snatched up the copy of Love & Fame which he had brought me and struck out certain poems,1 scribbling in the margins, “Crap!” “Disgusting!” But of one poem, “Surprise Me,” he wrote shakily, “This is certainly one of the truest things I’ve been gifted with.”

  I read it again now and see what he meant. I am moved by the life of a man I loved. He prays to be surprised by the “blessing gratuitous” “on some ordinary day.” It would have to be an ordinary day, of course, an ordinary American day. The ordinariness of the days was what it was all about.

  He had arrived during a sub-zero wave to give a reading in Chicago. High-shouldered in his thin coat and big Homburg, bearded, he coughed up phlegm. He looked decayed. He had been drinking and the reading was a disaster. His Princeton mutter, once an affectation, had become a vice. People strained to hear a word. Except when, following some arbitrary system of dynamics, he shouted loudly, we could hear nothing. We left a disappointed, bewildered, angry audience. Dignified, he entered a waiting car, sat down, and vomited. He passed out in his room at the Quadrangle Club and slept through the faculty party given in his honor. But in the morning he was full of innocent cheer. He was chirping. It had been a great evening. He recalled an immense success. His cab came, we hugged each other, and he was off for the airport under a frozen sun.

  He was a full professor now, and a celebrity. Life interviewed him. The Life photographer took ten thousand shots of him in Dublin. But John’s human setting was oddly thin. He had, instead of a society, the ruined drunken poet’s God to whom he prayed over his shoulder. Out of affection and goodwill he made gestures of normalcy. He was a husband, a citizen, a father, a householder, he went on the wagon, he fell off, he joined AA. He knocked himself out to be like everybody else—he liked, he loved, he cared, but he was aware that there was something peculiarly comical in all this. And at last it must have seemed that he had used up all his resources. Faith against despair, love versus nihilism had been the themes of his struggles and his poems. What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit. He drew it out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive. Forces were not joined. The cycle of resolution, reform and relapse had become a bad joke which could not continue.

  Towards the last he wrote

  It seems to be dark all the time.

  I have difficulty walking.

  I can remember what to say to my seminar

  but I don’t know that I want to.

  I said in a Song once: I am unusually tired.

  I repeat that & increase it.

  I’m vomiting.

  I broke down today in the slow movement of K. 365.

  I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.

  The Lord is known by the judgment

  which he executeth: the wicked is

  snared in the work of his own hands.

  Higgaion. Selah.

  PSALMS 9:16

  Author’s Notes

  He was an inveterate note-taker,

  note-maker, self-analyser.

  For once the vice would serve a purpose.

  JOHN BERRYMAN,

  ON A FOLDER MARKED “NOVEL NOTES”

  [The text of Recovery printed in the preceding pages is basically that of the typescript John Berryman left, on his death in January 1972, with handwritten additions and corrections. There is no doubt that he would have revised many portions of the novel substantially, in manuscript and—following his habit—during the various proof stages. But except for several fragments he explicitly labeled “end of book,” no manuscript for the concluding sections, “The Jewish Kick” and “Selah,” has been found. Although he was not given to unwarranted claims about his work, Berryman wrote in one of his letters (July 28, 1971): “I worked hard to become a Jew myself last Fall in hospital—the write-up in my novel will kill you laughing.” No trace of this material has been located. For this and other reasons, we have decided to print here some of the notes he left behind. Since he also refers in these notes to his short story of 1945, “The Imaginary Jew,” we are reprinting it in full. Such fragmentary material can hardly replace the portions of the novel that are unwritten, but it affords some insights into the techniques and concerns of John Berryman.

  —THE PUBLISHERS]

  16 Sept 71

  RECOVERY

  Vol. I WARD D Vol. II THE PRESENT SICK WHITE WORLD

  Selah

  I. First Day Relapse of the Second Step (BVM!)

  II. The First Step (I-IV)

  III. Contract One Slip

  IV. Confrontation The SST and Renunciation

&n
bsp; V. The Last Two First Steps Fidelity

  Hareford & VT (Assumption)

  VI. Contract Two Pike’s Peak

  VII. Self-Confronted Berkeley 2 Cor. 58

  Dry-Drunk Traumata at Home

  ‘As It Comes’

  The Jewish Kick and the Fifth Step God’s mercy and the Eleventh & Ninth Steps

  Higgaion (12th)

  300 pages? in 9 sections

  (6 weeks) 9 sections (9 months)—30 pp.

  av. = 270 pp.

  HAPPINhis 2 seminars

  ESS (euphoria)

  cancer-work

  Higgaion

  I. FIRST DAY

  II. THE FIRST STEP (I-IV) The Missing Years

  The First Contract: Amphitheatre

  III. WEEKS FOUR FIVE SIX

  IV. OUT-PATIENT PROGRESS How does that make you feel? (obverse of the Northeast medallion) Ps. 1912

  1. Dec.—‘only some’ w

  ‘believe my workers’ John

  ‘The hills are fallen unto

  me in pleasant places’ Ps. 166

  2. 6 months

  There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility,—which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).

  Slavery is man’s condition (the Adam-fall story is right, which required man to walk out of happiness, equipped with his evidently ruining self-will). But it is undesirable. (Why? because it makes me unhappy—unlike the rest of natural existence, stones, stars, flowers, animals, lightning, waterfalls, etc.) How then to escape? (Is escape possible? Yes, because some men have.)