{"id":54007,"date":"2013-06-06T14:58:11","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T18:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=54007"},"modified":"2013-06-14T08:05:23","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T12:05:23","slug":"henry-doesnt-have-any-bats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/06\/06\/henry-doesnt-have-any-bats\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry Doesn’t Have Any Bats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"johnberrymanlarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My poetry shelf is slim but holds the most thumbed book I own: John Berryman\u2019s The Dream Songs<\/i>, and, until recently, I would read several songs a week, rereading my favorites as if they held some kind of clue. I read them to cheer myself or wallow. I read them aloud, alone and to other people.\u00a0Some nights after having wine, I\u2019d read the meanest, strangest ones aloud. When I found a copy in a bookstore, I\u2019d open to a favorite and hand it to someone. Even his darkest, most dire, most hopeless songs soothe me.\u00a0Lines worm in me for weeks.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I think Berryman is the most talented writer or that he has written the most important poems or that his work has reached some aesthetic pinnacle or that I have nothing better to read. All of those things are untrue, and yet I am compelled to read his work in a way I am not often compelled by anyone else\u2019s work. I am still trying to understand why.<\/p>\n

Nearly a decade ago, I almost made myself sick on them during a New Orleans summer. While hurricanes spun toward us from the gulf, dire conversations at the grocery store blended into my Dream Song<\/em> summer like milk poured into milk.<\/p>\n

A note signed J.B.<\/em> at the front of the book:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

The poem then \u2026 is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age \u2026 who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Berryman was, also, a white American in early middle age who had suffered an irreversible loss, one that rippled toward other irreversible losses: loves lost, friends lost, sobriety lost, himself finally lost to the Mississippi River. His father, John Smith, moved the family from Oklahoma to Florida when Berryman was just twelve, and, soon after, he took his own life with a gun, his body falling outside the poet\u2019s bedroom window. His mother quickly married another John, also a banker, and the poet took this new father\u2019s last name: Berryman.<\/p>\n

John Berryman, the poet, found faith in a transcendent Christian God in 1970 and went to meet that God two years later by jumping from a bridge into the Mississippi. He was fifty-seven.<\/p>\n

When I returned to New Orleans after the storm I found a new home in a neighborhood where neighbors were few. Streetlights never lit. Refrigerators lined street medians, an army ready to fight nothing. I rode my bike to work through wet, navy mornings and spoke his lines to keep myself company. \u201cI don\u2019t see how Henry, pried \/ open for all the world to see, survived.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many years later, videos of Berryman\u2019s gnarled, drunken readings appeared on the Internet, his ghost now animated. But by late 2011, I\u2019d listened to or watched each reading, interview, and speech multiple times\u2014digitized Berryman had become inadequate: I wanted to hold paper<\/i> he\u2019d held, be closer to his years, see his signature, in ink, as he wrote it. I considered a trip to the full archives in Minneapolis, but settled for Columbia\u2019s smaller collection, a short subway trip from my apartment.<\/p>\n

There I found a photograph of young Berryman, mid-twenties, clean shaven, white suit, boyish smile. I took a picture with my phone and used it as my background.\u00a0(\u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d someone later asked. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I said.)<\/p>\n

I found a handwritten draft of Saul Bellow\u2019s foreword to Berryman\u2019s incomplete novel, Recovery<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Bellow: \u201cOnce as we were discussing Rilke I interrupted to ask him whether he had, the other night\u2009\u2026 pushed a lady down a flight of stairs\u2026\u201d><\/p>\n

And Berryman asks, \u201cWhom?\u201d<\/p>\n

And Bellow says, \u201cCatherine.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I think, Oh.<\/p>\n

Berryman says, \u201cDid I do that? I wonder why.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Bellow: \u201c\u2018Because she wouldn\u2019t let you into the apartment.\u2019 He took polite interest in this information. He said, \u2018That I was in the City at all is news to me.\u2019 We went back to Rilke. There was only one important topic. We had no small talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Catherine\u2019s blood and busted nose, the ambulance singing toward her: small talk for these giants.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I had known that Berryman and Bellow were colleagues, maybe friendly, but Bellow\u2019s cruelty and narrow-mindedness has always narrowed his appeal to me: as beautifully as he wrote, his\u00a0pessimistic misogyny leaks greater puddles than I can attribute to his generation, his time. So I resented, somewhat, the idea of Bellow and Berryman as friends. But then I saw a drunk John Berryman pushing some poor woman, some Catherine in New York, down the stairs. And isn\u2019t that what you say has happened when that hasn\u2019t happened at all?<\/p>\n

I got a black eye the day I moved in with a boyfriend-at-the-time, but it was entirely my own doing\u2014I somehow dropped the heavy base of a lamp onto my cheekbone. How hilariously implausible it sounded: Oh, that? She dropped a lamp on her face. But the way I got eyed in line at the grocery store was less hilarious. Not every black eye has a funny story. Not everyone can shrug it off, go back to talking Rilke.<\/p>\n

Bellow also told the story of discovering a deeply hungover Berryman facedown and motionless on his bed. \u201cThese efforts are wasted. We are unregenerate,\u201d Berryman said, speaking of how his poems could never redeem him. That notion was a rock tied to his foot, but to Bellow it was anecdote.<\/p>\n

I left the library and felt at odds with the sunlight. I thought about how Berryman signed his name with a backward J<\/em>. He must have always felt backward. I wondered who Catherine was.<\/p>\n

A few days later I baffled my therapist by sobbing, for too long, about how unfair it was that I enjoy the work this man suffered so heavily for. It was as if I had been pushed down the stairs but sympathized, mainly, with him.<\/p>\n

From an interview:<\/p>\n

\n

BERRYMAN: Well, being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn\u2019t get you anything. It doesn\u2019t get you any money, or not much, and it doesn\u2019t get you any prestige, or not much. It\u2019s just something you do.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER: Why?<\/p>\n

BERRYMAN: That\u2019s a tough question. I\u2019ll tell you a real answer, I\u2019m taking your question seriously, This comes from Hamann, quoted by Kierkegaard. There are two voices, and the first voice says, \u201cWrite!\u201d and the second voice says, \u201cFor whom?\u201d I think that\u2019s marvelous; he doesn\u2019t question the imperative, you see that. And the first voice says, \u201cFor the dead whom thou didst love\u201d; again the second voice doesn\u2019t question it; instead it says, \u201cWill they read me?\u201d And the first voice says, \u201cAye, for they return as posterity.\u201d Isn\u2019t that good?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In an interview with The Paris Review<\/i><\/a>, Berryman was asked how he responds to the label of \u201cconfessional\u201d that was regularly put upon him.: \u201cWith rage and contempt! Next question.\u201d He added, \u201cThe word doesn\u2019t mean anything. I understand the confessional to be a place where you go and talk with a priest. I personally haven\u2019t been to confession since I was twelve years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

From Dream Song 145:<\/p>\n

\n

rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window
and did what was needed<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From Dream Song 384:<\/p>\n

\n

I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave
who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(not the poet, not me)<\/p>\n

Some hypotheses:<\/p>\n

I am obsessed with Berryman and The Dream Songs<\/i> because his work and life scare the shit out of me, because I\u2019ve romanticized Berryman so fully he\u2019s a just a story I tell myself, because I am fulfilling this self-generated narrative of my obsession with The Dream Songs<\/i>,\u00a0because I am the reincarnated spirit of someone he once loved, because his work pushes me close to life and all its grit and decay.<\/p>\n

The last one seems the most accurate, though I still don\u2019t know why.<\/p>\n

From an interview:<\/p>\n

\n

Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair\u2014and fuck them, I’m not Henry; Henry doesn\u2019t have any bats.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The few times I\u2019ve published work about personal things, people say, Oh, it must have been cathartic to write that. But writing is not cathartic. Real catharsis needs a witness or a catalyst\u2014not just a page, not just a mind alone. Writing is a compulsive cocoon, and its only real benefit are the moments when you can produce something that brings you closer to other people. The act of me sitting here and writing right now does not, in itself, satisfy. A good day\u2019s work leaves me with nothing more than that loopy lull of an addict’s addiction met\u2014finishing something that makes my reality clearer to other realities is the only real point and even that<\/i> is beside the point.<\/p>\n

All work moves inevitably toward other people.<\/p>\n

But the relationship between a writer and reader is inherently incomplete. It exists in a vacuum where one fills the space and the other receives and projects their own stories onto it. The patient is the writer. The reader is the therapist, searching, turning pages.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I wonder what Berryman would say about catharsis. As far as I can tell, he never mentioned it.<\/p>\n

And I wonder if Berryman would have been as good a poet if he\u2019d had a therapist. I wonder if he would have killed himself if he\u2019d admitted that Henry was a kind of reflection of himself. I wonder if he believed he would become regenerate<\/i> as he hit the river on January 7, 1972.<\/p>\n

On January 7, 1972, 104 people died in a plane crash in Ibiza and the LA Lakers won their thirty-third game in a row and eight time bombs hidden in banks across America were defused by policemen and Berryman\u2019s body traveled seventy feet from the bridge to the water.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until recently that I knew how that kind of suicide works; it\u2019s the impact, they say: it rips up organs, can shatter a skull, make blood flow backward, jolt skin off the bone, and sometimes after I\u2019ve read Dream Song<\/em>, I feel guilty for how much pleasure it gives me\u2014that I shouldn\u2019t enjoy that darkness, the untended emotions he left before the river shredded his body.<\/p>\n

Or maybe all this is an attempt to become immune, to stop myself from turning the way he turned, ever inward, from the young man in the white linen suit to the face behind a wild beard, voice gin-thickened, eyes elsewhere, shouting poems that were no longer a bridge between himself and others, but a wall.<\/p>\n

To a crowd in 1968:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

If I were you I would reserve my applause until the end. And then withhold it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Catherine Lacey’s debut novel, <\/em>Nobody Is Ever Missing, is forthcoming. Her work has appeared in <\/em>McSweeney’s Quarterly, <\/em>The Believer, and <\/em>Brooklyn Magazine, among others, and earned her a 2012 NYFA fellowship for fiction. She is a founding owner of 3B, a cooperatively run bed-and-breakfast.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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