The Trip to Echo Spring (27 page)

I pushed the two seats together, settling down on the narrow bed. The abrupt end of
Recovery
had shocked me when I first read it, but it was worse now that I knew the circumstances in which it was been carried out while he
written. Berryman was released from his second spell at St. Mary's in late November 1970, determined to stay dry. Some time that winter he wrote himself a Thirteenth Step: ‘Avoid
all avoidable nervous & mental effort
for weeks to come.
Only teach,
& that
minimally.
(God can't help a nervous wreck: he'll drink, being physically alcoholic.) TAKE IT EASY!' Good advice, but he was already deep in the usual salt mine of work and self-improvement: a habit he'd had since he was a little boy, writing letters home to his mother boasting about his study. He read Emily Dickinson, underlining ‘can't stay' in a line from her letters: ‘I can't stay any longer in a world of death.' He read Freud's
Civilisation and its Discontents
, underlining: ‘I could not point to any need in childhood so strong as that for a
father's protection.'

At the beginning of 1971 he started writing political poems, inflamed by a sense that society itself was out of joint, even crooked. Poems about Che Guevara, My Lai. On 27 January he gave a reading in Chicago, drunk. His dear friend Saul Bellow was there, and later wrote in an essay printed at the front of
Recovery
that he looked decayed and that the reading itself was a disaster. Berryman muttered inaudibly on stage. He vomited in the car, passed out in his room and slept through the party given in his honour. ‘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 to the airport under a frozen sun.'

Quickly he reined himself in, returning to AA and repairing his sobriety. In the spring he taught two courses: ‘The Meaning of Life' and ‘The Post-Novel: Fiction as Wisdom-work', which included Malcolm Lowry's classic take on alcoholism,
Under the Volcano.
In March he corrected the proofs of an interview with the
Paris Review
that had
been carried out while he was in St. Mary's for the second time. He pointed out six instances of delusion, among them the claim that he had played a large part in the development of the nation, like Jefferson and Poe, and that he was not ashamed to hope that he'd be ‘nearly crucified' in order to produce great poetry.

On 24 April, he decided to write
Recovery
as a novel. On 20 May, ‘dry as a bone, nearly 4 months', he stayed alone in a hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. At some point that night he had the unnerving sense that Christ was somewhere in the room with him. He started a poem and carried it on, almost frantic, into the small hours. It ends:

Let me be clear about this. It is plain to me

Christ
underwent man & treachery & socks

& lashes, thirst, exhaustion, the bit, for
my
pathetic & disgusting

vices,

to make this filthy fact of particular, long-after,

far-away, five-foot-ten & moribund

human being happy. Well, he has!

I am so happy I could scream!

It's
enough
! I can't BEAR ANY MORE.

Let this be it.
I've
had
it. I can't wait.

Something badly awry in the perspective here. It's marked by the old alcoholic knack for self-pity, the conviction that nothing, not even God, is big enough to contain one's suffering – that Christ's happiness, in fact, depends on that of Berryman's. Terrifying, particu-larly if your recovery depends – Step Two – on believing that a Power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity, let alone – Step
Three – that you can turn your will and life over to a forgiving, beneficent God.

In his diaries that summer, the same phrases keep repeating.
Take it easy. Take it v. slow.
Hard to heed. He was rapt with the new book, the thrill of it, the enormous charge. He told his first wife, Eileen, in a letter: ‘Of course I am determined to produce the most powerful and shapely work of narrative art since
Don Quixote
– what else.'

On 13 June, his mother, who had been displaying increasing forgetfulness and strange behaviour – perhaps dementia, perhaps not – was finally persuaded to move into an expensive apartment across the street, funded by her dutiful son. The same day Kate went into labour. A couple of weeks later Berryman wrote his ecstatic letter to Bellow about
Recovery
being packed with encyclopaedic data. He was boiling over with other plans, too. A scheme for teaching his children, including Paul, who was visiting that summer. New books, scads of them. The long-neglected Shakespeare study. A life of Christ for children. A book of essays about the omnipresent theme of sacrifice in literature and art. Gloatingly, he totted them up: thirteen books burning for completion.

‘I admit,' he wrote to his old mentor Mark Van Doren:

I am putting myself through a crash course this summer of 20 works I should have mastered as they came out, besides the very elaborate novel-related reading, medical lectures and so on. BUT I am insisting on 10 pp a week drafted-typed-revised-retyped; so I don't see how I can go far astray. I am also studying theology before breakfast and after 1 a.m. and keep up a fancy exercise-programme and spend two evenings a week
at hospital and am catching up on 60–70 unanswered letters (many with Mss., alas, including some from Eileen, who has taken to writing stories – not bad either – and some poems from former mistresses and various protégées scattered around the Western world) and supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes.

Unsurprisingly, he stumbled under the weight of these good works. In the last days of July,
Recovery
stalled. Writing to Kate from California, where he'd gone to escape the noise of his newly swollen household, he compared it to being ‘in the Colosseum with the lionesses'. In the same letter he described a nightmare in which he found a decayed Russian aristocrat sleeping in front of his fireplace. Shooing him out, he realised the interloper had been clipping holes in his Shakespeare notes. Kate had been sympathetic to this bum, and her dream betrayal reminded him that he had other axes to grind.

I was sympathetic to your ‘depression' etc. God knows why. ‘I've been in shock for ten years' – I haven't heard such crap since ‘You've been drunk for nine years' (the aggressive delusion is succeeded by the defensive delusion) . . . I think you suffer from, among other things, the jealous hatred of the very weak for the decisively strong (yes, dear, that's me) . . . I want you in treatment before I return. I don't buy the ‘busy every minute' either, in regard to letters. Christ you nurse the baby, cook meals, that's it . . . No doubt I am projecting.

So much for abandoning resentment and self-pity – which, as he knew and as he'd just made Alan Severance say in
Recovery
, are the number one reasons a recovering alcoholic goes back to the bottle. That summer, an old and very close friend, Ralph Ross, Berryman's chairman at the university and one of his most stalwart supports, observed ‘no real warmth shown us, or anyone, no excitement of mind, no ardor. I concluded that the only John one could love was a John with 2 or 3 drinks in him, no more & no less, & such a John could not exist.'

All year he'd been worrying that his tentative return to Catholicism might be yet another delusion. During his first treatment at St. Mary's in May 1970 he'd had what he thought of as a conversion experience. He wanted to leave hospital for a few hours to teach a class, was given permission and then told at the last minute he couldn't go. A huge row ensued, which ended with him giving up in despair, stricken with guilt about his students. Then, unexpectedly, a counsellor offered to teach it for him. Something about this unlooked-for intervention tumbled him into a new sense of faith, and ever since he'd been writing religious poems, later published as
Delusion, Etc.
These might be described as addresses to the Lord: attempts to square himself with the God he felt had snatched his father and all his sense of security away more than forty years before. There'd been a period of blissfully renewed faith, but now it started pulling away, strips of paper from a damp wall.

On 13 December he wrote a long, unhappily ranging diary entry. ‘All yesterday, terrible.' ‘Don't
believe
gun or knife;
won't'
He ticked through his anxieties, the little and the large. His cough made Martha grind her teeth. His house wasn't paid for, he was afraid of his new chairman, he was 20lb underweight and ‘OLD'. He slept badly, had
bad dreams, dreaded winter. His penis was shrinking into his groin. He wrote: ‘Religious doubts come up,' added: ‘wonder if Hell –' and left that queasy thought unfinished. He described days spent in bed, obsessed with Daddy's grave. In the same entry, he recorded giving up
Recovery
for good
(‘gave up
novel. Bitter disappointment').

In December he was plagued by thoughts of suicide. On New Year's Eve, he went to a party, where someone took his photo: tense, suited, the light bouncing off his glasses. On 5 January, he bought a bottle of whiskey, and drank half of it. He wrote a poem that imagined cutting his throat after climbing the high railing of a bridge. ‘I didn't,' it starts. ‘And I didn't.' He scratched a line through it with his pen, tossed it in the bin, put the bottle away and called an AA friend, asking if someone else could take over at the next meeting, since he wouldn't be able to attend. Then, on Friday 7 January, he caught the morning bus to the Washington Avenue Bridge. He climbed the railing and let himself go, falling 100 feet on to a pier and rolling partway down the embankment of the Mississippi River. His body was identified by a blank cheque in his pocket and the name on his broken glasses.

Hardly any wonder
Recovery
was unfinished. What a title. What an insane risk. I looked out through the thick glass. We were coming into St. Paul. It was very late. There was a long pause while the train refuelled before we chugged out through Minneapolis, passing within half a mile of Berryman's old house in Prospect Park, and then curving by the university where he'd worked so hard, with such devotion, leaving his mark on many lives.

Skyscrapers, their windows glowing in the dark. Buildings that looked like factories, laboratories. Buildings without windows, mills, boarded-up warehouses, all lit by the same sickly orange. Then we
headed into partial darkness, broken by streetlamps that dimly revealed offices and parking lots; a man in silhouette walking down a flight of stairs. There was water out there somewhere. I could make out smears of reflected orange, breaking and reforming. Then a road, a truck, and then the outer edges of the city, muddling and messy, with shapes that might have been chimneys, water towers and, surely, chainlink fences.

I woke again at dawn. This time, the world outside was white. North Dakota, flat as an unironed sheet. There were dun patches where the snow had melted. It was a landscape of minimal colour. Telegraph poles, farms, the horizon wiped clean by mist, the sky above so blue it took my breath away.

At breakfast I sat with my friends from the night before. We talked about oil: how many barrels there were in Dakota, how many barrels the Saudis had, whether wind power would be big out here. Doug used to work as a machinist, manufacturing chromium caps for pistons. The degreaser they used contained the carcinogen dichloromethane. Many of the men got prostate cancer, he said, including his dad. Then the plant closed down and part of its output moved to Colombia, part to India. ‘Do they still use the degreaser out there?' Diane asked, and Doug said, shruggingly: ‘I guess so. They have different labor laws out there.'

I spent the rest of the morning in the observation car, digging through
Recovery
again. In Bellow's essay at the front there was a statement about Berryman's drinking I found hard to swallow. He described the feverish production of the Dream Songs and then added: ‘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.'

In the 1970s, a good deal less was known about alcoholism than today, either by doctors and psychologists or the population at large. It had only recently been classified as a disease, and most ordinary people had very little understanding of what it involved. It was also an era considerably more lubricated and less censorious than our own. In addition, Bellow may have been experiencing a species of the pervasive, insidious denial that tends to affect even the sharpest friends and family members of alcoholics. Nonetheless, it was a foolish thing to say. The poems weren't killing Berryman. They didn't cause delirium tremens, or give him gynaecomastia, or make him fall down flights of stairs, vomit or defecate in public places. Alcohol might have quietened his near omnipresent sense of panic on a drink by drink basis, but on a drink by drink basis it had also created a life of physical and moral disintegration and despair.