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Authors: John Berryman

Recovery (22 page)

BOOK: Recovery
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Yours, etc.,
 
in-patient
 
Severance was not very good at Natha(?) and yoga. He had mastered lobhastana and [
indecipherable
], but the instructions of his guru, a banker in Calcutta, went largely neglected.
 
3 or 4 months ‘out of' treatment
 
Severance was not happy about his money. He was paid a very high salary by the University for teaching three hours a week, his publisher sent him handsome cheques, often sums drifted in from foundations and Government, the place was crawling with dough. He sweated with guilt. He had been poor most of his life, many of his friends, including his brother, were actually unemployed at the moment—some for many months now—and though he supported half a dozen people and ‘lent' money to still others, he couldn't reconcile himself to his good luck. He didn't feel worthless, much less Franciscan, but
 
5th month out of treatment, Severance in his Want Ad cheaply buys himself in Des Moines a black star-sapphire ring from a young Thai sculptor, giving himself seven plus-strokes for only half of what the guy paid for it—sixty dollars, in Bangkok.
 
6 months out. Author interrupted at breakfast by phone. Liz is back in treatment!
He felt some hurt. Liz was a foxy intelligent sumptuous woman, rich, with four splendid girls, a bad but unassuming portrait-painter, a great friend of his. Towards their discharge, a year ago, he had proposed that the three of them—R. Wall was the witty snobbish advertising director for the second largest department store in the city—start their own AA group. Incredible? Yet at the time he hadn't understood at all when Jerry Croy, to whom he mentioned the gorgeous project in two sentences on the wing, had just said, ‘Sounds selective to me' and vanished down the corridor towards some meeting.
 
Delusions
(major ‘activity')
I. Drive to solve his failure with the 1st Step (he hadn't)
II. Drive to solve mystery of OK 5 years (real, and very odd because so long delayed and so long lasting—well, the joke reported by Augustine,
Confessions
)
III. Drive to become a Jew (expiate imaginary transgressions—cf. Guardini—join son and dead friend (Delmore Schwartz)
IV … . . Effort of > 3rd Step
I. Sacrifice. of vainglory (
not
‘amphitheatre') of self knowledge (
not
‘Fa>SKS-X)
II. Selflessness, in Group-Labour (find a term for this) entails:
sacrifice of
pride
; secrets! as ‘incest' and attempted————(drunk—barely escaped)
So, it wasn't only Mini-Group that did the work, but
both-
especially Keg bringing me out to ‘level' with him (= attack, & so remorse) and Harley trapping me in D-D at the last minute!
Only realized, 7 June 71, on noticing the “Sacrifice” of Hastings
encycl.
in a 2nd hand cat.
 
“The Jewish Kick
”
 
The priest genuflected and kissed and mumbled. In chapel Severance suddenly felt a resistless hostility, akin to mother's in Rome, against the gabbled masses. (Succumbed to thru awful laicism in old age, though.)
 
9:25 a.m. Fri. 13th
 
I become a Jew—the wonder of my life—it's possible! Rabbi M. is coming at 2:30.
My uneasiness with Xt'y (Christianity) came to a head in Mass with George this morning. Worship God but where? how?
want company
(George—Mike with his wife).
Passion over Rose's John saying to her at last “I love you” —Severance: ‘You never could say it to her before, could you?'—I thought of P.
wanting
to say it to
me
, maybe, but held off by disappointment with me (rage, perhaps?)—baffled, hurt—how will he take my letter?!?
 
Left and came to my room and incredibly thought of
becoming a Jew.
Always held it impossible because of inadequate concept of God. Ok since Vin's rescue—but hostile to Trinity, dubious of X (Christianity?), hostile to the Blessed Virgin, anti-Pope, deep sympathy with Church, but
not for me
.
alone with God, yet
not
alone, one of many worshippers, like them except in blood (who cares?)
Somebody in Snack Room even said to me recently, ‘You ought to become a Jew!!'—Bud? (Irish-Jewish wives—my
son,
perhaps the nexus just now.)
I feel apprehensive—joyful—can I? Will He receive me? I know I must prepare, be ready for all.
[NOTE ON SIDE OF PAPER] The Cantor's letter helpt me, unknowing by me. (Maybe as far back as “Imaginary Jew” *—and no wonder I was the N.Y. Jew in Hong Kong story) and overjoyed by
The Bridge
of Will Herberg!!
All
has pointed HERE.
I. In my old story
2
, a confrontation as Jew is resisted, fought, failed—at last is given into
symbolically
. I identified at least with the persecution. So the ‘desire' (was it?) is at least 25 years old.
II. PLUS after that,
The Black Book
3
—abandoned—obsessed—perhaps now take it up again?
My position
is certain
.
III. Horror of anti-semitism.
Excitement over Babel! Buber! the Hasidim! Bloch's music! Pascal's
Hebraism
in ‘conversion'! WCW's Jewish blood!
love for S., first doctor I ever felt
anything
for.
resentment of Cal's tiny Jewish blood, Daiches'
full
heritage.
flourishing of Freud and Einstein.
Jewish girls.
Yiddish stories and slang.
my Hebrew effort. Peret and Bargebecher(?).
regular Old Testament study at last, this year.
my anthology of Yiddish poetry! (till lately—why kept?)
unique devotion to
Job
—texts, study, translation begun.
resented/liked name ‘Berryman'
being thought Jewish
.
 
End of Book
 
LAST SIX PAGES? Book ends (put the Assumption stuff the
week
before) on the bus descending Pike's Peak. Put the ‘pros. distance', [
indecipherable
] and the ‘great sacrifice' bits the day
before
. Plus tooth long loose—to lose. P: in here better or worse. S: there isn't enough of it to form an opinion. With understanding of his special awareness earlier, growing up. Prem. of Death-controlled by: Medicine. Value. Still … Well, okay with him. He could see a good deal of pain coming up. No sweat. Sorry to leave dygs. so much work unfin'd. Oh sorry sorry—hard to leave [
indecipherable
]. Headache and lassitude gone. P's question and his answer.—P. slumpt in seat, M. sleeping. ‘He felt fine'
 
 
[Note on back of a yellow card in Berryman's hand] ‘END OF NOVEL: TURN THIS CARD OVER.'
.˙. by Christmas
The goals of psychotherapy
were char'd by remembering
. The goal of alcoholic treatment, he only had really grasped after six months out, was oblivion. ‘The passion of a free and truthful life.' [
Indecipherable
] Five minutes on waking, twenty seconds gratitude at bedtime,—‘the rest is silence.' He might, certainly, at any time drink again. But it didn't seem likely.
He felt-calm.
 
 
[On a separate page, in Berryman's hand] ‘LAST PAGE OF BOOK (EXCEPT SELAH).'
 
On Pike's Peak, coming down.
He was perfectly ready. No regrets. He was happier than he had ever been in his life before. Lucky, and he didn't deserve it. He was very, very lucky. Bless everybody. He felt-fine.
The second summer of the European War I spent in New York. I lived in a room just below street-level on Lexington above 34th, wrote a good deal, tried not to think about Europe, and listened to music on a small gramophone, the only thing of my own, except books, in the room. Haydn's London Symphony, his last, I heard probably fifty times in two months. One night when excited I dropped the pickup, creating a series of knocks at the beginning of the last movement where the oboe joins the strings which still, when I hear them, bring up for me my low dark long damp room and I feel the dew of heat and smell the rented upholstery. I was trying as they say to come back a little, uncertain and low after an exhausting year. Why I decided to do this in New York—the enemy in summer equally of soul and body, as I had known for years—I can't remember; perhaps I didn't, but was held on merely from week to week by the motive which presently appeared in the form of a young woman met the Christmas before and now the occupation of every evening not passed in solitary and restless gloom. My friends were away; I saw few other people. Now and then I went to the zoo in lower Central Park and watched with interest the extraordinary behavior
of a female badger. For a certain time she quickly paced the round of her cage. Then she would approach the sidewall from an angle in a determined, hardly perceptible, unhurried trot; suddenly, when an inch away, point her nose up it, follow her nose up over her back, turning a deft and easy somersault, from which she emerged on her feet moving swiftly and unconcernedly away, as if the action had been no affair of hers, indeed she had scarcely been present. There was another badger in the cage who never did this, and nothing else about her was remarkable; but this competent disinterested somersault she enacted once every five or ten minutes as long as I watched her,—quitting the wall, by the way, always at an angle in fixed relation to the angle at which she arrived at it. It is no longer possible to experience the pleasure I knew each time she lifted her nose and I understood again that she would not fail me, or feel the mystery of her absolute disclaimer,—she has been taken away or died.
[Mr. Berryman's short story originally appeared in
The Kenyon Review
, vol. VII, no. 4 (Autumn 1945), pages 529–39. It was awarded first prize in the magazine's story contest.]
The story I have to tell is no further a part of that special summer than a nightmare takes its character, for memory, from the phase of the moon one noticed on going to bed. It could have happened in another year and in another place. No doubt it did, has done, will do. Still, so weak is the talent of the mind for pure relation—immaculate apprehension of K alone—that everything helps us, as when we come to an unknown city: architecture, history, trade-practices, folklore. Even more anxious our approach to a city—like my small story—which we have known and forgotten. Yet how little we can learn! Some of the history is the lonely summer. Part of the folklore, I suppose, is what I now unwillingly rehearse, the character which experience has given to my sense of the Jewish people.
Born in a part of the South where no Jews had come, or none had stayed, and educated thereafter in States where they are numerous, I somehow arrived at a metropolitan university without any clear idea of what in modern life a Jew was,—without even a clear consciousness of having seen one. I am unable now to explain this simplicity or blindness. I had not escaped, of course, a sense that humans somewhat different from ourselves, called “Jews,” existed as in the middle distance
and were best kept there, but this sense was of the vaguest. From what it was derived I do not know; I do not recall feeling the least curiosity about it, or about Jews; I had, simply, from the atmosphere of an advanced heterogeneous democratic society, ingathered a gently negative attitude towards Jews. This I took with me, untested, to college, where it received neither confirmation nor stimulus for two months. I rowed and danced and cut classes and was political; by mid-November I knew most of the five hundred men in my year. Then the man who rowed Number Three, in the eight of which I was bow, took me aside in the shower one afternoon and warned me not to be so chatty with Rosenblum.
I wondered why not. Rosenblum was stroke, a large handsome amiable fellow, for whose ability in the shell I felt great respect and no doubt envy. Because the fellows in the House wouldn't like it, my friend said. “What have they against him?” “It's only because he's Jewish,” explained my friend, a second-generation Middle European.
I hooted at him, making the current noises of disbelief, and went back under the shower. It did not occur to me that he could be right. But next day when I was talking with Herz —the coxswain, whom I found intelligent and pleasant—I remembered the libel with some annoyance, and told Herz about it as a curiosity. Herz looked at me oddly, lowering his head, and said after a pause, “Why, Al
is
Jewish, didn't you know that?” I was amazed. I said it was absurd, he couldn't be! “Why not?” said Herz, who must have been as astonished as I was. “Don't you know I'm Jewish?”
I did not know, of course, and ignorance has seldom cost me such humiliation. Herz did not guy me; he went off. But greater than my shame at not knowing something known, apparently, without effort to everyone else, were my emotions for what I then quickly discovered. Asking careful questions during the next week, I learnt that about a third of the men I spent time with in college were Jewish; that they knew it, and the others knew it; that some of the others disliked them for it, and they knew this also; that certain Houses existed
only
for Jews, who were excluded from the rest; and that what in short I took to be an idiotic state was deeply established, familiar,
and acceptable to everyone. This discovery was the beginning of my instruction in social life proper—construing social life as that from which political life issues like a somatic dream.
My attitude toward my friends did not alter on this revelation. I merely discarded the notion that Jews were a proper object for any special attitude; my old sense vanished. This was in 1933. Later, as word of the German persecution filtered into this country, some sentimentality undoubtedly corrupted my no-attitude. I denied the presence of obvious defects in particular Jews, feeling that to admit them would be to side with the sadists and murderers. Accident allotting me close friends who were Jewish, their disadvantages enraged me. Gradually, and against my sense of impartial justice, I became the anomaly which only a partial society can produce, and for which it has no name known to the lexicons. In one area, but not exclusively, “nigger-lover” is cast in a parallel way: but for a special sympathy and liking for Jews—which became my fate, so that I trembled when I heard one abused in talk—we have no term. In this condition I still was during the summer of which I speak. One further circumstance may be mentioned, as a product, I believe, of this curious training. I am spectacularly unable to identify Jews as Jews,—by name, cast of feature, accent, or environment,—and this has been true, not only of course before the college incident, but during my whole life since. Even names to anyone else patently Hebraic rarely suggest to me anything. And when once I learn that So-and-so is Jewish, I am likely to forget it. Now Jewishness may be a fact as striking and informative as someone's past heroism or his Christianity or his understanding of the subtlest human relations, and I feel sure that something operates to prevent my utilizing the plain signs by which such characters—in a Jewish man or woman—may be identified, and prevent my retaining the identification once it is made.
So to the city my summer and a night in August. I used to stop on Fourteenth Street for iced coffee, walking from the Village home (or to my room rather) after leaving my friend, and one night when I came out I wandered across to the island of trees and grass and concrete walks raised in the center of
Union Square. Here men—a few women, old—sit in the evenings of summer, looking at papers or staring off or talking, and knots of them stay on, arguing, very late; these the unemployed or unemployable, the sleepless, the malcontent. There are no formal orators, as at Columbus Circle in the Nineteen-thirties and at Hyde Park Corner. Each group is dominated by several articulate and strong-lunged persons who battle each other with prejudices and desires, swaying with intensity, and take on from time to time the interrupters: a forum at the bottom of the pot,—Jefferson's fear, Whitman's hope, the dream of the younger Lenin. It was now about one o'clock, almost hot, and many men were still out. I stared for a little at the equestrian statue, obscure in the night on top of its pedestal, thinking that the misty Rider would sweep again away all these men at his feet, whenever he liked,—what symbol for power yet in a mechanical age rivals the mounted man?—and moved to the nearest group; or I plunged to it.
The dictator to the group was old, with dark cracked skin, fixed eyes in an excited face, leaning forward madly on his bench towards the half-dozen men in semicircle before him. “It's bread! it's bread!” he was saying. “It's bitter-sweet. All the bitter and all the sweetness. Of an overture. What else do you want? When you ask for steak and potatoes, do you want pastry with it? It's bread! It's bread! Help yourself! Help yourself!”
The listeners stood expressionless, except one who was smiling with contempt and interrupted now.
“Never a happy minute, never a happy minute!” the old man cried. “It's good to be dead! Some men should kill themselves.”
“Don't you want to live?” said the smiling man.
“Of course I want to live. Everyone wants to live! If death comes suddenly it's better. It's better!”
With pain I turned away. The next group were talking diffusely and angrily about the Mayor, and I passed to a third, where a frantic olive-skinned young man with a fringe of silky beard was exclaiming:
“No restaurant in New York had the Last Supper! No. When people sit down to eat they should think of that!”
“Listen,” said a white-shirted student on the rail, glancing around for approbation, “listen, if I open a restaurant and put
The Last Supper
up over the door, how much money do you think I'd lose? Ten thousand dollars?”
The fourth cluster was larger and appeared more coherent. A savage argument was in progress between a man of fifty with an oily red face, hatted, very determined in manner, and a muscular fellow half his age with heavy eyebrows, coatless, plainly Irish. Fifteen or twenty men were packed around them, and others on a bench near the rail against which the Irishman was lounging were attending also. I listened for a few minutes. The question was whether the President was trying to get us into the War,—or rather, whether this was legitimate, since the Irishman claimed that Roosevelt was a goddamned warmonger whom all the real people in the country hated, and the older man claimed that we should have gone into the f..ing war when France fell a year before, as everybody in the country knew except a few immigrant rats. Redface talked ten times as much as the Irishman, but he was not able to establish any advantage that I could see. He ranted, and then Irish either repeated shortly and fiercely what he had said last, or shifted his ground. The audience were silent—favouring whom I don't know, but evidently much interested. One or two men pushed out of the group, others arrived behind me, and I was eddied forward towards the disputants. The young Irishman broke suddenly into a tirade by the man with the hat:
“You're full of s. Roosevelt even tried to get us in with the communists in the Spanish war. If he could have done it we'd have been burning churches down like the rest of the Reds.”
“No, that's not right,” I heard my own voice, and pushed forward, feeling blood in my face, beginning to tremble. “No, Roosevelt as a matter of fact helped Franco by non-intervention, at the same time that Italians and German planes were fighting against the Government and arms couldn't get in from France.”
“What's that? What are you, a Jew?” He turned to me contemptuously, and was back at the older man before I could
speak, “The only reason we weren't over there four years ago is because you can only screw us so much. Then we quit. No New Deal bastard could make us go help the goddamned communists.”
“That ain't the question, it's if we want to fight
now
or
later.
Them Nazis ain't gonna sit!” shouted the redfaced man. “They got Egypt practically, and then it's India if it ain't England first. It ain't a question of the communists, the communists are on Hitler's side. I tellya we can wait and wait and chew and spit and the first thing you know they'll be in England, and then who's gonna help us when they start after us? Maybe Brazil? Get wise to the world! Spain don't matter now one way or the other, they ain't gonna help and they can't hurt. It's Germany and Italy and Japan, and if it ain't too late now it's gonna be. Get wise to yourself. We shoulda gone in—”
“What with?” said the Irishman with disdain. “Pop pop. Wooden machine-guns?”
“We were as ready a year ago as we are now. Defence don't mean nothing, you gotta have to fight!”
“No, we're much better off now,” I said, “than we were a year ago. When England went in, to keep its word to Poland, what good was it to Poland? The German Army—”
“Shut up, you Jew,” said the Irishman.
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