The Trip to Echo Spring (28 page)

Why, then? Why did a man of such prodigious intelligence, such gifts, return over and over to a substance that was destroying the fabric of his life? In
Recovery,
Alan Severance keeps asking himself this question, despite the patient efforts of his therapists to draw him back to the present moment. The Minnesota Model is – or was, in 1970 – essentially pragmatic, steering clear of psychoanalysis, the search for
reasons
, in favour of tackling and treating the addict's behaviour in the present. Severance, though, is stubbornly obsessed with two items from his past: the suicide of his father and a period of puzzling blankness during his adolescence. He keeps harking back to them in Group, unable to see that this is a way of avoiding his current situation and his responsibility to change it.

Not everything about Alan Severance is drawn from life, and part of his power as a character derives from the ironic distance between his perspective and the reader's – which implies that Berryman possessed more insight into the disease than his stand-in (though reading the vain, deluded, boastful poems of 1970's
Love and Fame
you might not always think so). That said, the material about the father is directly lifted from reality. Berryman was convinced that John Allyn's suicide was the crucial event of his life. For years, he'd been worrying over it, trying to work out how grave a wound he'd been struck.

The problem was he could remember almost nothing about the events on Clearwater Island. Neither what had happened nor his own feelings at the time were at all clear to him, and so he had to depend on the precarious testimony of his mother. According to
Poets in Their Youth,
Eileen Simpson's memoir, these conversations took place repeatedly, in person and by letter, particularly at times when John was under strain. Each time, Mrs. Berryman's story changed, and though sometimes he found this funny, at other moments her unreliability plunged him into an access of despair.

When he was in St. Mary's for the last time, he wrote to his mother, asking her to set down once and for all her recollections of Allyn's death. His questions were numbered and painfully precise.

1. Did I
hear
Daddy threaten to swim out w me (or Bob?) or drown us both? or did you tell me later?
when
?

2. When did I first learn that he'd killed himself?

3. How did I
seem to take
his death when first told? Before the drive back to Tampa that morning? How did I
act
in the car? Back in Tampa? at the funeral parlour? At the graveyard in Holdenville?
in Minn? Gloucester? thro' the 8th grade? (in Was DC? – where tho't I recognized him on the street one day – crushed?)

Mrs. Berryman answered with a long, circuitous letter. She said that the subject was painful and that she'd rather not remember; that she'd spent much of her life being tormented by what had happened to her husband. She described the circumstances of his death, in a confused and havering way. She said that she took five bullets out of the gun and buried them, but that he must have secreted a sixth somewhere, put it in and then clicked through the chamber so many times that eventually he came upon it (the idea that Allyn's death was an accident was a standard of her repertoire, most often wheeled out for strangers and new friends). She didn't answer the question about how her son behaved or seemed in that heartrending, pathetic tally of locations.

Berryman's response, written a few days before he left St. Mary's, is almost abject. He apologises for having distressed her. He tells her that anyway he's decided to abandon the subject: that he left it for a few hours and felt so much better he's resolved never to approach it again. (This lurch from brief experience to extravagant commitment is, incidentally, characteristic of his recovery, a kind of run before you can walk grandiosity that made him dangerously prone to failure. Sabotage, in short, since the inevitable disappointment would lead him straight back to drinking.)

The subject wasn't abandoned, of course. Instead he handed it to Severance to chew over – just as, for the last decade and a half, he'd given it to Henry, who is also haunted by the suicide of ‘the blue father', ‘this dreadful banker', and who spends much of the Dream
Songs either rehearsing the events on Clearwater Island or trying to dig down physically to his father's grave.

Trapped on Ward W, Alan spends much of his time pondering his loss. After an unsuccessful session of transactional analysis, he writes in his notebook:

New problem. Did I myself feel any
guilt
perhaps – long repressed if so, and mere speculation now (defence here) –
about Daddy's death?
(I certainly picked up enough of Mother's selfblame to accuse her once, drunk and raging, of having actually murdered him and staged a suicide.) Lecturer lately on children's blaming themselves for father drunk (=What did I do to make Daddy angry and get drunk?). BLANK, probably odd. He
was
drinking heavily, all four of them were in those last weeks, nightmarish quarrels. Gun-death at dawn, like Hemingway's, imitating his father. Does my fanatical drinking emulate his, and my fanatical smoking (both ‘manly')? So possibly it wasn't rage/self-pity, but guilt, that were simply driven underground for a year (Why? if so) to emerge after all and cripple my prep school years.

He continues in this vein for another paragraph, then drops his pen, baffled. ‘Tall handsome Daddy,' he thinks to himself, ‘adored and lost so soon!'

This statement is very close to one written in Berryman's own hospital diary, and the crippled prep school years were yet another item purloined from reality. At South Kent he'd been badly bullied and once, after being beaten up on a cross-country run, had tried very
hard to throw himself under a train (poor impulse control, a psychiatrist might note here, sucking on his pen).

When he looked back at this period from adulthood what troubled him most was a pervasive sense of blankness. His boyhood self seemed fogged-in and weirdly ambitionless. Damn it, he couldn't even remember what he'd
read
. In
Recovery
, Alan returns often to this subject, even raising in Group the mystery of his ‘uncharacteristic . . . wasted years'. (The counsellor, amused: ‘Everybody wastes years.')

I sat back in my chair, chewing my own pen. We were passing Rugby, the cars wheel-deep in snow. Black earth, the ice like tarnished silver. There were rusting drums in the field. I could see for miles, the rolling hills scored with pines. All the time that regretful, admonitory sound:
Hoooo Hoooo! Hiiiii Hiiiii!

Something about the spectacle of an ageing man picking at old wounds really got to me. I could see that in one respect it was just another avoidance technique, a way of refusing to face up to the role of drinking in the ongoing wreck of his life. And alcohol, as he well knew, is addicting for all sorts of reasons, some genetic and some merely circumstantial. The most urgent task isn't to find out why one drinks, but to get dry and then stay dry. Still, that period of blankness tugged at me. ‘Missing someone who is loved and longed for,' Freud once observed, ‘is the key to an understanding of anxiety.'

Recently, I'd come across a study that radically reaffirms the relevance of childhood experience to health in later life. The Adverse Childhood Experience Study was carried out in San Diego from 1995 to 1997, though its research is ongoing. It studied a cohort of 17,000 middle-class American adults of diverse ethnicity: a huge endeavour, and certainly large enough for its results to be statistically significant. Each
participant was asked to complete a questionnaire asking whether they'd experienced eight different kinds of childhood trauma, among them parental addiction, violence, sexual abuse, loss, and disruption of other kinds. These scores were then correlated against the presence of a variety of mental and physical diseases in adulthood, including alcoholism.

The results were staggering. In every condition, from nicotine addiction to heart disease, there was an unambiguous relationship between the percentage of sufferers and the degree of childhood trauma. In a paper entitled ‘The Origins of Addiction: Evidence from the Adverse Childhood Experience Study', one of the co-principal investigators, Dr. Vincent Felitti, summarised their findings in terms of addiction:

In our detailed study . . . we found that the compulsive use of nicotine, alcohol, and injected street drugs increases proportionally in a strong, graded, dose-response manner that closely parallels the intensity of adverse life experiences during childhood. This of course supports old psychoanalytic views and is at odds with current concepts, including those of biological psychiatry, drug-treatment programs, and drug-eradication programs. Our findings are disturbing to some because they imply that the basic causes of addiction lie within
us
and the way we treat each other, not in drug dealers or dangerous chemicals. They suggest that billions of dollars have been spent everywhere except where the answer is to be found.

Beneath this statement there was a table displaying the results for ACE score vs. Adult Alcoholism. It was one of the most sobering things I'd ever seen. Five black bars, steadily increasing. On the far left the bar was tiny. Just over 2% of adults with an ACE score of 0 (meaning that they had answered no to all eight questions about traumatic childhood experiences) had become alcoholics. The next along was slightly larger. Almost 6% of adults with an ACE score of 1 had become alcoholics. The next was bigger again. Around 10% of adults with an ACE score of 2 had become alcoholics. Then up again. Just under 12% of adults with an ACE score of 3 had become alcoholics. The last was the biggest. 16% of adults with an ACE score of 4 or more had developed an addiction to alcohol.

In the conclusion to this paper, one of a great many published by the ACE team on its various findings, Felitti wrote:

The current concept of addiction is ill founded. Our study of the relationship of adverse childhood experiences to adult health status in over 17,000 persons shows addiction to be a readily understandable although largely unconscious attempt to gain relief from well-concealed prior life traumas by using psychoactive materials. Because it is difficult to get enough of something that doesn't quite work, the attempt is ultimately unsuccessful, apart from its risks. What we have shown will not surprise most psychoanalysts, although the magnitude of our observations are new, and our conclusions are sometimes vigorously challenged by other disciplines.

The evidence supporting our conclusions about the basic cause of addiction is powerful and its implications are daunting.
The prevalence of adverse childhood experiences and their long-term effects are clearly a major determinant of the health and social well being of the nation. This is true whether looked at from the standpoint of social costs, the economics of health care, the quality of human existence, the focus of medical treatment, or the effects of public policy. Adverse childhood experiences are difficult issues, made more so because they strike close to home for many of us. Taking them on will create an ordeal of change, but will also provide for many the opportunity to have a better life.

There are criticisms of the ACE study, particularly that its findings are retrospective, and depend on the assumption that those taking part are both telling the truth and in possession of accurate memories. It also raises all kinds of questions, none of them as yet fully answered, including the exact route by which childhood trauma leads to later ill health, and what protective mechanisms exist in the majority who suffer early life upheaval but do not go on to develop adulthood disease. Still, it stands as radical proof of the common sense assumption that where you end up has its roots in where you began.

Berryman's ACE score was 3.
It is difficult to get enough of something that doesn't work.
Christ. It made a different sense of all those poems. Dream Song 96, stanza 1:

Under the table, no. That last was stunning,

that flagon had breasts. Some men grow down cursed.

Why drink so, two days running?

two months, O seasons, years, two decades running?

I answer (smiles) my question on the cuff:

Man, I been thirsty.

That flagon had breasts.
He was addicted to a false source of nourishment, but the thirst was real. Hardly any wonder he ended up, as the poem does, in hospital, his ‘rum, his Cointreau, gin-&-sherry, his bourbon' all threatened by figures in white coats.

I thought back again to the prep school years. They came hard on the heels of three consecutive losses: first the awful period at the Oklahoma boarding school when he was eleven, then his father's death and then the remarriage of his adored mother, which swallowed up even her Christian name. After two years in his new home in Jackson Heights he was sent to South Kent, where he was abjectly unpopular. No one to confide to, and anyway an environment in which feeling itself was dangerous. His letters home bear little traces of his distress – quick, pseudo-casual mentions of the boys who smashed his glasses or locked him in a cupboard. In urgent need of a defence, he began to bury himself behind a false self, a mask evident in all his cheerful, phoney letters to his mother. (‘And it's only 18 days until I go
home
! Imagine! I don't have an idea as to how the house will look. You're all settled by now, I guess, and I'll be a total stranger. Gee!') He was learning to absent himself, to deny and minimise his unhappiness: a technique that would serve him ill in years to come. And underneath, of course, the real feelings seethed: inadmissible, and as such impossible to discharge, except in wild moments like the day he flung himself down in the path of an oncoming train.

Something else came into my mind then. Perhaps it was irrelevant, perhaps not. Anyway, it seemed to belong amid this braid of need and
attachment, separation and anxiety. In Dream Song 96 Berryman made explicit reference to the commonality between bottles and breasts, to the suckling nourishment he could draw from a flagon. In the published correspondence with his mother,
We Dream of Honor
(which one critic described as being of interest only to a psychiatrist) there's a small window into Mrs. Berryman's feelings on the same subject. The introduction quotes a fragment of a short story she wrote in August 1931, during her son's second summer home from South Kent. It's a fantasy about a woman breastfeeding her infant son, and matches the ardent, seductive tone she often took in letters to John, though whether it's drawn from life or not is impossible to know.