All Each Damned Day

John Berryman was powerless over alcohol, but he was also powerless over poetry, and that’s the pits.

I do, despite my self-doubts, day by day
grow more & more but a little confident
that I will never down a whiskey again
or gin or rum or vodka, brandy or ale.

A mere alcoholic might work to have his fatal disease arrested one day at a time, and feel an incremental, fragile confidence (or despair) grow in sobriety. For the poet it’s all despite … doubts … and more and more but a little confident … of never drinking whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, and every other drink he can sensibly fit into a poem. You can almost taste the stuff.

Nor can the poet resist the temptation to remind himself that simple is hardly a synonym for easy:

It all is, after all, very simple.
You just never drink again all each damned day.

In a field not particularly characterized by normalcy, Berryman still stands out as a special case. In addition to the poetry and alcohol, there were lifelong psychiatric issues to add to the mix: his father’s suicide when Berryman was twelve (one among many issues) is as good a starting point for the latter as any, especially since the event may have followed the threat of a different order of insanity – suicide-murder “He was going to swim out, with me, forevers/and a swimmer strong he was in the phosphorescent Gulf/but he decided on lead.” Berryman may have been spoiled for choice, then, when it came to drowning. His was a tide governed by three moons.

In Tom Shone’s version, “John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a ‘dishevelled Moses’, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.”

(Shone accurately captures the general picture, although he conflates several hospitalizations, and misses Berryman, in disheveled Moses form, singing Bessie Smith’s blues. Berryman wouldn’t complain about the depiction. He was hospitalized so many times, he might have been confused himself. Less forgivable, of course, is Shone’s misquoting the poetry: the Berryman persona was under new “management.”)

As the alcoholic might try the switch from liquor to beer, during a later period of abstinence Berryman tried to calm the waters by turning from poetry to prose. The result was an appropriately unfinished novel called Recovery, “an object lesson in how not to recover.” Donald Newlove: “First you hang on to all your old romances about your illness, then you suck your old grandiosity for every drop that’s still in it, you vigorously emphasize your uniqueness among the clods who might be recovering with you, and then you defend to the death your right to self-destruction … Starting afresh meant that a massive part of his work so far was self-pity and breast-beating. That was the last mask he couldn’t rip off. It was like tearing the beard from his cheeks.”

This might be unfair on Berryman, and one wouldn’t want to make too much of hearsay, especially when the source is another alcoholic writer. But Berryman himself is hardly a reliable witness. A manuscript entitled Third Alcoholic Treatment, “a summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery,” notes: “Alcoholism produces inevitably what are known as ‘sincere delusions.’ A sincere delusion is a lie – an affective deformation of reality – which the liar does not know to be a lie … His delusion is shared in some degree by that part of the society which is concerned with his welfare.”

Berryman was late in trying recovery, but sincere enough or sincerely deluded enough to keep on keeping on. What seem to be prayers to a power greater than John Berryman populate his last volumes. He attended meetings, many of which did not always go according to plan: on one occasion, scheduled to lead a meeting and entirely unprepared, he decided to recite (like a poem?) his Fourth Step Inventory from a paper in his coat pocket. The poetry and its prose addenda kept pace. At the tail end of 1969, he worked on a biography of Shakespeare, which he cited as “a replacement for drinking.” A few weeks later, he was back in hospital, devastatingly drunk, deathly anxious, it seems, over the quality of new poems. The tides of 1970 followed this pattern. A few days after another hospitalization in December of that year he wrote: “I feel new - so far, 10 days, okay with no trouble. I’ll be in out-patient treatment two years now, then just on maintenance of the severe daily discipline I established in hospital 5 weeks ago & have not since once relaxed. The next drink I take will probably be on my death-bed, if then.” It wasn’t.

Saul Bellow (on Recovery the novel) notes that Berryman’s inspiration “contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabilizer. It reduced the fatal intensity.” The fatal intensity is not to be doubted - the Minneapolis Star reported a witness who observed that Berryman apparently “waved goodbye” just before he plunged from the Minneapolis Washington Avenue Bridge - but drink as a stabilizer is highly suspect.

In a Paris Review interview, eighteen months or so before his suicide, Berryman said:

“I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the word has never heard before … I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it. Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal that will not actually kill him. At that point he’s in business … I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, “Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,” but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know. I hope to be nearly crucified.”

Berryman might have been playing to the gallery here; but he might also have been living the part he was playing. In Discovery, Alan Severance, a barely disguised John Berryman, is described as “a conscientious man. He head really thought, off and on for twenty years, that it was his duty to drink, namely, to sacrifice himself. He saw the products as worth it.”

The poet sacrificing himself to the ordeal of alcoholism for the product of poetry fits well with the public narrative. An opposite one, the drinker sacrificing himself to poetry in order that he might drink, is just as plausible. So which came first – the headless chicken or the poisoned egg?

A.A. Alvarez (The Writer’s Voice) opts for the egg:

“As a rationale for alcoholism,” he notes of Severance’s justification, “this strikes me as being as fanciful and self-aggrandizing as Severance himself. It becomes convincing only when you turn it inside out: given Berryman’s belief in the connection between art and agony, given also the public’s appetite for bad behavior in its artists (which deflect it from taking their work seriously), it may be that, for Berryman, writing poetry was an excuse for his drinking.”

Or was that the chicken?

A Woman Under the Influence

What is it with Myrtle Gordon anyway? Well, it’s Cassavetes for a start.

Myrtle is an actor more acted upon than acting – she is bent out of shape by the director, the writer, and her fellow actors. Her identity is picked at by the melodrama onstage (a scene in which she is to be slapped is the cause of acute problems) and by the men (not just the men, but particularly the men) around her: the trailer (Opening Night, 1977) captures a little of the latter, with the director’s voice, talking to Myrtle, over images of Myrtle and a young female fan:

“It has nothing to do with being a woman … And you’re not a woman anyway … No, you’re a beautiful woman … You are … I was kidding … You see, you have no sense of humor, I told you that … It’s a tradition, actresses get slapped, it’s a tradition … I love you … I want you to be good … Would I hurt you? … Well then, you’re going to have to let me slap you … It won’t work if you don’t.”

Of course, it has everything to do with being a woman, and everything to do with getting older and damaged. “I’m getting old,“ her onstage co-star says: “What do we do about that?” Myrtle’s first words offstage, over the credits, are: “They wanna be loved … They have to be loved … The whole world … Everybody wants to be loved. When I was seventeen I … I could do anything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I’m finding it … harder … and harder … to stay in touch.” And she wants to find a way to play the part where age doesn’t matter.

“Aging is a serious problem,” says Cassavetes: “It’s a fear. Somebody reaches forty, it’s a bigger fear. They want to be thirty. Somebody’s thirty, they want to be twenty. So they can have all the access to life.”

When a young fan who had sought her autograph at the stage door is run over and killed by a car, Myrtle is visited by the specter of the younger woman, a ghost of illness, a reflection, perhaps, of her younger self. “I’m not afraid of you,” the woman says: “You’re an older woman. You’re frightened. And you’re a coward.” Threatened, Myrtle lashes out with her fists and a bottle, and then she’s lashing out at thin air.

And Myrtle drinks. She drinks hard, and all the time. In the first few seconds of the film she is making her way to the stage and taking a long swig from the bottle. She drinks throughout the film as her identity crisis, our main concern, threatens to take down the play with her. She swallows straight from bottles of J&B that appear to be everywhere, even on stage, and by the end, blind drunk but making it through to the final act, she is accompanied to her entrance by the props man who leans towards her and whispers: “I’ve seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I’ve never seen anybody as drunk as you and still able to walk. You’re fantastic.”

And so she is.

These Be The Steps

These Be The Steps
The Notebooks of Cal Chilo
In His Fourth Month of Sobriety
Norton, 120 pp., $120

A new book containing unpublished work by one of our finest living poets is a literary event. A new book containing unpublished work by Cal Chilo is something else altogether. But what, exactly?

It might be easier to start by noting what it is not: it is not, or not merely, a collection of new poems by the undeterrable author of Shit-Faced, All I Ever Want To Do (Is Drink), Two For The Road, and the thematically-related, Make That Three. However, Chilo fans shouldn’t struggle with their straitjackets and head for solid walls just yet, because the book does contain a fair amount of new poetry, albeit heavily disguised, in Chilo’s trademark style, as “fragments,” “unresolved vocabulary,” and “words that possibly rhyme.”

But These Be The Steps is bigger than poetry. Indeed, Chilo seems to have set himself a task usually reserved to literary executors with their hands on the udders of that most bovine of cash cows, the dead poet, by publishing every word, down to the last signed receipt, that has been formed by his pen. The result is a remarkable and seemingly random assemblage of verse, non-verse, prose, non-prose, thought and absent-minded doodling culled from what Chilo refers to as “spiral binders.” The witty epigraph sets the tone:

I open the bucket
And shake out the leaves
And then I think, ‘Fuck it!
This might be funny
And I need the money
What rhyme can I find for 'leaves'?

Chilo has been hailed as a universal poet, of sorts, in that his standing among the university elite perfectly reflects his standing in the insatiable mass market for poetry. While an Eliot or Stevens might shiver with distaste at the idea of a poetry deliberately conceived to be intelligible to the masses, and a Frost would evolve a style that would appeal to both the average poetry reader and, through secret equivocations, to the more discerning critic, only Chilo has so effortlessly pulled off the trick of challenging (mentally) both: “Ideally,” he noted in a recent Paris Review interview, “it will leave the former feeling they could use a drink, and transform the latter into chronic alcoholics.”

Chilo is first and foremost a student of our major poets, or, as his critics would have it, “nothing but a plagiarist.” He’s certainly not above frequent borrowing - there’s Stevens (“I placed a jar upon the bar”); Frost (“I took the bar less patronized”); and even Pound (“Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace./ You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to the pub").

But it is evident even here that the obsession is all his own. Liz Rosenberg likens a poem to a baby, because both are “self-absorbed and containing … the universal breath, and needing constant tiny cares and adjustments.” Not surprisingly, Chilo compares it to cheap beer: “Both, at the very least, addle the brain, and, at their best, make you want to throw up.”

There’s plenty on offer here for those Chilo fans, lighters aloft, anxious for a familiar encore. In scattered jottings on drinking, alcohol, and alcoholism - to name just a few of the many topics covered - Chilo drafts poems (“Dear Santa, Bring another drunk for me”), theorizes about poetics (“The poem must have a good point as a [sic] anecdote or joke about drink”); and lists topics for later writings (“the perfect pint of Guinness” and “ale?”). Occasionally, there is a ferocious lament in which his characteristic fixation is mixed with delusions of grandeur – “Beethoven couldn’t hear,” he writes at one point, “and I can’t drink.” More typical is the regretful and regrettable Pub Going:

A drink-drinking house on drink-drinking earth it is
In whose stale air all our desired drinks meet
Are re-ordered, and poured as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone (just not me!) will be surprising
A hunger in himself for much more drink-drinking,
And staggeringly heading to this ground,
Which, he once knew, was proper to grow drunk in,
If only that so many drunks lie round.

The revelation of the Notebooks, however, is that Chilo may be about to break new ground: much diminished is the trademark “desire to drink,” and gone entirely are the famous synonyms for drunkenness (“Paradise,” “Bliss,” and “The Bollocks”) as is the self-pitying brooding on the first step (“Powerless, powerless, the word is powerless/ Sometimes I wish I was drunk still and showerless”). Instead the focus is on “the quality of my sobriety (sucks)” and “How come/ As I change my thinking/ The world and its mum/ Have taken to drinking?”

Through dozens of pages we see Chilo struggle with a recurrent theme: the insanity of the second step. At first he “goes” rather than “comes” to believe that a power greater than himself can restore him to sanity and has to go back to the beginning. Then, once he has mastered the first verb, he becomes despairingly confused about the goal and is restored to vanity before realizing his error. As painful for the reader, perhaps, as for Chilo, he compounds his misery by next being restored to profanity, which he seems to enjoy enormously before it becomes painfully obvious that he has again reached a dead end. The reader will not know whether to laugh or cry as Chilo then attempts to restore his Higher Power to sanity.

The trademark “plagiarism” is here (“I saw the best livers of my generation destroyed …” begins one poem), nowhere more apparent than in the straightforward theft from Larkin with Annus Recoverus:

The second second step began
In twenty-ten A.D.
(It all seemed nuts to me) –
Between the end of the alcohol ban
And the gallons of iced tea.

Larkin is also hidden in plain sight (or plainly not hidden) in the poem that lends its title to the volume:

They fuck you up, steps two and three.
They are not meant to, but they do.

Here, the Notebooks give the reader a clearer indication than mere finished verse of the poet’s struggle: These Be The Steps begins life as Whose Idea Was This? and goes through numerous rewrites – notably as This Is The End and This Be The Pits – in which Chilo painfully considers the relationship between the God of his understanding and the self (which he elsewhere terms “the basket case”).

Chilo fans will delight in his experiments with some of poetry’s more esoteric forms, including the villanelle, sestina, rondeau redoublé, and the limerick:

After the alcohol tasked us,
A number of anonyms asked us
About certain powers
So much higher than ours -
There were some who suggested “Damascus!”

Chilo chooses to end the book on (or runs out of ink at) an optimistic and possibly delusional note:

I’ll be soberly full of surprises.
My steps’ll be all different sizes:
Some incredibly small,
Almost no steps at all,
And others so huge they’ll win prizes.

Few poets are as capable as Cal Chilo in testing Somerset Maugham’s belief that “the mere habit of notebook keeping might make the writer more observant.” Better suited to flipping around in rather than straight reading, perhaps, this is an essential book for the seriously demented poetry lover, who will find it a trove of Chilo’s famously earthy and yet deceptively non-existent wisdom.

Kafka's Monster, and Mine

In 1922, Kafka turned down an invitation from his friend Oskar Baum to spend his holidays with him, and used the occasion to write to Max Brod:

“It is a fear of change, a fear of attracting the attention of the gods by what is a major act for a person of my sort.

“Last night, as I lay sleepless and let everything veer back and forth between my aching temples, what I had almost forgotten … became clear to me: namely, on what frail ground or rather altogether nonexistent ground I live, over a darkness from which the dark power emerges when it wills and heedless of my stammering destroys my life. Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? But I don’t mean, of course, that my life is better when I don’t write. Rather it is much worse then and wholly unbearable and has to end in madness. But that, granted, only follows from the postulate that I am a writer, which is actually true even when I am not writing, and a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness.”

What would that make the drinker who is not drinking?

Say What You Like

Say what you like about alcoholism, but the poster in Starbucks (on the toilet wall, no less) – “Behind every good cup of coffee there is a barista and a good story” – makes no sense at all, unless they’re talking about Guinness and bartenders.

Say what you like, but life is not acted out, doesn’t raise its voice or spill over with coffee – it barely even clears its throat, and keeps itself to itself. And baristas, for the most part, are somewhat lacking in free indirect style.