The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

"Blazing Like Disease": John Berryman and the Dis-Ease of Suicide

Clare Emily Clifford
clifford@bama.ua.edu

I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.
and she never could. She had my portrait
done instead.
….
They hung my portrait in the chill
north light, matching
me to keep me well.
Only my mother grew ill.
She turned from me, as if death were catching,
as if death transferred,
as if my dying had eaten inside of her.
-Anne Sexton, “The Double Image”

Suicidal literature is not necessarily depressing or morbid;
the writer, like the physician, is interested in illness
in the larger context of healing and health.
-Jeffrey Berman, “The Grief That Does Not Speak”

I’ve been thinking about John Berryman and suicide for years. Not his suicide, or his father’s or aunt’s suicides, or even his critics’ theories about how suicide affected his life. No, I’ve been thinking about suicide in John Berryman’s poetry for years.  From his earliest book of poems, The Dispossessed (1948), his speakers have been trying to “learn / Compassion,” understand their suffering, and find “candour for [their] pain” (“A Point of Age” 61-2, 56)[1]. Within Berryman’s entire oeuvre, his speakers struggle to “master… the sorrow, the disease” in their lives and make sense of the suicidal “grave” that infects—and reinfects—their thoughts (75-6, 118). In my estimation, the compassion they are learning is for themselves. Berryman may have been considered the most revered elegist of his poetic generation and memorialized as “the obituary writer,” but Henry’s great subject of mourning is made plainly clear when he states that “It all centered in the end on suicide / in which I am an expert, deep & wide” (Davison, 136:17-8[2]).

Berryman critics are usually obsessed with his personal failures: the failed sobriety, the failed marriages, the failed life. Too often, when reading Berryman scholarship, his poetry is quoted as though it were a journal chronicling and explaining the frenzy of his life. The two biographies of Berryman haphazardly use his poetry to “speak for” his life—conflating, as often occurs, the lives of Henry & Berryman. In her review of these biographies Kathe Davis is understandably disappointed by their inept appropriation of his poetry:

The poems come to seem a by-product, a kind of incidental excrescence of neurosis, which throughout has center stage.  When the poetry is quoted—as, to be fair, it often is—it seems diminished into documentation, dissolved back into life. (Davis, LP 48)

The truth is that Berryman scholarship is frequently just that: scholarship about Berryman, not scholarship about his work. Instead of being elucidated, his poetry is “dissolved back into [his] life”. For as often as his critics sensationally mention Berryman’s own suicide—and they refer to it often—there is only passing critical attention to analyzing the role that suicide plays as a device in his poems.

I see John Berryman’s poetry about suicide as exemplary in giving what David Morris calls “voice to an otherwise often inarticulate discourse about pain” (Morris 3). Berryman’s work engages the painful subject of suicide, creating a space where language can speak about silenced subjects. The poet William Meredith reflects on how “Berryman helped a lot of us to find the language we needed to talk in poetry about what is new in our culture…. language that handles directly the anger and humor and violence of its time, with the traditional language of poetry” (qtd in Browne 72). The formulation of a new language creates a complex but generative space—one that discourses about pain, suicide, and words, which are all subjects mandating literal, personal, and cultural interpretation.

Morris argues that “pain [is] an event that demands interpretation.  Pain not only hurts but more often than not frustrates, baffles, and resists us.  It seems we cannot simply suffer pain but almost always are compelled to make sense of it” (18). Yet to “make sense of” pain, to “interpret” pain in the context of suicidality, we must do double-interpreting. A suicidal act is itself “a communication, an interpersonal” one that we struggle to make sense of as “we assign meaning to the logistics of the act”— hanging, shotgun, bridge-jumping (Sanderson 35, Jamison 130).  So as we accrue these intersecting subjects, we complicate the levels of interpretive work to be performed:  pain must be interpreted, suicide demands interpretation, and of course language is the vehicle of our communication, still open to interpretation as well.  It is no wonder that Berryman’s speakers find themselves inundated with the work of so many interpretations “too many, blazing like disease” seeking a “magical tongue” to “mend” their ills, searching for a “strange recovery” (“At Chinese Checkers” 60, 119, 122, 127).

Conservative estimates show that we live in a country and culture where nearly twice as many individuals die each year from suicide as there are deaths by homicide—there are 83 suicides a day in the United States, one every 17 minutes—and yet we still struggle to speak about suicide openly. Edwin Schneidman declared, at the end of his forty-five year career in suicidology, that

Pain is the basic ingredient of suicide…in order to begin to understand suicide, we need to think about what anguish means, as well as why people entertain thoughts of death, especially death as a way of stopping unbearable misery.  Suicidal death, in other words, as an escape from pain…. Pain is Nature’s great signal.  Pain warns us; pain both mobilizes us and saps our strength; pain, by its very nature makes us want to stop it or escape from it.  Pain is the core of suicide.  Suicide is an exclusively human response to extreme psychological pain, the pain of human suffering.  (7 author’s emphasis)

Accepting Schneidman’s logic, there is no way to disassociate suicide from the entanglements of pain. By attending to this “discourse of pain” and examining the “vocabulary of suicide,” my work engages poetry about suicide as it responds to, constructs, and challenges our cultural understanding of the suicidal mind (Morris 3, Schneidman vii). Like Jeffrey Berman, I too “seek a fuller discussion of suicidal literature and its impact on readers and society,” and therefore my interest in John Berryman centers “in the end on suicide”—on the choices Berryman makes in textualizing suicide in his poetry, and how frequently Berryman’s context for suicide engages dis-ease and pain (SLS 44).

During a Harvard Advocate interview, John Berryman was asked to describe his process of composing: “Could you talk about how—physically—you write your poems? Do you do several drafts, start with a line, a page, or several drafts, just write them out? What is the process?”(13). Berryman’s response in no way addresses the process of writing, instead his reply explains only his reason for writing: “Well, you feel uneasy, and you get going with a pencil or pen” (13). If, for Berryman, the impetus to write is a feeling of unease—dis-ease, even—then “get[ting] going with a pencil or pen” is the first step of his palliative care. The term “disease” etymologically derives from a state of dis-ease denoting the absence of ease, the sensation of discomfort, or a pathological illness affecting ones health. Disease even means—in a more archaic and now obsolete usage—to decease, to die.  Unquestionably, the work of John Berryman begins with and struggles with dis-ease, both real and “phantoming uneases” (“Not to Live” 4). 

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