The Trip to Echo Spring (29 page)

They were alone . . . He pushed at the bottle with his tongue, hunger assuaged, sleep hanging on his lids. Yearning over him, she dribbled milk on her breast and thrust the hardening nipple into his lax mouth; once, twice, he spit it out and then as the flesh-feel aroused him, he closed and tugged, drawing long arduous pulls, ceasing only to wail aloud at failure, nuzzling again for the nipple, pulling and drawing, whimpering and crying at the unnatural nothingness. Needle pain was stilled in her by the ecstasy of his need; futility closed iron claws upon her at the anguish of her sterile breast . . . As presently he relaxed, the bitterness of grief grew less keen.

It reads like a nineteenth-century seduction scene.
The ecstasy of his need:
what a dangerous thing to inculcate. And the breast is empty, while the real nourishment comes from a bottle. What's more, it's sexualised –
as the flesh-feel aroused him
– and mixed with a punishing lack of satisfaction.
If this has any bearing on the real relationship between mother and son, then it might explain at least in part why as an adult he would want complete control over his source of nourishment and comfort, and why he might suffer lifelong from an appalling sense of thirst.

The land changed again after Minot. Now there were closed river valleys, partially covered in scrubby trees, and little houses with bright red barns. I watched a falcon havering above the ruined grass. When the sun came out the cataracts of ice shone blue, silver, grey, pewter and sandy brown, the colours entwined like marble. Outside Stanley I saw a fox cantering through snow, its coat the dry brownish-yellow of winter grass. There was a wrecked goods train on its side by the tracks. An oil well, distant fires burning. ‘Attention please,' the tannoy said. ‘Williston, North Dakota will be coming up very soon. Williston, North Dakota is the next stop.'

I ate lunch that day with a man called Bob, who'd been the foreman electrician on Bill Gates's house. Two women joined us, both in their sixties. One was very dippy, the other stern, and they chattered away as we worked through our macaroni cheese and peanut butter pie. The stern one described how she raised her children and then the layout of her ranch. ‘I have two hundred acres,' she said. She wasn't boasting, just walking us through it. ‘A well, water a little hard, three springs, so I have water even if the pump fails. Stands of p-pine, ponderosa, so the cattle can get shade, and on the other side of the property, the north side, you get the moose and elk, they calve down there. I don't let the coyote and mountain lion on my property. If I
see them I fire a warning shot in the dirt. My husband doesn't like that, but I was raised around guns. My father's half-Wolf. He could catch a brook trout with his bare hands.' Then she told us a story about her mother walking to school in button-up boots in the 1920s, crushing big brown tarantulas all the way.

After coffee I went back to my cabin. Since Glasgow we'd been following the Milk River. It had burst its banks, and here and there fences were submerged to their topmost rung. I napped a while, and woke again to a different world. We were heading into the Rockies. Snow was billowing past the window. I figured from the map that we must be in East Glacier Park, almost 5,000 feet above sea level. I gummed my nose to the glass. Loose formless clouds. Only the nearest trees looked green. The mountains were covered in pines, the black on white translating to the monochrome grey of newsprint.

Talking to those people over lunch had reminded me of something else. In John Haffenden's compassionate and exacting biography of Berryman, he points out that one of the ways in which
Recovery
parts company with the poet's lived experience was in his relationships with the other inhabitants of the ward. Alan Severance is generally well liked, though at times his educated diction and self-important claims, delivered at a roar, repel his fellow patients. They think he's arrogant and deluded, but that's par for the course, and many of the sweeter scenes involve him engaging warmly with the others.

In reality, this wasn't quite the case. Berryman apparently found it very hard to see himself as part of this collective of poorly educated, unhappy people. For example, in
Recovery,
Severance makes mention of a ‘great friend of his' from a good background, with whom he hoped to establish a more exclusive AA group. Unhappily, according
to Haffenden, the real version of this woman, Betty Peddie, didn't much like Berryman. She felt he patronised her and boasted too much about his success, including his powers as a seducer. She read
Recovery
after his death, and delivered a report on it during a session of group therapy, which Haffenden reprinted in his book:

When he tried to relate to other people he did make friends, but he couldn't ever be wholehearted about belonging with the rest of us; he was constantly retreating into his uniqueness, but he really thought it was all he had that made him worth anything. So he stayed shut out, and he couldn't make it alone.

This is one of the saddest statements I've ever read, and it says a great deal very simply about the corrosive effects of alcoholic grandiosity and pride. It's probably also a very accurate assessment of why Berryman killed himself. The key to recovery from alcoholism is faith: faith in one's fellows, faith in God, faith in the recovery process and those who've passed through it. The problem, of course, is that alcoholism is often related to a badly damaged sense of trust. For Berryman, the work of the Twelve Steps meant encountering a place inside himself that was utterly unconvinced of any sort of loving presence in the universe, any sort of meaning. (In ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord', written in 1970, he reported bleakly: ‘my father's blow-it-all when I was twelve / blew out my most bright candle faith'.) For years, he'd been using drink to protect himself from this sense of abject terror and though it had never proved successful, without it he genuinely wasn't sure how it was possible to survive. As such, it's no coincidence that the only conclusion he could see for
Recovery
was Alan Severance's oncoming death.

Before the book foundered, Berryman sketched out where he wanted it to end: with a version of a walk he'd made with his own children, Paul included, up Pike's Peak in Colorado, where he'd had an intimation of death among the pines. He wrote down the last seven sentences on a notecard and they were printed in the appendix alongside some other scraps. ‘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.'

That's not recovery, though. That's flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, which is to say oblivion, escapism of the most conclusive kind. A sincere delusion, maybe, but the happiness is about as believable as it was in the Hartford poem that ends by screaming at Christ.

It was all so wasteful, so relentlessly destructive. I thought again of the dream he'd told Kate, about the decayed Russian aristocrat clipping holes in his Shakespeare notes. And then I remembered another dream he'd had, almost four decades before he died, when he was a young man in Cambridge, bewitched by language, half-drunk on the possibilities of what he might create. Up late one night in his rooms he went into a kind of trance, and saw when he closed his eyes a waking vision of Yeats, white-haired and tall, struggling to lift a great lump of coal. He raised it high above his head, then dashed it down on the polished floor, where it struck to pieces that rolled away, all silver. What a gap there was between the two scenes. That's what alcoholism does to a writer. You begin with alchemy, hard labour, and end by letting some grandiose degenerate, some awful aspect of yourself, take up residence at the hearth, the central fire, where they set to ripping out the heart of the work you've yet to finish.

8

HALF OF HIM

WHEN I WOKE THE NEXT
morning we were travelling through a vast snowy valley full of pine trees. The sun had just come up, and the ridge was glittering. As I watched, a wave of light washed down the slope, turning the pines a dusty greenish-gold. I drank my coffee, thrilled. It's almost impossible, watching the sun restore the world, not to feel some sense of gladness, of a covenant being kept.

An alcoholic
can
stop drinking. I knew it from my own childhood, and I knew it from my reading. My mother's ex-partner got dry at a treatment centre she still describes as a hellhole, and came back into our lives sober. They remain good friends, and Diana hasn't had a drink in twenty-three years, an achievement I find astonishingly heroic.

John Cheever managed it too, though he experienced many of the same difficulties with the drying-out process as Berryman did. His last year of drinking was purgatorial, a dizzying ride through the switch-back of late-stage alcoholism. After the year in Iowa with Raymond Carver, he took up a full professorship at Boston University in 1974. He moved into a furnished two-room fourth-floor walk-up and promptly set about drinking himself to death. The students seemed
less bright than those at Iowa, and his isolation rapidly deepened. He was living, he claimed, off oranges and hamburgers; his apartment was full of empty bottles and in the mornings he could barely hold a glass, let alone piece a sentence together.

In such circumstances writing was impossible, and he resigned partway through the spring term, handing responsibility for his classes to his colleague John Updike. Luckily, his brother Fred came to his rescue then, or he may well have succeeded with the depressing little feints at suicide he'd been making all term. Fred drove over to the apartment, dressed his naked and incoherent brother and drove him home to Mary, in the course of which journey he drained a quart of Scotch and pissed in the empty bottle. Back in Ossining he was immediately hospitalised before being reluctantly transferred to Smithers Alcohol Treatment and Training Center in New York.

While staying at Smithers, he was often reprimanded for grandiosity. Like Berryman, his diction counted against him, as did his habit of shoring himself up by drawing attention to his prodigious achievements, both in bed and on the page. In fact, he read Berryman while he was there, and his counsellor explicitly compared the two men. ‘But he was a brilliant poet and an estimable scholar, and I am neither,' Cheever said, faux-humbly, to which she replied: ‘Yes, but he was also a phony and a drunk, and now he's
dead;
is that what you want?'

Later, she elaborated on her estimation in a progress report: ‘He is a classic denier who moves in and out of focus. He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalized many rather imperious upper class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same time,' adding a tactical note: ‘Press him to deal with his own humanity.'

By some miracle, he managed it. Over the course of his
twenty-eight-day incarceration he went from guarded and rigidly defended to tentatively open, even soft. Despite his snobbery and habit of making light of suffering (to which he responded, à la Tennessee Williams, with a disconcerting giggle), he took a genuine interest in other people, and managed at least occasionally the trick of recognising himself in them. ‘I came out of prison 20 pounds lighter and howling with pleasure,' he wrote in a letter to a Russian friend on 2 June 1975, a month after his release, and though no cure had been found for his loneliness or sense of sexual confusion, he never drank again.

That howl of pleasure, of freedom and self-acceptance, reverberated into his new novel. For a long time, he'd been dickering helplessly over
Falconer,
the story of a man in prison for murdering his brother. He'd sold it to Robert Gottlieb at Knopf back in 1973 for an advance of $100,000 but had, despite his claims to the contrary, barely written a word before or since (‘Sauced, I speculate on a homosexual romance in prison'). In his Smithers diary, however, he'd been writing almost as much about the book as he had about his recovery. Now, healthier and more energetic than he'd been for years, he rolled up his Brooks Brothers sleeves and set about it.

There is in all Cheever's long fiction a haltingness that would under normal circumstances be incompatible with the ambitions of a novel. His books resemble in their discontinuity dreams: dreams in which one passes by a succession of lighted rooms, each containing a tableau at once inexplicable and alluring. At intervals, control of the narrative slips unexpectedly into the hands of a stranger, a passer-by, and though it may eventually slot back on track, one is never quite certain after that of either the destination or the direction of travel. While this practice is not without its frustrations, it captures very precisely the realm most
of us inhabit: a place of tailing off and interruption; irresolute, incomplete and infused with a melancholy and sometimes exultant beauty.

This hesitancy is still evident in
Falconer,
but here it gathers a new intensity. It's apparent that something imperative is being acted out on the page, although the urgency often seems incommensurate with the flimsiness of the players. The novel begins when a well-bred man named Farragut is brought into Falconer Correctional Faculty (the name Daybreak House hasn't caught on) and ends when he escapes from it. In the interim, he recovers from heroin addiction, survives a prison riot and falls in love with a fellow inmate, Jody, who effects his own escape by posing as a visiting bishop's aide. Unfree, confined, Farragut travels in his memories, which are for the most part Cheever's own. Farragut's father wanted him aborted; Farragut's father attempted to commit suicide on a rollercoaster at Nagasakit; Farragut suffers lapses in memory; Farragut's wife is very cold; and Farragut finds himself falling in love with a man, though he considers himself a paragon of the virtuous bourgeoisie.