Christian Thompsonfrom In Measured Resistance: On Hayden Carruth's "Contra Mortem"
In the characters of Meursault from The Stranger and Dr. Rieux from The Plague, Camus presents different attitudes toward a contemporary anxiety. Neither man questions whether or not God is dead but each demonstrates his own particular incapacity to believe. Meursault finds the question of God uninteresting and not worth his time, whereas Dr. Rieux is less aggressive in his response to those who try to convert him. He does not ridicule the believer's point of view but simply says it is not his own. Unlike Dr. Rieux, who demonstrates no anguish over his inability, there are those who are tormented, or at least disturbed, by why they find it so difficult to imagine how others can believe. These people live, not in a crisis of faith, but in a challenge to their imaginations.
I am one of the latter group. My search is not one toward faith but toward a condition of awe at who and what lives outside me. Abraham had the advantage of a purer ignorance than mine. But we live where and when we live in the bodies and minds we are given. As I work backwards I look for references closer to my experience before I can learn Abraham's language. "Contra Mortem" by Hayden Carruth is one of my references. It is a poem of wonder, gratitude and celebration expressed by a man whose expectations of the life he would live were decimated by mental illness. "Contra Mortem" is the foundation of a new life Carruth built through poetry after being told by doctors in an asylum he would never live anything which would approach a normal existence.
Before his illness blossomed in 1953, Carruth was editor of Poetry at the age of twenty-eight, his poems were being published in the right magazines and journals, and he was on his way toward the type of conventional literary success of which he had dreamed. When he collapsed it was recommended by his psychiatrist that he be admitted to Bloomingdale, a private asylum in White Plains, New York that was a branch of New York Hospital. While there for a little more than a year, he was heavily medicated with barbiturates and underwent numerous electro-convulsive treatments. His clinical diagnosis was "chronic and acute anxiety psycho-neurosis with generalized phobic extensions." Carruth describes his condition as a neurotic, bordering on psychotic, fear of people and open spaces. Although, even now, when he talks about his illness one hears in his voice the inadequacy of any description. Despite his hospitalization, Carruth's condition did not improve. When he left the asylum, he went to his parents' home in Pleasantville, New York where he lived for five years in a make-shift room in the attic. There he listened to jazz and classical music, read, and, with great difficulty, wrote. He describes writing a line of poetry during that time as like "trying to squeeze glue out of an old, dried-up tube." With the exception of visits to his psychiatrist and late night attempts to walk to the end of the block while loaded with Thorazine, Carruth rarely left his room for much of that five year period.
It was during his time in the attic when Carruth discovered Camus. I am always moved when I imagine the serendipity of that discovery. Part of the pain of Carruth's illness was the severe contrast between the lucid, penetrating quality of his mind sabotaged by a deep and fundamentally inexplicable anxiety. The tension of living within a mind, the full beauty and power of which was crippled by a mysterious defect, fueled Carruth's sense of injustice. He had been living a sick joke at which he could not laugh until he read The Stranger. Camus invented a character (Meursault) who spoke to Carruth with all of the paradox, tension, and bewildered amazement at the circumstances of a particular life which Carruth harbored from his earliest memories, with one important exception: Meursault was free. The tone of his voice, what he chose to see, what he chose to ignore, reeked of an accomplished freedom Carruth never imagined possible until he read the first words uttered by the narrator of The Stranger: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." I like to think upon first reading those words Carruth smiled, paused, then began to laugh. He was hooked. I am sure he read the book several times, made notes, ruminated, made more notes.
Eventually, with the help of a good psychiatrist, Carruth moved from his parents' home to a cottage on the Norfolk, Connecticut estate of his friend, James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions. Laughlin offered Carruth the job of putting the back files of New Directions into order. During his time in Norfolk Carruth met and married his third wife, Rose Marie Dorn.
After completing the project Laughlin hired him to do, Carruth and his bride decided to start their new lives together in Vermont. They bought a small house by a brook just outside the town of Johnson. In love, married, the father of a newborn son, and the owner of a home, Carruth was overwhelmed by his good fortune and the trappings of what one would call a "normal life." Although still sick, he was better. The slow turnaround of his life from incapacity to meager functioning in the outside world was as mysterious as his illness. Always the pragmatist, Carruth did not trouble himself over his inability to explain how and why it occurred. It happened and for that he was grateful.
During his early years in Vermont, the notes he made while reading The Stranger (as well as Camus' other works) in the attic, combined with his tendency to ruminate, developed into a book entitled, After The Stranger--Imaginary Dialogues with Camus, written on a Bollingen Foundation grant. Although his recovery was fundamentally mysterious, some of its components were not. Carruth has said repeatedly in interviews and private conversations that Camus played an important part in his gradual ability to come to terms with the world.
Carruth's early encounters with the people who lived in and around Johnson were hesitant and brief. Yet his pauses in the middle of doing whatever chores needed to be done--chopping wood, repairing the fence around his vegetable garden, tinkering with his truck engine--were interludes when he would look around at the mountains, woods, his wife, infant son, catch his illness unaware and see a world which functioned independently and without anxiety. He would remember those moments in a word, phrase, or, most often, a line with a particular rhythm and texture. Later, in the cowshed he converted into a workplace, after what he called his "hackwork" (book reviews, editing jobs, etc.) was finished for the night, he would turn that word or phrase or line into a poem.
The poems he wrote in Vermont were not, could not be, the kinds of poems he wrote before. The subject, the "I" of his perceptions was, if not wiped out, at least severely crippled by the ordeal of his illness. Rather than let it destroy him, Carruth turned his misfortune into an advantage which radically altered the type of work he produced. The breakdown had eviscerated his ego; what little impetus it had before to impose or dominate was gone. Had he become a kind of pure, generic consciousness? His continued panic attacks reminded him of his old self, yet now, there was someone or something else encountered in the making of a poem. Like the "benign indifference of the universe" with which Meursault felt such a "brotherly" relation, Carruth met, when he paused in the middle of his chores, evidence of primordial being. Like Abraham, this being was no idea or conception in Carruth's mind, yet unlike Abraham, it could not be God.
The being Carruth encountered had no name. Namelessness was its nature. It was, for Carruth, a wonder that it existed, free, and as alive and functioning for his battered, wounded mind to feel as for anyone else's.
To encounter a nameless, invisible presence was one thing; yet to find meaning in the meeting presented a separate issue. By this time, Camus had bored into Carruth's fiber in the mysterious way one profound mind assimilates another. The personality which came to Vermont--passive, prone to flee stress--was slowly acquiring, if not a confident posture, at least one which, in brief moments, discovered a kind of comfort in the world. What was happening? Was he, on some level, defying the predictions of the doctors at Bloomingdale? Was he resisting what seemed to be the inevitable progression of his illness?
In response to such questions, Camus would say that to resist inexorable forces is a uniquely human struggle. Whether one should enter the fight is a uniquely human choice. Yet in those interludes when Carruth paused in the middle of a chore, stood absorbing the world around him, he did not feel his situation to be purely the result of choice. Somehow he got there. How he got there was to a great extent a puzzle. To a pragmatist like Carruth, one familiar and in sympathy with the work of William James, how he got where he was made little difference. What interested him was that he was there, in Vermont, doing chores, in love with his wife and newborn son, interacting with the people in his community--living the kind of life conventional psychiatric wisdom thought impossible.
For Carruth, meaning, like choice, is not an either/or proposition, nor is it a static phenomenon. The world of which he caught glimpses could not be lived fully unless it were engaged through language. The poem which most deliberately and successfully presents and describes the elements of the life he found in Vermont is "Contra Mortem," a poem which began to take shape in earlier poems. Its external precursor is "The Asylum" in which Carruth first uses the "paragraph," a sonnet-like form he invented to carry a longer, sequential poem.
"North Winter" is, from an internal perspective, the most direct predecessor of "Contra Mortem." Tired of the egotism in much of contemporary American poetry and influenced to some extent by the Objectivists, the absence of the first person in "North Winter" was not only a deliberate decision but an honest, modest, accurate presentation of the quality of Carruth's mind during his early years in Vermont. It was an observing consciousness hungry to live its observations. Devoid of self-aggrandizing subjectivity but full of a different kind of subjectivity, namely, curiosity, the person of the poem is its presence. The presence within the poem is made by the meeting of nameless phenomena with language which accurately conveys it. Whether or not anyone sees him, the redpoll will continue to drink from a dripping icicle, yet
52 Small things hardest to believe redpoll snatching drops from an icicleis a life lived, in that moment, fully. Without the poem, the redpoll drinks, through the poem the poet and the reader drink with the redpoll.
25 Blizzard trampling past has left the birches bent as in humiliation the soft scotch pines laid down as in subjection the beeches snapped at the top as in a reign of terror the balsams scarred but upright as in the dignity of suffering and all the woods in sorrow as if the world meant something.
Christian Thompson's poetry and short fiction have appeared in APR, The Amherst Review, Caveat Lector, Appalachia, The Aurorean, and others. He was a finalist in The Center for Book Arts' 2002 poetry chapbook competition.
