This
is one possible definition of mental illness: It is the sickness of unborn
pain.
Suicide,
when it happens, is often, although I think not inevitably, tragic, but the
thought of suicide might well be a successful adaptation of the human mind to
extreme emotional distress.
It
is an odd fact that in the history of humanity that we have been dying for
millennia, without exception, and yet we still cannot face the fact that this
is not a tragedy.
Sentences like these
from Paul Gruchow’s extraordinary memoir (Letters
to a Young Madman: A Memoir, Levins Publishing, 2012) have a monumental
feel that commands special handling. Writing about big things necessitates
urgency—not to hurry the story into print but to get it told right. Sometimes
the need is so great that the customary ways just won’t do. Gruchow and Brian
Turner (My Life as a Foreign Country: A
Memoir, W.W. Norton, 2013)—as unlikely a pair of authors to appear in the
same sentence—shared that literary urgency. Gruchow, essayist lost to suicide,
and Turner, poet and Iraq war combat survivor—I bring them together here to
look at how they turned from their usual way of doing things to make their
stories into powerful memoir.
The author of six
acclaimed books of essays, Gruchow suffered through periods of depression and
hospitalization that eventually closed down his strong and often lyrical nature-writing
voice. Emerging from his protracted dry spell, however, he began work on a book
about his disease and treatment. He had accumulated pages of research,
recollections of childhood, vivid tales from inside mental institutions, even poems.
But how to fit it all into the elegantly structured essay style that had served
him over the years had him stymied and frustrated. Enter his friend and
literary confidant, Louis Martinelli, who came upon the inspired idea of
pointing Gruchow to the fragmented structure of Eduardo Galeano’s books. As
Martinelli says, “Paul got it right away.”
On the other hand, with
his reputation as a poet (Here, Bullet and
Phantom Noise) firmly in hand, Brian Turner
moved to nonfiction in a manner influenced strongly by his poetic aesthetic. In
an interview published on Brevity’s
Nonfiction Blog (23 September 2014), he told how after his military discharge
he was experimenting with haibun, a
traditional Japanese travel-writing form that combines a brief prose section
with a haiku. With no other intent (“I was simply experimenting with form and
trying to discover how it shaped my thoughts on memory and travel”), he
realized that an essay was emerging, an essay that would later grow into his
memoir of war and soldiering. The resulting fragmented work depends, in
Turner’s words, on “a reader that enjoys participating in the construction of
the work itself.” Discrete sections of narrative from across time, expository
historical sections, poetry, even a short screenplay wait to be joined by that
reader’s imagination.
Of course the notion of
assembling a myriad of referential moments isn’t new. How can any English major
forget T.S. Eliot’s “fragments” that he “shored against [his] ruins”? But the
notion is modern. Remember Tristram Shandy? Doesn’t it read,
diction aside, as though it were written a lot later than the middle of the
eighteenth century? It has that turn-of-the-twentieth-century feel to it—the
feel of that last, great epochal intellectual shift.
In 1907, Picasso set
the foundation for Cubism when he came to Paris with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the portrait of five nude prostitutes,
anatomically approximate but distorted beyond any semblance to an impressionist
or realist nude. It fell to Georges Braque to show the real meaning of Picasso’s
painting, which he did in a series of landscapes that included Houses at l’Estaque (1908). Here he
simply took apart a village visually and reassembled it as it might be seen
from multiple vantages. How does one look at five nude prostitutes anyway?
Well, look at one for a while, then another, look at parts of them that capture
your eye, turn away, turn back, left eye only, right eye, notice the setting.
Then think about how all these views make you feel. Memory and imagination will
do the rest. To paint that canvas would result in something more realistic than
any Titian.
Cezanne declared, and
Picasso and Braque echoed: Art is not nature and shouldn’t try to imitate it.
And just like that they rejected an aesthetic that had dominated visual art
since the Renaissance. After that, there
was no turning back. A painting was paint on a surface, nothing more, not a
window to the world outside. What freedom.
~
What matters is the
connection between fragmentation and memory, narrative and perception.
Modernist writing went Cubist in varying ways: Dos Passos’ “newsreels” and
“camera eyes,” William Burroughs’ “cutups,” the “things” of Paterson that contain William’s ideas,
and of course Eliot’s blend of the common and the obscure. Without the
traditional transitions, unconnected text has to be seen in visual terms in
order to be understood, must be related in ways that correspond to shape or
color or size. In other words, the organization becomes abstract, at which
point the correspondence between modern painting and modern writing is quite
apparent.
In addition, the fragments
can be seen as metaphor, attention given to the tension their various juxtapositions
create—space to be filled with something or not filled, just space to define
the actual. For what the Cubists found when they dumped 400 years of rules
about perspective was a new kind of space—what Braque called “tactile space,”
the distance between the viewer and the painting rather than the distance
between the painting’s objects. In this way, the viewer gains a new
involvement.
Whether in painting or
writing, singing or dancing, between the fragments comes space. But there’s so
much more—it’s not merely a structural thing, emptiness created by whatever
fragments or elements limit it; it is real, and it exists in time as well. As a
viewer or reader experiences those surrounding elements, whatever takes place
in that person’s imagination becomes the space.
Japanese culture has
offered a word for it. Ma. It is said
that in nothingness, ma enables. Ma is an interval, the presence of an
absence, a void waiting. And from China more than 2500 years ago,
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching, Trans. Stephen Mitchell
Testimony to Gruchow’s
and Turner’s artful handling of what might at first appear to be a random or
self-indulgent structure can be found in the tight control with which each
author manages the cohesion of his book. Each fragment has been composed and
situated with an eye both to its neighbors and to its overall purpose, and an
overall unity derives from continuation—of theme and time in Gruchow’s case and
in Turner’s, of poetic and novelistic devices.
Although the overall
organization of Letters to a Young Madman—absent
the usual chapter or section demarcations—may appear arbitrary, it suggests
strongly a chronological reading. A wide range of quotations from Marcus
Aurelius to Nietzsche set off apparent section divisions, and each fragment
bears its own title. But the quotations are best read alongside Gruchow’s
fragments rather than as introductions or summations. I’m examining here a
fifteen-page section of eleven fragments located between pieces titled “The Hospital
1” and “A Modest Proposal” that highlight what elevates Letters above mere memoir: Gruchow’s ultimate aim, which is no less
than to reform the mental health system. The fragments vary in length from two
sentences to two pages, starting with a chilling recounting of the first
moments of admission for a new psychiatric hospital patient and ending with a
scathing suggestion for hospital reform.
“The Hospital 1”
describes the intake process in declarative, simple sentences, most fewer than
a dozen words. The effect is haunting.
You
are led down a long hallway to your room. The hallway is wide and barren. The room
has two beds, a window, and one, hard low-backed chair. The window is covered in
thick Plexiglas. The floor is hard and the walls are unornamented. Everything
is some shade of gray. The beds are standard hospital issue.
The voice is
deliberately child-like because, as Gruchow says, “The last time you wore
pajamas twenty-four hours a day, you were an infant. You have now assumed the
appearance of a mental patient.” The point of view throughout is second person,
and the direct address is doubled when he has a nurse speak to the patient,
“I’m sorry but you’ll have to remove your shorts too.” (You, the reader,
suddenly morphs into you, the patient, and when Gruchow tells you the blankets
are flimsy and psychiatric wards are chilly, you empathize because you’ve
walked a mile in his hospital-issue socks.
“The Hospital 2,”
written in the same, flat voice, lays out the routine. And as if Gruchow were
unable to break the old transition-sentence habit, the closing sentence—“Three
or four days of this routine and you are bored to the bones”—introduces three
short “Boredom” chapters. Here Gruchow
drops the insider voice and returns to his familiar rhythms and approach. The
comments are trenchant, the sentences exact. The pieces run from three to eight
lines each and have the same stabbing effect as short sentences surrounded by
longer ones: “Boredom 2,” for example, reads in its entirety: “Babies have
pacifiers. Adults have television. The reason the television set is in the
center of the psychiatric ward life is that watching it is the only thing in
life that requires less effort than sleeping.” He then stops to summarize in “The
Hospital 3,” a statement that should be read by anyone connected in any
conceivable way to the mental health system in this country. It’s another brief
paragraph, and he’s considering what the mental health system calls the “therapeutic
milieu.”
Reduce
an adult to the status of a child, put him in surroundings that resemble as
little as possible a home, deprive him of nearly all intellectual and sensory
stimuli, induce nicotine and caffeine withdrawal, and provoke a simultaneous
state of insomnia and intense boredom. Perhaps there is something therapeutic in
this, but I confess that I cannot see what it is. Of course, I am not a
psychiatrist.
What a gem of
controlled anger and clear insight.
In a longer narrative
that follows, Gruchow is a storyteller; then in a concise look at psychiatric
hospital design, he’s a researcher. Finally, two fragments compare and contrast
hospital and prison life in traditional rhetorical ways. If read
thoughtfully—by Turner’s ideal reader who “enjoys participating in the
construction of the work itself”—all this jumping around, changing voices, and
coming at an issue from as many angles as possible—creates discrete moments of
intense empathy and comprehension broken by intervals inviting imagination and
contemplation. To help the reader in synthesizing these fragments, Gruchow
closes the section with “A Modest Proposal,” a satirical piece worthy of the
Swift tradition. In it, he suggests that before given admission to practice,
psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses must each be admitted to a psychiatric
ward with a “particularly pejorative diagnosis,” be medicated, and be given
“two weeks to convince the staff, without reference to their credentials, that
they are sane.” Those who fail get another chance in six months. Gruchow’s
proposal is a fine piece of wit that gathers and concludes the various
fragments of the section in a truly organic way.
In My Life as a Foreign Country, Turner numbers his fragments but
otherwise eschews any explicit divisions. He also provides blank pages that serve
to separate sections as well as to create silent intervals for taking deeper
breaths, waiting for understanding. The gathering of fragments considered here
(29-40) focus on and emanate from the recruiter’s office where Turner’s
military service began. Thoroughly remembered down to the “warmth of the
freshly printed list of options,” the scene ends with the anaphoric sentence
that will function like a musical burden—a droning repetition of a refrain:
variations on the sentence, “I pointed to the list and said the word Infantry.”
Why would anyone do
such a thing? I can give you only an impression of the answer. In fragment 30,
an eleven-year-old Turner is digging a foxhole based on specifications from his
father’s infantry field manuals. “I signed the paper and joined the infantry
for reasons I won’t tell you and for reasons I will.” In fragment 32, Turner’s
father, involved in a nearly fatal motorcycle accident, is left with a story
and a huge scar. “The scar said—that which is written in the flesh is
irrefutable. This is the mark of a man. This is what it takes.” In fragment 33,
Turner and his father— “fighting the invisible before us”— train in a backyard
dojo. “I pointed to the list and said
Infantry because I wanted the man in the polyester suit to know, at some
unconscious level, that I didn’t give a shit what row of ribbons he had pinned
to his chest.” In fragment 35, Turner is making homemade napalm with his father
following a recipe from The Poor Man’s
James Bond. And he’s remembering stories: from his Vietnam Veteran uncle
about enemy interrogations, from his father about secret reconnaissance
missions.
In the midst of this
collage of memory and violence, Turner inserts the screenplay of “The War that
Time Forgot,” a Super8 movie written, produced, and acted by him and his
middle-school friends. The movie concludes when the star (Sgt. T., played by Turner),
to a background of Barber’s Adagio for Strings, blows off an enemy’s head—“a
melon filled with sheep’s blood and pig brains.”
Then Turner returns to
the stories. His father clinically dead from a heart attack, revives. “So what
was it like, dying?” Turner asks. “That,” his father answers, “ that was a
trauma-junkie’s delight.”
Fragment 39 describes a
chilling moment of epiphany.
When
we triggered the device and the napalm exploded, I felt charged and electric.
We were surrounded by the cold. Coffee steamed in the cup as the entire world
disappeared in fog. And for a moment, I knew—here was the great body of Death.
A portion of the inheritance we all share. I wanted to see it break open in fire.
I wanted the world to be shaken by it. And, most of all, I wanted to be shaken
by it, too.
In the final fragment,
Turner introduces even more accounting—to the background of the burden’s drone:
“I said Infantry because my great-grandfather Carter was gassed during the
Battle of Meuse-Argonne in the fall of 1918.” And “I said Infantry because one
of my great-greats enlisted in the Union Army—15 November 1861—at Cumberland
Gap, Tennessee. . . .” And he signed because his grandfather survived
Bougainville and Guam and Iwo Jima. “I signed the paper because I knew that on
some deep and immutable level, I would leave and I would never come back.”
Of course, no
definitive explanation of Turner’s choices exists, but an empathic reading is
possible. It lies in the spaces between the fragments of his recollections,
just beyond language but informed by it. In the same way, Paul Gruchow’s
accounts
of the suffering the mentally ill endure and his rendering of his own struggle with
mental illness are so powerful that his words and images remain with us as we
pause, engage our own imaginations, and begin to understand during his book’s
indwelling silences.
********
This piece appeared first in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies (1.2). Check their website to see the good company it's keeping there.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from moma.org.
