In Measured Resistance: On Hayden Carruth's "Contra Mortem"

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2004 by Thompson, Christian

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 psychoneurosis 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.