Descent: A Memoir of Madness Read online

  Christmas morning and the stockings unhung, the gifts contemplated, The Nutcracker Suite and the Londonderry Boys Choir, almond cookies and sparkling cider, the dogs with their annual holiday biscuits, the new calendars and the NBA on television, the needles from the tree in the nap of the rug, the presents in mounds, the crimped foil from chocolates, also me with my morose X-ray vision—the brevity of life, its irrevocable meaninglessness—finally my well-deserved “Christmas nap,” wondering if I would ever indeed take an interest in my new home brewer’s five-gallon carboy or read The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing or tipple from my 40-ounce bottle of Sheaf stout. A gray day. Darkness came early. My in-laws assembled for an evening repast and I gathered up my sham of health and went down the stairs to greet them. We have a video recording from this Christmas Day and in it I see myself stilted and halting, bent at the waist and shuffling down a hall, threadbare and gauntly disinterested in smoked salmon served on tiny crackers with cream cheese, all of this visible beneath a tenuous performance of, if not mirth and gaiety, then peace. As the householder nursing his snifter of brandy, I light the cheery Yule log fire, straighten my sweater-vest, turn toward the flames, and decide, once again—off camera—not to weep.

  I was aghast that evening to hear Judy Garland’s rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a wish once sent across wartime miles to whoever it was who might not return, whose chances of returning were in the hands of fate. Have yourself a merry little Christmas, / Make the Yuletide gay, / Next year all our troubles will be miles away. Punctured by this, I retreated to the shower stall and sent tears feebly down the drain.

  * * *

  A woman once told me that, for a time after her husband died, her grief was as constant as breathing. Then one day, while pushing a shopping cart, she realized she was thinking about yogurt. With time, thoughts in this vein became contiguous. With more time thoughts in this vein became sustained. Eventually they won a kind of majority. Her grieving had ended while she wasn’t watching (although, she added, grief never ends). And so it was with my depression. One day in December I changed a furnace filter with modest interest in the process. The day after that I drove to Gorst for the repair of a faulty seat belt. On the thirty-first I went walking with a friend—grasslands, cattails, asparagus fields, ice-bound sloughs, frost-rimed fencerows—with a familiar engrossment in the changing of winter light. I was home, that night, in time to bang pots and pans at the year’s turn: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” It wasn’t at all like that—this eve was cloudy, the stars hidden by high racing clouds—but I found myself looking skyward anyway, into the night’s maw, and I noticed I was thinking of January’s appointments without a shudder, even with anticipation. Who knows why, but the edge had come off, and being me felt endurable again. My crucible had crested, not suddenly but less gradually than how it had come, and I felt the way a newborn fawn looks in an elementary school documentary. Born, but on shaky, insecure legs. Vulnerable, but in this world for now, with its leaf buds and packs of wolves.

  Was it pharmacology, and if so, is that a bad thing? Or do I credit time for my healing? Or my Jungian? My reading? My seclusion? My wife’s love? Maybe I finally exhausted my tears, or my dreams at last found sufficient purchase, or maybe the news just began to sound better, the world less precarious, not headed for disaster. Or was it talk in the end, the acknowledgments I made? The surfacing of so many festering pains? My children’s voices down the hall, their footfalls? Finally some combination thereof, or these many things as permutations of each other—as alternative vocabularies?

  However it was, by January I was winnowed, and soon dispensed with pills and analysis (the pills I was weaned from gradually), and took up my unfinished novel again, Our Lady of the Forest, about a girl who sees the Virgin Mary, a man who wants a miracle, a priest who suffers spiritual anxiety, and a woman in thrall to cynicism. It seems to me now that the sum of those figures mirrors the shape of my psyche before depression, and that the territory of the novel forms a map of my psyche in the throes of gathering disarray. The work as code for the inner life, and as fodder for my own biographical speculations. Depression, in this conceit, might be grand mal writer’s block. Rather than permitting its disintegration at the hands of assorted unburied truths risen into light as narrative, the ego incites a tempest in the brain, leaving the novelist to wander in a whiteout with his half-finished manuscript awry in his arms, where the wind might blow it away.

  I don’t find this facile. It seems true—or true for me—that writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’s reading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity—The Metamorphosis, or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered.

  In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life.

  * * *

  Like many fellow travelers who’ve crossed the Styx and returned, I view the itinerary as transformational. On the one hand, I won’t join that cohort claiming gratitude for their time in hell; on the other, I can say that in the wake of my depression, I’m pierced by other people as I wasn’t before, that I waste less time entertaining myself, and that I hear my thoughts with a useful attention to their tenor, fairness, and sanity. I feel equanimous most of the time, and have a strong impulse to give. My life has become, if you will, intentional, in a way it might not be if I hadn’t made my plummet.

  William Styron died in 2006. During the last third of his life, after the publication of Darkness Visible, he became a mental health advocate. I’m among those aided by his account, who found in it succor, but I’m also mindful of complaints such as those in Joel P. Smith’s essay “Depression: Darker Than Darkness”—that Styron was depressed for months, not years; that he was never alone; that he had the best of treatment; that he stayed in a hospital “as comfortable as they come”; and that he didn’t have to rely on radical remedies like electroshock therapy: all of this to say that Styron didn’t plumb the depths and can’t represent the depressed, and neither can I. Others have and have had it worse. For them, depression never yields or lessens. For them there’s no rising into the light of day, no edifications, and no gains, nothing but the wish to be dead, which is, after a marathon of untenable suffering, granted.

  “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. / And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars,” with which Styron ends Darkness Visible, also ends Dante’s Inferno. In that epic account of a trip through hell, Dante, having already met the virtuous heathens, the lustful, the gluttonous, the avaricious, and the prodigal, comes on a “dreary swampland, vaporous and malignant,” where the Styx spreads out into a noxious marsh, and where the wrathful, naked in this brackish muck, assault one another viciously. Underneath them, submerged in foul water, are those who lived, on earth, in sullen despond, and who mired now in bottom mud must endlessly repeat—in John Ciardi’s translation—“Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun; / in the glory of his shining our hearts poured / a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun; / sullen we lie forever in this ditch.”

  A modern sensibility can’t countenance this torture. For us, while sullenness might be morally problematic, it’s never a sin, whereas for thirteenth-century Chr
istians, apparently, to be sullen (tantamount to rejecting creation?) meant a one-way ticket to hell. Otherwise what are the sullen doing here, droning on in regretful chorus, drowned, “fixed in slime,” doleful, bitter, and trod underfoot while the wrathful duke it out?

  And what’s more, their “litany they gargle in their throats as if they sang,” but always, they lack “words and pitch.”

  That I get. I hear the words and pitch of these beleaguered dead as “the broken surfaces of those water-holes / on every hand, boiling as if in pain.” I see their meanings not as what they mean but as a roil festering the surface of the Styx where few pass by to look or listen. There the sullen suffer their wordlessness, and pour their garbled litany into an eternal absence. They can’t get the words out, and it makes no difference. There’s no one but two traveling poets to hear them, even if they could.

  “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain,” wrote David Foster Wallace in his story “The Depressed Person,” “and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

  After that horror—if you’re lucky enough to have an after (Foster Wallace wasn’t)—the pain might be gone but the language won’t come; there’s no translation for it. Gesture as you might across the divide, what’s over there remains visible only to those who, like you, have already been there.

  To put this another way, my words here recede from lived experience. But in the end there’s too much reproach and ignorance—depression as a cause for disgrace and contempt—for me not to write them anyway. Words, after all, remain, in this world, an aperture through which might appear some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.

  David Guterson

  Descent:

  A Memoir of Madness

  David Guterson is the author of the novels Snow Falling on Cedars (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award), East of the Mountains, The Other, Our Lady of the Forest (a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year), and most recently, Ed King; two story collections, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind and the forthcoming Problems with People; and a work of nonfiction, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Washington State.

  ALSO BY DAVID GUTERSON

  Ed King

  The Other

  Our Lady of the Forest

  East of the Mountains

  Snow Falling on Cedars

  Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

  The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind