`Guns (Not Persons)'

In 1966 we took a family vacation, pulling a 16-foot house trailer from Cleveland to the Black Hills of South Dakota. What I remember from the radio is not music but that summer’s grim soundtrack: Richard Speck murdering eight student nurses in Chicago on July 14, Lenny Bruce overdosing on Aug. 3, Illinois Sen. Charles Percy’s daughter Valerie murdered on Sept. 18, and the still-escalating horror in Vietnam. The vacation didn’t last all summer but the 40-year-old memories seem conflated.

From my third-floor office on a campus in Houston, I can see a tower that resembles the much taller tower at the University of Texas in Austin. On Aug. 1, 1966, a 25-year-old former Marine, Charles Whitman, climbed 27 floors to the observation deck and randomly shot passersby on the campus and city streets. Counting his mother and wife, whom he had stabbed earlier, the ex-Marine killed 15 people and wounded 31, before he was shot by Austin police. Whitman was armed with a shotgun, three rifles and three handguns.

John Berryman worked Speck and Whitman into “Dream Song 135.” Oddly, he didn’t play off the surname shared by the sniper and the author of Leaves of Grass, nor did he mention that the Austin killings occurred on Herman Melville’s 147th birthday. Here’s the poem, published three years later in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest:

“I heard said 'Cats that walk by their wild lone'
but Henry had need of friends. They disappeared
Shall I follow my dream?
Clothes disappeared in a backward sliding, zones
shot into view, pocked, exact & weird:
who is what he seem?

“I will tell you now a story about Speck:
after other cuts, he put the knife in her eye,
one of the eight:
he was troubled, missionary: and Whitman
of the tower murdered his wife & mother
before (mercy-killings) he set out.

“Not every shot went in. But most went in:
in just over an hour
with the tumor thudding in his brain
he killed 13, hit 33:
his empty father said he taught him to respect guns
(not persons).”

The Aug. 12, 1966 issue of Time has an owlish-looking Whitman and his dog on the cover. With typical Luce portentousness, the story is titled “The Psychotic & Society.” Berryman took the references to Whitman’s brain tumor and father from the Time story, and got the casualty numbers wrong. In “Dream Song 145,” he writes about his father’s suicide 40 years earlier, and says in passing:

“I touch now his despair,
He felt as bad as Whitman on his tower.”

Younger readers might mistake this for a reference to Walt. I feel uncomfortable with Berryman’s linkage of his father and a mass murderer, and the reference in the earlier poem to Speck stabbing a woman in the eye is part of a larger pattern of stabbings and hackings throughout The Dream Songs. Berryman was a great poet and narcissist, who confused his private horrors with the horrors of the world. Let’s hope no one, poet or otherwise, abuses the memory of the Amish girls in Pennsylvania.