| Tracking
Woody's HD
From
Instinct to Institution
Research
notes by Thomas H. Conner
Nov.
17, 2000
..
.. .. .. ..
This report
contains my complete research notes from several months of study
in the Woody Guthrie Archives in an effort to track the onset and
evolution of Huntington's Disease in Woody Guthrie's life. My purposes
for doing so were twofold: (1) to create a separate and clear, blow-by-blow
account of the disease's appearance in the family history and in
Woody's own life, and (2) to ascertain to what degree the disease
affected Woody's decisions, thought patterns, and his cultural output.
This record attempts to serve the first goal; the second goal will
be served by further analysis and narrative.
The following
notes are presented in chronological order - not in order of the
history of events but in order of Woody's and others' comments on
them. The themes on which I focused throughout my archival combing
were mentions of anything that might be a symptom of HD, direct
mentions of the disease, medical records, family history (particularly
his mother's misunderstood battle with the disease), the recurrence
of fire in the family history, and other possibly related material
(such as his discussion of and songs about venereal disease). To
easier differentiate between Woody's own commentary and the observations
of others, all material quoted from Woody's writing are, in this
report, in bold type.
| Contents |
| Prelude |
2 |
Demon
alcohol |
20 |
| Boomchasers |
2 |
Brooklyn
State I |
24 |
| Rage,
rage |
9 |
Running |
34 |
| In
the service |
11 |
Brooklyn
State II |
37 |
| Home
at last |
17 |
Greystone
Park |
42 |
| Seeds
of Man |
19 |
Final
Years |
45 |
.. .. .. .. ..
-
Prelude
The earliest
instance found on record of Woody discussing the disease that so
devastated his family - and would eventually devastate his own -
is a conversation between Woody and Matt Jennings, in Pampa, Texas,
circa 1930. Guthrie biographer Joe Klein recounts this moment in
Woody Guthrie: A Life:
Slowly, quietly,
he told Matt the family history: the fires, the death of his sister,
the insane asylum. "When I went to visit my mother, she didn't
even recognize me," he said. Then he talked about the disease:
it ran in the family, crossing from father to daughter and mother
to son. "Does that mean you could get it?" Matt asked.
"No. There's no way I'm gonna get that disease," he
said, and in the whiskey haze, Matt believed him. It was the only
time they ever talked about it. [Klein, Delta: 1980, p. 49]
Woody apparently
publicly mentioned his mother's illness for the first time in a
Library of Congress recorded interview, which likely was conducted
during Woody's visit to Washington, D.C., in May of 1940, a visit
that preceded his trip back to Oklahoma and Texas with Pete Seeger.
In Washington, he and Seeger completed work on the songbook Hard
Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, unpublished until 1967.
In the introduction
to this songbook, Woody is describing these songs as the ultimate
outlet for "the story of their life," that is, the hard-hit
people, but in his dramatization of what in their lives
is worth singing out, he uses a few of his own biographical details:
"...how it used to be, how it got to be, how the home
went to pieces, how the young wife died or left, how the mother
died in the insane asylum, how Dad tried twice to kill himself,
and lay flat on his back for 18 months - ..." [Hard
Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, Univ. of Neb.: 1999]
-
Boomchasers
The real
path to self-discovery of his family history and his own disease
begins in earnest, though, in 1942. Encouraged by his new love,
Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, Woody begins work on a book entitled
Boomchasers. It was an autobiography, of sorts - a collection
of colorful stories from his life thus far as a travelling soul
and singer - and would eventually be published under the title Bound
for Glory. The reflection on his past began to raise questions
in both lovers' minds.
In an
initial story synopsis for Boomchasers, under the subject
heading "The Boom Town," Woody wrote of his family's misfortunes
and of his father's dwindling fortunes in Okemah during the mid-'20s:
"He lost still more money, and a brand new 6 room house
caught afire and burnt to the ground, with not a drop of insurance
money on it. This worried my mama so much, that, added to papa's
other losses, she had to be watched very carefully."
Later
in this chapter description, he gets around to the family's move
to Oklahoma City, then adds parenthetically: "(I
forgot, in 1918, my 14 year old sister was ironing on an oil stove,
and it exploded, burning her to death.)"
The OKC
motorcycle-sales job never materializes when the entrepreneur dies,
and Woody sums things up this way in the synopsis: "This
caused my mother to lose her mind, and we moved back to Okemah,
and a few months later, she went to the asylum at Norman. Papa was
fixing an oil stove later, and caught afire, putting him flat on
his back for 18 months, and he was sent to the panhandle of Texas
to get well living with some relatives, wheat farmers."
[Archives:
Manuscripts-1, Box 1, folder 15]
Marjorie helped
Woody considerably during the work on this manuscript, in 1942,
and according to Klein, she asked Woody about the disease one day:
...Once, in
the midst of a description of his mother's illness, Marjorie stopped
and asked, "Woody, could you get sick like that?" "No,"
he said. "Only women." [Klein, p. 242]
In the published
version of Bound for Glory, Woody first publicly recounted
his mother's strange behavior and unsettled health. In Chapter 2,
Charley announces that he's purchased the London House in Okemah
and the family reacts coldly. In the published version, the section
ends with everyone in quiet distress, but a second draft added an
extra, eventually deleted, paragraph in which Nora first brings
up the subject of her own troubled mind:
"In
the other house," Mama was talking into a cloud of hot steam
over the stove, "Everything had its place. Everything was
clean and every stick of furniture, and every little piece of
silver ware, and every little rug on the floors made you think
of somewhere, where you was, what you were doing on the day that
you bought it. That's what a home is. That's what a home does.
Make your mind stay straight. Instead of everything all dirty,
and everything all twisted and all mixed up." The cold sweat
oozed out on mama's face. [Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box
2, folder 08] * This graf is marked through, deleted, in the bond
pages in folder 09.
In an earlier
draft for Chapter 2, this section continued on much further in a
passage marked for deletion. The passage carries on the narrative
with Clara offering insistently to do the dishes for Nora, and Nora
is resistant:
"What's
wrong with me washing them?" Mama's voice didn't sound like
it sounded in the other good house. It might as well have been
a different person. And Clara's little ears were keen and sharp,
and they knew every little sound of that voice, and Clara's eyes
just tried to figure out puzzles. "Why can't I wash them?
What's wrong with me? Do you see anything wrong with me? I'm not
sick. You don't have to treat me like I was a blooming six year
old; or like there was something wrong with me! I can still do
just as much work as the next one!"
"Sure,
I know you can," Clara told her, "But what's the use
of arguing about a thing like this? Why, mama, you know I offer
to do the dishes every single night -- because I know you've been
working hard all day, and the rest would do you good. That's all."
'"ou
asked me different today."
"Asked
you different?"
"Different,
yes."
"Why,
I've asked you this same thing a thousand times."
"It
was different today."
"How
was it different?"
"You
sounded different."
"How?"
"Today,
you talked, and you sounded like you thought I wasn't able to
wash the dishes the same as ever." When mama said this, her
face got tight, and she kept her eyes straight ahead, looking
at a little place on the stove pipe.
"Oh.
Well. Maybe that was because I'd been outside crying, and just
hadn't blew my nose, yet."
"Wasn't
no such a thing."
"Maybe
my eyes were so full of tears I didn't see how I was talking."
"No.
I told you. I know."
"Know
what?"
"I
know what you know."
"What
do I know?"
"About
the good house burning down."
"Sure,
it burnt down. Let it burn down, see who cares. We'll get us another
new house. Better one. Papa's going to buy one. He's already told
me. What's that got to do with me washing dishes?" Clara
asked mama.
"Got
a lot."
"Like,
what?"
"You
think I worry too much about the other house. You think it's bothering
me too much. You think it is, but it's not. It's not. ..."
[Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 3, folder 01]
In Chapter 3
of the published book, Woody recounts a conversation between his
mother Nora and her mother, called here simply Grandma (Mary Sherman-Tanner).
Grandma can tell something is wrong with Nora, but Nora tries to
brush it off as the strain of "just everday housework."
Grandma eventually gets to it:
Mama
rubbed her hair back out of her eyes and said, "I feel good,
I feel good all over. I work hard and I feel good, but I don't
know. Just seems like right in through my head some way or another,
something. Little dizzy spells." [Bound for Glory,
p. 61]
In the manuscript
drafts for this chapter, a great deal of text was edited out - marked
through by handwriting that could be Marjorie's or Woody's editor,
Joy Doerflinger - including more of Nora's deflections of Grandma's
health inquiries. At one point, Nora assures Grandma, "You
don't have to worry about me. Just a little headache. Dizzy spell.
Lots of people get them. I feel as spry as fox otherwise. ... I'm
all right!" Grandma huffs, indicates that she knows
better, and then adds: "But I know. Nora. You haven't
got over that fire, yet." In further deleted paragraphs,
Nora relents and agrees to have Grandma summon Doc Watts, but she
reiterates: "I'm not that sick. Just a little old crazy
dizzy spell that comes about once a day, and then it goes away and
I feel all right again." [Archives: Manuscripts-1,
Box 1, folder 20] As
the chapter continues, young Woody rides off with Grandma on her
errands and eventually on to her home in the country. On their ride,
the conversation weaves in and out of the sensitive subject of Nora's
condition. Woody recounts his own worries about Nora's health. He
tells her that Nora doesn't go out, that no one visits, that she
spends most of her time sitting around the house and staring blankly:
"Jest
sets. Looks. Holds a book in 'er lap mosta th' time, but she don't
look at where th' book's at. Jest out across th' whole room, an'
whole house an' ever'wheres."
"Is
that right?"
"If
Papa tells Mama somethin' she forgot, she gits so mad she goes
off up in th' top bedroom an' cries an' cries all day long. What
makes it?" I asked Grandma.
"Your
mama is awful bad sick, Woody, awful bad. And she knows she's
awful bad sick. And it's so bad that she don't want any of you
to know about it ... because it's going to get a whole lot worse."
[Bound for Glory, p. 65]
A large deleted
passage from this scene finds Woody in a rambling conversation with
Grandma, turning to a discussion of heaven, including this curious
mention of fire:
"When
you're up in heav'n, reckon can you see down here on th' ground?
What all folks is doin'?" I asked her.
"I'm
sure I don't know. I've never been to heaven."
"Maybe
if th' graveyard caught was to cetch on afire, an' start out to
burn all of them crosses down with peoples names on 'em, maybe
if you was up in heav'n, you could look down here an' see it,
an' come down an' put th' fire out," I asked her.
"I
don't know whether the angels want to wast [sic] their time going
around putting out fires or not," she told me.
"Why
not?"
"I
don't know. I'm just guessing. But I know one thing, I'll bet
you there's a whole lot more fires than there are angels to put
them out." [Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 1, folder
20]
In a deleted
passage a bit later, on the same ride to Grandma's, the discussion
of Nora comes up, though here it's Woody who broaches the subject
by asking Grandma point-blank:
"Grandma,"
I saked [sic] her, "Do you think my mama's sick?"
"Well,
I guess you heard what I told her, didn't you?"
"Yeah.
I heard you talkin'."
"Is
my mama real sick?"
"She
needs rest of some kind. A trip, maybe. I don't know. That old
house ain't good for Nora." [Archives: Manuscripts-1,
Box 1, folder 20]
A few paragraphs
of the published version go by, then in another deleted passage
Woody mentions: "Clara's afraid to tell mama she's
sick; 'cause mama gets mad." After Grandma warns in
the published version that Nora is indeed sick and that "it's
going to get a whole lot worse," there's a deleted extra line
at the end of that sentence: "... and all of you'll
know about it soon enough." [Archives: Manuscripts-1,
Box 1, folder 20] Grandma's
worries continue in another set of deleted paragraphs further on.
Woody is pestering her with questions about horses and kittens,
and Grandma cuts him off:
"No.
Shut up. I want to think. I don't want to ride along here and
worry trying to answer your silly questions. I'm thinking about
something a whole lot more important. I'm worried. I'm worried
about your mama."
"I
wanta go back home an' be with my mama."
"So
do I. That's what I'm worrying about. Somebody has just naturally
got to go and stay right there at that old house with Nora till
she gets all right again." [Archives: Manuscripts-1,
Box 1, folder 20]
In Chapter 8
of the book, Woody tells the story of his older sister Clara's death
by being burned in a mysterious fire at home. After a run-down of
the events as he understood them, he comes back to a second, brief
explanation of the events (as if adding the account, and possibly
language, of another person):
Her
school teacher was there. Clara had stayed out of school to do
the ironing. Mama and her had quarreled a little about it. Mama
felt sick. Clara wanted to get ready for exams. ... [Bound
for Glory, p.134]
Further on,
this event is described as:
...
the breaking point for my mother. She got worse, and lost control
of the muscles in her body; and two or three times a day she would
have bad spells of epileptics, first getting angry at things in
the house, then arguing at every stick of furniture in every room
until she would be talking so loud that all of the neighbors heard
and wondered about it. I noticed that every day she would spend
a minute or two staring at a lump of melted glass crystals, a
door stop about as big as your two fists, and she told me, "Before
our new six-room house burned down, this was a twenty-dollar cut-glass
casserole. It was a present, and it was as pretty as I used to
be. But now look how it looks, all crazy, all out of shape. It
don't reflect pretty colors any more like it used to - it's all
twisted, like everything pretty gets twisted, like my whole life
is twisted. God, I want to die!! I want to die! Now! Now! Now!
Now!"
And
she broke furniture and dishes to pieces. [Bound for
Glory, p. 135]
This passage
goes on about his mother's lost good looks, and about Woody's opinion
that she worried too much. She must have eventually consulted a
doctor, as Grandma had insisted, because Woody adds: "She
concentrated on her worries until it got the best of her. The doctor
said it would." [Bound for Glory, p. 136] Continuing
later with Nora's symptoms:
The
whole town knew about her. She got careless with her appearance.
She let herself run down. She walked around over the town, looking
and thinking and crying. The doctor called it insanity and let
it go at that. She lost control over the muscles of her face.
Us kids would stand around in the house lost in silence, not saying
a word for hours, and ashamed, somehow, to go out down the street
and play with the kids, and wanting to stay there and see how
long her spell would last, and if we could help her. She couldn't
control her arms, nor her legs, nor the muscles in her body, and
she would go into spasms and fall on the floor, and wallow around
through the house, and ruin her clothes, and yell till people
blocks up the street could hear her.
She
would be all right for a while and treat us kids as good as any
mother, and all at once it would start in - something bad and
awful - something would start coming over her, and it come by
slow degrees. Her face would twitch and her lips would snarl and
her teeth would show. Spit would run out of her mouth and she
would start out in a low grumbling voice and gradually get to
talking as loud as her throat could stand it; and her arms would
draw up at her sides, then behind her back, and swing in all kinds
of curves. Her stomach would draw up into a hard ball, and she
would double over into a terrible-looking hunch - and turn into
another person, it looked like, standing right there before Roy
and me. [Bound for Glory, p. 136]
He then explains
the family's move to Oklahoma City not as a necessity for Charley's
employment options but as a medical consideration for Nora: "We
didn't want to send Mama away. It would be better some other place.
We'd go off and start all over. So in 1923 we packed up and moved
away to Oklahoma City." [Bound for Glory, p. 138]
The next chapter,
Chapter 9, finds the Guthries back in a dying Okemah, relocated
to the shabby side of town. There is a passage ending the first
section in which Woody plays with matchsticks, which makes Nora
nervous. The narrative in the published version ends with Nora saying,
"We're not scared people, Woody!" The first carbon draft
of this chapter adds an extra, reworked graf to close out the section:
She
struck the match on the floor and held it up between her eyes
and mine, and it lit up both of our thoughts and reflected in
both of our minds, and struck a million memories and ten million
secrets that fire had turned into ashes between us. She went on
saying, "No. Not of fire any more. I'm not afraid."
And she blew the blaze out just as it crawled down the match stick
to her fingernails. "Not of fire, anymore."
[Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 1, folder 31] * This graf survived
through the second carbon draft, as well. Though in another, possibly
later, draft [in folder 26, "Assorted Pages"] the last
three sentences are marked to be deleted.
The next section
finds Nora and Woody working outdoors in the garden on a hillside
while the house is fumigated. In the published account, Woody asks
Nora how she feels, and she says, "I feel better than
I've felt in years." [Bound for Glory, p. 154]
Then Nora sees
smoke coming out of the house and runs toward it in a fit. Woody
runs for help and is then sent to Grandma's while the family deals
with it. When he gets back, he finds out from Roy that: "Oil
stove exploded. Papa's in the hospital. Pretty bad burns."
This is odd, since, as Woody points out in the narrative, he had
removed the oil tank from the stove and put it outside. Nora has
now been sent to the Norman hospital. [Bound for Glory, p. 157]
The first carbon
draft of this section includes these deleted paragraphs, relating
some of the action that occurred once Woody arrived at Grandma's
after being sent away:
Grandma
was walking back and forth on her porch rubbing her head and saying,
"I've been looking for this. Yes. All along. Sometimes I
hated to admit it. I didn't want to admit that my best and smartest
child could ever break down and end this way."
I
was talking pretty quiet, hanging my feet off of the front porch,
"Will she ever be all right?"
Warren
leaned against a post beside me and said, "Oh, she might.
She's been having these spells now for how long?"
"It
just barely first got started, I remember, back in that new seven
room house, then a little more in that old London House, then
come the cyclone, then Clara, then Oklahoma City and Leonard."
Grandma walked the floor of the porch and looked across the yard
of dry leaves with tears running down. [Archives: Manuscripts-1,
Box 1, folder 31] * This graf survived through carbon 2, as well.
It is marked for deletion in a later draft [folder 26,
"Assorted Pages"].
-
Rage, rage
By the
end of summer 1942, a pregnant Marjorie had returned to Philadelphia
to be with her husband (carrying Woody's child). Woody began a thorough
habit of correspondence, writing usually every day, and began revealing
a certain confusion about his own behavior. He would often get angry
with her, cuss violently, then write to apologize, as he did in
this letter dated Sept. 17, 1942, from the Almanac Singers' house
on Hudson Street:
I'm
thinking about all the things I said the other day and not asking
you to excuse them or overlook them - because they must have been
whirling around somewhere in my mind or else they never would
have come out. That's a habit of mine. It happened every so often.
And there really are quite a big bunch of little red devils with
pitch forks poking around in me somewhere and making me yell out
some pretty bad things. If it's not one thing it's something else.
I just pick a subject and start. And that's just one of the wagon
loads of wrong habits in me. It puzzles me almost to even try
to think how a person with a mind like yours can even stand the
presence of a mind like mine. ... [Archives: Correspondence-1,
Box 1, folder 44]
At about this
time, he wrote the following confession in one of his many diaries
to his unborn child, whom he called Railroad Pete: "I
have dreams that tell me I'm not entirely as sane as is comfortable.
... I don't know what kind of feelings are in me to cause me to
write all the things I do. ... One minute I'm nervous and afraid,
and the next minute I'm as big and strong as anyone...."
[Klein, p. 248] Also
about this time, Klein relates an incident in which Woody got angry
for little reason and smashed a new mandolin and several vases,
saying he wanted to kill Millard Lampell. [Klein, p. 250]
A long letter,
dated Nov. 17, 1942, goes on about shows and love; then, late on
page 7, Woody mentions how hard he's been working and adds this:
I
have already found out that the only thing that keeps me from
going completely screwball is just to keep at work every minute
of the night and day, and maybe this is a good thing, maybe the
best thing that can happen to anybody. To keep at work. If I can
think that I'm, somehow helping others, I can forget my own little
personal troubles. [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 1,
folder 44]
By December,
he mentions in one letter, dated Dec. 7 from 74 Charles St., that
"my head is unexplainably clear." The upswing continues
in another letter that week:
...
I'm, I guess, what you would call a happy man. And the old crazy
tailspins I have gone into so regularly in the past few months,
I see now, almost that they were absolutely necessary in order
for me to get my head running right and my eyes to seeing. ...
And do you know that even that crappy, cheap and lousy speech
I made ... even that, I think, was my last gathering of all the
planless and dreamless and thoughtless forces in my whole life,
piling them on you, because I really was thinking just the
opposite of every word I said. ... [Archives: Correspondence-1,
Box 1, folder 44]
In a long letter
dated Jan. 25, 1943, he thanks Marj for sending a couple of articles;
one was apparently about life in Russia, where "it
seems like man-woman and the whole business of sex, even venereal
diseases, are all pretty well cleaned up in Russia."
He eventually continues, rhapsodizing about disease:
In
fact, I am forming my own personal opinions on a theory that venereal
diseases as we know them here, are the direct outcome of nervous
frustration, and fear, that either weakens the system so the germ
can take hold, or gets the body in such a nervous state that it
can't fight back like it ought to. Do away with neurotic laws,
rules, fogey customs, narrow minded marriage and divorce and clinical
laws, and create a job and a time for leisure, a home and time
for work and rest, love and all that goes with it, for everybody,
and three fourths of not only our sexual diseases, but all bodily
sicknesses (which are based in the soul) would disappear like
smoke. [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 1, folder 45]
It's about this
period now, end of '42 and start of '43, that Klein starts remarking
on the volume of Woody's production, that he was just producing
reams and reams of words, and here he describes it:
He would chug
along with a routine account of the latest gossip or what he'd
had for breakfast or whom he'd bumped into and then, suddenly
- whoosh - he'd explode off into a wild fantasy, the words spilling
out effortlessly, on and on, for pages and pages, single-spaced,
mad, brilliant, disorganized, uneven, impossible, unique. [Klein,
p. 263]
Marjorie had
the baby, Cathy Ann, in February. By March, she still hadn't returned
to New York as promised, and Woody was frustrated. In a letter dated
March 21 from "same old lonesome place," he complains:
"But is the news that this must keep going on for another
month, another four whole weeks? They'll sure have to move over
and make room for me in the raving ward. I couldn't take care of
a bankrupt popcorn stand in this frame of mind." In
a letter later that month, he gets angry and calls off their relationship,
ending the letter with: "I can't live insane any longer."
[Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 1, folder 46] -
In the service Woody's
letters to Marjorie from his Merchant Marine service in the Atlantic
are still lengthy but brisk. On July 23, 1943, aboard the William
B. Travis "somewhere on the ocean," he writes: "I
feel on the whole better than I have ever felt in my life."
[Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 1, folder 47]
From that mission,
Klein recounts this conversation among Woody and his bunkmates,
which included friends Cisco Houston and Jimmy Longhi:
...When the
nervous back-and-forth subsided, Woody took over and began to
tell them, very calmly and in surprising detail, the story of
his family and the fires and his mother's illness. And then, in
conclusion: "And I'm pretty sure I've got the same thing
my mother had ..." "That's a crock," Jimmy started,
then: "How do you know?" "Dunno, just feel queer
sometimes." [Klein, p. 279]
By June 10,
1944, from the Sea Porpoise "at sea," Woody wrote to Marjorie:
There
is a wave of good health that comes over you out here. Nervous,
a calm nervousness which is really not a guilt nor a fear but
a desire to shape your life so that it swings into action. I have
felt this way many times before. Usually when things seem pretty
tangled up. [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 1, folder
50]
In a letter
to Marjorie, dated July 5, 1944, from the Sea Porpoise, Woody discusses
his theory that Cisco and Jimmy are "he males" while he
himself is quiet and contemplative, adding: "Cisco
looks upon me as a good old boy that had a fine start then lost
my marbles and maybe my own mind, somewhat, ..." [Archives:
Correspondence-1, Box 1, folder 50] Home
that autumn in Coney Island, Woody penned a song, dated Oct. 11,
1944, called "Face My Cold Grave," marking it "*needs
no comment," though itŐs probably a VD song. The first verse:
I'm
well known and famous From stateline to border For giving you
women just what you so crave! Why must I take down With this mean
old disease? Too soon! Too soon now I face my cold grave!
The fourth
verse continues, pointing out how hard the narrator worked at pleasing
women, especially when:
You
tell me your husband Just don't know his business To give you
women just what you so craved! I come through your door To ease
you and please you! Too soon! Too soon now I face my cold grave!
[Archives: Songs-1, alphabetical]
Two days after
he was inducted into the Army, Woody wrote to Marjorie on May 9,
1945, on US Army air mail stationery, from Fort Dix, N.J.: "My
arms hurt [from his shots] and I whirl in the brain but they say
you got to stay in action to keep it from getting you down."
[Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 2, folder 01] On
May 22, 1945, from Sheppard's Field in Texas, Woody writes home
of his "second complete medical checkup today," describing
it thusly:
He
[the medic] gave us a paper as we went in the door. It was a list
of all the diseases we had had, ruptures, hernias, neuroses, nightmares
and so forth. My chart was perfect except for two things. One
was my broken elbow. One was that my Mama had been an inmate of
a mental institution. (I am also 10 lbs. underweight.) My teeth
are pretty good the man said. (We all had to strip naked again
and be looked over by several specialists. Urine. Blood. Blood
pressure. Teeth. Ears. Eyes. Nose and throat. Posture. (Mine is
good!) Our feet. (Mine are good!) We had to bend down and touch
the floor ten times and then get a heart check. ... Everybody
back at the barrack was telling about all the initials, codes,
long words that the meds wrote on our charts and since none of
us know what the marks all mean we beat our brains out trying
to guess. I got a mark of "O.S." (I think). The boys
all told me it meant "Over Seas" - But I said "No
that's Officer Special." One kid said it meant "Oh,
Shit!" [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 2, folder
01]
Incredibly bored
in the postwar Army, Woody wrote two long letters to Marjorie on
July 10 from Scott Field in Illinois. The first mentions a new but
uneventful medical exam. The second includes this:
Time
comes when I feel like I lost my light. I see and I hear things
but they don't make sense. And then time comes when I feel like
I find it and I can see any two things work together. This could
be true and it could not be true to you, but you are one of those
that this is true to.
Later in the
second letter, he recounts a scene in which he tells two soldiers
on their way to a dance not to turn the barracks lights off and
on so quickly, warning them that the wires could heat up and "these
walls would burn like paper." Then this:
If
those men only knew the visions that fly through me after seeing
fire burn three of our houses down and taking my sister, Clara,
the prettiest girl in our school. Oh. Maybe no one wants to hear
my old cinders talk so sad. [Archives: Correspondence-1,
Box 2, folder 03]
A letter to
Marjorie dated July 12, 1945, is more of an essay, entitled "The
Big Dance." It's a clever cautionary tale about venereal disease
(though the phrase is never used until the very last line) and possibly
something larger. The complete text:
This
is big dance night. I am at my table here in my good Information
Center. The band plays and the drums beat. Feet trip a gay fandango
and uniforms and dresses whiff through the breeze. Cigaret smoke
is in the air. I hear loud voices and laughter. This is the night
of the big dance. Horns will blow, couples will whirl, eyes shine,
cheeks will smiles and the jokes and wise cracks will run. Everybody
will have a good time, most everybody. Nearly all will have a
good clean time. Almost.
Somebody
in the dance hall will catch a disease which he or she can track
germ by germ back to the dance hall door.
Somebody
will lose a part of life, it not all. Somebody will be nervous
and worried for all of the remainder of their days. The nervous
worry will track back to the big dance down there tonight.
The
nervous worry will really trace back to the door of carelessness.
Just didn't care. Just didn't give a damn. Heard and saw the lecture,
the book, the word, a thousand times. Still didn't care.
Didn't
care because he thought we didn't care. He didn't care because
he really figured at the bottom of his heart that nobody really
cared.
The
way to make the guys and dames all like you is to go roll them
good and then come back and tell a hundred jokes about her for
the next six months. The way to have a lot of pals is to have
lots of good raw meat jokes to spill out. Make it all a big joke.
A laugh. Ridicule it. Stretch it. Make it like a cartoon book.
She's this old dame, see this old broad, this pretty little piece,
this cute little satchel, see. See.
Yes,
this is it. This is the way to make all your pals and gals smile
and tell you howdy. This is the way to stay in with that click
[sic] you want to be with. Yes. Make her funny.
Work
it all up. Toss it around. Tickle your buddy's funnybone. Put
it in his mind. You're a man on these ladies. They mash their
feet off chasing you around. Tell all of your comrades where you
can be sure to knock of [sic] a little chunk. Use your imagination.
Build it up. Make fun of her. Stir up another good yarn.
Keep
your nerves all worked up. Knock yourself out. Work yourself up
into a lather. Get them hot.
Just
remember one thing. You laugh in the face of the first law when
you spread your nervous sex tales from one buddy on to your next
one. You fan a flame that has taken more people than fire. You
feed a storm that has killed more people than guns. You blow a
poison that has murdered more races of people than hunger. You
keep an enemy a thousand times deadlier than fascists, than Nazis
and Japs multiplied by twenty.
You
lead your friends and sell them over to this enemy when you try
to prove that the lightest thing in human existence is a joke,
a dead circus, a thing to yell, whistle, and laugh about. You
sell your boys friends and girl friends for just the price of
tickling your own greedy ignorance. Because to turn your eyes
from the first law is to drown yourself in your ignorance.
Your
ignorance proves that you are a coward too full of your own fear
to face the law. You are such a big coward that you are afraid
to live with the law. You choose to kill yourself in the greediest
possible manner, so you spit out your birthright on the ground,
and you make the law over to fit your ignorance. You mould life
into the jokes of your own vulgarity. You slip over into the jungle
you made in your wild nightmares and you get lost. You see nothing
except your pitiful greed and ignorance. You actually believe
that this silly world of rotten, nervous, wasted time, is the
real world. You see the unreal as the real and the real as the
unreal.
You
worship nervousness. You believe in vulgar. You see only the law
that you made for your own suicide. Your sex gets out of balance.
Your brain functions wrong and your nerve ends are irritated for
months or for years. Your tissues and organs get weakened, strained,
irritated, and run down. The germ comes and he finds himself at
home. The poisons from your glands did not work right because
you kept the nerves all upset, cramped, overly taxed. Your defense
fails. The germ lives. He makes your body his rotten log to breed
his city of germs in.
You
chose your own destruction. No living human can keep you alive
when you really desire to be dead.
You
say I am stretching the dead side of the picture. I say that I
have not made it one half as clear as it ought to be made. I have
stated nothing except pure scientific facts.
Not
all scientists will agree with me that this sort of vulgar nervousness
sets up a nervous irritation which paralyzes defense glands, but
I will stick to my point. It is pure psychiatry. Pure and simple.
The nervousness is caused by social and economic insecurity. A
further cause is your high desire to appear as
a man amongst men, a woman of the world, a somebody who is cute,
clever, popular, witty, and highly sexual attractive. You feel
short of almost all of your positive, useful goals and plans,
so you spend too much energy in the art of spreading a false sex
security in your own mind and in others. You see life very dimly,
complascently [sic], spasmodically, because your blood leaves
the higher cells and centers of your brain and flows to those
organs which laugh, clap, slap, and yell, and tell dirty stories.
Your blood flows in a confused and excess manner to the nerves,
tissues and organs of your sex, which includes all the other organs
in your body. You make use, the wrong use, of beer, wine, whiskey,
liquers, to confuse your vision and intellect still more.
You
are as cannibal, as savage, moreso, than the wildest creature
of the jungle, because you turn your back on several million civilized
helping hands and all our modern tools. The poor savage would
run a hundred miles to receive this much attention.
Now,
who is right. Be truthful. Be honest about it? Mama Nature, and
the human race, or you and your wild ignorance? If you see no
hope for the human race, if it is a planless and painful place,
if you just cannot stand it, then gooff [sic] somewhere in the
weeds and blow your brains out. We won't miss you. Go ahead. Blow.
But you had sure better not try to run that obstacle course of
loose and vulgar wild sex, because you won't last for twenty feet.
I went heavy on the cause. You go heavy on the cure. The only
cure for V.D. is a plan of living for everybody.
Woody
Guthrie
[Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 2, folder 03]
For the period
of September, as Woody languishes on the Illinois base, Klein observes:
He couldn't
be sure if it was the army or his own boredom, but there was an
odd, drifty sensation, an inability to concentrate or keep track
of what he was doing. "Confused states of mind, a
kind of lonesomeness, a nervousness stays with me no matter how
I set myself to reading, painting or playing my guitar. Without
trying to make it sound too serious, it never does get quite straight
in my head." [Klein, p. 314]
In an Oct. 22
ramble to Marjorie about sex and physicality, Woody wrote: "To
me the body is the mind. The mind is the body. Neither goes far
without the other." [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box
2, folder 09] In
a Nov. 3 letter to Marjorie, still from Scott Field, Woody wrote
about self-control:
I
learned before very many of these dark nights that here is one
of the deepest dares and challenges that ever comes over the human
brain, this dare to wrestle and to try to control your own nervous
thoughts out here in all of this wild world by yourself. I know
that I could never pretend to be a full grown adult till I could
keep my head clear out here. So I felt like I was learning one
more part of a big lesson. I felt like I could see all of the
weak spots in my own mind here, could learn how to over come it,
and how to free my mind so that all of the reflections of my brain
would come sure and true and quick and healthy. I felt a terrible
craving to do this over and over. I never have told anybody more
than a dozen words about this, except you. I wanted to know how
to make use of the contents of my own mind, and something told
me that I could learn in this way how to know other peoples hearts
and minds, also. [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 2,
folder 10]
-
Home at last Once
out of the Army, Woody launched into several other projects, but
he had difficulty bringing them to fruition. In '46, he and Cisco
Houston went to Boston to study the Sacco and Vanzetti case for
the purposes of writing an album's worth of songs about it. Klein
notes Woody's inability to finish the songs "to his own satisfaction,"
and how the spark had gone from his writing, his songs had become
"ponderous and self-righteous; he seemed to have lost his sense
of humor." [Klein, p. 328] Klein
also notes Woody's deteriorating stage presence during his immediate
post-Army years:
He still conveyed
the same sense of having stumbled accidentally onstage that he'd
used so brilliantly in the past to set up his humor, but now the
punch lines often were muffled or missing entirely, and all that
remained was aimless confusion. The fact was that he really did
stumble onstage at times. Some of his friends were quite concerned
about Woody's incessant boozing, and Marjorie agreed that it was
becoming a serious problem.
Also:
Woody was
beginning to lose control of the anger that he'd always been able
to harness as the fuel for his best songs; the rage that he'd
once controlled like a stiletto was becoming a bludgeon. ... His
driving, which never had been very steady, became a campaign to
flout every known traffic law and terrorize his friends. He'd
run red lights, go down one-way streets the wrong way, and make
sudden, lurching U-turns across traffic islands on the Belt Parkway.
[Klein, p. 335, 336-7]
In February
1947, fire claimed another Guthrie - this time the first child of
Woody and Marjorie, Cathy Ann. Woody is, of course, stunned by the
incident and writes in his note book: "And the things
you fear shall truly come upon you ..." [Klein, p.
350] A
few months later, Woody shoved off on a trip west, visiting Lefty
Lou in California (who Klein reports thought Woody "seemed
troubled and weird"). He wrote home to Marjorie many times,
and off-hand descriptions of his mental state began to sneak into
his reports, such as, "I don't know what has hit me.
I've never felt this low before," and "Every
day seems like it's no go. I don't feel like doing very much of
anything. All scrabbled up." [Klein, p. 355-6]
The following
poem is undated, but I'm guessing it comes from around this period,
based on the similarity of its ink and paper to other material from
this period. It's a simple poem, a personal expression of his uneasiness:
"Sometimes
I think I'm a gonna lose my mind..." Sometimes
I think Im a gonna lose my mind But it dont Look like I ever do.
I loved So many
People everywhere I went Some too much And others not enough.
I don't know
I may go Down or up or anywhere But I feel Like this scribbling
Will stay.
Maybe
If I hadn't Of seen so much hard feelings I might not Could of
felt Other peoples. So
When you think of me If and when you ever do Just say Well Another
man's done gone Yep Another man's done gone.
[Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 1, folder 27]
-
Seeds of Man Later
in 1947, Woody began work on another manuscript: Silver Mine, the
tale of a trip to south Texas he took with his father and some Pampa
relatives in search of a family legend's silver mine. The manuscript
title eventually was changed to Seeds of Man and wasn't published
until after Woody's death. Woody's initial drafts included a long,
drawn-out but poignant scene in which Woody argues with his father
about the family's history and circumstances. This scene appeared
between what became chapters 1 and 2 and did not make the published
version. First in this deleted scene, he pleads with his family
to commit itself to music as a way to earn a living instead of some
of the other means by which Charley Guthrie had used to feed his
family: "I'm jista sorta lettin' m'self hope a little
han'ful th't if we throw down our guns an' grab up our squawling
fiddles, an' jist lumber off an' out down th' music road, nowhere,
anywheres, we might still save all of th' resta us fr'm goin' an'
a-dyin' where mama went when she died."
Everyone chastises
Woody for dragging Clara and Nora into the argument, so in the following
passage Charley moans, then Woody's response:
"...
I hired the best doctors I could get. They all told me the same
thing. Humor Nora. Pet her. Be nice to her. ... That Doctor told
me that I had to find every possible way to try to make Nora feel
proud of all of her fine things. But I donŐt know why, and I just
never did know why, and I never will know why, she just turned
mean and hateful towards every good thing I tried to do for her,"
Papa said. "I know what was going on in Mama's head. I stood
there in our house and watched 'er make ever' move she made, an'
I stood there'n listen'd to 'er talk and argue to me right in
the days when she commenced t' havin' them first nervis fits.
Oh. Most alla this hyere stuff she'd talka 'bout jist aft'r ya'd
walk outta th' door an' ride old White Sam off ta werk at y'r
offis. I lissen'd to 'er all day an' ever' day. Roy an' Clara
didn't liss'n to 'er mutch's I did, 'cause botha them'd chaise
off outta crost th' yard fence an' git ta playin' with alla th'
neighbor kids. Roy'd come back t' eat. Clara'd come back ever'
coupla hours t' see how good 'er how bad things wuzza driftin'
along. An' alla th' time th't you's down there at yore offis,
well, Roy an' Clara an' m'self seen a big plenty. Jista
big big plenty. Plenty enuff ta let us know th't our mama
wuzza havin' reg'lar fits an' spasms an' a cussin' out at papa
all day long sa loud th't ever'body along our whole block'd git
out onta their front an' their back porches jist ta stan' there'n
lissen to 'er. Beggin' ya ta take off y'r guns an' ta throw that
there big biadge away, an' ta move outaa y'r ole fightin' cheatin'
real escape offis out ta liv onna farm of some kind she had all
eyyed up an' pick'd out. ... That's what she talk'd an' sigh'd
an' cried an' roll'd down acrost th' floor an' th' bed all day
longa 'bout. She had th' kinda eye it takes ta see th' bloody
kindsa han's th't yore dollers an' yore lan' titles wuzza goin'
through. I didn' jist hyear 'er weep an' wail 'er soul an' 'er
body away f'r jist one time, ner f'r a hundred times, but after
ya'd go off t' werk ever day an' alla them gone nights, too, well,
f'r my firs twelve years till we fell down ta th't ole rotty east
end shack where we's a livin' that bad ole night th't th' docters
come down an' drove 'er off ta th' 'Sylum. ..."Ó
[Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 5, folder 02]
-
Demon alcohol Quoted
in the Woody biography by Henrietta Yurchenco, Marjorie pointed
out she and the family had begun to notice Woody's change about
this time:
What confused
me, and Woody himself, in the early stage of the illness, was
that by nature he was a rather moody person. As early as 1948,
we began to notice that he was more reflective, and often depressed
by trivial things. [Yurchenco, McGraw-Hill: 1970, p. 139]
By 1949, Woody
was drinking pretty heavily, as Klein notes:
The level
of tension was higher than ever before. Woody was drinking more
heavily again, and behaving very strangely at times. One afternoon
he lost his temper and came charging at Marjorie with a kitchen
knife. She screamed, "Woody!" which shocked him back
to his senses, after which he apologized profusely ... but the
incident stayed in her mind. [Klein, p. 366]
In a discussion
of Woody's artwork from this period, Ellen G. Landau quotes from
"notebook of the later forties," in which Woody wrote:
The
old head I've got seems to be all cluttered up with trash and
garbage and crazy moving pictures - that whirl around all of the
time and never see anything quite clear enough - and never feels
[sic] anything quite plain enough. Never knows anything quite
sure enough. Maybe something ought to happen to me to make me
born again brand new. ["Classic in Its Own Little
Way," Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie,
Weslyan Univ.: 1999]
About 1950,
Howie Richmond is grooming the Weavers and takes an interest in
Woody. Woody spends lot of time talking with him and to Pete Kameron,
rambling stories, Klein writes: "Kameron was a man who enjoyed
conversation, no matter how fractured it sometimes seemed - as opposed
to Moe Asch, who'd grown tired of watching one of his favorite performers
fall apart." WG waits for Richmond at his office one night,
all night, police arrest him for loitering, Klein says, "Richmond,
and most other people, assumed that his brains had been scrambled
by alcohol." The next graf elaborates:
It was not
a difficult assumption to make. He showed all the classic signs
of alcoholism. There was a boozy, light-headed quality to him;
his walk had become a lurch, and his speech often was decidedly
slurred. What's more, he looked like a bum. Photographs taken
of him in Washington Square Park in 1952 show him with a full
beard and long, curly hair, looking very much like a biblical
prophet ... or a vision from a future time, the late 1960s, and
a state of mind not yet even vaguely imagined. [Klein, p. 376]
Continuing in
this vein, of 1950, Klein writes: "Marjorie found she was frightened
by him." An important discussion begins here of Marj's sharpening
perception of WG's worsening state, his air of danger, his flunking
of auditions, etc. Klein mentions this, too: "An odd thing
was happening, too, with his writing. It was beginning to bulge
and warp crazily, like images in a fun-house mirror." [Klein,
p. 377-8] Late
in 1951, the crazily warped letters were coming from Beluthahatchee,
Fla., where Woody had run to live with anti-KKK figure and soon-to-be
politician Stetson Kennedy. While living in Kennedy's refurbished
bus, Woody brainstormed an idea for a new novel, which he wrote
out in a letter to Marjorie:
Story
about a drunk man that has a fight in a house of prostitution,
gets knocked down a stairs, and wakes up in the A.A. ward of a
hospital. He is bodily and mentally sick and must be treated with
several well known shots and pills of modern day wonder drugs.
It's under the influence of these dopes and drugs that he mumbles,
murmurs, yells and loudly debates with all his nurses, doctors,
analysts, experts, as well as with all the inmates of his ward,
about what he claims to be the greatest grandest foolproof religious
theory and science. ... The hero of the tale, being under the
influence of many narcotics and many dopeyfying tablets, pills,
and intra muscular needle shots, and, also, having been too much
of a drinker and a sinner in every degree, yells all sorts of
twisted, unrelated, disconnected, and [uncommenting???] words,
and phrases, and sentences, both questions and answers, queries
and replies, and more isolated, disjointed, senseless phrases.
[Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 3, folder 02]
A song that
shows up in this period, dated "April Foolery of 19+52,"
illustrates some of the tension at home. This song is written in
Woody's hand but attributed to Arlo:
"My
Daddy Got Mad" My
daddy got mad My daddy got sad and he jumped inna bottle of wine;
My daddy felt bad so he jumped in a bottle of wine; and He didn't
come out cause mommy wouldn't pay his fine [Archives:
Songs-1, alphabetical]
Later that month,
Woody continued to ramble, this time making a run back to Okemah,
where he apparently stayed several days checking out his old haunts.
The following four passages are from letters written to Marjorie
during his stay at Okemah's Broadway Hotel. The first two are dated
April 25, 1952 - the second being written on both sides of a paper
bag from a department store called Dunlap's - and appear amid long
monologues about the apparent failure of their marriage, which he
blames on his alcoholism:
I'm
positive that 99% of our trouble is caused by my drinking; it
only comes over me to hate and fight and to be so unreasonably
jealous about you when I'm drinking. The drinking causes every
damned ounce of trouble between us, mainly because it causes my
brain to imagine a whole world of things about you that are not
true. [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 3, folder 03]
I
know that, if I can stop using liquor and tobacco that my head
will stay clearer .... The use of alcohol and tobacco both are
a dizzy kind of a sickness and they make me weak enough without
your pushing me out. ... Liquor causes every ounce of these crazy
fits of blind jealousy that come over me. [Archives:
Correspondence-1, Box 3, folder 03]
This third passage,
from a letter to Marjorie from this Okemah visit, is quoted in Klein's
book but was not located in the Archives. It concerns one particular
kind of weakness Woody seemed most concerned about at this point:
"I
feel terribly afraid of everything connected with the act of sex
... the sudden loss of this sexual ability, my fear of not being
sexually attractive all add up to a very strong, nervous, fearful
feeling that amounts to hate. ... I knocked all my sexual attraction
out of myself simply simply out through the necks of all those
sickly bottles. ... That bottle is my disease, and just about
my only disease." [Klein, p. 385]
And finally,
from a letter dated April 26, amid a few more pages of self-pity,
Woody writes off his latest symptoms to the alcohol: "I
get awful dizzy and awful sick and it robs me of even my ability
to fight it back." [Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 7,
folder 37] When
Woody returned to New York, the uncertainty of his future with Marjorie
agitated him greatly. He continued writing her letters in May, first
telling her off, then pleading with her to give him another chance.
It's the alcohol, he insisted, in a letter dated May 12, 1952: "Alcoholism
is like being sick. It feels just like any other sick spell you
pull into and out from under." Two days later, another
letter mentioned that Cisco had intervened, talking to Marjorie
and then speaking to Woody. Woody wrote: "He helped
me to undo, and to wash out, and to get rid of several thousand
destructive, deadening suggestions you're so truly shot at me, oh,
about being a psycho case, and an alky case, and every other poison
kind of a sting you tried to shoot into me." [Archives:
Correspondence-1, Box 3, folder 03] -
Brooklyn State I The
next day, May 15, 1952, everything came to a head. Marjorie came
home that night after a date with Tony; she found Woody at the house
"beyond reason" with scissors in his hand. He charged
her, fell on her, hit her with his fists and was allegedly frothing
at the mouth. Marjorie got him off her, and Klein notes the pivotal
realization in this incident: "And another odd thing she noticed:
he hadn't been drinking. He was sober, and yet crazier than she'd
ever seen him drunk" Police are called, and as Marjorie sat
with him later, Klein writes: "After a while, she said, 'Woody,
you're sick ... and you weren't drinking, and you shouldn't be that
way. I don't know what it is and you don't know what it is, but
you're sick.'" On May 16, Woody was checked into the detox
center at Kings County Hospital, and Klein notes the hospital's
records: "Although no diagnosis was made, hospital records
noted a 'bluntness of affect' (meaning that Woody didn't talk or
express himself very much) and 'sensitivity in the sexual sphere
with regard to the last time he slept with his wife.'" Woody
is released June 5 and immediately goes back to writing Marjorie,
blaming the alcoholism: "It was the dope in me, the
alcohol in me that forced me to behave so wildly. It turned me into
a senseless raving idiot." Marjorie began to keep
a record of the incidents in her day book. On June 14, Woody threatened
to jump from a roof if Marjorie didn't leave Tony. Cops were called.
He was taken to Bellevue where the diagnosis was schizophrenia,
though Klein adds, "but the doctors seemed rather puzzled by
his case. One of them told Marjorie, 'Mrs. Guthrie, your husband
is a very sick man, and we don't know what to do with him.'"
He's released on July 15. That same night he shows up at Marjorie's
home "drunk and disorderly" and attacks the kids, though
Klein notes that "the events of that evening aren't entirely
clear." He checks into the Kings County drunk tank the next
day and from there wrote, "Alcohol made me thrash my
kids with my fists because they played around my house too loud
when (I figured) they should have been asleep. I took my fists to
my own wife in one of my senseless, alcoholic fits of jealousy."
In a later notebook he wrote: "I'll never lose my temper
again in that old alcohol stuff that drove me to hit you that night
(like I did) because you wouldn't go to sleep on your bed, remember?"
He goes on to beg forgiveness and says, "We'll both
pretend it never did happen, won't we? Yes, we will. Yes, we will."
He wrote songs
in Kings County; Klein quotes this chorus:
Pacing
this ward in Bellevue Pacin' Kings County too I'm gonna pace on
outta my psycho ward Gonna pace back, baby, to you
Woody voluntarily
transfers to Brooklyn State Hospital on July 22, 1952. The examining
doctor at Woody's admission was Dr. Marlowe, who concluded that
"this is one of those cases which stubbornly defies classification.
In it, it has elements of schizophrenia, psychopathy and a psychoneurotic
anxiety state, not to mention the mental and personality changes
occurring in huntington's chorea, at this patient's age." Klein
says this "offhand inclusion of Huntington's chorea ... was
the first official suggestion that Woody might, indeed, be suffering
from the same disease that killed his mother." Klein follows
this up:
But the young
examiner obviously was confused about the nature of the illness,
since he didn't realize that the 'psychoneurotic anxiety state'
and all those other conditions he was describing were symptoms
of Huntington's chorea. But then, he'd probably never seen a case
of it before. It was so rare that it existed, for most doctors,
merely as another oddity in their medical school texts.
Klein wraps
a section with this projection:
Woody was
told about none of this. All he knew was that groups of doctors
were inspecting him periodically, and that they asked about his
mother on several occasions. It was odd, he thought, that they
were so curious about his mother, since he was absolutely convinced
that his problem was alcoholism, pure and simple, and it was his
father who'd been the drunk in the family.
Klein then quotes
a letter Woody wrote to Mary Jo but never mailed: "You're
just associating me with mama, thinking surely since she broke down
and died like she did over those long, slow years that I'm bound
and destined to break the same as she did. All the good doctors
I talk to tell me there is no connection between Huntington's Korea
which mama had, and my own trouble whatever my own will be named
and labeled." [Klein, p. 387-394] From
his first tour of duty in Brooklyn State Hospital, Woody wrote continually
- letters, songs, notebooks. A lengthy letter to Marjorie in splotchy
ink, dated July 1952 from Brooklyn State, begins a recurrent note
of optimism ("I'll have myself back under control in
another minute, another hour, another week or so"),
then goes into great detail about his feelings and symptoms:
Feel
terribly restless always. I get here and I want to be yonder.
I get over yonder and I want to be back over here. I get out west
and I crave to back east. I get down south and hope to get back
up north. I feel dissatisfied with myself no matter where I'm
located. ... I don't trust anybody I see. ... It's worse when
I feel hungry, and I feel hungry every minute, even after eating
a big double helping and getting up from the table. ... Disoriented.
That's the book name for what I am. Useless to a point where my
pain is all but unbearable. Not needed. Not wanted. No good to
myself nor no good to anybody else, a derelict of a failure. A
wreck not worth the salvaging. ... Yet in some odd way since my
hernia operation over at Bellevue, I feel better in my head and
all over (in general) than I've been feeling for many a dizzyheaded
year. ... [Archives: Correspondence-1, Box 3, folder
03]
Marjorie explained
something about the developing appetite increase in a later interview:
In Huntington's
the body metabolism doesn't work properly. Woody needed lots of
food, and lots of sweets. When he came home weekends, we would
feed him tons of food. This was a big joke for the children: How
many frankfurters would he take that day? Six; and how many milks?
He'd take four. And how many cakes? He'd take six. And how many
root beers? And whatever. [Yurchenco, p. 148]
In a notebook
from July and August, Woody made a drawing titled "Why I'm
Here." The drawing features a circle in the center of the page
with three arrows pointing out in equidistant spacing. Next to this
is written, "I came to Brooklyn State to"
and each arrow is labeled with a reason: 1. "sober
up," 2. "calm down," and
3. "to dry out." In
this same notebook, Woody later writes to discuss how he learned
to be a drinker from watching his dad. There's a new mention of
Charley's fire that once again confuses the account of that very
mysterious incident:
...
his abuses of an economic sort and his backsets in finances and
losses in political prestige hurt him very deeply and left him
threatening a great many times to take his own life. He finally
tried to burn himself to death on a bed full of kerosene soaked
Sunday papers that caught fire as he lay there reading them. Some
say it was accidental; some say he did it on purpose; nobody quite
knows, not even the family in our house with him at that very
minute. ...
Several pages
later, Woody is sketching more and writing less. Some pages have
titles but no words. Among this is the following list called "Diseases
I Beat," apparently a list of songs ideas for a thematic album:
1. T.B. 2.
Polio 3. Cancer 4. Vee dee 5. Hydrophobia 6. Malaria 7. Flu 8.
Alcoholism 9. Insanity 10. Penicillin story 11. Scarlet Fever
12. Doctor Song
Some songs came
off rather well, like the three-verse "Brooklyne State,"
which starts with this cheery verse:
Brooklyn
State! Brooklyn State! Hurry up, buddy, don't be late! Big Hall's
ready! Grab your plate! I gotta gain weight at Brooklyn State!
On the next
page is this, less cheery but still optimistic, lyric, "Hopes
Ahead":
I
get a feelin' I'm nearly dead; Nearly dead. Then I get to seein'
my hopes ahead. Hopes ahead. I
get a real bad knockin' in my head; In my head; But I still hear
hopes ahead Some hopes ahead.
Another song,
"Student Nurse" (not the same as "My Student Nurse,"
two years later and quoted here ahead), finds a cheery Woody wondering,
"What makes us all perk up / When you come around?"
Finally, here's
a song from August taking a different approach to the subject of
fire, titled "World on Fire":
When
the world's on fire, fire, My little darling I want your bosom
to be my pillow I want your bosom to be my pillow My little darling
When the world's on fire! When
God's big fire comes and the world is dry bones I wanta build
it all back for you my darling! I wanta build it all back for
you my darling! We'll stick together When the world's on fire!
I never shall
fear, fear, When the flood of flames come; I'll hold your warm
hand and stand beside you! I'll hold your warm hand and stand
beside you! My little darling When the world's on fire!
[Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 7, folder 40]
In a notebook
from early August 1952, from Brooklyn State, Woody scrawled this
poem, titled "Patient and You," twice on two separate
pages:
When
a patient cries and screams like hell; and when he yells and yells
and yells, It'll turn your blood From red to blue; But it's worse
on the patient Than it is on you.
Also in this
file are some early September pages, including the following pages:
"Full
Belly" My
dizzy drifty feeling, my old low sinky feeling always goes away
quickest when I eat and keep my belly full. Let's get famished
a lot together. "Humanly
Seed" I
see myself as a long scientific experiment to prove the indestructibility
of my humanly seed. [Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 7,
folder 41]
Another set
of notebook pages from August includes more titles and short scrawls:
"Dad
and Me"
I wanted to prove To my dad that I loved him the same as ever
In spite of his habits of drinking and smoking too much So I smoked
too much And I drank too much And I cussed too much And I sinned
too much To prove to my dad that love can laff at our bad habits.
What else have we got to laff at anyway? I never did know clear.
[Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 7, folder 42]
Among seemingly
endless ramblings on looseleaf notebook paper, all addressed to
Marjorie, he includes this description of his feelings - and how
he hides them - dated Aug. 21, 1952 still from Brooklyn State:
Here's
my funny feeling over me again. That lost feeling. That gone feeling.
That old empty whipped feeling. Shaky. Bad control. Out of control.
Jumpy. Jerky. High tension. Least little thing knocks my ego down
below zero mark. Everything cuts into me and hurts me several
times more than it should. Everything hits me. A word or a look
or an action of anybody here deals me a misery. I've not got strength
to go on, nor to see things in the light as they should be. No
bodily (physical) pains; just like my arms and legs and hands
and feet and my whole body belongs to somebody else and not to
me; so ashamed of myself I want to run hide away where nobody
can find me nor see how bad I feel. Can they tell by looking at
me how useless and weak and flimsy and artificial (and how foney)
I feel? Worse than this, I ask myself what makes me [break my
head???] to try to hide my weak jitters? Why don't I break down
and spill them out all over to the first person I see? Why don't
I? Why? It would all be over (the worst of it)
if I could only cave in and fall down and tell everybody how I
feel. My trouble isn't in the dizzy spell nor the pains not in
my [weakly???] feeling, but my worst pains come because I spend
every drop of my bodily strength trying to hide my trouble away
so you can't see it; trying to keep you from reading it in my
face, or my eyes, or in any words I'd say or in that stumbly way
I walk around. We never try to help our coal miners till our mine
caves in; we never can let you help us till our pride caves in,
and till our fears cave in. This business of trying to hide our
weaker feelings surely surely must be in all of us. Surely I'm
not the only man on this ward that hides all this as long as he
can. Everybody does it; everybody tries to hide it so's you'll
never guess how bad and how empty we feel. Some of us hide it
more (and longer) than others. Some of us break down under it
sooner than others; some talk it out, some weep it out, some yell
and scream and curse it out, some battle and fight it out; all
of us drive it out in our own way, but all of us must get your
help, must borrow your bosom to cry on, must
ask you to help us, must break our damnfool secrecy and our damnfool
pride on your shoulder. Why do I stall off my own breakdown like
I do? ... Could be partly because I've just never
been in a hospital like this before and my own crazy pride keeps
holding me back from breaking down and letting you know how thin
and how bad and how miserable I feel.
This goes on
a while more, with Woody lamenting his own stubbornness and how
miserable the results. A few pages later, it turns paranoid, with
Woody accusing Marjorie of being an FBI spy simply because she tries
to figure out what pains and symptoms he is actually hiding.
At the end of
this letter is a page with several separated grafs on it; they look
to have been written at different times, in different penmanship.
A few of them:
I
still feel that cool numbness in my left (infected injected) hand
a little too much to suit me. I'll ask some nurses and docs what
I ought to do about it.
Sometimes I feel like some kind of a machine running too fast
and all the parts flying out in every direction. Do you get to
feeling this way, does everybody, or just me? I'm not the only
person that flies apart am I? Or do I make my troubles sound worse
than they are? Could be. [Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box
7, folder 43]
The pages and
pages of notebook rambling continue, all dated from August. At one
point, Woody mentions the strange sensation of cold he felt in his
left arm, and concluding that the very act of writing was his best
medicine:
Funny
thing When I feel my uncertain spell creep and sneak down around
me, I grab up my paper and my pencil to write it all down and
it (my spell) runs like fourteen nests of wild rabbits to try
to hide so I can't write about it; and so I guess your pencils
and packs of paper (and yourself like you look right now) are
just about my best sober upper, bluesy chaser, warmup hand, nurse,
nurse, doctor, healer, and helper after all chips are in and down.
Later, probably
on another day, he mentions how he's feeling:
Feel
better all day today. Sociabler. Friendlier. Talkies to folks.
Not so damnably shy nor so quick to run off to hide myself. I
feel like I'm finding out that I'm just about like all the rest
of you here after all. I feel soberer and soberer and eat more
and more and two plates of several things and one plate of several
others. Drink floods of water. [Archives: Manuscripts-1,
Box 7, folder 44]
A lengthy letter
to Marjorie late in August includes this manifestation of his health:
I
feel mentally, physically, economically, neurophysically, bodily,
soulfully, economically, theoretically, esthetically, mathematically,
scientifically, hygeinically, psychologically, religiously, numerically,
philosophically, and sexually, and socially, and schizophrenically
better this morning than I feel most mornings here. I feel politically
better, too; and musically better, also; and husbandly and fatherly,
and manfully better. [Archives: Manuscripts-1, Box 8,
folder 01]
A notebook from
September includes another 100-plus-page ramble to Marjorie, which
at one point says, "Sure anxious to see what brand
name of a psychopathic label they'll tattoo onto my skin."
He's acknowledging he's sober, but still wondering if there's more
to his diagnosis than mere alcoholism. This uneasiness apparently
started from a doctor's examination, which he describes a few pages
later:
I
can't understand why I still stay so dizzy in my head. My doctor
asked me about the dizzy spells and I told him I thought I had
all the scientific symptoms of alcoholic withdrawal pains. And
he asked me how many days I'd been off the alcohol, and I told
him 45 days and he said 45 days is a long time to stay dizzy.
To which I agreed it was a long time. He asked me to pace up and
down his office for him which I also did. To call my dizzy business
a pain of withdrawal is not any too true, because I feel no aches
or pains of any actual bodily kind. [Archives: Manuscripts-1,
Box 8, folder 04]
Klein quotes
from a lengthy Sept. 6 diary entry: "I don't think
anybody will find any tracks of insanity or hereditary disease in
me, except for my mother's death by Huntington's Chorea which I've
read in a heavy book or two is not pass-onable." [Klein,
p. 396] |