Word: carruthers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Others have written with an equal bitterness about the War, about estrangement, about the uncomfortable timidity of poets in America (I'm thinking of the anthology of Poets on Vietnam, Hayden Carruth's "On a Certain Engagement South of Seoul," or Berryman's "Formal Elegy" on the death of President Kennedy). Yet Wilbur has referred to these events in passing, as if to recognize their presence without allowing them to oppress his spirit, knowing the limits of indignations...
Throughout the book, in alternating sections, Carruth's narrator presents himself to the reader in a strange double exposure-as he appeared in the early 1950s, when he had his first breakdown, and as he appears now, writing while caring for a deaf-mute as atonement for past sins. In the earlier period the narrator is (as Carruth was) a poet, editor, and a nihilist who thinks that "1 must be really half dead" but is not particularly disturbed by the fact: most of contemporary America, he implies, is in pretty much the same shape. The agent...
APPENDIX A by Hayden Carruth. 302 pages. Macmillan...
...pages of this unsettling book, the reader is imprisoned in the mind of a man who has suffered and is now suffering a total nervous collapse. Anybody who wants to know the identity of that man need only "look at the title page," according to Author Hayden Carruth. Carruth's self-described "novel or autobiography or dissertation" is not neatly scissored to easily discernible patterns; rather, it comes spooling off the mind of the narrator in grea loops and tangles of yarn. But its feeling is all of a piece-and chilling in effect...
Anguished in spirit but comic in detail, Author Carruth's convoluted tale is a convincing, step-by-step chronicle of a mind stretching beyond its breaking point. But Appendix A is more than case history. If modern man predicates his behavior on a world of non-meaning, Carruth suggests, even the hint of meaning can cripple...