260
PARTISAN REVIEW
With this awakening Mark sets out on a journey through the city,
searching for Marlene and his thirty-year-old daughter Jill. Jill is in
despair over the death of her husband Jack. But why did I use those
nursery-rhyme names? On one level my missing character Jack referred
to our loss of "handsome Jack /sensitive Jack" Kennedy, to a similar
shock to our innocence when he was assassinated . In the months after I
finished
Dark Carnival,
it came to me who Jack and Jill represented
more personally. In this dramatic poem, I seemed to have reversed the
generations. Jack and Jill, those nursery characters were symbolically
connected through reversal with my lost parents : Jack, like my father,
killed by the deadly needle of a plane, and Jill collapsing into despair
like my mother: "Jack and Jill went up a hill / To fetch a pail of water /
Jack fell down and broke his crown/And Jill came tumbling after."
Later I would discover a connection to a very early trauma that per–
haps led me to choose not only the names of nursery rhyme characters
but also the form of the poem. A psychoanalytic peer group I had joined
was discussing infant research and psychoanalysis and the conviction
that infants really couldn't conceptualize their feelings until two years
old. A couple of comments made me feel trapped and angry. Then I had
a flashback to being well under two years old, during the Second World
War. I saw myself lying on my parents' bed with severe, recurrent ear
abscesses waiting for the doctor to come and puncture them. I vividly
remembered tapping out varying patterns of ten beats with my fingers
to distract myself from the pain . Was this a basis for meter in my work,
and specifically in
Dark Carnival
with its many varying feet and
caesuras? Finally, it seemed that this doctor's needles also metaphori–
cally connected to my father's flu shot and those two jets.
Through this self-analysis, I learned that if metaphor and dramatiza–
tion were not only practiced poetic and dramatic techniques but also
derivatives of earlier traumas and fantasy, so too were meter and rhyme .
Perhaps at its deepest level, my attraction to rhyme originated in a very
early attempt to hold myself together then as I was doing now, and to
protect the good image of my parents from the anger I must have been
feeling as they held my arms down while the doctor held my head and
pierced. Perhaps the rescue fantasy driving both the lyric sequence and
the dramatic monologue derived at its earliest from a profound wish to
have my parents rescue me.
Here then is how the contemporary disaster and the series of early
traumas it called up ended with my characters in
Dark Carnival:
Mark
finally finds Marlene and Jill sitting on the marble steps of the restored
Winter Garden where Jack had proposed marriage
to
Jill. She and Mar-
