Vale David Berman (1967 – 2019)

David Berman 1988

Very very sad news recently that David Berman has died at the age of 52, followed by distressing reports that he had hanged himself.

It took me a while to find my copy of his 1999 book of poems Actual Air, where on every page you see a sharp and feeling intelligence grappling with the clearly observed details of our contemporary life.

Then she brought something black up to her mouth,

a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler. 

I reached under the bed for my menthols

and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead

in the distance where it doesn't matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,

so far behind his wagon where it also doesn't matter.

from ‘Imagining Defeat’

Photo used on back of 1999 book Actual Air

The sound of lawns cut late in the evening
and the memory of a push-up regimen he had abandoned.
...
Nothing had changed. He had retained his tendency
to fall in love with supporting actresses
renowned for their near miss with beauty.

from ‘The Homeowner's Prayer’

David was a sporadic blogger at mentholmountains. The latest post was made twelve days before his suicide, and contains quotes from Thomas Bernhard, and in particular his Correction, Extinction, and the autobiographical Gathering Evidence.

A post a month earlier also quoted from Gathering Evidence and speaks to how the contemporary ‘real’ world of business disturbs and destroys the sensitive mind:

“With its population made up of two categories of people, those who do business and those upon whom they prey, the city has only a painful life to offer the young person who goes there to learn and to study; for sooner or later anyone who lives there, whatever his constitution, becomes disturbed and is eventually deranged and destroyed by the city, often in the most deadly and insidious manner.”

David with wife Cassie

David’s confrontation with the world of business was deeply personal: in a post to his band’s bulletin board immediately after announcing the dissolution of Silver Jews, he revealed his “gravest secret. Worse than suicide, worse than crack addiction.” (He had attempted suicide in 2003, and was struggling with addiction). The post, entitled ‘My Father My Attack Dog,’ goes public with the fact that his father was Richard Berman. “My father is a despicable man,” he wrote: “Even as a child I disliked him.”

David included a link to the now defunct bermanexposed.org which explained / alleged:  “Richard ‘Rick’ Berman is a longtime Washington, D.C. public relations specialist whose lobbying and consulting firm, Berman and Company, Inc., advocates for special interests and powerful industries. Berman and Co. wages deceptive campaigns against industry foes including labor unions; public-health advocates; and consumer, safety, animal welfare, and environmental groups. Nicknamed “Dr. Evil” by his critics, Berman’s targets range from the Humane Society of the United States to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Berman founded seven tax-exempt non-profits and at least 40 other distinctly named linked projects. Although these groups present themselves as unbiased experts in their fields of research seeking to inform the public, in reality they are little more than front groups for Berman’s industry clients, run out of Berman’s offices in downtown Washington by Berman and Co. staff, most of whom hold different titles at several of the nonprofits”.

In a 2005 interview conducted over email, David mentioned the defining events of his childhood: “When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.”

Way back when it first begun
Starting when I first was young

Self portrait aged 6

Through all the years that were to come
I loved being my mother's son
…

When she was gone, I was overcome
The simple fact left me stunned
I wasn't done being my mother's son
Only now am I seeing that being's done

‘I Loved Being My Mother’s Son’, Purple Mountains, 2019

Source https://gramha.net/media/2107644124453952520

David's mentholmountains blog quotes several writers, including Robert Walser, but most frequently Thomas Bernhard.

Bernhard himself survived a traumatic childhood where he was subjected to a repressive school system run by Catholic priests and Nazis, and had to join the Deutsches Jungvolk. Bernhard never met his natural father, who committed suicide when Thomas was nine.

David quotes an interview with Bernhard where Bernhard describes an altercation in Salzburg with Jean Améry a few days before Améry's own suicide in 1978, a couple of years after the publication of his book Hand an sich Legen. Diskurs über den Freitod (translated as On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death). 

Améry had chosen his French-sounding name after the Second World War, in part to express his abandonment of German culture; he had been born Hanns Chaim Mayer in Vienna in 1912.  

Améry suvived the Gurs internment camp, then Auschwitz, Buchnewald and Bergen-Belsen. In At the Mind's Limits he wrote of his time in Auschwitz and mentions Primo Levi who was in the same barracks. Améry describes how Levi had the rare opportunity for an educated man to be spared hard labour by gaining a position to work as a chemist for IG Farben. Améry by contrast, having no ‘useful’ skill like the plumbers and electricians had, was assigned to work on the construction of an IG Farben factory, part of the “foreign labour forces” that the German economy first got used to at that time (to quote W.G.Sebald citing Hans Magnus Enzensberger on p.12 in the translated version of Luftkrieg und Literatur which was given the English title On the Natural History of Destruction). Améry took his own life two weeks before his 66th birthday. Primo Levi took his own life at the age of 67.

David 2016. Source https://gramha.net/media/2106002185744869204

Amanda Petrusich writing for the New Yorker recalled a meeting with David: “We met at a hotel bar in Greenwich Village. His wife, Cassie, was next to him; they seemed so happy. The three of us grinned the entire time. Berman was thrilling to talk to—loquacious and weird. A ten-word question might generate several paragraphs of rumination. Language just seemed to come so easily to him.”

In an interview published by The Poetry Foundation three and a half weeks before his suicide, David relates how the book Actual Air came into existence only because of the relentless encouragement of Rob Bingham, the founder of Open City. Rob died of a heroin overdose in 1999, the year Actual Air was published, at the age of 33, echoing his own father's death at the age of 34 when Rob was three months old. David said “hanging out with Rob was one of the funnest times in my life. He was hilarious and headstrong and extravagant in his ways. That opened my life to chaos.  And my whole art-ideology shifted. I became a heavy drug user and toxic party animal, meaning, I became a man of action; disastrous action.”

When David's close friend Dave Cloud died in 2015 he changed his middle name from Craig to Cloud.

David and Cassie had, according to The Guardian, separated fairly recently, and he had moved into a room above the offices of his record label. David said: “It’s sad. We love each other and never fight. But the way we’d like to spend out next 10,000 nights are completely different. And saying that out loud, when you don’t have kids, it naturally follows..... But being in the middle of it is painful. We own our house together. When I come home, like I am now, she is my family. We’ve been here 20 years in Nashville. (the grotesquefiction of Nashville over the last seven years, makes leaving easier). It hurts most when you fall into a sentimental frame of mind. I’ve had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain’s “Forever and For Always” whenever I’m there.  It’s hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.”

No one is at the playground, DB Age 6

And when I see her in the park
It barely merits a remark
How we stand the standard distance
Distant strangers stand apart
from ‘That’s just the way that I feel’, Purple Mountains, 2019

Course I've been humbled by the void
Much of my faith has been destroyed
I've been forced to watch my foes enjoy
Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude
And as the pace of life keeps quickening
Beneath the bitching and the bickering
When I try to drown my thoughts in gin
I find my worst ideas know how to swim

from ‘That’s just the way that I feel’, Purple Mountains, 2019

Well, I don't like talkin’ to myself
But someone's gotta say it, hell
I mean, things have not been going well
This time I think I finally fucked myself
You see, the life I live is sickening
I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion
Day to day, I'm neck and neck with giving in
I’m the same old wreck I've always been

from ‘That’s just the way that I feel’, Purple Mountains, 2019

His friend and Silver Jews bandmate Stephen Malkmus tweeted: “He was a one of a kinder the songs he wrote were his main passion esp at the end. Hope death equals peace cuz he could sure use it.”