Another poet we’re excited to have in this latest issue of 32 Poems is Les Murray, whose work will be familiar to many of our readers since his career is long and distinguished and he is, in some respects, more popular in the US than in his native Australia. As an admirer of his poems and a lover of prose by poets, I was interested to read his recent memoir and share my thoughts with our blog readers. Like the best prose-stylists, he packs as much into an essay as he does into a poem, and despite the painful content of the narrative, reading this book was a wonderful experience I hope you’ll choose to share.

Murray’s Killing the Black Dog: a Memoir of Depression (FSG, 2011), is a slender, elegant work of introspection and reflection by a voice that is sharp, unsentimental, and humane. The book continually convinces me of the authenticity of its witness by betraying no motive besides documenting an experience that, having been lived through, demands sharing. Who demands the story’s telling is up for some debate: Murray writes directly to the reader, “You must tell the exact truth, suppressing nothing…I can do this because you aren’t curing me, rather I’m telling you what did help me, and my own part in it.”(Isn’t he also instructing us about writing here? Not just memoir, but poetry?) Of course Murray’s journey is a personal one that we do not take a direct part in, and his pointing this out is consistent with a characteristic frankness. Still, can it be untrue that writing about his illness (or, since the book began as the text of a lecture, speaking about his illness) is a part of his role in the cure, and the reader/listener is essential to complete it? I don’t think (and he never claims) that the book is a purely altruistic enterprise; it’s partly for the writer, even if it’s more for the reader. The reader wants to understand the poet, wants to understand human nature, and often—as in the case of this reader—wants some insight into an illness that he or she has also struggled with: evidence that it can be survived as well as the human intimacy that witness brings, especially when it’s not tarted up as melodrama or used to lionize the author. As we find out in the book’s afterward, Murray’s conviction that he achieved a complete recovery was benighted. In fact he suffered depression at later times and continues to struggle with it as a permanent part of his life, though it is far more manageable and comprehensible now than it was during that long apex.

The first half of Killing the Black Dog is personal essay; the second half is poems, and the two are connected. In fact, as Murray tells the story of his illness, he often refers to specific poems that he wrote in response to stimuli of his life. As a result we’re able to chart the course of the poet’s sickness in the poems. It’s a wonderfully candid move, and, to my mind, argues against those essays of Eliot’s that promote a separation of the poem (an intellectual product) from the personal experience of the poet. It also takes real guts to lay bare the creative work done while suffering mental illness, in part because that work is often of poorer quality than the work done when one is healthy. Murray acknowledges this and openly discusses the difficulty of thinking well, let alone writing. “Mental illness is apt to make you into a bore,” he writes. “I’d always led a crowded mental life, but now my mind became congested, jammed with ideas I couldn’t formulate clearly or nimbly enough, so that they tumbled over each other and made me incoherent.” He also says, “I cut down on writing prose pieces because they were more liable than poetry to be infiltrated with the colours of confusion and obsession…I’d disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you’ll use any remedy you’ve got.”

Because mental illness is almost always caught up in a dog’s breakfast of misunderstandings and taboos, it’s difficult to talk about. Depression ranges, in common discourse, from a mood to a crippling chronic illness. Even in retrospect, it can be challenging for a depressed person to sort out the origin and quality of each negative feeling. “At first I suffered no more than the normal background depressiveness of a writer,” Murray writes. In expressing the common correlation of creativity and depression (which strikes many artists as verisimilar), he begins to establish the many gradations that depression can have even in one person’s experience. In doing so, he begins to put his finger on the reason clinical depression can be difficult to recognize in oneself. “I suspect that, like very many inherently depressed people, I simply lost the anger contest after babyhood, and learned to secrete my rage deep inside where it would do me maximum harm.” This sentiment must be almost universally relatable, even to people who have never been clinically depressed. Many of Murray’s questions go beyond the problem of living with mental illness to the problem of living in an imperfect world, whether ill or well. “I have always been fascinated by the question of how it is possible, even with the help of deadening stoicism or maniac laughter, to live with the darker aspects of human frightfulness…Introspection showed me that I’d been a sub-clinical depressive for pretty well all my life.”

Murray describes going to the hospital after a panic attack he misidentifies as a heart attack and calls the other patients “truly sick.” This ambivalence about the status of depression as an illness compared to physical illnesses also strikes me as very true. Compared to those in the hospital who were dying, he felt a poseur, but when you consider that he lived for more than twenty years in (at its best) sporadic agony, it seems one could hardly have a more serious illness. In the last sentence of his first paragraph, he writes, “I didn’t know that I was heading home in order to go mad.” Even this, I think, makes an important connection between depression and other forms of mental illness: the disease, while interacting with the events in one’s life, is a biological reality separate from any events that may complicate it.

Murray’s memoir is full of illuminating statements, undressed, simply conveyed, and folded into the story so gently they could be missed. One of them: “We gave each other permission to be ill, a necessary precondition to being cured,” strikes me as almost obvious, but of course it is not. In my experience, an inherent conflict in a depressed person is the struggle to feel, appear, be normal, to be other than what you are, which is sick. This is so entrenched as to be hard to realize, even in retrospect, and it deflects so much of the sick person’s energy into a fruitless cause: pretending to be well never resulted in a cure.

Ultimately, Killing the Black Dog is relevant because its compassion is sincere and directed not only inward, but also towards fellow sufferers of depression, the family who helped to care for him (and were in some cases victims of his illness), and the family of his past who in some ways exacerbated his enduring trauma. Of a friend who committed suicide, Murray writes, “I’ll never blame her, and if you do, you’ve never been where she and I have been and you can’t say anything meaningful to us or about us.” The connection between empathy and the value of what one has to say seems the particular reflection of an artist whose belief it is that good art is an act of communication and communion where, by understanding humanity, one is able to creatively and appropriately engage with it. He repeats this sentiment in a very different context, speaking of his father, who Murray realizes blamed himself for the death of his wife. “If I had not known his shame, I had not known anything.” This idea, that psychological states can be so fundamental to how a person exists in the world that to miss or misunderstand them is to be unable to understand anything about the person, is as much as anything else a reason for introspection, for listening to people and taking pains to imagine their experience and for writing a memoir of this kind and a lifetime’s poems.

—Jasmine V. Bailey