Islands in Time: Part Iv
From the Quatrain
Some Die Mad

By Perry Aayr

Part IV of Some Die Mad, Islands In Time, is a love story between Malcolm Ward and Marlene Weston wherein the love of a good woman lures a man from psychosis to a dazzling conclusion seldom seen in literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 26, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469767826

Perry Aayr

44288: b. 6/10/35. A 1953 graduate of Newark, Ohio High School, 44288 was President of Honor Society, Treasurer of Student Council and Secretary of Key Club. Won Denison University scholarship. Worked 11 months on B&O Railroad Section, Outville Gang. Managed Newark Municipal Pool three summers. Dropped out of Ohio State University after being accepted into Law School for class of 1957. Went instead to New York to become a poet. Wound up on New York Bowery. Thumbed up and down Eastern Seaboard while on the road. Probated Columbus State Hospital Fall of 1958. Wrote quatrain Some Die Mad 1962/63. End recorded at Akron St. Thomas Hospital Alcoholic Ward Labor Day of 1968. High school file contained standard document asking 44288 what he wanted to do in life and after he graduated. He said he wanted to ?Be a writer.??Perry Aayr.

Book preview

ISLANDS IN TIME

Part IV

From the Quatrain

Some Die Mad

By 44288

An Ohio Mental Patient

Edited from the original manuscript and

Presented by Perry Aayr

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

Islands In Time

Part IV

From the Quatrain

Some Die Mad

All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Edward L. Beardshear

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

5220 S. 16th St., Suite 200

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

Any resemblance to actual people and events is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

ISBN: 0-595-24474-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 0-595-74404-4 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-469-76782-6 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

PREFACE

ISLANDS-1

ISLANDS-2

ISLANDS-3

ISLANDS-4

ISLANDS-5

ISLANDS-6

ISLANDS-7

ISLANDS-8

ISLANDS-9

ISLANDS-10

ISLANDS-11

ISLANDS-12

ISLANDS-13

ISLANDS-14

ISLANDS-15

ISLANDS-16

ISLANDS-17

ISLANDS-18

ISLANDS-19

ISLANDS-20

ISLANDS-21

ISLANDS-22

ISLANDS-23

ISLANDS-24

ISLANDS-25

ISLANDS-26

ISLANDS-27

ISLANDS-28

ISLANDS-29

ISLANDS-30

PREFACE

Dear Reader,

You are about to embark upon a singular adventure.

Ohio Mental Patient 44288 (I am prohibited by contract with the family to reveal his name) chose as his life work the literary presentation of the interior landscape of insanity, using the legendary horrors of a large 1950’s state insane asylum as setting.

More than expose, more even than simple autobiography, 44288 tried to give readers the sights, sounds, smells, feel and actual bite and pain of this milieu, a feat I feel only he has fully accomplished. But he went one step beyond this to describe with all five senses for us (allegedly) sane and normal people the actual terror filled world of insanity. 44288 chose as set that which he knew and where he lived. But he also expanded his presentations into that bizarre inner place where melting watches hang from trees and time moves laterally or backwards or even sideways or stops altogether; and reality as we know it moves with all the profound non-principles of particle physics.

In short, 44288 tours the subconscious of us all. He tears from it great raw and bleeding chunks of horror; he presents to us the interior of the dark side of dementia that surrounded him and the even more frightening dementia we all possess in the dark side of our souls.

The presentation of both these worlds at the same time few artists have attempted, with the exception of Edgar Allan Poe. I am hard pressed to find other serious efforts in extant literature.

So then, let us begin.

My name is Perry Aayr and I am a retired Columbus, Ohio journalist/bureaucrat.

As a bureaucrat, the section I headed wrote the Ohio Driver Manual for many years in the 1970’s. I functioned mostly, however, as a policy level PR Consultant and speechwriter to no less than four members of the Ohio Governor’s Cabinet, the Directors of Ohio’s Highway (now Public) Safety Department. I served two directors from each political party.

I was civil service.

At the time, the Ohio Department of Highway Safety had as its two main constituents the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Ohio State Highway Patrol. We were the Administrative Section. The BMV Registrar and the Colonel of the Patrol reported to my Director who reported to the Governor. Chiefs of Public Information with the BMV and Patrol reported through their boss to my boss and through him to me.

That was the position I held when my bureaucratic career ended.

Prior to entering state service as a public information officer, I enjoyed ten years as a working journalist with the now defunct Hartley Newspapers. It touted on its masthead on thirteen area editions the boast it was Ohio’s Largest Weekly. This was not bragging. Circulation figures proved it.

While there I started in the old hot lead process with obituaries and copy running and the usual gofer duties. I moved in one decade to Editorial Assistant, Copy Editor, News Editor and finally, City Editor in charge of all thirteen editions. I also wrote a weekly column with no small success, handled the Entertainment Page where I served as chief drama critic and roving interviewer of celebrities. I personally interviewed many stars appearing in local versions of Broadway touring plays (which I also reviewed for 100,000 plus readers). Critical drama duties included reporting on, and watching and writing about, many area college productions and most all area Little Theatre productions. I personally met, interviewed and photographed a number of big name performers in film and Broadway touring plays.

So much for personal puffery.

When I retired, I hoped to find an activity that was not political, for I also worked evenings out of a home office as a political consultant and freelance political speechwriter. I designed local and state political campaign strategies and was a writer/producer of campaign literature. This was all in addition to being a consultant for a successful and active lobbying firm run by two former bosses. Suffice it to say, I didn’t get married until I retired.

Now the retirement activity I sought to fill time and occupy my energies had to be a return to literature and drama and journalism and still be of high personal interest. In the back of my mind, I also wanted to hark back to the days when I, too, wanted to write the Great American Novel. This goal was a cliché of its time and was the common dream of most journalists of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Money was not a consideration. Something artistic and something absorbing and time filling and interesting and artistic was.

Seeking ideas about what to do, I reviewed clippings. My late mother had been so taken by her little boy finally finding work she could brag about at bridge club she kept scrapbooks of my newspaper clips through much of the Sixties. Of course the bulk of material soon broke her down and she abandoned the project after a few years.

I started reading at clip one which that dear woman had mounted lovingly in a three-ring binder. Bang! There it was: my first feature story and byline.

How it brought back memories. Getting the assignment, making arrangements, taking a photographer, going to the site, meeting the people, doing the interview and then writing the story. And then breathlessly watching it appear in the Hilltop Record as a front page feature with my name right out there for everybody to see. A journalist’s first byline is truly heady stuff.

So I reread the piece and liked it better than when I originally liked it forty years earlier when I first wrote it.

As it happened, the Hilltop Record had in its circulation area Columbus State Hospital, formerly the Ohio State Asylum For The Insane, and this complex, plus its sister, The State Institution for the Retarded, right across the street, were two huge physical features of the area. In fact, these massive complexes pretty much ate up many prime acres of Columbus, Ohio’s West Side real estate. The Hilltop was a geographical fact and not simply an area neighborhood nickname.

The state hospital, we learned at the editorial offices right before I was given the assignment, had imported a Spanish psychiatrist. His name was Dr. Pedro Corrons. He was introducing to Ohio and the world this radical notion that art could more quickly and effectively find out what troubled the disturbed. And he claimed healers using his new technique could then treat persons with mental problems more quickly and accurately. This, he claimed, was far better than traditional talk therapy.

At the time, art therapy was a new notion and, indeed, Dr. Corrons touted his discovery as groundbreaking, unique and original. He claimed to be an inventor. Of course, it was all that to Ohio…but to the world, who knew? We let his claims stand and put them in quotes. But I got to write the story and get the byline and cut new teeth on one neat front-page feature.

While doing the story, I met a young man about my own age. His paintings were singularly impressive. Indeed, in later years I learned Dr. Corrons used this man’s work to illustrate art therapy all over America and in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and, of course, in his native Spain, along with a few other Continental countries thrown in. Bernard Stone, who later became Dr. Corrons’ disciple and first assistant, and who subsequently took art therapy to Harding Sanitarium, which was at the time the Menninger Clinic of Ohio, told me later in an interview he had more than once heard Dr. Corrons’ presentation and saw him use slides of these oil paintings as the very skeleton that held up his lectures and the visual spine of proof of his theories.

I saw on my feature story interview a number of these outstanding future examples. Mr. Stone claimed the graphic show was amazing. He also said the young man’s work was exhibited by Dr. Corrons, by slide, in Denmark and Sweden as art. At these showings, Dr. Corrons stripped the series of its art therapy sales use and exhibited the oil painting slides as art only. Mr. Stone said Dr. Corrons told him it was highly regarded and accepted by both the public and critics as gallery quality exhibition material. Unfortunately, Bernard Stone disappeared before I could get more information, or find a transcript of the lectures, or find documentation for these Continental showings. However, I did get copies of the slides Dr. Corrons used in his lectures. And they are now in digital form, and to say the least, they are stunning. The obvious pattern of disturbed integration, mental breakdown and subsequent return to a unified personality, which chronicled a single individual’s emotional resurrection, is breathtaking.

This all is ahead of our story here, but the context of this first feature and its history in order to explain subsequent events is well worth the space it takes to tell it.

I looked at the scrapbook and saw this feature, reminisced and recalled the young man told me he was not really an oil painter; he only did that for therapy; but he was, like me, a frustrated writer. And that he, like all of us ink-stained wretches of the era, wanted to write The Great American Novel (GAN). But then he went one step further that few of us ever took. He said he was, in fact, actually going to try.

As noted, this goal for writers was standard for the time, almost a throwaway make-conversation opener. But nobody really sat down and wrote. It was also used as a handy pickup line. And this young man’s dream was one among thousands. The phrase of write the GAN was in the air and a boast heard from many quarters, including bars and college beaneries and especially from people who never wrote, never wanted to write and had trouble finishing their theses, all of whom were soon to buy guitars and hang around grungy Beatnik bars slurp ing up Chickory and writing extremely bad poetry.

So about forty years later, I asked myself:

Wonder if he tried?

And that question, friends, is the beginning of our story and the genesis of this book.

I used old and rusty skills to track him down. Alas, he was lost at 33 as one might expect from an anxiety neurotic with untreated alcoholism and suffering treatments of the time. But like many a tortured soul before him, his creative activities never faltered, his dedication never flagged and he produced and submitted for publication and rehashed and revised his own major work all his short productive life; this, despite great privations and genuine poverty and gutter level want. I was taken by his dedication and found one relative who continued to submit his books for years after he was gone, until she, too, passed. I then found a more distant relation, a cousin, and tracked him down, and interviewed him, and traveled to his home. He pointed me forward on the trail. And there were other relatives I talked to about this man and each, in turn, led me closer and closer.

Oh, it was a wonderful retirement activity.

Finally, I found that one relative, a cousin both distant and ashamed, who actually possessed and saved the work of this notorious, but industrious, black sheep relative. About this man the family was silent. Out of shame they wanted his life hidden, forgotten and buried. But the family, even this far removed, could not, in conscience, destroy the materials that comprised his life work, no matter how much humiliation he brought them by being mentally ill. His probation to a state hospital was the nut of their shame; it was the public black mark upon them. But the work was there in bulk and he had labored so hard, hoped so much, and dedicated himself so completely to his task, plus he had literally died for its production, well…it could not easily be trashed. So the work was saved, but grudgingly and with resentment and fear, and passed along, and stored and shunted aside. And, of course, through time, as the emotional bond of each more distant holder grew thinner and thinner and the whole pile was, when I found it, soon headed to a furnace.

Then I appeared and asked about it.

These young people, who were last in a long list of reluctant custodians, showed me this huge pile of paintings and trunks, yes, trunks of writings, books of sketches, pastels and oils and records and correspondences and fully finished manuscripts of at least nine novels and nine non-fiction books, with still others in all stages of completion or draft. There were children’s stories, cartoons, collections of short stories and plays and poetry and literary experimental pieces, all piled up in the corner of a basement and dusty and wormy and browned and rotting and waiting for the trash collector and a fire.

It was so obvious this generation had said, OK, that’s it, we’ve stored this pile long enough. This era wanted out. They were soon to dump this whole quarter of a basement full of work without a backward look or a single twinge of conscience.

Bury the dead and don’t mark that grave.

Long story short: I moved the material to my place and signed a contract with the heirs and assigns of the family stating that if monies were ever derived from use of this man’s work, in whatever medium or form, a nice percentage goes to them, forever and in perpetuity.

And I would never, repeat never, use his name or give direct reference to the family name, even after all this time. Forty years and still the shame lingered. And they all smiled and signed. They were relieved, glad to find a home for what was for them a mountain of clutter, and happier yet it was away and off their hands and out of their custodianship. Some were titillated I might, in some way, earn them enough money to fund a down payment on a steak dinner. So they all went home and proceeded to sharpen forks.

To me, this was as good a deal as buying Manhattan Island for a string of beads.

Plus I got a whole new retirement activity for a song.

Now 44288 not only tried to write the Great American Novel, I poured through the stuff and I’m convinced he did it.

Hear me? I think he really did it.

If this four novel set called Some Die Mad is not GAN itself it is one hell of magnificent failure. And it was created from the pen of a poor suffering man who died to produce it. It is at least one truly heroic effort born from the womb of a horrendously hostile place and crafted by a man who was the most unlikely instrument of its creation, a man burdened and maimed. This work was carved out of the blood, life and thought of a fatally and massively handicapped man who led a sobbingly sad and thwarted life and was lost in drunken despair in a real life, and an extreme example in the Romantic tradition of the legendary tortured Bohemian artist.

Sadly, I also have in hand one whole lifetime of New York rejection slips. Still, Ohio Mental Patient 44288 never stopped working. Constant rebuke would not snuff this huge flame of hope.

Now at last 44288 meets one publisher who welcomes him with open arms in an era where technology has made his simple dream reachable and allows his work to become accessible. We have leapfrogged over the slush pile and its truly spaced out gatekeepers. It’s a shame 44 isn’t alive to see it.

This is Part IV, of the quatrain Some Die Mad. It is entitled Islands In Time and is presented here with only minor editing. Quite frankly, I don’t have the talent to reshape serious literature nor false pride enough to second guess this author. As a matter of fact, I love this work as is and most especially for its warts. I find rough spots enhance its authenticity. These raw segments add to the piece rather than detract. In fact, the warts are many times more revealing of author, story and set than a slicked up presentation could ever accomplish. Look, this work was formed in the crucible of a particularly disordered and chaotic life. Sometimes life is not pretty, or slick, or even coherent, much less ordered. Order could be a myth and in this sense all literature lies. I choose to keep 44288 honest in his lying by leaving rough edges. So Some Die Mad is published here pretty much as originally written.

Note: 44288’s records tell me 44 began Mad in January of 1963 at Columbus State Hospital, while working as a chaplain’s assistant, and under the guidance and help of his former creative writing instructor and artistic mentor, noted Ohio Poet Paul Bennett of Denison University. The eminent psychiatrist and forensic diagnostician, Dr. Benjamin Kovitz, then clinical director of Columbus State Hospital and chief of resident education, aided and encouraged production.

Ohio Mental Patient 44288 also records he finished most of the material around November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He further records he finished completely, adding all of this segment, Part IV, Islands In Time, by the end of January of 1964.

Dr. Tibor Agoston, a regularly publishing theoretical psychoanalyst from Vienna and a Columbus State Hospital psychiatric consultant and professor for resident psychiatrists, asked for, received and read the completed manuscript. He was so impressed he arranged a reading of Some Die Mad by a professional literary agency. His choice was not just any agency. Dr. Agoston got a reading for 44288 from Harold Ober Associates of New York City. This was the agency that had represented no less an artist than F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, after many months, in the summer of 1964, they declined handling the piece without comment.

Of course, it was not 44’s fault that was the year that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rocketed to publication success and later became an American film classic.

No matter, Some Die Mad rides the lighting bolt. It may miss finding literature’s Holy Grail but where are the books that actually found it?

While Nest cleared a respectable literary high jump, it was not high art or did it wish to be. 44288 shot out into space with a truly serious literary attempt. To 44, GAN was not idle dream; this man was young, grandiose, serious and dedicated. He was, and alas for him personally, also obsessed. This was his legacy; this was to be his contribution; this was his bid for immortality; this work was his progeny.

For my money I prefer the larger attempt, even if failed. I prefer the higher bar even if it is barely cleared and that crossbar gets hit and shakes enough to fall; I prefer to read a record of an impossible attempt by one human being to lasso light. Failures can have their own magnificence and the English routinely honor great attempts at hopeless causes. This could be yet another in that great and honored tradition.

Or it just may be what 44288 always hoped: a true GAN.

I am personally convinced he did exactly what he set out to do.

You, dear reader, will be the final judge.

Without more, I present Part IV, Islands In Time, the conclusion of 44288’s stunning and magnificent quatrain, Some Die Mad.

Sincerely,

Perry Aayr

P.S. Feel free here to read the climax, The Diary, first. It is near the end it won’t hurt to know where you’re headed. The Diary is a powerful, if not an axe to the forehead tour de force. It is an epistolary record of a tortured mind imploding. And don’t just skim it over and say, Aw, damn, Hortense, we been snookered. This here is one of them damn, dumb, arty, downer ends.

Admittedly, a quick read of The Diary looks like that might be the case. But The Diary is, in fact, a great and glorious life affirming and positive climax. It is Mythmaster Joseph Campbell’s Classic Heroic Story Line defined and fulfilled. It is the end point of the The Jarvis Novel Writing Method’s Masterpiece and Heroic Myth arc. Both these descriptions fit this work like spandex.

The Diary is not only life affirming and the climax and endpoint, it is a natural and carefully prepared and stunning climax; it could stand alone as a brilliantly executed record of the death of one sick personality, and the final admission that that personality, as formed, can not and will not and should not endure. Hero must die to live. The direct implication is clear: Malcolm Ward, our mythic Hero, must die to live. And, instead of Aw, shucks… we have Phoenix rising. One new healthy self pops out the chest of Malcolm dead like some ferocious fully formed alien ready for action, all new and complete and whole and active and ready to eat reality’s face off. The suppressed healthy core kills the sick core, incubates in the corpse and is violently born to survive, to live on in health and happiness and true to its nature in some other fully realized, but essentially new and different and quiet fulfillment.

If apotheoses and epiphanies define high art, we have them here in abundance.

The story is somewhat reminiscent of Somerset Maugham’s classic, The Razor’s Edge.

His major character receives enlightenment from Indian mysticism that cures his personal torture from horrible experiences in WWI (a common theme of literature of the Twenties and Thirties). He goes on to drive a New York taxi in happy, fulfilled and life-affirming obscurity. This transition from burn out level brilliancy to banality is, in and of itself, an artistic cliché in both theater and prose.

But how we get there, and in this version most particularly, how we get there through The Diary, simply thrills.

Read.

Enjoy.

Prepare to poop your pants.

P.P.S. Attention All English Majors: Please notice the first two words of Part II, Auschwitz, Ohio, are Malcolm awakes. And one of the last words in Part IV, Islands in Time, is riddle.

This significant word is mouthed by one Dr. Koan. Koan?

Hello?

As in Zen Buddhism?

A riddle in Zen is given the student and if one solves it he has the key to satori or enlightenment (e.g., What is the sound of one hand clapping?).

This was the chosen path to cosmic awareness of the Fifties (in contrast to Indian mysticism cures for WW I post traumatic psychosis).

Draw the lines.

See the allegory?

Do a paper.

Where are all those English majors when you actually need them?

P.P.P.S. A final heartfelt bitch:

Hello, New York, where you been all these years?

I have a wall full of pre-printed little rejection slips.

Who were all these flaky major publishing house manuscript readers graduated Bryn Mawr, girls who started with the serious publishing houses squatting over the slush pile, spread-legged and puffing, all those menstruating, boy crazy, giggly, hormonally gifted, and ultimately selfish and self-obsessed English grads seeking publishing glory? These slips were mostly from girls, with only an occasional boy. These gatekeepers kept sending 44288, or, later, his one sympathetic relative, literally dozens of rejection slips over almost three decades. Melodious names they signed like Muffy and Shawn.

You kids blind?

Or what!

Ooo, its all so big and heavy. Ooo, look here, it’s a damn downer ending, no no no. Ooo, I just made a date. Ooo, tell the mail room guy to send this ugly heavy monster back right now and just stuff it with that little rejection slip saying ‘Not for us.’ Really, who would ever read such a thing? Why, weighing it for postage gives you PMS. Hey, Muff, you want a bagel and some chickory because I dearly want to hear about your new Yalie date and don’t you just dare leave out the details? Ooo.

About one whole wall could be papered with rejection slips sent for decades straight, all from the same person, but with different names and from different times.

44288 never knew an agent, never made a contact, never got an in with the exception of his first reading by the prestigious Harold Ober Literary Agency. He just, well, went on and wrote his poor bleeding heart out. He probably bummed postage money and bought typists with needed wine money and then threw this gold in a mailbox and hoped.

It hurts me to see all of 44’s heartwarming and personal collection of mass printed Get Lost letters signed Buffy.

Hang your heads, boys and girls. Every literature professor who ever taught you should be summarily fired and/or get his pension revoked. And if that professor is already dead, better do both now and all together and all at once.

What a sorry collection of mindless twits, what a huge gaggle of grossly inattentive, ignorant, blind and callous boneheads.

You missed this?

Why, it gives a feeling thinking person the vapors.

And no, I’m not as bitter as I am disgusted.

Letter to 44288

Dear 44,

Hope this helps:

You are accepted. We will publish your book. Contract follows. Finally and high time, too. Here’s that one, single, thigh-slap YES letter you waited your whole life for.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, go celebrate. Take a rest. You deserve it. We gonna walk your baby and he gonna breathe free!

With love, sadness, great affection, And boundless admiration,

Your friend and publisher, Perry Aayr.

P.S. Copies to about two dozen, damn, dumb, mindless Buffy twats