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That is my country, that river
December 13, 1927–September 1944
[My parents] are sturdy, steadfast people, poorly educated and—especially my mother—very well read. My relatives are strangely unpredictable and rather wildly kind.
—from a letter to Mary Oliver, September 16, 1965
Riverview Cemetery commands the crest of an Appalachian foothill where the Ohio River flows past Martins Ferry, Ohio. Time and again, as a teenager in the early 1940s, James Wright climbed to this highest point above the river, anxious to feel “the sense, the vista” he found in books. But the smoke and soot from steel mills obscured the steep, matching hills of West Virginia on the opposite shore. Behind him, to the west, farmland, orchards, and fields had been disfigured by coal and strip mines; the river, too, was fouled by refuse and waste. Yet the Ohio defines the geography and the essence of the place; it is a boundary and a dark presence. The once thriving industrial town stretches along a narrow shelf half a mile wide, a hundred feet above the river’s floodplain. In Wright’s youth this bottomland was crowded with factories, tenements, and docks, whole neighborhoods at risk of flooding each spring. He counted himself “among the brief green things”—the sumac, trillium, and weeds—that survived in a ravaged place.
By the time Wright left Martins Ferry in June 1946, he knew every street and alleyway in his hometown, each muddy footpath that stretched for miles along the river. He knew the Ohio in all its moods; he knew what poverty was, and hard work. When Wright enlisted in the army at the age of eighteen, he swore he would never return to the Ohio Valley; he made only brief visits back home.
He climbed to the graveyard’s summit again on Christmas Eve 1951, a month before he graduated from Kenyon College. Liberty Kardules, a nursing student and high school classmate, stood beside him. They could see the Blaw-Knox and Laughlin steel mills dominating the northern edge of the flats beside the river and, among the factories, the green rectangle of the high school football field. They saw the train and streetcar lines, and the Terminal Bridge crossing at the tip of Wheeling Island. On the upper plateau, the twin blue domes of the Greek Orthodox church stood out from the grid of brick and clapboard houses. Wright gestured to the town below them and cursed the place: “‘Give up hope, all ye who enter here.’ It’s pure hell down there. Just pure hell.” Liberty agreed. “We knew that we had to get out of there or it would kill us.” Joined in desperation, the couple descended the stairs of that same church six weeks later as husband and wife.
Wright found himself in Martins Ferry once more in August 1953, with Liberty and their infant son, Franz. They had just returned from a year in Vienna and spent one night in her father’s house on Pearl Street. During their absence, Liberty’s mother had died of cancer, and when they visited her grave near the cemetery’s peak, Wright looked out once more on his hometown. Then twenty-five, he was about to take his young family on the long train journey to Seattle to continue his graduate studies. His rage to escape the Ohio Valley remained, but the pull of memory would prove stronger still. Wright’s childhood place came to occupy the center of his poetic imagination; over the remaining twenty-seven years of his life, he made it into an unmistakable landscape in American literature.
Wright came to accept the “peculiar kind of devotion” he felt toward Martins Ferry and its townspeople. “I have done a great deal of wandering,” he recalled late in his life—to Japan and Hawaii, throughout Europe and the United States. “Yet all of these places taken together do not have the vastness in my mind that I still find when I contemplate, as I’ve so often done in my books, the small river town of Martins Ferry in southeastern Ohio.” Wright remembered with startling immediacy “the dark howlings and twangs of the language I grew up with: the nearly unspeakable violences of the spirit and body, spun suddenly into baroque figures of speech across the sooty alleys near the river and up and down the B&O railroad track that lay peaceful among the hobo jungles like a scar.”
Martins Ferry was blighted in ways typical to industrial river towns throughout the early twentieth century: its hillsides gouged by strip mines, the air blackened by coal smoke, and the river polluted by sewage and oil. But as with other towns that flourished in the Ohio Valley, the factories and mines attracted a great diversity of people. The headstones in Riverview Cemetery chronicle the history of Martins Ferry’s growth; the older ones on the lower edge bear the names of Welsh coal miners from the mid-1800s. Ascending the slope, the stones describe successive waves of immigrants from Hungary, Poland, Italy, Greece, Romania, England, and Ireland.
In the “Childhood Sketch” he drafted in August 1978, Wright says of Martins Ferry: “I had lived in all of the neighborhoods except the wealthy ones up on the hills away from the factories and the river, and I knew most of the languages, and carry with me today the affections of those words.” Wright felt a sharp grief for those he left behind in Ohio; they are both the subject of and the intended audience for his poems. After years of rootlessness, he came to cherish the multicultural, working-class neighborhoods of his youth, and Wright’s imagination always returned to the banks of the Ohio River. “In form and body it remains itself one of the magnificent rivers of the world. It could gather into itself the Seine, the Arno, and the Adige, and still have room for a whole mile of drifting lost lives.”
* * *
In languages spoken by the native peoples of the Ohio Valley, many names for the river translate as “beautiful.” The Ohio flows south and west for a thousand miles, from the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers—the site of Pittsburgh—to Cairo, Illinois, where it joins the Mississippi. Various Algonquian tribes made their home in the valley and defended the land west of the river from both local Iroquois and European pioneers. Beginning in 1744 and continuing for two decades, British and French troops battled for possession of the Ohio River and its surrounding territories. Native warriors prevented settlements west of the river until after the Revolutionary War, when thousands of colonists and more recent immigrants crossed the Allegheny and Appalachian mountain ranges to claim land for homesteading. Indigenous tribes were pushed farther inland, but the battle for control of the river was prolonged and bitter. In some native tongues the Ohio became known as the “River of Blood.”
The first permanent settlement on the western shore, across from the fortified military post at Wheeling, Virginia, sprang up around a ferry landing, on a broad stretch of flatland. Absalom Martin had helped his father-in-law, Ebenezer Zane, survey the surrounding land, and Martin’s ferry became the starting point of “a good waggon Road,” as Zane called it, between Wheeling and Maysville, Kentucky. Zane’s Trace, a shorter and more reliable route west, less prone to the seasonal dangers of river travel, opened in 1797. For decades the town of Martins Ferry remained a major crossroads and entry point to the Northwest Territory—what became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The Zane family and other pioneers planted orchards of fruit trees, berry bushes, and grape vines on Wheeling Island and the open fields on the western shore, cultivating tracts they then sold to the steady waves of settlers. In childhood, Wright knew the legacy of those early farmers: along the riverbank, amid tangles of shrub oak and sumac, the fragrances of blossoming pear, peach, and apple trees mingled with the smell of locust trees in springtime.
European immigrants joined colonial homesteaders in the early 1800s, bypassing coastal states to settle directly in the interior. This northern heartland of the Midwest became the first region in the United States to prohibit slavery, and “free-thinkers”—who advocated tolerance and the necessity of education—influenced the region’s politics well into the twentieth century. The river formed a boundary between free and slave states prior to the Civil War, and by 1840, Ohio had more safe houses for escaping slaves than any other state. Martins Ferry, across the river from the slave-trading market in Wheeling, became a crucial haven.
Many Scots-Irish immigrants from England’s northern borderlands were self-sufficient farmers who raised their own livestock, a kind of plain-folk, hardscrabble farming that took root in the backcountry of Appalachia as a separate way of life. This “Cohee” culture (derived from “yeomen”) had enormous influence upon Wright’s mother, Jessie, who spent her childhood on a subsistence farm in northern West Virginia. Martins Ferry, too, first developed as a farming community, and in the 1860s was still surrounded by vineyards, orchards, cornfields, and farms.
The discovery of coal seams running beneath neighboring hillsides ignited the town’s industrial growth. With limestone, clay, and iron ore also close at hand, the riverfront made an ideal location for an iron-smelting blast furnace. In 1853, the Penn Central Railroad opened the entire area to heavy industry. Steel towns like Martins Ferry, Steubenville, Weirton, Benwood, and many others sprang up all along the Ohio River, which gave access to national and global markets. By the 1870s, Wheeling had become a major rail hub, while in Martins Ferry two separate train lines cut through the river’s wide floodplain, known as the Bottom. When the flats grew overcrowded, the town’s business district and wealthier citizens moved to the upper plateau above the river. The Ohio is a quarter-mile wide where the prominent brick houses of Martins Ferry ascend the western bank.
Hundreds of English and Welsh coal miners lived in Martins Ferry by the end of the nineteenth century, working in mines sunk straight into the hillsides. Wheeling Steel shuttled carloads of coal from the “tipple” down to the mill on elevated tracks that passed over working-class neighborhoods at the northern edge of town. With the mining boom, Martins Ferry’s population tripled by 1900, and this growth continued unabated at the time of Wright’s birth in 1927. Immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Hungary joined the local Appalachian workers, together with African-Americans from the South. During Wright’s adolescence, Martins Ferry boasted twenty thousand inhabitants, most laboring in the steel mills along the river or the coal mines in interior hill country to the west.
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When James Wright’s parents—Jessie and Dudley—married in March 1916, they united families with roots on both sides of the Ohio River reaching back more than a century. Wright described his mother’s parents, born and raised in West Virginia, as “honest-to-God hillbillies to a fare-thee-well.” Jacob James Rawley Lyons, Jessie’s father, was born April 17, 1859, near the western border of present-day Virginia, and died at the age of fifty-seven in June 1916. Rawley Lyons was twenty years old when he married Elizabeth Bedora Starkey—the matriarch of the Lyons family and a cherished presence in Wright’s childhood.
Elizabeth, or “Biddy,” was born in Hundred, West Virginia, on September 21, 1862, and married Rawley Lyons at the age of sixteen. Together they worked a subsistence farm in hill country a few miles east of the Ohio River in the West Virginia panhandle. Nearly a decade passed before their first child was born—a girl who died in infancy—but Biddy gave birth to seven more children over the next fifteen years. Jessie, born August 21, 1897, was the middle child, with two older sisters, an older brother, William, and three younger brothers.
Soon after the birth of the youngest, Sherman, in 1905, Rawley Lyons disappeared and was never heard from again. Though Biddy now faced the hardship of raising seven children on her own, a sense of relief followed her husband’s desertion. It freed her from Lyons’s violent temper, which grew worse the more he drank. The family left the farm Jessie had known as a girl and relocated across the river in Bridgeport, Ohio, the town just south of Martins Ferry. They moved often during her childhood, and though Jessie attended school only through the sixth grade, she became a voracious reader. Wright would later describe how his mother “slaved—it is the true word—in a laundry” from the time she was sixteen. After crossing the river into North Wheeling each day with her sister, Jessie worked the enormous ironing presses known as “mangles.” Jim’s aunt Grace would work at the White Swan Laundry her entire life.
Dudley Wright’s even temper and steady employment made him an ideal suitor for Jessie; he was also handsome, quiet, and kind. Over the course of their marriage, he proved to be a man of great forbearance as well. Like Jessie, he was a middle child from a large family who had grown up in poverty. Dudley’s father, Spencer Washington Sterms Wright, was born in 1861, not far from the birthplace of Biddy Lyons, south of Wheeling near the Ohio River. Ellen Louise Beck, Dudley’s mother, became Spencer Wright’s second wife, and like him had been raised in Belmont County, Ohio, twenty miles west of the river.
Wright spoke often of his Irish ancestry, common to both sides of his family; he regretted his “almost obscene gift of gab, which I learned from my poor frustrated mother.” He came to distrust the ease he felt in talking and storytelling. A more debilitating physical legacy, however, also came down to him: both grandfathers were alcoholics. Spencer Wright died in 1932 at the age of sixty-four as a consequence of his drinking. He had fathered eight children and, in many ways, had been as absent from his family as Jessie’s father had been.
John Dudley Ira Wright was born June 26, 1893, in Bridgeport, Ohio. By the time his father tried to get sober, he could no longer hold a job, forcing his children to find work. Dudley’s four sisters and a brother eventually scattered throughout Ohio and the Midwest, and only his sister Lillian remained close to him and his family. Dudley—who never drank—completed the eighth grade before taking a job at the Hinge Works in Wheeling, a factory that soon became the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company. He was fourteen years old.
Wright’s father spent his entire working life on a factory assembly line. He began as a press roller of steel before training as a die setter—a tedious job that nevertheless demanded skill and concentration. The Wheeling plant, an immense brick structure on the southeastern edge of the city, produced the zinc lids and rings used to seal mason jars. Dudley made the precise adjustments necessary to cut the lids from their metal matrix before they were fitted with rubber sealing rings. The home canning industry flourished throughout the Depression, and Dudley was thus rarely out of work—even during the worst years of the early 1930s. On his marriage certificate from March 1916, when he was twenty-two years old, Wright’s father listed his occupation as “Press Operator, Glass Works.” Jessie was then eighteen and glad to quit her job at the White Swan Laundry. The couple moved a few miles north, crossing the town line from Bridgeport into Martins Ferry.
After four years of marriage, Jessie and Dudley Wright adopted an eighteen-month-old baby girl, Margaret, from an orphanage in Wheeling. Jessie was anxious to start a family, but, as with her own mother, years passed before she first conceived. Marge was seven years old when Jessie’s first son, Theodore (called Ted), was born in July 1925. By then, Jessie had begun moving the family practically every year from one rented house to another. She was often nervous and irritable, and only Dudley’s return each night brought her some peace.
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James Arlington Wright was born at home on December 13, 1927. Jessie gave birth in an old-fashioned double bed with a wrought-iron headboard; she often said Jimmy was spoiled from the start. As was common, she spent ten days in bed nursing the newborn, but when she returned to her chores the boy squalled endlessly. In Aetnaville, at the southern edge of Martins Ferry, the Wrights’ home stood a few hundred yards from the river. Day and night, they heard the clatter of streetcars and coal cars, punctuated by the whistles of B&O freight trains and of shift changes at the factories. In the silence beneath, the Ohio River remained “part of my spirit,” Wright realized. “I always felt, since I was a kid, the need of being near water.”
“I was born at 613 Union Street,” Wright recalled late in life. “I don’t know why I should cling to that particular useless detail.” He could remember vast catalogs of detail, but Wright cherished this simple fact—in part because his family moved so often when he was young. Before he was ten he had lived in six different houses in every corner of Martins Ferry. Landlords offered a month’s free rent to tenants who stayed a full year, but the family’s frequent moves arose as much from Jessie’s restlessness as from the struggle to keep ahead. “It was like hopscotch,” Marge recalled. “Mother had a little gypsy in her, I think.” In many of the Wrights’ rented homes—including houses on Broadway, Walnut Street, Pearl Street, and South Third Street—Jessie took in boarders to help pay the rent; men came to town without their families to work in the mines or the steel mills. But Jessie was uncomfortable with the proximity and familiarity of neighbors. She even put bottles of colored water on her windowsills, a superstition she knew would upset the local clergy and churchgoing women.
Dudley’s patience and equanimity secured whatever happiness Wright’s parents knew in marriage—only he could quiet Jessie’s temper. She cursed Dudley each morning as he left for work, even as he bent to kiss her goodbye. The image of Jessie, always a strict disciplinarian, “swearing at the dishes” in Wright’s poem “How My Fever Left” is part of a portrait taken from life. Yet her children worshipped her, and she remained ever attentive to their needs and health. As a boy, Jim tested his mother’s patience on every walk to the grocery store, “stopping to look at every plant, every twig.” A photograph of Wright at ten months, seated between his sister and his brother Ted on a broad porch railing, shows this same curiosity, his left eyebrow slightly raised. This distinctive look appears in another photo taken at Christmas a week after his fifth birthday. Jim’s smile beams and his arched left eyebrow makes him seem both cautious and alert—an expression captured in photographs throughout his life.
Though his mother remained a resolute skeptic, two distinct strains of Christianity formed part of Wright’s upbringing: the strict mores of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and the animated drama of Pentecostalism. Jessie allowed Dudley to take their sons to church on Sundays, but Marge’s religious fervor led to an estrangement from her mother. Marge attended the fundamentalist Assembly of God church on her own, and she rebelled against her parents’ authority. At fifteen she left school and crossed the river into Wheeling to marry Paul Pyle, a man six years older who had just returned from California—“hoboing and hopping freight trains.” Their marriage lasted more than sixty years, until Marge’s death in 1996. The couple married in the depths of the Depression, and while Jim recalled putting cardboard in his shoes to cover the holes, Marge knew that their family had been spared worse hardships.
Skilled laborers like Dudley lived on the “streets with names” on the town’s upper plateau—a world apart from the houseboats, shacks, and tenements on the numbered streets near the train tracks and the river. Dudley continued to work, and there was always food on the table; Wright’s parents shared what they could and gave odd jobs to drifters in exchange for meals. But in the faces of those around him, Wright saw the daily struggle that life had become.
Martins Ferry had two “hot” mills—the Laughlin steel mill and the Aetna mill—where molten steel was rolled in slabs; day laborers contracted for “piecework” and got paid for the tonnage they produced each day. Towering brick smokestacks sent plumes of coal dust into the air, while every home also burned coal for heat. At night the town and hills above it were lit red from the blast furnaces pouring steel, and workers emerged from factory shifts blackened with soot. Homes quickly became grimy with the powdery ash, as did snow as soon as it fell. Local mining towns met the heavy demand for coal, with trains a hundred cars long—some stretching over two miles—passing every day along the river. These freight trains slowed as they moved through the populous flats, and townspeople jumped onto the open cars to throw coal down to others pushing wheelbarrows through the charred weeds. In winter, many gathered tree branches and logs washed up on the riverbank for fuel.
Vast neighborhoods of homes, businesses, and factories surrounded the thriving industrial commerce on the flatland along the river. The Train (or Terminal) Bridge marked the southern edge of town. On a narrow wooden walkway beside the tracks, Dudley and hundreds of other workers crossed the bridge every day to reach the factories and rail yards in Wheeling. Suspended a hundred feet above the river, the narrow boardwalk became treacherous with ice and snow in winter. Wheeling was then a city of more than a hundred thousand—six times the size of Martins Ferry—with an extensive downtown, five movie theaters, and the Capitol Theatre, which hosted Jamboree, the sole competitor to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.
Wright could sit for hours in front of the radio, and he listened to everything—not just country music but weekly serials, baseball games, and music of all kinds. He also paid close attention to the cadences and patterns of speech all around him; his “photographic” memory was linked to an uncommon aural acuity. “I have a reasonably good ear for music,” he once wrote, “and when I am alone, I can hear voices that spoke to me twenty years ago.”
* * *
Floods threatened towns all along the Ohio River during the snowmelt each spring. In March 1936, during a spell of bitter cold weather, floodwaters rose for three days, ultimately cresting more than eighteen feet above flood stage. The entire river valley, from Pittsburgh south to the Mississippi—including all of eastern Ohio—was ravaged. The swollen river rose nearly to the upper shelf of the town, and Wheeling Island flooded completely. A friend of Wright’s watched as the Wheeling Gospel Tabernacle was swept from the northern tip of the island, toppling homes before it into the surging waters. Seventeen deaths were reported in the local vicinity alone.
Wright, eight years old and living at the southern end of town just clear of the cresting river, witnessed the ferocity of the flood and the massive cleanup effort that followed. Families evacuated from the bottomland were housed in schools, churches, and fire stations in town—a forced camaraderie among those left homeless. All but the sturdiest brick structures were cleared from the flats; the homes and factory buildings left standing were filled with mud, and most were beyond repair. The tragedy united Ferrians in a profound way, helping define the community by the determination they shared to restore the town and overcome the devastation. As part of that effort, the Works Progress Administration built a public swimming pool in a downtown city park that summer, and Wright’s father and uncles “helped dig that hole in the ground.… No grave for once.” A luminous epiphany written decades later, “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio” captures the sense of renewal and possibility he then felt. But Wright and his friends, “children of the blast furnaces and factories and mines, kept faith with the river.” They continued to swim in the Ohio.
Swimming in the Ohio River was more common to the generation of Wright’s parents; it had always been dangerous. Powerful eddy currents surge at the northern tip of Wheeling Island, where the main course of the river follows the West Virginia shore and a smaller channel separates the island from Ohio. The “bare-ass beach” where Wright and other children swam was beneath the concrete piers of the Train Bridge, beyond the tracks and weeds along the riverbank. After work in the summer, Dudley often took his boys down to the river, and Wright treasured memories of swimming with his brother Ted, who recalled “a kind of a poor-man’s beach” where barges off-loaded gravel and sand. But every year brought news of drownings, especially in early summer when the water ran high. The dredging of sand from the river created whirlpools with incredible force, known by the “hideous Ohio phrase—a suckhole.” Both Jim and Ted witnessed such deaths. With his friend Thomas Hodge and other Boy Scouts, Jim helped search for boys who were lost to the river. The effort to recover the bodies often demanded the skills of a professional diver named John Shunk, who dragged the river bottom with huge iron hooks. Many times, they searched without success.
* * *
Just after Wright turned ten at the end of December 1937, his mother moved the family into the first home they ever owned: a large gray house in the southern part of town, beside a streetcar stop and the Nickles Bakery. The two-story structure at 1016 Broadway had a wide front porch and an alley at the back shored up with railroad ties, where a steep slope dropped off to the flats and the river. Ted was twelve years old when they moved in just before Christmas; Marge was already married, with a son the same age as Jessie’s youngest, Jack, who was three. The family soon adopted a black-and-white spaniel mutt named Queenie, who chose Jim as her favorite. The front yard had a mulberry tree, two sycamores, and a maple, and Jim could often be found among their branches. He lived in this house for seven and a half years—the longest period he ever spent beneath one roof. More than any other place, 1016 Broadway formed his idea of home.
Tom Hodge knew Jim best between the ages of ten and fourteen, during middle school and their early years of high school. Though two years younger, Hodge was precocious and kept pace with Jim’s intense curiosity. In summer they roamed west of town, stealing fruit from arbors and orchards “up on the hill,” as shown in “An Offering for Mr. Bluehart.” Hodge lived two blocks away, and between their homes stood the South School, which Wright entered in the middle of fifth grade. As he revealed in an autobiographical essay written at the end of high school, this was when Wright “discovered with a furious awe that he was a poet; a poor one, but a poet all the same.”
Encouraged by his parents, Jim had become an avid reader; books filled their home. Jessie had taught Jim to read before he entered school, and she often made her sons sit at the kitchen table and read to her as she did chores. By the age of ten, Wright was constantly seeking out new books and writers, and Tom Hodge witnessed Wright’s discovery of poetry through the work of Lord Byron. A boarder in the Hodge home, an itinerant preacher, had left behind a sizable collection of books, and Tom told Wright “he could just go through the books, read any one he wanted and keep any one he wanted. So Jim had his own little library at our place.” The two friends would often sit on the porch and talk of poetry. Byron’s poems captured Wright’s imagination, and even Jack, at the age of seven, remembered his brother declaiming:
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.
Of course, Jack could make little sense of “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” but Jim began reciting poems to anyone. He also discovered the heavily rhymed verse of James Whitcomb Riley, which often used midwestern dialects, but the poems of the English Romantics—Byron, Shelley, Blake, and Keats—were his earliest infatuation. “One of the strangest experiences of my life,” Wright later recalled, “was my first reading, as a child, of the Blake line ‘The Ohio shall wash my stains from me.’”
By the age of twelve, he had begun writing sonnets; he drafted hundreds of them throughout high school and his service in the army. When he entered Shreve High School in September 1941, he thought of himself as a writer and treasured the certificate of merit awarded by the American Legion for an essay in his freshman year. But Wright remained an unexceptional student, “solitary and morose,” and most of his courses amounted to vocational training. All that fall, from the porch of the Hodge home on Pearl Street or crouched beside the radio’s speaker, he and Tom listened to Pirates baseball games from Pittsburgh, Joe Louis prizefights, and serial mysteries, like The Green Hornet and Inner Sanctum. But reports of the war in Europe began to dominate the broadcasts, and soon many older friends had enlisted and shipped out.
English verse was not the only poetry to claim Wright’s attention. For years, he visited Grandma Lyons after school each day, and her warmth and understanding helped him weather his mother’s harsh discipline and bitterness. Biddy encouraged her grandson to read the Bible, a practice they came to share. The King James Bible had a profound and lasting impact on Wright’s language and thought; he received his own copy in Sunday school at the age of nine. He attended the First Christian Church regularly and was baptized in the fall of his sophomore year, which he considered a decisive event. Fellow churchgoers thought Jim might take up the ministry, and he briefly considered it himself. Wright’s deepening interest in theology and metaphysics, however, contributed to the nervous breakdown he suffered as a teenager in the summer of 1943.
His trouble began with the death of Grandma Lyons the previous fall—the first death of someone Jim felt close to. Not only did Wright mourn the loss of a beloved confederate who could ease his mother’s temper and agitation, but he also felt that Biddy had understood him better than anyone. Moreover, the war now overshadowed daily life; in the winter of 1943, radio reports chronicled the siege of Stalingrad. Despite the enlistment of so many young men and women, the population of Martins Ferry actually swelled, as the steel mills and factories worked around the clock to fortify the war effort. Ted graduated from high school in June 1943 and enlisted that July, leaving Jim the oldest son at home.
Two other books pilfered from the Hodge family’s attic compounded Wright’s anxieties that summer. One was The Bible Unmasked, which featured explicit pen and ink drawings of erotic scenes from the Old Testament and argued that incidents of incest and prostitution involving biblical patriarchs proved the immoral and contradictory nature of Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. In response, Wright began reading the Bible obsessively. Ted’s wife, Helen, believed this helped trigger his breakdown. “When he came home from the hospital, the doctor told him, ‘No more Bibles in the house. Get rid of all of them!’”
When Jack questioned their mother, Jessie told him that his brother had heard voices in his head debating the existence of God. She blamed another of the books Jim had found in the preacher’s library: The Mysterious Universe. Published in 1932 by a noted astrophysicist, the work argues that, given the infinite expanse of the universe, the presence of human beings on a tiny planet at the edge of one of millions of galaxies is utterly insignificant—to say nothing of any one life. As Wright struggled with fundamental questions of theology, the book became a source of anguish. In his application to Kenyon College in the fall of 1947, he confirmed Jessie’s suspicion that his reading had worked to undermine his sanity.
In about my fourteenth year, suddenly I discovered that the universe was infinite, that somewhere in the universe spun a tiny clot of mud called earth, whereon vegetated an ape-like creature known as man; and explosively I observed that I was alive upon the earth. The actions which were bound to effect intellectual isolation were inevitable.… Numerous months of my middle adolescence were spent inside a painful solitary shell.
As Wright later confessed, the mental turmoil he felt when he woke one morning compelled him to put his fist through a mirror. His parents took him to Ohio Valley General Hospital in North Wheeling, where he spent six weeks in the psychiatric ward, from the end of August into October. Doctors there administered insulin shock therapy—a precursor to electroshock treatments—that induced periods of intense hunger. Wright’s autobiography, written two and a half years later, gives a glancing description of his breakdown in the summer of 1943: “He became possessed by the flooding conviction that everything he had ever seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted, and slept with had to be recorded. His fingers sought out volumes of the writings of Milton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Keats, and any number of earth’s most powerful dreamers. Desperately he raged into Darwin’s Origin of Species, but it was too much.”
Recovered too late to begin his junior year, in October Wright crossed the river into Wheeling and found work at Bolton’s Cigar Store and Restaurant. Four months later he got a job on the loading dock at Sears, Roebuck & Co., “where he met, and was impressed by, the philosophy of truck drivers, furniture repair men, and trash collectors.” In the daily grind of this backbreaking work he also befriended a high school senior immersed in mathematics and physics, and the two talked constantly. Wright would later find joy in recounting this turn of events, calling it “a time when I began to rise from the dead.” When he returned to high school, Wright wanted to excel, determined to master Latin and mathematics and to seek a college degree. He knew that to stay in Ohio meant a lifetime of rough physical labor without reprieve. Throughout his adolescence, Wright “abominated the Ohio Valley,” and he came to blame this deep-seated hatred for the breakdown he had suffered. In his first letter to Robert Bly on July 22, 1958, Wright cursed Martins Ferry, “that unspeakable rat-hole where I grew up … the slag heaps and the black trees and the stool-washed river and the chemicals from the factories of Wheeling Steel, Blaw Knox, the Hanna Coal Co. which … are the only images of childhood I can ever have.” Later in life, Wright endured a recurring nightmare in which he was stripped of his college degrees and forced to return to work in a factory in Martins Ferry.
Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Blunk
