David Means: Hystopia

Maudsley’s report went on to conclude that it was highly probable that a connection existed between the holing-up syndrome (Stiller’s disease) and Allen’s suicide, years later, although the exact factors were indeterminate and open to speculation.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Suicide is an act around which we construct an assortment of potential causal conditions, none of which is provable. In his notebooks, Allen proposed a number of ways to commit the act. Here, below, is a list, transcribed as it appeared in his early notebooks:

• Go to the top of the new parking structure on Howard Street and toss myself off. But first spend some time tightrope-walking along the edge; make birdlike gestures and attract attention from those down below until a crowd gathers. Wave back at them and establish a rapport of some kind until someone yells, Jump, jump.

• Dig deep hole in Sleeping Bear sand dunes and then somehow rig sand slide to bury self if p— [illegible pencil scrawl].

• Get Billy Thompson angry enough to kill me when he comes back — if he comes back … [illegible pencil scrawl].

• Immolation in the style of monk, pour accelerants and ignite self outside the library — or in Bronson Park; make sure it’s done in an off-the-cuff manner and sit still during the raging fire, as stately still as possible.

• Jump straight into an ice fishing hole on King Lake, with feet pointed — during daytime — and then come up under the ice to the side and stare up through ice until blackout and suffocation transpire.

• Locate and join group of Wayward Tendency fuckups — full regalia, Harley cycles and etc. — and get self into some police/wayward battle.

• Start riot fire — anywhere in town, in a circular pattern so that fires converge and eventually entrap me. [Indiscernible scribble] … fire somehow guided by forces back to my body. No gasoline. None of that.

• Hold on to lightning rod wire — along the side of the house out at East Lake — and pray deeply for a bolt to strike, and when it does, hold on tight. Remember that time you were sleeping out there [illegible scrawl] and the cottage was hit; the wire going bright blue and then red and glowing while the ground turned to glass and … [illegible ink scrawl].

• Spontaneous-human-combustion-type fire, self-willed, urging my own cells to fuel themselves into a giant conflagration.

EDITOR’S NOTE

A fragment from Allen’s journals:

We drove over to Ann Arbor last night to hear the Stooges play at the Fifth Forum theater. Billy Thompson drove and we smoked a joint and shot the shit about Meg, mostly. Iggy was fantastic. Woke up in parking lot. Head against parking bumper. Iggy nudging my head with his boot. I woke to Iggy and Iggy seemed to wake to me. He told me to get the fuck up and to shake it off. That’s what he said. Shake it off, man, he said, and then he laughed and walked away before I could get up. Then Billy said the same thing. Shake it off, he said.

EDITOR’S NOTE

The manuscript was found in the drawer in Allen’s room by his mother, Mary Ann Allen, who gave it to Byron Riggs, professor of English at the University of Michigan, who in turn passed it on to his good friend, the writer Fran Johnson, who subsequently sent the manuscript to her agent, who, with the permission of the Allen family, submitted it to publishers, who, as they say, went into a frenzied bidding war that had little to do with the so-called marketability of the novel itself because, as most admitted, openly, the book was hardly fit for the fiction market at the time (or any time) but was publishable because of the marketability of the so-called backstory: a twenty-two-year-old Vietnam vet sits at his desk and composes a fictive world that is — as the critic Harold R. Ross stated—“bent double upon itself, as violent and destabilized as our own times, as pregnant and nonsensical.”

Hystopia was written during the hot summer a year after the Detroit/Flint riots. Allen continued his work on the novel into the fall, devoting all his time to it. The reader might take the liberty of picturing a slender man leaning down over a typewriter in the upstairs window of a house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, trying to concentrate while, downstairs, perhaps, a fight takes place. What is known about the family is somewhat limited; files on Meg Allen are, of course, sealed, but it is generally acknowledged that his sister suffered from adult-onset schizophrenia. (Later her diagnosis — confused by shifting categories — was changed to borderline.) It is also general knowledge that she had relations with a young man named Billy Thompson, who died in Vietnam.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Evidence from Allen’s journals and notes suggests that his fictional Grid zone, a safe, controlled area in which treated patients were released from treatment, was based on the proposed Unleashed Wayward Program of 1969, which was part of the Mental Health Corps Program (Psych Corps), part of the Kennedy administration’s initiative to solve the mental illness “problem” in general and the returning Vietnam vet problem in particular. Certain geographical specifics — the so-called Gleel Glen, where the Saginaw River cuts into Michigan — can be assumed to be products of the author’s imagination.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Below is an edited selection of interviews with friends and relatives of Allen who, upon reading the manuscript of Hystopia (rough text, unedited), offered responses.

Stanley Crop

Well, yeah, gangs of marauding motorcycle riders like the Black Flag group, the Summer of Hate, and Kennedy keeping the meat grinder in Vietnam up to full speed … all correct. Don’t accuse the kid of bending history. Accuse history of bending the kid. And the war, the war bent him, too. Like so many, he came back changed.

Markus Decourt

Maybe the treatment process wasn’t called enfolding, but the process I went through was similar to what he describes. As far as I knew, it was top-secret shit, so I suppose he got wind of it from Billy Thompson when he came home on leave, or he heard about it during his tour of duty. All the same, man, he got it right, mostly, and there were reenactment facilities where they messed you up. And the drug called Tripizoid. He gets that right, too, mostly. Little greenies, we called them, no bigger than a saccharine tablet. Pop one of those suckers, go through the reenactment of your original trauma — we’re talking controlled, man, scripted, staged right down to the gestures, the whole show run by these Shakespearian motherfuckers — and you’d come out cured. We were doing scenes from the Iliad , Hector and all that, and anyway he got it right and how he got it right in his book is a wonder to me, man, except to say he did.

Gerald McCarthy

You’d think it’s crazy that three buddies would go from Benton Harbor, Michigan, to Nam — all laughing and joking way over there — but it happened all the time and the Buddy Program was the reason. That Rake character is fucking real. I mean really real. You get home and aren’t really home and you’re charged up anyway. That guy was a psychopath to start. I believe him. I see his ghost all over the place.

Norman Joseph

I came home from Nam and went back to school. As a scholar of Vietnam literature I can say, with all frankness, that Hystopia is one of the strangest documents to come out of the war years. I can’t say it’s the most honest. A parataxic construct of sorts.

Buddy Anderson

That character named Singleton is a lot like me, man, and I take that as a compliment because I was Eugene’s best friend. Hell, my tour was only two years ago. When I sleep, which isn’t often, I have the same kind of dreams and I wish I’d’ve been treated, enfolded myself. Enfold me, man, I keep thinking, but then I guess a man has to carry what he has to carry. But let me tell you this, all the books I’ve read get it wrong, except for the ones where the main character is KIAed, or goes AWOL, or whatever; but the gung-ho ones are off, each time; too clean, too neat and tidy, even when you get a few killed — you’re stuck knowing that the dude telling the story, the writer, man, lived to tell it, and for me that always makes it unrealistic.