Before I got into the Mountain Goats, my favourite writer was Graham Greene: a ‘Catholic atheist’ invested in liberation theology whose novels ‘tapped into a deep inarticulate human vein of hope against the despair engendered by the prospect of eternal damnation.’ In a passage he liked to quote from Browning, his characters experienced the inner conflicts of ‘The honest thief, the tender murderer’; another favourite line, ‘In the lost boyhood of Judas / Christ was betrayed,’ summarises a broadly empathetic approach to the problem of evil.1
When Greene died in 1991, I looked like this, and concepts like original sin and the divided self would largely have been news to me. But years later, when I was looking to read about the life of the author behind Brighton Rock and The End of the Affair, the final volume of Norman Sherry’s epic biography had recently been released. I was keen to understand more about the kind of mind that could construct such vivid portraits of sin, shame and salvation but a cursory Google search revealed Sherry’s project to be sufficiently contentious that it didn’t seem worth the risk of reading its almost 2,500 pages. Critics described the biographer as ‘ludicrously self-aggrandising’ and focused on all the wrong things (primarily, Greene’s somewhat squalid sexual history). One passage in particular, recounting Greene’s death, was cited as the epitome of perverse over-identification:
Worms breed, and the handsome man with stunning blue eyes is host to a thousand sliding lascivious creatures, eating our flesh, turning us gradually into a sort of human jam.
My first response when I read that, to be honest, was ‘fair enough.’ Maybe I’m a goth at heart, but the lusty worms are a trope dating back at least to the early modern period: were they gratuitous then? Is death less awful now? I suppose I also had a lot of sympathy for the profound psychological unease which must surely arise when a biographer has to confront the mortality of the subject he has spent three decades of his own life pursuing. That said, I still haven’t read the book: not even in the three-volume hardcover set which my mother, without knowledge of any of this, bought me for my 18th birthday (a fact which I feel pretty Catholic about myself.)
Sherry was being faulted, I guess, for losing sight of the work in the life: always a pitfall of the literary biography. This project is explicitly not a biography of John Darnielle, and yet the singer’s lyrics and, especially, interview comments have engaged so deeply with the dialectic between personal narrative and fictional storytelling that it’s difficult to keep the life out of the frame. I planned to start this entry by confessing a mistake in the last one, having realised that ‘Running Away With What Freud Said,’ the first song on the first Mountain Goats tape, Taboo VI: The Homecoming, totally belied my own assertion that ‘the poem-songs Darnielle has just begun to write […] don’t draw at all explicitly on the suffering he had personally gone through.’ Then I realised that it wasn’t a mistake, exactly; that I couldn’t have known any of this if I’d heard the song in 1991.2
(When I ask Mum on the phone if she can find the photo above, she tells me I’m somewhere between six and nine months old in it – she knows that because I’m sitting up by myself, and I’m touched that she would even remember this kind of developmental milestone.) But I don’t know if many other people could have known it either. The proliferation of interviews and recorded live comments online in more recent years, since Darnielle’s first batch of explicitly autobiographical material appeared in 2004, has made it difficult for me as a younger fan to reconstruct how much information was known about the singer’s background in the early years. Liner notes from the 1998 reissue of Zopilote Machine do, however, suggest a long-held frustration with biographically-oriented, ‘post-romantic descriptions’ of ‘what songwriters do’:
these songs are all pages ripped from my diary, which drips blood. I have been alive for over 2000 years […] I was born in at least seven different countries. […] None of these songs were written. They are all spontaneous eruptions of directly experienced personal pain, deeply felt and wholly unvanquishable. Each time I sing any one of them I further aggravate a wound which will never heal.
It’s nonetheless the case that this song, and thus John’s whole recording career, ‘opens with a person, in Portland, who isn’t quite themselves.’ As Alex Russell puts it, in a song-by-song project far more comprehensive than this can hope to be, ‘you’ve got all the pieces there to construct hundreds of songs that followed.’ But at the time, Darnielle is writing in the spirit of deliberate occlusion, first conceiving of ‘Running Away With What Freud Said’ as a ‘song that no one could make any sense of.’
Onstage comments in 2006 and 2016 have since clarified its biographical grounding: the song describes the morning in March 1986 when its singer ‘emerged from a long alcohol and heroin binge that I had gone on when I was nineteen and I lost a lot of time.’ Believing, post-blackout, that he’s somehow paid his rent twice and has no money left, Darnielle spends the next three weeks ‘starving himself’ in his apartment, ‘eating sprouts and spoonfuls of peanut butter as my entire daily lot.’ When he’s finally able to psych himself up to go outside – having first ‘combed my hair and put on my hat and my sunglasses without which I did not leave the house,’ later referenced in ‘High Unicorn Tolerance’ – ‘it wasn’t cold anymore as it had been.’ ‘Spring had come to Portland’: ‘the planters on the corners were full of flowers and they saved my life.’
These events are all referenced fairly directly in the short lyric, where ‘new flowers’ contribute to a sense of the ‘city truly living’ and the wider ‘world breathing.’ ‘Woke Up New,’ fifteen years later, paints a similar scene as the ‘world, in its cold way,’ starts ‘coming alive’ for a figure stepping outside for the first time the morning after a breakup. Things are different, whether because your partner has left or because you no longer recognise your own body: ‘Whose bones are these?’ is Darnielle’s response to the mysterious click he had in his hip for two years after whatever happened in the ‘long blackout.’3 They’re better, too – in response to a more welcome natural flourishing than the kind he feared last week in ‘Going to Alaska,’ the singer feels ‘ready’ for a new, more viable future ‘to arrive’ – but before the situation leading up to this kind of catharsis has been fully left behind, that knowledge might at first be ‘cold comfort.’
Maybe the need for this kind of distance plays into the fact that when Darnielle started making music, he ‘fought long and hard against the idea of anything I wrote being confessional because what in this world is worse than a confessional singer songwriter with an acoustic guitar?’ Even without the ethical complexities of navigating your own trauma in art, this seems a rational enough position for a somewhat contrarian Southern Californian teenager to adopt in the late 80s. Alone, aged 22, in his Norwalk apartment, he pulls a pluralised bandname from bluesman Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s raucously theatrical ‘Yellow Coat,’ precisely to avoid the assumption that ‘I’m trying to introduce you to John Darnielle,’ to make sure people will know ‘I am telling stories.’
In later years, the singer has started to see things differently – ‘you can’t tell a story without putting yourself in it somehow, there’s no way, right? Any story you tell comes out of you. You can’t bleed somebody else’s blood type.’4 I won’t say that that sounds exactly like what Freud said, but it’s probably a good enough summary of the kind of statement the younger singer might have found reductive, not only in the world of music, but in pop psychology.
The song title comes from a phrase John heard on a TV talk show by Dr David Viscott, a Frasier-style call-in shrink who offered glib solutions to complex problems. Its implication, once taken deliberately out of context, might be you can go anywhere you like with any of the many things Freud said, but that this kind of psychoanalytic digging beneath can take you away from an experience actually in front of you, or from the images an artist has chosen to make present: the flowers, the buses, the fresh blood pumping in your veins.
I watch a couple of Viscott’s videos on YouTube: he’s less skeevy than Dr. Oz, but seems to be peddling the same brand of snake oil. He concludes one phone session, which must have been recorded in 1992, by telling a suicidal caller to cheer himself up by watching Aladdin in theatres. His own life seems to have fallen into shambles soon after: the doctor died in unclear circumstances in 1997, ‘drained of money and prestige,’ bereft of all his ‘guru’s trappings,’ like one of the washed-up wrestlers or film stars in whose stories Darnielle now specialises. You’ve got to wonder what Freud would have to say about that.
Small Shards of Shrapnel:
‘Running Away With What Freud Said,’ in the line ‘Whose bones are these? God knows’ sees the first appearance in a Mountain Goats lyric by God, one of Darnielle’s many prominent recurring characters.
It’s worth reading Dr David Viscott’s LA Times obituary in full for the description of scenes from a marriage which sound they would easily fit into a verse of ‘Oceanographer’s Choice’.
We don’t know which of Freud’s writings the doctor was referencing, but let’s imagine for a second it was The Interpretation of Dreams. Here’s a rare insight into one of JD’s, in which the dream protagonist, who ‘mainly observe[s]’, gets stuck in an air duct in extremis, at risk of starving to death, and crawls out to try to teach President Trump’s children empathy by stressing that fear is a universal human emotion. I’m no Dr David Viscott, but it feels like there’s a lot packed into that closing phrase: ‘there’s a blurring between the character Berger and myself, if I’m in the dream I’m him.’
Peter Green, ‘The End of the Affair’; John Banville, ‘A Cold Heaven’.
Most of the songs featured in this week’s entry can be found on the Spotify playlist below.
You can no longer easily buy Taboo VI: The Homecoming, on which ‘Running Away With What Freud Said’ features. I’ve linked within the post to a YouTube upload of the song itself – the full album is here, but since no money goes to the band or the original label, Shrimper Records, you might like either to buy newer work or to donate to a charity John has previously supported, Nextdoor Solutions.
Never have I felt more like Norman Sherry than when Googling ‘John Darnielle hip click’ to confirm my understanding of this information.
These comments come from a podcast interview with Steven Hyden.
This week, Richard is getting into seven-minute eggs.
1991: ‘Running Away With What Freud Said’