Songs from the Black Chair

SONGS FROM THE BLACK CHAIR: A Memoir of Mental Illness. By Charles Barber. Univ. of Nebraska Press. 202 pp. $22

Tobias Wolff, author of the autobiographical This Boy’s Life, selects the memoirs published in the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives series, and what a beautiful choice he’s made in this modest, bittersweet story of three boys’ lives that didn’t turn out as expected.

Three best friends grow up in a New England college town in the 1970s. Together they enact the ritual rebellions of adolescence: drinking, driving too fast, smoking pot, playing nasty music. The brilliant one, Nick, from a working-class Italian background, gets straight A’s and goes to the local college on a full scholarship. Henry, the classic WASP underachiever, is a shoo-in to join Nick at the college, where both his parents teach. Fellow faculty brat Charles, the author of this memoir, goes off to his father’s alma mater, Harvard.

Fast-forward two decades: Nick lives in his parents’ basement and works as an aide with people who are mentally retarded. Charles, who dropped out of Harvard after suffering a full-blown episode of obsessive-compulsive disorder, now does intake interviews at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter in New York City. And Henry is dead. He, too, dropped out of college, briefly worked as a busboy, then committed suicide at his parents’ summer cottage, after a drunken weekend there with Charles and Nick. A few years later, Henry’s mother replicated his suicide almost exactly.

Barber’s title isn’t phony symbolism. It refers to Songs from the Big Chair, the recording that Henry put into the tape player of his truck before letting the exhaust fumes take him out. It also refers to the black chair next to Barber’s desk at Bellevue, where the crazies sit and tell their stories, singing the atonal notes of their lives. Barber is supposed to check off all comers by category: SPMI (seriously and persistently mentally ill), MICA (mentally ill chemical abuser), Axis II (personality disordered), and so on. But the list means nothing, he quickly sees, so he creates his own: “The Travelers and the Wanderers, Guided by Voices, Vietnam Vets, Waylaid Tourists, . . . ‘No English’ and No Papers, . . . Manic in America, . . . The Truly Weird, for Whom We Can Find No Category That Fits.” Barber forms a special attachment to one of his clients, a brilliant Czech émigré, but one day the man jumps into the East River and never comes out.

Barber, who’s now an associate at Yale Medical School’s Program for Recovery and Community Health, is too reflective to offer any pat answers, but he does come to understand that life’s sensitive souls need help in every form, whether pharmaceutical, therapeutic, or familial, to get them through dark nights. Beyond that, who knows why some people make it and some don’t?

“You have to decide whether you are going to breathe or not,” Barber writes. He remembers an atypical conversation with his ordinarily reserved mother, soon after he’d dropped out of Harvard. “My mother and I were talking, in our roundabout way, about the difficulties that people have in the world. . . . ‘Look, living is hard,’ my mother said. ‘Breathing is hard. Just listen to the music.’”

Barber decided to breathe. He listened. He wrote a fine book about it, too.

—A. J. Loftin