Fall 2003 issue of The Georgia Review

As a follow-up to our Summer of Politics (see below post) is the poet Gerald Stern’s essay “Bullet in My Neck” from the Fall 2003 issue of The Georgia Review. Stern writes about being shot in the late 1980s when he and his companion became lost in Newark, NJ and two boys approached their vehicle at a red light.

The one thing the doctors, the nurses, and the police lieutenant, who came later, said over and over was that it was a mistake to stop at the red light. ‘Why did you stop at the red light?’ I was asked. ‘No one stops at that light!’ I felt guilty, as if I myself were the perpetrator.

For Stern, he felt grief but almost no anger at the boys who shot him, and makes the analogy between Newark, which at this time was poverty-stricken and crime-ridden, and his hometown of Pittsburgh in the 1930s. He writes that “Growing up in a brutal time, in a brutal city, I was always alert to vicious, unexpected, and insane behavior. I learned early not to be astonished at the undeserved and outrageous.”

In his hospital room, Stern reflects on the shooting of the writer and artist Bruno Schulz in 1942 by a German officer and the killing of a bullfrog by a childhood friend.

A bullfrog is not a Jewish slave, let alone a gifted and famous one, but the state of mind—of heart—may have been the same in the two murderers. I thought about the frog for years… As for the murder of Schulz, that beautiful writer—and painter—it has become for me, as I know it has for others, a symbol of capricious and perverse human behavior.

If the history of violence is rooted in economic, political, religious, and social oppression, then the history of literature is to make sense of this. “I have taken up the trade of poet in part because of the difficulty in understanding—and the need to ‘explain’—just that willful, capricious, perverse behavior.” This is the project of the writer. As we see every day, writers all over the world are censored, suppressed, imprisoned, and murdered for seeking to make sense. Or to not make sense. By incorporating allusions from history and literature—from Schulz to Emma Goldman to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus—Stern does both, brilliantly. Stern’s empathy for the boys who shot him, his humaneness in the face of violence, and his faith in his life’s-work is what makes “Bullet in My Neck,” which was later anthologized in The Best American Essays 2004, a beautiful and stirring portrait.

[For more on the "writers all over the world...censored, suppressed, imprisoned, and murdered" that Heath mentions—as well as information on what you can do to help—visit the PEN America website. Also check out their wonderful international literary magazine: PEN America Journal. -Ed.]