John Berryman Centenary Essays [1st, New ed] 9783034322553, 9781787073296, 9781787073302, 9781787073319, 3034322550, 1787073297

Citation preview

Modern Poetry

John Berryman Centenary Essays Philip Coleman and Peter Campion (eds) Foreword by Paula Meehan Afterword by Henri Cole PETER LANG

Drawing on the proceedings of two conferences organized to celebrate the centenary of John Berryman’s birth in 2014, John Berryman: Centenary Essays provides new perspectives on a major US American poet’s work by critics from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In addition to new readings of important aspects of Berryman’s development – including his creative and scholarly encounters with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats – the book gives fresh accounts of his engagements with contemporaries such as Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell. It also includes essays that explore Berryman’s poetic responses to Mozart and his influence on the contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon. Making extensive use of unpublished archival sources, personal reflections by friends and former students of the poet are accompanied by meditations on Berryman’s importance for writers today by award-winning poets Paula Meehan and Henri Cole. Encompassing a wide range of scholarly perspectives and introducing several emerging voices in the field of Berryman studies, this volume affirms a major poet’s significance and points to new directions for critical study and creative engagement with his work.

Philip Coleman is an Associate Professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, where he is also a Fellow. His most recent publications include John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating ‘The Scene of Disorder’ and Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse (2014). He also co-edited ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (2007). With Calista McRae, he is currently coediting a selection of John Berryman’s literary correspondence. Peter Campion is the author of three collections of poems, Other People, The Lions and El Dorado, as well as numerous catalogue essays and art monographs on contemporary painters. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize (Prix de Rome) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he directs the MFA programme in creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

www.peterlang.com

John Berryman

Modern

Poetry

Series editors: David Ayers, David Herd & Jan Montefiore, University of Kent

Volume 11

Peter Lang

Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien l

l

l

l

l

l

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion (eds)

John Berryman Centenary Essays

Peter Lang

Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien l

l

l

l

l

l

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954865

Cover image: Siah Armajani, Tomb for John Berryman, 2014 © 2016 Siah Armajani/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ISSN 1661-2744 ISBN 978-3-0343-2255-3 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-329-6 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78707-330-2 (mobi) • ISBN 978-1-78707-331-9 (ePub) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2017 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgementsix Paula Meehan

Foreword: ‘Berrymancy’

xi

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion

Introduction1 Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

1  Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

13

Michael Berryhill

2  Henry and His Problems

29

Claudio Sansone

3 John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

47

Edward Clarke

4  Berryman’s Mischief

65

Karl O’Hanlon

5 ‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

83

vi Deanna Wendel

6  Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

101

Heather Treseler

7 Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet115 J. T. Welsch

8 ‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame135 Alex Runchman

9 ‘the angel and the beast in man’: John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

149

Michael Hinds

10  Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

167

Katherine Ebury

11 ‘The sonnet might “lead to dishonesty”’: John Berryman and Paul Muldoon as Sonneteers

195

Stephen Matterson

12 Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

215

Adam Beardsworth

13 The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

231



vii

Eve Cobain

14  ‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

251

Peter Campion

15  John Berryman’s Acoustics

267

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson

16 Henry in High School: John Berryman in the Classroom is an ‘Angry Zen Touch’

281

Henri Cole

Afterword: My John Berryman; or, Imagination, Love, Intellect, and Pain

295

Notes on Contributors

299

Index305

Acknowledgements

This book has its basis in two events, one in Dublin and another in Minneapolis, organized in 2014 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of John Berryman. The editors wish to thank everyone who read poems, gave papers, chaired sessions, and participated in discussions at these conferences, and especially the following people and organisations for their exceptional back-up and support: Dublin: Joseph M. Bradley; Fiona Byrne; Susan Cahill; Ron Callan; Jonathan Creasy; Matthew Day; Martin Doyle; Kit Fryatt; Gillian Groszewski; Alan Hayes; Eleanor Jones-McAuley; Zosia Kuczyńska; Emma Loughney; Philip McGowan; Peter Maber; Niamh NicGhabhann; Joanne O’Leary; Kathrine Phillipa; Diane Sadler; the students and staff of the English Department of the Mater Dei Institute (Dublin City University); the students and staff of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin; the Fulbright Commission of Ireland; the Irish Association for American Studies; KC Peaches (Nassau Street); Poetry Ireland; The Irish Times; Reads Print and Design; RTÉ Radio One (The History Show); Newstalk FM. Minneapolis: Barb Bezat; Michael Dennis Browne; Tom Clayton; John Coleman; Raiana Grieme; Edward Griffin; Patricia Hampl; Kathryn Hujda; Lois Kelly; Richard J. Kelly; Alan K. Lathrop; Cecily Marcus; Tim Nolan; Ellen Messer-Davidow; Katherine McGill; Wendy Pradt Lougee; Elizabeth O’Brien; Kathryn Rensch; Daniel Swift; Jennifer Torkelson; Shannon Wolkerstorfer; the students and staff of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota; the students and staff of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota; the University of Minnesota Libraries; the staff of Andersen Library, University of Minnesota; Minnesota Public Radio; Minnesota Daily. For over four decades, scholars working on John Berryman’s work have had the support and encouragement of the poet’s widow, Kate Donahue Berryman, without whom none of this work would have been possible. The editors thank her and the members of the Berryman family who attended

x Acknowledgements

the conference at the University of Minnesota in October 2014: Martha Mayou, David Mayou and their son John; Sarah Berryman and her family; and Paul Berryman. Permission to quote from John Berryman’s published and unpublished works in this volume has been received from Kate Donahue Berryman, executrix of the John Berryman Estate. Permission to reproduce a photographic image of Siah Armajani’s Tomb for John Berryman on the cover has been received from the artist, with the assistance of Alejandro Jassan of Alexander Gray Associates LLC, New York City. Finally, thanks are due to the editors of Peter Lang’s Modern Poetry series for supporting this project, and Jasmin Allousch, Emma Clarke, Liam Morris and Emily Vincent for various kinds of assistance. Last but not least, many thanks to Christabel Scaife, who kept everything on course from initial proposal to publication.  

Philip Coleman, Trinity College Dublin Peter Campion, University of Minnesota

Paula Meehan

Foreword: ‘Berrymancy’

Editors’ Note: The following text was delivered at the opening of the John Berryman Centenary Symposium at the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies, the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University, Dublin, 10 October 2014.

When Philip Coleman approached me with news of this conference and an invitation to contribute here now at the opening of this conference, and also generously invited me to contribute to his anthology of responses in poetry to Berryman, Berryman’s Fate, a beautiful wee book, I had a long poem of my own, a poem of many parts in process, still in process if stalled in progress, so I felt the fickle finger of fate pointed back to Berryman. Do not look the gift horse in the mouth whatever they say in Ilium. I do not have the critical distance of a trained academic. My formation has been as a craftswoman and dreamer. Poems move through my body and I experience them on the pulses. Usually I’d sooner dance a poem than discuss it. When I first played with Berryman I was in my teens. We used the The Dream Songs as a book for scrying – as we did the I Ching, Finnegans Wake, The Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. And Dinneen’s Irish–English Dictionary was a bit like the Kerry Mafia – it made you an offer you couldn’t understand. Books of heft and substance and mysterious utterance, books that mirrored the myriad-faceted nature of our lives internal and external, our diamond faceted young minds. A random indication from the forces of the cosmos as to what was to be done. What will I do today? What will I home in on? Does he love me? Do I care? How will I resolve the row, another one, with my mother? Should I go to London and take the consequence? Will I pass Latin? Should I go to Cornwall and take the consequences? Will I drop out altogether and go to Afghanistan to see the mirror-embroidered robes of the natives flashing along the trails?

xii

Paula Meehan

Part of the zeitgeist of the heavenly and grave dance of the constellations that gave Paris in 1968, the foreshadowing of the Aquarian age in the astrology of 1969, the astrology the astrologers tell us we are living through now. As kids on street corners in Finglas with our heads flying off our shoulders, Berryman made as much sense as anything else in our universe where we mostly, to quote Alan Watts, a self-styled harbinger of that zeitgeist, ‘were climbing up the signposts instead of following the road’. The Dream Songs were (was!) all ludic divination and fun. So I scry – on Wednesday night opening at random holding in mind the question. Using The Dream Songs as if I were a Querant now in the dark art of ‘Berrymancy’, the question being: What say you, John Berryman, about the conference and festivities for your 100th birthday? This is what I get from the great Randomer Himself – Dream Song 275, entitled ‘July 11’: And yet I find myself able, at this deep point, to carry out my duties: I lecture, I write. I am even lecturing well, I threw two chairs the janitors had piled on the podium to the floor of the lecture hall: the students were amazed it was good for them, action in the midst of thought, an angry Zen touch, something not written down except in the diaries of the unknown devoted ones of the 115: ‘Master Henry is approaching his limit.’ A little more whiskey please. A little more whiskey please. Something’s gotta give either in edgy Henry or the environment: the conflict cannot last, I soothe myself with, though for 50 years the war’s made headlines. Waiting for fall and the cold fogs thereof in delicious Ireland.1

1

John Berryman, The Dream Songs (1969; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 294.

Foreword: ‘Berrymancy’

xiii

Ah! Hairs stand up on neck. Which Song speaks most clearly to me now. It has read me. We think we read the poem. The poem reads us. Finnegans Wake, dream song of this city: it reads the mind of whoever holds it in their hands. It reads the borders and the traditions of the beholder. The limits of their patience and their perseverance too. The limits of their trust. In my early twenties I encountered The Dream Songs again in the northwest of the United States. A course called The American Eiron from Mark Twain to Woody Allen. Taught by Jim Busskohl, who in an earlier incarnation had been a stand-up comedian down in San Francisco before he defected to academia. He riveted us with his renditions of passages from the set and other texts. In a classroom that could only be described as soul-less, not too far from Hanford, the nuclear town, up the road from Fairchild Airforce Base where the B52 bombers lined up on alert ensured it was a ground zero in the event of a nuclear attack by what the newspapers screamed were the Russkies, Jim Busskohl, almost in passing, embodied, doing the voices, Berryman’s characters, compelling and repelling at once. Theatrical. A good show. Synchronicitously I found The Dream Songs for a dollar in the Goodwill Store. I began to intuit The Dream Songs’ own performance of themselves. I understood the ‘I’ of the poem as a transpersonal ‘I’, another element in the construction of the poem to be manipulated and narrated at will or by inclination, and with that came the realization that the phrase ‘confessional poet’ is an oxymoron. All poems were becoming dream songs then, songs of the inner dreamer, or so it seemed at that moment, 1981, Ronald Reagan’s America. Was I able for it? Hardly. Often hungover myself and feeling shame or dehydration’s destruction of my electrolytes, one way or another in pain, Henry was out of favour. Henry was a bold boy. Henry was getting up the noses. Is someone else’s monkey mind any more interesting than one’s own? Do The Dream Songs help cope with monkey mind, the ceaseless chatter I, for one, and no doubt like many others, seek to quieten? Is the shaping, the force of will on the chaos of the wounded self a salvific act for the reader even though it didn’t save Berryman’s own poor demented hide?

xiv

Paula Meehan

The rage for order, the intense patterning, the keeping faith with the pact of his fate, the hard grafter, the master craftsman hammering the lines of his dreamtime, the songs. The third engagement with Berryman came after an approach last year from Philip Coleman, who has to take responsibility for this wave of obsessional behaviour, a veritable cult. I lugged The Dream Songs down to the island of Ikaria in the eastern Aegean where in the village of Therma (clue – hot springs) I opened the book again and let it read me. An asclepeion, a place of healing since ancient times, because of the radionic springs, Therma seemed like the right place for it. In ancient times the person seeking to be cured would first sleep in the precincts of the sanctuary of Asclepius until that person had a dream that could be used by the priests to effect a diagnosis and a course of treatment. I was taken with the idea of healing the wounded soul of The Dream Songs dream by dream, song by song. I felt the humanity of Berryman as a force for compassion for all the wounded and addicted souls that I had known. Compassion for the self too as addict and reader. I thought of how all traditions, or many traditions, hold an idea of retrospective redemption, whether it is the freeing of the souls from purgatory through our intervention in the Catholic tradition I was reared in, or the liberation through hearing for the beings in the bardos, the in-between place between incarnations in the Buddhist tradition. The Tibetan Book of the Dead refers directly to ‘liberation through hearing’, as the Catholics hold with an act of contrition: both practices recommended even when the person has died. I imagine your distinguished deliberations over these few days as powerfully redemptive energies for the soul of John Berryman. I know this book will mark a change in the way Berryman is read. It restores a dignity to the life of Berryman by refusing the indulgence of the stereotype, and it refuses to define, to confine or reduce Berryman’s life by the manner of his death. I imagine every person in this room has been touched by suicide. I rarely meet anyone who has been spared that most traumatic bereavement by the time they reach, say, the age where they can vote. I think Berryman has much to offer us in our apprehension of the forces that would drive a being to such a desperate end.

Foreword: ‘Berrymancy’

xv

It feels like pure geomancy that this conference and celebration should start in Dublin where, I am reliably informed, Ronnie Drew, singer of songs broad and narrow, inspired a smooth-shaven John Berryman to start his famous beard when they met. (A little more whiskery please, a little more whiskery …) Said beard must surely have its own website by now. You don’t have to be bearded, an alcoholic, or write obsessively in patterns to connect with Berryman. Believe me, I don’t think any of those attributes will help.

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion

Introduction

First published by Graywolf Press in John Berryman’s adopted city of Minneapolis in 2014, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric was widely praised as one of the most powerful works of poetry to appear in recent years.1 The book contains an unexpected reference to Berryman: Someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper knowing we couldn’t win.2

Strictly speaking, the ‘[s]omeone’ mentioned here is not Berryman at all, but Gottfried Benn, who is referenced in Berryman’s Dream Song 53: and Gottfried Benn said: – We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.3

Rankine includes The Dream Songs among the works referenced in Citizen – she does not cite Benn – but her re-writing of Berryman’s line suggests a radical form of interpretation.4 The shift from Berryman’s collective plural (‘our own skins’) to the singular (‘our skin’) in Rankine’s poem reflects a growing global demand for a new kind of racial understanding that problematizes a homogeneous idea of American selfhood: Black Lives Matter.

1

2 3 4

In 2014 Citizen was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2015 it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award, among many other awards. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 71. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 60. See Rankine, 167.

2

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion

There is a need to see the (black) ‘person’ beyond the (white) ‘symbol’. As Rankine puts it just before this direct reference to Berryman in Citizen, Sometimes ‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it. This makes the first person a symbol for something. The pronoun barely holding the person together.5

Rankine interrogates an idea of (lyric) subjectivity here that seeks to elide questions of difference, ethnicity and race, but she does so in a way that is prompted, in part, by Berryman’s example. Berryman’s suggestion, in a 1965 interview, that his discovery of the importance of ambiguous pronouns represented a breakthrough in his early development as a poet, also seems to inform Rankine’s text at this juncture.6 This is not because she wishes to undermine and dismiss Berryman. On the contrary, Berryman’s earlier negotiations of the complexities of language and race in The Dream Songs are referenced as part of Rankine’s broad engagement with the history of racial representation in US American literature and culture. In Citizen, then, Claudia Rankine engages in a powerful deconstruction of Berryman’s work by interrogating the ‘strange dream’ of his long poem.7 ‘Drag that first person out of the social death of history’, she demands, ‘then we’re kin’.8 Citizen, read in these terms, emerges as a text that challenges readers to reconsider the meaning of the self in what she calls the ‘Brahmin first person’ poems of Berryman, Robert Lowell and others of the so-called Middle Generation.9

5 6 7 8 9

Ibid. 71. Emphasis in original. See John Berryman, ‘One Answer to a Question: Changes’, in The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 326. Rankine, 73. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964) are included in Rankine’s list of ‘Works Referenced’ in Citizen, 167.

Introduction

3

In an important sense, of course, the publication of Citizen in 2014 had nothing to do with Berryman’s centenary, but the creative and scholarly work that was produced and published around the time of his one hundredth birthday may be read in relation to the ongoing importance of his example for many writers and critics. There has been a discernible increase in critical attention on the poet in recent years,10 but the range of artistic responses to Berryman is in many ways a more interesting phenomenon, not least because it encompasses a wide variety of art forms, from poetry and fiction to popular music and the visual and performing arts.11 Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse, published in 2014, includes work by over fifty poets, from Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and South Africa,12 but Berryman is also an important figure of creative enablement in works of fiction. The list of novels that engage directly with Berryman in one way or another includes J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974), Thomas M. Disch’s The Businessman (1984) and Paul Auster’s Timbuktu 10 Three monographs on Berryman have been published in the last decade alone: Brendan Cooper, Dark Airs: John Berryman and the Spiritual Politics of Cold War American Poetry (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); Tom Rogers, God of Rescue: John Berryman and Christianity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011); Philip Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: relocating ‘the scene of disorder’ (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014). 11 For example, see Greg Brosofske, Strange is the Heart, which is described online on the American Composers Forum website: (accessed 9 August 2016). See also Janika Vandervelde, ‘Henry’s Fate’ (1983), described online at: (accessed 9 August 2016). More recent responses in popular music include: The Hold Steady, ‘Stuck Between Stations’ on their album Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant Records, 2006); Okkervil River, ‘John Allyn Smyth Sails’ on their album The Stage Names ( Jagjaguwar, 2007); Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, ‘We Call Upon the Author’ on their album Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (Mute Records, 2008). Nick Cave provided a blurb for the 2014 re-issue of Berryman’s The Dream Songs by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. For a detailed discussion of the ways in which contemporary composers and musicians have responded to Berryman’s works, see Maria Johnston, ‘“We write verse with our ears”: Berryman’s Music’, in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam and New Jersey: Rodopi, 2007), 191–208. 12 See Philip Coleman, ed., Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse (Dublin: Arlen House, 2014).

4

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion

(1999), as well as Catherine Lacey’s Nobody Is Ever Missing and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, both published in 2014.13 In Coetzee’s text, the narrator internalizes Berryman’s Dream Song 29: Books have begun to rollout, I know, about the suburban sadists and cataleptic dropouts with Vietnamese skeletons in their cupboards. But the truth is that like huffy Henry I never did hack anyone up: I often reckon, in the dawn, them up: nobody is ever missing. Nor, if I were to commit myself body and soul to some fiction or other, would I choose any fiction but my own. I am still the captain of my soul.14

Coetzee’s meditation on the psychological fallout of the Vietnam War serves to politicize Berryman’s work, but it also responds to the poet’s own insistence, in a letter to the New York Times in 1971, that no American is off any hook, fellow-actors. The hook is thick and dug deep. […] We are obliged to hold ourselves responsible not only for a decade of Asiatic corpses and uninhabitable countryside and genocidal ‘resettlement’ of whole populations of Asiatic villagers, but for what we are doing to the survivors.15

In Dusklands, Coeztee expands on the ideas of obligation, responsibility and the connection between personal and historical guilt articulated by Berryman here. More recently, Catherine Lacey’s Nobody Is Ever Missing uses the same Dream Song (29) – which is given in full as an epigraph to her novel – to explore the personal crisis of a woman who decides to leave her husband and life in Manhattan to become a ‘missing person’ on the other side of See J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands (London: Vintage, 2004); Thomas M. Disch, The Businessman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984); Paul Auster, Timbuktu (London: Faber and Faber, 1999); Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (London: Granta, 2014). 14 Coetzee, 10, and see Berryman, The Dream Songs, 33. Coetzee’s text is divided into two parts, ‘The Vietnam Project’ and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’. While these are thematically linked they have different narrators and settings. The section quoted is from the first part, which concerns a character called Eugene Dawn. 15 The text of this letter is included in Berryman’s posthumously published novel Recovery. See John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 236–7. 13

Introduction

5

the world, in New Zealand. In the course of her journey, however, she realizes that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing – nobody is ever missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.16

Lacey’s novel describes a process of self-interrogation that can be related to Berryman’s profound probing of subjective experience in his work. But why Berryman? It is important to recognize the way that Berryman’s work serves as a source for Lacey’s text, just as it is to ask why Jenny Offill should write the following sentence in Dept. of Speculation: ‘What John Berryman said, Let all flowers wither like a party.’17 These references to Berryman, and direct quotations from his work, affirm his presence in the cultural, artistic and imaginative life of Lacey, Offill and many other contemporary authors and artists.18 Indeed, notwithstanding the grotesque representations of Berryman’s ghost in Thomas M. Disch’s novel The Businessman, and Paul Auster’s naming of a dog after the figure of Mr. Bones (from The Dream Songs) in Timbuktu, the interesting thing about all of these texts is the way that they keep the spirit of Berryman alive within a world of creative production (contemporary fiction) that is, in an important sense, at a remove from the core of his own artistic achievement (poetry). This is a

16 17 18

Lacey, 181–2. Offill, 109. Emphasis in original. Berryman is also mentioned and quoted in Offill’s novel on pages 112 and 135. For Berryman’s original line see The Dream Songs, 36. Further examples might include Patrick McCabe’s double-novella, Hello and Goodbye (London: Quercus, 2013), the first part of which is entitled ‘Hello Mr Bones’, and Paul Theroux’s short story ‘Mr. Bones’, collected in Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 35–58. Of course Berryman did not create ‘Mr. Bones’ – it derives from the tradition of minstrelsy – but the name has been popularized by him through its use in The Dream Songs.

6

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion

testament to the lasting power of Berryman’s poetry as much as it reflects an abiding interest in the story of his life and death. In different ways, all of these authors, from Coetzee to Rankine, were prompted if not provoked into new kinds of imagining and representation because of the originality and force of Berryman’s configurations in language. Another collection of essays could be published exploring in detail the ways in which Berryman has influenced the authors and artists mentioned above, and so many others. Perhaps the subject deserves book-length treatment in a monograph that would examine Berryman’s importance to a wide range of poets, novelists, musicians and artists from the 1970s to the present time. This volume is ultimately more modest in scope, although the relationship between Berryman and contemporary and later writers, including Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Paul Muldoon, emerges here as an important theme. The book has its basis in conferences held in Dublin and Minneapolis in 2014, both of which were organized to celebrate the centenary of Berryman’s birth (25 October 1914), and the contributions gathered here are based on papers delivered at both events.19 In a polemical essay published online under the title ‘#DownWithCentellianism’, Harris Feinsod has written that There are plenty of reasons one might dread the coming of the year 2022. As a scholar of modernist literature and culture, I derive a particular form of professional dread at the prospect of the commemorative panels and Daily Telegraph articles celebrating the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. April, 2022 will be an especially dreadful month in this respect. Elsewhere in the world, 2022 will be ruining Trilce for Peruvians, and centennialists may flock to a spate of delusive Blooms-century events in Dublin, brought to you by an overeager International James Joyce Foundation.

19

The programmes for both conferences are available online at: http://berryman2014. tumblr.com/. Accessed 10 August 2016. Not all of the papers delivered at the conferences have been included in this volume, but may be available elsewhere. See, for example, Calista McRae, ‘“There ought to be a law”: The Unruly Comedy of The Dream Songs’, Modern Philology 114/2 (November 2016), 411–32; and Radu Vancu, ‘Confessional Poetry and Music: John Berryman and Mircea Ivănescu’, Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 38/2 (2015), 129–44.

Introduction

7

I’ve been growing weary of this scenario since 2009, when Italian Futurism got hot and then cold again awfully fast. And again in 2010, the centenary of the year in which everything changed, according to Virginia Woolf. And 2014, with its wave of World War I commemorations. New Directions issues a centennial edition of Ezra Pound’s Cathay this fall. Important though it was, this slender chapbook – originally published in modest brown wraps – makes a dubious inductee into the ‘monumental’ logic of centenaries. Likewise dubious is FSG’s spate of commemorative reissues for the 1914 birth of John Berryman. ‘The anniversary invites a second look at Berryman’s life, art, and reputation’, writes Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books. Second since when? It is suddenly as if without the centenary, there had been no books available, no poems written under the Berryman influence, no articles or reviews, since … when?20 

On one level, Feinsod is right: centennials in themselves can sometimes seem self-serving, if not self-congratulatory, and it is often difficult to maintain the critical momentum they seek to generate beyond the main event. The Berryman centenary conferences in 2014, however, sought to provide a snapshot of Berryman studies at a particular moment in time, on both sides of the Atlantic, taking into account work being done on the poet by scholars from a wide range of cultural and academic backgrounds and at different stages in their professional development. An anniversary surely does invite a ‘second look’ from scholars and readers, as Helen Vendler has suggested,21 but it is also an opportunity to appraise the work that has been going on, to get a sense of where things stand, and to see where they might be headed in the future. Moreover, while the Berryman centenary conferences in Dublin and Minneapolis in 2014 provided linked occasions to get a sense of where scholarship on Berryman stood at the time, they also provided opportunities for poets and other artists to reflect and share ideas together in ways that might not otherwise have been possible. Most importantly, the conference in Minneapolis, in particular, gave the Berryman family, as well as his surviving friends and former students, an 20 Harris Feinsod, ‘#DownWithCentennialism’, available online at: (accessed 10 August 2016). 21 See Helen Vendler, ‘Berryman: Tragedy & Comedy Together’, The New York Review of Books (4 June 2015), available online at: (accessed 10 August 2016).

8

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion

occasion to celebrate and discuss the life of a man they knew more intimately than any scholar can ever hope to do. What Feinsod calls the ‘“monumental” logic of centennials’ – to erect a monument to Berryman, say, because one did not already exist – simply does not apply here. It is true that Farrar, Straus and Giroux re-issued a number of Berryman’s volumes in 2014, but there was nothing ‘dubious’ about this. Berryman’s works were already in print, on both sides of the Atlantic, and this was not a case of resurrecting minor works for cynical material ends. It is important to recognize FSG’s consistent commitment to Berryman, since he first published a book with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in 1956, and the poet’s close career-long friendship with Robert Giroux, in particular, is a part of that story that should not be overlooked.22 However, FSG’s decision to reissue three of Berryman’s volumes (77 Dream Songs, Berryman’s Sonnets, and The Dream Songs) with introductions, respectively, by Henri Cole, April Bernard, and Michael Hofmann, provides further evidence of Berryman’s importance to a diverse group of contemporary poets.23 Quite apart from celebrating Berryman’s centennial, these books also gave three very different writers an opportunity to say why he continues to resonate with them, regardless of their very different backgrounds, interests and approaches to the task of writing. A central part of the Berryman centenary events in Dublin and Minneapolis, then, was the involvement of these and other creative artists in the proceedings, and two of these, Paula Meehan

22

23

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Berryman’s first book with the press that would later become known as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in 1956, following initial publication in The Partisan Review in 1953. Berryman’s decision to publish with FSC, and later with FSG, was determined to a large extent by his close friendship with Robert Giroux, with whom Berryman studied at Columbia University in the 1930s. Giroux’s role in shaping Berryman’s career, during the poet’s lifetime and posthumously, was hugely important and could be the subject of a long essay in itself. Indeed, Giroux’s importance to several twentieth-century American writers, including Berryman, Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Flannery O’Connor, among others, would make a fascinating topic for a book-length study. In 2014, FSG also published a new selection of Berryman’s poems, edited by Daniel Swift, The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Introduction

9

and Henri Cole, are represented in the present volume. Among the other poets who read from Berryman’s works and discussed it during the events, in addition to April Bernard and Michael Hofmann, were Anthony Caleshu, Gerald Dawe, Maurice Devitt, Theo Dorgan, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Julie O’Callaghan, Ciaran O’Rourke, Leeanne Quinn, Jane Robinson, Gerard Smyth, Macdara Woods, Peter Campion, Ben Kreilkamp, Jim Moore, Joyce Sutphen, Michael Dennis Browne, Ray Gonzalez, and Wang Ping. In a crucial sense, then, the Berryman centenary conferences in 2014, and this volume of essays, can be seen as celebrations of the art of poetry, first and foremost. In the essays that follow, indeed, while questions of a biographical nature are asked and explored, it is to the work itself that the contributors turn again and again to provide new ways of reading and understanding John Berryman’s rich and complex body of writing. John Berryman: Centenary Essays begins and ends with the voices and reflections of poets, therefore, in recognition of their importance in the world of contemporary academic criticism – without whose efforts, indeed, academic criticism might not exist. Paula Meehan’s foreword, which was delivered at the opening of the Berryman conference in Dublin in 2014, celebrates many decades of reading and re-reading the American poet, while Henri Cole, in his afterword, also reflects on what Berryman has meant to him over many years. The volume then opens out with three pieces under the title ‘Berryman as Teacher and Friend’ that offer personal perspectives from individuals who knew Berryman during his lifetime. The fifteen essays that follow include Michael Berryhill’s reconsideration of Berryman’s engagements with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, refracted through the poet’s problematic relationship with his mother (Martha ‘Jill’ Berryman), and this topic is then taken up, in a different way, by Heather Treseler, in her reading of the connection between Berryman’s letters to his mother and the composition of his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Many of the essays included here, including Treseler’s, draw on previously unpublished archival material and references to Berryman’s personal library, both housed at the University of Minnesota. In her essay on Berryman’s engagements with Beethoven, for example, Eve Cobain makes detailed use of archival sources, while Stephen Matterson also refers to Berryman’s marginalia in his essay on the poet’s explorations of the theme of boredom. These essays allow Berryman’s work

10

Philip Coleman and Peter Campion

to be read in new contexts, and this is also a feature of other essays here, from Edward Clarke’s mischievous questioning of Berryman’s authority in relation to W. B. Yeats to Michael Hinds’s positioning of Berryman, with Randall Jarrell, within the context of late capitalism. Clarke and Hinds provide thoroughly original literary and cultural re-contextualization of Berryman within broad historical frames of reference, but in their essays Karl O’Hanlon, Deanna Wendel, J. T. Welsch, and Alex Runchman focus on Berryman’s dialogue with particular figures, including Shakespeare, John Milton, T. S. Eliot, and Delmore Schwartz. Focusing on the scene of contemporary poetry, on the other hand, Katherine Ebury examines Berryman’s importance for, and influence on, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon. In addition to these essays, the volume includes an essay by Claudio Sansone that invites readers to re-consider Berryman’s contributions to the development of the epic, while Peter Campion’s essay considers Berryman’s ‘acoustics’, his ability to convey and reflect upon the historical energies of post-war America in the specific, formal decisions of his poetry. If the essays gathered in this volume may be seen as exercises in academic criticism, however, they also have their basis in the classroom, where some of their ideas were first teased out. It is fitting, therefore, that the volume includes the contributions of two high school teachers from Kansas who have taught Berryman to their students for a number of years. In their co-authored piece, Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson show how meaningful Berryman’s work can be – despite all of the difficulties it presents – to the youngest of readers. There is a lesson here, too, for how ‘difficult’ literature is taught and studied at third level, but Carriger and Patterson’s reflections also point us back to the central point of this volume concerning poetry’s use and agency in the world as a source of constant, if sometimes troubling, critical and creative motivation. What is at stake when a student asks a high school instructor why Berryman’s speakers talk in a certain way and how does this differ, fundamentally, from the kinds of questions asked of Berryman’s work by poets such as Paula Meehan or Claudia Rankine? The essays in this volume acknowledge the importance of this questioning and they provide new ways of responding to Berryman that are informed and guided by many different cultural and critical perspectives.

Introduction

11

The image on the cover of this volume, a photograph of Iranian-born artist Siah Armajani’s sculpture Tomb for John Berryman (2014),24 is intended to capture the positive sense of critical openness that characterizes the book’s contents. Armajani’s piece, which is made up of objects that may and may not relate to the life and work of the poet, depicts a streetscape that embodies emblems of private and public life – a gate, a house, a chair, a stove, a cash register, a lawnmower, a typewriter, some telegraph poles. Out of these objects, as out of the details of the poet’s life and works, we assemble new forms of understanding, new arrangements of thought and feeling by which we come a little closer, if we are lucky, to figuring out what the poet wanted us to see and hear. Armajani’s Tomb for John Berryman is not a closed monument, in other words, telling us what to believe, no more than this book is intended to be a tomb, a closed space demanding genuflection. What Berryman wrote in his Dream Song epigraph to Berryman’s Sonnets comes closer, in conclusion, to articulating the editors’ hopes for how readers will engage with this volume: So free them to the winds that play, let boys & girls with these old songs have holiday, if they feel like it.25

24 For more information about Siah Armajani and the Tomb Series, of which Tomb for John Berryman is a part, see: (accessed 9 August 2016). 25 See John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971 (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 70. Emphases in original.

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

1 Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

Editors’ Note: The following recollections were given as part of a panel discussion by former students and friends of John Berryman at the Berryman Centenary Conference at the University of Minnesota on 25 October 2014.

Judith Koll Healey Remembering John Berryman: A Personal Recollection John Berryman was a significant presence for me in the last thirteen years of his own brilliant, difficult life. But this presence, and our relationship, resembled a shape-shifter changing and changing again. As did we. I came to the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis in the summer of 1959 as a ‘junior’, that is, in my third year of undergraduate study. My father had opposed my attending the University and my first two years were spent in two different women’s colleges, run and mostly staffed by nuns. These were not bad experiences but I felt they were limited and longed for the broader range of study at a secular university. And, I pointed out to my father, tuition was only $125 a quarter, including fees. In a burst of friendship while on a visit with me to my parents’ home in Winona, in southern Minnesota on the Mississippi River, my childhood friend, (my family had lived briefly in Minneapolis a decade earlier), Kathy Donahue, invited me to live with her family. Her mother had died when we were in high school. We had visited back and forth for years and her father, with his typical generosity, was happy to have me. Kathy was a student at

14

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

St Catherine’s College while I pursued my studies at the University. She was later to marry John and become Kate Berryman. (Kate was what I wrote on her lunch bags when it was my turn to make our lunches. Kathy, tall, dark-haired and fair-skinned seemed always to me to be quintessentially Irish, though her mother was of French descent.) The English department at the University of Minnesota was one of the best in the nation at that time, boasting a faculty of stars such as Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Frank, the Dostoevsky scholar, and Joseph Warren Beach, the critic. Allen Tate also taught, as did the writer and critic William Van O’Connor and many other noted scholars. The real seduction for me, however, was the Humanities department. It had been formed to introduce integrated liberal arts education to the undergraduates. I began my studies with the five credit sequence on the Renaissance and was forever after a Humanities groupie. John Berryman taught in Humanities. His reputation preceded him. I learned of his brilliant teaching style from a colleague in the Shell Oil Touring office, where I worked when I was not taking classes at the U that first summer. Her name was Val and she never enrolled in Humanities classes, but would find out where Berryman was teaching and sit in on his lectures. She said he was the best teacher she knew. Curious, in the winter quarter (undergraduate study was separated into ten-week ‘quarters’ defined by the season) I enrolled in a seminar open to upper-classmen taught by John. I continued into the spring quarter, fascinated by his eclectic approach to education in this seminar – one week Anne Frank, the next Cassirer or Malinowski – but even more enchanted by the teaching. John Berryman was then about forty-six years old. He was not a heavy man, and it was before he affected the long beard (grown, I believe, while in Ireland), so still young looking and handsome. He had a slight British twang to his voice, picked up when he was in Cambridge years earlier, and a riveting style. His idea of a ‘seminar’ was to lecture, with a lot of interaction with students. We did not read papers, he read to us. He raised questions with us, and often pushed hard against the answers he got. His goal seemed to be both pedagogic, that is to teach, but also to challenge. What did we know? How could we defend what we thought?

Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

15

He was a natural teacher, with all of the charisma and arrogance that comes in the package. And his students, at least in those seminar classes, adored him. At some point in the Spring of that year, John (as his students were encouraged to call him) became interested in challenging me in the classroom situation. He subsequently invited me to lunch in Dinkytown, the little village connected then to the campus. He suggested we write back and forth in a single notebook which we then did, primarily about the topics we were studying. (I later discovered he had done this with other students, but that in no way dims my appreciation of this method of intellectual exploration.) These notebooks were a way for me to exercise my emerging analytic and writing skills. For John, I believe at the beginning they were another way to teach. John was the first person to tell me I could write. But gradually, the writing became more personal. In September of my senior year, I discovered I would have enough credits to obtain my baccalaureate degree at the end of the quarter if I switched from theatre to English. (Did I mention I was a theatre major?) I was already enrolled in graduate courses, and I was dragging my feet on the last five-credit theatre department course I needed, as it would have involved endless hours of stagecraft training. I made the switch and finished the quarter with a good GPA and a BA. The end of the following February, I abruptly dropped out of the University and flew to California to stay with relatives and decide what I wanted to do with my life. My parents were alarmed, as they did not know my BA degree was already assured. I did not tell John where I was going, only that I was leaving. He called the Donahue’s house to find out my address and wrote to me, ‘Special Delivery’. For two and a half months we exchanged letters nearly every day. There was the weekly telephone conversation, which I would make from a pay phone at the local grocery store so that my relatives would not overhear. Then, suddenly, on 11 May, I received a package with three small books, John’s assigned reading for his spring quarter seminar class. On the same date the letters to Sacramento stopped and the phone calls to Minneapolis went unanswered. John had fallen in love with Kate.

16

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

When I returned to Minneapolis that summer I went back to the only house I had known, the Donahue family house on York Avenue South. It was an unsettling summer as Kathy and I had planned to move east together, but the pull of her relationship with John Berryman was too strong. At the end of the summer she and John were married and they went east for a year at Brown, while I headed west, back to California to teach second grade and to deliver Kathy’s younger sister, Irene, to her grandmother in California. At the end of that year I was still struggling to grow up, and could not decide if I wanted to continue in graduate school. I had begun with English and a focus in poetics in the then-excellent University of California system, but I missed my home and family. I returned to Minneapolis a year later, entered graduate school and found work. I visited the Berrymans that summer at the Mill-pond in which they lived in Rhode Island. Martha had been born at the Providence ‘Lying In’ hospital that winter. John returned to teach at the University of Minnesota. Kate and I resumed an altered friendship, a close relationship of adults – not children, not teenage girlfriends. And, by extension, John Berryman was part of that. The next phase of John’s presence in my life had begun. In those years, as I matured, my relationship with John Berryman changed. He was no longer my teacher or writing mentor, but now our families were friends. I married someone near my own age, also Irish, and had four sons – the last born a couple of months after John tragically died. I was in and out of graduate school, collecting a BS Degree in Education and an MA in Psychology, and made a career in a non-academic field. During those years John still carried a touch of that brilliant arrogance, but he could be oddly kind and/or human as well. A touch of that arrogance appeared one night when John and I tangled. The exchange brought back a memory of earlier conversations. When I was an undergraduate, John and I were talking over lunch one day. He began to tell a witty story about someone who confused Isaiah Berlin with Irving Berlin. Then he stopped. ‘Do you know who Isaiah Berlin is?’, he demanded. ‘Of course’, I answered with insouciance. ‘He’s the famous philosopher.’ (Actually, that’s about all I knew about Isaiah Berlin at the time.) ‘Good’, John replied. ‘Never lie to me about something you don’t know.’

Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

17

This all came back to me some years later. On a particular June night, as I was large with my first child and feeling awkward with it, I spent an evening with Kate and John while my own husband was in law school. John still enjoyed challenging and asked me directly if I knew a minor Italian poet with whom he was recently enamoured. I told him, somewhat defensively, that I did not know the man’s work. John sputtered, ‘I don’t have to stand for this ignorance in my own house!’ (Did I mention we had been drinking scotch?) I left in tears, primarily over being large in body and feeling ignorant in mind. When my husband heard the story he roared with laughter, ‘Why should you be expected to know everything John Berryman knows?’ I finally had to laugh as well. And that was the truth of it and part of John’s enormous appeal. He had an encyclopedic mind encompassing vast interests, and an often enormously detailed memory with it. He could mention some scene in Shakespeare and call up the number of the definitive folio. (He had spent a lot of time at the Folger Library in Washington). He could hold a discourse on Renaissance poetry or art as well as D. H. Lawrence or Plato and the Greeks. He was able to switch easily from one century or culture to another. And yet one of his most charming admissions to me when I was his student was that he read and loved detective stories. At the time, as an English honours major, I was appalled. But subsequently I used this as an excuse for myself to indulge in such reading and, eventually, writing, working mystery into my historical novels. John did me a great service by referring me to several writers on the development of the western poetic tradition. The book titled Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont (a colleague, I believe, when John was at Princeton) took me back to the Middle Ages and acquainted me with Arab Mystical Poetry. This association with the twelfth century, which I had begun when I read my brother’s Robin Hood books as a child, was the wellspring of my medieval novels and birthed what became the wonderful library of medieval history and philosophy that I have collected as an adult scholar. But this suggestion illustrates the span of his interest and reading: from Arab mystical poetry to jazz; from detective stories to Shakespeare. Berryman was truly a Renaissance man.

18

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

John’s wonderfully human side was evident one day when I visited him with Kate, at Abbott Hospital. He had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize recently, to add to his many prizes and fellowships before this, but nevertheless he was deeply unhappy that afternoon. The Atlantic Monthly (as it was then titled), a journal of significant intellectual heft in the general public sphere, had responded to several poems he had sent them with a form ‘rejection’ notice instead of a personal letter of regret. He was outraged. Another man of his poetic stature might have smoothly passed off this slight but not John Berryman. It was refreshing to see him openly annoyed, a truly honest reaction that amused us. His human side expanded when he was in treatment with others who shared his struggle with alcohol. He wrote poems, and the novel Recovery about his experiences and the people surrounding him there. While John was a political liberal in many ways, he also had a traditional side that would appear suddenly in odd places. One day he was showing me something in his study. I believe it was the Sunday of his youngest daughter’s Baptism and I had been the ‘godmother’ (as Kate was for my youngest son). It was the early seventies, and the ramifications of Vatican Two were still being felt around the Roman Catholic Church. I can’t remember how the subject came up, but John began to rail against priests who were leaving the church at that time, not keeping their vows, as he said. His voice rose in some anger. I didn’t want to remind him that he was on his third marriage; that would have seemed churlish. But I was surprised that he had that much feeling about the situation in the Catholic Church, especially since he had not been raised in that tradition. He had once written to me, ‘The church is not God.’ Yet the mass exodus of priests in this liberal period disturbed his sense of propriety. This is all the more puzzling because if one examines John’s poetry one finds him in the forefront of liberal – no, rather progressive – thought. He takes the side of the Minnesota Eight (an anti-Vietnam war protest group), he presents a decidedly feminist posture in ‘To A Woman’, and renders a gently critical caricature of Eisenhower in ‘The Lay of Ike’.1 He showed 1

Berryman’s poem ‘The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers’ was published in the first edition of Love & Fame (1970) but it was not included in the second edition

Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

19

international justice concerns when he rails against the Soviet system that put poet Joseph Brodsky on trial: […] seldom has a judge so coarse borne herself so coarsely; and often has a poet worked so hard for so small but they was not prosecuted in this world.2

With all of this orientation toward justice and openness, his disturbance about priests leaving a church that placed a high value on traditionalism and authority remains a mystery. Only two poems of John’s had ever anything to do with my life directly. One was the previously mentioned ‘To a Woman’, which John inscribed to me in the carbon copy he gave me. It is a vibrant poem, ahead of its time, celebrating not just my efforts, but all women’s emerging activity into the public and political realm in the early 1970s. I treasure it. The other poem is a lovely expression of his human side. The title is ‘An Afternoon Visit’ and it was written on the occasion of a visit John, Kate and Martha paid to our house on a summer afternoon.3 The social event itself was unremarkable, two families with young children having conversation and drinks together, but in this poem the past and the present and the future converge and inner and outer reality come together, dance and retire. It is the gift of all true poets, in my opinion, to create that timelessness, that acceptance of life as it moves us forward and backward, so that we see beyond to some larger and more complex inner existence.

2 3

(1971). It is contained in Daniel Swift’s selection of Berryman’s poems, The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 108. ‘To a Woman’, published in both editions of Love & Fame, is contained in Berryman’s Collected Poems, 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 204. ‘The Lay of Ike’ is the title Berryman gave to Dream Song 23. See Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 25. See Dream Song 180 in Berryman, The Dream Songs, 199. ‘An Afternoon Visit’ is included in Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 25.

20

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

Several weeks ago, I had occasion to root around in an old trunk in my storage area. I was looking for some early published writings of my own, and I came across an astonishing discovery: a copy of the galleys for John Berryman’s book Love & Fame. I have no recollection of when he gave me these, but the find was very moving for me. I asked Kate when we last had lunch together if she knew when he had given them to me (or why) but she did not. For me this discovery was a message announcing, like Gabriel might have, an important truth: that all the parts of our lives, however varied, are alive and moving in memory. Gratitude for all the splendid people and events that formed us must be expressed. John Berryman was one such person for me and I remain grateful for his remarkable presence in my life.

Richard J. Kelly Notes on a Remarkable Teacher John Berryman was the best teacher I ever had. His extensive influence on other poets – as a teacher of poetry writing classes and in his own work – has been well documented by Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, and others.4 But I wonder if his influence as a teacher in the Humanities Program at the University of Minnesota might rival that. The dozens of other likeminded students I’ve encountered over the years has been phenomenal, if understandable.

4

Philip Levine reflects on his time as a student of Berryman’s in ‘Mine Own John Berryman’, in Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, eds, Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 17–41. W. S. Merwin writes about Berryman in his poem ‘Berryman’. See Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 256. See also W. S. Merwin, ‘Introduction’ to John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), xxi–xxvi.

Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

21

The Humanities Program was chaired by the brilliant teacher-administrator Ralph Ross, who brought together such other luminaries as Allen Tate, Isaac Rosenfeld, George Amberg, Vivien Koch, Morgan Blum, and Saul Bellow. Tate had arranged with Ross for a position for Berryman in 1955. Lecturing on the history of Western civilization, as he was then called upon to do for the first time, was both stimulating and demanding for the former creative writing teacher. Later, he claimed to have learned more teaching these courses than he had at Columbia or Cambridge. He taught there for the next seventeen years and in 1969 was appointed Regents’ Professor of Humanities for ‘outstanding contributions to the teaching profession, the University and to the public good’. I formally took only one course from him, but after that life-changing experience, I sat in on countless other lectures he gave. The one I took with him, ‘Humanities 63: The Renaissance and Reformation’, was in Spring quarter (as the calendar was then set up) in 1965. It was held in the unHumanities-like Science Classroom Building on the East Bank. This also happened to be the quarter when Berryman won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs, and I still recall how pleased he seemed at the ovation we gave him as he walked into the classroom the day it was announced. The ambitious syllabus for the course was headed ‘The End and the Beginning’. Among the assigned readings were J. Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, R. H. Bainton’s biography of Luther, Here I Stand, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Machiavelli’s The Prince, various figures (Da Vinci, du Bellay, Nicholas of Cusa, Rabelais, Pius II, Alberti, Pico de Mirandola, Savonorolla, Luther vs Erasmus, Calvin, St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross) in The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by Ross and McLaughlin, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (translated by J. M. Cohen), and numerous other suggested readings. A term paper was required for an A. Looking now at my fifty year-old notebook for the course brings back to life a sense of what it was like.5 He usually brought a small stack of 3x5-inch note cards, set them down on the lectern, but then seldom 5

Parts of this and the next paragraph are paraphrased from previous publications of mine. See, in particular, Richard J. Kelly, ‘Preface’, in Philip Coleman and Philip

22

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

referred to them. He liked, instead, to read key passages from the works we were studying, and then to discuss them with us, testing us to see what implications, if any, we found in them for our own lives. Chain-smoking (yes, it was okay in those days) and pacing in front of the class, he gave so much of himself that he was afterwards often exhausted, his shirt and brow soaked with perspiration. More than once our discussions became so impassioned that he would say ‘that’s enough for today’, and break off early. Once he tossed a folding chair off the dais, which landed with a bang, for emphasis. Another time, reading a passage from Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’, he wept openly and unashamedly. I remember after the intensity of one such session, having to go home and lie down for a while myself. In lecturing on the Reformation, he once rightly remarked that Catholics became Lutherans and Lutherans became Catholics. His high intensity, though, was often leavened with humor. He thought Don Quixote was the funniest book ever written – an amalgam of slapstick and the supernatural – while, at the same time, being deadly serious. Wit, he pointed out, was considered a major attribute in the Renaissance – and his lectures were peppered with it. (Unfortunately, my notes do not do justice to his own piercing wit.) Socrates, he added, also thought wit very important. What came through most strongly: I (we) had never encountered anyone who loved books as much, and took them as personally, as he did – and it was contagious.6 Emphasizing a point with the forefinger of his right hand, he would sometimes raise his voice to a SHOUT! If you hadn’t read such and such a book, you might be NOWHERE! – and you’d better do something about it was the implication. Often, he would quote long

6

McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), xi–xviii. The heavily annotated books in his personal library aptly reflect this. For details about many of these annotations and Berryman’s annotation practice in general see Richard J. Kelly, John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).

Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

23

passages of poetry by heart – in various languages – to make a point, and say to one of us, ‘Isn’t that good, Ms X, or Mr Y? And what do you like about it?’ Some figure he found unworthy might be dismissed with a cutting ‘about whom the less said the better’. An increase in expansiveness, at times, suggested the influence of alcohol, but, paradoxically, it seemed to make him even more lucid. Names of famous friends (Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas) were dropped from time to time. It was a heady performance, both authoritative and, at times, hyperbolic. It’s safe to say few of us had ever encountered such charismatic brilliance. (In his copy of Ezra Pound’s Letters he marks the passage, ‘Secret of good teaching is to copy the best teacher you ever had.’ Mark Van Doren, probably, in Berryman’s case.) His intensity and the extensive reading required weren’t for everyone, though, and several students fell by the wayside early in the quarter. But he made it clear in this course and others, he wanted only the ‘serious ones’ to remain. He disappointed me just once, when one day after class, in reference to his lecture, I asked him if there was a difference between ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. He said they usually refer to the same thing. This seemed to me then, and does still, a true, but inadequate answer (look them up) for someone so steeped in matters theological, but perhaps the timing of the question prevented him from saying more. My notes from the class are filled with his comments on what we were reading. It is hard to convey the majority of what was said, but here are a few points that I recorded from those classes with Berryman: • •

•

The Renaissance was an impulse toward emancipation in the arts. The Reformation toward emancipation in religion. Both are still growing and are important to the present character of the US. Luther was a sort of force of nature. Not simply the servant of his movement: bone-headed, tyrannical, a born leader, devoted to St Paul, and able to affect other people profoundly. Like Paul he believed in the priesthood of all believers. He retained the sacraments of baptism and communion, and threw the other five out, because there was no scriptural authority. God is not easy. He must bring us to nothing in order to save us. Luther based everything on The Bible and knew more about it than any of the

24

•

• •

•

•

•

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

others. He was operating as a Catholic in great danger, taking every risk to save himself and others. The bitterness Luther put on display requires our admiration. It came out of pain, rage, hatred – social, economic and religious. He shook the Church and it had to be shaken. Neither the Papacy nor the Empire could have kept us going. The world had to split and he split it. Later in his life Luther degenerated both physically and spiritually, from lack of an occupation. Dürer’s paintings portray him as a pig. A man must have something to do. In the Medieval view – and Luther’s – hell does not subject itself to human understanding. It represents God’s justice, not his mercy. It represents the pain of loss (mental and spiritual); everything is lost. It represents the pain of failure – failure in all one’s prospects. All distraction is gone – friends, travel, money, etc. What is left is a selfsated revelling in sin. The fire burns the spirit. Hell is a place, though we don’t know how to describe it. In No Exit, Sartre catches this: one is with people just as bad as oneself. In The Prince, Machiavelli removed from political and military thought its ethical and religious colouring. The mere establishment of power is necessary, but nothing in itself. To hold power is the thing. Every morning you wake up and say I trust nobody. Trust in yourself only. He said what everyone actually knows. That no one gets to the top by being a nice guy. He had a great grip on reality – it’s as people are. But he was a failure himself. The Renaissance ideal (in Castiglione and elsewhere) is different from ours. We have scaled down our demands on people – as in architecture. There is a hankering after mediocrity. In The Courtier we start with the idea of a noble birth. It is proposed that it is fundamental. Aristotle also supports nobility. As a culture, we put down noble birth and civic responsibility. We are out of line in these two instances. A courtier is supposed to be acquainted with arms, be graceful, be able to speak and write forcefully, be a scholar, witty, acquainted with music, be able to write poetry, be familiar with the arts, be tactful; study and have fidelity with his prince; clothes should be individual, but simple; should have friends – but take few into intimacy; appear to pay no

Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

•

•

•

• •

25

attention to what one does, and not appear to take oneself seriously; be curious, over-study, be a pedant, know things and make an appearance of learning. The courtier must know and feel he is superior, but not be too loud about it, as to bring others’ feelings against him. Don Quixote is the story of the interrelationships between two souls – to the world and to themselves. Cervantes is a dead serious writer who understands life to its depths. He resembles Tolstoy – both are very concise, with great speed of narrative. He used two words where we would use forty. In the first paragraph he withholds everything from the reader, though he says he will tell the truth. The Don is off his rocker. He’s mad, but incredibly reasonable. His quest is ridiculous, but real. He has a job to do – he’s a crazy Catholic. He’s fulfilling his soul and redressing wrongs. The hardships he goes through are built into the Spanish character – they don’t care about comfort. By attacking the windmills, he’s attacking the sacraments. But he’s wrong. The point is we don’t understand these things and shouldn’t interfere with them. Cervantes is saying, between appearance and reality, we don’t know what is real and what is not. One should take appearance for reality – leave it alone. That’s Catholic, and the Counter-Revolution. It approaches reality by means of madness. One of the most important things that happens to the Don is that he finds a friend. He sets out on something that he thinks must be undertaken alone, but cannot be. Sancho is the earthly man, the Don the ideal. In some ways they’re analogous to Prince Hal and Falstaff. They are necessary to each other. The notion of the Don discarding Sancho – as Prince Hal did with Falstaff – is inconceivable. Therefore, Don Quixote is a greater work. Knights-errant like the Don have to know about everything – art, politics, action. They must be omni-competent, like Castiglione’s courtier. This is true in any serious profession. Every man should be the architect of his own honour. Dulcinea is who the Don gets in touch with – the reason for the quest. He really and truly loves her. She’s a type of the Virgin Mary. Without her, where would the fidelity be? She’s a motivating force. She’s also full of paradoxes. She’s a peasant and a princess. She’s not only ugly, but

26

•

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

incredibly beautiful. She’s remote, but also available. She’s ideal, but also actual. Real communication between the Don and Dulcinea is impossible. It’s a chaste relationship. He’s a devoted and innocent knight. Sancho does not have a sex life, either. It would derogate from his perfect devotion to the Don. Hamlet and the Don are both hopeless idealists, both reformers, devoted to setting things right. The two works were written at about the same time. Shakespeare had read the first part of Don Quixote. He based a play on it, which was lost.

The above are just a few gleanings from my notes on this provocative and stimulating course. When you come down to it, there might have been something Quixotic about Berryman’s ambitious approach to teaching. There was an emphasis throughout on man’s fallible nature –as recorded in most great literature, and the history of mankind. Certainly, it was more than most of us bargained for when we signed up for the class. It seemed aimed not only at helping us to understand the consequential material, but at prodding us to deal with our own individual reformations. Because he held us to a higher standard, many of us learned to, as well. Like the late, lamented Philip Levine, I regard him as the most ‘brilliant, intense, articulate’ teacher I ever had.7

Bob Lundegaard Berryman Recollections My panel was called ‘Students and Friends of John Berryman’ – I being the token friend. But in a sense, anyone who knew John was a student of his, so I have no problem falling under that rubric. I was for more than thirty years a reporter/editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, retiring in the late

7

See Philip Levine in Kelly and Lathrop, eds, Recovering Berryman, 40.

Berryman as Teacher and Friend: Personal Reminiscences

27

1980s, and it was in that capacity that I met him, for a newspaper article shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs. We maintained a sporadic friendship for the few years remaining to him, and in all my encounters with him, I found him unfailingly pleasant – a delight to be with. Despite his vast knowledge, he was never pontifical or condescending. On the contrary, he was interested in my opinions on all matters, treating me as an intellectual equal. He once told me he liked me because I brought him news, which I took to mean that it was a chance for him to escape the world of academia for a time. He was seldom without a drink in his hand, but even though his speech might be slurred, his mind was always sharp. One of my fondest memories came from a news story I wrote while covering the University of Minnesota for the Tribune during the Vietnam War. The Selective Service had devised a multiple-choice quiz to help it decide which college students should be deferred and which should become eligible for the draft and possibly sent to a war zone. I looked over some sample questions and discovered to my horror that about a quarter of them contained mistakes. One dealt with a poem by A. E. Housman that begins ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now …’ The second verse reads ‘Now of my threescore years and ten / Twenty will not come again.’ The question was ‘How old was the poet when he wrote the poem?’ The choices: (A) 20; (B) 50; (C) 70; or (D) one cannot tell. Their answer was (A), which is what the poem says. I argued that the proper answer was D, since there was no indication of how old Housman was when he wrote the poem. It may have been the only time Housman’s name appeared on the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune. The day the article appeared, I received a phone call at home. A familiar growl at the other end asked ‘Why didn’t you call ME? I could have told you. I’m the world’s leading authority on Housman.’ I hadn’t known that, but I was not surprised. John was of course very sensitive on the subject of death. While he was in Ireland in 1966 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, I wrote him – the only letter written on either side in our friendship – and began with the sad news that my best friend had died in a plane crash while on National Guard duty. John’s reply became Dream Song 325, which begins ‘Control it now,

28

Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard

it can’t do any good / Your grief for your great friend …’8 Unfortunately, John wasn’t able to follow this sound advice in his own life. But he was a good and kind man. When he returned from Ireland, the mayor of Minneapolis, Art Naftalin, who was also a neighbor and close friend of John’s, threw a party for him. Most of the guests were the A-list of Minneapolis: the publisher of my paper, the head of the Walker Art Center, the head of the Minneapolis library. The highlight of the evening was a reading by John of some of his poems. Before beginning, he announced that he was dedicating the reading to three women: Fran Naftalin, the mayor’s wife; Maris Thomes, the wife of his good friend and doctor, Boyd Thomes, and Betty Lundegaard. The first two names occasioned little surprise, but the third caused the assemblage to look around for the identity of this unknown woman. It was easy to find her. She was the lady sitting next to me on the living room rug, preening at this lovely tribute. It was typical of John’s generous nature. As for Dream Song 325, Kate Berryman discovered it among his effects after his suicide and gave it to me. It was inscribed ‘To Bob Lundegaard, with sympathy, John Berryman.’9

8 9

See Berryman, The Dream Songs, 347. Editors’ Note: Berryman’s dedication is not noted in his ‘Author’s Note’ to The Dream Songs (xxix–xxx). It is important for future Berryman scholars to know that the Dream Song was dedicated to Mr Lundegaard in this way.

Michael Berryhill

2  Henry and His Problems

A day or two after John Berryman’s funeral, his widow Kate introduced me to his mother. Jill Berryman was seventy-seven and still bright and vivacious and warmed to attention, despite the death of her son. I was twenty-seven and didn’t know much about people. I thought Berryman’s wound was his father’s suicide.1 He had declared it so, in ‘The Ball Poem’ and later in the harrowing Dream Song 384, in which Henry says, ‘I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave’, and then I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start.2

It’s a scene out of Hamlet, isn’t it? Berryman may have been a textual expert on King Lear, but Hamlet is Henry’s play. Like Henry, Hamlet talks about himself in the third person: ‘Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet. /

1 2

For an analysis of ‘The Ball Poem’ in relation to the death of Berryman’s father, see Michael Berryhill, ‘The Epistemology of Loss’, in Richard Kelly, John Berryman: A Checklist (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), xxi–xxxi. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 406.

30

Michael Berryhill

[…] / Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d. / His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy’.3 And think of Henry mourning poets in Dream Song 153: I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation. First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore. In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath. That was a first rate haul.4

At the end of Hamlet, Fortinbras looks at all the bodies littered on the stage and says, O proud Death, What feast is toward in thine eternal cell That thou so many princes at a shot So bloodily hast struck!5

Near the end of his life, Berryman planned a seminar on Hamlet and the year 1600, when, he believed, Shakespeare suffered his dark period after the death of his son and father and created characters out of that despair who suffered from darkness, melancholy, self-loathing, and fierce wit. Berryman could not agree with T. S. Eliot’s formulation of the ‘objective correlative’ in his 1919 essay on Hamlet.6 Eliot famously declared Hamlet’s emotions were ‘in excess of the facts as they appear’.7 Considering that 3 4 5 6

7

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, V.ii.179–85, in Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor et al., eds, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 716. John Berryman, The Dream Songs, 172. Hamlet, V.ii.319–21, The Oxford Shakespeare, 716. See Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, The Athenaeum 4665 (26 September 1919): 940–1, later published as ‘Hamlet’. Eliot declared in the essay that: ‘Coriolanus may not be as “interesting” as Hamlet, but it is with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success’. See Eliot, ‘Hamlet’, in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 47. Berryman turned Eliot upside down in his unpublished essay ‘The End’, noting that Coriolanus’s hatred of the mob ‘far exceeds any cause in the poor object, which it seeks by the way to exterminate’. See Berryman’s essay in John Haffenden, ed., Berryman’s Shakespeare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 141. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’, 48. Emphasis in original.

Henry and His Problems

31

Hamlet’s uncle has murdered his father and married his mother, Hamlet seems to have plenty of cause for emotion. Echoing Eliot, characters in the play tell Hamlet his emotions are excessive. In an early scene, Claudius chides him that his suffering is ‘unmanly’. He finds Hamlet’s grief so excessive he denounces it: Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers …8

Gertrude tells him that he must learn to accept death. Doesn’t he know that ‘all that lives must die / Passing through nature to eternity’?9 Their remarks parallel those of Henry’s interlocutor, who questions and chides him from time to time, as in Dream Song 4, when Henry ponders, ‘Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry’, and his friend says, ‘there is’. Or in Dream Song 36, Henry cries, ‘I have to live’, and his friend replies, ‘No there you exaggerate, Sah. / We haveta die. / That is our ’pointed task. Love & die’.10 Hamlet tells Gertrude, ‘But I have that within which passeth show – / These but the trappings and the suits of woe’.11 He’s trying to tell her that his pain is bottomless, boundless, excruciating, and that it is driving him mad. He will commit cruel and impulsive acts, drive his lover to suicide, and on impulse, stab to death a man hiding behind a curtain. And yet, we identify with him. That, I think, was Eliot’s problem with Hamlet. The play is, in Eliot’s word, ‘interesting’, because we identify with Hamlet, just as we identify with Henry. And that subjectivity was especially troubling for a group of writers and critics trying to make criticism seem more objective. When I was young and learning to write poetry, I fell in love with James Wright, not for those studied, skilled poems of St. Judas, but for those 8 9 10 11

Hamlet, I.ii.101–4, The Oxford Shakespeare, 685. Hamlet, I.ii.72–3, ibid. See Dream Song 4 and Dream Song 36 in John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 6, 40. Emphases in original. Hamlet, I.ii.85–6, The Oxford Shakespeare, 685.

32

Michael Berryhill

lovely, frank, autobiographical poems of The Branch Will Not Break. Then I came to Minneapolis for graduate school and discovered Berryman. How could a man so manic, alcoholic, impulsive, rude, salacious, suicidal, melancholic and sentimental, be so attractive? The ‘elementary thing required’ of a poet, Berryman once wrote, is ‘to sound as if he meant it’.12 Berryman as Henry and Shakespeare as Hamlet, sound as if they mean it. Berryman’s poetics were far from systematic. He turned to Whitman, not Shakespeare. He wrote, The poet – one would say, a mere channel, but with its own ferocious difficulties – fills with experiences, a valve opens; he speaks them. I am obliged to remark that I prefer this theory of poetry to those that have ruled the critical quarterlies since I was an undergraduate twenty-five years ago.13

Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of poetry was designed to disabuse all those schoolboys and schoolgirls who read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and assume the author felt the sexual shame and neurotic despair expressed by the character. In 1948, however, Berryman wrote in the Partisan Review of Eliot’s poems, ‘Perhaps in the end this poetry which the commentators are so eager to prove impersonal will prove to be personal, and will also appear the more terrible and more pitiful even than it does now.’14 It was easy enough to point out that Eliot’s personality was behind his poems, but for his whole adult life Berryman was after bigger game: Shakespeare. Berryman’s Shakespeare studies came as something of a surprise to admirers of his verse because most of this work remained unpublished until after his death. Berryman had such high ambition for his Shakespeare scholarship that he was almost certain to fail. His biographer and the editor of his work on Shakespeare, John Haffenden, described Berryman’s 1970 proposal for a book on Shakespeare. Using his skills as a textual editor, critic, poet and psychoanalytical biographer, he would synthesize his knowledge in a book with the ambitious title, Shakespeare’s 12 13 14

John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) 303. Emphasis in original. Ibid. 232. John Berryman, ‘A Peine Ma Piste’, Partisan Review ( July 1948), 828.

Henry and His Problems

33

Identity. ‘Berryman’s Shakespeare was not to be a picture of facile genius’, Haffenden wrote, ‘[h]e was to be a man struggling with his demons, like all men and overcoming them through the power of art’. Berryman’s old friend and teacher, Mark Van Doren, wrote him that he would never finish such a book, that ‘the over-ambitiousness and high anxiety would be staggering ….’ Haffenden argues rightly that Berryman was really searching for the meaning of his own broken identity.15 Berryman believed that a poet needed to experience emotions in order to express emotions. Find a powerful emotion in a poem, and the critic/ biographer will eventually find some event that fed that emotion. For example, Berryman cites Shakespeare’s late style with a passage from Pericles, in which the title character looks at his wife’s body. A terrible Child-bed hast thou had (my deare), No light, no fire, th’vnfriendly elements Forgot thee vtterly nor haue I time To giue thee hallowd to thy graue, but straight Must cast thee scarcly Coffind, in th’ooze, Where for a monument vpon thy bones And aye-remayning lampes, the belching Whale And humming water must orewhelme thy corpes, Lying with simple shells …

Berryman wrote, ‘Nothing that the poet’s imagination had suffered is forgotten in this style, and it is hardly too much to say that nothing is feigned’.16 This is a persuasive speculation, but nonetheless, a speculation. While confirming Shakespeare’s greatness, Berryman seems to be saying that he wishes he had written it, or that he would write as well, or that this is what he hopes to accomplish. Berryman did not examine Shakespeare as a dramatist but as a poet of great moments. Here is a speech from the late play, King John. It is delivered by Constance, whose son, a young prince, has leapt from a parapet to his death. Like Eliot writing of Hamlet, two

15 16

These details, and Van Doren’s words, are cited in Haffenden, ed., Berryman’s Shakespeare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), lxi-lxiii. Ibid. 144. The quotation is also from Berryman’s text in Berryman’s Shakespeare.

34

Michael Berryhill

authority figures, a cardinal and a king, tell Constance that she feels too much. ‘You hold too heinous a respect of grief ’, the cardinal, Pandolf, tells her; King Philip says, ‘You are as fond of grief as of your child’.17 Constance replies to them both, Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then have I reason to be fond of grief. Fare you well. Had you such a loss as I, I could give better comfort than you do. [She unbinds her hair] I will not keep this form upon my head Where there is such disorder in my wit. O Lord, my boy, my Arthur, my fair son, My life, my job, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrow’s cure!18

This speech is sometimes distributed in workshops for the families of alcoholics and addicts, people who have lost a child or are coming increasingly closer to losing one. The reflexive advice many people give is to calm down, don’t carry on so, which is tantamount to telling the grieving person her wound is not real, her feelings are not real. Most importantly, though, this is a speech about the pleasures of grief. Constance has reason to be as fond of it as she was fond of her son. Berryman thought this grieving voice was not something Shakespeare overheard or made up, or imagined, but had actually experienced. Berryman was not alone in wanting to infer that Shakespeare’s powerful speeches grew out of powerful experience. Some scholars have speculated that the speech in King John grew out of Shakespeare’s grief at the death of his son, and Berryman conceded this might be so.19 He was fully aware of

17 18 19

King John, III.iv.90, 91, The Oxford Shakespeare, 440. King John, III.iv.93–105, ibid. See Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 110.

Henry and His Problems

35

Stephen Dedalus’s ruminations on the relationship of Shakespeare to his plays in the library scene in Ulysses: ‘His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare’.20 Berryman explored these ideas in a series of lectures at the University of Cincinnati in 1952. A friend from the time wrote his biographer, The six months he was here, he was … obsessed with the idea that he, John Berryman, could uncover the truth of Shakespeare’s identity. It would appear that on this score he confused imaginative reality and the goal of the biographer […] He identified personally with the period Shakespeare’s tragedies and would speculate at length on the subject of the personal tragedies that induced the ‘dark period.’ […] Sometimes one had the feeling he was talking through his speculations, trying them out on diverse friends.21

Berryman might have doubts about King John, but he had none about Hamlet as Shakespeare’s personal expression. At the end of his unpublished essay, ‘Shakespeare’s Last Word’, Berryman quotes Hamlet’s cry to Horatio, Giue me that man That is not passions slauve, and I will weare him In my harts core, I in my hart of harts.

Berryman wrote, ‘Nobody, I suppose, who had not himself been passion’s slave could have made the longing in these lines so central in his most personal play’.22 Berryman’s presumption that poetic intensity signaled emotional experience was impossible to prove, of course, which might have made him reluctant to publish. He wanted to be a scholar, but he wanted to be a poet-critic even more. No matter how doggedly he collated lines from different folios or consulted the dry-as-dust scholars, his critical impulse was speculative.23 He aspired to do what the scholars could not do, because

20 21 22 23

James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 200. Cited in Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxv. Ibid. 165. Emphasis in original. In 1946 he wrote Mark Van Doren, ‘I have collated 24 copies of the First Folio in Washington last week and am only just able to see my hand in front of my face, ha, ha’. Cited in Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 242.

36

Michael Berryhill

he believed that only a poet, a peer, could spot the relationships between Shakespeare and his life. It’s a shame Berryman didn’t write an essay about Hamlet, which contains the psychoanalytic themes that were central to his life. A few months before his death, Berryman had proposed teaching a course called ‘The Age of Hamlet’, the notes for which are in his archive at the University of Minnesota. Through his course he proposed to define the mind of Shakespeare in the year 1600. Hamlet was, he wrote, the ‘pivotal play’ of Shakespeare’s life.24 But it was also the pivotal play in Berryman’s life. Hamlet, like Berryman, has lost a father, and like Hamlet, his mother has hastily remarried. Dream Song 168 opens, and God has many other surprises, like when the man you fear most in the world marries your mother

The Song digresses to other painful stories of betrayal, and ‘the final wound of the Cross’, but at the end, Henry, like Whitman, can’t get it out. What thickens my tongue? and has me by the throat? I gasp accursed even for the thought of uttering that word. I pass to the next Song:25

It’s not clear from the context what ‘that word’ is. This, then, is Henry’s and Hamlet’s problem: expressing what is repressed. As for ‘the man you fear most in the world’, Berryman’s stepfather, John Angus Berryman, who gave him his name, scarcely seems to have been frightening. Upon moving to New York, the stepfather’s fortunes declined, and the family depended largely on Jill Berryman’s earnings. When his stepfather died in October 1947, neither Berryman nor his mother seem to have mentioned him in their correspondence.26 The hastily married stepfather seems to have been

24 Ibid. 102. 25 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 187. 26 This is noted by Richard Kelly in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 227.

Henry and His Problems

37

as disappointing and ineffective to the poet’s mother as the father who killed himself. Berryman’s problem is not that a stepfather has supplanted his father, then, but that his mother has ascended, and enveloped his life. Important distinctions must be made, however, between Hamlet’s family drama and Berryman’s. Hamlet has been dispossessed, which is not by coincidence the title of Berryman’s first book of poems. Hamlet remembers and loves his father. The guard who first sees the ghost firmly identifies it as the very image of the old king, a warrior in armour whose grizzled beard is revealed when he raises his vizier. Hamlet longs to see it and talk to it. The ghost will call him to revenge. Berryman’s father never quite registered on him. In 1954, Berryman ended up teaching in Minnesota, where his father had grown up. While undergoing psychoanalysis, he noted, ‘I came here to Minnesota to tear him to pieces, to get square, to even the score with him! expose him.’ His dream analysis helped lead to the poems that made his reputation. In one of his notes about analysis, he wrote, ‘So dream is my bloody father looking down at me, whom he’s just fucked by killing himself, making me into shit: and taunting me before he flushes me away’.27 Berryman’s dream may have seemed explicit, but his memory was not. During this period, he wrote to his mother: The final thrashings of my father’s life seem to me (tell me what you think of this) those of a rather cold & inexpressive man feeling both so guilty and so rejected that what had been all his life (unjustly) hidden from him boiled irresponsibly up and unmanageably up in such a way as to bring him before no tribunal known to us. But I can’t quite see my father. I don’t know him. Well, who does know his father who died when he was twelve? R. I. P.28

One wonders what Berryman meant when he wrote about the thing that had been unjustly hidden from his father. He could have been talking about himself. What Berryman shares with Hamlet, then, is not a reverence for his father but an uncertainty about his mother and her psychic These notes are quoted by John Haffenden in The Life of John Berryman (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1982), 30. 28 Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 283. 27

38

Michael Berryhill

responsibility for his father’s death. In 1954, as Berryman was undergoing analysis and trying to come to grips with his destructive alcoholism, his relations with his mother were increasingly harrowing. In a series of letters she tries to explain herself and her husband’s death. She writes him that she was sure her late husband’s older sister thought she had murdered him, but then takes it back. ‘I do not believe that actually she ever really believed me guilty of murder’.29 Berryman wants to rid himself of his father’s ghost, but the assertion is not quite convincing. At the age of forty he has outlived his father and writes that he ‘can hardly compete with him any longer. I am willing to some extent to regard myself as his representative, but chiefly I am my own representative and custodian’.30 His mother tells him, ‘Never feel anything but free to speak of Allyn as you like to me, never think that I disliked or misrespected him – it was only that I did not love him and have long felt wretchedly guilty because of what came of us to him’. But then she takes it away. ‘This guilt I no longer feel, believing that then I could have done no other’.31 Berryman was not necessarily trying to make his mother feel guilty, though he was certainly capable of doing it from time to time, especially when he was drinking. He was interrogating her because, as Haffenden writes: Berryman could never actually recall his immediate sensations about his father’s death, only the ride to Tampa and the darkened funeral-home room. He could remember curiously little even of the man himself, except for his dark hair cut short, the fact that he smoked Camels and the mistaken notion that he resembled King George VI.32

To see his father as a king is an interesting projection, even if the resemblance to King George was vague. Even more interesting is to examine the two photographs of Berryman’s father published in Richard Kelly’s collection of the letters Berryman exchanged with his mother.33 John Smith 29 Ibid. 266. 30 Ibid. 272. 31 Ibid. 274. 32 Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 29. 33 See Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 72.

Henry and His Problems

39

bore a striking resemblance to his son. Berryman didn’t just lose his father, he lost the kingdom of his soon-to-be-emerging identity. While his father had taken a mistress, abandoned his family and was becoming more and more suicidal, Berryman witnessed the growing romance between his mother and her married landlord, John Angus Berryman. ‘Those lovely beach parties’, he recalled. ‘I had no idea what was wrong, of course, but a child picks up atmosphere.’34 Berryman lost not only his father, but also his mother at an age when he was extremely vulnerable. The loss of the father was evident, but the loss of the mother was repressed. The mother supplanted not only his father but his stepfather as well. The grieving was never processed because the mother was so completely present, an occupying force of personality. Berryman’s stepfather hadn’t taken over his kingdom. His mother had. The rage he felt at his mother was displaced onto a father he scarcely remembered.35 In Dream Song 100 Henry celebrates Jill Berryman’s birthday and her survival of ‘two and seventy years of chipped indignities’. He salutes her ‘goodness’ and ‘great strength’ and ‘her hope superhuman’. But he can’t come to terms with her: I declare a mystery, he mumbled to himself, Of love, and took the bourbon from the shelf And drank her a tall one, tall.36

This is not Berryman’s finest poetic moment, but it declares that the mystery of his mother must be numbed with alcohol. The suicide of the father is a terrible wound, but Berryman’s mother was the psychic force he could not bring himself to confront in his poetry. Jill Berryman makes very little show in the Dream Songs. Twice – in Dream Songs 166 and 212 – ‘mother’ is rhymed with ‘smother’. In Dream Song 166, Henry imagines himself being born ‘from Venus’ foam’:

34 Quoted in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 22. 35 I am indebted to Dr Glenn Cambor, a Houston psychoanalyst, for his insight into this problem. 36 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 117.

40

Michael Berryhill Thus his art started. Thus he ran from home toward home, forsaking too withal his mother In the almost unbearable smother.37

He barely escapes the mother to forge his art. In the last stanza of Dream Song 212 the mother-force is scarier: The women scream adown the mountain side & the frisky god screams, as full well he may, worst is the armed mother: night with her knives reigns. I will stay the night and I will have nothing more much now to say in the brilliance of their smother.38

The mother becomes more dangerous here, armed with ‘knives’, but the mother also brings night and the ‘smother’ of dreams. He cannot speak before them. The mother seems to be a smothering, silencing force in poetry. Bereft of his father yet unable to remember him, Berryman’s Henry has no foes to kill except in his dreams and imagination. Hamlet became a portal through which he could think about his mother. Berryman was familiar with the short essay by Freud and Ernest Jones’s Freudian analysis of Hamlet, but he did not have the benefit of Lacanian analysis. In their book Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine, Simon Critchley, a philosopher, and Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst, have much to offer about the play. Moving on from Ernest Jones and the Oedipal theory, they cite Lacan: The problem for Hamlet is not his unconscious desire for his mother. It is his mother’s desire that is a problem. What does Gertrude want? It is the enigma of Gertrude’s desire that drives Hamlet into a wild rage […] with the death of his father Hamlet is thrown back upon the desire of his mother in a kind of melancholic identification. He cannot separate from her. He is fixated within her desire.39

37 Ibid. 185. 38 Ibid. 231. 39 Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster, Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (New York: Pantheon, 2013), 165.

Henry and His Problems

41

In Berryman’s experience, that fixation played out in May 1952 while he was teaching in Cincinnati and still married. He tried to enlist his mother as an ally in his desire, writing to her at the time: I have got very serious favour to ask. I don’t like to ask it, but I have to. I have been in love for several months with a young woman here. There is no way for me to write to her, and after I leave we cannot communicate at all unless you are willing to receive letters from her and keep them for me. Will you? If so throw some affirmative expression inconspicuously into the final sentence of your next letter.40

The ghost tells Hamlet to leave his mother to heaven, but Hamlet cannot leave her alone, and ‘bounds toward his mother’.41 That anger at the smothering mother is suppressed in The Dream Songs. One of their worst blowups came when Berryman failed to alert his mother that his sonnets were being published in 1967. Berryman had always informed her of his publications and ambitions, but he failed to tell her at all about his new book about a twenty-year-old affair. He simply sent it in the mail, which she interpreted as an act of aggression. On 4 July 1967 – four days before her birthday – she began with the smothering: ‘Whatever I was ever able to do for you, John, was not done to make up for your loss of a father but in joy and happiness that I could do something for you who had fulfilled my life for me, you and your brother.’ Then comes the drama: Now for the other side of this coin. This should free you of the ambivalence that has agonized you. You are free to think, even believe, what you like, John, with no feeling of treachery toward your father’s memory or the latent fear that you have misjudged me. For the last time, for the record, John, I did not kill your father or drive him or lead him to his death. If you do not know in your blood and bone that I am incapable of assuming the burden of another’s death, nothing I can say would make sense to you. I tell you now, however, before God who is my refuge and my strength, that I, who fear a knife only less than a snake, could not, with a gun in my hand, shoot anyone coming at me with a knife – this refusal to accept certain responsibilities is a weakness in me, but it is one from which I shall never be well. Think of me as dead, John, for your own sake remember any good that you can and so ease your life and

40 Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 242. 41 Critchley and Webster, Stay Illusion!, 169.

42

Michael Berryhill living. It is my daily prayer that you be given the grace to some out of the fantasies you have so long clutched to yourself, and be free.42

Near the end of his life, Berryman wondered if he hadn’t been wrong to concentrate on the father as the source of his pain. He declared in a letter to Saul Bellow, ‘The trouble with a father’s dying very early (not to speak of his killing himself ) is not so much just his loss as the disproportionate & crippling role the mother then assumes for one’.43 In 1970, he noted: So maybe my long self-pity has been based on an error, and there has been no (herovillain Father) ruling my life but only an unspeakably powerful possessive adoring MOTHER […] she helped destroy my father & Uncle Jack; affairs […] intermittent heavy drinking […] would never & still hasn’t let go of me in any degree.44

He wrote Jill asking her to tell him about how he, at the age of twelve, reacted to his father’s death and how he behaved at the funeral. He couldn’t remember. She did not answer his direct question. Perhaps she couldn’t remember herself. Instead she told him about the gun with one bullet that her husband was carrying around and the Cuban mistress he hoped to marry. She firmly believed that Smith’s suicide had been an accident. Berryman had asked her about himself, but she wrote back about herself. He answered in exasperation, ‘Please, just forget it.’45 The letter replayed the closet scene in Hamlet, which Berryman made the subject of one of his four lectures on Shakespeare for the Hodder series at Princeton in 1951. In her memoir, Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson described how Berryman planned a psychoanalytic lecture on Hamlet’s obsession with his mother. He had a seat reserved for Jill in the front row. She walked in late wearing a ‘vivid’ dress and acted afterwards as if there had been no lecture at all, certainly not one that referred to her personal life. The scene sparked off three months of silence between mother and

42 Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 367–9. 43 Quoted in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 274. 44 Ibid. 33. 45 Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 376–80.

Henry and His Problems

43

son.46 I asked the librarians at the Berryman collection to look for the Hamlet lecture, but it seems to have disappeared. I suspect he destroyed it, though of course, this is my speculation. Berryman consciously held on to a great deal of archival material with the expectation he would be written about, but perhaps the lecture contained material that was too painful and too personal. In his last musings on Shakepseare’s ‘unmasterable identity crisis’, Berryman proposed to use the work of psychoanalyst Erik Erickson’s book Identity: Youth and Crisis.47 He took for one of his texts a little observed passage from All’s Well That Ends Well, in which Count Bertram is presented to the French king, who knew his father. The king says: Youth, thou bear’st thy Fathers face, Franke Nature rather curious then in hast Hath well compos’d thee: Thy Fathers morall parts Maist thou inherit too …48

Bertram is overwhelmed by the king’s fond and eloquent praise of his father. Berryman believes the poetic power of the passage that ensues reveals Shakespeare’s personality. He observes that the speech digresses from Shakespeare’s source and could only have come from his heart: Would I were with him! He would alwaies say, (Me thinkes I heare him now) his plausiue words He scatter’d not in eares, but grafted them To grow there and to beare: Let me not liue, Thus his good melancholly often began On the Catastrophe and heele of pastime When it was out: Let me not liue (quoth hee) After my flame lackes oyle, to be the snuffe Of yonger spirits …49

46 47 48 49

See Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth (New York: Random House, 1982), 209. This point is noted by Haffenden in Berryman’s Shakespeare, lxi. Ibid. 345. Ibid.

44

Michael Berryhill

‘What is the subject?’ Berryman asks. ‘The mourning in age, of the recent loss of an old colleague in virtues and also in a quirk, by no means universal presented as a crowning virtue, an anxiety not to stand in the way of the next generation.’50 Berryman proposes that in writing the speech, Shakespeare shared the same anxiety. He was going to quit writing at the top of his form. Like the king, Berryman is also the poet who mourns his colleagues, and wonders who will stand when he is gone. But Berryman also had to have identified with Bertram. How he must have longed to hear his father’s virtues extolled! He longed to connect to that part of him that died. This is the proper work of mourning, which Berryman never got to undertake. His only access to his father was through his (smothering) mother. Like Bertram, Berryman physically resembles his father. Unlike Bertram, Berryman has no fond older man to tell him about his father in an approving and loving way. Berryman’s last paragraph cites a list of facts from Shakespeare’s world that presumably would reinforce his speculation and declares, ‘One begins to feel at home, indeed, in that remote world’.51 Indeed, he might have been on surer ground in Shakespeare’s past than his own. Hopelessly dependent on the mother for his sense of worth, Berryman deeply resented her attention, and at times may have wanted to kill her. In the closet scene, Hamlet confronts Gertrude with the excellence of his father and rages at her for her sexuality, all things Berryman could not do. Hamlet is so intense that Gertrude exclaims, ‘What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?’ Her outcry alarms Polonius, who is hiding behind the curtain, and Hamlet kills him in an impulse of displaced rage.52 The fantasy of killing the mother is far too dangerous to consciously entertain, but Berryman found it in dreams, as in Dream Song 29, surely one of greatest lyrics of the twentieth century: There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years

50 Ibid. 347. 51 Berryman’s Shakespeare, 351. 52 Hamlet, III.iv.21–2, The Oxford Shakespeare, 703.

Henry and His Problems

45

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears, the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking. But never did Henry as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone & nobody’s missing. Often, he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.53

If I am right about this, such grief may be best un-sourced, the better to endure it and to stay fond of it. But allowed to torment a man for too long, it leads to disaster. When he was twenty-two years old, Berryman wrote his mother, ‘People have forgotten what tragic literature is – but they’ll remember. Gigantic, unspeakable but articulate disaster. Perhaps I can’.54 Dream Song 29 fulfils the ambition. In the best of his poems, Berryman showed us how unfathomable our emotions are. There is no ‘objective correlative’ to unlock the secrets of suffering. He would never have found Shakespeare’s identity. He could hardly bear his own. Nor is there a psychoanalytical key, because the psyche is not a simple lock. The declaration of suffering is not a terrible thing. We identify with suffering. It shows us who we are.

53 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 33. 54 Quoted in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 84.

Claudio Sansone

3 John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

Not only is John Berryman’s engagement with the epic tradition problematized by his nuanced self-stylization as an epic poet, but the importance of Ezra Pound within this process is largely unappreciated. As a result of an inattentive treatment of the epic tradition within Berryman scholarship, parts of his traditional experiments with the epic mode have been treated as radical, while elements of his true radicalism have remained undiscussed. Berryman himself dismissed critics who inclined to ‘act as if originality were not regularly a matter of degree’, when attempting to show that a man’s ‘achievement as a poet [can] finally be extricated from the body of his verse’.1 His statements that ‘what you write is pastiche in the ultimate analysis’ and that poetry ‘is a palimpsest’, demand that tradition be understood as a flexible, complex network, rather than a linear progression conditioned by a series of breakthroughs.2 Brendan Cooper has noted that already in Berryman’s time simple breakthrough narratives had become inoperative to critical work dealing with transmission and tradition.3 Therefore, to discuss Berryman’s ‘Poundian inheritance’, and his epic ambitions, it is necessary to begin with a corrective critical maneuver.

1 2 3

John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (London: Macmillan, 1976), 259. Berryman in Richard J. Kelly, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to his Mother (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 62; Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 258. Brendan Cooper, ‘“We Want Anti-Models”: John Berryman’s Eliotic Inheritance’, Journal of American Studies 42/1 (2008): 1–18; 2.

48

Claudio Sansone

In 1980, John Haffenden wrote on the epic character of The Dream Songs, identifying various important source texts.4 However, it is redundant to note that The Dream Songs is indebted to a litany of epic sources unless the mesh of tradition is considered as intrinsic to Berryman’s appropriations. Misunderstanding the experimentalism inherent in the epic tradition as a radical ‘breakthrough’, Haffenden was forced to concede to a provisional conclusion that does not properly contextualize Berryman’s epic project: What my argument points to is not that the final published sequence [of The Dream Songs] is ill-organized and unsuccessful as a poem of epic dimensions and some pretensions to the genre, but that The Dream Songs needs to be judged in terms less of received generic categories than of its own identity.5

Yet Berryman’s aspirations exceed ‘pretension’ when we recognize that the experimentalism that constitutes a degree of originality has been part of the epic tradition at least since Apollonius of Rhodes reacted to his Homeric models. Berryman claimed he ‘was aware [he] was embarked on an epic’ in composing the The Dream Songs, and became so ex post facto, after having written Homage to Mistress Bradstreet – and this claim should be taken seriously.6 Patrick White’s 1993 dissertation, ‘John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” and the American Long Verse Epic Tradition’, makes an effort to tie The Dream Songs to a more recent set of texts than Haffenden’s. Yet its core thesis, that The Dream Songs can be best understood within the context of the American Epic tradition, falls short in its attempt to localize a text within the American canon alone, for an epic’s generic aspirations are de facto universal and its network of textual relationships defies linear patterning.7

4 5 6 7

See John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 44, 54, 57, 61. Ibid. 62. See Berryman quoted in Harry Thomas, ed., Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections of the Poetry of John Berryman (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 33. Cf. H. N. Schneidau, ‘Pound’s Poetics of Loss’, in Ian F. Bell, ed., Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading (London: Vision Press, 1982), 103–20; 109.

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

49

Beyond this reductive treatment of the epic tradition, Berryman’s misgivings concerning the concept of an American tradition also undermine this thesis. The validity of such a category troubled Berryman throughout his career; he even went as far as to claim that modern critical thought should aim ‘to keep free from any struggle for an “American literature”’.8 Meanwhile, Kevin Young’s 1999 re-assessment of Berryman’s epic is symptomatic of other confusions regarding the tradition. Young labelled The Dream Songs a ‘fragmented epic’ and went on to claim that Berryman ‘suffered from his epic impulse – the long, fragmentary form he practiced and in some ways invented does not fit the way we are taught poetry’,9 but there is no evidence in his study that he has really considered the history of the fragmented epic. First, Young obviates a discussion of Pound and Eliot, through the unsubstantiated and unclear suggestion that in their work the fragment resolves itself into whole. Whether he intended ‘fragmented’ to mean the breaking down of a linear narrative, or the re-configuration of the epic as a lyric sequence, Young does not consider examples known to Berryman, such as Keats’ Hyperion, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Goethe’s Faust. The inclusion of these could have led to a nuanced consideration of the issue of generic boundaries that is the result of the assumption of a fragmentary poetics; importantly, this is also one of the key tropes that subtends the modern epic tradition, in which ‘heterogeneity [became] necessary […] because the preservation of cumulative [historical] traces required the breaking of thematic and topical unities’.10 Young also rehearses a second anachronistic argument: that Berryman’s radicalism lies in his decision to compose an epic in an age in which its dilatory pace (and in Young’s words, also its ‘heft and hubris’) does not live up to modernity’s expectations of immediacy.11 This diagnosis of the epic’s demise – and its purported effect on Berryman – fails to hold up to scrutiny. The epic tradition has long been proclaimed to be ‘in demise’, even in such places as the 8 9 10 11

See Berryman in Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 94. Kevin Young, ‘Responsible Delight: Reevaluation: John Berryman’, The Kenyon Review 21/2 (1999): 160–9; 160–1. Schneidau, 110. Young, 161.

50

Claudio Sansone

illustrious 1797 correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, but it has continued to flourish to the present day.12 The impression of discontinuity in the tradition exists only insofar as we read experimentalism as a sign of the tradition’s enfeebling – but it is precisely experimentalism which galvanizes the new poem for contemporary readership. If we take a more nuanced view, that the epic ‘is made of long-reserved and well-filtered traditions of knowledge transcending the mind of one man or even several’ – that, as H. N. Schneidau argues, ‘an epic must be a composite artifact, a cumulative if not collective production’ – it is then possible to naturalize experimentation as a non-radical constituent of the epic tradition.13 For only poets that expand the possibilities of poetry to express the past as present have been able to produce a form reflexive enough to achieve a compression of historical texture within their epic. Therefore, Pound becomes relevant to the study of Berryman’s epic ambition particularly when one considers his statement that the ‘epic is a poem including history’.14 The simplicity of this statement belies the complexity of its notion of ‘inclusion’. Berryman experimented with certain tropes that Pound developed to enact his ‘inclusion’, and having formulated his own thesis in a number of early or abandoned projects, he began to radicalize it (and it will only reach a full maturity in The Dream Songs). His approach was to place absolute importance on a feature that had previously been merely tangential in the epic tradition: the interrogation and containment of contemporary history, often by incorporating poets and near friends who stood (for him) on the limits of contemporaneity (i.e. those recently deceased). In his Sonnets to Chris, for example, Berryman’s 12

One need but consider an exemplary selection of epic authors to substantiate this – John Neihardt, William Carlos Williams, Derek Walcott, Frank Stanford, Jack Kerouac, Pablo Neruda, Christopher Logue, James Merrill, Alice Notley – many of whom, it is worth mentioning, are regularly and frequently taught on both highschool and university curricula. The lack of comparative work on Kerouac’s epic Mexico City Blues and The Dream Songs is particularly striking, given both Kerouac and Berryman’s interests in oneiric and musical forms of poetry. 13 Schneidau, 109. 14 See Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 86.

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

51

ratiocination around the Poundian thesis and his interest in performing contemporary investigations are already tangible. Sonnet 27, in which Chris is regaled with epithet-like images (‘Your shining-out-of-shadow hair’), provides us with a terminology through which to begin investigating Berryman’s radicalism: … O if my synchrisis Teases you, briefer than Propertius’ in This paraphrase by Pound …15

The neologism, ‘synchrisis’, is thoroughly Poundian in its impulse; it is a concept that contains itself in an ideogrammatic fashion. As noticed by Thornbury, ‘synchrisis’ is a pun.16 But it is more than merely a pun; it is a pun that makes syncretic the concept of synchresis itself as well as the name ‘Chris’, thus encapsulating the object of the sonnets within the very word that indicated the method of encapsulation. It is a poetic mechanism whereby the object and its images are collapsed into a single unit: different historical moments are distilled into a present expression.17 Through an analysis of Poundian poetics, one can approach a more refined definition of ‘synchrisis’, such that it can become adopted within a critical idiom useful to the criticism of Berryman’s works; the obvious beginning for this is Berryman’s allusion to Pound’s Propertius. Propertius was an inveterate recycler and compiler of poetic content and images, and Pound’s own ‘synchrisis’ of Propertius, the Homage to Sextus Propertius, is a concerted reconstruction of the historical texture of Propertius’ verse into modern expression, (while also asserting the importance of translation to

15 16 17

See Berryman, ‘Sonnet 27’, in Charles Thornbury, ed., Collected Poems 1937–1971 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 84. Thornbury, ‘Editor’s Notes, Guidelines, and Procedures’, in Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 299. Some further connotations this term may carry are those of ‘crisis’ and ‘Isis’. The former would underline the contingency of such a collapse, and the latter (alluding to a deity who is a patroness of artisans) to the inclusion of tradition in a historicized but compressed format.

52

Claudio Sansone

this principle).18 It is a ‘synchrisis’ of Propertius, his models, and Pound. Berryman noticed this, and once wrote to his mother pointing out precisely such a moment within Pound’s text: look at the remarkable statement I discovered recently in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’: ‘Standsgeniusadeathless adornment, a name not to be worn out with the years’. That is first-rate, Mum …19

Berryman’s first lengthy poem of ‘synchrisis’, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, is indebted to Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius in a manner that scholarship has overlooked. Berryman had attached a poem to the letter cited above that went by the title ‘Homage to Film’, demonstrating an early eagerness to develop an homage-response to this poem, and the idea had lain as a germ in Berryman’s mind since the late thirties. When Berryman made the decision to assume Anne Bradstreet as a model, his choice was a calculated analogy to Pound’s decision to take Propertius as his. Pound admired Propertius’ refusal to treat heroes and battles in his poetry, and his turn to the sublimity of everyday experience by taking love as his subject. Bradstreet echoes a similar sentiment in her poem ‘The Prologue’: To sing of wars, of captain, and of kings Of cities founded, commonwealths begun, For my mean pen are too superior things: Or how they all, or each their dates have run Let poets and historians set these forth,

18

19

The fact Berryman chooses to refer to it as a ‘paraphrase’ is a comical element – likely to have made Pound fume – that functions on two levels. First, it playfully alludes to the critical reception of Pound’s poem, for its (at the time) quite radical poetic principles led to more than one critic refer to it as a cheap paraphrase, or indeed a bastardization of the original Latin. Second, Berryman adopts the comical mode in order to distance himself from his model, as if anxious to refer to Pound directly. More on this strained self-distancing from Pound will be said below, and with regard to Eliot’s The Waste Land. See Berryman in Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 55–6.

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

53

My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.20

This parallel exemplifies the manner in which Berryman’s ‘synchrisis’ has developed alongside Pound’s – but here the relationship appears deceptively simple. Often, when comparing Homage to Mistress Bradstreet to its overt models, Berryman’s statements are ambiguous: In Homage to Mistress Bradstreet my model was The Waste Land, and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is as unlike The Waste Land as it is possible for me to be. I think the model for The Dream Songs was the other greatest American poem – I am very ambitious – ‘Song of Myself ’.21

That the comparison with the model is at once positive and negative is symptomatic of the complex relationship Berryman had to the tradition. It evinces his need to create a space for his own radical advancement of the tradition. Cooper had already noted this characteristic of Berryman’s relationship to his sources, suggesting he makes active attempts to ‘violently’ carve out a space for his radicalism, often providing (perhaps unintentionally) disingenuous cues to the interpretation of his own work.22 Much in line with this, Pound is obviated from a number of key discussions in which he self-evidently has a large stake (such as this one) and often receives only a terse and sarcastic mention. We have already gleaned an example of Berryman’s inconsistency in his use of the depreciative term ‘paraphrase’ in contrast to his enthusiasm about the poem, as it is revealed in his private correspondence with his mother. Therefore, recognizing Pound’s constant and strong background presence is more complex than it may at first appear: it is much more than one critic’s historical quibbling. When we realize that The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was a component in an early epic project, the Poundian influence is no longer just

20 Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 15. 21 See Berryman in Thomas, Berryman’s Understanding, 29. 22 Cooper, 4.

54

Claudio Sansone

secondary.23 The project was to take a tripartite form, much like Dante’s Commedia, wherein the unfinished sequence about the Nazi Holocaust, ‘The Black Book’, would stand as an Inferno, The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet as a Purgatorio, and the little-studied poem ‘Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion’ as a Paradiso.24 Berryman’s discussions of the larger ambitions he had for ‘Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion’, (accounting for his wish to compose Chinese epic about heaven), have gone mostly unexamined, although they reveal a direct connection to Pound. These take place in two interviews, the first, for the Harvard Advocate, in 1968, in which he said, ‘It’s a poem about Heaven. It’s called “Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion”, a single poem – which I still feel I can do in fifty lines, but it may work out to be a whole book’.25 And the second, for the Paris Review, in 1970: INTERVIEWER: […] What has happened to the poem about heaven set in China, titled ‘Scholars at the Orchard Pavilion’ [sic], which you were working on a couple of years ago? Are you still working on that? BERRYMAN: […] I intended that to be rather a long poem. I even tried to learn classical Chinese one time, but I decided after a few days that it was not for me. Anyway, I finally decided that I was nowhere […] I was personally not destined to write a Chinese epic. So at that point I felt fine, and I wrote a second stanza, and a third stanza, and a fourth stanza. […] And then I put some asterisks, and that’s what I’ll publish sooner or later. I may say, ‘Scholars at the Orchard [sic] Pavilion: A Fragment’.26

The poem was eventually published in its short form without the appended subtitle, ‘a fragment’, but we can see that, overall, Berryman’s interest in 23

Haffenden has pointed out, instead, a different early project that was also abandoned – a series of Eclogues. See Haffenden, Critical Commentary, 41. In the ancient understanding of gradus [‘steps’, ‘degree’] the Eclogues were a precursor to a poet’s epic attempt; this is most famously true of no less a writer than Virgil. 24 For a detailed examination of ‘The Black Book’ sequence, see Matthew Boswell, ‘“The Black Book”: John Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem’, in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 11–27. 25 See Berryman in Thomas, 13. 26 Ibid. 42.

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

55

‘synchrisis’ continued and indeed grew into a concerted effort to present an epic that would have translated not one but three distinct kinds of voices into present expression. The evidence connecting ‘Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion’ to Pound is substantial and grants insight into Berryman’s evolving conception of ‘synchrisis’, its Poundian roots and its application in an epic project. Berryman was particularly interested in Pound’s Canto XIII, whose thematic content resonates strongly with ‘Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion’. This is curious because Canto XIII has received little to no specific scrutiny in Poundian circles, and Berryman’s fascination with the Canto at first glance, (without understanding the epic project behind the origins of ‘Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion’) appears highly idiosyncratic. In his essay ‘The Poetry of Ezra Pound’ Berryman refers to the Canto in relation to the interrogation of literary history: ‘[Pound betrays] an inordinate passion for ages and places where the Poet’s situation appears attractive, as in the Malatesta Cantos […] and the Chinese Cantos (XIII, XLIX …)’.27 Interestingly, while Canto XIII introduces Confucius to Pound’s epic, it is not technically one of the ‘China Cantos’ and is couched between a Homeric preface and an initial Dantean exploration – connections that we will follow below. A second reference to Canto XIII occurs in Berryman’s birthday letter to Pound: ‘what the illiterate readers of the future will have to decide is whether to withhold from the poet of Canto XIII, much of Personae, and the Pisan Cantos, besides whatever is to come, the boring term “great”. I do not’.28 The inclusion of Canto XIII in this litany is striking, as this Canto has not (to my knowledge) been singled out for such special praise; it is placed in a selection that excludes a number of texts one would expect to see in its stead such as Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Homage to Sextus Propertius, or some of Pound’s translation projects. Finally, in the Berryman archives at the University of Minnesota there is a heavily annotated copy of Pound’s Draft of XXX Cantos (1933) that confirms Berryman’s mysterious interest in 27 Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 268. 28 See Berryman, ‘A Tribute to Ezra Pound on his Eightieth Birthday’, Agenda 4/2 (October–November 1965): 27–8.

56

Claudio Sansone

Canto XIII.29 Berryman wrote ‘marvellous’ at the bottom of the Canto – and drew a vertical line by these verses: … And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean for things they didn’t know, But that time seems to be passing30

This passage, in which Confucius is consulted by Chinese sages and given a voice by Pound (hence the quotation marks), is significant because it enacts two fundamental principles of epic poetics that we can read as partly constitutive of an act of ‘synchrisis’: nekuia and prosopopoeia.31 These two 29 Berryman’s copy of A Draft of XXX Cantos (MSS43) is held at the John Berryman Archives, University of Minnesota. In an in-set sheet of paper, already examined by Amanda Golden, Berryman catalogued the Cantos up to LXXVIII labelling them with short-hand titles, and he made a subsidiary list of some Cantos at the bottom of the sheet. Golden suggests this was compiled in preparation for Berryman’s introduction to the New Directions Selected Poems of Pound that was never ultimately published. In both the catalogue and the selection list, Canto XIII is emphasized with heavy pencil-strokes – consolidating the suspicion that Berryman felt this was a Canto of central importance. See Golden, ‘John Berryman at Midcentury: Annotating Ezra Pound and Teaching Modernism’, in Modernism/Modernity 21/2 (2014): 507–28; 513. 30 See Ezra Pound, Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996), 60. 31 Nekuia is a Greek word designating a rite by which ghosts of the dead are called up to be interrogated for advice about the present or future; prosopopoeia is the formal name for the rhetorical device of speaking to the audience through a character, by assuming a tone more appropriate to the character than the main speaker, but it has a long and complex history within the history of the epic, and dramatic lyric poetry especially. Berryman experimented with the two concepts in some of his earliest poems, even if he derived his inspiration and was not programmatic in his approach. In ‘On the London Train’, for example, the epic theme (adored by Pound) of distressed souls on beaches is reprised in a small nekuia. In ‘The Possessed’, Eliot’s famous lines from The Waste Land – ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’ – which are themselves a reprisal of Dante’s Inferno III.55–7 (‘si lunga tratta / di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto / che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta’) – are alluded to in the opening lines: ‘This afternoon,

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

57

tropes have enabled the epic to engage with the past throughout its long history. By reading into Pound’s use of them in Canto XIII and the first Canto (an indirect translation of Odyssey XI, the ‘nekuia’ episode) it will be possible to better understand Berryman’s appropriation of these tools for his own purposes – both in the composite, tripartite project, and in The Dream Songs. Pound’s use of both tropes helps heighten a sense of urgency with regard to history. In Canto XIII, the nekuia is similar to that in Canto I; the cemetery-sanctuary Mt. Taishan acts as a location to which the souls of the deceased are recalled from the chthonic world (in Virgil and Dante the protagonist descends to the underworld, but Odysseus will perform his katabasis only later). Berryman’s figures equally come to the fore as they are dramatically made into Pound-like personae speaking in the first person as the poetic subject of their respective poems. Pound’s use of prosopopoeia also adds to the urgency by enacting an analogous recollection of the voices from the past into the present moment – he is not looking to reconstruct the voices in a historical fashion, but recapture them through their now contemporary presence. Importantly, this is effected through an oblique act of translation, both literal and conceptual, across at least three languages and three historical periods – or four including Pound’s contemporary moment; Pound had some knowledge of Greek and Chinese, but he chose a Renaissance Latin Odyssey and a French Life of Confucius with which to compose these Cantos. In ‘The Poetry of Ezra Pound’, Berryman made explicit his interest in poetic renovation as an act of translation by discussing Pound’s interest in Ernest Fenollosa, citing Fenollosa’s argument that ‘the chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of transmission’.32 In Canto XIII, Confucius’ statement reports on an apparent end to the possibility of historical records, which Berryman ingeniously interpreted discomfortable dead / Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge’, in a further nekuia. See Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 16. For combinations of nekuia and prosopopoeia, one could also look to Berryman’s ‘Enemies of the Angels’ and ‘The Nervous Songs’ sequence from The Dispossessed (1948). 32 Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 265.

58

Claudio Sansone

as contemporaneity. In his early poem ‘The Moon and the Night and the Men’ he already indicated that ‘history is approaching a speechless end’, which goes some way to support his hermeneutic of the Poundian text and, perhaps, hints at the ultimately aporetic nature of prosopopoeia and the need for its radicalization.33 In turn, ‘Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion’ presents us with a dynamic exchange between two Chinese ‘sages’, the one who, ‘forgetting his later nature’, embraces the present moment, and the one who notices ‘the young shoots [i.e. sages] unaffected by the wind [i.e. the passage of time] / mock our love for their elders’, demonstrating the compromised space that the contemporaneous inhabits with respect to tradition.34 ‘Synchrisis’, which in part correlates with Pound’s inclusion of history and its two central tools (nekuia and prosopopoeia), is then to be understood also as an attempt to go beyond and bridge this gap, committing itself to an aporetic leap. Therefore, Pound’s poetics form a central prism, set before Berryman’s own investigative perspective, that led Berryman to the question: how can the epic include the immediate past – often more elusive because less formalized than the historicized past – within the bounds of its investigation? ‘Synchrisis’ is only the first part of an answer. In beginning to account for its application in The Dream Songs this part of Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ can be brought into sharper relief, even if at times Pound will seem to disappear amidst the shadows of Berryman’s radical self-assertion as an epic poet in his own right. The reward for pulling apart this fine mesh after having accepted it in its complexity, and not having reduced it like previous scholars, is that we will be able to reveal a unifying structure that underpins Berryman’s epic project, granting it a coherence that has previously gone unnoticed. In The Dream Songs Berryman has Henry interrogate those ‘who cherish the knowings of both worlds’ – the contemporary world and that of the dead – which he identifies are, namely, poets and men of letters.35 In 33 See Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 37. 34 Ibid. 246–7. 35 Family members and other close friends, and artists, appear too, but there is not the space here for a comprehensive treatment of all of these. It is worth noting that

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

59

Dream Song 88 we are placed on the threshold of death, and the poet’s experience is explicitly privileged: In slack times visit I the violent dead and pick their awful brains. Most seem to feel nothing is secret more to my disdain I find, when we who fled cherish the knowings of both worlds36

Berryman explores Bhain Campbell, W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas, on their respective death-beds, despite the fact that they are already ‘violent dead’. Randall Jarrell’s passing will be mourned in Dream Song 90 along similar lines.37 Already in this poem the liminal position of poets between worlds is made explicit, making of nekuia-infused ‘synchrisis’ a poetic staple. From Dream Song 121 to Dream Song 127, Berryman makes this explicit with reference to Jarrell, invoking parallels to Dante. He begins with what might be understood as a Poundian translation from the opening Canto of the Inferno: ‘He saw in the forest something coming, grim, / but did not change his purpose’.38 Jarrell’s experience of grief finds its image in Dante’s catching sight of the three beasts – the lynx, the lion, and the horrid, starved she-wolf that cannot be satiated. Dante also hesitated, ‘but did not change his purpose’, which he defined as exploring the underworld in order to tell of the good things he found there – that is, the lessons to be learned. This parallel aligns the act of nekuia with the calling of the poet. As the sequence on Jarrell proceeds, we encounter further Dantean echoes:

Henry’s mother appears in a scene in Dream Song 129 that is reminiscent of the Odyssey’s nekuia. 36 Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 103. 37 It is not possible here to go into detail about all the instances of nekuia and prosopopoeia in The Dream Songs – and at this stage the question of radical ‘synchrisis’, as I have redefined it, takes precedence – but it may be useful to note that these themes appear in the text as early as Dream Song 17, where Henry enters a chthonic dimension and converses with Lucifer. 38 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 138.

60

Claudio Sansone All souls converge upon a hopeless mote tonight, as though the throngs of souls in hopeless pain rise up to say they cannot care, to say they abide whatever is to come. My air is flung with souls which will not stop and among them hangs a soul that has not died and refuses to come home.39

The first image of an ‘air flung with souls which will not stop’ calls back to Canto V of the Inferno, in which Dante the Pilgrim encounters Paolo and Francesca, the two damned (adulterous) lovers, condemned to whirl in a vortex for the rest of eternity, always just beyond arm’s reach of one another. This perhaps semi-biographical allusion is compounded by Berryman’s preoccupation with the ontologically liminal status afforded to poets – he sees ‘a soul that has not died’ just like Dante in Inferno XXXIII, in which the Pilgrim encounters the souls of Fra Alberigo and Branca D’Oria, whose souls have been damned before they even died.40 The status of these figures, who are some of the worst of the damned, provides an uneasy comparison with the poets. Their position relative to life that emphasizes the poets’ need to engage in a resistance unto death, inasmuch as death is the end of the contemporary for the individual in question. Through this uneasy juxtaposition, a poet’s duty to assume the all-important poetic task of enacting a nekuia, especially one that engages with the traditions as collected by previous authors, is put forward as a statement in Berryman’s poetics, one that can conceivably help unify The Dream Songs from at least one cardinal perspective. And perhaps no higher praise is issued, and no greater emphasis placed, on the poet who ‘refuses to come home’.41 39 Ibid. 144. 40 A quotation from Dante’s Fra Alberigo episode was supposedly inserted by Eliot as a (later abandoned) epigraph to ‘Gerontion’, which goes some way towards showing the uneasy relationship of another poet with respect to these figures. 41 One could offer a particularly poignant further reading here, in suggesting that Berryman may also be acknowledging the ‘danger’ of poetic practice, having already noted in many interviews, poems, letters, and essays, that so many of his generation

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

61

Later, a very different poet is interrogated to confirm the importance of nekuia as part of the poetic process. A. E. Housman is mentioned in Dream Song 204 and discussed in Dream Song 205 (and also Dream Song 206, alongside Jonathan Swift), book-ended around what seems like Henry’s own (peculiar) attempt to communicate with the dead: we’ll play the Housman man unless, of course, all this is boring. Tides bring the bodies back sometimes, & not. The bodies of the self-drowned out there wait, wait & the widows wait, my gramophone is the most powerful in the country, I am trying, trying, to solve the andante but the ghost is off before me.42

As a poet and a classical scholar, ‘saved by his double genius & certain emendations’ (Dream Song 205), Housman is drawn into the mix as an implicit connoisseur of the ancient mechanisms of nekuia. However, Housman’s presence needs to be understood in contrast to Pound’s treatment of Housman in ‘Mr. Housman’s Message’. Pound’s version of Housman-esque sentimentality – ‘Some lads get hung, some get shot. / Woeful is the human lot / Woe! woe, etcetera …’43 – is sarcastic and reductive. Yet Berryman notices that Housman’s ancient learning never interrupted his focus on the contemporary, and therefore restores his dignity by acknowledging his looming, somewhat threatening importance on the century in Dream Song 205. All his long life, hopeless lads grew cold He drew their death-masks […………………………………….] He did his almost perfect best with what he had Shades are sorrowing up, as not called up (and the previous) were lost to suicide. There is no need to look further than Dream Song 153. 42 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 223. 43 See Pound, Personae: Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 42.

62

Claudio Sansone by in his genius him Others are for his life-long omission glad & published their works as soon as he came to a stop & could not review them.44

A further struggle between Pound and Berryman emerges in the elegiac sequence dedicated to Delmore Schwartz. The elements of nekuia and prosopopoeia are both present here, propelled into a ‘synchrisis’ of totalizing proportions in Dream Song 149: Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone, in New York: he sang me a song ‘I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz Harms & the child I sing’45

As with Jarrell, grief (appearing at the end of the previous stanza) leads Schwartz into a Dantean setting, the exception being that he is literalized into a Virgil figure (rather than compared to the Pilgrim). This occurs through, as Thomas Travisano has already noted, a ‘pseudo-Virgilian parodic couplet’ that aims to underline that Schwartz (like Berryman) ‘was carrying out a complex dialogue with literary tradition’.46 The words, ‘Harms & the child I sing’ do indeed echo the opening of the Aeneid, ‘Arma virumque cano’ [‘Arms and the man I sing’]. Yet, what Travisano does not note is that this parody is filtered through Pound’s own poem, ‘Famam Librosque Cano’ [‘Of fame and books I sing’],47 in which Pound proposes to essay the virtues and disappointments of literary canonization – satiri-

44 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 224. 45 Ibid. 168. 46 See Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 19. This is particularly significant when we note that though Schwartz’s epic Genesis: Book One was a lot less successful than Berryman’s, it develops similar strategies of nekuia and prosopopoeia. And this is also true of many of Schwartz’s shorter poems, such as ‘The Ghosts of James and Peirce in Harvard Yard’, ‘All Clowns are Masked and all Personae’, ‘Hölderlin’, and ‘Baudelaire’. 47 Pound, Personae, 14.

John Berryman’s ‘Poundian Inheritance’ and the Epic of ‘Synchrisis’

63

cally charging at Virgil (much like Berryman is wont to parody Pound), as part of his strategy to clear the ground for his own epic project. If this strategy still seems specious, it is substantiated by the subtitle to Dream Song 225, which follows Berryman’s homage to Pound in Dream Song 224. Berryman writes, ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt’ [‘may those who said our [things] before us die’],48 implying the importance of radicalization beyond the boundaries of experimentalism, so that the epic poet may be heard loud and clear in the present moment. What transpires as the unifying theme of The Dream Songs’ epic commitment is the imperative to investigate the overwhelming punishment (already present in Dante and Pound) of being deprived of contemporaneity through death. This is concretized by the reflexive activity of ‘synchrisis’ that pulls history and tradition together into the de facto present expression that is the epic poem. The appropriation, from Pound and Pound’s own sources, of nekuia and prosopopoeia enables this in Berryman, although ‘synchrisis’ can be understood as representing a poetic structure developed by him in order to radicalizes their foundational tenets, and grasp at contemporary history with the same impetus that the epic has always garnered to investigate the past. Reading into Berryman’s poetics as they grow out of and diverge from Pound helps locate the truly radical element in his poetics of the epic, detecting it in the result that recent history comes to be treated in the space of timeless mythology, recapturing its near-contemporaneity (even though its recent loss is felt as so much more immediate than the loss of, for example, an ancient past).49 By confirming itself an epic in at least this respect, The Dream Songs successfully enacts part of its ostensible titular programme by presenting an explicit exploration of what lies (in at least one, final direction) beyond waking life.

48 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 244. 49 It is no coincidence that since The Dream Songs some of the most successful epic projects have also incorporated this technique. A future analysis might pick up from here and tackle comparison with James Merrill’s The Changing of the Light at Sandover, for example, or Notley’s The Descent of Alette, exploring their own radicalizations and inheritances from the likes of Dante, Pound, and Berryman.

Edward Clarke

4  Berryman’s Mischief

I I do not think of Berryman’s achievement so much as his mischief. Behind the noun ‘mischief ’ is the verb ‘mischieve’, which brings out the common root of mischief and achievement. Mischieve is made out of ‘mis-’, which has the sense of ill, wrong, improperly, and ‘chieve’, which is from an Old French word chef, meaning head. ‘Chieve’ means to succeed, prosper, thrive, flourish, to make or win one’s way, to bring to an end or issue, to finish, accomplish, perform, achieve. To achieve today is to do all of the above, and more so, the addition of the prefix ‘a-’, expressing addition or increase. To mischieve is to afflict or overwhelm with misfortune, to destroy or ruin, to inflict injury or loss upon, to do harm or damage and also to suffer harm or injury, to meet with misfortune, to come to grief, as well as to abuse or slander.1 Clearly Berryman mischieved – in all of these senses – as much as he achieved much in his life and poetry. His poems are often about how he has met with misfortune and suffered loss. To what degree in his poetry has he attempted to destroy? The noun mischief in its original French form could mean misfortune and trouble, hardship, wrong, damage. By Berryman’s mischief, I mean his misfortune and bad luck; the harm, injury and evil that he suffered, his disease or pathological condition; the injuries that he inflicted, his offences, especially in the sense, his ‘tongue deviseth mischiefes’, as in Psalm 52 (King James version); and his evildoing or wickedness.

1

I refer here to the entries for ‘achieve, v.’ and ‘mischieve, v.’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (2002).

66

Edward Clarke

Although I should also soften my use of the word to the way we deploy it mostly today, so that I am first of all concerned with, or indeed about Vexatious or annoying action or behaviour; especially childish or irresponsible behaviour which is troublesome but not malicious. Also: a tendency to or inclination for such conduct; high-spirited or playful naughtiness.2

That said, note that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which contains that most mischievous of Shakespeare’s characters, the tricksy or endearingly naughty spirit Puck, the first instance of the word mischief implies violation: when Demetrius threatens to ‘do’ Helena ‘mischief in the wood’, that is, take her virginity away from her whether she likes it or not.3 My subject is the mischief of The Dream Songs in relation to my Yeatsian ideas about what poetry can achieve. Ultimately my question is, does Berryman playfully test my belief in the learning of the imagination or would he inflict damage on what other poets have achieved for us? For I have a feeling that Berryman sometimes brings out the worst in me as much as Yeats the best. The ghosts that haunt my reflections include, among others, Shakespeare, because Berryman was such a great Shakespeare scholar; Wordsworth, because of this poet’s invocations of specific genii in commencing his epic autobiography in verse; and Yeats, because, ‘After thirty Falls’ Berryman returned to Dublin to finish The Dream Songs and ‘have it out with’ the precursor poet whom he hails as ‘majestic Shade’, asking: ‘You whom I read so well / so many years ago, / did I read your lesson right?’4 Philip Coleman has rightly emphasized the importance of the lines that come immediately after this question: ‘did I see through / your phrases to the real? your heaven, your hell / did I enquire properly into?’ Coleman argues, with great insight into the nature of reading Berryman and the nature of Berryman’s own engagement with precursor poets,

2 3 4

See ‘mischief, n.’, ibid. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i.237, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor et al., eds, The Oxford Shakespeare (2nd edn; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 408. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 334.

Berryman’s Mischief

67

One can never know for sure that one’s scholarly enquiries are headed in the ‘right’ direction, but in these lines Berryman suggests a hermeneutic process that tends, ultimately, towards an understanding of the ‘real’ bases underlying Yeats’s art beyond his elaborate ‘phases’ and mystical schematics. […] By the same token, Berryman suggests that his own work might be read and re-read as part of a process of gradual real-isation of the world.5

This essay is very much an attempt to ‘read and re-read’ Berryman ‘as part of a process of gradual real-isation of the world’, and as much as I may seem to be concerned at the end with Yeats’s ‘mystical schematics’ my intention is to measure Yeats and Berryman against what I consider to be the ‘“real” bases’ that underlie their art.

II I must begin by celebrating Berryman’s high-spirited naughtiness. Although this essay will become concerned with what has been called Berryman’s ‘failed vision’,6 which we might associate with the dark latent meanings of mischief, behind current lighter applications of the word, let me stress at the outset that I am as charmed and exhilarated by Berryman’s playful naughtiness, both in life and language, as much as I am also discomfited by his mischief. I locate this kind of mischievousness, the lighter side of mischief, primarily in what Maria Johnston has called Berryman’s ‘attentiveness to […] the music of poetry’: ‘the truly dynamic and diverse music of the multifarious Henry’. Most readers become entranced by the ‘polyvocal’ quality of The Dream Songs: their ‘changes of register and key, as Henry talks both

5 6

Philip Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating ‘the scene of disorder’ (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2014), 162–3. Justin Quinn, ‘Failed Vision?’, in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 71–3.

68

Edward Clarke

to us and himself ’; the frequent interruptions of ‘the flow of the lyric to comment, question or advise in the style of the minstrel show’.7 This quality is also due to the ‘vast weave of allusions to other writers and thinkers throughout the poem, so that the text of The Dream Songs in places may be read like a palimpsest that contains past and present voices and quotations woven together’.8 Although I do not see why Johnston should introduce the De Quinceyesque idea of a palimpsest to picture what she calls Berryman’s weaving of other writers. A palimpsest does not contain something woven. The very word allusion, etymologically speaking, implies playfulness, derived as it is from the Latin, ludo, to play, and making allusions can be a kind of mischievous activity. Take, for example, Dream Song 32: And where, friend Quo, lay you hiding across malignant half my years or so? One evil faery it was workt night, with amoroso pleasing menace, the panes shake where Lie-by-the-fire is waiting for his cream. A tiger by a torrent in rain, wind, narrows fiend’s eyes for grief in an old ink-on-silk, reminding me of Delphi, and, friend Quo, once was safe imagination as sweet milk. Let all the flowers wither like a party. And now you have abandoned own your young & old, the oldest, people to a solitudinem of mournful communes, mournful communes. Status, Status, come home.9

7

Maria Johnston, ‘“We write verse with our ears”: Berryman’s Music’, in Coleman and McGowan, eds, ‘After Thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman, 191–208; 198. 8 Ibid. 198. 9 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 36.

Berryman’s Mischief

69

Part of Berryman’s mischief is his putting the reader in a labyrinth of explication, which is perhaps how reading and re-reading become ‘part of a process of gradual real-isation of the world’, as Coleman puts it. My next two paragraphs are a slightly edited version of what I was writing down as I began to mull over this poem in more detail, so that you can discern a critic fumbling after the poet’s mischief. I did not get this on my first two readings, but I think Berryman is talking about status quo. Berryman’s mischievousness had me first of all resuscitating my rusty Latin, resorting to Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary, to translate ‘friend Quo’ as ‘friend of anyone’, while trying to remember if there was a Roman writer called Status. But the thing is, ‘friend of anyone’ is a latent meaning and Status has been personified into a Roman sounding personage. Or rather they are the primary meanings that become secondary once you’ve got the joke. I assume I know what status quo means: the existing state of affairs, literally ‘state in which’. Turning to the OED to find out more, I find that status quo is post-classical Latin and that it is in Augustine as a collocation. Knowing the importance of Augustine for Berryman, I am intrigued, and understand that he is un- or de-collocating the expression or word, separating the components of Augustine’s collocation. Now where does Augustine use status quo? I then had a break to search Augustine for status quo, which in itself sounds like an at once promising and unpromising activity, but, as you shall see, the rest of this analysis is an attempt to navigate and perhaps emerge from Berryman’s labyrinth. I have foregrounded my activity as a critic in this way because I believe that part of Berryman’s mischief is to make us self-conscious as critics: he would like to undermine the activity of criticism itself, as it would attempt to realize his work. I chose Dream Song 32 for explication because I caught an allusion to Puck, not so much Shakespeare’s fairy, as Milton’s version in his poem ‘l’Allegro’. But already Berryman’s mischievousness has me looking into Augustine and musing on the significance of collocations and what the verb would be to separate the components of a collocation. As a critic I find it exhilarating that Berryman is causing me to reflect on that very activity.

70

Edward Clarke

Eventually I found a use of the collocation status quo in Augustine, in Book 19 of The City of God, in chapter 4, when Augustine considers ‘What the Christians Believe Regarding the Supreme Good and Evil, in Opposition to the Philosophers, Who Have Maintained that the Supreme Good is in Themselves’.10 The paragraph in which status quo appears seems to have peculiar significance for The Dream Songs. Augustine is referring to ‘Status quoque corporis atque motus’,11 which could be translated as ‘the erect posture and movement of the body’. He asks, For what flood of eloquence can suffice to detail the miseries of this life? … The amputation or decay of the members of the body puts an end to its integrity, deformity blights its beauty, weakness its health, lassitude its vigor, sleepiness or sluggishness its activity, – and which of these is it that may not assail the flesh of the wise man? Comely and fitting attitudes [or the erect posture] and movements of the body are numbered among the prime natural blessings; but what if some sickness makes the members tremble?12

I now realize that fittingly and savagely Berryman has literally dismembered Augustine’s collocation. His allusion, if allusion it is, is breathtakingly apt and full of mischief in both the lighter and darker senses of that word. Such high mischief perhaps proves Berryman to be one of our greatest mischievers. Then again, since the reference is so deft and devastating that I must question its status as an allusion, I have to begin to admit that there seems to be something, not haphazard, but supernatural about such high literary mischief. I cannot really tell if Berryman intended the reference to Augustine or not, and this doubt brings me to Berryman’s less ambiguous allusion to Milton and, indirectly, Shakespeare. As I said, when I first read the poem, immediately I thought of lines from Milton’s ‘l’Allegro’. In this poem, Milton describes how over ‘Spicy Nut-brown Ale’, villagers tell various supernatural tales,

Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: First Series, Volume II – St Augustine: City of God, Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Parker & Co, 1887), 401. 11 Augustine, De civitate Dei (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981), 357. 12 Schaff, 401. 10

Berryman’s Mischief

71

how the drudging Goblin swet, To ern his Cream-bowle duly set, When in one night, ere glimps of morn, His shadowy Flale hath thresh’d the Corn That ten day-labourers could not end, Then lies him down the Lubbar Fend. And stretch’d out all the Chimney’s length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength; And Crop-full out of dores he flings, Ere the first Cock his Mattin rings.13

The ‘drudging Goblin’ is Puck or Robin Goodfellow. In Shakespeare he is imagined as a diminutive, cupid-like sprite, although he is referred to as a ‘lob of spirits’,14 and Milton takes this cue in recreating his ‘Lubbar Fend’, restoring him to his proper size and all ‘his hairy strength’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck seems a much more mischievous creature, as one fairy suddenly apprehends, Either I mistake your shape and making quite Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Called Robin Goodfellow. Are not you he, That frights the maidens of the villag’ry, Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern, And bootless make the breathless housewife churn, And sometime make the drink to bear no barm – Mislead night wanderers, laughing at their harm? Those that ‘hobgoblin’ call you, and ‘sweet puck’, You do their work, and they shall have good luck.15

I apprehend the spirit of Puck at work and at play, diligently and mischievously, in at least the 77 Dream Songs: Berryman’s poem is remarkably possessed of such supernatural force. I believe that the poet has pleased

John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 51. 14 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i.16, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor et al., eds, The Oxford Shakespeare, 406. 15 Ibid. ll. 32–42; 406. 13

72

Edward Clarke

Puck enough for the spirit to help him with his work or mischief. As a self-confessed epic poet, Berryman has invoked demonic powers, in the same manner as Hesiod and Homer invoked the Muse at the beginning of their poems, and these unruly forces are at play within, or on, or about, the text, mischievously misleading readers, critics or ‘night-wanderers’, and probably Berryman himself, throughout The Dream Songs. Charles Upton explains that such spirits embody, if that is the right word, ‘the superhuman glamour with which the Regime of Nature can sometimes clothe the […] poet – before the credit card bill comes due, that is […] It is one thing to listen to the firm voice of one’s guardian angel, and quite another to be beguiled by the whispering of one’s familiar spirit’.16 Sometimes I wonder if Berryman is delaying the payment of his credit card bill by continuing The Dream Songs after the Dream Song 77. Such supernatural forces in nature have the power temporarily to dismember Augustine’s collocations and, therefore, they should be treated with caution. When Berryman was in Ireland he understood, ‘The whole place is ghostly: no wonder Yeats believed in fairies / And personal survival’.17 Yeats, whose greatness partly lies in his very real belief in the supernatural, would have cautioned Berryman to be wary of finding himself ‘astray upon the Path of the Chameleon, upon Hodos Chameliontos’.18 I see the same dangerous tendency to stray on this path in Wordsworth’s large autobiographical poem, The Prelude, the major precursor to The Dream Songs. Wordsworth began that poem in 1799 in a flurry of inspiration, recalling ‘spots of time’ from his childhood,19 but also invoking in the same breathless poetry supernatural forces, the genii of the Lake District, drawing on Shakespeare and others, but I would argue calling seriously to spirits:

Charles Upton, Folk Metaphysics: Mystical Meanings in Traditional Folk Songs & Spirituals (San Rafael, CA: Sophia Perennis, 2008), 131. 17 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 335. 18 See W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1980), 270. 19 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 50. 16

Berryman’s Mischief

73

Ye Powers of earth! ye Genii of the springs! And ye that have your voices in the clouds And ye that are familiars of the lakes And standing pools. ah! not for trivial ends Through snow and sunshine, through the sparkling plains Of moonlight frost and in the stormy day Did ye with such assiduous love pursue Your favourite and your joy. I may not think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry[.]20

Isolated in Germany and unable to begin a long philosophical poem suggested by Coleridge, Wordsworth was homesick for his native hills. He probably understood with Agrippa that there are in every region specific kinds of spirits: ‘Hence it is that the choice of a place, region, or time doth much conduce to the happiness of life where any one shall dwell, and frequent, according to the nature and instinct of his own Genius’.21 Wordsworth’s 1799 invocation of spirits with its allusion to Prospero’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves’22) clearly troubled him: the manuscripts show that it was subjected to numerous crossings out and revisions. At one point Wordsworth decided on ‘Ye winds ye voices that were in the clouds / Ye visions of the mountains Virtues, powers’,23 attempting to organize Prospero’s pagan genii according to medieval angelology. By 1805, when Wordsworth came to expand his autobiography into a poem of thirteen books, the passage reads, ‘Ye Presences of Nature, in the sky / Or on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills! / And Souls of lonely places’.24 The presence of the precursor poet has been subdued, and the different orders of angels substituted for 20 Ibid. 22–3 and 250–3. 21 Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson, trans. James Freake. (St Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 2004), 532. 22 Shakespeare, The Tempest, V.i.33, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor et al., eds, The Oxford Shakespeare, 1240. 23 Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799, 250–3. 24 Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979), 54.

74

Edward Clarke

‘Souls of lonely places’, or ordinary Cumbrian ghosts doomed to wander certain spots of the Lake District as part of their Purgatory. Wordsworth in the course of his revisions to the passage, like Prospero in the very speech to which Wordsworth alludes, has invoked certain kinds of spirits, in order to let them go. As I have argued elsewhere, these spirits ‘should be substituted for that which already contains them. Like Augustine at the beginning of his Confessions, Wordsworth’s revisions to his autobiographical poem reveal him wondering about the paradox of invoking that power, which is always already in man’.25 Augustine’s reflections on the paradox of invoking God should also be read in relation to Berryman’s mischievous dealings with mischievous supernatural powers in The Dream Songs. And how shall I call upon my God, my Lord and God? because that when I invoke him, I call him into myself: and what place is there in me fit for my God to come into me by, whither God may come into me; even that God which made heaven and earth? Is it so, my Lord God? Is there anything in me which can contain thee? Nay, can both heaven and earth which thou hast made, and in which thou hast made me, in any wise contain thee? Or else because whatsoever is, could not subsist without thee, must it follow thereupon, that whatsoever hath being, is endued with a capacity of thee?26

The more intimate and more mysterious ‘thee’ of Augustine’s beautiful meditation on invocation must contain already ‘ye that are familiars of the lakes’. I believe that Wordsworth’s revisions and anxieties about invoking ‘ye Genii of the springs’ demonstrate his intuition that he must cultivate in his poetry ‘a capacity of thee’ rather than merely ‘be beguiled by the whispering of [his] familiar spirit[s]’. Nonetheless, like Berryman, Wordsworth could not resist persisting with his autobiographical poem, perhaps seduced by the ‘superhuman glamour’ of the ‘Regime of Nature’, and with disastrous consequences:

25 See Edward Clarke, The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (Winchester: iff Books, 2014), 70. 26 Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1, 5.

Berryman’s Mischief

75

guided by ‘Ye Powers of earth’, Wordsworth thought that he was tracing the sources of his creativity in his childhood and adolescence, in preparation for writing a greater redemptive work. But I believe that these powers led him in the wrong direction: Wordsworth’s obsession with his past, it might be argued, helped to diminish his later creativity. He was ultimately unable to write the greater poem that he had planned. I also wonder whether Berryman’s obsessive attention to his own life in his poetry causes similar and very real mischief or damage. I will spend the rest of this chapter trying to explain why. For clearly Berryman was himself very scared of such mischief, contemplating suicide, for example, in Song 345: ‘the worst of the Act, the worst of the Act! Sit still, / maybe the goblins will go away, leaving you free, / your breath coming normally’.27 In Dream Song 32, we see that Berryman has long nursed Macbethian dreams of status, destroying anybody, even ‘friend Quo’, a kind of Banquo, to arrive there. Like Lady Macbeth the ‘murd’ring ministers’ he has invoked to achieve that fame have poisoned the milk of his loving imagination to take it for ‘gall’, ‘Wherever, in your sightless substances / You wait on nature’s mischief ’.28 In the process the poet’s status quo is almost literally dismembered – as are those two archetypes of the poet, Orpheus and Faustus, as well as the two words in the poem – and Berryman is driven to thoughts of suicide. As the Caledonian chief Calcagus says of the Romans, rousing his men before a Scottish battle of 83 AD in Tacitus’ life of Agricola: ‘They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace’.29 Wasteland translates solitudinem, another Latin word in Dream Song 32, which Byron renders ‘solitude’ when he uses the lines in the Bride of Abydos: ‘Mark! where his carnage and his

27 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 367. 28 Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.v.47–9, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor et al., eds, The Oxford Shakespeare, 974. 29 Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus, trans. M. Hutton and W. Peterson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 30.3b-6.

76

Edward Clarke

conquests cease! / He makes a solitude, and calls it – peace’.30 My concern is this wasteland or solitude in Berryman’s later poetry.

III Stephen Matterson has drawn out well Berryman’s curtailed use of the Trickster figure from Native American culture in The Dream Songs, a figure that performs a similar function to the mischievous Puck and even Wordsworth’s powers of earth. Matterson has posited that: Berryman’s considerable research on Shakespeare would have brought him into contact with the parallels that scholars have seen between the Trickster and Shakespearean clowns, and he would certainly have known of mythological and classical avatars of the Trickster, such as Hermes.31

Hermes was the god of thieves and poets, proving mischief and theft to be close to the heart of all great poetry. As one of the greatest of all Shakespeare’s tricksters, the rogue Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, confesses to the audience, speaking perhaps for Shakespeare: My traffic is sheets. When the kite builds, look to lesser linen. My Father named me Autolycus, who being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. With die and drab I purchased this caparison, and my revenue is the silly cheat.32

Lord Byron, The Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 7 vols (London: John Murray, 1900), vol. 3, 198. 31 See Stephen Matterson, ‘“He lived like a rat”: The Trickster in The Dream Songs’, in Coleman and McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 141–54; 151. 32 Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, IV.iii.23–7, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor et al., eds, The Oxford Shakespeare, 1139. 30

Berryman’s Mischief

77

Berryman was always trying to understand Shakespeare the man, in his essay that imagines him at thirty or in his unfinished biography. But here, I believe, Shakespeare speaks. Autolycus after all means the wolf himself; he is someone born under the sign of Mercury, the Roman Hermes. Autolycus the character, like the bird of prey the kite, steals linen drying on hedges. He would then sell these sheets for cash, or perhaps barter them, to buy beer, having gambled and whored himself into poverty. Likewise Shakespeare’s revenue is ‘the silly cheat’, or the gullible, that is, us: we who are cheated by his tall stories, by plays written on sheets, not of linen, but of paper. T. S Eliot observed, ‘mature poets steal’,33 presumably from earlier writers. They would also steal, in every sense of that word, from their audience. In Shakespeare I see the great good of the theft: we are conned into paying to see a play based on a story or unconsidered trifle, which Shakespeare snapped up or had stolen, but in turn we are transformed by that play, and I would argue for the better. At the end of The Winter’s Tale, the wolf himself disappears as we are taken out of ourselves, albeit temporarily, into a kind of faith, if only in supreme fictions, that may withstand or even transform a sceptical age. Berryman would take from me my time and money, peddling the sheets of his long mischievous poem. But since he has not stolen away himself, I must ask, what is its worth in the end? In the final part of this essay I will attempt to measure Berryman’s mischief against Yeats’s achievement because I believe that we are invited to do so at the end of The Dream Songs and because no reader of Berryman can quite escape the horrifying thought, best articulated by Justin Quinn, that he ‘is ultimately a narcissist who projects his psychic states into the poems and observes the subsequent punch-up’.34 Once upon a time those psychic states would have been thought of as demonic. I take it that when ‘disappointed & amazed Henry’ comments on Yeats in Dream Song 334, Berryman was also being deliberately obtuse.

T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays On Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Company Ltd, 1920), 114. 34 Quinn in Coleman and McGowan, ‘After thirty Falls’, 72–3. 33

78

Edward Clarke Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols & Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge would not have been scared, like you & me, he would have been, before the bullet that was his, studying the movements of the birds[.]35

Sure enough Yeats understood that ‘Measurement began our might’36 and his later poems especially are based on measurement: on the rhythm or numbers of traditional verse and on symbolic foundations, worked out before their geometric lineaments are covered over with pleasing naturalistic details. Such a method of composition implies that the poet believed all natural forms to be the expression of God on earth, the realism of his verse expressing for the initiated the ideals of divine order. Like the greatest sculptors and painters of tradition, and unlike Berryman, Yeats models in verse, not an imitation of ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’,37 but ‘the “Divine Human”, “Jesus the Imagination”’,38 our greater future self, the form that God must take if He has indeed chosen to become manifest in man. Such a project has nothing to do with Wordsworthian egotism that looks backward to its past, and when Henry says the opposite, Berryman must have known that Yeats would have called him ‘All out of shape from toe to top’;39 Berryman must have known that he was shirking Yeats’s late grand injunctions: Poet and sculptor, do the work Nor let the modish painter shirk What his great forefathers did, Bring the soul of man to God, Make him fill the cradles right.40

35 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 356. 36 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), 399. 37 W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), 509. 38 Kathleen Raine, Golgonooza City of Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake (Ipswich: Lindisfarne Press, 1991), 13. 39 Yeats, Collected Poems, 400. 40 Ibid. 399.

Berryman’s Mischief

79

And Berryman must have discerned that Yeats’s poems themselves are Proof that there’s a purpose set Before the secret working mind: Profane perfection of mankind.41

Such is the achievement of Yeats’s art. But as much as Yeats’s poetry would put us on a soul-making ladder, putting aside our everyday selves to apprehend God within the imagination, his poems are also teeming with the ironies of life, that is, with mischief. The poet addresses again and again his ‘troubled heart’ to confront the absurdity or mischief of ‘Decrepit age’.42 Yeats was also quite capable of playing the role of ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’, ‘“Because I am mad about women”’.43 We now know, as Berryman could not, that Yeats intended the last lines of the ‘Lyrical’ part of his Collected Poems to be about a girl he distractedly eyes during a meeting: ‘But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms’;44 a girl who seems as if she might be quite similar to the woman Berryman hungers after in a restaurant ‘Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken páprika’.45 Yeats’s art is properly two-folded: it makes literal as well as spiritual sense; it is of this world and of the land of divine imagination, both at once the ‘“real” bases’ of his art. When Yeats’s persona lies down at the end of the Collected Poems ‘In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ it is because he knows that that is where ‘all the ladders start’.46 Yeats will happily live it all again, caught up, as we all are, in metempsychosis, and so these lines make literal sense. His book of poems is also designed to put each bold and discerning reader on a soul-making journey from the heart. I would

Ibid. Ibid. 218. Ibid. 356. Ibid. 393; see also W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (2nd edn; New York: Scribner, 1997), 356. 45 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 6. 46 Yeats, Collected Poems, 392. 41 42 43 44

80

Edward Clarke

argue that Shakespeare’s plays, taken together and read aright, perform the same function. In the first of his ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord’, Berryman says, ‘I have no idea whether we live again. / It doesn’t seem likely / from either the scientific or the philosophical point of view / But certainly all things are possible to you’.47 My final concern is whether this very late belief in a God of rescue might have been the beginning of a Yeatsian journey out of Berryman’s impassable years. Coleridge once exclaimed: O! few have there been among critics, who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its various metempsychoses, and consequent metamorphoses; – or who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare avatar, the human race frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity!48

I see Berryman very much as a reincarnation of that ‘ever wandering spirit of poetry’, lying at the bottom of all the ladders, threatened by the mischief of our ‘filthy modern tide’.49 At the ‘real’ base of Berryman’s art I find the spirit of poetry in a process of ‘real-isation’, ‘assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances’, circumstances that seem most unpropitious to the poet traditionally conceived. For, as Yeats observed in the introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, ‘The mischief began at the end of the seventeenth century when man became passive before a mechanised nature’.50 In this situation – like Brutus in his orchard in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, his ‘genius’ and his ‘mortal instruments / […] in counsel’ as the ‘little kingdom’ of his selfhood ‘suffers […] / The nature 47 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 215–16. 48 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, ed. H. N. Coleridge, 2 vols (London: William Pickering, 1849), vol. 1, 31–2. 49 Yeats, Collected Poems, 376. 50 W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), xxvii.

Berryman’s Mischief

81

of an insurrection’51 – ‘Henry took stock of where he now might be / in his own warring state. He stood perplexed / as to where to go next’.52 Had he read The Dream Songs, I believe that Yeats would have admonished Berryman to get up from this confused state, perhaps thinking of Berryman’s poetic work as part of the ‘Confusion’ that ‘fell upon our thought’ after the 1830s.53 Berryman asserted, just as Yeats might have, that ‘Jesus Christ is the only true literary critic’,54 but I wish that Berryman had cultivated Augustine’s ‘capacity for thee’ within The Dream Songs. In other words, I wish that the prayers at the end of Love & Fame had been integrated all along into his great work so that he had not been so brilliantly and mischievously beguiled. That these prayers were absent then may be the greatest mischief of all; had they been integrated, we might have been in for more.

51 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, II.i.66–9, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor et al., eds, The Oxford Shakespeare, 634. 52 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 389. 53 Yeats, Collected Poems, 400. 54 See ‘John Berryman, The Art of Poetry No. 16’, interviewed by Peter A. Stitt, The Paris Review (Winter 1972), available online at: (accessed 11 August 2016).

Karl O’Hanlon

5 ‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

Since the publication in 1997 of John Haffenden’s edited selection Berryman’s Shakespeare it has become difficult to deny the (admittedly erratic) depth of John Berryman’s Shakespearean scholarship, and as a corollary to conclude that his decades’ long activity in the field necessarily bleeds into his creative work.1 Certainly, Berryman’s passion for ‘the multiform and encylopedic bastard’ Shakespeare was profound;2 Robert Lowell was later to recollect of the Berrymans’ visit in July 1946 to the house in Damariscotta Mills he owned with his first wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, ‘John could quote with vibrance to all lengths, even prose, even late Shakespeare, to show me what can be done with disrupted and mended syntax. This was the start of his real style’.3 The hold of ‘Shakespeare’s broken syntax’ over the stylistic imagination of Berryman cannot be gainsayed.4 Nevertheless, this essay proposes ‘a fresh, active relation’ between the work of Berryman and John Milton,

1

2 3 4

John Haffenden, ed., Berryman’s Shakespeare (London: Tauris Parke, 2001), lxv. See Peter Maber’s exploration of the importance of Shakespeare to Berryman’s creative work, ‘John Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography’, in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 209–24. Cited in Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxiv. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 112. See Lowell, ‘For John Berryman (After reading his last Dream Song)’, in Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, eds, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 738.

84

Karl O’Hanlon

particularly Milton’s 1637 monody for Edward King, Lycidas.5 In his Paris Review interview published in 1972, Berryman insisted (to protestation from interviewer Peter Stitt) that his work ‘[seems] to have been sort of untouched by Shakespeare, although I have had him in my mind since I was twenty years old […] I believe strongly in the authority of learning. The reason Milton is the greatest English poet except for Shakespeare is because of the authority of his learning’.6 What complicates Berryman’s qualified acknowledgement of Milton, however, is his stronger personal identification with this Miltonic aspect, books as ‘the precious life-blood of a master spirit’ (Areopagitica) – the pedagogy and unabashed erudition of the seventeenth-century poet’s work. In a shrewd assessment of ‘extra-literary personality’ in Ring Lardner, Berryman writes, ‘all the artists who have ever survived were intellectuals – sometimes intellectuals also, but intellectuals […] The popular boys cannot understand this’.7 The bookishness of Milton was, of course, a tried and tested line of attack by his critics.8 In Berryman’s short story ‘Wash Far Away’ – a sublime and underrated example of its genre – the scant action revolves entirely around

5

6 7 8

This titular phrase is drawn from ‘Wash Far Away’, Berryman’s short story about a professor teaching Lycidas: ‘He could determine to teach today as he hadn’t for a long time, to swing the whole class to a fresh, active relation, an insight grave and light’; in The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 369. All subsequent references to The Freedom of the Poet in this essay are abbreviated as FP. John Berryman, ‘The Art of Poetry No. 16’, interviewed by Peter A. Stitt, No. 73 (Winter 1972), available online at (accessed 4 July 2016). See Berryman, ‘Enslavement: Three American Cases’, in FP, 215. Compare remarks on the subject by two bookish individuals intent on running with the ‘popular boys’: Samuel Johnson, that ‘[Milton] saw Nature […] through the spectacle of books’ (The Six Chief Lives from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, ed. Matthew Arnold [London: Macmillan, 1898], 107), and Eliot: ‘[…] a man whose sensuousness, such as it was, had been withered early by book-learning’ (‘Milton I’ [1936], On Poetry and Poets [London: Faber and Faber, 1957], 139); there is an exquisite irony in the choice of ‘sensuousness’, a Miltonic coinage the apposition of which Eliot surely relished with a scholar’s pedantic glee, arrived at by the methods he makes a pretence of disparaging in momentary fauvist philistinism.

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

85

an unnamed professor’s recollection of a day years prior, his preparation and subsequent teaching of the poem Lycidas, described in the story as ‘the chief poem in the world’ (FP, 367). In a quarrel with a student over the seemingly pedantic matter of whether the ‘blind Fury’ of the poem is indeed a Fury proper or a moniker angrily applied by the shepherd-swain speaker of the poem to Atropos (a Fate), the pedagogical impulse of the creative act is taken into both the subject matter and the style of the prose: Warner was decided, superior. ‘What’s the difference?’ The professor suffered a flick of rage. The cold self-assurance in the voice cambered as from endless metallic contempt for these subjects, these feathers.

They age [sic], like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke, Hated not learning worse than toad or asp.

‘The difference is between understanding a world-poet, Mr Warner, and not. Or between cultivation, and Ignorance truculent’. (FP, 381)

In its dramatic orchestration, the story is as good an introduction to Lycidas (and, indeed, to the fallible art of teaching) as can be imagined. The professor’s passion for both literature and teaching sometimes calcifies into superiority, while occasionally the obvious fact that the essential ‘lesson’ the professor wishes to extract from the poem – ‘whatever we do and think we are doing, however objective or selfless our design, our souls are every instant enacting our own destinies’ – is ultimately brushed to one side by the give-and-take of the classroom (FP, 375). In this extract, that quintessentially Miltonic inversion of the final phrase (noun, adjective) is itself a wilful idiom, mimetically capturing the foot-dragging wilfulness of Warner’s self-assured ignorance. ‘Ignorance truculent’ is a more inveterate, resistant piece of syntax than the manageable category of ‘truculent Ignorance’. The insult, moreover, is enriched by the reader’s recognition of its structural allusion to Milton’s Latinate syntax, not to mention the scandal such syntax caused to literary posterity; if we do not know this, we croak or hiss in ignorance; its erudite bitchiness, the Cheke of it, is denied us. In a piercing review of Haffenden’s Life of John Berryman and Eileen Simpson’s memoir Poets in their Youth, Geoffrey Hill stresses the importance of ‘syntax’ to the sustained technique of Berryman: ‘I believe [that he]

86

Karl O’Hanlon

never ceased to care about “syntax” and though towards the end of his life the technical botchings proliferated he seems even then to have retained a self-castigating craftsman’s faculty which is not to be confused with the destructive compulsions of the neurotic self.’9 This care or something like it is keenly felt in a note that Berryman made in October 1946 on a manuscript draft of ‘Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons’: I vowed (a) to think harder in verse; ‘argument’. (b) Experiment with movement, the matter I understand best. (c) Language that will interest at least me (‘frore’); but caution […]10

‘Thinking harder in verse’ meant within the movement of syntax, ‘the matter’ Berryman understood best, and with complicated diction, both technically controlled yet impacting upon the condition of thought itself, what Donald Davie terms the ‘articulate energy’ of poetry.11 It is significant that this artistic credo was penned only months after Damariscotta Mills, Lowell’s dating of the emergence of Berryman’s ‘real style’. As a vital postscript to Lowell’s recollections of Berryman’s late-Shakespearean ‘disrupted and mended syntax’, Eileen Simpson (Berryman’s first wife) recalls that Lowell insisted that they prolong their visit in Maine; ‘we must stay, Cal said. How could John even consider going when they hadn’t discussed Lycidas?’ She adds that post-breakfast one morning, Lowell and Berryman enjoined in ‘a good long recitation’: Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

9 Hill, ‘Lives of the Poets’, in Essays in Criticism 34/3 ( July 1984), 265. 10 Cited in Philip Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating ‘the scene of disorder’ (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014), 79. 11 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: an Enquiry into the Syntax of English poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955); ‘a movement of syntax can render, immediately present, the curve of destiny through a life or the path of an energy through the mind’ (157).

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

87

and explication of Lycidas, which they had no trouble agreeing was one of the greatest poems in the language.12 Simpson’s Miltonic, or rather, Lycidean postscript to Lowell’s Shakespearean ‘real style’ bears scrutiny. Certainly, as Thomas Travisano has written, ‘one of the keys to the artistic relationship between Lowell and Berryman, each among the most heartbreaking and innovative of our most recent elegists, can be acquired only by examining their relation to Lycidas’.13 Randall Jarrell astutely recognized as early as 1946 in a review of Lord Weary’s Castle that ‘Mr Lowell’s essential source is early Milton’, an observation that holds good for Berryman’s elegiac oeuvre, too.14 Shakespeare must not be reduced to a stalking horse to illuminate the importance of Milton’s elegy to the creative practice of Berryman; still, it is tempting to see Lowell’s remembrance of ‘disrupted and mended syntax’ or ‘broken syntax’ as more properly Miltonic than Shakespearean, especially the idea of tampering with smooth lines. In 1933, John Crowe Ransom published in The American Review a highly influential, obstreperous essay ‘A Poem Nearly Anonymous’, the latest in a long pedigree of wolfish harrying of Milton’s elegy. In the essay, Ransom bemoans Milton’s sacrifice of his poetic prowess to his ‘surliness’ (a Johnsonian adjective) as a rebellious proto-modern, and the ‘lawlessness’ of his poetic practice, particularly a too-occasional metrical slackness and ‘bachelor’ lines unrhymed: It is not merely easy for a technician to write in smooth metres; it is perhaps easier than to write in rough ones, after he has once started; but when he has written smoothly, and contemplates his work, he is capable actually, if he is a modern poet, of going over it laboriously and roughening it. I venture to think that just such a

12 Simpson, Poets in their Youth (Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Faber and Faber, 1982), 33. 13 Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 203. Michael Molan ( Jesus College, Oxford) has recently submitted an unpublished thesis on Milton’s influence in contemporary poetry, sections of which are amply devoted to Lowell (not to mention the vexatious constellation of the southern Agrarians and New Criticism). At the time of writing this thesis has been unavailable to me. 14 Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden, & Co. (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), 132.

88

Karl O’Hanlon practice, speaking very broadly, obtained in the composition of Lycidas [sic]; that it was written smooth and rewritten rough; which was treason.15

Later he adds in finely poised mitigation that perhaps Milton ‘[wrote] into [the poem] plenty of formlessness’ to energize the leaden tradition of the elegy, ‘violating the law of his art entirely for its public effect; a Jesuit of an artist’, this last aside a wonderfully screwball characterization (p. 15). The central charge – ‘roughening’ – is evocative of Lowell’s ‘disrupted’ and ‘broken syntax’. The critic R. P. Blackmur, who was directly responsible for Berryman’s appointment to teach at Princeton in 1943, was trenchant in his 1950 lecture entitled ‘The Lion and the Honeycomb’ about Ransom’s wilful dereliction of ‘the theology and politics and personal experience which are the intellectual and poetic subject of the poem […]’.16 Berryman regarded Blackmur, ‘the dearer of the dear’ (Dream Song 173), with almost filial reverence.17 Seven years prior to taking the job at Princeton, he had read Blackmur’s critical aperçu in Poetry magazine, which Berryman later immortalized in verse: The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence in the poetry of a fresh idiom: language so twisted & posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.’ I was never altogether the same man after that.18

15 Ransom, The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 12. 16 R. P. Blackmur, The Lion and the Honeycomb (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1956), 192. 17 The Dream Songs (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 192. All subsequent references to The Dream Songs in this essay will be abbreviated as DS [number]. 18 Emphasis in original. See ‘Olympus’, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 179. All subsequent references to poems in this volume will follow the abbreviation CP.

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

89

Given in his youth to ‘re-deploying all of Blackmur’s key terms / & even his sentence-structure’ (ibid. p. 180), it is highly probable that the latter’s forensic defence of Lycidas from Ransom’s blunt New Critical tools was an essential ingredient in Berryman’s early enamour with the poem.19 Ransom’s 1933 intervention emerged the same year as F. R. Leavis’s excoriating essay ‘Milton’s Verse’ in the pages of Scrutiny, both preceding T. S. Eliot’s acerbic judgement on the ‘bad influence’ of Milton in his first of several forays into the matter. Both Eliot and Ezra Pound, to name only two prominent anti-Miltonists, had nevertheless made preliminary obiter dicta before then.20 Berryman’s critical essays in The Freedom of the Poet plot a trajectory of increasing antipathy to the Eliotic dogma of ‘the impersonality of the artist’, with the adjectival dyad in 1949 ‘this perverse and valuable doctrine’ hardening by 1960 to ‘Eliot’s intolerable and perverse theory’ (FP, 264, 12). An extremist version of Eliot’s ‘impersonality’ is certainly one context against which both he and Lowell rebelliously found Lycidas ‘the chief poem of the world’; Pound’s influence was another. In his 1949 essay ‘The Poetry of Ezra Pound’, Berryman takes Pound to task for his relative ‘weakness of syntax’: (By instinct, I parenthesize, Pound has always minimized the importance of syntax, and this instinct perhaps accounts for his inveterate dislike of Milton, a dislike that has had broad consequences for three decades of the twentieth century; not only did Milton seem to him, perhaps, anti-romantic and anti-realistic, undetailed, and anti-conversational, but Milton is the supreme English master of syntax.) (FP, 264)

With the word ‘syntax’, Berryman is using live ammunition. Samuel Johnson had attacked the ‘peculiarity’ and ‘repulsive harshness’ of Milton’s English

19

Much of this essay is indebted to Chapter 3, ‘Scrannel Soundings’, of James D. Bloom’s excellent study of the relationship between Blackmur and Berryman, The Stock of Available Reality (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984). Debts acknowledged, I will have cause to dissent in my conclusion from Bloom’s insistence on a nigh-Arnoldian didactic quality to Berryman’s writing, which I believe is untenable; see Bloom, 96, 109. 20 For an overview, see Christopher Ricks on ‘the Milton controversy’ in Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1–21.

90

Karl O’Hanlon

poems: ‘the combinations of the words are new, but they are not pleasing’ ( Johnson, 95). Eliot also finds Milton’s word order peculiar, an oddity not entirely divorceable from his blindness: ‘the syntax is determined by the musical significance, by the auditory imagination, rather than by the attempt to follow actual speech or thought […]. The result with Milton is, in one sense of the word, rhetoric’ (Eliot, 142). Eliot is careful in his essay, using the prose style of Henry James as a foil, not to attack a supposed tortuousness of syntax per se; yet his distinction between James’s legitimate mimesis of ‘the real intricacies and by-paths of mental movement’ (ibid.) and Milton’s purported monumental grandstanding is, as Ricks and others have argued, upheld in spite of critical attention to the ways in which ‘[Milton’s] syntax is meaningfully controlled with great success’ (Grand Style, 27). Inversion, as we have seen, is a not-negligible part of that syntax: as Berryman was to write apropos Thomas Nashe, ‘[i]t is hard to measure what has been lost in our prose by the uniform adoption of a straight-on, mechanical word order (reflecting our thoughtless speech). Perhaps Nashe’s prime instruction to modern writers might be located here’ (FP, 14). Milton, a fortiori. From the earliest of his poems, John Berryman was experimenting with syntax. In ‘A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away’ from The Dispossessed (1948), Berryman’s syntactical effects might aptly be described as Miltonic. The poem, as Paul Mariani notes, was probably meant for Pound at St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington D. C. (who had been writing frantically to Berryman in the early months of 1947 since reading a review of his in The Nation), a dedication and subject matter that give its avowedly Miltonic ‘syntactical dislocations and its attendant deracinations’ some pungency.21 Your letter came. –Glutted the earth & cold With rains long heavy, follows intense frost; Snow howls and hides the world We workt awhile to build; all the roads are lost; […]

21

Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (2nd edn, Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 184.

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

91

I too the breaking blizzard’s eddies bore One year, another year; tempted to drop At my own feet forlorn […] (CP, 61–2)

‘A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away’ might best be regarded as an exercise in what a modern pastoral elegy might look like, denuded of ‘all those nymphs and flowers and wood gods’, as one of the students in ‘Wash Far Away’ equably puts it (FP, 377). The poem, I would argue, is an elegy in which the friend mourned is not dead, but ‘away’ – in that ordinary sense of elsewhere, the specific sense of Pound’s incarceration, and perhaps most poignantly, that metaphysical state which Berryman revealed lay dormant in the word, as in ‘[i]t was the thought that they thought / they could do it made Henry wicked & away’, such pettish élan married to real pathos (DS 1).22 It is this sense of awayness that links the sender of the letter to the speaker-recipient, who in the second stanza reveals with antic intensity and Miltonic deferral of the verb, ‘I too the breaking blizzard’s eddies bore […]’. Mariani reads this as a reference to ‘the Detroit winter when [Berryman] thought he was going mad’ (184). One sense of ‘away’ short of death is psychological dislocation.23 It is more than probable that, in addition to Yeats (see fn. 22), the famous use of the word in the first Dream Song was a recollection of lines in Lycidas: ‘Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding

22

23

See Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision, 51, for an astute discussion of ‘away’ as a Yeatsian trope of cultural and psychic dislocation. Berryman had owned a copy of Yeats’s early essay ‘Away’ published in The Fortnightly Review (1902). The concept also seems to spectrally inhabit another frequent Berrymanic usage, ‘astray’. I have written elsewhere in an essay on Geoffrey Hill and John Berryman of the former’s discovery in Berryman’s poem ‘The Song of the Tortured Girl’ the line ‘And there were sudden noises, which I made’ (CP, 52) about which Hill comments in an unpublished lecture ‘the syntax itself [is] a mimesis of detachment beyond agony’, a mimesis he has subsequently incorporated into his poem ‘Men are a Mockery of Angels’: ‘the cries / As they come are mine […]’; see Hill, Broken Hierarchies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55. Karl O’Hanlon, ‘“The Violent and Formal Dancers”: John Berryman and Geoffrey Hill’, The Cambridge Quarterly 45.3 (September 2016): 208–23.

92

Karl O’Hanlon

seas, / Wash far away, where’er thy bones are hurled […]’.24 Note how that Latinate deferral of the verb has a correspondence in the Dream Song line, ‘made’ arriving only after the reflexivity (‘the thought that they thought’) and modality (‘they could do it’) of the mid-sentence, finally culminating in ‘away’, which puckishly flits between being an adverbial or adjectival participle. Certainly, in the spring of 1947 when he wrote ‘A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away’ (same grammatical ambiguity in the word), Berryman was drafting the short story that in its early stages took its title, ‘Vain Surmise’ from a concatenation of the lines ‘denial vain’ (18) and ‘false surmise’ (153) in Lycidas; it was posthumously published as ‘Wash Far Away’. Milton’s ‘away’ is no more straightforward than Berryman’s, the geographical and temporal connotations skewed by careful periphrasis and mythopoeic resonance, tilting the meaning of ‘away’ into oblique non-presence. Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows denied, Sleeps’t by the fable of Bellerus old […] (156–60)

Berryman’s tuning of the potent Miltonic word ‘away’ adapts an already rich semantic pitch. In ‘A Winter-Piece’ Pound, the wicked and vehement old poet, is away, and Berryman has nature in full mourning garb, the clotted syntax soughing with inversion (in particular the supremely Miltonic cadence ‘[a]t my own feet forlorn’; cp. ‘these wild woods forlorn’, Paradise Lost, IX. 910), elisions, pastoral archaicisms (‘Glade grove and ghyll of antique childhood’), sudden rhetorical questions – ‘No voice goes far; one is alone whirling since where, / And when was it one crossed?’ (cp. ‘Who would not sing for Lycidas?’ ‘Had ye been there … for what could that have done?’, 10, 57).25 24 Milton, Lycidas, The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), 251. All citations of Milton’s poems drawn from this edition, given parenthetically as line references in the text. 25 Christopher Ricks has compared The Dream Songs with Lycidas and In Memoriam: ‘like all good elegies [it] can’t but be a theodicy’ (336), albeit a modern one which

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

93

At one point, not content with the rageous shows of nature, the speaker of Berryman’s poem in full Doric mode bids ‘[s]olicitudes of the orchard heart, comply / A little with my longing, a little sing / Our sorrow among steel and glass’, an exquisite pastiche of Miltonic muse-invocation, as in Lycidas: ‘[b]egin, then, sisters of the sacred well […] Begin and somewhat loudly sweep the string’ (241). Given the elegiac mode and the fact that around the same time Berryman was working on drafts of ‘Vain Surmise’ (‘Wash Far Away’), it is safe to presume that the poem is also caught in mourning Bhain Campbell, the Communist poet and dear friend of Berryman whose death in 1940 certainly figures behind the professor’s deceased friend, Hugh, in the story. The death, Bhain ‘yellow with cancer, paper thin, & bent / even in the hospital bed / racked with high hope’ (DS 88), had left Berryman with the conviction ‘I thought life wd [sic] bring me nothing like this again’.26 Pound and Campbell figure two aspects of awayness in the poem: ‘Artists insane and dead / Strike like a clock.’ If it is a modern pastoral, it is distressedly so, with the too-plausible pathetic fallacy resisted by stubborn interruptions of fact: such as the parenthetical frost (‘— / The thaw alone delays—’) in the last stanza, a Miltonic attrition. In the first of the Dream Songs to mourn Delmore Schwartz, the syntax bends around what is elsewhere termed the ‘complex death’ (DS 156). Dream Song 146 begins with pneumatic buoyancy, ‘[t]hese lovely motions the air, the breeze / tell me I’m not in hell’, a ‘lively Henry’, giving way to the first word of the second stanza, ‘only’, which introduces a counter-theme: ‘only his heart is elsewhere, down with them / & down with Delmore especially’, before finally the repeated gravity of the word ‘down’ is reclaimed angrily by Henry in the final stanza, ‘“Down with them all!” […] Their deaths were theirs’. That gravitational pull – upbeat vivacity, to morbid depression, to

comes clean about its anger towards God, indifference, doubts, and erotic passion as an earthly challenge to heavenly stasis (338); ‘Recent American Poetry’, Massachusetts Review 11 (1970), 329–38. As James Bloom remarks, this theodicy is related to Berryman’s idea of open-ended inquiry, as manifested in the professor’s notion in ‘Wash Far Away’ of a ‘trial’ enacted in Lycidas: It doesn’t matter what the questions pretend to be about […] What matters is that there be questions’ (See Bloom, 105). 26 Cited in Mariani, 127.

94

Karl O’Hanlon

subtle alteration of the word ‘down’ in Henry’s frustrated cry – is every bit as fluid as Milton’s syntax, which as Empson noted mixed short clauses and ‘a sustained style with the weight of momentum’; here, too, the first sentence ends twelve lines and two stanzas into the poem, while the first three lines of the final stanza contain three sentences, including Henry’s terse dismissal.27 Like Milton, Berryman is a master of the verse paragraph. Elegy is, by its nature, repetitive (‘yet once more, ye laurels’, 1); the repeated ‘O’s’ of lament may be conventional, but ruptured syntax also attempts to convey the inadequacy of language to mourning: compare ‘now thou art gone, / Now thou art gone’ (Lycidas, 37–8) with any of the woeful imprecations in The Dream Songs: ‘I can’t get him out of my mind, out of my mind’ (DS 155), ‘O and O I mourn’ (DS 156). The pallor of convention lies heavy on these formulae, notwithstanding that they are a concession to the limits of language: indeed, that ‘strengthless’ quality is ironically their gift.28 In his elegy for victims of the Holocaust, ‘Black Book (iii)’, he writes, ‘[l]ift them an elegy, poor you and I, / Fair and strengthless as seafoam / Under a deserted sky’ (CP, 156). That adjective humbly concedes the ranging verdict of Adorno on post-Holocaust poetics without being cowed by it.29 The point is that the syntax in its very texture instantiates the elegist’s ambivalences – life/buoyancy, death/gravity, resentment/volcanic eruption (ironically in the cry ‘down’). This anaphoric flow can be no more dismissed as a kind of ‘auditory’ drift as can Milton’s verse. ‘It is in the administration of rhetoric, / On these occasions, that—not of the fathomless heart— / the thinky death consists’ (DS 10). In spite of Eliot’s dismissal of Miltonic ‘rhetoric’, Berryman recognizes that modern elegy requires the technician’s ‘administration’ if it is to avoid cloying sincerity, not cynicism’s other but its twin.

William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 161. Cp. Berryman’s ‘Epilogue’ on Campbell’s death: ‘Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel’ (CP, 282). 29 See Coleman, esp. 118–20. As Coleman notes, the ‘strengthless’ foam turns tidal in the first Dream Song: ‘Hard on the land wears the strong sea, / And empty grows every bed’. For sea imagery in The Dream Songs, see DS 143, 172, 204, and 303: ‘for the grand sea awaits us, which will then us toss / & endlessly us undo’. 27 28

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

95

Some of Berryman’s most assured syntactical moves feature in his prose as well as verse. I would argue that it is syntax of a profoundly Miltonic temper that allows one (with considerable impropriety) to call ‘Wash Far Away’ an elegy. The essence of elegy is memorial. As the professor thinks to himself, ‘do I do anything ever but remember? […] The rememberer. Teaching is memory’ (FP, 370–1). The entire story is framed as a recollection of a spring day’s teaching, which opens with a wonderfully liquid, sensuous recreation of the ‘not-exactly’ remembered details (i.e. the character’s memory of that day) wimpled by intimations of a still-further past. He stepped down into the brilliant light, blinked, sweating, and set out. My God, away. The small leaves of the maple on the corner shook smartly as he passed. Alice’s fierce voice echoed. Sunlight plunged to the pavement and ran everywhere like water, vivid, palpable. I am a professor, he reflected, moving rapidly, or a sort of professor. There is a breeze, a wild sun. (FP, 367)

The technical achievement of this ‘second’ opening is enough to argue for Berryman’s place as one of the great neglected prose stylists of his time: lucid gorgeous description and choppy internal monologue, the ‘fierce voice’ of the professor’s dead wife echoing undifferentiated from natural phenomena is intensely moving. Indeed, Berryman’s syntax as a whole in ‘Wash Far Away’ with the minutest of operations can produce deep pathos: instance that slight flickering afterthought in the professor’s rhetorical question, where the sun intensifies the gulf between him and his dead friend, Hugh: ‘His face shadowed, and he shifted his eyes to the portrait, which the sun reached. Have I betrayed you? Here in the sun?’ (374). Syntax is the main rampart at which Milton’s detractors hoped to ‘[leap] o’er the fence with ease into the fold’ (PL, IV. 187); diction is another. Of Lycidas, Johnson wrote ‘the diction is harsh’, (Lives, 95), and more generally ‘through all [Milton’s] greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction […] Of him, at last, may be said what Jonson says of Spenser, that he wrote no language, but has formed what Butler calls a Babylonish Dialect, in itself harsh and barbarous […]’ (Lives, 116).30 Milton, 30 Eliot, in his much-chastened second Milton essay (1947), maintains as ‘permanent censure of Milton’ these remarks of Johnson (On Poetry and Poets, 153).

96

Karl O’Hanlon

proleptic in all things, mordantly has the measure of such criticism in his sonnet ‘A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon: ‘Cries the stall-reader, Bless us! what a word on /A title page is this! (Carey and Fowler, 305). Or (Berryman), ‘the popular boys cannot [will not?] understand this’ (FP, 215). In terms of diction, as we have seen, Berryman had promised himself late in 1946 to use ‘[l]anguage that will interest at least me (“frore”)’. The word ‘frore’ appears in the poem ‘Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons’, in which Berryman writes: ‘the frore pride wherein they burn’ (CP, 58). The Oxford English Dictionary (3rd edition, online) gives as definition ‘intensely cold, frosty, frost-like. Now only poet. […] (after Milton’s use)’ (OED3, n. 2). The oxymoron of a frozen pride that burns the denizens of Hell is a commonplace of medieval writing, including Dante (see Carey and Fowler’s notes, 535), but the word is Milton’s own, ‘the parching air / Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire’ (PL, II. 594–5). Thomas N. Corns suggests that the word, which survived into the nineteenth century in Sussex dialect, was possibly ‘a form Milton had heard’, and certainly the OED links current literary usage to him.31 Given the pandemonic subject matter of the poem, the dating of the manuscripts to 1946 shortly after he and Lowell had been much exercised by their reading of Lycidas, it is a safe assumption that he derives the word from Milton. It is of note that his scribbled artistic credo contains the caveat ‘but caution’. Within a year, Eliot would publish his second essay on Milton – the controversy was still at its height. Other ‘Babylonish’ debts in Berryman’s poems might include ‘troll’ as an imperative verb in ‘A Professor’s Song’ (cp. Milton’s use, its first transitive usage, in PL, XI. 620); ‘freaks’ potentially being used as verb in Dream Song 374, though the sense is ambiguous (in Milton, ‘the pansy freaked with jet’, Lycidas, 144); and ‘amaranthine’ (‘the amaranthine / mild quirks of Marvell’, CP, 86; compare ‘bid amaranthus all his beauty shed’, Lycidas, line 149). Also Berryman’s preoccupation with the deprivative effects of the negative prefix ‘un-’, for example ‘un-Greek’ (DS 33), ‘un-charges’ (DS 43), and, in a sublimely camp parody of the grammatical tick, ‘nodded, -un’ (DS 45), although the sense here also admits an onomatopoeic grunt.32 31 32

Thomas N Corns, Milton’s Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 111. On ‘un-’ in Milton as a ‘stylistic motif ’, see Corns, 84–6.

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

97

Berryman’s language shunts from playfulness to wilful obscurity, blackface clowning to gnarled, archaic and painful erudition, then suddenly scatological. It is not difficult to detect something of what Johnson thought of as Milton’s ‘Babylonish dialect’ being jazzed for mid-twentieth-century America; as Adrienne Rich writes in an essay on Berryman: […] there is no standard American language. […] [w]e have this mad amalgam of ballad idiom (ours via Appalachia), Shakespeherian rag, Gerard Manley Hopkins in a delirium of syntactical reversals, nigger-talk [sic], blues talk, hip talk engendered from both, Miltonic diction, Calypso, bureaucratiana, pure blurted Anglo-Saxon.33

‘Heavy’: Alex Runchman has convincingly excavated the Shakespearean weight behind the Berryman fingerprint-word ‘heavy’,34 the heft of that word in Milton’s monody for King is worth considering too. But, O the heavy change, now thou art gone, Now thou art gone and never must return! (37–8)

Having quoted these lines to refute charges of Milton’s lack of emotion for his friend from a student, the professor in ‘Wash Far Away’ feels that ‘[t]heir languid gloom oppressed him’ (FP, 377). Earlier in the story, he admits to himself that his dead friend Hugh ‘kept steadily with him like a deadweight he could never live up to’ (368). Part of the scruple of Berryman’s elegiac art, and it is a modern scruple, is to insist on the act of remembrance without fudging unpalatable truths: the resentment of the living towards the dead, at times even a sickening envy. This honesty which still has the power to appal gives some of Berryman’s elegies (especially those for his father) their verdictive accuracy. Whereas ‘strengthless’ from The Black Book encapsulates the vulnerability of mid-twentieth-century elegy, the word ‘heavy’ distributes the weight of the reality principle in these keenings. To conclude, I want to return to the idea of ‘Wash Far Away’ as an elegy of sorts, and an extremely accomplished short story that warrants more recognition that it has previously enjoyed. The draft title in the years after 33 Cited in Bloom, 113. 34 See Alex Runchman’s essay in the present volume.

98

Karl O’Hanlon

Bhain Campbell died was ‘Vain Surmise’, a re-working of a phrase proximate in Lycidas to the line that became its actual title, ‘Wash Far Away’: ‘For so to interpose a little ease / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise’ (152–3). In preparation for the class, the professor reads the poem twice: ‘both times he was gently moved by the exquisite melancholy of [this] semi-couplet’, the narrative tells us, quoting the lines before informing us, with laconic humour in the verbatim repetition, ‘[h]e wrote “exquisite melancholy” in the margin the second time’ (372). The bathetic repetition is a self-directed jibe at the elegist’s art, that he will never satisfy Johnson’s complaint against Milton, ‘[w]here there is leisure for fiction there is little grief ’ (Lives, 96). In fact, the dallying with ‘false surmise’ that occupies Milton is a riposte avant-la-lettre of Johnson, the acknowledgement of the circumstances that vex elegiac writing – venal motives, resentment or indifference towards those mourned, the stultifications or banalities of language itself – or merely the inability to comfort or comprehend, for how can the away of that utterly other kingdom ever be apprehended in human language? Caught in the dazzling fence of the classroom the professor’s didacticism, his insistence on the ‘lesson’ that Milton’s elegy is essentially an enactment of his own destiny and the ‘melancholy […] all Milton’s’ (385), is, pace James Bloom,35 tossed to one side by the professor’s shock of recognition on re-reading these lines: ‘“[f ]alse” threw its iron backward through the poem. The room shook’ (ibid.). The tremor, it seems to me, is brought about by the fault-line that a vulnerable (‘strengthless’) disruption or admission of a reality-principle (‘heavy’) in the elegiac mode can take the measure of its difficulty, avoiding the Scylla of cynicism or the Charybdis of sentimentality. Jahan Ramazani recognizes that in Lycidas ‘Milton nearly vandalises the elegy’s consolatory machinery’, but stresses that ultimately the normal ‘work of mourning’ and cathartic recompense is achieved.36 Yet Lycidas is more modern in the sense that Ramazani wants to delineate than he credits, which Ransom correctly perceived but deplored, and the professor 35 See Bloom 96, 109. 36 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3–4.

‘A fresh, active relation’: Milton’s Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman

99

in ‘Wash Far Away’ recognizes this ‘lawlessness’ (to use Ransom’s terms) in the word ‘false’, which not only calls into question the stable ‘work of mourning’ erected, but scrupulously answers the charge of artificial emotion by admitting into its own texture that very charge, the architectonics of its own ‘strengthless’ and ‘heavy’ limits in apprehending death. With compression that is worthy of emulation, Berryman manages to suggest an entire ‘missing or misrepresented element in an agreed-upon design’ (from ‘One Answer to a Question: Changes’, FP, 326) – namely, the noble struggle to publically articulate the memory of the dead and the away, with all its compromises and evasions. ‘His difficult, morning sense of the poem as a breathing, weird, great, incalculable animal was strong on him again’ (FP, 385). In the liquid edges of Berryman’s story, we can almost hear ‘weird, great, incalculable’ Memory breathe.

Deanna Wendel

6 Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

During a 1968 interview, John Berryman was asked why he considered The Dream Songs a single poem rather than multiple poems, and he replied, ‘Ah – it’s personality – it’s Henry …. The reason I call it one poem is the result of my strong disagreement with T. S. Eliot’s line – the impersonality of poetry’, noting that ‘it seems to me on the contrary that poetry comes out of personality’.1 Throughout his career, Berryman made such remarks, repeatedly disavowing the depth of his affinity with Eliot; he humorously noted that he ‘refused to meet him on three occasions’, admitting that ‘there was a certain amount of hostility in it, too’.2 He said that even when he purposely took The Waste Land as a model – in his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet – he ended up with a work ‘as unlike The Waste Land as it is possible to be’.3 The question of the reasons underlying Berryman’s presentation of tension between his poetic vision and Eliot’s own grounds this essay. Just how much was Berryman influenced by Eliot, in what sense, and how generative or limiting was that influence? And how did Berryman in turn reinvent or modify Eliot’s work? It’s difficult to discuss poetic influence without examining Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence as a starting point, particularly because of its historical congruity, in literary criticism, with the moment in which Berryman was writing The Dream Songs. Bloom penned The Anxiety of

1 2 3

See Berryman in Harry Thomas, ed., Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 3–44; 5. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 29.

102

Deanna Wendel

Influence, as he notes, largely in the summer of 1967, after Berryman had published His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Bloom, at that time, seemed to innately categorize Berryman among a crowd of ‘weak poets’ who were not able to fully innovate and instead remained overly imitative of the work of their forebears, unable to escape from the shadow of poets past.4 Conversely, the ‘strong poet’ would be one who struggles lifelong with the ‘Oedipal father’ amongst their poetic predecessors in a way that aids their creative output, as for instance, Bloom sees Shakespeare as influenced by, but eventually surpassing, Marlowe. The ‘strong poet’ is always necessarily an anxious one, who manages – through one of six general strategies – to transmute or break from the work of the poet with whom they have an ‘intra-poetic relationship’ of influence.5 In Bloom’s reading of Berryman, who he reads ‘less enjoyably’ than other poets, Bloom proclaims to ‘discover the field alas is too near to those of Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, Yeats, and the toy, dream, veritable rest are also the comforts of the same poets’,6 implying that Berryman resides among the weak poets who ‘idealize’ unlike stronger poets who ‘appropriate for themselves’.7 However, Bloom, I pose, missed the ways in which Berryman was doing precisely this, embodying the anxiety and ‘the persistence to wrestle’ with the poetic history that came before him, while ultimately reinventing the poetics of those prior writers. 4 5

6 7

As David Fite suggests, Berryman is one of the ‘losers’ in Bloom’s ‘process of canonmaking’. See Fite, Harold Bloom: the Rhetoric of Romantic Vision (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 12. In addition to clinamen, or ‘misprision proper’, Bloom describes revisionary strategies including tessera (filling in gaps in the ‘parent-poem’ as a form of continuity that goes further than the original), kenosis (breaking or promoting discontinuity in a sense that ‘empties’ out the earlier poem), daemonization (turning to a power seen as standing outside of the original poem), askesis (attempts to surrender one’s own self – the later poem – to separate from the earlier one), and apophrades (the return of the dead, in which a precursor’s work is openly acknowledged and allowed in once again, but in order to give an effect of the later poet as having written the original work). See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (2nd edn; Oxford University Press, 1997). Harold Bloom, ed., John Berryman: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 28. Ibid. 5.

Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

103

The vehemence of Berryman’s resistant response to Eliot’s theorization of impersonality is one particular manifestation, as I see it, of what Bloom calls, in other cases, clinamen: a strong bias against or swerving-away from a predecessor, a movement-away that is justified on the basis of ‘misprision’, in which a poet deliberately misreads the work of an earlier poet in order to set their own work against it in an ‘an act of creative correction’.8 When Berryman states that Eliot is wrong about poetry – that it comes out of personality (Henry’s, in his work) rather than impersonality – it is hard not to see Berryman’s reading as just such a ‘necessary misinterpretation’ of Eliot’s original point. What Eliot describes, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ as the ‘continual extinction of personality’ that ought to occur in poetry was never truly a threat to the poetic speaker, to Henry, but rather to the relationship between the poet and the poem; as Eliot explains impersonality, it refers only to the artist’s position: ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which create’. There is not truly a contradiction, the ‘on the contrary’ that Berryman points to between his and Eliot’s views, but in saying that there is, Berryman carves out space for himself – or rather, space for Henry. Bloom’s language ends up being surprisingly fitting here, then, for as he stated, ‘The stronger the man, the larger his resentments, and the more brazen his clinamen’.9 Berryman’s disparaging remarks against Eliot throughout his career embody such a partially real, partially playful resentment, in a way that might be deemed, to use Bloom’s words, a ‘defensive parody’.10 I am interested, then, in going beneath the suggested swerving, or clinamen, between the two poets, to show the ideas about poetry that they ultimately share with each other. Henry’s relationship to the impersonal – in the sense that Eliot originally meant it – is much more pronounced than it might appear. Yet Berryman does do something different with impersonality than Eliot, since his version of it is centered on showing Henry not to be a single unified personality, but rather one made up of multiple 8 9 10

Ibid. 30. Ibid. 43. Ibid. xxii.

104

Deanna Wendel

voices, a split and fragmented speaker who is more multiple than a single personality. While Berryman openly claimed that Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’ was the influential model for The Dream Songs, I will examine how he actually created a poem that shares a good deal more with Eliot, including an inverted model of his understanding of poetic impersonality. Eliot’s impersonality, as Berryman himself points out, remains highly concerned with the personal, while the dominant personality of The Dream Songs (Henry) is strangely impersonal. As Sharon Bryan points out, even though the central speaker of The Dream Songs is ‘multiple’ in a sense, Henry’s personality is still not the ‘billowing, boundless I’ of Whitman.11 She too hears ‘echoes’ of Eliot, particularly of Prufrock, in Henry, and tellingly states that both poets are masters of creating voices that evoke an entire character, in all its anxieties, flaws, and fraughtness. This is precisely what Eliot means when he describes impersonality, not that there are no speakers or characters with personalities in his poetry, but rather that the author should not be seen as identifiable with that character. As Eliot says, of course poets must draw on personal experience, but the greatest poets ‘digest and transmute’ their own emotions so as to make them novel and unfamiliar, abstracted from individual experience, for ‘the difference between art and the event is always absolute.’ Thus, ‘impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.’12 The assumption, one carried on in the movement toward New Criticism that Eliot contributed to, was that an author’s personal biography would not be a representative way to look at poetry – at least not if it were the

11

12

See Sharon Bryan, ‘Hearing Voices: John Berryman’s Translation of Private Vision into Public Song’, in Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, eds, Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 141–52; 143. Bloom makes a similar point, but as a critique, in John Berryman: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1989). Bloom positions Whitman as the figure of greatest influence for Berryman, but one that he could never successfully measure up to. See T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 37–44; 43.

Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

105

creation of ‘a mature poet’ who removes himself as much as possible from the medium. Such a poet renders personal ‘emotions’ instead into more abstract and novel ‘feelings’ that can be found in art, but seldom in life. Yet the idea that the ‘man’ should be filtered out of the art, not identifiable with the speaker, resonates with Berryman’s own insistence that he is not Henry and Henry is not him. Berryman was markedly inconsistent on his own closeness to, or distance from, Henry. He said, for instance, that ‘[Henry] is nothing but a series of conceptions – my conceptions […] He only does what I make him do’, thus presenting himself as the controlling author-puppeteer.13 On other occasions, Berryman’s self-described ventriloquism also blends him with his character: ‘Henry both is and is not me, obviously’.14 Yet Berryman also claimed that ‘the speaker [of a poem] can never be the actual writer’, and that writing ‘opens inevitably an abyss between [the poet’s] person and his persona […] the persona looks across at the person and then sets about its own work’.15 Here Berryman allows that the puppet may actually take over, gaining some agency of its own. Berryman’s person/persona distinction aligns with that of Sharon Cameron, who has written extensively on impersonality, within Eliot’s work as well as that of other authors. Cameron explains that ‘The word person confers status’, that is, ‘value, even equality’, but it does not ‘presume anything of substance’ (since a corporate body, or an ‘artificial person’, is still considered a person under the law).16 Cameron also points out that the word person comes from the word ‘persona’, which signifies something still more ephemeral: ‘a persona is not an actor but the mask which covers the actor’.17 The character is that mask, which covers the author, in Berryman’s case. While endorsing the persona/person division, however, Berryman does not know what to do with the word ‘personality’; he

13 14 15 16 17

See Berryman quoted in John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary (New York: University Press, 1980), 63. Ibid. Ibid. 64. Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), viii. Ibid.

106

Deanna Wendel

fluctuates between describing Henry as his ‘persona’, and, as stated at the beginning of this essay, as a ‘personality’, but Cameron points out that these should not be seen as interchangeable entities. For Cameron, ‘personality stresses self-ownership, the of or possessive through which individuality is identified as one’s own’.18 Impersonality, in her view, challenges any concept of ownership of ‘the human particular’.19 Similarly, and in appropriately Eliotesque fashion, Berryman once even denounced The Dream Songs as ‘too personal’ and therefore ‘too accidental’ which is interesting considering the history of much biographical criticism on a poet whose personal life is often seen as inseparable from a full sense of his poetic meanings.20 Another link between Eliot and Berryman is that, in a sense, both embody the aesthetic value of ‘difficulty’ initially associated with high modernism, because of their switches, often barely marked or not marked at all, between multiple speaking voices. We see this in both The Waste Land, with its large ensemble cast of characters, many of whom appear and disappear after speaking a few lines, or after remaining silent while being described in ‘heap[s] of broken images’.21 For Eliot, polyvocality works as one manifestation of the slippery notion of impersonality. Eliot does not say this exactly in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ – only that ‘[t]he poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’ – but I see the ability to try on, or become, other voices as the next logical outcome of a collecting impersonality.22 This mass storing of thoughts/words from others across time and space is that impersonality could also be understood, paradoxically, as transpersonality. Not having a ‘personality’ oneself is what legitimatizes a mass ventriloquizing of other persons. Thus, the ‘Waste Land’ itself (and the The Waste Land as poem) is not only ‘a heap of broken 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. ix. 20 Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 4. 21 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 49–74; 51. 22 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 41.

Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

107

images’, but also a heap of personalities, if none fully developed. It’s only a series of steps from Eliot’s conception of the poet’s mind as a ‘compound’ of sensory impressions to what John Haffenden calls Berryman’s literal ‘compound hero’.23 While The Waste Land more blatantly foregrounds polyvocality, gathering many voices in one poem without filtering them through a central character, Berryman doesn’t abandon, but actually re-develops, polyvocality in order to situate it within the individual. Although it might seem there is a clear personality at the heart of the text – that is Henry, ‘a white American man in early middle age’ – there are multiple voices even within him. Henry also speaks to himself in first, second, and third person, speaks to the ‘friend’ who calls him Mr Bones, and there is also another potential, ambiguous speaker who stands outside of any of these entirely. While The Waste Land, which jumps from person to person, assumes a certain universality to its emotional experiences, rather than its belonging to ‘the’ poet or ‘the’ speaker, the initial quote from Berryman suggests that The Dream Songs’ very status as a poem pivots upon the presence of a unifying personality. However, once we examine Berryman’s central personality Henry, he, too, breaks down into a series of other voices, an internal rather than external multiplicity. As readers have often remarked, even the speaker who calls Henry Mr Bones appears to be an ‘imaginary friend’ created for Henry’s own companionship and comfort. Here we have an ‘I’ who constantly abstracts from that ‘I’ to talk to and about itself, at such times conceptualizing its own personality as an other. Even if we don’t want to say that this friend is imaginary – though I’m not sure the distinction would even matter in the dream-world of the text – it would still remain difficult to distinguish when Henry is speaking to himself ‘in blackface’ from when Henry is being spoken to by his black friend. This is the individual who calls Henry ‘Mr Bones’, who watches Henry’s absurd actions and offers such pat-on-the-back-reassurance as ‘Mr Bones, we all brutes & fools’ (in Dream Song 62) or metatextual reflections on Henry’s writing: ‘Thass a funny title, Mr Bones’ (about ‘April Fool’s Day,

23 Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 25.

108

Deanna Wendel

or, St Mary of Egypt’ in Dream Song 47).24 Of course, Henry also speaks to his friend in the same diction, problematizing the lines between identity, identification, and racial mimicry. As Haffenden notes, in most of the Songs, direct quotation is not even used for the friend.25 Even if ‘real’, then, this second speaker becomes un-liftable from Henry’s speech and thought patterns, troubling Berryman’s notion of Henry’s own distinct personality as that stable entity grounding The Dream Songs. It is also significant that the imaginary or internalized friend who becomes part of this dual personality is represented by a racial other. This degree of racial mimicry or the fantasy of Henry occupying a position of ‘bothness’ – both black and white – seems to be rendered more possible by writing, where we are not forced to confront any corporeal differences between multiple speakers; we never see ‘two bodies’. When all we have is a page with language, which is seldom marked by specific speech tags, then we’re hard-pressed to draw the distinction. One example I’d point to is Dream Song 60, which is conducted by both ‘dash’ and ‘non-dash’ speakers in the same diction, and even the dashes don’t signify clear switches. After, for instance, Henry in his performance as Mr Bones opens with ‘Afters eight years, be less dan eight percent, / distinguish’ friend, of coloured wif de whites / in de School, in de Souf ’, Henry’s friend counters with ‘– Is coloured gobs, is coloured officers, / Mr Bones. Dat’s nuffin?’26 Yet even while sectioned off by dashes, it becomes difficult to distinguish speakers without mapping the movements between them in scrawled asides, especially as their own perspective melds into one when ‘Friend Bones’ convinces his interlocutor that he is right about the lack of progress in racial equality. For Eliot, too, the most significant or fully fleshed ‘perspective’ in The Waste Land is that of a peculiarly liminal figure, who also serves as a mediator for other figures in the poem – Tiresias. However, this liminality represents Tiresias’ fraught position in regard to sex and gender, not race. For both Berryman and Eliot, the in-between speaker has a heightened 24 See John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 69, 51. 25 Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 49. 26 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 67.

Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

109

perception, and is particularly qualified to offer something resembling wisdom. The nuances, though, are complex and troubled: are Tiresias as male/female and Henry as black/white truly really speaking from a privileged position that somehow transcends either gendered or racial divides? Or do they fluctuate, cross back and forth? The mythology of Tiresias makes it clear that he is not a hermaphrodite, which is what the idea of a ‘hybrid’ speaker might suggest, but a man who became female (as the myth goes, as punishment for angering Hera), married, had children, and then was transformed into a man once again. Yet he retains the physical traces of ‘wrinkled female breasts’, and feels that he is incessantly ‘throbbing between two lives’, an experience that I think we could also see as Henry’s own position when it comes to race, and one that is also grounded to an extent in myth – as, for him, this position is only possible through poetry.27 Furthermore, Tiresias occupies a space of privileged internal vision (despite physical blindness), able to view figures from other sections of the poem, including ‘the sailor’ and ‘the typist’.28 Like Henry’s ‘friend’ who comments on the titles of his poems, and like the impersonal poet, Tiresias achieves a certain distance from the various individuals of the poem, while simultaneously empathizing with their plights to the extent that they become personal. Such a remoteness, also inherent in the notion of poetic impersonality, is ambiguous (which is part of Berryman’s issue with it) because the very detachment is what seems to allow a unique affective closeness to character: Tiresias watches a typist’s passionless romance from afar, but says that the experience is his, too, declaring that ‘I Tiresias have foresuffered all / Enacted on this same divan or bed’.29 For both poets, that which is impersonal in their poetry isn’t so in the sense of the word’s sometimes connotations of coldness, distance or objective removal (despite Eliot’s pretenses to the scientific in poetry). Rather, it is the refusal to be only one, unified personality, in order to instead take on myriad other subject positions, and imagine oneself into the other. It 27 Eliot, Selected Poems, 59. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 60.

110

Deanna Wendel

is precisely because one’s own personal experience – that of the poetic speaker, rather than of the author – is so much more all-encompassing than might otherwise be thought. Impersonality of this sort leads to empathy in a deeper-than-usual sense; Henry and his friend are not separable, just as Tiresias does know the position of the other, having experienced it himself. Despite all of these conceptual links, there is only one explicit mention of Eliot’s name in The Dream Songs.30 This reference occurs in the final Dream Song in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest and merits analysis for that reason. Here Eliot’s own name is filtered through another, a reference to Ralph Hodgson: the line is, ‘The man is dead whom Eliot praised’.31 This might be seen as another way of pointing out that Eliot’s conceptions of poetry and the poet are also dead. Among the plethora of authors cited in The Dream Songs itself in a polyvocal, transpersonal way – a list that includes Eliot’s contemporaries Frost, Auden and Yeats – Eliot’s delegation to the final page, then, makes him appear at once a culmination and an afterthought. Berryman goes on to say ‘The man is dead whom Eliot praised. My praise / follows and flows too late’.32 Berryman is still only indirectly, second-handedly, referring to Eliot – not making Eliot himself the subject, but rather ‘the man’ to whom Eliot attached an aesthetic judgment. Berryman’s praise, in turn, is not of Eliot, but of Hodgson. At the same time, Berryman – Henry, but I’ll commit the important crime of confusing them – admits his own failure, admits that Eliot beat him to the punch, and that he is following in his wake. However, if we read the original poem, ‘Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre’, in Eliot’s ‘Five-Finger Exercises’, we see that this ‘praise’ is really playful rhyme denoting how Hodgson is ‘worshipped by all waitresses’; the poem reduces Hodgson to the things he eats, and tells us how, always in parentheses, ‘Everyone wants to know him’.33 Eliot goes on in the poem

30 In addition to the direct reference, Eliot is also invoked once (and perhaps more intimately) by the nickname ‘Possum’, given to him by Ezra Pound. 31 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 407. 32 Ibid. 33 See T. S. Eliot, ‘The Five-Finger Exercises’, in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 92–3.

Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

111

to then provide a self-parody, making a rare – and, yes, personal – appearance in his own work as ‘Mr Eliot’, only to talk about how unpleasant he is to know, making a more humorous case for the need for poets to make themselves ‘extinct’ from their works. This is the kind of double-edged ‘praise’ that Berryman has for Eliot: on the one hand, he says late in life, ‘I now rate [Eliot] very high. I think he is one of the greatest poets who ever lived’, but he also states at the same time that he is ‘only sporadically good’, deeming Eliot’s career ‘a pure system of spasms’.34 However, Berryman also admits, ‘My career is like that. It is horribly like that’.35 While Berryman conceives the shape of his career as mirroring T. S. Eliot’s, in The Dream Songs and The Waste Land, I read Eliot and Berryman as arriving at an impersonal/personal middle ground, though from opposite starting points. Eliot begins with impersonality – or rather, multiple persons – to then focus in on the universal experience of the individual within the collective; Berryman starts with a particular person, but reveals Henry’s individuality itself as a collectivity. In other words, Eliot talks about the experience of the one in the many, while Berryman finds many in the one. This strained relationship to individual personhood is also reflected by the very title of Berryman’s poem, in having to refer to The Dream Songs as ‘a poem’, Berryman’s conception of the work. The Dream Songs, like its protagonist Henry, is ‘one’, but also ‘many’. Despite the fact that it is supposed to come together and be understood as a whole, it is nevertheless still designated by the plural nomenclature of ‘Songs’. Meanwhile, the title of The Waste Land, despite the poem’s lack of a single unifying personality – and its multiple persons – still offers a title that is clearly in the singular. Even with its array of persons, there are not individual or multiple Waste Lands. In its form, then, there is a possibility for universal connection from the poet so well known for his vivid depiction of feelings of social disconnect, epitomized in ‘Prufrock.’ In The Waste Land, it is anomie that unites all of the voices. In other words, people are made to ‘bond’ over mutual isolation, but this can only happen because of the poem itself. Poetic form is the only thing shackling these 34 Berryman quoted in Thomas, ed., Berryman’s Understanding, 25. 35 Ibid.

112

Deanna Wendel

individual voices together, since many of the persons in the poem do not communicate in direct dialogue with each other. When I say that Berryman’s multiple-personality is a descendant of Eliot’s impersonality, and that Henry can only be understood as such a multiple (im)personality, I don’t mean this in the sense of any individualized pathology or psychology. Rather, the non-unilateral, disoriented location of the speaker is one that Berryman indicates as a specifically modern condition: that part of being modern is that now each of us is an ‘us’. Henry’s poetic multiple-personality may be cogent to consider in relationship to one of the central threads of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (although they use the term schizophrenia, rather than multiple personalities or impersonalities, so the links I’m drawing are loose ones) which is that capitalism ‘sets in motion schizo-flows’.36 They write that, ‘Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that schizos are not salable’.37 The key point they establish is that the relationship between society and schizophrenia goes ‘far beyond problems of modes of living, environment, ideology’.38 It also ventures beyond the clinical and into the intellectual and creative spheres, which reproduce the same impetus but with a difference; even the notion of Deleuze and Guattari writing together as ‘one’, as a response to capitalism’s ‘schizo-flows’, is described in self-reflexively schizophrenic terms. A question that I think would be central to Berryman and/or Henry, which Deleuze and Guattari ask is: ‘Why does [capitalist production] make the schizophrenic into a sick person – not only nominally but in reality? Why does it confine its madmen and madwomen instead of seeing in them its own heroes and heroines, its own fulfillment?’39 The Dream Songs’ relationship to any form of ‘madness’ is an artistic one, figurative and nebulous, but nevertheless I think it’s a thought structure that provides a useful framework for thinking 36 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 245. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman

113

about The Dream Songs, one which helps to situate the phenomenon of the multiple-self or multiple-voice poetics as peculiarly modern. It also helps to address Berryman’s recurrent questions: Am I or am I not Henry? Then, too, is Henry – or is Henry not – Mr Bones? History has rendered us capable of all kinds of self-abstraction, and therefore of engaging in a normalized ventriloquism with our own other possible selves. It is in this sense that Berryman’s response to impersonality is not just a reiteration of or a resistance to Eliot, but at the end what Bloom found, in other artists, to represent a constructive ‘misprision’. Berryman envisions his project as responding directly to ‘the turbulence of the modern world, and memory, and wants’.40 At the same time, he wants not only to record a modern experience, but to offer The Dream Songs as a kind of (albeit temporary) solution to it. They are, as he says, ‘like a series of dreams, some funny, etc., bitter but some, and especially late on in the series, designed to lift the reader out of the world’.41 Sharon Cameron’s analysis of T. S. Eliot similarly links impersonality with ‘lifting’, giving it a celebratory resonance: through the impersonal, ‘phenomena are liberated from personality’.42 Berryman, though, extends this specifically to the reading act. Yet the reader is not liberated from personality in general, just momentarily extricated from his or her own, in order to enter Henry’s chaotic multiple-personality. Furthermore, Berryman’s serial description suggests that The Dream Songs have a teleological underpinning, and hope to move progressively toward a ‘higher’ realm; this ironically attaches the work, despite its fragmented form, to an older romantic ideal of transcendence. The poem presents itself as an escape from the material world, that is, which it also can’t help but transcribe. It grants readers some time to no longer be themselves: surrendering their own personality in order to try on others for size. However, Berryman, and Henry, also question whether this species of escape is sufficient. Hence The Dream Songs enacts longings for the fuller manifestation of impersonality Eliot envisions and Berryman critiques as naive. Ultimately, 40 See Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 59. 41 Ibid. 40. 42 Cameron, Impersonality, 176.

114

Deanna Wendel

Berryman was all too familiar with the sentiment that Eliot stated was located at the heart of the aesthetic doctrine of impersonality, which is that ‘only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things’.43

43 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 43.

Heather Treseler

7 Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

‘I did not choose her – somehow she chose me.’1

In 1934, John Berryman became the quixotic student of the influential poet-critic Mark Van Doren at Columbia University.2 But the nineteenyear old failed Van Doren’s course in eighteenth-century literature, having read but seventeen of the forty-two assigned books, and the failure forced him to lose his scholarship and sit out the following semester.3 Academic disaster cured Berryman of distraction, however: in the next two years, he re-dedicated himself to the study of literature and became Van Doren’s star protégé, winning the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship to study in England in 1936.4 Curiously, over the summer that marked Berryman’s academic Saul-toPaul reformation, he composed a sonnet sequence for his mother’s fortieth birthday that, in retrospect, tellingly presages the tensions and effortful displacement in his break-through poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), finished nearly twenty years later. Berryman’s mid-century epic has remained resonant in its high modernist experiment, kinky séance of the dead, and portrayal of a literary artist’s bid for autonomy within a personal

1 2 3 4

John Berryman, ‘One Answer to a Question: Changes’, in The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 328. John Berryman, We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988), 33. Ibid. Ibid.

116

Heather Treseler

circumstance and cultural milieu that had, for decades, ‘unhanded’ him.5 Yet, for all the novel invention evinced in Homage, Berryman was an alluvial poet; in fashioning a lyricism as ‘unstable, guilty, and anxious as the American life he depicts’,6 Berryman reached back to primary sources of desire and conflict linked to the slow emergence of his own poetic voice. In a late-life interview with Peter Stitt, Berryman admitted that he was not interested in ‘Bradstreet as a poetess [… but rather] as a pioneer heroine, a […] mother to the artists and intellectuals who would follow her and play a large role in the development of the nation. People like Jefferson, Poe, and me’.7 Enlivening an historical mother at American poetry’s putative point-of-origin, one he could imaginatively seduce as a ‘demon lover’,8 Berryman positioned himself in a genealogy in which he could reconcile his filial role with the sovereignty of poetic vocation. Berryman’s birthday sonnet cycle for his mother, ‘July 8, 1934’, is one likely, if largely unacknowledged, prequel to Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. These sonnets illustrate the double-bind of fealty and repudiation that Berryman recreates in conjuring Bradstreet as his ‘mistress neither of fiery nor velvet verse’.9 The sonnets appear in Richard J. Kelly’s We Dream of Honour (1988), a carefully edited selection of 228 letters and twelve previously unpublished poems that Berryman exchanged with ‘Jill’ Berryman in their forty-three year correspondence of over 700 letters.10 The epistolary relationship between mother and son, like their quotidian one, was intense and tempestuous. As Kelly notes, Jill Berryman ‘insisted on being the most John Berryman, ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’, in Collected Poems 1937–1971 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 133. ‘We are on each other’s hands / who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us’. 6 Stephen Burt, ‘My Name is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover Berryman’, in Close Calls with Nonsense (Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2009), 134. 7 Peter Stitt, ‘The Art of Poetry’, Paris Review 53 (Winter 1972): 177–207, in Harry Thomas, ed., Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 18–44; 33. 8 Ibid. 9 Berryman, Collected Poems, 135. 10 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, xv. Jill Berryman was born Martha Shaver Little on 8 July 1894. 5

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

117

important person in his life and, fearing displacement by wives, or other women, grew increasingly possessive […]. Mrs Berryman’s expectations of him as a husband surrogate […] clearly raised the Oedipal currents swirling around the two of them’.11 Berryman’s desire to acknowledge his mother’s enabling support – ‘the goodness of this woman / in her great strength, in her hope superhuman’12 – while extricating himself from the centre of her obsessive attention profoundly shaped his early career. Mother and son shared literary aptitude and parallel formative experiences. Like her son, Mrs Berryman suffered the early loss of her father as he abandoned his family when she was five.13 She also was a precocious student, graduating early from high school; attending the two-year Christian College in Columbia, Missouri, where she was valedictorian; and marrying a bank manager, John Allyn Smith, at age eighteen.14 Following her first husband’s death in 1926, Jill married her Florida landlord and later worked in New York, ascending the corporate ladder through various sales and advertising positions.15 As Haffenden notes, by the late 1930s, she had become ‘a shrewd, absorbed, wholly sufficient businesswoman’, running her own firm ‘Berryman & O’Leary’ (1951–9) and earning a salary, in her best year, of almost forty thousand dollars.16 But her gifted son was the product Jill would most obsessively fashion. Though few of Jill’s letters before 1954 survive, those that do – coupled with their correspondence in the last two decades of John’s life – provide a remarkable record not only of their troubled relation but of the poet’s sensibility evolving in relation to a plethora influences, including his mother’s own. Ann Bower observes that letter writers often ‘attempt to create and revise both self and addressee … they have this power or they would not

11 12 13 14 15 16

Ibid. 5–6. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 117. John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (Boston: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1982), 8. Ibid. 10–12. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 103.

118

Heather Treseler

write’.17 The Berrymans’ correspondence manifests such a relational contest, providing a portal into the governing alliance in the poet’s life. As scholars’ reconnaissance of Berryman’s archive lends an increasingly complex view of Berryman’s ‘peripatetic subjectivities’,18 it is clear his influences were both intensely regional (as in the heady Princeton milieu of the 1940s) and thoroughly international, and his defining concerns both intimate and worldly, informed by the coincident realms of public event and private history. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in the September–October edition of Partisan Review in 1953, was Berryman’s first successful bid for literary fame and a dedicated attempt to rival his modernist ‘grandfathers’,19 specifically, the scope of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and, stylistically, the elegiac tenderness of W. B. Yeats’ ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, a poem that honours a dead airman and, obliquely, his surviving mother. Yet as Berryman’s trove of letters suggests, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was also an aestheticized effort to rhetorically limit and disarm ‘an unspeakably powerful possessive adoring MOTHER’20 who, from the nascence of Berryman’s career, had enabled and obstructed her son’s talent in almost equal measure. Consider excerpts from the letter Jill wrote to John on receiving a copy of Homage: [F]irst let me thank you again for the poem, John – I have read it again and again, over and over, with tears of awe and gratitude and reverence. […] As nearly, I think, as anyone not you can understand, I see something of what it must mean to move and be moved from one world into another, and of wht [sic] agony the time of accustomedness must be, coming as it does now upon exhaustion, nerve wrack, and utter depletion. […] [D]o not be offended with or brush aside as puerile or pollyannic my sure belief [that] one can only start by setting aside anger and hatreds and contempt and disgust

Ann Bower, Epistolary Responses: The Letters in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Criticism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 5. 18 Philip Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating ‘the scene of disorder’ (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2014), 94. 19 John Berryman, ‘Poetry Chronicle, 1948: Waiting for the End Boys’ in The Freedom of the Poet, 299. Berryman writes, ‘The young poets lately, in short, have had not fathers but grandfathers’. 20 Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 33. 17

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

119

and resentments. You have written one of the world’s great poems […] If the poem were not great, then your present attitude would not be so dangerous to yourself […] In all reverence, a poet is in human sense God […] Throw away thy wrath. And in throwing it away, save thyself. [M]y son, my son.21

Moved to ‘tears of awe and gratitude’, Mrs Berryman may have regarded Homage as a veiled portrait of her own life on the ‘frontiers’ of the Florida land boom, New York advertising, and modern motherhood. Her intuition about the poem’s personal register, moreover, may have also informed her insistence that John cast aside the ‘anger and hatreds and contempt and disgust’ she reckons fueled his Herculean poetic endeavour. At a minimum, Jill’s letter is a mother’s plea for her son to separate the gestalt evident in a work of art from its authoring life, and it shows the hieratic authority she arrogated to her own advice. It also legitimates the possibility that Berryman’s self-described ‘dialogue’ in Homage with ‘this boring highminded Puritan woman […] our first American poet but not a good one’22 restaged a central tension in his private history. Berryman’s fascination with a spiritually wracked, desiring, devotedly maternal woman whose ‘[a]mbition mines, atrocious, in’23 likely began with the woman he knew most intimately, not with the Princeton suburbanite with whom he had the sustained adulterous affair that galvanized his Sonnets for Chris (1947, 1966). Berryman’s sonnet cycle, ‘July 8, 1934’, is an early precedent for the poet’s formal Homage, which made Berryman ‘something of a national celebrity’.24 These poems for his mother suffer from adolescent experiments in syntax (‘in bands / Of spangled light her eyes are soft and lean / Inward, for all her kindliness commands’)25 and a dense swirl of subtexts not wholly within his control. But they are a cipher for the tightly staged masque in Homage, which – with a similar mixture of formality and bathos 21

Jill Berryman to John Berryman, letter dated ‘Monday night’, John Berryman Papers, Special Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Box 31. 22 Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 328–9. 23 Berryman, Collected Poems, 136. 24 Luke Spencer, ‘Mistress Bradstreet and Mr. Berryman: The Ultimate Seduction’, American Literature 66/2 (1994): 353. 25 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 34.

120

Heather Treseler

– lauds the Puritan poet for her maternal virtue and reproductive power while belittling her artistic achievement. This subtly pejorative approach is evident in the four early poems written for Jill. Consider the first sonnet: I sing a mother’s love, too strong to hold Unto herself her son, though they were two So near in mind and heart, and eyes controlled By one strong light, they visioned a single view; Possessive of naught against the world save her, She would not see him grow too closely dear, And, held apart, he waxed in strength under His own will, on his own life-path, but near To that wise road she went. And mounting still, But far below, he strove to build his way After her quiet, undenying will To rise unselfish to a self-perfected day. Beneath her joy in a practised life there moves A soul that sees and knows and aches – and loves!26

Jejune, strained, loosely Shakespearean, the poem begins in paradox: a ‘mother’s love’ is illogically ‘too strong’ to demand exclusive possession of its object.27 Mother and son have also ‘visioned a single view’, and the poetspeaker’s attempt to cleave himself, to separate his ‘I’ if not his ‘eyes’ from his mother’s person, is the crux of the next ten lines.28 Admonishing his addressee to keep him ‘held apart’ lest he ‘grow too closely dear’, Berryman cites his mother’s ‘quiet, undying will’ as a paradigm of affective restraint, noting the discipline that belies ‘[a] soul that sees and knows and aches – and loves!’29 While seemingly celebratory, Berryman’s sonnet has an unmistakably didactic air: in its catalogue of maternal virtues, the poem reminds its apostrophized subject of behaviour a mother ought to uphold. Homage, in its medieval sense, reified a contractual understanding between

26 27 28 29

Ibid. 33–4. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 33–4.

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

121

vassal and lord; in his birthday sonnets to Jill, Berryman similarly enacts a pledge while providing an implicit set of stipulations.30 In the third sonnet of this private cycle, Berryman departs from milquetoast accolades to deploy innuendo. Rendering a blazon of his mother’s physical charms and enduring erotic appeal, he notes that her ‘Hair [is] a whispering, friendly brown to men’ and ‘Her waist a slender charming line between / God’s twin mysteries in woman’.31 In lavishing description on his mother’s physique, Berryman reframes Jill’s influence – subtly directing it toward other men – giving himself room to assert his individuation from a powerful maternal figure. The double-edge of Berryman’s birthday verse, however, is most acute in the fourth and final sonnet. Although he praises Jill’s ‘verbal brilliance’ and ‘veritable wells’ of lyric thought, he also caricatures her as a fitful artist, unable to distil her animal energy compellingly onto paper.32 ‘[H]er thought as from a cage / Leaps out’, he writes, noting the ‘quality that strains behind the words’ in her attempt to ‘summon[s] poignant beauty to her page’.33 In a gesture that reappears in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the speaker intimates that the mother’s artistic failure is what the male ‘poet employs to freeze his soul’;34 he will avoid ‘the explosive power of bawling herds’ and ‘undertones of birds’ that mark his mother’s refusal of ‘ordered rhyme’.35 Thus, Berryman suggests that authoritative writing cannot emerge from the ‘cage’ in which Jill dwells as a physically sensate, artistically impulsive, uncomfortably close mother.36 Endeavouring to ‘sing a mother’s love’37 in 30 The Oxford English Dictionary glosses the function of ‘homage’ in feudal law as the ‘formal and public acknowledgement of allegiance, by which a male tenant declares himself the vassal of a king or lord from whom he holds land’ or as ‘the existence of such a relationship, typically entailing payment, oaths of fidelity, or obligation of service’. 31 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 34. 32 Ibid. 35. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 33.

122

Heather Treseler

the tradition of Homer and Virgil, Berryman’s birthday ode satirizes his mother’s imperium. But his sonnet cycle employs a blend of Petrarchan and epic conceits that reappear, profitably welded to his mature style and wielded to new effect, in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953/6), The Dream Songs (1969), and Love & Fame (1970). Another impassioned female artist with ‘frustrated literary ambition’38 figures in Berryman’s Homage, in which he stages the manumission of his voice in connection with the colonial poet whose Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) iconized the Puritans’ attempt to distinguish themselves from their British motherland. Throughout his life, Berryman was intrigued by women exiles and outliers, writing not only of Bradstreet but also about Olive Schreiner, Anne Frank, and Kathleen Nairn, among others. In a revealing but often overlooked essay, ‘The Development of Anne Frank’ (1967), Berryman describes his fascination with Frank’s Diary, which he read in galley proofs in 1952. He reports being struck by Frank’s book as an exceptional account, ‘even more mysterious and fundamental than St. Augustine’s […] [in showing] the conversion of a child into a person’.39 In many ways, Berryman’s Homage, which he completed the year after he read Frank’s Diary, offers its own conversion story. He depicts a contemporary male poet and the colonial Bradstreet struggling to make good on their talent, to rebel against constraining circumstance, and to find, in another human being, wholesale fealty and recognition in a ‘lovers’ air’40 and ‘concord of […] thought’.41 With tender sympathy, the speaker addresses Bradstreet, ‘I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea, / spares from his rigour for your poetry / more. We are on each other’s hands / who care’.42 Intimating that Bradstreet’s harsh environs and marital demands

38 Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 192. 39 John Berryman, ‘The Development of Anne Frank’, in The Freedom of the Poet, 93. Berryman notes additionally, ‘It is not universal, for most people do not grow up. [...] It took [...] a special pressure forcing the child-adult conversion, and [...] exceptional powers of expression, to bring that strange or normal change into view’. 40 Berryman, Collected Poems, 133. 41 Ibid. 140. 42 Ibid. 133.

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

123

leave little time for her poetry, Berryman’s narrator is by turns courtly and empathetic as he inaugurates their ‘care’ in a tonal range similar to that in his sonnets and letters to Jill.43 Akin to the double portrait Berryman offered of himself and his mother in ‘July 8, 1934’, the speaker in Homage parallels the academic and religious orthodoxies of the Cold War and colonial eras, occasionally blending the menace of one with those of the other, as in the haunting lines of stanza 55: ‘I am a closet of secrets dying, / races murder, foxholes hold men, / reactor piles wage slow upon the wet brain rime’.44 Berryman links the country’s origins in warfare, slavery, and indigenous genocide to the Cold War’s theatre of repressive normativity, internal division, and nuclear weaponry. From the repressive ‘closet’ within a domiciled, domesticated wilderness to the ‘wet brain’ of radiation edema, the ills of American colonialism persist – across time and the lines of the poem – in a paratactic continuum. Berryman’s narrator, moreover, appears sympathetic to Bradstreet’s need to find safe harbor for the work of literary imagination despite ‘this blast, that sea’,45 the steady erosion of ‘great draughts of time’,46 the indifference of a ‘barbarous place’,47 and the certain ‘rain of pain & departure’.48 In 1965, Berryman remarked that in the figure of Bradstreet he could explore the ‘insuperable difficulty of writing high verse at all in a land that cared and cares so little for it’.49 An American poet, from Berryman’s perspective, might justifiably worry about being forgotten both by the philistines of his era and by posterity. Or, as Berryman’s speaker asks of Bradstreet, ‘When the mouth dies, who misses you?’50 Louise Glück observes that when Berryman ‘found his voice he found his voices’,51 the mouths of his remembering, and the informing tones of 43 Ibid. 133. 44 Ibid. 146. 45 Ibid. 133. 46 Ibid. 146. 47 Ibid. 135. 48 Ibid. 147. 49 Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 328. 50 Berryman, Collected Poems, 133. 51 Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 43.

124

Heather Treseler

Berryman’s elegiac epic were several. While Berryman composed the first stanza and two lines of the second in 1947, he did not resume composition until five years later, when he finished the poem’s 456 lines in two feverish months of 1953.52 In this interval, Berryman completed his psychobiography of Stephen Crane (1951), using depth psychology to argue that Crane suffered from a crippling Oedipal complex.53 Berryman also sought the care of a New York psychiatrist, whom he credited with giving him the defenses for sustained effort, and he studied ‘Freud, Fechner, Reich’s Character-Analysis […] as well as Helene Deutsch’.54 Tellingly, Berryman’s psychiatrist occasionally advised him not to communicate with his mother as he confronted in his therapeutic hours a strong desire not ‘to go beyond the dead, my father & [his friend] Bhain – to whom I then added my brother […], Mother in her frustrated literary ambition […] an amazing circle of guilt-sense to hold me’.55 Berryman’s need for an escape hatch from the inhibiting mortmain of the dead and from his mother’s overweening influence emerges in his letters from the 1930s and ‘40s to find formal expression in Homage. His post-collegiate missives to Jill reveal his intense need for reassurance, for solidarity in a social-literary periphery (‘I crop the grass and stamp the ground at the edge’),56 and for her approbation as he metamorphosed from a brilliant, feckless student to an accomplished Shakespearean scholar and

52 Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 228. 53 Ibid. 208. 54 Ibid. 185. 55 Ibid. 192. When Berryman was asked in his Partisan Review interview with Peter Stitt (1972) about the origins of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, he cited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a ‘model’ and four other instigations: his wife Eileen Simpson’s surgery, his friend Saul Bellow’s ‘wonderful daring’ in his Chicagoan bildungsroman The Adventures of Augie March, a close reading of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and ‘emotional shock’ from his experience of group therapy. He also claimed that ‘the crucial point’ in his writing of Homage was the realization that he needed ‘to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem’. See Thomas, Berryman’s Understanding, 33–6. 56 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 202.

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

125

from ‘a burning, trivial disciple of the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats’57 to a poet confident he could reliably ‘sound like myself ’.58 From an analytic perspective, the poet’s epistles and epic poem also enact, in ‘personal’ and ‘public’ modes, attempts to introject his mother’s voice while forsaking her overriding influence, establishing an ‘empty space’59 from which selfauthorized speech might emerge. As Luke Spencer has argued, Berryman’s Homage might be dismissed as a ‘gesture of trans-historical, cross-gender solidarity [that] turns into self-serving patriarchal ventriloquism’.60 Such an interpretation, however, ignores the lyric intricacy with which the male narrator hyper-cathects Bradstreet’s experiences, a cathexis wrought with strange eroticism and deep sympathy if also with aggrandizing force. Depicting Bradstreet’s intimate experiences of childbirth, sexual love, and theological doubt, Berryman’s narrator amplifies the valour of Bradstreet’s life beyond the Puritan constraints of her own poems. Thus, in its psychic mechanics, the poem loosely follows a Freudian paradigm of mourning and the dialectic of incorporative repudiation evident in Berryman’s ‘July 8, 1934’. Unlike the speaker in the birthday sonnets, however, the narrator in Homage must first conjure his ‘mistress’61 and hold her with his ‘western lust’62 before he can effectively lose her, replacing her seemingly forgettable poetry with a virtuoso performance of his own. Shortly after Bradstreet’s ghost capitulates, declaring forthrightly ‘I want to take you for my lover’ in stanza 30, the poet-narrator counters that he is ‘drowning in this past’63 and prescriptively notes, ‘I lose sight of you / who mistress me from air’.64 Syntactically, Berryman intimates that the Puritan mother is the desiring agent of their commingling, a ‘witch57 Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 323. 58 Ibid. 324. 59 Tammy Clewell, ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52 (2004): 49. 60 Spencer, ‘Mistress Bradstreet and Mr. Berryman’, 365. 61 Berryman, Collected Poems, 141. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid.

126

Heather Treseler

seductress’65 that he can ‘straiten […] on’ 66 and subsequently dismiss. Indeed, although the poet-narrator claims to lose ‘sight’ of Bradstreet, he soon acquires intimate knowledge of her in an episode of thinly eroticized violence. In stanza 35, his gaze penetrates her colonial garb and skin: ‘And the brown smock splits / down the pale flesh a gash / broadens and Time holds up your heart against my eyes’.67 This one-sided consummation of the male narrator’s desire symbolizes – in stark, melodramatic terms – his assumption of Bradstreet’s innermost experiences including those of marital and maternal love, acute illness and spiritual doubt. In the coda to Homage, the narrator assures the Puritan mother that ‘all your ages at the mercy of my loves / together lie at once, forever or / so long as I happen’.68 He guarantees, in a Shakespearean vaunt, that the apostrophized object will continue as an integral subject in his poem, that her experiences will be remembered for as long as he (or his poem) ‘happen[s]’. Practising a ‘[l]ove […] / [that] elfs from silence melody’, Berryman allows Bradstreet to ‘Hover, utter, still / a sourcing’,69 disembodied from life but redeemed from soundlessness. As Tammy Clewell observes, traditional elegies often conclude with the poet’s ‘assessment and affirmation of his surviving powers, one of the most important of which is his continued use of language’.70 In the coda to Homage, Bradstreet becomes a ‘sourcing’ for the narrator’s phallic ‘lost candle’ such that he has the last word and the last light. Having the ‘last word’ on shared experiences is also a constitutive part of the Berrymans’ correspondence, which similarly features courtly expressions of love and expectation; theological musings and confessions; sympathy and competitive plaint. From his earliest letters, Berryman addressed his mother with a range of sobriquets to include ‘little mother’, ‘Darling’, ‘Dearest Jill’, ‘kid’, ‘Blessed Mother’, and ‘Jackass’, as he wrote prodigiously from Cambridge, England (1936–8); Wayne State and Harvard University

65 Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 329. 66 Berryman, Collected Poems, 141. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 147. 69 Ibid. 70 Clewell, ‘Mourning Beyond’, 49.

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

127

(1938–43); Princeton University (1943–54); and Minneapolis (1954–72). Some letters, particularly those written from England, are as revealing of the poet’s formation as John Keats’s letters to his brother George, which similarly mix the mundane and mytho-poetic, the silly and sublime. Upon arriving in London in 1936, for example, Berryman confesses that the traffic has nearly killed him, ‘I simply cannot remember which way to look and my eyes are quite worn out with pivoting […] America has nearly lost her (unknown) white hope several times’.71 Portraying himself as an innocent in the urban wilderness, Berryman nonetheless describes in that same letter his visit to the residence of Virginia Woolf, convinced that the proprietress of Hogarth Press would be glad to publish ‘Ritual in Arlington’, a poem he intended to give her.72 Disappointed to learn that Woolf is recuperating in the country, Berryman continues undeterred in his campaign for the sponsorship of a modernist ‘grandfather’ (or grandmother) in the European theatre. After settling into Cambridge University, which he found ‘beautiful beyond imagination’73 in its ‘rich historic peace’,74 he sent poems to W. B. Yeats. Subsequently, he writes excitedly to his mother about receiving Yeats’s reply in which the elderly poet thanked Berryman for ‘the eloquent compliment’75 of his poems. Yet Berryman counterpoints his buoyant cheer from Yeats’s acknowledgement with complaints about ‘thick, uninteresting’ British women.76 ‘Complete celibacy’, he candidly apprises his mother, ‘bores me ineffably’.77 Berryman’s descriptions of his liaisons, his undergoing tests for syphilis, and his entreaties to Woolf and Yeats attest to the almost spousal level of intimacy he maintained with his mother. When Jill acquired a new position at the Neva-Wet company in 1936, for instance, Berryman reports that he spent ‘several hours last evening making some stanzas out of my emotion

71 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 47. 72 Ibid. 48. 73 Ibid. 50. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 70. 76 Ibid. 72. 77 Ibid.

128

Heather Treseler

of the circumstances and you’.78 Apostrophized in poems and letters, Jill was the acknowledged centre of her son’s emotional life. Berryman himself recognized his ‘mania of spiritual absolute dependence’79 on his mother’s epistolary attention, a circumstance that catalyzed a crisis when he fell in love with a British woman named Beatrice. Writing of this news to Jill, the poet is obeisant and apologetic as if taking a lover signalled character weakness or filial abandonment: ‘I am not to blame in this’, he pleads. ‘The fact of her [Beatrice’s] being directs, makes full – significant [in] my life as no relationship except yours and mine has ever done before’.80 Thus by the late 1930s, Berryman was employing the letter as a relational shuttle, ‘an intermediary step between indifference and intimacy’,81 which might engage his correspondents in proportion to his need for them. Berryman’s epistles, in their palimpsestous play, also include revelations pertinent to his breakthrough in Homage. Two years after flunking Van Doren’s eighteenth-century literature course, Berryman writes to his mother with authoritative aplomb, America has never had such learning as the 18th century ( Johnson, Addison, Walpole, Swift) had, and the stuff transplanted has been mostly topsoil. […] [Yet] American literature has been for thirty years […] more resourceful, more interesting, more excellent than English literature. […] [M]y real point is that the task of the American writer is infinitely more difficult than anyone has assumed, and that a definite severance has taken place.82

Berryman assesses the plight of the American writer in a contemporary scene that seemingly lacks – or is severed from – its genealogy, its parents; American poetry’s deeper ‘sourcing’ is the question Berryman addresses in the figure of Bradstreet, who suffers more starkly the fate of being without a milieu. Indeed, he portrays her as a colonial curiosity and a formalist

Ibid. 74. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 105 (emphasis added). Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1982), 186. 82 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 62. 78 79 80 81

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

129

drudge in passages rendered in her own voice: ‘Versing, I shroud among the dynasties; / quaternion on quaternion, tireless I phrase / anything past, dead, far, / sacred, for a barbarous place’.83 Unable to write outside of inherited forms or to address anything present, lively, or profane, Berryman’s Bradstreet remains cadaverously trained on the past, the departed, and the other-worldly. ‘Appalled’ by her ‘abstract didactic rime’, Berryman’s narrator is also moved by her earnestness, which he tellingly attributes to her desire ‘[t]o please […] [her] wintry father’.84 In counterpoint to Bradstreet’s anxiety of Anglophonic influence, Berryman asserts his new sense of poetic ‘appetite’ for the British tradition in his Cambridge letters to Jill. He confesses, ‘I shall never be a scholar, although I may […] have gathered some learning, for my mind is neither systematic nor patient, and two stanzas from [Richard] Crashaw satisfy my hunger for days […] and I may make something from them, that most perhaps cannot’.85 Berryman’s homo faber relationship to the canon is amplified in a passage within that same letter in which he reflects on the mechanics of apostrophe – and, by extension, of dialogic imagination – two integral qualities in his epic poems: You are right in believing that a great deal of my energy goes in letters to you, but it is somehow important that I set down what I think; I flinch from the discipline of verse […] and your suggestion of a journal is impossible, I find: I cannot write into blank air, I must address some near sensibility. Obviously, it is you whom I must, with rare exceptions, address. And I shall no longer be afraid of ‘mannered’ writing, in the effort to form a style; nor shall I any more restrict my prose to the kitchen logic of the news-column. There will be tone and shift and subtlety, and honesty, and a solid, I hope, individual texture. The point of prose is to get things said, and my assumption that they can be said as well in a casual, ‘un-literary’ fashion as in any other, is ridiculous. Letters can form a style.86

Berryman admits that the ‘address of some near sensibility’ is essential ‘to form a style’ with tonal range and ‘individual texture’. As Kelly observes, 83 Berryman, Collected Poems, 135. 84 Ibid. 85 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 93. 86 Ibid. 95.

130

Heather Treseler

Berryman’s letters to Jill increasingly reflected the elliptical, jagged playfulness of his poetic voice as these two modes, epistolary and lyric, grew closer in their tenor in the 1940s and 1950s. Langdon Hammer, drawing on the analytic model of D. W. Winnicott, has similarly surmised that letters provided the poets of Berryman’s generation with intimate ‘potential space’ or a ‘third area’ of narrative play akin to the contented activity of a child who feels assured of his mother’s care.87 Ironically, Berryman would use letters not only to cultivate a maternal-filial bond but also to broker a necessary distance within it. From an object-relations standpoint, literary work itself is a ‘compensatory gift’ motivated by ‘the interior need to replenish the self, to find a way to survive the first and most crucial loss, that of the mother’.88 Berryman’s epic poem might be profitably read as one of several compensatory gifts needed to survive a mother he struggled to lose as well as to imaginatively restore. Berryman’s letters feature moments of strategic distancing. When his mother cautions him against his engagement to Beatrice in 1938, for example, he writes, ‘And on my honour [sic], I cannot let go by what may be my one chance for a full and rich and permanent […] human happiness. […] [C]an you have no confidence at all in me?’89 Berryman’s mixture of assertion and piteousness – in claiming his love object while also seeking his mother’s approval – patterns the dialectic of allegiance and rebuttal in Homage. It also marks his acidly bleak depictions of his life in his letters to Jill in the late 1940s and ‘50s. Berryman, for example, wrote as he was revising The Dispossessed, the collection that appeared in May of 1948 to lukewarm reviews. Dearest Jill It is shameful in me not to have thanked you long ago for this paper, the desk & chair, etc. –they are all admirable, and I do! […] But my book disgusts me, and in consequence this revision is proceeding very slowly and stupidly, like an incompetent dressing a corpse[…]. I see no end to it, and I can attend to nothing else […] I go

87 Langdon Hammer, ‘Useless Concentration: Life and Work in Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters and Poems’, American Literary History 9/1 (1997): 173. 88 Ibid. 174. 89 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 109–10.

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

131

nowhere & see no one; can’t talk. Another of my close friends, after various encounters with the police, has entered an asylum or rest home & writes to me unintelligibly. Don’t speak of this. I […] apologize for this faithful representation of my extremely unsatisfactory state of mind. Eileen has been having pain again. Adorable spring!90

In the guise of a belated thank you note, Berryman delivers an uncensored jeremiad. Yet Jill, in her extant letters from the 1950s, also trespasses normal maternal/filial boundaries in intimate confessions of her spiritual struggles; her business and financial worries; her anxious states and diet plans; her three husbands’ specific shortcomings; and, even, the psychological construction of her son’s sexuality in connection with her own. Thus, she wrote to Berryman in December of 1954, ‘I must say here, in fairness, that just as my interest in the other sex, in sex itself, came wholly from my father, yours would come mostly from me’.91 Around the time of Berryman’s completion of Homage and separation from his first wife, Jill also wrote on her son’s behalf to Mr Benham Ingersoll, turning down an invitation to collaborate on a libretto; to an optometrist to resolve an outstanding bill; to his soon to be ex-wife; and to an editor at Life Magazine, whom she urged to feature Berryman’s epic.92 It is not clear that Berryman authorized his mother’s intervention in any of these instances. Indeed, Jill construes her son’s struggle to find a publisher for Homage as a family crisis in which she and Berryman’s brother, Bob, are intimately implicated. Dearest John, […] What he [ John’s brother, Bob] did not understand any more than I was how the publisher could do so – the fact that Viking will regret this bitterly does not make things easier for you now. It is at times such as these that I feel most futile and so wrong […] I pray, daily, that the knowledge that you have made one of the

90 John Berryman to Jill Berryman, letter dated ‘Friday’, John Berryman Papers, Special Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Box 31. 91 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 278. 92 Jill Berryman, assorted letters, John Berryman Papers, Special Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Box 31.

132

Heather Treseler great poems in any language will be an ever-present comfort in the face of stupidity and blindness.93

Whether rhapsodizing about the myopia of New York publishers or her new red convertible ‘Rudolph’, her spiritual progress or her resolve to be emotionally continent, Jill appears maudlin and obsessive in the letters extant from 1954 to 1971. Whether for pity or theatrical effect, she often castigates herself: I fail in all ways, as a Christian, a human being, a mother, a wage earner, as the ever present help in time of need which a parent should be […] My greatest struggle, on returning to my faith, was to forgive myself, not to hold guilt […] I set up a plan which will, I pray, habituate me in such ways as to grant me again the comfort and joy of full love of God.94

Similarly in December of 1954, on the eve of the Feast of Immaculate Conception, she meditates on a Bible passage about the Golden Rule and glibly applies it to herself: ‘As I resign not only my death but my life into His hands, I begin to feel again a trickle of the overflowing love […] I ask for nothing from our Father except what he wills me to have […] It is time for me to learn to love others instead of myself without despising myself, no easy task’.95 The warbling piety of ‘Jill Angel’s’ epistolary prose likely served Berryman as a model for the mawkish, mock-erotic tones with which his version of Bradstreet describes her God and her unworthiness. In Homage, Berryman’s narrator focuses on Bradstreet’s struggle to uphold her faith in those ‘[in] whom I have trusted, & [in] whom I have believed’ in a New England wilderness of heretics and harsh conditions.96 Her moments of spiritual and artistic despair are nominally counterbalanced with her pride in her maternal role and reproductive power; Berryman’s

93

Jill Berryman to John Berryman, Letter dated ‘Friday, May Day, 1953’, John Berryman Papers, Special Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Box 31. 94 Berryman, We Dream of Honour, 275. 95 Ibid. 281. 96 Berryman, Collected Poems, 134.

Of Letters and Lyric Style: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

133

speaker pointedly juxtaposes Bradstreet’s ‘abstract’97 and ‘spiritless’98 verses with her fecundity. Thus she crows, in the graphic childbirth scene, ‘and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me // drencht & powerful, I did it with my body! / One proud tug greens Heaven’.99 Emphasizing the dissonance between Bradstreet’s bodily authorship and derivative poetry, Berryman upends the metaphor of poetry-as-progeny that Bradstreet herself used to strategically demean her work in poems such as ‘The Author to Her Book’, in which the colonial poet refers to ‘the ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain’. In stanza 42 of Homage, Berryman allows Bradstreet to proffer her own condemnation. When by me in the dusk my child sits down I am myself. Simon, if it’s that loose, let me wiggle it out. You’ll get a bigger one there, & bite. How they loft, how their sizes delight and grate. The proportioned, spiritless poems accumulate. And they publish them away in brutish London, for a hollow crown.100

Bradstreet, in Berryman’s reanimation of her, finds her proper sphere and identity (‘I am myself ’) in parental ritual. Her natural tone, in addressing ‘Simon’, contrasts with the artificiality of the ‘proportioned […] poems’ that find their commercial growth spurt in ‘brutish London’, which capitalizes on her American novelty. Bradstreet’s poems, in Berryman’s depiction, are her meager and secondary harvest, and she is more identifiably her son’s mother, obsessively doting in her care. As in his early sequence ‘July 8, 1934’, Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet allowed the poet to assert himself in counter-distinction to a mother’s errant demanding love, a ‘sourcing’ he figuratively introjects to attain the polyvocality of his mature style. Displacing the epistolary

97 98 99 100

Ibid. 135. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 137–8. Ibid. 143.

134

Heather Treseler

persona – and disabling influence – of ‘Jill Angel’ onto an historical figure, he constructed a mother he could disinter, seduce, renounce, and return to the ground at will. Thus, Berryman’s epic staged his metamorphosis from a position of ‘dispossessed’ dependency to a poet of declared independence from an abusive motherland, a vestigial American gesture if there ever was one.

J. T. Welsch

8 ‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame

On Tuesday, 25 April 1939, Delmore Schwartz stopped by the Park Avenue apartment where John Berryman was staying with his mother. She and Berryman’s stepfather had recently separated, and his own fiancée had sailed home to England earlier that month. At age twenty-four, Berryman’s poems were beginning to appear in major magazines, but a full-length book was still a decade away. Schwartz had published In Dreams Begin Responsibilities the year before. The praise heaped on that debut, a book combining short stories, poems, and a verse play, still seems almost inconceivable. Allen Tate called it ‘beyond any doubt the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound’.1 John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and countless others added their endorsement. The title story, written when Schwartz was only twenty-one, would be singled out by Nabokov as one of ‘half a dozen favorites in modern literature’.2 Schwartz wrote to his publisher, James Laughlin at New Directions, ‘All these fine reviews and all the rest of the things that I’ve been getting during the last few months are accumulating to the point where I am going to be terrified. It can’t last’.3 On their own, either Berryman or Schwartz’s bodies of work present all the usual challenges of apparently autobiographical writing – if, by that term, we refer to a category of text in a typically imaginative genre whose content corresponds in detail to that of another category, containing

1 2 3

James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 129. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 110.

136

J. T. Welsch

whatever textual record of a life we take as factual. Any writing forces a critic to decide for themselves the extent to which they are able (or willing) to make distinctions between relevant biographical contexts and that which is ‘outside’ the work’s concerns. Both Berryman and Schwartz warn us against conflation. In an essay written at Columbia University and in thrall to the New Criticism at age twenty-one, Berryman assures us, ‘We need nothing, properly, outside the work, and interest in circumstances or in the author as individual becomes recognizably what it in fact always is, vulgar and unwarranted curiosity’.4 In the preface to his book-length epic, Genesis: Book One (1943), Schwartz explains likewise, ‘Since this narrative is a mixture throughout of invention and memory, and since I cannot signify the shifts between invention and memory, it is an obvious stupidity and misuse to take any sentence as truth about any particular human being’.5 That critics are so often still inclined to take them at their word in this, without irony, might be the New Criticism’s longer legacy. Adam Kirsch begins his study, The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (2005), which includes a chapter each on Berryman and Schwartz, with this quietly contradictory disclaimer: ‘To treat their poems mainly as documents of personal experience is not just to diminish their achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry’.6 How, in this pose of a kind of Cartesian aestheticism, are we to distinguish between personal expressions of ‘disdain’, for instance – expressed in interviews, letters, or the poems themselves – and expressions of ‘personal experience’ as such, in those same texts? For all of Berryman and Schwartz’s protests or disavowals of the ‘confessionalist’ label, we can hardly pit their own self-interpretation against caricatures of bad biographical reading without admitting the line between them is much fuzzier after all. That’s not to say bad biographical readings don’t exist, or that biographical readings are not often dead ends in themselves as any 4 5 6

Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (2nd edn; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 54. Delmore Schwartz, Genesis: Book One (New York: New Directions, 1943), ix. Adam Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), x.

‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame

137

‘single-issue’ critical framework. In the case of Berryman, Schwartz, and the compounded complications of their personal and textual relationship, it is to suggest a degree of disingenuousness behind such categorical statements. In Kirsch’s case, it suggests another kind of bias behind the assumption that autobiographical readings somehow ‘diminish their achievement’. Irving Howe seems conflicted on this same issue in his preface for In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, warning of ‘a real danger that [Schwartz’s] work will be brushed aside as he himself becomes the subject of lurid legend’, before admitting, ‘I don’t want to be righteous about this, since I find Schwartz’s life as fascinating (though also frightening) as anyone else does’.7 ‘Nevertheless’, Howe resolves himself, ‘we ought to insist that what finally matters is the work that remains, far more so than the life that is gone’.8 On one hand, Howe seems right to have worried. As Kirsch admits, ‘Today, even Schwartz’s legend is losing its potency. Some of his poems and stories are still found in anthologies, but his complete body of work is almost unknown’.9 When The Wounded Surgeon was published in 2005, this made Kirsch’s repeated emphasis on the ‘pioneering’ achievement of Schwartz’s Genesis somewhat bittersweet, since the book itself has been out of print since 1943. Ten years later, the question of whether fascination with Schwartz’s ‘lurid legend’ is to blame for the ‘brushing aside’ of his work is again more complicated. One curious consequence of Lou Reed’s death in 2013 and Reed’s tribute to Schwartz in Poetry magazine the year before was the publication of Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz in 2016 – a volume which, according to New Directions, ‘aims to restore Schwartz to his proper place in the canon of American literature and give new readers access to the breadth of his achievement’.10

Irving Howe, ‘Preface’, in Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (London: Souvenir Press, 2003), vii. 8 Ibid. vii. 9 Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon, 198. 10 See (accessed 11 July 2016). 7

138

J. T. Welsch

In this essay, I am chiefly concerned with the extent to which John Berryman’s preoccupation with issues of autobiography is affected by his preoccupation with Delmore Schwartz’s life and death. The internal debate in Howe’s preface helps us see that this is less a simple binary of life and art, or text and context, than a messier fixation, which Berryman shared, upon the myths or types by which we inevitably attempt to understand individual lives. ‘The image of the artist’, Howe writes, ‘who follows a brilliant leap to success with a fall into misery and squalor, is deeply credited, even cherished in our culture’.11 Schwartz himself was not immune to this romantic figure, writing to a friend at age seventeen, ‘You do not know what it is to fear that if the excitement in your mind, and mouth increases, you will become convulsive, very sick, and your body will die with an explosion’.12 In reality, Schwartz’s life ended in a dingy New York hotel in 1966, having long alienated all friends and champions, wandering in a daze of drug and alcohol-fuelled paranoia into the corridor one early morning, where a heart attack would kill him, aged fifty-two. But if, as Howe suggests, our culture – of which Berryman and Schwartz were part – cannot help conflate an individual’s downfall with that archetype, we also have to contend with the extent to which their poetry is not only the site of such conflations, but the means by which it is enacted and continually negotiated. Although this project might include tracing Schwartz’s fear of success noted above – the self-fulfilling premonition that ‘it can’t last’ – in order to focus on Berryman, or on their intermingled oeuvres, we might linger a further moment in 1939, back with those two kids meeting in that apartment: if Schwartz’s own fame terrified him, how must Berryman have felt, ambitious as he was, and as possessive of Schwartz as he would prove to be over their long friendship? A few days after their first meeting, Berryman wrote to Mark Van Doren, a mentor since his undergraduate days at Columbia, gushing that he had never liked ‘anyone better at first sight’.13 Berryman and Schwartz had narrowly missed each other at Columbia, where Schwartz 11 Howe, ‘Preface’, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, vii. 12 Letter to Julian Sawyer, quoted in Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 39. 13 Mariani, Dream Song, 102.

‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame

139

took prep courses before transferring to Wisconsin, but by 1939, Van Doren knew him through the Partisan Review crowd and helped set up the meeting. Whatever Berryman took from that first conversation with Schwartz, who was there to solicit work as new poetry editor of the Partisan, the impact on his writing was immediate. Although we risk reading too much into the new poem enclosed in that same letter to Van Doren – written from the point of view of one of Christ’s disciples, ‘amazed at what that man could do’ – another, ‘The Statue’, drafted a few days later, was characteristic enough in its envious meditations on fame to have inspired the link between a statue of the philosopher Humboldt and the tragic poet of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, plainly modelled on Schwartz.14 There is plenty of important work to be done, scouring Berryman’s work for this sort of speculative influence or spectral influence of Schwartz’s ‘new ghost’ (as he is preserved in The Dream Songs). But the opposite may be as true and useful. Out of this passionate and formative rivalry, Schwartz’s impact on Berryman’s work is equal perhaps in its contrary influence, or in the extent to which his work develops in measurable counterpoint. Love & Fame (1970), the last book Berryman published in his lifetime, is a case in point. Read alongside Schwartz’s autobiographical epic, Genesis (1943), Berryman’s most baldly autobiographical book is marked everywhere by Schwartz’s conspicuous absence, both in the timeline covered and by Berryman’s contrasting approach to the telling of his origin tale. The first two parts of Love & Fame cover Berryman’s undergraduate years at Columbia and the start of his postgraduate fellowship at Cambridge, followed by a long Part III set in the present, and Part IV’s ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord’. Not only does this skip neatly over the nearly thirty years he knew Schwartz, but its emphasis on the careful project of study and hard graft by which the poet honed his craft stands in contrast to Berryman’s own sense of Schwartz’s precocious ‘gifts’, as well as Genesis’s 200 pages taking the protagonist only to age seven. What remains for Love & Fame is a very calculated portrait of the self-made artist, or a sequence deeply obsessed with the overlap and influence between type and individual. 14 John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), 4–5.

140

J. T. Welsch

Despite the uncharacteristic plainness of exposition – which Berryman thought, proudly, ‘didn’t resemble any verse I had ever written’15 – play with time and tense, gaps in memory, and plenty of what comic book fans call ‘retroactive continuity’, all work to establish the poet’s authoritative interventions over his kunstlerroman. Where the Freudian prerogatives of Genesis or stories like ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ put Schwartz at the mercy of a past he mines for meaning, Love & Fame imposes its retrospective constructions no less forcefully than The Dream Songs upon what only happens to be biographical material. Berryman articulates this Wordsworthian aim in a television interview at the Brockport Writers Forum, given just after the book’s completion, where he traces a rise to eminence with an emphasis on the ‘apprenticeship’ by which the artist arrives as an ‘advanced man’. ‘Suppose I want to be a composer and write concerti. I don’t buy some music paper and sit down’, he explains. ‘We serve an apprenticeship’. At another point, he goes as far as using this to justify ‘waiting’ so long to publish, calling this decision, retrospectively, ‘one of the few sensible things I have ever done’.16 The fact that Love & Fame undertakes the grand task of this origin myth with such irony and self-deprecation, from the title and throughout, only underscores the pose of mastery. Schwartz’s single, brief cameo in the book is typical of Love & Fame’s contrivances. The poem ‘Monkhood’ in Part II follows our hero’s apprenticeship, now in ‘the other Cambridge’ – a phrase which performs another of those retroactive inversions, since it’s really only ‘other’ in relation to Berryman’s later stint at Harvard. The suggestion that his lonely monkhood meant surrendering all pride and ‘wish for comradeship’ suddenly launches the poem a few years forward, to when, now presumably ordained, Berryman and Schwartz ‘were preaching at Harvard’, and Schwartz accused

15 16

Peter A. Stitt, ‘John Berryman, The Art of Poetry, No. 16’, Paris Review 53/1 (Winter 1972): 177–207, available online at (accessed 11 July 2016). Interview, 8 October 1970, Brockport Writers Forum, published as ‘John Berryman: A Memoir and an Interview’ by William Heyen, in The Ohio Review 15/2 (Winter 1974), 46–65. The interview is also available on YouTube as ‘The Poetry of John Berryman (1970)’ in six parts.

‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame

141

him of ‘Satanic pride’.17 Yet it’s a fond memory, and the remark was ‘to my pleasure’, Berryman insists, since Schwartz was ‘far superior then to me’, at any rate. It’s difficult to avoid reading ‘far superior then’ as another of those quietly jostling tributes, like those lines from the elegies for Schwartz in Book VI of The Dream Songs: ‘I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved / but it is not so’.18 Neither is so far from Arnold’s Thyrsis, lamenting Arthur Clough’s tired throat, in the great tradition of backhanded elegies. The ‘Ten Songs, one solid block of agony’ in The Dream Songs lean heavily on the reversal of fortunes, the mythic structure of Schwartz’s fall from ‘the brightness of his promise […] when he was young & gift-strong’, as Dream Song 149 introduces the sub-sequence.19 The story arc is also established in that apparently idyllic period ‘thro’ all our Harvard years / when both of us were just becoming known’ or meeting on the walk to Warren House so long ago we were almost anonymous waiting for fame to descend with a scarlet mantle & tell us who we were.20

These poignant scenes serve a neat narrative purpose within the broader structure of this part of The Dream Songs and for that moment of Love & Fame, where the memory of Schwartz’s remark prompts a key dramatic crisis, bursting as if spontaneously, out of the book’s past: ‘Will I ever write properly, with passion & exactness, / of the damned strange demeanours of my flagrant heart?’21 Such pathos, the great human struggle to speak one’s soul. Of course, all of it is as manufactured as those scenes at Harvard. Schwartz was hardly ‘just becoming known’ or still ‘waiting for fame to descend’, given the sensation around his early work. As Berryman’s first wife, Eileen Simpson, remembers in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth, ‘At the age of twenty-six, Delmore was famous in the literary world. John’s 17 Berryman, Collected Poems, 194. 18 John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 169. 19 Ibid. 168. 20 Ibid. 168; 171. 21 Berryman, Collected Poems, 194.

142

J. T. Welsch

career, by contrast, had barely begun’.22 It’s left for Berryman to re-imagine an equal footing, when all evidence suggests how intimidated he had been by Schwartz’s success. James Atlas notes Berryman’s possessiveness (which irritated Schwartz, he says), recording ‘Delmore’s every word’ in his journals.23 We see what Atlas calls Berryman’s ‘novelist’s eye’ for Schwartz and his ‘marvelous faculties’ in the fawning depiction from ‘At Chinese Checkers’ (1939): Deep in the unfriendly city Delmore lies And cannot sleep, and cannot bring his mind And cannot bring those marvelous faculties To bear upon the day sunk down behind, The unsteady night, or the time to come.24

Atlas finds Berryman recording details like Schwartz’s unmatched socks – an endearing detail transposed to Auden in Love & Fame – suggesting ‘Berryman’s Boswellian zeal complemented Delmore’s Johnsonian wit’.25 After all, it was Schwartz who had gotten Berryman the post at Harvard in 1940, and pushed James Laughlin to include Berryman in the Five Young American Poets anthology that year. In 1943, when both of their teaching contracts were ending, the poets commiserated together, and Schwartz told Berryman, ‘I feel like a tragic hero’. The latter recorded the solidarity in his journal: ‘As always, Harvard is too much for us’.26 But it was only too much for him, it turned out. When Schwartz’s contract was renewed after all, Berryman left Boston bereft. A series of rejections and the struggle to find work make this period unsuitable for the teleological myth of Love & Fame, it would seem. The two great ‘disasters’ of Part I, by contrast, see undergrad Berryman put on a semester’s academic suspension, before the ‘Prodigal Son’ is welcomed back

22 Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 3. 23 Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 209. 24 Berryman, Collected Poems, 28. 25 Atlas, 209. 26 Ibid. 221–2.

‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame

143

‘with crimson joy’, then pitted against a professor of nineteenth-century literature who ‘had come to hate me personally’ and would foil his hard work towards graduation with an ‘implausible’ C.27 That poem ‘Crisis’, can only conceivably be followed by ‘Recovery’, at the end of Part I, where the faculty Dean, Van Doren, and ‘the whole senior staff of the English Department’ fret and agree to set a further trial for our hero in the form of a second exam: ‘I took it – it was fair, hard – & I killed it.’28 Saving the department from ‘disgrace’, he is free to take up the ‘major Fellowship / for two years in England’ and fulfil his destiny. It is, perhaps, another place where a contrary influence asserts itself on Love & Fame, here in contrast with Schwartz’s bitter earlier departure from postgraduate studies at Harvard, without taking a degree after missing out on a fellowship he had been promised. A more pointed contrast emerges in the emphasis placed on mentors and heroes throughout this apprentice stage, whose dropped names confer all the cachet of association without undermining the narrative of self-actualization, as more credit to helpful peers might do. Among these, Auden is a recurring figure, with whom admiring encounters in Parts II and III are foreshadowed in the second poem of Part I, where the besotted undergraduate vows, I poured more thought that Fall into Auden than into Shirley C the preternatural dancer from Johnson Hall.29

Another poem in Part I fantasizes about taking either Yeats or Auden as father to his motherly longing to give birth to ‘big fat fresh original & characteristic poems’.30 Given Berryman’s tendency to ‘outrageously hero worship living and dead’, as Lowell later recalled, we might hurry to repeat one of Schwartz’s favorite anecdotes, about Berryman’s jealousy at his first

27 Berryman, Collected Poems, 185. 28 Ibid. 187. 29 Ibid. 171. 30 Ibid. 177.

144

J. T. Welsch

meeting Auden in 1940.31 A mutual acquaintance had been in touch to tell Schwartz the English poet, freshly arrived in New York, was eager to meet him. Schwartz had published his critical but admiring essay ‘The Two Audens’ in the Kenyon Review the previous month, and the two spent most of the afternoon together, before Schwartz finally met Berryman, two hours late, at the Museum of Modern Art. When Schwartz told him where he had been, Berryman promptly fainted, or ‘staged a faint’, as Schwartz saw it.32 Never mind that Berryman had been unwell throughout the winter, in and out of care, and recently diagnosed with petit mal epilepsy. Schwartz would profess to their mutual mentor Van Doren, ‘My own impression, whatever it is worth, is that the only thing wrong with John is some kind of hysteria. The fainting fits […] I don’t think they’re sheer frauds, but if they spring from his secret disease, the disease is an open secret, and besides the fainting, there is no sign of anything wrong with him.’33 Never mind as well, the fact – corrected for the record by Love & Fame – that Berryman had already encountered Auden years before in England, then been in correspondence with, and seen him separately in New York before Schwartz. Ultimately, the most immediate historical contrast between Genesis and Love & Fame might be in their making. Berryman finished most of his book in a furious seven weeks of early 1970. Schwartz, on the other hand, had worked on early versions of the great myth of self-origin finally published in 1943 since at least 1931, when, as an undergraduate at Wisconsin, he began laboring over the structure of what he then planned on an earnest philosophical schema, moving through what he called epistemological ‘grades of permanence’.34 On the surface, these contrasting processes are inverted in relation to the developmental myths propagated by Genesis and Love & Fame, with the former’s emphasis on the child’s natural gifts and the latter’s on a long life of slow toil and hard graft. But again, this disparity seems to underlie Berryman’s attempts to rationalize the different shapes of their careers. Although Eileen Simpson insists ‘he didn’t envy Delmore 31 32 33 34

See Robert Lowell, ‘For John Berryman’, New York Review of Books (6 April 1972). Atlas, 157. Ibid. 211. Ibid. 73.

‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame

145

his fame’, this is qualified by Berryman’s insistence that ‘precocity was an enemy of promise’, (with reference to Cyril Connolly’s book).35 Rather, he told her, anticipating Love & Fame’s premise, The ideal is to keep almost completely but not entirely underground until one is sufficiently formed and strong enough to be unaffected by either success or […] failure. […] A long slow development, the work getting better, the character stronger, until the late great poems and world fame. That’s what Delmore would have wished for himself.36

The chronology and, therefore, mortal bearing on this last sentence’s past tense is vague, since Simpson is paraphrasing from memory and different moments in their relationship. But whether he means this is what Schwartz would have wanted in another life or another chance at youth, the sense of regret imposed upon the other poet seems essential to the definition of Berryman’s ideal, even or especially where he adds (‘with amusement’, Simpson recalls), ‘Not, mind you […] that Delmore hasn’t schemed for success […]’.37 James Laughlin expressed deep reservations while preparing Genesis (‘Book One’) for publication, but these doubts merely provoked greater self-assurance in Schwartz, who would only concede, ‘I read some more of Genesis and now fear that it is so good that no one will believe that I, mere I, am author, but rather a team of inspired poets.’38 The standard narrative of Schwartz’s long downfall sets his outrageous confidence that the book would be hailed as a masterpiece, a ‘giant work’ which ‘will last as long as the Pyramids’, against the lackluster reality of its reception.39 But six months before publication, the manuscript had its most articulate challenge – or, in Schwartz’s case, occasion for belligerent defiance – from

35 36 37 38 39

Simpson, 6. See Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1938). Ibid. 6. Ibid. See Robert Phillips, ed., Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 147. Ibid.

146

J. T. Welsch

Auden himself. He begins a long, detailed letter, ‘I have been trying to get clear in my mind just how to explain to myself and you why I feel you would be wise not to publish a poem on which you have spent so much time and thought.’40 In short, Auden thinks Schwartz lacks conviction. The metaphysical and psychoanalytic frameworks upon which the poem is built have brought Schwartz to a ‘precipice’ from which he appears unable or unwilling to make the final leap of faith.41 This needn’t be regarded as a strictly religious faith, however; and Auden compares Genesis to Wordsworth’s conviction in The Prelude ‘that the poetic imagination and the religious revelation are one’. Of course Auden disagrees, but the point that ‘Wordsworth really managed to believe this, while you are trying to, but are too advanced to succeed’.42 He concludes, ‘The central fault in your poem is, in my opinion, just this false hope that if you only look up and remember enough, significance and value and belief will appear of themselves’.43 Whether or not we agree about the implications for Genesis’ final merits, Auden’s critique cuts to the book’s solipsistic heart, which indeed, beats with Schwartz’s philosophical preoccupations. In notes for the workin-progress, he bemoans the self ’s essential isolation, ‘Do I love only my sense-impressions, enacting the sin of Narcissus?’44 Even the chorus, which might have saved the subject from isolation, is conceived in earlier versions as ‘the ego’s image of what the world would think (psychologically speaking) of [the protagonist’s] long confession’.45 Without diagnosing Berryman as any less or differently narcissistic, we can wonder if Auden’s critique extends to a book like Love & Fame, or if it circles the same selfconscious premise. I don’t think so; and not only because the book name-checks Wordsworth one time too many. A bit contrarily, perhaps, the most striking

40 41 42 43 44 45

Atlas, 217. Letter of 26 August 1942, quoted in Atlas, 217–20. Ibid. 218. Ibid. 220. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75.

‘Satanic pride’: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame

147

evidence for Berryman’s more objective (as opposed to subjective) convictions lies in the artifice of Part IV’s dramatic religious conversion (rather than the sort of leap Auden means). Whether, like his counsellors in St Mary’s rehabilitation centre, we remain unconvinced by his change of heart is beside the point. The fact that, unlike the Harvard episode above, we have no way of proving or disproving the reality of Berryman’s religious faith, either inside or outside the text, is the great coup of its contrivance. The dropping of masks in the rest of book – putting ‘John Berryman! […] John Berryman!’ into Part I, or his home address in Part III – can already be read as a perverse response to the charge of ‘confessionalism’, which he elsewhere answers in interviews ‘with rage and contempt!’46 By closing the gap on all speculative correspondence between biographical and textual subjects, the poems submit to more radical ambiguities. As Louise Glück reads it in her searing essay ‘Against Sincerity’, by posing as ‘straight gossip, straight from the source’, the poems amplify their classically Berrymanic discontinuities.47 The poem ‘Message’ in Part III calls us out: ‘I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends. […] It’s not my life. / That’s occluded and lost’.48 ‘I do not understand; but I believe’, the speaker avows in the eighth address, ‘A Prayer for the Self.’49 Beneath the performative ritual of belief which makes the invocations of ‘Eleven Addresses’ as real and staged as anything else in the book, Berryman’s New Critical agnosticism, in contrast with Schwartz’s Freudianism, draws an equivalence between the I and Thou of these poems, or the lyric address which is, at any rate, analogous as a device to the ‘you’ of his Sonnets or Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. The question posed in No. 4 of the Addresses, ‘If I say Thy name, art Thou there?’ pertains as much to the poet ‘there’, beyond the poem; and the rhetorical answer is precise in its equivocation: ‘It may be so’.50

46 Berryman, ‘In & Out’, Collected Poems, 183; ‘Antitheses’, ibid. 63; Berryman, Paris Review interview. 47 Louise Glück, ‘Against Sincerity’, in Proofs & Theories (New York: Ecco, 1994), 44. 48 Berryman, Collected Poems, 201. 49 Ibid. 220. 50 Ibid. 217.

148

J. T. Welsch

In this way, the devised uncertainty of the ‘Eleven Addresses’ fulfils the negative capability of this Keatsian-titled book. We could hardly contrive a better illustration of this last point about the objective self than a beautiful moment in Berryman’s Paris Review interview, conducted in St Mary’s a few months after finishing Love & Fame. Discussing the formal breakthrough he had with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a poem which moves towards a similar collapse of address, Berryman explains, ‘It did not occur to me to have a dialogue between them – to insert bodily Henry into the poem’. He quickly corrects himself, ‘Me, to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem …’ The interviewer asks, ‘Was that a Freudian slip?’ And of course, the poet is obliged to answer, ‘I don’t know’.51

51

See Berryman’s Paris Review interview, which is available online at: (accessed 8 January 2017).

Alex Runchman

9 ‘the angel and the beast in man’: John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

In his Paris Review interview, conducted a year before he died and published posthumously in Winter 1972, John Berryman reflected on his own work, that of his friend Delmore Schwartz, and the importance of Shakespeare to both of them. ‘Schwartz once asked me’, he recalled: why it was that all my Shakespearean study never showed up anywhere in my poetry, and I couldn’t answer the question. It was a piercing question because his early poems are really very much influenced by Shakespeare’s early plays. I seem to have been sort of untouched by Shakespeare, although I have had him in my mind since I was twenty years old1

Poets are not always the most attentive critical readers of each other’s – or even their own – work. Of the various claims made here about influence, only the one about early Schwartz responding to early Shakespeare carries any weight; and even that is undermined by Berryman’s failure to see that Schwartz’s later poems – those written after his celebrated first collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) – are no less responsive to Shakespeare (both early and late). Berryman’s idolization of the young Schwartz, along with his insistence that Schwartz’s late work was ‘absolutely no good’, appears to have blinded him to overt Shakespearean references and influences in Vaudeville for a Princess (1950) and the new poems in

1

Peter A. Stitt, ‘John Berryman: The Art of Poetry No. 16’, Paris Review 53 (Winter 1972), available online at: (accessed 5 September 2015).

150

Alex Runchman

Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1958).2 Such reverence for youth might also begin to account for Berryman’s prioritization of Shakespeare’s early plays over his late as influences on Schwartz, a further curious bias given that one of Schwartz’s major early works, ‘Coriolanus and His Mother’, revisits a play first performed in 1609, after the four great tragedies. Even if one agrees with Berryman that this piece (and especially its monologue interludes) is tonally closer to, say, The Comedy of Errors than to Coriolanus itself, it is hard not to conclude that Berryman read his friend’s poetry wanting to confirm a preconceived idea. In failing to find any Shakespeare in Berryman’s work, Schwartz may have done the same. Berryman’s poetry is, in fact, very much touched by Shakespeare.3 But even stranger than Berryman’s apparent concurrence with Schwartz’s blind-sighted view is the fact that his own poetry (especially his own early poetry) tends to be touched by Shakespeare in ways that are similar to those in which Schwartz’s poetry is also touched. Berryman’s works often bear the imprint of Schwartz and Shakespeare simultaneously, and his Shakespearean borrowings occasionally accrue connotations through having already been imported from Elizabethan or Jacobean England into twentieth-century America by Schwartz. This is not to say that Berryman simply depends upon Schwartz as an intermediary in assimilating Shakespeare into contemporary 2

3

Ibid. An example of Berryman’s reverence for the young Schwartz is his claim, in Dream Song 156, that ‘the young will read his young verse / for as long as such things go’. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 175. See Chapters 4 and 5 of Alex Runchman, Delmore Schwartz: A Critical Reassessment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) for a discussion of Schwartz’s later volumes. John Haffenden, for example, remarks that, while Berryman never completed his intended critical edition of King Lear, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet took direct inspiration from that play. See Haffenden’s ‘Introduction’ to Berryman’s Shakespeare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), xxxiv. Peter Maber, meanwhile, takes the influence of both Richard II and Richard III upon Dream Song 85 as a case study, suggesting that ‘Berryman’s work on Shakespeare had a profound, many-levelled impact upon his own creative work and, most importantly, upon his own process of self-scrutiny’. See Maber, ‘John Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography’, in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’ : New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 223.

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

151

US culture. Reading Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs in particular, it becomes clear that Shakespeare (especially late Shakespeare) enabled a contorted, fractured style for Berryman that was not accessible to Schwartz. Robert Lowell would remember, for example, how ‘John could quote with vibrance to all lengths, even prose, even late Shakespeare, to show me what could be done with disrupted and mended syntax’, adding that ‘This was the start of his real style’.4 Schwartz never wrote like this, not even in the verse plays he wrote between 1936 and 1941, which alternate between loose blank verse and philosophical prose, but lack compression and consequently intensity. Schwartz is far more innovative in the long poems, ‘Coriolanus and his Mother’ and Genesis, whose meta-theatrical conflations of audience member and performer on one hand recall the likes of Christopher Sly sleeping through The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet watching and commenting on the Players, and Puck and Prospero delivering their famous epilogues; and, on the other, anticipate the dialogic and performative scheme of The Dream Songs. In these, too, however, Schwartz’s characters – despite occasionally taking on certain tones of each other’s speech, and despite regular ellipses – still speak in continuous syntax. Schwartz’s stylistic innovations owe more to the Jewish-American dialect he spoke in Brooklyn than they do to Shakespeare. Shakespeare matters more to him for tonal reasons, for his subject matter, and for the inferences of particular borrowed words – and these are aspects that are also important to Berryman. Citing Schwartz as a model to Berryman in his use of Shakespeare is not, either, to insist upon his uniqueness in this regard. Schwartz was, after all, less than a year older than Berryman and, like him, had learned his craft from Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Auden. There is, however, a notable omission in Berryman criticism, arising from a tendency to read the relationship between the two poets biographically but not also in terms of their respective writings. While the poets’ shared familial anxieties and Schwartz’s importance to Berryman as a Jew (one of the motivations behind ‘The Imaginary Jew’ and some passages of Recovery) are a necessary part of the

4

Robert Lowell, ‘For John Berryman’, New York Review of Books (6 April 1972).

152

Alex Runchman

story, these tell us relatively little about how they wrote or what Schwartz meant to Berryman as a writer, rather than just as a friend. Berryman’s Dream Song elegies to Schwartz have received respectful critical attention (notably from Jahan Ramazani and Samuel Fisher Dodson), and the friendship between the two poets has been memorialized by Eileen Simpson, William Barrett and each poet’s biographers; but there has, as yet, been no serious attempt to trace the ways in which Schwartz’s writing gave fire to Berryman’s.5 A comparison of Berryman’s ‘The Ball Poem’ to Schwartz’s ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’ by Stephen Matterson is about as far as such endeavours have gone.6 This essay argues for the centrality of Schwartz’s poetry to Berryman’s apprenticeship, examining the Shakespearean affinities of both poets and the ways in which Schwartz may have taught Berryman how to ‘use’ Shakespeare. * On 17 November 1946, Schwartz wrote in his journal, ‘What are Shakespeare’s themes? Melancholia, despair, distrust, sexual disgust, love versus duty, the mixture of the angel and the beast in man’.7 Like W. H. Auden, who believed that all great drama was characterized by ‘the tension of [an] ambivalent attitude, torn between reverence and contempt, of the maker towards the doer’, Schwartz was sensitive to the paradoxes

5

6 7

See Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Samuel Fisher Dodson, Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006); Eileen Simpson, Poets in their Youth (New York: Random House, 1982); William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982); James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1982); Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). See Stephen Matterson, Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (Palgrave Macmillan, 1987). Elizabeth Pollet, ed., Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz: 1939–1959 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 287.

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

153

and internal conflicts that vitalize Shakespeare’s characters.8 And in noting Shakespeare’s themes, Schwartz might also have been enumerating his own. The title In Dreams Begin Responsibilities would lose a Yeatsian allusion and a Freudian invocation if it were paraphrased in terms of love giving rise to duty, but it is the same dialectic at play. The coexistence of angel and beast in man, meanwhile, is a motif that recurs throughout the volume – and it is one that Schwartz frequently articulates with recourse to the persona of the fool. The term ‘fool’, as used by Shakespeare, is associated, in William Empson’s analysis, with, on one hand, innocence, childishness, and inherent wisdom, and on the other, madness, cuckoldry, and violent stupidity.9 These characteristics are in play when, reviewing William Faulkner’s A Fable, Schwartz is impressed enough to compare Faulkner’s idiots to Lear’s fool, albeit with the caveat that in King Lear ‘the genuine fool is matched by a rational man who makes believe he is a fool; rationality presides and triumphs over the scene, despite the irrationality of life’. The review, written in 1941, makes clear why a world in crisis might demand the innocence of a fool’s wisdom, Schwartz concluding with a direct echo of Lear’s poor fool: ‘This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen’ (King Lear, III.iv.78).10 Schwartz most self-consciously puts on such a mask himself in the prose interludes of ‘Coriolanus and His Mother’, in which he announces himself to be ‘the most belated Shakespearean fool’.11 However, even when he is not so explicitly in role, the anxiousness of his interrogations into human character belies a characteristically naïve-seeming tone. In the short 8 9 10 11

W. H. Auden, ‘The Globe’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1962; rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1989), 181. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951; rpt. London: Penguin, 1995). Delmore Schwartz, ‘The Fiction of William Faulkner’, in Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker, eds, Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 274–89; 288–9. Delmore Schwartz, Selected Poems (1938–1958): Summer Knowledge (1959; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1967), 131. All further references to Schwartz’s poetry are to this edition and will be abbreviated to SK, incorporated in the text, unless otherwise noted.

154

Alex Runchman

poem ‘Concerning the Synthetic Unity of Apperception’, for example, the speaker addresses ‘the king [his] uncle’, goading him to the point of madness: ‘Uncle’, I said, ‘I’m lonely. What is love?’ This drove him quite insane. Now he must knit Time with apperception, bit by tiny bit. (SK, 40)

We might think first of Lear’s Fool needling his Nuncle (who did not – at least not at the start of the play – know what love was), but the poem also seems to transpose him into Hamlet, a play in which the title character is more adept at fooling than revenge. ‘The king my uncle’ reminds us of Claudius, and the seemingly throwaway references in Schwartz’s poem to the ‘spirit’s’ smoke and ghosts that ‘come back’ sound like oblique, and possibly guilty, references to the murder of Old Hamlet. (‘Are all the rest come back?’ Claudius asks on hearing that Young Hamlet, whom he has sent to England to be killed, has returned, if not exactly ‘lonely’, then emphatically ‘alone’ [Hamlet IV.vii.49, 52]).12 Even the remark that there are ‘No bear and no siestas up above’ sounds sinister given that Old Hamlet was poisoned while sleeping in the afternoon. The philosophical conundrum on which Schwartz’s poem ends – how to reconcile chronological time with the mind’s perception of its own consciousness, a challenge to the uncle’s earlier advice to live in the moment – is unresolved, but it works as a vindication of the fool, implying that wisdom (as both Hamlet and Lear, but never, in fact, Claudius, discover) might derive from apparent insanity. The companion poem ‘The Sin of Hamlet’ intimates that Hamlet’s sin is nostalgia, ‘looking backward’; and the ghost seen in the mirror at the end of this poem, ‘his shameful eyes, his mouth diseased’, resembles, in part, the jester Yorick, whose skull, when Hamlet finds it, is without lips and ‘quite chop-fallen’ (SK, 35; Hamlet, V.i.192). Hamlet, quite as much as Shakespeare’s earlier plays, haunts Schwartz, himself a disloyal son and

12

In referring to Shakespeare, I use the text of The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), unless otherwise noted.

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

155

would-be clown prone to dwelling in the past, and obsessed, as Berryman was as well, with the death of a father. Unlike Berryman, Schwartz never wrote a full-length analysis of any of Shakespeare’s works, but his essays on other subjects contain plenty of hammy asides. Inspired by the Broadway success of Kiss Me Kate in the late 1940s, for instance, Schwartz enjoyed pointing out that ‘Shakespeare really wrote musical comedies, a truth which remained unknown for centuries’ (Selected Essays, 39). He also managed to conclude an essay on André Gide by speculating on the rise of TV via a seemingly incongruous nod to Sonnet 73. Television, he suggests, ‘may transform motion-picture palaces into bare ruined choirs where late Bing Crosby sang’ (Selected Essays, 254). Most flagrantly, he offset the forty traditional sonnets of Vaudeville for a Princess with jaunty prose retellings of Hamlet and Othello which see Hamlet ask his mother to sing the songs ‘My Old Kentucky Womb’ and ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginity’, and Iago’s hopeless accomplice Roderigo (renamed Rollo) described as ‘a dreadful dumb-bell […] just poor white trash’.13 The tone irritated Hugh Kenner so much that he accused Schwartz of coming ‘on stage without his trousers’ and choosing ‘to play Danny Kaye instead of Hamlet’.14 The prose pranking of Vaudeville for a Princess might well reveal Schwartz in his least subtle fooling, but it also underlines his identification of himself with the figure of the clown throughout his career; and this is the tendency most likely to have prompted Berryman’s comparison of his mentor to early Shakespeare. One clown in particular appears to anticipate early Schwartz’s melange of pathos and humour. In his essay on ‘Shakespeare’s Early Comedy’, Berryman, in line with the still prevalent critical consensus, finds little to recommend The Two Gentleman of Verona. One quality that he does admire, however, is ‘the sudden endowing of a clown – against our expectation – with a voice of his own’.15 He quotes the self-pitying ‘clownish servant’ Launce’s opening monologue at length: 13 Schwartz, Vaudeville for a Princess (New York: New Directions, 1950), 15, 14. 14 Hugh Kenner, ‘Bearded Ladies & the Abundant Goat’, Poetry 79 no. 1 (October 1951): 50. 15 John Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 27.

156

Alex Runchman Nay, ‘twill bee this howre ere I haue done weeping: all the kinde, of the Launces have this very fault: I haue receiv’d my proportion, like the prodigious Sonne, and am going with Sir Protheus to the Imperialls Court: I think Crab my dog, be the sowrest natured dogge that liues: My Mother weeping; my Father wayling: my Sister crying: our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexitie, yet did not this cruell-hearted Curre shedde one tear … Ile shew you the manner of it. This shooe is my father: no, this left shooe is my father; no, no, this left shooe is my mother: nay, that cannot bee so neyther: yes, it is so, it is so: it hath the worser sole: this shooe with the hole in it, is my mother … I am the dogge: no, the dogge is himself, and I am the dogge: oh, the dogge is me, and I am my selfe: I; so, so …16

What appeals so much to Berryman about this is its presentation, ‘for the first time in English comedy’, of ‘a definite and irresistible personality, absorbed in its delicious subject to the exclusion of all else; confused and engaging’.17 Schwartz must have had it in mind when gnomically beginning one of his ‘Poems in Imitation of the Fugue’, ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.’18 Schwartz’s dog in this poem is a counterpoint to Launce’s (the only one to appear onstage in Shakespeare’s oeuvre), sentimentally barking, wailing, and moaning at the sound of violins. The poem’s conclusion adds to this cacophony of lamentation while also reversing the same pun that Launce employs in denigrating his mother: ‘And we are howling or dancing out our souls / In beating syllables before the curtain’ (SK, 68) – lines which might remind us of how, in the one sincere act of love in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Launce himself takes a beating to avoid one being given to his dog.19 What matters most in Schwartz’s poem is that the traditional wisdom granted to the fool is transposed to dog and child

16 17 18 19

Ibid. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, II.ii.1–23. Berryman’s transcription is followed here. John Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare, 27. This poem has a partner in ‘A Dog Named Ego, the Snowflakes as Kisses’, although the Shakespearean affinities of this poem are less explicit. See Anne Barton’s introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, 179. A beating is a characteristic punishment for fools, as Lear’s Fool also makes clear in telling the king, ‘If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time’ (King Lear, II.v).

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

157

who, in their humble responses to daily things, ‘Know more and less than you: they know full well / Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well’ (SK, 68). A similar sentiment is suggested at the end of Berryman’s Dream Song 14 when a dog, oblivious to the speaker’s boredom and untroubled by dreams, simply takes ‘itself & its tail considerably away’.20 It is for suggesting how humbly and simply life might be lived that, for Schwartz, ‘Angels and Platonists’ (SK, 68) are fit to judge the dog, beast as it is. If ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are Strangers’ represents a thematic nod to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, then stylistically Schwartz sounds most like Launce in the prose interludes of ‘Coriolanus and his Mother’, in which his speaker undergoes similar bother with regard to his own identity, and about which material objects might be made to stand in for an identity. ‘We cannot regard the warm identity beneath our faces as being no more than an abstraction’ (SK, 93), he contends in the first interlude, all the time working through a repertoire of lists, catalogues, and ideas that are reformulated in different guises and in a manner that reveals him to be, like Launce, absorbed in the act of thinking to the exclusion of all else. ‘What a jack-in-the-box I am’, he exclaims in the interlude entitled ‘Justice’, but truly with a decent motive – to entertain, to be useful – and also to arrive at a point. What point? I do not actually know, except that there must be a point and when I get there I will recognize it, though I scarcely expect to get there very soon … (SK 103)

The denouement of this episode, meanwhile, capitalizes on the pathos of the clown. The speaker recounts an Aristophanic fable, told to him by his own father, in which a father ultimately shoots his horse, his son, and himself, because he has been ridiculed for, first, allowing his son to ride the pony while he walks; then for riding the pony while his son walks; then for having them both ride the pony; and finally for carrying the pony together on their shoulders. At the end of the story, the narrator’s mother enters and maligns the father for telling it, resulting in a family scene to rival that of

20 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 16.

158

Alex Runchman

the Launces: ‘I wept loudly’, the speaker admits, ‘watching them, weeping because of the sad end of the story, because they were denouncing each other, and because I had been slapped for calling my father a liar’ (SK, 106). A great perplexity altogether. * The clown may have been useful to Schwartz as a figure within which angel and beast coexist, and his example almost certainly played a part in prompting Berryman’s presentation of Henry. In Dream Song 77, it is Henry’s unnamed friend who appears to take the clown role, alluding to Feste’s ‘Come away, Death’ (Twelfth Night, II.iv.51) in singing ‘– Come away, Mr Bones’ (The Dream Songs, 84); in Song 199, however, the roles are reversed, with the friend telling Henry, ‘Mr Bones, you a clown’ (218). There is almost always a fear, however, inherited from Schwartz, that the brute will win out. In ‘I am to my own heart merely a serf ’, for example, Schwartz presents the heart as an ‘unfed animal’ (SK, 72), the traditional centre of love becoming synonymous with instinctive desire. When, in ‘Coriolanus and His Mother’, Schwartz presents the Roman general as the epitome of individuality and describes him as ‘a breathing animal, almost divine’ – an admixture of physical weight and ethereal lightness – he appears attracted and repulsed in equal measure, that ‘almost’ stressing how the beast falls just short of the angelic (SK, 78). For Schwartz, this combination is a cause, if not exactly of sexual disgust, then certainly of sexual fear, partly because he sees a disjunction between purity of intention and the physical brutality of the act, and partly because he is so conscious of the literal weight of one body upon another set against the numinous nature of orgasm. Heaviness, burden, and labour as correlatives for fate are recurring tropes. ‘Child labor!’ Schwartz exclaims in ‘The Ballad of The Children of the Czar’: ‘The child must carry / His fathers on his back’ (SK, 22). The immediate reference is to Aeneas bearing his father, Anchises, out of Troy; but it is again possible to find a gesture back to Hamlet – specifically to Hamlet saying of Yorick ‘he hath borne me on his back a thousand times’ (V.i.186), but also, more obliquely, to the filial duty the prince owes to Old Hamlet. In ‘Prothalamium’, the particularity of sexual threat is more strongly in evidence. The speaker’s marriage song is thrown out of tune by

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

159

a continued fear of intimacy and by his daemon, lying in bed next to his fearful bride, ‘breathing heavily / His sense of ignorance, his wish to die’ (SK, 48) – a word which here connotes both existential anxiety and, as a Shakespearean pun, a desire for sexual release. A little earlier in the poem, the speaker utters his marriage vows as though under duress, repetitions and internal rhymes slowing the pace of the verse: what your body and what your spirit bears I will like my own body cure and tend But you are heavy and my body’s weight Is great and heavy: when I carry you I lift upon my back time like a fate Near as my heart, dark when I marry you. (SK, 47)

The pun on ‘bears’ renders the spirit physical: not just burdened but also naked and even – given Schwartz’s references elsewhere – like a bear. The body, in return, is granted none of the spirit’s lightness. The short lyric ‘What is to be given’ condenses these apprehensions into aphorism, remembering not just beasts and angels, but also that ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action’.21 The poem is rather more than a straightforward comparison of love (‘spirit’) and lust (‘animal’), ‘the sky’ and ‘the blood’ (SK, 53) because its speaker is so troubled by the recognition that, for love to have any physical manifestation, lust must be part of it. The speaker’s fear, in the last stanza, about giving ‘too much’, can be understood in both sexual and psychological terms. What is to be given is, in the most corporeal sense, semen; and, as such, giving might also be taking (the shy beloved’s virginity). But, less literally, the speaker simply wishes not to be a burden, not to give so much of himself that the beloved rejects him. Spirit and animal are inseparable. Touch is ‘like a gun’ (SK, 53); intimacy, both emotional and physical, suggests threat as much as trust. A companion to this poem, ‘O Love, Sweet Animal’ once again evokes the fool – the ‘freak or clown’ (SK, 28) that bemuses with its strangeness. When Schwartz republished the poem in Summer Knowledge, Love, in the 21

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129, in Colin Burrow, ed., Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 639.

160

Alex Runchman

first line, became not ‘sweet’ but ‘dark’; and in both versions, it is impossible to distinguish tenderness from menace. Love is implored here to ‘Brush [its] heavy fur / Against her, long and slow’ and to ‘stare at her’ because she was once ‘Frightened by a look’ (SK, 28), not in spite of this fact. With its slow, sensuous rhythm and a complete lack of agency from the beloved, the poem depicts something closer to an imagined rape than a scene of mutually wished-for intimacy. All of these uses and intimations of the word ‘heavy’ unite in what remains Schwartz’s best-known poem, ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me’ – a poem in which the word comes freighted with a plethora of Shakespearean associations, and which is also of tremendous importance to the ‘heavy’ and animal moments in Berryman’s poetry. The poem’s sources are not just Shakespearean: Eliot’s ‘Animula’, in which he describes ‘the heavy burden of the growing soul’ is also behind it, as is Apollinaire’s ‘La Tzigane’, with the line ‘l’amour lourd comme un ours privé.’22 However, as ‘a swollen shadow, / A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive’ (SK, 74), the bear is conceived of principally in Shakespearean and theatrical terms. With the poem hinging on the pun that the heavy bear is a heavy burden, it also bears up the quivering meat of the cowardly Falstaff, with his complaint in Henry IV Part I that ‘I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too: God keep lead out of me! I need no more weight than my own bowels.’ (V.iii.33–5). And, given that the ‘inescapable animal’ suggests destiny, it’s hard not to hear something of the final words of Othello in Schwartz’s repetitions: Ludovico’s ‘Myself will straight abroad: and to the state / This heavy act with heavy heart relate’ (V.ii.380–81). Lumbering, honey-smeared, and in love with sleep, there is a kind of benignity to the bear that evokes Brutus, in Julius Caesar, telling his boy, Lucius, to enjoy the ‘honey-heavy dew of slumber’ (II.i.230), although this is offset by intimations of Hamlet’s disgust at Gertrude, living in ‘the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love’ (III.iv.93–4). Echoes of Romeo and 22

T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 107); Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, ed. Garnet Rees (London: Athlone, 1975). The debt to Apollinaire is noted by Edward Ford in A Reevaluation of the Works of American Writer Delmore Schwartz, 1913–1966 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2005), 2.

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

161

Juliet sound louder still: Romeo laments early in the play that he is sinking under ‘loves heavy burthen’ (I.iii.22), and Schwartz also brings into play the young lover’s joke about torches – ‘Being but heavy, I will bear the light’ (I.i.12) – by associating his bear with darkness. It is tempting, too, to detect some lightness of Schwartz’s own in distorting Juliet’s horrified imagining of Romeo’s ‘heavy-bier’ (III.ii.60) into his own ‘heavy bear’. Twelfth Night is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays not to contain the word ‘heavy’. But with its clowning (which comes perilously close to violence), its references to ‘bear-baiting’, and its setting in the court of a love-stricken Duke, Orsino, whose name in Latin means ‘little bear’, it, too, presses upon Schwartz’s poem. A stronger source, however, (and one which also has some bearing on the horse-carrying story in ‘Coriolanus and his Mother’) may be Sonnet 50, which begins ‘How heavy do I journey on my way’ and pities the horse to whom the speaker is a burden: The beast that bears me, tired with my woe, Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me, As if by some instinct the wretch did know His rider loved not speed, being made from thee.23

Schwartz, a dedicated if also conflicted disciple of Eliot, is relentlessly allusive, and (as I have argued elsewhere) tends to transform his sources. The empathy between man and beast so evident in Sonnet 50, the play on emotional weight as physical weight, the portrayal of melancholy giving rise to cruelty: these are all dislocated into an American setting of candy and football as Schwartz turns Shakespeare’s horse into a bear, reverses the roles by making the speaker the one who must carry, and turns the beast into an obstruction that makes empathy between two human beings impossible. Schwartz’s transformation of his sources is one of the ways in which he attempts, like the producers of Kiss Me Kate, to assimilate Shakespeare into his contemporary culture. ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me’ adapts Shakespeare for an early to mid-twentieth-century US audience, just as one might stage one of the plays in a modern setting (or subject it, as Schwartz

23 Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, 481.

162

Alex Runchman

does in ‘Coriolanus and His Mother’, to Freudian and Marxist criticism). This is not to suggest, however, that Schwartz’s use of Shakespeare is part of a systematic project. Rather, his allusive recastings evidence a dynamic interaction with a few specific instances, his uses of ‘heavy’ drawing upon what Empson would call a ‘generalised memory’ of a word that had great import for Shakespeare. The further adaptations undertaken by Berryman mark an additional stage in the evolution of the angel and beast in man. * Berryman evidently concurred with Schwartz that, among Shakespeare’s themes, sexual disgust and ‘the mixture of the angel and the beast in man’ are prominent. Discussing Hamlet, for example, in his lecture on ‘The Crisis’ that Shakespeare seemingly underwent in the early 1600s, Berryman is drawn to Hamlet’s soliloquy on encountering Fortinbras’s Captain in Act IV, Scene iv, in which he asks, What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Until his mother’s death by poison, Berryman argues, Hamlet is not free to kill Claudius. ‘Until then, he drifts, flailing, amongst apathy, hysterical and irrelevant emotions, self-questionings, sexual disgust, torture of mind, yet unable to do everything but that which is necessary and this able to forget, to let sleep in “bestial oblivion”, seeking always his own death’ (Berryman’s Shakespeare, 115). Berryman’s terms are remarkably similar to those employed by Schwartz in his diary entry, and it is impossible not to notice that Henry, in The Dream Songs, experiences these same emotions: he finds life boring; he ‘hates the world’ (The Dream Songs [74], 81); he cannot keep on the same topic for a single song; his identity is unstable; he is promiscuous, yet rackt with guilt; and he wants, but is not able, ‘not to be’. (When he seems to have accomplished this, he is reluctantly resurrected). It is no surprise, then, that ‘What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear and be’ (The Dream Songs [1], 3). But before he could afford to let Henry affect Hamlet’s postures, Berryman had to learn his craft. A number of his early poems make no bones

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

163

about borrowing from Schwartz. William Barrett recalls Schwartz’s mockdismay over Berryman’s rewriting of his poem ‘Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses’ as ‘Exasperated, worn, you conjure a mansion’: ‘Berryman always has to outdo me’, Schwartz complained. ‘I think of a house, he has to have a mansion.’24 ‘There Is A World By Night’, meanwhile, begins with an overt acknowledgement of Schwartz’s most famous title: ‘The history of strangers in their dreams / Being irresponsible’ (34).25 It goes on to expostulate on the Shakespearean and Schwartzian subjects of sons and fathers and of flight from duty. In ‘At Chinese Checkers’, Delmore even appears as a named character, lying ‘deep in the unfriendly city’ (Collected Poems, 28) in a passage which James Atlas reads merely as a jibe at Schwartz’s chronic insomnia but which is subtler than that in that it seems also to remember King Henry IV’s famous ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ speech (2 Henry IV, III.i.31).26 It is widely accepted that Berryman’s ‘The Nervous Songs’ can be read as proto-Dream Songs, but intimations of his most celebrated work are in embryo throughout The Dispossessed – not least when Schwartz’s heavy bear lumbers in. Consider this stanza from ‘A Point of Age’: The animal within the animal How shall we satisfy? With toys its fear, With incantation its adorable trust? Shall we say ‘We were once and we shall be dust’ Or nourish it with confident lies and look Contentment? What can the animal bear? Whose version brightens that will not appal? (Collected Poems, 10)

And consider, as well, the two versions of the poem named ‘The Animal Trainer’, the second of which ends with particularly Schwartz-like intonations:

24 William Barrett, The Truants, 26. 25 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 34. All further references to this edition are incorporated in the text. 26 Atlas, 210.

164

Alex Runchman – Animals little and large, be still, be still: I’ll stay with you. Suburb and sun are pale. – Animals are your destruction, and your will. (Collected Poems, 32)

This picks up the cadence of Schwartz’s poem ‘Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now’ with its echoing conclusion, ‘Old Noumenon, come true, come true’ (SK, 58). It also evokes ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’ by ending on the Shakespearean word ‘will’. What is especially noticeable about these two poems, however, is how well-trained Berryman’s animals are. The difficulty of satiating the animal, its appetite, its fear of death, the association of ‘bear’ with forbearance: these all make their way from ‘The Heavy Bear’ into ‘A Point of Age’, but there is still a long way to go before Berryman can match the ‘The hungry beating brutish one’, or the ‘scrimmage of appetite everywhere’, with Henry’s ‘constitutional’ hunger (The Dream Songs [311], 333). These poems do suggest, however, that there is a process of evolution that takes us from heavy bear to Berryman’s own beast-angel, Huffy Henry. As with most evolutions, there are also some felicitous mutations. The Dream Songs often draws upon influences that were unavailable to Shakespeare and that are absent in Schwartz and in Berryman’s own early poetry: the most notable of these are jazz and the blues. Nonetheless, whether the burden be the poet’s (or Henry’s) heavy boredom or his heavy daughter, there remain links back to Shakespeare and Schwartz’s earlier usages of this evocative word. The beginning of Dream Song 29, for example, intensifies the suffocating quality of Schwartz’s inescapable companion: ‘There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart / só heavy, if he had a hundred years / & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good’ (The Dream Songs [29], 33) ‘Weeping, sleepless’: Schwartz’s bear ‘howls in his sleep’, ‘howl’ evoking, above all, Lear’s inarticulate grief at the death of Cordelia (‘Howl, howl, howl, howl!’ [V.iii.258]), while also anticipating Allen Ginsberg’s almost hyper-articulate (because so prolix) despair at the state of mid-twentieth-century America. Notably, Henry (unlike the bear, but like the sleepless Delmore) doesn’t sleep at all, time (a hundred years, a thousand) offering no respite: the thing sitting on his heart is inescapable.

John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare

165

In his critical introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare, John Haffenden remarks that critics ‘have not yet evaluated the full degree to which [The Dream Songs] is fired by Shakespeare’.27 To do so might prove a task as endless as Berryman’s own in attempting to produce a definitive edition of King Lear. The undertaking would have to acknowledge the ways in which Berryman’s middle-generation contemporaries – and perhaps Schwartz most of all – likewise sought to make Shakespeare’s language their own; and it would also have to acknowledge some of the intermediary uses to which that language had been put. In Dream Song 148, for example, one of his elegies to Schwartz, Berryman evokes an elegy that both poets loved – Milton’s Lycidas. ‘[T]here died of late a great cat, a real boss cat, / fallen from his prime’ (The Dreams Songs [148], 167), Berryman laments, echoing ‘Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime’ (with the intimation that Schwartz, unlike Lycidas, had, in fact, reached his: that familiar narrative of falling off ). The allusion is, in part, an admission of poetic rivalry, one akin to that felt by Milton for Edward King; but this is not to anaesthetize further lines from Milton’s elegy that are brought into play through cadence and repetition: ‘But O the heavy change now thou art gon, / now thou art gon and never shall return.’28 Even in a poem that dispenses with the word ‘heavy’, its pressure can still be discerned. The particular summoning here may be of Milton, but Shakespeare remains present throughout Dream Song 148 thanks to references to ‘Gravediggers’ and, via the word ‘apperceptions’, to Schwartz’s own Hamlet-poem ‘Concerning the Synthetic Unity of Apperception’. Similarly, although Berryman apotheosizes Schwartz as a ‘cat’, a reference, earlier in the poem, to his ‘brutal commitments’ suggests a less domesticated animal – something more like a Shakespearean ‘angel and beast’ – while the mention of Schwartz’s fall reminds us that his heavy bear had trembled on a tight-rope. Subtle and multiform as his allusive weavings are, it becomes difficult not to conclude that whenever Berryman thought of Schwartz, he tended also to think of Shakespeare. Further enquiries into the matter would 27 28

John Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxiv. John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (1968; rpt. London: Longman, 1997), 244, 246.

166

Alex Runchman

need to address each poet’s use of the sonnet – Schwartz reverentially in Vaudeville for a Princess, and Berryman more mischievously in Berryman’s Sonnets and, later, in mutated form, The Dream Songs. They would also need to interrogate what the habit of middle-generation punning owes to Shakespeare. Without ever going as far as Shakespeare does with his ‘Will’ puns in Sonnets 135 and 136, both occasionally play on the syllables of their names. Schwartz’s posthumously published poem ‘America, America!’ for example, concludes with ‘the city consciousness’ saying ‘more: more and more: always more’, as though trying to utter ‘Delmore’.29 In Berryman’s case, there is an acrostic in Sonnet 87 – ‘I CHRIS AND I JOHN’ (Collected Poems, 114) – but, more pertinently, there is also an inflection to his every use of the word ‘bear’. Though it may also have Schwartz’s bear somewhere behind it, this equally suggests the first syllable of the name that Berryman assumed on his mother’s remarriage following his father’s death. Lowell plays a similar kind of trick in ‘Skunk Hour’, in which the recurrent double ‘l’ sounds suggest the poet hiding within his own words while simultaneously revealing his hiding place. Each of these instances of clowning in the face of illness and loss invites Richard II’s question to John of Gaunt who, on his deathbed, insists on saying how gaunt he is: ‘Can sick men play so nicely with their names?’ Gaunt’s reply – ‘No, misery makes sport to mock itself ’ (Richard II, II.i.84–5) – is astute in its understanding of how bitter laughter might, in trying to stay off outright despair, exacerbate it. The insight helps to explain why one of Berryman’s last lines sounds so bleak, a line from ‘The Facts & Issues’ in Delusions, etc. which, whether it can be thought of as allusive or not, encapsulates Schwartz’s sense of inescapable burden at the same time as punning, desolately, on Berryman’s own name: ‘It’s enough! I can’t BEAR ANYMORE’ (Collected Poems, 263). Exit, pursued by a bear.

29 Schwartz, Last & Lost Poems, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vanguard Press, 1979), 4.

Michael Hinds

10  Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

As a poet worthy of dedicated and singular attention, John Berryman is in good shape, attracting plenty of dedicated scholarship and literary tribute; beyond that, he has also become an icon, given the degree to which his work is now cited across a wide range of media.1 Randall Jarrell, Berryman’s direct contemporary, has never mustered a similarly committed clientele, despite the efforts of influential critics like Stephen Burt. A certain cause for this is that Jarrell has proven harder than anyone to disentangle from the narrative weave of the middle generation which in many respects grew out of the epochal rhetoric of Robert Lowell: ‘Yet really we had the same life, / the generic one / our generation offered’.2 The influence of these narrative terms is pervasive, but so too is the confusion that they generate, as the following comments by William Meredith indicate: [W]hile I’m sure that we had basic encounters with history that nobody else had, we took them differently. I believe Lowell is right in associating himself so closely with Berryman. Berryman associated himself closely with Lowell, and both of them with

1

2

Indie music has produced Berrymanists in Nick Cave, Will Shef of Okkervill River and John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. The recent trend towards citation of canonical poetry in American TV (Frank O’Hara in Mad Men, Walt Whitman in Breaking Bad) saw Berryman get a turn in the HBO mini-series Olive Kitteridge (2014). In the visual arts, Siah Armajani’s Tomb for John Berryman (2014) – reproduced on the cover of the present volume – is part of a series of elegiac installations which pay tribute to a super-powered cultural canon; Berryman is put in the company of Adorno, Benjamin and Whitman amongst others. This is the intellectual context in which this essay will attempt to situate the writing of both Berryman and Randall Jarrell. Robert Lowell, ‘For John Berryman’, Day by Day (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 27.

168

Michael Hinds Jarrell, although if you look at Jarrell’s work, you wouldn’t know that there was any relation. It’s one of my theories that Jarrell is probably the most useful of the three.3

‘You wouldn’t know that there is any relation’ is the truth-moment in this passage, revealing the nonsense of the generational framing, except in stressing Jarrell’s ‘usefulness’ we are faced with some more questions: useful in what sense? and for whom? At a (very) banal level, it is arguable that he is useful for proving that the Middle Generation exists, otherwise there would be no way of facing him. The other poets have proven their independence, yet Jarrell remains where he was left when Stephen Burt argued in Randall Jarrell and his Age (2002) that ‘we do not yet know how to read him.’4 This crisis of interpretability is often inadequately explained by resorting to Helen Vendler’s neat formulation that Jarrell ‘put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry’, indicating that Jarrell’s best work was done serving others;5 as David Bergman said of this verdict in his review of Burt’s book, ‘It justifies ignoring Jarrell’s extraordinary poetry and resting contentedly with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as the king and queen of the middle generational prom’.6 In this scenario, Berryman is presumably the class clown (the crying-on-the-inside kind), Jarrell the disaffected hall monitor; it is hardly an adequate framing. I want to show that we cannot presume proximity between Jarrell and Berryman through the convenient literary-historical lens of the middlegenerational, and that the evidence shows indeed that there is little relation between them in the way that we might expect from members of a poetic group. Out of that, however, I want to stress ultimately a different kind of comparability, one that is nevertheless founded on an apt sense of their thorough difference. 3 4 5 6

William Meredith, ‘The Art of Poetry’, in Poems Are Hard to Read (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 221. Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and his Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xi. Helen Vendler, ‘Randall Jarrell: The Complete Poems’, Part of Nature, Part of Us (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980): 111. David Bergman, ‘Disturbing Randall Jarrell’, American Literary History 16/2 (Summer 2004): 350.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

169

I  Berryman’s Jarrell Berryman’s Jarrell is an easier text to explore than Jarrell’s Berryman, not least because of Berryman’s persistent elegizing of Jarrell in The Dream Songs, as well as his essay for the commemorative volume Randall Jarrell 1914–65.7 Until the event of Jarrell’s death, however, there was little evidence that these members of the ‘middle generation’ saw any relationship between themselves. Jarrell and Berryman rarely corresponded, and did not exchange drafts of poems. They were not like Lowell and Bishop, whose demonstrable proximity might allow the suggestion that the ‘middle generation’ was really a generation of just those two. They were intimate with each other to a degree far beyond their relationships with Berryman or Jarrell (who might at best be described as a third wheel). The separation between Lowell-Bishop and Jarrell-Berryman can also be measured in terms of class; fraught with suffering and loss as their backgrounds might have been, Lowell and Bishop nevertheless shared an origin in New England privilege. This enabled them to know each other very well, but could make other people incomprehensible: this became manifest in Bishop’s letter to Lowell where she deplores Jarrell’s writing about women. Yes, I agree with what you say of Randall – exactly. I did write him with all the compliments I could truthfully pay – now I think I have some more and shall write again. I dislike the ones on ‘women’ – more than you do, no doubt – and wonder where he gets these women – they seem to be like none I – or you – know. But still & all, – he’s so much better than anyone else one reads, almost. He does write about a class of American life that is strange to me – perhaps it is the ‘west’. He makes me feel scarcely American at all, and yet I am, through and through.8

Every single expression of awkwardness or dissent here has its explanation in terms of class; there was nothing remotely aristocratic about 7 8

See Berryman in Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor and Robert Penn Warren, eds, Randall Jarrell 1914–65 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 14–17. Elizabeth Bishop in Saskia Hamilton and Thomas Travisano, eds, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2008), 573.

170

Michael Hinds

Jarrell’s America, none of Lowell’s ‘hierarchic privacy’ or Bishop’s ‘good manners’. Of course, it has to be acknowledged that all of these poets no doubt shared concerns of ambition and were sensitive to the exigencies of the world, in the way that poets are usually presumed to do. Memoirs such as Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth provide abundant examples of their acute consciousness of the contemporary situation and their peculiar vulnerability and sensitivity as poets within it;9 and one of Berryman’s elegies for Jarrell, Dream Song 90 (Op. post. no.13), acknowledged that bond: In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat and all will be as before whenas we sought, among the beloved faces, eminence and were dissatisfied with that and needed more.10

Sensitivity, anxiety and ambition are exactly what we expect and usually demand to find in poets; as criteria for regarding poets collectively and then evaluating them in relationship, however, any poet could justifiably replace Berryman and Lowell in a reading of Jarrell. There is nothing particularly astonishing in poets being poets; with all of that unsatisfied craving for eminence, they inhabit forms of poignancy in whatever age they live. That said, Jarrell’s death was sufficiently preoccupying that Berryman could not quite deal with it in a single poem. He returned to it several times, never quite resolving the matter, notably in Dream Song 121: Grief is fatiguing. He is out of it, the whole humiliating Human round, out of this & that. He made a-many hearts go pit-a-pat who now need never mind his nostril-hair nor a critical error laid bare.11

9 10 11

Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth (London: Picador, 1993). John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 105. Ibid. 138.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

171

It is not immediately apparent who Berryman or Henry is talking about, and there is every reason to think that it is himself. When ‘He’ is revealed as Randall Jarrell in the second stanza, it is in a context of nervous affinity, therefore; through his death, and especially in the curious opacity around the circumstances of his death, Jarrell becomes more thoroughly a friend to Berryman than he was in life. He endured fifty years. He was Randall Jarrell and wrote a-many books & he wrote well. Peace to the bearded corpse. His last book was his best. His wives loved him. He saw in the forest something coming, grim, but did not change his purpose.12

The final stanza gives three more lines to Jarrell, then three to Henry, a marriage of their afflictions and ambitions: Honest & cruel, peace now to his soul. He never loved his body, being full of dents. A wrinkled peace to this good man. Henry is half in love with one of his students and the sad process continues to the whole as it swarmed & began.13

There is a powerful implication in this poem that Jarrell’s death was a suicide, precisely the version of events that Jarrell’s widow, Mary von Schrader Jarrell, had worked so dedicatedly to deny.14 This might explain the curious last line of Dream Song 198, which appears to offer a form of reconciliation for an unspecified offence, a public reference to a private problem: ‘I wish all well, / including Mrs Randall Jarrell’.15 Given that Berryman was probably more familiar with Jarrell’s first wife, Mackie, there is ambiguity Ibid. Ibid. ‘In the judgement of the coroner and the medical examiners – all of whom had seen the body – Randall’s death was accidental, and that is what is given on the death certificate. Not a suicide as was precipitously rumoured in some quarters’. See Mary Jarrell, Remembering Randall (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 168. 15 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 217. 12 13 14

172

Michael Hinds

even in the use of the phrase ‘Mrs Randall Jarrell’, something indicated with the reference to ‘His wives’ in Dream Song 121. If Berryman had something to apologize to Mrs Randall Jarrell for, it might have been for the inference of suicide in that same poem; it could also have been for what he contributed to the memorial volume for her husband, Randall Jarrell 1914–1965, a brilliantly arch portrait of a difficult man. Berryman is partly in awe of his subject, but also vengeful towards him and finishes with an anecdote that is a parody of the cruel anecdotalism for which Jarrell had been notorious: I’ll tell you one other story about Jarrell. This is secondhand, and it comes from Jean Stafford, a woman so witty that you can’t trust her stories. You mustn’t be that witty, but this is apparently a true story. I’ll tell it to you, and then I’ll comment on it. Randall was staying one time at the house of one of Jean Stafford’s best friends, and he played croquet with the children in the afternoon and lost. He didn’t like that at all. He was very grumpy at dinner and went to bed early. Next morning, Jean’s friend woke very early and went downstairs to put on coffee or something, and she was going down her spiral staircase with the window that faced on the front lawn where the wickets were, and she found Randall out there. (This is about five o’clock in the morning.) Randall was studying the ground – changing the wickets. It’s a good thing that he had a very successful career, as he did, because he was a hard loser. He wasn’t a man who liked to lose at all.16

This is a very strange eulogy, but behind its gossip and mischief, there is a rueful understanding of a mutually held loathing; the hatred of losing was another manifestation of the desire for eminence, maybe the only thing that could compensate for more grievous losses sustained elsewhere. This found expression in Berryman’s last variation on the Jarrellicide in Love & Fame’s ‘Relations’: Losses! As Randall observed who walked into a speeding car under a culvert at night in Carolina having just called his wife to make plans for the children17 16 17

Randall Jarrell 1914–65, 17. John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 202.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

173

The last line expresses perfectly the debate about Jarrell’s death, as it comes very close to Mary Jarrell’s explanation for why it could not have been a suicide; her argument was based upon the supposition that someone who cares for his children cannot afford to be suicidal. As we know, these questions were freighted with agony for Berryman. Jarrell as an anxious father takes us right back to an even more thorough consideration of the obsession with status that is used to exemplify the collective temper of the middle generationists. Their anxieties about success were not unique, however; ambition and material success were hegemonic values in post-war America, and poets worrying about getting ahead were at many levels the same as insurance salesmen or ad men preoccupied with the same thing. Jarrell nailed this phenomenon with typically epigrammatic force: ‘Who knew that the age of the poet in the Grey Flannel Suit was coming?’18 The ubiquity of the grey flannel suit was a direct indication of the professionalization and specialization of all aspects of American life, and the competitive edginess of Berryman and Jarrell was part of this excess of organization with its foundation in capital. It is here that they intersect most meaningfully, where poetry and money meet, and in their anxious querying of how one might become the other. Clive James’ essay on Jarrell contextualizes the will-to-fame within an analysis of American Poetry Incorporated that he had gleaned from a typically cynical Ian Hamilton: In America, the poetic heavies were always ‘working on a book of poems’, usually with the benefit of a large support system – a sojourn at the expense of the Corporation of Yaddo, for example – and almost invariably with the intention of winning a National Book Award at the very least. For the securing of the awards, the poet’s hunger for self-promotion and the upmarket media taste for the alpha celebrity went hand in hand: they were made for each other.19

18 19

Randall Jarrell in Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection (expanded edition), ed. Mary Jarrell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 413. Clive James, ‘Poetry’s Ideal Critic: Randall Jarrell’, in As of this Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968–2002 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 88.

174

Michael Hinds

The analogy of poetic and financial speculation is driven towards an inevitable crash: Deadly serious about being thought successful as artists, they forgot that a better guarantee of seriousness would have been to pursue their art even if they were thought to have failed. The risk run by the adepts of a spiritual activity in a materialist society became threateningly clear; when all the measures are set internally, peer-group pressure can be fatal. Lowell, Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath: to any of them, nothing mattered more than the ticker tape that carried the stock market quotation of their status. A ten-point drop could send them to the window sill: for the artists concerned with his own share price, it is always 1929.20

There is plenty to argue with here, not least the suggestion that these poets were uniquely sensitive to matters of status and ambition and only in terms of their own internal market; such an obsession with measurable prestige was epidemic and endemic in America, the evident symptom of a capitalist culture. In Jarrell’s poetry, any such measuring is an instrument of total terror, as in ‘The Emancipators’ which indicts the Enlightenment for its generation of a hyper-rationality that translates beings into objects, ideals into uses: ‘Your doctrines blew like ashes from your bones’.21 Reading Jarrell’s poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, it is evident that he did not need to meet Hannah Arendt to evolve the thorough post-Marxist pessimism that is so evident in the jeremiads against consumerism of the much later A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. In the poems of the wartime books, Losses and Little Friend, Little Friend, Jarrell was already sounding like Theodor Adorno, who had spent the mid-1940s in Pacific Palisades putting together the exploded epigrams of Minima Moralia, a book that is uniquely acute in its sense of America at that time as a centre of violent transition and imposition, one that demanded comparison to the human catastrophes then taking place elsewhere in the world.22

20 Ibid. 89. 21 Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 120. 22 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. H. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974).

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

175

In his essay ‘Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture’, Diederik Oostdijk observed that in Jarrell’s 1947 poem ‘Money’, his ‘implicit criticism of the capitalist system … [i]s indeed similar to leftist readings of culture, for instance by members of the Frankfurt School’.23 This tentative reading should be rewritten, and it can be applied to practically the entirety of Jarrell’s work; his criticism of the capitalist system was explicit, in that he showed the consequences of its insidious reification of its values throughout life in America, where ‘the things learn that they are things’;24 rather than being merely similar to Frankfurt School analysis, therefore, it might be seen as a direct (if unconscious) expression of it. Furthermore, it was not the consumer culture of the post-war period that brought this analysis into being for Jarrell; rather, it was the war itself, or rather the global forces that had engineered it. The Marxism of these poems is practically didactic, particularly when they concentrate into epigrams. ‘Because we died a bank in Manchester / Ships textiles to the blacks the Reich had taxed.’25 ‘What fool would kill his neighbour for the thanks / Of governments of other people’s banks?’26

Pessimism is a complex phenomenon in Jarrell’s poetry, sometimes expressed comically and elsewhere in much more thoroughly melancholic terms. It is most readily identified in the late essays of A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, where Jarrell performed the role of American Jeremiah with the grace of a dandy; however, that was a late style revision and reassertion of a radical tendency which had been there from the very beginning. Jarrell’s early poetry bears the evident weight of his simultaneous interest in Marx and Freud; the influence of the latter on him has been thoroughly

23

Diederik Oostdijk, ‘Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture’, in Eric L. Haralson, ed., Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 113–32; 116. 24 Jarrell, ‘The Lines’, The Complete Poems, 198. 25 Jarrell, ‘The Soldier’, The Complete Poems, 402. 26 Jarrell, ‘The Germans Are Lunatics’, The Complete Poems, 443.

176

Michael Hinds

explored, but the question of his political commitments has been treated far more cautiously.27 Critically, however, the point is not whether Jarrell was more interested in Freud or Marx; what demands to be understood is the way in which he saw them as equally necessary, enfolded within each other in ‘the forest / Of luck and money’.28 The inference might be that Jarrell left Marx behind on the way to adopting Freud wholly, if we read lines like ‘Use-, surplus- and exchange- / Value (all that, and plain/ Value’ from ‘The Night before the Night before Christmas’ in terms of exhausted irony.29 But in his fundamentally dialectical habit of mind, and in his lifelong contextualization of human subjects in inhuman situations, there is plenty of evidence that he still adhered to a Marxist analysis in substantial ways, not least in how he was drawn to thinking about all experience as founded in economy. Jarrell frequently expresses this comically – ‘Friends! Subjects! Customers!’30 – yet the satire is grounded in such thorough cynicism that it is hardly funny. In this way, Jarrell provides a thoroughly Adornoesque critique of Enlightenment as only another expression of total Capital, and that selfhood as such is utterly subordinate to it. This finds its expression in the specialization of culture and society, and the corralling of individuals into their niches, including killing, profiteering and the writing of poems.

Mary Jarrell was undoubtedly influential again in this, with her assertion in the Letters that Jarrell had been ‘apolitical since the 1940s’ (486), only for John F. Kennedy to reawaken his interest. It should also be added to this that the kind of politics which Jarrell had been interested in was not something that would be advertised unwarily in the Eisenhower era; the brief but highly uncomfortable investigation about his alleged communism when he was nominated as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress is a clear indication of why Jarrell had reason to opt for an appearance of silence. Jarrell’s politics became submerged, rather than frozen, in his work. Burt makes a great deal of reference in his study to a range of sociological and psychological theories, but does not emphasize politics to anything like the same degree; it needs to be conceded that the socio-psychological is inevitably also a political context for reading. 28 Jarrell, ‘1938: The Spring Dances’, The Complete Poems, 390. 29 Jarrell, ‘The Night before the Night before Christmas’, The Complete Poems, 44. 30 Jarrell, ‘The Island’, The Complete Poems, 60. 27

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

177

We who have possessed the world As efficiently as a new virus; who classified the races Species, and cultures of the world as scrub To be cleared, stupidity to be liquidated [………………………….………….………….….] Who made virtue and poetry and understanding The prohibited reserves of the expert, of workers Specialized as the ant-soldier31

These lines are taken from ‘The Winter’s Tale’, a poem in Jarrell’s first full volume Blood for A Stranger (1942); they show that Jarrell’s analysis of the total influence of capital was formed early. They also show that this understanding had direct implications for how Jarrell regarded the dominant literary values of his time. He shows the direct correspondence between the New Critical obsession with metrics and capital’s matrix; in this way he is prefiguring his own defence of Whitman in 1955, where his ventriloquizing of a formalist contempt for ‘Song of Myself ’ is read as analogous to the psychopathology of genocidal utilitarianism: ‘the man who would call the next quotation a mere list – anybody will feel this – would boil his babies up for soap’.32 The empirical means the murderous. Questions of taste and measure were consequently highly political, and for Jarrell expressions of taste were loaded with anxious impact; his championing of unfashionable writers such as Kipling was also more complicatedly self-reflexive than merely expressing his resentment at not being more celebrated. Jarrell particularly felt compelled towards work that was popular (at least qualifiedly) with anyone other than literary specialists (even though he was one). The critical economy that he himself had perpetuated as a poetic gatekeeper for The Nation was misunderstood as defensive, as an insulation of unique qualities that might be called poetry. What Jarrell was demanding was something different; poetry that could be transmitted beyond the domain of poetry, reaching the minds of people who did not view it as a specialization, but as a thing among other things 31 Jarrell, The Complete Poems, 380. 32 Jarrell, ‘Some Lines from Whitman’, Poetry and the Age (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 114.

178

Michael Hinds

that was worthy of attention (a simple-sounding but complex perspective in its generous social commitment). Jarrell’s great failure as a poet was that he never quite wrote such poetry, no matter how hard he tried.

II  Jarrell’s Berryman It is significant that while Lowell, Berryman and Jarrell may have perceived themselves as being in competition for recognition, they did not necessarily regard themselves as having the poetic relationship that critics such as Thomas Travisano have subsequently endeavoured to establish as a basis for their classification.33 In these poets’ critical writings on one another, they often display mutual regard and ambition, but never acknowledge or reveal any shared artistic identity. Jarrell reviewed Berryman’s work on only a few occasions; his reticence signified his conspicuously qualified admiration. In his review of New Directions: 1941 for The Partisan Review ( July–August 1942), Jarrell lamented the lack of direction and concentration that he saw in Berryman’s early poems with a single sentence: John Berryman’s ‘Five Political Poems’ have lots of Yeats, lots of general politics, a 1939 reissue of 1938, and a parody of ‘Lord Randall’ that – but nothing can make me believe that Berryman wrote this himself, and is not just shielding someone.34

33

34

Travisano argues that: ‘Jarrell, Bishop, Berryman, and Lowell were drawn so magnetically and lastingly to one another’s work (despite obvious differences in temperament, artistic manner, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth) because each consciously or unconsciously recognized in the others a shared determination to bypass or unmake modernism’s impersonal aesthetic and to create amongst themselves a new aesthetic that would empower them to address the problem of selfhood in the postmodern world’. See Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 9. Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 86.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

179

The criticism is readable as a classic piece of Jarrellian cruelty, but the remark that John Berryman is ‘shielding’ John Berryman or an unnameable other identifies the simultaneously enabling and disabling crisis of identity that would persist throughout Berryman’s writing. Nevertheless, Jarrell’s public and private comments on Berryman tend towards the negative; in a letter to Allen Tate in 1940, Jarrell discussed the inclusion of himself, Berryman and George Marion O’Donnell in the New Directions collection Five Young American Poets: I thought Berryman much better than O’Donnell so far as the negative virtues are concerned; as for positive ones, there the difference is smaller. I think Berryman has a pretty inferior feel for language for one thing; and to talk about your old favourite, the poetic subject, he’s obviously not really found his.35

Jarrell did not live to witness the magnificent unravelling of The Dream Songs in which Berryman certainly ‘found’ ‘his poetic subject’. Nevertheless, Jarrell’s identification of selfhood as the problematic – but potentializing – core of Berryman’s writing is astute. In his 1948 review of The Dispossessed, Jarrell alluded to how effective Berryman’s dissembling could be, saying, ‘among all those statues talking like a book, there were, sometimes, lines of an obscure magic’.36 Yet despite Jarrell’s indication that there was imminent genius in Berryman’s poetry, he never wrote about him or reviewed him again. Berryman was similarly reluctant to comment in print on Jarrell’s work during their lifetime, producing just one review of Poetry and the Age and never writing about Jarrell’s poems until after his death. At the end of the croquet hoops-anecdote, it is notable that Berryman chose to commemorate an ingeniously complex human phenomenon – ‘this amazing man’ – rather than as a great writer.37 The rueful tone of Berryman’s remarks signifies the disconnection between the two men, but also an acknowledgement that they both were under the obligation to fashion a ‘career’. For Berryman – as for many others – the really memorable incarnation of Jarrell as a writer 35 See Letters of Randall Jarrell, 30. 36 Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co., 153. 37 Berryman, Randall Jarrell 1914–1965, 17.

180

Michael Hinds

was as a killer-critic, ‘immensely cruel, and the extraordinary thing about it is that he didn’t know he was cruel’.38 This is a perfect statement of the writer’s predicament under capital; to make your career by terminating the merits of others; Jarrell did it unwittingly to others, according to Berryman. Berryman is knowingly doing the same thing to Jarrell. The wariness here is an American product, emerging from what Adorno observed to be the fundamental anti-social rhythm of society in the United States, its relentless promulgation of competition. In the midst of standardized, organized human units the individual persists. He is even protected and gaining monopoly value. But he is in reality no more than the mere function of his own uniqueness, an exhibition piece, like the foetuses that once drew the wonderment and laughter of children. Since he no longer has an independent economic existence, his character begins to contradict his objective social role. Just because of this contradiction, he is tended in nature reserves, enjoyed in idle contemplation. The individualities imported into America, and divested of individuality in the process, are called colourful personalities. Their eager, uninhibited impulsiveness, their sudden fancies, their ‘originality’, even if it only be a peculiar odiousness, even their garbled language, turn human qualities to account as a clown’s costume. Succumbing to the universal mechanisms of competition and having no other means of adaptation to the market and making good than their petrified otherness, they plunge passionately into the privilege of their self and so exaggerate themselves that they completely eradicate what they are taken for. […] Those who put their individuality on sale adopt voluntarily, as their own judges, the verdict pronounced on them by society.39

Adorno’s analysis can clearly be applied to the way in which poets (and everyone else) might caricature themselves (and others) to survive in the universal grindhouse of competitiveness. It also has a further implication for the way in which we conceive of these poets together, not least within a group context like the middle generation (or indeed confessional poets). Poets are celebrated as exemplary individualities, only to be subsumed into the mechanisms of competition; for Jarrell and Berryman, the middle generation construct clearly exists as such a mechanism. If we insist upon the

38 Berryman, Randall Jarrell 1914–1965, 15. 39 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 135–6.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

181

extraordinary aspects of their work, it perversely only serves to justify the mechanism, and provides us with the material to make what are otherwise irrelevant comparisons. In Jarrell’s case, his poetry ‘resembled’ Berryman’s on only three or four occasions; and it was early in their careers, when both bore heavily the influence of Auden. As for Lowell and Jarrell, resemblance between them is rare enough to be considered accidental. Whatever coincidences there were came from the sharing of early influences such as Tate (soon to be renounced, particularly in Jarrell’s case) or certain formal qualities which were relinquished as each poet pursued his own mannerisms. Jarrell was admittedly open to the idea of transference from his work to that of his contemporaries, but this was almost invariably with women poets like Adrienne Rich or Eleanor Ross Taylor, not Lowell or Berryman. When Jarrell wrote to Bishop of what he felt to be a unique sympathy between them, however, the awkwardness of the moment is tangible, as if Jarrell was blundering into Bishop’s private rooms: I always have a queer feeling when I talk to you – I don’t know whether I can describe it. It’s as if what you said – even when it’s uncongenial to me, something I’d never think or say – were in another way always congenial, direct, easy for me to see and feel; as if we were very different but did come from the same planet, so that it’s easier for me than something for somebody just like us from another planet. It’s a feeling I never have with somebody else: I’m not saying this as a vague intensive but as a precise observation. It’s as if you were a color I see so easily I hardly have to look.40

If Bishop responded to this letter of February 1957, it has not yet emerged; a letter she wrote to Lowell in December of that year refers to a ‘long and peculiar silence (which I really feel was my fault this time, probably)’.41 It is hard to resist the thought that Jarrell might have gone too far in his ardent claims of kinship. Jarrell is often represented as a problem in terms of tact, as a violator of codes (not least codes of niceness and conformity between poets), as if he did not get (or chose not to get) the milieu (or more emphatically, the class) in which he was operating. In some cases, this 40 Jarrell, Letters of Randall Jarrell, 420. 41 See Bishop in Words in Air, 243.

182

Michael Hinds

goes further, and the interloper becomes a figure of demonic mystique. In this excerpt from Paul Mariani’s biography of Berryman, the critical trope of ‘listing’ Jarrell licenses his fetishization into an obscure object of desire, simultaneously signifying the erotic, the Gothic, the sadistic, the neurotic: Jarrell: tall, willowy, thin, dark-haired, dark-eyed, half a year older than Berryman, a man of stunning contrasts, a sentimental southerner, a hipster whose language was ten years out of date, a puritan who drove fast cars, a killer who could weep apologetically after his words had innocently sliced the heart from his victim.42

Jarrell is made into a combination of Hester Prynne, Joan Crawford and Blanche du Bois. His casting as the femme fatale of American poetry is doubly significant; it allows the insinuation that Jarrell’s conflicted sexuality was the source of what made him problematic, something that Berryman had already identified in Dream Song 121: ‘He never loved his body’.43 It also identifies him as a deviant in comparison to the more macho heroics or anti-heroics of Lowell and Berryman. Yet Mariani makes Jarrell sound like a Berryman poem, a sum of alienations and contradictions. This camp carnivalizing of Jarrell can also imply a J. Edgar Hooveresque hypocrisy on the part of the critical terminator and gatekeeper, the ‘establishmentarian’, as Roy Basler labelled him, who hid ruthlessness beneath his extravagance.44 From a limited perspective, this list of definitions and descriptions clearly indicates that each individual term is inadequate as an authoritative statement of Jarrell’s achievement and what it signifies; yet it also suggests that Jarrell flauntingly and deliberately defied such normative terminologies. For all that, Jarrell as critic did oil the killing machine, even if as a poet he was processed by it. Part of Jarrell’s motivation for such resistance was the fact that such conflicts of name-tagging were irrelevant, as they were overruled by the hostility of American culture to the fastidiousness of the academy, just as 42 Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (New York: Norton, 1990), 173. 43 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 138. 44 Roy P. Basler, The Muse and the Librarian (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 146.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

183

it was indifferent to poetry: ‘The public has an unusual relationship to the poet: it doesn’t even know that he is there’.45 In the same way as Jarrell, Berryman related public indifference to poetry with the desires of critics for increasingly modish but limited group-designations for poets’ place in tradition. Can we regard Roethke and Lowell as members of one poetic generation? Considering the figure of Karl Shapiro whose age divides theirs and who, as we will see in a moment, certainly ought to be regarded as a member of generations, it would seem that they can. But I wonder whether the question has meaning in a society where the attention paid to poetry is so very slight. A ‘generation’ in this sense, apart from the private sense of co-working that an artist may have, is a public conception – one that still exists in England and France. But probably the American conception of a poet is of a man dead, or in his eighties (Frost, Sandburg) or a European. […] No sense of a generation of poets will flow from this conception; one thinks instead of isolated pockets of spiritual activity.46

Berryman’s ‘conclusion’ indicates that he understood with Jarrell not only the inadequacy of movements as a conceptualizing agency in the reception of poetry, but also the idiotic power of movements to contribute to the overall indifference with which poetry was regarded, casting poets in roles instead of their complex histories: ‘let us avoid cant about poetic generations and war poets and other things we care nothing about’.47 It also indicates that Berryman understood very well that the ‘public concept’ of a generation was only ‘public’ in the sense that a brand is, or another form of convenience that serves a total conformity. Yet a shared sense of frustration and anxiety between the poets did not result in an identical poetic project. Berryman’s poetry was a method of survival, a radical strategy of containment, given the immense destructive force that his work could gather; Jarrell worried explicitly at the question of the insignificance of both poetry and himself to the public up until his death, demonstrating ‘the obscurity of the poet’ in equal measure to lamenting it. Berryman performed riotously as if an 45 Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co., 305. 46 John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 311. 47 Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 312.

184

Michael Hinds

audience existed for him already; Jarrell wrote for an audience that he thought he ought to have, but did not.

III Money-Men Frank Lentricchia showed in Modernist Quartet how relationships to money were intricately worked into the poetry of Stevens, Eliot, Frost and Pound.48 This was a substantial factor in their compulsive appeal to Berryman and Jarrell, providing an intrigue beyond aesthetic modelling. In The Dream Songs, Eliot is ‘The subtle American British banker-man’,49 while Stevens is ‘That funny money-man’.50 In Jarrell, these poets and Frost are regarded as writers who cracked the code of combining material and artistic success (even if one was not necessarily the product of the other). Just as with Whitman, Jarrell was obsessed with Frost’s accessibility and marketability, and how he achieved this despite the barely repressed menace of much of his work, its covert hostility to the same readers which it nevertheless seduced. Frost was a remarkable phenomenon in that he was the most professional of all poets, but his version of professionalism was very different to that of poet-academics. He managed to evade the effects of the academic-specialization of poetry, the knowledge-economy that Berryman knew would be his fate: ‘will assistant professors become associates / by working on his works?’51

48 Frank Lentricchia argues that, ‘The American literary dream in the twentieth century is to reconcile aesthetic commitment and economic necessity beyond the storied opposition that had more or less inescapably haunted writers ever since the eighteenth century, the more or less of nightmare depending on the more or less of cash a writer might lay easy claim to from an inheritance, say, or possibly a patron.’ See Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48. 49 Berryman, Dream Song 218, The Dream Songs, 237. 50 Berryman, Dream Song 219, ibid. 238. 51 Berryman, Dream Song 373, ibid. 395.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

185

Of course, the path that opened up for Jarrell and Berryman which allowed them to pay for their poetry was by working in universities, but this apparent freedom came at a price, with the two-way terror that comes with professionalization in the arts and the academy. The professionalization of these activities condemns those who regard their work (or have to regard it) as a profession to the logic of the career-path, with all of the compliance, panic and illiberality which that implies. It also breeds a massive class resentment against those who can do it for love rather than money. Their very pleasure becomes readable as a decadent lack of professional accountability. As Adorno wrote, such a working environment becomes a site of acute sensitivity to economic privilege: ‘Some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game’.52 Berryman and Jarrell did not have the luxury of choice, but they could enjoy the fantasy that they did: Mary Jarrell quotes her husband as saying ‘I’m crazy about teaching; if I were a rich man, I’d pay to teach’.53 This statement is often taken to communicate a sense of mission on Jarrell’s part, a sense of his own privilege, but it is not quite the same as saying that you would be happy to work for nothing. Both Berryman (‘Who gains his housing, heat, food, alcohol / himself & for his spouse & brood, barely’54) and Jarrell potentially were ‘Bards freezing, naked, up to the neck in water’,55 had it not been for their other lives as academics. They were not moneymen like Stevens or Eliot, nor were they opt-ins to academia like Lowell and Bishop: their lives were structured around the necessity of teaching. Relationships to money are always personal, this is what signifies its totalizing power and also where the palpable distress of Jarrell and Berryman’s poetry emerges from; they address it in fundamentally different ways, but both describe money-graphs in their poetry which manifest fluctuations of dispossession and acquisition, minor wins and major losses:

52 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 21. 53 Randall Jarrell’s Letters, 435. 54 Berryman, ‘Dream Song 141’, The Dream Songs, 158. 55 Berryman, ‘Dream Song 125’, ibid. 142.

186

Michael Hinds Each cat should seizing private waterfall, Or rent, as Henry do. Seizure is gall, I guess. Yes; We nothing own. But we are lying owned56

The Dream Songs describe a volatility that is fundamentally economic; there are libidinal and political economies at work too, but they emerge from base anxieties about money. A marked index of health and wealth is evident throughout the sequence, running a continuous seam of microaggravation about the fear of being broke: All your bills will be paid, he added, tense.57 O and on these he banked58 Supreme my holdings, greater yet my need59 No wonder they don’t pay you60 I feelin fair mysef, taxes & things seem to be back in line61 What ever happened to Political Economy, leaving me here?62 Pushing his fright off with the now accumulated taxes accustomed in his way to solitude and no bills63

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Dream Song 228, ibid. 247. Dream Song 154, ibid. 173. Dream Song 160, ibid. 179. Dream Song 64, ibid. 71. Dream Song 67, ibid. 74. Dream Song 68, ibid. 75. Dream Song 84, ibid. 99. Dream Song 91, ibid. 106.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

187

Like everything else in The Dream Songs, such matters might seem unimportant until they are measurable by death. Henry rushes not in here. The matter’s not their matter, and Hart Crane drowned himself over some money64

When money takes the form of sex, the distinction between Jarrell and Berryman could not be clearer. Prefiguring the predations of Don Draper in Mad Men, Henry thinks of desire in terms of campaigns and conquest: ‘The thought he puts / into that young woman / would launch a national product’.65 Jarrell’s later poems are full of not-so-young women that desire to be seen in such a way: ‘I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me / And its mouth watered’.66 The positionings are different, but the understanding is the same, that there is no intimacy that has not been zoned and vocabularized by capital. Even princesses exemplify such rigours; fairy tales were to Jarrell what the mundo was to Stevens, but again their primary interest for Jarrell was as much economic as psychological. Fairy tales fantasize about hierarchies of privilege and wealth, but also about their dissolution. Cinderella and Snow White should be Queens, but they live and work like peasants. They suffer from the same malaise as Jarrell’s shoppers and trophy wives. When Jarrell enters into a masculine characterization of desire by shopping, it is in the form of the hilarious (but nonetheless terrifying) catalogue-reader of ‘Sears Roebuck’, a post-nuclear, hellfire-afflicted consumer who first browses the things he does not desire, just so he can ogle the women in the Lingerie section (that he does). This masturbatory ‘John Doe’ does this all under the shadow of a double apocalypse, the end of days that he subscribes to as a Christian, and the nuclear disaster that Jarrell identifies as the frame of menace within which all such consumption operates.67

64 65 66 67

Berryman, Dream Song 180, ibid. 199. Berryman, Dream Song 69, ibid. 76. Jarrell, ‘Next Day’, The Complete Poems, 279. Jarrell, ‘Sears Roebuck’, The Complete Poems, 109.

188

Michael Hinds

The later Dream Songs keep re-iterating the ever-present demands on mind and body that ‘Ha ha, money, money, money’ exerts on Henry, as Berryman writes in Dream Song 318;68 this acquired a particular focus in Irish exile, when Berryman writes of the torment of being a landlord – a torment that is only fuelled by friends finding it amusing: Henry as a landlord made his eight friends laugh But Henry laughed not’69

Being the man of property is the real problem here, as such a man also therefore has something to lose, and contains the potential to become another failed father, a failed banker: ‘Abruptly my happy thought became financial’.70 In Minima Moralia, Adorno had indicated how economics added an even crueller twist to the knot of Oedipal and generational anxieties: Our relationship to parents is beginning to undergo a sad, shadowy transformation. Through their economic impotence they have lost their awesomeness […] today we are faced with a generation purporting to be young yet in all its reactions insufferably more grown up than its parents ever were; which, having renounced before any conflict, draws from this its grimly authoritarian, unshakeable power. […] Even the outdated, inconsistent, self-doubting ideals of the older generation are more open to dialogue than the slick stupidity of Junior.71

For Jarrell and Berryman, the feelings of aggression towards parents who had abandoned them one way or the other were not only personal, therefore. In the matrix of capital, you can disappear overnight, no individual can be held to blame for that.

68 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 340. 69 Berryman, Dream Song 336, ibid. 358. Irish attitudes to money were a significant element in Jarrell’s expression of revulsion for Ireland in ‘A Rhapsody upon Irish Themes’, where he describes the country as bearing ‘the adding-machine on your shoulder’. See Jarrell, The Complete Poems, 75. 70 Berryman, Dream Song 337, The Dream Songs, 359. 71 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 22.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

189

I raced into the bank, my bank, after two years, with healthy cheques & nobody seem to know me: was I ex-: like Daddy??72

Both could trace the collapse of their family romances to the economics of the 1920s, and in the wake of that developed extraordinarily intense relationships with their mothers; Berryman’s correspondence with Jill demonstrates an edgy intimacy, whereas Anna Campbell Jarrell was kept at a remarkably chilly distance. In Jarrell’s late poem ‘The Player Piano’, he comes to a realization that his parents were hapless in the face of the larger forces that govern a life, and that outrage was only the perpetuation of the problem: Two babies with their baby. I don’t blame you, You weren’t old enough to know any better; If I could I’d go back, sit down by you both, And sign our true armistice73

In this, he recognized the conclusion that Adorno had come to in his account of generational aggressions: ‘One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one’s parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one that was even worse’.74 The automatic piano plays what it is programmed to play, providing a soundtrack for the stranglehold of capital. The poem hesitates between rage and forgiveness, hamstrung with intelligent understanding of how his parents were constrained, but unable to do anything about it. This understanding also explains why The Dream Songs could not end simply with the antic dispatch of an already dead banker; to do so would only upset the balance sheet. The pound-for-pound weighting of fatherly responsibility for his ‘heavy daughter’ in Dream Song 385 implies a contract of sorts with the father-spectre of the previous song, achieving a commerce like that which

72 Berryman, Dream Song 241, The Dream Songs, 260. 73 Jarrell, ‘The Player Piano’, The Complete Poems, 354. 74 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 22.

190

Michael Hinds

Ezra Pound agreed with Whitman in ‘A Pact’, the acknowledgment of an unbearably shared burden.75 Jarrell also wrote towards such a balancing in The Lost World, most noticeably in ‘Thinking of the Lost World’: I reach out to it Empty-handed, my hand comes back empty, And yet my emptiness is traded for its emptiness, I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found Columns whose gray illegible advertisements My soul has memorized world after world: LOST NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD. I hold in my own hands, in happiness, Nothing: the nothing for which there’s no reward.76

What Jarrell has reached is a place beyond exchange, where he wants nothing, and also perhaps where he has nothing to offer. In the period following the publication of The Lost World, Jarrell appears to have attempted to escape the demands of money by performing incomprehensible giveaways. His attempt to tip a waitress with a cheque for $1,500 (while visiting his mother in Nashville) has been cited by Mary Jarrell as the act that led to his psychiatrist recommending his admission to hospital;77 it also suggests that Jarrell had found himself emerging into a Lear-like state in which he would strive to see whether nothing would come of nothing. Berryman came to a similar understanding of the need for the peace that nothing brings, but did so more quickly and adroitly through the guise of the fool. Jarrell’s knowledge was more straightforwardly agonizing, as he wrote in ‘90° North’, ‘Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain’.78 In perhaps the strangest coincidence that exists between them, both Jarrell and Berryman fixated on bats at roughly the same moment; Jarrell for his children’s book The Bat-Poet (1964) and Berryman memorably in Dream Song 63, which begins, ‘Bats have no bankers & they do not 75 Berryman, Dream Song 385, The Dream Songs, 407. 76 Jarrell, ‘Thinking of the Lost World’, The Complete Poems, 338. 77 Jarrell, Letters of Randall Jarrell, 500. 78 Jarrell, The Complete Poems, 113.

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

191

drink’.79 Jarrell had written about animals endlessly in his work, and particularly the rapt affection that children extend to them (as in the three-part poem, ‘The Lost World’, where he describes cuddling up to the pet dog of the woman who owns the M-G-M lion). Adorno again intervenes productively for us here: The relation of children to animals depends entirely on the fact that Utopia grows disguised in the creatures whom Marx even begrudged the surplus-value they contribute as workers. In existing without any purpose recognizable to men, animals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, utterly impossible to exchange. This makes them so beloved of children, their contemplation so blissful. I am a rhinoceros, signifies the shape of the rhinoceros.80

Animals are only themselves, animals have nothing; ‘Bats have no bankers’.81 That song directs us again to the traumatic confrontation of Dream Song 384, and the spectre of the ‘dreadful banker […] who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn’; if bats have no bankers, they therefore have it made, because bats therefore do not have fathers who kill themselves. Berryman’s banker-father is a money-man who is indubitably a victim in this context. In ‘Tampa Stomp’, Berryman makes it clear that Florida in 1928 was a landscape Eliotically dank with the inevitability of failure, one in which there was nothing for a money-man to do. The first signs of the death of the boom came in the summer, early, and everything went like snow in the sun. Out of their office windows. There was miasma, a weight beyond enduring, the city reeked of failure.82

The problem for Jarrell was not so much failure in business, as having to endure the counter-myth of the American success story. Jarrell famously loathed his mother’s rich relatives, on whom she was dependent after the break-up of her marriage. Villain in chief was his Uncle Howell Campbell, a candy manufacturer who had directed Jarrell to study accounting with 79 Berryman, Dream Song 63, The Dream Songs, 70. 80 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 228. 81 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 70. 82 Berryman, Collected Poems, 247.

192

Michael Hinds

the view that he should one day take over the business. He was particularly repelled by the memory of having to sell candy and Christmas wrapping door-to-door in an earlier effort to teach him the trade: ‘Imagine, pestering people like that in their houses. Wasn’t that a wicked thing to make a child do?’83 In Jarrell’s apparently benign late poem about his paperboy, ‘Nestus Gurley’, we are really seeing the little entrepreneur that he could not bear to be.84 Howell Campbell appears to have been the model for the protagonist of ‘Money’, a poem that shows us a man who is also the instigator of a chain of correspondences and other guises.85 He is a master of servants, a thug and a miser, but he is also shown to be a donor to charities and a patron of the arts, as well as a buyer of politicians: ‘In my time I’ve bought the whole Rhode Island legislature’.86 He is Capital, therefore, Mammon in golf-pants. He is a model of the bad patron, indifferent to anything other than the tax-breaks his patronage earns him, demolishing the delusion that there can be a good rich man. In The Lost World’s ‘The Old and New Masters’, Jarrell presents a counter-portrayal of patronage; in his description there of Hugo van der Goes’ Nativity in the Uffizi: The medium-sized donor, his little family,  And their big patron saints; the Virgin who kneels  Before her child in worship87

In this picture, everything knows its place, the donor gave because he recognized that he might have to atone for what he did to get his money in the first place; Capital is subordinate rather than Total. In ‘Money’, we are presented with not only a portrait of a particular individual and a demonstration of his peculiar subjectivity, but the culture that has been generated through his unaccountability to the relative sanity that kept the William H. Pritchard, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 15. 84 Jarrell, ‘Nestus Gurley’, The Complete Poems, 235. 85 ‘Money’ and ‘Sears Roebuck’ are the central texts under scrutiny in Oostdijk’s useful survey of Jarrell’s evolving attitudes towards Consumer Culture in the 1950s and 1960s, see note 23 above. 86 Jarrell, ‘Money’, The Complete Poems, 118. 87 Jarrell, Complete Poems, 332–3. 83

Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities

193

other donor ‘medium-sized’, the kind of sanity that comes with the fear of damnation. Jarrell’s godless money-man has no such fear, fulfilling Adorno’s identification that the ‘miser of our time is the man who considers nothing too expensive for himself, and everything for others’.88 The last stanza offers a Rosebud scenario, that this life of acquisition is founded in want: When my ma died I boarded with a farmer In the next city; I used to think of her, And I looked around me, as I could, And I saw what it added up to: money.89

The miser-brute does not really invite compassion, but that is because he does not invite it; in fact he denies it. Jarrell goes right to the point of indicating vulnerability, only for the money-man to eradicate it: The first time I couldn’t think of anything I didn’t have, it shook me.

But giving does as well.90

It is a final dialectical turn, but it is also a punch-line, shaking us out of the potential sanity that ‘nothing’ provided in ‘Thinking of the Lost World’ and restoring the lunatic hoarding of everyone’s Uncle Howell.

IV Nothing Berryman and Jarrell have nothing in common, in that they recognized the terror of late capitalism, but also realized that there was nothing they could do about it. Adorno described the impossible dilemma for the intellectual in such a society: 88 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 35. 89 Jarrell, The Complete Poems, 119. 90 Jarrell, The Complete Poems, 119.

194

Michael Hinds Material practice is not only the pre-condition of his existence, it is basic to the world which he criticizes in his work. If he knows nothing of this basis, he shoots into thin air. He is confronted with the choice between informing himself or turning his back on what he hates. If he chooses the former, he does violence to himself, thinks against his impulses and in addition runs the risk of sinking to the level of what he is dealing with, for economics is no joke, and merely to understand it one has to ‘think economically’. If, however, he has no truck with it, he hypostasizes as an absolute his intellect, which was only formed through contact with economic reality and abstract exchange relations, and which can become intellect solely by reflecting on its own conditions. The intellectual is thereby seduced into the vain and unrelated substitution of the reflection for the thing. […] Whatever the intellectual does is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependents: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child.91

Jarrell and Berryman were highly intelligent inhabitants of this culture, and they understood that ignominious choice; knowing that to critique was to conform, they could signify everything but mean nothing. The Dream Songs presents it at the very beginning; Henry has to stay huffing in his room, or he must come out to meet the full viciousness of ‘the barbaric success-religion of today’.92 When The Lost World was demolished by Joseph Bennett in The New York Times Book Review, he referred to the book’s ‘indulgent and sentimental Mama-ism […] doddering infantilism’.93 Setting aside the critical merits of this verdict, the phrase aptly indicates the dilemma that Adorno described, and it applies equally well to both Jarrell and Berryman. Capital withers you, even as it makes you a cry-baby.

91 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 132–3. 92 Ibid. 187. 93 The hostility of this review has been suggested by Mary Jarrell as a powerful motive for Jarrell’s depression and eventual death-by-automobile: ‘Within days of this, and in such unrelieved depression that shock treatments were being considered, Randall cut his left wrist in a suicide attempt’. See Remembering Randall, 164.

Katherine Ebury

11 ‘The sonnet might “lead to dishonesty”’:1 John Berryman and Paul Muldoon as Sonneteers

Despite Paul Mariani’s somewhat acid reminder that Berryman did not make ‘any real friends’ during his visit to Ireland in 1967, only ‘pub acquaintances’,2 this essay will consider whether John Berryman can at least be said to have left a poetic legacy in Ireland. I will briefly explore Berryman’s appropriation of the Irish modernist tradition, focusing especially on what might be termed the ‘Irish’ Dream Songs and, in particular, his use of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, as well as his literary tourism during his visit to the country. However, my key focus will primarily be on poetry from an earlier period of Berryman’s career. Furthermore, I will explore the influence of Berryman’s experimentation with the sonnet form on the work of Paul Muldoon. The relationship is undoubtedly a productive one to consider, especially in relation to the sonnet form, and it is also worth noting that Muldoon recently paid direct homage to Berryman and the Dream Song form in Berryman’s Fate, poems written largely in response to Berryman’s centenary.3 Focusing on parallels between Berryman’s Sonnets (also known as Sonnets to Chris), The Dream Songs and the eponymous sonnet sequence from Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes, I will look at both poets’ similarly irreverent negotiations of the sonnet form.

1 2 3

Paul Muldoon, Meg Tyler, Jeff Hilson, and Peter Howarth, ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, in A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth, eds, The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11. Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (2nd edn; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 427. See Philip Coleman, ed., Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse (Dublin: Arlen House; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014).

196

Katherine Ebury

Berryman and the Irish Tradition Berryman had a profound interest in Irish literature, and especially the work of Joyce and Yeats. As has recently been noted by Amanda Golden, he taught Ulysses to undergraduates at the University of Minnesota in the period before and during the composition of The Dream Songs.4 Many parts of this long poem were written in Dublin during his visit from 1966 to 1967, when he visited many sites of Joycean and Yeatsian significance, including the Martello Tower at Sandycove, County Dublin, and Yeats’s grave in Sligo. In fact, Vivian Igoe, who was present during Berryman’s visit to the Martello Tower, points out that the poet actually used the Tower as a venue for a photo-shoot, arriving with the photographer Terence Spencer, who took about ‘one hundred photographs’ in the Tower for a feature in Life magazine.5 So far, I have only found a few images out of that hundred: one of Berryman alone on the top of the Tower, one of him with a journalist and the other of Berryman alone inside it.6 The third image could be seen as a constructed but nonetheless poignant avowal of Joycean influence: in a room once occupied by Joyce, with his face turned from the camera, Berryman connects with the stone of the Tower, reaching upward towards the light. The final section of The Dream Songs (Books VI and VII) was written during this period of residence in Ireland, as Berryman grapples with the Irish influence on his work. Even as he explains Henry’s journey in lines that stress Yeats’s influence, in Dream Song 281 – ‘After thirty Falls I rush back to the haunts of Yeats / & others’7 – in that suggestive ‘others’ is Joyce, as well as Jonathan Swift, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Patrick Kavanagh and Austin Clarke, who are all mentioned in Dream Song 321, along with 4 5 6 7

Amanda Golden, ‘Teaching Berryman at Mid-Century: Annotating Ezra Pound and Teaching Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity 21/2 (April 2014): 507–28. See Vivien Igoe, ‘Early Joyceans in Dublin’, in Joyce Studies Annual 12 (2001): 81–99. Some of the images are included in Jane Howard, ‘Whisky and ink, whisky and ink’, Life 63 (21 July 1967): 66–76. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 303.

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

197

James Connolly and Padraic Pearse.8 Gerard Manley Hopkins, who lived for a period and died in Dublin, is added to this list in Dream Song 377.9 Switches from Yeatsian to Joycean influence often occur abruptly between Dream Songs, so the lovely elegy for Yeats in Dream Song 312 closes with the lines: Your high figures float again across my mind and all your past fills my walled garden with your honey breath wherein I move, a mote.10

But Dream Song 313 opens in a way that punctures this Yeatsian mood, reminding us of the way Joyce uses breaks between chapters to rupture Stephen’s epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘The Irish sunshine is lovely but a Belfast man / last night made a pass at my wife’.11 At times Berryman even directly repudiates Yeats, as here in Dream Song 334: ‘Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols / & Wordsworthian egotism’.12 Excellent work on the influence of Yeats on both Berryman and Muldoon has been conducted by a number of scholars: on Berryman and Yeats by Charles Thornbury (1985), John Roe (1999) and Philip Coleman (2003);13 on Muldoon and Yeats by William Wilson (1993), Jonathan

8 9 10 11 12 13

Ibid. 343. Ibid. 399. The relationship between Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’ and Berryman’s sonnets and Dream Songs would also be worth investigating in a future study. Ibid. 333. Ibid. 334. Ibid. 356. See Charles Thornbury, ‘John Berryman and the “Majestic Shade” of W. B. Yeats’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 3 (1985): 121–72; John Roe, ‘Huffy Henry and Crazy Jane: The Dream Songs in Ireland’, Symbiosis: A Journal of AngloAmerican Literary Relations 3/1 (April 1999): 26–40; Philip Coleman, ‘“The Politics of Praise”: John Berryman’s Engagement with W. B. Yeats’, Études Irlandaises 28/2 (Autumn 2003): 11–27.

198

Katherine Ebury

Allison (1993) and Guinn Batten (2001) among others.14 Perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this essay, Northern Irish poet Alan Gillis has argued that ‘while experimentation with the [sonnet] form is now synonymous with Muldoon and Carson, it should be clear that the game begins with Yeats.’15 More recently, as mentioned above, Amanda Golden has researched Berryman’s reading and teaching notes on modernism (2014),16 while Stephen Watt has written on Muldoon and Joyce (2011).17 Aside from this shared influence, my work on the Berryman-Muldoon connection has been inspired by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews’s recent, groundbreaking book, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection (2014). This book seeks ‘to study the dialogic interactions between Northern Irish and American poetries’ through discussions of how poets including Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, and others were influenced by American culture and poetry.18 Berryman is most frequently referenced in relation to Montague’s work, never in relation to Muldoon: Montague knew Berryman personally and, like Muldoon, he also contributed to Coleman’s celebratory volume Berryman’s Fate.19

14 See William Wilson, ‘Yeats, Muldoon, and Heroic History’, Learning the Trade: Essays on W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Fleming West Cornwall (Locust Hill, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1993), 21–38; Jonathan Allison, ‘Questioning Yeats: Paul Muldoon’s “7, Middagh Street”’, Learning the Trade, 3–20; Guinn Batten ‘“Where All the Ladders Start”: Identity, Ideology, and the Ghosts of the Romantic Subject in the Poetry of Yeats and Muldoon’, in Barry Milligan and Ghislaine McDayter, eds, Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Gleckner (London and Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 245–80. 15 Alan Gillis, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 571. 16 See fn 4 above. 17 Stephen Watt, ‘“Oirish” Inventions: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Paul Muldoon’, in Michael Adams, ed., From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 161–83. 18 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry: The American Connection (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2014), 2. 19 See Coleman, Berryman’s Fate, 86–7.

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

199

Although such wide scope does prevent the kind of detailed study of connections that I will attempt here, Kennedy-Andrews endeavors to unsettle simplistic divisions – such as the claim that Northern Irish poetry ‘adher[es] to staid traditions of form and voice’ while American poetry ‘is characterized by originality and improvisation’.20 Kennedy-Andrews argues that, To the American reader, (Northern) British/Irish poetry has allowed a preoccupation with formalism and metrical language to dull the imagination: to the British/Irish reader, the American preference for a freewheeling, loose-lined open-ended poetry runs the risk of sacrificing lyric quality.21

Since the main focus of this essay is on Berryman’s and Muldoon’s negotiations of their formalist inheritance as contemporary poets – and, in particular, their engagement with the sonnet form – I hope to consider how formalism might come to terms with such ‘freewheeling’ play in their work. Equally, however, my opening discussion of Berryman’s visit to Ireland and engagement with an Irish tradition also seeks to offer a corrective to some of Kennedy-Andrews’s political assumptions. He writes, for example, that, ‘[b]y being receptive to American texts, ideas and experience, Northern Irish poets have been able to transform, modernize and internationalize the insular, conservative, nationalistic tradition of Irish poetry.22 While I would broadly agree that this has been true for Muldoon, it posits an unnecessarily one-sided relationship, where Berryman’s influences from Ireland are removed from consideration. As a critical paradigm that idealizes American politics and society it also does not allow much room for the kind of critique of American politics that Muldoon attempts in the sequence of sonnets published in Horse Latitudes, which I will discuss later in this essay.

20 Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry, 7. 21 Ibid. 11. 22 Ibid. 14.

200

Katherine Ebury

Reading Muldoon Reading Berryman Paul Muldoon has never acknowledged the influence of Berryman in print, most often citing the influence of W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and rock music on his work. Moreover, of the so-called Confessionals, only Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop are discussed in his prose book The End of the Poem. Ironically, a five-star Amazon.com review of Berryman’s Fate concluded: ‘I expect I will now spend some time looking at Muldoon’s academic work on Berryman’,23 but no such academic work by Muldoon on the author of The Dream Songs exists. However, the present essay was sparked by my finding by chance a recording, posted online in 2012 by Berryman and Muldoon’s US American publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, of Muldoon reading Dream Song 14, followed by one of Berryman’s Sonnets, and then immediately by his own ‘Burma’ sonnet from the 1998 collection Hay.24 Muldoon notes that he will read four sonnets of his own, but the recording only includes one so we cannot know what three other sonnets followed. One of the key pleasures of this recording is of hearing the Berryman poems in Muldoon’s accent and intonation. Muldoon does not offer any connection between the Berryman poems and his own in the recording; this is in stark contrast to another recording, posted on the same date, also by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, of Seamus Heaney reading Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’, followed by his own poem ‘Postscript’, in which he discusses Hughes’s influence on him, his friendship with the English poet, and offers a thoughtful close reading of the poem.25 Muldoon’s silence on 23

The review is available online under the name ‘B. Johnson’ at (accessed 10 July 2015). 24 See ‘Paul Muldoon Reads John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14”’, 7 February 2012, available online at: (accessed 10 July 2015). 25 See ‘Seamus Heaney reads a poem by Ted Hughes, plus one of his own’, 7 February 2012, available online at: (accessed 10 July 2015).

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

201

why he is reading Berryman and what he thinks of him, though mysterious, is even more suggestive: the ordering of the poems and the choice of form suggests, at least in this one moment, an implied narrative about the genesis of the Muldoon sonnet. One thing that Muldoon might value is the ‘serious play’ element of Berryman’s work, its combination of humour and difficulty. Muldoon has spoken about the sonnet’s ‘serious play’ which allows it to ‘meet a reality’ with ‘flexibility rather than fixity, pliability rather than petrification’: There’s some resistance to the idea that a poem, as it investigates the crime scene of itself, may follow its own leads. This is often described as some version of the tail wagging the dog. My own view is that it’s sometimes only when a tail wags that we become aware that there’s a dog attached to it, though it might also turn out to be an elephant, or a comet, or even a shirt. The serendipitous aspect of writing that Auden refers to as ‘pure accident’ may be no more accidental than play, and no less productive. As the biologist Paul Grobstein once put it in an entry in the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, play ‘is not purely entertainment or a luxury to be given up when things get serious. It is itself a highly adaptive mechanism for dealing with the reality that the context for behavior is always largely unknown’. The ability of the sonnet to manage what I described earlier as ‘meeting a reality’ is astonishing in that regard, for it allows for flexibility rather than fixity, pliability rather than petrification.26

In the kind of tenuous but playful readerly connection often made by Muldoon in The End of the Poem, I cannot help but hear the dog, tail and wag of Muldoon’s point about play as a buried allusion to the ending of Berryman’s Dream Song 14, the poem he read first in the FSG recording. (I also cannot help but hear Muldoon’s notion that a poem ‘investigates the crime scene of itself ’ as a reference to Dream Song 29, surely a prime example of the kind of inductive play that Muldoon advocates). Below the recording of Muldoon reading Berryman’s Dream Song and then his own poem, YouTube commentators note audience laughter during Dream Song 14, which begins and ends in the second stanza. They note,

26 Muldoon, ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, 11.

202

Katherine Ebury Mike Pietrobon: Why are they laughing? This is so incredibly sad. Philip Nast:

Because it’s funny … even if sad.

valentuss:  Mike Pietrobon – you’re absolutely right, my friend! They simply lack the brain cells! They just do not understand what the poet says …27

A risk that the playful, difficult contemporary sonnet takes is the chance of readers or audiences ‘not getting it’: this is something both Berryman and Muldoon are hyperaware of, and yet neither of them makes concessions. Muldoon’s refusal to explain why he is reading Berryman to his audience or to explain the poem is part of this refusal of concessions. Adam Phillips has written about ‘not getting it’ on his book Missing Out: In the smaller world of literary criticism, and the larger world of so-called popular culture, this is known as the ‘difficulty’ of modern poetry. If, at least as a reader of poetry, your project is not to get it, you are better off reading John Ashbery than Philip Larkin, J. H. Prynne rather than John Betjeman. […] When Ashbery was asked in an interview why his poetry was so difficult he replied that when you talk to other people they inevitably lose interest but that when you talk to yourself people want to listen in […] what Ashbery is suggesting in his whimsically shrewd way is that the wish to communicate estranges people from each other. […] The wish to understand or be understood – to, as we say, communicate or be accessible – might give a false picture, might be a hiding place, might be a retreat or refuge.28

Both Berryman and Muldoon seek to turn the familiar sonnet into a place that cannot be a hiding place or retreat or refuge for the reader, or the author for that matter. In these densely packed sonnets we have to risk not getting it – the joke, the personal or political reference, the allusion – and that is part of the pleasure.

27 28

See the ‘Comments’ section following ‘Paul Muldoon Reads John Berryman’s Dream Song 14’ at the website mentioned in note 24 above. Adam Phillips, ‘On Not Getting It’, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 61.

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

203

Berryman’s Sonnets and Horse Latitudes In an essay on the twentieth-century American sonnet, Alex Runchman discusses distinctive aspects of Berryman’s innovations with and variations upon the sonnet: Although Sonnets to Chris is set around Princeton and treats a distinctly modern relationship, The Dream Songs is a more obviously American work. The references to African-American culture, jazz, minstrel shows, American politics and American writers, might seen untenably discordant in a classical sonnet … but the Dream Song form absorbs them all. Unlike Lowell, Berryman does not appear to have found his new form a bind. The model is endlessly adaptable, even more so than the sonnet. Berryman himself points out that the Dream Songs are ‘not but mostly rhymed with great strictness’, his odd phrasings stressing their formality and relative freedom all at once. A rhyme scheme established in the first stanza is not necessarily followed in the second and third, and sometimes a song that does not rhyme to begin with does later. Line lengths range from a single syllable to twenty-three syllables, and the form easily accommodates such variation. […] Although he felt compelled to devise a more flexible form than the sonnet, Berryman nonetheless needed the limitations of structure – and this conforms with traditional defenses of the sonnet that emphasize freedom within bounds.29

Alan Gillis, in his essay on ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, has expressed similar ideas to Runchman about freedom and boundedness in the sonnet form in a Muldoon sonnet from the early collection Meeting the British: Much of Muldoon’s sonneteering stretches the identity of the form beyond recognition. A fourteen-line verse unit forms the backbone of a long poem such as ‘7 Middagh Street’, for example but there seems to be nothing sonnetesque about these units other than that they consist of fourteen lines. Yet, given his experimentation elsewhere, it becomes impossible, or at least meaningless, to attempt to draw a line of distinction between the sonnet and the mere fourteen-line unit. […] As, again

29 Alex Runchman, ‘“Continuity with lovers dead”: Berryman, Lowell and the Twentieth-Century American Sonnet’, in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 29–44; 43.

204

Katherine Ebury and again, we find ourselves within a fourteen-line structure […] we increasingly feel bound within an ineluctable grid of historical and psychic circumscription.30

The idea of ‘units’ that seem ‘sonnetesque’ forming ‘the backbone of a long poem’ applies not merely to many other Muldoon poems such as ‘The More a Man Has’ and ‘The Old Country’ but also, I suggest, to Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, poems which do not meet the traditional or conventional requirement of being written in fourteen-line units. The historical circumscription that Gillis describes in relation to the reader’s experience of the Muldoon sonnet is not simply the sonnet form but history itself: Gillis sees the space of the sonnet as ‘a site of psychic and cultural infliction’.31 So, for example, Muldoon’s sonnet ‘Beijing’, from Horse Latitudes, is satire, puzzle and elegy; as Jefferson Holdridge notes, it contains Muldoon’s ‘criticism of Bush and the war’ while being couched in ‘personal terms of longing and loss’.32 For Berryman, the central historical reality the sonnet had to meet was the Cold War. For Muldoon, it was initially the Troubles in Northern Ireland but more recently he has engaged also with American politics. The Horse Latitudes sonnet sequence responds to the Iraq War with a sequence of nineteen poems responding to historical battles beginning with the letter B: the twentieth poem, which Muldoon reportedly suggests is ‘implied by omission’, would have been about Baghdad.33 As Muldoon has said to the English poet James Fenton, The poems have to do with a series of battles (all beginning with the letter ‘B’ as if to suggest a ‘missing’ Baghdad) in which horses or mules played a major role. Intercut with those battle-scenes are accounts of a ‘battle’ with cancer by a former lover, here

30 Gillis, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, 583. 31 Ibid. 585. 32 Jefferson Holdridge, The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2009), n.p. 33 See Robert Potts, ‘Far more going on than first meets the eye: Robert Potts reviews Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon’, The Telegraph (29 October 2006), available online at: (accessed 3 July 2015).

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

205

named Carlotta, and a commentary on the agenda of what may only be described as the Bush ‘regime’.34

Personal realities, then, are mixed in with these historical events and the degree of attention afforded to them says a good deal about their critical reception. Berryman’s love affairs and family history and drinking are more often highlighted in readings of his sonnets than the Cold War. On the other hand, the underlying theme of loved ones lost to cancer present even in the most political poems of Horse Latitudes has seldom been noted in reviews of Muldoon’s work, even though the Mistress/Muse figure of these sonnets (Carlotta) is dying of breast cancer. Despite passing references to Berryman in recent books on literature and the Cold War such as Deborah Nelson’s Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (2012), the Berryman sonnet has yet to be seen as politically radical, while the Muldoon sonnet has yet to be seen as ‘confessional’. Recent work by Philip Coleman has begun to repair this omission for Berryman.35 The reason Muldoon’s personal poetry has yet to achieve specific attention, on the other hand, might well be because Muldoon defends the radical power of the sonnet through the idea of dishonesty: It’s true, of course, that there’s a long tradition of sonneteering and sonnetizing that allows the casual observer to stigmatize the sonnet as the preserve of the fuddy-duddy and the fart, young and old. The real problem here has nothing to do with the sonnet per se but the widespread belief cherished by many poets, even quite well-known ones, that the actually know what they’re doing. They’re right, of course. They do know what they’re doing, along with the rest of us and, as Warren Zevon would have said, it ain’t that pretty at all. To go back to Auden, I like the idea that, if anything, the sonnet might ‘lead to dishonesty’. It sounds a lot more interesting than wherever it is most poems lead us.36

34 Quoted by James Fenton in ‘A Poke in the Eye with a Poem’, The Guardian (21 October 2006), available online at: (accessed 8 July 2015). 35 See Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating ‘the scene of disorder’ (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014). 36 Muldoon, ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, 18.

206

Katherine Ebury

Dishonesty, rather than confessionalism, seems to be what Muldoon most finds in Berryman if the poems he selects to read from are anything to go by. In email correspondence conducted as part of the research for this essay, Muldoon noted the early influence of a line about dishonesty from Dream Song 16: ‘I’m pretty sure that the idea that one daiquiri telling another a lie is one that influenced some of my own craziness, it being a line I read as a teenager’.37 As I will go on to discuss the politics of the sonnet form, however, it is also worth noting that Dream Song 16, the source of what seems to be Muldoon’s favourite Berryman line, is one of the more overtly political of the Dream Songs, contrasting the poverty of India and China with the ‘gorgeous’ decadence of fashionable American society: Collect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay, in Sealdah Station some possessionless children survive to die. The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.38

Muldoon’s point that the sonnet ‘might lead us to dishonesty’ is especially fitting given many early reviews of Berryman’s Sonnets focused on the supposed inappropriateness of the modern adulterous affair for this courtly love form. Runchman reminds us that courtly love was often adulterous, but quotes Donald Davie: ‘For what we seem faced with is Berryman’s determination […] that Petrarch’s sonnets should (must) be made to fit an adulterous (doubly adulterous, it appears) liaison in the United States of the 1940s. The “fit” is just not there’.39 Mariani’s chapter on the affair in his biography of Berryman is, tellingly, called ‘The Art of Adultery’. The sonnets in this book, therefore, are doubly dishonest: their forms are playful and misleading, while their subject is adultery.

37 Paul Muldoon, email to the author, 16 July 2015. 38 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 18. 39 Runchman, ‘Continuity with lovers dead’, 33.

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

207

Linking the two, we see the evasiveness even of direct address in a secret courtship in the poem that Muldoon chose to read in the recording (Sonnet 37): Sigh as it ends . . I keep an eye on your Amour with Scotch, – too cher to consummate; Faster your disappearing beer than lately mine; your naked passion for the floor; Your hollow leg; your hanker for one more Dark as the Sundam Trench; how you dilate Upon psychotics of this class, collate Stages, and . . how long since you, well, forbore. Ah, but the high fire sings on to be fed Whipping our darkness by the lifting sea A while, O darling drinking like a clock. The tide comes on: spare, Time, from what you spread Her story, – tilting a frozen Daiquiri, Blonde, barefoot, beautiful, flat on the bare floor rivetted to Bach.40

Historical and personal coincidences also link Berryman and Muldoon. Berryman’s Sonnets was published the same year as Berryman’s trip to Ireland (1967); by further coincidence, the sonnets are set in Princeton, where Berryman taught in the 1940s and stayed for several years before beginning an affair with Chris in 1947. Muldoon is now Howard G. B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, so he would see the locations alluded to in these poems every day. Mariani argues that Berryman realized that ‘it was exactly this emphasis on the local in his sonnets that was new and distinctive about them’.41 However, place in Berryman’s Sonnets can also be read in relation to the politics of displacement that Coleman has discerned in relation to The Dream Songs: he writes that ‘the long poem as a whole gives voice to a radically unsettled and unsettling sense of place’.42 40 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 89. 41 Mariani, Dream Song, 193. 42 See Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating the Scene of Disorder, 139.

208

Katherine Ebury

The localized, but somehow blurry, quality of space in Berryman’s Sonnets, where the university, Nassau Street, and the city’s back roads are only backdrops for encounters between the lovers – such as ‘the grove’ which could be anywhere – is not unlike the blurred locatedness of the Horse Latitudes sonnets. The speaker and Carlotta seem to be in a hotel in Nashville, but more important is their placement in the ‘horse latitudes’ doldrums and the ‘B’ places that offer metaphors for their relationship and her illness.

The Politics of Sonnet Forms If we were slightly freer with our definitions of the sonnet it would be possible, and essentially correct, to suggest that Berryman writes nothing but sonnets and sonnet-like forms for most of his career: from the more conventional sonnets addressed to Chris to the truncated stanza-sonnets of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet; to the extended sonnets of The Dream Songs. Berryman noted in a 1969 interview with the Harvard Advocate that the Dream Song stanza form is borrowed from Yeats, but that this form is also ‘rather like an extended, three part sonnet’.43 Although critics have often discussed the erotics of address in Bradstreet this has not extended so far to thinking in detail about this poem’s units as trimmed sonnets. I teach my undergraduate students that a sonnet is basically a fourteenline poem, but Berryman and a few other contemporary poets, including Muldoon, make me want to stop counting lines. Gillis, in discussing what he calls ‘sonnetesque’ poems by Yeats, such as ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ (with thirteen lines) and ‘The Cold Heaven’ (with twelve), identifies a similar aesthetic wish to play with the sonnet form and a similar critical wish to use the term sonnet more freely.44 Cathy Shrank notes that ‘in many Tudor miscellanies […] works deemed sonnets can range from two 43 See John Plotz, et al., ‘An Interview with John Berryman’, Harvard Advocate 103/1 (Spring 1969): 8. 44 Gillis, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, 571.

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

209

to over forty lines’,45 which Berryman as a Shakespeare critic undoubtedly would have known; both Berryman and Muldoon might also be thinking of Yeats, as much as Berryman is also somewhere in the middle between Yeats and Muldoon. John Goodby has argued that, There is an almost mathematical progression in the incidence of sonnets in Muldoon’s work, which builds to a high point in the early 1980s; Mules has sixteen (of forty poems); Why Brownlee Left has nine (of twenty-seven); Quoof fifteen (also of twentyseven), together with the forty-nine ‘imploded sonnets’ of ‘The More a Man Has’; and Meeting the British seven (of twenty-three). So pervasive are they that other lyric forms appear, in context, to be trace particles produced by Muldoon’s bombardment of the sonnet form.46

For the purposes of this essay, I have roughly updated these sonnet counts to include a view of the trend in Muldoon’s more recent work: Madoc has twenty-six sonnet forms, all but one, ‘The Briefcase’, contained within the titular sequence; The Annals of Chile contains three sonnets (of twelve poems); Hay includes thirteen sonnets, plus the thirty sonnets of ‘The Bangle’ (of forty poems); Moy Sand and Gravel has thirteen sonnets (of forty-five poems); Horse Latitudes has fourteen individual sonnets, together with the nineteen sonnets of the ‘Horse Latitudes’ sequence, the thirteen sections of the crown of sonnets called ‘The Old Country’, with overall forty-six appearances of the form across only thirty full poems; Maggot includes thirty-nine sonnets or sonnet units, as well as the nine sonnets of ‘Maggot’ (of thirty-eight poems); One Thousand Things Worth Knowing contains thirteen (of thirty-five poems). So, while Goodby is right to identify the numerical peak of Muldoon’s sonneteering in Quoof (1983), because of ‘The More a Man Has’, there is a similar peak between Horse Latitudes (2006) and Maggot (2010). The sonnets I have counted in each

45 Cathy Shrank, ‘Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in David Armitage, et al., eds, Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2013): 106. 46 John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), 277n63.

210

Katherine Ebury

volume include poems that can be read as Petrarchan and Italian-style sonnets. Interestingly, there tended to be fewer Shakespearean sonnets in the poems I counted from Muldoon’s recent work, although the trace of this form appears to be present in the earlier sequence ‘The More a Man Has’ and elsewhere. Muldoon’s apparent choice of a Petrarchan version of the sonnet as the foundation for his experiments is also significant in relation to Berryman, who, given his work as a Shakespeare critic, preferred the Italian model himself. Runchman notes that ‘Berryman – who never published one – claimed that Shakespearean sonnets were easier to write than Petrarchan ones and thought most of Shakespeare’s couplets weak’, arguing that this and other criticisms of the quality and morality of the Dark Lady sonnets were connected to Berryman’s own unease about recording similarly scandalous material in Berryman’s Sonnets.47 Shrank, on the other hand, has argued of the Renaissance discussions of the sonnet that, ‘[s]onneteering is thus frequently depicted as an activity that contributes little or is even antithetical, to the public life of the polity’, although she also argues that twenty-first century criticism must also acknowledge that ‘the association of sonnets with love poetry does not empty them of political content or political potential’, especially as the love sonnet was a socially acceptable way of expressing political ambition.48 Shrank points out that both Shakespeare’s sonnets and Petrarch’s contain political content, but that Petrarch’s Rime Sparse contained especially satirical and ideological sonnets. We are less familiar with this version of Petrarch, which was ‘overshadowed by post-Romantic critical discourse’, but early modern readers were especially attuned to this aspect of his work, as Berryman would likely have known.49 In relation to the critical failure to acknowledge the politics of the Renaissance sonnet form, Coleman argues that ‘critics have on the whole failed to recognize the extent to which Berryman’s Sonnets – read as a complete sequence – sheds light on the poet’s troubled thinking about the public sphere’, highlighting in

47 Runchman, ‘Continuity with lovers dead’, 37. 48 Shrank, ‘Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, 102. 49 Ibid.104–5.

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

211

particular the political content of Sonnet 4.50 Equally, the Shakespearean form might well be used less frequently by Muldoon for more explicitly political reasons: for a Northern Irish poet to write fully Shakespearean sonnets might well be a bridge too far, unless for the purposes of specific irony. Goodby argues that Muldoon chooses the sonnet ‘because of the traditionally erotic-political content of the sonnet in its Petrarchan origins’, linking its entry into English language poetry in the 1590s via Sidney with the Nine Years War and the Plantation with Ireland.51 Where Goodby sees the politics coming from a deliberate confronting of this legacy, however, I see a more oblique politics emerge from Muldoon’s sidestepping of that tradition through the choice of European forms. In counting Muldoon’s sonnets I included more unconventional sonnets such as the fourteen line units of ‘At Least They Weren’t Speaking French’, which includes three quatrains and two repetitions of a repeated refrain and which is certainly directly political and postcolonial in the way that Goodby argues, or ‘Burma’, which Muldoon read in the recording mentioned above, which is more politically subtle and includes variable line lengths. I have not counted poems that I consider sonnets which are more or less than fourteen lines, though I believe Gillis is correct to say that ‘[t]wo of [Muldoon’s] best sonnets, for example, consist of fifteen lines (“Something Else” and “Aftermath”)’.52 Earlier we saw Runchman praise the flexibility of the Berryman Dream Song variation on the sonnet form. Although Muldoon does not directly comment on the Berryman poems he reads from, it seems clear that his level of play with the line lengths in a poem like ‘Burma’, for example, is very much in sympathy with Berryman’s experiments. Before concluding, I would like to look at Muldoon’s contribution to the Berryman’s Fate volume, where it appears that the question of Berryman’s legacy for Muldoon is addressed in a politically and aesthetically

50 Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision, 86–7. 51 Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950, 277. 52 Gillis, ‘The Modern Irish Sonnet’, 571.

212

Katherine Ebury

complex way through the idea of time.53 The poem is an occasional piece that records a homage to Berryman through the form but also apparently documents Muldoon’s visit to ‘Shad Fest’, a fish-themed arts festival held every April in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Lambertville, New Jersey. I earlier pointed out the connection of Berryman and Muldoon via Princeton; Princeton is important in this poem not just in Muldoon’s explicit reference to the university’s slave-owning past, but also in relation to the mention of Richard Feynman in the final stanza, who took his PhD degree at Princeton. Although Spring is obviously important to the poem’s setting, Muldoon also offers alternatives to progress narratives, discussing the loss of the technology of the mechanical reaper to the dark ages, the idea of antimatter ‘being matter / that merely goes backwards in time’, while each generation repeats the violent consumption of the shad and its eggs. Muldoon’s reference to time running backward and to anti-matter seems to be sourced in the opening of a specific Dream Song, that is Dream Song 103, where Berryman writes, I consider a song will be as humming-bird swift, down-light, missile-metal-hard, & strange as the world of anti-matter where they are wondering: does time run backward – which the poet thought was true; Scarlatti-supple; but can Henry write it?54

Coleman suggests that Berryman’s poem explores ‘analogies between writing and military prowess’,55 while legacies of political violence inform Muldoon’s poem, including Agincourt in the reference to the ‘Henriad’ and the allusion to the St Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V (‘we few, we happy few’). There is also an allusion to George Washington crossing the Delaware River (New Hope legend has it that Washington stayed the night before the battle in the town) and Feynman’s work on the Manhattan See Paul Muldoon, ‘April in New Hope’, in Philip Coleman, ed., Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse, 40. 54 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 120. 55 Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision, 147. 53

Berryman and Muldoon as Sonneteers

213

Project. The tone of seasonal disillusionment is similar to Berryman’s Dream Song 103, which turns out to be, in part, about New Year malaise, concluding with, ‘Happy New Year, Mr Bones’.56 In his poetic tribute to Berryman, then, Muldoon suggests that American society has not moved on from some of the same political issues and conflicts that troubled Berryman in his work. Rather, for both Berryman and Muldoon, to adapt Stephen Dedalus’s well-known formularion in James Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘History is a nightmare’ from which it may not be possible to awake.57

56 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 120. 57 James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics), 34.

Stephen Matterson

12 Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

Richard Wilbur, one of John Berryman’s foremost contemporaries, reflects on boredom in a poem tellingly titled ‘Lying’. In it he asserts, Not that the world is tiresome in itself: We know what boredom is: it is a dull Impatience or a fierce velleity, A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude, To make or do1

Even as late as 1987 the poem nicely represents Wilbur’s characteristic Olympian and latinate loftiness, exactly the style of writing that Berryman had very consciously rejected in the 1950s. But leaving that aside – and, for the moment, the poem’s overall proposed relationship between boredom and lying – it is worth focusing on the assumption that we all ‘know what boredom is’. On one level this seems irrefutable. We have all been bored, and Wilbur succinctly rehearses the register or thesaurus of boredom; tiresome, dullness, velleity, lassitude. His poem develops in complex ways beyond a representation of boredom, which, he suggests is the basis for our lying, our need to invent something more interesting than the life we have, lying that includes imaginative literature and all linguistic troping.2

1 2

Richard Wilbur, ‘Lying’, in New and Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 9. For a nuanced and helpfully contextualized reading of the poem, see Patricia M. Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10–12.

216

Stephen Matterson

But while we have all experienced boredom, it does not necessarily follow that we know what it is. Wilbur’s Wallace Stevens-like sentiment that our imagination arises from dissatisfaction with our actual world is familiar enough. But the concept of boredom deserves consideration in its own right, not just as a staging post for some other destination. For one thing, ‘boredom’ is a relatively recent concept, especially associated with modernity, and has been increasingly scrutinized as a subject over the past forty years. Indeed, it is remarkable to reflect on just how recently the verb ‘to bore’ and the noun ‘boredom’ entered our language. To bore and be bored date from the mid-eighteenth century, while the OED lists ‘boredom’ as a coinage of Charles Dickens, when he needed a noun to represent Lady Dedlock’s state of mind in Bleak House (1852). Dickens created the noun in the way that the noun ‘kingdom’ is formed: ‘my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own maid for being in spirits’.3 This development of the term does not of course suggest that no-one was bored before the eighteenth century. But boredom was in effect the modern secularization of what had generally been considered a spiritual condition, nominated by terms such as acedia, tedium vitae, and melancholy, and then by ‘spleen’ or ‘ennui’. This is the evolution of boredom delineated by Reinhard Kuhn in his ground-breaking study, and has generally been followed by others.4 In particular, a distinction is drawn between ‘boredom’ and ‘ennui’, with ennui considered a ‘judgement of the universe’ while boredom is ‘a response to the immediate’. As Patricia Spacks goes on to elaborate, ‘boredom’ is from within: When midway through the eighteenth century the bore entered the language, moralists, unwilling to locate boredom explicitly as a sin, nonetheless continued to believe

3 4

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: The Folio Society, 1985), 149. Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Ralph Clare usefully and succinctly summarizes ‘The Construction of Boredom’ in his essay ‘The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale King’, in Marshall Boswell, ed., David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing’ (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 187–207.

Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

217

that focused spiritual endeavour might effectively combat psychic malaise. Not your stars or your employment or your friends but your self was at fault if apathy and discontent submerged you.5

Boredom is thus a secularized and internalized condition, distinct from what appear to be its older synonyms. It also, as many have noted, becomes democratic. Tellingly, Dickens coined the term to describe Lady Dedlock, as though the condition was reserved for the leisured class who had no prescribed occupation to fill their days. But the idea that work itself could be boring developed during the industrial revolution, conceptualized by Karl Marx as alienation and by Émile Durkheim as anomie. This idea was outlined in Humboldt’s Gift, one of the great novels to consider boredom, and written by Berryman’s friend Saul Bellow and obliquely representing another, Delmore Schwartz, recalled as Von Humboldt Fleisher. Bellow’s protagonist Charlie Citrine has been pressed to write a study of ‘Great Bores of the Modern World’ and although the project is abandoned, we see a good deal of his notes for it. In one extract he proposes that ‘boredom is a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents’: People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and in invention – all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problems by forcing boredom itself to yield interest. This insight I owe to Von Humboldt Fleisher who showed me how it was done by James Joyce, but anyone who reads books can easily find it out for himself. Modern French literature is especially preoccupied with the theme of boredom.6

Citrine goes on to comment that boredom can be ‘an instrument of social control … Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to

5 Spacks, Boredom, 12. 6 Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Viking, 1975), 199–200. Citrine has Stalin’s long state dinners immediately in mind, although in Warsaw Pact countries demotion to a menial, repetitive job was a common punishment for dissent.

218

Stephen Matterson

combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death’.7 In fact David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King, though unfinished, is another of the great novels about boredom, possibly since forensic accounting readily lends itself to the condition. Like Bellow, Wallace provides a sense of the history of boredom, analyses its aspects, and relates it to lack of work fulfilment, to social control even under neoliberalism. This leads to a version of hell, as envisaged by the character Lane Dean Jr: hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his own devices.8

Many of the reviews of The Pale King quoted section 25, with its muchrepeated ‘turns a page’. But focusing on the individual’s boredom alone is unhelpful in considering Wallace’s overall representation. Like Bellow, his larger concern is with the condition of neo-liberal postindustrial society, with boredom and apathy cultivated as systems of political control. Anyone who can counter this boredom represents fresh possibilities: ‘It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom there is, literally, nothing you cannot accomplish’.9 Conversely, of course, succumbing to boredom means stasis, apathy and inaction. As Bellow notes, the literary history of boredom begins in France in the 1850s. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is often named as one of the great novels of the topic, and Baudelaire as its greatest poet. For his Imitations (1961) Robert Lowell translated Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’, the stunning introduction to Les

7 8 9

Ibid. 201. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011), 379. See also 384–5, where Garrity’s ghost misleadingly summarizes the history of boredom for Dean. Ibid. 438. Ralph Clare’s essay, cited in note 4 above, is especially lucid on this social and political aspect of Wallace’s representation.

Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

219

Fleurs du Mal, as a poem directly on this condition. He renders its final stanza as the moment in which the condition can be named at last: It’s BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together. You know it well, my Reader. This obscene beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine – you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!10

With its inevitable Eliotean recall Lowell here deftly reminds us that as boredom is intertwined with modernity it is also at the origin and the apex of literary modernism. From ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to some point beyond The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s characters are afflicted by boredom and all that it embodies and generates, a condition that afflicts without distinction as to class, nationality and gender. The characters are paralysed, suspended between life and death, unable to act in ways that affirm life. Rather than Tiresias, boredom is the most fundamental link between the different voices of The Waste Land, and, beyond, the essential connection between Prufrock and Sweeney and Doris as they appear in Fragment of an Agon. Boredom is life as it is, unadorned, reduced to its essential elements only, unrewarding and blank. It is the ‘nothing’ repeated over and over in ‘A Game of Chess’ with its ‘What shall we ever do?’11 It is the ‘shadow’ in ‘The Hollow Men’ destroying aspiration, mocking whatever else we want life to be or to become, and it is most directly confronted in the dialogue of Sweeney and Doris: SWEENEY: DORIS: SWEENEY: DORIS: SWEENEY:

10 11

Nothing at all but three things What things? Birth, and copulation and death. That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all, Birth, and copulation, and death. I’d be bored. You’d be bored. Birth, and copulation, and death.

Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 234. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–62 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 68.

220

Stephen Matterson DORIS: SWEENEY:

I’d be bored. You’d be bored. Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks: Birth, and copulation, and death.12

Indeed, Eliot’s considered interrogation of Matthew Arnold pivoted on his own Baudelaire-infused invocation of boredom as central to modernity: ‘the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory’.13 Given what we know of Eliot’s journey towards religious faith and his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, it is almost inevitable that we now think of his representation of boredom in spiritual or religious terms. But Eliot’s modernistic boredom is actually closer to the kind of self-dissociation that began to be described at the end of the nineteenth century and which was eventually given the clinical name Depersonalization Disorder. It is a condition to do with the sense of loss of self, and a growing sense of one’s own unreality.14 There are several particularly celebrated descriptions of this condition, the first being that of the Swiss academic Henri Frédéric Amiel, who for thirty years from the 1850s recorded his growing sense of detachment from others and his own increasing self-estrangement. Amiel’s Journal was posthumously published in 1882 and was widely circulated, especially after Mrs Humphrey Ward brought out an English translation in 1885. In Eliot, from ‘Fragment of an Agon’, Collected Poems, 131. Eliot intended this poem to be part of a verse drama but it was never completed, and two sections appeared in the ‘Unfinished Poems’ section of his 1963 Collected Poems. Sweeney has a kind of ancestral resemblance to Berryman’s Henry, compounded by Eliot’s use of Tambo and Bones and the mixing of poetic registers in ‘Fragment of an Agon’, and by his uncollected 1924 poem ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’, later incorporated into ‘The Hollow Men’. 13 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 106. 14 For an account of Depersonalization Disorder, see Daphne Simeon and Jeffrey Abugel, Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 12

Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

221

the twentieth century the major exploration of the condition is Fernando Pessoa’s remarkable compendium The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa worked on this book all of his life, a kind of journal comprising several hundred prose fragments and reflections, necessarily unfinished; and unpublished until 1998, more than half a century after his death. This is a condition beyond boredom or, more accurately, it is the condition for which boredom is a symptomatic manifestation. As Pessoa puts it, ‘tedium is an ailment of the soul’: Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.15

This is one of the most significant distinctions to be made when considering boredom; is it a condition from within or from without? Am I bored because of an inner prior condition or am I bored by external factors which generate tediousness? Is it my fault or the world’s fault that I feel as I do? Of course, part of the problem here arises because as a portmanteau word ‘boredom’, unlike many other neologisms from the nineteenth century, never carried and still does not carry, any precise clinical definition. Indeed, to say that you are ‘bored’ is to make a purely subjective statement, incapable of any objective verification. However, the insistence that boredom is the result of an inner condition has been of great importance in reflecting on it, as has been the challenge to the idea that it is a purely subjective condition. When Martin Heidegger proposed a taxonomy of boredom, he suggested that there were three types. His thoughts appear in the lecture course that he gave on Metaphysics, and were partly published as the essay ‘What is Metaphysics?’ in 1929, and later collected as Basic Concepts of Metaphysics. Heidegger’s three types of boredom depend on the distinction between boredom as a condition from within and from without. He writes of the differences between ‘becoming bored by something’; 15

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 365 (fragment 445). It is notable that major works on boredom, such as Pessoa’s and Wallace’s, are unfinished, or planned but unwritten, as in the case of Citrine.

222

Stephen Matterson

‘being bored with something’ and what he calls ‘real boredom’ or ‘profound boredom’.16 To be bored by something is a relatively straightforward concept: something or someone external to ourselves creates tedium for us; we endure a dull lecture, wait dully for a delayed train. To be bored with something is more complex; by it Heidegger means that we undertake an activity that is unrewarding, or undergo some experience that is ultimately unfulfilling, not fully engaging us, even as it may be a reasonably enjoyable way of passing time. In Basic Concepts of Metaphysics the example Heidegger provides is attending a dinner party which is at the time a satisfying experience, but which later leads us to reflect ‘I was bored after all’.17 The event was unfulfilling, merely a way of passing the time. As might be expected, Heidegger is most concerned with real, or profound, boredom. This is a condition in which nothing can possibly engage or interest, in which there is nothing within. In a much-quoted passage he writes, Real boredom is still far off when this book or that play, this activity or stretch of idleness merely bores us. Real boredom comes when ‘one is bored’. This profound boredom, drifting hither and thither in the abysses of existence like a mute fog, draws all things, all men and oneself along with them, together in a queer kind of indifference. This boredom reveals what-is in totality.18

16

17 18

Heidegger’s essay and the series of lectures are lucidly and helpfully explored, along with an important consideration of Pessoa, in Jan Slaby’s ‘The Other Side of Existence: Heidegger on Boredom’, in Sabine Flach, Jan Söffner and Daniel S. Margulies, eds, Habitus in Habitat II: Other Sides of Cognition (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 101–20. I am also indebted to Peter Nicholls’s essay on George Oppen in which he considers Heidegger’s representation of boredom. See Nicholls, ‘A Homemade World? America, Europe and Objectivist Poetry’, in Cristina Giorcelli, ed., The Idea and the Thing in Modernist American Poetry (Palermo: ILA Palma, 2001), 13–30. Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 109–10. Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’, in Existence and Being, trans. R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick (London: Vision Press, 1949), 364.

Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

223

Two things should be noted here. Firstly, that Heidegger’s representation of profound boredom has much in common with Freud’s representation of melancholy as well as with key aspects of Depersonalization Disorder. Secondly, profound boredom engages Heidegger as a stage in his overall intellectual movement to what would eventually flourish as existentialism, since acknowledging one’s profound boredom is a step towards finding new possibilities for the self. Jan Slaby expresses this move particularly well: the experience of profound boredom, understood in its full existential depth, makes manifest that a human being is the free and responsible creator of whatever meaning there is in one’s life. Not only that, profound boredom moreover amounts to a call to actively take charge of one’s existence so as to endow it with meaning, and thereby effect a fundamental change in existential temporality.19

Studies of boredom typically quote Berryman’s Dream Song 14, and rightly so; it is almost an anthem of boredom. It is also one of Berryman’s best known, most quoted and most anthologized poems. In fact, when Berryman first made his appearance in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, in 1992, Dream Song 14 formed the bulk of his four extracts. Yet very few of these critical studies analyse the poem in any sustained way, several being content to quote a few of its lines, or use part of it as an epigraph. If we momentarily lift the poem out of the contexts provided by Henry and the unfolding sequence of Dream Songs, it is most striking as a poem covering the different kinds of boredom that studies have identified. Berryman includes the specific, the individual person or thing that bores, Heidegger’s ‘bored by’: ‘Henry bores me’ as does nature, as do ‘people and valiant art’ – and, by implication, even the Romantic sublime indicated by the flashing sky and sea. This ‘bored by’ recurs in Dream Song 231, applied specifically there to the poet James Thomson in the Song’s epigraph, but then extending in the poem to Henry’s being punished by alienation from all that he holds dear. Heidegger’s ‘bored with’ is there in the opening words of Dream Song 14; ‘Life’ itself is boring. Heidegger’s ‘profound’ boredom eventually pervades the poem as the underlying condition of its speaker: ‘I am heavy

19

Slaby, ‘The Other Side of Existence’, 103. Emphases in original.

224

Stephen Matterson

bored’. In accommodating all of Heidegger’s categories Berryman locates this profound boredom as pivotal. At the same time, though, he alludes to the religious or spiritual dimensions of boredom that considerably predate the versions of boredom that modernity generates. The use of the verb ‘to confess’ in the phrase ‘Ever to confess you’re bored’ may seem casual enough, but Berryman is far from being a casual writer.20 He does something similar with the word ‘cross’ in the first line of Dream Song 153, ‘I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation’.21 ‘Cross’ suggests a kind of sulky petulance, but maintains the trace of its non-secular connotations in a poem that will go on to consider suffering and submission to God’s design. In Dream Song 14 ‘confess’ connotes that boredom is a kind of sin, a condition of alienation from God, and confessing that you are bored is to articulate something that must not be said. In Dream Song 14 Berryman is certainly covering the range of what boredom is, how it has been defined and mediated. The statement in the opening line – that life is boring but ‘We must not say so’ – brings in other dimensions as well. Firstly, boredom as something that must not be acknowledged brings a social dimension to the poem. The idea that boredom has social implications and is not merely a personal condition becomes part of public debate while Berryman is creating the Dream Songs. The belief that ‘teenagers’ (itself a term that first appeared in the 1940s and gained currency in the mid-1950s) would be bored and become ‘juvenile delinquents’ (another new term), was a serious matter for public debate. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ initiative, which began in 1964, was primarily aimed at reforming the US with regard to poverty and racial inequality. But it was also very much to do with encouraging civic virtues and, specifically, eliminating the causes and consequences of boredom. One of Johnson’s major speeches on the movement addressed this very directly:

20 Quotes from Dream Song 14 in John Berryman, The Dream Songs (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 16. 21 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 172.

Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

225

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.22

Johnson’s re-articulation of the American dream restores work and the Benjamin Franklin idea of useful leisure to the essence of society. Thus by confessing boredom the speaker of Dream Song 14 is also repudiating values that characterize the nation. The second and inevitably more personal aspect of ‘We must not say so’ is linked directly to the representation of the speaker’s mother. We guess that the speaker must not confess to boredom precisely because the mother has forbidden it, and has done so repeatedly. This actually brings in another aspect of boredom, and one that is often overlooked; that it may be a significant dimension of a child’s development. This is the approach taken by the psychotherapist Adam Phillips in his essay ‘On Being Bored’ (which is prefaced by the first line of Berryman’s poem). ‘Children are not oracles’, Phillips writes, ‘but they ask with persistent regularity the great existential question, “What shall we do now?”’23 He gives an account of an eleven-year-old boy sent to him for therapy. At one point Phillips asks the boy if he is ever bored. ‘He was surprised by the question and replied with a gloominess I hadn’t seen before in this relentlessly cheerful child, “I’m not allowed to be bored”’.24 Over the period of the course of treatment, Phillips sees that the boy’s development of a ‘false self ’ of cheerfulness is an attempt to obey the mother’s insistence that he not be bored, that he be interested in everything: ‘Being good, in terms of the maternal demand,

22 Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘Remarks at the University of Michigan’, 22 May 1964, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1963–64, 2 vols (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 1:704. 23 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 71. 24 Ibid. 73.

226

Stephen Matterson

was having lots of interests’.25 He reflects more generally on how adults react to a child’s saying they are bored: Is it not, indeed, revealing, what the child’s boredom reveals in adults? Heard as a demand, sometimes as an accusation of failure or disappointment, it is rarely agreed to, simply acknowledged. How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him – as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.26

Read in this light, the presence of the mother in Dream Song 14 takes on a fresh significance, both in the poem and in The Dream Songs overall. To say that life is ‘boring’ can be childishly petulant. But it is also an act of rebellion against the mother who has tried to forbid and banish boredom, even a kind of declaration of independence. As Phillips remarks, ‘The child’s boredom starts as a regular crisis in the child’s developing capacity to be alone in the presence of the mother. In other words, the capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child’.27 We know that Berryman’s mother, self-styled as Jill, hated Dream Song 14, and was upset when she heard her son read it publicly. On the face of it this reaction seems excessive, even for someone as apparently capable of the histrionic as Berryman’s mother. After all, the mother ostensibly appears in the poem only as the characteristic adult response to the whining complaint of a bored child. But on another level, she pervades the poem, and this is perhaps what Berryman’s mother recognized. The claim to be bored is not only an act of rebellion against the mother, it is in some measure an accusation made against her, a charge that she has somehow created this condition in the now adult son. The force of this charge is intensified by Berryman’s use of persona in the song. It hardly needs to be said that Berryman conflates ‘I’ and Henry so frequently in the Songs

25 Ibid. 73–4. 26 Ibid. 72–3. 27 Ibid. 72.

Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

227

that any tenable difference between them becomes blurred. But every so often he sets up a clear distinction between them, and does so in some of the most significant Songs in the sequence, including the first one and the final two. He does so here, too, making it clear that it is the speaker of the poem who finds life boring. Henry, by contrast, does not: Henry has his ‘plights and gripes’ but unlike the speaker, he ‘loves people and valiant art’.28 This distinction is important, although it typically goes unnoticed. Even so formidably meticulous a reader as Helen Vendler conflates them and mistakenly represents Henry as the speaker.29 Berryman’s drawing apart of ‘I’ and Henry makes the song intensely personal to him, as he names his own condition and implicates the mother in its origin. There is also the possibility that these very Songs come from boredom. In his copy of Ezra Pound’s essay on the troubadours, Berryman marked these sentences: ‘There was unspeakable boredom in the castles. The chivalric singing was devised to lighten the boredom; and this very singing became itself in due time, in the manner of all things, an ennui’.30 Berryman’s boredom comes to be part of a cluster of ideas and emotions surrounding his mother, his intense self-examination, and his alcoholism. This is Heidegger’s profound boredom. The cluster is especially evident in Recovery. While preparing for his first step in the Alcoholics Anonymous Programme, Alan Severance asks in his journal, ‘Why do I drink?’ Among the entirely plausible answers is ‘To animate boredom’, although he adds, ‘but is this really so?? Screw this usual idea, in my case (I feel as if the scales were falling from my eyes. Surely this can’t all be wrong?)’.31 On the same page there is clearly an implied though unarticulated association leading 28 Philip Coleman rightly sees the distinction as crucial to the Song and how it represents an ‘affirmative’ view of Henry. See Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2014), 161. 29 Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 46–7. 30 Ezra Pound, Make it New: Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1935), 32. Berryman’s copy is in the John Berryman Papers, Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries, L–M 209 MNU. I am grateful to Eve Cobain for directing me to this marginal mark. 31 John Berryman, Recovery (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 78–9.

228

Stephen Matterson

on from the word ‘wrong’. Severance asks himself: ‘Have I been wrong all these years and it was not Daddy’s death that blocked my development for so long? Could this have been mere separation from Mother??’ and continues, ‘DID I IN FACT TAKE HIS DEATH IN STRIDE[?]’ before stating, So maybe my long self-pity has been based on an error, and there has been no (hero-)villain ruling my life but ONLY an unspeakably powerful possessive adoring MOTHER whose life at 75 is still centered wholly on me.32

Severance’s sequence of thought is striking, from the source of his alcoholism through boredom and then on to his father, finally settling on a fresh revelation over his mother. Earlier on in the novel, Severance had concluded that his misfortunes, including his loss of religious belief, originated in his father’s suicide.33 But now it is the mother who has stifled development, with what Berryman will later call her ‘postal adulation & reproach’, the mother who, as can be suggested by Dream Song 14, is the source of adult pain.34 It is notable that in the earlier passage Severance connects (though then ‘severs’) the separation from his mother with the effects of his father’s death. This touches on what is actually another signifier of boredom’s lexicon, its fundamental similarity to melancholia and to mourning. As Phillips points out, several of Freud’s comments about the melancholic may be applied to the bored child. He quotes Freud’s remark that ‘One feels […] a loss […] has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either’.35 This touches of course on several elements of The Dream Songs, notably the recurring sense of mystery as to the source of Henry’s various afflictions. This originates in the first Dream

Ibid. 79–80. Ibid. 48–9. The idea recurs in ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord’: ‘my father’s blow-it-all when I was twelve / blew out my most bright candle faith, and look at me’. See John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–71 (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 219. 34 ‘Of Suicide’, ibid. 206. 35 Phillips, On Kissing, 75. 32 33

Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman’s Lexicon of Boredom

229

Song with ‘Then came a departure’ masking the actual source, and surfaces most notably in Dream Song 29. There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good.36

Among other concepts, ‘heavy’ connotes grief and melancholy, so that Berryman’s collocation ‘heavy bored’ is a compelling representation of boredom with bereavement. But ‘heavy’ has other connotations. In Hamlet, Shakespeare used it to represent guilt, with particular reference to Claudius’s murder of Hamlet’s father. Thus Claudius refers to his ‘heavy burden’ and describes the murder of Polonius as a ‘heavy deed’, and Hamlet also associates ‘heavy’ with sin and guilt while comparing his father and Claudius as he hesitates to kill the King.37 The ‘heavy’ thing that sits on Henry’s heart has all of these connotations. But Berryman makes ‘heavy’ into an adjective with multiple meanings. He used it informally as the slang of the 1950s, mentioning his ‘heavy insomnia’ in the opening of one of his letters to his mother – and ‘heavy bored’ might carry exactly the same colloquial tone.38 Much more tellingly, the adjective bookends Dream Song 385, with its opening ‘My daughter’s heavier’ and ending with the stanza-breaking ‘my heavy daughter’.39 It is tempting here to consider a modulation of ‘heavy’ and consequently, to reflect on the possibility that Berryman’s representation of boredom might be kinetic rather than fixed. Boredom is both a signifier of melancholic self-disassociation, with no articulated cause, and a stage of opportunity for self-development leading to a reconnection with others.

36 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 3, 33. 37 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, eds, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), III.i.54; IV.i.13; III.iii.84. 38 See Berryman in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to his Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 323. 39 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 407.

230

Stephen Matterson

Boredom is a state of possibility as well as abjection, just as Heidegger proposed. But this is perhaps to provide an overly formal sequential narrative for The Dream Songs, a too-neat structure through which Henry moves from all of the difficulties of grief towards a stage of healing. It is perhaps more appropriate to think of Berryman’s representation of boredom as multivalent, its stages and complexities apparent in each moment.

Adam Beardsworth

13 The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

In an unpublished fragment written for his Black Book, a suite of Holocaust poems started in 1948 but never completed, John Berryman expresses contempt for an American public eager to consume the spectacle of atrocity without accepting moral responsibility: Illustrated these crimes are cheap, they swarm Tabloids & drugstores. Read What Hitler Hid; The nervous quick of our strong apathy Peers at the lid Attractive any murder, innocentwith-distance these that [childhood’s] early lusts fulfill: Peek-a boo raging, ‘Now you see me, – now You never will’.1

Here the poet is frustrated by the ‘apathy’ of a nation that consumes the crimes of the Holocaust in ‘illustrated’ and ‘cheap’ tabloids from the safety of the local drugstore. Seduced by headlines promising to reveal ‘What Hitler Hid’, fulfilling ‘[childhood’s] lusts’, they are conscious that ‘any murder’ is ‘innocent-with-distance’. Although Berryman never completed his Black Book,2 the distaste for the public’s appetite for suffering expressed in the 1 2

John Berryman, ‘Black Book’, Unpublished Miscellaneous Poetry, Box 1, Folder 25, John Berryman Papers, Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries. For a detailed account of the history of Berryman’s ‘Black Book’, see Matthew Boswell’s essay ‘The Black Book: John Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem’, in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 11–28.

232

Adam Beardsworth

fragment ironically anticipates critical responses to his own later work. For many critics, Berryman’s autobiographic turn in The Dream Songs, a turn frequently associated with the ‘confessional’ movement, amounted to little more than the production of a tabloid poetry that peddled private suffering to an audience hungry for the salacious. This business led early respondents to poetry’s confessional moment such as M. L. Rosenthal to see the work as a ‘rather shameful’ trading in private details that ‘one is honor-bound not to reveal’.3 Considered in relation their Cold War and New Critical contexts, such responses to the chronicles of guilt, avarice, and trauma of confessional poetry seem symptomatic of a more general postwar concern about the pornographic exploitation of images of atrocity, a concern grounded in the United States government’s desire to procure ideological consensus for foreign and domestic policies. Eager to allay concerns about the Soviet menace and the nuclear threat that it posed, American Cold War interests sought consensus by promoting conformity to middle-class, neoliberal values. Such conformity was framed as a patriotic duty that could help stabilize the United States, both economically and morally, in the battle against the insidious communist Other. Against such political and cultural appeals to conformity, appeals ultimately invested in the biopolitical management of the Cold War subject, Berryman’s confessional aesthetic employs images of the abject and fragmented self in order to symbolize a culture irrevocably altered by the mass death and suffering of World War II. In The Dream Songs Berryman transforms the private, suffering subject into a fetish object, one that transgresses the literary codes of New Critical propriety and the moral codes of a Cold War state invested in containing public anxiety in an age of geopolitical uncertainty. Faced with a culture regulated by ideological interventions – from state-sanctioned initiatives such as the House Un-American Activities Committee, to cultural investments in domesticity, heteronormativity, and conspicuous consumption – Berryman’s Dream Songs expresses an excess of affect that overflows the barriers of Cold War containment. In contrast to the readerly pleasures and formalist style of New Critical poetry, the restless 3

M. L. Rosenthal, ‘Poetry as Confession’, in Steven Gould Axelrod, ed., The Critical Response to Robert Lowell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 64.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

233

turmoil of The Dream Songs derives from an inexhaustible jouissance that, in its probing of the unrepresentable space between joy and loss, ecstasy and grief, positions the Cold War subject as intrinsically displaced, incapable of conforming to the administrative regimes of postwar America. By eroticizing this space of irrecoverable loss, Berryman solicits a pornographic gaze only to stare back at a culture predicated upon objectifying and containing aberrant behaviour. The gaze returned by his poems is obscene insofar as it makes visible a traumatic gulf of suffering, the Lacanian Real that can never be fully assumed or integrated into the subject’s symbolic order. By performing suffering in order to expose the trauma at the core of the Cold War subject, The Dream Songs resists the biopolitical regulation that helped consolidate consensus in a containment strategy aimed at domesticating dissent by inuring the public against perverse acts of violence. In the wake of World War II, concerns about the conflation of pornography and suffering were raised by several critics and commentators. In 1945 James Agee, for instance, wrote that watching violent footage of war atrocities was akin to consuming pornography, insofar as ‘pornography is invariably degrading to anyone who looks at or reads it’.4 In 1955, the ‘British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer used the phrase “the pornography of death”’ to denounce violent public descriptions of soldiers suffering during the war, which he feared functioned as perverse forms of gratification for a psychologically ill society.5 By 1965, George Steiner was drawing a connection between a pornographic turn in literature and the Holocaust, claiming that a generation of ‘novels being produced under a new code of total statement shout at their personages: strip, fornicate, perform this or that act of sexual perversion. So did the SS guards at rows of living men and women’.6 As these examples illustrate, cultural critics in the early Cold War period, which coincided with Berryman’s development as a poet, feared that postwar culture’s increased focus on images of atrocity enabled a pornographic fascination with abject violence. 4 5 6

Carolyn Dean, ‘Empathy, Pornography, Suffering’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14/1 (2003): 98. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 100.

234

Adam Beardsworth

The desire to curtail the relationship between pornographic fascination and spectacles of violence is consistent with the emergence of the containment discourses that pervaded the early Cold War culture in which Berryman lived and wrote. Containment broadly refers to a postwar American climate that privileged – and proliferated – discourses of domestic normalcy and security as a means of ‘containing’ the threat posed by communist infiltration and by the possibility of nuclear conflict. The idea of containment, which was first penned by US policy analyst George Kennan in a 1947 essay called ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ and published anonymously in Foreign Affairs, came also to designate practices in the cultural sphere designed to preserve American culture from a corruptive Red Menace. As Alan Nadel explains in Containment Culture, the term signifies a privileged American narrative during the cold war. Although technically referring to U.S. foreign policy from 1948 until at least the mid-1960s, it also describes American life in numerous venues and under sundry rubrics during that period: to the extent that corporate production and biological reproduction, military deployment and industrial technology, televised hearings and filmed teleplays, the cult of domesticity and the fetishizing of domestic security, the arms race and atoms for peace all contributed to the containment of communism, the disparate acts performed in the name of these practices joined the legible agenda of American history as aspects of containment culture.7

Containment is therefore a multifaceted term that describes a campaign waged against the communist threat on the overt level of political policy, and on the hegemonic level of cultural discourse. While on the political level containment advocated for greater measures of domestic security, on the cultural level it privileged the nuclear family as the locus for the proliferation of secure, domestic American values. Containment was also disseminated via the cultural narratives, including the film, television, and literature, that came to define the 1950s as an iconic age of suburban lifestyles. Haunting the proliferation of such visions of normalcy was the spectre of what might occur should America let its guard down. The Communist 7

Alan Nadel, Containment Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 2–3.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

235

menace lingered, waiting for its opportunity to infiltrate the sanctity of a secure America, just as the possibility of nuclear disaster, often dramatized on both overt and metaphorical levels in the era’s science-fiction films, was constantly reinforced by the prevalence of ‘duck and cover’ television ads and nuclear drills in public schools.8 Meanwhile the spectacle of such politically sanctioned repression as HUAC meant that also haunting these discourses of normalcy was the very real threat to personal liberty posed by deviant behaviour. By publicly promoting the importance of conforming to discourses of American domestic normalcy, containment ‘made personal behaviour part of a global strategy at the same time as they personalized the international struggle with communism.’9 Containment therefore found its political efficacy in paradox: it reminded citizens that the freedom and virtues of American capitalism could be upheld so long as individuals were willing to conform to models of domestic security, surveillance, and consumption that impinged upon their autonomy within a democratic political system. As an ideological strategy that promoted conformity and political desensitization, containment exemplified a movement towards biopower, or what Michel Foucault refers to as ‘the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power’.10 In The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Foucault defines biopower against the sovereign power that characterized sociopolitical relationships prior to the nineteenth century. Sovereign power is defined by violence; sovereign rulers demonstrated their power over life by making it clear, often in very public terms, that they were capable of enforcing death. Appropriating national wealth, collecting taxes, indenturing servants, and conscripting soldiers, for instance, were sovereign responsibilities administered under fear of the death that may result should orders not be obeyed. Unlike sovereign power, biopower is no longer exercised under 8

For a discussion of the politicization of culture during the early Cold War, see Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (2nd edn; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) and Paul Boyer, By The Bomb’s Early Light (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 9 Nadel, Containment Culture, xi. 10 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (London: Picador, 2009), 16.

236

Adam Beardsworth

the threat of death; instead, biopower endeavours to control human life by implementing scientific techniques and administrative regimes of power. As Foucault puts it, under the auspices of biopower: The law operates more and more as a norm, and […] the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into the continuum of apparatuses (medical and administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life.11

Fears that Cold War culture was becoming increasingly ‘normalized’ are visible in the era’s critical studies. Influential works such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd12 and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man analysed changes in human social dynamics in an era of emergent neoliberal values. For instance, lamenting what he sees as a burgeoning generation of bureaucrats, Whyte mocks the conformity he sees on university campuses: ‘Come spring and students may start whacking each other over the head or roughing up the townees and thereby causing a rush of concern over the wild younger generation. But there is no real revolution in them, and the next day they likely as not will be found with their feet firmly on the ground in the recruiters’ cubicles.’13 In similar terms Randall Jarrell, disenchanted with the ideological incursion of the military-industrial complex, feared the advancement of a world where ‘among the related radiances of a kitchen’s white-enameled electric dryer […] and Waring Blendor, the homemaker sits in the trim coveralls of her professions; where above the concrete cavern that holds a General Staff, the rockets are invisible in the sky’.14 Such concerns about the emergence of a conformist, neoliberal culture are summarized by John Aldridge in his 1956 book In Search of Heresy, where he claims,

11 12 13 14

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. One (New York: Vintage, 1978), 144. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New York: Doubleday, 1950). William H. Whyte, The Essential William H. Whyte (New York: Lafarge, 1956), 88. Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001), 21.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

237

[i]t is a feature of our democracy that it has no dogma to enforce, but neither does it enforce its conformism. It does not need to because it produces conformism by leaving open to the mass of people no alternative to conformism, and, therefore, by removing from them the possibility of choice.15

Criticisms of confessional poetry have often reflected the conservative containment politics of the Cold War era insofar as they were driven by a desire to commodify excessive affect, a reaction that frequently manifested itself as a critique of the poets’ self-exploitation and degradation in the name of literary celebrity. Along with Rosenthal’s early concerns about confessionalism’s perceived self-indulgence came a range of other criticisms predicated upon moral aversions to its maudlin aesthetic, and to the delinquent lives that informed the work, many of which remained long after the geopolitical anxieties of the Cold War had subsided. So, as Jeffrey Meyers claims, ‘The poets competed with each other in madness as in art, and flaunted their illness as a leper shows his sores’.16 Bruce Bawer claims that ‘the very conditions which so tragically crippled [Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz, and Lowell] as men also provided their poetry with its greatest beauty and strength;17 while Lewis Hyde asserts that Berryman’s Dream Songs, far from being poetically innovative, are little more than an accumulation of drunken ramblings that ‘can be explicated in terms of alcoholism’.18 More recently, Justin Quinn has argued that ‘Berryman is ultimately a narcissist who projects his psychic states into the poems and observes the subsequent punch-up’.19 Even critics writing in praise of confessional poetry often exalt the poets’ tragic self-sacrifice in the name of art. 15 16 17 18 19

John W. Aldridge, In Search of Heresy (New York: Greenwood, 1956), 4. Jeffrey Meyers, Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle (New York: Arbor House, 1987), 13. Bruce Bawer, The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986), 4. Lewis Hyde, ‘Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking’, in Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, eds, Recovering John Berryman: Essays on a Poet (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 215. Justin Quinn, ‘Failed Vision?’, in Coleman and McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman, 72–3.

238

Adam Beardsworth

Thus A. Alvarez writes that the poet must ‘survive morally by becoming, in one way or another, an imitation of death in which their audience can share. To achieve this the artist, in his role of scapegoat, finds himself testing out his own death and vulnerability for and on himself ’.20 While recent scholarship on Berryman, including works by Brendan Cooper,21 Tom Rogers,22 Philip Coleman,23 and others, has worked to recover Berryman’s poetic reputation, he is still often disregarded ‘as a poet of solipsistic disengagement and self-absorption’.24 However, when considered in relation to the containment politics of the early Cold War era, Berryman’s turn to a style invested in performing private suffering can be read as an indirect response to the political interpellation of the Cold War subject. The political and cultural containment of dissent promoted by American political and popular interests, coincidentally or otherwise, resembled the impersonal and politically benign aesthetic promoted by the New Criticism that dominated the American literary scene in the 1940s and 1950s. In an era of New Critical impersonality, domesticating poems that expressed personal turmoil by critiquing their lack of aesthetic integrity disarmed the poem’s potential as social critique. New Critical methodologies offered convenient means for readers to contain excess suffering by offering a set of pre-conceived reading strategies. As Edward Brunner notes, the New Criticism helped make poetry accessible for an increasingly diverse reading public, many of whom were taking advantage of increased access to post-secondary education. By insisting on the autonomy of the artwork, the New Criticism democratized the reading site. At the same time, the New Criticism succeeded in professionalizing that reading site by claiming a distinct set of interpretive procedures that would

20 A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Norton, 1990), 262. 21 Brendan Cooper, Dark Airs: John Berryman and the Spiritual Politics of Cold War American Poetry (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 22 Tom Rogers, God of Rescue: John Berryman and Christianity (London: Peter Lang, 2011). 23 Philip Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating ‘the scene of disorder’ (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014). 24 Ibid. xv.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

239

do justice to the literary text. Once the merit of a work of art was dependent upon its accessibility, the obscurity in poetry was no longer a virtue but a symptom of a particular failure: a mark of the incomplete work of the poet whose poems had not been suitably revised and polished.25

By domesticating the poem’s energy, these New Critical strategies also commodified it as a readily consumable artifact. As Brunner continues, ‘formalism in this regard does not offer itself as a set of intimidating gestures that are tokens of elitism but as an assemblage of useful techniques that guarantee consumer usability’.26 In his 1957 essay ‘Song of Myself: Intention and Substance’, Berryman makes it clear that he had grown tired of the New Criticism’s exaltation of poetic impersonality: I call your attention to an incongruity with Eliot’s amusing theory of the impersonality of the artist [in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’] and a contrast between the mere putting-on-record and the well-nigh universal current notion of creation, or making things up. You will see that as Whitman looks more arrogant than Eliot in the Personality, he looks less pretentious in the recording – the mere recording – poet not as maker, but as spiritual historian.27

Against the New Critical desire to codify and contain the Cold War poem, Berryman calls for a return to Whitman’s poetics of personality, one capable of recording American spiritual history. The mid-century American history Berryman set out to record, however, is far less optimistic in its scope than Whitman’s musings on America’s potential. Berryman’s evasive constructions of Henry as a suffering subject in The Dream Songs are thus more interested in challenging, and deconstructing, the containment of suffering by a hegemonic Cold War culture. As Anthony Caleshu has pointed out, ‘the artificial world of “loss” constructed in The

25 Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001) 6–7. 26 Ibid. 27 John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 230.

240

Adam Beardsworth

Dream Songs is a world of paradoxically naturalizing affect’.28 Therefore, ‘Berryman offers a perverted dramatization of what a destabilized author can achieve to his own end’.29 If Berryman is acting out a spectacle of suffering rather than confessing overt personal struggles, it would suggest that he is deliberately inviting the pornographic gaze (and its attendant moral outrage) instead of seeking genuine sympathy for Henry’s debauched and perverse behaviour. Indeed, he invites this gaze in order to dramatize the spectacle of the Cold War subject struggling to maintain an elusive, and ultimately impossible, sense of autonomy in the face of a containment apparatus that had grown aggressive in its demands for conformity to dominant American postwar cultural narratives and values. In Dream Song 366, for instance, Henry, after being told by his worried companion that he sounds ‘will-like, / a testament & such’, retorts with the pacifying reminder, ‘These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort’, only to immediately undercut that statement with the cryptic conclusion, ‘Lilac was found in his hand’.30 Or in Dream Song 67, where Henry’s narcissism rings with the ironic echoes of onanism when he says ‘I am obliged to perform in complete darkness / operations of great delicacy / on my self ’, only to once again undercut that irony by intimating that ‘Later’ he succeeded in dying.31 Or in Dream Song 184, which begins ‘Failed as makar, nailed as scholar, failed / as a father & a man, hailed for a lover, / Henry slumped down, pored it over. / We c-can’t win here, he stammered to himself.’32 In poems such as these Henry engages in a dialectic pitted between genuine anguish, and the courting of more anguish with self-destructive behaviours; indeed much of the spectacles’ success is dependent upon the confusion surrounding the sincerity of Henry’s maudlin claims, and the degree to

28 Anthony Caleshu, ‘“Dramatizing the Dreadful”: Affective Postures in The Dream Songs’, in Coleman and McGowan, eds, ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman, 104. 29 Ibid. 30 John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 388. 31 Ibid. 74. 32 Ibid. 203.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

241

which those claims reflect the author’s life (a confusion Berryman deliberately invites and heightens with the prefatory note to the complete Dream Songs which insists Henry is not him33). Thus Henry the narrator feels exhausted by the need to keep performing; however, he simultaneously realizes that there is little else beneath that performance; the true, suffering self, for Berryman (and Henry) is inaccessible beyond the regressive constructions of performed identity, and that performance functions as a prophylactic for contending with the incommensurable trauma at the core of his selfhood. The core trauma that Berryman’s writing gestures towards – between performance and identity, between language and silence – resembles the space that Roland Barthes claims is responsible for creating textual pleasure in the work of Sade: the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from certain breaks (or certain collisions): antipathetic codes (the noble and the trivial for example) come into contact; pompous and ridiculous neologisms are created; pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models. As textual theory has it: the language is redistributed. Now, such redistribution is always achieved by cutting. Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it has been established by schooling, good usage, literature, culture), and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.34

It is this erotic space between culture and destruction that Berryman courts in his poems. Indeed, The Dream Songs is pornographic insofar as it solicits a gaze at that space of jouissance. As Barthes reminds us, jouissance in this erotic manifestation does not necessarily connote a blissful experience: ‘[t]he text of pleasure is not necessarily the text that recounts pleasures; the text of bliss is never the text that recounts the kind of bliss afforded 33 Ibid. xxx. 34 Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 406.

242

Adam Beardsworth

literally by an ejaculation. The pleasure of representation is not attached to its object; pornography is not sure’.35 Indeed, the heightened pleasure of the text is contingent upon the refusal of consummation. Erotic books, for instance, ‘represent not so much the erotic scene as the expectation of it, the preparation for it, its ascent; that is what makes them “exciting”; and when the scene occurs, naturally there is disappointment’.36 Thus, from a literary perspective, the writer may choose to either conform to narratives that assert the practical pleasures of everyday life, which in the early Cold War may have meant acquiescing to formalist methodologies; or the writer may ‘force the text to breach bliss, that immense subjective loss, thereby identifying this text with the purest moments of perversion, with its clandestine sites’.37 The desire to ‘breach bliss’, to convey the ‘immense subjective loss’ that cannot be fully disclosed, is the primary means by which Berryman elicits desire for the unknowable space that exists beyond early Cold War culture’s appeals to conformity and domesticity. The poems are seductive insofar as the life they evoke generates a forbidden desire to watch Henry’s pathological struggles, and a concomitant shame for the pleasure experienced while watching. At the same time, the poems also fail to fully represent, or consummate, the desire aroused by their jouissance. As Slavoj Žižek argues, it is precisely the obscurity of the object of desire, even if that desire is predicated upon an irreconcilable gap or loss, that makes poetry seductive: ‘Poetry, the specific poetic jouissance, emerges when the very symbolic articulation of the Loss gives rise to a pleasure of its own.’38 For the subject who desires the pleasure afforded by this encounter with loss, consummation remains like a striptease, slightly out of reach, a fact that leaves the subject always alienated from reunification with the core desire, the primordial trauma that jouissance refuses to fully disclose. This position of alienation, as Žižek argues, reveals the fundamental displacement of the subject: ‘Jouissance is thus the “place” of the subject – one is 35 36 37 38

Ibid. 409. Ibid. 412. Ibid. 412. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 58.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

243

tempted to say: his “impossible” Being-there, Da-Sein; and, for that very reason, the subject is always-already displaced, out-of-joint, with regard to it. Therein lies the primordial “decentrement” of the Lacanian subject’.39 For Berryman and other poets of the confessional movement, soliciting desire for jouissance was a means of both countering the domesticated joys proffered by Cold War capitalism, and of positioning the postwar subject as fundamentally de-centred. Berryman overtly announces that his sequence of Dream Songs will be predicated upon a profound loss, one articulated by a de-centred subject, in Dream Song 1, where we are told that All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry’s side. Then came a departure. Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don’t see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived.40

Here Henry moves from a comfortable sense of self-integration, symbolized by the warmth of the ‘woolen lover’, to a state of loss where ‘nothing fell out as it might or ought’. Significantly, the ‘departure’ that de-centres Henry is never named; rather we are simply told that it ‘pried Henry open for all the world to see’. Indeed, the ambiguous nature of his injury, and the departure that caused it, generates curiosity about its source. While he was once singing happily in a sycamore, we are left with the furtive assertion that now ‘Hard on the land wears the strong sea / and empty grows every bed’.41 Berryman’s unwillingness to fully disclose the nature of Henry’s affliction, and the sources responsible for it, is a solicitous gesture that generates a desire to keep reading until the source of his loss is revealed. The Dream Songs can therefore be read as a literary striptease. As Barthes argues,

39 Ibid. 61. 40 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 3. 41 Ibid.

244

Adam Beardsworth Striptease […] is based on a contradiction: woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.42

While the ‘ritual signs’ Berryman announces occasionally evoke ‘the idea of sex and its conjuration’, as in Dream Song 4, where Henry lusts after a woman ‘Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken paprika’ while imagining ‘What wonders / is she sitting on’, more frequently the signs he evokes are ritual signifiers of loss. They convey a jouissance that conjures a desire for that which the subject lacks but that can never be properly fulfilled. As Žižek argues, this desire is characteristic of an otherwise ‘normal’ existence: ‘Someone can be happily married, with a good job and many friends, fully satisfied with his life, and yet absolutely hooked on some specific formation […] of jouissance, ready to put everything at risk rather than renounce that (drugs, tobacco, drink, a particular sexual perversion …).’43 For Berryman’s Henry, the urge to fill the ‘departure’ at the centre of his existence by partaking in self-destructive behaviour constitutes his very subjectivity. As we are told in Dream Song 311, for instance, Hunger was constitutional with him, women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need until he went to pieces. The pieces sat up & wrote. They did not heed their piecedom but kept very quietly on among the chaos.44

The fact that hunger was ‘constitutional’ implies that the need to fill an unfillable, primordial loss is part of Henry’s subjective composition. His avaricious behaviour is less an abnormality than a fundamental means of concealing the fact that ‘normal’ subjectivity is in fact an illusion. Indeed, Berryman appears to play on the word ‘constitutional’ here in order to 42 Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 84. 43 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 61. 44 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 333.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

245

contrast Henry’s deviance with the expectations of the ‘normal’ American subject, governed by the moral and legal codes of the United States constitution. Berryman’s construction of Henry as an ‘unconstitutional’ subject recalls Foucault’s assertion that the predominant form of mid-century social control was based on biopower. In The History of Sexuality Foucault draws a direct connection between biopower and the Cold War containment strategies implicit in the production of nuclear anxiety, when he claims ‘The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence.’45 Thus in an era of containment politics, biopower functions to remind citizens daily that not adapting to models of domesticity may in fact lead to violent actions against the corporeal body; actions administered, of course, by an ideological enemy. Against this biopolitical management, Berryman constructs what Carolyn Dean calls ‘the metaphor of pornography’, which ‘describes a process by which bodily degradation and suffering – the indignity of the literal body and the metaphorical body of historical memory it is our responsibility to transmit – become a focus of fascination or pleasure for both erotic and aggressive drives. In so doing, it describes a process by which we transform the subjects of our interest into objects of our now corrupted pleasures.’46 For Berryman, fetishizing this site of corrupted pleasures is a political gesture. By eroticizing jouissance Berryman constructs an epistemological striptease. In an era of containment, this space of loss signifies that which exceeds the limits of biopolitical management. Eroticizing this space elicits a potent desire to recover an identity beyond the management of the Cold War state. As The Dream Songs makes clear, recovering that identity is ultimately a doomed task. However, the de-centred and fragmented ego revealed by desiring the space of jouissance holds, paradoxically, the seeds of an anti-containment poetics. Berryman subtly invokes this anti-containment poetics in poems where the degraded physical body merges with the indignity of recent history, even if that history is never fully named. Consider, for example, Dream Song 23: 45 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 137. 46 Dean, ‘Pornography, Empathy, Suffering’, 102.

246

Adam Beardsworth This is the lay of Ike. Here’s to the glory of the Great White – awk – who has been running – er – er – things in recent – ech – in the United – If your screen is black, ladies & gentlemen, we – I like – at the Point he was already terrific – sick.47

Berryman’s response to Eisenhower’s election to a second term dramatizes, through a gnarled and spastic grammar, the limits of dissent in the McCarthy era. He refuses to allow his sentences to be completed, leaving it unclear whether or not he means the poem as praise or critique, a tactic that suggests his physical attempts to resist, however unsuccessfully, Cold War biopower’s containment of political dissent. His use of guttural utterances as end points for apparent lines of praise asserts both an inability to verbally manifest such praise, and a latent disgust for Eisenhower as its subject, as in ‘Here’s to the glory of the Great White –awk’. While ‘awk’ homonymically implies a rare bird – and one that is extinct, past its prime – the spelling evokes a regurgitative sound meant to convey disgust. Later, unable to complete the juvenile-sounding ‘I like Ike’ campaign slogan, Berryman invokes Eisenhower’s early promise at West Point Academy, where ‘he was already terrific-sick’. The word ‘sick’ sits unpunctuated at the end of the stanza without making a tangible transition to the next stanza. It again serves a dual function, indicating that there is something ‘sick’ about Eisenhower, but more importantly, something ‘sick’ about attempting to lavish the ‘lay’ president with such platitudes. The dissociative nature of Berryman’s form disrupts the possibility of conceptual, and political, synthesis. It acts as a counterpoint to the Eisenhower-era narrative of containment while defying easy containment as a work of literature through its spasmodic, paratactic methodology. Implicit in this dramatization of Cold War politics is Berryman’s recognition of his own interpellation as a biopolitical subject. Therein lies Berryman’s reasons for both enacting a spectacle of suffering and eliciting the pornographic gaze: he evokes suffering at the level of bodily fetish in

47 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 25.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

247

order to assert, and challenge, society’s regulation of individuals not just through consciousness or ideology, but also at the level of the corporeal body. Thus it is not just his own personal sadness that Henry struggles with; more accurately he is in constant conflict with the political attempt to reduce his individuality to the level of fetish object. Indeed, much of his suffering is caused by his inability to confront and resist this powerful, if innocuous, Cold War political process, aimed at encouraging docility and political consensus amongst populations. This struggle between self and biopower is particularly well demonstrated in Dream Song 8, where Berryman conveys a tension between torture and resistance as his persona is subjected to the violent inquisition of a group of nameless agents. The first stanza reads, The weather was fine. They took away his teeth, white & helpful; bothered his backhand; halved his green hair. They blew out his loves, his interests. ‘Underneath’, (they called in iron voices) ‘understand, is nothing. So there’.48

The poem distinguishes between a calm external state and an inner state tormented by persecution and violence. At the beginning of each stanza, Berryman’s speaker states that the weather was fine. That calm climate is then juxtaposed with images of inquisition and decay. Henry is systematically prodded and tormented by an unnamed ‘They’ who remove his teeth, halve his ‘green hair’, and blow out his loves and interests, lines that indicate he is being inflicted with both physical and psychological violence. The repeated focus on weather invokes not only environmental conditions but also the calm political and cultural climate that the containment apparatus sought to project onto the Cold War public. At the same time the paratactic juxtaposition between the climate and ambiguous forces of persecution implies that calmness is obtained (and maintained) biopolitically by inflicting repressive forces at the level of the corporeal body. This violent suppression is manifested in the actions performed against Henry’s 48 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 10.

248

Adam Beardsworth

body as he is slowly taken apart by nameless agents. The images of decay suggest an ironic reversal of the biological metaphors often applied to the threat of infection by the insidious disease of communism. Disease and decay, for Berryman’s subject, comes not from virulent communism, but from the state biopower mobilized to contain its spread. By taking away his teeth and backhand, the ambiguous ‘They’ disarm Henry both physically and psychologically, making him defenseless against their violations. Significantly, however, the tortured subject (presumably Henry) already recognizes that their desire to control him is compromised by the fact that ‘“underneath” / is nothing. So there’. Henry realizes that the loss at the core of his selfhood means he is fundamentally de-centred and fragmented. While the nameless agents may assert control, the disintegrated nature of his ego leaves him ultimately beyond biopolitical containment. By repeatedly putting anguish on display, Berryman fetishizes it as a seductive, even pornographic space that resists the politics of containment. Indeed, this resistance is quantified repeatedly by Henry’s inability to locate either a stable identity, or to represent the space of loss linguistically. By Dream Song 74, for instance, we are told that ‘What the world to Henry / did will not bear thought. / Feeling no pain, / Henry stabbed his arm and wrote a letter / explaining how bad it had been’.49 The entire sequence of Dream Songs may, in part, be read as this letter of explanation. If, as Lacan argues, language is a ‘torture house’, then Henry, already victimized by the exterior pressures of his surveillance culture, experiences further anguish when his attempts to express pain reveal the irremediable gap between the torturous anxieties of Cold War experience and the ability to register that trauma symbolically. The poems are often constructed dialectically, enacting a tension between autonomy and conformity while their parataxis evokes the psychic disarray caused by the excessive guilt and anxiety that is symptomatic of an environment afflicted by trauma and ideological repression. Images of trauma, suffering, and loss are erotic in The Dream Songs insofar as they provide a tantalizing glimpse of an intractable subject position, however compromised, beyond the biopolitics of 1950s America.

49 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 81.

The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering

249

What such a paradox brings to light is that in the world of containment, ‘freedom is ultimately not freedom to enjoy but freedom from enjoyment’.50 The Dream Songs therefore participates in the tabloid culture that the poet disdains in The Black Book. However, unlike the magazines that sell salacious details about Hitler in order to reinforce the normalcy of the American Cold War state, Berryman’s tabloid poems eroticize suffering in order to seduce readers into recognizing their status as fragmented subjects. By soliciting this pornographic gaze, the poems trouble the biopolitical regime that sought to manage, and render docile, the personal lives of Cold War subjects. Berryman’s pornography of suffering serves as a reminder that the containment of Cold War subjectivity fails to account for the intractable trauma at the core of the postwar psyche. As a political gesture, Berryman’s solicitation of a pornographic gaze eroticizes grief, madness, trauma, and deviant behaviour in order to restore illicit desires as motivators in the search for autonomy for a conformist Cold War public.

50 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasties, 221.

Eve Cobain

14  ‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

‘The life is large which can receive a Beethoven’, wrote Margaret Fuller in 1841, after hearing a rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.1 John Berryman’s long affair with Beethoven began in 1937, when the poet was just twenty-three, and lasted the duration of his career. It was during his time at Clare College, Cambridge, where Berryman was studying on a Kellett Fellowship, that the poet began to express a sudden and voracious appetite for music – a fascination helped along by the young composer Brian Boydell, whom he mentions in the late poem ‘Friendless’ as his sole companion.2 Berryman’s diaries of the period are swollen with musical commentary, and notes pertaining particularly to Beethoven. It was also at Cambridge that Berryman first saw Abel Gance’s classic film, Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936). ‘Superb’, he concluded, in a diary entry dated 15 October 1937.3 In another, dated Wednesday 3 November, the poet records himself as having attended a reading of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale after which he ‘[l]istened to the Fifth Symphony’, claiming that ‘the crescendo in the last movement records [his] aimless agitation of spirit’.4 By the end of his term abroad, it was clear the poet had received his Beethoven.

1 2 3

4

Margaret Fuller, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Vol. 2, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth (London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 206. See John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971 (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 193. Reference is made here to the following unpublished items in Berryman’s archives at the University of Minnesota: MSS 43 Diaries 1931–1957 (incomplete), old boxes I-III: ‘Journal 1937; 1938–9; 1940’ in the Literary Manuscripts Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries. Ibid.

252

Eve Cobain

Berryman’s admiration for the composer finds expression across the full span of his works. The Romantic figure emerges as early as Berryman’s Sonnets, which the poet claimed were to be like ‘Beethoven’s onslaughts on the very materials of music’ (1947).5 He is invoked again in ‘Boston Common’ in The Dispossessed (1948), where his variations soar, and continues to assert his presence though The Dream Songs – most notably in Dream Songs 204 and 331 in which he is a tragic and, indeed, ‘majestic Shade’ (as Berryman describes Yeats in Dream Song 312).6 Beethoven also makes a guest appearance in the short story ‘Wash Far Away’, where the Fourth Piano Concerto is used to elucidate Milton’s Lycidas for a class of undergraduates.7 Such mentions across the range of Berryman’s work gesture towards the significance Beethoven held for the poet, but not until his final collection, Delusions, etc., published posthumously in 1972, does Berryman’s Beethoven come into full relief. ‘Beethoven Triumphant’, which was included in this final volume, asserts itself as a kind of poetic biography, paying homage to the musical master as it moves through Beethoven’s life and career. In enacting a close reading on this dense and touching biopic, this essay explores the function and significance of Beethoven particularly within the context of Berryman’s late work. Berryman ‘had long applied himself to the art of biography’, writes John Haffenden in his own biography of the poet, ‘attending particularly to major careers (such as Beethoven, Luther, and Tolstoy)’ in the hope that they would ‘enrich his task of writing Shakespeare’s Reality’.8 While the project was never completed, Berryman’s attentions to the form during 5 6 7

8

Mss 43 Delusions, etc., Berryman’s Sonnets, ‘Sonnet Notebook’ in the Literary Manuscripts Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 223, 353, 334. The story was begun in 1947 (under the working title of ‘The Group’) and was revised, in 1952, under the title ‘The Lesson and the Light’. It first appeared in print as ‘Wash Far Away’ in the American Review in 1975 and was finally collected in Berryman’s The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976). John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 401.

‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

253

the late 1960s certainly came to inform his work. ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ is just one among a flush of portraits that make up the second section of Delusions – the others paying homage to George Washington, Emily Dickinson, Georg Trakl, and Dylan Thomas. Yet the poem for the composer, which comprises twenty-seven numbered sections, is certainly the most far-reaching. Berryman’s engagement with the poem in its making was also a deep and continuous one. On what must have been one of the earliest plans for the book (dated ‘4 Aug. 1970’), the poem’s title actually appears under the rather macabre heading ‘Last Poems’.9 Thus, while the work was there at the genesis of Delusions, it also appears to have been one of the last that Berryman significantly operated on. The poet continued to redraft this work through various proof copies of the book, even while the rest of the contents remained largely untouched. Indeed, in the final phase of his creative life, Berryman appears to have had a vested interest in the character of Beethoven, and the poem itself maps out an imagined connection between the two artistic lives. I want to begin by focusing on the ways in which the poem demonstrates Berryman’s capabilities as a listener of Beethoven’s music, before moving on to consider some points of connection in terms of their creative processes and output. In her memoir, Poets in Their Youth (1982), Eileen Simpson singles out Beethoven as a composer whom Berryman listened to with special attention. Recalling the poet’s response to one of the composer’s string quartets, Opus 59 (no. 3), she writes, Whenever I hear it, I see us wedged together, knee to knee, in the tiny oven of a booth at the Record Collector’s Exchange where we first heard it. John’s upper lip, shaved of its mustache, is beaded with perspiration. He bends over, his right ear inclined toward the turntable, listening with his whole brain. From time to time, looking as though he might levitate, he grabs hold of my hand and with an ecstatic expression on his face says, ‘You hear?’ as the cello pizzicato plucked at our hearts.10

9 10

Mss 43, Delusions, etc., Berryman’s Sonnets. Box 1, Folder 3 in the Literary Manuscripts Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries. Eileen Simpson, Poets in their Youth: A Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 17–18.

254

Eve Cobain

While ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ shows the marks of the poet’s study it is also keen to impress us with a sense of Berryman’s unique relationship to Beethoven, and exhibits an embodied response to the music that he listened to with his whole brain. ‘Dooms menace from tumults’, declares Berryman, as the composer enters clamorously onto the scene; ‘Who’s immune / among our mightier of headed men? / Chary with his loins / womanward, he begot us an enigma’.11 An imagined connection grows through the body of the work, which acts out, in the style of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, an erotic encounter between the poem’s subject and its writer. While he begins in the first stanza by addressing the composer in the third person, as a historical figure, Berryman has fallen, by stanza 10 into the more direct and personal ‘you’ form of address. This Beethoven is erotically charged. He becomes imbued, in stanza 15, with the ability to make ‘throats swallow’ and to shiver ‘the backs of necks’ – to make ‘quiver with glee, at will’.12 Berryman was known to make similar claims about the sensory potentials of his own art: ‘I have been writing brilliantly’, he boasted in a letter to his mother, dated April 1958: ‘I have a style now pared straight to the bone and can make the reader’s nerves jump by moving my little finger’.13 Both claims contain striking innuendo and a noticeable show of maleness. Indeed Berryman rounds off the stanza (15) with the unusually macho dictum: ‘This world is of male energy male pain’,14 yoking the two artists into one conglomerate masculine entity. The artist’s desire to rouse an atmosphere of intense feeling and create an embodied response in the listener is presented here as a power hunger that verges on sadism. Beethoven’s art is in the first instance violent; he is described, in stanza 14, to have ‘Tortured [his] surly star to sing impossibly /

11

All quotations from ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ in this essay are from John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 236–42. 12 Ibid. 239. 13 See Berryman in Richard J. Kelly, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to his Mother (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), 319. 14 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 239.

‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

255

against the whole (small) thwarting orchestra’.15 His language is forcibly penetrating, as he moves from stanza 14 into 15: ‘One chord thrusts, as it must // find allies, foes, resolve, in subdued crescendo’.16 Yet if the composer has shown himself to be the dominant figure in this encounter, stanza 16 shows a slight re-adjustment in terms of the creative power play. His music is now tender: ‘Softnesses, also, yours, which become us’,17 admits the poet, who acknowledges his complicity as he is caught up in the listening experience. In stanzas 17 and 18, Berryman loses his projected direction as he remembers Beethoven’s unique power over his body and emotions. The section swells to unprecedented capacity, asserting its status as a kind of love sonnet as it reaches into the next stanza. 17 I’m hard to you, odd nights. I bulge my brain, my shut chest already suffers, – so I play blues and Haydn whom you – both the which touch but they don’t ache me. I’m less inured in your disaster corner, Master. You interfere. O yes we interfere or we’re mere sweetening: what? the alkali lives around and after ours. Sleeking down nerves Passing time dreaming. And you did do that too. There hover Things cannot be banned by you; damned few. If we take our head in our ears and listen Ears! Ears! the Devil paddled in you 18 heard not a hill flute or a shepherd sing!18

15 16 17 18

Ibid. 239. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 239–40.

256

Eve Cobain

The writing becomes spontaneous and sensual as the poet discovers surprise in the language that his listening has begun to engender. The act of generation is implied within the text itself, the ejaculate ‘what?’ – which arrives promptly after the suggestion of interference – leaving an ‘alkali’ deposit that ‘lives’ on in embryo. Such a sexualized response to Beethoven’s music was not without American precedent. In her exposé, ‘The Lives of the Great Composers’, which was published in The Dial in 1841, Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller exhibits a similarly charged response to a Beethoven who she also names ‘Master’.19 In fact Berryman’s poem appears to borrow directly from Fuller’s accounts of her imagined love affair with Beethoven. On 25 November 1843, Fuller had famously written a striking letter to the spirit of the dead composer in which she praised him as her raison d’être: but thou, oh blessed Master, dost answer all my questions, and make it my privilege to be. Like a humble wife to the sage or poet, it is my triumph that I can understand, can receive thee wholly, like a mistress I arm thee for the fight, like a young daughter I tenderly bind thy wounds. Thou are to me beyond compare, for thou art all I want.20

The poem’s sudden recourse to the sonnet form is also telling of Berryman’s debt, since Fuller too had selected that form with which to honour Beethoven. Her poem, entitled ‘Beethoven’, was also printed in The Dial and it similarly aims to capture the composer’s sui generis appeal and power over the emotions: Most intellectual master of the art, Which, best of all, teaches the mind of man The universe in all its varied plan, – What strangely mingled thoughts thy strains impart! Here the faint tenor thrills the inmost heart, There the rich bass the Reason’s balance shows;

Margaret Fuller, ‘Lives of the Great Composers’, The Dial 2/2 (October 1841): 148–203. 20 Letter quoted in Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 61–2. 19

‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

257

Here breathes the softest sigh that Love e’er knows; There sudden fancies, seeming without chart, Float into wildest breezy interludes; The past is all forgot, – hopes sweetly breathe, And our whole being glows, –when lo! beneath The flowery brink, Despair’s deep sob concludes! Startled, we strive to free us from the chain, – Notes of high triumph swell, and we are thine again!21

Like Fuller, Berryman finds himself given over to these notes of high triumph and deep despair, and by the time we reach section 18 of his poem he has so entered into the music that he wonders, ‘Who was I? / Am I these tutti, am I this rallentando? / This entrance of the oboe?’22 The listener’s identity is soluble in Beethoven’s music; and it is in the composer’s disaster corner that the poem sets up camp, with the rather ominous (and Whitmanesque) conclusion: ‘I am all these / the sane man makes reply on the locked ward’.23 Indeed, if Berryman imagines some affinity with Beethoven, then this closeness is experienced, in a large part, through the notion of shared artistic struggle – and creative interference appears, once again, to work both ways. A particular moment of pathos occurs in stanza 8 as Berryman reaches backwards through time in an attempt to identify with and reassure the composer from his point of historical advantage: O did he sleep sound? Heavy, heavy that. Waked at 3:30 not by some sonata but by a botched rehearsal of the Eighth where all thing has to go right (Koussevitzky will make it, Master; lie back down)24

21 Fuller, The Dial 2/2 (October 1841): 203. 22 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 240. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 238. Note that Berryman here and elsewhere in the poem uses slightly larger stanza breaks than usual.

258

Eve Cobain

Berryman’s choice of the resonant word ‘Heavy’ here augments the sense of shared suffering, since it links the scene back into a number of episodes depicting his own ‘heavy’ wakefulness, as described in Dream Song 29, where he writes, There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good.25

The looming and resonant presence of The Dream Songs is backed up by an earlier draft of the poem in which insomniac Berryman writes, I puzzle – it’s quarter to five a.m. – were you ever satisfied. Ah, I think, often. Getting things right26

This version gestures at what Berryman describes in Dream Song 1 as ‘a putting things over’, or the impulse to ‘do it’ – the very struggle that causes Henry to be ‘wicked & away’.27 In the case of Beethoven, Berryman surmises, personal contentment must have been contingent on artistic production. The theme of creative struggle is borne out further in stanzas 9 and 10: Fact is, he stumbled at the start and in the sequence, stumbled in the middle, 10 often unsure at the end – shown by his wilderness on-sketchings encrusted like Tolstoy (not Mozart: who’d, ripping napkins, the whole strict in mind before notes serried; limitationless, unlike you).28

25 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 33. 26 Mss 43, Delusions, etc., Berryman’s Sonnets, Box 1, Folder 4 in the Literary Manuscripts Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries. 27 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 3. 28 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 238.

‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

259

Ever aware of his own creative limitations, the poet feels more affinity with Beethoven here than with Mozart who, he suggests, experienced no barrier to the expression of his musical ideas. Berryman was no doubt thinking of his own difficulty to see order in his poetic projects – particularly The Dream Songs, which, as Haffenden notes, ‘seemed resistant to any possible shape or scheme’; in August 1962, Haffenden continues, Berryman ‘set down one attempt at a conspectus; but then, starting a fresh page, “ugh”, he wrote, “so many schema: + minstrelsy.” His misgivings about the Songs were many’.29 It is true that both Berryman and Beethoven sketched their ideas with unusual dynamism. In trying to perceive a connection between their creative processes, however, Berryman somewhat misrepresents the composer, whose sketchbooks critics instance to suggest the spontaneity with which he expressed himself. Berryman uses these ‘wilderness / on-sketchings’ to emphasize the composer’s increasing sense of isolation while upholding him, at the same time, as a kind of musical prophet. He returns to these drafts in stanza 20, drawing on them to demonstrate the inscrutability of late Beethoven: ‘Straightforward staves, dark bars, / late motions toward the illegible. Musical thighs’.30 Berryman’s preference in the poem is clearly for these later and often baffling works; and the concept of deafness, as an embodied alienation, becomes bound up with artistic late style. While ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ gives an overview of the composer’s life, all of the compositions mentioned – with the exception of the Fourth Piano Concerto – were in fact composed after the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, in which he expresses a sense of isolation brought on by his worsening condition. ‘I must live like an exile’, wrote Beethoven, if I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, a fear that I may be subjected to the danger of letting my condition be observed. […] What humiliation for me when someone standing near me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents brought me near to despair; a little more and I would have ended my life. […] Only

29 John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 309. 30 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 240.

260

Eve Cobain art held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I produced all that I felt was within me; and so I spared this wretched life.31

This statement clearly resonated with Berryman on a number of levels; in fact, he draws upon it as he remarks upon the ingenuity of Beethoven’s late work, which acts out in defiance against the estranged and ailing body: If we take our head in our ears and listen Ears! Ears! the Devil paddled in you 18 heard not a hill flute or a shepherd sing! tensing your vision onto an alarm of gravid measures, sequent to demure, all we fall, absently foreknowing . .32

Berryman picks up here on the anti-pastoral, even anti-traditional aspects of Beethoven’s mission statement and aesthetic, suggesting that the composer’s ‘exile’ in later life brought about a kind of fall – another resonant word in Berryman – into new musical terrain. And like a number of theorists of late style – notably Theodor Adorno and Edward Said – Berryman is interested in a type of late work that is characterized by its difficulty and resistance. ‘Each of us can readily supply evidence of how it is that late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor’, writes Said in Late Style, Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? […] It is this second type of lateness as a factor of style that I find deeply interesting. I’d like to explore the experience of late style that involves a non-harmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against.33

Quoted in Barry Cooper, Beethoven: An Extraordinary Life (London: ABRSM, 2013), 59. 32 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 240. Note Berryman’s idiosyncratic two-point ellipsis here. 33 Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 7. 31

‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

261

Such an aesthetic is clearly inborn in the roughly hewn ‘Beethoven Triumphant’. Uneven and obscure, the work’s numbered sections appear often as shards broken off from a larger monument. These fragments shift fluidly between historical and subjective experience – between the poet and the composer – and spill the bounds of the units implied. While the poem strives to achieve a semblance of order, ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ suggests a poet more comfortable than ever with breaking the rules. Berryman had more than once drawn upon Beethoven as a model for this brand of artistic lateness. In Dream Song 204 he invokes ‘Beethoven’s 109-10-11 & the Diabelli Variations’, remarking, ‘You go by the rules but there the rules don’t matter / is what I’ve been trying to say’.34 The composer appears a similarly dissenting figure in Dream Song 331, which brings him into connection with the deaf and alienated Goya: ‘a strangeness in the final notes, never to be resolved, / Beethoven’s, Goya’s: you had better go to the Prado / downstairs, to see on what I am insisting’.35 Here Berryman was referring particularly to Goya’s Black Paintings, murals composed on the walls of the painter’s house – the Quinta del Sordo or Deaf Man’s Villa, just outside of Madrid – in the final years of his life. These paintings are famously enigmatic, full of menace and doom. As a poem that deals with the work of the aging and alienated composer, as well as the ailing Berryman, ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ is itself replete with such painterly strangeness – and the central enigma is surely that of the ‘musical thighs’, which return three times throughout the poem. These pose a deliberate challenge to interpretation but have their origin in Yeats, reminding us not only of Leda’s ‘thighs caressed’ and that ‘shudder in the loins’, but also the ‘slow moving’ thighs in ‘The Second Coming’.36 Yeats, assuming once again the role of the ‘majestic Shade’, comes to the poet’s aid here in articulating the sublimity (even terrible beauty) of late Beethoven,

34 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 223. 35 Ibid. 353. 36 See W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘The Second Coming’, in John Kelly, ed., Selected Poems (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 55, 39.

262

Eve Cobain

who, as Berryman affirms at the outset, ‘begot us an enigma’. Beethoven’s last works take ‘precedence’, writes Adorno, ‘by virtue of their enigma’.37 Yet more than Yeats is in the background here. If the Irish poet hovers as one of the major presences behind the poem in connection with this enigma, Shakespeare takes centre stage. Beethoven himself professed an interest in the works of Shakespeare, as recorded in Schindler’s biography,38 and the poet’s burgeoning influence on Beethoven has long been the subject of engrossed critical debate. The composer’s Shakespearean predilections could only have magnified his appeal for Berryman, now seemingly more eager than ever to constellate his interests. And unsurprisingly, it is the late works that emerge. In Stanza 5 the ‘4th Piano Concerto’ is said to be ‘Miser & Timon-giving, by queer turns’, while stanza 12 significantly recounts an incident where Beethoven used Shakespeare as a key to interpreting his unconventional ideas: ‘when Schindler was an arse to ask / your drift in Opus 31 and the Appassionata / you uttered at him, cheerful, “Just read The Tempest.”’39 Like Beethoven, Berryman refuses to make the connection between these two works explicit, but was no doubt aware of the fact that Opus 31, no. 1 was finished just after the completion of the Tempest Sonata (Opus 31, no. 2) and points to a definite sea change in terms of his musical style. In an essay that sets out to recover Beethoven’s literary interests, Thomas Sipe suggests that ‘after the onset of deafness Beethoven’s experience of literature in general (and Shakespeare in particular) stimulated his inner world of ideas’; Sipe goes on to underline the way in which this ailment caused him to ‘“turn inward” for his creative inspiration’.40 Such a movement ‘inward’, of course, had been Berryman’s tactic since the naissance of The Dream Songs, whose minstrel epigraph (to 77 Dream Songs)

Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2002), 124. 38 See Anton Felix Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, ed. Donald W. MacArdle (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996). 39 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 237, 238. 40 Thomas Sipe, ‘Beethoven, Shakespeare, and the “Appassionata”’, Beethoven Forum 4/1 ( January 1995): 73–96; 87. 37

‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

263

ushers, ‘Go in, brack man, de day’s yo’ own.’41 Thus, just as Beethoven had looked to Shakespeare to provide a parallel for his own late experience, so Berryman now looked to Beethoven as he made his final turn inward. In his last book, Delusions, etc., Berryman was retreating deeper into the inner world of fantasy and remembrance – expressing all the hallmarks of the terminal imagination. In stanza 24 of ‘Beethoven Triumphant’, The Tempest makes yet another appearance when Beethoven’s music conjures ‘[i]slands of suffering & disenchantment & enchantment’.42 ‘This is the prerogative of late style’, writes Said, it has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.43

Delusions, etc. finds the poet marooned on such an island; the collection contains within its very title a hint at the kind of distorted psychic experiences that might come to be expected there. The island, in fact, was a trope that Berryman used repeatedly in connection with terminal (and musical) activity. In Dream Song 25, for example, Henry, who claims to be ‘going away’, recalls, as he does so, something in my dream about a Cat, which fought and sang. Something about a lyre, an island. Unstrung. Linked to the land at low tide. Cables fray.44

‘Thank you for everything’, the Dream Song concludes, in seeming supplication, as he moves into a space beyond the poem. Similarly, in ‘Henry’s 41 See John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), viii. 42 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 241. 43 Said, On Late Style, 148. 44 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 27.

264

Eve Cobain

Understanding’, from Love & Fame, Berryman receives a vision of his journey ‘out towards the island’, an epiphany that occurs to him ‘Suddenly, unlike Bach, // & horribly, unlike Bach’.45 The break between stanzas here becomes a space in which the voice reverberates. As early as 1948, in fact, Berryman considered the figure of the artist to be one ‘moving towards annihilation – towards becoming a voice: first a voice for the object, later (very rare, this) a voice for powers and passions and acceptances buried somewhere in men for good – Tempest, Magic Flute, Schubert C Major Quintet, last works usually’.46 Thus it would appear that the author of ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ had for some time held his own particular theories on artistic lateness – ideas he most often expressed through the ally of music. As early as May 1948, indeed, the poet ‘pondered writing […] an article equating The Tempest and The Magic Flute, to be called ‘Shakespeare and Mozart: The End’, as well as another grand Shakespearean project’.47 It was finally though the figure of Beethoven that the poet actualized his treatise on the creative terminus. Much remains to be done on Berryman’s late work in general, and the fact that his last two books – Love & Fame and Delusions, etc. – are often thought so resistant to criticism is itself testament to their bristling difficulty. His ‘last two books […] move’, writes Lowell, ‘they may be slighter than the chronicle of dream songs, but they fill out the frame, alter their speech with age, and prepare for his death’.48 These books, we might say, suffer a sea change. ‘Lateness’, Said suggests, ‘is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present’.49 This holds true for Berryman, whose exploration of Beethoven’s

45 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 256. 46 Quoted by Charles Thornbury in his ‘Introduction’ to Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, lvii. 47 See Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 190. 48 See Robert Lowell, ‘For John Berryman’, New York Review of Books 18/6 (6 April 1972), available online at: (accessed 13 July 2016). 49 Said, Late Style, 14.

‘He begot us an enigma’: Berryman’s Beethoven

265

music and character gave him full access to the sensual present while calling to shore many drifting relics of his own poetic career. The poem bears witness to his own historicity as much as to the composer’s. Though the re-visions of the teetering artist, suggests Berryman, the great artwork is reborn – its futurity secured in a cycle of et ceteras. The poem’s final mention of Shakespeare renders just such an exchange. Berryman’s Beethoven, at the end, is pictured ‘gasping of Shakespeare’, while simultaneously ‘knocking over the picture of Haydn’s birthplace’.50 Austria, the birthplace of his mentor, was also, notably, the scene of Beethoven’s death. And Berryman, rooted firmly in his terminal present finds himself similarly fortified by a great crowd of witnesses. His appeal to Beethoven has all the pathos and religious fervour of Fuller’s in her 1843 letter, ‘To Beethoven […] My only friend’: Oh, if thou wouldst take me wholly to thyself. I am lost in this world where I sometimes meet angels but of a different star from mine. […] Even so does thy spirit call upon, plead with all spirits. But thou dost triumph and bring them all in. My triumphs are but for the moment, thine eternal.51

For Fuller, and Berryman, Beethoven becomes a kind of ‘Over-Soul’, as Ralph Waldo Emerson formulated the term, under and into which is gathered our collective artistic endeavours – ‘within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship’.52 In collating and connecting the late and enigmatic works of some of his earliest paramours, the poet was working suggestively towards the construction of a kind of self-elegy. Moreover, the poem’s place in Berryman’s final collection speaks to his own hopes of a creative afterlife. ‘Beethoven Triumphant’, in short, leads out in triumphal procession:

50 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 241. 51 Fuller, quoted in Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings, 61–2. 52 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Oversoul’ in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 206.

266

Eve Cobain They said you died. ‘20,000 persons of every class’ clashed at the gates of the house of mourning, till they locked them. Franz Schubert stalked the five hundred feet to the church. It’s a lie! You’re all over my wall! You march and chant around here! I hear your thighs.53

The composer’s triumph is that of the creative spirit acting out in selfexpression against and in spite of the aging body. It is the mysterious final soundings that emerge out of this conflict, which is his creative legacy. The elegy first appeared in The New York Review of Books on 6 April 1972, nearly three months after the poet’s death. It is not entirely clear whether Berryman submitted the poem for publication himself or if it was submitted on his behalf, perhaps by Robert Lowell, who has a memoir for Berryman in the same volume. ‘John himself lived to the age of Beethoven’, comments Lowell, ‘though he died with fewer infirmities than Beethoven. The consolation somehow doesn’t wash’.54 Lowell cites ‘Beethoven Triumphant’ as ‘the most ambitious and perhaps finest of [Berryman’s] late poems’.55 The poem serves as a monument, not only to the triumphs of the composer but those of the late Berryman. We hear his thighs.

53 Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, 242. 54 Robert Lowell, ‘For John Berryman’. 55 Ibid.

Peter Campion

15  John Berryman’s Acoustics

In 1989, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the Collected Poems of John Berryman, The New Republic ran a review by Donald Davie.1 Against familiar notions of Berryman as poet of the individual, tortured psyche – of mental disorder, dipsomaniacal high-jinks, erotic banditry, and so on – Davie portrays Berryman not just as a political poet, but one confronting a particular political situation: American empire. ‘He didn’t mean to be and yet he was a poet of empire’.2 It may have been Robert Lowell, Davie argues, who compared twentieth-century America to Augustan Rome, with its truculent bloat from republic to empire, but it was Berryman who fully rendered and dramatized this condition. Berryman, for Davie, remains an artist who ‘recognizes civic responsibilities; not, as too many commentators would persuade us, a man entranced by his own image in the mirror’.3 In 2014, 100 years after Berryman’s birth and a quarter century after that New Republic review, at least two events made Davie look like a soothsayer. The first was the publication of Philip Coleman’s John Berryman’s Public Vision. Elaborating the whole, webbed membrane of political consciousness in Berryman’s poems, Coleman offers a reading that feels, at the same time, definitive and open-ended – a precise and comprehensive portrait, promising a robust life to come for Berryman’s poetry. In fact, the second event was a great example of this robustness, the centenary celebration at the University of Minnesota of John Berryman’s birth. Held over one weekend, following an earlier centenary event in Dublin, the celebration brought together scholars from all over the world, students, 1 2 3

Donald Davie, Two Ways out of Whitman, ed. Doreen Davie (London: Carcanet, 2000), 92. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 92.

268

Peter Campion

filmmakers, composers, members of the Twin Cities literary communities, friends and former students of the poet, and three generations of his family. The editors of new, centenary editions of Berryman’s work, April Bernard, Henri Cole, Michael Hofmann, and Daniel Swift, gave superb readings from Berryman’s poetry and their own. The essays collected in the present volume testify to the intellectual urgency and vivacity of the ongoing work these centenary celebrations revealed. For my part, the celebration was also simply an occasion to listen to Berryman, to hear his marvelous poems again, this time in a dialogue containing many voices. In fact, what I want to claim here is that Berryman makes a superlative, if surprising, poet of collective life because of a certain technical gift – his feel for acoustics. I choose the word ‘acoustics’ because it implies not only the management of rhythms, like and unlike syllables, tones, expressive attitudes, and registers of diction – but also the spaces in which such sounds reverberate. These include stanzas, and Berryman was a superlative architect of stanzas, but they also comprise the entire depth and dimension of collective life, the explicit or interpreted distances and proximities between speakers and listeners. Used to describe how small formal qualities and large historical forces become mutually entailing in poems, ‘acoustic’ contains a revealing contradiction. While the word implies depth and dimension, it may also suggest its opposite – two-dimensional space. Berryman’s contemporary, the pop philosopher Marshall McLuhan uses the word this way when he relates a vision of modern experience as essentially ‘acoustic.’4 Electronic media, technologies of instantaneous transmission, have returned us, McLuhan’s excitable prose claims, to a world more tribal than civic, in which traditional hierarchies tumble, leaving diverse facets of experience to balance in weird solution, as distinctions between background and foreground, cause and effect, society and self-collapse, like so many discrete bodies melting into overlapping information streams. Central to all these transitions, for McLuhan, remains the shift from a pictorial to an ‘acoustic’ paradigm, characterized by the two-dimensional space of the mosaic in which ‘components 4

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Berkeley, CA: Ginko Press, 2005), 9.

John Berryman’s Acoustics

269

co-exist without direct lineal hook-up or connection, creating a field of simultaneous relations’.5 Examples include radio and television, but also the newspaper, whose sections and columns not only contain seemingly unrelated information but sometimes perform entirely different social functions while lying right there next to one another. There’s a heavy dose of technological determinism in McLuhan, and a waft of shambolic vagueness, but his vision of modernity goes some way toward describing Berryman’s own; the dreams of Henry House are nothing if not ‘acoustic’ environments. In fact, Berryman here proves the greater thinker about modernity. He sees the paradigm McLuhan describes as more than technological: he understands it as the precise stock in trade of imperial America – the same power for whom communications technology has become central, in warfare as in the glut of post-war cultural production. The power of The Dream Songs in particular comes from the way that amorous, impulsive, cracked-up, short-circuiting Henry stands as an American Everyman for his age. He does so precisely because he includes various and extreme examples. This occurs even at the level of typography: the proverbial stones that the builder refused here become dialect spellings, slang words, and accent marks. As for the people in these poems, Henry not only sympathizes with, but sees himself in, murderers, paranoiacs, and sexual deviants, as well as great religious and political figures. He casts himself in the roles of both victims and perpetrators. His purview remains mostly national, as he admits to being a ‘monoglot of English (American version)’,6 and yet Berryman is canny about how this figure appears in an international context. When travelling to India in Dream Song 27, for example, Henry makes a grimly comic parody of a colonialist, even while attempting to be good guest: ‘the little people spread, & did friendly things’.7 These poems are everywhere polyphonic and everywhere tinged with the central conflicts of post-war America. Consider how such political ‘acoustics’ inform Dream Song 22, which the poet titles ‘Of 1826’, referring to the death of those famous rivals, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, on the same day, 4 July 1826: 5 6 7

Ibid. 9. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 52. Ibid. 31.

270

Peter Campion I am the little man who smokes & smokes. I am the girl who does know better but. I am the king of the pool. I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut. I am a government official & a goddamned fool. I am a lady who takes jokes. I am the enemy of the mind. I am the auto salesman and love you. I am a teenager cancer, with a plan. I am the blackt-out man. I am the woman powerful as a zoo. I am two eyes screwed to my set, whose blind – It is the Fourth of July. Collect: while the dying man, forgone by you creator, who forgives, is gasping ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives’ in vain, in vain, in vain. I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.

The first twelve lines read as a negative reversal of Whitman’s lyric ‘I’ as container of multitudes. In this poem the multitudes show up alright, but they’re a nightmarish gaggle. The end-stopped clipping isolates each character, but does anything connect them? Before we can answer, the poem jump-cuts, morphing from a hypnagogic TV set to a nineteenth-century deathbed scene. Can the founding rivals, Adams and Jefferson, Federalist and Republican, reconcile at the end? Can those private selves ever join a redemptive union greater than the sum of its parts? The answer would seem to be ‘no’. But the poem doesn’t end before a whole other tone arrives. Here, Henry adopts his feline avatar, echoing those first twelve lines with his own boastful self-declaration, ‘I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.’ The exuberance has a retroactive effect on the preceding lines: despite the obvious grimness of such statements as ‘I am a teenage cancer with a plan’, these ‘pure products of America gone crazy’8 may begin to seem more 8

William Carlos Williams, The Complete Poems, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 217.

John Berryman’s Acoustics

271

sympathetic. For one thing, there’s the possibility of erotic attraction. Henry Pussy Cat might just enjoy the company of ‘the woman powerful as a zoo’, not to mention ‘the girl who does know better but’. And yet the recuperative potential here goes beyond self-gratification: if only by virtue of its location in the poem, the concluding flare of excitement suggests an adversative turn on that penultimate line at the presidential deathbed, ‘in vain, in vain, in vain’, so that the glimmer of hopefulness extends now to the nation itself. This may not insure anything like a ‘happy ending’, and yet the poem concludes with an artist’s own commitment to his art, which proves inseparable from his commitment to the dissociated people of this poem. These isolate flecks from the mosaic of the American populous, are for Berryman what the ‘foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ was for Yeats at the end of ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’.9 Although Berryman’s declaration, ‘I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly’ remains more ambiguous than that of his great predecessor, nevertheless, the imagined public of Dream Song 22 – unctuous car dealers right along with founding fathers – turns out for Berryman to be the source ‘where all the ladders start’. Berryman’s ability to derive lasting poetry from this source depends upon his acoustic sense, in both, seemingly contrary connotations of that phrase. Discontinuous, like non-figurative shapes on the flattened picture plane of a modern painting, discrete patches of speech in The Dream Songs turn individual poems as well the whole sequence into what McLuhan would call ‘a field of simultaneous relations’. Indeed, the death of Henry, which occurs in Dream Song 26 but seems to impede neither his carrying on with the events of his life nor his dying again, performs the same function: it confutes linear chronology, exercising the ancient prerogative of lyric to suspend time, to make all time simultaneous. Still, the Dream Songs are more than mosaic tiles of lexical and narrative discontinuity. Just as the wildly different registers of these poems, their seemingly singular verbal bursts, in fact link up in a grammar of remarkable precision, so the disparate songs become continuous with the storyline of 9

W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works, Volume I: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 348.

272

Peter Campion

one individual. The feeling that these poems come off the page, that they take shape right out of the air, startling themselves into the third dimension, depends upon forceful interjections and unexpected idioms, but also upon the likelihood, though never the inevitability, that such moments will contribute to a narrative, that for all Henry’s obvious theatrics and hyperbole, the complaint, the cry, the moan of anguish and desire have reasons. These psychological depths reveal, in turn, the larger historical scope of the poem. It’s precisely in Henry’s isolation, the depths of his subjective states, his dreams themselves, that the social becomes vivid and powerful. The most obvious example is the one Berryman himself mentions in his preface to the complete edition of The Dream Songs when he describes Henry as ‘a white American in early middle age, sometimes in blackface’. Social class, marked by race and the history of slavery, inform the very language from which Berryman forms Henry – the private, direct, often offensive and self-destructive thoughts ‘one’ would not normally speak out loud both parallel and create a linguistic underworld of improper though rich and expressive speech. The drama created by idioms of different racial provenance rubbing up against one another proves paradigmatic: throughout the poem, private experience gets interrupted when the very language used to translate it can’t help but reveal social and political relations. In a letter to Berryman, Saul Bellow quipped that 77 Dream Songs might as well be titled ‘The Spiritual History of America Under the Administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower’,10 and he may have had in mind Dream Song 23, subtitled ‘The Lay of Ike’, a poem whose choppy, interruptive syntax parodies both broadcast technology and Eisenhower’s own, less-than-Ciceronian oratory. But the imagery and tone of that poem colour other Dream Songs, too, including many whose occasions remain more obviously personal. The imperial forcefulness and bumptious clumsiness that Berryman sees in Eisenhower, as well as the feeling of militarism, lingering amid the booming prosperity and technological wonder of a post war economy, appear in Dream Song 69,

10

Saul Bellow, Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2010), 245.

John Berryman’s Acoustics

273

for instance, when Henry declares a lust so overpowering it could produce ‘TV spots and skywriting / outlets in Bonn & Tokyo’.11 One of Berryman’s favourite abbreviations, ‘p.a.’ for public address, here deserves attention. It shows up in Dream Song 24 when Henry lectures an Indian audience, as well as back in Dream Song 9,12 a poem remarkable for its own engagement with popular culture, electronic media, and state power: Henry’s mental anguish here finds an image of itself in the final scene of Raoul Walsh’s film-noir classic, High Sierra, when Ida Lupino speaks through a California state trooper’s microphone, attempting to talk Humphrey Bogart’s ‘Mad Dog’ Earl Ray down from a cliff. In all these poems, ‘public address’ suggests a parallel with the poet’s own acoustic art. After all, what does the poet do but address others through a conduit connecting collective and personal experience? And yet there’s also a certain embarrassment: ‘p.a.’ may suggest the eminence of the person speaking, but it also conjures those institutional authorities – the police, as well as academics – to whom people generally aren’t overjoyed to listen. In Berryman’s poems, p.a. systems often evoke a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of entrapment within structures of power. The great wonder of The Dream Songs lies in Berryman’s ability, like Kafka’s, to balance this fatalistic tendency with wonder about sheer surprise at the inevitable process of becoming. Consider Dream Song 77, the concluding poem in the first volume of Dream Songs, as well as the third to include that abbreviation ‘p.a.’. It’s unique not so much for portraying the intersection of private and public consciousness, but how and why artwork might strive for such portrayal. Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world & shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up and p.a.’d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand interest to Henry, ah to those less & none. Wif a book of his in either hand He is stripped down to move on.

11 12

Berryman, 76. Ibid. 11.

274

Peter Campion – Come away, Mr Bones. – Henry is tired of the winter, & haircuts, & a squeamish comfy ruin-prone proud national mind & spring (in the city so called). Henry likes Fall. He would be prepared to live in a world of Fall forever, impenitent Henry. But the snows and summers grieve and dream; These fierce & airy occupations, and love, raved away so many of Henry’s years it is a wonder that, with in each hand one of his mad books and all, ancient fires for eyes, his head full and his heart full, he’s making ready to move on.

This is a poem about the life of the poet, and yet Henry’s individual travail reveals another subject, more universal and more particular: the sense of time, the sense of being in time, like it or not. The final clause, ‘he’s getting ready to move on’, distils the problems inherent to his preoccupation into an effective joke. The imperative of the poet may be very much not to move on, not to ‘get over’ events – sadness as well as love. And to ‘move on’ in a poem may mean to end, to affix the words irrevocably to the page, so that they will always remain still. We can picture Henry himself moving, for sure: on the level of individual behaviour, he’s hardly someone who can keep in one space. And what could be a more American ending than moving on, like the hero at the end of a western, his restlessness tinged perhaps with equal parts optimism, avoidance, wonder, and wastefulness. But can we really imagine Henry moving on from anything? The joke here is also the promise of a sequel, and sure enough, there’s Henry again on the first page of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.13 In the poem itself, this conflicted sense of time shows as two sets of contradictions. The first is that central contradiction of the personal and public life, showing in the contrast between the ‘grand interest’ Henry 13

Berryman, 93.

John Berryman’s Acoustics

275

himself has in his topics and the disinterest of his audience, as well as in a basic, perceptual disjunction between what Henry experiences internally and what we commonly accept as reality. Henry’s comic complaint, for example, turns ‘the city’ into ‘the city so called’, so that the alienated poet seems to claim the prerogative of idealist philosophers to create that which he sees. At the same time, such metaphysical, personal preoccupations can appear illusory, a waste of time, so that the ‘fierce and airy occupations’ of literature, love, and even consciousness itself turn into mere abstractions that have ‘raved away so many of Henry’s years’. The attempt to solve this dilemma leads Berryman, Henry, and the reader to that inveterate problem for the lyric poet confronting mortality, the contradiction between organic and inorganic being. ‘Seedy’, for example, the initial word of the poem, suggests Henry’s amorous urges, but also the way any person is bound to biological processes as well impenitent desires to live ‘for ever’. Attempting to solve this contradiction becomes part and parcel of that first one: the poet makes the personal public – and in Berryman’s case ‘national’. This proves no mere confessional act, in the sense of M. L. Rosenthal’s persistent but diminishing coinage,14 because the poet also makes the public personal. He does so in language that employs time against time. Casual idioms, dialect spellings such as ‘Wif ’ and ‘de’, and references to his own historical moment, including its specific technologies, are themselves as contingent or ‘ruin prone’ as Henry’s proud national mind. At the same time, they’re the necessary material of an art work striving if not like Yeats’s to ascend ‘out of nature’, at least to make permanent a new fold in reality. The contradiction of the organic and metaphysical develops, then, into a synthesis similar to that of the personal and public: the poem makes each one become the other. Throughout his work, such synthesis prevents Berryman’s poems from turning into thickets of competing tensions, halls of mirrors in which contradictions face off into infinity. In fact, another word for synthesis might be direction. I have in mind the sense of a poem’s ending, the impression it leaves of where it has taken the reader and why, and of where its affective 14

M. L. Rosenthal, Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Persea Press, 1991), 109.

276

Peter Campion

energies now lead. I want to conclude, then, by examining a late poem that Donald Davie singled out for praise, ‘Lines to Mr Frost’, a poem that shows Berryman thinking about what poetry as an acoustic art can do, where it can lead, personally and historically – all while addressing the ghost of Robert Frost. It’s significant that Frost should appear at such a moment. If Berryman’s immediate predecessors in ventriloquism were Eliot, Crane, and Pound, his forbear in acoustics – this art of getting sound and voice to dramatize historical forces – was none other than the great eclogist living north of Boston. It was Frost, after all, who declared in his famous ‘sound of sense’ letter, sent from England to his former student John Bartlett in 1913, that his metrical art was distinct from that of British predecessors (Frost mentions Tennyson and Swinburne) due to his unique concern with the vocal gestures underlying words, which he calls ‘the abstract sound of sense’,15 and in a later letter, ‘sentence sounds’.16 These ‘definite entities’ are characterized by creaturely rather than semantic intention, by suasion. ‘The best place to get the abstract sound of sense’, Frost writes, ‘is from voices behind a door that cuts of the words’. He then illustrates the concept by asking Bartlett to imagine how a few examples would sound, You mean to tell me you can’t read? I said no such thing. Well read then. You’re not my teacher. ______ He says it’s too late. Oh, say! Damn an Ingersoll watch anyway. __________ One-two-three—go! No good! Come back—come back. Haslam go down there and make those kids get out of the track. Those sounds are summoned by the audial imagination and they must be positive, strong, and definitely and unmistakably indicated by the context. The reader must be

15 16

Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 664. Ibid. 667.

John Berryman’s Acoustics

277

at no loss to give his voice the posture proper to the sentence. The simple declarative sentence used in making a plain statement is one sound. But Lord love ye it mustn’t be worked to death.17

If Frost’s Independence Day brag about his originality compared to the likes of Swinburne and Tennyson prefigures Berryman’s own ‘proud’ though admittedly ‘ruin prone’ national mind, and if his preference for vocal drama (‘Lord love ye’) over the monotonous repetition of simple declarative sentences anticipates the verbal antics and agonies of Berryman’s poems, that imagined pair of walled-off voices, taking on different forms in each of the three examples, might just be the literary parents of Henry House. So it’s appropriate that ‘Lines to Mr Frost’ contain its own dialogue, this time with Frost’s late poem ‘The Draft Horse’, an uncharacteristic, hermetic, and violent dream parable, in which Frost imagines a man attacking the horse that draws the speaker’s buggy. The final three quatrains are as follows: The ponderous beast went down With a crack of a broken shaft. And the night drew through the trees In one long invidious draft. The most unquestioning pair That ever accepted fate And the least disposed to ascribe Any more than we had to to hate, We assumed that the man himself Or someone he had to obey Wanted us to get down And walk the rest of the way.

And Berryman’s ‘Lines to Mr Frost’: Felled in my tracks by your tremendous horse slain in its tracks by the angel of good God,

17

Ibid. 665.

278

Peter Campion I wonder toward your marvelous tall art warning away maybe in that same morning you squandered afternoon of your great age on my good gravid wife & me, with tales gay of your cunning & colossal fame & awful character, and – Christ – I see I know & can do nothing, and don’t mind – you’re talking about American power and how somehow we’ve got to be got to give it up – so help me, in my poverty-stricken way I said the same goddamn thing yesterday to my thirty kids, so I was almost ready to hear you from the grave with these passionate grave last words, and frankly Sir you fill me with joy.18

Maybe the most remarkable thing about both poems, taken at first blush, remains their startling shifts in the direction not of action so much as tone. Frost imagines a brutal attack, the dramatic culmination of the ominous tone he builds in the first six lines, but then has the speaker and his companion respond with neither rage nor terror but acceptance. I’m convinced Berryman’s right about the poem: the ‘invidious’ draft, for example, hints at universal male conscription, law in the United States from 1940 to 1973.19 ‘Too frail a buggy’ pulled by ‘too heavy a horse’ makes a fine figure for the situation that Eisenhower himself described, in his farewell address about the ‘military industrial complex’.20 But this is not to ignore the obvious: ‘The Draft Horse’ is a strange poem. For all its verbal and dramatic clarity, its relation to its context stays murky. Responding to ‘The Draft Horse’, Berryman’s ‘Lines to Mr Frost’ has its own constitutive tensions. For one thing, there’s a certain disparagement John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 249. 19 Frost, 454. 20 Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17 1961, available online at (accessed 31 July 2016). 18

John Berryman’s Acoustics

279

of Frost’s ‘colossal fame / & awful character’ that follows and leads back to tribute. More important, the poem balances two seemingly opposite conceptions of history. Deterministic fatalism crops up when the poet states, ‘I can do nothing’. But a sense of history as possibly redemptive shows in the final statement about joy through artwork – a common note in Berryman’s last poems, but one that never resolves the ominous undertones. This tension also appears, ingenuously, in the use of the present participle, ‘you’re talking about’. This is the verb tense we hear when a talking head on TV loses his or her poise: ‘no what you’re saying is … no, what I’m talking about …’ It is a staticky kind of ‘sentence sound’ and Berryman employs it with consummate skill, so that it performs two tasks at once: it hints at a belief in the limits of denotative language, and of free will, a belief that sees our participial actions rolling on without us, so that our identification of them comes only after the fact; at the same time, it simply lowers the register and grounds the poem, suggesting a collective sense of mutual endeavour. After all, the occasions of speech – the acoustic events – that Berryman portrays, including Frost’s regaling the Berryman family during a visit, as well as Berryman’s lecturing his college students, are those in which vital messages intermingle with everyday mundanities and awkwardnesses. This is what makes Berryman such a powerful political poet. Writing about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the poet’s contemporary James Baldwin once explained that ‘the failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended’.21 Berryman’s rhetorical ‘message’, his direction or directive, couldn’t be clearer: he explains Frost’s warning regarding an American descent from republic into empire: ‘you’re talking about American power and how / somehow we’ve got to be got to give it up’. But he answers this with ‘I said the same goddamn thing yesterday’, submitting that message to the world of actual and various speakers. Frost avoids what Baldwin calls the ‘categorization’ that ruins protest literature, the too easy matching of schematics to actual human beings, by way of an allegory he leaves

21

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), 23.

280

Peter Campion

shadowy, perhaps too shadowy. Berryman does so by way of fidelity to the creaturely textures of his subject and his own linguistic material. ‘Lines to Mr Frost’, like all of Berryman’s best work, gathers ‘beauty, dread, power’ because its language carries the energies of history into a vivid present, in which excitement and even joy exist right along with terror and outrage.

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson

16 Henry in High School: John Berryman in the Classroom is an ‘Angry Zen Touch’

Michael P. Carriger Let me begin with a personal note. I grew up in Oklahoma, attended Oklahoma public schools in the 1970s and 1980s, and though I was not always the most focused student, not once did I hear the name John Berryman mentioned in or out of a classroom.1 We studied Wiley Post, Will Rogers, Woody Guthrie, Jim Thorpe, and Sequoyah, but teachers and textbooks did not include Berryman as a favoured son. In fact, even in my liberal arts pursuits in college during the early 1990s, I never knowingly came across The Dream Songs or Homage to Mistress Bradstreet or any of the shorter lyrics. It wasn’t until graduate school, and by chance in graduate school, that I met a fellow student from Minneapolis / St Paul, and she kept praising his name and making allusions to the poetry. Since that introduction, I have not been able to kick my Berryman habit. He exists now, for me at least, both in and out of the classroom. My colleague, Bill Patterson, and I are lucky to work for a public school district in Kansas that continues to support a certain measure of teacher autonomy. That is quite rare these days. Despite the battalions of reforms and initiatives, including Common Core, our district has allowed us the space to shape our high school English curriculum, as well as the day-to-day choices of texts in our classroom. Over the years, we have made a concerted effort to include Berryman’s poetry in our classes, namely in 1

John Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1914, and lived in the state for the first ten years of his life.

282

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson

junior-level American Literature courses and senior level literature and composition courses. But, to this day, I know of no high school English textbooks that include Berryman. All of the poems we teach, we include on our own. We have served on several curriculum reviews over the last twenty years and continue to receive sample copies of the canned curricula that ships out of the edu-corporations, but none include Berryman. Why is this? Is it Berryman’s noted complexity, his intentional off-putting syntax, his esoteric multi-vocality with monologues slipping into frustrating disembodied dialogues, his cryptic and sudden allusions? Well, these may very well be to blame. Or, is it his occasional slide into the coarse, the vulgar, the not so silent wonderings of a woman’s backside, the falling in love with a ‘gash’?2 Possibly. Could it be the ever-present question of selfslaughter, the descent into the alcohol-soaked darkness? Maybe. Could it be the reductive accusations of racism? Potentially. Or, is it Berryman’s own demanding view of The Dream Songs as a long poem with only occasionally easily accessible individual lyrics that continues to be the force keeping the poems from the high school classroom? In his introduction to the 2004 John Berryman: Selected Poems, Kevin Young muses on this very problem in his own college classroom. He even asks, ‘Who would rather take a week teaching Berryman’s Dream Songs than an hour with the self-contained ‘For the Union Dead’ by Robert Lowell or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’?’3 Bill and I spoke with Kevin about this a few years ago, and he told us what he continues to convey in his introduction. He writes, ‘When I dare to teach the poems, I find that for every I don’t get it there are four more I can’t stand its and, inevitably, one kid who gets a gleam in her eye, or a smirk on his face, and says nothing – until conferences, when I hear them confess how much they like Berryman’.4

2 3 4

See Berryman’s poem ‘Her & It’ from Love & Fame (1970) in Charles Thornbury, ed., Collected Poems 1937–1971 (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 169. Kevin Young, Introduction to John Berryman: Selected Poems, ed. Kevin Young (New York: The Library of America, 2004), xvii. Ibid. Emphases in original.

Henry in High School

283

There is, indeed, so much to like in Berryman, especially for the adolescent in high school. Yes, especially for the adolescent in high school. Again, let us list: sudden swings into the esoteric, including references to popular culture, yes; multiple, disparate voices ranging from the judgmental to the self-loathing and back to ecstatic and raging, yes; complexity of thought and emotion with a tinge of melancholy and a dash of questioning existence, again, yes and yes. These neuroses and behavioural manifestations are often the very definition of modern American adolescence. What better poems to accompany teenagers in their studies and their own lives than Berryman’s poetry, especially The Dream Songs. What better poems to ask students to wallow in words, to wrestle language, than Berryman’s? But, these ‘fierce & airy occupations’5 can present a real test to the high school student. They don’t give in to adolescent threats and eye rolls easily, not without a fight. In Dream Song 275, Berryman depicts a classroom moment of his own at the University of Minnesota. He writes, And yet I find myself able, at this deep point, to carry out my duties: I lecture, I write. I am even lecturing well, I threw two chairs the janitors had piled on the podium to the floor of the lecture hall: the students were amazed it was good for them, action in the midst of thought, an angry Zen touch, something not written down except in the diaries of the unknown devoted ones of the 1156

First, it was rewarding to hear some of these stories, these classroom memories, over the few days of the centenary conference from the ‘devoted ones’. But second, that is exactly what The Dream Songs provides the high school English classroom, an ‘angry Zen touch’. Just as Henry heaves two chairs 5 6

John Berryman, Dream Song 77, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 84. Ibid. 294.

284

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson

across the classroom, disrupting, or more importantly, purposefully drawing out a deeper attention from his students, so too The Dream Songs shocks students into a closer reading, demanding a more focused attention to poetic diction and the situational problems in the poems. So, suppose with me a time a place a high school student who has waked, maybe, risen, washed, dressed, fed, maybe, been seen off for the day by busy parents in the middle of the school year – about October, say of 2014, a Monday – whether at Lawrence, Kansas or Minneapolis, Minnesota or any other typical (American) town or city. The student strolls into first hour English class with a mind on a different world; s/he is in orbit. The hour begins with the handsome and brilliant instructor passing out a dozen or so poems, each built on three stanzas of six lines. These poems do not closely resemble Shakespeare’s sonnets, which have been the subject of scrutiny for the last two weeks, though many do hinge at the start of the third stanza, like the sonnets turning into the sestet. The first one, untitled, sets the room abuzz. Near the dry erase boards, one set of students sends up a rough whisper, a question. ‘Who is Henry? Do you see a last name anywhere? And, who is talking about him? Who is this I?’ Another table quietly claims, ‘I mean, he is a blob. I think he just morphs into different personalities’. Still, another group of students, feeling their way through the poem, groans, ‘Poor Henry. What do you think the departure is? He needs some comfort. Could it be a divorce, a death?’ Lastly, one young man – there is always one young man – interrupts, ‘Who the hell is Mr Bones?’ And, shoulderto-shoulder to those most vocal are the wide-eyed and stunned students who think they are completely lost, silently accusing their teacher of the most bitter of educational betrayals. This scene has played out in my classroom over the years, particularly this past year. I asked fifty seniors in two sections to examine selections from The Dream Songs. Though I have many students who are always willing to explore any text I place in front of them, some students resist the difficult, the challenging. I asked them to consider the poem as a puzzle, to understand that we can identify a puzzle is a puzzle without yet knowing the answer. These students often want an immediate answer. They just want the poem to open up and lay itself bare. I suggested we search for clues.

Henry in High School

285

Again, we may know something is a clue without knowing how it is a clue. If we acquire enough clues, we may find that the poem provides its own code, its own primer, for understanding it. I think I compared a poem to an engine; an engine has its parts. In a particular flurry of what I thought was inspiration, I even suggested that a poem is a patient demonstrating symptoms, requiring a diagnosis. I may have even yelled out, ‘Typhoid!’ at some point. Humbling. Humbling. It is truly humbling to think about what we utter with good intentions sometimes. However, this method worked particularly well for my students looking at Dream Song 55. It reads, Peter’s not friendly. He gives me sideways looks. The architecture is far from reassuring. I feel uneasy. A pity, – the interview began so well: I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away and sloshed out a martini strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters – God’s health, the vague hell of the Congo, John’s energy, anti-matter matter. I felt fine. Then a change came backward. A chill fell. Talk slackened, died, and he began to give me sideways looks. ‘Christ’, I thought ‘what now?’ and would have askt for another but didn’t dare. I feel my application failing. It’s growing dark, some other sound is overcoming. His last words are: ‘We betrayed me’.7

Dream Song 55 gives us Henry before St Peter, who is giving him ‘sideways looks’ and privately debating his possible admission and placement into the afterlife. Without my guidance, my assistance, my students noted the language of business: ‘interview’ and ‘application’. They resisted the 7 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 62.

286

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson

temptation to let those two words determine the whole interpretation. They moved on to the martini that Peter ‘sloshed’ out. They wondered how a martini shows up in a job interview, but they did not bog down. Some forced the names of ‘Peter’ and ‘John’ into the discussion and noted ‘God’s health’ and Henry’s explosive sigh of ‘Christ.’ This close reading of a Dream Song, several Dream Songs, and the attention to structure and language before meaning and interpretation serves my students well, particularly as a bridge between a psychological study of Hamlet and an upcoming and particularly gruelling reading of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Berryman certainly merits his own study, even in the high school classroom. But, as he purposefully absorbed and rejected so many of his predecessors, his work is particularly useful as a theoretical and processoriented framework for accessing other rigorous literary texts.

William C. Patterson Many have remarked that Berryman was not only an effective teacher but also a rousing one who threw himself into lecturing with an ecstatic force.8 There are many moments of confluence for Berryman as poet and professor. As cited earlier, in the final stanza of Dream Song 275 Henry remarks, […] Something’s gotta give either in edgy Henry or the environment: the conflict cannot last9

This is often the case in the high school literature and composition classroom as well; sometimes in October, often in April, ‘something’s gotta

8

See, for example, Judith Koll Healey and Richard J. Kelly’s contributions to the present volume. 9 Berryman, The Dream Songs, 294.

Henry in High School

287

give’. In my experience in the classroom, as in my writing life, poetry is more often the cure than it is the cause. I soothe myself with, though for 50 years the war’s made headlines. Waiting for the fall and the cold fogs thereof in delicious Ireland.10

Here, for Henry, as for Berryman, ‘delicious Ireland’ anticipates his opportunity to continue and perhaps to complete what he started in The Dream Songs – ultimately he goes much farther, writing and cutting hundreds of songs. For the high school literature teacher, it is not simply the winter and summer breaks that provide a necessary solace, but also what is afforded in a day’s or week’s engagement with a difficult but rewarding poem or set of poems; this engagement, when it takes with students, is our ‘delicious Ireland’. I have beheld a poem give that something; I have witnessed a poem changing a classroom environment; a poem can turn what might have been a remote and meaningless conflict for a student into a terrible beauty that might even break into blossom. I have worked with intelligent high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors long enough to formulate and, over time, to test a hypothesis connecting a student’s ongoing academic success with his or her engagement with (so called) difficult poetry. Those students most willing to engage with a challenging poem such as Dream Songs 14, 29, 55, or 76 – the recent activity conducted with seniors who were simultaneously reading Hamlet alluded to earlier – are the students most likely to find academic success at the university, graduate, or post-graduate level, without regard to future discipline of study or choice of occupation. This is because those students have the curiosity of spirit that makes them willing to put in the intellectual effort long enough to locate something meaningful in a difficult task. I have found that that ability is transferable to a host of other intellectual activities. Of course, my evidence is intensely personal and mostly anecdotal, but it has held true for former students who have become entrepreneurs,

10

Ibid.

288

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson

university instructors, creative writers, medical professionals, aerospace engineers, political scientists, and fellow school-teachers. I am not merely repeating that old dictum that poetry enriches its readers; I am suggesting that poetry marks its readers. As an example, consider high school students considering Dream Song 14. I have provided this poem to high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors throughout the last decade: Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources’. I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.11

The opening is almost universally chuckled over. ‘My grandpa says that same thing’ or ‘My mom would always get mad at me when I’d say I’m bored’. But this is simply the hook of the poem. If students stop there, they have not engaged with the poem. They might likely settle down into their ‘heavy boredom’ and contemplate the next swipe of their digital life, ‘inner resources’ being largely digital these days. However, those who stick around to contemplate boring old achilles, that same achilles ‘sulking’ like 11

Ibid. 16.

Henry in High School

289

‘unappeasable Henry’ in his tent on the beaches of Troy, the one they met earlier that semester or earlier in their high school days in Homer’s Iliad, they will engage. The intellectual currency they banked in former study will constitute an inner resource. Like Henry, perhaps, they ‘loves people and valiant art’ but what will they do with that dog who wanders randomly in and adds to the abandonment? The notion of heavy boredom and ‘lacking inner resources’ may mark the poem in a personal way for them, but further engagement with this poem and its connection to other poems (both by Berryman and by others they have read) marks them as readers if they fully engage. Henry David Thoreau, who lacked many things perhaps, but did not lack inner resources, quipped in Walden that many readers mark a personal era by the reading of a book, Walden is such book for many, but I would argue that a poem, if engaged in the way a longer work is engaged with – or a collection of poems (and why not The Dream Songs?), marks a reader just as deeply. I could not say it better than delicious Ireland’s Seamus Heaney: What matters most in the end is the value that attaches to a few poems intimately experienced and well remembered. If at the end of each year spent in school, students have been marked by even one poem that is going to stay with them, that will be a considerable achievement. Such a poem can come to feel like a pre-natal possession, a guarantee of inwardness and a link to origin. It can become the eye of a verbal needle through which the growing person can pass again and again until it is known by heart, and becomes a path between heart and mind, a path by which the individual can enter, repeatedly, into the kingdom of rightness.12

This year’s students, senior Advanced Placement students, some heading to notable universities and others to local community colleges, note the following regarding Dream Song 14 in a written response that came out of a small group discussion. They wrote, The first two stanzas of Dream Song 14 represent a disillusion and boredom with reality. In the second stanza, Berryman [through Henry] mocks ‘great literature’ by 12

Seamus Heaney, ‘Bags of Enlightenment’, The Guardian (25 October 2003), available online at: (accessed 12 July 2016).

290

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson proclaiming it painfully boring. The laundry list of things that bore him include all literature, valiant art, and even Henry himself. Much like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the speaker of Dream Song 14 knows it is wrong to be bored with life, but he cannot seem to help himself. A parallel can be drawn between the tone of the speaker in Dream Song 14 and Hamlet’s melancholy state. Both are disappointed with life, perhaps, as a result of the loss of their fathers. […] Berryman creates a distinction with Henry by having him speak of the dullness of reality and the vibrant world that awaits in dreams.

In conversation with the students who wrote this, they further explained that they had spoken of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy and his mention of the ‘undiscovered Country’ that signifies death and the afterworld, but is insinuated as dream by both Henry and Hamlet. They marked Berryman’s Dream Song 14 using Hamlet, another remarkable text they had recently read. This was a memorable experience for them. They, in turn, were marked by it. This same activity rendered the following remarks on Dream Song 1 from another small group. They wrote, Henry could be switching between 3rd and 1st person as a way of demonstrating his mental instability. He says, ‘I don’t see how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived’. Here, Henry is addressing his astonishment at his own survival. This use of multiple voices allows the speaker (or speakers) to tell the story from multiple perspectives.

These same students noted connections in theme and tone between Henry and Hamlet writing: A number of connections may be drawn between Berryman’s Henry and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Both characters have experienced a loss. Hamlet lost his father and in Henry’s life ‘came a departure.’ What connects the two subjects the most, though, is their reaction to the loss and their subsequent psychological state. Just as Hamlet felt that he ‘must hold [his] tongue’ and suppress his feelings, Henry ‘sulked’ and ‘should have come out and talked.’ Similarly, just as Hamlet’s life seemed in shambles after the death of his father, ‘nothing fell out as it might or ought’ in Henry’s life. Also, Henry was ‘pried open for all the world to see’ much like Hamlet’s psyche was exposed when he ‘put on an antic disposition’.

Henry in High School

291

They conclude by saying, ‘Berryman’s poem could easily be interpreted to be about ‘Huffy Hamlet’. This type of educational experience requires strong students who are willing to engage in a difficult task whose rewards go well beyond the grade-book. I assure you that these students do exist and not just in advanced classes. These experiences also require strong poetry. Mike and I agree that Berryman’s poetry, including but not limited to The Dream Songs, is ripe for exploration by high school students, and we are committed to defending that claim. The Dream Songs situates well, as suggested above, within a high school curriculum that includes, as ours does, a study of the various forms and genres of poetry. Our students, many of them anyway, have read Homer (the IIiad and the Odyssey), Sophocles (Oedipus and Antigone), Virgil’s Aeneid, Gilgamesh and Beowulf, as well as Dante and Shakespeare. They have read Whitman, including the 1855 Leaves of Grass. They have read Dickinson. These same students will also soon read Faulkner and Eliot and Joyce, employing not only the cluster analysis they practiced in reading Shakespeare’s sonnets but equally the collecting of clues they found integral in their reading from The Dream Songs. What this suggests to us is that Berryman is an essential addition to this canon as his work connects these earlier poets and storytellers and projects forward to contemporary literature as well. Before we conclude, please allow me to share a story about my father I often unintentionally find myself telling my students after or before an important lesson with a set of poems. My dad was a manufacturing engineer by trade, but he was a literary man at heart. As a boy, he and his brothers would take apart whatever machines they could get their hands on: watches and clocks, bicycles and pulleys, graduating to small engines and eventually whole automobiles. He longed to know how things worked. He would tell us stories of these exploits on occasion and his workshop showed he never fully grew out of this. Growing up, our family bookshelves contained my grandfather’s black, leather-bound Harvard Classics, my fathers’ editions of Stevenson, Dickens, Hawthorne, Twain and Poe, and countless how-to and do-it-yourself manuals. They sat side-by-side on the shelf. Two sides of a coin for him: Literature and Life, representing a kind of ora et labora,

292

Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson

prayer and work. My father and his brothers’ ability to take apart a bicycle, recognize its parts, their separate functions and design, and how they contribute to the whole, its functionality, and to put it all together again became for me the perfect metaphor for reading a poem. I never had the opportunity to explain this to my father, but I am willing to bet he would have agreed. He loved a good story, he longed to tell them; he remembered poems, could recite lines learned thirty or forty or fifty years earlier. I tell this story to my students for two reasons. The first is to suggest that the humanities and the sciences need not be separated so distinctly. The literary mind and the scientific mind may merge. This is an appeal to both the future engineers and the future poets. The second reason is to set up a metaphor that borrows from both William Carlos Williams and my father. Williams’ idea that a poem is ‘a small (or large) machine made of words’13 is my starting place; my father and his brothers taking apart a bicycle and putting it back together is the second part. I try to convince them that reading a poem is noticing the integration of parts. Locating the devices, the aspects of frame and form. Getting a handle on it. Taking it apart. Putting it back together stronger. Taking it for a ride. By extension, the practice of a close and critical reading of poem is akin to the assembling or reassembling of a machine. If the poet is a maker, as the Greeks suggested, then the close-reading critic might as well be an engineer. Mike mentioned earlier that the high school literature teacher might borrow Henry’s ‘angry Zen touch’. Both of us have been known to go beyond William Stafford’s ‘Lit. Instructor’ who keeps ‘flapping [his] wings’14 and bang around on items in the room, tell a slightly off joke, raise our pulpit voices high, or slam a book to the floor; it’s all a part of the sober dumbshow. But, they know when it is real and can respect and even reverence an authentic and passionate explication of a poem. They will rise to the challenge themselves in the best of their moments. In the fifteen years that Mike and I have worked together, we have tried to inject Berryman and his works into our own teaching as they bring out our authentic enthusiasm 13 14

William Carlos Williams, ‘The Wedge 1944’ in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939–1962 (New York: New Directions, 2003), 53–5. William Stafford, The Way It Is (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1998), 87.

Henry in High School

293

for poetry that even reluctant students recognize. It is our wish to see more high school teachers of English attempt to incorporate him. We will be conducting a seminar for English faculty in our district, specifically encouraging them to employ Berryman’s poetry in their classrooms. High school English teachers can be a practical bunch. They demand immediacy and relevancy. We will demonstrate the effectiveness of Berryman’s poetry as a bridge to the past (the epic tradition, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Whitman, Eliot) and as a foregrounding of the personal and tragic voices that emerge in the poets of the Middle Generation and thereafter. Put simply, we need more of Henry in the high school.

Henri Cole

Afterword: My John Berryman; or, Imagination, Love, Intellect, and Pain

When writing the introduction to a handsome new edition of John Berryman’s long poem 77 Dream Songs,1 I was happy for the chance to consider why it was that I was first drawn, thirty-five years ago, in graduate school, to his baffling book. Perhaps it is the strange combination of decorum and distress that I love most, or, to put it another way, the volatile mix of tenderness and unease. And I love that the Dream Songs are not tidy little poems following each other tidily into silence, like so many poems published today. Berryman is a lyric poet, which means that his poems express intense personal emotion, and probably I am drawn to this because I am a lyric poet, too. To the ancient Greeks, anything lyrikos was considered appropriate for the lyre, the elegant stringed instrument that was highly regarded by them and played as an accompaniment to unarmoured or personal poetry. I admire the private intensity of Berryman’s work, which records not only the depths of his own degradation but also love and ecstasy. When asked to define the most important elements of poetry, Berryman replied, ‘Imagination, love, intellect – and pain. Yes, you’ve got to know pain’.2 Of course, it is in part the pain of human voices (comical, sad, troubled, vulnerable, vehement, libidinous) that makes the Dream Songs still edgy and strange fifty years after they first appeared.

1 2

See Henri Cole, ‘Deep in the Mess of Things’, ‘Introduction’ to John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), xiii–xxi. Berryman quoted in Daniel Swift, ‘Introduction’ to John Berryman, The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), xxxv.

296

Henri Cole

Some readers have wondered if these uncomfortable poems were the result of alcoholism, or of double doses of chlorpromazine (an antipsychotic) or Dilantin (an anti-convulsant), which had both been prescribed to Berryman. But I do not really care, since beneath the gruff surface and the high jinks of these poems we hear, deeper down, a vibrant, loving man with a vast spirit. Exacerbated and enormously learned, Berryman was a master of the poem written with manic energy from the edges of human experience. Now, a half-century later, the Dream Songs remain a delicious, horrible, grotesque, ridiculous, fragmentary, tortured, diary-like transcription of a life in which a man worked hard, got up early each day to work at his desk and assemble language into art, strived to love his young wife and children, taught his classes, lectured, wrote letters of recommendation, mentored his students, and fulfilled the obligations that came with being a lonely man of letters living in the Midwest. Envy doesn’t appear to have been one of Berryman’s afflictions. But he was a poet of deep unease, and in this unease he longed for stillness, silence, and the peace of lying down. The question of how to represent sorrow in poetry interested Berryman, and one of the ways he found to do it was through the dialogue between the character in the poems, Henry, and Henry’s empathetic, patient, unnamed confidant. Berryman believed that the writer of a long poem needed to have ‘gall, the outrageous, the intolerable’, as his longpoem predecessors – Whitman, Eliot, and Pound – had. Perhaps one of his solutions was to occasionally give Henry a black voice. Berryman loved the blues and owned all of Bessie Smith’s records. While still an undergraduate at Columbia, he often visited the Apollo Theater, on 125th Street, in Harlem, to hear the melancholic songs. The Dream Songs, with their erratic rhymes, their unmetered meter, their contrasting styles and voices, their nervous self-scrutiny, and even their code-switching from white to black vernacular, represent Berryman drawing his writing ‘out of his vital organs, out of his very skin’, his friend Saul Bellow said.3 Berryman loved William Blake’s couplet: ‘A truth that’s told

3

See Saul Bellow, ‘John Berryman’, foreword to John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), xiv.

Afterword: My John Berryman; or, Imagination, Love, Intellect, and Pain

297

with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.’4 This is why Berryman is not an obscure writer to me. Even when he seems to be a messy poet, and difficult to make cohere, I sense truth trying to make some grand, if ugly, appearance. Berryman said about Mozart that ‘His whole life was at the mercy of his art’,5 and I think that this is true about Berryman, too.

4 5

William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, available online at: (accessed 12 July 2016). Berryman made this comment in an interview with Jonathan Sisson for the University of Minnesota magazine Ivory Tower in 1966. See John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1983), 337.

Notes on Contributors

ADAM BEARDSWORTH is Assistant Professor in the English Programme at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, where he teaches contemporary literature and critical theory. He is the co-editor of Vancouver 1963: Crossroads of the Canadian Avant-Garde (forthcoming) and his articles have appeared in journals such as Canadian Review of American Studies, Canadian Poetry, and Studies in Canadian Literature. MICHAEL BERRYHILL is Professor and Chair of Journalism at Texas Southern University in Houston. His book The Trials of Eroy Brown: the Murder Case that Shook the Texas Prison System was published in 2011. He has written for many Texan newspapers and magazines, as well as for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Places Journal. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review and in two chapbooks, Not Now and Everything Changes. PETER CAMPION is author of three collections of poems, Other People, The Lions, and El Dorado, as well as numerous catalogue essays and art monographs on contemporary painters. The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize (Prix de Rome) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he directs the MFA programme in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. MICHAEL P. CARRIGER teaches literature and composition at Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas. With degrees from Harding University and the University of Kansas, his studies centre on literary theory, criticism, the American long poem, and John Berryman. With his poet-teacher wife, Shannon, and his daughter, Emma, he currently resides in Ottawa, Kansas. EDWARD CLARKE teaches English literature at the Department for Continuing Education and St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. His

300

Notes on Contributors

books include The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (2014) and The Later Affluence of Yeats and Stevens (2012). He has published work in the Modern Language Review, the Wallace Stevens Journal, and contributed to ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (2007) and The Greenwood Encyclopaedia of American Poetry and Poetics (2006). Every month he writes the opinion column ‘Quad Talk’ in the Oxford Times. EVE COBAIN is a doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin. Her thesis explores the significance of music in the work of John Berryman and is funded by the Irish Research Council. More broadly, her interests include contemporary Irish and American poetry as well as poetry, music and the visual arts. HENRI COLE was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published nine collections of poetry, including Nothing to Declare and Touch. Among the many awards he has received for his work are the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College. PHILIP COLEMAN is Associate Professor in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where he is also a Fellow. His most recent publications include John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating ‘The Scene of Disorder’ (2014), Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse (2014), and Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace (2015). With Philip McGowan, he edited ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (2007), and he has also edited books on literature and science, youth in US American literature and culture, and the poetry of Pearse Hutchinson. With Calista McRae, he is co-editing a selection of John Berryman’s literary correspondence for Harvard University Press. KATHERINE EBURY is Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her first monograph, Modernism and Cosmology, appeared in 2014 and she is the co-editor, with James Fraser, of Joyce’s Nonfiction

Notes on Contributors

301

Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction (forthcoming). She has published on Berryman and Joyce in Hypermedia Joyce Studies. Her articles have also appeared in journals including Joyce Studies Annual, Irish Studies Review and Journal of Modern Literature.  JUDITH Koll HEALEY has spent most of her career in philanthropy, as a senior officer or president in several private, corporate, and community foundations. For the past twenty years she has worked as a consultant to charitable foundation boards, in particular family foundations, in philanthropic planning and family dynamics. She has published two novels set in Medieval France, The Canterbury Papers and The Rebel Princess, and a biography, Frederick Weyerhaeuser and the American West. She recently completed a new novel, a retelling of the murder of Thomas à Becket from the point of view of the King called Becket: The Murder Book and she is working on a memoir provisionally entitled No Fixed Abode. In recent years, she has been engaged in training to become a Jungian Analyst. She lives in Minneapolis near her four sons and their families. MICHAEL HINDS teaches in the Department of English, St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, and he has previously been Head of English and Coordinator of The Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University. He edits the journal POST: A Review of Poetry Studies and has published widely on US American and Irish poetry. He edited Rebound: The American Poetry Book (2004) with Stephen Matterson and he is currently co-editing a book on Johnny Cash. RICHARD J. KELLY is retired Professor and Bibliographer in the University of Minnesota Libraries. A contributor to John Berryman Studies during the years of its publication (1975–7), he has written several articles on the poet in scholarly journals. He is also the author/editor of John Berryman: A Checklist (1972), We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (1988), Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet (1993), with Alan K. Lathrop, John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue (1998). He wrote the Preface for ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman, edited by Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan (2007).

302

Notes on Contributors

BOB LUNDEGAARD is a retired journalist residing in the Twin Cities area. He stays fit at eighty-four by playing senior softball and conducting tours of Target Field, the stadium home of the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise. STEPHEN MATTERSON is Professor in the School of English at Trinity College, University of Dublin, and a Fellow of the college. He has published widely on US literature, notably on twentieth-century poetry and on literature of the mid-nineteenth century. As well as numerous articles, publications include co-edited collections of essays, Forever Young: The Changing Images of the United States, with Philip Coleman (2012); Aberration in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2012) with Lucy Collins; and Rebound: The American Poetry Book (2004) with Michael Hinds. Book publications include: Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (1988), an edition of The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman (2006) and American Literature: The Essential Glossary (2003). Recent publications include the chapter ‘American Modernism from the 1930s to the 1950s: Williams and Stevens to Black Mountain and the Beats’ in A History of Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (2015), and the monograph Melville: Fashioning in Modernity (2014). PAULA MEEHAN has published six award-winning collections of poetry including Dharmakaya and Painting Rain. Her seventh collection, Geomantic, was published in 2016. She has written plays for both adults and children, notably Cell, a play about women prisoners, and The Wolf of Winter, an ecological fairytale. Music for Dogs collects three plays concerned with suicide during the economic boom years in Ireland. Dedalus Press republished Mysteries of the Home, seminal poems from the 1980s and the 1990s. Selections of her poetry have been published in French, German, Galician, Spanish, Japanese, Estonian, Greek, with smaller selections published in other languages, including Irish. In 2015 she received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Hall of Fame. She has been Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013–16, and a collection of her public lectures from the professorship, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was also published in 2016.

Notes on Contributors

303

KARL O’HANLON grew up in Purdysburn. He has written pieces on Geoffrey Hill, W. B. Yeats, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and has articles published or forthcoming in Cambridge Quarterly, English and PN Review. His first poetry collection And Now They Range was published in 2016. WILLIAM C. PATTERSON teaches literature and composition at Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas. He has an undergraduate degree from Benedictine College and a Masters in Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Kansas. He lives in Atchison, Kansas with his wife, Erin, and their four children. His poetry and prose appears in various publications. ALEX RUNCHMAN is Lecturer with special interest in academic English at University College Dublin. His monograph Delmore Schwartz: A Critical Reassessment was published in 2014. He has also published articles and book chapters on US American, English, and Irish poetry, and, with Tom Walker, is currently co-editing a special edition of Modernist Cultures, to be published in 2018. An article on Ezra Pound’s parodic contributions to the New English Weekly is forthcoming in Symbiosis.  CLAUDIO SANSONE is pursuing a joint PhD in Comparative Literature and Classics at the University of Chicago. He earned his BA at Trinity College Dublin, writing a dissertation on Ezra Pound under Philip Coleman. His current research interests are the epic tradition, comparative studies in mythology and religion, and historical poetics. He works with the Ezra Pound society as an Associate Editor of Make it New! and as the Chief Editor of the Online Bibliography of Italian Pound Studies (OBIPS). HEATHER TRESELER is the winner of the 2016 Frank O’Hara Prize and an assistant professor at Worcester State University. Her poems and essays appear in three books and in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, Pleiades, The Weekly Standard, and Boston Review, among other journals. Selected in 2014 as the ‘Emerging Poet’ at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, she has received fellowship support from the Virginia Center of Creative Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

304

Notes on Contributors

J. T. WELSCH is Lecturer in English and Creative Industries at the University of York. His research focuses on the use of critical and confessional forms by modernist writers, especially William Carlos Williams, Joyce, and Eliot. He has published articles on Williams, contemporary British poetry, and creative writing pedagogy, and is currently working on a monograph on the UK poetry industry. His own poetry has appeared in various journals, anthologies, and six chapbooks, including Hell Creek Anthology and The Ruin, both in 2015. DEANNA WENDEL is Associate Instructor of English at Indiana University. Her research examines American modernist aesthetic projects through an ecocritical and formalist lens. She has published articles in The Journal of Modern Literature (on D. H. Lawrence and posthumanism) and the European Journal of English Studies (on the rhetoric of nineteenth-century scientist Louis Agassiz).

Index

Adams, John  269–70 Adorno, Theodor  94, 167, 174, 180, 185, 188–9, 191, 193–4, 260 Agee, James  233 Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius  73 Alberti, Leon Battista  21 Aldridge, John  236 Allen, Woody  xiii Allison, Jonathan  198 Alvarez, A.  238 Amberg, George  21 Amiel, Henri Frédéric  220 Apollinaire, Guillaume  160 Apollonius of Rhodes  48 Arendt, Hannah  174 Aristotle 24 Armajani, Siah  11, 167 Arnold, Matthew  84n8, 141, 220 Ashbery, John  202 Atlas, James  142, 163 Auden, W. H.  110, 135, 142–4, 146, 147, 151, 152, 181, 205 Augustine, St  69–70, 74, 81 Auster, Paul  3, 5 Bainton, R. H.  21 Baldwin, James  279 Barrett, William  152, 163 Barthes, Roland  241, 243 Bartlett, John  276 Basler, Roy  182 Batten, Guinn  198 Baudelaire, Charles  218 Bawer, Bruce  237 Beach, Joseph Warren  14

Beethoven, Ludwig van  9, 251–66 Bellay, Joachim du  21 Bellow, Saul  21, 23, 41, 139, 217–18, 272, 296 Benjamin, Walter  167n1 Benn, Gottfried  1 Bennett, Joseph  194 Beowulf  291 Bergman, David  168 Berlin, Irving  16 Berlin, Isaiah  16 Bernard, April  8, 9, 268 Berryhill, Michael  9 Berryman, John Angus (stepfather)  36 Berryman, John, works of books Berryman’s Sonnets 8, 11, 41, 147, 166, 195, 200, 206, 208, 252 see also Berryman, books, Sonnets to Chris Delusions, etc.  166, 252, 263 The Dispossessed  57n31, 90, 130, 163, 179, 252 The Dream Songs  xi, xii, 8, 41, 48–9, 50, 58, 60, 63, 101, 104, 108, 110, 122, 139, 151, 162, 166, 169, 179, 186, 189, 194, 195, 200, 204, 207, 208, 232, 233, 252, 258, 259, 262, 269, 271, 281, 282, 283, 284, 287, 289, 291 The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems 19n1 Henry’s Fate & Other Poems 19n3 His Toy, His Dream, His Rest 102, 110, 274

306 Index Homage to Mistress Bradstreet  8n22, 9, 48, 52–3, 101, 116–34, 147–8, 151, 204, 208, 254, 281 Love & Fame  18–19n1, 10, 122, 139, 148, 172, 264 77 Dream Songs  8, 21, 27, 71, 262, 272, 295 Sonnets to Chris  50, 119, 195 see also Berryman, books, Berryman’s Sonnets Dream Songs Dream Song 1  162, 243, 258, 290 Dream Song 4  31, 244 Dream Song 8  247 Dream Song 9  273 Dream Song 14  157, 200, 201, 223–28, 287, 288–90 Dream Song 16  206 Dream Song 17  59n37 Dream Song 22  269, 271 Dream Song 23  19n1, 245–6, 272 Dream Song 24  273 Dream Song 25  263 Dream Song 26  271 Dream Song 27  269 Dream Song 29  4, 44–5, 164, 201, 229, 258, 287 Dream Song 32  68, 69, 75 Dream Song 33  96 Dream Song 36  31 Dream Song 43  96 Dream Song 45  96 Dream Song 47  108 Dream Song 53  1 Dream Song 55  285, 287 Dream Song 60  108 Dream Song 62  107 Dream Song 67  240 Dream Song 69  272–3 Dream Song 74  162, 248

Dream Song 76  287 Dream Song 77  72, 158, 273 Dream Song 85  150n3 Dream Song 88  59 Dream Song 90  59, 170 Dream Song 100  39 Dream Song 103  212–3 Dream Song 121  59, 170, 172, 182 Dream Song 127  59 Dream Song 129  59n35 Dream Song 146  93 Dream Song 148  165 Dream Song 149  62, 141 Dream Song 153  30, 61n41, 224 Dream Song 155  94 Dream Song 156  93, 94 Dream Song 166  39 Dream Song 168  36 Dream Song 173  88 Dream Song 180  19 Dream Song 184  240 Dream Song 198  171 Dream Song 199  158 Dream Song 204  61, 252, 261 Dream Song 205  61 Dream Song 206  61 Dream Song 212  39–40 Dream Song 224  63 Dream Song 225  63 Dream Song 231  223 Dream Song 275  xii, 283, 286 Dream Song 281  196 Dream Song 311  164, 244 Dream Song 312  197, 252 Dream Song 313  197 Dream Song 318  188 Dream Song 321  196 Dream Song 325  27–8 Dream Song 331  252, 261 Dream Song 334  77, 197 Dream Song 345  75

307

Index Dream Song 366  240 Dream Song 374  96 Dream Song 384  29, 191 Dream Song 385  189, 229 poems / shorter works in verse ‘An Afternoon Visit’  19n3 ‘The Animal Trainer’  163 ‘Beethoven Triumphant’  251–66 ‘The Black Book’  54, 94, 97, 231 ‘Boston Common’  252 ‘At Chinese Checkers’  142, 163 ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord’  139, 148 ‘Enemies of the Angels’  57 ‘The Facts & Issues’  166 ‘Friendless’ 251 ‘Homage to Film’  52 ‘July 8, 1934’  116, 119, 123, 133 ‘The Minnesota  8 and the Letter-Writers’ 18n1 ‘Monkhood’ 140 ‘The Moon and the Night and the Men’ 58 ‘The Nervous Songs’  57n31 ‘Olympus’ 88n18 ‘A Point of Age’  163–4 ‘The Possessed’  56n31 ‘Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion’  54–5, 58 ‘The Statue’  139 ‘Tampa Stomp’  191 ‘To a Woman’  18–19n1 ‘Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons’  86, 96 ‘A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away’ 90–1 prose Berryman’s Shakespeare 83 ‘Enslavement: Three American Cases’ 84 ‘The Imaginary Jew’  151

‘The Poetry of Ezra Pound’  55 Recovery 18 ‘Wash Far Away’  95–99, 252 sonnets (from Berryman’s Sonnets / Sonnets to Chris) Sonnet  4 211 Sonnet  27 51 Sonnet  37 207 Sonnet  87 166 Berryman, Kate  28, 29 see also Donahue, Kate (‘Kathy’) Berryman, Martha (daughter)  16 Berryman, Martha (‘Jill’, mother)  9, 29, 39, 116–34, 135, 226 Betjeman, John  202 Bible, The  xi, 132 Bishop, Elizabeth  8n22, 181, 185, 200, 282 Blackmur, R. P.  88 Blake, William  296–7 Bloom, Harold  101–3, 113 Bloom, James D.  89n19, 98 Blum, Morgan  21 Bogart, Humphrey  273 Boswell, Marshall  216n4 Boswell, Matthew  54n24, 231n2, Bower, Ann  117 Boydell, Brian  251 Bradstreet, Anne  122, 133 Brosofske, Greg  3n11 Browne, Michael Dennis  9 Brunner, Edward  238–9 Bryan, Sharon  104 Burt, Stephen  167, 168, 176n27 Byron, George Gordon  75–6 Caleshu, Anthony  9, 239 Calvin, John  21 Cambor, Glenn  39n35 Cameron, Sharon  105, 113 Campbell, Howard  191–2 Campbell, Robert Bhain  59, 93, 98

308 Index Campion, Peter  9, 10 Carriger, Michael P.  10 Carson, Ciaran  198 Cassirer, Ernst  14 Castiglione, Baldassare  21, 24 Cave, Nick  3n11, 167n1 Cervantes, Miguel de  21, 22, 25 Christ 139 Clare, Ralph  216n4 Clarke, Austin Clarke, Edward  10 Clewell, Tammy  126 Clough, Arthur  141 Cobain, Eve  9, 227n29 Coetzee, J. M.  3 Cohen, J. M.  21 Cole, Henri  8, 9, 268 Coleman, Philip  xi, xiv, 66, 69, 197, 198, 205, 207, 210, 212, 238, 267 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  73, 80 Confucius 55–6 Connolly, Cyril  145 Connolly, James  197 Cooper, Brendan  47, 53, 238 Corns, Thomas N.  96 Crane, Stephen  124, 276 Crawford, Joan  182 Critchley, Simon  40 Crosby, Bing  155 Da Vinci, Leonardo  21 Dante  54, 57, 59–60, 63, 96, 291 Darnielle, John  167n1 see also Mountain Goats, The Davie, Donald  86, 206, 267, 276 Dawe, Gerald  9 Dean, Carolyn  245 Deleuze, Gilles  112 Deutsch, Helene  124 Devitt, Maurice  9 Dickens, Charles  216–17, 291

Dickinson, Emily  253, 291 Dinneen, Patrick S.  xi Disch, Thomas M.  3, 5 Dodson, Samuel Fisher  152 Donahue, Kate (‘Kathy’)  13–15 see also Berryman, Kate Dorgan, Theo  9 Drew, Ronnie  xv Dürer, Albrecht  24 Durkheim, Émile  217 Ebury, Katherine  10 Eisenhower, Dwight D.  246, 272, 278 Eliot, T. S.  10, 30–45, 49, 77, 89–90, 101–14, 135, 151, 160, 184–5, 200, 219–20, 276, 291, 293, 296 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  265 Empson, William  94, 153, 162 Erasmus, Desiderius  21 Erickson, Erik  43 Faulkner, William  153, 286, 291 Feinsod, Harris  6, 8 Fenollosa, Ernest  57 Fenton, James  204 Finnegans Wake  xi, xiii Flaubert, Gustave  218 Foucault, Michel  235–6, 245 Frank, Anne  14, 122 Frank, Joseph  14 Franklin, Benjamin  225 Freud, Sigmund  40, 175–6, 228 Frost, Robert  110, 184, 276–9 Fuller, Margaret  251, 256, 265 Gance, Abel  251 Gide, André  155 Gilgamesh 291 Gillis, Alan  198, 203, 208, 211 Ginsberg, Allen  164 Giroux, Robert  8

309

Index Glück, Louise  123, 147 Goes, Hugo van der  192 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  49 Golden, Amanda  56n29, 196, 198 Gonzalez, Ray  9 Goodby, John  209, 211 Gorer, Geoffrey  233 Goya, Francisco  261 Grobstein, Paul  201 Guattari, Félix  112 Guthrie, Woody  281 Haffenden, John  32–3, 48, 83, 85, 107, 108, 117, 165, 252, 259 Hamilton, Ian  173 Hammer, Langdon  130 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  291 Haydn, Joseph  265 Heaney, Seamus  198, 200, 289 Heidegger, Martin  221–23, 227, 230 Hesiod 72 Hill, Geoffrey  85 Hinds, Michael  10 Hitler, Adolf  249 Hodgson, Ralph  110 Hofmann, Michael  8, 9, 268 Holdridge, Jefferson  204 Homer  72, 122, 289, 291 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  197 Housman, A. E.  27, 61 Howe, Irving  137–8 Hughes, Ted  200 Huizinga, Johan  21 Hyde, Lewis  237 I Ching xi Igoe, Vivian  196 James, Clive  173 James, Henry  90

Jarrell, Anna Campbell  189 Jarrell, Mary von Schrader  171, 173, 185, 190 Jarrell, Randall  6, 10, 59, 62, 87, 167–94, 176n27, 236, 237 Jefferson, Thomas  269–70 John of the Cross, St  21 Johnson, Lyndon B.  224 Johnson, Samuel  84n8, 89, 95, 97, 98 Johnston, Maria  67 Jones, Ernest  40 Joyce, James  35, 195, 196, 197, 213, 291 Kafka, Franz  273 Kavanagh, Patrick,  196 Kaye, Danny  155 Keats, John  49, 127 Kennan, George  234 Kennedy, John F.  176n27 Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer  198, 199 Kenner, Hugh  155 Kerouac, Jack  50n12 King, Edward  84, 97, 165 Kipling, Rudyard  177 Kirsch, Adam  136–7 Koch, Vivien  21 Kreilkamp, Ben  9 Kuhn, Reinhard  216 Lacan, Jacques  40, 248 Lacey, Catherine  4 Langham Jarrell, Mackie  171 Lardner, Ring  84 Larkin, Philip  202 Laughlin, James  142, 145 Lawrence, D. H.  17 Lentricchia, Frank  184 Levine, Philip  20, 26 Lewis, Charlton T.  69 Logue, Christopher  50n12 Longley, Michael  198

310 Index Lowell, Robert  23, 83, 86, 88, 143, 151, 167, 169, 178, 181, 185, 200, 203, 218–19, 237, 266, 267, 282 Lundegaard, Betty  28 Luther, Martin  21, 23–4, 252 Maber, Peter  150n3 McCabe, Patrick  5n18 McCarthy, Joseph  246 McGuckian, Medbh  198 Machiavelli, Niccolò  21, 24 McLuhan, Marshall  268 MacNeice, Louis  135 Mad Men 187 Mahon, Derek  198 Malinowski, Bronisław  14 Mariani, Paul  90, 182, 195, 206, 207 Marlowe, Christopher  21, 102 Marx, Karl  175–6, 217 Matterson, Stephen  9, 76, 152 Meehan, Paula  8, 9, 10 Meredith, William  167 Merrill, James  50n12, 63n49 Merwin, W. S.  20 Meyers, Jeffrey  237 Milton, John  10, 69–71, 83–99, 165, 252 Mirandola, Pico de  21 Molan, Michael  87n13 Montague, John  198 Moore, Jim  9 Mountain Goats, The  167n1 see also Darnielle, John Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  259, 264 Muldoon, Paul  10, 195–213 Nabokov, Vladimir  135 Nadel, Alan  234 Naftalin, Art  28 Naftalin, Fran  28 Nairn, Kathleen  122 Nashe, Thomas  90

Nast, Philip  202 Neihardt, John  50n12 Nelson, Deborah  205 Neruda, Pablo  50n12 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan  9 Nicholas of Cusa  21 Nicholls, Peter  222n16 Notley, Alice  50n12, 63n49 O’Callaghan, Julie  9 O’Casey, Sean  196 O’Connor, Flannery  8n22 O’Connor, William Van  14 O’Donnell, George Marion  179 Offill, Jenny  4–5 O’Hanlon, Karl  10 Okkervill River  167 see also Shef, Will Olive Kitteridge 167 Oostdijk, Diederik  175 Oppen, George  222n16 O’Rourke, Ciaran  9 Patterson, William C.  10 Paul, St  23 Pearse, Padraic  197 Pessoa, Fernando  221 Peter, St  285 Petrarch 210 Phillips, Adam  202, 225–6 Pietrobon, Mike  202 Ping, Wang  9 Pius II  21 Plato 17 Poe, Edgar Allan  291 Post, Wiley  281 Pound, Ezra  23, 47, 49, 51–63, 89, 92, 135, 151, 184, 190, 227, 276, 296 Prynne, J. H.  202 Psalm  52 (King James)  65

311

Index Quinn, Justin  77, 237 Quinn, Leeanne  9 Rabelais 21 Ramazani, Jahan  98, 152 Rankine, Claudia  1–2, 10 Ransom, John Crowe  87, 89, 98, 135 Reagan, Ronald  xiii Reed, Lou  137 Rich, Adrienne  97, 181 Ricks, Christopher  89n20, 90 Riesman, David  236 Robinson, Jane  9 Roe, John  197 Rogers, Tom  238 Rogers, Will  281 Rosenfeld, Isaac  21 Rosenthal, M. L.  232, 237, 275 Ross, Ralph  21 Rougemont, Denis de  17 Runchman, Alex  10, 97, 203, 206, 211 Sade, Marquis de  241 Said, Edward  260, 263, 264 Sansone, Claudio  10 Sartre, Jean-Paul  24 Savonorolla, Girolamo  21 Schiller, Friedrich  50 Schindler, Anton Felix  262 Schreiner, Olive  122 Schubert, Franz  264 Schwartz, Delmore  6, 10, 62, 93, 135, 149–66, 217, 237 Sequoyah 281 Shakespeare, William  9, 10, 17, 26, 29–45, 66, 70–5, 77, 80, 87, 102, 149–66, 208, 210, 212, 229, 251, 262–5, 284, 286, 287, 290, 291, 293 Shef, Will  167n1 see also Okkervill River Shelley, Percy Bysshe  49

Short, Charles  69 Shrank, Cathy  208, 210 Sidney, Philip  211 Simpson, Eileen  42, 85, 141, 144, 152, 170, 253 Slaby, Jan  222n16, 223 Smart, Christopher  xi Smith, Bessie  296 Smyth, Gerard  9 Smyth, John Allyn  38, 117, 135 Socrates 22 Sophocles 291 Spacks, Patricia  216 Spencer, Luke  125 Spencer, Terence  196 Stafford, Jean  83 Stafford, William  292 Stanford, Frank  50n12 Steiner, George  233 Stevens, Wallace  102, 135, 184–5, 216 Stevenson, Robert Louis  291 Stitt, Peter A.  84, 116 Sutphen, Joyce  9 Swift, Daniel  268 Swift, Jonathan  61, 196 Swinburne, Algernon Charles  276–7 Synge, J. M.  196 Tacitus 75 Tate, Allen  14, 21, 135, 179, 181 Taylor, Eleanor Ross  181 Tennyson, Lord Alfred  276–7 Teresa of Avila, St  21 Theroux, Paul  5n18 Thomas, Dylan  23, 59, 253 Thomes, Boyd  28 Thomes, Maris  28 Thomson, James  223 Thoreau, Henry David  289 Thornbury, Charles  51, 197 Thorpe, Jim  281

312 Index Tibetan Book of the Dead, The xiv Tolstoy, Leo  25, 252 Trakl, Georg  253 Travisano, Thomas  62, 87, 178 Twain, Mark  xiii, 291 Upton, Charles  72 Valentuss 202 Van Doren, Mark  23, 33, 115, 128, 138–9, 143–4 Vandervelde, Janika  3n11 Vendler, Helen  168, 227 Virgil  57, 62–3, 122 Walcott, Derek  50n12 Wallace, David Foster  218 Walsh, Raoul  273 Ward, Mrs Humphrey  220 Warren, Robert Penn  14 Washington, George  212 Watt, Stephen  198 Watts, Alan  xii

Webster, Jamieson  40 Welsch, J. T.  10 Wendel, Deanna  10 White, Patrick  48 Whitman, Walt  32, 36, 102, 104, 167n1, 177, 190, 239, 257, 270, 291, 293, 296 Whyte, William H.  236 Wilbur, Richard  215 Williams, William Carlos  50n12, 292 Wilson, William  197 Winnicott, D. W.  130 Woods, Macdara  9 Woolf, Virginia  127 Wordsworth, William  66, 72–5, 146 Wright, James  31 Yeats, W. B.  10, 59, 66, 77, 79–81, 91, 102, 110, 125, 127, 151, 195, 196, 197, 200, 208–9, 252, 261–2, 275 Young, Kevin  49, 282 Zevon, Warren  205 Žižek, Slavoj  242, 244

M o d e r n

P o e t r y

Series editors:

David Ayers, David Herd & Jan Montefiore, University of Kent The Modern Poetry series brings together scholarly work on modern and contemporary poetry. As well as examining the sometimes neglected art of recent poetry, this series also sets modern poetry in the context of poetic history and in the context of other literary and artistic disciplines. Poetry has traditionally been considered the highest of the arts, but in our own time the scholarly tendency to treat literature as discourse or document sometimes threatens to obscure its specific vitalities. The Modern Poetry series aims to provide a platform for the full range of scholarly work on modern poetry, including work with an intercultural or interdisciplinary methodology. We invite submissions on all aspects of modern and contemporary poetry in English, and will also consider work on poetry in other language traditions. The series is nondogmatic in its approach, and includes both mainstream and marginal topics. We are especially interested in work which brings new intellectual impetus to recognised areas (such as feminist poetry and linguistically innovative poetry) and also in work that makes a stimulating case for areas which are neglected. For further details please contact Professor David Ayers ([email protected]), Professor David Herd ([email protected]) or [email protected]. Volume 1

Nerys Williams: Reading Error: The Lyric and Contemporary Poetry. 265 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-025-4

Volume 2

Mohammad A. Quayum (ed.): Peninsular Muse: Interviews with Modern Malaysian and Singaporean Poets, Novelists and Dramatists. 305 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-061-2

Volume 3

Brendan Cooper: Dark Airs: John Berryman and the Spiritual Politics of Cold War American Poetry. 262 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-861-8

Volume 4

Mark Ford: Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays. 259 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0247-0

Volume 5

Anthony Caleshu: Reconfiguring the Modern American Lyric: The Poetry of James Tate. 267 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0174-9

Volume 6

Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling (eds): Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts. 268 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0185-5

Volume 7

Stephen McInerney: The Enclosure of an Open Mystery: Sacrament and Incarnation in the Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, David Jones and Les Murray. 283 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0738-3

Volume 8 Cary A. Shay: Of Mermaids and Others: An Introduction to the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. 286 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0810-6 Volume 9

Alex Pestell: Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason. 256 pages. 2016. ISBN 978-3-0343-1861-7

Volume 10 Matthew Jarvis: Devolutionary Readings: English-Language Poetry and Contemporary Wales. Forthcoming. ISBN 978-3-0343-1975-1 Volume 11 Philip Coleman and Peter Campion (eds): John Berryman: Centenary Essays. 330 pages. 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-2255-3