John Berryman, best known as the author of the long poems Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, first came to my attention when, somehow or other, I stumbled upon his Freedom of the Poet, a miscellany of mostly literary criticism. The essays are characterized by (among other things, such as learnedness) swift, vivid openings that have stuck in my head to this day. For example, the book's first essay, "Marlowe's Damnations," commences:
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apart, only of Christopher Marlowe among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist's life and his work, which interest an increasing number of readers in this century, and the existence of which is denied only by very young persons or writers whose work really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux. Marlowe was a professional secret agent, a notorious unbeliever, a manifest homosexual, cruel, quarrelsome, and perhaps murderous, his habitual associates scoundrels and traitors. He reminds us, learned and drastic, rather of Villon or Rimbaud than of any English writer.
Let us take both the atheism and the homosexuality seriously, because Marlowe did: he was missionary about both and he could have been burned for either. As William Empson has remarked, he was lucky to be murdered before he was burned. . . .
Learned and drastic: that was Berryman, too. He was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1914. When he was ten the family moved to Tampa, where, a couple years later, his father, a banker, shot and killed himself outside the boy's bedroom window. Edmund Wilson thought that Dickens's time in the blacking factory had inflicted a wound, the self-ministration for which was connected to his feverish creativity. Berryman might have served as Exhibit B for the syndrome. Within months his mother had married a Mr Berryman, another banker, and the boy took his stepdad's name. Though this marriage ended in divorce, the stepdad was interested in Berryman's education: he was sent to boarding school in Connectucut, then Columbia, then, courtesy of a Kellett Fellowship, to Clare College, Cambridge. Berryman liked to say that he was more of a scholar than a poet, and it's true that he earned his living from university teaching--at Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton, and, from 1955 until his death in 1972, at the University of Minnesota. By every account he took this work seriously and was, notwithstanding alcoholism and unstable health, especially mental health, at least intermittently an inspiring and wonderful teacher. It amuses me a little to think of him carrying on passionately, idiosyncratically in an English literature classroom while, less than ten miles away, I was suffering through junior high school.
You can tell something of what was important to him from the titles to some of the "nervous songs" in his first collection, The Dispossessed: "The Song of the Demented Priest," "The Song of the Tortured Girl," and "The Song of the Man Forsaken and Obsessed." In an elegy for Wallace Stevens, Berryman criticized that poet for being unable to "wound." He was attracted to the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet not by her verse, which he called "bald" and "abstract," but rather by her life of passionate suffering.
Pioneering is not feeling well,
not Indians, beasts.
Not all their riddling can forestall
one leaving. Sam, your uncle has had to
go from us to live with God. 'Then Aunt went too?'
Dear, she does wait still.
Stricken: 'Oh. Then he takes us one by one.' My dear.
Not bald, not abstract, wounding. Her hard life in the new world, beset by illness and loss, recommended her as a vehicle. It's telling to note where Berryman's Bradstreet appears to diverge from the one we know from the admittedly scanty record: he makes her dissatisfied with her marriage, though from all we can tell it was for her a source of happiness and fortification.
The 57 stanzas of Homage were published in 1956, and Berryman reported being so exhausted by the effort that he was for two years "a ruin." It's a favorite word, ruin. His next work, 77 Dream Songs (1964), includes one, the forty-fifth, that begins: "He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back." As in many of the songs, the portentous opening peters out, and it ends with a bare prefix of negation: "un-". The most famous is probably the fourteenth:
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 and its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
Three stanzas, six lines in each--representative of almost all of the dream songs, as is the tone of casually dismissive, half-humorous informality which, one eventually comprehends, is a kind of defense. There's too much pain in the world for straight-on earnestness.
Berryman added 308 more dream songs to the original 77 and published, in 1968, all 385 in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He thought some of the critical reaction betrayed incomprehension and wrote, in an explanatory note:
The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not me, not the poet) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irretrievable loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.
Not him, not the poet? From Dream Song #384, the next-to-last:
I spit upon this dreadful banker's grave
who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn
O ho alas alas
When will indifference come, I moan & rave
On the morning of January 7, 1972, Berryman leapt to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge which spans the Mississippi River, connecting the East and West Bank campuses of the University of Minnesota. 77 Dream Songs had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest received both the National Book Award for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize. I see he has a considerable presence on YouTube, where you can see him interviewed and reading his poems.
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