HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: JOHN BERRYMAN AND THE POETICS OF SURVIVAL ___________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University ___________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English ___________________________________________ by Andreas Britz June 2010 Britz 1 Introduction John Berryman was fifty-seven years old when he leapt to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge on Friday, 7 January, 1972. Most of his friends and contemporaries had already gone before him; there was Randall Jarrell who stepped in front of a moving car on 14 October, 1965, and Dylan Thomas who had drank himself into a fatal stupor on 9 November 1953, and the beloved and brilliant Delmore Schwartz who died in obscurity in a cheap New York hotel on 11 July, 1966. Berryman’s untimely demise was sadly a predictable outcome for one of the finest specimens of America’s Middle Generation of poets. The so-called Middle Generation of poets of which Berryman was a part lived out their existence, at least initially, in the shadow of their Modernist predecessors such as T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. Berryman, like many of his contemporaries, was first indoctrinated in the style of late Modernist or 1940s period verse, exemplified perhaps by the famed English expatriate W.H. Auden. To say that Berryman’s early verse was unexceptional would be an understatement. Reviews of Berryman’s first two notable publications, Poems (1942), and The Dispossessed (1948) singled out for praise his admirable craftsmanship and awareness of tradition but denied him the compliment of innovation, insight, and feeling. Even Randall Jarrell had identified the symptoms of an Audenesque apprenticeship gone horribly awry. Berryman’s work was generic, commonplace, and worst, it was the work of a mature man. Britz 2 Berryman was intensely aware of the date of expiration for aspiring poets described by T.S. Eliot in his Modernist manifesto “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920). His twenty-fifth birthday had passed long ago and it was with the label “poetaster” that he expected to be permanently branded. This considered, it wasn’t until the publication of his first long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) that Berryman’s late excellence began to manifest itself. In this poem, Berryman experimented with a greater variety of voices, an unusual use of syntax, and a personal involvement in the material of his poem that had been expressly forbidden by what he regarded as “T.S. Eliot’s perverse theory of the impersonality of the artist.” Berryman would capitalize on this success by conceiving of a more ambitious project that began with a nursery rhyme composed for his infant son Paul that later evolved into a 385 page poem that Berryman described as a “survival epic” focusing on one imaginary character named Henry. According to the author of The Dream Songs (1969), Henry is a middle- aged American male who occasionally appears in blackface and has suffered an irreversible loss which is never fully divulged by Berryman. Henry’s participation in blackface minstrelsy is one of the more fascinating aspects of his character. One is almost reminded of that sentimental and conscientious deserter of the white race in J.F. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826). Henry, like Natty Bumpo, has aligned himself with an endangered and persecuted people by putting on the face and habits of the black man, or stage- negro more accurately, in the hope that he might better endure the hardships Britz 3 and realities of modern life. Despite appearances, however convincing, both men are performers performing the roles of their adopted cultures. They are, essentially, white men in disguise. However, later in this discussion, quandaries will arise concerning Henry’s ethnicity, his racial ancestry, and spiritual solidarity with other retarded peoples. As early as the second song Henry initiates a dialogue between himself and an unnamed interlocutor who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof. Despite being extremely inarticulate, the interlocutor exists in the poem as the sole voice of rationality, constantly interfering in Henry’s psychedelic affairs for the protagonist’s benefit. It is thought that Berryman had originally modeled this relationship on that between Don Quixote and his devoted subordinate Sancho Panza in Cervantes’ mock-heroic masterpiece. Berryman outlines this relationship in his personal notes, writing: “They will talk and “debate, abt the proposed adventure, & its early details, etc, as betw. Don Q & SP”” (Smith 434). This considered; the poem changes drastically in the seventh and final book when the interlocutor’s interruptions become less frequent and Henry no longer requires the reassuring insights and heartfelt consultations of this jive-talking Job’s comforter. The seventh book documents Henry’s brief excursion in Ireland sometime after establishing himself as a major poet in his country of origin. This positive metamorphosis in the author becomes a topic of serious, repetitive introspection as he considers the new possibilities and limitations of his recent celebrity status. One surprising realization that occurs to Henry in this book is Britz 4 the futility or impracticality of disguise for a man who is both globally admired and globally recognized. Henry is no longer able to hide under his blackface persona of Mr. Bones, nor any of the other monikers that he assumes throughout the work, and must embrace his new role as a public figure by participating in interviews, answering fan mail, and graciously accepting the compliments and awards bestowed upon him by what was formerly a very hostile and unsympathetic world. Included in The Freedom of the Poet, a collection of essays and short stories published posthumously in 1976, is an essay on Anne Frank’s diary entitled “The Development of Anne Frank.” In this brilliant essay, Berryman insists that Anne Frank’s diary be read not only as an historical document but as a coming-of-age narrative, describing the maturation process of a young girl under the most disheartening and dreadful of circumstances. Berryman himself had intended to compose a poetic cycle about the abuses of fascist Germany, in particular the Holocaust, in 1948 under the provisional title The Black Book. The title referred to the numerous black books or holocaust testimonials that began to surface after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. These various black books, to which Anne Frank’s account belongs, confirmed with unmistakable clarity and specificity the grotesque and horrifying extent of Hitler’s Final Solution. Begun in July of that year and abandoned shortly thereafter, Berryman quickly realized that “he would never be able to shape such evil into art” (Mariani 211/2), despite his enduring interest in physical and psychological trauma. Britz 5 Of Anne Frank herself, Berryman wrote the following: “The author has been made into a spokesman against one of the grand crimes of our age, and for her race, and for all its victims, and for the victims […] of all tyrannies of this horrifying century” (92). Like much of Berryman’s criticism, his comments could just as easily be self-directed and self-applied to his own work, especially The Dream Songs. Henry, like Anne Frank, is a pitiful but resilient character whose only consolation however miniscule is the prospect of survival in an extremely violent and ideological society. Like Anne Frank, Henry too is a diarist who obsessively records the misfortunes of his, and by association, John Berryman’s long life. In many of his songs, particularly those offering some form of political commentary, Henry presents himself as a passionate representative of all peoples known and obscure who have experienced enormous hardship and alienation on an almost cosmic scale. Henry passively resists the intimidation and maltreatment directed toward him by a malevolent and even predatory god by doing exactly as Anne Frank did in her story, hiding. Henry’s exceptional ability for reinventing himself ensures him temporary anonymity in a life which spans almost four-hundred pages of excruciating mental and bodily torment. As the prime mover and ultimate authority of the Dream Song world, whose judgment and prophecy, as diabolical as it is, is thought to be unchallengeable, God alone, it therefore appears, is accountable for the protagonist’s disillusioned and eschatological sense of existence. This seems undeniably the case upon first reading The Dream Songs. However, as I will attempt to show, by the arrival of the Britz 6 seventh and final book, one begins to realize after the deus abscondis, the vacuous space left by God’s withdrawal in the poem was always filled and will continue to be filled by simple, random chance. That said, I do not exclude God from this discussion; on the contrary, until Book VII, I continue to attribute Henry’s near-insurmountable tragedies to his decree, precisely because Henry, a blaspheming although god-fearing man, himself does so. God is a vividly illuminated figure for Henry House, who, despite his actual absence in the poem, is nonetheless, animated as a character/concept through Henry’s unwavering belief in him. But more of this later. Simultaneously, Henry’s main prerogative in the poem is self-disclosure and autobiography for reasons understandably both noble and conceited. On the one hand, Henry wishes to embrace his role as representative figure and expose the world to crimes orchestrated against defenseless minorities of which he is a particularly vocal member. Less honorably, Henry also wants to be famous. Like Berryman, Henry finds himself to be the most fascinating subject for a serious and equally comic portrayal of humanity. Henry actively seeks reassurances and gestures of admiration from those of his contemporaries still living.