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The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman's Letters | the New Yorker The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-heartsick-... Books October 19, 2020 Issue The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters Tracking the poet’s chaotic, self-destructive life, his correspondence strains toward the condition of music. By Anthony Lane October 12, 2020 Berryman in 1966, two years after the publication of “77 Dream Songs.” Photograph from Getty 1 of 13 12/10/2020, 12:40 The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-heartsick-... he poet John Berryman was born in 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was T educated at Columbia and then in England, where he studied at Cambridge, met W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, and lit a cigarette for W. B. Yeats. All three men left traces in Berryman’s early work. In 1938, he returned to New York and embarked upon a spate of teaching posts in colleges across the land, beginning at Wayne State University and progressing to stints at Harvard, Princeton, Cincinnati, Berkeley, Brown, and other arenas in which he could feel unsettled. The history of his health, physical and mental, was no less ftful and spasmodic, and alcohol, which has a soft spot for poets, found him an easy mark. In a similar vein, his romantic life was lunging, irrepressible, and desperate, so much so that it squandered any lasting claim to romance. Thrice married, he fathered a son and two daughters. He died in 1972, by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. To the appalled gratifcation of posterity, his fall was witnessed by somebody named Art Hitman. Berryman would have laughed at that. In an existence that was littered with loss, the one thing that never failed him, apart from his unwaning and wax-free ear for English verse, was his sense of humor. The frst that I heard of Berryman was this: Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky fashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves fash 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 2 of 13 12/10/2020, 12:40 The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-heartsick-... and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag. “Wag” meaning a witty fellow, or “wag” meaning that he is of no more use than the back end of a mutt? Who on earth is Henry? Also, whoever’s talking, why does he address us as “friends,” as if he were Mark Antony and we were a Roman mob, and why can’t he even honor Achilles—the hero of the Iliad, a foundation stone of “great literature”—with a capital letter? You have to know such literature pretty well before you earn the right to claim that it tires you out. Few knew it better than Berryman, or shouldered the burdens of serious reading with a more remorseless joy. As he once said, “When it came to a choice between buying a book and a sandwich, as it often did, I always chose the book.” “Life, friends” is the fourteenth of “The Dream Songs,” the many-splendored enterprise that consumed Berryman’s energies in the latter half of his career, and on which his reputation largely rests. His labors on the Songs began in 1955 and led to “77 Dream Songs,” which was published in 1964 and won him a Pulitzer Prize. In the course of the Songs, which he regarded as one long poem, he is represented, or unreliably impersonated, by a fgure named Henry, who undergoes “the whole humiliating Human round” on his behalf. As Berryman explained, “Henry both is and is not me, obviously. We touch at certain points.” In 1968, along came a further three hundred and eight Songs, under the title “His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.” (A haunting phrase, which grabs the seven ages of man, as outlined in “As You Like It,” and squeezes them down to three.) Two days after publication, he was asked, by the Harvard Advocate, about his profession. “Being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn’t get you anything,” he said. “It’s just something you do.” There was plenty of all that jazz. Berryman forsook the distillations of Eliot for the profusion of Whitman; the Dream Songs, endlessly rocking and rolling, surge onward in waves. Lay them aside, and you still have the other volumes of Berryman’s poems, including “The Dispossessed” (1948), “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1956), and “Love & Fame” (1970). Bundled together, they fll nearly three hundred pages. If magnitude freaks you out, there are slimmer selections—one from the Library of America, 3 of 13 12/10/2020, 12:40 The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-heartsick-... edited by Kevin Young, the poetry editor of this magazine, and another, “The Heart Is Strange,” compiled by Daniel Swift to toast the centenary, in 2014, of the poet’s birth. And don’t forget the authoritative 1982 biography by John Haffenden, who also put together a posthumous collection, “Henry’s Fate and Other Poems,” in 1977, as well as “Berryman’s Shakespeare” (1999), a Falstaffian banquet of his scholarly work on the Bard. Some of Berryman’s critical writings are clustered, invaluably, in “The Freedom of the Poet” (1976). In short, you need space on your shelves, plus a clear head, if you want to join the Berrymaniacs. Proceed with caution; we can be a cranky bunch. f late, Berryman’s star has waned. Its glow was never steady in the frst place, but it O has dimmed appreciably, because of lines like these: Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip, but is he come? Le’s do a hoedown, gal. “The Dream Songs” is a hubbub, and some of it is spoken in blackface—or, to be accurate, in what might be described as blackvoice. It deals in unembarrassed minstrelsy, complete with a caricature of verbal tics, all too pointedly transcribed: “Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.” To say that Berryman was airing the prejudices of his era is hardly to exonerate him; in any case, he seems to be evoking, in purposeful anachronism, an all but vanished age of vaudeville. Kevin Young, who is Black, prefaces his choice of Berryman’s poetry by arguing, “Much of the force of The Dream Songs comes from its use of race and blackface to express a (white) self unraveling.” Some readers will share Young’s generously inquiring attitude; others will veer away from Berryman and never go back. For anyone willing to stick around, there’s a new book on the block. “The Selected Letters of John Berryman” weighs in at more than seven hundred pages. It is edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, and published by the Belknap Press, at Harvard—a selfess undertaking, given that Berryman derides Harvard as “a haven for the boring and the foolish,” wherein “my students display a form of illiterate urbanity which will soon become very depressing.” (Not that other colleges elude his gibes. Berkeley is summed up as “Paradise, with anthrax.”) The earliest letter, dated September, 1925, is from the schoolboy Berryman to his parents, and ends, “I love you too much to talk about.” In a 4 of 13 12/10/2020, 12:40 The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-heartsick-... pleasing symmetry, the fnal letter printed here, from 1971, shows Berryman rejoicing in his own parenthood. He tells a friend, “We had a baby, Sarah Rebecca, in June—a beauty.” And what lies in between? More or less the polyphony that you’d expect, should you come pre-tuned into Berryman. “Vigour & fatigue, confdence & despair, the elegant & the blunt, the bright & the dry.” Such is the medley, he says, that he fnds in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and you can feel Berryman swooping with similar freedom from one tone to the next. “Books I’ve got, copulation I need,” he writes from Cambridge, at the age of twenty-two, thus initiating a lifelong and dangerous refrain. When he reports, two years later, that “I was attacked by an excited loneliness which is still with me and which has so far produced ffteen poems,” is that a grouse or a boast? There are alarming valedictions: “Nurse w. another shot. no more now,” or, “Maybe I better go get a bottle of whisky; maybe I better not.” There are letters to Ezra Pound, one of which, sent with “atlantean respect & affection,” announces, “What we want is a new form of the daring,” a very Poundian demand. And there are smart little swerves into the aphoristic—“Writers should be heard and not seen”; “All modern writers are complicated before they are good”—or into courteous eighteenth-century brusquerie. Pastiche can be useful when you have a grudge to convey: “My dear Sir: You are plainly either a fool or a scoundrel.
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