'My Brilliant Friends': The Correspondence of John Berryman - ... https://www.pulitzer.org/article/my-brilliant-friends-corresponde...

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Review (/archive/637) 'My Brilliant Friends': Te Correspondence of John Berryman

A collection ofers new insights into the 1965 winner's life and career.

By Sean Murphy

A rare photo of Berryman before he grew his signature beard in the early 1960s. (Star Tribune) n October 13, the Belknap Press of Press released "Te Selected Letters of John Berryman." (https://www.hup.harvard.edu O /catalog.php?isbn=9780674976252) Edited by Philip Coleman of Trinity College

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Dublin and Calista McRae of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the volume represents a major addition to the oeuvre of the 1965 Poetry winner (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/john-berryman).

Although he has been loosely agglomerated with such second-generation modernist academicians as 1954 Poetry winner Teodore Roethke (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners /theodore-roethke), poet and short story writer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmore_Schwartz) and poet-novelist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Jarrell) — all of whom are represented in the collection — Berryman remains a vexatious force more than 50 years after four-time Poetry fnalist (https://www.pulitzer.org/fnalists/late-adrienne-rich) postulated that he and 2008 Special Citation recipient Bob Dylan (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/bob- dylan) all but defned the "English (American) language" of the '60s (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-genius-and-excess-of-john- berryman/384967/).

A nominal acolyte of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound) and T. S. Eliot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot), Berryman ultimately found his most enduring metier in the 1950s and pre-revolutionary '60s. With "Forbidden Planet" in the cinemas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet), Norman O. Brown a mainstay of learned journals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_O._Brown) and Wilhelm Reich in prison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich#Imprisonment), Berryman's dreamtime poetics synced up with the zeitgeist. He also anticipated the difusion of the postmodern era in his reclamation of less fashionable infuences at the zenith of the New Criticism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism), including Whitman and Shakespeare. Indeed, the minstrelsy-interrogating diction of Berryman's Pulitzer-winning "77 Dream Songs" has inspired a robust critical debate over the decades, including notable contributions from (https://www.jstor.org/stable /4337897?seq=1).

Yet these innovations — and, for that matter, his Shakespeare scholarship, comparable to Orson Welles' contemporaneous eforts and belatedly collected in the posthumous "Berryman's Shakespeare" (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781466808119) — largely have been obscured by two factors: the alcoholism that precipitated a litany of boorish incidents ("Surmounted by carrion, cry out/ and overdose and go," he wrote later in life) and the sepulchral current initiated by his father's suicide in 1926, culminating in his own suicidal jump from ' Washington Avenue Bridge on the morning of January 7, 1972.

Te epistolary Berryman is often emblematic of an era in which humanities departments were fush with funding from the Sputnik-inspired National Defense Education Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act) and more discreet funding conduits such as the Intelligence Community, as delineated by Eric Bennett in

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"Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War." (https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609383718/workshops-of- empire) Berryman, who was ambivalent toward creative writing workshops, spent much of his career teaching in an interdisciplinary humanities program at the University of .

Following decades of dead-end lectureships at Harvard and Princeton, Berryman's lack of a doctorate (he did complete a prestigious Kellett Fellowship (https://urf.columbia.edu /fellowship/kellett-fellowships) at Clare College, Cambridge after graduating from Columbia in 1936) no longer posed an obstacle to employment, as writers became grandfathered into American academia. Touring Japan on behalf of the United States Information Agency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agency) in 1957, he is nearly ebullient: "I am not fresh but feel fne and became excited when Japanese land showed below: every tone of green & brown, in early dusk, looking both graceful & wild."

By and large, correspondence was not a particularly ruminative realm for Berryman. Many of the letters take on the adjuring cadences of networking following his appointment to Minnesota (at the behest of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Tate), who facilitated the position following a drunken arrest at the Iowa Writers' Workshop) in 1955.

Writing to 1940 Poetry winner and Columbia faculty mentor (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/mark-van-doren) in 1962 during a visiting professorship at Brown, Berryman mentions ofhandedly that he "got fond of" and cultivated a friendship with two-time Poetry winner (https://www.pulitzer.org /news/memoriam-richard-wilbur) during a conference. Several years later, Wilbur and 1959 Poetry winner (https://www.pulitzer.org/article/remembering-stanley- kunitz) narrowly recommended the "Dream Songs" in lieu of a posthumous second award to Roethke while empaneled as the Poetry jury in the 1965 cycle, although it is unclear if Wilbur (who died aged 96 in 2017) recused from the selection to any extent.

Te text ofers revelatory insights into Berryman's intimate relationship with publisher and editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Giroux), a lifelong friend from their undergraduate days under the aegis of Van Doren at Columbia. After two consciously prolix volumes published by New Directions and gadfy science fction writer William Sloane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sloane_(author)) a decade apart, Giroux played the decisive role in popularizing his friend after joining Farrar & Straus in 1955, publishing nearly all of his subsequent work. It is Giroux who appeared (alongside quotations from the omnipresent Shakespeare) in a 1935 reference to their work on the Columbia Review and Giroux who nearly closesd out the volume in an October 1971 letter to mutual friend (and 1988 Poetry winner (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners /william-meredith)) William Meredith: "If I cd see you & Giroux occas'y, I'd feel more human." One only wishes that his responses to Berryman's intricate letters concerning the

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conceptualization and preparation of the "Dream Songs" for publication (following a decade of work) could have been included.

Berryman begins to confront his alcoholism at the turn of the 1970s, but a malaise becomes increasingly palpable. In an early 1971 note to frst wife , he writes: "Twenty-three yrs of alcohol hard on memory, tho' I escaped Korsakov's [sic] syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korsakof_syndrome)." With his New York Intellectual contemporaries divided between the "radical chic," New Left-inspired sympathies of two-time Pulitzer winner Norman Mailer (https://www.pulitzer.org/article /most-important-single-intellectual-event-last-few-years-norman-mailer-and-town-bloody- hall) and the incipient neoconservatism of Norman Podhoretz (https://www.nytimes.com /2017/03/17/nyregion/norman-podhoretz-still-picks-fghts-and-drops-names.html), Berryman remains steadfastly apolitical, disinclined to accept a distinguished professorship at Brooklyn College that would bring him closer to his friends amid the maelstrom of his personal life. Evanescent dreams sufused with responsibilities — a reduced teaching schedule, lecture tours, the ongoing benefcence of Giroux, a six-month Alcoholics Anonymous pin — fade, but the desultory specter of "our tragic & beloved Delmore Schwartz" endures into the fnal letter, a brief missive to writer Ted Hoagland.

As the "moneyball" era of modern segued into a more inclusive present, many of the friends and rivals who shaped his destiny were already deceased, prematurely eulogized in the "Dream Songs." But by remaining so fastidious in his correspondence, Berryman created the kind of elliptical scholarly record that Whitman and Shakespeare neglected to keep — one that will arguably yield dividends and revelations for generations.

Tags: Poetry (/archive/559)

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