In the Final Two Years of His Life John Berryman Completed Two Collections of Poems – Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc

LOVE & FAME AND THE SELF IN SOCIETY PHILIP COLEMAN In the final two years of his life John Berryman completed two collections of poems – Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. – and he brought close to conclusion the novel Recovery, which was published posthumously in 1973. In a letter to Robert Giroux in May 1971 he described his “Present plan” in the following way: 1) vol. Essays/stories – Spr. ’72 2) Delusions, Etc. – Fall ’72 3) Recovery (the novel) – ’73? 4) Shakespeare’s Reality – ’74? 5) The Blue Book of Poetry (ed.) 6?) I am also doing a Life of Christ for Martha [Berryman’s daughter]: illustrated – e.g. Titian’s great “Scourging” in the Pinakothek.1 Berryman’s activity and output during this period of his life is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least because he spent a great deal of this time in hospital undergoing treatment for alcoholism, as well as carrying out his duties as Regents’ Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota. It is interesting too because, much to the poet’s dismay, the reception of The Dream Songs had more or less decided his critical fate, as Robert Lowell implied when he wrote that Berryman’s “last two books, Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc., move” but only insofar as “they fill out the frame” of The Dream 1 Quoted by Robert Giroux in the Preface to John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, viii. 226 Philip Coleman Songs and “prepare for his [Berryman’s] death”.2 Lowell’s remark is problematic for a number of reasons, but mainly because it suggests that the work Berryman produced in the last few years of his life in some sense pre-empted or prophesied his death by suicide in January 1972. It also relates to what I term the “narrow confessional” interpretation and designation of Berryman’s work, which seeks to underestimate and, indeed, erase those aspects of his poetry that engage with the social and political world outside of the private, domestic experience of the author. If, as Steven Gould Axelrod has argued, confessional poetry involves an interconnection of private and public matter,3 critics of Berryman’s poetry have tended on the whole to ignore his elucidations of the latter, preferring to read his work as a sustained examination and elaboration of the former.4 Lowell’s regrettable insistence on the connection between Berryman’s poetry and his suicide was rehashed recently by Michael Hofmann, in his Introduction to a selection of Berryman’s poems for Faber and Faber’s “Poet to Poet” series.5 Hofmann quite rightly notes that “things have gone rather quiet around Berryman” in recent years, as far as critical engagement with his work is concerned, but one of the reasons for this neglect has to do with the persistence of narrow confessionalism in Berryman studies, which insists that his poetry represents a kind of solipsistic inwardness and withdrawal from the world that precludes engagement with broader social or political concerns. Hofmann writes: I may of course be mistaken about both, but while I find it easy to think of Sylvia Plath without and apart from her suicide, I can’t do that with Berryman. It was a part of him for longer, and it’s harder to think what else he might have done.6 2 Robert Lowell, “For John Berryman, 1914-1972”, in Collected Prose, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, 116. 3 See Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, 98. 4 John Haffenden, for example, has written that “the poet is everywhere at the centre of his work”, but many of Berryman’s public interests and engagements remain unacknowledged (see John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, New York and London: New York University Press, 1980, 1). 5 Michael Hofmann, Introduction to John Berryman: Poems Selected by Michael Hofmann, London: Faber and Faber, 2004. 6 Ibid., viii. .

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