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
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.
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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 middleaged 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 stagenegro more accurately, in the hope that he might better endure the hardships
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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
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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.
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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
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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. The disproportionate number of elegies to dead
poets in Book VI and Henry’s eventual fame and international exposure which
occur in Book VII distinguish the author as the only survivor in a world of
dead heroes. It is the intention of this essay to show how Henry manages,
rather cunningly, to survive in the terrifying universe of The Dream Songs and
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to explain and enlarge upon the ensuing consequences of his survival in Book
VII, the poem’s deeply meditative and enchanting final act.
I
In an interview with the Harvard Advocate which took place on 26 October,
1968, not long after the publication of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest1 (1967),
Berryman had this to say about the hero of The Dream Songs: “Henry does
resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry.
You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax” (7).
This is
something closely akin to Magritte’s explanation of “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,”
and while this may be technically true, it is true only in the sense that Henry is
a literary construct and John Berryman is not. Berryman’s dismissive attitude
is present even in the “Note” to the second volume of The Dream Songs where
he writes, vehemently: “The poem […] whatever its wide cast of characters, is
essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me)” (vi). The
scholarly consensus of the present has determined, reasonably in my opinion,
that this assertion is at best absurd. And by the way, Henry does pay income
tax (220).
Some scholars, among them Anthony Caleshu, contemplate whether
Berryman “wanted to pose an interesting challenge to the idea of
confessionalism, which of course, he helped foster” (104), and, indeed,
whether he accomplished that feat is left to individual judgment. However, as
1
The title comes from a collection of Elizabethan keyboard music known as The Fitzwilliam Virginal
Book, in which there appears three dance pieces entitled “A Toy,” “Giles Farnaby’s Dreame,” and “His
Rest.” The discovery is Kathleen Kelly’s.
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Caleshu further points out: “Though Berryman wears the mask of Henry quite
well in the early Dream Songs, by the later ones he is so obviously
documenting autobiographical matter that one has to wonder why he offers
the pose of the “Note” in the first place?” (104). I’ll elaborate briefly by
saying that, among other similarities and affinities, Henry shares with the
author degrees from Columbia and Cambridge Universities, European trips
abroad, extramarital affairs, physical characteristics, teaching appointments,
speaking engagements, social networks, and credited publications. The list
continues indefinitely it seems.
The term “Confessionalism” is difficult to define, especially since almost
all literature is on some level confessional. Its foundational texts, Heart’s
Needle by W.D. Snodgrass and Life Studies by Robert Lowell, both published
in 1959 and both sensational successes, inaugurated an era in American letters
that focused on the life of the author in a state of great mental and spiritual
turmoil. Pound’s Cantos is perhaps the earliest example of this kind of
unembarrassed self-revelation in verse and it was Pound’s theme especially,
the life of the poet, that most resonated with the Berryman of The Dream
Songs. Another acknowledged influence on Berryman, excluding the obvious,
Auden and Yeats, was Walt Whitman.
Beginning his sea journey in Book VII, Henry takes with him only five
books, “a Whitman, a Purgatorio, a dictionary, an Oxford bible, and a copy of
Yeats’s last poems, all works” Joel Conarroe notes, “that for years exerted a
powerful influence on his mind and art” (142). No doubt, holding certain
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qualities in common with his revered ancestor and by all estimates literary
superior, Berryman seems most appreciably in debt to Whitman’s powerfully
commanding “I,” a voice, Berryman notes in an essay of his dating from 1957,
that is “for himself and others; for others as himself [and] this is the intention
clearly” he goes on to say, “an underlying exhibitionism and narcissism we
take for granted” (230). In other words, the voice of Whitman’s poem is a
representative one. Similarly, Henry is also a representative and unifying
figure. However, unlike Whitman’s “I,” Henry unites not through a visionary
idealism or equilibrium but rather a distraught sense of terror and provocation.
Another representative figure that I have already mentioned is Anne Frank.
In “The Development of Anne Frank,” Berryman writes, generously, of
Frank’s diary: “the work has decided literary merit; it is vivid, witty, candid,
astute, dramatic, pathetic, terrible, –one falls in love with the girl, one finds
her formidable, and she breaks one’s heart” (92).
The Dream Songs too might be described in this way, and Henry, despite his
many negative attributes, is also formidable, and on occasion, is capable of
breaking one’s heart. John Haffenden writes, confidently, that few things
were more important to Berryman than “the timely awareness that the Dream
Songs was evolving as a ‘Survival-epic’” (45). That in mind, I couple this
quotation with another from Arpin who writes of Henry’s struggle: “He
undergoes the suffering that Rimbaud said the poet should undergo, hoping to
find, not so much the “unknown” or some ideal realm, but a strategy for living
in a world filled with all-too-real difficulties” (10). This strategy, in essence,
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is non-combative, even cowardly depending on one’s point of view. Henry, a
remarkably reclusive and inglorious character, endures and eventually
triumphs over injustice by simply avoiding it at whatever cost.
The relevance of French symbolist poets such as Rimbaud and Corbiere
cannot be overstated in this discussion.
According to Arpin, “Henry in
blackface is an American figure, but he is also a descendant of Rimbaud’s
“nigger,” a metaphysical slave, one of “the race that sang under torture”” (75).
Rimbaud’s conception of the poet as black man differs from Berryman’s only
in tone.
Rimbaud emphasizes and draws deep gratification from his
imaginary kinship with the tortured black man and believes it to have a
genuinely edifying effect on his character.
Henry, in contrast, passively
accepts this association without necessarily embracing it. The passage that
Arpin refers to is taken from Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (1873) under the
heading “Bad Blood:”
I saw myself in front of any angry mob, facing a firing squad,
weeping with misery that they would not have been able to
understand, and forgiving them! –Like Joan of Arc! –‘Priests,
teachers, masters, you are wrong to deliver me up to justice. I
have never belonged here with you; I have never been a
Christian; I belong to a race which sang on the scaffold; I do
not understand the laws; I have no moral sense, I am an
animal: you are making a mistake…’ Yes, my eyes are blind
to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved.
You are niggers in disguise, the lot of you, maniacs, savages,
misers
(11).
Arpin makes an important point when he writes “Henry in blackface stands,
an “imaginary Negro,” as Berryman had stood in his early short story “The
Imaginary Jew” bearing “in the fading night our general guilt”” (75).
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However, according to Berryman, “The imaginary Jew I was was as real as
the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, in a real Jew”
(366), and it is for this reason that Henry’s choice of disguise in this case is
the ultimate irony of The Dream Songs.
I can easily agree with Arpin when he says that Henry in blackface is a
“metaphysical slave” and a descendant of Rimbaud’s “nigger.” In fact, I
would go one step further and suggest that Henry out of blackface is also
answerable to this description. Henry is made into this metaphorical “nigger”
by tyrannical, immaterial forces that, it stands to reason, are also descendents
of Rimbaud’s “angry mob.” Henry possesses this black soul long before he
discovers the means to disguise it. That Henry seeks asylum in the minstrel
show under the false pretense of being “just another white performer in
disguise” explains what I mean when I say that it is “the ultimate irony” of the
poem. Like Berryman in “The Imaginary Jew” (1945) and Rimbaud in Une
Saison en Enfer, the very act of racial profiling does its greatest injury to the
accused, namely Henry, by constructing an identity that cannot be entirely
disowned by the protagonist. Indeed, Henry is a metaphorical negro who
disguises himself as a white man who is, himself, disguised as a negro. This
disguise is particularly effective for this very reason. Sanctuary for Henry
exists in the illusion of theatricality. Thus, Berryman is inviting us, perhaps,
to challenge his own exploitation of the fanciful, and to surmise, quite rightly,
despite the author’s attempts to misdirect and mislead, that Henry is not
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merely a work of fiction and that poet and character are, in fact, one and the
same.
That much considered, Henry’s blackface persona is only one of a dozen or
so fictitious characters that Henry impersonates throughout the poem. Some
of the most common and absurd include: Henry House (122), Henry
Hankovitch (31), Henry Pussycat (22, 322, 365), Sir Henry (316), Sir Bones
(2), Henry of Donnybrook (97), Rabbi Henry (136), Cave-man Henry (381),
and Clown Henry (Uncollected). However, according to J.M. Linebarger,
“[t]he poet dons not only these masks but others in The Dream Songs: he is
often a cat, once a raccoon (57), an opossum (355), a deer (56), and, in one
wild analogy, a helicopter (367)” (80). In a book of uncollected Dream
Songs, published posthumously under the title Henry’s Fate (1977), there
appears a poem which begins:
Old codger Henry contained within hisself
Henry young, Henry almost beautiful
Henry the seducer
Henry the mad young artist, with no interest in pelf
(Berryman 27).
The great multiplicity of identity found in Henry’s character, as illustrated by
the above quotation, is most prevalent in the first six books and then becomes
increasingly remote in the seventh once Henry has enhanced his reputation as
a literary writer and become known to the world.
The next logical question must now be: why does Henry disguise himself?
Henry has often been characterized by Berryman scholars as a comic evader,
both of responsibility and that which is most threatening to all us, death.
2
Numbers listed here refer to Dream Song number, not page number.
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Indeed, when the question is posed by Henry himself: “Then how did Henry
make itself of use?” (Berryman 216), his response is the most honest one:
“Henry hid.” He also says in Dream Song 356 “I’m not […] what I appears”
(Berryman 378), echoing the Prince of Denmark’s famous address to his
mother in Act I, Scene II of Hamlet, where he declares: “I have that within
that passes show” (Shakespeare 1.2.85). By identifying himself with Hamlet,
Henry is identifying himself with a notoriously theatrical personality; an actor,
essentially, who uses this ability to his advantage.
Henry also uses his
theatrical nature to his advantage by assuming a great number of aliases to
take the place of his one “true” self. He does so, I argue, solely out of fear
and concern for his personal wellbeing.
And so he should be concerned, for his adversaries are numerous, and none
so satisfyingly and effectively devises Henry’s destruction than God.
In
Dream Song 194, Henry says to God: “If all must hurt at once, let yet more
hurt now, / so I’ll be ready, Dr God. Push on me. / Give it to Henry harder”
(Berryman 213).
These opening lines parody John Donne’s famous
exclamation from Holy Sonnet XIV (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”)
where, Donne, desperate for spiritual salvation, asks that God force his love
upon him: “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you / As yet but knock
breathe, shine, and seek to mend” (64). In Dream Song 194, however, Henry
expresses no desire for reconciliation with a heavenly creator and considers
God’s violent intervention simply a merciful means of ending his long,
abusive life.
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In fact, another variation of Donne’s sonnet appears in Dream Song 266
when Henry begins, similarly: “Dinch me, dark God, having smoked me out. /
Let Henry’s ails fail, pennies on his eyes / never to open more” (Berryman
285). In this particular song, it is a “dark god” to which Henry is appealing,
and one which has “smoked [Henry] out” of his hiding place, and not the
other way around. This image of having been smoked out by God presents
Henry for the first time as a refugee, one who has desperately avoided the
attention of a god whose “presidency” he refers to in the same song with a
sense of scorn and whose “career” he passionately derides in another. In
Dream Song 113, titled “Amy Vladeck or Riva Freifeld,” Henry’s combined
feelings of condemnation and irreverence that are present throughout the
poem are given extra credibility when he says:
-The body’s foul, cried god, once, twice, & bound it –
For many years I hid it from him successfully –
I’m not clear how he found it
But now he has it”
(Berryman 130).
In no other passage in the poem is God depicted so unfavorably by the
protagonist who feels he must hide his “foul” body for fear that it be “bound”
once more and disfigured by a capricious and sadistic higher being.
The extent of God’s ruthlessness is verbalized by a seemingly and
demonically possessed Henry late in Book VI when God attempts to justify
his mistreatment of the poem’s hero by saying:
You lowered a wall between us
which was your privilege. Now you must not expect
anything but suffering more,
fearless & final. You became anonymous
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(Berryman 281).
The motive and at least one of the means of Henry “becoming anonymous” I
have already described in some detail.
Elsewhere in the poem
disembowelment, castration and other obscene punishments are visited upon
Henry by what he perceives to be a bloodthirsty and unyielding god who
cannot be bargained with nor propitiated to. However, more often than not,
this horrifying destruction of the body is purely metaphorical and describes
rather Henry’s great psychological and existential disharmony that only
increases in severity as the conclusion of Book VI fast approaches. Some of
the most ghastly displays of disregard for the body occur with ominous
frequency in the opening and penultimate books of the poem where Henry
claims in one song that “They sandpapered his plumpest hope [and] They took
away his crotch” (Berryman 10), despite the fact that “his loins were & were
the scene of stupendous achievement” (Berryman 28) as his many accounts of
philandering and extramarital affairs can attest to.3
Book II also “emphasizes violence, both Henry’s own repressed violence
and the violence of the world at large [while] [t]he third book” like the
seventh, “emphasizes Henry’s poetry and the potentially restorative value of
poetry” (Arpin 44/45). As I’ve just illustrated, Henry “sometimes imagines
being punished by having his “hands” (81) or his “crotch” (8) taken away, or
by having a phallic leg cut off by a surgeon (319)” (Linebarger 111). In one
instance he confesses that “[h]e never loved his body, being full of dents”
(Berryman 138), and in another he describes himself walking “as if he were
3
See Berryman’s Sonnets (1967) for a more detailed memoir of one affair.
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ashamed / of being in the body” (Berryman 266). There are countless other
examples of this brutality in the poem that I think are better left imagined than
described.
One consequence of this relentless intimidation (a somewhat
humorous one depending on your reading) is Henry’s death which occurs at
the end of the first volume and is the subject of the “Opus Posthumous”
sequence that introduces the second.
These songs achieve little more than a comedic effect that releases the
tension of the first three books. What is important, however, is Henry’s
resuscitation which takes place at the beginning of Book V and continues into
Book VI, a book that contains an unusually high volume of elegies to dead
poets, both contemporaries and predecessors of Henry. Book VI then could
rightly be called (and I do call it) The Dream Songs’ “Book of the Dead.”
Book VI alone contains eight of the fourteen elegies that appear in the poem,
including the eleven songs addressed to Delmore Schwartz at the beginning of
the book. A reader less skeptical than myself might read these songs, as no
doubt Berryman had intended him or her to, with a great sense of sympathy or
heartfelt respect for Henry’s attempts to honor the dead.
My reading,
however, is considerably more suspicious, and for good reason, as Henry
characterizes himself in one song as having “no team-spirit” and lashing “the
lapses of those who were to inherit” (Berryman 387). Inherit what exactly?
The title of greatest living American poet is what Henry seeks so diligently in
The Dream Songs as did Berryman in almost all of his endeavors.
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Thus we return to Henry’s egocentric quest for fame that I mentioned
earlier in this discussion. It is now well known that Berryman was a maniacal
opportunist surpassed in his conniving perhaps only by Delmore Schwartz
whose designs for self-promotion were almost as elaborate as his designs for
his long unfinished poem, Genesis (1943).
Paul Mariani notes in his
biography of Berryman one incident in the poet’s life that is here particularly
relevant: “Later that day Daniel Hughes came into Berryman’s office with the
news that Frost had died. With the great man gone, Berryman wondered, who
was “number one” among poets? Berryman suggested Lowell, hoping Hughes
would contradict him and tell him he was” (391/2). John Haffenden’s account
of this incident is the less sympathetic of the two: “Hughes had brought his
own tidings: Robert Frost was dead. Berryman greeted the news with a wideeyed question: ‘Dan, it’s scary. Who’s number one? Who’s number one? Cal
is number one, isn’t he?’ Hughes was aware that Berryman wanted him to say,
‘You’re number one, of course,’ but he did not say it. He was in fact mildly
shocked by Berryman’s competitiveness” (319).
This competitiveness is
present throughout the whole enterprise of The Dream Songs and often does a
great disservice to the addressees of this dedicational verse.
Berryman successfully maintains the posture of bereavement in these songs
but his intentions are always selfish and can occasionally appear reactionary
or condescending.
Restricting my remarks to the Delmore Schwartz
sequence, I would say Henry’s admiration for the poet is genuine but not
without a measure of harsh honesty or “matter of factness” that comes across
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as patronizing. For instance, nothing delights Henry more than restating the
fact that Delmore’s work fell into decline in his middle age. In one song, he
says: “I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved / but it did not so”
(Berryman 169), in another, “High in the summer branches the poet sang. /
His throat ached, and he could sing no more” (Berryman 166), and another,
“His work downhill, I don’t conceal from you, / ran and ran out” (Berryman
176), and once he describes him as “a real boss cat / fallen from his prime”
(Berryman 167) and again he refers to “the failure of his administration”
(Berryman 170) with a self-righteousness that characterizes all eleven songs in
the sequence.
For Henry, the decline of Delmore Schwartz the poet
corresponded to the decline of Delmore Schwartz the man, and as many
speculate, Henry included, one decline precipitated the other.
Henry’s real objective in this sequence and indeed in all of the elegies in
The Dream Songs is not dedication but rather self-congratulation.
Commemorating the lives of these dead poets is secondary to Henry’s real
purpose which is to construct an image of himself as the ultimate survivor of
the Dream Song world. Henry’s sense of superiority stems from the fact that
he has not met his end prematurely like so many poets of his generation. This
is why, when Henry says in one song addressed to Delmore Schwartz, that he
“nearly would follow him below” (Berryman 175), one can only react as Dr.
Hughes reacted, with enormous outrage at the poet’s insincerity. One song I
find particularly revealing is Dream Song 153, an elegy that begins:
I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation.
First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore.
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In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath.
That was a first rate haul. He left alive
fools I could number like a kitchen knife
but Lowell he did not touch.
(Berryman 172)
Ignoring the pun of the opening line, this song is a reliable, self-contained
statement of the problem facing Henry’s “wrecked” generation. God the
destroyer is reintroduced as a kind of enemy of the poets who consumes the
creative faculties of thinking men like Randall (Jarrell) and Delmore
(Schwartz). In a world of chaotic uncertainty about the outcome of one’s
professional and personal life, Henry reassures himself that once all of his
contemporaries have been eradicated, he alone will remain as the lone
contender for the place of America’s greatest living poet.
II
Early in the summer of 1946, the Berrymans (John and Eileen) left the
generous hospitality of R.P. Blackmur and his wife Helen to accept two
similar proposals offered by Nela Walcott and the Lowells (Robert and Jean),
all summer residents of Maine. Lowell’s nineteenth-century clapboard house
was located in Damariscotta Mills in a leisurely, even frivolous, environment
that he and his visitors took full advantage of. Once the Berrymans’ weekend
stay had ended they were offered and accepted to extend their visit another
fortnight. Berryman and Lowell provided each other with great intellectual
companionship during those two weeks and were in the habit of drinking and
talking excessively at all hours of the night. “Looking back to that time,
Lowell understood that Berryman’s preoccupation with broken syntax in the
Britz 20
mid-1940s was “the start of his real style”” (Mariani 177); a style that would
years later provoke polarizing responses of great approval and stern rejection
by most reviewers of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs.
The few negative reviews of the poem’s first installment, 77 Dream Songs,
“more often than not concerned the odd language of the poems, the gnarled
syntax, minstrel dialect, and shifting pronoun usage” (Smith 432).
The
earliest appearance of this experimental use of syntax in Berryman’s work
was in “a series of negligible poems called “The Nervous Songs,” […]
derived from Rilke” (Bawer 157), of which Randall Jarrell made honorary
mention in a collection he and others unapologetically detested. The origins
of Henryspeech remain as yet an unanswered mystery, though countless
theories have been entertained with equal feasibility over the years. Poetanthologist Donald Hall offers one popular theory in his review of Berryman’s
The Freedom of the Poet, saying: “The Freedom of the Poet includes nothing
better than his work on Nash, Marlowe, and Shakespeare […] in which we
find him celebrating Elizabethan syntax for its expressive distortion by rupture
and eccentricity” and where “we realize a source for an aspect of the poet’s
style” (656).
This assertion has gained in credibility over the years due in part to
Berryman’s very outspoken preference for Elizabethan verse drama,
especially Shakespeare, whose Folio he had studied at great length while a
university undergraduate at Cambridge.
Conarroe elaborates by saying
“Henryspeech, that queer language peculiar to this work, derives its effects
Britz 21
from archaic and Latinate constructions, from crumpled syntax, odd diction,
idiomatic conversation, and conscious violations of grammatical rules” (116).
Louise Bogan, poet and Bollingen prize panelist, referred to Berryman as “the
enemy of the English language,” and no doubt regretted the committee’s
decision to award Berryman the prestigious prize, a title that he shared with
Karl Shapiro in 1969.
Few readers of Berryman’s verse reacted so
contemptuously as Miss Bogan, though his use of language often had and
remains to have a bewildering effect on even his most devoted and determined
readers.
Most conclusions concerning Henry’s language seem equally valid and
equally contestable. That said, I offer the following explanation at my own
inevitable peril. It seems to me overwhelmingly the case that a close reading
of Henry’s relationship with the interlocutor is the best and most profitable
reading that can be attempted. “For the disposition of Mr Bones and his
interlocutor” writes John Haffenden, “Berryman borrowed features from the
stage pattern of minstrel show tradition, for which his source was Carl
Wittke’s Tambo and Bones, a work published in 1930” (48).
The
interlocutor’s many cameo appearances in The Dream Songs often result in
some moral epiphany for Henry whose increasingly homicidal behavior
requires some psychoanalytical input from a trustworthy second party. That is
to say, the voice of the interlocutor is instructional, and his student throughout
the course of the poem is, of course, Henry. In the interlocutor’s tutelage
Britz 22
Henry narrowly avoids a great number of ghastly and unredeemable decisions
that would place him and others (often women) in certain physical danger.
Dream Song 4 is a fine illustration of this teacher-student relationship
between Henry and the End-man.
The song’s setting is an expensive
restaurant where a beautiful woman of “Latin complexion” is witnessed by
Henry “[f]illing her compact & delicious body / with chicken paprika”
(Berryman 6). Unlike Henry who is dining alone, she is accompanied by “her
husband & four other people,” who present a great obstacle to Henry’s
incurably dangerous fantasies. In this song, Henry’s machinations do not
extend beyond an unhealthy voyeurism, although the impulse to “spring on
her,” i.e. rape her, is dangerously present up until the poem’s climax when the
interlocutor appears to console and deter.
The song ends with Henry saying to himself “There ought to be a law
against Henry” to which the interlocutor responds “Mr. Bones: there is”
(Berryman 6). Adam Kirsch’s analysis of this song is poignant and to the
point: “Henry is mocking his own appetites, and his “there ought to be a law”
is a stock phrase. But the response of his religious friend suggests to Henry,
and the reader, that there really is a moral law; that Henry’s lust is no joke, but
a sin that will be punished” (129). I take issue only with Kirsch’s unfounded
claim that this “moral law” is God’s law, rather than society’s law.
Otherwise, this perfectly explains the interlocutor’s invaluable presence in The
Dream Songs as Henry’s sole source of ethical absolutism.
Britz 23
Consequently, it is not unreasonable to believe then that two characters as
intimately connected as Henry and his friend, one a teacher, the other his
pupil, should view their relationship as an apprenticeship of sorts. Both are
members of the same act, namely, the minstrel show, one an imposter as I’ve
already explained, the other curiously out of place, but nonetheless convincing
in his role as dramatic commentator and moral instructor. As readers of The
Dream Songs may have noticed, the interlocutor “seems always to be in
blackface and to speak in dialect,” and as Linebarger points out, “[h]e is
never, so far as I can tell, a pompous white man” (86/87); the type of character
who traditionally would have filled such a role.
The interlocutor’s language and the rules governing that use of language
should be our subject. For the sake of time, I will condense my remarks to
brief generalizations about how minstrel speak works or doesn’t work. Firstly
and essentially, it is grammatically inaccurate. Examples of this fact are
arbitrarily abundant, and one need only turn to Dream Song 2 (the
interlocutor’s first appearance) in which the End-man asks Henry “Is you feel
well?” (Berryman 4) for an illustration. Secondly and less significantly, the
interlocutor tends to speak in Negro dialect like Jim in Huck Finn or Toomer’s
characters in Cane. In Dream Song 36, for instance, he informs Henry that
“We hafta die” and that “De choice is lost” (Berryman 40). It should also be
mentioned that another great irony of the poem is the severely inarticulate and
uneducated manner in which the interlocutor imparts his wisdom to Henry.
The End-man’s stereotypically awkward, almost infantile command of the
Britz 24
English language, including, ironically, its often enlightening philosophical
content, is precisely that which Henry hopes to imitate in this strange minstrel
apprenticeship.
Berryman’s own various apprenticeships began in the 1930s while a
Columbia undergraduate under the very capable mentorship of poet-scholar
Mark Van Doren.
This was only one of many undigested voices that
prevented Berryman’s own voice from emerging in his early poetry.
Berryman’s style then, it is agreed, conformed to the prevailing ethos of
poetry that was, in part, shaped by Modernist “dictators” such as T.S. Eliot
and W.H. Auden. In his excellent study of Berryman, Linebarger quotes the
poet as saying that “”for several fumbling years I wrote in what is convenient
to call ‘period style,’ the Anglo-American style of the 1930’s, with no voice
of my own, learning chiefly from middle and later Yeats and from the brilliant
young Englishman W.H. Auden”” (29/30).
Berryman’s enormous poetic
debts did not go unnoticed in reviews of his early works, Poems (1942) and
The Dispossessed (1948), and critics, Jarrell included, wrote discouragingly of
Berryman’s painful unoriginality and almost maniacal obsession with form.
Haffenden quotes from Randall Jarrell’s uncompromising review of The
Dispossessed, where he points out, perceptively, that ““[d]oing things in a
style all its own sometimes seems the primary object of the poem, and its
subject gets a rather spasmodic and fragmentary treatment”” (199).
In
Linebarger’s generous, even courteous appraisal of Berryman’s early verse, he
writes: “Only one stylistic quality remains constant throughout the early
Britz 25
poetry –the poet’s craftsmanship,” though he concedes that “[s]ometimes […]
it seems to be merely a “delight in craftsmanship” […] for its own sake” (51),
and consequently, the author fails to convey any emotional depth.
In
summary, “[t]he problem for the serious poet,” or the early Berryman, writes
Mariani “was to find the right system on which to hang one’s poems” (61).
For Henry in The Dream Songs, the interlocutor provided him with such a
system.
Henryspeech then, it may be inferred, is an amateurish misappropriation or
inflation of that system of language that characterizes the interlocutor’s many
terse interjections in the poem.
In other words, Henry learns from the
interlocutor the mechanics of minstrel speak (grammar, syntax, dialect, etc)
and then studiously and overzealously applies these principles until it no
longer resembles minstrel speak and is, in fact, a parody of it. For example,
while the interlocutor may make grammatical errors in his orations, Henry
often commits grammatical travesties. But this is precisely his point. Like the
real-life Berryman, Henry’s overwhelming concerns with form, his “delight in
craftsmanship” which consists chiefly of being a-grammatical, is taken to such
extremities that meaning is occasionally lost and, quoting Jarrell for a second
time, his subjects get “a rather spasmodic and fragmentary treatment.”
Consequently, Henry’s unruly attempts at imitation result in a language that
draws attention to its own artificiality. That is, Henryspeech exposes both
language and man as being fraudulent, and compromises Henry’s already
questionable presence on the minstrel stage.
Britz 26
Furthermore, in a work where “[a]uthor, character, form, and language
stand at militant attention as various poses and guises are assumed” (Caleshu
102), it becomes apparently clear that not only the hero of the poem but the
poem’s author too has cleverly disguised himself in this work. Caleshu refers
to “Berryman’s exploitation of the “dramatic”” which, he points out, “has its
roots in dramatic monologue, where not only the poet but the speaker is
hidden behind a mask of intentions (that is, Berryman dons the mask of Henry
who dons the mask of Mr Bones)” (102). Like Henry’s many false monikers,
Berryman’s “disguise” in the poem is the personality of Henry –specifically,
his most animating characteristic, his language. Berryman’s masquerade is
one of grammar and syntax. He invents a language that literally gives life to
his character and until the seventh and final book the deception remains in
place.
III
The seventh book begins with Henry aboard an ocean liner heading for Ireland
where he is to remain for the duration of his one year sabbatical. “The
seventh (and final) book [also] opens with a resolution [one of many] to “craft
better,”” (Conarroe 141) and to respond to his fan mail in a timely fashion.
The opening song ends with Henry reassuring himself, rather optimistically,
that his whole year will be “tense with love.” Already one can sense that this
is not the same man who only one book earlier pledged to follow Delmore
Schwartz into the grave. The voice is infinitely more confident, more mature
even, more pragmatically involved in the affairs of his family life and his
Britz 27
professional life, both of which have improved inestimably since the
beginning of the poem when “unappeasable Henry” made his self-loathing
debut. The tone is also considerably more reflective, possibly even nostalgic.
Self-accusation is replaced with introspection, catastrophe with pet-peeves,
and gradually it becomes clear that it is the perspective of an old man that we
are given in the final book.
Dream Song 283 is a good example of Henry’s hallucinatory splendor in
the opening songs. It is one of six introductory songs which take place aboard
the ship that is transporting Henry from the “country of the dead” (it is salient
to mention that in the “survival epic” mode, this represents a great triumph for
Henry –a journey from a country of death to a country of life) to “the haunts
of Yeats,” where he promises to “have it out” with his significant other of
bygone years. He begins by saying:
I seem to be Henry then at twenty-one
steaming the sea again in another British boat
again, half mad with hope:
with my loved Basque friend I stroll the topmost deck
high in the windy night, in love with life
which has produced this wreck”
(Berryman 305).
The Spenserian conceit of the advancing ship is invoked by the author again
and again throughout this six-song sequence. Here, however, Henry reminds
himself of a similar voyage undertaken in early adulthood when he left the
United States, Columbia University specifically, aboard another ocean liner,
the Britannic, heading for Cambridge in September, 1936. Mariani describes
the event by writing: “As the Britannic churned through rough seas, Berryman
spent most of his time with a thirty-two-year-old Basque journalist and
Britz 28
political caricaturist named Pedro –or, as of the moment –Pierre Donga” (59).
In this song, contrary to the tone of the earlier books, remembrance bears
positive associations for Henry who declares himself a man “in love with
life,” despite the fact that it has “produced this wreck.” One reason for this
major attitude adjustment is Henry’s fame.
“Although not of noble mind,” Linebarger writes, “Henry is enamoured of
fame and speculates about it often” (96). Moreover, “Berryman [himself] was
particularly concerned that the public-at-large be interested in him as a
celebrity poet” (Caleshu 105), and the final book, the most novelistic of the
seven according to Conarroe, portrays with painstaking clarity the fulfillment
of Henry’s professional ambitions. For example, in Dream Song 280, the
second of the seafaring songs, Henry assures himself that “the large work
largely done, / over the years, the prizes mostly won, / we work now for
ourselves alone” (Berryman 302).
In another song, Henry claims
triumphantly that “the war for status had ceased // forever” (301), and in
another, more humorously, “[h]aving made a dent / in the world, he insisted
on special treatment, / massage at all hours” (373), and other eccentric
privileges that characterize literary celebrity. On another occasion, Henry
claims that “institutions had come up to scratch / awarding Henry much”
(319), and at the end of the book, a very generous and affectionate farewell
party is thrown in Henry’s honor, where “[t]he whole city turned out / to rustle
Henry home” (381), contrary to Henry’s prediction in an earlier Dream Song
Britz 29
that there, in fact, “will never come a congregation / to see needing Henry
home” (362).
Combined, these kind personal and public gestures give the impression that
Henry has courageously persevered, at long last, in his attempts to overcome
ridicule and scholarly neglect and rightly assume a position of authority in
American letters. Another, more nuanced indication of this fact is, oddly
enough, the content of Henry’s mail. Mail appears to possess a kind of
mystical quality in The Dream Songs that often takes the form of strangely
accurate premonitions of Henry’s maligning hardships in earlier books or, in
the final book, his unexpected success. To clarify, if one wants to know how
Henry is doing at any point in the poem, one need only look at his mail. In
Books I-V ½, for instance, Henry’s mail is notably disappointing, in moments,
even devastating. In these earlier books, Henry is the recipient of taxes, bills,
news of war, court cases, notices of friends’ suicides, or worst, nothing at all.
For example, in Dream Song 186, appropriately titled “Henry’s Mail,”
Henry describes his mail “brimming with Foundation reports / and with the
late inaction of the Courts / in his case” (Berryman 186); to what court case he
is referring, I am not sure. In another Dream Song, Henry mentions the
arrival of “a great cheque / eaten out already by the Government & State”
(21). In another, Henry describes his day, frustratingly, by saying that he is
often “on his own: / marrying, childing, slogging, shelling taxes” (220).
Elsewhere, Henry simply pleads that the “mail demain contain no pro’s or
Britz 30
con’s” (189), and assures himself that “the postman may indeed follow the
moon and the sun / but believe me he follows not Henry” (186).
Contrast this then with the type of mail that Henry receives in Book VII,
when, expecting more demoralizing news, “[i]nstead came a cable / from the
most beautiful woman in the United States, / devout & lovely” (382). In
another song, he congratulates himself for “getting / four ladies to write to
Henry” (326), rejoicing also in the fact that “long sums have come / from
foreign places” (350), as well as “[t]he White House invitation” (324) and,
perhaps most importantly, “[f]an-mail from foreign countries” (364), and a
“lone letter from a young man” (364) that he decides, nobly, is the very
definition of fame. In one very telling moment, he even remarks: “Golden his
mail came at his journey’s end, / Henry was back in action” (319). Here, mail
is used as a pun to characterize Henry as a kind of knight in shining armor,
dressed in chain mail, golden chain mail to be precise, which he predicts will
be of great use to him now that he is “back in action” in the seventh book.
At one point, Henry says to himself: “I dote on my mail: I need its bung”
(186). This idea of “need” is crucial to this discussion. For Henry, what was
originally a burdensome interest, bordering on pathological obsession has, in
latter books, developed into a remarkably satisfying form of idolatry. Henry
is torturously in the grips of his own fortunes which are determined, one
begins to notice, not by the most likely agent, namely, God, who has harassed
Henry with ambitions of sabotage and insatiable cruelty, but rather the very
human, very material mail system that reveals with perfect accuracy Henry’s
Britz 31
progression or regression in the poem. Coupled with this fact is another
sobering realization in Book VII of the “deus abscondis” or withdrawal of
God from all of Henry’s private, and now, public affairs. Replacing theories
of divine providence (indeed, replacing God himself) with the seemingly
random dictates of the mail system, appears to transfer Henry from a world of
gullible supernaturalism to a world of superstitious materialism, and, it has to
be said, he is all the better for it.
The variety of Henry’s costumes also markedly decreases in Book VII.
Henry even appears to have given up the façade of blackface minstrelsy,
fulfilling an earlier prophecy from Dream Song 231 that “[h]e’ll lose his
minstrelsy” (250), and, consequently, would have to “do it again, / in
whiteface” (239). There are two closely-related explanations for this lull in
dramatic fervor in Book VII. Firstly, it stands to reason that Henry’s recent
fame has made it impossible for him to continue hiding. Emerging as an
international figure in the final book after being elevated to the much-coveted
status of poet celebrity, Henry is no longer capable, as he once was, of
“blending into” the crowd, unnoticed. Indeed, “[s]uch hard work demands
such international thanks” (62) he exclaims in one Dream Song, and reveals in
another that his works have been translated into Polish. Henry’s poems are at
this precise moment an achievement of global proportions, and their author, a
prodigious, marketable old poet cherished by all countries containing a
printing press. Thus, his “special gift, / the wardrobes wider & wider” (379)
Britz 32
that served him so well in earlier songs have now been rendered ineffective
and unnecessary.
Secondly, Henry’s multiple obligations to his family, publishers, critics
and admirers have in some real sense replaced these comparatively comic
roles or performances of previous books. The roles of Mr. Bones, Henry
Pussycat, and Henry House have been spiritedly substituted for the more
domestic and harmonious roles of husband, father, and celebrated writer. For
instance, Henry’s daughter, Martha “Twiss” Berryman, is introduced in Book
VII as a major, recurring character. She and her mother, Kate Donahue,
appear in a combined total of sixteen Dream Songs (283, 289, 293, 295, 298,
303, 308, 315, 318, 330, 349, 373, 379, 381, 383, and 385) in the seventh
book, one of which idealizes Henry’s wife (295), another, his daughter, whom
he describes as his “near perfect child” (298) and the clear favorite of his two
legitimate children begot by Donahue and Berryman’s second wife, Ann
Levine.
Conarroe agrees, writing that Henry’s “wife and new daughter are
described again and again, always in the most affectionate terms” (137),
where in one isolated song, Henry concludes, whimsically, that “[w]orking &
children & pals are the point of the thing” (325), and are, according to Arpin,
“the only means of coping with his environment” (82), which has steadily
improved over the course of the final two books. Henry, “speaking in propria
persona, husband and father, poet, too, representative man” (Donoghue 165),
unburdens himself of his early, denigrating struggle for survival, and is
Britz 33
acceptingly domesticated by his loving wife and infant daughter who seem to
represent in some fundamental sense the continuation of Henry’s legacy, and
thus his ultimate triumph over death. Even though Henry “comes to realize”
in one song, “that when Twissy graduates from Smith he will be gone”
(Conarroe 145), physically annihilated like so many of his contemporaries, a
part of him, nonetheless, will endure, will remain on earth immortally
preserved, which is the essentially unattainable ambition of the survival epic
hero. Thus, “Henry ultimately finds in his family the values necessary for
survival in, and, indeed, triumph over a hostile world” (Arpin 17); a world that
has impeded his moral, psychological, and financial progress from the first
self-pitying moments of the poem.
Another explanation of this change, possibly the most enticing, is the
ingenious and greatly momentous unmasking of the poem’s reclusive author.
As I’ve already mentioned, language in The Dream Songs, has a powerfully
animating quality that literally gives life to the character of Henry and his
devoted interlocutor.
Furthermore, language, that is, Henry’s language,
extraordinarily ineloquent as it is, ensures that the author remains reclusive,
indiscernible, and unidentifiable in the poem. In Book VII, however, all of
this changes. Beginning as early as Dream Song 274 of the previous book, a
song belonging, unofficially, to a five song farewell sequence, one is
immediately struck by the direct, conversational tone of this final chapter of
Henry’s life. The final book, it may be said, is infinitely more readable than
anything that comes before.
Britz 34
“It is as if a second poem had been begun” remarks Arpin, “[…] a poem
about Berryman writing a poem about Henry” (83), and, indeed, spoken in
Berryman’s own unpretentious voice. The reason for this change, as it occurs
to me, is the wish of the author to insert himself in this comparatively
picturesque conclusion to his narrative.
By removing the mask of
Henryspeech entirely, thereby forcing Henry to remove the mask of Mr.
Bones, Henry Pussycat, etc, Berryman has made of his life a sensational
spectacle that culminates with the audacious Superman-like moment where
the Man of Steel reveals his true identity to the world, confirming what all
readers of Superman’s adventures knew from the very beginning.
An
illustration is in order. I’ll begin by quoting an early Dream Song from the
first book and then contrasting it with another from Book VII. Dream Song
32 unfolds as follows:
And where, friend Quo, lay you hiding
across malignant half my years or so?
One evil faery
it was workt night, with amoroso pleasing
menace, the panes shake
where Lie-by-the-fire is waiting for his cream.
A tiger by a torrent in rain, wind,
narrow fiend’s eyes for grief
in an old ink-on-silk,
reminding me of Delphi, and,
friend Quo, once was safe
imagining as sweet milk.
Let all flowers wither like a party.
And now you have abandoned
own your young & old, the oldest, people
to a solitudinem of mournful communes,
mournful communes.
Status, Status, come home.
Britz 35
Compare this then to Dream Song 313 from the last book:
(Berryman 36)
The Irish sunshine is lovely but a Belfast man
last night made a pass at my wife: Henry, who had passed out,
was horrified
to hear this news when he woke. The Irish sunshine
is lovely as it comes & goes. The country is full of con-men
as well as the lovely good.
Saints throng these shores, & ancient practices
continue in the dolmens, ruined castles
are standard.
The whole place is ghostly: no wonder Yeats believed in fairies
& personal survival. A trim suburban villa
also is haunted, by me.
Heaven made this place, also assisted by men,
great men & weird. I see their shades move past
in full daylight.
The holy saints make the trees’ tops shiver,
in the all-enclosing wind. And will love last
further than tonight?
(Berryman 335)
Clearly, Henry’s manner of speech has improved, immeasurably. The first
Dream Song, spoken in Henryspeech, is incoherent in the extreme, almost to
the point of being insusceptible to criticism. The second example, on the
other hand, is poignantly well-balanced and clear. It is spoken in a language
that is concise, somewhat quirky, though perfectly digestible by comparison.
Rhetorically, the voice of the second Dream Song is a confident and educated
one. Indeed, this is the true voice of John Berryman. I would suggest further
that the apprenticeship between Henry and the interlocutor, as disastrously
unedifying as it was, led the student, namely, Henry, after prolonged trial and
mistrial, spanning six books and almost three hundred pages of The Dream
Britz 36
Songs to the discovery of his real voice, which, as it happens, is the voice of
his literary inventor, John Berryman –another marvelous irony of the poem.
Collusion between Henry and the interlocutor in Book VII is also
outstandingly rare. In this ultimate phase of Henry’s life, his friend discovers
his student to have, in a sense, exceeded expectation, morally and rationally,
to be of concurring mind with his teacher whose singular position as
consigliere is finally proven to be a redundant one. In fact, the interlocutor
almost completely disappears in Book VII, appearing sparingly, twice by my
count, in the entire book. Denis Donoghue agrees, claiming that “in the later
songs attention to other voices has receded” and that “[i]ncreasingly, there is
one voice, doctrinaire, edgy, magisterial” (163).
Indeed, according to
Conarroe, “Henry is by now virtually on his own” (141). Consequently, I
assert that the elimination of the interlocutor, as disciplinarian and the sole
voice of rationality in the poem, represents Henry’s own unconscious
internalization of that rational voice. To put it another way, Henry discovers
his own conscience.
To aid me in this point, I quote Adam Kirsch who insists that the
interlocutor is “essential to the poetic success of the Dream Songs, because”
Kirsch continues, “his critical perspective assures the reader that Berryman’s
authorial consciousness is wider than the consciousness of Henry” (126). He
goes on to say that “Henry’s friend makes it possible for the reader to enjoy
Henry’s irresponsibility without feeling that the Dream Songs are simply
confessions of an irresponsible author” (126) of the kind found in Berryman’s
Britz 37
next collection of poems Love & Fame (1970). Implicit, I think, in what
Kirsch writes is the idea of the author’s divided self. The reciprocity between
Henry and the interlocutor is, indeed, gravely important because, in some
sense, it represents a generous portion of Berryman’s consciousness.
Therefore, the discreet merger of these two symbiotic characters in Book VII
results in a merger or reunification of Berryman’s “authorial consciousness”
in the character John Berryman, or, as the author, himself, described it “Me,
to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem” (33). Thus,
for a second time, Berryman succeeds in inserting himself in the conclusion to
his own masterpiece, in the same way Botticelli painted himself into the
nativity scene or Leonardo, himself, into countless other works of the
Renaissance.
“The discovery of Henry’s whole identity,” writes William Meredith, “by
him and by us, comprises the plot of the poem” (28). Fearing for his safety,
Henry falsifies his identity with repeated exuberance, until the seventh book,
the moment of his exoneration, when he is able, finally, to emancipate himself
from his harrowing, lifelong battle against authorities vengeful and
murderous. Likewise, the author, himself, disguises his person, principally,
through clever, sometimes surreal ventriloquisms that present Henry, halfconvincingly, as an independent entity from the author. In this epic story of
survival, one man, belittled and begrudged, nonetheless overcomes this
inhumane treatment, these spiteful onslaughts of evildoing, not through acts of
Britz 38
retaliation or rich demonstrations of valor, but rather sensible, self-interested
decisions concerning his own safety; specifically, by hiding.
Cowardice can be a cardinal virtue in a survival epic such as The Dream
Songs, and Henry’s achievement, unlike Odysseus, unlike Ossian, or
Spenser’s Arthur or even Cooper’s Natty Bumpo, is weighed not by the body
count that he leaves behind him nor the number of wrongs righted at the
poem’s end. Rather, it is his undiminished ability to endure and persevere in
moments of stupendous mental and spiritual crisis. This is a kind of bravery
that is both praiseworthy and inspirational. It is a heroism propelled by the
belief in the supremacy of personal will and a commonsensical value for the
preservation of human life. That said, I leave you with these parting words as
Henry communicates them in Dream Song 367, his “Crisis” song:
‘My friends are full’ he muttered to himself,
‘I’ll make no more, so many now are dead.
Backward is the gallant word,
and grapple to my heart the splendid rest,
to leave the land unknown & undistressed’ –
The happy rotors whirred
(Berryman 389).
Britz 39
Works Cited
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Britz 40
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Britz 41
Linebarger, J.M. John Berryman. New York: Twayne, 1974.
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