“After
thirty Falls”
New Essays
on John Berryman
38 DQR
STUDIES IN
LITERATURE
Series Editors
C.C. Barfoot - A.J. Hoenselaars
W.M. Verhoeven
“After
thirty Falls”
New Essays
on John Berryman
Edited by
Philip Coleman
Philip McGowan
With a Preface by
Richard J. Kelly
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
For Kate Donahue Berryman & Richard J. Kelly
Cover image: The manuscript image incorporated in the cover of this book is
a facsimile of a handwritten draft of John Berryman’s Dream Song 281, which
provides the title for the collection. The editors acknowledge the assistance of
Barbara Bezat and Ahn Na Brodie of the University of Minnesota Libraries
for helping to make this image available in electronic format. Permission
to reproduce it here has been granted by Kate Donahue Berryman and the
Manuscripts Division of the University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis,
Minnesota.
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2219-5
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
vii
Note on Abbreviations
ix
Preface
Richard J. Kelly
xi
Introduction
Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan
1
The Black Book: John Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
Matthew Boswell
11
“Continuity with lovers dead”: Berryman, Lowell, and the
Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
Alex Runchman
29
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
Page Richards
45
Encountering Henry: A Roundtable on Dream Song 1
Ron Callan
Justin Quinn
Edward Clarke
Kit Fryatt
65
71
75
81
Form and Discontent: The Prosody of The Dream Songs
Peter Denman
87
“Dramatizing the dreadful”: Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
Anthony Caleshu
101
vi
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
Michael Hinds
121
“He lived like a rat”: The Trickster in The Dream Songs
Stephen Matterson
141
“One grand exception”: The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
Brendan Cooper
155
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
Tom Rogers
173
“We write verse with our ears”: Berryman’s Music
Maria Johnston
191
John Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
Peter Maber
209
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
Philip Coleman
225
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
Philip McGowan
241
After Berryman: Four Poets
Lavinia Greenlaw
Brendan Kennelly
Maura Dooley
Harry Clifton
258
259
261
262
Notes on Contributors
265
Index
271
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has its basis in a symposium that was held at Trinity
College Dublin in January 2002 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of
John Berryman’s death. For their assistance in making that event
possible, the editors wish to thank Professor Nicholas Grene, former
Head of Department in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin,
Professor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, former Dean of Arts (Letters),
Trinity College Dublin, and the Irish Association for American
Studies, whose support for the event was crucial.
The editors would also like to take this opportunity to record the
assistance of those people who helped to make the symposium so
memorable, whether they presented papers, chaired sessions,
contributed ideas from the floor, or provided background assistance or
support, and especially the following: Gerald Dawe, John Devitt,
Eldrid Herrington, Benjamin Keatinge, Stephen Matterson, Sean
Ryder, and Andrew Taylor. We are also grateful to Dennis O’Driscoll,
who provided a photograph of Berryman that was used on the
symposium poster, and to the Audio-Visual and Security staff of the
Arts Building in Trinity College Dublin, who ensured that the event
ran smoothly from start to finish.
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman has two
dedicatees: Kate Donahue Berryman, in recognition of the generosity
she has shown to Berryman scholars over the past three decades and
more, and for granting permission to use unpublished archival
material in this volume; and Richard J. Kelly, whose invaluable work
on Berryman is described in the Preface to this volume and
acknowledged, implicitly and explicitly, by each of the contributors in
their essays.
A special word of thanks goes to Cedric Barfoot, for his scrupulous
reading, and re-reading, of the manuscript as it has been prepared for
publication, and to Marieke Schilling of Rodopi, who provided
efficient and generous help at every stage of the book’s development.
For their patience during the book’s somewhat protracted compilation
and preparation, a word of thanks is also due to the individual
viii
Acknowledgements
contributors, especially those who came on board in the later stages of
its progress. Seamus Heaney provided valuable encouragement at a
crucial stage in this book’s development, for which the editors are
extremely grateful.
The cover image is a facsimile of a handwritten draft of
Berryman’s Dream Song 281, the third stanza of which provides the
title for this collection. The editors acknowledge the assistance of
Barbara Bezat and Ahn Na Brodie of the University of Minnesota
Libraries for helping to make this image available in electronic
format. Permission to use it has been granted by Kate Donahue
Berryman and the Manuscripts Division of the University of
Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota. For their assistance in
working with unpublished archival materials in many of the
contributions to this collection, the editors and the individual
contributors concerned are grateful to Barbara Bezat and Alan K.
Lathrop, who have played a major role over a number of years in
making Berryman scholarship not only possible but enjoyable.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem “Snow Line” is reprinted here with the
author’s permission from A World Where News Travelled Slowly ©
Faber and Faber (1997). Permission to quote from John Berryman’s
work in this collection has been granted by Kate Donahue Berryman,
executrix of the John Berryman Estate.
NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS
Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from John Berryman’s poetry
are from the following editions: Collected Poems 1937-1971, ed.
Charles Thornbury, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989, and
The Dream Songs, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990.
References to Berryman’s Collected Poems are abbreviated CP
throughout the collection, whereas individual Dream Songs are
referred to by Song number. All other references are explained in the
footnotes accompanying individual contributions.
PREFACE
RICHARD J. KELLY
What a pleasure to have a new collection of essays on John Berryman,
most by a younger generation of scholars – and from the other side of
the pond, as it were. Having immersed myself in the fertile waters of
Berryman scholarship since the early Seventies, I have had the
privilege to observe, and be part of, the ebb and flow of over thirty
years of work on a man I believe will be remembered by future
generations as one of the most notable and enduring poets of his time.
This fine book gives heart to that belief.
Writing a Preface to such a collection has afforded me the rare
opportunity to ruminate on my own “thirty Falls” and more of
involvement with Berryman scholarship. Looking back, the singular
theme that seems to run through these years, in my case, is simply that
one thing leads to another. Certainly, I did not set out to be involved
with Berryman scholarship for three decades. It really began for me
several years earlier, in the mid-Sixties, as a student of Berryman’s at
the University of Minnesota. Unlike any other teacher I have ever had,
he was, by the force of his enthusiasm, able to transmit the importance
and relevance of literature to our lives, and by the intensity of his
personal struggles, the serious enterprise that life is.
Although he usually brought with him to class a small number of 3
x 5 inch note cards, he rarely referred to them. He liked, instead, to
read key passages from the works we were studying – these were
Humanities courses, ranging across the great works of Western
literature from The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote and
Shakespeare to Job, in the King James version, and Martin Luther –
and then to discuss them with us, testing us to see if we felt their
implications for our own lives. Smoking and pacing in front of the
class, he gave these sessions everything he had, his shirt and brow
xii
Richard J. Kelly
often drenched with sweat at the end of them. Once, for emphasis, he
threw a folding chair off the dais. More than once, our discussion
became so impassioned he would reluctantly say “that’s enough for
today” and break off early. I remember after one of these classes
having to go home and lie down for a while. Another time, while
reading a passage from Matthew’s Gospel, “Come unto me all ye that
labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”, he broke down
and wept openly and unashamedly. Clearly, such books were not to be
taken lightly.
After having finished my degrees at Minnesota, I was fortunate to
find a position in the University Libraries, where I was able to
maintain some contact with Berryman, and to go on attending many of
his readings and lectures. In paying close attention to his growing
output of poetry and prose, as well, it occurred to me that it might be
useful to compile a checklist of writings by and about him, and when I
broached the topic with him, he kindly offered to be of whatever
assistance he could. He did, in fact, provide helpful information and
advice on several occasions over the ensuing months. Ever an avid
library user, the last time I saw him was the day before his death,
when I found him in the Reference Room of Wilson Library,
engrossed in some religious tome: a volume of James Hastings’
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, as I recall. We talked briefly
and, unaware that anything was amiss, I left him to his reading. The
next morning brought the terrible news of his death. John Berryman:
A Checklist, published by Scarecrow Press, appeared later that year
under wholly different circumstances than I had imagined, with a
moving Foreword, “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of The
Dream Songs” by his friend, the poet William Meredith and a heartfelt
Introduction, “The Epistemology of Loss” by another of John’s
students, Michael Berryhill.
While compiling the Checklist, I learned that another young
Berryman scholar, Ernest Stefanik, was working on a descriptive
bibliography of Berryman’s work (it was published by the University
of Pittsburgh Press in 1974) and we began to correspond. Soon, Ernest
hatched the idea of publishing a journal devoted to Berryman from his
home in Derry, Pennsylvania, with the help of his wife, Cis, and asked
me to be a contributing editor. It was, Ernest acknowledged in a letter
of 15 September 1974, a “risky venture, with failure threatening at
every turn”, but he hoped that “with the company of two Berryman
fanatics, it might have a chance to succeed”.
Preface
xiii
The first issue of John Berryman Studies, in which it is described
as “a quarterly journal devoted to research-based articles and essays
on the writings of John Berryman and other middle generation poets”,
appeared in January 1975. It would also publish a limited amount of
poetry. Produced by multilith, the pages 7½ x 8 inches in size, and the
gathering stapled with the wrapper, the journal was clearly a labour of
love published out of the Stefaniks’ home/office. An annual
subscription was $5.00, with single issues available for $1.50. Number
One had a Contents page, listing article titles and authors, but listed no
page numbers (these began to appear in the second issue).
In an auspicious beginning, the inaugural issue included solicited
articles by Gary Q. Arpin (who would later join me as a contributing
editor and publish two monographs on Berryman), J.M. Linebarger
(author of the first published full-length study of Berryman), budding
Berryman scholars Ann Hayes, Arthur Oberg and Michael Pavlovcak,
poems by Samuel Hazo and William Heyen, and a review of
Linebarger’s book by Ernest. It was inspiring for all of us to see JBS
well launched and a pleasure for me, personally, to be involved,
soliciting manuscripts, offering opinions and suggestions as
submissions came in, and being in contact with a surprising number of
scholars with similar enthusiasms.
The list of those writers whose work appeared in this and
subsequent issues is a virtual roll call of scholars who would go on to
make substantial contributions to Berryman studies in the years ahead:
John Haffenden, Peter Stitt, Jack Barbera, Laurence Liberman, Anne
B. Warner, Larry Vonalt, Charles Thornbury, Kathe Davis Finney,
Charles Molesworth, Susan G. Berndt, Jo Brans, and Linda
Welscheimer Wagner. Also of special interest among the essays to
appear were three by Japanese scholars Yuichi Hashimoto (Hokkai
Gakuen University in Sapporo), Toshikazu Niikura (Meiji Gakuin
University) and Shozo Tokunaga (Waco University), and one by the
Italian scholar Sergio Perosa (Universita degli Studi di Venezia).
Two of the issues were devoted to symposia. The first (Number 4),
which I edited, was on Berryman’s “First Dream Song”, with
contributions by Gary Q. Arpin, Jo Brans, Charles Molesworth, Ernest
Stefanik, Jr., and Larry Vonalt. The second (Number 9), edited by
Arpin, was on the “Last Dream Song”, with contributions by Anne B.
Warner, Susan G. Berndt, Charles Thornbury, Kathe Davis Finney,
A.J. Alberti and Peter Stitt. Number 8, a special poetry issue edited
by Ernest and Cis, which I introduced, was a collection of poems by
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Richard J. Kelly
fifty poets, gathered in Berryman’s honor, with an Afterword by Gary
Q. Arpin. This issue was simultaneously published as a monograph,
entitled Once in a Sycamore. Filling out the issues, at intervals, Ernest
and I, later joined by John Haffenden, provided checklists of new
scholarship as well as of the many posthumous publications of
Berryman’s that continued to appear.
By 1977, however, Ernest’s concerns about JBS being a “risky
venture” were being realized. The rising cost of print, of envelopes, of
postage, and the need to continue, for the most part, to solicit
submissions seemed to dictate the need for a change. Finally, after
three years and eleven issues (the ninth was a double issue), the board
of Rook Press, which the Stefaniks had formed to publish another
journal, Thistle, as well as some poetry broadsides, voted to “suspend,
not terminate” publication of JBS and concentrate on publications
“that can pay their own way”. Despite a strong collective desire to do
so, the journal was, alas, never revived. Still, it had been a heroic
effort on the Stefaniks’ part and JBS had succeeded both in increasing
interest in Berryman and encouraging scholarship in the early years
following his death.
Another milestone in Berryman scholarship, and one which would
greatly affect the number of scholars working on the poet, occurred a
year later, in 1978, with the acquisition by the University of
Minnesota Libraries’ Manuscripts Division of the poet’s manuscripts
and papers from his widow, Kate Berryman. Several years earlier, it
had been my privilege, in part through my growing friendship with
Kate, to be involved with placing the collection on deposit (pending a
later sale) with the University Libraries, and at that time to curate an
exhibit highlighting some of the more interesting documents. While
limited access had previously been made available for a few scholars,
with Kate’s permission, through Professor and Curator of the
Manuscripts Division, Alan K. Lathrop, once the collection had been
acquired by the University Libraries, its availability could be made
more widely known, and many more researchers could apply to use it.
As a result, Berryman scholarship began to flourish. Most of the
scholars who went on to do substantial work on Berryman came, of
course, to Minnesota to work with the manuscripts and I had the
pleasure of getting to know many of them.
In the same vein, in 1990, two other important Berryman
collections were added to the University Libraries that would generate
further research. The first was a remarkable gathering of more than
Preface
xv
seven-hundred letters written by Berryman to his mother over his
lifetime. The letters had also been placed on deposit in the Libraries
by Kate Berryman, following the death of the poet’s mother, Martha
“Jill Angel” Berryman, in 1976. John and Kate had moved the elder
Mrs. Berryman from Washington, D.C. to an apartment just down the
block from their house in Minneapolis, in 1971, less than six months
before his death. Lonely and shaken by her son’s suicide, she
remained steadfast in her belief in his genius, telling me on two
occasions that she was certain he had been someone special from his
boyhood on.
Because of the voluminous nature of the correspondence and
because the emotional bond between mother and son was so
consequential for his life and work, I thought the letters formed a
natural unit, deserving of undiluted attention. Berryman’s publisher,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, however, declined interest in publishing
them. But, finally, after substantial editing of the letters, it was my
good luck to interest an excellent and resourceful editor, Kathleen M.
Anderson at W.W. Norton, in my proposal to publish a selection of
them. This selection of letters – 228 of John’s to her, along with 19 of
Jill’s to him – was published in 1988 as We Dream of Honour: John
Berryman’s Letters to His Mother to very gratifying reviews.
In editing the letters, it was of course essential to draw on the
recollections of many people in the Berryman circle. First and most
crucial of all, Kate Berryman again gave me her complete cooperation
and assistance at every turn, filling in some of the mysterious
references made by mother and son. Another invaluable source of help
came when I traveled to Bronxville, New York, to meet with Robert
Jefferson Berryman, the poet’s younger brother and at one time an
editor at Time magazine, who graciously spent a day sharing his
thoughts and memories of both John and their mother with me and on
numerous other occasions helpfully responded to my letter and
telephone inquiries. I corresponded with Berryman’s first wife, Eileen
Simpson, who answered many questions about their years together.
Closer to home, again, I met and was befriended by Dr A. Boyd
Thomes and his wife Maris (both of whom, you will recall, appear in
The Dream Songs), who vividly called up memories of their
friendship with Berryman during his Minneapolis years. It was Boyd
and Maris who aided John in bringing his books to Minneapolis after
they had been left in storage in Princeton for a decade.
xvi
Richard J. Kelly
I met with E.M. “Milt” Halliday, Berryman’s closest friend at
Columbia University, in his Manhattan apartment and was regaled
with tales of their academic and amorous (at times competitive, here)
adventures. “Milt”, who had gone on to a career as a Professor of
History at the University of Michigan, and as a senior editor at
American Heritage, had published an affectionate account of their
friendship, John Berryman and the Thirties: A Memoir in 1987. Other
Berryman scholars, most notably John Haffenden and Charles
Thornbury, also helped shed light on murky references in the letters.
And, to my delight, I was able to enlist Martha Berryman, John’s
eldest daughter, to assist with the proofreading. As all researchers
know, the satisfaction of such contacts goes far beyond the project
itself. It is, doubtless, one of the things that keeps us at it.
Berryman’s personal library of some 3,500 books and journals,
also acquired in 1990 by our Rare Books Division from Kate
Berryman, has proved to be a valuable complement to the papers.
Moreover, it is, just for the volumes alone, a distinguished one in
several areas, with an impressive collection of first editions of most of
the important British and American poets, presentation copies of
works by many of Berryman’s friends and colleagues (Robert Lowell,
Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow, R.P. Blackmur, Edmund Wilson), and
his more than 500-volume Shakespeare collection. What makes the
library uniquely valuable, though, is the extensive pencil-and-ink
record, evidenced throughout the collection, of Berryman’s passionate
interaction with the books. Ultimately, in 1999, nearly three decades
after first examining and cataloguing the library in the Berryman
home, almost exactly as they had been organized at the time of his
death, John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue, was
published by Peter Lang as a commentary on the poet’s use of the
books and as an aid to researchers. (It had not been practical to publish
the Catalogue before the library became generally available to
researchers.) Happily, several recent researchers who have since
arrived in the Berryman archives have made good use of the library,
including some of the authors represented in this volume.
To celebrate the addition of these two collections (the letters and
the personal library) and to honor John Berryman’s life and work, a
national conference was organized at the University of Minnesota. As
a member of the planning committee – together with Alan Lathrop,
Curator of the Manuscripts Division, Michael Dennis Browne,
Director of the University’s Creative and Professional Writing
Preface
xvii
Program, Charles Thornbury, of St John’s University, Laurie Dechery,
of Gustavus Adolphus College, Leslie Denny, the University’s
Professional Development Office and Thomas Trow, of the College of
Liberal Arts Dean’s Office – we solicited papers and, in the end, were
fortunate to bring together many of the leading Berryman scholars
from around the United States.
The three-day conference, held in October 1990, included a stirring
keynote address by poet Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman”,
and stimulating panels on “Berryman’s Early Writing” (Charles
Thornbury, Larry Vonalt, Sharon Bryan), “Berryman’s Scholarship”
(Peter Stitt, John Clendenning, Ernest J. Smith), “Berryman’s Middle
Work: The Dream Songs” (Kathe Davis, Lea Baechler, Jerold M.
Martin), “Berryman and the Tradition” (Paul Mariani, William Heyen,
Charlotte H. Beck), “Berryman and Alcoholism” (Lewis Hyde, Roger
Forseth, George Wedge), “Berryman and Women” (Christopher
Benfey, Katharine Wallingford, Carol Ellis), “Berryman’s Late Work”
(Joseph Mancini, Fred D. White, Alan Altimont) and “The Future of
Berryman Studies” (Charles Thornbury, Alan Lathrop and myself).
There were also readings of some of Berryman’s favorite poems by
poets and writers Michael Dennis Browne, Patricia Hampl, Barton
Sutter and Ted Wright, an exhibit, music, two films on Berryman, a
reading of Berryman’s unpublished one-act play, Cleopatra: A
Meditation, nicely-staged and acted by Chuck Nuckles and Linda
Bruning of Gustavus Adolphus College and, finally, a performance,
by the superb University of Minnesota dancer and choreographer,
Maria Cheng, “She Dances Henry Away”, ended the conference with
class.
It was an emotional three days, not only because it brought
together so many outstanding participants, but for the many close
friends and relatives, scholars and students, and people from the
community who attended. In addition to Kate, Martha and Sarah
Berryman, Boyd and Maris Thomes and many other friends, the poet’s
brother Robert (Jeff) Berryman came with his wife, Rose. Walking
back over the Washington Avenue Bridge to Wilson Library,
following Philip Levine’s keynote address, a beautiful tribute to
Berryman as a teacher, Jeff said through happy tears how proud he
was of his brother and how glad he was that he had come. At a party
that night at our house – hosted by my wife Lois, who was there every
step of the way during my thirty years of immersion in Berryman – I
was talking with Philip Levine in our living room when the inside
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Richard J. Kelly
front door suddenly blew open, this windy October night. For some
reason I was moved to say “come in, John”, and Philip noted, only
half-jokingly (I think) that he nearly fainted. At any rate, John
Berryman’s spirit was deeply felt throughout this event.
A short time after the conference I was contacted by LeAnn Fields
at the University of Michigan Press who, impressed by the conference
participants, expressed an interest in publishing a selection of the
papers. Alan Lathrop and I agreed to edit the collection. The
participants – Philip Levine, Peter Stitt, Charles Thornbury, Charlotte
H. Beck, Lea Baechler, Sharon Bryan, Christopher Benfey, Joseph
Mancini, Jr, John Clendenning, Jerold M. Martin, Lewis Hyde,
George F. Wedge, Roger Forseth, and Alan J. Altimont – polished
their submissions, and I wrote an Introduction. Fortunately, with Kate
Berryman’s permission, we were also able to include with the essays
Berryman’s Cleopatra: A Meditation, written at Cambridge in 1937,
with an Introduction and Afterword by Charles Thornbury.
Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, the last book of essays on
the poet before this one, was published in 1993.
It seems clear to me now that it was as much Berryman’s spirit –
felt so deeply at the conference – as his poetry and prose that has
continued to sustain my interest in him over the years. After these
“thirty Falls” (and a few more), he remains both a powerful voice and
a vivid presence to me, challenging me to do better whatever it is I
might be doing. He and the people and experiences inadequately
sketched above, and too many more to mention, have greatly enriched
my life, both scholarly and personal, one thing leading to another.
Here’s to Berryman scholarship and to new Berryman scholars!
INTRODUCTION
PHILIP COLEMAN AND PHILIP MCGOWAN
Following the death of W.B. Yeats in 1939, John Berryman wrote a
letter to A.J. Putnam of Macmillan publishers in New York proposing
to edit a collection of essays on the Irish poet. In the final paragraph of
his covering letter, he said that the collection would be “the best
tribute that can be afforded to the greatest poet of this century”; it
would, he added, “be a permanently valuable commentary”.1 The
collection was never published, but Berryman’s intense lifelong
interest in Yeats, and his meeting with him in London in April 1937,
in particular, are invariably mentioned in biographies and critical
surveys of Yeats’ career.2 Berryman’s early essay on Yeats’ drama,
first published in The Columbia Review in 1936,3 is rarely credited by
Yeats scholars, but Berryman nonetheless played an important passing
role in the public drama of Yeats’ life as a man of letters, the elder
statesman of poetry who took the time out to meet “a burning, trivial
disciple”4 (as Berryman later put it) at his club in London two years
before his death. The event had such an impact on the shape of
1
This unpublished letter to A.J. Putnam, dated 16 April 1939, is contained in the
Unpublished Non-fiction Prose file, box 2, John Berryman Papers, University of
Minnesota.
2
See, for example, Terence Brown, The Life of W.B. Yeats, Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1999, 380, and R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II. The Arch-Poet, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003, 580. Berryman’s description of his meeting with
Yeats is given in a letter written to his mother, dated 18 April 1937, which is included
in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J.
Kelly, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988, 98-101.
3
See “The Ritual of W.B. Yeats”, in John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 245-52.
4
See “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet,
323.
2
Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan
Berryman’s career that thirty years later, leaving Minneapolis with his
wife (Kate) and young daughter (Martha) to spend an academic year
in Ireland on a Guggenheim Fellowship, his thoughts continually
returned to his earlier encounter with the figure he came to see as a
“majestic Shade”, as he described him in Dream Song 312.
Yeats’ presence, and the American poet’s memory of his meeting
with him in 1937, is felt throughout Berryman’s poetry, and especially
in The Dream Songs. His large body of work engages with a vast
range of named and unnamed “others”, however, and one of the
purposes of this collection of essays and reflections is to explore the
roles played by some of those figures, from Shakespeare to
Kierkegaard, Catullus to Beethoven, in the thematic and structural
evolution of Berryman’s oeuvre. “After thirty Falls I rush back to the
haunts of Yeats / & others”, he writes in the final stanza of Dream
Song 281:
with a new book in my briefcase
four times too large:
all the year I must in terminal debates
with me say who is to lives & who to dies
before my blessed discharge.
On one level these lines suggest the radical expansiveness of
Berryman’s project as a writer, and the largeness of his vision. They
also encapsulate his idiosyncratic subversion of conventional
linguistic codes and structures, and signal his career-long interrogation
of first and last things, origins and endings, questions he believed it
was the poet’s primary responsibility to examine.
The poet’s responsibilities, however, are not the same as the
critic’s. In Dream Song 308, somewhat wryly, Berryman issued “An
Instruction to Critics”:
My baby chatters. I feel the end is near
& strong of my large work, which will appear,
and baffle everybody.
They’ll seek the strange soul, in rain & mist,
whereas they should recall the pretty cousins they kissed,
and stick with the sweet switch of the body.
In the Dream Song epigraph he wrote for Berryman’s Sonnets (1966),
later collected as Sonnets to Chris (CP 69-129), the speaker says of
Introduction
3
his “a-many songs”: “let boys & girls with these old songs have
holiday / if they feel like it” (CP 70). Now, over three decades after
Berryman’s death, it could be said that most major critics of American
poetry have taken the advice of the speaker in Dream Song 308 a little
too much to heart. Berryman’s poetry has not received the same
degree of critical attention that has been given to the work of some of
his contemporaries, including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and
Sylvia Plath. That neglect is being reversed at the present time, as the
contributions to this book demonstrate, but the diminishment of his
reputation in the time since his death needs to be acknowledged. It is
worth stating, indeed, that one of the primary aims of this book is to
revivify Berryman criticism, and to refocus critical attention on the
work of a poet who played a pivotal role in the development of
American poetry and poetics in the second half of the twentieth
century.
In the 1970s a number of studies of Berryman’s career appeared:
by Gary Q. Arpin, J.M. Linebarger, and Joel Conarroe.5 In retrospect,
however, the most significant early contributions to Berryman studies
were John Haffenden’s Critical Commentary of 1980 and his Life of
John Berryman, first published in 1982. In terms of their perennial
usefulness to scholars working on the poet, to Haffenden’s essential
contributions should be added Richard J. Kelly’s Checklist of
Berryman criticism, which first appeared in 1972, and the checklist
that appeared as a supplement in an edition of the Literary Research
Newsletter in 1982.6 Berryman criticism through the 1980s and 1990s
was subdued to say the least. Of course there are many reasons for this
– poets go in and out of fashion like anything else – but apart from
Joseph Mancini’s incisive The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic
Strategies in the Poetry of John Berryman, which is now out of print,7
5
Gary Q. Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat
Press, 1978; J.M. Linebarger, John Berryman, New York: Twayne, 1974; Joel
Conarroe, John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1977.
6
John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, New York: New York
University Press, 1980; The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1982. Richard J. Kelly, John Berryman: A Checklist, Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow
Press, 1972; “John Berryman: A Ten Year Supplemental Checklist”, Literary
Research Newsletter, VII/2 and 3 (Spring-Summer 1982), 65-115.
7
Joseph Mancini, Jr., The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Strategies in the Poetry of
John Berryman, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987. Two valuable
studies which look at Berryman in connection with other writers are James D. Bloom,
4
Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan
the poet-critic Michael Hofmann is right when he says that “recently,
although The Dream Songs have continued to sell, at least in the
States, things have gone rather quiet around Berryman”.8 Occasionally
articles and chapters in books have indicated a possible change in
direction. Helen Vendler, Thomas Travisano, Paul Giles, and Edward
Brunner have all written valuable accounts of Berryman in recent
years,9 but generally speaking scholars of American poetry have not
yet paid very much attention to Berryman’s work. One important
exception to this is Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop’s collection
of essays Recovering Berryman, which was published in 1993,10 but
as Berryman himself put it in an interview in 1970, in answer to a
question about “being cannon fodder [sic] for aspiring young critics
and graduate students”: “The professional critics, those who know
what the literary, historical, philosophical, and theological score is,
have not really gone to work yet, and may not do so for a long time
yet.”11
The title of Kelly and Lathrop’s collection indicates the extent to
which scholars working in the field two decades after Berryman’s
death felt that the poet had essentially gone off the radar, at least as far
as a perusal of titles in library catalogues was concerned. Since
Recovering Berryman appeared no other collection of essays on the
The Stock of Available Reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman, Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1984, and Stephen Matterson, Berryman and Lowell: The
Art of Losing, London: Macmillan, 1988.
8
See Hofmann’s Introduction in John Berryman: Poems Selected by Michael
Hofmann, London: Faber and Faber, 2004, viii.
9
See Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets, London:
Faber and Faber, 1995; Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell,
Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, Charlottesville and
London: University of Virginia Press, 1999; Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and
Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992; Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry, Urbana and Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001.
10
Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, eds Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
11
See Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman”, Paris
Review 53 (Winter 1972) 177-207, reprinted in Berryman’s Understanding:
Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1988, 28. Thomas’ collection, though valuable, is a gathering of
earlier essays on the poet and does not constitute an original contribution to Berryman
studies in its own right. The same applies to Harold Bloom’s John Berryman: Modern
Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House, 1989, which is a compendium of earlier
responses.
Introduction
5
poet has been published. No book-length monograph given over
entirely to examining the range of Berryman’s work has been
published since 1987, though a number of the contributors to this
collection, including Philip Coleman, Peter Maber, and Tom Rogers,
are set to change that situation with projects currently in progress that
will consider the poet’s work from a range of critical perspectives. 12
Other important books related to the poet need to be acknowledged:
Richard Kelly’s invaluable edition of the poet’s letters to his mother,
and his catalogue of Berryman’s library, for example, as well as E.M.
Halliday’s memoir John Berryman and the Thirties.13 It seems,
though, that there is now plenty of biographical and bibliographical
material available about Berryman: a second edition of Paul Mariani’s
biography appeared in 1996.14 What is lacking is the kind of sustained
critical analysis that Steven Gould Axelrod has brought to the poetry
of Robert Lowell or, to take a more recent example, the kind of
focused attention on Randall Jarrell’s poetry provided by Stephen
Burt.15 In short, Berryman’s poetry has not yet been given detailed and
sustained attention by scholars who, as Berryman put it, “know what
the literary, historical, philosophical, and theological score is”.
Bringing together a group of thirteen new essays and a number of
shorter critical and poetic reflections on the poet here, this collection
aims to alter that situation by stimulating further research and debate
about this fascinating poet as we move towards the one-hundredth
anniversary of his birth in 2014.
In Dream Song 159 Berryman writes that “there are secrets,
secrets, I may yet – / hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme –
/ come on to understand”. This collection represents the work of
12
Samuel Fisher Dodson’s Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and
Art (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006) provides readers with a guide to The
Dream Songs. Its stated purpose is “to provide the beginning reader and the scholar
with a map for approaching this large work” but it is also valuable for its reproduction
of several previously unpublished drafts of poems and other items drawn from the
John Berryman Papers at the University of Minnesota.
13
Richard J. Kelly, We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother,
New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988; John Berryman’s Personal Library: A
Catalogue, New York: Peter Lang, 1999; E.M. Halliday, John Berryman and the
Thirties, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
14
Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.
15
See Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978; Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
6
Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan
critics who have attempted to probe the “secrets” of Berryman’s
writing, not just as an act of “recovery” but as part of an attempt to
celebrate and affirm the critical value of his persistently engaging
“large work”. That “work”, of course, extends beyond The Dream
Songs, and a full critical survey of Berryman’s career would need to
include accounts of his poetry going back to the 1930s, as well as
analyses of the later collections of verse, his prose writings, and his
attempts at verse drama. Moving from a consideration of (published
and unpublished) poems written in the unfinished Black Book of the
1940s through discussions of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,
Berryman’s Sonnets, The Dream Songs, Love & Fame and Delusions,
Etc., the contributions to this collection do not waste time providing
biographical details that are already available elsewhere, except where
they are crucially relevant. Rather, “After thirty Falls” is a gathering
of new and wholly original accounts of Berryman’s poetry and poetics
that engage with aspects of his work that have not, until now, been
adequately explored.
The originality of the collection as a whole is accomplished
primarily by the freshness of each contributor’s view of Berryman’s
work, but it is further reinforced by the fact that a number of the
scholars represented here have drawn on the poet’s unpublished
manuscripts in their research. One of the things that this collection
provides, indeed, is an illustration of the value of primary archival
research in contemporary literary scholarship. At a conference held by
the Manuscripts Group of the Standing Conference of National and
University Libraries at King’s College London in 1979, the poet (and
librarian) Philip Larkin argued that “a manuscript helps to enlarge our
understanding of a writer’s life and work”.16 By drawing on various
unpublished sources, the general understanding of Berryman’s
professional life as a scholar and his work as a writer, and of the
relationship between the two, will undoubtedly be enlarged by the
essays in this collection, a number of which bring to the public’s
attention materials that have not previously been aired in discussions
of Berryman’s achievement.
The process of enlarging existing understandings of Berryman’s
poetry through the use of primary archival materials begins here with
16
Philip Larkin, “A Neglected Responsibility: Contemporary Literary Manuscripts”,
in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1966-1982, London: Faber and Faber,
1983, 99.
Introduction
7
the collection’s opening essay by Matthew Boswell, which explores
the complex textual and contextual layering involved in the making of
The Black Book. The important insights afforded by unpublished
sources described by Boswell’s essay are also demonstrated by
Michael Hinds in an essay that includes a previously unpublished
translation by Berryman of Catullus’ Carmina XXXIV. Hinds’
reading of Dream Song 4 stresses the densely allusive quality of
Berryman’s poetics, but it also argues that conventional ideas of
sequentiality – often applied to The Dream Songs – belie the
strategically interrogative aspect of Berryman’s poetry, which tends
toward a subversion of lyric as it has been traditionally understood.
Unpublished materials are also used by Tom Rogers, in an essay that
explores the relationship between Berryman’s unfinished “Life of
Christ” project and his poetry through a period spanning over twenty
years, and in Peter Maber’s account of the relationship between
Berryman’s Shakespeare scholarship and The Dream Songs. Each of
these essays makes extensive use of unpublished sources, throwing
new light not only on Berryman’s poetry but also on the literary and
theological interests that informed it.
No more than The Dream Songs could be said to adhere to a linear
narrative structure, the essays included here are not arranged
according to an overarching editorial principle that strives towards
critical agreement, although they are arranged in a loosely
chronological fashion. Given the compositional interconnectedness of
Berryman’s work, such chronologies are always open to
rearrangement, and so this collection resists the temptation to impose
a restrictive meta-narrative on the essays that constitute this book as a
whole. Apart from the fact that each of the contributors recognizes the
critical value of Berryman as a major twentieth-century American
poet, each has provided a fresh perspective on his poetry, but not all of
these are based on archival research. Peter Denman, for example,
offers a reappraisal of the achievement of The Dream Songs by paying
close attention to the ways that Berryman manipulates traditional
prosody in that poem; while Stephen Matterson provides a compelling
account of The Dream Songs that explores Berryman’s use of the
Trickster figure in his longest long poem, situating his reading within
the context of the emergent American Indian Movement in
Minneapolis in the late 1960s. Readings of this kind cannot but alter
the current perception of Berryman and develop the general view of
his work’s engagements with contemporary American culture, a view
8
Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan
that has frequently been overlooked by critics who have insisted on a
narrowly defined confessional designation of Berryman’s poetry. It is
precisely this view that Philip Coleman interrogates in his essay on
Love & Fame, which he reads as a text that embodies Kierkegaard’s
analysis of the disjunction between the “aesthetic” and the “ethical”
life in Either/Or. Further commentary on the relationship between
Berryman’s poetry and the poet’s readings in philosophy and theology
are provided by Brendan Cooper, who challenges the assumption –
first articulated by Christopher Ricks in 1970 – that The Dream Songs
is a theodicy, while in his essay Philip McGowan demonstrates the
usefulness of the ideas of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas in
reading what Berryman termed “the geography of grief” in Dream
Song 172.
Further essays by Alex Runchman, Page Richards, Anthony
Caleshu, and Maria Johnston expand the terms by which we may
discuss Berryman’s poetry and poetics by considering his contribution
to the development of the sonnet in twentieth-century American
poetry, the role of framing and performance in his work, and the
importance of music in the formation of his poetics. The analyses of
framing and performative strategies in Berryman’s poems offered by
Richards and Caleshu represent a major step forward in terms of the
historical and theoretical appreciation of his work, while Runchman
and Johnston, in their accounts of Berryman’s interests in specific
forms of literary and cultural expression, enlarge the frame of
reference for reading his work in important new ways. These and the
other long essays in the collection represent enthusiastic reappraisals
of the value of Berryman’s work, but the book also includes a
roundtable discussion that gathers four brief responses to Dream Song
1 by critics Ron Callan, Edward Clarke, Justin Quinn, and Kit Fryatt.
Quinn’s voice emerges from this discussion as one of dissent, as he
questions the success of Berryman’s project in The Dream Songs with
a brief but trenchantly critical overview of the first Dream Song. This
is countered, however, by the multiplicity of meanings unearthed by
the other participants to this contribution, and especially Callan’s
suggestion of an ethical basis for Berryman’s long poem, which is
reinforced by Fryatt’s description of the “agile grammar” of
Berryman’s poetic and Clarke’s exploration of its “unappeasable”
intertextuality. The four pieces together demonstrate the provocative
nature of Berryman’s poetry, its polyvalent possibilities and clear
Introduction
9
potential for promoting further discussion beyond the scope of this
book.
If discussions about his achievement in the three decades after his
death were somewhat muted, this book shows that many critics are
now keen to initiate a new and exciting conversation about the value
of Berryman’s work. If critics have on the whole been rather silent
about his status in recent years, however, Berryman’s impact on the
development of modern American poetry has been significant.
Though it has not been explored in sufficient detail, his presence may
be discerned in the work of poets such as W.S. Merwin, William
Meredith, Alan Dugan, James Tate, Michael Dennis Browne, Charles
Simic, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Mark Levine.17 Each of these
poets, at one time or another, has either written about Berryman or
under the poet’s own “majestic Shade”. Berryman’s impact on the
development of poetry in Europe has been equally pervasive, and this
collection concludes with four recent poems, all but one previously
unpublished, written with Berryman either in mind or somewhere in
the background. The inclusion of these texts by Lavinia Greenlaw,
Maura Dooley, Harry Clifton, and Brendan Kennelly, is intended to
reflect Berryman’s own sense of the mutuality of creative and critical
endeavour, but it also signals the persistence of his influence in the
development of poetry on the European side of the Atlantic.
The last two lines of Dream Song 373 will always trouble scholars
new to Berryman studies: “will assistant professors become associates
/ by working on his works?” Given the current academic climate of
restructuring in institutes of Higher Education in Europe, especially in
the United Kingdom and Ireland, collections of essays such as this are
small beer where the pursuit of tenure is concerned. It is hoped,
however, that the essays collected here will kick-start a new phase in
the development of Berryman studies more generally. In the diversity
of its approaches and findings, this collection shows that Berryman is
a poet about whom a great deal remains to be said. In Dream Song
364 Henry commands himself to go “Back to the Folger!” – the
library in Washington, D.C. where Berryman conducted so much of
his own Shakespeare scholarship over a number of decades. The
17
For an account of Berryman’s influence on contemporary American poetry, see
Stephen Burt, “My Name is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover John Berryman”, in
Eric Haralson, ed. Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and
Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Iowa, University of Iowa Press, 2006,
233-251.
10
Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan
essays and reflections gathered here, ultimately, send us back to the
published and unpublished work of a poet who, “like Lowell and
perhaps more so”, as John Bayley wrote in 1973, “is the poet of the
time whose size and whose new kind of stylistic being shrugs off any
kind of enclosure”.18 The critical exegeses and disclosures of this
collection confirm and reassert Bayley’s claim, showing that it makes
as much sense today (“After thirty Falls”) as it did the year after the
poet’s death. “Leaves on leaves on leaves of books I’ve turned / and I
know nothing, Henry said aloud, / with his ultimate breath” Berryman
writes in Dream Song 370. This collection attests to the permanent
value and excitement that Berryman’s “leaves”, like Walt Whitman’s,
are capable of arousing – “leaves” that “will do good to us so long as
our language persists and the human race remains capable of interest
in such things” as he said of Whitman in his essay “ ‘Song of Myself’:
Intention and Substance”. 19 “All I mean to do here”, he added, “is to
construct a crude approach that may prove helpful to the discovery of
answers to the questions that these difficulties inspire”. The essays
and reflections gathered here have been put together in a similar spirit
of questioning, and the book as a whole is informed by a desire to
know more about the achievement of one of the most innovative and
prolific writers, across a variety of genres, of his own or any
generation.
18
John Bayley, “John Berryman: A Question of Imperial Sway”, in Berryman’s
Understanding, ed. Harry Thomas, 192.
19
John Berryman, “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in The Freedom of
the Poet, 227.
THE BLACK BOOK: JOHN BERRYMAN’S HOLOCAUST REQUIEM
MATTHEW BOSWELL
In 1948 John Berryman began working on what he termed “a suite of
poems” about the Nazi Holocaust that he planned to publish as a
single volume called The Black Book. The collection was to comprise
forty-two sections, and would be illustrated with watercolors or
drawings by one of his former students, Tony Clark.1 Berryman had a
highly ambitious, almost monumental conception of what his incipient
project might ultimately achieve both as a poetic and a cultural
document, going so far as to conjecture “a diagnostic, an historical
survey”.2 The very title of the collection was itself a reflection of the
historical import that he attached to it, with its reference to the many
“Black Books” that emerged during and immediately after the war,
which were amongst the first accounts of the crimes against humanity
perpetrated in Nazi-occupied Europe.
For Berryman, The Black Book was to be very much a poetic
sequence. Indeed, the extensive lists and notes that he made suggest
that this sense of sequence was the true raison d’être for many of the
planned poems – poems which would be created of necessity as he
sought to fill in the gaps of an ordering, and ever-evolving, master
narrative. Unpublished hand-written sheets make diverse and
fascinating suggestions as to what this master narrative might have
Author’s note: I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities
Research Board, without whose assistance the research presented here could not have
been conducted.
1
John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982, 206.
2
Ibid., 205.
12
Matthew Boswell
been: he describes his intention to “parody [the] Mass of [the] Dead”, 3
noting that the volume could take a “Mass-form; post-Corbière
style”;4 elsewhere he suggests a “Requiem form”, 5 and there exists a
plan for the sequence which is based on the structure of Mozart’s
Requiem. (Berryman’s version of the Requiem, however, was to have
had an extra section: in the plan this stands slightly adrift from the
previous twelve parts, forming a kind of phantom coda in which the
poet asks: “And where does horror winter? I sleep, I sleep / If all my
friends burned, or I turn inside out.”)6 Furthermore, Berryman initially
saw The Black Book itself as the first part of an even more ambitious
poetic sequence that was to be based on The Divine Comedy: it would
be a kind of Inferno, with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and
“Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion” providing equivalents for
Purgatorio and Paradiso respectively.7
Four sections of the cycle were published in Poetry magazine in
January 1950, and three sections were later included in the short work
His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt (1958).8 However, by
around 1 April 1949 Berryman had stopped working on The Black
Book;9 despite sporadic attempts to return to it in the 1950s, the
sequence was never completed. 10
In an interview Berryman ascribed his decision to abandon The
Black Book to the emotional strain involved in writing about such
3
Berryman, “who … inherited” (MS), “Black Book”, Unpublished Miscellaneous
Poetry, box 1, folder 25, John Berryman Papers (JBP), Manuscripts Division,
University of Minnesota Libraries. (All titles of unpublished work from the John
Berryman Papers refer to the first words on the relevant loose sheet. Subsequent
references will be abbreviated.)
4
Berryman, “Mass-form” (MS), ibid.
5
Berryman, “the resolution for Death” (MS), ibid.
6
Berryman, “Mozart’s Requiem” (MS), ibid.
7
John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 1980, 165.
8
The poems in Poetry were “not him”, “2”, “the will” and “waiting”. Poetry LXXV,
October 1949-March 1950, New York, AMS Press, 1950, 192-96. “not him” and “2”
(renamed “from The Black Book” [sic] parts [i] and [ii]) were also published in His
Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt, Pawlet: Claude Fredericks, 1958. (CP 15456)
9
Haffenden, Life of John Berryman, 205.
10
According to Paul Mariani, Berryman also worked on The Black Book in October
1954 and again in the summer of 1955. See Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John
Berryman, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 287 and 297. He also
worked on one poem, “from The Black Book (iii)”, in 1958. See below.
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
13
distressing subject-matter, conceding: “I just found I couldn’t take it.
The sections published … are unrelievedly horrible.”11 Yet his failure
to complete the volume clearly had procedural as well as
psychological origins; or rather poetic procedure and psychology seem
to have become increasingly interfused as the project developed.
Above all, Berryman’s inability to settle on a definite final structure
(which anticipates the trouble he would have ordering The Dream
Songs) reflects a preoccupation with the psychology and historicity of
form that may have placed internal halters on his outward ambition.
In his biography of the poet, John Haffenden further notes that on
the day he abandoned the volume, “Berryman wept on reading about
the murder of the Polish professors in The Black Book of Poland”.12
Berryman’s journals, on which Haffenden based his account, are
currently unavailable to scholars,13 but it seems that he was moved by
a description of the murder of professors from the University of
Cracow – a passage alongside which Berryman would have found, on
a page facing a list of the names of 172 members of the University
who were deported to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, a large facsimile
reproduction of a poster advertising “A REQUIEM MASS for the
seventeen Professors of the University of Cracow, who died in the
German Concentration Camp at Orarienburg [sic] or as a result of
their treatment there”. 14 The dates given by Haffenden suggest that
this poster may have presented Berryman with evidence of a real
historical requiem for the dead that caused him doubts about his
ability to produce a valid imaginative equivalent; and while this poster
alone is certainly not a categorical explanation for Berryman’s
abandonment of the project, it highlights a root conflict between
history and poetry, between factual occurrence and aesthetic form,
that was a central concern of Berryman’s when he was writing The
Black Book.
Both published selections from The Black Book, and all the drafts
and notes that Berryman made for the collection, begin with a poem
11
Haffenden, Life of John Berryman, 206.
Ibid., 205.
13
These diaries are among papers given to the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C. in 1989 by Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife, and will not be made
available for public use until 2019.
14
The Black Book of Poland, ed. Polish Ministry of Information, New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1942, Picture 128.
12
14
Matthew Boswell
that was originally called “not him”, and later numbered “from The
Black Book (i)”:15
Grandfather, sleepless in a room upstairs,
Seldom came down; so when they tript him down
We wept. The blind light sang about his ears,
Later we heard. Brother had pull. In pairs
He, some, slept upon stone.
Later they stamped him down in mud.
The windlass drew him silly & odd-eyed, blood
Broke from his ears before they quit.
Before they trucked him home they cleaned him up somewhat.
Only the loose eyes’ glaze they could not clean
And soon he died. He howled a night and shook
Our teeth before the end; we breathed again
When he stopt. Abraham, what we have seen
Write, I beg, in your Book.
No more the solemn and high bells
Call to our pall; we crawl or gibber; Hell’s
Irritable & treacherous
Despairs here here (not him) reach now to shatter us.
The uncomplicated, abbreviated language and syntax of the first
sentence, the narrator’s description of the grandfather’s arrest by an
anonymous “they”, and his or her over-simplified notion of causation,
suggest a child’s eye-view of events. As the grandfather is taken away
to some kind of internment or concentration camp, the subject matter
becomes increasingly horrific. However, Berryman does not give us a
realistic or plausible depiction of the man’s life in a Nazi camp: rather
the grandfather is subjected to grotesque, almost cartoonish, acts of
violence – “The windlass drew him silly and odd-eyed” – further
intimating a child’s perception of barbarity. The time frame of this
section is the recent past, but a vagueness about the temporality of the
action complements the otherworldliness of the space in which the
grandparent is brutalized; only the most basic form of temporal
15
In Charles Thornbury’s edition of Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937-1971 there
appears to be a misprint in the second stanza, where the original “we crawl or gibber”
is replaced by “we call or gibber” (CP 155). I can find no evidence to suggest that the
change was made by Berryman himself, and will therefore use the text that appeared
in Poetry.
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
15
continuity is established through the repetition of the single word
“later”.
This uncertainty of time and location is representative of both the
narrator’s naivety and the grandfather’s battered condition, of his
disorientation and damaged vision: he is described as “odd-eyed” and
witness to a “blind light”. The second stanza begins with another
reference to his blindness: “Only the loose eyes’ glaze they could not
clean / And soon he died.” Yet while the poem’s representation of
“sight”, in both a physical and narratorial sense, is that of a faculty
prone to failure, both character and narrator retain the capacity to hear
and make noise: in the second stanza, for example, we are told that the
grandfather “howled a night” before he died. Thus even as the poem is
unable to make clear sense visually, through its infantile perspective
on events and its opaque imagery, it does contain a certain sonic
sense; and the sound of the poem, like the sounds of the events it
describes, is violent: “blood / Broke from his ears before they quit.”
The meter is irregular throughout, as are the end rhymes, yet they
create specific acoustic effects. The first full rhyme is spaced four
lines apart, and is relatively tame in semantic terms – “upstairs” /
“pairs” – but then suddenly the rhymes close in towards the end of the
stanza to form a macabre couplet that rhymes “mud” with “blood”. On
the other hand, Berryman deliberately avoided certain rhymes,
particularly those that would have produced an unwanted
harmoniousness: drafts for the poem show that the final line of the
first stanza had originally read “they cleaned him up a bit”.16 This
earlier version would have created a full end rhyme with the preceding
line, but the poet clearly wished to obviate this consonance. In its
place “somewhat” suggests both semantic and sonic uncertainty, while
interjecting a mannered Anglo-American voice into the poem which
further contributes to the pervasive feeling of disparity and
awkwardness.
The second stanza recounts the abrupt and harrowing denouement
of the grandfather’s story. The description of his “loose eyes’ glaze”
evokes the physical violence done to him, and also the resultant
disconnection between his inner and outer worlds, which prevents
both narrator and reader from seeing exactly what has happened to
this man, or understanding what inner destruction has occurred. In this
16
Berryman, “THE BLACK BOOK” (TS with MS corrections), Unpublished Miscellaneous
Poetry, box 1, fol. 25, “BB”, JBP.
16
Matthew Boswell
way the victim is figured in an essentially negative relation to both
narrator and reader: he is both “him” and, as in the original title of the
poem, “not him”; someone whose terrible injuries and suffering are
such that they place him beyond any of our familiar fields of
conceptual or emotional reference.
The grandfather lacks a human language: all he can do is “howl”
like a wolf, and his ululating has a disconcerting effect on the narrator,
who describes how it “shook / Our teeth before the end”. There is a
dark irony in this reference to his family’s full sets of teeth: the reader
knows that the grandfather’s murder – which is only accomplished
after his release from the concentration camp – must in fact prefigure
the rapid accentuation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, for whom
the loss of teeth, through either malnutrition and disease, or as a result
of the Nazis’ practice of extracting gold from the teeth of their
victims, would become commonplace. The reference could also be
biblical: after the description of “the loose eyes’ glaze” the mention of
teeth in the next line forms a parody of the Old Testament moral code
of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. And indeed while all
Christian ceremonies, such as its rituals of mourning, are summarily
banished from the poem – “No more the solemn and high bells / Call
to our pall” – the narrator upholds the Old Testament tradition as
represented by Abraham, whom he calls on to write in his “Book” of
the historical crimes that “we” (himself, his family, his tribe, his
readers) have “seen”.
The poem’s biblical allusions portray the Jews as a people whose
fate presents a challenge to the Christian God; so much so that the
tribe of Israel comes to resemble the fallen angels of Paradise Lost in
the final part of the poem. The final clause’s lineation is such that the
first four words could be read as a self-description of the narrator and
the rest of the Jews (whom he now seems to represent, or who now
speak collectively through him) as being, like Satan and the fallen
angels, “Hell’s / Irritable & treacherous”, with the adjectives of the
penultimate line assuming the status of nouns. The layout of the final
three lines of the stanza ensures that this false sense, or misreading, is
actually retained by the reader as a more obscure full meaning is
developed through the last line.
A late switch to the present tense, a sense of rhythmic and syntactic
urgency (the last clause is doubly enjambed, and covers three lines
without being interrupted by any form of punctuation other than a
short parenthesis), and the repetition of “here here”, combine in these
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
17
last lines to make the Jews’ condition seem horrifically present. Yet
their claim to authority, and to the reader’s attention, remains
precarious: they “beg” Abraham that their story be told, even as they
themselves disappear (Hell’s Despairs “reach now to shatter” them);
and the victim himself is enclosed by brackets, and is thus only visible
in terms of grammatical and linguistic negativity: “(not him)”. This
apostrophe to Abraham – a narratorial apostrophe that could almost be
understood as being targeted from within the poem at Berryman
himself, as a generative poet-Patriarch – is thus beset by paradox and
self-doubt. Even the way that the narrator(s) “beg” Abraham to write
of “what we have seen” in a “Book” is undermined by the content of
the poem, which constantly draws attention to the fact that we “see”
very little.
While a requiem would traditionally call for the peaceful repose of
the souls of the dead, the narrator of the first section of The Black
Book seems to doubt that the poet – his creator, his Abraham – will
ever be able to complete this weighty undertaking precisely because
the dead will not rest. In the final lines this rapidly maturing narrator
seems to transcend the limits of his fictive corporeality, as though
Berryman sends him out as an emissary into an obscure threshold
space, an interstice where he meets with, and usurps the identity of,
those who “crawl or gibber”, and finds an opening into their Hell. But
as he reaches this point, the narrator’s vision of his own imminent
annihilation warns the poet-Patriarch that even if he is able to lay the
single soul of the Grandfather to rest by writing of it in this book,
there are still souls all around with invisible bodies and silent voices,
dead souls with Hell’s Despairs who will reach through and “shatter”
his fragile song. In this way, this final stanza – which obliquely refers
to the Nazis’ genocidal persecution of the Jews, but which also shows
how that murder is already vanishing from within the very text which
describes it – might be said to form a kind of template for the entire
sequence, introducing the reader to the metaphysical, historical and
representative parameters within which Berryman would craft the
volume.
The poem that Berryman originally proposed to place second in
The Black Book, “Rising Hymn”, has never been published, and was
never finished in a way that was satisfactory to Berryman. On what
appears to be the last complete typescript of the poem there are large
hand-written crosses against two stanzas, smaller crosses against key
18
Matthew Boswell
lines, and on the top of the page the blunt directive: “rewrite”. 17
Indeed the poem is a particularly turbid and contorted work; for
example, a whole stanza is taken up by the single question:
Who will complain when murmur must
Such guest that instant entertain,
Moving the spirit from its dust,
Rooted, dividing cheek and brain?
As its title suggests, the poem is written in a traditional Christian
hymn form, and its language and references derive from the Christian
tradition; yet the historical subject matter of the poem, the Holocaust,
was a predominantly Jewish experience. While “Rising Hymn”
remains more of an experiment than a fully realized piece, the
dialogue it consequently engenders between its content and its form
significantly shows Berryman attempting to embody theological and
historical argument through poetic structure.
With Berryman’s failure to complete a satisfactory version of
“Rising Hymn”, the poem that had previously been numbered (iii),
and given the provisional title of “Warsaw”, became “from The Black
Book (ii)”. It is the longest of all the completed poems, and also the
most overtly innovative and ambitious in language and style, and in its
drifting, oneiric narrative, in which both distant and more recent
elements of Polish history are intertwined, as in this central section:
‘Boleslaus brought us here, surnamed the Good,
Whose dust rolls nearly seven hundred years
Towards Sirius: we thank that King
As for the ledge whereto we cling,
Night in the caves under the ruins; stars,
Armbands come off, for which we could
Be glad but the black troops gather.’
So those who kneel in the paling sky & shiver.
(CP 155-56)
The final stanza of the poem, however, provides a stark counterpoint
to the poem’s (and The Black Book’s) previous mixture of allusion,
periphrasis and rhetorical bombast:
17
Berryman, “Rising Hymn” (TS with MS corrections), ibid.
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
19
One officer in black demarches here
Cupshot, torn collar by a girl unwilling
Native & blonde through the debauch
That kept him all night from his couch,
Hurts his head and from the others’ howling
Drove him out for morning air.
Brooding over the water
He reddens suddenly. He went back & shot her.
(CP 156)
The girl’s murder is described in a comparatively straightforward
manner, and this stylistic simplification suggests a kind of truth claim
– one that is made all the more effective and morally emphatic by the
more obscure stanzas that precede it. However, in a reversal of the
technique used in the first poem of the sequence, where the past tense
narrative suddenly becomes present in the last line, Berryman
switches from the present to the past tense, creating a dividing gap
between “then” and “now” which counters the line’s syntactic clarity.
Up until this line a community of temporality is established through
the use of the historic present, meaning that throughout the final
stanza the reader is effectively placed alongside the officer, in his time
and space. This remains the case right up to the point where the man
(presumably a Nazi) reddens by the water; but between that moment
of shame or embarrassment or feared discovery and the shooting of
the girl there is a gulf that those of us who were not there cannot hope
to bridge. The use of the past tense to represent the murder thus
nudges this final act into a place where we, the readers, and perhaps
even the poet himself, can no longer quite reach it, shifting it beyond a
common temporality of ongoing-ness and into a zone of finitude and
belated incomprehension.
The third poem from The Black Book published in His Thoughts
Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt was written over a decade after
Berryman first began work on the project (a hand-written draft of the
poem includes the note “16 July ’58, largely remade”),18 which is to
say several years after he seems to have given up hope of ever actually
finishing the sequence. This is nonetheless the only poem written for
the collection in which Berryman makes unveiled reference to the
most notorious features of the exterminatory process:
18
Berryman, “Lover & child” (MS), Unpublished Miscellaneous Poetry, box 1, folder
25, “BB”, JBP.
20
Matthew Boswell
Lover & child, a little sing.
From long-lockt cattle-cars who grope
Who near a place of showers come
Foul no more, whose murmuring
Grows in a hiss of gas will clear them home:
Away from & toward me: a little soap,
Disrobing, Achtung! in a dirty hope,
They shuffle with their haircuts in to die.
Lift them an elegy, poor you and I,
Fair and strengthless as seafoam
Under a deserted sky.
(CP 156)
For this poem Berryman drew on a factual report outlining conditions
in the death camp of Treblinka. The document, compiled from
eyewitness accounts given both by victims and by persecutors, was
written by Vassili Grossman, and was published in another Black
Book – this one brought out just after the war, and entitled The Black
Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People (1946).19
Grossman’s narrative, like Berryman’s poem, begins with the
moment when the deportees arrived at the infamous fake station in
Treblinka. He describes how, during the thirteen months that it was
operational, Treblinka became a “conveyor belt execution block”,20
with each new train’s arrival designed to coincide with the so-called
“liquidation” of the previous batch of victims. As soon as the victims
got out of the cattle-cars they were led to a square near the station,
where they were immediately forced to surrender their possessions.
They were then escorted into the camp through a barbed-wire fence.
The men were told to remain where they were, and the women were
ordered to go and undress in a nearby barracks. Grossman continues:
And again the square resounded with the word: – Achtung! – Achtung!
It is at such a moment that the peoples’ minds [sic] must be confused
again; they must again be filled with hope, with rules of death given
out as if they were rules of life. And the same voice shot out each
word distinctly:
19
The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, New York: The
Jewish Black Book Committee, 1946, 398-413.
20
Ibid., 398.
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
21
“Women and children are to take their shoes off at the entrance to
the barracks. The stockings are to be put into the shoes. The children’s
socks are to be placed in the sandals, in the little shoes and slippers.
Be neat.”
And then again:
“When going to the baths, take along your valuables, documents,
money, a towel and soap … We repeat …”
Inside of the women’s barracks there was a barber shop. The
naked women were given hair cuts, and the wigs were taken from the
old women. This death hair cut – according to the testimony of the
barbers – convinced the women that they were being taken to the
baths.21
Susan Gubar has theorized how verse is the ideal literary form for
the practice of “proxy-witnessing”, whereby poets bear witness not to
events themselves, but to the depositions of the victims. Berryman’s
poem, with its evident dependence on Grossman’s text, displays many
of the aesthetic features and representative strategies that Gubar
suggests characterize this verse form:
The shortness of verse; its deliberate placement of words in lines that
do not necessarily accord with syntactic breaks; the use of rhythm or
rhyme; the compression of a plethora of details into fewer and
therefore more charged terms and images; the reaching for analogies,
albeit inadequate ones; the suppression of logical, narrative links:
these lead creative writers to take factual material … and,
paradoxically, use their imagination to make it more palpably real .…
Poets of proxy-witnessing attempt to return what they have borrowed
“sharper” than they received it.22
I am dubious of Gubar’s contention that poetry is somehow able to
make documentary accounts “more palpably real”, as this fails to
account for poetry’s deliberate stylization of source material, and to
foreclose the disjunction between historical reality and aesthetic
representation that has formed the definitive agon of post-Holocaust
poetics. However, it is certainly the case that our understanding of
source material can be radically altered when a poet makes innovative
use of the sorts of stylistic and formal techniques that Gubar draws
21
Ibid., 404.
Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003, 149-50.
22
22
Matthew Boswell
attention to: for example, the dramatic and acoustic elements of poetry
can give documentary material a greater sense of immediacy than it
has in prose. The sound of poetry can also be used to create the
emotional terrain for the action described in its lyric: in Berryman’s
poem the prisoners “shuffle” to their deaths to the accompaniment of a
sombre iambic pentameter. Verse form also allows a writer to
generate a more dynamic interplay of emphases; so when Berryman
rhymes “soap” with “hope”, he dramatically highlights the precise
connection that the Nazis wanted the Jews to make.
This is not to say, however, that Berryman sees verse as an art
form that intrinsically sanctions the free play of the creative
imagination. Other than in the final couplet, almost all the figures and
metaphors that he uses actually belong to the discourse and pseudoideology of the Nazis themselves. For example, as the victims leave
the cattle-cars they are described as being “Foul no more”, Berryman
here drawing attention to the Jews’ place in the Nazi mentality as
tainted and socially undesirable Untermenschen, while also showing
how this conception of the Jew became literalized through practices
such as the use of cattle-trucks, where Jews were treated like animals
(like fowl). The reference to the soap that prisoners were given to hold
as they were led to their deaths, and the description of how the gas
would “clear them home”, also emphasize the way that the Nazis
would physically stage their anti-Semitic construction of the
verminous, disease-carrying Jew. For the Nazis, killing was above all
a matter of hygiene (we recall that Zyklon B was a form of rat
poison). In a subtle interiorization of this Nazi metaphor, it is not the
Jews themselves, however, but rather their desperate, deluded hope
that they would not be killed that Berryman emotively calls “dirty”.
It is not only what the formal elements of poetry add to
documentary texts, by way of an altered focus gained through rhyme
or rhythm or a fragmentation of narrative, that can change a reader’s
perception of that material: what poets leave out in their revisions of
historical documents can be just as significant, and Berryman’s poem
is a very good example of a poet becoming an astute editor of primary
material. A key difference between Grossman’s prose report and
Berryman’s poem is that any form of extended commentary on events
is noticeably absent from the latter. In his report Grossman expands on
the barbers’ interpretation of why they thought they had to give
victims the “death hair cut” (they believed it was simply a way of
convincing the victims that they were being taken to the baths), adding
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
23
that the hair itself had economic value, and was sent back to Germany
where it was used as raw material by the army and navy for such
things as stuffing mattresses. 23 There is no explanatory or discursive
equivalent in “from The Black Book (iii)”; but rather than extended
commentary on events themselves, what we find in Berryman’s poem
is a contemplation of the non-victims’ mode of relation to these
events: a self-reflective consideration of encounter that is explored
primarily through the writer’s control of poetic address.
Berryman begins his narrative with a characteristic piece of babytalk: “Lover & child, a little sing.” The phrase “a little sing” seems to
introduce a song, which is possibly a reference to the poem itself, and
the suggestion is that the unidentified “Lover & child” are its
addressees. Given the content of the rest of the poem, we assume that
this “Lover & child” are victims of the Nazi genocide; and even if
their identity is never made particularly clear, the possibility that the
narrator might here be addressing the dead, along with the tender,
private language used in the line, implies a certain narratorial
intimacy.
This poignant sense of personal contact between the poem’s
narrator and its addressees also inheres in the fifth and sixth lines,
where Berryman describes how the deaths of the Holocaust victims in
the gas chambers “will clear them home: / Away from & toward me”.
However, the narrator’s relation to the dead is here conceived of in
terms of a more ambiguous double movement, as though it is their
passing away from the living that brings them somehow closer to
those they have left behind. The counterpoised forces of this double
movement are also reflected in the reference to a “home” – a word
with both domestic and theological connotations – which leaves it
unclear whether the poet is describing a relation to things past, and the
revisiting of a shared past through memory, or if the dead are here
being conceived of as spirits whom the narrator hopes to join in the
afterlife.
This representation of simultaneous loss and contact, of immediate
absence and premonitions of presence, could also be understood as a
meditation on the role of the Holocaust poet: even a reflection on how
Berryman conceived of his own personal relation to the murdered
Jews whose deaths were the subject of The Black Book. The ambiguity
of address might thus figure the poet’s uncertain relation to historical
23
The Black Book: The Nazi Crime, 404.
24
Matthew Boswell
women and children whom he feels compelled to write about, and yet
with whom he fails to make complete poetic contact. In this context
the relation between the narrator and his “lover” significantly has
connotations of illegitimacy, even indecency, with the word “lover”
displacing the more normative “mother” (while also evoking the Nazi
practice of separating the women and children from men on entry to
the camps, as described in Grossman’s report). The suggestion is that
the male poet is illicitly infatuated with his own grievous subject
matter.
If the poem follows an abiding trajectory of descent, a katabatic
plunge into the depths of history, into mass murder and the death
camps, then the final three lines clearly describe a reciprocal
movement of ascent, hauling the subject-matter heavenward in a
manner that seems integrally bound to the production of the elegy
itself. As the poem goes on, its imagery lightens, with the weighty
“long-lockt cattle-cars”, wrenched together with firm, brace-like
hyphens, giving way to ethereal “seafoam” and “sky” in the final two
lines. The poet wishes to raise an elegy to the dead, and in a manner
reminiscent of the call to flight in the opening couplet of “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – “Let us go then, you and I, / When the
evening is spread out against the sky”24 – he enjoins the reader to take
part in this burdensome task. It is almost as though poet and reader,
“poor you & I”, have become involved in a Dantean partnership of
guide and pupil; and as we come out on the other side of this Gehenna
we join together to tell our tale (and thus we perform the requisite task
of all those who journey into the underworld).
The reader is therefore directly implicated in the struggle to
produce meaning, or, like a modern-day Atlas, to hold up meaning,
after Treblinka; but the unexpected lightness and vacuity of the
imagery at the end of the poem is profoundly at odds with our sense of
the monolithic character of the elegy, and confounds our earnest
attempt to shoulder the dead weight of the Holocaust. Rather than
lifting up totemic meaning, we actually find meaning itself floating
away, and the final two lines confirm that we are unable to lift even
this increasingly flimsy-seeming elegy: the sky is “deserted”, void of
elegiac commemoration and consolation and also God after the
24
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, in Collected Poems: 1909-1962,
London: Faber and Faber, 1974, 13.
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
25
tremendum of the genocide;25 and the partnership of poet and reader is
termed “Fair & strengthless”, our fine Aryan heads of hair making our
attempt to raise an elegy to victims whose heads were shaved seem
like an incongruous, almost obscene sort of enterprise. The gap
between the two key duos of the poem – the “Lover & child” on the
one hand, and “you & I” on the other – widens, and the only simile of
the poem, the comparison of the “Fair and strengthless” dyad of reader
and writer to “seafoam”, emphasises our ineptitude, our elegiac labour
merely washing around the outermost fringes of a vast, oceanic crime.
The allusion to the birth of Aphrodite, who rose from the foam of the
sea, again figures the poet’s obsession with history as a dubious kind
of love affair, or worse: the way the word “foam” harks back to the
“soap” that the prisoners were made to carry to the gas now makes
this attraction almost seem repulsively necrophilic.
The image of “seafoam” also brings to mind the writings of Primo
Levi, and in particular his description in The Drowned and the Saved
(1986) of how, even after the war, the victims were overcome by the
“memory of the offence”: “The ocean of pain, past and present,
surrounded us, and its level rose from year to year until it almost
submerged us.”26 In contrast, Berryman imagines a union between
writer and reader which clearly presupposes that neither partner was
there. We remember nothing and, as a result, we can only ever skim
the surface of an “ocean of pain” whose awesome depths remain
hidden from us. The very fact that we have never descended in the
way that Levi describes means that neither can we take it upon
ourselves to represent any kind of ascent from the depths of history,
thus forestalling the elegy’s implicit promise of imaginative
resurrection. For Berryman, “you & I” remain the uninitiated: those
who must act as the witnesses to the witnesses, yet who must
continually falter in our attempts to lift them a befitting elegy of
permanence.
The handful of published poems from The Black Book represents a
mere fraction of the forty-two sections that Berryman had planned to
write; yet the voluminous notes and drafts that he made for the
25
For an influential interpretation of the Holocaust as a human equivalent of the
mysterium tremendum, the terror-mystery of God, see Arthur A. Cohen, The
Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, New York: Crossroad
Publishing Company, 1981.
26
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London:
Abacus, 1996, 65.
26
Matthew Boswell
sequence do at least offer some tantalizing clues about what other
material might have been included. For example, a hand-written draft
describes a motorcade heading towards a concentration camp:
South thro’ unwintering boroughs the big cars glide
Foreign & swift; officials snug inside;
A tinkle from a foreign orchestra
Startles the Polish fields. Until these arrive,
The ceremonial fires delay,
Eight thousand bodies are & are alive.27
Another hand-written lyric portrays “the crematorium at Maidanek”:
So many bodies in a breathless space
To dust & air! Your bloody body burns
Three to an hour, save the bigger bones,
Haircuts have saved the hair. 28
The published poems and drafts seem to indicate that Berryman’s
suite of Holocaust poems would have mirrored the actual chronology
of the “Final Solution”: the first poem is set in a period before the
Nazi purges had reached their worst; the next describes a central
precursor to the destruction, the establishment of Jewish Ghettos, and
the murder of a single woman in Nazi-occupied Warsaw; a poem
called “waiting” (published in Poetry) is a dramatic monologue
spoken by a man who is about to be interrogated; the poems “the will”
(also published in Poetry) and “Rising Hymn” are then set in Nazi
camps; and the Jewish genocide is the subject of “from The Black
Book (iii)”. As the sequence developed, Berryman thus moved deeper
into the heart of the extermination process, tracing a gradual journey
of descent, a Dantean progress through the worsening circles of this
historical Inferno.
George Steiner has claimed: “The world of Auschwitz lies outside
speech as it lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is to risk
the survivance [sic] of language as creator of humane, rational
truth.”29 Berryman’s Holocaust sequence, however, suggests the
27
Berryman, “Dawn like a rose” (MS), Unpublished Miscellaneous Poetry, box 1,
folder 25, “BB”, JBP.
28
Berryman, ibid.
29
George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the
Inhuman, New York: Atheneum, 1982, 123.
The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem
27
opposite: that after Auschwitz the survival of a rational language is
not a risk but a necessity, and that language, and also certain narrative
structures (such as religious schemas of ascent and descent), have
become even more redolent with meaning – albeit with direly inverted
meaning – than ever before. A central feature of both the sequence as
a whole, and of individual poems – most notably “from The Black
Book (ii)” – is that as their subject matter becomes more horrific,
Berryman’s style grows increasingly perspicuous.
The volume was thus underpinned by a strong impulse towards
clarity; but at the same time poems such as “from The Black Book
(iii)” do, of necessity, confront the limits of Holocaust representation,
and the difficulty – even the undesirability – of transgressing these
limits. They do not concur with Steiner’s assessment that Auschwitz
lies “outside speech”; but in drawing attention to their own inner
silences, they do anticipate what Adorno would diagnose as art’s
situation of permanent, disabling paradox after Auschwitz. For
Adorno, any aesthetic representation of “the unthinkable fate” of the
victims turns that alien fate into something potentially gratifying, with
the result that “something of its horror is removed”.30 Yet equally, he
argued, art could not not confront that past. So while “to write lyric
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, literature must “resist this
verdict”.31 In identifying this aporia in the cultural representation of
historical barbarity, Adorno seems to call for a self-scrutinizing and
morally scrupulous art – an art that would aspire to document its own
impossible position – and Berryman’s The Black Book precociously
highlights the possibilities and the limitations inherent in Adorno’s
vision of the legitimate post-Holocaust artwork, being both driven and
stalled by the need to incorporate antagonistic ethical imperatives into
its representative logic.
30
Theodor Adorno, “Commitment”, trans. Francis McDonagh, Aesthetics and
Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, London: NLB, 1977, 189.
31
Ibid., 188.
“CONTINUITY WITH LOVERS DEAD”: BERRYMAN, LOWELL,
AND THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN SONNET
ALEX RUNCHMAN
“Why did I attempt that exhausted and contemptible art-form the
Sonnet Sequence anyway?”1 The thirty-two-year-old poet had good
reason, on 26 July 1947, to doubt the form he had chosen to record his
extra-marital affair. As an American, writing under the burden of Walt
Whitman’s dictum that “the expression of the American poet is to be
transcendant [sic] and new”2 and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s contention
that “we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe”,3 how
could Berryman justify using a received form laden with European
and courtly associations? The major modernists of his own century –
T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams
among them – almost entirely ignored sonnets. And even Harriet
Monroe, who had chosen a Petrarchan sonnet by the now-forgotten
Arthur Davison Ficke to begin the first issue of Poetry in September
1912, had conceded only six months later that “the sonnet is an
exhausted form, whose every shade of cadence has been worked out
and repeated until there are no more surprises left in it”.4 Monroe’s
foreign correspondent Pound may have influenced this retraction, but
with regard to Davison-Ficke’s poem of “isolate realms”, “empery”
1
Quoted in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1982, 177.
2
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, eds Sculley Bradley and
Harold W. Blodgett, 2nd edn, rev. by Michael Moon, New York and London: W.W.
Norton and Co., 2002, 619.
3
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”, in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff,
London: Penguin, 1982, 104.
4
Quoted in Ian Hamilton, The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors, London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976, 52.
30
Alex Runchman
and “the musking dusk of even”, every word of it is warranted and it
must have sounded like a death knell for the sonnet in America a year
before Berryman was born.
However, the early twentieth century was not as devoid of
American sonnets as is often assumed. Berryman and his
contemporary Robert Lowell were able to draw upon the precedent of
several earlier advocates of the form, the most influential of whom
were Robert Frost and Lowell and Berryman’s immediate mentors,
John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Mark Van Doren. Frost’s first
volume, A Boy’s Will, was published in April 1913, the very month in
which Monroe wrote off the sonnet. The book’s four surprising
sonnets owe much to the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth and
Keats, but they are also distinctively American. “The Vantage Point”,
for example, concludes: “I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant, / I
look into the crater of the ant.”5 For the rhyme to be exact, “plant”
must be given a short-voweled American pronunciation, appropriately
since the juniper and bluet mentioned in the poem are native to North
America. This contrasts with the archaic usage of a second syllable,
required by the meter, in “bruisèd”. Such attempts to unite everyday
American speech and a more literary lexis within a tight form are
characteristic of Frost’s poetry, and anticipate the starker contrasts that
abound in Berryman’s Sonnets to Chris and, later, The Dream Songs,
as well as in Lowell’s late sonnet variations. While other American
poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and
Claude McKay wrote plenty of sonnets, none of these was especially
important to Berryman or Lowell, who ultimately came to regard
themselves as Frost’s successors, and wrangled after his death for the
position of top American poet. 6
Berryman also admired e.e. cummings, though his fragmented
sonnets in Tulips & Chimneys (1923) and later books, with their words
scattered across the page, were too erratic to suggest that the sonnet
could survive in anything other than a mutilated state. A more
5
The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, 2nd edn, London:
Vintage, 2001, 17.
6
C.C. Barfoot has written a useful account of Edna St Vincent Millay’s recognition of
the versatility of the sonnet form, which is worth considering in relation to discussions
about the sonnet’s place in twentieth-century American poetry. See C.C. Barfoot,
“Edna St Vincent Millay’s Sonnets: Putting ‘Chaos Into Fourteen Lines’”, in Uneasy
Alliance: Twentieth-Century American Literature, Culture and Biography, ed. Hans
Bak, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004, 81-100.
The Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
31
imposing figure in the 1940s was the recently Americanized W.H.
Auden, but Sonnets to Chris marks the stage at which Berryman broke
from Auden’s excessive influence on his early work, and Lowell was
later to mock his elder contemporary’s insistently impersonal attitude,
writing in “Truth” that “Nothing pushing the personal should be
published, / not even Proust’s Research [sic] or Shakespeare’s
Sonnets”.7 In time, Berryman and Lowell came to feel as uneasy about
the Anglophile and formalist views they had inherited from Auden
and the New Critics as they did about the sonnet form. Were these
views sufficiently respectful of a varied American tradition? A spirit
of rebellion against their mentors and against the sonnet tradition
propelled both poets’ innovations. But, equally, both were plagued by
apprehensions – artistic and moral – about their writing. They
attempted, in contrasting ways, to reconcile the conventions and
constraints of a typically European form with their American free
verse heritage, but they also betrayed their doubts that this could be
done or even that it was worth doing. In this essay, then, I shall
consider the ways in which Berryman and, more briefly, Lowell
negotiated the difficulties of writing sonnets in late twentieth-century
America, addressing in particular their consciousness of the form’s
history and their uneasiness about adapting it to treat their modern
American love affairs.
The sonnet form was still vital in 1947, but what place was there
for courtly convention and idolatry of the beloved in modern
American verse? And, while a sonnet such as Frost’s “The Silken
Tent”, with its sustained conceit and simple but not especially modern
language might stand alone as a traditional love poem, what place was
there for the love sequence? Auden, Ransom and Tate had all written
short narrative sonnet sequences, and Frost’s friend Merrill Moore,
who was also Lowell’s mother’s psychiatrist, had produced an
astonishing but unsequential thousand-sonnet opus. However,
Berryman’s 117-poem work, like Lowell’s 104-poem The Dolphin, is
much closer in design to the Renaissance sequences of Sir Philip
Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare –
and, as we shall see, Berryman felt extremely ambivalent about
Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular.
7
Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, eds Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, London:
Faber and Faber, 2003, 697. All subsequent references to Lowell’s poetry (except
Notebook) are to this edition.
32
Alex Runchman
So why did he attempt such an outmoded and, to his mind,
contemptible art form? Paul Mariani claims that he did so “to justify
his obsession” by elevating it “to the level of art”.8 However,
Berryman’s sequence is so imbued with shame and remorse that to
suggest it justifies the relationship goes too far, and his own answer,
while offering a plausible explanation, indicates no such certainty of
purpose:
Partly events seduced me, so that I was in the thick of it, with a dozen
sonnets, before (I think) I much reflected. But partly I had several
things in mind. I wanted one form … in order to record (form, master)
what happened. Well, but not an invented form – I wanted a familiar
form in which to put the new. Clearly a sonnet sequence. And this
gave me a wonderful sense of continuity with lovers dead.9
About the same time, Berryman noted his belief that Americans
should “see themselves as part of an English tradition”. 10 His use of
sonnets to establish “continuity with lovers dead”, the most famous of
whom were English or European, attests to this belief.
The sonnets (or “songs”, as Berryman sometimes called them,
recalling that the two terms were almost synonymous in the
Renaissance and indicating their relation to his later long poem The
Dream Songs) first appeared as Berryman’s Sonnets in 1967, twenty
years after their completion. 11 On publication, Berryman added a
prefatory Dream Song and seven new sonnets to the original
sequence. The title, suggested by Berryman’s publisher Robert Giroux
– who published a book on the authorship of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in
198212 – picks up on that given by Thomas Thorpe to the original
1609 Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Quite possibly Giroux had
more regard for Shakespeare’s sonnets than Berryman himself did,
and hoped to make a grand claim for the book. However, readers
already familiar with 77 Dream Songs must have found Berryman’s
8
Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 187.
9
Cited in Haffenden, 177.
10
Mariani, Dream Song, 228 (emphasis in original).
11
In his edition of Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury
reverts to the 1947 typescript and consequently restores the original title, Sonnets To
Chris.
12
Robert Giroux, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
The Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
33
Sonnets puzzling and regressive when they first appeared, and some
critics have been irked by Berryman’s attempts to maintain an English
tradition. John Fuller, for example, omits any of Berryman’s poems
from his recent Oxford Book of Sonnets on the grounds that they are
“over-reliant on revived Renaissance tropes”, 13 and Donald Davie’s
reaction is just the kind that Berryman might fearfully have
anticipated: “what did he think he was doing, dredging up from twenty
years before poems that, for all their audacity and inventiveness, were
irretrievably compromised by being in thrall to a rhyming and metrical
straight-jacket long discredited?”14 Davie also calls into question
Berryman’s motivation to put the new into a familiar form:
For what we seem faced with is Berryman’s determination –
supposedly in 1947, more certainly on publication twenty years later –
that Petrarch’s sonnets should (must) be made to fit an adulterous
(doubly adulterous, it appears) liaison in the United States of the
1940s. The ‘fit’ is just not there.15
Davie’s criticism is unjust for a number of reasons. Firstly, the sonnet
had not been discredited, and still hasn’t. Secondly, it is misguided to
chastise Berryman for appropriating courtly conventions to address an
adulterous affair since courtly love itself was usually adulterous.
Sidney’s Stella was a married woman. All the same, Berryman was
just as conscious as Davie of the lack of “fit” between his
consummated affair and the unrequited loves of most of his poetic
ancestors.
Also in Berryman’s defense is the fact that this “metrical straightjacket” encouraged him to contort syntax and foster an affected,
hybrid language that would become surprisingly felicitous for him.
William Carlos Williams, reviewing Lowell’s The Mills of the
Kavanaughs in 1951, remarked that Lowell appeared “to be restrained
by the lines” and to want to break them.16 The same observation might
be made of Berryman in his sonnets, which veer between lyrical
13
The Oxford Book of Sonnets, ed. John Fuller, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000, xxvii. Berryman’s sonnets (7, 15, 36, 107, and 115) are included in The
Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, ed. Phyllis
Levin, New York and London: Penguin Books, 2001, 221-223.
14
Donald Davie, “A Bee in His Sonnet”, in Two Ways Out of Whitman, Manchester:
Carcanet, 2000, 92.
15
Ibid., 93.
16
Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, New York: Random House, 1954, 324.
34
Alex Runchman
passages and gnarled obscurities, elegant enjambments and emphatic
ellipses. Berryman often addresses Chris as “Lady”, but slangy
modern lines also abound: “The damned sky clears / Into a decent sun
(this week’s the worst / Ever I see-saw” he writes, for example, in
Sonnet 74 (CP 107). Tensions between literary and contemporary
diction are pronounced, more so than in Frost’s poetry. Berryman
seesaws between extremes, and Sonnet 47 suggests that he was quite
conscious of what he was doing:
Double I sing, I must, your utraquist,
Crumpling a syntax at a sudden need,
Stridor of English softening to plead
O to you plainly lest you more resist.
(CP 94)
Those unfamiliar words “utraquist” and “stridor” are used precisely.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary an “utraquist” “composes
in both Latin and the vernacular”; “stridor” means a harsh sound. The
lines defend the inconsistencies of register within individual poems: it
may be necessary to crumple syntax, even at the risk of becoming
incoherent, in order to respond to the urgency of a situation and,
equally, the poet’s sometimes harsh use of English may have to be
softened when he is appealing to Chris. The last of these lines enacts
such a softening. Berryman’s combination of Latinate lyricism and
modern slang is bizarre and unsettling, suggesting a mind ill at ease,
but also feverishly all-accommodating.
Sonnets to Chris marks the point at which Berryman first took on
the challenge of reconciling his English and European literary
influences with his American heritage. The sequence begins his
progression, via Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, completed in 1953,
towards the form and idiom of The Dream Songs, which is recognized
by Christopher Ricks, among others, to be a “brilliantly adapted” and
“preposterously distended” relation of the sonnet sequence. 17 The
sonnets are Berryman’s first sequence and, as Stephen Matterson
notes, Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, 77 Dream Songs, His Toy, His
Dream, His Rest and, to some extent, Love & Fame also “achieved
17
Christopher Ricks, “Recent American Poetry”, Massachusetts Review, 11 (1970),
333.
The Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
35
their finest effects through being considered as sequences”. 18 There
may be no easy “fit” between Berryman’s contemporary situation and
the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, but this disparity is what makes
Sonnets to Chris vital and it compelled Berryman to adapt the form
further and set up the drama of voices in The Dream Songs.
For an American poet, the sonnet may be limited as much by its
European associations as by its actual formal constraints, but
Berryman is just as eager to challenge his poetic ancestors as to revere
them. He often evokes Elizabethan sonnet conventions explicitly to
distance himself from them. Sonnet 40, for example, with obvious
allusion to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, implies that twentieth-century
poets no longer have immortal longings for their verse: “Marble nor
monuments whereof then we spoke / We speak of more”. Berryman
found the claims to immortality of Shakespeare’s sonnets “tiresome
(though justified)”;19 in this poem such claims are “A Renaissance
fashion, not to be recalled”. Lowell shared Berryman’s regard for
immediacy and spontaneity in verse over memorialization. “I have
tried to write alive English and do what my authors might have done if
they were writing their poems now and in America”,20 he wrote in the
Introduction to Imitations, his volume of versions of European poetry
that has its own English precedent in Dryden’s classical translations.
This sense of language, poetry and history as living things informs the
whole of Lowell’s oeuvre. “Often a poem didn’t live until the last line
cleared the lungs”, he explained to Ian Hamilton about his Notebook
sonnets.21 In “The Nihilist As Hero” he wants “words meat-hooked
from the living steer”, but gets only a “beautiful unchanging fire”. 22
Words, once printed, lose vitality, but Lowell nonetheless strives for
as immediate an effect as possible. By loosening the sonnet form
Lowell attempts to escape the rigor mortis he felt fixed line length and
rhyme schemes might induce in his poetry. His collapsing of the
sonnet into blank verse or prose and his erratic shifts of focus are
equivalent to Berryman’s “crumpling a syntax at a sudden need”; and
18
Stephen Matterson, Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988, 94.
19
John Berryman, “The Sonnets”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed. John Haffenden,
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 285.
20
Lowell, Collected Poems, 195.
21
Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux, London: Faber and Faber,
1987, 271.
22
Lowell, Collected Poems, 590.
36
Alex Runchman
both poets’ adaptations of the form are responses to their anxiety that
without challenges to the sonnet’s conventions their own poems might
seem stagnant.
In Sonnets to Chris, Berryman also competes amorously with his
poetic ancestors. He is as protective of his lady’s beauty as an
Arcadian shepherd. Sonnet 27 begins: “In a poem made by
Cummings, long since, his / Girl was the rain, but darling you are
sunlight” (CP 84). Somewhat unconventionally, Berryman writes
“Cummings” with a capital “C”. The reference to cummings’ “i have
found out what you are like / the rain”, however, is gratuitous, but for
the opportunity it gives Berryman to claim, just as conventionally, that
his girl is something better.23 In Sonnet 75, he compares his
relationship with Chris to Petrarch’s with Laura, and does so with an
equal measure of remorse and swagger. “He never touched her. Swirl
our crimes and crimes” (CP 108). And his insistence on Chris’
blondeness is at once a snub to Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” and a
refutation of the Renaissance association of fairness with purity.
Spenser’s bride in his “Epithalamion”, with her “snowie necke lyke to
a marble towre”24 and other pale attributes, may have epitomized
chastity, but for Berryman Chris’ blondeness has purely erotic appeal,
provoking him in the first poem alone to summon up a whole series of
white or bright things: semen-like starch and melted ice cream –
“Blond silky cream, sweet cold” – bright sand, and “a bone sunned
white”.
Perhaps the most striking of Berryman’s challenges to his
predecessors – although it is made in an essay and not in the sonnets
themselves – is his dismissal of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets as
“mostly very bad poems indeed, contemptuous, trivial and obscene”. 25
However, this is more a manifestation of Berryman’s own unease
about using the sonnet sequence – and even art itself – to record
(form, master) his extramarital affair than it is a considered criticism.
Anne Barton has shown in a review of Berryman’s Shakespeare that
Berryman’s essay on the sonnets must have been written after the
publication of Leslie Hotson’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated in 1949,
23
e. e. cummings, Complete Poems 1910-1962, ed. George James Firmage, London:
Granada, 1981, 169.
24
Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe, London: Penguin,
1999, 442.
25
Berryman’s Shakespeare, 286, 287.
The Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
37
and therefore also after the completion of his own sequence.26 By
disparaging the “Dark Lady” sonnets, then, Berryman also implicates
his own, at this point unpublished, poems. Poems that treat alfresco
sex (Sonnet 71, amongst others) and sex in the car “(cave of our
radical love)” (Sonnet 9), evoke fellatio (Sonnet 59),27 and pun with
Jacobean relish on the words “come”, “die” and, in line 4 of the first
sonnet, “will”, can hardly be expected to escape the charges of
obscenity Berryman passes on the “Dark Lady” sonnets. Berryman –
who never published one – claimed that Shakespearean sonnets were
easier to write than Petrarchan ones and thought most of
Shakespeare’s couplets weak.28 But in calling the poems “bad” he
might equally be attacking their morality as their skill. The
conscience-ridden adulterer, it seems, could not accept that “Love is
too young to know what conscience is”.
A further point arising from Berryman’s essay, elucidated by
Barton, is that if, as Berryman believed (mistakenly, it now appears),
Shakespeare’s sonnets were written as early as the late 1580s but not
published until 1609, the period of time between composition and
publication would be almost exactly the same as that between the
composition and publication of Berryman’s sonnets. Berryman must
therefore have reconsidered his opinion that “the middle-aged
respectable Shakespeare”29 would not willingly have released such
poems – an opinion shared by Auden who thought “Shakespeare must
have been horrified when they were published”. 30 Berryman’s
decision not to publish his own sonnets for nearly twenty years was
informed by his unwillingness to make his affair with Chris public.
However, it can reasonably be inferred that their artistic merit also
troubled him and that he could not disentangle his apprehensions
about them as good poetry from his guilt about the relationship. His
continued ambivalence, even on publication in 1967, can be adduced
from the prefatory Dream Song. “Has he the right”, Berryman asks in
that piece,
26
Anne Barton, “John Berryman’s Flying Horse”, New York Review of Books, 23
September 1999, 66.
27
See Joel Conarroe, John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977, 56.
28
Berryman’s Shakespeare, 285.
29
Ibid., 288.
30
W.H. Auden, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, in Forewords and Afterwords, London:
Faber and Faber, 1997, 105.
38
Alex Runchman
upon that old young man,
to bare his nervous system
& display all the clouds again as they were above?
(CP 70)
This sounds like an ethical question. Should he allow his old self, like
Henry in Dream Song 1, to be “pried / open for all the world to see”?
“What does anything matter?” Why not burn up the songs and avoid
public humiliation? These are not the questions of a man confident
that it would be appropriate or valuable to make his early work – and
infidelity – public.
The reason given for not burning them is that “The original fault /
will not be undone by fire” (CP 70). What is surprising, in the next
stanza, is the revelation that “The original fault was whether
wickedness / was soluble in art”. That is, the original fault was not the
fact of the affair (which is simply “wickedness”), but the fact of
having written poems about it in the hope that doing so might
constitute some kind of atonement. Dream Song 26, in which Henry,
after becoming interested in women’s bodies, falls “back into
the
original crime: art, rime” also voices the anxiety that writing might be
primitive and sinful. How can a writer defend turning his
transgressions into art? All the same, for Berryman to burn his sonnets
would not destroy the fact that he had written them in the first place.
He notes that “History” and Jacques Maritain (Emeritus Professor of
Philosophy at Princeton from 1948) say, tentatively, that “wickedness
was soluble in art” – and for Berryman to leave his songs unpublished
would be to leave the question unresolved.
Berryman was brought up as a Catholic, and his self-judgments are
severe. “I did not foresee fraud of the Law”, he admits in Sonnet 45,
the capitalization of “Law” indicating Mosaic Law: “Thou shalt not
commit adultery.”31 However, though Berryman felt despondent about
his affair and the pain he was causing his wife, Eileen,32 he was also
concerned about how his poems might reflect on previous sonnet
lovers. “As a friend of the Court I would say, Let them die”, he admits
in the prefatory Dream Song. Though he finally resisted this
judgment, Berryman’s concerns about his poems’ unfriendliness to a
31
32
Exodus 20:15.
Named “Esther” in Berryman’s Sonnets.
The Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
39
genteel tradition jostle with the more confident challenges I have
already noted. Such concerns are suggested in the not quite coherent
conclusion to Sonnet 56, a poem which contemplates the possibility of
divorce and which I would like to consider at some length (CP 98).
The sonnet begins:
Sunderings and luxations, luxe, and griefUnending exile from the original spouse,
Dog-fights! one bites intimate as a louse
The lousy other ….
The dense consonantal alliteration on “luxations”, “luxe”, and “exile”
owes much to John Donne and, later, to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and
is characteristic, as is the associative word play that follows on
“louse”, “lousy” and “mouse”. (An allusion to Donne’s “The Flea” in
the image of the “louse” is also apparent.) However, it is the poem’s
difficulties, which attest to the modernist heritage Berryman never
completely rejected, that are of most interest. Each of the poem’s
unusual words – “luxations” (dislocations), “luxe” (luxury), and, a few
lines later, “nulliparous” (used of a woman who has never given birth)
– is liable to disrupt this poem preoccupied with breakages by sending
its readers to the dictionary. There are also five ellipses, which are
further interruptions (the first of them aptly occurring after “divided”
and before “divorce”), marking points at which the reader must try to
piece together a plot from fragments of narrative and unanswered
speculations. In this respect, the poem makes similar demands to the
sequence as a whole, whose narrative is punctured by lacunae.33 All
but eighteen of the sonnets contain at least one ellipsis, and amongst
these are the seven new sonnets Berryman added in 1966.
These ellipses imply truncated trains of thought, but the final two
especially also hint towards things left unspoken because they do not
bear thinking about:
I thought of you, – come we too to this vile
Loose fagend? earlier still loves so defile? . .
Could our incredible marriage . . like all others’ . . ?
“Could our incredible marriage . .” demands to be completed by a
word such as “fail”. This requirement is evaded only by a pessimistic
33
Ellipses are also common in Lowell’s sonnet books, to similar effect.
40
Alex Runchman
and hyperbolic afterthought: “like all others’ . .?” The question mark
is left hanging as if in acknowledgment that the question itself remains
incomplete (in the previous line the ellipsis follows the question
mark). The Petrarchan form is better suited to this kind of open-ended
conclusion than the Shakespearean, which would demand a couplet
and therefore a greater sense of closure.
There is also some confusion as to whom the pronouns in these
final lines should refer, and this further complicates the poem. If “we”
and “our” are taken to refer to Berryman and Chris, the “incredible
marriage” of the final line must refer, symbolically, to their
relationship. However, it is hard to ignore Berryman’s consciousness
throughout the sequence that his actual marriage, to Eileen, is at risk,
hinted at earlier in this poem by “exile from the original spouse”.
Could this be to what he refers? Either way, the italicization of “our”
indicates incredulity at the prospect of the marriage ending. The
italicization of “still” in the penultimate line is more problematic.
What are these “earlier still loves” that Berryman is afraid of defiling,
and why should the failure of his marriage, symbolic or real, defile
earlier loves in any case? Earlier than what? If Berryman means
earlier than the failed unions of the “others” that he and (presumably)
Chris have been discussing, then it is just possible that he has in mind
the ideal loves of Petrarch for Laura, Dante for Beatrice, or Astrophil
for Stella. Shades of another meaning of “still” – motionless – might
also be present, inviting a contrast between Berryman and Chris’
restless and physical relationship to those of other sonnet lovers,
unrequited and now unchangeably set in works of art; relationships
that, “like all others”, were also doomed. Nor is it too far-fetched, in a
poem that uses the word “nulliparous”, to make an associative leap
from “still loves” to still births. The birth scene in Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet, which culminates in Anne Bradstreet asking “Is that thing
alive?” confirms that Berryman saw a Freudian analogy between
giving birth and writing, as does Dream Song 124 in which Henry
practices couvade. 34 Like Lowell, Berryman wanted his poems to
“live”, but feared they would not. Sonnet 56 is highly enigmatic, but it
does suggest Berryman’s apprehensions that his sonnet sequence of
34
Anne Bradstreet, who was noted for her poetry of married love, is the one person
whose “earlier love” Berryman certainly defiles when he imagines having an affair
with her.
The Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
41
erotic love might sully the love tradition (adulterous though its
premise often was) and ultimately prove fruitless.
Berryman’s acute doubts about writing’s aptitude for purgation
recall Sonnet 34 of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella with its rebuke “Art
not ashamed to publish thy disease?”,35 and Lowell is similarly racked
throughout The Dolphin. “Surely good writers write all possible
wrong”, 36 he puns in “Summer Between Terms I”, wishing that
writing wrongs would also amount to righting them. In fact, as he
admits in “Dolphin”, it appears to have had the opposite effect of “not
avoiding injury”37 either to himself or to others. Lowell’s use of
“good” here, like Berryman’s dismissal of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady”
sonnets as “bad”, invites the question of whether a “good” writer is a
morally upright one or merely an accomplished craftsman.
Lowell also uses the language of moral evaluation to comment on
his slackening of the sonnet form. “My meter, fourteen line unrhymed
blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and elsewhere, but often
corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose”, he remarks in the
“Afterthought” to Notebook. Lowell was (and is still) lambasted for,
amongst other crimes, razing and de-structuring the sonnet.38 By using
the word “corrupts”, he pre-empts such criticisms, but he makes no
apologies and his next comment suggests that he would have liked to
distort the form further: “Even with this license, I fear I have failed to
avoid the themes and gigantism of the sonnet.”39 Whether or not one
concludes that Lowell’s poems of this period ought to be called
sonnets there is no doubt that they relentlessly break down distinctions
– between “unrhymed blank verse”, “prose” and the “sonnet”, and
between “book” and individual “poems”. This is reflected in their
content. Pieces of throwaway conversation, letters, and comments by
critics are all incorporated alongside literary references, mostly
unacknowledged. In Notebook in particular, with its intuitive
arrangement and its refusal to differentiate between great historical
figures and visits to the dentist, contemporary politics and words for a
35
Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella and Other Writings, ed.
Elizabeth Porges Watson, London: Everyman, 1997, 36.
36
Lowell, Collected Poems, 658.
37
Ibid., 708.
38
See, for example, Calvin Bedient, “Visions and Revisions: Three New Volumes”,
in The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod, London:
Greenwood Press, 1999, 183.
39
Robert Lowell, Notebook, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1970, 262.
42
Alex Runchman
guinea-pig, the formal collapse, however frustrating to the reader,
appropriately mimics the breakdown of a hierarchy in the subject
matter. Similarly, in History, distinctions between past and present –
especially Ancient Rome and 1960s America – and between the
individual, his history and his society are blurred in poems that also
blur genre distinctions.
“I didn’t find fourteen lines a handcuff”,40 Lowell insisted in a
1971 interview with Ian Hamilton, but while writing what would be
his final book, Day by Day, he admitted that the form had, in fact,
been constraining: “gone now the sonnet’s cramping and military
beat.”41 And the tergiversations of his final sonnet, “Dolphin”, suggest
that even after five years of sonnet-writing, five books, and over a
thousand published poems, Lowell was not confident that he had
breached the gulfs between England and America, the past and the
present, or the personal and the public. The poet is guided through a
“maze of iron composition” but by a “wandering voice”; he has
plotted “freely” but is “caught in [a] hangman’s-knot of sinking
lines”.42 Similar tensions between freedom and containment are
registered in the form, which falls between the strictures of the
conventional Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet and a
characteristically American free verse tradition. With a wry nod to
Emerson, Lowell admits: “I have sat and listened to too many / words
of the collaborating muse.” This “collaborating” as opposed to courtly
“muse”, is, in the first instance, Caroline Blackwood, Lowell’s third
wife (an Englishwoman) and the “Dolphin” of the book’s title.
However, she was not the muse for his other sonnet books: one might
equally take this muse to be whatever it was that inspired Lowell to
try reconciling distinct European and American traditions, as if his
sonnets were the result of a collaborative venture between two
different cultures. The conspiratorial overtones of “collaborating” and,
in the next line, “plotted”, further suggest Lowell’s fears about the
appropriateness of his endeavour.
Lowell concludes “Dolphin”, and his entire sonnet-writing phase,
with a botched attempt to align himself with Shakespeare, in his
opinion “much the best English or American writer”. 43 Frank Bidart
notes that Lowell believed himself to be quoting Shakespeare’s first
40
Lowell, Collected Prose, 271.
Lowell, Collected Poems, 993.
42
Ibid., 708.
43
Lowell, Collected Prose, 289.
41
The Twentieth-Century American Sonnet
43
editors Heminge and Condell in the final line of “Dolphin”: “my eyes
have seen what my hand did.” As it is, he was mistaken, but the
attempt is self-aggrandizing after the humble admissions of the
preceding lines.44 This extra, fifteenth line hangs disjointed from the
main body of the poem, denying The Dolphin (and “Dolphin”) a tidy
conclusion and suggesting that both poem and book could go on
endlessly, despite the affirmative, retrospective stance. Depending on
how one reads “Dolphin”, the close proximity of the references to
Emerson and Shakespeare either serves only to stress the tensions
between the opposing influences or to unify them. Either way,
Lowell’s allegiance to both is implied.
Berryman’s Dream Song form allows for an equally broad scope.
Although Sonnets to Chris is set around Princeton and treats a
distinctly modern relationship, The Dream Songs is a more obviously
American work. The references to African-American culture, jazz,
minstrel shows, American politics and American writers, might seem
untenably discordant in a classical sonnet, even (or especially)
alongside the more literary references, but the Dream Song form
absorbs them all. Unlike Lowell, Berryman does not appear to have
found his new form a bind. The model is endlessly adaptable, even
more so than the sonnet. Berryman himself points out that the Dream
Songs are “not but mostly rhymed with great strictness”, 45 his odd
phrasing stressing their formality and relative freedom all at once. A
rhyme scheme established in the first stanza is not necessarily
followed in the second and third, and sometimes a song that does not
rhyme to begin with does later. Line lengths range from a single
monosyllable to twenty-three syllables, and the form easily
accommodates such variation. But the structural backbone of each
song is never abandoned. Henry says of a friend in Dream Song 346,
“he is too free, / he needs the limitations of Henry”; although he felt
compelled to devise a more flexible form than the sonnet, Berryman
nonetheless needed the limitations of structure – and this conforms
with traditional defenses of the sonnet that emphasize freedom within
bounds.
A principle of compromise informs both poets’ innovative versions
of the sonnet. High and popular culture, the personal and the
44
Lowell, Collected Poems, 1139.
John Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of The
Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 330.
45
44
Alex Runchman
impersonal, the literary and the slangy, and the part and the whole, are
set alongside and against each other. In part, such inclusiveness brings
to the fore the dilemma of the generic American poet of the period,
trying to make sense of a multiplicity of equally valid influences. But
their inclusiveness also attests to the enormous ambitions of Berryman
and Lowell as individuals. Considering their enormous range, it is
impressive that Lowell’s sonnet books and Berryman’s Dream Songs
do not succumb to the chaos that threatens to engulf them. Lowell’s
loosening of the sonnet form, and Berryman’s experiments with it that
culminated in his creation of The Dream Songs both represent
attempts to find a middle way between earlier English influences and
more recent American ones. In so doing, they become themselves
unique, and if they appear to “corrupt” or “defile” the sonnet tradition,
they also revivify and invigorate it.
THE WRITTEN AND THE ORAL IN
HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET
PAGE RICHARDS
John Berryman’s language has cornered much of the critical debate on
his longer poems, especially Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The
Dream Songs. Concerning poems, that seems inevitable. With
Berryman’s poems, however, the inevitable is more literal than first
meets the ear. There is already a problem with the language:
“Spellbound held subtle Henry all his four / hearers in the racket of
the market / with ancient signs, infamous characters, / new rhythms.”
(Dream Song 71) Critics have noticed this extraordinary difficulty. As
Kathe Davis says: “It was the language of the Songs that most startled
and bewildered readers. Berryman’s style was perceived as so unusual
as to constitute a separate ‘language.’ ”1 In her essay Davis deals with
Berryman’s many and important allusions to dialect, the minstrel
show, and the blues, but these observations are about the use and
integration of oral and cultural materials. This essay does not further
gloss or interpret these allusions, whether, for example, to AfricanAmerican or Native-American oral traditions. Instead it examines
rhetorical acts of oral strategies – tall tales, for example – in
Berryman’s written language, acts dating back to settler and
postcolonial preoccupations with existence and voice. In an essay on
The Dream Songs Ernest J. Smith comments on “the odd language” of
the poems, the “shifting pronoun usage”, and “the gnarled syntax”.2
Edward Hirsch recognizes the critical history, attempting to preserve
1
Kathe Davis, “ ‘Honey Dusk Do Sprawl’: Does Black Minstrel Dialect Obscure The
Dream Songs?”, Language and Style, XVIII/1 (1985), 30.
2
Ernest J. Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’ for The Dream Songs and an
Instance of Revision”, Journal of Modern Literature, XXIII/3-4 (2000), 432.
46
Page Richards
such shattered pieces in “dramatic monologues” which “allowed them
to act as anonymous shape-shifters, to conceal secrets inside their
exclamatory revelations.”3 In another essay Carol Frost suggests that:
“The discomfort for the reader caused by unfamiliar phrasings, strong
feelings, disjunctions of syntax, even the subjects of Berryman’s
poems … have caused and continue to cause consternation.” What,
then, can one say about poems that so literally force us to reconsiderations of what we think we already know about language?
Frost argues for “the new convention” in Berryman’s poetry, “taking
surprise to its limit: a tendency toward shock, where formerly the
milder emotions satisfied”.4 The poet’s own notes for composition,
Smith observes, emphasize the idea to “play more”, making it too easy
to identify Berryman’s own language with newness or
“experimentation”: “the main point of emphasis concerning language
in the notes is on flexibility and experimentation.”5
Considering the problems of Berryman’s idiom, I suggest that we
go in another (contrary) direction, towards an exploration of oral
technique in Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, and
especially his manipulation of traditional American procedures in the
language of that poem. Arguing against any “obscurantist tactics” in
Berryman’s dialect, Davis insightfully identifies “nonrational order”
mistaken for thematic “lack of meaning”. But what deserves attention
is a rhetorical rather than a thematic “lack of meaning”. The
substitution of “a levity we need to face the grave world” for the
thematically “incomprehensible” does not address the poetry’s
tactics.6 Instead, observations on a lack of thematic obscurity register
the traditions of American tall tale and frame humor. They need to be
rediscovered because Berryman’s poems do not lead to levity as
thematic conclusion, but depend from the beginning upon both
trumped-up obfuscation and the anticipated levity (produced by such
trumped-up obfuscation) not to settle for such humility in facing the
world. This essay, therefore, will focus on language in terms of these
longstanding forms which are oral in root. It will point out the absence
of either formal newness or humility and reveal instead aggressive
3
Edward Hirsch, “One Life, One Writing!: The Middle Generation”, The American
Poetry Review, XXXIX/5 (2000), 11.
4
Carol Frost, “The Poet’s Tact, and a Necessary Tactlessness”, New England Review,
XX/3 (1999), 201.
5
Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’”, 432.
6
Davis, “ ‘Honey Dusk Do Sprawl’”, 30, 31, 42, 33.
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
47
acts of language that demand oral reclamation. In an article on
“Aggression in Children’s Jokes”, Sandra McCosh underscores the
kind of verbal ambivalence that makes the listener feel like a fool in a
shaggy dog story: “Here the teller relates a very long story, with as
many details as he can manufacture, and ends with a punchline that
doesn’t resolve the problem in the joke, and leaves the listener
hanging.”7 In Berryman’s poems, when the reader is left hanging or
“not being told something”8 that “something” is not due primarily to
“loss”9 or inarticulateness but to an oral collusion of another sort. If
we reclaim the oral background, we see the poetry’s history and
humor in a different way.
Too often critical assumptions begin by figuring how the language
in Berryman works as written text. Even when arguments approach
oral underpinnings, they begin with a written sense of things.
Precisely when “levity” is what we need, for instance, to “face the
grave world”, 10 we are given a case for what words represent, rather
than for how listeners, in oral traditions, reintroduce words. Much of
the levity and laughter of Berryman’s poetry, however, derives from
language reorganized as talk. Moreover, Berryman’s body of poems is
in a long tradition of American oral tales (shaggy dogs, frame stories,
and rhetoric) and the language, therefore, should not be measured
wholly in terms of written mastery. Humor is often derived from
situations where someone is being or acting strange or peculiar, notfunny funny. In Berryman’s poetry manipulations of standard
grammar reintroduce oral strategies into written language, making a
written text “act oral”. Looking backwards, then, to American oral
traditions in the remainder of this essay I want to attempt to uncover
Berryman’s rhetoric and humor: I can do no more than give a few
examples, but they are suggestive, I hope, of the unexpected coercive
patterns of participation demanded by longstanding American oral
strategies that nonetheless are never longstanding enough to reassure
an audience of a narrative that exists or persists without them.
7
Sandra McCosh, “Aggression in Children’s Jokes”, Maledicta, I/2 (1997), 130.
Kevin Young, “Responsible Delight”, The Kenyon Review, XXI/2 (1999), 161.
9
Roger Pooley, “Berryman’s Last Poems: Plain Style and Christian Style”, Modern
Language Review, LXXII/2 (1981), 291.
10
Davis, “ ‘Honey Dusk Do Sprawl’”, 42.
8
48
Page Richards
Whether approached thematically, psychoanalytically, 11 or
stylistically (as Pooley does, parsing plain and Christian styles),
Berryman’s poetry appears to “estrange us from the familiar and
signal the presence of something in us that is deep and demonic,
something wild and unruly, irrational, imaginative”.12 Young echoes a
common response when he says that: “I should say here that my initial
judgment of the Dream Songs was harsh and unequivocal: I hated
them. They are difficult at best, dense and even offensive at worst.”
But something else happened to Young concerning the poem’s
difficulty, though it is hard to say what: “I cannot say what
transformation made me laugh with them instead of at them, or stop
worrying that he was laughing at me as a reader.”13 The
transformation from “at” to “with” here is crucial. It identifies what
Henry B. Wonham notices in the American oral tall tale as an
“invitation for collusive agreement between a narrative performer and
privileged members of his or her audience”.14 By the end of a tall tale,
squash vines, for example, as Ariane Dewey relates, “grew so fast that
farmers could ride them from one field to the next. A tendril could
sneak up a pant leg and grow a cucumber in one’s pocket while one
chatted with a neighbor.” This invitation in the oral tall tale is initiated
by what Dewey calls “some ordinary factual event” that catches the
reader off guard by being escalated, or we might say dropped, “to the
ridiculous”.15
We can hear this escalation of an ordinary event in the opening
lines of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet: “The Governor your husband
lived so long / moved you not, restless, waiting for him?” (CP 133) It
grows out of proportion with impatience – “lived so long” makes one
11
Sarah Provost, for example, looks at “ways in which the poems became his
children”, in “Erato’s Fool and Bitter Sister: Two Aspects of John Berryman”,
Twentieth-Century Literature, XXX/1 (1984), 76. For Luke Spencer, one of
Berryman’s important motives in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is “his urgent need
to examine and, if possible, expiate his guilt about his own adulterous relationships
with women”. See Luke Spencer, “Mistress Bradstreet and Mr Berryman: The
Ultimate Seduction”, American Literature, LXVI/2 (1994), 353.
12
Hirsch, “One Life, One Writing!”, 11.
13
Young, “Responsible Delight”, 161, 163.
14
Henry B. Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993, 23.
15
See Ariane Dewey, “Comic Tragedies/Tragic Comedies: American Tall Tales”, in
Sitting at the Feet of the Past: Retelling the North American Folktale for Children,
eds Gary D. Schmidt and Donald R. Hettinga, New York: Greenwood Publishing,
1992, 195, 196.
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
49
wonder how “long”? – until at the end of the poem both “forever” and
its counterpoint – “so long as I happen” – become humorously
conjoined (CP 147, emphasis added). This is not a resolution, or the
thematic absence of one, but a narrator’s nod to having brought the
“audience to a peak of impatience” with more than fifty stanzas in
between. Such oral exaggeration of “I” is complete. Selfdifferentiation by the narrator feigns its way into an agreement, an act
of collusion with Anne Bradstreet that literally depends for its life
upon such continuous talking.
We also recognize, more simply, the organization of language: the
first line (“The Governor your husband lived so long”) with the norm;
the second line (“moved you not, restless, waiting for him?”) against it
(defined in terms of conversational, standard syntax). In this sequence,
the lines together generate a narrator, and the language immediately
anticipates an attempted recovery by a reader toward the norm,
leading into the written relief of syntax and oral joke on such reward
of patience in the third line: “you were a patient woman” (CP 133).
No wonder the feigning collusion of the narrator with Anne Bradstreet
at the end of the poem is orally a relief – a “collective phew”16 – and
seriously overwritten. This is not surprising because as early as the
poem’s second line, we who are listening should be orally alert to the
rhetoric of jokes. Through overwritten text, the rhetoric produces the
map of an oral tale. Bent for knowledge, readers of course look for
irony, gaps, “fracture”17 in Berryman’s poem, but as listeners we hear
differently. Oral techniques going back to the American tall tales are
originally designed to draw on the knowledge of insiders.18 These
written versions, as we will see, draw out cultural and postcolonial
insiders of language (in particular, traditions of the British English
language) to make them part of history-making, becoming, in short,
outsiders all over again; that is, potential new insider-narrators of
American English. Listeners who find their way through to the last “so
long as I happen” are ratified for still being there, but they have also
been transformed back to there, changed – now part of the “with” – in
collusion with the narrator, without ever fully recognizing or
understanding their original distance from either the narrator or their
own laughter as one of the narrators.
16
Dewey, “Comic Tragedies/Tragic Comedies”, 196.
Frost, “The Poet’s Tact, and a Necessary Tactlessness”, 201.
18
Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 22.
17
50
Page Richards
Berryman’s poems grow out of a tradition that, in Wonham’s
terms, invites “interpretive commitment from listeners who lack either
cultural experience or experience of the genre, or both”. As in an oral
tall tale, Berryman’s language therefore insists that it has a problem
with idiosyncratic interpretation – it, too, will “feign agreement” from
readers “where none exists”19 until the reader, again, stops laughing at
and begins to laugh with the idiosyncrasies. Indeed, such a strategy
often leads to finding an excuse for a real narrator at the end who is
often named as Berryman himself. Young says, for example, “by
looking at the early work we can see what led Berryman not just to
Henry, but to himself”.20 In this frame of collusion, Berryman remakes
words and narrators, one by one. In most of the Dream Songs, Smith
observes that “prosodic elements are inconspicuous, overshadowed by
the sheer strangeness of the poem’s language”.21 Smith may sound
nearly pejorative, but not if the language is seen within the oral
tradition. This is exactly the point. In this American frame, the initial
self-conscious and heavy written or syntactical convulsions noticeably
outweigh the more subtle poetic gestures; they nearly drown them on
the page and force the reader into making sense at the start of what is
being written down. But to approach the text solely as a written
document sends us in the wrong direction. If the text is heard in the
oral tradition, however, it does just what it continuously proposes to
do: it performs itself or, as Wonham heavy-handedly explains: “The
meaning of a tall tale, in this oral scenario, is indistinguishable from
the event of performance; significance is the product of a transactive
process that occurs in the rhetorical space between narrative
presentation and response.”22 Although Berryman’s poems are written,
they vamp their own response by turning written language into oral
counterpart.
Even this more straightforward example needs its oral roots:
“I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea, / spares from his rigour for
your poetry / more.” (CP 133) One possibility of conventional syntax
is: “I doubt if Simon spares from his rigour more than this blast, that
sea for your poetry.” One can quickly argue here for Berryman’s
poetic rendering, the rhyme of “poetry” on “sea”, his use of sibilance
(Simon, blast, sea, spares) yielding to the final liquid “r”-sounds in
19
Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 24.
Young, “Responsible Delight”, 163.
21
Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’”, 437.
22
Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 27.
20
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
51
“spares”, “rigour”, “poetry”, and “more”. Yet the point of the highly
self-conscious written syntax is that it anticipates precisely – it sets the
stage for – this untwisting and subsequent shaping of the drama in
language. The strangeness (of which lyricism becomes only a part) is
put on or performed as an invitation – to be put out temporarily,
leaving what is left, which is not closure but a bare opening for
“more”. It is oral and, in this context, ripe for a common point of
reference as communal assault against the “idiosyncratic
interpretation” that the convoluted syntax exaggerates. One of
Berryman’s phrases, “damned serious humor”, 23 comes out of this
highly-written exaggeration, and does so in a context of equally
exaggerated time travel. Such exaggeration laughs and nods
historically to its status as misfit, especially in the non-visual rhyme of
“sea” and “poetry” that self-consciously lends itself to poetry. At
exactly the same time, the oral rhyming on “sea” and “poetry”
squeezes literally “more” from itself, squeezes out an oral agreement
to proceed from the same written joke. This is a deadly serious joke
that substitutes oral talk and collusion for written meaning or
designation of the idiosyncratic.
One way to understand this almost adolescent dare-structure is to
see Berryman in the context of traditional English-language American
literary history and discourse. Its written history has oral theatre and
performance built into it. The tension and humor of Berryman’s words
reveal, in historical ways, an oral technique in written text, where
insiders and outsiders jostle uncomfortably. “Hallmarks of orality”,
notes Bonnie D. Irwin, include “reiteration of themes and typical
scenes” and characters who are sometimes “narrating for their lives
against seemingly impossible odds”.24 Critics have noted different
American sources. For Jennifer Andrews, the stress is due to
geography: as Americans went westward into unknown territory, the
American tall tale “provided a way to cope with and make sense” of
this expansion. 25 Wonham places the American tall tale in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and calls tall talk an adopted
“national idiom”. I think, however, it is due to the special demands on
23
Cited by Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’”, 430.
Bonnie D. Irwin, “The Frame Tale East and West”, in Teaching Oral Traditions, ed.
John Miles Foley, New York: Modern Language Association, 1998, 394-95.
25
Jennifer Andrews, “Reading Toni Morrison’s Jazz: Rewriting the Tall Tale and
Playing with the Trickster in the White American and African-American Humor
Traditions”, Canadian Review of American Studies, XXIX/1 (1999), 91.
24
52
Page Richards
audience that are rooted in American oral discourse. The American
oral tradition projects “multiple verbal meanings at once by
addressing at least two audiences” and the “utterance is calculated to
mean something different to each”. 26 The written forms ultimately
“depict the oral traditions from which they are derived” – and
therefore the paradox of being written.27
Many of the interpolated tales “flourished in the oral tradition”,
notes Bonnie D. Irwin.28 They immediately draw in listeners to affirm
collective experience “at the expense of cultural outsiders”. Meanings
for “privileged readers” are based on predetermined understandings
between an audience and a narrator of what constitutes falsehood and
fact, always locally determined. In the American tall tale, the line
between fact and fiction is based on one of common cultural
experience, such as “weather conditions, the habits of animals, or the
hardships of life that are peculiar to a given region”.29 Berryman’s
poems must be seen in this context. For poetry renowned for multiple
verbal meanings, speakers, and narrative perspectives, there is a nearly
neglected but comparable line demarcating a privileged
understanding, historically bound to one particular kind of oral
performance, one predicated on common speech: the grammar and
syntax of American English.
In America the Puritans landed writing. Thus the two, oral and
written, are effectively simultaneous, and the written could on this
edge be considered first. But the English language that Americans
used, oral or written, posed special problems for them. In relation to
English grammar, syntax, and meaning, the insider’s position,
normally rooted in the oral and native, began instead as a written role
of insiders who felt like outsiders to their own language for their new
nation. In 1815, Walter Channing suggested that
The language in which we speak and write is the vernacular tongue of
a nation which thinks it corrupted on every other lip but its own .…
Our descriptions, of course, which must, if we ever have a poetry, be
made in the language of another country, can never be distinctive.
26
Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 21, 31.
Irwin, “The Frame Tale East and West”, 395. Tall tales are one kind of frame tale, a
genre which, she says, “occupies a unique place in the relation between orality and
literacy” (ibid., 391).
28
Ibid., 392.
29
Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 22, 24.
27
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
53
Channing explains that “peculiarities of country, especially the great
distinctive characteristick ones, and manners likewise, can be
perfectly rendered only by the language which they themselves have
given rise to. I mean a peculiar language.”30
Postcolonial England’s domination, then, made many Americans
come to see themselves back as outsiders to their own “insider”
language. Searching for their own national language, Americans
equated authentic language to something non-British: “Another reason
why there are few original publications among us”, George Tucker
writes, “may be found in our former colonial dependence, and in the
identity of our language and manners with those of Great Britain”. 31
The postcolonial defensiveness – “To quote from Holy Writ, ‘We,
measuring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves among
ourselves, are not wise’”32 – reproduced oral American-narrators, who
sought refuge from a language that was often perceived as borrowed
from England. In their search for a distinctive language and literature,
“genius” became associated with non-British, non-figurative:
No matter for rudeness …. It is enough that all is our own and just
such as we were made to have and relish. A country then must be the
former and finisher of its own genius. It has, or should have, nothing
to do with strangers.33
So in “new” oral narratives – that is, through oral techniques in
written texts – the insider-narrator of England’s written English is
transformed into an outsider and set up for the possibility of being
reinstated as a new insider-narrator, one who can hear American
English.
Translation of English into English, therefore, took the early lead.
The theatre became a forum for hostility. Theatre was considered, as
30
Walter Channing, “Essay on American Language and Literature”, The NorthAmerican Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 1 (1815), 309. Channing is among the
most famous for explicitly identifying the problem of an overlapping language.
31
George Tucker, “On American Literature”, in Essays by a Citizen of Virginia:
Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy by a Citizen of
Virginia, Georgetown: Joseph Milligan and Jacob Gideon, Jr, Printer, 1822, 51.
32
Editor, “American Letters: Their Character and Advancement”, The American
Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, and Science, I/6 (1845), 575.
33
Edward Tyrell Channing, “On Models in Literature”, The North-American Review
and Miscellaneous Journal, 3 (1816), 207.
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Page Richards
Jeffrey H. Richards says, “the province of our late enemy, the
British”; antipathy toward theater “in nearly every venue” led to the
practice of turning plays into lectures and began to make American
history, like language used literally, especially popular.34 Each of
these oral forms featured narration and a narrator, whether the theaterlecture or the American tall tale. This association became a general
“defining character trait” and through it British attitudes about
America were routinely “parodied”. 35 It is not surprising, then, that
many of Berryman’s best poems, like many American texts, demand
oral performance. Expectedly, they occasion self-rejection and
conversion, like those of the tall tale from written language. As is
often not true in the other traditions, however, these written (and
traditionally) Protestant texts function to set up a continuous stream of
outsiders, not insiders. These outsiders include, again, narrators, who,
one by one, openly bury and re-present inert language as alive,
strange, alien to the ear, if not to the mouth and hand. Look at this
verse-sentence from Berryman, seven far-from-simple words: “I
summon, see / From the centuries it” (CP 133). In this direct address,
“you”, the subject of “see”, is hidden for a moment. “I” therefore is
not the subject, as it appears, but part of the object. Therefore, the
narrating “I” – the outsider “I” – is created from the inside out, when
“I summoned” is recognized as framed by the narrating “You see …”.
The whole thing is framed by a narrator who openly covers “see” in
parallel next to “it” so that the buried “you” is reinvigorated as an
insider to its own sentence. The narrator also sinks both narration (the
fact of the frame) and “you” for a moment to make the words “see”
and “it” disproportionately literal, odd, full of life, foreign to the ear,
unmediated. “I” seems to be doing everything, summoning and seeing,
but “I,” as it turns out, is not the subject. Buried “you” literally is.
Thus, as points of the sentence’s momentum, “see” and “it” have
undue importance, exaggerated literalness, each hanging upon the
other in translation; in “see / From the centuries it” it is “you” who
does the seeing. “You” is made an outsider to be refashioned as never
anything but an eye, the “I”: a cultural insider.
Drawing upon these early oral practices of American rhetoric and
tales demands this elaboration. Otherwise, the crucial insider/outsider
34
Jeffrey H. Richards, Introduction, Early American Drama, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1997, xii.
35
Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 39-40.
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
55
relations are missed. Berryman’s collusion too draws on the American
tall tale. What Wonham calls its “invitation for collusive agreement”
is a transformed rebirth of the earlier modes of religious conversion,
what Young momentarily renames by experience “transformation”.
American tall tales, broadly, are designed to ratify convention and
convert by pressure. For example, in “The catfish roll’d his eyes clean
round till he squinted – when snap went the line, crack went his gills,
and off he bounced like a wild Ingen”, everyone knows that a catfish
doesn’t roll its eyes and squint.36 Moreover, these traditions, as we
have noticed, finally reject the multiple meanings that their tales
embody to draw in converts in favor of consensus. Their emphasis on
repudiating literal understanding – the catfish squinting or the word as
a substitute for the Word as the highest form of self-delusion – leads
to broadening consensus, one by which an agreement to agree
supersedes either multiple meanings or any single rendering of the
truth.
But in Berryman’s poems, as in American postcolonial traditions
generally, literal meaning is not to be distrusted, as it is in the tall tale.
As Berryman himself suggests: “an American historian somewhere
observes that all colonial settlements are intensely conservative,
except in the initial break-off point.”37 The reinvented literal meaning,
like the rediscovered “it” in Berryman’s poem, is the only thing that
makes a word a matter of movement, of living, of birth. As Gabór
Bezeczky explains about literal language:
It is impossible to tell a lie in this language because words cannot be
used outside their proper fields of application …. This also prevents
speakers from mistakes and “planned mistakes” or “calculated errors”
as metaphors are sometimes considered.38
Refusing words inside their proper applications, Berryman’s outsider
narrators undermine the application, and underwrite the literal,
stripping the written function of the words down to sound. In
Berryman’s work, social inadequacy is a means by which words – not
silences – are generated and words are specifically not an expression
of failure: “Versing, I shroud among the dynasties; / quaternion on
36
Cited by Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 39.
John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1976, 328.
38
Gabór Bezeczky, “Literal Language”, New Literary History, XXII/3 (1991), 609.
37
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quaternion, tireless I phrase / anything past, dead, far, / sacred, for a
barbarous place” (CP 135).
The carryover from the oral tall tale is clear in Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet. The “I” is buried by inhabiting two bodies at once. The
outsider “I” is the insider “I” too, producing acts of simultaneous
translation and conversion – and speech itself (“Versing”, “phrase”) –
around a dead body, the historical “I”. Again, earlier, the use of
“most” qualifies written narration with oral interjection: “we were,
most, used up” (CP 134). Caught between modifying “we” and
“used”, “most” reverts to itself, lying neither way, buried alive
between its conventionally “heard” functions, reviving instead now
simply as utterance from a character created inside out from another
and earlier (Anne Bradstreet’s) narration. The narrator therefore dies
as a teller of tales but lives in speech. Instead of achieving the
“spontaneous activity of listeners” in oral performance, these written
texts draw out humorously and to no end, written frames of multiple
perspectives, parodying storytelling but not utterance.
Framing also draws on the American oral tradition. In his prefatory
“Note” to The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman initiates such frames:
“Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the
character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work.”
This self-conscious look at origins in language, which playfully
defrays authorship, alludes to a national controversy one hundred and
fifty years earlier. Fisher Ames defensively noted the absence of
“original” authors. “Is there one luminary in our firmament that shines
with unborrowed rays?” he asked, continuing: “giants are rare; and it
is forbidden by her [that is, Nature’s] laws that there should be races
of them.”39 In place of oral spontaneity, written frames produce a
certain structure for jokes that offend their listeners – the supposed
cultural insiders – by having their words mean exactly what they mean
when spoken, not conventionally heard. But such texts deliberately
discomfort the supposed insiders of the language; they make words
from listeners (extracting language from silence) and authority from
the literal (reclaimed) meaning of a word.
Pascal Covici notes that “Although most significant American
authors do not generally receive the title of humorist – more and more
39
Fisher Ames, Works of Fisher Ames with a Selection from His Speeches and
Correspondence, ed. Seth Ames, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1854, 430,
437.
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
57
of them, however, write humor – a great many of their works force
readers into the same sudden shifts of perspective that humor brings
about.” The “revelations brought about by much American literature
occur in large part because that literature functions in many ways that
humor does”, he adds, “even when it is essentially very unfunny
indeed”. 40 Berryman’s poems would receive this title. However, his
sudden shifts of perspective are also very serious not about being
funny but about being, or acting, literally “funny”. This more literal
and functional form of “funny” is hard to describe, but it is not as
laughable as funny and not as meaningful as literal. The more the
oddness is appreciated for what it is doing, rather than what it is
saying, the more truly funny and moving it can become, without
losing its seriousness as an act in history.
As we have seen, words in Berryman’s poems are frequently made
unfamiliar, deliberately drawn outside expectations of grammar and
syntax and time, producing frames of multiple perspectives. His
strategies also defamiliarize by making the conventions insiders of
English both strange and literal: “When the mouth dies, who misses
you?” (CP 133). By mouthing and defamiliarizing, Berryman’s
insiders become outsiders – storytellers, speakers, narrators who
exhort to themselves as narrators: “Talk to me” (CP 140). Outsiders
no longer exist, except importantly as an act of narrating.
Look at “Can be hope a cloak?” (CP 142) Its very subject – “hope”
– does not immediately present itself, making space for an inaudible
pronoun. In this opening note, someone is already buried. The
beginning of a sentence is replaced with a middle. The ear attempts
initially to revive and replenish “can be” with an appropriate pronoun
or noun. Stripped at first of its subject, the verb “can be” acts
positively, by sounding like an active verb, with “hope” as the object
of its action: “can be [might have] hope.” “Can be” declares
ultimately, by grammatical deformation, what the syntactical question
attempts to remove: “hope” as literal: for a passing moment the phrase
“Can be hope” replaces the rhetorical question that figuratively turns
hope into a cloak: “Can hope be a cloak?” The question mark signals
figurative language, a metaphor (“cloak”). As figurative, “hope” is
laughed at, but the word “hope” is made unfamiliar, and is not laughed
at – not at all. The action of deformed grammar and colliding syntax
40
Pascal Covici, Humor and Revelation in American Literature: The Puritan
Connection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 3.
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therefore joins “hope” and “cloak” more closely into one sound,
latched by a long “o”. The utterance mocks metaphor-making at the
same time that it reinvents the sound of the word, “hope” (and
“cloak”). By placing “hope” self-consciously near the act of making
(“hope a cloak”, with a transformative “is” heard before “a”), the
metaphor “hope is a cloak” is turned into self-conscious action. It
shows the maker making literal and funny what should be a metaphor,
revealing what it is meant to conceal.
This is a good example of odd, unfunny humor. As local
performance within itself, this action is funny. But in terms of the long
frame of the poem it is also not funny. In truth, there is no pronoun or
person speaking the subject’s part. “Hope” is formally the subject. Yet
in the long view of the poem’s frame, the speaker created by the
utterance is actually dead. “Can be hope a cloak” is attributable to a
dead speaker, the female poet Anne Bradstreet. Thus the line declares
itself self-consciously as a moment of narration, an instance of voice
(regardless of initial statement). In the longer view, it frankly declares
itself – against the odds of the common grammar and syntax of the
insiders. The line is alive, but to or for whom? Once the initial
pronoun or noun has been stripped to loosen the speaker’s identity,
laughing at the utterance is laughing only at the character who has
been made to say it. In particular, such a stripping allows the character
potentially to include the listener. The sentence, therefore, refuses to
represent anyone. It articulates everyone. All are invited by cultural
insider awareness of grammar, and all are just as quickly rebuffed by
alien syntax. Only “hope” survives literally as the subject. Funny from
the point of view of form, it is also trivial and also serious. It is
structurally amusing, dead-serious in its literalness of re-founding the
word through sound. “Hope”, a word re-fitted by a narrator, makes a
rebel of the reader reading.
Many lines in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet read as these
examples do, and it would be useful to describe the grammatical
patterns. Prepositions generally move into subject locations. Verbs are
frequently replaced by understudies of verbs, adverbs and adverbial
phrases. Therefore, named verbs have less action than the other parts
of speech enacting the verbs’ roles. Missing subjects are doubled to
make pronouns appear, underscoring their proportionate absence.
Run-on sentences are often resolved on an indeterminacy, just as midsentence beginnings draw attention to the artifice of origins. As
Joseph Mancini argues, Berryman’s reader “accurately and
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
59
simultaneously hears and speaks the poem”41 or, to put it another way,
Berryman talked about hearing poems “with your eyes”,42 orally
implementing a written text. By separating the prepositional phrases
from their adverbial functions, by compressing time sequences into
one, and by putting adjectives after nouns, the narrative breaks apart
speaking from receiving, context from text, utterance from origins.
The pattern isolates single words, “it”, “me”, “you”, “unchained”,
making them peculiar, funny, literal, non-meaningful, un-word-like,
moments of spontaneous action and sound. To hear such words is to
say them again to oneself – to live.
This pattern of utterance exploits the insider/outsider pattern that is
a staple in the American oral tradition, making grammar careen in new
paths. When outsiders stop being self-conscious about their own
language, they become insiders, attuned to figurative language that
they did not figure. In each case, a separation of pronoun from his or
her action (whether by interruption, dislocation, or mixed grammar
parts) removes the verb function, distributing its attributes among the
surviving parts of speech, forcing them alive, or at least, momentarily
to the center. The passing privilege of verb action is forced, invented
by translating English into English. When English is asked to imitate
English, new hearing is required. As in formal translation, a word as
uttered is separate from the same word as received. The history of the
tiny shudder between imitation and translation is a long one. Donald
Carne-Ross, for example, resituates imitation as “translation”; for him,
the original text is already a translation from the pre-verbal to the
verbal.43 When “imitation” is perceived, more simply, to be linked
with “borrowing”, 44 that is, to be specifically “artificial” and nonoriginal, translation became a literal enterprise away from a language
that imitates itself upon utterance. In Berryman’s grammar, the
smallest “it” reverberates. The uttered word “it”, for example, which
we hear in “from the centuries it” (CP 133) is disproportionately loud.
As utterance, it is spoken to insiders of English as definitive and
41
Joseph Mancini, Jr., “A Hearing Aid for Berryman’s Dream Songs”, Modern
Language Studies, X/1 (1979-80), 58.
42
Cited by Thornbury (CP xxxv).
43
D.S. Carne-Ross, “Translation and Transposition”, in The Craft of and Context of
Translation: A Symposium, eds William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1971, 3-4.
44
Edward Tyrell Channing’s phrase is “borrowers and imitators” (see “On Models in
Literature”, 205).
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representative. A pronoun, “it” stands for a noun. Here, however,
upon being received, it is first indeterminate, literally no more or less
than a place holder, withdrawn from figurative, and thus, language
function. To suggest that it serves the noun “body” is precisely to
suggest an absurd attachment, the tie to time and place that the word
“body” defines, and specifically what its dislocation here rejects. It is
it, a sound that is made funny by function: it rejects its body, here
literally so, its noun “body”. It is serious in not warning against speech
but in protecting speech itself.45 Techniques are fashioned in which a
literal meaning is extracted back from a figurative one. For the
purposes of re-establishing American English from English, this has
an advantage. As Bezeczky says: “What gives relative stability [that
is, literal use] will also give instability in metaphors and will lead to a
new stability in dead metaphors.”46 Still a performance, then, this act
of creating new stability, and the impossibility of lies, from dead
British metaphors was a perceived necessity.
To this effect, insider positions based ultimately in British English
literary traditions were sacrificed. Creative, American outsider and
narrator rhetoric grew large, exaggerated: it had to translate one’s own
story and language back into oral, underlying conditions and
beginnings. Strategies of stylistic fracture, like Berryman’s, are at the
tail end of many oral techniques, including the American tall tale.
Many written American texts create themselves back through the
absence, of an oral tradition in America. Multiple meanings and
single renderings literally fail to render what is already understood (by
cultural insiders) or not (by cultural outsiders to their language). It
helps to shift the terms of inadequacy from success or failure to
participation (conversion) or rebellion. This makes language a
physical matter of social placement. It becomes an element of time
rather than truth. In this way, many of America’s stories and poems –
from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Henry James’
“The Beast in the Jungle” to “The Poem that Took the Place of a
45
The inexpressibility topos, by contrast, is noteworthy here. As Ann Chalmers Watts
says: “Defined in its pure form inexpressibility centers on language, not the speaker:
the point is not that the speaker fails, though the speaker does, but that any tongue
fails.” She adds that “it acknowledges a struggle between word and not-word” –
which is obviously a relevant but different struggle between word and word. See Ann
Chalmers Watts, “Pearl, Inexpressibility, and Poems of Human Loss”, Publications of
the Modern Language Association of America, XCI/1 (1984), 27.
46
Bezeczky, “Literal Language”, 610.
The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
61
Mountain” or “Thinking of a Relation between the Images of
Metaphors” by Wallace Stevens – have frequently developed oral
techniques in written texts as a way for written texts not to stay quiet.
If such works – and Berryman’s poems in particular – are approached
this way, they can no longer be measured in terms of written mastery
alone. Instead, they must be seen as working within American oral
and colonial traditions of survival, saying, and being heard.
ENCOUNTERING HENRY: A ROUNDTABLE ON DREAM SONG 1
RON CALLAN
JUSTIN QUINN
EDWARD CLARKE
KIT FRYATT
HOW-TO-DO
RON CALLAN
Dream Song 1 is a “how-to-do” poem, a series of related strategies by
which language is evaluated ethically, and, by which one survives.
Survives what? This is not at all clear at any stage of the poem, but the
italicized “do” in line five points in the direction of the problems:
“they thought / they could do it.” The use of pronouns makes it
impossible to be certain of the facts here – the details of the drama are
denied to readers. However, there is a clear sense of a process of
thinking (“they thought”) which presupposes and predicts a successful
outcome (“they could do it”). By reflecting on those who think they
can “do it”, Henry is in a huff, an understandable huff. The suggestion
made by the figure “I” in the third line is that Henry does not think as
others do; he does not think that he “could do it”. In assessing himself
and others in this way, Henry chooses silence as a response and, as
such, he hides himself away. The silence is recorded in the image of
huffiness, the act of hiding, and the emphatic lacuna in the first line,
which points to an absence when the expectation is presence. Indeed,
that space presents a visual sign of Henry’s sense of otherness – Henry
is at odds with others who represent, for him, oppressive behavior and
values.
Henry’s huff is not absolute, of course. He has someone to speak
for him and the form of communication promotes a counter set of
values. The alliteration, the lacuna, and the object of the verb “hid”
being “day” point to a language that is not factual or prosaic, but
literary and figurative, opposed to the notion of simple speech, and, by
implication, to those who “do it”. To be “doing it” is paradoxically
certain as it is vague; to “hid[e] the day” is paradoxically vague and
certain: the certainty of doing “it” seems superficial and beyond
questioning; to hide the day suggests a subtlety of mind and an interest
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Ron Callan
in questioning. This initial difference indicates an important topic for
this Dream Song and, indeed, for The Dream Songs as a whole: how
to act and how to express actions – ethical issues.
Henry is seen to be wrong to sulk and hide, and be “unappeasable”.
While there is sympathy for him, it is clear that “he should have come
out and talked”. Promoted here is activity – Henry should have found
a means of expression and not hidden away. To “come out” suggests
both a physical and an imaginative emergence, and is itself associated
with the final image of the Song’s first stanza – the activity of talking.
It suggests that language, expression, words, are key factors in the
good activity. The stanza rests firmly with talking, with finding the
means to bring internalized feelings and responses into language.
Henry’s coming out is an act of being well and, indeed, of developing
a society that is well: to hide is represented as dangerous in that it
denies expression to thought; furthermore, it leaves the field open to
domination by the others who simply “do it”.
The beginning of the second stanza indicates why we should care
for Henry. “All the world” alludes to Jacques’ “seven ages” of man in
the speech beginning “All the world’s a stage” in Shakespeare’s As
You Like It (Act II, scene vii). Indeed, it serves as a context to
undermine and trivialize Henry’s articulation of his own development.
His inactive drama is weak by comparison to Shakespeare’s
“comedy”. It is, in short, farcical as Henry’s world is “like a woolen
lover”. A simile links Henry’s world to a “woolen lover” – an image
of a lover dressed in wool (depending on the wool this could be an
attractive or an unattractive option) or it could be a knitted doll or a
teddy bear. It suggests a “once-upon-a-time” world when Henry
sought and expressed a simple comfort zone. The comfort evident in
the terms of the simile draw Henry towards those who could “do it”,
even if it is by virtue of his innocence and, later, his silence – a
woolen mind by implication.
Henry’s developing experience, however, takes him beyond farce.
His quotidian life and crises are revealed as noteworthy, the material
for the complexity of an unfolding drama. While the “departure” is
less a split with this woolen state of being and more a tear or fraying,
it constitutes a harsh judgment on simile – the wool is being undone.
This process occurs at the mid-point of the Song, lines nine and ten,
where it seems poised on a fulcrum. Weighted against the
representation of Henry’s difficulties and responses are set the terms
of the non-woolen world. Here we are made aware that “nothing fell
How-to-do
67
out” as it should (“might or ought”). “Falling out” in the context of
language suggests an instinctive, thoughtless act, a tendency simply to
“do it”. It suggests that Henry is severely at odds with society as he
cannot simply let things “fall out” in acceptable ways. “Falling out”
also points to a dispute between lovers, friends or colleagues. These
“falls” are in marked contrast to the advice given to Henry in the first
stanza to “come out” which suggested a thoughtful act, a desire to
bring thought and speech into line, a more measured activity at odds
with “falling out”. Finally, “fall” suggests sin (Genesis) and points to
Henry – and his society/community – as fallible and human. It seems
to me that Henry strives to face that legacy of the fall and is a figure
striving to be true to himself.
This is a significant crisis – how does one act? how does one
speak? what “might” be? what “ought” to be? – and these become
critical questions and they are raised by Berryman with considerable
urgency in the first Dream Song. The inability of the figure “I” to see
(“I don’t see”) is set against the world’s clear vision (“open for all the
world to see”). Henry’s departure from the norm and the problems that
arise because of it leave him not only “pried” but prised “open”. The
inappropriateness of pry/prise calls into question Henry’s ability to
survive, yet survive he does for the action is described in the past
tense. Henry has managed to exist under immense pressure and so the
“might” and “ought” (pointing to his ethical failure in “normal” terms)
have been addressed in some way. Survival is a form of success and is
surely drawn from an as yet undefined form of expression. The focus
is on language and the context is an ethics of expression – simply
“doing it” and staying silent is not an option.
The fact that “All the world once did seem on Henry’s side” points
us to “once upon a time…”, to the power of fairy tales, to a time when
simile served the purpose, to the “woolen lover”. That was, as we are
told, “Then”. The poem, however, deals with “now”. The present is a
difficult time and place as the act of saying is a “long / wonder”. What
is a “long / wonder”? The phrase is suggestive but not definitive.
“[W]onder” indicates curiosity, surprise, or strangeness. Henry is
seen, as he has been throughout the poem, as an oddity engaged by the
complexity of being and committed to accuracy in expression. This
phrase does not have the sound-bite likeness of similes, but is a form
that represents more accurately the long song of experience. This
singing is not that issued from the “top” of the “sycamore” but made
of words that “the world can bear & be”. The ampersand significantly
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Ron Callan
represents the flexibility of language, a sign (beyond the alphabet and
at the same time related to it) that points to complexity and
complementarity. The terrible division of the opening stanza becomes
the catalyst for an expression to bridge the cataclysmic separation of
Henry from himself and from the world.
The final two verse sentences represent a conclusion of sorts. The
first returns us to the world of “once-upon-a-time”. The figure “I”,
dramatically in control of the narrative, achieves success away from
the earth, high on a tree, singing. The image points vertically to the
heavens as gladness lies in the status of being high above the earth,
linked to strong, powerful, and phallic imagery, and “glad” (pleased,
willing) to sing. While the occasion is undoubtedly in the realm of
“once”, the language offers something beyond simile, something of
his new experiences. The event is either factual (happiness was
achieved by climbing a tree) or symbolic (happiness lies above, away
from human interaction, close to nature, and pointing to the heavens
and god). In the first stanza, Henry “should have come out and
talked”; here the figure “I” is “all at the top, and [he] sang.” In the
first, voice is promoted and encouraged to enter social circumstances,
and isolation is seen as a force of repression; in the second, voice is
delivered in isolation and is “glad”, and the imagery seems at odds
with the earlier advice. The tree scene is an example, however, of the
developing ethical voice. We know this partly by the use of “and”
(and not the ampersand) because “and” links “come out and talked”
with “all at the top and […] sang”. The figure “I” recalls the singing in
ways which link it to his experiences in the present (the “now-once”
construction). This context is effectively a new way to report an old
event; this is part of his coming out, and there is not a simile in sight.
The penultimate verse sentence establishes, through memory, a
potent voice that understands and represents nostalgia without
conceding to it. This new voice is most evident in the final two lines.
Here the angle of vision shifts dramatically to the horizontal and to
land. The complexity of the occasion is immediately evident as land
clashes with another element – the sea. This immense battle becomes
the site for the “now”. The meeting point is represented by the verb
“wears” which suggests one being dressed (adornment) and/or one
being eroded by the other (violation). This is not direct language, not
imagery to be easily understood (“do it”). What we witness is a titanic
contest as elemental forces compete: “Hard” against “strong”. The
images of masculine attributes (“hard” and “strong”) and elemental
How-to-do
69
agents (“land” and “sea”) point to an epic contest; yet this is on
Henry’s patch. It is as though the figure “I” is best represented by
images of contested space and the reality of his situation is best known
by synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, symbol, image – but not simile,
at least not now. Survival depends on accuracy.
So how can we read the final line and the strange setting of
“empty” with “grows” in the context of “bed” (flowers and sex)? The
use of “and” is helpful here as it points us to the earlier usage and to
singing and talking. But this is a winter scene with the beds
paradoxically growing emptiness – growth signaling the inevitability
of death. However, it also suggests cycle and renewal in the image of
the “bed” and, again, in the embedded (carnal) image of the “Hard on”
which suggests the potential for insemination (love and/or sex). The
scene is obscure, a vortex of ideas and action, delivering a judgment
that is firmly rooted in loss, winter and despair, as in renewal, spring,
hope. The decisive action is essentially ethical, driven by a need to
reflect experience in words to make us feel the veracity of complexity,
the truth of paradox, and the capacity of language to reflect these
issues – drawing the “ought” out of “thought”. 1
This is a damning judgment on the assonantal and alliterative
world/woolen/lover images implanted in nostalgia by the powerfully
restrictive “like”. Dream Song 1 is a portal for what is to come in The
Dream Songs. It is a poem about nothing (we have no details of
Henry’s actual crises) and a poem about everything (how should we
express ourselves?). As I said at the outset, it is a “how-to-do” poem,
about, for, and by Henry, who survives.
1
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Ethics”, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds Frank
Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd edn, London: University of Chicago Press,
404.
FAILED VISION?
JUSTIN QUINN
Of all the things that people can tell you about themselves, few are as
tedious as their dreams. It is perhaps because dreams promise access
to so much that is denied us in everyday life – freedom, beautiful
forbidden bodies, terrible monsters – and yet when the story is told it
conjures up a world which turns around the teller alone, that is, not the
real world at all. Our dreams are endlessly, panoramically, luridly,
violently, erotically about ourselves, and our egotism is measurable by
the extent to which we think they are interesting for other people. The
very word “dream” is extremely powerful, and poets have always
known this. In English, there is the added advantage of the many
words which rhyme with it: “stream”, “gleam”, “seem”, “seam”,
“beam”, “ream”, “deem”, “supreme”, “teem”, “extreme”, “bream”, to
give but a few. Line these up on the right hand side of a page and the
poem will quickly spread out flush to the left margin, almost
generating itself. That facility is of course a trap, as is evidenced by
much poetry of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, and we value
those poets who are able to use such acoustics without succumbing to
them completely. W.B. Yeats particularly comes to mind in this
respect. Connected with this also is the fact that his was a spectacular
egotism balanced by an acute awareness of necessity in the grand
sense of Moira.
Berryman’s gambit, then, was considerable when he chose to write
hundreds of songs about his dreams, especially given that he cared
little about politics, history or culture in general, if these things could
not immediately illustrate some aspect of himself. The rationale of the
gambit is explained by Paul Breslin in his book The Psycho-Political
Muse: “Because the one-dimensionality of the system was presumably
ubiquitous, reaching even into one’s own psyche, the poet had only to
Justin Quinn
72
look about him, or even into his own soul, to be confronted with the
crisis of American society.”1 By focusing ever more closely on the
self, the life of the nation would be revealed. However, the gambit
never paid off for Berryman, and The Dream Songs is ultimately a
kind of Grand Guignol that plays itself out in the cramped quarters of
one man’s cranium. No wind blows through, no sun breaks in. Allen
Ginsberg made a similar gambit, but successfully, as the public life of
the United States during several decades is revealed in his poetry,
along with the fugitive narrative of the nation’s secret desires and
fears.
One index of this failure is Berryman’s use of minstrel talk without
any reference to its problematic racial aspects (there is only an
occasional decorous nod towards African Americans, say in Dream
Song 2, and passing references to Bessie Smith). It might seem that I
am laying on the political correctness a little bit thick; however, my
intention is not to judge Berryman morally, but to indicate how distant
his psychic drama was from the sea changes that were taking place in
American society during the period in which The Dream Songs was
written. By the early 1950s Ralph Ellison and others had made the
idea of minstrels problematic for a mainstream American audience.
But Berryman, it would seem, never apprehended the nature of the
challenge offered to American society by Ellison and his like.
Berryman’s poetry, then, does not let us see America, rather it tries to
blot it out and proclaim that the poet’s own ego is the only object of
interest in the world. If a significant trace of this erasure were left in
the poetry then it would be immediately more interesting. But
Berryman exerts no imaginative energy in this direction: he merely
takes the matter for granted, and gets on with rhyming another
burlesque episode from his brain.
The first of these, Dream Song 1, humorously considers “Huffy
Henry” hiding from “the day” and sulking. The speaker, with a show
of amused objectivity, remarks, “I see his point”. This sets up a
distance between Henry and the Berryman-speaker, and it is a kind of
narcissism. Indeed Berryman is not, in my view, a Confessional poet
at all, as the idea of confession implies the acknowledgement of an
ethical standard above and beyond the individual. Berryman is
ultimately a narcissist who projects his psychic states into the poems
1
Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties, Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 17.
73
Failed Vision?
and observes the subsequent punch-up. The second stanza
condescends to Henry’s self-pity, but underlying it is
Henry/Berryman’s outrage that he does not control the world in all its
aspects. The last stanza contradicts some of things I have said since it
provides a glimpse of the world without Berryman’s psycho-drama: it
is immediately more interesting, and the pity of The Dream Songs is
that it did not extend this glimpse to a vision.
BERRYMAN IN HIS SYCAMORE
EDWARD CLARKE
What is John Berryman as “Huffy Henry” hiding from the reader in
Dream Song 1? Since his day has come, my reading does not attempt
to put such an unappeasable poem to rest, instead I begin by getting
into bed with the poet and his alter ego. But does Dream Song 1 allow
its future readers, who alternate with black night, to become the poet’s
second self when he is gone? Among these second selves, in the third
line of the first stanza, “I see his point, – a trying to put things over”;
not trying to put things down or right but “over”. In the final two lines
of the second stanza, “I don’t see how Henry, pried / open for all the
world to see, survived”. As I pry into the word “pried” I find
Berryman’s “I” has already pried it open. Voices speaking the poem
anticipate how I would open it up to look closely at it, but “Then came
a departure”. Dream Song 1 is portentous and oxymoronic in the
manner of this line since a departure that came must have already
departed for that which is to come.
This subtly foolish poem came to us as we depart from it; when we
would interpret the poem as a departure that came from our
explications to come; but it is already prised apart for us to peer into
as it is “trying to put things over”. Is Berryman trying to put one over?
“I see his point”, which is not a full point but two points – a comma,
then a dash – denoting the caesura and dividing the end-stopped line,
which ends with “over”. But “I don’t see” how my reading can have
survived the enjambment “pried / open” as the poem puts not things
but its leg over, enjambing the expression, and prying Henry open for
all the world to pry into, when all the world can see that all the world
has already left Henry’s side – “and empty grows every bed”.
Although “Huffy Henry
hid the day” with no one at his side to
put his leg over, the poem remains an invitation to peer into his lonely
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Edward Clarke
bed and even to prise him out of it. My suspicion is that this invitation
is put “wicked & away” over my response because of the thought that
I thought I “could do it”. Then my reading of the poem complains:
“But he should have come out and talked.” Instead the poem responds
to another kind of voice, which commands, “Write!”.1 Dream Song 1
is a scrupulous poem that pragmatically allows graduate students,
associate professors, professional critics and all kinds of academics to
empathize with it. But, it turns out, the poem is written in secret for
the dead whom Berryman loves; it is sung for the ones that he believes
will return to read him as posterity: the ideal audience that came as a
departure. I ask, is it possible for posterity not to empathize with
Dream Song 1? Can I stop projecting my personality or critical
consciousness into the poem and die out of it, in order to join the
readers whom Berryman has in mind when he writes? Finally, are the
dead, whom the poet loves, reading Dream Song 1 as posterity or is
the poem movingly but merely empathetic?
Luckily for us, since we are not dead, we find posterity, conversing
through the voices of earlier poets, in the sycamore of the third stanza:
“Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang.” I wonder
if the Berryman of the summer of 1947 in Sonnet 10, imagining Lise
in her “stone home where the sycamore / More than I see you sees
you”, would have understood that this sycamore is a different kind of
tree – of a different genus – from Tennyson’s large-leafed sycamore in
section XCV of In Memoriam A. H. H.:
1
The injunction “Write!” is part of “an old saying” or conversation between two
voices, quoted by Søren Kierkegaard and repeated by Berryman in an interview when
he was asked why being a poet is “just something you do”: “Write! – For whom? –
For the dead whom thou didst love. – Will they read me? – Aye, for they return as
posterity” (see “An Interview with John Berryman” by John Plotz, et al., in
Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry
Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 17). For Kierkegaard’s
meditations on this old saying, see Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling / Repetition
(1843), eds and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1983, 244, and Works of Love (1847), eds and trans. Hong and
Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, 362. In the interview
Berryman maintains that the saying is originally from the work of Johann Georg
Hamann, but the Kierkegaard scholar George Pattison has assured me the quotation is
actually from Johann Gottfried von Herder. See Herder, Abhandlungen und
Briefe über schöne Literatur und Kunst, in his Sämmtliche Werke. Zur schönen
Literatur und Kunst, I-XX, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1827-30, II, 45.
Berryman in His Sycamore
77
…and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:
And sucked from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o’er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume….2
Berryman as Henry once sang in a North American plane or
buttonwood, Platanus occidentalis, but Tennyson sings of a shady
ornamental pseudo-plane, introduced into Britain in the sixteenth
century from the continent, and, in fact, a large species of maple, Acer
Pseudoplatanus. Henry’s huffing is such as he opens his Dream Songs
to half-perceive how the leaves of Tennyson’s climactic sycamore
tremble in a creative breeze sucked out of the first line of
Wordsworth’s Prelude (“O there is a blessing in this gentle breeze”3)
and puffed back through “Tintern Abbey”: “The day is come when I
again repose / Here under this dark sycamore”,4 which is certainly
another umbrageous Acer Pseudoplatanus shading a poet. As Henry
admits in Dream Song 116, “Chilled in this Irish pub I wish my loves /
Well” and “I stand up for much, / Wordsworth and that sort of thing”.
The I of “I see” and “I don’t see” came as a departure in “I was glad”
and “I sang” because Henry is not such a big bad wolf to blow
Wordsworth’s house down.
Each poet writes of a particular sycamore, of whatever genus, and
recalls a “spot of time”, but Dream Song 1 comprehends these trees as
possessing generic characteristics. Berryman’s sycamore at once
trembles over Tennyson and shades Wordsworth and as we climb up
into it, it provides the vantage point from which we can discern the
seminal leaves of Shakespeare’s sycamores, which are now grown
into these poems. “Under the cool shade of a sycamore / I thought to
close mine eyes some half an hour”, relates Boyet to the Princess of
France in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “When lo, to interrupt my purposed
rest / Toward that shade I might behold addressed / The King and his
2
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Maud and Other Poems, London: J.M. Dent,
1974, 129.
3
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, eds Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and
Stephen Gill, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1979, 28-29.
4
William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson,
London: Oxford University Press, 1950, 163.
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Edward Clarke
companions.”5 Boyet’s solitude under a sycamore is disturbed by a
lovesick King and his Lords in the same way as Benvolio sees but
does not approach Romeo during a lonely pre-dawn walk “underneath
the grove of sycamore / That westward rooteth from this city side”.6 In
both cases the sycamore foreshadows the approach of those who are
lovesick (sick-amour), a pun apparent when Desdemona sings in
Othello: “The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, / Sing all a
green willow. / Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, / Sing
willow, willow, willow.”7
The time is come again in Dream Song 1 when we behold all these
figures addressed to interrupt Berryman’s purposed rest; addressed as
he sang, “Once in a sycamore”. This sycamore foreshadows more than
the sick-amour, it portends a departure from the “radar romanticism”
Berryman found so “incredibly boring”,8 but as the poem looks before
and after, singing to the dead whom he loves. The “I”’s of Tennyson
and Wordsworth are of many voices in Dream Song 1 as Berryman
compounds his “I” in the sycamore also out of attendant lords like
Boyet and Benvolio, “To swell a progress”,9 containing, explicating
and nursing Henry’s personal drama as it unfolds. These are the voices
“all at the top” in Henry’s head: the dead whom the poet loves. In
turn, these return to the poem to read it as posterity because the aftertime of Henry’s drama occurs as the poem unfolds and the poet makes
us remember assistant professors are not attendant lords.
All the time we must remember that Berryman’s American
sycamore is of a different genus from the sycamores in Tennyson,
Wordsworth and Shakespeare. In fact, it may be that Shakespeare’s
sycamores are after all mulberry trees, which resemble fig trees. This
Elizabethan misappropriation of the biblical Ficus Sycomorus,
common in Egypt and Syria, is as large a transition as Berryman’s
appropriation of Acer Pseudoplatanus by confusing it in his American
poem with Platanus occidentalis. Now Henry is suspended in his
sycamore singing not only to Lise but also to the chief among the
5
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, V.ii.89-93, in The Complete Works, eds
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 298.
6
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, I.i.118-19, in The Complete Works, 338.
7
William Shakespeare, Othello, IV.iii.38-41, in The Complete Works, 847.
8
John Berryman, “Hardy and His Thrush”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 244.
9
T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, London: Faber and Faber, 1969, 16. I
am not comparing Henry with Prufrock or Berryman with Eliot.
Berryman in His Sycamore
79
publicans in Jericho, Zacchaeus: “And he sought to see Jesus who he
was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And
he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him: for he
was to pass that way.”10 “In arborem sycomorum”11 Zacchaeus is
converted: “And he made haste, and came down and received [Jesus]
joyfully.”12 In a typological reading, Luke’s story partially redeems
the fig tree in Genesis,13 the large leaves of which provide aprons for
Adam and Eve; “that Sycamore, / Whose leaves first sheltered man
from drought and dew” as George Herbert says in “The World”.14
This sycamore shades all of our poets. As Sin’s Sycamore is planted in
the stately house that Love built in Herbert’s poem, we witness how
Berryman’s sycamore, “Working and winding slyly evermore, / The
inward walls and Sommers cleft and tore”.
As Berryman sings to the dead we have assembled in his sycamore
he is working and winding at the supporting beams of the traditional
forms he has inherited from them. Dream Song 1 announces an old
story, “Once in a sycamore”. The poet will speak of the love and the
feelings of the sick-amour, no longer lovesick, but sick of love and
figured as the survivor of a broken relationship. After Wordsworth’s
poem of relationship and love under a sycamore, Tennyson is still not
certain that love of Nature leads to love of mankind. In Dream Song 1,
the reader is less assured of his relationship with the poet. Does
Berryman comprehend what he has done as he writes for the dead
whom he loves? Is there a leap of conversion or recognition out of the
sycamore? As a poet Berryman wanted to see it and did not want to
see it and he frequently teased his readers so that Henry and we could
emerge. As an expired poet he still exudes through explications of his
work. But every poet, however reluctant to be gone, should be put to
rest. At least, then, he is greater than he knows. Now, Berryman’s
second self is night, until youthful poets attend him. Then again,
“Huffy Henry” is still having a lie-in, dreaming of an incident in a
sycamore, and still hanging over us. Dream Song 1 is not composed of
10
The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version: Luke, 19: 3-4.
Nouum Testamentum Latine: Secundum Lucam, 19: 4.
12
The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version: Luke, 19: 6.
13
“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and
they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons”, in The Holy Bible:
Authorized King James Version: Genesis, 3:7.
14
George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, London: Penguin, 1991, 77.
11
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Edward Clarke
“Rich Critical Prose” but Berryman makes it hard for us to leave “that
fragrant area” (Dream Song 170).
SHAKESPEARE AND BERRYMAN:
SONNET 129 AND DREAM SONG 1
KIT FRYATT
John Berryman was a dedicated and distinguished commentator on
Shakespeare, but this essay has nothing to say about his Shakespeare
scholarship. It does not seek to prove the influence of Sonnet 129 on
the first Dream Song, nor does it suggest that Berryman’s poem
definitely alludes to Shakespeare’s (I believe it does, but I cannot
prove it). Rather, it is a reading which, as Deborah Madsen comments
of the Jewish hermeneutic tradition known as midrash, “not only
revives … meanings but seeks out all semantic properties of the proof
text[s]”. 1
My title alludes to the essay “William Shakespeare and E.E.
Cummings” [sic], by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, which was
later revised by Graves and reprinted as “A Study in Original Spelling
and Punctuation”. 2 This “exercise in irresponsible editorial restraint” 3
applies much misplaced ingenuity to Sonnet 129 in defense of the
proposition that the punctuation and spelling of the 1609 Quarto
should be retained by modern editors as most conducive to
comprehension by “the plain reader”.4 Like practitioners of certain
kinds of midrash, Riding and Graves put forward interpretations that
1
Deborah L. Madsen, Re-reading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre, London:
Macmillan, 1995, 37.
2
Robert Graves, “A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling”, in The Common
Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922-1949, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949,
84-95.
3
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2001, 447.
4
Graves, “A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling”, 61.
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Kit Fryatt
are “often very free and sometimes obviously fictional”.5 While they
are not always to be trusted as scholars, there is something very
engaging about their sprightly certainty on such dubious matters as
how Shakespeare might have said “extreme” (rhymes with “lame”),
how seventeenth-century readers heavily inured to printerly error and
idiosyncrasy read punctuation (astonishingly, like over-ingenious
modernist poet-critics) and most overwhelmingly, what is good for us
“plain readers”. While scholars deplore Graves and Riding’s choice of
a poem already plentiful in linguistic crises and ambiguity for further
complication, it is also true that there is something peculiarly
appropriate in their determined over-reading of a poem that is actually
about perversity and self-delusion. Riding and Graves respond to
Sonnet 129 at a level beneath analysis and scholarship, reproducing
the poem’s excessiveness and illogicality, giving us an insight into its
power in a way denied more responsible approaches.
I want to argue here that Berryman’s first Dream Song shares its
mood of perversion and illogic, and some of its erotic anger, with
Sonnet 129; but further, that it is capable of being over-read in a way
which reveals, and indeed enacts, those qualities. Its alliterative
opening line, “Huffy Henry hid
the day”, immediately recalls the
Sonnet’s sour imitation of lovers panting in sexual excitement, “Had,
having and in quest to have, extreme” (l.10), suggesting an erotic
context to Henry’s sulk. This anticipates both the “departure” from
lovers’ complicity with “All the world” in lines seven to nine and the
Song’s final images of a scouring sea and a sterile bed.
The semantic plenitude of the first line of Shakespeare’s sonnet
also finds a fainter echo in Berryman’s first line. “Th’expense of
spirit” has both a general sense of “expenditure of energy” and a
specifically sexual connotation of “ejaculation”. Still richer, “a waste
of shame” might signify “an absence of modesty”, ungrammatically
but still powerfully, “a shameful waste”, and “a wasteful shame”, “an
unworthy squandering of honor or of instructive shame”, a paysage
moralisé containing a waste(land) called Shame, or even a pun on
“waist” (there is some support in Hamlet, II.ii.231-35 for the
anatomical imprecision). Some of these meanings are contradictory –
it is hard to see how a whole landscape of shame could appear in the
utter absence of modesty, for example. In a similar vein, “Huffy
Henry hid
the day” might mean “Henry hid himself for the whole
5
Madsen, Re-reading Allegory, 37.
Sonnet 129 and Dream Song 1
83
day in a huff”, “Henry concealed the day’s activities from his own or
others’ memories with his sulk”, or “Henry obscured the daylight with
the blackness of his mood”. That the first of these is the most likely
does not become apparent until the sixth line, and even then, since
“come out” might be a synonym for “talked” (as in “come out with
it”), it is not certain that it is himself that Henry is hiding. Later in the
Song, though possibly earlier in the sequence of events it describes,
Henry becomes public property, an anatomical specimen: “I don’t see
how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived” (ll.11-12).
This gives support both to a reading which sees Henry hiding himself
and one which sees Henry hiding the day: he might be prompted to
conceal himself after humiliating exposure, or the sight of a body
“pried / open for all the world to see” might be enough to obscure its
surroundings. Very much depends on how we read the extended
spacing of “hid
the day”. It may be a lacuna or a hesitation, a
missing rhythmic unit mediating the change from trochees (“Huffy
Henry”) to an iamb (“the day”), or simply a waste, a waste of space or
breath.
Sonnet 129, like many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, employs a
rhetorical grammar in which logical syntax is suspended. The
adjectival description of lust in lines three and four refers
grammatically to the quality of lust itself, and yet by extension also
implicates the lustful person; from lines five to twelve the longer
verbal and antithetical phrases may refer also to the person lusted after
as well as one or both of the former, or all three. The lustful person
and the object of his desire are grammatical ghosts, always implied
but never made manifest as the subject of a sentence. The abstraction
“lust” is concrete: those who give in to it waste themselves into
syntactic shadows. “Hunted” (l.6) must refer to the object of desire,
but once “had” she merges with lust itself, since both she and lust may
be “possessed” by her desirer, with “hated” he is conflated with both
of them, as he may hate himself, her, and lust as an abstraction. Our
sense that the speaker of the poem is someone who has experienced
lust and bitterly repudiates it must remain a conjecture implied by the
perverse movement of its grammar. Force of expectation produces a
lyric speaker, but there is no “I” in Shakespeare’s poem.
Berryman’s Dream Song, by contrast, is spoken by a distinct
persona, who appears in each stanza with a first-person statement.
This figure at first seems quite separate from Henry, claiming to “see
his point” in the third line but assuming a rather reproachful tone, “he
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Kit Fryatt
should have come out and talked”, in the sixth. The speaker is again
distinct from the group of people who have outraged Henry, but it is in
discussing them that he begins to move towards being Henry,
ventriloquizing his exasperation in a shower of fricatives: “It was the
thought that they thought / they could do it” (ll. 4-5). In the second
stanza the speaker’s ambiguously discrete status changes again. The
first two lines, with their homely syntax and metaphor, “All the world
like a woolen lover”, sound suspiciously like a rather self-pitying
individual talking about himself in the third person. But then the
speaker admits that he does not “see” how Henry can have survived
his humiliating exposure, “pried / open for all the world to see”. This
privileges the speaker even as it distinguishes him from Henry,
bringing him closer to the hero and away from the generality. For him,
seeing is synonymous with understanding; for “all the world” it is
simply an ocular function. However, the speaker achieves this
distinction between himself and the world only at the expense of not
seeing. Henry’s capacity for survival remains hidden. Shakespeare
also deals with what is universally understood but not seen, that is,
understood on the level of experience: “All this the world well knows,
yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”
This concluding couplet combines an apology for hackneyed material
with the psychological insight that it is difficult (perhaps impossible –
“none knows well”) to learn from an occurrence of lust, the sin
infinitely repeatable because it seems so heavenly at first. The
repetitions of “all the world” and “see” in Berryman’s second stanza
substantially replicate this experience of lust. “All the world”, which
“like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry’s side” (there is
perhaps a pun on “see” as well as “seam” here) becomes a gawping
mob at his dismemberment; the speaker, not seeing how he could have
survived, unintentionally evokes the same hellish spectacle.
In the first and second stanzas of Dream Song 1 the speaker
oscillates between being and not being Henry, so that Berryman’s
protagonist appears to move into first-person visibility, only to hide
again. It is a process analogous in many ways to the grammatical
fluidity of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, which conjures a pair of
protagonists – a lustful lover and his object – only to have them
dissolve back into an abstraction and a moralizing conclusion. In the
third stanza of Berryman’s Song, Henry and the speaker are decisively
conflated:
Sonnet 129 and Dream Song 1
85
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed. 6
The first person utterance here makes little sense unless it is spoken by
Henry, but no conventions of direct speech, quotation marks, italics,
even a preceding colon appear. And yet does Henry really speak, at
any rate in this Song? We are told, possibly by Henry referring to
himself in the third person, possibly by a separate speaker, “What he
has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be”. What we
get is not “a long wonder” (an extended fantasy or prolonged ponder)
but an ambiguous memory and a brisk aphorism. The “long wonder”
must refer to The Dream Songs as a whole, rather than these four
closing lines, which opens the Song again to the possibility of
multivocality, just when we thought that Henry was speaking to us
plain.
This wider reference, of course, applies as much to Shakespeare’s
sonnets as to The Dream Songs. Our desire for narrative may produce
protagonists in the individual sonnet or Song, who on closer
inspection prove to be elusive. I hope I have made my case that both
Shakespeare and Berryman use syntax to play on and with this
narrative desire. But such play becomes serious when considered
within the wider framework of the long poem or sequence. The
personae of Shakespeare’s sonnets have been the subject of exhaustive
and sometimes exhausting debate; similarly, the identification of
Henry with Berryman himself threatens a tedious reductionism. These
poems show that in both cases, the poet anticipates and supersedes
6
The sycamore has a Shakespearean and erotic context too: it reminds us, as Edward
Clarke notes in the previous contribution, of Desdemona’s “Willow Song”, bizarrely
transposed to a triumphant instead of tragic context. Instead of sitting singing beside a
sycamore this character is atop it, a radical change in pastoral iconography. As the
Arden edition of Othello notes, sycamores are not (unlike willows) associated with
grief. Shakespeare’s choice of tree seems to be a macaronic pun (sick-amour), one he
had used before, in Romeo and Juliet. The love-sickness that Henry suffers is not
Desdemona’s or Romeo’s, though it perhaps shares their respective tragedies’
flirtation with the stereotypes of comedy. See William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. A.J.
Honigmann, London: Methuen, 1999, 291. Benvolio finds Romeo in a sycamore
grove in I.i.121.
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Kit Fryatt
such criticism: the lyric and the dramatic are bound together in their
agile grammar.
FORM AND DISCONTENT:
THE PROSODY OF THE DREAM SONGS
PETER DENMAN
When The Dream Songs was published in 1969, Elizabeth Bishop
greeted it with a “Thank-You Note”, published in the Harvard
Advocate.1 It is a slight and occasional piece, playfully punning on
“berries” and Berryman’s name, but it nonetheless affords an entry
into his work. In the first couplet – “Mr Berryman’s songs and sonnets
seems to say: / ‘Gather ye berries harsh and crude while yet ye may’ ”
– there are at least three allusions to works by poets from the English
tradition. The first line recalls Donne’s Songs and Sonets, while the
second conflates Herrick (“Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may”) and
Milton (“I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude” from
“Lycidas”). After these textual allusions to English poetry, the second
half of Bishop’s poem moves on to a specifically American
experience that is non-literary and of the senses, evoking the
astringent taste of the chokecherry. If nothing else, this suggests that
what Bishop calls the “thick-bunched” fruit of The Dream Songs is
something of an acquired taste. Certainly, it presents an enduring
puzzle: while The Dream Songs is the most elaborate and sustained
exercise of his particular poetic methods, and arguably constitutes his
greatest achievement, Berryman’s Dream Song structure does not
seem to have entered fully into the corpus of late twentieth-century
poetry as an exemplary form.
“After thirty Falls” the degree to which Berryman’s poetry is being
eroded by subsequent history seems remarkable. Where once he was
an inevitable and insistent voice, he risks nowadays being consigned
1
Elizabeth Bishop, “Thank-You Note”, Complete Poems, London: Chatto and
Windus, 1983, 207.
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Peter Denman
to the status of a madman in our attic. It may be that the present
generation of readers is left uncomfortable and embarrassed by the
subject matter of many of the Songs. Sexual adventuring is now likely
to be regarded as predation; alcoholism and depression are conditions
to be treated and cured, and are not intrinsically interesting in
themselves; social faux-pas are not to be repeated; and grief is to be
kept within the bounds of decorum. Attitudes, which in their time
seemed daringly individual and innovative, are now regarded as
questionable and reprehensible.
It is not unusual for a poet’s reputation to dip after his death. The
details of Philip Larkin’s biography as they emerged had a notorious
effect on his posthumous reputation, because these details were
socially rebarbative to many of his readers. Indulgence of the poète
maudit, confessional and uncomfortable, appears to have been
replaced by an understandable preference that poets nowadays be
genial, adept at working a wine-and-cheese reception, and able to
exude affability on the book launch and poetry reading circuit that is
the cockpit of contemporary reputations. In Berryman’s case the
awkward aspects of the life are deeply embedded in the Dream Songs
themselves, and it may be simply that nowadays there is less of a
readership for poems based on a difficult and damaged life. The silent
criticism of the poems is, in part, a stricture on the behavior. The
prominence of Berryman’s own persona and experience has been an
issue from the outset, right from his disingenuous remarks about the
distancing of Henry. The distinction Berryman asserted between
Henry and himself has not ever been taken at face value. His use of
the stratagem is no more than a reminder of the distance to be
understood between the poetic first-person and the author: The Dream
Songs was, after all, written by a poet whose career was coincident
with the heyday of New Criticism and its insistence on the exclusion
of the poet as subject.
The Dream Songs is characterized by Helen Vendler as a sequence
of “Freudian cartoons”: with its repetitions and anecdotes in
freewheeling, free-associating language, the poem mirrors the regular
therapeutic interviews of psychoanalytic sessions.2 The Freudian
reference is also a reminder of the complexity of the personality that is
depicted through the different speakers and voices characterizing the
2
Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets, London: Faber
and Faber, 1995, 31.
The Prosody of The Dream Songs
89
Songs. This complexity is apparent not just in the multiplicity of
voices and attitudes that the poems contain, but also in their structure.
While there is undoubtedly an identifiable Dream Song form, it is a
form characterized by variation and multiplicity. The usefulness of the
structure of the Dream Songs is that it allows for different registers of
language: for different voices, and different levels of what used to be
called “poetic diction”. The changes in diction may or may not
coincide with changes in voice. Denis Donoghue has shown this at
work within a single stanza of the very first Dream Song. In its final
stanza,
the first voice is objective, the poet introducing his character, giving
the gist of his theme. The second voice may be received as Henry’s
voice, recalling the good times, sycamores and songs. But the third
voice is different from either; it is generic, representative, apocalyptic,
Mankind rather than any particular man, Henry or J.B. or anyone else.
In this third voice the feeling is universal rather than local; it is
consistent with the first and second voices, but distinct, as if its
experience was the history of the world rather than the fate of a man.
It is my understanding that these three voices are nearly as many as
the poet requires for his long poem.3
The triple stanza structure also has a practical use in a poem that has
three speakers, although the distribution of voices and diction is
played against the tripartite song structure and does not at any time
coincide with it. The presence of the alternative voice or voices is
more for interjection and interrogation, punctuating and disrupting the
larger progress of the song as much for rhythmic as for dramatic
effect.
The emergence of the Dream Songs and the characteristic form
associated with them can be traced back to Berryman’s “Nervous
Songs”. 4 These “Songs”, according to Berryman himself, grew out of
his “admiration for Die Stimmen [The Voices] of Rilke”.5 “The
Nervous Songs” foreshadow The Dream Songs in at least two
respects. They have three six-line stanzas and they use putative
speakers, as indicated by the titles: “The Professor’s Song”, “The
3
Denis Donoghue, “Berryman’s Long Dream”, in John Berryman: Modern Critical
Views, ed. Harold Bloom, New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1989, 22-23.
4
See “The Nervous Songs” (CP 49-55).
5
Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 210.
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Peter Denman
Song of the Bridegroom”, and so on. The form of the titles, and the
description as “song”, imitate Rilke. Two of Rilke’s nine pieces have
three six-line stanzas, the basis of the form that Berryman adopts
throughout “The Nervous Songs” and which later provided the shape
of the Dream Songs. However, there are two significant differences in
the stanza form as Berryman developed it for The Dream Songs. A
distinctive feature of the Dream Song stanza is its use of shorter third
and sixth lines. This is the crucial difference from the Nervous Songs,
in which the basic six-line stanza is made up of lines without any
patterns of variation, although “The Song of the Young Hawaiian”
does use a short final line in each stanza. “The Song of the Man
Forsaken and Possessed” drops a line in its final stanza.
However, it is the short third line in the Dream Songs, typically
containing two beats as opposed to the four or five beats in the longer
lines, which allows for a turn in the progress of the Dream Song
stanza. The prosodic break marked by the shorter third line of the
Dream Song stanza, and the change in sense that is frequently
associated with it, are important because they are instrumental in
resisting the emergence of a steady progression through the stanza.
Further, the final short line of the stanza allows for a variety of
terminal effects that may range from closure to enjambment. Along
with the shorter third and sixth lines, which become established as a
normative but by no means invariable feature of the stanza, there is
also the fact that the stanzas of all but one of the “Nervous Songs” are
end-stopped.
The Dream Song stanza is typically but by no means invariably
made up of longer first, second, fourth and fifth lines, and short third
and sixth lines. The normative long line of the stanza exhibits five
beats distributed across ten syllables, and they conform to the standard
iambic pentameter. Many lines fall perfectly into that pattern: “These
lovely motions of the air, the breeze” (Dream Song 146) and
“Transfixed in Schadenfreude like a mission” (Dream Song 202). The
later Songs in the “Op. posth.” group (Section IV of The Dream
Songs) follow iambic pentameter rhythms closely. In Dream Song 89,
for example, all twelve long lines can be scanned according to that
pattern, and the only departures from strict meter are variations in the
placing of the first beat (lines one, possibly eleven, and sixteen) and
an extra initial unstressed syllable in line seven. The underlying
presence of the iambic pentameter throughout The Dream Songs as a
standard measure from which to depart and to which to return is one
The Prosody of The Dream Songs
91
of the features giving a formal continuity to the sequence.
Furthermore, the use of the standard line of English verse in The
Dream Songs aligns Berryman with those exemplary English poets
evoked by Elizabeth Bishop in her “Thank-You Note”, especially
Donne and Milton. The Songs and Sonets display a similar
conversational “nervous idiom” and a range of sexual and emotional
activity to The Dream Songs, while “Lycidas” foreshadows the elegiac
quality that underpins so much of Berryman’s sequence.6
The third and sixth lines of each Dream Song stanza tend to be
shorter, typically with three beats. Again, there are many departures
from this basic pattern. For instance, in the final stanza of Dream Song
53, its third and sixth lines are among the longest in the poem, with
fourteen and seventeen syllables respectively. The fifth line of the
stanza is reduced to four syllables and two beats, and it might be
argued that here one of the short lines has been moved to a new
position in the stanza:
Kierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read ’papers,
and that was not, friends, his worst idea.
Tiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything,
a programme adopted early on by long Housman,
and Gottfried Benn
said:–We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.
The long third and sixth lines of this stanza can really only be
reckoned by a syllable count and not in terms of beats. The prosodic
variation here is not an extension of the line’s poetic rhythm but a
departure from it. The lines do not admit of a regular scansion, and the
beat pattern is abandoned for what becomes effectively a prose
rhythm. In instances such as these, the overall rhythm does not derive
from the placing of stresses and beats, but from a larger oscillation
that moves between a poetically shaped phrasing and a prose phrasing.
The second line of the sestet quoted above is perfectly scannable as
five regular beats, with an unstressed syllable substituted by a pause
between the beats on “not” and “friends”. The non-metrical lines in
the stanza are those containing quotations or ideas imported from
6
Berryman further acknowledges his appreciation of Milton’s pastoral elegy in his
1957 short story “Wash Far Away”, which is included in The Freedom of the Poet,
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 367-86.
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Peter Denman
figures outside the poem, while Berryman’s own comment is cast in
metrical form.
Other departures from the matrix of the stanza structure result from
added or interpolated lines. Dream Song 92 (subtitled “Room 231: the
fourth week”) begins with a preliminary extra-stanzaic line, followed
by a formally regular first stanza. The organization of the lines in the
second stanza of Dream Song 99 (“Temples”) is radically disrupted,
but in the final stanza there is a progressive return to formal regularity,
complete with a terminal rhyme. In this instance, the final line is used
to provide closure by returning to the rightness of the full rhyme on
“wrong” with its self-referential comment on the song: “– Mr Bones,
you too advancer with your song, / muching of which are wrong.” The
very final words of the final Dream Song (385) are in the appended
half-line “my heavy daughter”, which is extra-metrical. That half-line
is typographically separated from the rest of the poem. It stands
outside the triple stanza structure, a structure marked by a carefully
observed rhyme scheme that has been completed by the full rhyme of
the three-beat sixth line of the final stanza: “I wouldn’t have to scold”.
The appended phrase is necessary in order to complete the syntax and
the thought of the poem, but it disrupts the closely observed rhyme
scheme, and also breaks out of the shape of the poem on the page, the
form of the stanza, of the song itself, and even by extension of the
entire sequence.
The Dream Song triple sestet is a regular sustained stanza structure
that allows for play against and within the form as the long sequence
develops. It affords a unity with an unusual degree of variation.
Berryman often uses it as a syntactically open form, in which the
discursive flow of the sentence is not end-stopped at the stanza break
but runs on. This open form, in which the stanza boundaries are
subordinate to the flow and to the spatial rearrangement as lines are
inserted or extended, reminds us that the overall form is that of a
poetic sequence, in which an individual Dream Song links into a
larger form. Between the levels of the individual song and of the full
sequence are other groupings. They may reflect the composition and
publication history: 77 Dream Songs (1964) was followed by His Toy,
His Dream, His Rest in 1968. Then there are the seven irregularly
sized sub-divisions marked by roman numerals; at a lower level there
are groups linked by headings or titles, such as the fourteen “Op.
Posth.” (Dream Songs 78 to 91), the two Songs headed “The
Translator” (180 and 181), the three-headed “Henry’s Farewell” (276,
The Prosody of The Dream Songs
93
277, and 278). Some are linked verbally, as in Dream Songs 83 and
84, where the last word of the former (“Plop”) is picked up in a very
different context as the beginning of the latter. In addition, there are
song-groups linked thematically: the poems about Asia or Dublin, the
elegies for Delmore Schwartz, and so on.
Occasionally, there are meta-formal references, in which the poems
refer to their own form, as does for instance Dream Song 146, the first
of the poems about the death of Schwarz, which announces its own
ending in the last line: “I have tried to be them, god knows I have
tried, / but they are past it all, I have not done, / which brings me to
the end of this song.” Berryman writes nine more songs on Schwartz’s
death (they are among the most powerful of all the Songs) and then
commences the next poem: “Ten Songs, one solid block of agony, / I
wrote for him, and then I wrote no more” (Dream Song 157). These
are lines about grief, but the meta-formal description in the first of
them shows Berryman thinking of the group as a unit.
End-rhyme is used predominantly but not inevitably in The Dream
Songs. When used, there is a great variety in the type of rhyme
admitted, from full rhyme to slant rhyme and assonance. Feminine
rhyme is used relatively sparingly. The rhymes are typically in three
pairs within each stanza. Even though syntactically the stanzas are
treated as open forms, it is rare for a rhyme to extend across a stanza
break. However, within the stanza, the rhymes may fall in any pattern.
Frequently the short third and sixth lines rhyme. The rhyme scheme is
not consistent across the three stanzas of a particular song, and rhyme
may be abandoned for part or all of it. The variety of rhyme patterns,
and the frequent absence of rhyme, means that rhyme does not serve
to define the normative form of the Dream Songs. It does not have a
basic pattern throughout the Dream Songs, other than that it does not
extend beyond a stanza. While the stanzas are open syntactically,
rhyme if present tends to be closed and confined within the six lines of
the stanza.
Yeats, a modern master of stanzaic poetry and an acknowledged
influence on Berryman, might be thought to have provided a model
for the Dream Song form. However, the particular Dream Song sestet
with its waist-like centre and the narrow pedestal of its final short line
is not found in Yeats’ work. The overall arrangement exhibits
affinities with the stanzas of Elizabethan and early sixteenth-century
songs and lyrics. The closest twentieth-century model for the Dream
Song stanza is perhaps to be found in Dylan Thomas’ early poetry,
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Peter Denman
poetry that Berryman presumably knew given his contacts with
Thomas.7 Poems such as “A Process in the Weather of the Heart”
offer a close model: two lines of between eight and ten syllables
followed by a six-syllable line, repeated. A similar outline shape
occurs in poems such as “Where once the waters of your face”, “Our
Eunuch Dreams”, and in the first section of “I, in my intricate image”,
and other poems. These offer close precedents for the shape of the
Dream Song stanza. Berryman departs from it principally in flexibility
of rhyme and line length, and in the rhythms employed.
There are also occasional traces of Thomas in the linguistic register
and use of language in The Dream Songs. It is in Thomas that
precedents for some of Berryman’s characteristic turns can be found.
Were it not so well known we might have difficulty assigning
Thomas’ phrase “A grief ago” to Thomas or Berryman.8 “Grief” and
its variants are prominent in the Berryman lexicon, right from “The
Ball Poem” and its “ultimate shaking grief” through to The Dream
Songs (see, for example, Dream Songs 3, 36, 84, 121, 139, and 203)
and the neoligistic “grievy” at the centre of Dream Song 385. “A grief
ago” is a notable case of poetic linguistic deviation, and in Dream
Song 15 we find Berryman following the paradigm set up by Thomas:
“Let us suppose, valleys & such ago.” Scattered throughout the Songs
are other lines that read like pure Thomas.
Of course, there are many other registers of speech in The Dream
Songs that are nothing like Thomas. The difference between the two
poets is that, first of all, the Dream Songs move through a far greater
range of diction than does Thomas’ poetry. Secondly, notwithstanding
the occasional overlap of language intensity, there is always the sense
with Thomas that the words are some way ahead of the lived
experience. His poems generate a mood or attitude that is in excess of
the sensed actuality. That is their strength: the poems create through
their writing. In The Dream Songs one cannot avoid the impression
that the space between what is represented in the poems and the lived
experiential background is minimal: for Berryman, the work of the
language is to make that experience transferable to the reader or
7
For an account of Berryman’s contact and engagement with Thomas, see Philip
Coleman, “‘An unclassified strange flower’: Towards an Analysis of John Berryman’s
Contact with Dylan Thomas”, in Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall, eds John
Goodby and Chris Wigginton, Special Issue of The Swansea Review, 20 (2000), 2233.
8
See Dylan Thomas, Poems 1934-1952, London: J.M. Dent, 1952, 54.
The Prosody of The Dream Songs
95
listener. The success of The Dream Songs is that it achieves this
transfer. It was this immediacy of experience – its astringent
chokecherry taste – that first won admiration for Berryman’s long
poem.
It is a quality, too, that reminds us that The Diary of Anne Frank
loomed large in Berryman’s consciousness throughout the time he was
writing The Dream Songs. It figured on his teaching courses, and at
the end of his life he was working on an essay on it, “The
Maturation”. The diary form, in which the development of the work,
its composition, and the life it records, all proceed more or less
contemporaneously, enables us to understand the form of The Dream
Songs. Both works are, as it were, “written to the moment”; the life
being recorded is a life under pressure; in each case the overall work
is made up of separate parcels of writing that together are components
of an eventual whole: the daily entries in the diary, the individual
poems in The Dream Songs. A further, contingent, similarity is that
our responses to both works are conditioned by awareness of events
subsequent to, and outside, but intimately germane to their
composition. Our knowledge of Frank’s capture, transportation and
death is an integral and inevitable part of our reading of the diary. It
was not always the case that our knowledge of Berryman’s suicide
was integral and inevitable to his poetry (unlike the diary, the poems
were in circulation before the poet’s death) but his suicide now colors
our reading of them inseparably.
Charles Thornbury offers a valuable analysis of Berryman’s
language in his Introduction to his edition of the Collected Poems
1937-1971. Although this does not include The Dream Songs, many of
the features that give the language of The Dream Songs its particular
appearance, its nervous idiom, are attributable to the possibilities and
demands of their prosodic features. These are not unique to The
Dream Songs, for many of them appear in earlier Berryman works,
but it is in The Dream Songs that they are deployed to the greatest
extent and become integral to the fabric of the verse. The inserted
blank spaces in mid-line may be rhythmical, put there to indicate a
pause in the reading act without interfering with the syntactical
punctuation or the overall lineation. As such, they are a typographical
marker of the traditional caesura, but the caesura is much more firmly
associated with grammar. They also create additional positions of
privilege in line. Just as the line offers the possibility of highlighting a
word by its placement at the beginning or end, the caesura-type space
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Peter Denman
offers an additional position of privilege by placing a pause before,
after, or between words; in that way it adds to the versatility of the
basic form. It is a device that Berryman deploys in the very first line
of The Dream Songs: “Huffy Henry hid
the day.” The break marks
off the opening alliterative string, and makes the verb ambiguous
before the hesitation in deciding whether it is transitive or not: are we
to take it that the day has in some sense been hidden by Henry, as the
syntagmatic string would suggest or, more likely, are we to take “the
day” adverbially, indicating the time when or during which Henry was
hidden.
In the last line of Dream Song 88 (“Op. Posth. 11”), “I didn’t hear
a single
word. I obeyed”, one can see that the space in the text
before “word” offers a pause that operates in a radically different way
to the pause at the full stop. The latter marks syntactical completion.
The former separates the noun from its epithet and so cuts across a
basic syntactical unit. It creates a pause that is dramatic; as placed
here the delay seems to enact the “not hearing”. The absence or
silence that ensues after “single” is that of a word, both generically
and literally. A similar effect occurs in Dream Song 295: “so well it’s
hard to think of anything you need”. Here the visual enactment of
a pause corresponds to the difficulty of thinking, as of hearing in the
previous example. Again, the pause is placed in the middle of a
phrasal verb. As a result, the space generates an effect of double
syntax. The first part of the line appears to offer a complete and
absolute statement about the difficulty of thinking. This is modified by
the completion of the line, which changes the import of the statement
to focus on immediate and contingent requirements: “anything you
need”. As the verb receives its momentarily delayed completion we
move, with a faintly comic bathos, from the realm of philosophy to
that of list making.
The use of the suffix “-t” as opposed to “-ed” as the terminal mark
of the past form of the verb rises as a stylistic mannerism of
Berryman, but is directly related to reproducing speech and avoiding
any suggestion of disrupting the metrical structure and syllable count
of the line by sounding “ed” as a separate syllable. In the central
stanza of Dream Song 5 we get a clear sense of the spoken quality:
Henry sats in the plane & was gay.
Careful Henry nothing said aloud
but where a Virgin out of cloud
The Prosody of The Dream Songs
97
to her mountain dropt in light,
his thoughts made pockets & and the plane buckt.
‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’
For all the care in saying nothing aloud, by its end the stanza has
slipped into direct speech, carefully rendering the elisions of the
spoken word. Here the elisions are those of speech and are not
primarily in the service of prosody. The same can be said of many of
the utterances of Henry’s “friend”. Other phonetic niceties are more
puzzling. Describing arrival in Ireland, Dream Song 342 tells how
“The tender left the liner & headed for shore. / Cobh (pronounced
Khove) approached, our luggage was ready.” The scruple to convey
the pronunciation of the Irish place name looks like the sort of
interpolated remark a poet might make when giving a reading, except
that at a reading it would be superfluous, as the pronunciation and not
the spelling would be primary. It is not altogether an interpolated
comment, as the line with the parenthetical gloss has the same syllable
count of twelve as the lines before and after. So this is a phonetic
detail for the silent reader. The case is all the more curious in that the
name of Cobh occurs also in the previous stanza, but the strangeness
of the pronunciation is passed over in silence. Indeed, in Dream Song
306 he has already written “The green green fields between Cobh
(Khove) & Dublin”.
It is, however, a reminder of the spoken quality that is fundamental
to Berryman’s poetry, and especially in The Dream Songs. Many
commentators, following Berryman himself, have pointed to the
presence of different voices in the poem, linked to different speakers.
Vendler has linked the poems to the “talking cure” of repeated
sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch. In addition to that, the generic
name “Song” suggests vocalization. This virtual enactment of speech
is further represented in details of the form and language. Berryman
frequently has recourse to a number of devices in which qualities
specific to speech are characterized and conveyed in print, among
them capitalization, italicization, unusual spelling, typographical
rearrangement, and straightforward verbal description. While these are
markers of the “nervous idiom”, they also work hand in hand with the
prosodic features of the songs to give them the distinctive formal
qualities that individuate them as a form.
Berryman does not scruple to mark a syllable with an accent when
he wants it to carry a beat. He is one of the few twentieth-century
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Peter Denman
poets (since the publication of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Poems in
1918) to use the device extensively, with the possibly more recent
exception of Geoffrey Hill.9 Again, it is a feature that indicates the
importance Berryman attached to the sound and prosodic structure of
his songs. Dream Song 4 is a poem that, after the first stanza,
becomes either dialogue or snatches of interior monologue. Yet, in the
descriptive first stanza that sets the situation, the sounds of speech are
formally crucial. The word “paprika” has two possible stress patterns
in English; the primary accent may fall on the first or second syllable
of the word. Berryman marks it to make clear that it is to be read as
“páprika”, so making the entire line accord with a regular iambic
pentameter rhythm: “with chicken páprika, she glanced at me.” This
metrical regularity is important, given the abrupt disruption of the
third line immediately after, which is reduced to a single syllable,
“twice”. The pentameter also gives a pointer to picking up the fourth
line, which practically mirrors the second: “Fainting with interest, I
hungered back.” This again has ten syllables, in the same iambic
pentameter rhythm apart from a trochee substitution in the very first
foot, a standard variation. However, before finally establishing this
metrical reading, there is a minor problem to solve.
This line has a comma marking a pause in precisely the same place
as in the second line, and before the comma another metrically
ambivalent word: do we read “interest” as two syllables or three? The
example of “páprika” invites us to follow its stress pattern, and say
“int-er-est”. The next line breaks from the iambic pentameter pattern
and enacts in its rhythm something of the impatient restraint of which
it speaks. The rising duple pattern of the iambics is replaced by a
rising triple rhythm, in which the beats are typically preceded by two
off-beat syllables: “and ónly the fáct of her húsband & fóur other
péople / képt me from sprínging on hér.” In a recording of Berryman
reading this song, it is noticeable that he observes the integrity of the
line structure in the opening stanza, marking the line endings with a
pause. In the later stanzas, where the metrical structure is looser, the
line endings are less marked in the reading performance.10
9
See, for example, Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech!, Washington: Counterpoint, 2000.
As evidenced, for example, in the reading of the poem by Berryman included in
Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath, eds Elise
Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, Naperville, Illinois: MediaFusion, 2001, CD3,
Track 9.
10
The Prosody of The Dream Songs
99
The use of an interpolated syllable such as “ha” or “ho”, or “O”, is
frequent throughout The Dream Songs. These are apparently phatic
syllables, signifiers without a signified that can serve two functions.
They can be expressive of emotion, and they can fill out the metrical
shape to a line without having to resort to awkward inversions or
poetic diction. Indeed, if meaningless syllables can be pulled into
service, it is also true that normal words are sometimes pressed to
become rhythmical beats in their repetition, as in the use of “all” in
Thomas’ line: “All all and all the dry worlds lever” [sic]. 11 Once
noticed, it can be seen that this is a stylistic mannerism of The Dream
Songs that is used with remarkable frequency, and goes considerably
beyond the rhetorical device of repetition. It is often used as an
opening device, where the artificiality of the repetition immediately
establishes a rhythmic entrance to the poem: “Stomach & arm,
stomach & arm” (Dream Song 163); “Love me love me love me love
me love me” (Dream Song 192). Conversely, in Dream Song 147 the
repeated “Delmore, Delmore” emerges as a refrain, an instance in
which there is a clear formal carry over from one stanza to another.
Moreover, in Dream Song 22 there is a repeated initial element
through the first two stanzas as each line begins with “I am”, and then
in the third stanza across the second-last line of the song: “in vain, in
vain, in vain”. Similarly, in Dream Song 153: “a day, a day, a day.”
To conclude, let us consider briefly some of the prosodic features
that effect of one of the best-known songs, Dream Song 384, the
penultimate in the sequence. This strong poem is one of the climactic
poems of the sequence and it is remarkable how Berryman returns to
prosodic regularity for this poem of extreme emotion. Here the
meaningless syllabic fillers take on meaning, and become expressive
where the “oh ho” of line 9 becomes an exclamation of grief, similar
in function to the more conventional “alas” that follows in the same
line. The poem has a full rhyme scheme that, unusually, follows a
consistent abcabc pattern in all three stanzas. All the longer lines
conform to iambic pentameter, with variations only in the first line
(“flowerless”) and at the end of the third-last line where we have to let
the first syllable of Henry carry the stress, although the rhyme with
“see” in line 1 of the stanza, and the dominant rising prosodic pattern
suggests its unnatural movement to the second syllable. In these pairs
11
See Dylan Thomas, “All all and all”, in Collected Poems 1934-1953, eds Walford
Davies and Ralph Maud, London: J.M. Dent, 1993, 29.
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of lines linked by rhyme there is an interpolated “ha” that carries a
beat, as does the “ho” in the short central line of the second stanza. In
each stanza there is an unstressed middle syllable (“-er”):
“flowerless”, “indifference”, “mouldering”. In the case of “interest” in
Dream Song 4 we saw how the prosody there invited us to give that an
unambiguous three-syllable reading. In each of these instances taken
from Dream Song 384, the “-er” may be either elided or treated as an
extra and supernumerary unstressed syllable. The short lines of this
song mostly have three beats, except for the third line of the final
stanza, which is cut in two. The equivalent lines of the two previous
stanzas would, without the repetitions of “often” and “alas”, also have
just two beats. The poem is about a repetitive and obsessive visitation.
The stanzas move progressively through the tenses, from the past
(“often, often before / I’ve made this awful pilgrimage”) through the
present (“I come back for more, // I spit”) to the future (“I’d like to
scrabble”). Nevertheless, it is trapped in repetitions and doublings:
“often, often before”, “I come back for more”, “moan & rave”, “right
down/away down”, “heft the ax once more”. The first rhyme word is
one of completion (“done”) and the last is one of commencement
(“start”), suggesting that this “final card” may not, after all, be all that
final.
Berryman’s poems can be read not just for their exuberant
explorations of the self, in other words, but as exercises in formal and
linguistic discovery. Their language has attracted much comment, but
it is important to acknowledge too the way that this remarkable
language is informed not just by the rhythms of idiomatic speech but
by prosodic and structural techniques that have determined the
character of poetry throughout its history and development, from
Donne’s Songs and Sonets to Berryman’s Dream Songs and beyond.
“DRAMATIZING THE DREADFUL”:
AFFECTIVE POSTURES IN THE DREAM SONGS
ANTHONY CALESHU
Perhaps more than most poets, Berryman’s poetry relies on
“postures”. While one might fruitfully explore his oeuvre to this end, I
want to concentrate on The Dream Songs, where his postures take the
forms of various performative fronts, often exploiting writer-readertext relations, acknowledged ironies, and necessary contrivances. Selfawareness of situation and sentiment is ever-present, but often comes
second behind dramatic displays of denial, loss, ignorance, and
pretence. These last terms, when linked with others I am going to be
attaching to Berryman’s poetry – including “theatrical”,1 “unnatural”,
and, to complicate my interest in “the affects”, “affected” – may seem
to invoke the negative connotations one typically associates with the
term “posture”. To be sure, Berryman’s postures manifest as
emotional risks, complicated in their potential to incite reception of
the poet as impostor, which is most readily apparent when a writer’s
sense of self and subject are at odds with the audience’s desire for
sincerity, credibility, and believability (issues with which Berryman
himself was often concerned).2 Instead of being destructive, however,
I want to explore how Berryman’s postures contribute to the mostly
1
For discussions about the often negative reception of the “theatrical” in the arts, see
the Introduction to Performativity and Performance, eds Andrew Parker and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, London: Routledge, 1995, 3. For an interesting discussion of the
“show”, “falseness”, and the “theory of stage craft”, see “ ‘A Fan’s Eye View’: Bruce
Springsteen interviewed by Nick Hornby”, The Observer Music Monthly, 23 (July
2005), 9-14.
2
See Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman” (1972), in
Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry
Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 18-44.
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positive affects of his poetry since the risks involving identity, formal
technique, and melodrama enable a complicated reader response.
Initially I am relying on a basic dictionary definition, exploring
Berryman’s “postures” for 1) his stance as “poet” in relation to both
reader and persona; 2) the physical carriage of his deliberate use of
form; and 3) to take “posture” as an intransitive verb – the
exaggerated or unnatural attitude assumed by the persona Henry in
The Dream Songs.3 Inevitable to exploring a poet whose personality is
so bound up with his poetry, these variable distinctions will often
intersect. Further, as one might expect from what Berryman called a
poem “strictly about a personality”,4 Berryman’s exploitation of the
“dramatic” 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).
If we take it a step further and think of The Dream Songs as a selfconscious drama, overt in stagecraft, the postures of the poem are akin
to the theatricality of its own vaudevillian act. Berryman’s desire,
then, is both to build and break down the “fourth-wall” between
character and audience in order to strengthen the possibility of our
shared liability for the staged life which he’s unraveling before us.
Complicating our reception, however, is that as quickly as the long
poem professes a direct discourse of sentiment, it acknowledges that it
is pretending to be something it is not: it is not about its author John
Berryman (“not the poet, not me” reads the prefatory “Note” to The
Dream Songs). Moreover, it is evasive about Henry’s past (why is he
so hurt?), and discursive in plot (where is he going? what does he
want?). All of this contributes to the tragic/comic paradigm: a
dramatic show is being produced, not on a false stage, but on an
intricately contrived one. Author, character, form, and language stand
at militant attention as various poses and guises are assumed. If, at
times, the expression of situation and emotion disguises the very
sentiment being relayed (we laugh when we should cry and vice
versa), we similarly have to acknowledge that this is part of the
desired effect. For the artificial world of “loss” constructed in The
3
See “Posture”, in The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edn, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1992, 1416.
4
In a reading in 1969, Berryman qualified The Dream Songs in terms of “personality”
and Eliot: “The poem is all about Henry, just one man, and it’s done in terms of what
T.S. Eliot said we must not do, that is to say it is strictly about a personality” (Festival
of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Italy, 1969).
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
103
Dream Songs is a world of paradoxically naturalizing affect. As
readers, we are asked not only to recognize it, but to indulge in the
theatre of a poem which engages in a project of “dramatizing the
dreadful” as Berryman puts it in Dream Song 146.
The “Note” with which Berryman prefaces The Dream Songs is
our first experience of Berryman manipulating poet-reader relations in
order to complicate our engagement with his imagined worlds:
Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the
character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work. It
is idle to reply to critics, but some of the people who addressed
themselves to the 77 Dream Songs went so desperately astray … that I
permit myself one word. The poem then, whatever its wide cast of
characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet,
not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age
sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss ….
As an author, Berryman poses both direct and indirect fronts,
explicitly offering us the posture of his “interpretive interest”, while
similarly denying an interest in such, permitting himself only “one
word”. Charles Altieri tells us that:
Artists work hard to efface the signs of their interpretive interests so
that the audience will take the sensuous properties themselves as the
expressive register rather than treating them as only a meditation of
what the artist “wants to say.” But there are also levels within the
work where the awareness of affectively charged sensations does
involve a relation to the artist’s purposive activity.5
Though one might argue that Berryman’s “Note” is not part of the art,
it sets the very deliberate stage for the art. His “purposive activity” or
“will”, as Altieri uses the term, directly contributes to his poetry’s
“affective charg[e]”, thereby establishing the very bond he seems to
wish to dismantle between writer and reader.
In the late 1960s, at just about the time Berryman was writing his
prefatory “Note” to The Dream Songs, the subject of authorship was
being explored by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Though
Barthes and Foucault had different goals in mind, Berryman offers a
5
Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2003, 237.
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perverted dramatization of what a destabilized author can achieve to
his own end. Where another author might accept the faults of his text,
in removing himself as governing force (the “opinions and errors” are
not to be referred to him), Berryman assumes the posture of one
without authority for the transgressions of the text (both Henry’s and
his; both moral and formal). Further, Berryman bucks expectations by
removing his character from fault, thereby defaulting “opinions and
errors” onto a piece of the text itself, the “title of the work”.
Significantly, they are not “My” Dream Songs or even “Henry’s”
Dream Songs; but while “Songs” can exist in a nether space (that is, as
anonymous songs), “Dreams” must be attached to someone in order to
be affecting. To this end, the public’s need to attach The Dream Songs
to someone – Berryman or Henry – is so strong that the posture of
trying to remove the thing that is most human about them, ironically,
draws the reader back to the very source which Berryman has told us
they do not come from. Though Berryman has set the reader to work
dismantling the unity of the author, in effect, the dramatic
performance of protest in the “Note” ends up reinforcing it: he not
only re-authors himself as “the poet, [the] me”, but in turn becomes
more-than-ever the “imaginary character … named Henry”.
I am not interested in reading The Dream Songs biographically, per
se, but in exploring the affect of a posture that achieves the opposite of
the poet’s expressed intentions. As frustrated as he was with the
“critics … who … went so desperately astray” in reviewing 77 Dream
Songs, as he writes in his “Note”, Berryman also, whether unwittingly
or not, started an elaborate game with his readers and critics by
denying them what they not only know to be true, but may have
wanted to be true. One might wonder if the public’s inherent belief in
the confessionalism of the times brought Berryman to write the
“Note”, or if, alternatively, he wanted to pose an interesting challenge
to the idea of confessionalism, which of course, he helped foster.
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? In his Paris Review interview with
Peter Stitt he explained:
Henry both is and is not me, obviously. We touch at certain points.
But I am an actual human being; he is nothing but a series of
conceptions – my conceptions. I brush my teeth; unless I say so
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
105
somewhere in the poem ... he doesn’t brush his teeth. He only does
what I make him do. If I have succeeded in making him believable, he
performs all kinds of other actions besides those named in the poem,
but the reader has to make them up. That’s the world. But it’s not a
religious or philosophical system.6
As quickly as Berryman singles out that they are “my conceptions”, he
defers to the reader as creative partner. The reader, in other words,
must contribute not only to the making up of Henry’s world, but to the
making up of Henry himself. This not only ensures that the reader has
to assume some of the responsibility for the “opinions and errors” that
become Henry and the Songs, but ensures what Berryman, in fact,
desires most – a close readership.
Barthes tells us that “The text you write must prove to me that it
desires me”.7 If only implicit in the “Note”, Berryman makes explicit
his desire for an appropriate (that is, learned) readership in The Dream
Songs. Note the famous beginning of Dream Song 35: “Hey, out
there! – assistant professors, full, / associates, – instructors – others –
any – / I have a sing to shay!” Berryman/Henry begins the poem
demanding academic attention, but after the tenured professors and
even the instructors decline the invitation, he moves on to accept the
attention of those much lower down the ranks (be they academic or
not): “others – any.” As I will discuss later in this essay, Berryman’s
own sense of learnedness means he hopes to condition a complex
affective response. If the “Note” made the writer-reader bond seem
parasitic at worst, however, the promise of professional promotion in
studying The Dream Songs (assistants and associates can become full
professors) brings readers to writers in symbiotic union. From needing
readers to needing the fame that comes with readers is not such a long
jump, and Berryman was particularly concerned that the public-atlarge be interested in him as a celebrity poet. Indeed, his
acknowledged sense of fame as a subject throughout The Dream
Songs forms the basis for the complicated posture that he cares “less”
for, that which “obsess[es]” him most: “As he grew famous – ah, but
what is fame? – he lost his old obsession with his name” (Dream Song
133). The fame Berryman secured for himself with the publication of
The Dream Songs had the knock-on effect of making him feel the
need to produce for a readership which, in its expectancy, made the
6
7
Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 31.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 2000, 6.
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later Songs something of a chore: “I sing with infinite slowness finite
pain”, Henry tells us in Dream Song 305. But by this point in the long
poem, the question of identity has been turned upside down once
again; Henry is no longer a product of Berryman so much as
Berryman has become a product of Henry, the celebrated dummy
speaking through the slumped posture of the defeated ventriloquist.
In not achieving the removal of the author, Berryman manages to
achieve reader empathy by living on as a character in Henry’s fiction.
Not content in masking his own interpretive interests, Berryman
masks Henry, as purported author of the Songs, in blackface and
multiple voices. This foregrounds a posture whereby Henry is
unrecognizable and fractured in places, but notably human in others: a
real “human American man” (Dream Song 13). Complicating
Berryman’s need to write the real is his attraction to making Henry an
obvious fiction, a myth, and like the subject of most myths, Henry
fulfills our expectations by being dead; not just dying once, but
several times over the course of the 385 Songs. Of course, as we will
find out, even the grave will not stop Henry from talking, and soon
enough he is alive again (“Lazarus with a plan” as he puts it in Dream
Song 91), which is all the better since he can now literally fulfill both
his and Berryman’s raison d’être – to live to tell his tale. Teller of the
tale in first person, positioning himself as his own reader in second,
returning to become the interpretive critic of himself and his work in
third, Berryman/Henry perpetuates a never-ending loop of narrative
possibilities and strategies, which returns me to Barthes’ need to feel
“desired”. Despite the fact that in the Song that begins it all we are
told he is “hid[ing]” and “sulk[ing]” Henry’s constant sense of selfreferentiality shows him desiring an audience from the beginning. The
posture put forth in Dream Song 1, then, is the grandest of all: for
Henry, in fact, has never gone “away”. We are only told he has gone
away in order to welcome him back to talk some more.
The physical posture of Berryman’s poetry, particularly his sense
of form, has often been discussed and debated, but I want to tweak the
angle of the discussion here as I pursue my second point which
concerns the interrelationship between affect and form. Berryman
referred to long poems as poems of “scale” and indeed it is his “sense
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
107
of scale” which ultimately serves as the major organizer of feelings in
The Dream Songs.8 As Altieri writes:
The arts rely heavily on feelings that emphasize the expressive quality
of spatial relations. The most obvious of these are feelings organized
by a sense of scale … along with related concerns for proportion and
fit – both positively and negatively. Analogously, special fit or
configuration draws immediate conjunctions among details and
foregrounds the significance of the linked features … but most
probably the most intense and intricate spatial feelings occur in
relation to how boundaries and frames work …. Boundaries can repel
connection or seem invitingly porous.9
The “boundaries and frames” which Altieri tells us are responsible for
the most “intense and intricate spatial feelings” are similar, on a grand
level, to Berryman’s use of subsections, the seven “Books” which link
the 385 poems together under the title The Dream Songs. In interview,
Berryman referred to his sense of form as “partly preconceived and
partly developing … sometimes rigid and sometimes plastic, structural
notions”, 10 and this rigid/plastic paradox seems particularly pertinent
to the affect of both repelling and inviting reader connection. There
has been much debate over the exact structural nature of the seven
Books, and some of this has been stirred by Berryman himself who, in
an effort to combat his anxiety over the reader’s desire for narrative
drive, offered both that his long poem “has no plot”,11 and the idea
that “each book … is rather well unified”.12
While one might puzzle over the exact nature of the “Book” as
developmental marker, at the least, it serves as a grouping mechanism,
figurative and fluid (or “plastic”) in a world without an absolute
chronology of time or narrative. 13 My interest here is not in offering a
8
Berryman made this remark before a reading of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in
the Library of Congress in 1962.
9
Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 235-36. Altieri cites visual arts as examples
here. But, as he writes, “poetry is an art that almost equals painting’s interest in
boundaries” (243).
10
Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 29.
11
John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, London: Macmillan,
1980, 52.
12
Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 29.
13
For an extended exploration of Berryman’s sense of structure, see Haffenden, John
Berryman: A Critical Commentary. Haffenden challenges the orthodox view
embodied by William J. Martz’s understanding of the long poem as lacking structure,
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new structuring principle for The Dream Songs, however, but to
explore the posture of the dramatic arc that is purported by virtue of
what often seems a contrivance of beginnings and endings. For
example, Book I ends with Henry’s declared death and Book II
begins: “spring returns with a dance and a sigh” (Dream Song 27).
The overarching structure relies on the three movements of dramatic
acts: movement one introduces, movement two develops conflict
(Henry vs. self, vs. family, vs. friends, vs. God), and movement three
attempts to resolve these conflicts. However, the frames of the Books
never offer any progression; exposition is stalled at the point when we
first meet Henry. Questions as to how, why and when things happen
are not so much addressed as broached and dropped. But still, the
affect of Berryman’s “Books” comes in the wish to offer a sense of
containment as well as a sense of sprawling narration; which is to say,
the posture of sub-sections contributes to Berryman’s wish to have it
both ways: to write a long poem that is both lyric in song and narrative
in drive. To move between and beyond the seven Books empowers the
reader to take part in Henry’s action and creation. As quickly, then, as
the frames and boundaries work to contain the sprawl, the affect
becomes one of liberation.
Containment, or compression, is, of course, crucial not only to the
form the poem takes as a large sequence, but in terms of its “linked
features” (to use Altieri’s term), its individual Songs. As a young poet,
Berryman’s sense of a poem’s formal qualities informed his ideas
about affect in similar ways as they would in later projects such as The
Dream Songs. In “A Note on Poetry”, which prefaced a selection of
twenty of his poems in Five Young American Poets (1940), he wrote
that:
One of the reasons for writing verse is delight in craftsmanship –
rarely for its own sake, mainly as it seizes and makes visible its
subject. Versification, rime, stanza-form, trope … they provide the
means by which the writer can shape an experience in itself usually
vague, a mere feeling or phrase, something that is coherent, directed,
since it “lacks plot, either traditional or associative”. He argues “that Berryman’s
disquisitions on the subjects of Christology and eschatology are so insistent and
cohesive as to function as a principle of structure”. He also charts Berryman’s own
notions through letters and talks, offering a variety of structural interpretations
including those of “thematic harmony” (a “calendar framework”) and literary models
such as Virgil’s Eclogues, Dante’s Inferno, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a
Thousand Faces, and Homer’s Iliad. See Haffenden, 41-54.
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
109
intelligible. They permit one to say things that would not otherwise be
said at all; it may be said, even, that they permit one to feel things that
would not otherwise be felt ….
Poetry provides its readers, then, with what we may call a
language of experience, an idiom, of which the unit may be an entire
complicated emotion or incident. (CP 287)
Berryman’s wish to maximize the expressive quality of his use of
form – that is, the technical virtuosity of his craft – was one he picked
up from admired influences: from Shakespeare and W.B. Yeats to his
Southern mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, who required
that “good poetry must be demanding, and must eliminate the
possibility of simple affective response”. 14 Appreciating the formal
aspects of Berryman’s poetry in terms of its affects is to begin to
explore how “feeling” is naturalized in an artificial, postured setting.
While Berryman would move beyond the preconceived structures of
formal verse as such, he kept up the ghost of form precisely because
he believed, as Tate and Ransom instructed, that poetry was
responsible for engaging the “individual intellect”.15 For Berryman, a
learned style conveyed a “complicated emotion”, which in turn
conditioned the reader’s own emotion, ensuring Berryman’s respect
and attention. As he puts it in Dream Song 297: “I perfect my metres /
until no mosquito can get through”.
Under the auspices of individual Songs, Altieri’s ideas of “scale”
and frames are still functional. This is especially apparent in, for the
most part, their contained sense of space: “18-line sections”, as
Berryman had it, “three six-line stanzas, each normally (for feet) 5-53-5-5-3, variously rhymed”.16 Berryman’s imposition of a rigid
formality to individual poems manifests as a desire to govern readerresponse while also serving to govern his own output (once he
commits himself to the rigid pattern, he has to keep it up; and he does,
with only a handful of exceptions). The sestets are more often than not
end-stopped, but the space does not break up so much as contribute to
the physical posture of rhythmic patterns. Broken body paragraphs, on
a grammatical level, function figuratively as broken bones on a
14
Quoted by Stephen Matterson in Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing, London:
Macmillan, 1988, 22-23.
15
Ibid., 22.
16
See Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of the Poet,
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 323-33; 330. Berryman’s language of
distorted syntax and variable registers also contributes to the posture of his form.
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literary/anatomic level, so that when Henry advances – “Collating
bones” as he puts it in Dream Song 30 – he is in effect collating
himself via linguistic fragments.
To explore Berryman’s use of fragmented language as it relates to
spatial relations, is to explore his sense of syntax, which in its
distortion sends signifiers flying well beyond their signifieds. As
much as it contributes to slowing the reader down (in terms of
understanding), it also works to move the poems forward with great
momentum. In this respect, at times the Songs can read as if written in
broken English, where verbs and subjects are inverted, and language
spills down the page. “Henry rushes not in here” begins Dream Song
180, but the immediacy of the rush, as captured in the first two words
is not negated so much as reconciled as an affective entity in its own
right for its delayed “not”. Which is to say, again, that affect is
preserved in the paradox of a rigid/plastic poetry.
I would like to expand this to refer not only to structure, but to the
ideas of artistic integrity and spontaneity. If individual Dream Songs
are kept rigid in terms of the compressed three sestets, they retain a
plasticity in their seeming spontaneity of experience and reflection.
Dream Song 380 begins, “Wordsworth, thou form almost divine, cried
Henry” and it is interesting to consider Berryman’s relation to
Wordsworth’s most recognizable definition of poetry:
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But
though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached were
never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being
possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought
long and deeply. 17
The paradox between spontaneity and long and deep thought is
paramount to the affects of The Dream Songs particularly since at
every turn of line and phrase we are confronted by a calculated use of
craft. In this way, Berryman aspires to a sort of sprezzatura, a display
of effortlessness despite the artifice. Knowing, however, that artifice
cannot be erased in poems that wear their formal technique and craft
on their sleeves, the affects of the Songs rely on a tension between the
wish to appear spontaneous and the wish to appear learned to the
reader.
17
William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, in Romanticism, ed. Duncan
Wu, 2nd edn, London: Blackwell, 1998, 358.
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
111
The point can be illustrated in relation to Dream Song 26, where
Berryman dramatizes what amounts to a functionally dysfunctional
relationship between his quest for “art, rime” (with all its learned
affiliations) and a desire to express lust (in all its spontaneity). Over
the three sestets of this poem, Henry’s friend will pose the same
question three times: “What happen then, Mr. Bones?” The repetitions
work as frames which invite Henry to expose how and why he has
fallen from grace: for as he tells us in the poem’s first line, “The
glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once”. The use of “aria”
here draws our attention to a series of antithetical gestures; the first
being that Henry of multiple voices was once a solo voice (has anyone
considered The Dream Songs as operatic in structure?). Further, the
antithetical pun on “Aryan” highlights Henry’s former whiteness,
which in turn highlights his postured blackness as “Mr. Bones”. As
expressed earlier, one of the most dramatic postures of The Dream
Songs is that Henry has a past, or more to the point, that his past was
one of silence (as opposed to the chatty Henry which we have in front
of us). The past, of course, duly affects the present, and brings Henry,
like a displaced Adam, to entertain the same question posed in Dream
Song 4: “Where did it all go wrong?” Indeed, as in Dream Song 4, it
seems “Women’s bodies” were his downfall and yet, “his loins were
& were the
scene of stupendous achievement.” Berryman’s
allocation of page space gives pregnant pause, juxtaposing and so
annunciating with the gravity of delay the implausibility of Henry’s
loins ever being the locale of “achievement”. It also exposes the
typical reliance on ampersands as a mode of compression. The verbal
tick of “My God” which Henry utters three times throughout the Song,
as well as the conceit of dialogue with his unnamed friend, are further
evidence that it is based on a pre-conditioned model of a particularly
contrived physical stance. On one level, Henry is aware that the
physicality of art and rime can be distrusted by those who read it as
manipulation of originary emotion. On another level, one might read
Berryman as perpetuating a laissez-faire attitude to grammar and
syntax, “the original crime, art, rime”; though, of course, he is
absolute about “the administration of rhetoric” (as he tells us in Dream
Song 10). The jump between “the original crime” and original sin is
not a big one, and soon we find that doomed Henry is damned, not
only for violating women, but for violating the very “art, rime” he is
perpetuating.
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As if Henry himself recognizes the posture of this physical and
metaphysical attitude, however, he equates his death with a “most
marvellous
piece of luck”. The physical attitude of the poem –
boastful of its craft and yet insecure about its affects – mirrors Henry’s
physical attitude toward women. He is boastful about his sexual
prowess and yet intimidated by a woman’s potential to destroy him.
Throughout his life, Berryman found his technique and method the
most ambitious quality of his work but, as his insecurities about his
readership grew, he also feared his ambitions did not always pay off. 18
Considered as postures, however, his wish to reconcile “a personality
and a plan, a metrical plan”,19 secures an “affective response”, and one
which is anything but simple.
I have begun to blur the boundaries between Berryman’s postures
and those of his poetry. This is inevitable in a work which predisposes
itself to be read as both personal experience and imaginative
invention. In the next part of my essay, however, I want to address the
expressive quality of Henry himself, and so I will begin by following
up what I have already begun to assume: that Henry’s wallowing is a
wonderfully dramatic performance. To lament any number of losses
(and disgraces) becomes the subject of individual Dream Songs, but
the posture is that these losses or disgraces in themselves are
secondary, almost irrelevant when compared to the one that came
before it all, the one that lords over all the others in its stupendous
capacity to inflict pain some several hundred Songs later. Even as we
near the end of 77 Dream Songs, the front of enigmatic loss is
perpetuated: “Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry / did
will not bear thought” (Dream Song 74). This coy ploy ensures that
we do indeed “bear thought” about what has happened to Henry, and
by Dream Song 101 we are still searching for a possibility while
Berryman is still thwarting (and so maintaining) our desire for
discovery: “I can’t go into the meaning of the dream / except to say a
sense of total LOSS / afflicted me thereof…” (The capitals are
Berryman’s). If “Dream” and “LOSS” are one in the same, one begins
to wonder if a psychological model would fit, which is to ask, is his
loss only imagined? In the last line of Dream Song 101, Henry tells us
that “everything is what it seems” in this dream world, but again, a
18
See Haffenden’s John Berryman: A Critical Commentary for meticulous
descriptions of Berryman’s compositional process as it relates to his self-examination.
19
Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 30.
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
113
posture seems perpetuated, since nothing is as it seems in a world
where “LOSS” has painted everything black, including Henry’s face,
and the poem’s humor.
To counter the relentlessness of despair, and to offer a semblance
of relief, Berryman routinely relies on such moments of comic
interlude, as in Dream Song 8 where we are told Henry has lost that
which may well define him the most: “They took away his crotch.”
Vital to a sense of posture is the fact that Henry never gives up the
game of pain, and indeed in the final Dream Song (385), Henry is still
addressing a nebulous past in a nebulous world where things were
better – that is, where he knew those important things he no longer
knows: “Off away somewhere once I knew / such things.” Henry is
specifically referring to his past knowledge of whether turkeys “wish”
they could fly better – a relatively inconsequential question which in
itself is not interesting. What is interesting is the light it shines on the
questioner. In Henry’s case, I would argue that the question exploits a
front of ignorance and inadequacy, the very fronts which have allowed
him to make his way through the Songs to this point. If we consider
that Henry/Mr Bones is continuously downgrading his intelligence,
sometimes even posing as an “idiot”, the question we have to ask, is:
what for? To demonstrate modesty, humility, meekness? Possibly,
since the meek are to inherit the Earth, as “blest” Henry well knows.
As we read in Dream Song 364:
There is one book that Henry hasn’t read:
Ubu Roi. He feeling ignorant whenever his mind brings it up.
Everytime anybody says
– Mr. Bones, you has read everything – he singles out instead
Ubu Roi, to prove he is an idiot
and should be, as one, blest.
This is not, necessarily, to say that Henry is abusing his sense of loss
to receive the consolations of his readership, but to say that his
investment in such is substantial to the point that it influences our
judgment and sense of sympathy.
Altieri writes that:
The best way I know to keep judgment and sympathy in balance is to
return to the concept of expression, particularly to the ways that
expressions can implicate both active and passive aspects of agency
…. As an expression of the subject, an attitude can make visible and
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plausible why the agent is invested in a particular emotion. As an
expression of some objective condition, the attitude can seem to reveal
symptomatic factors that have control over the agent without his quite
recognizing what is happening.20
Henry certainly seems to have little control over his loss, and so over
himself. If this makes him a passive agent of loss, however, it also
makes him an active one in that he promotes himself as a victim in
nearly every Dream Song. His investment in such emotion is
conflicting since it both disables and enables his sense of self: both a
“human American man” (Dream Song 13), and likewise “a clown”
(Dream Song 199). If a martyr to loss, he is also a villain, and
moreover the crime itself: “There ought to be a law against Henry. / –
Mr. Bones: There is” (Dream Song 4). For this reason, we question
the expressive quality of Henry and the poems as they construct an
emotive front which requires us, as audience, to receive him as
playing all parts. As Berryman puts it in Dream Song 143:
– That’s enough of that, Mr. Bones. Some lady you make.
Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man,
I’ll sing you now a song
the like of whích may bring your heart to break….
Henry, then, is aware of himself as performer, aware that the Songs he
sings constitute a “show”, literally a theatrical performance, as
acknowledged in the vaudevillian persona of Mr Bones.
This is not just the black-faced minstrel’s language of “irregular
verbs” (not to mention malapropisms, misspelled and mispronounced
words, complete with excessive accent marks), however, but the
language games of the Professor who, in Dream Song 242,
transfiguratively becomes his own student. As might be expected,
then, behind all the masks Henry wears, he is not simply iterating loss,
but performing it, and like any good performer (or obsessivecompulsive performer), loss is not simply part of his act. For the line
between Henry’s reality and the show has broken down. While we get
glimpses of Henry behind the curtain, these moments are not
indicative of a “reality”, so much as indicative of another “stage” of
20
Altieri is writing about the “agent” (speaker) of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Isolation:
For Marguerite”, but his theoretical aside seems pertinent to all poetry, subjects, and
agents (The Particulars of Rapture, 93).
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
115
dreams. To ask if Henry is aware that his posture has become him, I
would also argue that with the soft shoes of a veteran he is very aware
that he is relying on reader empathy with well-worn subjects: which is
to say that Berryman has adopted the guise of melodrama, which, of
course, gets as bad a rap as “posture”.
In their mixture of music and drama, The Dream Songs as a whole
may well be read as classically melodramatic (as related to opera: I
refer back to the “aria” of Dream Song 26), but what I am really
interested in here is the modern sensibility of melodrama as that which
exploits spectacle and sensation. Henry’s throwaway cynicism and
self-pity thrust him into situations with dramatic aplomb, even if,
more often than not, they’re imagined (which is to say, “dreamed” in
the figurative sense of wished for). In Dream Song 4, for instance,
Henry tells us that he has to be held back from “springing” on the
Latin lady, by “her husband & four other people”, but chances are this
is hardly the case. He holds himself back with insecurities and
complexes to the point that he can only “advance upon / (despairing)
[his] spumoni”. The irony of self-awareness is even more notable in
the despair and need which drives Henry to commit exclamatory
declarations of great derivativeness: “Love me love me love me love
me love me” (Dream Song 192).
Such melodramatic moments exploit Henry’s sense of self as
subject, and it is at these times – in which Henry appears trite in spirit,
and soul – that a complicated attitude is posed. Out of control, Henry
forces us to bear witness to his loss and lusts so that his dreams
ultimately become, if not always nightmares, places of death, drink,
and disease: “All the girls, with their vivacious littles, / visited him in
dream… // stroke four, put him on the wagon, Death, / no drinks: that
ought to cure him” (Dream Song 350). And literally, the destruction
he does to himself is for our reading pleasure: “On all fours he danced
about his cage, poor Henry” (Dream Song 351). What is more, in what
might have been considered bad taste, but for its exceptional posture
of hyperbole, “Apoplectic Henry” appropriates historical atrocity,
putting himself through Hell and metaphorically aligning himself with
the “Armenians, the Jews, the Ibos” in suffering (Dream Song 353).
Further, we are told he experiences “the sufferings of wood // when
burnt” just so he can, not so much remember, but tell “what he saw,
how he felt & smelt” (Dream Song 353).
This not only refers to the heartache of the performer painted in
burnt-cork (the minstrel’s painted frown), but refers to the pain of the
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black man suffering in a racist America (whether he is one like Bert
Williams, playing the part of “coon”, or not). As such, he asks for our
sympathy, love, tears, and the blackest of laughter; all of which is to
say, he asks for our recognition: “nobody seems to know me” (Dream
Song 241). This, of course, seems another posture, since Berryman
and his creation, Henry/Mr Bones, are famously well known
throughout the land: “The White House invitation came today”
(Dream Song 302).
I should acknowledge that, for the most part, Henry’s sense of self
as ignored and displaced applies to those Dream Songs dedicated to
Henry’s own person. Where Henry’s investment is supposedly in
others, the melodrama seems that much less formidable. That is, his
sense of loss seems less postured, and therefore more prosaic. For me
this makes some of the Dream Songs just that bit less interesting.
Though some might find the elegiac Songs for Delmore Schwartz of
Book VI (146-159), moving for their natural speech and genuine wish
to express pathos – “[expressive] of [the] objective condition” of
mourning, in Altieri’s terms – these Songs seem to me places where
Henry not only loses his sense of self, but Berryman loses his sense of
Henry. The posture of dramatic language and form, and the intricacies
of the poet/persona attitude, can seem negligible here, and perhaps,
letting these poems fall flat for their reliance on pedestrian facts: “I
imagine you have heard the terrible news, / that Delmore Schwartz is
dead” (Dream Song 149); “His good body lay unclaimed / three days”
(Dream Song 151); “I’m cross with god who has wrecked this
generation. / First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now
Delmore” (Dream Song 153).
Alternatively, in some of the Songs where Henry rises up to
perform the attitudes he is best associated with, the poems serve
Schwartz by involving him in the theatricality of poetic death and
memorial. In the lines that follow from Dream Song 146, there is
nothing “limp” about the dramatic posture of linguistic bravado and
emotional utterance; instead, the affect is in the poem’s affectation –
of solidarity and testament – as Henry on Earth does not act, but only
contemplates, going down to the netherworld with Delmore:
These lovely motions of the air, the breeze,
tell me I’m not in hell, though round me the dead
lie in their limp postures
dramatizing the dreadful word instead
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
117
for lively Henry, fit for debaucheries
and bird-of-paradise vestures
In the second stanza of this Song, “lively Henry” continues to play as
a Hamlet-figure, complete with “the new ghost / haunting Henry
most”, but really it is the fact that his posture of commitment is so
ineffectual that makes the poem so utterly convincing. Though, over
the course of the 385 Songs, Henry kills himself off for less, note just
how quickly he removes himself from Delmore’s sphere:
‘Down with them all!’ Henry suddenly cried.
Their deaths were theirs. I wait on for my own,
I dare say it won’t be long.
I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried,
but they are past it all, I have not done,
which brings me to the end of this song.
Despite the self-deprecation, Berryman/Henry has done exactly what
he tells us he has not: he has become as famous and proficient as the
friends he has tried to be (“Ted, Richard, Randall… Delmore...
Sylvia” as he writes in Dream Song 153). In positioning himself next
to these of “limp postures” Berryman vents his poetic aspirations as
intent on “dramatizing the dreadful word instead”: the dreadfulness
being that they have all died instead of him. As poignant and dramatic
as such mourning is, however, it is important to recognize that the
poem also serves to announce that Henry, if only for the moment, has
managed to survive them and so basks in the “lovely… breeze”.
Though he has “tried to be them” it is interesting to consider the tone
with which he attests, “they are past it all” – of sadness, yes, but also
of triumph? Of pride? For as he concludes, he is, in fact, “end[ing]”
yet another Song. One can almost see him looking ahead to
completing more than twice as many as the 146 he has already
written.
This idea of posture as it accords to Berryman’s positioning of
himself next to (and against) other poets is the last thing I want to
consider since it shows Henry/Berryman as building on pretences
which most would consider unflattering to say the least. My reading of
this may make it seem as if I am showing Berryman in the bad light
poets are famous for: a competitive spirit, lusting for fame at the
derision of his poet-friends. But the point I am more interested in has
to do with the way that the work’s energy and verve owes a debt to
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Berryman’s own sense of posture as theatrical insult. For just as he
does not begrudge those of his generation, neither does he really
believe Rilke was “a jerk” as he professes in the third stanza of Dream
Song 3 (“A Stimulant for an Old Beast”). It has often been
commented that Rilke’s Stimmen provided Berryman with a model for
his earlier “Nervous Songs”, and over a decade later, a similar voice
and structure contributed to the making of The Dream Songs. To
“admit [Rilke’s] griefs & music” as governing his own compositions
is an acknowledged counter-balance to the original slur.
One need only pause to consider Harold Bloom’s theory of the
“anxiety of influence” to begin to understand the complex
relationships poets have with their precursors, but Berryman’s
anxieties are I think fruitfully made comical, which is to say often
uttered in jest, and with tongue in cheek. To pay “Homage” to Anne
Bradstreet, for instance, was not, of course, to salute her poetry, but in
order to get her into the sack. It precedes the lusts of Henry in Dream
Song 187:
Miss Dickinson – fancy in Amherst bedding hér.
Fancy a lark with Sappho,
a tumble in the bushes with Miss Moore,
a spoon with Emily, while Charlotte glare.
Miss Bishop’s too noble-O.
The question becomes how do we receive Berryman/Henry’s positing
of his famous foremothers as merely bed matter? As reduction? As
victimization? Poetic rape? His awareness of his stance as
preposterous belies a grand charade not of lust, nor even envy, but
more self-denigration: “It is a true error to marry with poets / or to be
by them”, he concludes Dream Song 187. As one who often admitted
his faults as a husband through acts of adultery, he hereby indicts
himself: the posture of sexualization may be read as one complicated
by his own admitted sense of “error”, of machismo and braggadocio.
Berryman’s name-dropping amounts to performances of rubbing
shoulders with the greats, and this is perhaps best seen in those poems
where he nods to Yeats. While Yeats serves as a poetic demigod – the
subject of affective worship in many Dream Songs – another creator
concerns Berryman even more. As Haffenden writes, “a consuming
interest of the Songs (so prevalent as to be a dominate theme) is the
Affective Postures in The Dream Songs
119
very nature of godhead and immortality”.21 The last performance of
posture that I want to mention, then, conflates Berryman/Henry’s
sense of himself as one who both bows down to those above him and
yet as one who is willing to assume the stance of God in order for his
own voice to prosper. The third stanza of Dream Song 281 (“The
Following Gulls”) reads:
After thirty Falls I rush back to the haunts of Yeats
& others, with a new book in my briefcase
four times too large:
all year I must in terminal debates
with me say who is to lives & who to dies
before my blessed discharge.
The last two Books of The Dream Songs are substantially longer than
the previous ones, and if either of them, or even The Dream Songs as a
whole, is the book which is “four times too large”, it is so for its
attempt at expansiveness, and perhaps Berryman’s inability to decide
between the “betters” and the “lessers” (as he writes of his mentors in
Dream Song 364). Though Berryman assumes or likewise gives Henry
the power to say “who is to lives and who to dies” (literally, which
Songs, as well as which people, will be “discharge[d]”), Berryman
well knows that, within the real world, life and death is, or should be,
God’s dominion, and that neither he nor Henry can do anything but
celebrate and mourn. That said, the word “blessed” does put the idea
of “discharge” in his vested interest and confirms perhaps his sense of
it as within his grasp (here the “terminal debates” becomes personal).
Enabling this paradox of life and death, fiction and reality, is
Berryman’s paradoxical sense of his own relationship with God:
“God’s Henry’s enemy”, we are told way back in Dream Song 13, and
yet, of course, Henry needs God’s love and acknowledges his
“Goodness” as much as he does any “girl’s” (as in Dream Song 80).
If Berryman’s sense of “divinity and death” is “reiterate[ed]”
“earnestly” as Haffenden believes it is, then it is also reiterated within
the great theater that comes with his interest in pending doom and
salvation, which involves playing the part of both fallen angel and
devoted servant. Dream Song 177 picks up on this thematic thread in
the context of Berryman’s complicated sense of a problematic
readership, which returns us to one of the sources and reasons for his
21
Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 52.
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use of posture in the first instance: “I am tame now. Undead, I was not
killed / by Henry’s viewers but maimed. It is my art / to buzz the
spotlight in vain…” The idea that Berryman “buzzes” on stage,
looking to be seen, performing in the spotlight for any who will listen
to his Song, explicitly announces the posture of servitude at which he
has become proficient. The idea that he is “tame[d]” is another posture
in a poem and a poetry which though expressive of “doubt”, is also
one of known confidences (in form and subject). Time and again,
Berryman’s postures amount to a dramatic performance, where he
shines the “spotlight” on himself in all disingenuousness,
ambivalence, love, crisis, fame, and solitude. For this reason, the
affect of his art is well illuminated, and it is rare that he sings his
Songs “in vain”.
ALLUSIONS, ETC.:
BERRYMAN, CATULLUS, SAPPHO
MICHAEL HINDS
As The Dream Songs confronts and then dispenses with a series of
poetic fathers at one intertextual crossroads after another, initially I
want to justify the comparison study of Berryman and Catullus. Most
obviously, sequentiality links The Dream Songs and Catullus’
Carmina. The Carmina is read frequently as a sequence containing
three distinct but nevertheless mutually informative poetic series:
Carmina I-LX consists of short poems (assumed by many to have
been organized by Catullus himself) written in a vast range of metres
that establish a vivid social, literary and sexual milieu through the
combined and constant use of public and private references. Catullus
is one of its most avid participants and its most acute witness, just as
Henry and others are both protagonists and commentators in the action
of The Dream Songs. Poems LXI-LXVIII of the Carmina are longer
poems, all composed in elegiacs, including epithalamiums and a miniepic. Of most obvious relevance to Berryman in this series are LXV
and LXVIII, in which Catullus indicates how his poetics were
recontextualized and reformed by the death of his brother, declaring
an aesthetics of grief reminiscent of that which sustains Berryman’s
writing about his father and contemporaries in his sequence. Berryman
is also akin to Catullus in his candid and tenderly profane elegies for
lost love, as with Henry’s “memory of a lovely fuck” at “the funeral of
tenderness” in Dream Song 46.
Berryman’s obsessions with love and fame, loss and friendship,
personal lament and gossip combine with equal vitality throughout
Catullus’ poetic series. The final poems within the Carmina (poems
LXIX-CXVI) confirm this, as Catullus uses the love epigram to both
relate back to some of the tendernesses of the first series while also to
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inveigh against particular members of the society which that opening
series so brilliantly evoked. Inferior fellow poets, corrupt politicians,
misers, hypocrites all get the treatment. Vitally, the characters that
Catullus excoriates are members of the same polis as himself, and
therefore he makes them into grotesquely alterior projections of
himself. He knew the corruptions of fellow citizens as if they were his
own, because to an extent, they were. The jaundiced analysis of
cultural and political life, self-indulgence and recrimination (for others
and himself) of Berryman’s poems about drinking parties and social
cliques is also vital to the Carmina, and indeed is intrinsic to Catullus’
conceptualization of himself. This provides a doubly literary and
therapeutic context for understanding how both Berryman and
Catullus are attempting to fashion a sympathetic reader even as they
rebuke themselves, a “big brother” or sponsor. The Dream Songs and
the Carmina have been read as narratives of addiction, whether to
love, loss or drink, and as texts that exhibit excruciatingly the
dynamics of manic depression. So when Dream Song 97 refers to
“Cats’ blackness, booze, blows, grunts, grand groans”, it could be
inferred that we are talking about both an American and a Veronan
cat. Economically, both Catullus and Berryman are readable as
describing the inevitable alienation of the human subject in a
commodified culture; and both are expert in the poetry of pleading
poverty or the expression of material envy. 1
Some further consideration has to be made here of Catullus and
Berryman’s positioning of the reader. The Catullan scholar William
Fitzgerald complained that “Catullus is the Rilke of antiquity”, in that
he excites a confessional response from critics which buries the
memory of the original texts.2 Whether “Rilke was a jerk” (as
Berryman writes in Dream Song 3) or not, it is worth remarking that if
Catullus has been vulnerable to the projected confessions of scholars,
then surely Berryman has to be seen as similarly vulnerable. Both
poets insinuate and demand a certain confidence from the reader;
certainly, Catullus’ reader is designed to be a student with aspirations
to friendship. Catullus is attempting to make himself known to those
who are worthy of him, and in the settling of scores that goes on in his
sequence he demonstrates how false friends can be dispensed with so
1
For example, Dream Song 337 dramatizes Henry’s self-loathing and envy as he feels
the quality of the fabric on the suit of his ex-wife’s new husband.
2
William Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 212.
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
123
that real ones can be nurtured. Berryman and Catullus set about how
to receive their restaurant pleadings and graveside orations, in effect
attempting by accretion to make the reader into a doppelgänger of the
poet. To offset the neediness of this pleading, there is also a
considerable amount of braggadocio, what David Wray has termed “a
Mediterranean poetics of aggression”.3 Berryman follows Catullus in
employing a calculatedly obnoxious bravado, as with the dismissal of
Rilke, or in the reductivist semiotics of the poem “Her & It” in Love &
Fame: “I fell in a love with a girl. / O and a gash.” (CP 169) This
heartless innuendo from a thorough cad (despite the pun on preserving
the girl’s anonymity) conveys a profound sense of unshakeable
inadequacy on the speaker’s part, a failure, as he fails to hear what the
girl has “muttered”. Berryman’s laconic voice is recoiling from his
initial aggression, her “O” provides a diminishing of his slender “I”,
and Berryman turns out to have written a gynocritical demolition job
upon himself.
Progressively, as Lesbia rejects Catullus and as the world and the
girl repel Henry, the reader is squeezed all the more jealously. Rather
than producing thorough solidarity, however, the product of this
process is a precarious and frail complicity between reader and poet,
which can lead to the subordination of the poet to the confessional
impulses of the scholar. For the remainder of this essay, I want to
rescue Berryman from this consequence of his own poetic, and look at
him and Catullus not as poets of the self, but rather poets who are
seeking a way out of the impasse of the self: “I heard said ‘Cats that
walk by their wild lone’ / but Henry had need of friends.” (Dream
Song 135) In order to do this, they found their way to the lyric voice
of Sappho, and through her they produced poems that enable a revived
interrogation of the allusive dynamics of lyric.
Richard J. Kelly’s John Berryman’s Personal Library: A
Catalogue documents that Berryman owned a copy of Loeb’s Latin
text of Catullus (the Heinemann edition of 1935).4 The volume also
contains a translation of Catullus’ Carmina XXXIV on a loose sheet:5
3
David Wray, Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001, 113.
4
Richard J. Kelly, John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue, New York: Peter
Lang, 1999, 62.
5
Thanks are due here to Kate Donahue Berryman, who kindly gave permission for
these materials to be used in this essay. Berryman’s notes on Catullus’ Carmina are
contained in his copy of the Loeb Classical Library Edition of Catullus, Tibullus and
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Girls and unstained boys we are
Aspirants, and to Diana, dear;
Unto Diana then our praise,
Unstained boys and girls we raise.
– “Child of Latona and Jove
Whom by the Delian olive love
Brought thy mother to her bed,
Lady of mountain and green wood,
Hidden grove, leaping river:
By mothers lying down forever,
Junico Lucina art thou known,
Powerful Trivia & the Moon
Of stolen light. You goddess give
Bit by bit the year we live,
You bless & fill (our hecatomb)
With grain & fruit the farmer’s home,
Holy by whatever name,
Come as in ancient time you came,
Keep – as you kept our fathers – us,
Thy children, the children of Romulus.”6
This poem is Catullus’ astonishing hymn to Diana, in which the entire
world is seen as being made massively reproductive through her
menstrual ministrations. It finds expression in Dream Song 75 where:
“Neither the menstruating
stars (nor man) was moved / at once”
when “Henry put forth a book”. On a larger scale, both Berryman and
Pervigilium Veneris, eds T.E. Page and W.H.D. Rouse, London: Macmillan, 1935,
which is held in the Special Collections Unit of the Wilson Library at the University
of Minnesota. Berryman’s scholarly fastidiousness is foregrounded on the title page of
his edition, where he corrects the sole crediting of F.W. Cornish as translator by
adding the name of Rouse. Berryman had noted the crediting of Rouse by Cornish in
his introduction to the volume for provision of paraphrases for Carmina XV, XXI,
XXVII, LXIX, LXXI, LXXIV, LXXVIII, LXXIX, LXXX, LXXXIX, XCIV, XCVII,
C, CX, CXI, CXII, and CXIII. This indicates both the meticulousness of Berryman as
a reader, alive to every detail of both text and peritext, and also his righteous sense of
credit being given where it is due. Cornish acknowledged Rowse’s contribution on
page ix of his Introduction, but Berryman promotes him to the status of co-translator.
Berryman’s sensitivity to matters of correctness, status and meritocracy is as clear
here as that shown by Catullus in his stringent commentaries on the nepotism and
corruptions of Roman society. Berryman’s notes and hieroglyphs may be infrequent,
but they are all the more pointedly valuable for their selectivity and scarcity. They are
never merely pedantic.
6
This appears to be Berryman’s final manuscript version of the poem.
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
125
Catullus find the ferocity of maternity to be a more abiding and
decisive cosmic force than the perceived fallibilities of patriarchy.
Berryman’s version of Catullus is at once an awed homage to his
mother and to the marauding presence of the White Goddess.7
Berryman’s mother had in fact presented herself to her son in similar
terms:
I do love you most devotedly and concernedly, and must always do, I
judge from the past, and the comet’s train on this is the need to know
how things are with you, even or perhaps especially in difficult times.
Now none of that need be said again for on some certain stands, of
which this is one, I am fixeder than the stars.8
Although the poetic highlight of the translation of Carmina XXXIV is
the word “Unstained”, a Keatsian intersection of innocence and
foreknowledge that also seems aptly Catullan and Berrymanic in its
sense of imminent corruptibility, the peritext of the translation also
intrigues. Berryman notes meticulously that he has made “20 Eng”
lines out of “24 Latin”, which proves the focus that he was bringing to
bear on his reading of the Catullan text. On the left hand margin of the
penultimate line, Berryman has written “AEH”, referring to A.E.
Housman, who was to become a vital presence in the late Dream
Songs, and whose combined personae of classicist, elegist, and sexual
outcast provide a model for Henry the scholar-poet of Dream Song 4.
For the immediate purpose of this essay, however, Berryman’s
most significant annotation to his edition occurs on page 60, where he
marks with a stroke the entire texts of Carmina LIa (the disputed coda
to Catullus’ translation of Sappho 31 in Carmina LI) and LII.
Furthermore, inside the back cover, the following note appears: “cf.
DS! 60 (11 May ’59)”. “60” here refers to the page number in the
Loeb edition, and establishes a direct correlation between The Dream
Songs and Catullus LI and LII. This confirms what had first brought
the relationship of Catullus and Berryman into my mind; that Dream
7
Dream Song 212 represents antique femininity in an equally awestruck but more
hidebound light as the Bacchae persecute an Orphic Henry, who is then terrorized by
a maternal Queen of the Night (“worst is the armed mother”).
8
John Berryman, letter dated 7 December 1954, in We Dream of Honour: John
Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly, New York: W.W. Norton and
Co., 1988, 277.
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Song 4 reads as a version of Carmina LI.9 The shared mise-èn-scene
should be readily apparent: that of eyes meeting across a crowded
room, alluding to the presence of a love that can never become other
than imagined. It is a scenario so pervasive that popular culture is
unimaginable without this locking of gazes. The date mentioned by
Berryman in his note is also particularly intriguing. On 11 May 1959,
Berryman was in Minneapolis, between breakdowns and marriages
(he had been divorced on 28 April 1959). It is tempting to conjure
with the thought that Dream Song 4 began on this date, as Berryman’s
lovelorn sense of isolation must have been more than usually acute at
the time. 10 However, I want to use this detail not to license a
biographical reading of the poem, but to insist that we focus more
closely on its relationship to Catullus.
For all the apparent spontaneity of Haffenden’s claim that Dream
Song 4 was “written in the Gaslight Restaurant, Minneapolis”, 11 few
other poems by Berryman make so much play of how haplessly Henry
is enveloped by the poetry of predecessors, and few sense more deeply
that he cannot ever be his own man. This sublunary restaurant could
be renamed Diana’s Place, taking us back to that translation of
Carmina XXXIV. In this environment, Henry may have begun by
perceiving of himself as a predator, but he is forced into a realization
that “she” is the hunter, and furthermore that he is unwanted prey.
“She might as well be on Mars” as Venus, therefore, because Henry is
an alien to both planets. From a promising beginning (after all, “she
glanced” at him not once, but “twice”) in what might just be reality,
Henry cannot suppress the precedent poetic voices in him that are
seeking satisfaction, and he turns into a pedant who can only express
himself in terms of rapidly multiplying allusions, while painfully
sensing that there is a vestigial palimpsest of eloquent desire that is
demanding to be expressed. The problem for Henry is not that the
woman will not yield, but that he has her yield too readily to being
made lisible, while resisting his desire to make her scriptible. She
offers plaisir but withholds jouissance. Henry’s envy is as powerful as
his desire; rather than having her, perhaps his deeper wish is to be “the
9
All translations of Catullus and Sappho in this essay are my own, unless indicated
otherwise.
10
John Haffenden declines to speculate about a date for Dream Song 4 in “The
Chronology of The Dream Songs”, in John Berryman: A Critical Commentary,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980, 157-64.
11
Ibid., 83.
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
127
slob beside her”, who is apparently free from scholarly interests. In
this poem, Henry is a randy pedant doing an imitation of a lovestruck
Catullan poet, if not necessarily Catullus himself. This suggestion of
imposture is vital to acknowledge, as it is also an intrinsic part of the
Catullan text. Catullus’ Carmina LI is mostly a translation of the
poem by Sappho that is by now best known for its inclusion in
Chapter 10 of Longinus’ On the Sublime:
Godlike is that man, who
face to face, sits and listens
to your sweet speech and lovely
laughter.
This raises up a storm
in my breast. At the slightest sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is splintered.
In that instant, a subtle fire runs through
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
crash.
Sweat flows: trembling
Binds me. I go paler
than straw, teeter on the edge
of death.12
Catullus maintains the Sapphic meter, while Berryman alludes to it
with his shortening of every third line (as opposed to the fourth in
Catullus and Sappho). One of the curiosities of this poem is how the
reader is engulfed into Henry’s nausea over his inability to deal with
reality except through the consolations of study. Reading Dream Song
4, running down intertexts and risking directionless pedantry, it is vital
that we consider the predicament of Henry as he sits at the mensa. Just
as Catullus could not have Lesbia in Carmina LI, Henry cannot have
“her” except as a text, a “Dream Song”.
12
William Carlos Williams translated “Sappho’s Ode out of Longinus” in 1958, and
may therefore have provided a stimulus for Berryman’s poem. See Williams,
“Sappho”, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Christopher
MacGowan, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1988, II, 348.
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Michael Hinds
Apart from that scribbled note in the back of Berryman’s edition of
Catullus, is there any other reason for insisting upon Catullus’ poem,
rather than Sappho’s, as the primary allusion in Dream Song 4? One
answer lies in the vital adaptation of Sappho’s text that Catullus
performs, and (in Pound’s phrase) the “austerity” that it introduces to
the Greek original.13 Catullus adds a final stanza to the Sapphic text, a
move that has caused scholarly consternation for the thousand or so
years that the Carmina have been extant. Is this a stray fragment, a
coda, or an integral part of the poem, as thoroughly incorporated into
the text as anything else in it? Whatever, it represents a change in tone
and style that finds its provocative and problematic match in
Berryman’s final lines: “There ought to be a law against Henry. / –
Mr. Bones: there is.” While this “law” remains unexplained, it retains
its “Big Other” status and maintains Henry’s Kafkaesque helplessness.
In Catullus, the law erupts into the poem in the final stanza to
admonish the anarchic passion of the Sapphic voice and the miserable
sloth of the Sapphically-inspired poet; and this admonition has
consequences for Henry and Berryman alike. In a state of longing but
also a desire for release, Catullus introduces a senatorial voice to
declare himself a Roman again, stanching Sappho’s Hellenistic flow
through him. Analogously, Berryman invokes the voice of “Mr.
Bones” to assert an Eliotic law of bathos (that you must end with a
whimper), a ruling related to the Darwinistic law that stipulates the
overwhelming of meekly clever Henrys by ill-read hungry slobs, and
confirmed by the Freudian dictat that you never will meet one like
your mother, so stop trying.
Helen Vendler’s reading of Dream Song 4 is that it is “unthinkable
in American poetry before the postwar Freudian era”, as it presents a
“picture of the Id at work, checked in lust by Conscience”.14 She also
describes the poem’s blasphemous and comic engagement with the
love poetry of the troubadour tradition, Berryman’s joyous travestying
of the love poets of the past. However, the Catullan context demands
that we read the poem otherwise, less as an exuberant travesty and
more as an agonized homage to the beginning of lyrical time, eons
before the troubadours and all that. The troubadours may have turned
the concept of the planctus into a cliché, voided of psychological
13
Ezra Pound, letter to Harriet Monroe, in The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–
1941, ed. D.D. Paige, New York: New Directions, 1950, 69.
14
Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets, London: Faber
and Faber, 1991, 50.
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
129
consequence, although that is arguable. With Catullus and Sappho, we
are reading the ur-texts that inspired traditional homages from
Cavalcanti to Joe Jackson’s “Is she really going out with him?” The
clichés are not theirs, but rather belong to their imitators; Berryman if
anything uses those so-called clichés to signal a way back to the urtext. The girl has a “complexion latin”, alright, but it is the colour of
papyrus and literary history as much as a literal suntan. The planctus
for Catullus was already a mannerism electrified by an emotional
reality, and signifies neither unambiguous masochism nor hollow
formulaism. With every urging of Catullus’ desire he also experiences
an agonizing counter-urgency of conscience, as he mimics Sappho, he
is reading himself doing so. Maybe Catullus is not translating at all,
and instead reciting automatically from a decadent memory, only to be
interrupted by an interventionist voice of Roman self-governance.
Sappho has erupted from Catullus’ consciousness upon the pricking of
his desire, and her voice has to be subsequently codified as a siren
song by the judgment of LIa.
In effect, Catullus dramatizes the negotiation between Id and
Conscience two thousand years before Freud gave it a name, and
Vendler could claim it as a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon.
Dream Song 4 is how it is because Berryman knew his poetry even
better than his psychopathology, but, like Catullus, he saw them as
instinct with one another. If literary consciousness is indivorcible from
psychosexual reality, there are no such things as empty literary
conventions. In Catullus, all imitation is meaningful as it provides
flashes of a shared literary subconscious. Vendler’s appropriation of
Freudian terminology is useful to comprehend the psychopathology of
lyric consciousness-formation, but Freud is a symptom here rather
than a cause. Reading Catullus allowed Berryman to tap in to an
ancient sexual verve, but he could not ignore the pulverizing
supervisory voice in LIa reminding him that so much unrequited love
amounts to so much self-abuse.
Henry’s table is crowded enough, what with two versions of Bones
to feed amongst others, but beyond that “the restaurant buzzes” with
both the noise of lyrical discourse and the regenerated heat of the
“emotional concourse” that Longinus identified in the Sapphic
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Michael Hinds
original.15 For Sappho, Catullus and Berryman alike, the desire that
the woman evokes in the poet is awful and awesome, too much to bear
alone. The restaurant buzzes with the white noise that is crashing in
the ear of Sappho, but it has been augmented with the static mess of
something that has been felt and then written a thousand times.
Berryman writes in Dream Song 30, “I took up a pencil; / Like this
I’m longing with”, and this longing is essential in his fashioning of
The Dream Songs as an American work of art. But Henry does not
simply long for love or sex, he is nowhere close to a desire so
palpable. In Dream Song 4, Henry longs to want – and that represents
in turn a double or triple longing (to love, be loved, to be seen to be
loved). This waiting to want further catapults Henry through time, and
Henry’s longing becomes cosmic, if not sublime. To connect with his
desire would allow for some delay in this eternal longing, but it also
would mean the end of him. The true Sublime is where the Ideal and
the Real are wrapped up in one another; it is a state of speechless unity
in which there is no need for personae or poetry. Unable to articulate
or cease his desire, Henry is at best a beautiful loser, borne back
ceaselessly into the past. If he unleashes his longing, he screams with
a noisy bathos and desperation: “Love me love me love me love me
love me / I am in need thereof, I mean of love” (Dream Song 192).
Sappho’s originating presence complicates necessarily the notion
of an agon between Berryman and Catullus. If anything, Catullus is
Berryman’s elder brother rather than his father, but they are all
subordinate to Sappho, la belle maman sans merci, and the masculine
academy that Henry represents turns out to be a matriarchal
institution.16 Sappho’s ur-text exists as a constant value in the lyric
that threatens male authority with deconstruction. Yet, while
Berryman’s poem appears to be purely about containment, failure and
inhibition, its allusive networking with the Sapphic origins of the
lyrical sublime enables a radical feminine authority to erupt. Henry’s
look of love turns out to be intrinsically emasculatory, as it was never
a male gaze, but rather an impersonation of Sappho’s. Becoming
Sappho offers Berryman a temporary release from having to be a man.
15
Anne Carson puts it neatly: “Sappho’s body falls apart, Longinus’ body comes
together: drastic contract of the sublime.” See If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, 364.
16
Dream Song 208 signals Berryman’s awareness of the exclusion of female
complexity from the poetic canon: “So many thinking & feeling, in so many
languages / … women barred.”
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
131
This respite from maleness is the abiding narrative behind the
persistence of Berryman’s American contemporaries in their attempts
at writing as women. Christopher Benfey’s essay, “The Woman in the
Mirror: John Berryman and Randall Jarrell” has discussed this
phenomenon, and his woman in the mirror could be our woman in the
restaurant, offering a fugitive femininity to the conflicted poet. Benfey
argues that conjuring with gender for these poets is an exercise in
telling us “about the limitations of our own engendered selves”.17 Yet
this socially specific formulation of Lacan does not allow for how
Berryman is looking at poetry itself as a gendered practice. The
woman in the restaurant may well be the projected other of Henry, but
it has also to be admitted that Henry is a projection of Berryman. As
such, the real other of Berryman is Henry.18 However, behind all of
this Berryman is a projection of Sappho, and so the author of The
Dream Songs is also its other. So the real subject of Dream Song 4 is
Sappho. And there are others and others. Immediately we may read
Henry as wanting the girl, but we simultaneously acknowledge that
whom he wants to be is the man beside her. Wanting, that is, what
Sappho wanted to be.
So there are simultaneous and complex systems of reflection at
work here; importantly, there is enough in the poem and Berryman’s
edition of Catullus to suggest that Dream Song 4 is an implicating
play on the entrapments of allusion rather than an accidental case of
Lesbian interference with what is intended as a broadcast of
impotence in plain American. “Writing the feminine” turns out not to
be an option but rather an inevitability, it is what the lyric poet does.
Dream Song 4 is a radical poem, because even though there is no selfdeclared assumption of a female persona by Berryman, it happens
anyway. Even though Sappho is not cited by name (although she is in
Dream Song 187, “Fancy a lark with Sappho”), her authority is
everywhere. The Sapphic text underlying the Catullan allusions is in
fact a more thorough rejection of virility as a repressive code than
anything a more overtly “feminized” poem could have achieved.
Berryman is a man pretending to be a man, like countless men before
17
In Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, eds Richard J. Kelly and Alan K.
Lathrop, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 166.
18
As “Catullus” in the Carmina is the other of Catullus the poet.
132
Michael Hinds
him, yet his scholarship intimates to him persistently that the male
gaze he is projecting is in fact female. 19
In contrast with the poetic delicacy of the vivid inwardness of
Sappho and the main body of Carmina LI, the Latin of Carmina LIa
demands to be expectorated as much as read. The rasping admonition,
“otium, Catulle, tibi molestumst: / otio exultas niminque gestis. / otium
at reges prius at beatas / perdidit urbes”, with its unforgiving
sibilants, is the senatorial voice of Roman measure that intervenes to
impose sanction on the rampant liquidity that Catullus discovered in
Sappho. The scholarly dispute over LIa is whether it is a bona fide and
integral part of Carmina LI, or a fragment from another place
altogether; the strophe represents a significant break from the temper
of Sappho’s original, but at that it retains her lyric metre. At issue here
is the question of whether the fragment is as self-constitutively
significant a poetic event as any other. Berryman sees the value of LIa
less as a fragment and more as an attachment. He sees the dramatic
gain in the sacrifice of lyric isolation. So Berryman’s final two lines to
Dream Song 4, in which he lays down his own understanding of the
law, present a similar problem to the disputed final strophe in
Catullus. They have the feel of an interruptive commentary upon the
first three stanzas of the poem, but they are sufficiently dislocatory to
suggest randomness or arbitrariness. They trample on the lyric, albeit
with a laconic sense of comedy.
Scholars have often pointed out the allusive dialogue that goes on
between Carmina L and LI (principally because of each poem’s use of
variations upon the loaded term otium), but Berryman’s markings in
his text of Catullus insist rather upon a linkage between the
coda/strophe/fragment LIa and LII.20 Carmina LII is an ancient
version of Tom Lehrer’s crack about the futility of satire in an age
19
It is worthwhile referring to Berryman’s inveterate scopophilia. Dream Songs 233
and 247 describe seeing, and acting upon the desire provoked by it, with some
trepidation. Dream Song 357 resignedly describes the end of desire, where Henry can
only see himself: “Pained eyes, Henry’s, / Unmanly slovenly love took him at times.”
Dream Song 69 revisits Dream Song 4, only the gap between the desired and Henry is
filled with the effects of commodity fetishism rather than the reverberations of
Sappho.
20
Otium can mean leisure, but also that which is hateful (as in “otiose”); it is the
opposite of negotium, which is business and industry. Over the years, otium in
Carmina LIa has been translated with a variety that conveys the perplexity of its
translators and pays tribute to the complexity of the term: “ease” (Higham), “sloth”
(Michie), “idleness” (Cornish).
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
133
when Henry Kissinger could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As a
degraded democracy effectively eradicates all reason for selfexpression or self-determination, the only reasonable option is to die:
Die, Catullus, just drop down and die,
The tumescence Nonnius fills a magistrate’s chair;
Vatinius perjures himself, bags a consulate.
Die, Catullus, just drop down and die.
The reason that intervened in LIa to admonish is shown here as having
mutated into fatuous nihilism. Reason is exposed as pompous and
pretentious, and the world is inescapable other than through death.
Catullus’ world has become touched with a suicidal bathos. This is a
wretched state of affairs, but also a comic one, as Dream Song 57
says, “a state of chortle sin”. For Henry, the law is a gag in a double
sense; it is a joke that makes him mute. 21 He is speechless with desire
and tongue-tied by an external consciousness of what the world holds
for him; as Dream Song 46 says, in the world of responsibilities,
“Fools elect fools”, so why persevere?
We have seen how the law can be a poetic or psychosexual edict,
but in Berryman’s linkage of Catullus LIa and LII we see that it is also
political. Given things as they are, there is nothing to be done. Denis
Donoghue’s astute remark about Berryman’s problematic quest to
learn “how to be free and law-abiding at the same time” acquires acute
focus here. 22 The problem with this crisis is that it does not exist in
actuality; the law never goes away, and you abide by it inevitably. In
this respect, Catullus in LII is unironical, and The Dream Songs
(however ironically) are a project in which Henry is seeking to escape
the entanglement of ironies, even though they are what keep him (and
the reader’s interest in him) alive.
It is remarkable how archaic Berryman’s poem becomes by simply
mentioning the “law”, with its connotations of monolithic symbolic
orders. Dream Song 4 has the ring of an ancient prophecy fulfilled,
21
The thick tongue that mutes Sappho and Catullus is a recurring problem in The
Dream Songs: “When I had most to say / My tongue clung to the roof … of my
mouth” (Dream Song 112); “coats upon his tongue formed, white, terrific” (Dream
Song 122); “What thickens my tongue? / and has me by the throat / I gasp accused”
(Dream Song 168).
22
Denis Donoghue, “Berryman’s Long Dream”, in John Berryman: Modern Critical
Views, ed. Harold Bloom, New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1989, 21.
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Michael Hinds
and itself prophecies the antagonism of law and pleasure identified by
Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text (1970) as an “old, very old
tradition: hedonism has been repressed by nearly every philosophy”:
“No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of
the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you: the political
policeman and the psycho-analytical policeman; futility and/or guilt,
pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion.”23 The
admonitions at the end of both Berryman and Catullus’ poems present
illusions of irreversibility, but they are upstart statements of false
authority, as the male word in lyric is always predicated upon a female
one. Robert Graves, to whom Berryman paid tribute as “one of the
shrewdest, craziest, and most neglected students of poetry living”, 24
advocates this fundamental and ancient power of Sappho’s Law
clearly in his mytho-poetic masterpiece, The White Goddess: “woman
is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing.” Thus, the male
poet is a subordinate to her; by comparison, the woman poet “should
be the Muse in a complete sense …. She should be the visible moon:
impartial, loving, severe, wise”. According to Graves, Sappho took
this responsibility. By comparison, male poets have always had to
declare their deference, even when they are attempting to be at their
most self-assertive: “However bitterly and grossly the poet may rail
against her in the hour of his humiliation – Catullus is the most
familiar instance – he has been party to his own betrayal and has no
just cause for complaint.” Male poets forget themselves when they
forget the law of the lyric, which is authorized by an awesome
femininity: “Poetry in its archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral
and religious law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse, or the
ecstatic utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification
of the Muse.”25
The male poet’s role is that of acolyte, and the poems of Catullus
and Berryman acknowledge this, even as they rail. We are able to
identify Sappho as the supreme influence on Berryman’s poem, while
indicating that Catullus’ argument with that supremacy is what
connects most vitally to Dream Song 4. The structure of Carmina LI
23
“From The Pleasure of the Text”, in A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag,
London: Vintage, 1993, 411.
24
John Berryman, Stephen Crane, rev. edn, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1962, 273.
25
Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1984,
447-48.
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
135
is thoroughly allusive, which is what makes it Catullan. To an extent,
Catullus and Berryman are cowed into silence by the supervisory
voice that admonishes them; but on another level it is the stunning
example of Sappho herself. Woman is both the form and the matter of
the poem. At the same time, Berryman’s poem allows him to allude to
both Sappho and Catullus without reverting entirely to either of them.
What Catullus offers to Berryman is a poetics of simultaneity: how to
be Greek and Roman, lover and hater, prude and rake, Faustus and
Don Juan, man and woman, homo- and hetero-sexual, “scholar and
legionnaire” (Dream Song 63). Poetry is not just a means of
ventriloquizing these separate beings, but of actively becoming them,
however temporarily: “Failed as a makar, nailed as a scholar, failed /
As a father & a man, hailed for a lover”. So in Dream Song 242, when
Berryman writes, “I am her”, that is what Catullus is saying when he
writes as Sappho. That song is yet another poem full of looks, which
ends in a mutual flow of tears: “She did, I did.” The identity of Henry
with the girl indicates gratitude (albeit expressed with intense
solemnity) that in this play of glances he has been spared sex. Henry’s
dream lover suppressed, he is free himself to become feminized.
Berryman can give up on himself and talking “About that me”, and his
relief is ecstatic.
One could complain that my argument is that a male poet cannot
even look at a girl without being full of Sapphic intent. Within a
lyrical context, that is precisely my point. Looking and longing in
lyric poetry has its origin in Sappho, and it takes a formidably
solipsistic and iconoclastic poet to be able to resist wanting as she did.
It takes the likes of Rimbaud, who in “Au Cabaret Vert” crushes the
distance between subject and object, appetite and satisfaction, wanting
and having. In doing so, he flouts the precise and tender geometry of
desire that Sappho founded in the lyric, simultaneously making an
unrepeatable poem.
At this point, we should remark that while American poetry has
conventionally aligned itself with Greek poetic projects, they have
been epic. Walt Whitman can be termed the “American Homer”, but
there has been less of a rush to identify an “American Sappho”. In
part, what this is evidence of is a gap in conceptualization. The
American lyric is very often in fact an elegy, a partial lyric or a metalyric rather than a lyric in the purest sense. The pure lyricism of
Sappho is a rare phenomenon, unmediated and apparently direct.
Berryman wrote that “some of the best kind of writing is really
136
Michael Hinds
transparent … you get no impression of viewing art”, and it is this
quality that is at work in Sappho and some of Catullus.26 The Dream
Songs is not a sequence of lyrics, although some of its individual parts
could well be described as near-lyrics. The most lyrical of all the
Carmina is LI, principally because it uses Sappho’s metre and form
(pedantically speaking, only the translations in the Carmina are
lyrics). The lyrical highlight of The Dream Songs is Dream Song 4,
which is the progeny of the Catullan text. The Sapphic transparency of
Carmina LI and Dream Song 4 is what makes them the lyrical
highlights of the collections or sequences in which they are primarily
located. If they are so transparent that commentary is useless, then the
point of law according to canonicity is made even more emphatically
for Henry. If all commentary is idle, and all you do is commentate,
then you may as well cease to be.27
I have been willfully complicating the most immediate and simple
poems that these poets have to offer, principally as that simplicity is
problematised because it has been excavated from Sappho. Anne
Carson has commented on the radical force of Sappho making herself
“transparent” in fragment 31, as in doing so she “plays havoc with
boundaries and defies the rules that keep matter in its place”.28
Transparency is anarchy, and Berryman’s most transparently simple
Dream Song turns out to contain a concept of lyric poetry as a deeply
feminine art that revolutionizes how relationships of power are
represented. Henry realizes that his authority over his own impulses –
both poetic and sexual – is based on an illusory usurpation of feminine
authority. Even the food being consumed is revolutionary.
Hippokrates wrote that:
The female flourishes more in an environment of water, from things
cold and wet and soft, whether food or drink or activities. The male
flourishes more in an environment of fire, from dry, hot foods and
mode of life.29
26
Quoted by Thornbury in his Introduction to Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937–
1971, l.
27
This returns us to the logic of Carmina LII.
28
Anne Carson, “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution
in Antiquity”, in Men in the Off-Hours, London: Cape, 2000, 152.
29
Quoted by Carson, Men in the Off-Hours, 132.
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
137
But she is eating chicken paprika, and he spumoni, a cold creamy
confection. In the Sapphic domain of the lyric, she burns while Henry
freezes.
Aphrodisiacs are only symbols; they are not desire itself, but
indicators of the distance between desire and act. Food is as close to
the woman as Henry gets, but it still lies between them. Their shared
hunger established, suddenly that distance between them grows huge
and cosmic. The woman is consigned to a role of allegorical mystery,
deliberately recalling the lady in Milton’s Comus. “What wonders is
she sitting on over there?” could be a schoolboy tribute, but it is also
readable as an anxious speculation over the woman’s autoeroticism
and polymorphous self-sufficiency as a sexual being. Catullus and
Berryman both have to stiffen themselves in their codas, to legislate
for the rampant sexual self-reliance of “she”, whether that is the
beheld beloved or Sappho herself; but such phallocentric self-policing
is also a passion killer. More radically, Dream Song 4 has set free
what Carson calls the Sapphic phenomenon of liquidity, and all Henry
can do is wait, wilt, and melt.30 Yet whatever the consequences for
Henry of the gag upon him in the last two lines of his poem,
Berryman’s use of allusion indicates that he is in control of his selfperception and his poem. The withering of his ardency is a matter of
his creation, and even though the law may come for him, he has
touched fire nevertheless. He has written a lyric, even if it was
unfinished business. 31
The problem of reading Catullus sequentially is that it tends to deemphasize those poems that do not coincide with our notion of what
belongs in a lyrical sequence. A similar problem exists with The
Dream Songs, in that reading it as a lyric sequence sees emphasis fall
upon the most lyrical poems, whereas reading it as elegiac sequence
foregrounds the most elegiac poems. Most evidently, Berryman and
Catullus both require a different and flexible terminology, and a
reading after the same fashion. They are not so much sui generis, as in
and out of genre. I have focused on the lyrical highlights of their
collections in order to dramatize concurrencies in their art; beyond
regarding the similarity of individual poems, an understanding is
desirable of how radically these poets require us to have movable feet.
30
Ibid., 136.
The Porlockian calling of the law also makes Dream Song 4 Berryman’s most
Coleridgean poem.
31
138
Michael Hinds
The reader has to become part of the overall structure of the
arrangements of Berryman and Catullus, and must free the poet from
being locked within a sealed self-perception. The reader will give
release.
Dream Song 75 confirms this anxiety that the reader relieve the
poet of their duties as reader, as it is written as a form of retrospective
envoi. The envoi is a poem with a substantial history in American
poetics, from Anne Bradstreet through Whitman to Pound, one in
which the tangled intimacy of poet, book and nation is made tangible.
It also confirms, however, that American poetry is one of
simultaneous loss and transmission, describing an inevitable lapse of
innocence and authority that occurs as the book leaves Henryman and
goes out into the world of text. The past tense of this envoi (“Henry
put forth a book”) suggests that The Dream Songs was a book that was
orphaned from its beginning, however, as opposed to Bradstreet’s
sense of her continuing maternal bond with her book (a bond that we
can also see in Sappho). As Catullus in Carmina I uses the envoi to
suture poet, man and book together, Henry and Berryman are mutually
identified as makers and senders of books in The Dream Songs; but
both Berryman and Catullus must surrender to the knowledge that
their poetry has departed into the mind of the reader. What the reader
or friend has to realize is that the point of The Dream Songs is not to
deliver Henry to us, nor is it to produce Berryman as a renewed
individual, whether redeemed or damned. Turning it into an epic
project, a Henriad, or a Tragicall History of Dr. Berryman The
Overreacher, is the reversal of what is at issue. The tangible product
of The Dream Songs is its reader. That achieved, the poet can
disappear. More importantly, the reader has been created so as to
understand why the poet wishes to disappear. This locates Berryman
decisively within the traditions of American modernism rather than
another cultural narrative.
If the mission of the Carmina and The Dream Songs is the creation
of a reader who can provide a proper friendly service to the poet,
poems such as Berryman’s fourth and Catullus’ fifty-first present
some acute problems. Whatever the urgencies of desire that prompted
the occasion of the poem, both Catullus’ “Catullus” and Berryman’s
Henry find themselves alienated from that desire not simply out of
some psychological knot – because of the men they are – but rather by
what they are as poets, makers of connotations rather than originators:
it is because they are not Sappho. “Catullus” and Berryman as Henry
Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho
139
see the girl, and even if the girl sees them back (as in Dream Song 4),
the poetic mind asserts itself and directs matters back to Sappho.
Henry muses on seducing his ideal woman, but is inevitably drawn to
her opposite, the sublime woman-poet who will not be seduced or
denied. The Dream Songs declare their lyric ambitions in their title,
but that title also concedes that those ambitions are a fantasy.
Berryman’s dream is to be a lyric poet, like Sappho, or at least to be a
poet like Catullus who can dream of being Sappho. Contiguous with
this fantasy is Henry’s desire to discover precisely the power of
maternity (a power he had coveted already in Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet), and to escape forever the dilemmas of the erotic. Dream
Song 385, the last in the sequence, and the lyrical highlight after
Dream Song 4, answers the desire that was imminent in the earlier
poem. Conventionally, this final poem is read therapeutically as
Berryman’s reconciliation with his responsibilities as a father. More
profoundly, he has finally discovered how to think and write as a
mother, and to speak with the authority of the huntress, the moon and
the mother of the lyric: Sappho.
“HE LIVED LIKE A RAT”:
THE TRICKSTER IN THE DREAM SONGS
STEPHEN MATTERSON
Given the range of explication and analysis devoted to The Dream
Songs over the last thirty years it is odd that there is no sustained
commentary on Berryman’s use of the Trickster figure in the poem.
There are strong and significant parallels between the Songs and the
Trickster cycles and there are compelling reasons for considering
Henry as a Trickster figure. Even without such internal evidence, there
seems to be ample external evidence at least to suggest that Berryman
had an interest in the Trickster. An erudite and widely-read scholar, it
is almost inconceivable that Berryman would not have known of Paul
Radin’s groundbreaking study The Trickster, published in 1956.1 It is
equally likely that Berryman’s considerable research on Shakespeare
would have brought him into contact with the parallels that scholars
have seen between the Trickster and Shakespearean clowns, and he
would certainly have known of mythological and classical avatars of
the Trickster, such as Hermes.
Even if Berryman showed relatively little interest in Native
American cultures in his poetry, his personal circumstances meant that
Native Americans were far from exotic or alien to him. He was born
in Oklahoma less than a decade after it was widely known as the
Indian Territory, and he lived in Minneapolis during a period (195472) that saw significant changes for Native Americans, many of which
1
Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956; rpt. New
York: Schocken Books, 1972. The Trickster is made up of renditions of two Trickster
story cycles (“The Winnebago Trickster Cycle” and “The Winnebago Hare Cycle”)
and a commentary by Radin entitled “The Nature and Meaning of the Myth”. Later
editions of The Trickster include an introductory essay by Stanley Diamond, and
translations of commentaries by Karl Kerényi and Carl Jung on the Trickster tradition.
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Stephen Matterson
impinged on or were actually initiated in that city. These changes
included the increasing urbanization of the Native American after the
1954 introduction of Termination as a policy, 2 the beginning of the
Native American Renaissance, and the birth of the American Indian
Movement in Minneapolis itself.3 In this essay, then, I shall explore
the strong links between The Dream Songs and Trickster tales, and
focus on the relation between Henry and the Trickster. However, I
shall argue that although Berryman made serious use of aspects of
Trickster in The Dream Songs, he ultimately moves away from these
in an effort to generate a cohering narrative, and also to endorse a
Christian teleology in the sequence.
Although in The Trickster Radin elucidates the basic characteristics
of the Trickster figure, he also points out that the figure is something
of a puzzle if we expect consistency or if we expect Trickster to be a
God-like figure; in fact, one of the central points that must be made
about Trickster is that he evades easy identification and rigid
definition. He is a benefactor to humans, bringing fire and either
making useful plants and herbs or showing humans how to use them,
yet he is also a deceitful mischief-maker. He can be a comic figure
inciting laughter but may also be cruel and vengeful. He is cunning
but is also capable of ludicrous stupidity and thoughtless actions. He
has special powers, such as the ability to assume the shapes of various
animals, but he is by no means omnipotent and is frequently the butt
of jokes. He is a figure of strong masculinity but he may also change
sex, and s/he can be impregnated and is able to bear children. His
other attributes include sexual prowess and appetite, and a sometimesconfused relation to his body parts, which occasionally take on a
separate identity (in many cycles he has a talking anus). Trickster is
also a wanderer. It is generally true that Trickster cycles include
2
The policy of Termination meant that tribes could choose to renounce the special
status they had been granted by federal statutes. They would then become subject to
state laws, and they could sell reservation lands to non-Indians. The policy was
intended to facilitate Native American assimilation into mainstream American culture
and society, and around one hundred tribes and bands were terminated. The policy
resulted in vast amounts of Native American land being sold and in the relocation of
Native Americans to urban environments. The policy was abandoned in the 1960s.
3
The AIM was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 to defend the rights of Native
Americans, at first focusing on the plight of urban-based American Indians, then
developing to represent all dispossessed Native Americans. See Russell Means and
Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell
Means, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995.
The Trickster in The Dream Songs
143
explanations for the creation of the world and various natural
phenomena, but this does not mean that this is their primary purpose,
or that they therefore function as originary myths do. Similarly
Trickster’s sexual appetite (he has an enormous penis) does not
suggest that the cycles are comparable to myths dealing with fertility.
Regarding the relation the Trickster stories have to myth and religion,
Radin points out that Trickster blurs the usually held distinction
between gods and humans, embodying
memories of an archaic and primordial past, where there as yet existed
no clear-cut differentiation between the divine and the non-divine.
For this period Trickster is the symbol. His hunger, his sex, his
wandering, these appertain neither to the gods nor to man. They
belong to another realm, materially and spiritually, and that is why
neither the gods nor man known [sic] precisely what to do with them.4
In developing this insight Stanley Diamond argues (in an essay
contrasting the Trickster stories with the Book of Job), that the
Trickster tales were an antecedent or that they offered an alternative to
the Judaic and Christian dualistic assignation of good to God and evil
to Satan. Trickster may be both and for Diamond this suggests that in
common with other pre-Judaic or pre-civilized stories, the Trickster
tales represent the need to bear the realities and contradictions of this
world.5
Several other aspects of the Trickster need to be mentioned at this
point. Although the Trickster cycles vary considerably among Native
American cultures, there are certain common elements and episodes.
The cycles themselves are episodic and do not necessarily provide a
linear sequence that involves any kind of development of character.
The different cycles are characterized by the animal shape that
Trickster has assumed, and particular Tricksters are associated with
specific regions. Coyote is the trickster for the American Indians of
the Central Plains, California, and the Southwest; Nanabozho (or
Great Hare or Master Rabbit) for those of Eastern North America, and
Raven (and sometimes Mink, or Blue Jay) for those of the Pacific
Northwest. Also, it is important to mention that Trickster is by no
means exclusive to Native American cultures. He tends to be
4
Radin, The Trickster, 168.
Stanley Diamond, “Introductory Essay: Job and the Trickster”, in Radin, The
Trickster, xii.
5
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Stephen Matterson
particularly associated with Native Americans because those cultures
sustained the Trickster stories and they were therefore available to
anthropologists in relatively intact forms, whereas in other cultures the
stories changed and developed, particularly after contact with
Christianity. Radin claimed that very few myths were as widely
distributed as that of Trickster, and that European figures such as the
picaro, the jester, Pulcinello and the clown were versions of Trickster.
As might be expected, Carl Jung saw the trickster as an archetype
originating from shared human psychic needs and representing the
earliest stages of human development.6 Others have explored the
presence of Trickster in Greek or Roman myths, notably in the figures
of Prometheus and Hermes.
In African cultures, Trickster appeared as a monkey or rabbit, and
has been transformed by African-Americans into familiar figures
(Brer Rabbit being the most recognizable). This African-American
metamorphosis of Trickster is especially interesting for consideration
of Berryman’s use of Trickster in The Dream Songs. This is partly
because of the possible links between Trickster and the minstrel
tradition that Berryman uses in the Songs, having Henry perform
sometimes in blackface, but also because African American versions
of the Trickster have often focused on Trickster’s capacity to survive
through the alteration of identity.7 That is, African-American stories
have been changed in order to function as “spells for survival” in a
way comparable to The Dream Songs. Trickster’s protean identity was
of crucial importance to Berryman’s contemporary (and fellowOklahoman) Ralph Ellison. In Invisible Man (1952) Ellison created a
powerful fusion of Trickster, the blackface minstrel and jazz in order
to address urgent questions concerning racial identity. Having been
impressed by the survival strategies of the novel’s true Trickster, B.P.
6
See Carl Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure”, in Radin, The Trickster,
195-211.
7
In his influential study The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores
African American usages of the tricksters Esu-Elegbara and Jigue (see Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Ralph
Ellison’s essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (in which Ulysses is hailed as a
Trickster) is important in forging links between Trickster and the minstrel (Ralph
Ellison, Shadow and Act, New York: Random House, 1964, 45-59). See also Ishmael
Reed, “The Tradition of Serious Comedy in Afro-American Literature”, in Writin’ is
Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper, New York: Atheneum, 1988, 13541.
The Trickster in The Dream Songs
145
Rinehart,8 Invisible Man begins to imitate them. In a passage that has
particular resonance for The Dream Songs, Invisible Man begins to
wonder whether true identity is after all non-assignable, multiplicitous
and variform. Tempted by the possibilities offered by the shifting
identities of Rinehart he wonders whether embracing and performing
different identities would provide a solution to his manqué romantic
perception of lost identity:
The more I thought of it the more I fell into a kind of morbid
fascination with the possibility. Why hadn’t I discovered it sooner?
How different my life might have been! How terribly different! Why
hadn’t I seen the possibilities? If a sharecropper could attend college
by working during the summers as a waiter and factory hand or as a
musician and then graduate to become a doctor, why couldn’t all those
things be done at one and the same time? … My God, what
possibilities existed! … And that lie that success was a spiraling
upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only
could you travel upward towards success but you could travel
downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance,
crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old
selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time. How could
I have missed it for so long?9
Trickster is here the exemplar of simultaneous multiple identities
rather than serially chronological varied identities. As the figure of
Rinehart he would provide a means of relieving Invisible Man from
the burden of belief in singular identity and, temporarily at least,
offers a respite from what Invisible Man has sought since his
expulsion from the university: a means of both surviving and acting
meaningfully in the world. Trickster does not seek to suppress the
contradictory nature of identity but celebrates and performs it.
Because of Trickster, Invisible Man is alive to the possibility that
multiform identity is not necessarily an abhorrent and freakish
condition enforced on the individual by the circumstances of family,
society, history and racist stereotyping, but is actually the condition of
all.
8
Although this is not mentioned in Invisible Man, in his 1958 Partisan Review essay,
later published as “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”, Ellison writes that
Rhinehart’s [sic] initials B.P. stand for Bliss and Proteus (Shadow and Act, 56).
9
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, New York: Vintage, 1967, 385.
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Stephen Matterson
Even this brief outline of Trickster should be enough to suggest
that there are significant similarities between Berryman’s Henry and
the archetypal Trickster. (Indeed it should make us wonder why
assessments of Berryman have paid so little attention to the function
and presence of Trickster in The Dream Songs.10) Henry’s protean
identity is the most obvious similarity: this is after all a song
collection in which the main protagonist inhabits various identities,
black and white, male and female, and who actually appears to die and
be resurrected during one section of Songs. True to the Trickster
tradition, Henry is possessed of an enormous sexual appetite,
combined in The Dream Songs with an appetite for alcohol. As with
Trickster, this sexual power is exaggerated into legendary or mythic
status: “his loins were & were the scene of stupendous achievement”
(Dream Song 26). In fact, it was this feature in particular which led
Radin to speculate that the Trickster cycle began as “an account of a
nondescript person obsessed by hunger, by an uncontrollable urge to
wander and by sexuality”.11 This description is particularly apt for the
overall representation of Henry, and is specifically relevant to Dream
Song 311 where Berryman writes that “Famisht Henry ate everything
in sight” and that “Hunger was constitutional with him”. At the same
time, however, Henry has an uncertain and sometimes troubled
relation to his body parts. He describes his body as a “pain-farm”
(Dream Song 163) while Henry is a “fractured cat” (Dream Song 65)
and in some Songs, notably 326, Henry’s body parts are dislocated
from each other. Limbs seem to be constantly in danger of being
broken or falling off, and the threat of being stripped of the body is
also a constant one. This is especially evident in Dream Song 8, which
begins with Henry detailing the loss of his teeth and half of his
(“green”) hair, and ends with the loss of his crotch. Although the Song
10
In this respect, Kenneth Lincoln’s assessment of Berryman in Sing with the Heart of
a Bear is particularly disappointing. Having published two outstanding and influential
studies of Native American writing, Native American Renaissance, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983, and Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native
America, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, surely no critic was
better placed than Lincoln to provide an informed perspective on Berryman’s use of
the Trickster. In Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American
Poetry 1890-1999, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000, he
does point out that The Dream Songs provides “age-old Trickster stuff, the sport who
out-wits the hero-king” (173), but he does not develop this in his assessment of
Berryman.
11
Radin, The Trickster, 165.
The Trickster in The Dream Songs
147
certainly echoes John Crowe Ransom’s poem “Captain Carpenter”,
which Berryman particularly admired, it is also immediately
recognizable as part of Trickster idiom. 12 Henry’s observations of his
body in terms of its demands and appetites are partly comic and partly
melancholic. He also, like Trickster, experiences a form of pregnancy:
in Dream Song 124 “Henry is delivered” and Berryman writes that the
male imitation of pregnancy, couvade, is “Henry’s favourite
custom”.13 Overall, though, there is the sense, as with Trickster, that
the body is somehow unassimilated to the self, remaining alien,
unpredictable and uncontrollable. This feature is particularly evident
in what may be one of the most explicit references to Trickster in the
Songs, that is, Berryman’s echo of the “talking anus” of the Trickster
cycles in Henry’s inability to control his bodily functions in Dream
Song 134.
There is also, and this is a feature of The Dream Songs that often
goes unremarked, a kind of bestiary in the poem. It contains a large
number of references to animals, which Berryman frequently links to
human traits, or associates with particular individuals. These are far
too numerous to detail here, but a cursory sample identifies a starved
lion (Dream Song 6), a shark (Dream Song 7), bears (Dream Song
11), a mouse (Dream Song 12), rats (Dream Songs 7 and 12), crows
(Dream Songs 24 and 93), a hound-dog (Dream Song 40), bats
(Dream Song 63), a rabbit (Dream Song 62) and a lobster (Dream
Song 84). Henry is explicitly or implicitly compared to or is identified
with various animals. These include the cockroach (Dream Song 31),
the rat (Dream Song 13), the raccoon (Dream Songs 57 and 66), and
the pig (Dream Song 97), but he is most frequently identified with a
“pussy-cat” and with the fox. Striking though they are, these
identifications do not really suggest that Berryman is identifying a
cycle of Songs with the Trickster cycles in which Trickster has taken
on the form of a particular animal. The cumulative effect of
Berryman’s bestiary is not that he is invoking some kind of fabular
12
See Berryman’s essay “The Sorrows of Captain Carpenter”, in The Freedom of the
Poet, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1976, 279-81.
13
This song is especially interesting for comparison of Henry with Trickster, since
Berryman refers to a Trickster-like legend in which a bride bites off and ingests the
penises of her successive husbands (all brothers), until the last husband, the youngest
brother, uses a crowbar to reclaim the penises. Berryman refers to the legend again in
Dream Song 335, where he acts like the youngest brother in calling for a “locksmith,
to burst the topic open” in order to reclaim dead friends.
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Stephen Matterson
code, or invoking a Trickster-like power to invest a self in particular
animals, but that he is using animal identities to emphasize Henry’s
profound instability of identity.
Invoking the Trickster cycles as a model for The Dream Songs is
particularly useful in the perspective it gives to some of the most
vexed questions about Berryman’s poem. That is, whether or not the
Songs incorporate a narrative structure and whether there is a dramatic
impetus to the sequence, which involves the development of Henry’s
character. The absence from Native American mythologies of the
Judaeo-Christian story of the fall (or the later figuration of the fall
with the moment of contact with the European) has been much
commented on. In particular, it is often suggested that this absence
results in a narrative that is not teleologically closed, thereby not
leading to crisis and ultimately to some sort of resolution. The
Trickster tales, true to the key features of oral tradition, involve cycles
and repetition rather than linear plot development.
Also, the Trickster stories are emphatically not narratives of
character development. As in one of their later humanized
manifestations, the picaresque novel, they comprise episodes that are
connected insofar as they are focused on one figure, but they do not
necessarily need to be read, told or performed in a set sequence. We
do not expect the Trickster stories to obey a narrative framework that
involves conflict, climax and resolution. Nor is there necessarily any
psychological development or moral growth of Trickster. In his
commentary on Trickster as archetype, Karl Kerényi wrote that he had
been unable to discover “any such thing as the ‘inner development’ of
the hero”.14 This, he argued, was an important aspect of the figure’s
primitivism, his function being not to imply that there is a coherent
solution to the apparent disorder of the universe, nor to supply some
kind of order, but rather he worked to reinforce the sense of disorder,
chaos and unpredictability of the world. In what could be a description
of Henry’s function in The Dream Songs, Kerényi describes the
Trickster as:
a figure who is the exponent and personification of the life of the
body: never wholly subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, for ever
running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid in action. Disorder
belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the
14
Karl Kerényi, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology”, in Radin, The
Trickster, 184.
The Trickster in The Dream Songs
149
trickster .… [The function] of the tales told about him is to add
disorder to order ….15
Using the figure of the Trickster, then, we see that Henry is
Berryman’s pertinent response to a painful and chaotic reality, to a
universe apparently without order; a “world so ill arranged” as he calls
it in Dream Song 164. The fact of a disordered and dark reality is
frequently invoked in The Dream Songs and with it, Henry’s shifting
and uncertain identity and the sharp transitions of tone in the Songs
themselves. If Henry’s journey is without progression it is because no
such framework can be imposed on chaotic reality. Furthermore the
Songs frequently emphasize the mysterious, enigmatic and
incomprehensible, although not in ways that make these attractive. To
some extent they are embodied in the figure of Delmore Schwartz,
especially in Dream Song 159: “His mission was obscure. His mission
was real, / but obscure.”
Seeing The Dream Songs as a continuation of a Trickster tradition
can be liberating. It partially absolves us of the need to search for
structure, narrative and character development in the Songs, since
these are not necessary prerequisites of the tales. It reinforces the fact
(too often easily disregarded by commentators) that Henry is an
amenable construct rather than a confessional representation of
Berryman’s life. It also encourages us to locate the Songs more
certainly among post-modernist texts that question the validity of
grand narratives and which endorse and embrace the apparently
contradictory as a form of multiplicity and which suggest that the
concept of a coherent identity is a fiction that should be discarded.
Certainly this would bring Berryman’s use of Trickster into creative
alignment with the use of him made by such diverse figures as Ellison,
Ted Hughes, Gerald Vizenor and Louise Erdrich. 16 It also reinforces
the relevance of Berryman’s belief that poetry was a restoration of a
primitive impulse, something that is both a spell for survival and
something that is a “terminal activity” which takes place “out near the
15
Kerényi in Radin, The Trickster, 185.
Ted Hughes’ use of the Trickster figure as the basis for Crow is well established.
Gerald Vizenor frequently uses the Trickster in his work, and contends that Trickster
is a much more compassionate and less amoral figure than Radin proposed (Gerald
Vizenor, Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Erdrich’s character Gerry Nanapush in Love
Medicine (1985) is based on Nanabozho.
16
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Stephen Matterson
end of things”. 17 His further explanation of this implies a strong link
between the pre- or non-Judaeo-Christian Trickster and the impulse to
poetry: “Poetry begins – as a practical matter, for use. It reassures the
savage .… And medicine men are shrewd: interpretation enters the
chanting, symbols are developed and connected, the gods are invoked,
poetry booms.”
As Trickster, then, Henry functions in The Dream Songs as the
primitive’s response to elemental questions of pain, suffering and
endurance. In part this has to do with Trickster’s mixed and uncertain
nature. Trickster predates and therefore evades the Christian dualism
that assigns goodness to God and evil to Satan, and his amoralistic
combination of good and evil, mischief and unpredictability,
beneficence and malevolence, is closely allied with the urgent
questions that Berryman asks about the presence and nature of God,
the direction of history and the moral nature of the self. As he writes
in Dream Song 239:
Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?
– Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both,
like most of we.
The evidence is difficult to structure towards deliberate evil.
But what of the rest? Does it wax for wrath
In its infinite complexity?
Berryman withholds credence from the teleological and redemptive
possibilities that are provided by the Christian or Jewish God, and
consequently must find a way to endure and appease suffering. (It is
of course relevant here to recall that The Dream Songs originated in
“The Nervous Songs” and in The Black Book, both of which
confronted appalling individual and public displacement in the
twentieth century.) Using the Trickster tradition, Berryman occupies
an alternative position to the Judaic and Christian traditions, from
which he confronts the absurd and appalling realities of modernity. In
so doing he avoids what Stanley Diamond, in his essay comparing
Trickster with Job, called the “embarrassing denouement of the book
of Job” and The Dream Songs really are, as Berryman states at the
17
Berryman cited in Charles Thornbury, Introduction to John Berryman, Collected
Poems 1937-1971, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1989, xxix.
The Trickster in The Dream Songs
151
outset, “a long / wonder the world can bear & be” (Dream Song 1). 18
Trickster is appealing to Berryman in that he provides a provisional
answer to what are perennial human concerns and issues. Suffering
has no meaning but it must be borne. Endurance, humor and the
capacity to face reality are the most salient and even heroic responses
to an unamenable and puzzling universe. As for Ellison, the
invocation and embrace of multiple and shifting identities is a key
strategy for ensuring endurance and evasion.
Henry certainly possesses key Trickster characteristics, and his
presence highlights some of the most fundamental features of The
Dream Songs. But at this point I want to press the analogy between
Henry and Trickster a little harder, in particular to explore what might
be seen as a major conflict that is being examined in the Songs. As we
have seen, Trickster is an appealing figure for Berryman, offering a
non-Christian explanation of suffering and loss and seeming to
provide a formulation of responsive identity in the modern world. But
there is also another narrative being explored (or even performed) in
The Dream Songs, which suggests that Berryman is examining the
possibilities of the Trickster but that he ultimately rejects them. I want
to argue that in effect there are two competing narratives in The
Dream Songs. There is the Trickster narrative, non-linear, episodic,
and liberated from teleology, focused on the protean Henry. But
alongside this there is also a potential for structured narrative which
unfolds dramatically in linear form, and in which Henry develops and
changes before a conclusion is reached.
It is certainly the case that Henry functions at times in The Dream
Songs as the agent of confusion; to use Kerényi’s phrase again, the
Trickster adds “disorder to order” so as to challenge us to see the
“totality of life”. But in this respect the most striking difference
between Henry and Trickster is Henry’s sense of guilt. That is, unlike
Trickster, he has a conscience. At times this is comically invoked by
Berryman, emphasizing Henry’s almost-eagerness to blame himself
for the world’s mishaps and disasters. As he writes in Dream Song 5:
Henry sats in de plane & was gay.
Careful Henry nothing said aloud
but where a Virgin out of cloud
18
Diamond is here referring to the happy ending of the Book of Job, which sees Job’s
health and riches restored to him after acknowledging God’s absolute power over him
(Radin, The Trickster, xii).
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to her Mountain dropt in light,
his thought made pockets & the plane buckt.
‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’
Since he lacks any moral sense Trickster is unable to blame himself
for anything, still less to apologize. By contrast, at certain moments in
The Dream Songs Henry is represented almost as a scapegoat. He not
only possesses special insight into the losses and hungers of others but
burdens himself with them and is even likely to accuse himself of
various potential crimes, including murder. Trickster is an attractive
figure for Berryman, an escape from the burden of the self, just as he
was for Ellison’s Invisible Man. But in both cases, the absolution from
responsibility and identity is temporary. In fact, Trickster functions for
Ellison and for Berryman almost as a brief holiday or term of respite
from reality and responsibility (and thereby consolidates Jung’s
suggestion that there is an intimate link between Trickster and the
European tradition of carnival). Invisible Man will ultimately refuse to
imitate Rinehart and reject the multiplicity of identity in an attempt to
invoke and to act out a sense of social responsibility; he wills a form
of acting in the world rather than only a means of responding to it.
Henry may wish himself to be an animal – or, more accurately,
Berryman wants Henry to perform as if he were an animal – obedient
to instinct and appetite alone. He can act as if he were another
incarnation of amoral Trickster, but he finds that his humanity
persists, and with it, his excess of guilt and shame.
Henry fulfills his various appetites but unlike Trickster he desires
release from them, or he may see them as stages of progression
through which he must pass, or he finds that they have inescapable
consequences. In this respect, Dream Song 69 assumes special
significance. In it Henry prays for “a personal experience of the body
of Mrs Boogry / before I pass from lust!” The idea of passing from
lust, of developing away from it, is directly counter to the Trickster’s,
and for the most part Henry’s, indulgence of desires. Berryman
indicates that appetites may be seen as part of a progression, and that
they are not inconsequential. In fact, one of these consequences is the
excessive intensification of conscience and the assumption of shame.
(Perhaps this is nowhere more apparent than in Dream Song 29, the
almost unbearable poem of alcoholic insomnia in which Henry
wonders whether he is a murderer.)
The Trickster in The Dream Songs
153
The point here is not only that Henry may be seen as a Trickster
who has developed a conscience, but that there is a significant
oscillation in The Dream Songs between the longing for multiform
identity (especially associated with the lives of animals) that recalls
Trickster, and the sense of responsibility towards a human identity and
all that this involves concerning a moral sense; an identity that
Berryman sees as synonymous with Christianity. After all, the
existence of a conscience implies not just a potentially Christian
sensibility but also an innate sense of the distinction between right and
wrong. This oscillation of identity provides a useful perspective on a
feature of the Songs that seems to be unexplored; the repeated
suggestion that Henry has fallen into human identity from some other
state, or that his membership of the human race is somehow voluntary:
“Henry for joining the human race is bats” (Dream Song 63). This
theme is particularly explored in Dream Song 13. Using the past tense,
Berryman offers an evaluation of Henry’s life that masquerades
almost as an obituary: “God bless Henry. He lived like a rat, / with a
thatch of hair on his head / in the beginning.” Although the Song
begins with the will to bless Henry, his humanity is immediately
qualified in the first clause of the poem’s second sentence. The poem
promptly invokes a tension that is repeated at large throughout The
Dream Songs: the positioning of Henry in the human realm, with all
that this implies regarding moral responsibility and conscience, versus
his positioning as an animal, a gesture that invokes the amoral, guiltfree Trickster who is defined and controlled by his various appetites
without understanding them or considering their consequences.
This division is immediately broadened out into the conflict
between a pre- or non-Christian mode of apprehending the universe
and that provided by Christian belief. “He lived like a rat” echoes
King Lear’s appalling lament at the death of Cordelia in
Shakespeare’s most determinedly pre-Christian play: “Why should a
dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?”19 However,
“in the beginning” recalls the opening of St John’s gospel and
consequently the start of the Christian faith, when God assumes
human form. The Song’s second stanza asserts that Henry was after all
“a human being … a human American man”. But this is then
complicated by the statement that “God’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in
business.” Thus, Berryman concisely lays out for us the terms on
19
See William Shakespeare, King Lear, V.iii.305-306.
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Stephen Matterson
which he is constructing Henry’s identity and the implications that this
has for the “business” of the Songs. If Henry is a Trickster (a rat, in
this case) then he exists beyond the Judaeo-Christian God’s ordering
of the world. But this brings him no comfort or assurance, because
unlike Trickster he cannot evade an acknowledgment of an inner self
that requires him to judge his actions morally. Yet if Henry renounces
Trickster and inhabits human form he stands condemned by God (now
his “enemy”). This is, ultimately the “business” of The Dream Songs:
the exploration of what it means to be “at odds wif de world & its
god” as Berryman writes in Dream Song 5 and, consequently, whether
to counter this with the amoral, multiplicitous world of Trickster, or to
reform the self and shape it to Christian faith.
In broader terms, then, The Dream Songs simultaneously inhabits
and explores the claims of two opposed ways of looking at the world,
ways that Diamond characterized as Job versus the Trickster. In the
story of Job, suffering and deprivation have a point, being ultimately
redemptive. Henry is unable fully to accept the nature of Job’s God,
but he eventually finds this story (even with its “embarrassing
denouement”) preferable to the meaningless world of Trickster. While
Trickster is used by contemporary writers, notably Gerald Vizenor, as
part of a post-modernist celebration of multiple identities and nonlinear, interrupted and elided narrative, neither Ellison nor Berryman
could be so affirmative. Both Invisible Man and The Dream Songs are
significant examinations of the possibilities of Trickster in the
twentieth century, but both ultimately reject him/her in favor of a form
of modernist coherence.
“ONE GRAND EXCEPTION”:
THE DREAM SONGS AS THEODICY?
BRENDAN COOPER
“But how should a man be just with God?” (Job 9:2)
Christopher Ricks, in a 1970 review of contemporary American
poetry, argues that The Dream Songs might be read as a theodicy:
Like all good elegies (Lycidas as well as In Memoriam), the Dream
Songs [sic] can’t but be a theodicy. Berryman’s poem, for all its
fractures and fractiousness, is as intensely a theodicy – “a vindication
of divine providence in view of the existence of evil” – as In
Memoriam; as intensely, and as equivocally. “God loves his creatures
when he treats them so?”1
This comment has been noted by a number of critics without any
comprehensive investigation of its problematic nature.2 Ricks claims
The Dream Songs to be an “equivocal” theodicy, and bolsters it here
1
Christopher Ricks, “Recent American Poetry”, Massachusetts Review, XI/2 (Spring
1970), 336. Ricks’ assertion is, of course, also provocative with respect to Tennyson’s
In Memoriam. Though an investigation of that poem as “theodicy” is beyond the
scope of this essay, it is worth noting that it culminates in a positive declaration of
God’s “one law … To which the whole creation moves”, a resolution that is missing
from The Dream Songs.
2
See, for example, Douglas Dunn’s “Gaiety & Lamentation: The Defeat of John
Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John
Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 139-51.
In The Poetry of John Berryman (New York and London: Kennikat Press, 1978),
Gary Q. Arpin praises Ricks’ “excellent review essay” (66). John Haffenden notes
that Berryman’s “life and work incorporates a theodicy, as Christopher Ricks has
indicated” in his Introduction to Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972, London:
Faber and Faber, 1978, xviii.
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Brendan Cooper
with the standard dictionary definition, “a vindication of divine
providence in view of the existence of evil”. Yet if that is its meaning,
the term itself seems ultimately to demand an annihilation of
equivocality in favor of a revelation of divine order, a replacement of
equivocation with vindication. A recognition of the difficulties
surrounding the concept of “theodicy” must underpin any assessment
of Ricks’ provocative application of the term to Berryman’s long
poem.
The word “theodicy” is a product of the theological problem of
evil, an issue that has been painstakingly explored by countless
religious scholars and one that stretches back into the heart of
scripture. The prophet Habbakuk laments, “Thou art of purer eyes
than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest
thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when
the Wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”.3 A
suffering Job asks, “Is it good unto thee that thou shouldst despite the
work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel of the wicked?”. 4
Human rationality struggles to accommodate the coexistence of
manifest worldly injustice and a moral framework of justice
administered by an omnipotent and loving God. The specific term
“theodicy” appeared in the eighteenth century to describe the
structured philosophical response to this problem, and was coined by
G.W.F. Leibniz in his 1710 volume Theodicée, written in reaction to
the skeptical arguments of his contemporary Pierre Bayle. The word
stems from the Greek theos, “God”, and dike, “justice”: a theodicy,
then, according to its etymological components, is the conjunction or
reconciliation of God and right – the revelation, that is, of an intact
divine moral order behind and within morally corrupted quotidian
reality. Leibniz’s attitude is marked by a fundamental urge towards
resolution: “Concerning the origin of evil in its relation to God, I offer
a vindication of his perfections that shall extol not less his holiness,
his justice and his goodness than his greatness, his power and his
independence.”5
The positivity of Leibniz’s work was famously attacked by
Voltaire, who felt tragedies such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake
hopelessly undermined the notion that we are living in the best of all
3
Habbakuk 1:13.
Job 10:3.
5
G.W.F. Leibniz, Theodicy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951, 61.
4
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
157
possible worlds. And Voltaire’s Enlightenment antagonism towards
theodicy anticipated by two centuries the assault on positive religious
conceptions effected by the events of the twentieth century. After the
Holocaust, Soviet genocides and the Atomic bomb, theological
discourse was forced to reconstruct itself in accordance with a cultural
reality that had for many people been irreparably evacuated of its
teleological properties. Various prominent writers and thinkers have
examined the ways in which mid-twentieth-century events served to
challenge or undermine religion and metaphysics: Theodor Adorno,
for example, wrote that the events of Auschwitz “make a mockery of
the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated
by an affirmatively posited transcendence”; George Steiner, more
recently, has suggested that “The twentieth century has put in doubt
the theological, the philosophical and the political material insurance
for hope”.6 Post-Holocaust debates on the matter of theodicy hence
accept that “theodicy consists of fallible options”, that “no theodicy
has the final answers”, that “we cannot hope for a universal solution,
since we never agree on the statement of the problem at the outset”.7
Some theologians, such as Terence Tilley, have gone further, arguing
that all modern efforts at theodicy are an outrage against the actual
fact of human suffering that they attempt to justify: “I have come to
see theodicy as a discourse practice which disguises real evils while
those evils continue to afflict people.”8
Jewish theologians have struggled to reconfigure their theological
understanding in response to the Holocaust and the threat to Judaic
religious life caused by its occurrence. The radical theologian Richard
Rubenstein argued that the Holocaust incurred a demolition of
traditional deistic belief anticipated in the writings of Nietzsche,
concluding that “we live in the time of the death of God”. The moral
outrage of the Holocaust means that “the thread uniting God and man,
heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in a cold, silent,
unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own
6
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York: Seabury Press,
1973, 361. George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, 7.
7
The statements, by John K. Roth, Stephen T. Davis and Frederick Sontag, form part
of the collaborative symposium entitled Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy,
Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1981, 8, 22, 141.
8
Terence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University
Press, 1991, 3.
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Brendan Cooper
resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?” 9
Rubenstein’s bleak vision was controversial at the time of publication,
but his attitude exemplifies the radical reformulation of religious
conceptions that the events of World War II widely necessitated. More
recently, Zachary Braiterman has examined the way in which “The
catastrophic suffering born of mass death and the wholesale
destruction of collective aggregates radically undermine social and
symbolic orders”. As a counter to theodicy, he draws attention to
antitheodicy as a “post-Holocaust theological sensibility” whereby an
individual “refuse[s] to justify, explain, or accept” the relationship
between God and evil.10
These postwar attacks on and reconstructions of religious thought
provide a useful historical platform for a reading of The Dream Songs
in response to Ricks’ provocative comment. Berryman’s poem
extensively confronts the sociopolitical and religio-political conditions
of postwar America to a degree hitherto under-acknowledged in
accounts of his work. Philip Coleman’s recent ground-breaking
research in this area has begun to address the problematic fact that a
“view of Berryman as a poet whose work says something important
about the state of the nation is rarely (and then uncomfortably) found
in Berryman studies”.11 The profound impact the Holocaust made on
Berryman’s work, for example, remains an insufficiently recognized
fact.
In 1945, Berryman wrote the story “The Imaginary Jew”, based
upon a real incident in 1941 in which Berryman was mistaken for a
Jew, and which addresses the question of collective human guilt for
the Nazi atrocities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Berryman
worked extensively on a long poem to be entitled The Black Book,
which was to deal directly with the extermination of Jews in the Nazi
death camps. Ultimately, he found the work too harrowing to
complete, and was forced to abandon the project.12 But the subject
matter of The Black Book clearly spilled over into his composition of
9
Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism,
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966, 151-53.
10
Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in PostHolocaust Jewish Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, 26, 4.
11
Philip Coleman, “The Politics of Praise: Influence and Authority in John
Berryman’s Poetry”, PhD Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2002, 4.
12
See John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1982, 205-206.
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
159
The Dream Songs: one unpublished Dream Song manuscript runs
“They’ll start burning Jews up again – Mr Bones, / they never burnt
up no Jews. – No? How come? Why? / − They too sanitary”; another
reads “It’s nice, + v. nice, if a-many Jews / are seen to die, and keen to
kill them are / a good many Germans –”.13 These disturbing drafts are
evidence that the subject Berryman strived to address in The Black
Book continued to be a consciously thematic concern during his
development of the Dream Song format. The personal readings that
have dominated Berryman criticism have hindered adequate
recognition of this politicized quality to his voice, and our
examination of The Dream Songs as “theodicy” should proceed in
recognition of the extent to which he confronts religious questions in
terms of the traumatic events of mid-twentieth-century history.
In Dream Song 97, Henry complains:
My slab lifts up its arms
in a solicitude entire, too late.
Of brutal revelry gap your mouth to state:
Front back & backside go bare!
Cats’ blackness, booze, blows, grunts, grand groans.
Yo-bad yōm I-oowaled bo v’ha’l lail awmer h’re gawber!
– Now, now, poor Bones.
John Bayley was perplexed enough by the penultimate line here to
read the Song as “laps[ing] delicately into gibberish.”14 It is, in fact, a
transliteration from the Hebrew of the beginning of Job’s first speech:
“Perish the day wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said,
There is a man child conceived.”15 Henry, having reluctantly returned
to life from his “death” in Book IV of The Dream Songs, suddenly
becomes Job, lamenting his own birth in the face of an apparently
cruel and unjust God. Job’s anguish is comically thrust into the
twentieth-century world of urban decay, the esoteric Hebrew
bathetically juxtaposed with the litany of urban detritus described in
the previous line. Braiterman identifies Job as an “antitheodic” figure,
13
Dream Songs (Unpublished), box 1, folder 4, John Berryman Papers, University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis.
14
John Bayley, “John Berryman: A Question of Imperial Sway”, in Berryman’s
Understanding, 205.
15
Job 3:3.
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Brendan Cooper
since he “reject[s] suffering and protest[s] providence”, a voice of
religious rebelliousness that makes particular sense in a postHolocaust civilization.16 Berryman’s incorporation of the voice of Job
hence may be read as constituting a moment of antitheodic rebellion.
It is also part of a larger context of intensified interest in Job in the
twentieth century; Jon Douglas Levenson has written that “Events of
the twentieth century have called forth a more sympathetic reading of
Job, and this new interest is part of a wider reappraisal of biblical
theology based on recent history”. The Book of Job became a natural
model for modern writers, since “in no other book are characteristic
themes of the twentieth century – ‘disaster’, ‘unimagined evil’,
‘frustration’, ‘bewilderment’, ‘a sense of despair’ – so central”.17
But in Berryman’s Dream Song 97, Job’s suffering undergoes
comic degradation. The “grand groans” of Job are spoken by a bestial
Henry whose “grunts”, alcoholism, and drunken fighting make a
mockery of the profound agony of Job’s expression. The gravity of the
line is further diminished by the fact that the transliterated words
resemble the baby-talk and blackface used so frequently by both
Henry and his companion elsewhere in The Dream Songs. Henry cuts
a ridiculous figure, as he jabbers a dialect that is nonsensical and
useless in a postwar American society divorced from both the
linguistic comprehension and the religious framework of Job’s speech.
A few lines earlier, Henry is seen in a position of reached-for but
failed supplication: “My slab lifts up its arms // in a solicitude entire,
too late.” The nullifying lateness of Henry’s religious submission
signifies that the cultural moment of its expression is posterior to any
age of positive religious faith; and Henry’s anti-religious descent into
ribaldry is subsequently stressed by the line “Front back & backside
go bare!”, an allusion to a traditional English drinking song made
popular by RAF pilots in World War II (“Let your back and sides go
bare, me boys, / Hands and feet grow cold. / But give to your belly,
boys, ale enough / Whether it be new or old”). Martin Buber wrote of
the “Job of the gas chambers”, whose suffering does not take place
within any scheme of justice and which is not answerable via
affirmative religious propositions. 18 Berryman’s utilization of Job
16
Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 10.
Jon Douglas Levenson, The Book of Job in Its Time and in the Twentieth Century,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972, 2, 3.
18
Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken, 1967,
224-25.
17
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
161
appears similarly to highlight a schism between the contemporary
world and affirmative belief. The post-Holocaust spiritual scenery
within which Henry conducts his life consists of corroded and
disintegrated religious values. In his disharmony with both secular and
divine realities (“at odds wif de world & its god,” as he puts it in
Dream Song 5) Henry embodies the multivalent disconnectedness of
modern man after the militaristic and genocidal cultural darknesses of
the twentieth century and the dismantlement of collective religious
faith. Unlike in the Book of Job, in The Dream Songs there is no
religious orthodoxy, misguided or otherwise, offered as an alternative
to Henry’s tormented and ambivalent religious rebellion.
In a 1970 interview Berryman elaborated on the parallel between
the dialogic structure of Job and the Henry-friend dialogue of The
Dream Songs, suggesting that the friend’s role is that of Jobcomforter.19 But in Dream Song 97, the friend can offer nothing more
than what appears to be a bland and empty comfort or admonition –
“now, now” – in reply. Yet for all its apparent blandness and
emptiness, the friend’s reply is charged with significance. It signifies
the fact of present-day modernity – “now, now” – that renders Henry’s
appropriation of Job not only anachronistic but futile, the dead matter
of a religious tradition radically inapplicable to a postwar world
secularized by a magnitude of mass death that tore apart teleological
conceptions of the world and exposed the failure of cultural progress.
Dream Song 97 therefore appropriates the antitheodic figure of
Job, and presents Henry as a bathetic modern Job-parody, ridiculously
attempting to re-deploy Job’s righteous anguish in a postwar America
whose faithlessness and moral decay he himself embodies. The
sinfulness of Henry, who lusts after “women’s bodies” (Dream Song
26) and “debaucheries” (Dream Song 146), is in stark contrast to the
“perfect and upright” Job of the Old Testament. 20 The allusion is,
however, an indication that Job was an extremely important model for
Berryman’s poem. In an unpublished manuscript of Dream Song 1,
19
“[Henry] is suffering and suffering heavily and has to. That can’t be helped. And he
has a friend, Mr. Bones, but the friend is some friend. He’s like Job’s Comforter.
Remember the three who pretend to be Job’s friends. They sit down and lament with
him, and give him the traditional Jewish jazz – namely, you suffer, therefore you are
guilty. You remember that. Well, Henry’s friend sits down and gives him the same
business” (Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with Berryman”, Massachusetts
Review, XI/2 [Spring 1970], 346).
20
Job 1:1.
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Brendan Cooper
Berryman noted that the first half of the first line, “Huffy Henry”,
refers to “Achilles – insult, unused power, loss, viciousness,
generosity”. But under the second part of the line, “hid
the day,”
Berryman wrote: “Job – war w. God; suffering.”21 This manuscript
note signifies the fact that the first line of Berryman’s poem contains
an allusion that no critic has yet identified, to the first line of Job’s
opening speech. Berryman’s interest in Job was profound: he even
began a translation of the verse dialogue of Job in 1956, a work which
was never finished and never published. The time of writing is
significant, just when many of the earliest Dream Songs were being
written. Job crops up again and again in Berryman’s notes on his long
poem, and various critics, such as John Haffenden and Joseph
Mancini, have noted the fact that Job is in one way or another a model
for Henry. 22
The allusion to Job’s opening speech at the very beginning of The
Dream Songs enforces the validity of reading Henry as a type of
twentieth-century Job-figure. Job desires a cessation to his suffering
that he feels is only possible through an annihilation of his self: “For
now I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then
had I been at rest.”23 Job’s identification with those who “dig for
[death] more than for hid treasures” finds a parallel in the reluctantly
resurrected Henry, who is “Lazarus with a plan to get his own back”
digging his way back down to his grave in Dream Song 91. 24 But
Henry’s predicament involves a transformation of Job’s Old
Testament religiosity into a twentieth-century context wherein
Christian eschatology is continually threatened by agnostic or secular
ontological perspectives. This ambivalence occurs throughout The
Dream Songs: “we will not wonder, will us, Mr Bones, / whether
either He looms down or wifout trace / we vanisheth” (Dream Song
220); “Am I a bad one – / I’m thinking of them fires & their
21
Dream Songs (Unpublished), Box 1, Folder 1, John Berryman Papers, University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis.
22
“It must be said that Berryman did see Henry as a type of Job, and does express
personal suffering in The Dream Songs”, writes John Haffenden in John Berryman: A
Critical Commentary, New York: New York University Press, 1980, 81. Joseph
Mancini notes that in “a number of interviews, Berryman suggested the affinities
between this work and his Songs” (see Mancini, The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic
Strategies in the Poetry of John Berryman, New York: Garland Publishing, 1987,
219-20).
23
Job 3:13.
24
Job 3:21.
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
163
perplexness – / or may a niche be found / in nothingness for
completely exhausted Henry?” (Dream Song 239); “I want rest here,
neither below nor above” (Dream Song 256); “This place is not so
bad, considering / the alternative with real fear. / Being dead, I mean.
‘Well it is a long rest’ / to himself said Mr Bloom. But is it that now?”
(Dream Song 288). Henry’s sinfulness incurs an unassuagable terror
of Christian eschatological tenets that he is unable to stabilize through
the apprehension of positive religious faith.
Berryman’s redeployment of Job’s condition in a context that is not
ordered by stable doctrine therefore provocatively parodies and
undermines the religious underpinnings of the Judaic text. In his essay
on Whitman’s “Song of Myself” – published in 1957, again around
the time when many of the earliest Dream Songs were being written –
Berryman warns the reader against confusing the form and content of
Whitman’s poem, and does so via an unexpected comparison:
I must say first that its form is perhaps misleading, like the form of the
Hebrew poem of Job. That mysterious work – never mind the prose
folk-tale in which we find it imbedded – has at any rate the form of a
theodicy; but that form is ironic for God’s justice is never vindicated
at all, solely his power is demonstrated; so that we have to call the
poem a theodicy of power – that is, no theodicy at all.25
The refusal or failure of God to provide Job with direct reconciliatory
answers, Berryman argues, prevents the book as a whole from being
acceptably defined as “theodicy”. Berryman’s identification of the
antitheodic quality of the book of Job can be applied directly to The
Dream Songs, as the absence of resolution upon which the poem
proceeds precludes the occurrence of any ultimate theodic moment.
This mode of procedure resembles less a theodicy than Braiterman’s
antitheodicy, since the poem “refuse[s] to justify, explain, or accept”
the moral disorder of the world in terms of an overarching framework
of divine justice. But Berryman’s work is further dislocated from
particular doctrinal frameworks than Braiterman’s conception of
antitheodicy, as it lacks any consistently envisaged religious schema
against which antitheodic rebellion might be situated.
The non-reconciliatory mode of The Dream Songs thus explicitly
and aggressively opposes the positive and constructive concept of
25
See “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in John Berryman, The Freedom
of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 233.
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Brendan Cooper
“theodicy”. All religious frameworks are fragmented and adrift since
they are part of the disintegrated world Henry describes. “My
framework is broken, I am coming to an end, / God send it soon”,
Henry pleads in Dream Song 112. The appeal to God here is
undermined by the lack of a stabilizing framework of religious values
within which such an articulation might be made positively and with
hope. The poem’s mode of progression is fundamentally entropic,
creating an ambiguity of moral values so that the very notions of
“divinity”, “evil”, and “justice” are radically destabilized. Religious
images and allusions are unstable detritus: Paul Giles notes that while
the iconography and aesthetic structures of Catholicism surround
Berryman’s work, his “textual significations are so dense, multivalent,
and indeed contradictory that it would be not only reductive but
actually impossible to collapse their complexity in the name of any
one systematic doctrine”.26 The grammar of Christian theology is used
to express the distance of modern consciousness from positive
religious experience.
Henry’s subsistence is a continual Fall, a continual slippage away
from divine order. In Dream Song 1 “nothing fell out as it might or
ought”. He also “likes Fall,” and is “prepared to live in a world of Fall
/ for ever”. In Dream Song 57 he laments that “I fell out of the tree”,
an image that echoes the nostalgic memory in Dream Song 1 of sitting
“all at the top” of a sycamore tree. This tree may perhaps imply
another powerful symbol of Eden, the tree of knowledge. It is also a
sycamore that Zacchaeus climbs at Jericho in order to view Jesus as he
passes by. 27 Berryman’s image of the sycamore implies a vision of
Christ now lost and yearned for, a T.S. Eliot-like recognition of past
religious feeling now replaced by contemporary faithlessness: “He
who was living is now dead / We who are living are now dying / With
a little patience.”28 In The Dream Songs, any positive adherence to a
mode of Christian theology is always dropped in favor of a more
skeptical or rebellious theological position. In Dream Song 56 Henry
expresses sympathy for Origen’s heretical theory of apocatastasis, and
26
Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 237.
27
“And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he
was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see
him; for he was to pass that way” (Luke 19:3-4). The image recurs in Dream Song
328 where we are told Henry “flourisht like a sycamore tree”.
28
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, London: Faber and Faber, 1974, 76.
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
165
imagines that “Hell is empty. O that has come to pass / which the cut
Alexandrian foresaw, / and Hell lies empty.” But by line nine of the
Dream Song a terrified bestial Henry’s “cleft feet drum”, and the
language is powerfully that of disintegration and spiritual fear –
“terror, & plunging, swipes”, “Crumpling, I– why,–”. By the
beginning of the next Song, Henry is “In a state of chortle sin”, the
pun on chortle/mortal exemplifying the playful blasphemy that
constantly serves to undercut religious sentiments throughout the
poem.
Berryman himself responded ambiguously and evasively to Ricks’
assertion, stating merely that “it is a tough question. The idea of a
theodicy has been in my mind at least since 1938.”29 Though keen to
express a long-established interest in the concept, he was clearly
reluctant explicitly to label his poem with the term “theodicy”.
Moreover, the song from which Ricks quotes in support of his
comment, Dream Song 266, is itself radically uncertain with respect to
God’s justice and love, displaying Henry’s terror at a seemingly
hostile God who directs towards him not love but a merciless and
indefinite prolongation of Henry’s worldly pain:
…Was then the thing all planned?
I mention what I do not understand.
I mention for instance Love:
God loves his creatures when he treats them so?
Surely one grand exception here below
his presidency of
the widespread galaxies might once be made
for perishing Henry, whom let not then die.
He can advance no claim,
save that he studied thy Word & grew afraid,
work & fear be the basis for his terrible cry
not to forget his name.
Henry is “perishing Henry” who nevertheless cannot die: a self caught
within a continual process of dying or disintegration that does not
allow the release of annihilation. Elsewhere in The Dream Songs,
“Henry is vanishing” (Dream Song 140), “dying” (Dream Song 199),
29
See “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman”, in Berryman’s
Understanding, ed. Thomas, 31.
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Brendan Cooper
“dying / as all we all are dying: death grew tall / up Henry as a child”
(Dream Song 144). His own entropic condition mirrors the disorder he
finds in the surrounding world, “at the center of which is the ‘hidden
God’, deus absconditus, who, by withdrawing from the world, has
precipitated the corruption and the pain which now characterize it”.30
Henry’s fear is a perception of this lack of order, a perception that
God’s love and the events of human reality are for him not
reconcilable. In Dream Song 266 he gazes with terror upon scripture,
since in doing so he perceives the yawning chasm between secular
reality and the inapprehensible divine. J.M. Linebarger is misguided to
claim that the plea of the last lines “is a wish for fame rather than for
an existence in an afterlife of any sort”, since the lines set up a clear
and terrifying contrast between the human system of naming and
God’s eternal Word, between the “Word” and the poet’s secular
“name”.31 The song circles around a heroic couplet: “God loves his
creatures when he treats them so? / Surely one grand exception here
below.” These lines begin as an assertion of God’s love – “God loves
his creatures” – but by the end of the first line the language has fallen
away into a question, the poet’s mind descending from belief to doubt
to antitheodic rebellion.
Henry is the “grand exception” to God’s love, a self-inflatory
description that seems to exalt Henry’s condition to a level of
historical uniqueness ironically and parodically comparable to that of
Christ. But the language used by Berryman is carefully chosen to
intimate cultural questions that extend beyond the personal doubts of
Henry. Meaning “one thousand” in colloquial American speech since
the 1920s, “one grand” is a pun; hence, at the very moment when
Berryman seems to be expressing the uniqueness of Henry’s condition
with particular intensity, he is simultaneously implying a broader
collective cultural denial of divine justice. God’s supervision of the
world is a “presidency”, a word that invites correlations between
divine governance and the political governance of the American
democratic system. And God is impertinently described here via the
decapitalized epithet “his”, an impertinence accentuated by Henry’s
30
Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman, 29.
J.M. Linebarger, John Berryman, New York: Twayne, 1974, 104-105. Berryman
was born John Allyn Smith in 1914, but changed his name to John Berryman upon his
mother’s remarriage after his father’s death. This name-change in his youth, one
might assume, increased his sensitivity to the fact that his name was not an intrinsic or
true description of his self, that truth and language are not one and the same.
31
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
167
description of himself through the capitalized “He” in the next stanza,
a typographical contrast that retains some force despite the latter’s
position at the beginning of a sentence. Berryman engages in these
kind of linguistic games throughout his poem. In Dream Song 26, for
instance, Henry speaks of “the original crime: art, rime”, the word
“rime” here displaying its own unoriginality and fallen-ness by
echoing, copying itself from “crime”. The poet’s ability to so
mischievously manipulate language displays its malleability but also
its corruptibility, or corrupt-ness.
Berryman’s employment of punning and “blasphemous”
articulation in The Dream Songs is part of a profound preoccupation
with unavailable Edenic primal silence and the fundamental
imperfection of human language. In Dream Song 1, Henry recollects
that “Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang”. The
word “sang” paradoxically signifies vocal expression prior to the
language of the poem; in other words, in describing song, it describes
silence, an Edenic oneness with the logos that the word itself is only
able to signify by becoming a linguistic indication of unavailable
expression. Henry laments this fact elsewhere, as in Dream Song 48:
He yelled at me in Greek,
my God! – It’s not his language
and I’m no good at – his is Aramaic,
was – I am a monoglot of English
(American version) and, say pieces from
a baker’s dozen others: where’s the bread?
but rising in the Second Gospel, pal:
This song was partly written in reaction to the “little apocalypse” of
Mark 13.32 Henry’s frustration is caused by his entrapment within the
ambiguities and uncertainties of human languages. John Haffenden
has said “Song 48 hinges on the fact that Christ spoke Aramaic (l.3),
and yet this pronouncement comes to us in Greek via the Gospels”,
but there is more to Henry’s frustration since Berryman is pointing
towards the double level of Christ’s language as explicitly put forward
in the prologue to the fourth gospel: Christ’s Aramaic was human
language that was also, simultaneously, an embodiment of the divine
32
Mark 13:5-37 (see Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 98).
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Brendan Cooper
Word, o logos sarx egeneto.33 The above lines rage against the
impenetrable forest of corrupt and fallen language that separates
Henry from God’s Word; his monoglot of English and “a baker’s
dozen others” emphasizes the post-Babelian corrupt-ness and
multiplicity of the articulative mode by which he is entrapped.
Henry’s description of his life involves a parodic mimicry of the
logos, as his blasphemies and reductive puns enact language’s
inability to reveal God. 34 In the final stanza of Dream Song 48 Henry
is “full of the death of love”, a kind of walking antithesis to Christ.
Berryman’s Dream Songs then assert the fact that human language
constantly reveals the unavailability of God’s breath, the pure breath
behind ehyeh asher ehyeh, the indivisible Word of God.35
The Dream Songs recurrently expresses this unrequited desire for a
perfect, prelapsarian mode of articulation. Giles notes how
“Berryman’s text strives to tear down delusive literary words in order
to incorporate the primal silence of the Word”.36 In Dream Song 266,
Henry’s desire for connection with God makes him aware of his
failure to make such a connection, caught within a human system of
naming that confesses its own corruption and imperfection. He
articulates a desire for a lost Edenic past that the very act of
articulation demonstrates to be impossible, since, as Walter Benjamin
explained, language betrays continually its own fallen-ness:
The Fall is the moment of birth of man’s language, that in which the
name no longer remains intact …. The word must communicate
something now, outside itself. This is really the original sin of the
spirit of language. As it communicates outside of itself the word is
33
John 1:1-5, 1:14 (see Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 98).
The intensity of Henry’s dislocation from God fundamentally involves an element
of Christ-parody. In Dream Song 112 Henry tells us “I now must speak to my
disciples”. His resurrection in Dream Song 92 brings not a sense of death transcended,
but the recognition that there is “something black somewhere
in the vistas of his
heart”.
35
Exodus 3:14, see Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1988, 74: “[God] also indicates by his palindromic utterance,
with its repeated ‘h’ and ‘sh’ sounds, that his is the breath that lies beneath all
utterance and all action, a living breath which does not move forward yet does not
remain static, upholding both speech and the world.” For a discussion of Dream Song
48 in relation to the Bakhtinian idea of heteroglossia, see Tom Rogers,
“Representations of Christianity in the Poetry of John Berryman”, PhD Thesis,
University of Sheffield, 2004.
36
Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, 237.
34
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
169
something of a parody, by an explicitly mediate word, of the explicitly
immediate word, of God’s creative Word.37
Language is a vehicle of articulation that is forced to point back to an
irretrievable and inarticulable past wholeness. Henry’s loss sits
forever beneath or prior to his ability to express it, so the expression of
his self is an enactment of that loss. The creation of art, of poetry, far
from being a redemptive activity, expresses the impossibility of
achieving such redemption. Dream Song 266, then, resolutely fails to
answer the question around which it gravitates: “God loves his
creatures when he treats them so?”
To describe The Dream Songs as a “theodicy” is therefore to assert
a reconciliatory energy to the poem that opposes the failure of
reconciliation Berryman centralizes. Ricks’ assertion ultimately
provides a helpful and fascinating catalyst for investigation of the
poem’s religious qualities without accurately representing the mode in
which the poem operates. Douglas Dunn is the single critic to have
questioned Ricks’ idea, stating that “There is so much blasphemy and
doubt in Dream Songs [sic] that its religious dimensions come across
as an absence of faith, as spiritual torture”.38 Dunn’s assessment is
incisive, though it is important to recognize that Henry’s “absence of
faith” is not merely a personal condition but an expression of
collective cultural spiritual desiccation in postwar America, part of
what Coleman calls the poem’s “extended meditation on the
vicissitudes of Cold War displacement and alienation”.39
This conflation of the personal and the religio-political is evident in
the last song of Berryman’s poem, Dream Song 385. Here, the
presence of Henry’s daughter in the opening line represents an attempt
to assert the redemptive power of human love in the face of personal
pain; yet this final Dream Song concerns itself with the irretrievable
failures of communication between father and daughter. Alongside
this personal sentiment exists a comment on the modern reduction of
the religious meaning of the Thanksgiving festival to the mass
slaughter of turkeys in the service of American consumerism.
Berryman puns elaborately on the word “fall” so as to construct a
narrative backdrop of the Thanksgiving season that is simultaneously
37
Walter Benjamin, Schriften, eds Theodor W. Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Frederick
Podszuz, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955, II, 464-65.
38
Douglas Dunn, “Gaiety & Lamentation”, in Berryman’s Understanding, 140.
39
Coleman, “The Politics of Praise …”, 141.
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Brendan Cooper
a metaphysical self-examination, an articulation of unresolved
spiritual anxiety:
… My praise
follows and flows too late.
Fall is grievy, brisk. Tears behind the eyes
almost fall. Fall comes to us as a prize
to rouse us toward our fate.
My house is made of wood and it’s made well,
unlike us. My house is older than Henry;
that’s fairly old.
If there were a middle ground between things and the soul
or if the sky resembled more the sea,
I wouldn’t have to scold
my heavy daughter.
Here we are invited to read the word “fall” as signifying the physical
activity of falling, the season, and the Fall of Man. The Dream Song
therefore reveals the continuation of Henry’s condition as expressed in
Dream Song 1: there, “nothing fell out as it might or ought”, and here
Henry is still falling, and also is fallen, unregenerate. Berryman’s
language is again an enactment of its own fallen-ness. In the second
stanza, behind the repeated sounds of “praised”, “praise”, and “prize”,
lie “pray” and “prayer”; they are the words Henry cannot say, his
language failing to grasp onto the indivisible and inarticulable Word
of God. “Tears behind the eyes almost fall”: Henry is trying to
apprehend an enlightenment that will facilitate submission before a
revealed God, but finds himself incapable of successfully doing so. In
Dream Song 153 Henry had pondered, “I suppose the word would be,
we must submit. / Later. / I hang, and I will not be part of it”. A
position of submission or supplication before God is forever just
beyond the reach of his ability, or his desire. In Dream Song 385 his
praise, and his prayers, flow “too late”; just like Henry’s religious
submission in Song 97, his devotion here is caught within a
contemporary world that has irreparably lost its sense of meaningful
religious experience.
The absence of a “middle ground” in the final stanza articulates
Henry’s failure to apprehend a connecting point between the divine
and the secular. There is no synthesis between things and the soul, sky
The Dream Songs as Theodicy?
171
and sea, heaven and earth, temporality and the atemporal divine. In
examination of himself as father, Henry perceives the yawning gap
between himself and the divine Father, so that by the time the image
of his “heavy daughter” reappears as the Song’s, and the book’s,
closing phrase, it has become a metaphor for his anxious and
fragmented spiritual condition. The image of the daughter frames
Berryman’s song in a clear echo of Eliot’s “Marina”, but while the
latter’s daughter becomes a figure of emotional and spiritual hope,
Berryman’s daughter is a vehicle for the failure of such hope. Eliot’s
post-conversion Christian faith is rejected in Berryman’s postwar
skepticism and ennui.
The final song simultaneously addresses both daughter and nation;
Susan G. Berndt writes that, herein, the “poet speaks also to his nation
as a father would ‘scold’ his daughter, or as Jeremiah scolded the
‘daughter of Zion.’ Berryman’s nation is one that has dispensed with
its religious heritage and prostituted its moral character.”40 The
“daughter” represents his human daughter, his contemporary culture,
and also his poem, heavy because it is long, but also because it is nonredemptive, because it demonstrates his inability to ascend towards
any kind of God or heaven. The continuity and futurity provided by
the post-Holocaust contemporary world are devoid of teleological
energy and spiritual promise. Gary Arpin concludes of this song that
the “conflict between the notion of a benevolent God of rescue and the
available facts, the aspect of the poem that constitutes the equivocal
theodicy that Ricks pointed out, is, like the conflict in Henry’s rescue
dreams, only partially resolved”. Hence, “if Henry cannot achieve a
union with or a reconciliation with God, he will be satisfied with its
possibility”. 41 In fact, Berryman’s poem provides no such image of
possibility; instead he presents the antitheodic impossibility of
reconciliation with God in an irretrievably post-religious, postHolocaust Western civilization.
40
Susan G. Berndt, “The Last Word”, in “A Symposium on the Last Dream Song”,
John Berryman Studies, III/1-2 (Winter-Spring 1977), 83.
41
Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman, 72.
THE LIFE OF BERRYMAN’S CHRIST
TOM ROGERS
For John Berryman, New Testament scholarship and the quest for the
historical Jesus in particular was a major personal as well as academic
preoccupation. The most dedicated of his numerous works that draw
on the subject is his unpublished, and very much unfinished, “Life of
Christ”: an unintentionally long-term prose project that he refers to as
his “labour of love”. 1 After many false starts, Berryman made most
headway on the project during the last year of his life, completing two
chapters before his death in 1972. As archival material and published
poetry reveals, however, he always maintained an ambition and
enthusiasm for the Christ project that continually outweighed his
achievement, at least in the form of a finished product. This essay
describes the evolution of the work as far as it is realized; it looks at
the particular critics who inspired it, certain of whom were as
important and influential to Berryman as his favorite literary heroes,
and it also demonstrates the way the poet often draws on issues raised
by New Testament criticism as material for his poetry, particularly for
his most famous work, The Dream Songs. Although he made no
important scholarly contribution to the field of Christology, besides
his teaching, he does offer us in certain Dream Songs a profound and
entertaining artistic treatment of the problem of the historical Jesus,
and, most importantly, its consequences for personal faith. It is this
poetic achievement that finally led to a breakthrough in the writing of
his prose biography of “the most interesting man who has lived”.2
1
John Berryman, “The Life of Christ”, unpublished typescript, Miscellaneous Prose,
Box 6, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Subsequent
references will be abbreviated JBP.
2
John Berryman, Preface to “The Life of Christ” (c. 1956), manuscript sheet, JBP.
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Tom Rogers
In his 1971 poem “The Search” Berryman describes his “historical
study of the Gospel” as being prompted by an existential crisis:
I wondered ever too what my fate would be,
women & after-fame become quite unavailable,
or at best unimportant. For a tooth-extraction
gassed once, by a Russian woman in Detroit,
I dreamed a dream to end dreams, even my dreams:
I had died—no problem: but a mighty hand
was after my works too, feeling here & there,
& finding them, bit by bit.
At last he found the final of all one, & pulled it away, & said ‘There!’
I began the historical study of the Gospel
indebted above all to Guignebert
& Goguel & McNeile
& Bultmann even & later Archbishop Carrington.
(CP 198-99)
Disillusioned with the worldly pursuits he describes in the first two
parts of Love & Fame, particularly the notion of immortalizing oneself
through writing, the poet (parodically echoing the opening to John
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress) sets out on an academic pilgrimage
to find the truth. His lost sense of self-sufficiency is replaced by a
disturbing feeling of absolute dependency for which he now wants
answers. As he suggests in the poem, despite surveying “other
systems, high & primitive, / ancient & surviving” (CP 200), his quest
to unravel life’s purpose is from the start focused on the question of
whether the claims of Christianity have any credence; in other words,
“is Jesus Christ the person Christianity claims he is?” As Christian
belief rests on the conviction that God, through the Incarnation, has
specially intervened in human history, Berryman looks to the
discipline of historical criticism as the most credible source of
justification for any decision in the direction of faith. There does
appear to be a creative ellipsis in his recounting of this journey in
“The Search”. The incident in Detroit almost certainly refers to his
brief, disastrous stay in the city during 1939-40, while teaching at
Wayne University, Michigan: a period when his grip on reality
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
175
seemed at times tenuous.3 However, although his writings in the
intervening period are far from indifferent towards Christian themes,
any serious interest in “the historical study of the Gospel” is not
evident until the early 1950s.4
It was Berryman’s appointment as a Humanities lecturer at the
University of Minnesota in 1955 that provided him with the
opportunity to explore the subject in greater detail. He began teaching
a course in “Christian Origins” as part of the University’s Humanities
program, one component of a range of courses exploring the
development of Western civilization. The main emphasis of the
course, as Berryman describes it, is “on the New Testament and the
Inferno of Dante”, but it also examines the cultural context from
which Christianity emerged, as well as its subsequent impact on
Western culture. 5 The approach Berryman took to the study of the
New Testament was an “historical and documentary” one,
encouraging students to look critically at scripture, unprejudiced by
personal belief or skepticism.6 The aims were to determine what we
can know for a fact about Jesus, to explain the composition of the
New Testament, and to offer an account of the remarkable rise and
cultural influence of this new religion. From very early on in his
teaching, Berryman relied on a rather small number of New Testament
scholars for his sources, most of whom he cites in “The Search”.
Here Berryman parades the eclecticism of his influences, which do
not appear to sit easily together, but portray a broad-minded, earnestly
investigative individual determined to scour all avenues for the truth.
What unites these critics (from Goguel and McNeile to “Bultmann
even & later Carrington” [CP 200]) is that, despite their varying
perspectives on the subject, they all regard Jesus Christ as the most
significant figure in world history. The affinity that the poet feels with
3
For accounts of Berryman’s time in Detroit, see John Haffenden, The Life of John
Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 112-28, and Paul Mariani,
Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst: Massachusetts
University Press, 1996, 110-28.
4
A draft Preface for the 1971 version of “The Life of Christ” states that Berryman
“became interested in the subject 18 years ago”.
5
From a draft Foreword for a planned textbook based on his “Humanities in the
Modern World” (Humanities 54) course. See “Humanities 54” typescript, Folder 10,
Box 1, Class Files, JBP.
6
See “Humanities 62” teaching notes headed “Newman”, manuscript, Folder 19, Box
II, Class Files, JBP.
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Tom Rogers
them is expressed through the rather ironic use of Albert Einstein’s
remark in the last stanza:
When at twelve Einstein lost belief in God
He said to himself at once (as he put it later)
‘Similarly motivated men, both of the past & of the present,
Together with their achieved insights,
waren die unverlierbaren Freunde’—the unloseable friends.
(CP 200)7
The combined insights of the thinkers mentioned in “The Search”
contributed to the kaleidoscopic perspective on Christianity that the
poet now claims to possess.
The most important of his “unloseable friends”, however, are
Charles Guignebert (1867-1939) and Maurice Goguel (1880-1955).
The “formidable sceptics of the Continent”, as he refers to them, are
identified in the anxiety dream of Dream Song 322 as providing “the
scholarly frame” for Henry’s complex and troubled religious outlook.
As he notes in this Song, these New Testament scholars are associated
with the “Ecole des Hautes Etudes”, a school of the Sorbonne in Paris
where they both taught during their distinguished careers. They regard
themselves, first and foremost, as historians, attempting to reconstruct
a true picture of Christ and his teaching, as far as it can be
authentically discerned, from the available historical evidence. Much
of their reasoning leads them to dispute the figure of Christ that comes
to us through Christian tradition, including basic tenets of the faith,
such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Both take a rationalistic
approach towards the Gospel miracles, rejecting the possibility of such
“supernatural” events. Their picture of Christ is not that of the eternal
7
The quotation in this poem is derived from a memoir written in German by Albert
Einstein for a volume of essays intended to mark his seventieth birthday. A parallel
translation is provided by the editor: “The contemplation of this world beckoned like a
liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to
admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it ….
Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights which
they had achieved, were the friends which could not be lost. The road to this paradise
was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has
proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it” (Albert
Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes”, trans. Paul Arthur Schlipp, in Albert Einstein:
Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, the Library of Living Philosophers,
Evanston: Banta, 1949, 5).
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
177
Logos, but a Jewish prophet whose life and teaching has become
misconstrued through the doctrinal development of a new religion.
There are, however, differences between their two perspectives.
Whereas Goguel, a proponent of liberal Protestantism, believes that
the Synoptics can provide us with the basic outline of Jesus’ ministry,
Guignebert remains resolutely agnostic: both in terms of his personal
faith, and in the belief, as a historian, that the truth behind the Gospel
accounts is now essentially irrecoverable. Berryman relies on both
scholars for the basic historical outline of his own “Life of Christ”. In
general, his attitude towards the Gospels is more sympathetic towards
the position of Goguel, but the influence of Guignebert’s more radical
skepticism and wit is particularly apparent in The Dream Songs.
Historical criticism by itself, however, fails to satisfy Berryman in
his quest for the truth, and he seeks out writings that may convince
him about elements of the faith that the skeptics dismiss out of hand.
Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) for instance, the famous form-critic
and existentialist theologian, takes an even more radical, but
unhistorical view: hence the remark “Bultmann even” in “The
Search”. He rejects altogether the relevance of the quest for the
historical Jesus (whom he believes in any case to be irrecoverable) in
favor of Christ’s existential significance – the meaning his teaching
has for us now in our present situation. Bultmann still believes God
has acted in human history through the “event” of Christ, and his
inclusion in “The Search” represents the possibility of faith without
the need for historical proof. Berryman also looks to more orthodox,
but equally inspiring, exegetes who bring the meaning of scripture
alive for him, including Philip Carrington (1892-1975), Martin Luther
(1483-1546), Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), and Lancelot
Andrewes (1555-1626). He discovers a radical contemporary defender
of the faith in Karl Heim (1874-1958), a Lutheran theologian who
published a series of books reconciling the biblical and modern
scientific worldviews. Berryman is clearly open-minded towards
Christianity, but wants to make sure that any leap of faith he may be
required to make is a well-reasoned one.
The “unloseable friends” inspire Berryman sufficiently, by the late
1950s, to attempt his own “Life of Christ”. His “indebtedness” is
illustrated by the fact that almost all of them are acknowledged at least
once in the various draft Prefaces that he wrote for the work. Archival
evidence reveals that he made no less than four serious attempts over
an eighteen-year period to commit his “Life of Christ” project to a
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Tom Rogers
publishable form. Begun in 1956, this prose account of “the most
important human personality, and the most important career, of which
we have knowledge”, will take on a number of different formats over
the next eighteen years.8 The existing manuscript and typescript
material is produced over two time periods: the mid- to late-1950s,
and the final two years of his life, 1970 and 1971. Each attempt at the
book generally takes the form of a very carefully drafted Preface,
accompanied by extensive notes and plans. The most successful
attempt, on the evidence of what survives, is the final 1971 version,
for which two complete chapters are typewritten; however, by this
time, the work has taken on a radically different format to that which
was originally conceived.
Writing a Preface at the outset, before even drafting any of the
main text, seems to have been an important creative aid for Berryman,
serving both to inspire him, and to define the task at hand. Many
abortive attempts at other prose works in the John Berryman Papers at
the University of Minnesota include the same carefully crafted
Preface. In the absence of anything approaching a finished “Life of
Christ”, these unpublished texts are highly illuminating, supplying an
important insight into the nature of the planned book, as well as the
author’s own personal involvement with the project. The five Prefaces
that exist from the two different time periods demonstrate how his
approach to the venture evolved. They are, however, strikingly similar
in at least two respects: they all exhibit a rather ironic, selfdeprecating attitude, which protests the author’s inadequacy to deal
with the subject, and they also reveal a consistent reliance on the same
limited sources.
Two very distinct versions of the “Life of Christ” were attempted
in the late 1950s by Berryman: one in 1956, and another in 1958.
Their Prefaces illustrate his far from straightforward critical position
towards Christianity, influenced as it is by his syncretic coterie of
sources. The 1956 Preface declares:
This volume is not of course intended as a substitute for the Gospel
narratives to be found in the New Testament, a book easily available.
These invaluable accounts of the most interesting man who has lived
differ so much among themselves that they must be studied as wholes
…. But the popularity of re-tellings of the life and ministry of Christ,
8
Draft Preface dated “4 Jan 1970”, JBP.
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
179
especially when vulgar, sentimental, and theologically contemptible,
suggests that many readers do not in fact study the New Testament;
and some readers who do may be helped by having the material set in
an order and, as compositions nearly two thousand years old,
annotated. The annotations are drawn from English and American
scholarship, chiefly Protestant, from the formidable sceptics of the
Continent like Guignebert and Goguel, from the Fathers and from the
Reformers; I hope they contain nothing original, but some of them
have surprised me and I suppose they will probably surprise most
readers. I may add that it is almost useless to read the Gospel accounts
with settled incredulity, such as a conviction (based on what evidence
or faith I have no idea) that what are called miracles cannot happen
…. It must be understood that the Christian Faith and the Christian
Church do not exactly rest upon confidence in the truth of the
revelation contained in the Gospels and the Epistles. It is the other
way round, and no one has ever put it better than Luther.9
Although Berryman draws largely from the “sceptics”, Goguel and
Guignebert, he remains open-minded concerning the core elements of
Christian doctrine: the rationalistic dismissal of which, by the more
incredulous critics, he appears to find unpalatable. He is at pains to
stress that any doubt he casts upon the historical truth of various
elements of the written Gospels should not be viewed as an attempt to
undermine the Christian Faith. Through his reference to Luther, he
points out that the Gospels are above all a testament to the faith of the
communities from which they arose. For Luther,
faith has a personal rather than a purely historical reference …. Faith
is not simply historical knowledge. Luther argues that a faith which is
content to believe in the historical reliability of the gospels is not a
faith which justifies …. Saving faith involves believing and trusting
that Christ was born pro nobis, born for us personally, and has
accomplished for us the work of salvation.10
9
No date is given on the typescript itself, but the Preface mentions the case “lately” of
a doctor accused of murdering his pregnant wife. The famous case of Dr Sam
Sheppard also concerns the subject of an unpublished poem, “My students have no
trouble with miracles”, on the manuscript of which Berryman writes: “1st (or 2nd?)
winter in Mpls.” Since he took up his Minneapolis post in 1955, it must have been
written in either the winter of 1955-56 or 1956-57. The manuscript is contained in
Folder 1, Box 1, Miscellaneous Poetry, JBP.
10
Alistair E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997, 439-40.
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Tom Rogers
Such positions hold an important safety net for Berryman as he
attempts to ground his search in historical criticism, but, nevertheless,
it is historical criticism that dictates the format of the work.
It is clear, too, that he perceived his work to be filling a gap in the
market; he intended it to be an annotated “harmony” of the Gospel.
Gospel harmonies were, traditionally, an attempt to reconcile the four
Gospel narratives into a single chronological schema. It is a process
that fell out of favor with Gospel critics during the eighteenth century,
as the emphasis shifted more towards synopsis.11 Berryman’s harmony
was not intended to be a substitute for the existing Gospel accounts,
but an annotated, chronological compilation of what he considered to
be the most reliable elements. His approach, in one sense, appears to
be a highly unfashionable and discredited one; but in another, it is
actually quite innovative. Whereas harmonies were originally intended
to integrate the different Gospels, despite their problematic
inconsistencies with each other, into one, reverently presupposing
their historical authenticity, Berryman’s harmony acknowledges the
deficiencies of every previous attempt, and aims to create a harmony
on the basis of authenticity itself. He says he will “use Mark as basis
but including from other Synoptics, & John, what is plainly genuine
that Mark omits; & from Paul & Acts” and he remarks that this plan
“gives at any rate a chronology which is non-subjective; no harmonychronology is really possible”. He consequently aimed to resurrect an
old discipline in the light of recent scholarly advances.
In 1958, however, Berryman commenced work on a slightly
different project, although it is uncertain whether he intended this to
accompany or supersede the previous attempt. As the next blueprint,
written almost twelve years later, follows the revised format, one
would presume the latter. The self-deprecating, ironically apologetic
tone of the Preface, which professes the insignificance of the book,
remains the same:
An apology may properly be expected for a book on this subject, but I
offer none. I have written it for my own, not satisfaction but,
instruction. I had no thought of entering the arena with either say Mr
Jim Bishop’s florid invention or with M. Goguel’s magisterial enquiry
in The Life of Jesus … and the opening chapters of The Birth of
Christianity. I have small learning in this area; “lesse Greeke”,
11
Maurice Goguel, The Life of Jesus, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958, 38-40.
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
181
experience in textual criticism, some familiarity with biographical
evidence; it makes no equipment upon which I could advise any
reader to rely, and I publish the book only for anyone similarly
curious who has not happened to undertake a study for himself ….
The present work, I hope, exhibits little sympathy with critics such as
Bultmann, for whom “there is not one of his words which we can
regard as purely authentic”, or with writers who find themselves able
for example to inform us of Christ’s physical appearance.
Guignebert’s survey of this latter topic is worth preserving.
The appended book-list aims solely at the elucidation of
references. Even among debts so numerous and deep I cannot forbear
signalizing those to Goguel and Cullman, and, among older works, to
Westcott’s great edition of the Fourth Gospel.
The new project is to take the form of an historical critical
commentary. The extent to which he will base its format upon
Goguel’s and Guignebert’s lives of Jesus is evident from his notes:
“Draft out, with Harmony etc., from Goguel-Guignebert –
commentators before really going into other authorities paying no
heed to errors of any kind.” The book aims to evaluate systematically
the life and teachings of Jesus as they come to us through the New
Testament, in the light of whatever strands of scholarship appeal to its
author. The Preface declares how Berryman aims to resist either of the
possible extremities that may result from a life of Christ. He intends to
occupy a middle ground between the antipodes of “dogmatic
scepticism” on the one hand – the hyper-historicists, who render the
“historical” Jesus unrecognizable, as well as those who reject his
significance altogether – and on the other hand, the hagiographers
who embellish history with doctrinal interpretations and pious
inventions.
A major flaw is clearly evident in the proposed book. Berryman is
not, as he admits, a specialist in the field, and so is not consequently in
any position to offer groundbreaking new research or original insights.
Moreover, rather than provide an authoritative overview of
contemporary critical debate, or of the history of Gospel criticism, the
work unashamedly exhibits the personal tastes of its author, as well as
the limited extent of his reading. Justifiably, therefore, he implicitly
warns of its probable unreliability for anyone “who has not happened
to undertake a study for himself”. Furthermore, is the Berryman name
really significant enough at this point for anyone to care to read the
arbitrary jottings of a self-professed dilettante instructing himself? The
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Tom Rogers
conclusion of its author would appear to be in the negative; he seems
to anticipate the book’s drawbacks, from a marketing point of view, in
the Preface, and, after making little headway on the project, he
consigns it to the filing cabinet for the next twelve years.
Despite the decade-long hiatus in his work on the “Life of Christ”,
however, the 1960s was far from a period of indifference towards the
subject for Berryman. As well as continuing to further his reading and
develop his teaching in the area, he also poeticizes the quest for the
historical Jesus in The Dream Songs, the epic poem composed during
the late-1950s and 1960s. With the innovation of the Dream Song
format, he found a poetic style that enabled him to capture the
immediacy of his own experience: he was able, in other words, to
assimilate all his intellectual and emotional preoccupations into the
poem’s open-ended narrative; that is, the evolving personality of its
protagonist Henry as he makes his way in the world. It is not
altogether surprising, therefore, that the historical problem of Christ
makes an allegorical appearance in the very first prototype Dream
Song, which was composed around 1955. There the “jolly old man”
remarks: “Goguel says nobody knows where the christ [sic] they
buried him / anyway but the Jewish brass. / … So at sweet dawn wás
he gone?” This alludes to Goguel’s conclusion that the site of the Holy
Sepulcher can never be known. 12
In The Dream Songs Henry’s religious quest is continually
frustrated by the relentless difficulties thrown up by historical Gospel
criticism. The problems do not stop there: Henry also has to grapple
with the question of God’s existence, and his enquiries are mostly
centered round the problem of evil. Henry concludes that God must be
either inexistent, incompetent, or, as he suggests in Dream Song 238,
“something disturbed”. God and Christ are not synonymous in The
Dream Songs, and Henry has far more respect for the latter. Whereas
the long poem’s portrayal of God is a wittily combative and irreverent
one, the portrayal of Christ is more concerned with retrieving this
“great man” from the clutches of misrepresentation (Dream Song
234). For this reason The Dream Songs may be described as “antiChristian”, but it is definitely not “anti-Christ”. Unless it is viewed as
a trait of Henry’s characterization, The Dream Songs represents what
appears to be a shift on Berryman’s part towards a more solidly
12
Goguel, The Life of Jesus, 546-51. The Dream Song is reprinted in Mariani, Dream
Song: The Life of John Berryman, 299.
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
183
skeptical position on Christianity, which is closely aligned to that of
Goguel and especially Guignebert. The Dream Songs does not exhibit
the same openness to more orthodox interpretations as Berryman’s
“Life of Christ” does. Whereas Henry doubts the existence of God, the
existence of Jesus Christ, as a historical person, is taken for granted:
as indeed, even the most skeptical of Berryman’s sources, Guignebert,
affirms. Berryman has no time for the “Jesus myth” school; the
question for him now is whether Christianity is a true reflection of the
intentions of its founder.
Dream Song 48 provides an example of one of Henry’s surreal
confrontations with Christ, depicting a religious gulf between Christ
and Christianity. The Song is constructed around an apparently
disjointed stream of pseudo-critical utterances, pieced together to form
an elaborate intellectual joke. An absurd phantasmagorical scenario is
evoked in which Henry encounters the distinctly unhistorical Christ: a
very defamiliarized, almost dehumanized figure, a kind of cultural
Frankenstein’s monster, who is attempting unsuccessfully to get his
message across, through the obfuscation of linguistic and cultural
difference barring his authentic message. The Evangelists wrote their
Gospels in Greek, whereas Christ spoke Aramaic. The argument of the
Song draws heavily from Guignebert’s Jesus (1956). Guignebert, with
a critical stance sympathetic towards that of the history-of-religions
school, argues that the Greek influence of the Gospels is more than
just language deep. He believes that the Hellenistic environment, in
which the primitive Church settled after expanding out of Palestine,
heavily influenced its doctrinal development, to the point, in fact,
where it became utterly divorced from the religious intentions of
Jesus.13 The Song exhibits a close adherence to this view as its
argument progresses.
Henry draws attention to his own language, consequently making a
point about the intrinsic heteroglossia of all language. Multifarious
cultural, social, and historical influences stratify the utterances he
makes; he is, to some extent at least, a cultural construct, and of his
time: just as he implies Jesus and his words, as they come to us in the
written Gospels, are similarly cultural constructs. The first stanza
functions to strike a skeptical chord, concerning Christian tradition,
from the outset. The issue at stake, however, is about far more than
13
Charles Guignebert, Jesus, trans. S.H. Hooke, New York: University Books, 1956,
528-36.
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Tom Rogers
something being lost in translation. We are led on to what Henry
perceives as the dubiety of Christian doctrine, based as it is on this
cultural distortion of Christ’s life and teaching.
What sounds like a very clumsily conceived word association
game (“Where’s the bread?” as in “Where’s the Bread of Life?” or
“Christ”) prompts a mock parable in the form of a baking metaphor in
the second stanza. This life of a loaf of bread, from the sowing of the
seed through to the eating, functions as a parodic conflation of the
three seed parables in the fourth chapter of Mark, the “Second
Gospel”. In the Marcan parables, Jesus illustrates how the Kingdom of
God will flourish through his death and resurrection, and how the
Word will implant itself in the hearts of his followers. However, the
Dream Song parable demonstrates how a new religion, Christianity,
has developed as a result of the cultural context that Jesus’ legacy
found itself in after his death. Berryman derives the idea of this mock
parable entirely from Guignebert’s account of the development of
Christianity as it broke from Judaism. To Guignebert, the doctrine of
the Resurrection is important from the historical point of view, but
only “in so far as it concerns the foundation, development and
expansion of the Christian religion”:
By means of that belief [in the Resurrection], faith in Jesus and in his
mission became the fundamental element of a new religion, which,
after separating from, became the opponent of Judaism, and set out to
conquer the world. It also rendered Christianity a favourable soil for
syncretistic influences, by virtue of which the Jewish Messiah,
unintelligible and uninteresting to the Greeks, became the Lord, the
Saviour, the Son of God, the supreme Master of the Universe, before
whom the whole creation bends the knee. The ground was prepared
for it throughout the oriental world by the ancient myth of the dying
and rising God.14
Berryman draws his parable directly from Guignebert’s own
subversion of Jesus’ seed parables. The idea of the Resurrection is
culturally favorable to the Greeks, and so the implantation of Jesus’
messianic legacy in Greek soil, once belief in the Resurrection has
gained ground, enables a new religion to flourish. Furthermore, what
Henry refers to as the “eating” of the risen God, that is the celebration
of the Eucharist, is also, according to Guignebert, a specifically Greek
14
Guignebert, Jesus, 536.
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
185
innovation. The French scholar states that “the Eucharist as a
sacrament of communion with the Lord is wholly foreign to Jesus’
thought”, and, by interpreting the Last Supper as an instituting of the
Eucharist, we “attribute to Jesus a concern with and a knowledge of
things only shared by the Greek environment of Paul’s time and our
conservative critics”.15 The perplexed pause between “occurs” and
“eating” reflects how unpalatable Henry finds the relating of this
doctrine to the authentic historical Jesus. “He said so” consequently
becomes an extremely ironic and facetious assertion; it is the phony
Greek Christ of the written Gospels who has initiated this doctrine.
What Henry, as an “imaginary Jew”, finds “troublesome” is the
way that this “Jewish Prophet” has become divorced from the
intentions of his message, through the formation of a new Hellenistic
religion. The third stanza depicts how the new faith has become what
Guignebert describes as “the opponent of Judaism”. The Macbeth
allusion illustrates the involuntary Judas-complex that Henry
experiences on behalf of the Jewish race. Certain important questions
arise from Shakespeare’s play: did Macbeth fulfill the witches’
prophecy of his own free will by slaying Duncan? Or was it
predestined that he would perform this same act of murder, in the
same manner, at the very same time, therefore being incapable of
choosing otherwise? This is the anxiety of Macbeth himself: he is
uncertain as to whether the “air-drawn dagger” is real or a
manifestation of his evil intent.16
The Dream Song also parallels the predicament of Macbeth with
that of the Jews, and their fateful place in God’s plan. “The Jews”, as
the chosen people, were, according to the New Testament,
prophesized to reject their Messiah and betray him into the hands of
sinners, assisting the Roman authorities in his downfall. The question
of free will is especially pertinent in the case of Judas: was he created
from the outset with the propensity to betray his Creator? Could he
really have chosen not to betray Christ? Many, throughout history,
have misinterpreted the New Testament as espousing the guilt as
collective on behalf of the whole Jewish race, especially with regard
to the blood-curse of Matthew’s Gospel: another reason why Henry,
as an “imaginary Jew”, also feels implicated. 17
15
Ibid., 365, 448.
See William Shakespeare, Macbeth, II.i.33-51 and III.iv.62.
17
“And all the people answered, His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew
27: 25).
16
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Tom Rogers
In Dream Song 48 Berryman poetically visualizes certain problems
raised by his readings of New Testament criticism, to the point here of
dramatizing a passage from one of his favorite critic’s commentaries.
The Song also portrays the implications for his own individual faith,
and the anxious consideration of his response. The final line
exemplifies his ambivalent attitude towards Christ and Christianity at
the time of the Song’s composition in 1959.18 The accented stress on
the word “ought” implies an inclination to flee this “troublesome”
version of Christ, but also suggests “I óught to get going, but
something makes me stay”. The poet is filled with profound doubts
about the Christian faith, justified, as he sees it, by the grave problems
historical criticism seems to raise. However, he is still greatly
intrigued by the mystery of Christ; he feels sufficiently compelled to
pursue the matter further and discover the truth behind Christianity’s
origins.
In The Dream Songs, then, Berryman successfully executes
poetically what he had so far failed to achieve in a more conventional
scholarly prose format. One of the reasons why his “Life of Christ”
project had not progressed was that he was unsure of the nature and
direction of the work he was undertaking. The first three versions he
attempted took the form of critical commentaries, or annotated
harmonies, of the Gospels. Yet, if, as Berryman himself admitted, the
work would exhibit little in the way of originality and learning, then
there was ultimately little point behind the exercise, beyond that of his
own indulgence. Furthermore, his limited, and slightly eccentric, field
of sources would result in a summary of the subject that would be of
questionable reliability, and usefulness, for newcomers to life of
Christ scholarship. He attempts a new critical work again in January
1970; it follows a similar format to the 1958 version, and little
progress is made. By the time he earnestly takes up his “Life of
Christ” again in 1971, shortly after his religious conversion, he
realizes he has the makings of a stylistic format capable of
transforming the Christ project into a highly effective artistic one,
through the use of a persona well-established in his poetry. The
persona of Henry had enabled him to incorporate sometimes complex
theological inquiry into dramatic, often humorous, verse. After Henry,
18
Dated in John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1980, 158.
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
187
the poetic persona becomes the figure of the poet himself in Love &
Fame, and it is one that is easily transferable to prose.
The final version of Berryman’s “Life of Christ”, the one on which
he made most headway, is a very different kind of book to that which
was originally planned in the 1950s. Now, tentatively titled “The Life
of Jesus Christ: (on earth) so far as we have record of it”, its intended
purpose was transformed from being a useful study aid for the more
discerning reader, to what he refers to as an “aid to meditation”. 19 The
two complete chapters reveal the new, exciting and highly original
direction the work had taken. It is to be relatively short and concise;
the chapters each span only three pages, although, as plans indicate,
the lavish work will include maps and original illustrations. The
finished chapters are an enthralling culmination of his eighteen years
of research, as well as his quest for a suitable prose vehicle for it.
They contain some features characteristic of the earlier versions, such
as a “harmony” of the Gospel materials, and “eccentric commentary”
assimilating the work of his favorite critics, but these have been
integrated into a distinctly literary framework.
Under the title of the typescript Berryman adds the sub-heading:
“collected for Martha at age 8 by her father (age 56), and high time.”
The work does indeed take the format of the author narrating the
Gospel story to his young daughter. The first chapter exploits this
literary device to the full; it is a lively paced narrative, integrating
synopsis, eccentric commentary, and asides to Martha, as the opening
extract demonstrates:
In ancient Jewish story – and perhaps in truth – the Lord God Yahweh
(known too as Elohim and Shaddai) created the Sun and the Moon and
the Earth, its seas and its lands, and then created a Garden eastward of
Eden (over here is your map, honey) where He made the first man,
Adam, and the first woman Eve. The first thing they did was sin.20
Beginning naturally with Creation, he achieves the remarkable feat of
delivering a concise and lively summary of the Hebrew Bible,
portraying the pre-Christian history of God’s revelation of Himself to
mankind, in just three pages. The synopsis is frequently interspersed
with this kind of parenthesized commentary and directions addressed
to Martha as narratee. Some of this commentary, addressing complex
19
20
1971 draft Preface to “Life of Christ”, JBP.
“The Life of Jesus Christ”, Chapter 1, typescript, JBP.
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Tom Rogers
historical problems, is wildly inappropriate for even the most
precocious eight-year old, and it is obvious that the narratee is above
all a literary device. The implied reader is his regular readership that is
in tune with the Berryman persona and forgiving of, or indifferent to,
what he refers to in the preface as his “magpie scholarship”. The
extra-diegetic asides to Martha create an atmosphere of homeliness in
the proceedings, enabling Berryman to overcome the selfconsciousness of producing a pseudo-scholarly work that “pretends to
no original learning”.21
Poetry is also incorporated in the same illustrative manner: he uses
a quotation from Robert Lowell’s poem “Leviathan”, for example,
first published in Land of Unlikeness (1944), when summarizing the
story of Cain and Abel:
The Lord preferred to his offering of sacrifice, the fruit of the ground,
the offering of his brother Abel, the firstlings of his flock; so Cain
killed Abel. What this means is that the Jewish tribesmen were
developing, against old-fashioned resistance, from a nomadic pastoral
existence to a settled agricultural existence: as a friend of Daddy’s put
the matter 30 years ago,
When the ruined farmer beat out Abel’s brains
Our Father laid great cities on his soul.22
As this extract shows, the higher-narrative level between father and
daughter enables him to combine synopsis and commentary, as well as
poetic emphasis and illustration. It is a highly effective means of
assimilating his scholarly interest and attention to detail into an
accessible and enjoyable retelling of the story. Altogether it is a very
personalized, not to mention artistic, interpretation of the historical
problem of Christ.
Unfortunately, as unfinished as the work is, the most important
aspect of the study – Berryman’s assessment of the actual person of
Christ and his teaching – is never reached. His re-acquaintance with
the Christ of faith is to be found in the devotional poems of the
posthumously published collection Delusions, Etc., where, in contrast
to The Dream Songs, God and Jesus do become synonymous. In
21
1971 Preface, manuscript, JBP.
“Life of Christ”, Chapter 1, typescript, JBP. See also Robert Lowell, “Leviathan”,
Collected Poems, eds, Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2003, 894.
22
The Life of Berryman’s Christ
189
“Vespers”, for instance, he muses: “Maybe it’s not God’s voice / only
Christ’s only. (But our Lord is our Lord. / No vent there.)” (CP 233).
One can only speculate on how this new insight would have
influenced his quest for the “historical Jesus”. The final extant
remnants of this work in progress seem to have been written during
the summer of 1971, months before the poet’s death. The work that,
after so many years of false starts, eventually showed so much
promise, now exists as a mere glimpse of what it might have been.
Fortunately, however, we do have a number of published and
unpublished poems on the subject, which in many ways already
embody the artistic expression of the Christ preoccupation for which
Berryman so long searched, and which continues to stimulate and
reward research on his remarkable poetry.
“WE WRITE VERSE WITH OUR EARS”: BERRYMAN’S MUSIC
MARIA JOHNSTON
Over the past three decades much of the criticism on John Berryman’s
poetry has tended to focus primarily on biographical details, the poet’s
troubled childhood, his mental health, alcoholism, depression and the
tragic circumstances of his death. Berryman, along with Robert
Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, is regarded as
one of the most outstanding figures of the “Middle Generation” of
twentieth-century American poets, but the label of “Confessional”
poet was one that Berryman himself held “with rage and contempt”. 1
Here instead was a poet consummately dedicated to the craft of
poetry, always attentive to the possibilities of language, serving his
apprenticeship under W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden and committing
himself to a life of learning as he set about schooling himself to
become a poet of remarkable technical mastery.
Berryman viewed this process of apprenticeship as integral to the
development of all artists, as he declared in an interview with William
Heyen when he drew an insightful comparison between the
composition of the sister arts of poetry and music:
I believe in apprenticeship. Suppose I wanted to be a composer and
write piano concertos. I don’t buy some music paper and sit down. I
don’t know what an oboe can do! Isn’t that so? Okay. We serve an
apprenticeship.2
1
Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry”, in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the
Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1988, 21.
2
William Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir and an Interview”, Ohio Review, XV/2
(Winter 1974), 59.
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Maria Johnston
Although no sustained examination of the technical aspects of
Berryman’s poetry exists – the breadth of his poetic resource is often
overlooked – some critics have made passing mention to the musical
nature of the work. Edward Mendelson, for example, has stated how
the Dream Songs “are always patterned and often musical”, while
Douglas Dunn has noted Berryman’s “use of musical-sounding
verse”.3 Of the early, central influence of Yeats and Auden, Michael
Dennis Browne – in an essay on Berryman’s work that enthuses over
the “extraordinary art of these poems” and their “authority of music” –
sees Berryman’s poetic mentors as masters of a similar “combination
of passionate personal utterance and formal memorable music”. 4
Browne was first “struck” by the “sheer music” of Berryman’s poems
at a reading Berryman gave in 1971:
He read them slowly – more slowly at times than I would have thought
possible – but there were also variations within this slowness, sudden
bursts and accelerations, sudden drastic increases in volume. And the
poems came over to the audience with an extraordinary combination
of authority and intimacy – a kind of lyrical power that I had not heard
in spoken poetry before.5
According to Browne, Berryman was wholly alert to the aural
subtleties of language, the different registers of the human voice, the
phonological effects and intricate patterns that shape poetry and the
music of the line in verse.
Heyen, indeed, has recalled that Berryman “was always noting
lines, sounding out lines”.6 When asked in an interview about the
process of beginning a poem, Berryman replied, “you get going with a
pencil, and rhymes emerge and sentences emerge”.7 The attention to
sound and form was, in other words, integral from the very start. In his
introduction “Note on Poetry” in Five Young American Poets (1940),
3
Edward Mendelson, “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs”, in John Berryman,
ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1989, 53-69; 54, and Douglas Dunn,
“Gaiety & Lamentation: The Defeat of John Berryman”, in Berryman’s
Understanding, 141.
4
Michael Dennis Browne, “Henry Fermenting: Debts to The Dream Songs”, Ohio
Review, XV/2 (Winter 1974), 77.
5
Ibid., 76.
6
Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir …”, 48.
7
John Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, in Berryman’s
Understanding, ed. Thomas, 13.
Berryman’s Music
193
Berryman testifies to the importance of technique in his poetry: “One
of the reasons for writing verse is delight in craftsmanship – rarely for
its own sake, mainly as it seizes and makes visible its subject.
Versification, rime, stanza, form, trope, are the tools” (CP 287). He
elucidates his own technique in detail referring to his poem “On the
London Train”, again displaying a deep preoccupation with the way in
which meaning is enacted through the sound and structure of the
verse:
In the third stanza, for example, occurs the first serious conflict
between syntax and verse-form: “most / Embarrassing” and “this side
/ Satisfaction” are split in successive lines. The resulting impression of
strain, torsion is useful to the subject. (CP 286)
As he puts it in an account of the evolution of his early pieces “Winter
Landscape” and “The Ball Poem”, where he eschews secondary
details in order to focus more clearly on the craft of the poem: “Art is
technical”.8
On Yeats’ “A Prayer for Old Age”, Berryman wrote to his mother:
“Like most of his poems it should be read aloud a hundred times
sometimes only after weeks of reading have I understood an
intonation.”9 That Berryman placed great emphasis on the sound of
poetry is also apparent from his critical writings. “Let us listen to this
music” he insists in his essay on Ezra Pound’s poetry for, he writes,
“Behind this mastery lies his ear.” Here he also draws attention to
what he calls “the equivalents for musical form, and the versification”
of Pound’s work.10 Pound, of course, was also a music critic, theorist
and a composer who wrote prolifically on the subject and used the
term “melopoeia” to describe poetry “wherein the words are charged,
over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property
which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.”11 This definition
applies very much to The Dream Songs also. In his essay on
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Berryman meticulously notes “the quality of
8
Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976, 327.
9
Berryman in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to his Mother, ed.
Richard J. Kelly, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988, 73.
10
Berryman, “The Poetry of Ezra Pound”, Partisan Review, XVI/4 (April 1949), 38889.
11
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, London: Faber and Faber, 1954, 25.
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the sound” of the play as he analyses the aural devices in the couplet
“By the pricking of my thumb / Something wicked this way comes” in
terms of rhyme, alliteration and assonance: “The word ‘wicked’ keeps
the sound of ‘pricking’ going, the reader’s experience of the pricking
of the witch’s thumb intensifies.” Ever conscious of the importance of
sound structure in generating deeper levels of meaning, Berryman
suggests that: “This play is certainly about Good and Evil, and we
learn so partly from the aural organization of this couplet.”12 As T.S.
Eliot puts it “The music of poetry is not something that exists apart
from the meaning”. 13 Furthermore, referring to The Merchant of
Venice in his essay “All’s Well”, Berryman describes the lovers
Jessica and Lorenzo as “conversing in music”;14 the pure aural
harmonies of Shakespeare’s love poetry could hardly be rendered
better.
As a poet who was deeply attentive to the particular sound effects
of poetic language, then, it is no surprise, for example, to find
Berryman recognizing, in an interview, that his Dream Song 147
“sounds like Troilus and Cressida”.15 His praise of other works is
often given in musical terms as, for example, when he says of
Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that “Little, until the close, is impressive
in itself, but much, when read in the poem and especially the close,
affects me like some of the late, great songs in Winterreise and above
all ‘Leiermann’”.16 Dylan Thomas is lauded for his inventive energy
in the area of technique as Berryman lists his use of “[a]lliteration,
internal rhyme, refrain and repetition” as the devices that go towards
his making of a “language seen freshly, a new language”17 while
Robert Lowell, on the other hand, is criticized as one whose “ear is
not infallible”.18
Music was without doubt one of Berryman’s greatest pleasures.
John Haffenden’s biography of the poet describes him “playing the
Kreutzer sonata over and over again” as well as the music of “Bach,
12
John Berryman, “Notes on Macbeth”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 57.
T.S .Eliot, “The Music of Poetry”, in On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber and
Faber, 1979, 29.
14
Berryman, “All’s Well”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed. John Haffenden, New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 81.
15
Stitt, “The Art of Poetry”, 22.
16
Berryman, “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in The Freedom of the
Poet, 241.
17
Berryman, “The Loud Hill of Wales”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 282.
18
Berryman, “Robert Lowell and Others”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 291.
13
Berryman’s Music
195
Sibelius, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky”, and Haffenden writes that
Berryman, throughout his life, “grew fiercely percipient about music”.
As a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s he wrote the lyrics
for a “Cradle Song” composed by Irish composer Brian Boydell.19 In
an account describing Berryman’s first meeting with Randall Jarrell,
Robert Lowell witnessed how Berryman “jarred the evening by
playing his own favourite recordings” on a gramophone that had
belonged to the renowned musicologist Bernard Haggin, and of whom
both Jarrell and Berryman were “disciples”. 20 (This same prized
gramophone is later hailed in Dream Song 204.) Berryman was also
an ardent fan of blues music, naming Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey,
and Teddy Grace as his favorite singers in this genre. Furthermore, his
story “The Imaginary Jew” shows his sensitive understanding to the
way music works on the senses and the memory as he summons
Haydn’s “London Symphony”:
One night when excited I dropped the pickup, creating a series of
knocks at the beginning of the last movement where the oboe joins the
strings which still, when I hear them, bring up for me my low dark
long damp room and I feel the dew of heat and smell the rented
upholstery.21
Berryman’s poems constantly attest to his passion for music. The
sequence of Berryman’s Sonnets contains rapturous references to the
strains of Bach, Schubert, Mozart and Monteverdi as the poet’s
beloved appears in Sonnet 37, “flat on the bare floor riveted to Bach”,
while Sonnet 117 wonderfully sings of how “Supine on the floor lay
Lise / listening to Schubert grievous and sublime” (CP 129; 89).
Dream Song 204 begins:
Henry, weak at keyboard music, leanèd on
the slow movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A
& the mysterious final soundings
of Beethoven’s 109-10-11 & the Diabelli Variations.
19
John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982, 88.
20
Robert Lowell, “For John Berryman: 1914-1972”, in Collected Prose, ed. Robert
Giroux, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, 112.
21
John Berryman, “The Imaginary Jew”, reprinted in Recovery, London: Faber and
Faber, 1973, 243.
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And so, his late poem “Beethoven Triumphant” from Delusions,
Etc. (1972) is an extended homage to the great composer, across
twenty-seven separate stanzas of varying lengths. The number of
stanzas corresponds with the number of years Beethoven enjoyed
before his deafness set in, so the poem’s very formal structure speaks
explicitly of its aural concerns. Indeed, that Berryman often had
Beethoven in particular in mind is clear from his writings, where
analogies frequently point to the great composer, as illustrated from
his observation that “Shakespeare used as few stage directions as
Beethoven used emotional directions” in an essay entitled “Pathos and
Dream”.22 Also, Berryman hoped that his proposed study
Shakespeare’s Identity would ultimately be comparable to “J.W.N.
Sullivan’s book on Beethoven’s ‘spiritual development’”. 23 In
“Beethoven Triumphant”, however, he engages with his cherished
“master” in a most intimate way, mixing the quotidian with the
mythological, the contemporary with the historical, as he weaves
together pieces of Beethoven’s biography – letters, anecdotes,
reportage – with his own thoughts and emotional responses to the
music, paying tribute to the composer’s life and work. Constantly
shifting, the active voice alternates restlessly between directly
addressing and conversing with the composer (“Koussevitzky will
make it, Master; lie back down” [CP 238]), or questioning – “What
stayed your chosen instrument?” (CP 239) – and speaking of the
composer with sure authority in the third person: “One time his
landlord tipped a hat to him; / Beethoven moved” (CP 237). He also
allows the composer’s own words to speak: “You grumbled: ‘Religion
and Figured Bass are closed concepts. / Don’t argue’” (CP 239).
Berryman explores Beethoven in his stark humanity as well as
exalting his artistic powers, laying bare Beethoven’s mode of
composition as he corrects Betty von Arnim’s claims about the
composer’s “fluency”: “Fact is, he stumbled at the start / and in the
sequence, stumbled in the middle, // often unsure at the end – ” (CP
238). In this way Berryman obliterates the boundaries that exist
between music and words, fact and fictions, between past and present,
life and death.
Beethoven’s music is brought to life through the music of
Berryman’s words. Here the poet describes the “Heiligerdankgesang”:
22
23
Berryman, “Pathos and Dream”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 53.
Ibid., Introduction, lxi.
Berryman’s Music
197
“One chord thrusts, as it must // find allies, foes, resolve, in subdued
crescendo” (CP 239). Sound generates sense here: the main sounds of
“one chord thrusts” are born out of the preceding word “orchestra”
while the rhyme on the accented “thrusts” and “must” provides the
momentum for the sustained sound of the “chord” itself to reach
across the stanza break. The volume and aural intensity of the
language rises to convey the chord itself crescendo-ing, progressing in
stages towards resolution, as it moves through the bright assonance of
“find allies” – each stage underscored by the throbbing pentameter
and the emphatic pauses provided by the commas, until finally the
chord itself resolves and the “o” of “foes” resolves too, finding its
echo at last in the resolved “crescendo”. The aural gestures work
effectively from the very beginning, striking from the poem’s opening
lines with their compelling, fanfare-like quality: “Dooms menace from
tumults. Who’s immune / among our mightier of headed men?” (CP
236). Here the internal rhyme, slant rhymes and the repeated full,
mouthy “m” and sibilant “s” sound their sensual music, setting the
poem up as a solemn, timeless hymn of praise as the arresting caesura
after “tumult” provides the pause after the grand opening statement
and the strong, momentous beat coupled with the enjambment carries
the music of the line as it surges towards its rhetorical question
“Who’s immune?” in this true ode. The florid archaic diction and
syntax also add to this aural effect.
Berryman makes of us all a rapt audience but only “If we take our
head in our ears and listen / Ears! Ears!” (CP 240). The sheer impact
of Beethoven’s music is almost physical, he suggests:
I’m hard to you, odd nights. I bulge my brain,
my shut chest already suffers, – so I play blues
and Haydn whom you – both the which touch but they don’t ache me.
(CP 239)
Actual music sounds also as Beethoven’s greatest works – the fourth
Piano Concerto, Diabelli Variations, the B Flat Major Quartet, the
Eighth
Symphony,
the
Appassionata
Sonata,
the
“Heiligerdankgesang” from the A Minor Quartet – are summoned and
come alive in the inner ear, their strains filling the air as they are
worked into the sound texture of the poem on a purely musical level:
My unpretending love’s the B flat major
By the old Budapest done. Schnabel did record
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The Diabelli varia. I can’t get a copy.
Then there’s Casals I have, 101, both parts.
(CP 237)
The lives of the composer and poet are connected then in a tactile,
spiritual way by the same music. The composer’s presence is
complete, the effects of his masterful music all-pervasive as Berryman
concludes with a loud, triumphant, ecstatic roar: “You’re all over my
wall! // You march and chant around here! I hear your thighs” (CP
242).
This same intense attentiveness to music and to the music of poetry
is apparent in The Dream Songs, itself a highly musical arrangement
of 385 songs. As Berryman revealed in an interview, The Dream
Songs has a very particular structure and sound: “Yes, well the stanza
is complicated. It goes 5-5-3-5-5-3, 5-5-3-5-5-3, 5-5-3-5-5-3 – that’s
the business – and it’s variously rhymed, and often it has no rhyme at
all, but it sounds as if it rhymed.”24 Modeled on Whitman’s epic
“Song of Myself” – a work which Berryman regarded to be “as deeply
influenced by music as Eliot’s poems are”25 and which he described in
musical terms, referring to its “movements” rather than its sections –
many individual Dream Songs are sung by the main character in the
poem, Henry. As he said of the poem in the same interview, “its plot
is the personality of Henry as he moves on in the world”26 and the
movement of the poem is directed through the truly dynamic and
diverse music of the multifarious Henry. The poem is polyvocal,
pronoun shifts creating a polyphony of voices and changes of register
and key, as Henry talks both to us and himself. He refers to himself in
the first, second and third persons and he quotes the conversations and
writings of others. He converses with an unnamed character or
interlocutor present in the text who refers to Henry as “Mr. Bones”
and frequently interrupts the flow of the lyric to comment, question or
advise in the style of the minstrel show. There is a vast weave of
allusions to other writers and thinkers throughout the poem, so that the
text of The Dream Songs in places may be read like a palimpsest that
contains past and present voices and quotations woven together.
24
Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, 12.
Berryman, “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in The Freedom of the
Poet, 233.
26
Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, 7.
25
Berryman’s Music
199
In an examination of Berryman’s notes and drafts for The Dream
Songs Ernest J. Smith has attested to how the poet’s “attention to the
concerns of rhythm and rhyme was clearly among [his] concerns as he
wrote and revised Dream Songs”27 and of how:
Among the aspects of style and technique, much of the notation on the
Songs has to do with his concern over the poem’s diction, especially
the problem of diction in relation to rhythm. At one point Berryman
undertook a very detailed line-by-line analysis of the “jolly old man”
Song …. His full-page critique identifies the number of beats in each
line, the wide range of metrical feet occurring in each, and then offers
a description of the type of diction employed in each line ….28
Throughout his long poem Berryman delights in words themselves,
employing different languages, rare and obsolete words, newly-coined
words. He is always alert to the specifics of punctuation, verbal
nuance and colour, syntactical movement, and of the particular sounds
and rhythms of words as they are brought together and set in
arrangements that create compelling harmonies or dissonances.
Sounds echo throughout individual Songs and throughout the work as
a whole, unifying the structure of the work as motifs and aural
harmonies, forging aural links. These words and themes constantly
modulate to create a continually varying accumulation of meaning
through sound across time. An examination of 77 Dream Songs alone
shows this to be true with the word “away” – which is first intoned in
the first song – appearing eleven times across Songs one to seventyseven. Words linked through rhyme such as “years”, “tears”, “hears”,
and “ears” sound thirty-five times in the first seventy-seven Songs.
Certain words accumulate a rich resonance as leitmotifs as the
work progresses. The word “fall” with its proliferation of meanings is
a pivotal motif in The Dream Songs, first appearing in Dream Song 1
as “fell”, referring, on one level, to the Fall into a world of sin that
comes with birth. In his interview with Heyen, Berryman spoke of this
same “great loss, from the controlled environment of the womb”.29 It
recurs in a more comical setting in Dream Song 4 as Henry, eyeing a
beautiful girl in a restaurant, must restrain himself from “falling at her
27
Ernest J Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’ for The Dream Songs and an
Instance of Revision”, Journal of Modern Literature, XXIII/3-4 (Summer 2000), 436.
28
Ibid., 433.
29
Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir …”, 60.
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little feet”. It then modulates into the ominous “landfall” in the dark
Song 12, then again in Song 33, which describes in archaic diction a
death from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, where Cleitus must “fall to
the spear-ax ah” – a motif further developed in Song 384 where
Henry, at his father’s grave, wishes to “ax the casket open”. Dream
Song 77 employs the noun “Fall” repeatedly as “Henry likes Fall. / Hé
would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll / for ever. Impenitent
Henry”. Song 385 sounds the word “Fall” in its multiple senses, as:
“Fall is grievy, brisk. Tears behind the eyes / almost fall. Fall comes to
us as a prize / to rouse us toward our fate.” Henry laments his own
mortality and the passing of generations. Similarly, the word “sea”,
which again is introduced in the first Dream Song, carries a strong
resonance throughout the poem, sounding in 35 of the 385 songs.
Dream Song 76, “Henry’s Confession”, reveals it as part of the motif
of death that permeates The Dream Songs, particularly the suicide of
the father, one “who dared so long agone leave me. / A bullet on a
concrete stoop / close by a smothering sea.” The word “rose” too
appears in sixteen of the Songs, with Dream Song 77 proclaiming:
“Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world.” Later however in Dream Song
145 the verb modulates to become laden with tragic tones as Henry
again laments the suicide of his father who “rose with his gun and
went outdoors by my window / and did what was needed”. The sound
texture is one of echo and reverberation as particular words are carried
across the entire work.
The musical quality of The Dream Songs then is compelling indeed
and is most strongly attested to by the existence of settings of the
poem to music by modern day composers who have been influenced
and inspired by Berryman’s poetry. The setting of poetry has always
been a contentious practice for composers and poets alike. If done
effectively, however, the composer will bring out something of the
essential music of the poetry in the process. Steve Reich praises
Luciano Berio’s Circles – a setting of poems by e.e cummings – as,
“an ear and mind opener,” for:
Here was an Italian who clearly understood that cummings’s poetry
was largely “about” the individual syllables of which it was made. The
first syllable of the first word “stinging” was separated into a very
long held ‘ssss’ followed by ‘ting’ and finally ‘ing’ by the soprano
whose sibilance on ‘ssss’ was answered by two sandpaper blocks
rubbed together by a percussionist. The marriage of instrumental
Berryman’s Music
201
timbre with syllabic timbre went exactly to the heart of cummings’s
poetry. It was a lesson in text setting without need of a classroom.30
In his study of the art of setting poetry to music, the composer Joseph
Coroniti discusses his own setting of four of Berryman’s Dream
Songs. From his own workings with the Songs, Coroniti came to
realize how the rhythmic potency of Berryman’s work is a force that
cannot be sacrificed for other concerns: “To try to follow exactly the
tergiversations of Berryman’s mind in one of the Dream Songs, while
neglecting his rhythms, is to invite folly.”31 As Coroniti recognizes,
“There’s always something happening in terms of sound – ‘music’ –
in these songs”, so much so, indeed, that as a composer Coroniti
speaks of how “the poems, so rich in their own aural energy, require
that I leave them intact”.32 This awareness brings him to see that his
own composition must function only as a “re-harmonization” of
Berryman’s words, thus enabling him to retain the integrity of the
rhythmic workings of The Dream Songs. So he eschews overt
programmatic and imitative devices, elucidating how his setting of
Dream Song 76 deliberately employs disconnected musical shifts to
underscore what he sees as the “obvious lack of any real
communication between Henry and his friend”.33 His other concern
here is with what Pound termed the poem’s Great Bass and so his
setting of Dream Song 14 uses a repeated semi-quaver figure on
marimba to capture this effect. 34
Another contemporary composer, Eric Chasalow, has set five
Dream Songs (1, 48, 14, 22, 77 – in this order) to music in his work
Dream Songs (2001). This work provides a point of entry into
Berryman’s work, opening up the Songs to their musical possibilities
and bringing out their aural effects in extremely interesting and
stimulating ways. Chasalow has spoken of Elliott Carter and John
Cage as important mentors and his work reflects these influences in
terms of his professed attention to the manipulation of timbre,
30
Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000, ed. Paul Hillier, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002, 203.
31
Joseph Coroniti, Poetry as Text in Twentieth-Century Vocal Music: From
Stravinsky to Reich, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, 44.
32
Ibid., 87.
33
Ibid., 89.
34
Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray
Schafer, London: Faber and Faber, 1978, 475.
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complex layering, rhythmic energy – heavily influenced by a
lifetime’s listening to be-bop and jazz – and a preoccupation regarding
“issues of processing elements of other musics and of history and
musical memory”. 35 His work, like Berryman’s, “often includes literal
quotations from older composers” to add “a particular resonance of
memory to the music” and his Dream Songs contains musical
allusions to Bach, Hector Berlioz and, by extension, Alban Berg. 36
Chasalow’s Dream Songs betrays a keen understanding of Berryman’s
workings with language and the myriad voices of Henry. Scored for
orchestra and tape, this non-tonal work is in five movements which
move fluidly into each other. In order to remain true to the varying
speech rhythms of Henry’s words the work is polymetrical. Chasalow
employs a variable time signature and each movement also demands a
change of tempo. This is entirely fitting as Berryman’s Dream Songs
are after all very much concerned with the passing of time: as
Berryman said, “Henry gains ten years”37 and even dies in Book IV of
the long poem and then comes back to life in Book V. Moreover, in
his notes for The Dream Songs Berryman considered the “unity of the
year (seasons, but dreamlike)”38 as a structuring device for the poem.
The Dream Songs, being a performance in time, embodies its own
temporality and Chasalow too, describing his setting, has spoken of
“the way that the sounds shape our sense of time passing, through
phasing and the like, that carries the musical idea”.39 Chasalow’s
Dream Songs brings out the music of Berryman’s words in terms of
their sound and colour – the manipulations of the aural effects of
syntax, diction, rhyme, tone and rhythm employed by the poet – as a
brief examination of the first movement of Dream Songs will
illustrate.
Chasalow’s setting has the text of The Dream Songs on a tape
recording that is played back in performance, sung by a tenor and
35
See Eric Chasalow, “Left to His Own Devices”, available online at:
http://www.behindthebeat.net/genre.asp?g=198&ar=334#a334 (accessed 4 November
2005).
36
See Eric Chasalow, “Boston Connection: Programme Notes”, available online at:
http://www.bmop.org/season/program_notes.aspx?cid=41&from=concert (accessed 4
November 2005).
37
Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, 7.
38
Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’ …”, 430.
39
This and all subsequent quotes by Eric Chasalow are from “Art of the States:
Dream Songs”, available online at: http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/piece.pl?pid=226
(accessed 4 November 2005).
Berryman’s Music
203
variously spoken or sung by layers of other voices – at times at odds
with each other, at other times harmonizing each other – often
electronically manipulated and distorted to bring out the strange
polyvocal quality of the poem and the isolation of the speaker from
the world. As Chasalow explains: “this creates a disembodied voice
that puts a distance between the words and the audience and maintains
an illusion of the kind of internal world that the poem inhabits.” The
fourth movement, a setting of Dream Song 22, which begins “I am the
little man who smokes and smokes / I am the girl who does know
better but”, is based on a canon, the pitch of which rises a tone as it
repeats itself, and increasing its intensity as layers of voices, male and
female, spoken and sung, build to a schizophrenic climax. The first
movement, a setting of Dream Song 1, has the text enter after an
intense frenetic opening by the full orchestral forces with tape. Made
up of falling glissandi, percussive chimes, chromatic figures, rising
and falling intervals, wild leaps upwards, sustained eerie harmonics
and soft, plaintive gestures followed by abrupt bursts of rapidly
ascending triplets and dotted semi-quavers on strings, woodwind and
brass that build to a crescendo, the texture constantly shifts
dramatically, encompassing – as Berryman’s poem does – extremes of
registers, rhythms and dynamics and a whole array of timbres. The
text then enters falteringly on tape, with a stuttered, spoken “Huffy
Henry” gradually giving way to the orchestral forces as they intervene
with a full, loud, accented passage of syncopated quavers, wild leaps
downwards and glissandi. This then drops downwards and away as
the violas resume a repeated semi-quaver figure on G, and the text
then begins again, this time sung by the tenor. The caesura in the first
line “Huffy Henry hid the day” is emphasized by a break for three
beats in the vocal line during which the orchestra plays fortissimo
ascending and descending semi-quaver sextuplets that come to an end
as the vocal line resumes. The vocal line is fractured with rests, thus
capturing the rhythms of the voice and its erratic syntax in Berryman’s
text. Longer rests function as Berryman’s commas, dashes and stops.
The stressed syllables of the meter always fall on the strong beat of
the bar and the rhythm and phrasing meticulously match Henry’s
speech as a variable time signature is employed throughout and the
notation consists of short syncopated quavers, semi-quavers in triplets
and quintuplets interspersed with brief rests as follows:
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The heightened emotion and repetition of “It was the thought that
they thought / they could do it” of lines 4-5 of the same Dream Song
are captured by the creation of a jerky, syncopated chromatic
ascending and descending line which ends with an interval of an
intervallic leap to octave Fs on the frenzied “away” as the orchestra
loses restraint and explodes into forte sextuplets. The final line of the
stanza is divided between sung and spoken voices. After a five-bar
rest to separate the stanzas the vocal line resumes, breaking into a
lyrical melody for “All the world like a woolen lover” which moves
from a dark minor to a bright major sonority on “like a woolen lover”.
The usually jagged rhythm here becomes lyrical and whole as the
melody moves expressively by step on long, joined minims and
crotchets to reflect the meaning of the words:
This soon breaks down, however, for “once did seem on Henry’s
side”, as the dark tonality resumes accompanied by wide leaps and
syncopated rhythms that sound the growing sense of panic, thereby
capturing the inflections and contours of Henry’s manic utterances.
This intensifies further on with the lines “Then came a departure. /
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought”, which are completely
fractured as other voices intrude and the leaps between notes widen.
Here also the oboe sounds a melody that will re-appear in one of the
myriad voices in the fourth movement’s setting of Dream Song 22,
entitled “Of 1826”. As the objective voice then enters with “I don’t
know how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived” the
line momentarily becomes less disjointed, proceeding by step until the
word “pried” is sounded with a crescendo. The anguished “pried” is
stretched into two syllables, divided between two long notes reaching
from a B upwards to an E, mimetic of the enjambment that Berryman
Berryman’s Music
205
employs to signify Henry almost physically coming apart. Trumpets
enter to sound a harsh accent to the word “survived”, the word
appropriately drawn out as the syllables are broken up in a melismatic
fashion that descends chromatically. The longer duration of both the
words “pried” and “survived” also reinforces the rhyme that aurally
links their meaning. After two bars’ rest the voice enters for the third
and final stanza.
Of this third stanza of Dream Song 1, Denis Donoghue has
suggested that it is made up of “Three voices, two lines each, speaking
in one stanza”. 40 Chasalow’s setting distinguishes three voices in
different modes. “What he has now to say” is delivered in broken
syncopated triplets which then move into an expressive line, rising
and falling chromatically as the long vowels of “long”, “wonder” and
“bear” are treated melismatically, each drawn out over three notes
while “be” is held for almost a full bar and emphasized with an
inverted B flat major chord in the tape and strings. The sound and
structure then changes abruptly for “Once in a sycamore I was glad /
all at the top, and I sang” as multiple voices are electronically
distorted, the line once again broken and more jagged. “All at the top”
has the notes ascend to a high, precarious F on “top”, followed by a
violent leap from a low E to a high E sharp on “sang” which is held
for emphasis. The tone then changes again for the last two lines as the
pitch drops back to the middle register. The notes turn chromatically
around B flat, A, A flat and B natural, mimetic of the same “hard”
wearing motion of the sea, this hardness enforced by the stressed
syllables of “hard” and “land” while the words “strong sea”, linked by
alliteration, are emphasized on strong crotchets and by an echoing
turning figure on piano and violins that sounds a valedictory gesture.
Furthermore, the long, emphatic duration of the word “sea” links it
back to its homonym “see” from the previous line which is treated
similarly. It ends with a mournful, broken line on “and empty grows
every bed” with sparse instrumental accompaniment by strings and
crotales in a despondent minor sonority. This exact attention to the
subtleties of Berryman’s aural devices, motifs and turns of phrase is
carried through the remaining movements.
Much of the rhythmic and linguistic energy of The Dream Songs
derives in part from Berryman’s absorption of the music of jazz and
40
Denis Donoghue, “Berryman’s Long Dream”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed.
Thomas, 153.
206
Maria Johnston
blues, and it is therefore appropriate that contemporary composers
such as Chasalow have found so much to play with in setting this
work to music. Many others have, of course, picked up on the musical
aspects of Berryman’s poetry: Dream Songs 40 and 68, for example,
have been included in recent anthologies of jazz and blues poetry.
Song 40 features in Blues Poems (2003), edited by Kevin Young,
alongside a poem by David Wojahn titled “John Berryman Listening
to Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues, January 1972”, which
acknowledges, as it imitates Berryman’s idiosyncratic technique and
subject matter, the poet’s keen musical interest. Dream Song 68,
where Berryman pays homage to Bessie Smith, is included in The
Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1996) edited by Sascha
Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. This Dream Song, delivered in
broken African-American dialect across one long sentence spanning
thirteen lines and a shorter sentence of five lines as a coda,
expressively moves and stalls, as Bessie Smith performs on stage –
“Ms Bessie soundin [sic] good” – performing her “Yellow Dog Blues”
and “Empty Bed Blues” with Pinetop and trombonist Charlie Green.
The references to “Empty Bed Blues”, “Pinetop” and “trees” here link
this Song back to the first Dream Song where “Once in a sycamore, I
was glad, all at the top” and “empty grows every bed”, developing the
leitmotifs of the loveless empty bed and the tree-top of creative
fertility. Furthermore, Dream Song 2 (“Big Buttons, Cornets: the
advance”) presents Henry as a minstrel and is dedicated to Daddy
Rice, a nineteenth-century blackface performer who became famous
for his song and dance act “Jumpin’ Jim Crow.”41 Dream Song 148
(“Glimmerings”) also includes lines addressed to Jelly Roll Morton.
In Dream Song 40 Henry is described as “free, black & forty-one”
singing the blues as Berryman here employs the stylistic features of
blues songs. This piece is informed by the blues in a number of ways,
technically and thematically. The six-line stanza here becomes
reminiscent of blues poetry, particularly that of Langston Hughes, and
the idiomatic, colloquial diction and tone attests to Berryman’s deep
interest in this area. In true blues style the song centers on the self,
opening with the troubled speaker’s cry of loneliness: “I scared a
lonely. Never see my son.” The focus on the self looks set to move
41
See William Wasserstrom, “Cagey John: Berryman as Medicine Man”, in
Berryman’s Understanding, 174-77, for a discussion of this Dream Song. Ernest J.
Smith’s article also sheds light on how Berryman’s revisions enhanced the sound
qualities of this Song.
Berryman’s Music
207
outward in the third and fourth lines as the speaker regards the world
outside; however, this only serves to show the extreme contrast that
exists between self and world, heightening all the more acutely the
speaker’s isolation: “combers out to sea / know they’re goin
somewhere but not me.” The use of rhyme here is mimetic of this
failed progression as the subjective verb “see” of the opening
statement becomes in the third line the external noun “sea” visually
different on the surface but ultimately identical in sound as the “sea”
and its associations only refer back to how the speaker can “never
see”, offering no consolation. The focus then moves back onto the
speaker with the repeated intensity of “Got a little poison, got a little
gun”, the repetition underscoring the self-obsessed nature of the
desperate speaker. Typical blues-like repetition is employed as both
the first and last lines of the first stanza repeat the refrain, “I scared a
lonely”. This is then repeated further in the first line of the second
stanza, but here develops into “I scared a only one thing”. End rhyme
and slant rhyme are omnipresent too, rhyme being an important
stylistic element of blues songs.
Asked in an interview about the influence of blues and minstrel
shows on The Dream Songs, Berryman replied: “Heavy. I have been
interested in the language of the blues and Negro dialects all my life,
always been. Especially Bessie. I picked all of it up from records.”
The interviewer then asked him who else he had listened to, in
addition to Bessie Smith, and he replied “Victoria Spivey and Teddy
Grace”, before breaking into song:
He went away and never said goodbye.
I could read his letters but I sure can’t read his mind.
I thought he’s lovin me but he was leavin all the time.
Now I know that my true love was blind.42
The lines that Berryman sung here are used as an epigraph to His Toy,
His Dream, His Rest, the title of which alludes to the well-known
Fitzwilliam Virginal Book of music for harpsichord, wherein the songs
“A Toy”, “Giles Farnaby’s Dreame”, and “His Rest” appear in
succession.43 Musical references pervade The Dream Songs at every
turn, in other words, and music is everywhere in Berryman’s poetry.
42
Plotz, et al, “An Interview with John Berryman”, 8.
Edward Mendelson makes this connection in his essay “How to Read Berryman’s
Dream Songs”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 54-55.
43
208
Maria Johnston
Berryman was a poet greatly influenced and informed by music, and
he was deeply attentive to the musical possibilities of language. There
is harmony and dissonance in his work, varying sounds and rhythms, a
range of registers, tones and voices, combining in different ways to
make a rich acoustic. His attentive detail to sound and the arrangement
of sounds in structuring and enacting meaning and in shaping poetic
form has for too long been neglected by critics who have instead
concentrated mainly on extra-poetic concerns. While critics have often
overlooked this crucial aspect of Berryman’s poetry, however, it has
not escaped the attention of composers and musicians, many of whom
have been drawn to the potent musical experience, and experiment,
that is The Dream Songs. There can be no better testament to the art of
the poetry than this. And so, the words of Dream Song 324 (“An Elegy
for W.C.W., the lovely man”) are no less appropriate for Berryman
himself: “Rest well, who worked so hard, who made a good sound /
constantly, for so many years: / your high-jinks delighted the
continents & our ears” – and they continue to do so.
JOHN BERRYMAN AND SHAKESPEAREAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
PETER MABER
The publication in 1999 of Berryman’s Shakespeare, John
Haffenden’s superlative edition of Berryman’s protracted and
extensive, often very brilliant critical work on Shakespeare,
comprehensively unveiled a rich source for the development of
Berryman studies. Though Berryman’s Shakespearean writings are
worthy of consideration in their own right, their frequently
investigative, biographically exploratory nature means that inevitably
some of their hypotheses are dated; one of the strengths of
Haffenden’s edition is its detailed Introduction which sets forth the
current consensus on the issues of dating and authorship into which
Berryman delved. What justifies even the more speculative aspects of
Berryman’s work, however, is its creative importance to the author;
indeed, it is some of the Shakespeare work’s very idiosyncrasies that
most merit attention in the consideration of its artistic importance.
With this eccentric yet enduring, fragmented yet cohesive body of
work before us we are now in a position to assess the relations
between Shakespeare’s
works, Berryman’s
Shakespearean
scholarship, and the poet’s creative opus.
As far back as his undergraduate days at Columbia University
(1932-1936), Berryman was engaged in the serious study of
Shakespeare, encouraged and inspired by his first mentor, the
Shakespearean scholar Mark Van Doren. The early interest he had
evinced in Shakespeare then intensified during his time at Clare
College, Cambridge (1936-1938), where he pronounced that it was
silly “ever to do anything but read Shakespeare – particularly when
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Peter Maber
we’ve only one lifetime”. 1 Before long Berryman was writing about
his obsession too: in his first year he produced a seventy-seven page
essay on “The Character and Role of the Heroine in Shakespearean
Comedy”, with which he failed to win the Harness Prize, and then in
his second year he had more success, winning the prestigious Oldham
Shakespeare Scholarship.2 Back in America in the 1940s Berryman
tried to realize one of his Cambridge ambitions, working on a critical
edition of King Lear. Over the course of his university career he
lectured extensively on almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, once
covering over twenty-two in a single course.3 However, Berryman’s
greatest and longest-running Shakespearean enterprise was a critical
biography, unfinished after twenty years of writings and research.
Berryman began a study of Shakespeare’s life and work in 1951,
and over the next two decades labored on and off at plans and
proposals, drafts and prefaces for his “Shakespeare book”. The project
underwent numerous evolutions, and through various contracts. In
1955 he signed an agreement for “Shakespeare: A Critical
Biography”, and then in 1958 took on a commission for a
“Shakespeare Handbook”; this, together with “Shakespeare’s Friend”,
a work considering possible collaborations between Shakespeare and
William Haughton, ran parallel to the larger-scale biography, but none
of these ventures was ever completed. At the end of the 1960s the
biography was still protean in its substance. Its changing names tell us
much about its shifts in direction: by 1969 it had become the cautious
and uncertain “Shakespeare: An Attempt at a Critical Biography”; in
1970 the work sounded far more confident, with the grandiose title,
promising great revelations, “Shakespeare’s Identity”. In 1971
Berryman was describing his undertaking as “a large psychosocial
critical biography,” and it was now to be called “Shakespeare’s
Reality”, taking the model of the psychologist Erik H. Erikson’s
1
Quoted in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1982, 85.
2
Berryman’s Oldham papers, which he kept, are in actual fact most peculiar as prizewinning essays. They skirt illogically over many plays, offer but the occasional
aperçu, drop the odd critical reference, and protest repeatedly against the time
constraints of the exams. See “College Papers”, John Berryman Papers (MSS43),
Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis.
3
At the graduate summer school at Harvard University, 1954. See John Haffenden,
Introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999,
lvii.
Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
211
Gandhi’s Truth.4 A strain that runs throughout the work’s
developments is Berryman’s search to find Shakespeare the man; and
it is this aspect of his long-running project, this particular personal
quest, that reveals the true depth of his involvement.
Berryman was no stranger to critical biography, or to the practice
of reading texts not ostensibly autobiographical as biographical
sources. The poet’s strong belief in the legitimacy of this practice is
demonstrated in the wide range of authors whom he subjected to it. In
his first, successful attempt at critical biography, Stephen Crane
(1950), Berryman approached the author through psychoanalytical
readings of his poems and stories, which culminated in the
extraordinary chapter of Freudian insights, “The Color of This Soul”.
In a 1949 essay on Ezra Pound, Berryman wrote of his former poetic
master, W.B. Yeats, that it is Yeats himself who is “the subject of his
own poetry” and, in the same essay, of Pound’s Cantos he remarks
that “the persona increasingly adopted … is Pound himself”.5 The
procedure is not to be denied by temporal constraints; of Marlowe, in
1952, he said “his sinister art ran exactly with his life”; and Berryman
dismisses potential skeptics in a cutting aside, stating that “the
existence of [correspondences] is denied only by very young persons
or writers whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their
lives, tant pis pour eux”.6 It is taken for granted that most artists’ work
interacts with their lives. This particular essay, “Marlowe’s
Damnations”, casts further light on Berryman’s theory of biographysearching in its introductory remark that this kind of criticism
demands that at least something is known to begin with of the author:
“Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apart, only of Christopher Marlowe
among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known
personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now
illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist’s life and his work.”
Yet, in the case of Shakespeare, even the preliminary evidence is
so elusive, ambiguous, and contradictory, that the task before
Berryman would never be transparent. One explanation for the
project’s altering courses is the sheer difficulty Berryman encountered
(and what Shakespearean biographer has not?) in discovering “the true
Shakespeare”. In 1952, when beginning his project, Berryman was
4
See Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, lxii.
Berryman, “The Poetry of Ezra Pound”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 263, 268.
6
Berryman, “Marlowe’s Damnations”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 5, 3.
5
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Peter Maber
perplexed by Shakespeare’s polymorphous nature and the
impossibility of pinning down the man from Stratford once and for all:
“that multiform & encyclopedic bastard” he shouted in mock-despair.7
One of Berryman’s earliest essays of Shakespearean biography,
“Shakespeare at Thirty”, which was published in The Hudson Review
in 1953, is prefaced with words of caution and restraint from the
Nicomachean Ethics: “We must be content, then, in speaking of such
subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in
outline”, it begins.8 Perhaps the following quotation from a “Plan of
Work” submitted to the Guggenheim foundation, also from the early
1950s, placed alongside such reservations, explains why the biography
never came, never could have come, into fruition: “The biographer
must be capable of a book, a constructed and written book, clear,
neither unduly confident nor perpetually reserved, presenting an
image unified and acceptable to a reader sick of quarterShakespeares.”9 Clearly such a unified image would be reductive and
would involve gigantic leaps of faith (like Kierkegaard’s “great leap
… into infinity” in Fear and Trembling, also quoted as an epigraph to
“Shakespeare at Thirty”): being the perfectionist that he was, with this
image as his aim, his project certainly looked destined for failure.
From the start of his project Berryman insisted that the known facts
about Shakespeare’s life might legitimately be taken into account in
the critical appreciation of his plays. In a Preface for the “Shakespeare
Handbook” Berryman proclaimed that:
Shakespeare was a man whose son died, who was publicly ridiculed
and insulted, who followed a degrading occupation, whose mistress
got off with his beloved friend, whose patron was condemned to death
and imprisoned for years, whose father died. He wrote many personal
poems about some of these things.10
Take, for example, Berryman’s writings on Hamlet. In the
psychoanalytical lecture from the early 1950s, “The Crisis”, Berryman
sets out to examine how Shakespeare became a tragic writer, and he
relates the composition of Hamlet to the possibility of Shakespeare’s
father’s death occurring immediately beforehand, and to the known
7
See Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxiv.
See “Shakespeare at Thirty”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 31.
9
Berryman’s Shakespeare, lix.
10
Ibid., lviii.
8
Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
213
fact that Shakespeare had a son christened Hamnet, who died five
years previously.11 As others had done before him, Berryman saw
Shakespeare in Prince Hamlet; in a draft from 1970 he attributes
Hamlet’s “sex nausea and cosmic loathing” to the author himself. 12
Berryman, though, goes further, deducing, from observation of these
features through other plays of the same period (Troilus and Cressida,
Othello, and Measure for Measure), that Shakespeare must have
undergone a terrible crisis, only “being himself again”, albeit altered
by the experience, by the time of Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
Furthermore, identifying a similar nausea, loathing and insane
jealousy in certain sonnets, but unable to date these at the same time,
Berryman tells us that “we must conclude that Shakespeare twice in
his life – during his late twenties possibly and in his middle thirties –
underwent a kind of suffering that few men are called on by fate to
experience at all”. Assurance infringes on the cautious: “During his
late twenties possibly” but we “must conclude that” Shakespeare twice
underwent these crises. In this typical instance Berryman speculates
with supreme confidence.
For Berryman it was not simply that the putative facts about
Shakespeare might be applied to his work, but also that one might
arrive at conclusions about Shakespeare the man from judicious
readings of the plays: he believed in something analogous to Borges’
description of Shakespeare “leav[ing] a confession hidden away in
some corner of his works, certain that it would not be deciphered”. 13
Increasingly Berryman went beyond reading into or out of
Shakespeare’s works mere factual autobiography: towards the end he
sought to discover what he called Shakespeare’s “spiritual status” and
he scoured elusive passages from the plays concerned with identity
(concealed or disturbed identities in particular) searching for the key
to Shakespeare’s self. He shunned large-scale theories, accepting that
11
See “The Crisis”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 110-11.
Berryman’s Shakespeare, lx-lxi.
13
Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”, trans. James E. Irby, Labyrinths, eds
Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, 285. It should be
pointed out that Berryman was at times contemptuous of the “passionate search for
hidden meanings” in literature, finding such approaches “distasteful” in his essay on
Joseph Conrad, “Conrad’s Journey”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 107-14. See also
Joseph Mancini, Jr., The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Structures in the Poetry of
John Berryman, New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, 206. Berryman’s Shakespeare
readings evidence a belief in “hidden confessions”, however, as well as a belief in the
unconscious shaping, and revealing itself in, poetry and drama.
12
214
Peter Maber
he could not reach a transparent or universal biographical
interpretation of a play (such as the notion raised in “The Crisis” that
Hamlet might project “an imagined life” for Shakespeare’s dead son
Hamnet). 14
Perhaps the closest Berryman came to formulating a theory of his
project is in the draft for an Introduction entitled “Shakespeare’s
Reality”, from 1971. In this piece Berryman initiates a discussion on
the concepts of “The I” and “The Other”, arguing that “The Other” is
not confined to dramatic verse, nor “The I” exclusively to lyric poetry,
supremely in the case of Shakespeare. “The I” and “The Other” are
seen to be bound neither to genre nor to individual work; the poet may
come and go in his work, personally present at one moment, removed
at the next. As an example, Berryman draws attention to the French
King’s speech to Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, in which the
King mourns the death of Bertram’s father. These fifty-odd lines are
unprecedented in Shakespeare’s work, Berryman believes, especially
since they, for him, “contribut[e] nothing to the play”. Berryman’s
reading of the speech is highly problematic, not least because he reads
the lines “Let me not liue […] / to be the snuffe / of yonger spirits” as
the King’s “anxiety not to stand in the way of the next generation”,
whereas of course the burnt-out wick is the King himself, who fears
being mocked by the young. But though flawed, Berryman’s account
of the speech reveals the personal search he was embarked upon: he
explains this apparent aside from the dramatic action by concluding
that “Shakespeare shared the anxiety of his French King’s equally
imaginary friend”, reaching this conclusion from the fact of
Shakespeare’s retirement from the theatrical world at “a peak of his
dramatic power”.15 Thus the French King’s speech is seen to contain a
sudden surfacing of Shakespeare the man; after which, says
Berryman, the author “remembered he was writing a play, and went
curtly back to work”.
This notion of an interchangeable “I” and “Other” has important
bearings upon Berryman’s own work, and on his own descriptions of
it. Berryman’s poetry is famous for its vagrant personalities which
“shift, reify, dissolve, survive, project”, discontinuous personalities
that make it difficult to distinguish between the original and the
14
15
See “The Crisis”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 116-17.
“Shakespeare’s Reality”, ibid., 346-47.
Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
215
assumed.16 “The Ball Poem” and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet have
been noted for their switches and mergers in which “I” and “Other”
intertwine, overlap, and separate. Berryman himself identified one of
his most important techniques relating to the subject of personality
when he described discovering in “The Ball Poem” that ambiguous
pronouns could be used to reserve “commitment of identity”.17 This
technique triumphs in The Dream Songs, where Berryman is at his
most tantalizing in his refusal to fix characters, to guarantee their
homogeneity. The poet’s complex relation to the character Henry in
The Dream Songs is a striking example of the interplay of “I” and
“Other”: once described as a portrait of the author, another time
renounced as an entirely distinct creation, Henry embodies the
ambiguities of character Berryman delighted in creating; his life and
identity both are and are not those of the poet.18
What emerges, placing Berryman’s poetry alongside his
Shakespearean scholarship, is a singular inter-animation that operates
at an almost personal level: Shakespeare was a source, a model, but
also a driving force, a living inspiration. In the Fifties, when stumped
in the middle of the second stanza of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,
Berryman acknowledged that it was his work on Shakespeare that
inspired the poem’s continuation. 19 One of the reasons why the
Shakespeare project was never completed and ran so long is that
Berryman’s poetry – Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and then The
Dream Songs – took off; but they did so with a debt to the scholarship.
16
See Berryman’s “Scholia to Second Edition” of Love & Fame (CP 290-92).
“One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 326.
18
Compare an unpublished preface for The Dream Songs, where Berryman writes:
“nothing in the poem is imaginary. It all happened” (handwritten page headed
“Version for Note”, Unpublished Dream Songs, box 1, folder 2, John Berryman
Papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) with the “Note” published in the first
complete edition of the poem in 1969, which insists that Henry is “an imaginary
character (not the poet, not me)”. Perhaps Berryman put it best in his Harvard
Advocate interview when he said, “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.” See John Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, in
Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry
Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 7.
19
Berryman’s Shakespeare, xiii. Later, Berryman believed that working on
Shakespeare aided his recovery from chronic alcoholism, citing his critical biography
as a “replacement for drinking” in his Alcoholics Anonymous Step One (see
Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 374-76).
17
216
Peter Maber
It was not a handover, from scholarship to poetry, but a sustained
symbiosis, continuing right up to the end of Berryman’s life.
Berryman seemed frequently to be discovering, or perhaps rather
drawing, parallels between himself and Shakespeare. Haffenden
writes movingly that the practice of biography often tends, for the
biographer, towards self-exploration; and indeed it is notable that in
1963, in the midst of his work on Shakespeare, Berryman began work
on an autobiography (to open with his father’s suicide), though it was
rapidly abandoned. 20 For Berryman the self-searching was not merely
a by-product but a primary factor in the work, to the extent that his
fervent personal involvement with the biography spilled over into his
scholarship. At times, indeed, Berryman’s own self-perceived
similarity with Shakespeare itself becomes the basis of his critical
approach. The emphasis he places on Shakespeare’s sorrows, for
instance, matches his own troubles, and their creative importance to
his work. Angered by the Shakespearean scholar C.J. Sisson’s essay
entitled “The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare” Berryman declared
that readers skeptical that Shakespeare ever wrote out of his own heart
were “stunted”.21 This anger, defensive and defiant, was surely stirred
by Berryman’s first-hand knowledge of what it is to be a suffering,
troubled artist.
The extent to which Shakespeare was a model to Berryman is
illustrated neatly by the publication history of Berryman’s sonnets.
Berryman delayed the publication of his 117 sonnets by twenty years,
and this was surely in imitation of the delay in publication of
Shakespeare’s, at least according to his own dating (he places the
Sonnets between 1588 and 1589, the Quarto being 1609; Berryman’s
sonnets were published in 1966, nearly twenty years after their
composition).22 The reasons Berryman gives for Shakespeare’s delay,
that Shakespeare wanted to avoid hurting any of the people associated
with his affair, including himself, are highly pertinent to Berryman’s
Sonnets, dangerous in their explicit autobiography, without the
disguises of persona of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The
Dream Songs.
Shakespeare is behind some of Berryman’s finest poetry. He is
both a creative inspiration, and a direct influence, inextricably tied up
20
See Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 320.
See “Shakespeare’s Reality”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 347.
22
For Berryman’s dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, see “The Sonnets”, in Berryman’s
Shakespeare, 288.
21
Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
217
with both Berryman’s life and work. The following two case studies
show how Berryman’s own biography, or identity, appears in what he
conceived to be a Shakespearean mode. These examples come from
the beginning and towards the end of Berryman’s career. The first is
“The Architect”, the unfinished play from Berryman’s Cambridge
years, which constitutes the first moment Shakespeare enters
Berryman’s work.
Shortly after his arrival in Cambridge, inspired by his reading of
Shakespeare, Berryman had dreamt of writing plays: “great, incredibly
great plays can be written, and I’m positive … that I can write them”
he wrote, having read King Lear “over and over in a kind of frenzy”. 23
“The Architect”, begun in its first version in December 1936 while
Berryman was on holiday in Paris, marks his first significant attempt
at playwriting. The play was never completed; in the John Berryman
Papers in Minneapolis there are notes on characters and action, as well
as some speeches Berryman had begun to draft.24 In New York in
1938 Berryman returned to the play, revising and filling in the plot,
and completing whole scenes; but it is the earlier manuscript material
that is more interesting in relation to Berryman and Shakespeare.
“The Architect” in its first version was to be a tragedy in three acts,
observing the neo-classical unities, and culminating in the murder by
the protagonist of his best friend, and the protagonist’s subsequent
suicide. The play was planned as being partly in verse, and, in a letter
to his mother, Berryman cited King Lear as a justification for writing
verse plays.25 Berryman told his mother he was striving to avoid
“Elizabethan pastel” (by which he meant “pastiche”); yet he wanted to
capture the direct, what he called the “simplest & best”, power of
Elizabethan drama, and he stressed his preference for dramatic effect
over believable character.26 There appears to be a tension, however,
23
Letter dated 27 October 1936, collected in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s
Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly, New York: W.W. Norton, 1988, 64.
24
For the following material I am indebted both to the Manuscripts Division of the
University of Minnesota (“First Notes for The Architect: Paris, Dec. 1936” in “Prose”:
Box 4, “Plays [Unpublished]”, John Berryman Papers), and to Charles Thornbury’s
essay, “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices (1935-36)”, in Recovering Berryman:
Essays on a Poet, eds Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993, 77-111.
25
Letter dated 26 December 1936, in Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 82.
26
Letter dated 25 December 1936 in Correspondence, box 1, “1931-1936”, John
Berryman Papers. Berryman’s remarks follow a performance of Thomas Dekker, John
Ford and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton, which he saw at the Old Vic
218
Peter Maber
between Berryman’s aim to avoid realism (which he said would
pander to his audience’s taste) and his other main articulated aim, that
the play should be, above all, “honest”.27 The architect of the title, the
protagonist referred to as “H.” in the notes, was to have depth: as an
architect he would be “a public as well as private artist, a man with
social power & responsibility as well as acuteness & integrity”.28
The public and private sides to this character and the insistence
upon honesty resonate throughout Berryman’s play. For the play is
strongly autobiographical in its conception, as Charles Thornbury has
observed in an essay on Berryman’s early years. H., the unstable
protagonist whose father committed suicide ten years before, is clearly
designed to represent Berryman himself. H.’s closest friend, “B.”, is
compared to Mark Van Doren; and this character is also to be the
father of “Jean”, H.’s former girlfriend, whom Berryman told his
mother was “modelled, roughly” on his American girlfriend of the
time, Jean Bennett. H. is recovering from the loss of this, his first
love; Berryman had recently complained in his letters home of Jean’s
long silences since he arrived in Cambridge in October, but in the play
it is clearly H. who is to blame, having alienated his former love. We
are left, then, with these two, strangely divergent strands. Is the
coupling of this autobiographical honesty with (what Berryman felt
were) the techniques of Elizabethan theater designed as a disguise? Or
does it represent a particular affinity Berryman felt with the past?29
The influence of Shakespeare is revealed in the manuscript notes;
Hamlet, which Berryman recently felt for the first time he “knew
something about”, is particularly prominent. The character modeled
on Van Doren is also described “as Fortinbras”. Jean has been driven
to the point of madness by the loss of H.’s love and, Ophelia-like, she
has disturbed lyrical speeches, songs, and moments of shocking
before leaving for Paris: “It taught me that the Elizabethan aim was not character not
consistency not persuasion, but drama at its simplest & best power.”
27
Letter dated 26 December 1936, in Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 81.
28
Letter dated 27 December 1936, in Correspondence, box 1, also quoted by
Thornbury in “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices” (Recovering Berryman, 103).
29
Thornbury relates the projected stylized Elizabethan elements of “The Architect” to
Berryman’s interest at this time in ritual (see “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”,
101-107). Indeed, Berryman had written to Van Doren that he would write plays as a
“mask for my life, a discipline, a stylized order” (see Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The
Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996,
62). See also Berryman’s essay “The Ritual of W.B. Yeats” (1936), a review of
Yeats’ Collected Plays, in The Freedom of the Poet, 245-52.
Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
219
bawdy. 30 The ghost of H.’s father was to appear to H. one night in his
office; at one point H. was to be thought mad; and this character,
having listened to the ghost of his father, was to debate suicide:
whether to join the beckoning ghost (“Join me, join me” it begs) or to
heed the ghost’s other advice, to survive and “study perfect vigor in
[his] work”. 31 Though the ghost of the father appears to explain his
death as suicide (“circumstances tired me, and I died”), revenge is, as
in Hamlet, a prominent subject for the protagonist: H. is “seeking
‘revenge’ … but sees no enemy – ‘nothing’”, Berryman wrote in his
notes, perhaps picking up Hamlet’s famous “nothings” in Act II, scene
ii of Hamlet. Actors, Hamlet says, act “all for nothing”, whereas he
himself has a purpose but “can say nothing”. Significantly, the first
words sketched for H. in Berryman’s play are “Nothing, nothing”. 32
H. is “made … Hamlet here / For lack of what to kill”: like Hamlet
before he receives his directive, or like Hamlet in his inability to act
but for different reasons.
30
The following speech, with echoes of Ophelia’s death, and which clearly portends
her own, is sketched for Jean speaking to H. in Act II, scene iii:
Mad? Mad? I am not mad. I see merely
The drowned, the unintelligible dead
Among the weeds. There, there the faces are.
They watch – but you – for they are sure of me:
My welcome is prepared, as if a surgeon
Slipped in the operating room and fell,
Point down. Don’t wait for them to speak. They have
An absolute late language of their own
And hear no other – Besides, the flesh is fallen
Finally – translation has nothing there.
Listen…
Already in Berryman’s work there is the pull of the dead upon the living, a seductive
communing which cannot be wholly understood, nor resisted. Another draft speech
testifies to her moments of bawdy:
Are they not comfortable breasts? – whereon a king
(When there were kings) might joyfully have lain?
And put his lips? – Ah, touch them not,
They are too proud with time to suffer you
Now. Yet they are lonely.
31
32
Quoted by Thornbury in “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”, 103.
In the draft opening to Act I.
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Peter Maber
The Hamlet frame of reference and in particular the ambiguous
words of the ghost, look forward uncannily to Berryman’s
reconsideration of the events surrounding his own father’s death.
Being unsure of the exact circumstances and motives of John Allyn’s
suicide, Berryman returned time and again to speculate on the
ambiguities and on the psychological effects of the loss. Thornbury
points out that in 1954, in an interpretation of a dream of Hamlet’s
father’s ghost, Berryman suggested that his father, like Hamlet the
elder, was killed by an uncle – “Uncle Jack”, his mother’s name for
Berryman’s stepfather, John Angus McAlpin Berryman.33 A scribbled
note in the manuscripts indicating that H. is “later rechristened”
suggests that Berryman’s replacement father was to have a bearing
upon the play. Another foreshadowing of Berryman’s later work arises
from Berryman’s choice of Hamlet as a model for the sections of the
play about his father’s death: there are unspoken glimpses of the
psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet, and of himself, Berryman would
develop in the 1940s and 1950s. A theory articulated in “The Crisis”
comes readily to mind: that Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because
Claudius has fulfilled his own desires, the death of the father and
enjoyment of the mother. Moreover, this is accompanied by
Berryman’s theory that he himself may have suffered from an Oedipus
complex, adopting some guilt for his father’s suicide: “I realise
suddenly … – that I may have wished Daddy’s death” he wrote in
1947.34 When H. ultimately takes revenge upon himself might it be in
acknowledgement of personal guilt in his father’s death?
“The Architect”, as it stands, does not explore in any depth these
psychological scruples. What it does show is that in his earliest
creative work Berryman’s biography appears in Shakespearean mode:
the Hamlet allusions conceal family, friends, and painful personal
truths. Though at this stage the connection between Shakespeare and
autobiography may appear circumstantial, there is a distinct bond
between this early fragmentary play and Berryman’s mature opus. In
“The Architect” lies the germ for both the influence of Shakespeare on
Berryman’s poetry, and for his highly personal approach to
Shakespearean biography.
As Berryman’s search for Shakespeare the man moved
increasingly beyond mere factual autobiography into the realm of the
33
34
See Thornbury, “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”, n56, 111.
Quoted in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 192.
Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
221
soul and the self, something similar was happening in Berryman’s
poetry. In The Dream Songs, begun in 1953, Berryman was turning
his poetic attentions ever more inwards. Each metaphysical search
affected the other; but in order to investigate the interrelations we
need an example. In 1964 Berryman composed Dream Song 85,
(“Opus posth. no. 8”). In the “Opus Posth.” Dream Songs (78-91)
Henry is buried in his coffin, apparently having died, yet in a state
between life and death, and in this particular Song his state of
imprisonment brings about worries, and ultimately, in the last stanza,
a crisis of self. Henry’s “I am” construction in the final stanza of
Dream Song 85 (“I am – I should be held together by – / but I am
breaking up”), the very construction of his being, falls apart: language
and self disintegrate together, bringing about the “full stop” of both
grammar and body. Not just the “I am”, but also the iambic rhythm
breaks up: the double anacoluthon, “I am – I should be held together
by – / but I am breaking up”, interrupts the rhythmic flow. His self
fractured, Henry cannot go on. He turns in on himself, “fold[ing] / him
over himself”, “collapsing”, motions which have connotations of
death (in particular suicide) as in the “crumpling” of Dream Song 56
or in the “scrunch[ing] down” of Dream Song 81.
There are many half-submerged literary references in Dream Song
85: John Clare’s “I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows”;
Descartes’ famous cogito; Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, Hopkins in
the plea to the Trinity, “Triune!”. Most explicit though are
Shakespearean echoes which bind the poem together. Searching for
Shakespeare’s “spiritual status”, Berryman focused increasingly upon
passages concerning identity: “confusions of identity” and “crises of
loss of self-recognition”, he said, were central to Shakespeare’s “most
promising” plays.35 In this Dream Song Henry undergoes such a
“crisis of loss of self-recognition”: his very being has become inert
except for the process of decay impacting upon him – “I am breaking
up”? In Dream Song 85 there are traces of several Shakespearean
heroes in crisis: Richard II for instance. The reference to uncertain
kings (“Who’s king these nights”), Henry’s loneliness and his concern
about ending (“How will the matter end”), and the uncertain quotation
(“O get up & go in / Somewhere once I heard”) bring to mind Richard
imprisoned in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle, an unkinged King
35
From notes headed “At Last! … after 18 years at it”, dated November 1970, cited
by Haffenden in Berryman’s Shakespeare, lxiv-lxv.
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Peter Maber
harrowed by misremembered Biblical scruples, playing “in one person
many people”, and longing to be “eased / With being nothing”.
Perhaps the most striking Shakespearean King who influences
Dream Song 85 is Richard III of whose climactic line, “Richard loues
Richard, that is, I am I”, Berryman wrote, “having listened to
Professor Erikson, we can say with confidence that what is in question
here is an unmasterable identity crisis”.36 Richard’s identity crisis, like
Henry’s, is expressed in versification: Berryman himself observes that
“the pivoting of the line after its fifth syllable has no parallel at this
date (1590). It obliges us to contrast three heavy first words, a strong
unit, with the hesitant traipsing that follows”: “Richard loues Richard,
that is, I am I.” After Richard’s effortless victory upon victory, after
his unshakable confidence that Berryman described as “omnipotent
ego” (asserted in his opening soliloquy by the hammering of “I”s after
a thirteen-line reserve: “I – that am not shap’d”, “I – that am rudely
stamp’d”, “I – that am curtail’d”), after all his luxuriating in the self,
on the night before his crucial battle the eleven ghosts of his victims
(and compare here Berryman’s fear of “ghastly frights”) appear to
Richard, and he goes to pieces. The line which is supposed to comfort,
to reassure, fails in its very utterance, and Richard contemplates flying
from himself, revenging himself upon himself: torn apart by fear and
self-hate, he doubts who he is.
Berryman notably picks up on stylistic details from Richard’s
speech. There are Richard’s absolutes, “Richard loves Richard”, “I am
I”, which are traceable in “The cold is cold”; and even in “I am – I”,
though here the second “I” begins a new construction. There is also
the use of the third person. When Richard speaks of himself in the
third person he is self-dramatizing, trying to be assertive; but this
feature can also signify a distance from the self, and this is especially
true of Dream Song 85 where the pronoun shift works backwards: “I
should be held together by – / but I am breaking up / and Henry
now…”, so that the third person coincides with the break up. Finally,
there is the expression of inward-turning motion, of suicide: Richard
frantically speaks of revenging “myself upon myself”, whereas Henry
is more resigned, folding “him over himself quietly”. I would suggest
also that the invocation of Shakespearean heroes in this Song in itself
contributes to the identity crisis in as much as it places Henry at a
36
“Shakespeare’s Reality” (1971), in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 344. Berryman first
considered this line in the earlier essay “Shakespeare at Thirty” (1953).
Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography
223
distance from himself: his identity is threatened by usurpation through
another’s words. Having said that, Henry in this Song ultimately
undergoes his own identity crisis and not Richard III’s. What this
poem demonstrates so forcefully is that Berryman’s work on
Shakespeare had a profound, many-levelled impact upon his own
creative work and, most importantly, upon his own process of selfscrutiny; in the midst of creating a poetic identity crisis, lines from
Shakespeare that Berryman had studied and would study again, enter,
producing some of his finest and most moving work.
Shortly before his death Berryman underwent a crisis of
confidence, despairing of ever completing his Shakespeare book: “I
thought new disappointments impossible but last night (Thurs.)
suddenly doubted if I really have a book ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’ at
all, despite all these years”, he wrote at the end of 1971.37 While he
thought himself a failure as a critic, and as a dramatist – “The worst
disapp’t of my life, if I should die tom’w: no plays”, he declared in
195738 – and widespread interest in his critical writings and plays for
their own sake has not survived, the same is not true of Berryman’s
poetry. What we ultimately receive from Berryman’s Shakespearean
scholarship, in other words, are his poems, and that in itself redeems
and justifies the former’s vagaries and imperfections.
37
38
Quoted by Haffenden in The Life of Berryman, 418.
Quoted by Thornbury in “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”, 107.
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.
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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.
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
227
Hofmann is right to point out Berryman’s lifelong (personal and
professional) preoccupation with suicide, but what modern writer –
from William Shakespeare and John Donne to Samuel Beckett and
Don DeLillo – has not been troubled by the possibility of selfannihilation? Hofmann’s inability “to think what else he might have
done” is more immediately problematic. At the very least, Berryman’s
note to his publisher in May 1971 shows that in the months
immediately preceding his death the poet himself believed he had a lot
of work to do – and that he was capable of doing it.
In the two or three years before his death Berryman knew full well
that contemporary critical appraisals of his writing were tending
towards the kind of negativity that is, ultimately, at the heart of
Hofmann’s claim and the narrow confessional designation of his work
more generally. When he wrote in the posthumously published Dream
Song “Henry’s Fate” that, “All projects failed, in the August afternoon
/ he lay & cursed himself & cursed his lot / like Housman’s lad
forsooth”, 7 he was on one level describing his disappointment with the
extraordinarily constricted focus of many critical engagements with
his poetry. This fundamentally negative and restrictive attitude
towards his poetry was exemplified by Robert Phillips’ influential
study The Confessional Poets (1973) where, in a chapter entitled
“John Berryman’s Literary Offenses”, Phillips says of Love & Fame
that: “Rather than displaying moral courage, these poems display
instead immoral callowness. In place of love and fame, we have lust
and notoriety”. “These tendencies were present in The Dream Songs,
of course”, Phillips continues, “but were held in check by Berryman’s
use of the Henry persona .... The Dream Songs are motivated [sic] by
the ego; Love & Fame is sheer vanity.”8 Phillips’ account was first
published in the winter 1971-72 issue of the North Atlantic Review
under the title “Balling the Muse”. Whether Berryman read it or not is
impossible to tell, but Phillips’ dismissal of his work, and of Love &
Fame in particular, is based on an assumption of willful solipsism and
self-indulgence – a lack of “moral courage” – that has been reiterated
over the past three decades by many commentators and which has,
7
See John Berryman, Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972, ed. John Haffenden,
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, 32.
8
Robert S. Phillips, The Confessional Poets, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1973, 97 (emphasis in original).
228
Philip Coleman
more troublingly, influenced the popular perception and transmission
of Berryman’s later poetry as a failed project.9
I want to move on from this negative view of Berryman’s work,
then, and explore some of the ways that his late poetry – and the
poetry of Love & Fame in particular – works successfully in the
opposite direction, towards an acute awareness of the difficulties and
responsibilities faced by the self in society. Of Love & Fame Phillips
suggested that: “Mr Berryman, well, Mr Berryman, alas, was toting up
his relative successes in the game of love and the game of fame.” 10
Against that view, I read Love & Fame as a text that not only displays
but also encourages a form of earnest ethical and spiritual
inquisitiveness that allows us to place Berryman’s late work beside
other important meditations on the theme of responsibility in
twentieth-century American poetry. It accomplishes this in part by
being modeled on the structure and treatment of the relationship
between the “aesthetic” and the “ethical” life mapped by Søren
Kierkegaard in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843). Reading Love &
Fame is not just a matter of gauging Berryman’s “sincerity”, in other
words, as Phillips attempted to do, 11 but it is a text that invites readers
to consider for themselves a set of fundamental ethical questions
regarding the nature of social responsibility. Berryman’s ethical
viewpoint, indeed, could be compared to that of Emmanuel Levinas,
for whom, as Simon Critchley has observed, “ethics … is defined as
the calling into question of my freedom and spontaneity, that is to say,
my subjectivity”.12
The development of Berryman’s poetry throughout his career could
be charted in these terms – as a “calling into question” of the nature of
human subjectivity – from his early interrogation of the “epistemology
of loss” in “The Ball Poem” (CP 11) to the recurring examination of
what he calls “the Facts & Issues” in the poem of that title in
Delusions, Etc. (CP 262-63) The four parts of Love & Fame, broadly
9
Stephen Minot, for example, has argued in relation to Berryman that “It takes
courage to conclude that a body of work by a talented and sincere writer has failed”.
See Minot, “John Berryman and the Lure of Obscurity”, The Sewanee Review, CXI/3
(Summer 2003), 424.
10
Phillips, The Confessional Poets, 98.
11
Ibid., 103-104. Gary Q. Arpin challenges Phillips’ views on the “insincerity” of
Berryman’s late poems in The Poetry of John Berryman, Port Washington: Kennikat
Press, 1978, 93-100.
12
Simon Critchley, Ethics – Politics – Subjectivity: Derrida, Levinas, and
Contemporary French Thought, London: Verso, 1999, 97.
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
229
conceived, map a subject’s movement from an obsession with the
events of his past through to a realization that they are irretrievable, to
an engagement with (and a commitment to) the realities of the hereand-now. In his Paris Review interview in 1970 Berryman said that
Love & Fame “is very shapely and thematically unified, and in that it
resembles a long poem”. 13 As a “thematically unified” work, the book
is more linear in its development than The Dream Songs, which is
characterized by narrative discontinuity and resists absolute closure.
In Part I of Love & Fame, the reader encounters a speaker who is, as
Berryman puts it in the “Scholia” to the second edition, a “distasteful
Braggart”. (CP 290) This figure can only remember very vague details
about the amorous adventures of his past, and by the end of Part I, in
“Recovery”, he admits of his intense coming-of-age that:
I don’t know what the hell happened all that summer.
I was done in, mentally. I wrote nothing, I read nothing.
I spent a pot of money, not being used to money,
I forget on what, now. I felt dazed.
(CP 187)
Forgetfulness and incomprehension about the speaker’s past dominate
what finally amounts to a very scrappy account of his youthful
encounters with a relatively small group of women – named in the text
as Shirley, Garnette, Louise, Elspeth, and Charlotte – in Part I of Love
& Fame. What Phillips rejected as Berryman’s outrageous
autobiographical confessions, in other words, are reduced by the end
of Part I to a scattering of vague anecdotes, tending very quickly
towards the Keatsian “nothingness” alluded to in the book’s title. 14
In the “Scholia” to the second edition of Love & Fame Berryman
wrote that:
The initial American public reception of this book, whether hostile,
cool, or hot, was so uncomprehending that I wondered whether I had
wasted my time, until a letter came from Stanford seeing that it is –
however uneven – a whole, each of the four movements criticizing
13
Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman” (1972), in
Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry
Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 36.
14
See John Keats’ sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (1818), in The
Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, London: Oxford University
Press, 1926, 303.
230
Philip Coleman
backward the preceding, until Part IV wipes out altogether all earlier
representations of the ‘love’ and ‘fame’ of the ironic title. (CP 290)
Reiterating the idea that the book should be read as a “whole” here,
Berryman’s claim regarding its “ironic title” is significant. It is worth
noting, indeed, that Berryman’s use of irony in Love & Fame is
developed in the posthumously published novel Recovery in his
creation of the “disrupter” and “tearer-apart of people” Alan
Severance.15 Moreover, the broad Kierkegaardian structure of the
novel – a text I believe Berryman conceived in part as a response to
the “uncomprehending” reception of the first edition of Love & Fame
in 1970 – may be applied to Love & Fame also. In Parts I and II the
speaker’s ardent adventures and his youthful desire for fame are
sketched out, but in Parts III and IV a more socially aware figure
comes into focus, culminating in the second of the “Eleven Addresses
to the Lord” (in Part IV) with an appraisal of the necessity of faith in
“a damned strange world” where “Man is ruining the pleasant earth &
man” (CP 216). Contrary to Jonathan Galassi’s view that Love &
Fame “is devoted like all Berryman’s last work to the phantasies or
delusions which dominated the poet’s life”,16 then, the book may be
said to describe a self struggling with the pervasive uncertainties of
modern life – and not just those experienced by the individual poet
and private citizen “John Berryman”. The book’s overall design –
from “Her & It” to the eleventh of the “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”
– strives to convey a “Sense of a selfless seeker in this world” as
Berryman writes in “In & Out” (CP 182).
Berryman invited his readers to consider the retrospective, ironic
structure of Love & Fame seriously, and in the “Scholia” to the second
edition, having offered a reading of the book’s opening poem (“Her &
It”) he adds: “Other readings will occur to anybody listening” (CP
291). During the brief period of the book’s composition – he claimed
it was written in five weeks – Berryman sent drafts of the poems to
Richard Wilbur and William Meredith, and Wilbur suggested on one
occasion that Berryman “ought to write an additional poem or passage
in which he explained that he was not writing a full literary
15
In his Introduction to Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury
suggests that “Alan … is Celtic for ‘harmony’ and Severance means ‘tearer-apart of
people, disrupter’ ” (CP xxiii).
16
Jonathan Galassi, “Sorrows and Passions of His Majesty the Ego”, Poetry Nation 2
(1974), 124.
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
231
biography”. 17 Berryman took Wilbur’s advice seriously and in
“Message” he declares, “I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse,
my friends” (CP 201). That he was not writing straightforward
autobiography, however, should have been clear already, and
especially “to anybody listening” to the philosophical and cultural
allusions in Love & Fame, which expand the interpretive frame of the
book beyond the self of the author sitting at his breakfast table or
lying in his lover’s bed. In an early essay on the work of Christopher
Marlowe, Berryman wrote that:
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apart, only of Christopher Marlowe
among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known
personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now
illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist’s life and his work,
which interest an increasing number of readers in this century, and the
existence of which is denied only by very young persons or writers
whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis
pour eux.18
A great deal is known about Berryman’s personal life, and there are
clear points of contact between the self sketched in Love & Fame and
Berryman’s biography. Having said that, the idea of Love & Fame as a
self-contained imaginative work that is not principally concerned with
achieving autobiographical exactitude has rarely been explored in
Berryman studies. Rather than collapsing the work on the man who
created it and reading it as an extended account of his “old college
dates recollected at fifty”19 – which is easily done by collating names
and dates – it is also possible to read Love & Fame as a self-contained
literary work that encloses a rigorously determined ethical system.
Understood in this way, we can see that Love & Fame has value above
and beyond the disclosure of details about the personal life of its
author.
In “Away”, the opening poem of Part II of Love & Fame, the
speaker says farewell to America – scene of countless flirtations and
courtships – and sets sail for Europe and the “haunts of old masters
where [he] may improve” (CP 189). In this poem a clear change in the
17
John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982, 362.
18
Berryman, “Marlowe’s Damnations”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 3.
19
Robert Lowell, “For John Berryman, 1914-1972”, 117.
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Philip Coleman
speaker’s interests is signaled. The salacious anecdotes of Part I are
gradually replaced by descriptions of literary heroes and reading-lists
as the speaker embarks on an earnest course of study and selfimprovement. The arrogance of the seducer described in Part I is now
substituted by the figure of the aspiring writer and scholar, sketched
here in “Monkhood”:
I don’t show my work to anybody, I am quite alone.
The only souls I feel toward are Henry Vaughan & Wordsworth.
This guy Dylan Thomas though is hotter than anyone we have in
America
& hardly at all like Auden.
(CP 194)
By the time we reach Part III, however, the protagonist is placed very
clearly in the thick of things: “My world offends my eyes” he says in
“Dante’s Tomb” (CP 207), and in a number of overtly political poems
in this section the “distasteful Braggart” of Part I’s “Her & It” is
replaced by a self acutely aware of his place, not apart or removed
from, but intractably embedded in society.
Not only does the speaker’s “world” change from “New” to “Old”
in the first two parts of Love & Fame, then, but so does his worldview. By the end of Part II, and more distinctly in the course of Part
III, he abandons his selfish thoughts of sexual conquest and fame and
turns towards matters of clear social and moral import. Marking this
important transition is the third-last poem of Part II, “Transit”, which
begins with a description of the foreign scholar alone in the Old World
(“O a little lonely in Cambridge that first Fall”) and ends with a series
of reflections on the Spanish Civil War and a former classmate’s
suicide:
The news from Spain got worse. The President of my Form
at South Kent turned up at Clare, one of the last let out of Madrid.
He designed the Chapel the School later built
& killed himself, I never heard why
or just how, it was something to do with a bridge.
(CP 197)
The phrase “I never heard why / or just how” here is important
because it signifies a reluctance – or an inability – to provide the
actual details of the suicide. The speaker is unable to “tell it all”, but
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
233
this has less to do with self-censorship than it has with the fact that
many details of the self are “occluded & lost”, as Berryman puts it in
“Message” (CP 201). The occlusion of details implies not only that
certain facts have been withheld, but also that the speaker has decided
to leave the past behind him and move on. Parts III and IV of Love &
Fame, subsequently, describe a movement towards ethical
understanding that is comparable to the description of the poetic
existence offered in the first and second parts of Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or. A speaker comes into being in Berryman’s work who
comprehends the importance of “ethical continuity … over against
aesthetic immediacy and the self-criticism of the conscience-bearing
will is opposed to aesthetic enjoyment”, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has
written of the shift between the first and second parts of Either/Or.20
The reference to Kierkegaard here is not perfunctory. Kierkegaard
is not only mentioned in one of the poems in Part III of Love & Fame
(“The Search”) as one of the speaker’s key interests – “Wellisch on
Isaac & Oedipus / supplements for me Kierkegaard” (CP 200) – but
the “transit” from the accounts of the “distasteful Braggart” and selfimportant seducer of Parts I and II, to the more ethically responsible
(and “conscience-bearing”) figure of Parts III and IV, parallels the
structure of Either/Or which begins with a description of the
“aesthetic life” (containing “The Seducer’s Diary”) and ends with a
lengthy meditation on the meaning of the “ethical life”.21 It is worth
pointing out here that Kierkegaard’s importance in contemporary
philosophical debates has also been undermined because of what some
commentators see as the confessional emphasis of his work, as George
Pattison, Steven Shakespeare, and others, have suggested in their
interrogation of “the stereotype of Kierkegaard as the archetypical and
apolitical individualist”. This view of the philosopher has, in the
words of Pattison and Shakespeare:
played an important role in the gradual marginalizing of
Kierkegaard’s work in the period since the 1960s, when existentialism
began to go out of fashion and we learned that all thought and
20
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Letter to Dallmayr”, trans. Richard Palmer and Diane
Michelfelder, in Dialogue & Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, 97.
21
See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, ed. Victor Eremita, trans.
Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992.
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Philip Coleman
language were culturally conditioned in ways more complex and
deep-rooted than even Marxist reductionism had suggested.22
Moreover, Kierkegaard’s unfashionable place in contemporary
philosophy is described by Pattison and Shakespeare as a consequence
of the transformation in thinking that coincided with the demise of
existentialism and the casting of doubt “upon the coherence and
transcendent worth of such notions as Subject, Author, and even Man
himself”. In the context of Berryman criticism a similar critical
backlash against the author-centered confessionalism that was seen to
dominate poetic discourse during the 1960s may be held responsible
for the widespread refusal to read Berryman’s later work as anything
more than an autobiographical portrayal of the poet himself. Rather
than read him as a poet for whom (as Pattison and Shakespeare have
said of Kierkegaard) “the categories of the individual and the social
are themselves called into question”23 critics have preferred to read
Berryman’s poems, as Louise Glück has commented, as if they are his
“fingerprints” – fragments of self to be reconstructed in the reading
process.
One aspect of what Glück terms the “mixed messages”24 of
Berryman’s poetry is its blend of intellectual speculation and low
comedy, characterized by the mixture of sometimes bawdy anecdote
and philosophical inquiry in Love & Fame, and indeed the whole book
seems to present a “mixed message” in the form of two distinct
personalities. In “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic”,
one of the pieces contained in Part I of Either/Or, Kierkegaard
invokes the figure of Don Juan who, as Sylvia Walsh has commented,
is “the embodiment of our primal, insatiable desire for enjoyment
through an immediate gratification of the senses, especially sexual
desire”.25 In this he is an archetype of the figure described in
Berryman’s “Two Organs” who “stood up in the rowboat fishing to
take a leak / & exclaimed as he was about it with excitement // ‘I wish
my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’” (CP 179). In The
22
George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare, “Introduction: Kierkegaard, the
Individual and Society”, in Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, eds Pattison and
Shakespeare, London: Macmillan, 1998, 1.
23
Ibid., 2.
24
Louise Glück, “Against Sincerity”, in Proofs and Theories, Manchester: Carcanet
Press, 1995, 44.
25
Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics, University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, 70.
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
235
Dream Songs, as John Haffenden has shown, Berryman used the
model of Byron’s Don Juan in his conception of the long poem’s
design.26 The figure of Don Juan is portrayed by Kierkegaard in
Either/Or as “the representative of sensuousness in … demonic form”;
furthermore, he represents, “on a spiritless level, the rebel in us, the
desire within us to gratify our natural inclinations without constraints,
without regard for others, in total freedom and total enjoyment of
life”. 27 This description of Kierkegaard’s Don Juan might also be
related to the seducer of Parts I and II of Love & Fame who, in the
first stanza of “In & Out”, describes “The verve [he] flooded toward
in Don Giovanni” (CP 182). That “verve” or energy is modulated in
the course of Parts III and IV of Love & Fame, however, where
Berryman, like Kierkegaard in the second part of Either/Or,
concentrates his energies on providing the basis for a more balanced
and ethically responsible paradigm for human existence.
Walsh has described this movement in Kierkegaard’s text in terms
of a distinction between “the romantic pattern of living poetically” and
“an ethical pattern of living poetically”:
In contrast to the romantic pattern of living poetically … in volume 1
of Either/Or – an ethical pattern of living poetically is etched in
volume 2. Unlike the romantic design, which experiments with a
multiplicity of possible self-identities, this pattern is modeled on a
single paradigmatic figure within the context of an ethical-existential
aesthetics that stands in continuity with the religious, or Christian,
alternative to the romantic mode of living poetically…. The figure in
which the pattern is exemplified in this instance is that of a married
man, Judge William, the pseudonymous “author” of two long
epistolary essays in this volume. … He thus mounts a concerted effort
in the form of two “letters” to his friend, the romantic aesthete of
volume 1, to make a convincing case for the aesthetic validity of
marriage and the need for a balance between the aesthetic and the
ethical in the development of personality.28
In Parts III and IV of Love & Fame Berryman mounts a similar
defense of the importance of marriage, the family, and work to that
described in the second part of Kierkegaard’s text. In the sequence
that constitutes Part IV of Love & Fame (“Eleven Addresses to the
26
Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 64.
Walsh, Living Poetically, 71.
28
Ibid., 99 (emphasis in original).
27
236
Philip Coleman
Lord”), Berryman asserts “the need for a balance between the
aesthetic and the ethical in the development of personality” that not
only aligns him with Kierkegaard’s “ethical-existential” position but,
more importantly, defines the tone and trajectory of Berryman’s later
work as a whole.
That tone is introduced by a number of the overtly political poems
in Part III of Love & Fame: “Have a Genuine American Horror-&Mist on the Rocks” and “To a Woman” are particularly interesting
examples, but a sense of ethical responsibility towards others is also
registered by poems such as “The Hell Poem”, “Death Ballad”, “I
Know”, and “Purgatory”. In these poems the charge that Berryman’s
later work is grounded in a poetics of avoidance or withdrawal is
countered by an anxious social and environmental criticism,
evidenced in the first stanza of “To a Woman”, where the reader is
encouraged to realize that “The problem is urgent, yes, for this hot
light / we so love may not last. / Man seems to be darkening himself”
(CP 204; emphasis in original). The theme of imminent environmental
collapse is reiterated in “Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on
the Rocks”, where Berryman writes of some “14,500 six-ton concrete&-steel vaults of nerve-gas rockets, lethal” dumped on the floor of the
Atlantic by the American military. This poem marks an important
shift from the seducer’s self-centered uncertainties of the earlier
poems of Love & Fame (described, for example, in “Shirley &
Auden” and “Images of Elspeth”) to a more worldly sense of doubt
concerning the future of the planet itself and life on it “in the long
dark / of decades of ecology to come / while the 20th Century flies
insanely on” (CP 203). “Man is a huddle of need” Berryman writes in
the poem of that title, but in Part III of Love & Fame he is generally
less concerned with describing physical or sexual needs than he is
with exploring what he terms the “Protractions of return / to the now
desired but frightful outer world” in “The Hell Poem” (CP 208-209).
In a movement similar to the slow return to society described in the
course of Alan Severance’s narrative in Recovery, then, the poems of
the third section of Love & Fame map a subject’s confrontation with
emotional and psychological breakdown and “the lies of Society” that,
it is suggested, may have caused that breakdown in the first place.
Those “lies” are described in “Have a Genuine American Horror-&Mist on the Rocks” as the secrets of an irresponsible American
military that shows little or no concern for the environment or those
who inhabit it, and they are bound up with Berryman’s sense of the
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
237
“frightful outer world” of American society in general – “The
American Nightmare” identified by Severance in Recovery.29
“Epictetus is in some ways my favourite philosopher”, Berryman
writes in “Of Suicide” (CP 206). Epictetus, an Ancient Greek Stoic
philosopher who believed in self-renunciation and the brotherhood of
man, presides with Kierkegaard over the poems of Parts III and IV of
Love & Fame to remind us of the importance of ethical self-awareness
and responsibility to one’s family and fellow human beings. As
Berryman puts it in the same poem, “A basis rock-like of love &
friendship / for all this world-wide madness seems to be needed” (CP
206). In the second part of Either/Or Kierkegaard, through the persona
of Judge Wilhelm, describes the importance of work, marriage, and
friendship in terms of their role in establishing “equilibrium between
the aesthetic and the ethical in the development of personality”.30 A
similar effort is recorded in Love & Fame where the indulgences of
the seducer-self described in Parts I and II are offset by a sense of
responsibility for others and the world in general in Parts III and IV,
as when the speaker assumes the role of mentor to fellow-patients in a
psychiatric hospital, most memorably those named “Tyson & Jo” in
“Death Ballad” (CP 209-10). The psychiatric disorder experienced by
these figures is presented as part of a pervasive “world-wide madness”
which Berryman suggests in “Death Ballad” is the result of an
uncaring and irresponsible society that insists its most unfortunate
citizens “don’t exist” (CP 210). Rather than accept this enforced
erasure of the self, however, in the closing poems of Part III of Love &
Fame the speaker prepares to rejoin his own family with a renewed
sense of the strength that may be drawn from them and his work. As
Berryman writes in “Purgatory”: “The days are over, I leave after
breakfast / with fifteen hundred things to do at home; / I made just
now my new priority list” (CP 211). The patients described in “Death
Ballad”, on the other hand, have fled from society, and either “Apathy
or ungovernable fear” prevents them from returning to or even
contemplating it “through the window starlight”. The speaker pleads
with Tyson and Jo to return to a world of love and friendship with
him, but they “prefer Hell”, having been “forbidden to communicate /
either their love or their hate” (CP 210).
29
30
See John Berryman, Recovery, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, 158.
This is the title of the second section of Part 2 of Either/Or.
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Philip Coleman
“The Home Ballad” brings Part III of Love & Fame to an important
conclusion by situating the protagonist back in society, facing up to
his responsibilities before the thanksgiving of Part IV (“Eleven
Addresses to the Lord”) and the rediscovery of faith described and
celebrated therein. The speaker’s decisive abandonment of the empty
pursuit of “love” and “fame” takes place in Part IV where he places
his trust in the “Sole watchman of the flying stars” (CP 217) and
celebrates God as the “Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, /
inimitable contriver, / endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from
the boring Moon” (CP 215). The rediscovery of faith described here
may be read as the final rejection of the life of indulgence and selfabsorption described in the earlier parts of the book. Also important
here, however, is the persistence of the theme of ecology and
Berryman’s insistence on man’s responsibility to the world on a
number of occasions in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”. The first
“Address” begins with the image of the “Earth so gorgeous &
different from the boring moon” just quoted, but in the second
Berryman writes that: “Man is ruining the pleasant earth & man” (CP
216). Berryman’s earlier reflections on the fact that “Man seems to be
darkening himself” in “To a Woman” (CP 204) are here reiterated
with renewed urgency when he suggests that only God can protect
wayward “Man”. In the same way that the preceding sections of Love
& Fame played man’s self-destructive impulse against an awakening
ethical vision, Berryman’s descriptions of the beauty of creation are
counterpoised here by a recognition of mankind’s capacity for selfannihilation. As he writes in the second “Address”:
Yours is the crumpling, to my sister-in-law terrifying thunder,
yours the candelabra buds sticky in Spring,
Christ’s mercy,
the gloomy wisdom of godless Freud:
yours the lost souls in ill-attended wards,
those agonized thro’ the world
at this instant of time, all evil men,
Belsen, Omaha Beach,—
incomprehensible to man your ways.
(CP 216)
Love & Fame and the Self in Society
239
Out of the vision of ethical responsibility described in the closing
poems of Part III of Love & Fame Berryman arrives at an
understanding of human endeavour in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”
that is neither dogmatic nor precious in its meditation of faith. Rather,
the “Addresses” – and Love & Fame in its entirety – posit a version of
ethical authority that Berryman’s early master W.H. Auden conceived
in terms of the “ethical hero”: one who is “happier than his inferiors
because he is already in the movement away from the dark misery of
ignorance and servitude to passion towards the bright joy of freedom
in knowledge and truth”.31
Awakening into this understanding of ethical-existential liberty at
the end of Love & Fame, Berryman imagines a figure who finds the
strength to confront the problems of the modern world, from “the lies
of Society” (CP 210) to “the gloomy wisdom of godless Freud” (CP
216). This is a figure who, through a series personal trials, has learned
to reflect on a world that is fraught with difficulties not only for
himself but also for others. As Berryman writes in the fourth
“Address”: “Caretaker! take care, for we run in straits. / Daily, by
night, we walk naked to storm, / some threat of wholesale loss, to
ruinous fear” (CP 218; emphasis added). Although he has given up on
human forms of authority and found hope in the possibility of a divine
presence – “Under new management, Your Majesty: / Thine” (CP
219) – the speaker is still painfully aware of what Berryman will term
the world’s “black corruption” (“this schwartze Verwesung”) in an
elegy for Georg Trakl included in his final collection Delusions, Etc.
(CP 243). If it can be said that Berryman maps what Auden described
as “a movement away from the dark misery of ignorance and
servitude to passion towards the bright joy of freedom in knowledge
and truth”, in other words, then that “knowledge and truth” includes
an intense awareness of modern man’s failings, the most significant of
which is the delusion that he can avoid the movement toward social
and ethical responsibility charted by the elusively “plain-saying”
poems of Love & Fame. Against those readings that present
Berryman’s late work as a catalogue of scandalous anecdotes, or
interpretations which insist that self-obsession was the poet’s primary
motivation in writing Love & Fame, the book may finally be seen –
like The Dream Songs – as an extended meditation on the self’s
31
W.H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood; or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea,
London: Faber and Faber, 1951, 84.
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Philip Coleman
determination to confront rather than withdraw from the modern
world.
JOHN BERRYMAN AND THE WRITING OF SILENCE
PHILIP MCGOWAN
Berryman’s description in Dream Song 172 of a “geography of grief”
summarizes his career-long charting of a textual and psychical space
that is regularly occluded and effaced by traditional methods of
literary interpretation. To narrow the gauge somewhat, and to
facilitate a discussion of Berryman’s deployment of language to
access such realms of intangible absolutes, his long poem The Dream
Songs rises as the central work in his corpus in which language is
pushed to the extreme in its attempts to write the unsayable. So
numerous are the Dream Songs in which Berryman engages with the
questions of death and suicide, that one encounters an almost
insurmountable difficulty in addressing Berryman’s position in
relation to his poetic subjects and the linguistic modes that avail his
discussion of them. The Dream Songs represents an engagement with
language and its disintegration as it encounters the void, be that a
psychical internal one or the ultimate abyssal experience of death.
Reading suicide as the ultimate incarnation not only of a personal
subjectivity but also as the endgame to a philosophical imponderable
restructures how we read the works of this generation and of
Berryman in particular. The urge to commit suicide and the mental
processes involved in such an act are instincts and articulations that
are located within the individual’s mental world and, for Berryman,
particularly within the philosophical debate that centers in the role and
possibility of language. It becomes akin to creative endeavour, much
as Albert Camus intimated: “An act like this … is prepared within the
silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.”1 The comparison is
1
Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971,
121.
242
Philip McGowan
more than simply apt: the essential silence that preludes the creation
of art preludes the commission of this act, the understanding of which
pivots on whether suicide can be deemed to be creative or destructive.
Berryman’s contemporary Anne Sexton muddies the waters of this
debate, possibly with self-serving reasons. When she declares, in an
interview that discusses Sylvia Plath’s death, that “Suicide is, after all,
the opposite of the poem”, 2 she simultaneously opens and closes a
debate the terms of which once more rotate about the irresolvable
question of language. If this sentence does relate Sexton’s own
philosophy with regard to suicide, it produces a range of problems. If
suicide is the opposite of the poem, then the reverse by this logic is
also true, that poetry is the opposite of the act of suicide. The moment
of suicide is one that leads to death; therefore, the moment of poetry
must be one that leads to the opposite of death, to not-death, to life,
birth even. Poetry then is not a birth as such but a conception, just as
suicide is not death but an action of death, an action leading to death.
For the two to be opposites, they must be located as threshold
moments, prior to both the beginning and the termination of language.
If poetry operates as the expression of the essence of language and as
the possibility of discovering or encountering language at its source,
suicide is itself an expression, an encounter with the moment of death,
of death in its essence even if the totality of the experience of Death
can never be realized (either through language or the act of suicide).
As an act that may seek to accelerate the experience of death, suicide
can never encompass Death; it may seem to offer access to a full
encounter with Death, but the moment of its realization is the
simultaneous moment of the impossibility of any such encounter.3
Acknowledging that the two events are recognized as opposed
impulses, suicide becomes anti-poetry in this taxonomy, an impulse
that is anti-language, or is the physical refusal or rejection of the
possibility of language. It is the cataclysmic intrusion of the eradicated
2
Anne Sexton, No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, ed. Steven
Gould Axelrod, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985, 92.
3
Maurice Blanchot relates how the moment of suicide is remote from the actuality of
death, connected more to life than to the abyssal beyond: “Just as the man who is
hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, the final shore,
rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which
holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to
the existence he would like to leave, even so Thomas felt himself, at the moment he
knew himself to be dead, absent, completely absent from his death”. See Blanchot,
Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamerton, New York: David Lewis Inc., 1973, 36.
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
243
self into the Blanchotian project of sustaining language in its essence. 4
It is the intersection of the biographical or autobiographical into the
poetic to which language cannot attend. If the poem is language (as
essence), the fact of suicide must exist outside of this signifying
framework. Even in its opposition, or Sexton’s interpretation here of it
as being in opposition, to the poem, suicide as an ethical or
philosophical response to existence is configured in language: it
remains for that moment part of a linguistic terrain, a place of opposed
meaning to the prospect of the poetic, a geography all its own. Poetry
creates its own geographies of meaning: sometimes these are
geographies of love, or of death, of joy, or of grief. Suicide, and the
encounter with the finality of its possibility, comes as the ultimate
realization of the geography of grief in Berryman’s poetic lexicon.
Berryman’s Dream Song 384 narrates a return to his father’s grave,
the father also a suicide, “who tore his page / out” and who dominates
the work’s recurring portraits and considerations of suicide. This selfdestructive act is simultaneously written as an act that counters the
possibility of writing, a destructive resistance to the Work, the
ineffable essence to which all writing tends.5 The act of suicide is the
place where geography stops; it is a place beyond place, beyond
location and locatability. It is a terrain where meaning ends, where the
debates central to poetry and poetic creation, the debates about
language and meaning and interpretation, are closed off, cut off,
silenced, “leaving the page of the book carelessly open, / something
unsaid, the phone off the hook” as Sexton relates in “Wanting to
Die”.6 The language of suicide is as distinct as the geography it
demarcates: Sexton’s declaration in this same poem that “suicides
4
Blanchot contends that “the poet produces a work of pure language, and language in
this work is its return to its essence”. See Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans.
Ann Smock, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 42.
5
Martin Heidegger postulates that “Every great poet creates his poetry out of one
single poetic statement only. The measure of his greatness is the extent to which he
becomes so committed to that singleness that he is able to keep his poetic Saying
wholly within it …. The poet’s statement remains unspoken. None of his individual
poems, nor their totality says it all. Nonetheless, every poem speaks from the whole of
one single statement, and in each instance says that statement …. Since the poet’s sole
statement always remains in the realm of the unspoken, we can discuss its site only by
trying to point to it by means of what the individual poems speak.” See Martin
Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, New York and London:
Harper and Row Publishers, 1971, 160.
6
See Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, 143.
244
Philip McGowan
have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which
tools. / They never ask why build”7 is a necessary extension of this
wholly other relation to existence; it goes with the territory. It is not
just a coded version of language, but an altogether alternative register
in which “why” is replaced by how, the why and wherefore already a
decided issue. The philosophical issues that occupy other minds are of
no direct concern to the suicide as they relate to an antithetical
position, a world apart from “the almost unnameable” [sic] desire that
occupies their own. Such logic leads to the language of disconnection,
to broken connections in the worlds of signifying and communication:
“leaving the page of the book carelessly open, / something unsaid, the
phone off the hook.” This is not so much a failure to communicate as
a refusal to do so, a refusal to be known, or to be included in processes
of communication. Such poetry writes an alternative register of
possible meaning, recognized in a final and ultimate resistance to
meaning. The “almost unnameable” becomes the unnameable, the
unsayable that voids language, the frozen moment that stands in
eternal opposition to the poem.
The space that death occupies is a nowhere, an absence, akin to the
night. Blanchot recognizes it in midnight, the axis on which yesterday
and tomorrow distinguish each from the other and from the present.
Death in the moment of its occurrence becomes a negation of time, a
denial of the present: “no longer a present, but the past, symbolized, as
is the end of history in Hegel, by a book lying open upon the table.” 8
The personal history ended in suicide adds a “carelessly” to Hegel’s
analogy of the book left open. It moves the argument into an arena
where there can be no argument, the “something unsaid” something
that can never now be said. Henry “alone breasts the wronging tide” at
the close of Dream Song 172 unable to ascertain why and for how
long he will remain untouched by suicide’s “torrent … of agony and
wrath”. Dream Song 112, among others, discovers him unable to
speak; Dream Song 335 writes the impossibility of communicating the
experience of death: “no messages return, they preserve silence.”
Unrepresentable, death resonates in a void of silence. 9 Inexpressive,
7
Ibid., 142.
Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 113.
9
Levinas notes how the “approach of death indicates that we are in relation with
something that is absolutely other, something bearing alterity not as a provisional
determination we can assimilate through enjoyment, but as something whose very
existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken
8
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
245
Henry is caught between the action of speech, a desire to speak and
the silenced ability to speak: “When I had most to say / my tongue
clung to the roof / I mean of my mouth” (Dream Song 112). For
Berryman, the poem functions as a silent arena signaling the
possibility of death, a venue that echoes Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow
Man,” recalling the figure who “beholds / Nothing that is not there
and the nothing that is”.10 The Dream Songs is littered with
inarticulations and stopped-short attempts at communication,
something that is not quite language and yet a something that is.
Stevens is instructive again when, in “Adagia”, he comments that:
“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence that
takes its place as life’s redemption.”11 If, as Critchley suggests, “[i]n
the face of a God-less world, individual authenticity produces itself
through acts of self-invention and self-creation, where death becomes
my work and suicide becomes the ultimate possibility”,12 it becomes
possible to understand Berryman’s enduring fascination with the topic
of suicide. For him and other writers of his generation, suicide became
the only possibility, and the subject of death and the distillation of
American geographies of grief their lifework. The numerous Dream
Songs that speak of suicide and that attempt an encounter with death
vibrate on the boundary that divides our physical world from the
possibility of a world beyond it. Unable to name in full the desire for
death that it seeks, such poetry represents this urge for absence as a
gathering storm of physical instances this side of the leap into the
wished-for space of death. The degree to which such a desire and such
an act is a creative force, or whether it intimates a destructive potential
is a highly debatable issue. The choice of suicide may emanate from a
number of circumstances: insurmountable grief, incessant melancholy
concerning the human situation, loss, nihilistic despair, death itself. 13
by it.” See Levinas, from Time and the Other, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 43.
10
See Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, revised edition, London: Faber and Faber,
1989, 7.
11
Ibid., 185.
12
See Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature,
London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 25.
13
Emile Durkheim describes three basic forms of suicide: egotistic suicide, where the
individual discovers herself disconnected from society, relying on her own abilities to
form a world; altruistic suicide, as its name suggests, is the opposite of egotistic
suicide and occurs when an individual’s identity is suppressed in favor of a group
identity to which the individual belongs; and anomic suicide, resulting from an
246
Philip McGowan
As the ultimate manifestation of the geography of grief, suicide names
and is the condition of its own limit, its one act the realization and
simultaneous denial of its own intimation of release. Suicide as the
chosen moment of exchange of life for death circulates in a selfserving circle of contradictory belief: in offering the individual the
ability when and how to chose their own death, its logic is based on a
delusion if it believes that such a choice either equates the individual
human being with the power of the Absolute (to terminate as well as
create life) or provides them with an unending dominion over Death.
The finite nature of our knowledge of the finite world is endlessly
defeated when we turn to consider the eternal infinitudes beyond this
existence. 14 Suicide, an apparition that tantalizes the individual with
the possibility of becoming this infinitude, ties the individual to this
finite world and, in the act of suicide, to the finite moment of that act.
As Critchley summarizes the position:
there is an almost logical contradiction at the heart of suicide, namely
that if death is my ownmost possibility, then it is precisely the
moment when the “I” and its possibilities disappear. In suicide, the
“I” wants to give itself the power to control the disappearance of its
power. If the resolute decision of the suicide is to say, “I withdraw
from the world, I will act no longer” then he or she wants to make
death a final act, a final and absolute assertion of the power of the
“I”.15
Suicide wishes to make of death an act of the individual will, to
reduce its infinite span to the mirror image of life’s finite term. This
individual’s inability to cope with a sudden change in their economic or social
position. See Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George
Simpson, London: Routledge, 1952.
14
As Emmanuel Levinas notes in his preface to Totality and Infinity, “the relation
with infinity – the idea of the Infinite, as Descartes calls it – overflows thought in a
wholly different sense than does opinion. Opinion vanishes like the wind when
thought touches it – or is revealed to be already within that thought. What remains
ever exterior to thought is thought in the idea of infinity. It is the condition for every
opinion as also for every objective truth. The idea of infinity is the mind before it
lends itself to the distinction between what it discovers by itself and what it receives
from opinion.” He adds, “The relation with infinity cannot, to be sure, be stated in
terms of experience, for infinity overflows the thought that thinks it”. See Levinas,
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969, 25.
15
Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, 68 (emphasis in original).
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
247
myopic situation arises from the inability of the human mind to
comprehend or begin to encompass the infinite and of our reserves of
language to encapsulate a terrain of which it can never have
knowledge. The suicide’s encounter with death, as far as it can be
understood in language, is a short-circuiting of the processes of death,
a detour to the end bypassing the normal, arbitrary means to that end.
It is the willed translation of the self into everything that is not the
self. As the ultimate act of the self, as the act of self-definition, it is
the last act in which the self believes that it can be recognized. The
deletion of the self sanctioned and executed by the act of suicide
terminates all possibilities of the self. As the defining term of a
“special language” it is the last word, the place where definitions, and
the hope of self-definition, stop: rather than preserve the individual’s
desire to imprint the power of the “I” over death, the reverse is the
case, death’s domain and dominion is guaranteed and the “I”
dissipates.
To want to die, as Sexton’s poem intimates, is a yearning, a “lust”
and a “passion” to defeat the inevitable fact of death by dictating the
moment of its arrival, even though this arrival confirms death’s
inevitability. Critchley questions the basis of such a desire with
important consequences for interpreting Berryman’s poetry that deals
with these subjects: “Death is not an object of the will, the noema of a
noesis, and one cannot, truly speaking, want to die. To die means
losing the will to die and losing the will itself is the motor that drives
the deception of suicide.”16 Death is an unwilled entity: it exists
beyond the will and the passions of the individual. The heightened
visceral encounters that gather in The Dream Songs speak of a
physically realized obsession with the moment of death which, when
it comes, abolishes such physicality, translating this looming presence
that dominates the individual mind into an infinite absence. For
Blanchot, as for Critchley:
the explanation is that you don’t want to die, you cannot make of
death an object of the will. You cannot want to die, and the will,
arrested thus at the uncertain threshold of what it cannot attain,
redirects itself, with its calculating wisdom, toward everything that it
still can grasp in the area around its limit. You think of so many things
because you cannot think of something else, and this is not for fear of
looking into the face of too grave a reality; it is because there is
16
Ibid., 71.
248
Philip McGowan
nothing to see. Whoever wants to die can only want the borders of
death, the utilitarian death which is in the world and which one
reaches through the precision of a workman’s tools. Whoever wants to
die does not die, he loses the will to die. He enters the nocturnal realm
of fascination wherein he dies in a passion bereft of will.17
“ ‘…It all centered in the end on the suicide / in which I am an
expert, deep & wide’ ” concludes Dream Song 136. A fascination with
the issue of suicide clots Henry’s abilities to function in The Dream
Songs and also bleeds into Berryman’s later collections Love & Fame
and Delusions, Etc. The abstract nature of language, that produces its
own failure to communicate, 18 underpins and simultaneously
undermines these attempts to write that which circulates beyond
language. The fissure that opens between the impulse to say and the
resulting linguistic expression of that impulse becomes an abyssal
breach that collapses the fragile possibilities of poetic expression.
Linguistic disjunctions interrupt the translation of thought into word,
cordoning-off the writer from the desired end product that writing
seeks: the fallibility of the word divorces the poet from the possibility
of the Word, of creating in language the absolute expression of
existence:19
Error is the risk which awaits the poet and which, behind him, awaits
every man who writes dependent upon an essential work. Error means
wandering, the inability to abide and stay. For where the wanderer is,
the conditions of a definitive here are lacking ….
Blanchot’s instruction lights the unbridgeable discordance that
Berryman’s later writings encounter. Exiled from the possibility of the
Work, the full articulation of the very essence of his thought,
Berryman’s late works write the simultaneous and inevitable failure to
produce the Work and to write the Word. Language cannot
accommodate the absolute essence of its own possibility, though
17
Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 105.
As Paul Bové argues: “All language is capable of authenticity and inauthenticity,
i.e., it both discloses and covers up, often in the same movement.” See Bové,
Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980, 84.
19
As Bové notes, regarding Heidegger’s reading of Stefan George’s “The Word”, “the
poet is ultimately confronted by the failure of language to articulate his final vision of
what the ordinary and habitual obscures” (ibid., 147).
18
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
249
poetry attempts to locate and narrate such essence. Indeed, as
Blanchot continues in the chapter entitled “Literature and the Original
Experience” in The Space of Literature:
The risk is more essential. It is the danger of dangers by which, each
time, the essence of language is radically placed in doubt. To risk
language: this is one of the forms of this risk. To risk being – the word
uttered when absence is spoken, and which the word pronounces by
pronouncing the word beginning – this is the other form of the risk.20
In the face of the Absolute, either in the shape of death’s infinitude
or of God, language falters in its ability to communicate. It is the final,
incomplete and equivocating intercession in language’s encounter
with what lies beyond its capabilities. Unquestioning, it replaces the
prosaic demands of factuality and meaning; it denies language the
possibility of its own expression. The Dream Songs, and Berryman’s
later works, address the ultimate question of existence: how will I face
my death? Death is the one constant that can be relied upon and it
marks the transition from the finite into the realm of the infinite.
Moreover, it is the absolute condition of the possibility of language,
the place where signification is suspended, withheld, and returned to
its finite circle encompassing what can be said about life.21
Encountering death, the subject simultaneously encounters the
terminus of language. Answering the question of whether suicide is
the ultimate act of subjective consciousness or whether it is the
quintessential act of self-delusion,22 Berryman closes the breach in his
poetic language that divides it from a comprehension of the Absolute
with this final act.
20
Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 238 (emphasis in original).
As Critchley argues: “Death is radically resistant to the order of representation.
Representations of death are misrepresentations or rather representations of an
absence” (Very Little … Almost Nothing, 26). Death is forever that which cannot be
represented, my own death a certainty that I cannot represent because, once it
happens, then it will be too late. Yet, the fact of my death and my response to that
sense of my finitude is something that I can register, an intractable problem that, for
Berryman, had one inevitable solution.
22
“Suicide is the fantasy of total affirmation, an ecstatic assertion of the absolute
freedom of the Subject in its union with nature or the divine, a mystical sense of death
as the scintilla dei, the spark of God” (see Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing,
68).
21
250
Philip McGowan
Death is not, however, an end-stop to the process of creating
literature or art. Indeed, as Kristeva argues, death, while existing as
“the inner boundary of the signifying process”, is what must be
crossed if “art” is to be created: “Crossing that boundary is precisely
what constitutes ‘art.’ In other words, it is as if death becomes
interiorized by the subject of such a practice; in order to function, he
must make himself the bearer of death.”23 Death maintains the
individual experience of its inevitable presence; unable to be resisted,
it is internalized, drawing it within the confines of the ability to speak,
to relate and ultimately to be. Already acknowledged as operating
within an alternative signifying system reserved for the suicidal,
Berryman / Henry is Kristeva’s bearer of death: he carries its presence
inside, a mortal affliction that negotiates his artistic production. The
boundary at which death hovers is an abyss that must be accepted, not
questioned. Facing an encounter with the Absolute, the individual
subject cannot speak; indeed, speech can say nothing of this
encounter. What Berryman’s poetry so acutely relates is a twinned
acknowledgment of the failure of self and language: subjective
ontology and aesthetic practice coincide and map the other as the
output of the late collections funnels Berryman toward suicide’s
irreversible abdication of the word to silence. 24 The Dream Songs is a
manifestation of the bifurcated risk of which Blanchot speaks:
language and self are beset with irresolvable tensions that destabilize
the very structure of their possibility; the failure of words for
Berryman is irrevocably intertwined with the failure of self for both
have been established in symbiotic relation to each other throughout
his work.
This individual voice experiences isolation because of the absence
of known routes of access or indicators of direction, the lack of textual
mappings of the semiotic, of the unsayable. The particular geography
mapped by poets in this situation, such as Berryman and Sexton, is a
23
Julia Kristeva, from Revolution in Poetic Language, in The Portable Kristeva, ed.
Kelly Oliver, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 56.
24
Bové’s analysis is of further relevance here: “Representation and articulation both
break down when the poet successfully destroys enough of the traditional habits to
encounter this mysterious limit of articulation. Perhaps all that the poet does finally
encounter in this way is the failure of language, which reduces him to gesture and
bodily expression .… The poet moves beyond, transcends what the ordinary or
habitual defines as life and at that moment is reduced to a non-verbal being. The
necessary shared basis of language, its common referents and significations,
disintegrate” (see Destructive Poetics, 147-48).
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
251
landscape of such absences written in a language that initiates debate
about its own possibility. It is an aesthetic that, aware of the
limitations of its own practice, provides a route to the representation
of what previously had been unrepresentable. As a means of access to
the real, this poetry offers a map to an unrecognized geography that
faces moments of trauma and ultimate despair: the navigation of this
terrain unites these writers within a poetic practice that attempted to
write that which resists language (trauma, grief, and death). The
writing of or the attempt to write the unsayable becomes the central
concern of their texts and their lives. Berryman faces these issues of
authenticating the self through language, simultaneously aware that
language betrays the impulse to communication, wiping out the tracks
it has just formed as it moves toward an encounter with the absolutes
of existence. With suicide as the endgame of such histories and
geographies of grief, it comes as the final inscription of a language
that has itself been vanishing as the final movements are made toward
death. Suicide is the last word, the silencing avowal of a metaphysical
selfhood that obliterates the physical “I”.
The suffering that the human form undergoes both in life and in
anticipation of death manifests itself in pain and also in our fear of
that pain. It also arises in our fear of death itself, what it actually
means to be dead. Berryman recognizes that death is necessarily other
to meaning: it is beyond our cognizant realm of understanding, an
abyssal condition that can be neither written nor resisted.25 In
envisioning death, he not only seeks to disable the attendant horrors of
its inevitability; he covets the certainties of its irreversible finality:
“My desire for death was strong”, as Berryman writes in Dream Song
259. Death, or the power of death to instill fear, is at some level then,
diminished as a result of such thinking. Suicide, however, clouds the
waters here somewhat: by choosing an immediate death over both the
processes of life and of dying, the suicide draws the abyss closer to
25
In Time and the Other Levinas argues that “The structure of pain, which consists in
its very attachment to pain, is prolonged further, but up to an unknown that is
impossible to translate into terms of light – that is, that is refractory to the intimacy of
the self with the ego to which all our experiences return. The unknown of death,
which is not given straight off as nothingness but is correlative to an experience of the
impossibility of nothingness, signifies not that death is a region from which no one
has returned and consequently remains unknown as a matter of fact; the unknown of
death signifies that the very relationship with death cannot take place in the light, that
the subject is in relationship with what does not come from itself. We could say it is in
relationship with mystery.” See The Levinas Reader, 40.
252
Philip McGowan
hand; rather than triumphing over the unfathomable proportions of its
infinite reach, he submits to them. Suicide, then, comes as the final
response to a fear, not of death, but of dying, not of life, but of
living.26 “It seems to be DARK all the time” opens “Despair” from
Love & Fame (CP 207). The vortex of silence, solitude and death into
which the Berryman poetic spirals becomes the final condition of his
poetic expression.
Such silence and solitude is essential for this artistic process to
occur even if it leads to the paradoxical double bind of the writer’s
position as noted by Blanchot in The Gaze of Orpheus: a writer “is not
free to be alone without expressing the fact that he is alone”.27 Alone,
the artist or writer is not in isolation from language, the existence of
which speaks his communal ties: such solitude is related by the artist
through the very entity, language, which negates that solitude. Indeed,
as Critchley argues, this becomes a necessary situation for the writer
to experience if he is to write at all. Following this strategy of the
“silence of solitude” that stands at the centre of the artistic process, he
untangles Blanchot’s thinking with regard to what a writer actually
produces, what he writes about, and what significance it has for a
reader:
Silence is then equated by Blanchot with the theme of nothing (le
rien), the silent essence of solitude is nothingness. Nothing, then, is
the material of the writer and the writer has nothing to express …. The
writer has an obligation to say or to bring to language, to literature, the
nothing or silent solitude that is the source of literature.28
26
As Blanchot indicates, “it is not certain that suicide is an answer to the call of
possibility in death. Suicide doubtless asks life a question – is life possible? But it is
more essentially a questioning of itself: Is suicide possible?” (see The Space of
Literature, 102; emphasis in original). Is the promise that suicide appears to offer
possible? Can suicide provide a definitive victory over dying (and thus over living)?
The circularity of the philosophical argument recalls how Blanchot in Thomas the
Obscure writes the remoteness of suicide from the actuality of death. It is an instant
connected more to life than to the abyssal beyond. The moment of suicide is a
moment of life, an instant irretrievably tethered to life and not to death; the
disappointment the suicide feels is one of betrayal, that death has not been
accomplished: the act of suicide reiterates the physicality of life, not the promise of
death.
27
See Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis, New
York: Station Hill, 1981, 4.
28
Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, 37 (emphasis in original).
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
253
Writing in order to access language at its source, Berryman encounters
the absolute conditions of silence in which the voided centre, the
nothing that precedes literary creation, has its formative being.
Recalling Stevens’ “The Snow Man” once more, the “Nothing that is
not there and the nothing that is” is precisely the moment and location
of absence and possibility from which poetic language springs. The
abyssal condition of language, of art, of the impulses that draw them
into communicable entities, circulate in this terrain of dual yet
necessarily silent possibility. This is the very condition that
Berryman’s work narrates.
In this location, however, what is absent becomes present through
the language of the poem, a language that can only relate in its oblique
significations the absence about which it speaks. This is “the silence
that alone speaks” in Blanchot’s reading and which “speaks from the
depth of the past and is at the same time the whole future of the
world”. 29 This place of solitude is the core at the heart of signification
without which language is not possible, the poet its translator even
though what he translates is the essential silence of the encounter.
Blanchot, elaborating upon Rilke’s concept of Weltinnenraum (or
“world’s inner space”) comments that this space is where things “pass
from one language to another, from the foreign, exterior language into
a language which is altogether interior and which is even the interior
of language, where language names in silence and by silence, and
makes of the name a silent reality”.30 In order to create, the writer
must return to this condition of silence in which the possibility of the
word exists; coined in silence it enters the linguistic from this void
without which it cannot exist. To this void the writer returns, moving
ever further into its limitless realm where language at its essence
forms in silence the words that will transmit his art, thought, and his
silent poetic expression.
The silence that eats away at the poet is death, the encounter with
which awaits his journey to the end of language, the poem the
intervening space that translates the invisible into the visible, the silent
into the said, composed of the two but tending ultimately toward the
voided absence from which and back into which all language flows.
Facing across the open divide toward the Absolute, the poet
29
30
Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 114.
Ibid., 141.
254
Philip McGowan
temporarily substitutes words for silence conscious that his poetic
language will disappear back into this vacuum:
The Open is the poem. The space where everything returns to deep
being, where there is infinite passage between the two domains, where
everything dies but where death is the learned companion of life,
where horror is ravishing joy, where celebration laments and
lamentation praises – the very space toward which ‘all worlds hasten
as toward their nearest and truest reality,’ the space of the mightiest
circulation and of ceaseless metamorphosis – this is the poem’s space.
This is the Orphic space to which the poet doubtless has no access,
where he can penetrate only to disappear, which he attains only when
he is united with the intimacy of the breach that makes him a mouth
unheard, just as it makes him who hears into the weight of silence.
The Open is the work, but the work as origin.31
A perpetual silence and a mouth unheard: Blanchot and Berryman /
Henry travel to the limits of language, marked by death and silenced
by the unsayable to which their work impels them. The ultimate
possibility of human existence, whether perceived in the fantasy of
suicide or the search for a language that precedes the essence of the
word, hastens the poet’s journey through geographies of grief and
despair seeking for the elusive Absolute, both there and not.
The poet exists in an endless geography of grief, then, conscious of
the “misery in the sound of the wind”, as Stevens puts it, accompanied
by death and traveling irrevocably toward that end:
At every time [the poet] lives the time of distress, and his time is
always the empty time when what he must live is the double infidelity:
that of men, that of the gods – and also the double absence of the gods
who are no longer and who are not yet. The poem’s space is entirely
represented by this and, which indicates the double absence, the
separation at its most tragic instant.32
An abysmal condition, circulating the abyssal essence of language, the
poet exists and acts to create within a centripetal momentum that
draws him into the void. Caught between the possibilities of an
Absolute that was and an Absolute to be, he interposes between
humanity and the knowledge of its finitude. The poem is the transient
31
32
Ibid., 142 (emphasis in original).
Ibid., 247.
John Berryman and the Writing of Silence
255
expression that both separates and connects humanity to the
incremental absences of silence, death and God; the one facility that
makes an understanding of these infinite dimensions possible, it
forever speaks the fact of its inability to make them comprehensible in
language. By writing, both the poem and the poet repeatedly recycle
the silence that activates and terminates their existence. The
possibility of God, or of humanity coming to an understanding of the
Absolute, remains a necessarily abyssal encounter. God exists, and a
belief in God exists, in this space, the “abyss”, a location without
locatability, without precise dimensions or co-ordinates. The depths
and widths, the crevices and ordinals of this space or entity that is
termed God are unknown; indeed, they remain unknowable to the
human consciousness. The attempt to access this location comes
through language. The word of the Word, our way to an understanding
of the Word, is the poem; the poem speaks the possibility of the Word
through the intercession of language, writing the absence of God, the
abyssal moment of God’s existence, in the perpetually disappearing
footprints of the word: “Crackles! in darkness HOPE; & disappears. /
Lost arts. / Vanishings” (CP 208). 33
33
Intriguingly, the late Sexton poem “The Big Boots of Pain”, released after her
death, observes: “Somehow DECEASED keeps getting / stamped in red over the word
HOPE.” See Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, 549.
AFTER BERRYMAN: FOUR POETS
LAVINIA GREENLAW
BRENDAN KENNELLY
MAURA DOOLEY
HARRY CLIFTON
SNOW LINE
LAVINIA GREENLAW
It was wet & white & swift and where I am
we don’t know. It was dark and then
it isn’t.
John Berryman, Dream Song 28
Dying wasps crawl into shoes, settle and curl.
I find them, wings askew, staggering up window-panes.
They have lost an element to play in and must
rebalance their weight. The call I want to make
is ill-timed, unanswerable. A dream I had wanted?
There is snow, feet deep on the overheated hill
and falling. I walk slowly, lie down in it with care.
All that talk when it could be simple!
THE GEOGRAPHY PAPER
BRENDAN KENNELLY
It was the Geography Paper did it
or was it? Anyway, he decided
to kill himself so he said farewell
to Leaving Cert and got a bus
to Dun Laoghaire where he walked into
the sea.
The question is, where is he now?
That’s another kind of geography.
Maybe he’s a city somewhere
or a village in a hot country
where people sleep and work in him.
Maybe he’s a lake of complete peace
some folk love to gaze at
imagining their hearts at rest;
or he could be a hill near home his father
never bothered to look at, took for granted.
Dispersed like fields and water he
changes with the weather
yet stays the same. Most human eyes
never linger long enough to know
260
Brendan Kennelly
the difference. If he’s a dark valley
he’ll relish those who dare to travel
through him, enjoying his shade and light,
his bumpy corners, quiet runs, startling angles,
a dead badger smashed and flung
into roadside grass, commented on
by another Michael being driven
to hospital by a tired, determined woman.
Above all, he’s beyond questions and answers.
Some set the questions, some provide the answers.
All are ignorant of the bottom of the sea.
That’s an enduring problem, too deep for you and me
who live this side of the borders of geography.
TRANSIT
MAURA DOOLEY
For John Berryman
Untidy life of faith and fear and the unfaith
stretch your sexy span across the city
an unforgiving breath from birth to bitter
for he’ll remember every slight and kindness
and know that we will likely someday mutter
– I never heard why
Or just how, it was something to do with a bridge –
Under which flows it all ever endlessly
water traffic the dreams the deeps the certainty that
untidy love has him as its sweet kernel
faithless fearless frightened closing the circle
singing Tomorrow we’ll do our best, our best
Tomorrow we’ll do our best.
IN SICKNESS: THREE POEMS AFTER JOHN BERRYMAN
HARRY CLIFTON
1. WOLF HOUR
If I were to write now
It would be poems, not of light
Or love, or the luckily endowed,
But of shortening breath,
The watches of night,
The solitude in the hour of death.
At four in the morning
I reach for your hand. It is given, blind.
Unconsciously, a pact is made –
You alive, and me returning
To the land of shades.
The first bird, the first car,
And the wolf hour
Dissipating. Ishtar’s daughters
Moving about already,
Waking the dead
With the sound of running water.
Dawn, a borrowed flat,
And no-one to stop it, the dark alarm
Announcing God knows what
With hours, insomnias in its keeping –
Gently I disengage my arm
And you go on sleeping.
Harry Clifton
2. THE DOLL IN THE STAIRWELL
The doll in the stairwell –
Look at it. Two storeys down
And dropped from the hand of a child of three
With a mind elsewhere,
It might as well lie drowned
On the floor of the sea.
From the kingdom of loss
It stares back up. Irretrievable
Now, for ever and ever.
Mother was here, and Mother is gone,
And to go back as impossible
As to go on
Up the giant stairs,
Frightening. All that remains
Is to wait, in vertigo and terror,
With heightened sounds above
And smells below, for Her to return again.
Abandonment, love –
A moment’s inattention
Then a Hand. And gravity-defying,
Rabbit-soft, from out of the fourth dimension,
Mother and doll restored
And everything back to normal,
Everyone lying.
263
3. WRECKER’S LANTERN
Uncharted, brightening,
Fading, vanishing into black –
The wrecker’s lamp. Or is it a lighthouse
Sending out its brilliant track
Of signal or semaphore
Across the muffled snore
Of waves in the night,
Of a chest gone tight?
If Christ could walk on water
Sleep is the glass-bottomed boat
I make my bed on.
Lying weightless, self afloat
On darker self –
The blue on blue, going down
Through lung-tree, peristaltic valve,
Breathing, making itself known
From beyond the continental shelf
And the realm of the drowned.
“A light that never was
On land or sea….”
I see it, and it frightens me,
Dilating, between three and four –
Sternum-wreckage, legend, loss –
From the other shore.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
MATTHEW BOSWELL completed a PhD on the Holocaust Poetry of
John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and W.D. Snodgrass at the University of
Sheffield. He currently works at the University of Salford.
ANTHONY CALESHU is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative
Writing at the University of Plymouth. Current projects include a
monograph on the contemporary American poet, James Tate, a poet in
the direct line of Berryman. His first book of poems, The Siege of the
Body and a Brief Respite, was published by Salt in 2004.
RON CALLAN is a College Lecturer in the School of English and
Drama, University College Dublin. His book William Carlos Williams
and Transcendentalism: Fitting the Crab in a Box, was published by
Macmillan/St Martin’s in 1992. He is currently researching the work
of Louis Zukofsky and other Objectivist poets. He was Chair of the
Irish Association for American Studies (1997-2003) and has been on
the editorial board of the Irish Journal of American Studies.
EDWARD CLARKE completed a doctoral thesis at Trinity College
Dublin on Wallace Stevens’ creative conversations with earlier
English poets in 2003. He now tutors visiting students in American
and British poetry at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.
HARRY CLIFTON has published five collections of poems with Gallery
Press: The Walls of Carthage (1977), Office of the Salt Merchant
(1979), Comparative Lives (1982), The Liberal Cage (1988), and
Night Train through the Brenner (1996). The Desert Route: Selected
Poems 1973-1988 was published by Gallery in 1992 and was a Poetry
Book Society Recommendation. A chapbook, God in France, was
published by Metre Editions in 2004. His stories are collected as
Berkeley’s Telephone (Lilliput Press, 2000). He has lived in various
parts of the world, and is a member of Aosdána.
266
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
PHILIP COLEMAN has published essays on John Berryman in
Thumbscrew, the Irish Journal of American Studies, The Swansea
Review, Etudes Irlandaises, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, and
Tales of the Great American Victory: World War II in Politics and
Poetics (VU University Press, 2006). He has also edited previously
unpublished poems by Berryman for publication in the Times Literary
Supplement and Metre. He is currently writing a book on Berryman
for UCD Press and editing a collection on literature and science for
Four Courts Press. He is a Lecturer in the School of English, Trinity
College Dublin.
BRENDAN COOPER completed a PhD on John Berryman at the
University of Cambridge in 2007. His article “‘We want anti-models’:
John Berryman’s Eliotic Inheritance” is forthcoming in the Journal of
American Studies.
PETER DENMAN teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry at
the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he is Dean of
Arts. He is the author of Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement
(Colin Smythe, 1989) and Rogha Dánta, translations/versions of
poems by Sean Ó Tuama (Cork University Press, 1997). He has edited
Poetry Ireland Review.
MAURA DOOLEY has published five collections of poetry, including
Ivy Leaves and Arrows (Bloodaxe, 1987), Explaining Magnetism
(Bloodaxe, 1991), and Kissing a Bone (Bloodaxe, 1997) which was
shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her collected poem, Sound Barrier,
was published by Bloodaxe in 2002. She has also edited several
anthologies and collections of essays and currently co-ordinates and
teaches on the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths’
College, University of London.
KIT FRYATT completed a PhD on allegory in modern Irish poetry at
Trinity College Dublin in 2003. She has published poems,
translations, reviews, and articles on contemporary literature in a wide
range of international journals, and is currently completing a booklength study of twentieth-century Irish poetry. She is a lecturer in
English literature at the Mater Dei Institute of Education, Dublin City
University.
Notes on Contributors
267
LAVINIA GREENLAW has published three books of poems: Night
Photograph (Faber and Faber, 1993), A World Where News Travelled
Slowly (Faber and Faber, 1997), and Minsk (Faber and Faber, 2003).
Her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover (Flamingo, 2001), won
France’s Prix du Premier Roman, and her second is An Irresponsible
Age (Fourth Estate, 2006). She also collaborated with the
photographic artist Garry Fabian Miller on Thoughts of a Night Sea
(Merrill, 2003). Her awards include a Forward Prize for best single
poem and a NESTA Fellowship. She teaches at Goldsmiths’ College,
University of London, has written three libretti, and has made various
radio programmes about light.
MICHAEL HINDS is a lecturer in English literature and Head of the
English Department at the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University.
He has also taught in the University of Tokyo and at Trinity College
Dublin where he completed a doctoral thesis on the work of Randall
Jarrell in 2000. With Stephen Matterson he edited the collection of
essays Rebound: the American Poetry Book (Rodopi, 2004), and he
also edits the Mater Dei Institute journal REA: Religion, Education
and the Arts.
MARIA JOHNSTON is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin where she
read for a degree in English Literature and Music. She is currently
writing a PhD on Sylvia Plath and contemporary poetry.
RICHARD J. KELLY is a retired Professor and Bibliographer in the
University of Minnesota Libraries. A contributing editor to John
Berryman Studies during the years of its publication (1975-77), he has
written several articles on the poet for scholarly journals. He is also
the author/editor of John Berryman: A Checklist (Scarecrow, 1972),
We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother
(Norton, 1988), Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet (University
of Michigan Press, 1993), with Alan K. Lathrop, and John Berryman’s
Personal Library: A Catalogue (Peter Lang, 1998).
BRENDAN KENNELLY retired as Professor of Modern Literature and
Director of the MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin in
2005. He is the author of several collections of poems, essays, plays
and translations, including Familiar Strangers: New and Selected
268
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
Poems 1960-2004 (Bloodaxe, 2004). His long poems include
Cromwell (Bloodaxe, 1988) and The Book of Judas (Bloodaxe, 1991).
PHILIP MCGOWAN has published essays on Ernest Hemingway, Saul
Bellow, Anne Sexton and others in a range of international journals.
He is the author of American Carnival: Seeing and Reading American
Culture (Greenwood, 2001) and Anne Sexton and Middle Generation
Poetry: the Geography of Grief (Praeger, 2004). He is a Senior
Lecturer in American Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast.
PETER MABER completed a PhD on the connections between John
Berryman and William Shakespeare at Trinity College, University of
Cambridge. He teaches English and American Literature at the
University of Cambridge, and is currently editing Berryman’s
unpublished drama and verse plays.
STEPHEN MATTERSON has written extensively on American literature,
and his books include American Literature: The Essential Glossary
(Arnold, 2003), Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (Macmillan,
1987), an edition of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (Penguin
Classics, 1991), and The Great Gatsby: The Critics Debate
(Macmillan, 1990). He also edited Rebound: The American Poetry
Book with Michael Hinds. He is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin,
where he is an Associate Professor and Head of the School of English
(2006-2009).
JUSTIN QUINN was born in Dublin and now works at the Charles
University in Prague, where he is Associate Professor at the
Department of English and American Studies. He has published two
studies of American poetry and four collections of poetry, most
recently Waves and Trees (Gallery, 2006). His translations of Czech
poetry have appeared widely.
PAGE RICHARDS completed her PhD at Harvard University. Her
studies on American literature and her poetry have appeared in a
variety of international journals. Her book Distancing English, on
decolonization and framing in the United States, is forthcoming. She
is currently teaching literature and creative writing at the University of
Hong Kong.
Notes on Contributors
269
TOM ROGERS completed a doctorate on the poetry of John Berryman
at the University of Sheffield in 2004, where he currently teaches
English literature. He spent a period working with John Berryman’s
manuscripts at the University of Minnesota in 2001. His book God of
Rescue: John Berryman and Christianity will be published by Peter
Lang in 2007.
ALEX RUNCHMAN read for a degree in English Language and
Literature at the University of Oxford before completing an M.Phil in
American Literature at the University of Cambridge in 2004. He is
now a teacher.
INDEX
Abraham, 14, 16, 17
Adorno, Theodor, 27, 157;
Aesthetics and Politics, 27;
“Commitment”, 27;
Negative Dialectics, 157; ed.
(with Gretel Adorno and
Frederick Podszuz),
Schriften, 169
aesthetics, 8, 13, 21, 27, 121, 164,
228, 233-37, 250-51
African American culture, 43, 45,
72, 115-16, 14 (and see
minstrelsy)
Alberti, A.S., xiii
alcoholism, 88, 146, 152, 160,
191, 215, 225
Allyn, John (father), 121, 130,
166, 200, 212, 216, 218-19,
220, 243
Altieri, Charles, The Particulars
of Rapture, 103, 107, 108,
109, 113-14, 116
Altimont, Alan, xvii, xviii
Alvarez, Al, The Savage God: a
Study of Suicide, 241
American Heritage, xvi
American Heritage Dictionary,
The, 102
American Indian Movement, the,
7, 141; U.S. Termination
Policy, 142
American Review, the: A Whig
Journal of Politics,
Literature, Art, and Science
I/6 (1845), 53
American tall tales, 45, 46, 47,
48, 49-50, 51-52, 54-55, 56,
60
Ames, Fisher, Works of Fisher
Ames with a Selection from
his Speeches and
Correspondence, 56
ampersands, 67-68, 111
Andrewes, Lancelot, 177
Andrews, Jennifer, “Reading Toni
Morrison’s Jazz: Rewriting
the Tall Tale and Playing
with the Trickster in the
White American and
African-American Humour
Traditions”, 51
Aphrodite, 25
apocatastasis, 164 (and see
Origen)
Aristotle, The Nicomachean
Ethics, 212
Arnim, Elizabeth von, 196
Arnold, Matthew, “Isolation: For
Marguerite”, 114
Arpin, Gary Q., xiii, xiv; The
Poetry of John Berryman, 3,
155, 166, 171, 228
Asia, 93
Auden, W.H., 31, 37, 191, 192,
232, 236, 239; The Enchafèd
Flood; or, the Romantic
Iconography of the Sea, 239;
Forewords and Afterwords,
37; “Shakespeare’s
Sonnets”, 37
Auschwitz, 26-27, 157-58 (and
see concentration camps;
272
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
The Holocaust)
Axelrod, Steven Gould, ed., The
Critical Response to Robert
Lowell, 41; ed., No Evil
Star: Selected Essays,
Interviews, and Prose, 242;
Robert Lowell: Life and Art,
5, 226
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 194, 195,
202
Baechler, Lea, xvii, xviii
Bak, Hans, ed., Uneasy Alliance:
Twentieth-Century
American Literature,
Culture and Biography, 30
Bakhtin, M.M., 168
Barbera, Jack, xiii
Barfoot, C.C., “Edna St Vincent
Millay’s Sonnets: Putting
‘Chaos Into Fourteen
Lines’”, 30
Barthes, Roland, 103, 105, 106,
134; The Pleasure of the
Text, 105, 134
Barton, Anne, “John Berryman’s
Flying Horse”, 36, 37
Bayle, Pierre, 156 (and see
Leibniz, G.W.F.)
Bayley, John, “John Berryman: A
Question of Imperial Sway”,
10, 159
be-bop, 202
Beck, Charlotte H., xvii, xviii
Beckett, Samuel, 227
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 2, 195,
196, 197-99; “Kreutzer
Sonata”, 195
Bellow, Saul, xvi
Benfey, Christopher, xvii, xviii;
“The Woman in the Mirror:
John Berryman and Randall
Jarrell”, 131
Benjamin, Walter, Schriften, 168
Benn, Gottfried, 91
Bennett, Jean, 218
Berg, Alban, 202
Berio, Luciano, Circles, 200-201
Berlioz, Hector, 202
Berndt, Susan G., xiii; “The Last
Word”, 171
Berryhill, Michael, “The
Epistemology of Loss”, xii
Berryman, John, aesthetics, 8, 13,
21, 27, 35, 121, 164, 228,
233-37, 250-51; affairs, 29,
31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 115, 216;
alcohol dependence of, xvii,
88, 115, 122, 152, 160, 191,
215, 225; ampersands, 6768, 111; birth of, 30, 141,
166; and the blues, 45, 195,
197, 206-207; Catholicism,
38, 164; and Catullus, 12139; and Christ, 7, 164, 166,
167-68, 173-89, 225, 238;
and Christianity, 16, 18, 47,
48, 142, 143, 144, 148, 15051, 153-54, 162, 163-64,
168, 171, 174-75, 176, 17779, 181, 182-84, 186-89,
235; and the comic, 96, 102,
113, 118, 128, 133, 142,
147, 151, 159, 160, 199,
234; and confessionalism, 8,
72, 88, 104, 122, 123, 149,
191, 200, 213, 226-27, 229,
233, 234; and the dead, 12,
13, 17, 23, 24, 32, 56, 58,
76, 78, 79, 106, 116-17, 120,
147, 163, 164, 214, 219,
241; death of, xii, xiv, xv,
xvi, 3, 4, 9, 10, 88, 95, 173,
189, 191, 223, 226, 227,
249; divorce, 39-41, 126;
Dream Song form, 43, 44,
89, 91-100, 109-14, 159,
182; egotism, 71-73, 227;
Index
elegies, 20, 24-25, 91, 93
116, 121, 125, 135, 137,
155, 208, 239; ethics, 8, 27,
38, 65-73, 228, 231, 233,
235-36, 237, 238-39; and
fame, 105-106, 120, 121,
166, 174, 227-28, 229-30,
232, 238; and father, 121,
130, 166, 200, 212, 216,
218-19, 220, 243; Freudian
readings of, 40, 88, 128,
129, 211, 203-204, 238, 239;
and God, 16, 24, 25, 68, 93,
108, 111, 116, 117, 118-19,
127, 142, 143, 153-54, 15571 passim, 174, 176, 182-85,
187, 189, 238-39, 245, 249,
254-55; grief, 8, 39, 85, 88,
93, 94, 99, 118, 121, 241,
243, 245-46, 251, 254;
Guggenheim Fellowship, 2,
212; guilt, 37, 48, 134, 151,
152, 153, 158, 161, 185,
220; history, 5, 11, 13, 18,
21, 24, 25, 35, 38, 49, 54,
57, 71, 87, 89, 138, 145,
150, 159, 160, 174, 175,
177, 181; the Holocaust, 11,
18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 15561, 171; humor, 46, 47, 51,
57, 58, 72, 113, 146, 187;
influence on American
poetry, 9; influence on
European poetry, 29, 31, 34;
influences on, 43, 44, 81, 93,
109, 118, 121-39, 192, 193,
202, 207, 208, 216-23;
intertextuality, 8, 121, 127;
and jazz, 43, 144, 161, 202,
205-206; jokes, 47, 49, 51,
56, 133, 142, 183; and
Judas, 185; laughter, 47, 49,
116, 127, 142; letters, xv,
xvi, 1, 5, 108, 125, 193, 217,
273
218, 225; library of, xvi, 5,
123; and loss, 23, 47, 69,
101, 102-103, 112-14, 11516, 121, 122, 138, 146, 151,
152, 162, 169, 199, 218,
220, 221, 228-29, 239, 245;
and Robert Lowell, 29-44,
188, 191, 194, 195, 225-26;
manuscripts of 1, 6, 7, 1112, 15, 17-19, 25, 26, 159,
161-62, 173-89, 215, 21720; music, 8, 12, 115, 118,
191-208; Modernism, 29,
39, 138, 149, 150, 154; and
mother, xv, 1, 5, 125, 166,
193, 217, 218, 220; and
mourning, 16, 116, 117, 119,
205; New Testament
scholarship, 173-89;
performative strategies, 8,
50, 54, 58, 101-120 passim,
202; philosophy, 8, 96;
poem sequences, 11, 17, 19,
34, 36, 40, 86, 106-107, 121,
136, 137; on poetry, 107108, 149, 150-51, 192-93,
211; politics, 41, 43, 71;
post-Modernism, 149, 154;
and Ezra Pound, 193, 211;
prosody, 7, 87-100;
psychology, 13; puns, 37,
41, 82, 84, 111, 123, 165,
166, 167, 168, 169; Regents’
Professor of Humanities,
University of Minnesota,
225; silence, 27, 55, 56, 65,
66, 67, 96, 97, 111, 135,
167, 168, 218, 241-45, 250,
252-54; and William
Shakespeare, xi, 2, 7, 9, 3537, 42, 43, 66, 77, 78, 81-86,
109, 141, 153, 185, 193-94,
196, 209-23, 225, 227, 231;
and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
274
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
31, 32, 35-37, 40, 41, 42,
81-86, 204, 207; sonnet
form, 8, 29-44; sonnet
sequences, 29-44; suffering,
16, 115-16, 150-51, 154,
156-57, 158, 160, 161, 162,
213, 216, 251; teaching, xixii, xvii, 95, 173-74, 175,
182, 210, 225; theology, 5,
7, 8, 18, 23, 156, 160, 164,
177, 179, 187; and Dylan
Thomas, 93-94, 194, 232;
and the trickster, 141-54; use
of baby-talk, 23, 160; use of
blackface in The Dream
Songs, 103, 113, 114, 115,
116, 144, 160, 206; use of
slang, 34, 44; and Walt
Whitman, 10, 29, 135, 138,
163, 194, 198; and
witnessing, 15, 21, 25, 68,
79, 115, 121; and W.B.
Yeats, 1, 2, 71, 93, 109, 118,
119, 191, 192, 193, 211,
218, 221
Works
Criticism: “All’s Well”,
194; Berryman’s
Shakespeare, 35, 36, 194,
196, 209-23 passim; “The
Character and Role of the
Heroine in Shakespearean
Comedy”, 210; “Conrad’s
Journey”, 213; “The Crisis”,
212-13, 214, 220; The
Freedom of the Poet, 1, 10,
43, 55, 78, 91, 109, 147,
163, 193, 194, 198, 211,
213, 215, 218, 225, 231; Life
of Christ, 7, 173-89, 225;
“The Loud Hill of Wales”,
194; “Marlowe’s
Damnations”, 211, 231;
“The Maturation”, 95; “A
Note on Poetry”, 108-109,
192-93; “Notes on
Macbeth”, 194; “One
Answer to a Question:
Changes”, 1, 43, 109, 193,
215; “Pathos and Dream”,
196; “Plan of Work”, 212;
“The Poetry of Ezra Pound”,
193, 211; “The Ritual of
W.B. Yeats”, 1, 218;
“Robert Lowell and Others”,
194; “Scholia to Second
Edition” of Love & Fame,
214-15, 229-30;
“Shakespeare at Thirty”,
212, 222; “Shakespeare’s
Reality”, 210, 214, 216, 222,
223, 225; “‘Song of Myself’:
Intention and Substance”,
10, 163, 194, 198; “The
Sonnets”, 216; “The
Sorrows of Captain
Carpenter”, 147; Stephen
Crane, 134, 211
Drama: “The Architect”,
217-20; Cleopatra: A
Meditation, xvii, xviii
Fiction: “The Imaginary
Jew”, 158, 195; Recovery,
195, 225, 230, 236, 237;
“Wash Far Away”, 91
Letters: We Dream of
Honour, xv, 1, 5, 125, 193,
217, 218
Lyrics: “Cradle Song”, 195
Poems: “A Huddle of
Need”, 236; “Away”, 231;
“Beethoven Triumphant”,
196-98; “The Ball Poem”,
94, 193, 215, 228; “Dante’s
Tomb”, 232; “Dawn like a
Rose”, 26; “Death Ballad”,
236, 237; “Despair”, 252,
255; “Drugs Alcohol Little
Index
Sister”, 239; “Eleven
Addresses to the Lord”, 230,
235-36, 238-39; “The Facts
& Issues”, 228; “from The
Black Book (i)”, 12, 13-14;
“from The Black Book (ii)”,
18-19, 27; “from The Black
Book (iii)”, 12, 18, 23, 26,
27; “Have a Genuine
American Horror-&-Mist on
the Rocks”, 236; “He made,
a thousand years ago, amany songs”, 37-38; “The
Hell Poem”, 236, 237;
“Henry’s Fate”, 227; “Her &
It”, 123, 230, 232; “The
Home Ballad”, 238; “I
Know”, 236; “Images of
Elspeth”, 236; “In & Out”,
230, 235; “Lover & Child”,
19-20, 23-25; “Message”,
231, 233; “Monkhood”, 232;
“The Nervous Songs”, 8990, 118, 150; “not him”, 12,
14-17; “Of Suicide”, 237;
“On the London Train”, 193;
“The Professor’s Song”, 89;
“Purgatory”, 236, 237;
“Recovery”, 229; “Rising
Hymn”, 17-19, 26;
“Scholars at the Orchid
Pavillion”, 12; “The
Search”, 174, 175-76, 177,
233; “Shirley & Auden”,
236; “The Song of the
Bridegroom”, 89-90; “The
Song of the Man Forsaken
and Possessed”, 90; “The
Song of the Young
Hawaiian”, 90; Sonnet 1, 37;
Sonnet 9, 37; Sonnet 10, 76;
Sonnet 27, 36; Sonnet 37,
195; Sonnet 40, 35; Sonnet
45, 38; Sonnet 56, 39-41;
275
Sonnet 59, 37; Sonnet 71,
37; Sonnet 74, 34; Sonnet
75, 36; Sonnet 117, 195; “To
a Woman”, 236, 238;
“Transit”, 232-33;
translation of verse dialogue
of Job, 162; “2”, 12; “Two
Organs”, 234; “Vespers”,
189; “waiting”, 12, 26;
“Warsaw”, 18-19; “the
will”, 12, 26; “Winter
Landscape”, 193
The Dream Songs; Dream
Song 1, xiii, 8, 38, 89, 96,
106, 151, 161-62, 164, 167,
170, 199, 201, 203, 205,
206; Dream Song 1 and
responses to, 63-86; Dream
Song 2, 72, 206; Dream
Song 3, 94, 118, 122; Dream
Song 4, 7, 98, 100, 111, 114,
115, 125-39, 199-200;
Dream Song 5, 96-97, 15152, 154, 161; Dream Song 6,
147; Dream Song 7, 147;
Dream Song 8, 113, 146-47;
Dream Song 10, 105; Dream
Song 11, 147; Dream Song
12, 147, 200; Dream Song
13, 106, 114, 119, 147, 15354; Dream Song 14, 201;
Dream Song 15, 94; Dream
Song 22, 99, 201, 203, 204205; Dream Song 24, 147;
Dream Song 26, 38, 111-12,
115, 146, 161, 167; Dream
Song 27, 108; Dream Song
28, 258; Dream Song 29,
152-53; Dream Song 30,
110, 130; Dream Song 31,
147; Dream Song 33, 200;
Dream Song 35, 105; Dream
Song 36, 94; Dream Song
40, 147, 206-207; Dream
276
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
Song 46, 121, 133; Dream
Song 48, 167-68, 183-86,
201; Dream Song 53, 91;
Dream Song 56, 164-65,
221; Dream Song 57, 133,
147, 164, 165; Dream Song
62, 147; Dream Song 63,
135, 147, 153; Dream Song
65, 146; Dream Song 66,
147; Dream Song 68, 206;
Dream Song 69, 132, 152;
Dream Song 71, 45; Dream
Song 74, 112; Dream Song
75, 124, 138; Dream Song
76, 200, 201; Dream Song
77, 200, 201; Dream Songs
78-91 (“Op. Post.”), 90, 92,
221; Dream Song 80, 119;
Dream Song 81, 221; Dream
Song 83, 93; Dream Song
84, 93, 94, 147; Dream Song
85, 221-23; Dream Song 88,
96; Dream Song 89, 90;
Dream Song 91, 106, 162;
Dream Song 92, 92, 168;
Dream Song 93, 147; Dream
Song 97, 122, 147, 159-62,
170; Dream Song 99, 92;
Dream Song 101, 112-13;
Dream Song 112, 133, 164,
168, 244, 245; Dream Song
116, 77; Dream Song 121,
94; Dream Song 122, 133;
Dream Song 124, 40, 147;
Dream Song 133, 105;
Dream Song 134, 147;
Dream Song 135, 123;
Dream Song 136, 248;
Dream Song 139, 94; Dream
Song 140, 165; Dream Song
143, 114; Dream Song 144,
166; Dream Song 145, 200;
Dream Song 146, 90, 93,
103, 116-17, 161; Dream
Song 147, 99, 194; Dream
Song 148, 206; Dream Song
149, 116; Dream Song 151,
116; Dream Song 153, 99,
116, 117, 170; Dream Song
157, 93; Dream Song 159, 5,
116, 149; Dream Song 163,
99, 146; Dream Song 164,
149; Dream Song 168, 133;
Dream Song 170, 80; Dream
Song 172, 8, 241, 244;
Dream Song 177, 119-20;
Dream Song 180, 92, 110;
Dream Song 181, 92; Dream
Song 187, 118, 131; Dream
Song 192, 99, 115, 130;
Dream Song 199, 114, 165;
Dream Song 202, 90; Dream
Song 203, 94; Dream Song
204, 195; Dream Song 208,
130; Dream Song 212, 125;
Dream Song 220, 162;
Dream Song 233, 132;
Dream Song 234, 182;
Dream Song 238, 182;
Dream Song 239, 150, 16263; Dream Song 241, 116;
Dream Song 242, 114, 135;
Dream Song 247, 132;
Dream Song 256, 163;
Dream Song 259, 251;
Dream Song 266, 165-66,
168-69; Dream Song 276,
92; Dream Song 277, 93;
Dream Song 278, 93; Dream
Song 281, 2, 119; Dream
Song 288, 163; Dream Song
295, 96; Dream Song 297,
109; Dream Song 302, 116;
Dream Song 305, 106;
Dream Song 306, 97; Dream
Song 308, 2, 3; Dream Song
311, 146; Dream Song 312,
2; Dream Song 322, 176;
Index
Dream Song 324, 208;
Dream Song 326, 146;
Dream Song 328, 164;
Dream Song 335, 147, 244;
Dream Song 337, 122;
Dream Song 342, 97; Dream
Song 346, 43; Dream Song
350, 115; Dream Song 351,
115; Dream Song 353, 115;
Dream Song 357, 132;
Dream Song 364, 9, 113,
119; Dream Song 370, 10;
Dream Song 373, 9; Dream
Song 380, 110; Dream Song
384, 99-100, 200, 243;
Dream Song 385, xiii, 92,
94, 113, 139, 169-170, 200
Collections: Berryman’s
Sonnets, 2, 6, 39-44 passim,
195, 216; The Black Book,
6-7, 11-27, 150, 158-59;
Collected Poems: 19371971, 14, 32, 95, 136, 230;
Delusions, Etc., 6, 189, 196,
225, 228, 239, 248; The
Dream Songs, xv, 2, 4, 6, 7,
8, 13, 30, 32, 34, 35, 43, 44,
45, 48, 50, 56, 66-69, 71-73,
75-80, 81-86, 87-100, 10120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 130,
133, 136, 138, 139, 141-54,
155-71, 173, 177, 182-83,
186, 189, 192, 193, 198-208,
215, 216, 221-23, 225-26,
227, 229, 239, 241, 245,
247, 248, 249, 250 (and see
The Dream Songs,
individual Dream Songs);
Henry’s Fate & Other
Poems, 155, 227; His
Thoughts Made Pockets &
the Plane Buckt, 12, 19; His
Toy, His Dream, His Rest,
34, 92, 207; Homage to
277
Mistress Bradstreet, 6, 12,
34, 40, 45-61, 107, 118, 139,
215, 216; Love & Fame, 6,
8, 34, 123, 174, 187, 215,
225-40, 238, 252; 77 Dream
Songs, 32, 34, 92, 103, 104,
112, 199; Sonnets to Chris,
2-3, 30, 31, 32, 34-37, 43,
216
Unpublished works: xvii,
1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11-12, 15, 1719, 26, 159, 161-62, 173-89,
210, 215, 217-20; Life of
Christ, 7, 173-89, 225;
“Mozart’s Requiem”, 12;
translation of Catullus’
Carmina XXXIV, 123-25
Berryman, John Angus McAlpin
(stepfather), 220
Berryman, Kate Donahue (third
wife), xiv, xv, xvi, xvii,
xviii, 2, 123
Berryman, Martha (daughter),
xvi, xvii, 2, 92, 169, 170,
171, 187, 188, 225
Berryman, Martha “Jill Angel”
(mother), xv, 1, 5, 125, 166,
193, 217, 218, 220; death of,
xv
Berryman, Robert Jefferson
(brother), xv, xvii
Berryman, Sarah (daughter), xvii
Bezeczky, Gabór, “Literal
Language”, 55, 60
Bible, the, xi, 16, 38, 79, 159,
160, 174-87; The Acts of the
Apostles, 180; Book of
Exodus, 38, 168; Book of
Genesis, 67, 79; The Gospel
According to St. John, 153,
167-68, 180; The Gospel
According to St. Luke, 79,
164; The Gospel According
to St. Mark, 167, 180, 184;
278
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
The Gospel According to St.
Matthew, xii, 186; The
Letters of St. Paul, 180, 185;
New Testament, 174-87
passim; Old Testament, 16,
161, 162 (and see The Book
of Job; Job)
Bidart, Frank ed. (with David
Gewanter), Robert Lowell:
Collected Poems, 31, 42-43,
188
Bishop, Elizabeth, 3, 87, 91, 118;
“Thank-You Note”, 87, 91
Bishop, Jim, 180
Blackmur, R.P., xvi, 4
Blackwood, Caroline (Robert
Lowell’s third wife), 42
Blanchot, Maurice, 8, 242, 243,
244, 247-48, 249, 250, 252,
253, 254; The Gaze of
Orpheus, 252; The Space of
Literature, 243, 244, 247-48,
249, 252, 253; Thomas the
Obscure, 242, 252
Bloom, Harold, 118; ed., John
Berryman: Modern Critical
Views, 4, 89, 133, 192
Bloom, James D., The Stock of
Available Reality: R.P.
Blackmur and John
Berryman, 3-4
blues, the, 45, 195, 197, 206-207;
blues poetry, 206
Book of Job, the, 143, 150, 151,
154, 155, 156, 159-63
(and see Job)
Borges, Jorge Luis, “Everything
and Nothing”, 213
Bové, Paul, Destructive Poetics:
Heidegger and Modern
American Poetry, 248, 250
Boydell, Brian, 195
Bradstreet, Anne, 40, 49, 56, 58,
118, 138
Braiterman, Zachary, (God) After
Auschwitz: Tradition and
Change in Post-Holocaust
Jewish Thought, 158, 15960, 163
Brans, Jo, xiii
Brer Rabbit, 144
Breslin, Paul, 67; The PsychoPolitical Muse, 71-72
Brontë, Charlotte, 118
Brontë, Emily, 118
Brown, Terence, The Life of W.B.
Yeats, 1
Browne, Michael Dennis, xvi,
xvii, 9; “Henry Fermenting:
Debts to The Dream Songs”,
192
Brunner, Edward, Cold War
Poetry, 4
Bryan, Sharon, xvii, xviii
Buber, Martin, On Judaism, 160
Bultmann, Rudolph, 174, 175,
177, 181
Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s
Progress, 174
Burt, Stephen, Randall Jarrell
and His Age, 5; “My Name
is Henri: Contemporary
Poets Discover John
Berryman”, 9
Byron, George Gordon, Lord,
Don Juan, 235
Cage, John, 201
Cambridge, xviii, 210, 217, 218,
232 (and see University of
Cambridge)
Camus, Albert, 241
Carne-Ross, Donald, “Tradition
and Transposition”, 59
Carrington, Archbishop Philip,
174, 175, 177
Carson, Anne, 130, 136, 137;
“Dirt and Desire: Essay on
Index
the Phenomenology of
Female Pollution in
Antiquity”, 136, 137; If Not,
Winter: Fragments of
Sappho, 130
Carter, Elliott, 201
Catullus, 2, 7, 121-39; John
Berryman’s translation of
Carmina XXXIV, 123-25;
The Carmina, 121, 122,
128, 131, 136, 138;
Carmina I, 138; Carmina ILX, 121; Carmina XXXIV,
7, 123-25, 126; Carmina L,
132; Carmina LI, 125, 126,
127, 132, 134-35, 136;
Carmina LI and Dream
Song 4, 125-35; Carmina
LIa, 125, 132; Carmina LII,
119, 132-33, 136; Carmina
LXI-LXVIII, 124; Carmina
LXV, 124; Carmina
LXVIII, 124; Carmina
LXIX-CXVI, 124
Cavalcanti, Guido, 129
Cervantes, Miguel de, Don
Quixote, xi
Channing, Edward Tyrell, “On
Models in Literature”, 53,
59
Channing, Walter, “Essay on
American Language and
Literature”, 52-53
Chasalow, Eric, “Art of the
States: Dream Songs”, 201,
202; “Boston Connection:
Programme Notes”, 202;
Dream Songs, 201-203;
“Left to His Own Devices”,
201-202
Cheng, Maria, xvii
Christianity, 16, 18, 143, 144,
148, 150-51, 153-54, 162,
163, 164-65, 168, 171, 174-
279
75, 176, 177, 178-81, 18283, 184, 186, 187, 235;
Christian hymn forms, 18,
48; Christian teleology, 142,
148, 150, 151, 157, 161, 171
Clare, John, “I Am! Yet What I
Am None Cares or Knows”,
221
Clark, Tony, 11
Clendenning, John, xvii, xviii
Clifton, Harry, “The Doll in the
Stairwell”, 263; “Wolf
Hour”, 262; “Wrecker’s
Lantern”, 264
Coleman, Philip, 5, 8, 94; “‘An
unclassified strange flower’:
Towards an Analysis of
John Berryman’s Contact
with Dylan Thomas”, 94;
“The Politics of Praise:
Influence and Authority in
John Berryman’s Poetry”,
158, 169
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 137
Columbia Review, the, 1
Columbia University, xvi, 209
concentration camps, 13-14, 16,
20, 24, 25-26, 157-58 (and
see The Holocaust; The
Nazis)
conference on John Berryman
(1990), xvi-xvii
confessionalism, 8, 72, 88, 104,
122, 123, 149, 191, 226-27,
233-34
Conarroe, Joel, John Berryman:
An Introduction to the
Poetry, 3, 37
Coroniti, Joseph, Poetry as Text
in Twentieth-Century Vocal
Music: From Stravinsky to
Reich, 201
Covici, Pascal, Humor and
Revelation in American
280
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
Literature: The Puritan
Connection, 56-57
Critchley, Simon, Ethics—
Politics—Subjectivity:
Derrida, Levinas and
Contemporary French
Thought, 228; Very
Little…Almost Nothing:
Death, Philosophy,
Literature, 245, 246, 247-48,
249, 252
cummings, e.e., 30, 36, 81, 200201; Complete Poems 19101962, 36; Tulips &
Chimneys, 30
Daddy Rice, “Jumpin’ Jim
Crow”, 206 (and see
minstrelsy)
Daniel, Samuel, 31
Dante Alighieri, 24, 26, 40, 108,
175, 232; The Divine
Comedy, xi, 12; Inferno, 12,
26, 108, 175; Paradiso, 12;
Purgatorio, 12
Davie, Donald, “A Bee in His
Sonnet”, 33; Two Ways Out
of Whitman: American
Essays, 33
Davis (Finney), Kathe, xiii, xvii,
45, 46, 47
Davis, Steven T., 157
Davison Ficke, Arthur, 29
death camps, 20, 158 (and see
Auschwitz, concentration
camps, the Holocaust,
Maidanek, Orarienburg,
Treblinka)
Dechery, Laurie, xvii
Dekker, Thomas (with John Ford
and William Rowley), The
Witch of
Edmonton, 217-18
DeLillo, Don, 227
Descartes, René, 221, 246
Dewey, Ariane, “Comic
Tragedies/Tragic Comedies:
American Tall Tales”, 48,
49
Diamond, Stanley, “Introductory
Essay: Job and the
Trickster”, 141, 143, 150,
151, 154 (and see Job;
Radin, Paul)
Dickinson, Emily, 118
Dodson, Samuel Fisher,
Berryman’s Henry: Living
at the Intersection of Need
and Art, 5
Don Juan, 135, 234-35 (and see
Byron, George Gordon,
Lord)
Donne, John, 39, 87, 91, 100,
227; “The Flea”, 39; Songs
and Sonets, 87, 91, 100
Donoghue, Denis, “Berryman’s
Long Dream”, 89, 133, 205
Dooley, Maura, “Transit”, 261
dreams, 71, 104, 115, 171, 174
Dryden, John, 35
Dublin (and see Ireland), 2, 93,
97
Dugan, Alan, 9
Dunn, Douglas, “Gaiety &
Lamentation: The Defeat of
John Berryman”, 155, 169,
192
Durkheim, Emile, Suicide: a
Study in Sociology, 245-46
Eden, 164, 167, 168, 187
Einstein, Albert, 176;
“Autobiographical Notes”,
176
elegy, 20, 24-25, 91, 93, 116, 121,
125, 135, 137, 155, 208,
239
Eliot, T.S., 24, 29, 78, 102, 128,
Index
164, 171, 194, 198; “The
Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”, 24; “Marina”,
171; “The Music of Poetry”,
194
Elizabethan poetic/sonnet
conventions, 35, 93, 217
Ellis, Carol, xvii
Ellison, Ralph, 72, 144-45, 149,
151, 152, 154; “Change the
Joke and Slip the Yoke”,
144, 145; Invisible Man,
144-45, 152, 154
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29, 42,
43; “The American
Scholar”, 29
Epictetus, 237
Erdrich, Louise, Love Medicine,
149
Erikson, Erik H., 210, 222;
Gandhi’s Truth, 210-11
ethics, 8, 27, 38, 65-69, 72, 228,
231, 233, 235-36, 237, 23839, 243
fairy tales, 66, 67
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, xv
(and see Giroux, Robert)
Feinstein, Sascha, ed. (with Yusef
Komunyakaa), The Second
Set: The Jazz Poetry
Anthology, 226
Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto,
Italy (1969), 102
Firmage, George James, ed., e.e
cummings: Complete Poems
1910-1962, 36
Fitzgerald, William, Catullan
Provocations: Lyric Poetry
and the Drama of Position,
122
The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,
207
281
Five Young American Poets, 102,
108-109
Foley, John Miles, ed., Teaching
Oral Traditions, 51
Forseth, Roger, xvii, xviii
Foster, Roy F., W.B.Yeats: A Life,
II. The Arch-Poet, 1
Foucault, Michel, 103
Frank, Anne, The Diary of Anne
Frank, 95
Frost, Carol, “The Poet’s Tact,
and a Necessary
Tactlessness”, 46, 49
Frost, Robert, 30, 31, 34; A Boy’s
Will, 30; “The Silken Tent”,
31; “The Vantage Point”, 30
Fuller, John, ed., The Oxford
Book of Sonnets, 33
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, “Letter to
Dallmayr”, 233
Galassi, Jonathan, “Sorrows and
Passions of His Majesty the
Ego”, 230
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., The
Signifying Monkey, 144
George, Stefan, “The Word”, 248
Gewanter, David (see Bidart,
Frank)
Giles, Paul, American Catholic
Arts and Fictions: Culture,
Ideology, Aesthetics, 4, 164,
168
Ginsberg, Allen, 72
Giroux, Robert, 32, 225; The
Book Known as Q: A
Consideration of
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 32
Glück, Louise, 9; “Against
Sincerity”, 234; Proofs and
Theories, 234
Goguel, Maurice, 174, 175, 176,
177, 179-80, 181, 182, 183;
282
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
The Life of Jesus, 179-80,
181, 182
Grace, Teddy, 195, 207
Graham, Jorie, 9
Graves, Robert, 134; The White
Goddess, 134; (with Laura
Riding), “William
Shakespeare and E.E.
Cummings”, 81-82
Green, Charlie, 106
Greenlaw, Lavinia, “Snow Line”,
258
Grossman, Vassili, 20-21, 22, 24;
The Black Book: The Nazi
Crime Against the Jewish
People, 20-21
Gubar, Susan, Poetry After
Auschwitz: Remembering
What One Never Knew, 21
Guggenheim Fellowship, 2;
Guggenheim Foundation,
212
Guignebert, Charles, 175, 176,
177, 179, 181; Jesus, 183,
184-85
Habbakuk, 156
Haffenden, John, xiii, xiv, xvi, 3,
13, 118-19, 126, 155, 162,
167, 194-95, 226, 235; ed.,
Berryman’s Shakespeare,
35, 35, 37, 185, 187, 209-23
passim; ed., Henry’s Fate &
Other Poems, 155, 227;
“Introduction to Berryman’s
Shakespeare”, 201;
“Introduction” to Henry’s
Fate & Other Poems, 155;
John Berryman: A Critical
Commentary, 3, 12, 107108, 112, 118-19, 126, 162,
167-68, 186, 226, 235; The
Life of John Berryman, 3,
11, 12, 13, 29, 32, 158, 175,
194-95, 210-11, 215, 216,
220, 223, 230-31
Haggin, Bernard, 195
Halliday, E.M., xvi, 5; ed.,
American Heritage, xi; John
Berryman and the Thirties:
A Memoir, xvi, 5
Hamann, Johann Georg, 76
Hamilton, Ian, 35, 42; The Little
Magazines: A Study of Six
Editors, 29
Hampl, Patricia, xvii
Haralson, Eric, ed. Reading the
Middle Generation Anew:
Culture, Community, and
Form in Twentieth-Century
American Poetry, 9
Hardy, Thomas, 78, 91
Harness Prize, the, 210
Harvard University, 210
Hashimoto, Yuichi, xiii
Hastings, James, xii
Haughton, William, 210
Haydn, Franz Josef, 195, 197;
“London Symphony”, 195
Hayes, Ann, xiii
Hazo, Samuel, xiii
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
244
Heidegger, Martin, On the Way to
Language, 243
Heim, Karl, 177
Herbert, George, 79; “The
World”, 79
Herder, Johann Gottfied von, 76;
Abhandlungen und Briefe
über schöne Literature und
Kunst, 76; Sämmtliche
Werke. Zur Schönen
Literatur und Kunst, I-XX,
76
Hermes, 141, 144 (and see
Trickster)
Herrick, Robert, “To the Virgins,
283
Index
To Make Much of Time”, 87
Hettinga, Donal R. (see Schmidt,
Gary D.)
Heyen, William, xiii, xvii; “John
Berryman: A Memoir and an
Interview”, 191, 192, 199
Hill, Geoffrey, Speech! Speech!,
98
Hillier, Paul (see Reich, Steve)
Hippokrates, 136
Hirsch, Edward, “One Life, One
Writing!: The Middle
Generation”, 45-6, 48
history, 5, 11, 13, 18, 21, 24, 25,
35, 38, 42, 49, 54, 57, 71,
89, 145, 150, 159, 160; and
Christ, 174, 175, 177, 181,
185, 187, 244; and poetry,
35
Hofmann, Michael, John
Berryman: Poems Selected
by Michael Hofmann, 4,
226-227
Holocaust, the, 11, 18, 20-21,
23-27, 157-58, 160, 161,
171
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 39, 98,
212; Poems, 98; “Triune!”,
221
Hornby, Nick, “‘A Fan’s Eye
View’: Bruce Springsteen
interviewed by Nick
Hornby”, 101
Hotson, Leslie, 36 (and see
Shakespeare’s Sonnets)
Housman, A.E., 91, 125, 227
Hudson Review, the, 212
Hughes, Langston, 206
Hughes, Ted, Crow, 149
Hyde, Lewis, xvii, xviii
Irby, James E., ed. (with Donald
A. Yates), Labyrinths, 213
Ireland (and see Dublin), 2, 9, 97
Irwin, Bonnie D., “The Frame
Tale East and West”, 51,
52
Jackson, Joe, “Is she really going
out with him?”, 129
James, Henry, “The Beast in the
Jungle”, 60
Jarrell, Randall, xvi, 5, 116, 117,
131, 191, 195
jazz, 43, 144, 161, 202, 205; jazz
poetry, 206
Jeremiah, 171
Jewish culture, 16, 150, 157, 161,
176, 177, 184, 185-86, 187,
188; and anti-Semitism, 22,
157-59; and Christianity,
150, 176-78, 185-86;
ghettoes, 26; Nazi
persecution of, 16-18, 20,
22, 23, 26, 115, 157, 158-59
(and see concentration
camps; The Holocaust;
Judaism)
Job, xi, 143, 150, 151, 154, 156,
159-63 (and see Book of
Job; Diamond, Stanley),
John Berryman Studies, xiii-xiv,
171
Jonson, Ben, 211, 231
Josipovici, Gabriel, The Book of
God, 168
Judaeo-Christianity, 148, 150,
153-54
Judaism, 16, 150, 177, 184, 185;
break from Christianity,
176-77; Christ as Jewish
prophet, 176-77; theology,
150-51, 184, 185-86
(and see Jewish culture)
Jung, Carl, “On the Psychology of
the Trickster Figure”, 141,
144, 152 (and see the
trickster)
284
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
Keats, John, 30, 125, 229; “When
I have fears that I may cease
to be”, 219
Kelly, Richard J., vi-xviii, 3, 4, 5;
John Berryman: A Checklist,
vii, 3; “John Berryman: A
Ten Year Supplemental
Checklist”, 3 (and see
Literary Research
Newsletter VII/2 and 3);
John Berryman’s Personal
Library: A Catalogue, xvi,
5, 123; ed. (with Alan K.
Lathrop), Recovering
Berryman, xiii, 4, 131, 217;
ed., We Dream of Honour:
John Berryman’s Letters to
His Mother, xv, 1, 5, 125,
193, 217, 218
Kennelly, Brendan, “The
Geography Paper”, 259-60
Kerényi, Karl, “The Trickster in
Relation to Greek
Mythology”, 141, 148-49,
151 (and see the trickster)
Kierkegaard, Søren, 2, 8, 76, 91,
212, 228, 230, 233-34, 236,
237; Either/Or: A Fragment
of Life, 8, 228, 233, 234-35,
237; Fear and
Trembling/Repetition, 76,
212; Works of Love, 76
Kissinger, Henry, 133
Kostelanetz, Richard,
“Conversation with
Berryman”, 161
Koussevitzky, Sergei, 196
Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in
Poetic Language, 250
Lacan, Jacques, 131
Larkin, Philip, 6, 88; “A
Neglected Responsibility:
Contemporary Literary
Manuscripts”, 6
Lathrop, Alan K., xiv, xvi, xvii,
xviii; ed. (with Richard J.
Kelly), Recovering
Berryman: Essays on a Poet,
4, 131, 217
Lehrer, Tom, 132
Leibniz, G.W.F., Theodicy, 156
Levenson, Jon Douglas, The Book
of Job in its Time and in the
Twentieth Century, 160
Levi, Primo, 25; The Drowned
and the Saved, 25
Levin, Phyllis, ed., The Penguin
Book of the Sonnet: 500
Years of a Classical
Tradition in English, 33
Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 228;
Time and the Other, 244-45,
251; Totality and Infinity,
246
Levine, Mark, 9
Levine, Philip, xvii, xviii; “Mine
Own John Berryman”, xvii
Liberman, Laurence, xiii
Lincoln, Kenneth, Sing with the
Heart of a Bear: Fusions of
Native and American Poetry
1890-1999, 146
Linebarger, J.M., John Berryman,
xiii, 3, 166
Lisbon earthquake (1755), 156
Literary Research Newsletter,
VII/2 and 3, 3
Longinus, On the Sublime, 127,
129-30
Lowell, Robert, xvi, 3, 5, 9, 29,
30, 31, 33, 35, 40, 42, 43,
188, 191, 194; and John
Berryman, 29-44 passim,
188, 191, 225-26, 231; and
the sonnet form, 25, 39,41,
42, 43, 44
Works: Day by Day, 42;
Index
“Dolphin”, 41, 42-43; The
Dolphin, 31, 41, 43; “For
John Berryman, 19141972”, 195, 225-26, 231;
History, 42; Imitations, 35;
Land of Unlikeness, 188;
“Leviathan”, 188; The Mills
of the Kavanaughs, 33; “The
Nihilist as Hero”, 35;
Notebook, 35, 41; “Summer
Between Terms I”, 41;
“Truth”, 31
Luther, Martin, xi, 177, 179
Madsen, Deborah, Re-reading
Allegory: a Narrative
Approach to Genre, 81, 82
Maidanek, 26 (and see
concentration camps)
Mancini, Jr., Joseph, xvii, xviii, 3,
162; “A Hearing Aid for
Berryman’s Dream Songs”,
58-59; The Berryman
Gestalt: Therapeutic
Strategies in the Poetry of
John Berryman, 3, 162, 213
Mariani, Paul, xvii; Dream Song:
The Life of John Berryman,
5, 12, 32, 89, 175, 182, 218
Maritain, Jacques, 38
Marlowe, Christopher, 211, 231
Martin, Jerold M., xvii, xviii
Matterson, Stephen, 4, 7, 34-35,
109; Berryman and Lowell:
The Art of Losing, 4, 35, 109
McCabe, Richard, ed., Edmund
Spenser: The Shorter
Poems, 36
McCosh, Sandra, “Aggression in
Children’s Jokes”, 47
McGrath, Alistair, Christian
Theology: An Introduction,
179
285
McKay, Claude, 30
McNeile, A.H., 174, 175
Means, Russell, (with Marvin J.
Wolf), Where White Men
Fear to Tread: the
Autobiography of Russell
Means, 142 (and see
American Indian
Movement)
Melville, Herman, “Bartleby, The
Scrivener”, 60
Mendelson, Edward, “How to
Read John Berryman’s
Dream Songs”, 192, 207
Meredith, William, xii, 9, 230;
“In Loving Memroy of the
Author of The Dream
Songs”, xii
Merwin, W.S., 9
Michelfelder, Diane, ed. (with
Richard Palmer), Dialogue
and Deconstruction, 233
Middle Generation, the, xiii, 46,
191
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 30
Milton, John, 87, 91, 137; Comus,
137; “Lycidas”, 87, 91, 148;
Paradise Lost, 16
Minneapolis, xv, 2, 7, 126, 14142, 179, 217;
and the American Indian
Movement, 7, 141-42
Minot, Stephen, “John Berryman
and the Lure of Obscurity”,
228
minstrelsy, 43, 45, 72, 114, 115,
144, 198, 206, 207; minstrel
talk, 72
Modernism, 29, 39, 138, 154
Molesworth, Charles, vxii
Monroe, Harriet, 2, 30, 128
Monteverdi, Claudio, 195
Moore, Marianne, 118
286
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
Moore, Merrill, 31
Morton, Jelly Roll, 206 (and see
Daddy Rice; minstrelsy)
Mosby, Rebekah Presson (see
Paschen, Elise)
mourning, 16, 116, 117, 119, 205,
214
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 12,
195; Requiem, 12
music, xvii, 8, 12, 111, 115, 191208
Native American culture, 45, 14142, 143, 144, 146, 148 (and
see the trickster)
Nazis, the, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20,
21-24, 26, 158 (and see
concentration camps;
Holocaust)
New Criticism, the, 31, 88, 186
New York, xv, 1, 217
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 157
Niikura, Toshikazu, xiii
Oberg, Arthur, xiii
Oklahoma, 141, 144
Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship,
210
Oliver, Kelly, ed., The Portable
Kristeva, 250
Once in a Sycamore, xiv
Orarienburg, 13 (and see
concentration camps)
Origen, 164 (and see
apocatastasis)
Paige, D.D., ed., The Selected
Letters of Ezra Pound, 128
Palmer, Richard (see
Michelfelder, Diane)
Paris, 176, 217, 218
Parker, Andrew, ed. (with Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick),
Performativity and
Performance, 101
Paschen, Elise, ed. (with Rebekah
Presson Mosby), Poetry
Speaks: Hear Great Poets
Read Their Work from
Tennyson to Plath, 98
Pattison, George, 76; ed. (with
Stephen Shakespeare),
Kierkegaard: The Self in
Society, 233-34
Pavlovcak, Michael, xiii
Perosa, Sergio, xiii
Petrarch, 33, 36, 40; Petrarchan
sonnet form, 29, 35, 37, 40,
42
Phillips, Robert S., The
Confessional Poets, 227,
228, 229
Plath, Sylvia, 3, 117, 191, 226,
242
Plotz, John, et al, “An Interview
with John Berryman”, 76,
192, 198, 202, 207, 215
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 200
poetry, and the limits of
representation, 27, 245, 24851, 254;
as essence of language, 24243, 245, 248-49, 252-53,
254; opposed to prose, 21,
22, 65, 87-100 passim; and
performative strategies, 8,
52, 101-120; and trauma; 22,
23, 26, 159, 251; and the
unsayable, 241-55; and the
unspeakable, 22, 23, 26; and
witnessing, 20-21, 25, 68,
115, 121
Poetry, 12, 26
politics, 41, 43, 71, 122, 166, 226,
232, 236
Pooley, Roger, “Berryman’s Last
Index
Poems: Plain Style and
Christian Style”, 47, 48
post-Holocaust poetics, 21, 27,
157-71
post-Holocaust theology, 150-52,
154, 164
post-Modernism, 149, 154
Pound, Ezra, 29, 128, 138, 193,
201, 211; The Cantos, 211;
Ezra Pound and Music: The
Complete Criticism, 201;
Literary Essays of Ezra
Pound, 193; Selected Letters
of Ezra Pound 1907-1941,
128
Princeton, xv, 38, 43
Prometheus, 144 (and see the
trickster)
Protestantism, 54, 177, 179
Provost, Sarah, “Erato’s Fool and
Bitter Sister: Two Aspects
of John Berryman”, 48
Puritans, 52
Putnam, A.J., 1
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A
Study in American Indian
Mythology, 141, 142, 143,
144, 146, 148, 149,
151 (and see the trickster)
Ransom, John Crowe, 30, 31,
109, 147; “Captain
Carpenter”, 147
Reed, Ishmael, “The Tradition of
Serious Comedy in AfroAmerican Literature”, 144;
Writin’ is Fightin’: ThirtySeven Years of Boxing on
Paper, 144
Reich, Steve, Writings on Music
1965-2000, 200-01
Richards, Jeffrey H., Early
American Drama, 54
287
Ricks, Christopher, 8, 34, 155-56,
165, 169, 171; “Recent
American Poetry”, 34, 15556
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 89-90, 118,
116, 122, 123, 253;
Die Stimmen, 89-90, 118
Rimbaud, Arthur, “Au Cabaret
Vert”, 135
Robinson, Edward Arlington, 30
Rogers, Tom, 5, 7;
“Representations of
Christianity in the Poetry of
John Berryman”, 168
Roth, John K., 157
Rubenstein, Richard, After
Auschwitz: Radical
Theology and Contemporary
Judaism, 157-58
Saint Paul, 180, 185
Sappho, 118, 123, 127-33, 12435, 136, 137, 138, 139;
Sappho 31, 125, 129
Schmidt, Gary D. ed. (with
Donald R. Hettinga), Sitting
at the Feet of the Past:
Retelling the North
American Folktale for
Children, 48
Schubert, Franz, 195
Schwartz, Delmore, 93, 116-17,
149
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
(see Palmer, Andrew)
Sexton, Anne, 191, 242, 243-44,
247, 250, 255; “The Big
Boots of Pain”, 255; No Evil
Star: Selected Essays,
Interviews, and Prose, 242;
“Wanting to Die”, 243-44,
247
Shakespeare, Stephen (see George
288
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
Pattison)
Shakespeare, William, xi, xvi, 2,
7, 9, 31, 32, 40, 41, 43, 66,
81, 82 103, 141, 196, 20923, 227, 231
Works: All’s Well That
Ends Well, 214; Antony and
Cleopatra, 213; As You Like
It, 66; Hamlet, 82, 117, 21213, 214, 218-20; King Lear,
153, 210, 217; Love’s
Labours Lost, 77-78;
Macbeth, 185, 193-94, 213;
Measure for Measure, 213;
The Merchant of Venice,
194; Othello, 78, 85, 213;
Richard II, 221; Richard III,
222; Romeo and Juliet, 78,
85; Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
31, 32, 35-37, 39, 40, 41, 42,
81-86, 213, 216; Sonnet 55,
35; Sonnet 129, 81-86;
Troilus and Cressida, 194,
213
Sibelius, Jean, 195
Sidney, Sir Philip, 31, 33, 41;
Astrophil and Stella, 31;
Defense of Poesie, Astrophil
and Stella and Other
Writings, 41
silence, 27, 55, 56, 65, 66, 67, 96,
97, 111, 135, 167, 168, 218,
241-45, 250, 252-55
Simic, Charles, 9
Sisson, C.J., “The Mythical
Sorrows of Shakespeare”,
216
Simpson, Eileen (first wife), xv,
13, 38, 40
Smith, Bessie, 72, 195, 206, 207;
“Empty Bed Blues”, 206;
“Yellow Dog Blues”, 206
Smith, Ernest J., xvii; “John
Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’
for The Dream Songs and an
Instance of Revision”, 45,
46, 50, 51, 199, 201, 202
Smith, Pinetop, 206 (and see
Smith, Bessie)
sonnet form, 8, 29-44
Sontag, Frederick, 157
Sontag, Susan, ed., A Roland
Barthes Reader, 134
Spanish Civil War, the, 232
Spencer, Luke, “Mistress
Bradstreet and Mr
Berryman: The Ultimate
Seduction”, 48
Spenser, Edmund, 31, 36;
“Epithalamion”, 36; The
Shorter Poems, 36
Spivey, Victoria, 195, 207
Stefanik, Ernest, xii-xiii, xiv
Steiner, George, 26, 27, 157;
Grammars of Creation, 157;
Language and Silence:
Essays on Language,
Literature and the Inhuman,
26, 27
Stevens, Wallace, 29, 61, 245,
253, 254; “Adagia”, 245;
Opus Posthumous, 245;
“The Poem That Took The
Place of A Mountain”, 6061; “The Snow Man”, 245,
253, 254; “Thinking of a
Relation Between The
Images of Metaphors”, 61
Stitt, Peter, xiii, xvii, xviii, 4, 101,
104, 182; “The Art of
Poetry:An Interview with
John Berryman”, 4, 101,
104-105, 165, 191, 194, 229
suicide, xv, 95, 200, 216, 217,
218, 219, 220, 221, 222,
226, 227, 232, 237, 241-55
Sullivan, J.W.N., Beethoven: His
Spiritual Development, 196
Index
Sutter, Barton, xvii
Synoptics, the, 177, 180
Tate, Allen, 30, 109
Tate, James, 9
Taylor, Ronald, ed., Aesthetics
and Politics, 27
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 195
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 76-77,
78, 79; In Memoriam
A.H.H., 76-77, 155
theodicy, 8, 155-71
Thomas, Dylan, 93, 94, 194, 232;
“A Process in the Weather
of the Heart”, 94; “All all
and all the dry world’s
lever”, 99; “I, in my intricate
image”, 94; “Our Eunuch
Dreams”, 94; “Where once
the waters of your face”, 94
Thomas, Harry, ed., Berryman’s
Understanding, 4, 10, 76,
101, 105, 107, 112, 155,
159, 165, 169, 191, 192,
205, 206, 207, 215, 229
Thomes, A. Boyd, xv, xvii
Thomes, Maris, xv, xvii
Thornbury, Charles, xiii, xvi, xvii,
xviii, 14, 32, 59, 95, 217,
218, 219, 220, 230; “A
Reckoning with Ghostly
Voices (1935-36)”, 217,
218, 219, 220, 223; ed.,
Collected Poems: 19371971, 14, 32, 59, 95, 136,
150, 230;
“Introduction” to Collected
Poems: 1937-1971, 59, 95,
136, 150, 230
Thorpe, Thomas, 32
Tilley, Terence, The Evils of
Theodicy, 157
Tokunaga, Shozo, xiii
Trakl, Georg, 239
289
trauma, 159, 251
Travisano, Thomas, Midcentury
Quartet: Bishop, Lowell,
Jarrell, Berryman and the
Making of a Postmodern
Aesthetic, 4
Treblinka, 20, 24 (and see
concentration camps)
Trickster, 141-54; Coyote, 143;
Nanabozho (or Great Hare
or Master Rabbit), 143, 149;
Raven (or Blue Jay or
Mink), 143; trickster tale
sequences, 148 (and see
Native American culture)
Trow, Thomas, xvii
Tucker, George, Essays by a
Citizen of Virginia: Essays
on Various Subjects of
Taste, Morals, and National
Policy by a Citizen of
Virginia, 53; “On American
Literature”, 53
Ulysses, 144 (and see Ellison,
Ralph; Trickster)
University of Cambridge, xviii,
195, 209, 210, 217, 218, 232;
Clare College, Cambridge,
209
University of Minnesota, xi, xiv,
xvi, 1, 5, 12, 124, 159, 162,
173, 175, 178, 210, 215,
217, 225
University of Paris (Sorbonne),
176
Van Doren, Mark, 30, 209, 218
Vaughan, Henry, 232
Vendler, Helen, 4, 88, 97, 128,
129; The Given and The
Made, 4, 88, 128
Vizenor, Gerald, 149, 154;
Trickster of Liberty:
290
“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman
Tribal Heirs to a Wild
Baronage 149
Voltaire, 156-57
Vonalt, Larry, xiii, xvii
Wagner, Linda Welscheimer, xiii
Wallingford, Katharine, xvii
Walsh, Sylvia, Living Poetically:
Kierkegaard’s Existential
Poetics, 234-35
Warner, Anne B., xiii
Wasserstrom, William, “Cagey
John: Berryman as Medicine
Man”, 206
Watts, Ann Chalmers, “Pearl,
Inexpressibility, and Poems
of Human Loss”, 60
Wayne University Michigan, 17475
Wedge, George, xvii, xviii
Westcott, Brooke Foss, 177,
181
White, Fred D., xvii
Whitman, Walt, 10, 29, 135, 138,
163, 194, 198; “Song of
Myself”, 10, 163, 194, 198
Wilbur, Richard, 230-31
Williams, William Carlos, 29, 33,
127, 208; “Sappho”, 127;
Selected Essays of William
Carlos Williams, 33
Wilson, Edmund, xvi
Wojahn, David, “John Berryman
Listening to Robert
Johnson’s King of the Delta
Blues, January 1972”, 206
Wonham, Henry B. Mark Twain
and the Art of the Tall Tale,
48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55
Wordsworth, William, 30, 77, 78,
79, 110, 232; The Prelude,
77; “Preface to The Lyrical
Ballads”, 110; “Tintern
Abbey”, 77
World War Two, 158, 160
Wray, David, Catullus and the
Poetics of Roman Manhood,
123
Wright, Ted, xvii
Yates, Donald A. (see Irby, James
E.)
Yeats, W.B., 1-2, 71, 93, 109,
118, 119, 191, 192, 211,
221; Collected Plays, 218;
death of, 1; and dreams, 71;
influence on John Berryman,
71, 93, 109, 118, 191, 192,
211, 218; meets John
Berryman, 1, 2; “A Prayer
For Old Age”, 193;
“The Second Coming”,
221
Young Kevin, ed. Blues Poems,
206; “Responsible Delight”,
47, 48, 50, 55
Zacchaeus, 79, 164