He never stopped fighting and moving all his life; at first, expert and derivative, later full of output, more juice, more strange words on the page, more obscurity. I’m afraid I mistook it for forcing, when he came into his own. No voice now or persona sticks in my ear as his. It is poignant, abrasive, anguished, humorous.
Other readers heard Berryman’s voice and reached different conclusions. As early as 1948, Berryman’s poetry seemed surcharged to one reviewer of The Dispossessed. “[A] fanfare of shipwrecked syntax, textbook inversions and alliterations.” But another reviewer, in The Times Literary Supplement, admired his style as “a living compromise between the way people speak and the outsize gestures that poetry traditionally demands.” While Berryman bristled at unfavorable reviews, he was pleased to stir up controversy—“Long may they rave,” he would say—for opposing views attest to what his poetry asks. He prods us to re-examine our fundamental notions about the design and function of poetry, what poetry does for, even to, the poet and the reader.
The critical standards by which Berryman measured other poets suggest an insight into his notions about his own poetry. Generally speaking, especially during the period of his most accelerated development in the mid- to late 1940s, he might have been writing about himself in praising other poets’ “intensity” and “urgency and power.” He admired Stephen Crane’s primitive style and the power of his “refusal to guarantee” the reader’s expectations. He was attracted to Edmund Waller’s violations of the reader’s expectations: “Waller … so controlled the forms in his best poems as to produce an expectation differing wholly from previous expectations, and then by violating the expectation got his effects.” He found a kinsman in Tristan Corbière’s “abrupt phrasing,” “violent shifts,” and “lightning alternations of the sardonic and the profound.” Enlarging the tactic of stylistic violations of expectation to the design of a whole poem, Berryman regarded the first two lines in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as being “diminished or destroyed” in the rest of the poem.
Several of Berryman’s early poems signaled the unexpected turns of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs. He described his poem “Winter Landscape,” written in early 1939, as pivoting “on a missing or misrepresented element in an agreed-on or imposed design.” By 1955, after having completed Homage, he could articulate his fundamental poetics: “The two great things [in all writing],” he wrote to his mother, “are to be clear and short; but rhythms matter too, and unexpectedness. You lead the reader briskly in one direction, then you spin him round, or you sing him a lullaby and then hit him on the head.” Berryman’s twin standards would appear to be at odds with unexpectedness, but to be “short” may mean that the poem will lurch abruptly, accelerate, and leave the reader standing still. Similarly, to be “clear” may mean that the design and language of a poem take into account, perhaps enact, the unexpected turns of human experience. The poem, it follows, is open to the crosscurrents of the drift-of-life, an openness that gives a sense of being simultaneously polished and jagged, appealing and offensive. In the gaps and silences of lightning shifts, readers may feel as though they have been hit on the head.
Berryman also had his eye on the reader in choosing his (outwardly) defiant tactic: “[C]ontrol … the reader,” Berryman advises a young writer, “to do half the work” (“Purgatory,” L&F). Readers are controlled to the extent that they are required to stake a claim in the creation of understanding and meaning. If readers are given the language, characters, and meaning they expect or want to hear, their feelings are unarticulated and their minds unexamined. They may follow nervously; indeed, Berryman believed that the most successful poem rattles the reader’s expectations. Readers may be made uneasy because “[t]he serious writer,” as Berryman says, “is something of an inquisitor [who] not so much asks questions of the reader as he forces the reader to put to himself the same questions about life that the author has had to put to himself.”
Berryman’s poetry, as he says of T. S. Eliot’s, is “grievous and profound beyond a single poet’s.” As for readers, they “will have to follow, wherever, wherever.” Berryman’s making, unmaking, and remaking of sound, sense, and self; his ferocity and tenderness; his songs, satires, petitions, lamentations, and blues require adept readers. His world is Cervantine, Shakespearean, and Joycean. Like Walt Whitman, the American poet he most resembles, Berryman delights equally in tragedy and comedy. He is proud and humble, learned and primitive, nervy and nervous, fantastic and realistic. His characters are victims and masters, self-pitying and brave, lecherous and loving, responsible and irresponsible, alienated and connected. He takes quite literally Coleridge’s definition of the “secondary Imagination” that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” He is a poet of Keatsian “Negative Capability” in which the poet, as Keats says, “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He believes that intensity, in Keats’s words, is “capable of making all disagreeables evaporate.”
Some may view Berryman’s life as mired in shame and loss, but his poetry rises above a black pathology. (“You can rely upon it,” Thoreau said, “you have the best of me in my books.”) Those who regard him as abrasively “confessional” might very well see only one tactic of his drama of compensation and grace, a complex play of multiple tactics of self-deception and self-understanding. Certainly he attempted to compensate for his shame; at times it is as though he hoped to trick his terror so that he might believe he was acceptable to himself and to others. But his poetry is also his gift, a peculiarly tangled and eloquent gift. Neither he nor his poetry wants to stay in place; his life and poetry are like a “great Pierrot’s universe,” as Robert Lowell said of 77 Dream Songs, “[that] is more tearful and funny than we can easily bear.”
Berryman investigates the provisional formations and re-formations of the human personality. Believing the personality to be discontinuous and ever-changing, he rebels against the view that the poem must be polished and autonomous. He assumes that the poet and the reader are bound to an uncertain process of something taking shape, of something circling rather than battened down: “If we take our head in our ears and listen,” Berryman responds to Beethoven’s music, “You force a blurt: Who was I? / Am I these tutti, am I this rallentando? / This entrance of the oboe?” (“Beethoven Triumphant,” De). The “sane man” replies, “I am all these.” To be these voices and instruments at the same time suggests that readers, too, “contain multitudes,” as Whitman says of himself, and to contain multitudes is to set in motion questions and contradictions, an unsettling affront to our need for certainty.
Berryman’s manner and matter yield up neither one lock nor one key. His poetry makes a bid for readers to become members of both the choir and the orchestra. The music of the masters, “profound solemn & clear,” Berryman says in “Canto Amor” (1945), has its own harmony and grace, but Berryman’s poetry is “the other music,” a dissonance poised in the act of becoming harmony, a jammed voice sounding out its own articulation, a “flowing ceremony of trouble and light” (“Canto Amor,” TD). The “ceremony” in his poetry is as important as the “trouble and light.” He invites readers to recognize that they are not victims of change, but rather communicants in the cycles of life’s ebb and flow, its departures and returns. “Strange lives we lead,” he wrote to his mother in 1954; “life is, all, transformation. We must not be glad, or sorry, to be part of it; but we can’t help being. And there there was some unkindness, somewhere, somewhere? And pity, and kindness.”
Like other great moderns and contemporaries—Hardy, Yeats, Bishop, and Lowell—Berryman regards the outcome of human experience as frequently the opposite of what we either expect or hope for. And yet, as it was in Yeats’s and Lowell’s life and poetry, and before them Emerson’s and Whitman’s, uncertainty is drawn into the larger orbits of death and rebirth. Berryman’s dominant image is that of a figure poised to make ready for the
transforming moment of a new beginning. The hero undergoes a series of shocks and misfortunes (a “fall”) and arrives at a moment of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Like Henry, Berryman’s archetypical alter ego, his heroic figure has “ancient fires for eyes”; his fall is fortunate in that he comes to a moment of transforming intensity with “his head full / & his heart full” (Dream Song 77). But the moment of the new beginning is neither the end of his journey nor the last death and rebirth he will experience. While death and rebirth may be certain, the drift-of-life in between is uncertain; he is continuously “making ready to move on” (Dream Song 77). So if Berryman’s abrupt shifts and tentative conclusions refuse to guarantee readers’ expectations, they should know that he does not expect them to. He asks for a risky contract; readers who inquire further may find rewards other than confirmation.
The formations and re-formations of Berryman’s life. There are many John Berrymans. There is the boy—born John Allyn Smith, Jr., on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma—whose family moved every two or three years, because his father, a banker, either resigned or was fired. There is the nine-year-old Catholic altar boy admiring his first surrogate father, Fr. Boniface Beri, O. S. B., and the “fox-like child I was,” he said many years later, “or assume I was” (“At Chinese Checkers,” TD). There is the bright and lonely ten-year-old who attended a Catholic boarding school for several months in Chickasha, Oklahoma, while his parents were in Tampa, Florida, attempting to establish a new life. There is the bereft eleven-year-old whose father committed suicide in Clearwater, Florida, in June 1926, only ten months after the family’s move. There is the boy who felt that his father’s abandonment “blew out [his] most bright candle faith” (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” #6, L&F).
Young Smith becomes the dispossessed son whose mother hastily remarries John Angus McAlpin Berryman, nearly twenty years her senior, in New York City two and a half months after her husband’s death. The confused and silently angry adopted son is renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman—“a trick a mockery my name,” he writes at age twenty-five (“A Point of Age,” TD)—who feels he is denied the birthright of bearing his father’s name. He is the schoolboy at P. S. 69 in Jackson Heights, Long Island, a successful and imaginative student placing in a district spelling bee, winning a prize for his essay on the prevention of cruelty to animals, and writing a science-fiction novel.
He is the short and awkward teenager at South Kent School in Connecticut, nicknamed “Blears” because his “eye glasses were so thick you could perform physics experiments with them,” a classmate said. He is the dutiful son whose sense of himself is fused with his mother’s ambitions, and he is the unsuccessful athlete who regains some self-esteem by reporting sports events for the school newspaper. He is the protector of his younger brother, Bob, and the successful student who takes great pride in his top academic ranking. He is the bullied and frustrated teenager who, in an impulsive moment of vengeance, must be pulled off the railroad tracks of an oncoming train. He is the precocious teenager who is the first in his prep school to skip the sixth form to enter college.
As an undergraduate at Columbia College (1932–36), Berryman is determined to become a new person. In his freshman year he runs for class office and goes out for sports (crew, wrestling, and track). Despite the Depression and his family’s modest income, Berryman’s friend E. M. Halliday recalls, his mother “saw to it that John was well dressed and well laundered.” Indeed, he changes so dramatically from the frustrated prep student with thick glasses that some admire his poise and self-assurance: “John,” Halliday says, “with his lean build but broad shoulders, his sharply cut jaw, and his quizzical hazel eyes flickering behind his metal-framed glasses, radiated charisma.” The collegiate Berryman is known as a “tireless & inventive dancing man” (“My Special Fate,” L&F). He falls passionately in and out of love with the changes of the seasons, but most often he is the “haggard unsuccessful lover.” He is alternately serious and flippant, a scholastic monk and a slapstick clown.
Mark Van Doren—Berryman’s mentor and friend (“it was the force of his example,” Berryman said many years later, “that made me a poet”)—remembered the young man as “slender, abstracted, courteous,” and he recalled that the young Berryman “lived one life alone and walked with verse as in a trance.” The eager apprentice also wishes to be a critic like R. P. Blackmur, another of his surrogate father-heroes: “To be a critic,” he writes thirty-six years later, “ah, / how deeper & more scientific” (“Olympus,” L&F). Berryman publishes his first poems and reviews in The Columbia Review and Robert Giroux names him one of the magazine editors. He graduates as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and is awarded the Kellett Fellowship to study at Cambridge University in England for two years. All the while, he secretly longs to recover his lost father, especially when he visits his friends’ homes “with fathers / universal & intact” (“Freshman Blues,” L&F); and he dreams, too, of his “name / blown by adoring winds all over” (“My Special Fate,” L&F).
Berryman’s journey to Cambridge at once promises a new beginning—“I swamp with possibility” (“Away,” L&F)—and intensifies his fear of inadequacy: “Black hours over an unclean line. / Fear. Of failure, or, worse, insignificance” (“Friendless,” L&F). But he sets about, in long hours of intense work, re-forming himself, for the colleges of Cambridge are the “haunts of old masters where I may improve” (“Away,” L&F). On the occasion of his twenty-second birthday, less than two months after settling in his rooms at Clare College, he writes in an unpublished poem: “From this day forth I will absolute change.” He becomes the tweedy scholar, grows a beard, wins the prestigious Oldham prize for his knowledge of Shakespeare, and learns to prepare tea the proper English way. He avidly reads biographies and the letters of great poets, especially John Keats’s letters; he plans to write a biography of his hero W. B. Yeats. Always self-conscious, he changes his handwriting from undergraduate flourishes to a crabbed and mandarin penmanship, and his American accent takes on the sophistication of Oxbridge rhythms.
After completing his studies at Cambridge in 1938, Berryman’s public roles are limited to those of poet, critic, scholar, and teacher. He becomes the tightly wired and learned don dressed in a bow tie and a Brooks Brothers sports jacket. He is the itinerant professor-poet who teaches at Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton, Cincinnati, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington, California (Berkeley), Brown, and Bread Loaf in Vermont. He writes a biography of Stephen Crane (1950) and starts a Shakespeare book (unfinished); he is the elegant, formal, and shrewd critic of poetry, drama, and fiction in literary magazines; the unashamedly learned editor who works with an accountant’s attention to detail on a definitive edition of the text of King Lear (also unfinished after many years of work). He is ceremonious and decorous and yet he delights in violating ceremony and decorum. He is the bad, wild poet who is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest; he is the “meteor-bearded” Regents’ Professor at the University of Minnesota.
“[P]arts of my surface,” Berryman writes in the last year of his life, “are continually slipping past others” (“Matins,” De). Likewise, parts of Berryman’s inner life slip past others. He is the angry son who is at once ashamed of his father’s death and longs to avenge his loss; he seeks out surrogate fathers; he devours the works of major and minor writers, theologians, philosophers, archaeologists, and psychologists. He is the bibliophile of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of poetry and drama, a collector of sayings in crisis and of last words at death; he fears death but longs to embrace it. He is the self-wrestler, the scared and searing self-critic, the hard worker who agonizes over periods of calm that seem to him laziness. He is alternately strong and sickly, almost a hypochondriac. He is the lover of Bessie Smith, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart; the stubborn craftsman; the avid moviegoer; the failed playwright. He continues to be the dutiful son of a possessive mother, but he is also the possessive son of a d
utiful mother.
His personality resembles the warring name of his fictional character Alan Severance in Recovery: Alan (an allusion to his father, Allyn?) is Celtic for “harmony” and Severance means “tearer-apart of people, disrupter.” He becomes the husband married three times, the “sexual athlete,” the womanizer, the father of a son in his second marriage, two daughters in his third, and one child, as he said, “off the record.” He is as cruel as a Pharaoh in insulting and blaming others for his misfortunes and as admirable as a good Samaritan in his deep empathy with the pains and difficulties of friends and acquaintances. He is unashamedly patriotic, at once jealous of the national honor and chagrined by Americans’ shallow knowledge of their country’s history. He is the poet who is distressed by an American society that values his success in the media more than his achievement in his poetry. He is the generous and profligate spender, the proud pauper, the mad charmer, the bristling, stagy, and swaggering egotist; he is the fiercely loyal friend, the untrustworthy and betraying friend, the alcoholic, the public clown, the witty conversationalist, the believer in a “God of rescue,” and the suicide in Minneapolis at age fifty-seven on January 7, 1972.
Berryman’s intensity—his affliction and his means of grace. Like his alter ego Henry in The Dream Songs, Berryman believed he was afflicted by “a sense of total LOSS” that created in him “an absolute disappearance of continuity & love” (Dream Song 101). As a result, when someone mentions “‘worthless’… he took it in, / degraded Henry, at the ebb of love— / O at the end of love…” (Dream Song 109). Perhaps it was the violations in his youth that created in him a radically incomplete sense of identity, but whatever the cause, he frequently and acutely expected to be shamed, betrayed, and abandoned. When the environment of shame and loss seemed to rage, he felt fragmented, insecure, needing, helpless, and terrified. When the turbulence moderated, he gave the impression of an engaging personality negotiating a tightrope of conflicting urgencies. “Berryman the man,” Jane Howard wrote in Life in 1965, “is as fully complex as Berryman the poet.… You never know whether to treat him as an august man of letters or as a prankish little boy, because he is always, simultaneously, both.” Berryman often seemed stymied in his hope to “wipe out,” as he would say, his unpredictable and undesirable selves. “The law,” in Berryman’s and Henry’s mind, is that “we must, owing to chiefly shame / lacing our pride, down what we did” (Dream Song 58).
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