John Berryman

by John Berryman

  Since grace and dignity are hard won for the person who experiences shame and loss so profoundly, Berryman’s expectations throughout his life issued in a distrust of stability. “My occasional absolute confidence is what worries me,” Berryman wrote to Halliday in 1937; “experience says man never got what he counted on.” “[W]hat should be normal life,” he wrote to his mother on his thirtieth birthday (October 25, 1944), “comes to have, transient & tolerable, the air of a vacation, unreal interim.” Similarly, Berryman said to an interviewer in 1967: “I’m not an enemy of good news at all, mind you. When news is good, it’s fine with me—but I usually expect it to be bad.”

  Believing he was destined to suffer, Berryman’s questions often had to do with what form the suffering would take and how he might endure it. At times he believed that suffering should not be, as he wrote to a friend in 1948, “kept going” and that he should “head through” suffering. Characteristically, he took himself up, for these were his “provisional” feelings. And indeed they were: “My idea is this,” he said to an interviewer in 1970, “the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point he’s in business.” “What seems to happen [when one suffers],” Berryman wrote in 1948, “is that one is dared to move, and a great boulder is thrown down on one, and then certain men are able to move. We have to be very grateful for the dare.” But to take up the dare to endure suffering was not enough. Berryman’s view of suffering is what Nietzsche called “joyful wisdom” (that which does not kill me makes me stronger) and what Yeats identified as “tragic gaiety.” In the aftermath of shame and loss, one maintains one’s dignity by defying adversity with a bitter and compassionate laughter.

  But it was not the suffering that Berryman desired; one might even say that he did not desire to suffer at all. His sense of “tragic gaiety” was an effort to turn suffering in on itself, as though the flame might be so intense that it would purify and make him new. He desired most to replace his intensity of loss with an intensity of grace. At some level of self-understanding, Berryman seemed to be aware that intensity, whether destructive or constructive, was the habitual center of his craving and expectation. He sought out intensity in almost every activity—conversation, dancing, drinking, lecturing, writing, even his reading:

  How shall I tell you how I am reading it? [he wrote to his mother in 1942 about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment]. As if I were driving a pack of hounds through a wood, feverishly; only every tree and bush is so unbearably interesting and exciting that I’d like to stop and examine it for a long time, but the hounds are off ahead and won’t stop.… [M]y faculties are raging out in front of me. I haven’t felt so powerfully in a long time. Even my unhappiness is acute, sharp, engaging.

  As a young man, Berryman was aware of the paradoxical power of intensity, and he began to investigate how he might use it in the style and composition of his poetry. In an unpublished poem, four days before his twenty-second birthday, he came to the conclusion: “I derive a curious ease from contemplation of the intense, the / Unalterable place which will be mine.” Eleven days earlier, he wrote of a similar intensity he desired in his life and poetry:

  Idiom and reference are but

  Statistics of catastrophe,

  Intensity is the lever that

  Riots the nerve within the bone.…

  The next day (October 11, 1936) he wrote to his mother: “I want more and more only intensity or the ineluctable authority of precise poetic statement.” Berryman was drawn to the same intensity in the writing of poetry as he wanted in it, one being necessary to accomplish the other. He frequently spoke of the “valuable heat” of composition that he found most present in writing a long poem like “Boston Common” (TD) in 1942:

  [E]ach stanza appears a kind of mountain.… Until yesterday I could work only at night; during the days I read William James and Aristotle and Donne and generally waited, in a state best described as frenzy; at midnight I began.… Each session brings more mistakes than the last, as the effort needed increases, as my fatigue increases, and as I approach the unsayable centre. Most of them, so far, I have been able to correct—a poor term, “correct,” just as “mistakes” is, but you understand: mistakes, I mean, considered as a deviation from the top of intensity and truth [Letter to his mother, June 1942].

  John Keats—“the lovely man,” Henry says—would have understood Berryman’s “unsayable centre”: “[T]he excellence of every art,” Keats wrote, “is its intensity capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.” (This quotation was one of the epigraphs Berryman considered using for Homage.) Both recognized that, for them, the actual composition of a poem was as important as the completion of it, for both seemed to hope to refire an intensity that evaporates the old self and tempers the new. Each new poem offers the possibility of the exhilarating grace of a new beginning, what Berryman sometimes experienced as “a freeing, with the creation of every real poem.” Each new poem comes as a gift and a prayer: “Gift us,” Berryman prays to God, “with long cloaks & adrenaline” (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” #4, L&F).

  “The sense of change … will abide.” The supreme expression of Berryman’s intensity in his life and poetry was his fear of death and his desire to embrace it. “How impatient [John] had been for death the late Dream Songs make clear,” writes Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife and the author of Poets in Their Youth. Simpson suggests that Berryman’s being a poet did not, as she and others had sometimes believed, contribute to his suicide. On the contrary, “It was the poetry that kept him alive”; because of his “certainty that there were all those poems still to be written,” he lived nearly twenty years longer than his father. Berryman’s friend Saul Bellow cites the poem “Despair” (L&F), written several years after The Dream Songs, as an explanation of the suicide: “It seems to be DARK all the time.… I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.” “At last,” Bellow comments, “it must have seemed that he had used up all his resources.… The cycle of resolution, reform and relapse had become a bad joke which could not continue.”

  Whatever one’s view, Berryman’s suicide, in the context of his life, was also a final rebirth, a freeing. “The only comforting reflexion,” Berryman wrote several months before his death, “is not / ‘we will all rest in Abraham’s bosom’ & rot of that purport / but: after my death there will be no more sin.” Berryman would have delighted in Bellow’s idea of the “bad joke” of the cycle of resolution, reform, and relapse. “But, Saul,” he might have replied, “the cycle may end with a final re-formation.” He might have cited another poem written about the same time as “Despair”: “Rest may be your ultimate gift. Rest or transfiguration!” (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” #5, L&F).

  “The sense of change, suns gone up and come down,” he wrote in 1939, “Whirls in my tired head, and it will abide” (“At Chinese Checkers,” TD). Throughout his poetry and diaries, Berryman alternately lamented and celebrated moments of transition, especially the seasons of Christmas, Easter, spring, and his birthday. He either resolved or hoped, as in a primitive rite, for a necessary rebellion and a fresh beginning, a willed death and a new birth. Every new year, as Eileen Simpson writes, he anticipated “a magical rebirth.” His ambitious New Year’s resolves a little over two months after his first marriage are a typical example:

  To keep my temper, and to preserve an even manner; to feign self-possession if I can’t achieve it.

  Not to exaggerate unless my irony is perfectly clear. To keep my opinions to myself.

  To try to bring my humility and my arrogance together. Is a more regular current of feeling impossible?

  To be a better husband altogether.

  And a better friend: to allow, to have faith, to answer letters, to be kind.

  To keep the Journal and to make it continually more useful to me.

  To learn to know Christ.

 
One of the engaging qualities of Berryman’s character is his ability to act as his own ironic observer. On January 2, 1955, he wrote to his mother: “I made no resolutions. None was necessary. I am all resolution.” But, in Flannery O’Connor’s phrase, his “habit of being” was a habit of seeking Verklärung, the moment of transfiguration and ecstasy. “I have been reading some notes about my dead self,” Berryman wrote in his diary in January 1940. “Of course it is not dead I am sad to say. What is needed is suicide each year, the dead one then to phoenix into change.” Berryman’s very grammar points to his moment: the noun becomes the transitive verb that at once names and enacts his desire—“insisting on the verb,” as Henry says, “not the noun” (Dream Song 161).

  It is in his poetry that Berryman’s self-re-forming idiom takes its most pure and primitive form. In the new year of 1937, for example, Berryman writes in an unpublished poem: “A certain peace for my head / In death, I shall make my pause.” In another unpublished poem he perceives the cyclical nature of death: “Man is the ground of many deaths.” In early January 1945, he probes deeper:

  [C]an old wounds be

  Anything in the new man, man we await,

  Man I am on tiptoe for for years and cling

  To the mirror at morning?

  “This spending, surrendering,” Berryman concludes, “I hold becoming”:

  Grinding more long that it may live more clear,

  Moving at last invisible and dear

  Into the house that was always familiar here.

  The language of the poet is the chant of the intense man becoming—a “flowing ceremony of trouble and light,” a history of “the fate of the soul,” as Henry says, “what it was all about / during its being” (Dream Song 156).

  One cannot of course be certain, but Berryman’s suicide seven days into the new year tells his story one last time, the moment in which his metaphor becomes his reality. Perhaps his desire “to phoenix into change” was his rescue from his need to live, as he had written of Stephen Crane’s, “in the midst of all but unbearable excitement.” “Death,” therefore, as Berryman says of Crane’s suicide fantasy, “ends the terrible excitement under which he is bound to live, death resolves panic, death is ‘a way out,’ a rescue.” In the last year of his life, Berryman frequently spoke of a “God of rescue,” and a draft he wrote six months before he died for a book to be titled Sacrifices could very well be his own remarkable epitaph:

  An entirely new kind of freedom manifested in several ways, in retirement, in death, but invariably in a special retirement or death that contains as one of its chief meanings a repudiation of the earlier “freedom.” There is a conversion, in short, if we can employ the term without either religious or psychoanalytic overtones. Someone is changed, simply, into someone else.

  The poet and the poetry. Not until 1959—confident in the authority of having written The Dispossessed, Sonnets to Chris, and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet—was Berryman able to articulate publicly the ritual that was buried in his deepest experience. When he inquired into his motives for making poetry, his experience seemed to confirm that poetry “aims … at the reformation of the poet”:

  Poetry is a terminal activity, taking place out near the end of things, where the poet’s soul addresses one other soul only, never mind when. And it aims—never mind either communication or expression—at the reformation of the poet, as prayer does. In the grand cases—as in our century, Yeats and Eliot—it enables the poet gradually, again and again, to become almost another man; but something of that sort happens, on a small scale, a freeing, with the creation of every real poem.

  Berryman’s motives for making poetry were more complex than his aiming at his own re-formation, but our recognizing his primary (I want to say primordial) motive leads to an enlightening way of thinking about the design and function of his poetry. On the one hand, Berryman’s reformations appear to be willed changes; as he said after writing Homage: “After having done one thing, you want to do something as different as possible.” Near the end of The Dream Songs he vowed: “I will not come again / or not come with this style” (Dream Song 379), and he did not. On the other hand, Berryman believed that the will, as expressed in ceremony and ritual, may be instinctual—what he called, at the age of twenty-one, “the power of animal will to alter or renew.” Furthermore, poetry may be organic, he said several years before his statement about the aim of the poetry, because it “makes use of and adapts to its ends the basic rhythms of human life: the systolic-diastolic rhythm of the blood, of breathing, of the alternation of day and night, of cyclical desire and conception, of the procession of the seasons, the stages of youth and age.” Willed and organic changes, however, are not necessarily mutually exclusive notions: the poet’s apparently willed re-formations may be instinctive responses that are attuned to the alternating rhythms of human life.

  At the risk of oversimplifying Berryman’s subjects and themes, I would suggest that, beginning with The Dispossessed (1948), the rite of re-formation informs the design of all his major collections. Although he arranged most of the poems in his collections chronologically, in order of composition, he selected those that cluster in cycles, cycles moving simultaneously to the alternations of day and night, desire and conception, the procession of the seasons, and the stages of youth and age. Regarded as a whole, his poetry—like his life—was a series of new departures and new beginnings. Some departures are unexpected, some new beginnings are either willed or worried into being, but all are open to a re-formation, a re-formation aimed equally at the poet and the reader.

  The poems in Berryman’s first major collection, The Dispossessed, suggest that neither a new beginning nor a rebirth is possible in the violent and violated world of the late 1930s and World War II. “Winter Landscape” (1939)—the opening poem that simultaneously alludes to “three men in brown” in Brueghel’s painting Hunters in the Snow and to Hitler’s brownshirts—establishes the image of a weary, frozen world. The three hunters, returning from a hunt, are at once frozen in time, like figures on a Grecian urn, and moving in time, unaware of “the evil waste of history / Outstretched” as they descend “[a]nkle-deep in snow down the winter hill.” The next five poems present a similarly immobilized modern world where “[d]isfigurement is general” (“The Statue”). It is a world of “storm and gloom” in which the young poet makes his testament of being “prepared to start” (“A Point of Age”), a world where travelers are uncertain of their destination (“The Traveller”), and a world in which a helpless boy learns “well behind his desperate eyes, / The epistemology of loss” (“The Ball Poem”). “Fare Well,” the concluding poem of Part I, returns to the winter landscape of the opening (“I slip into a snowbed with no hurt”), and the final stanza suggests that a new departure will be undertaken in the poems that follow. Berryman’s emblematic metaphor of the phoenix reappears (“Fare Well” was written in December 1947), but the image of the phoenix—not a verb this time—is a “weak peep” and seems to exist in memory only.

  The poems in Parts II, III, and IV follow, with some variations, the thematic design of Part I. Part IV, for example, begins with “Canto Amor,” in which the speaker, like Berryman, is at a point of transition (“the midnight of [his] thirtieth year”); he hopes that his marriage will endure in an uncertain world. “The Lightning,” the concluding poem of Part IV, mirrors the terza rima form of “Canto Amor” and addresses Berryman’s sister-in-law, Marie Mabry, who fears a terrifying lightning storm. The speaker concludes, almost protesting too much, that although the “lightning dances,” he “cannot despair.” The Dispossessed ends (Part V) with the new beginning of the nuclear age in the title poem, part of which Berryman wrote on the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The new dawn, however, reveals a lifeless landscape (mirroring the winter landscape of the opening poem), and the child of the nuclear age is deformed and grotesque—“the faceless fellow waving from [a woman’s] crotch.”

  Berryma
n’s most dramatic development as a poet—his change from a rhetorical public voice to a sustained nervous idiom—came about during the writing of Sonnets to Chris. Sonnets represents his own second birth, and he became the passionate poet, a role he had been rehearsing for over a decade. The first, written on April 26, 1947, seeks a new beginning in spring (“I wished, all the mild days of middle March…”) in an adulterous affair. By mid-July, as he waits in vain for the usual tryst, he is reminded of ancient graves: “In Shub-ad’s grave the fingers of a girl / Were touching still, when they found her, the strings of her lyre” (Sonnet 65). In the aftermath of bitterness, guilt, and their “simultaneous dying” (Sonnet 71)—in the seventeenth-century sense of orgasm and death—the affair ends. Like his experience of reading Dostoevsky, his unhappiness is “acute, sharp, engaging,” and he continues writing sonnets. The last, written in September 1947 (the other concluding sonnets were written in 1966), ends with an image of the flame of intensity that has created a new beginning: “I am free now of the fire of this sin…” (Sonnet 111).