Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  Fourth, and last, there is throughout Kees’s writing, at any rate, an element of the macabre and the fastidious. He is a blackly funny writer, in prose and verse, who compounds satire and dread. In a representative line of his, say, “The tambourine did not function with its usual zest,” one hears the pert disengagement of Eliot and Oscar Wilde. He is a wonderful poet of rooms and atmospheres. Social and external details are produced with a bracing and inexhaustible dysphoria. Here is his short poem, “For H. V. (1901–1927)”:

  I remember the clumsy surgery: the face

  Scarred out of recognition, ruined and not his own.

  Wax hands fattened among pink silk and pinker roses.

  The minister was in fine form that afternoon.

  I remember the ferns, the organ faintly out of tune,

  The gray light, the two extended prayers,

  Rain falling on stained glass; the pallbearers,

  Selected by the family, and none of them his friends.

  (“The pure products of America go crazy,” William Carlos Williams wrote once; a puzzling remark, it would seem, to many.) Perhaps one has not to be an American to relish this comprehensively ruined account for its dry, almost scurrilous wit, and not merely to find it “depressing.” Most poetry written nowadays is again as sanctimonious and as imperially overblown as in the 1940s and 1950s. What a tonic a wider appreciation of Kees would be! He still seems, as his editor, Donald Justice, remarked back in 1960, the sort of poet readers discover for themselves, and by accident. Now, thanks to this really good, well-written, and thoughtful biography, by James Reidel, himself a Keesian of twenty years’ standing, he will be just a little harder to ignore than before.

  JOHN BERRYMAN

  I don’t write these damned things willingly, you know.

  —J.B. to Allen Tate, June 26, 1963

  “I look less weird / without my beard,” he tells us, but I’m not sure I agree. It’s strange to think of him for so long as buttoned-up and repressed and preppy and clean-shaven and starchy; blue jaws like Nixon’s, and small, rather shifty eyes. Like a middle manager and tweed fancier, with a secret penchant for golf: “They set their clocks by Henry House, / the steadiest man on the block.” A strange, doomed effort to pass. “He knocked himself out to be like everybody else,” Saul Bellow confirms in his gorgeous memoir of his friend. And then with the beard—the badge of his emancipation and loss of control—in Terence Spencer’s magnificent Life photographs of him in 1967 in Ireland, hunched over, possessed, in spate, the beard gesticulating and waving like a third hand. The one pursed-lipped and Anglo-Saxon and mute; the other an uncontrollably gabby sage. From an unhealthy tightness to an unhealthy looseness.

  John Berryman did not get to publish his first full-length book, The Dispossessed, until 1948, and it was only in 1953 that he graduated from the realms of the “promising” with his long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet; and then it was not until the appearance of 77 Dream Songs in 1964, when he was fifty, that he established a poetic identity and achieved enduring renown. The following year, he won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1967, he brought out Berryman’s Sonnets (an account of an adulterous love affair written twenty years previously and never published before) and a retrospective Short Poems. In 1968, he published His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a selection of a further 308 Dream Songs (four times the number of the original volume, and for the most part rather more straightforward). For this he was given the National Book Award in 1969. The Dream Songs were then published in one volume—385, count ’em—and they were followed by a couple of chatty, rather prosy, sporadically highly attractive books, with earthy and heavenly sections, Love and Fame (1970) and Delusions, etc. (1972). By the time Delusions appeared, it was posthumous, for on January 7, 1972, Berryman had killed himself by leaping from Washington Bridge in Minneapolis (where he lived and taught) onto the frozen banks of the Mississippi. One further posthumous selection was put together by John Haffenden, called Henry’s Fate and Other Poems (1977); disappointingly but not altogether surprisingly, it contained many pieces in the Dream Song mode (which he was supposed to have forsworn)—“I will not come again / or not come with this style”—and a lot of naked distress. In the decade or so after his death, there was a little spate of critical attention—much of it again from John Haffenden, who also wrote the best biography of the poet (The Life of John Berryman, 1982)—but recently things have been rather quiet around Berryman. Perhaps his example seems too extreme. Yet young readers have always been drawn to him, especially to The Dream Songs: no one writes like that, no one dares, no one would have the wild imagination or the obsession. Who knew English could encompass that flux; that whinny; those initially baffling, then canny and eventually unforgettable rearrangements of words; that irresistible flow of thoughts and nonthoughts of that degree of informed privateness?

  I first read Berryman in 1977, in what still felt like his Cambridge, when I was twenty and he was five years into his posterity. It wasn’t therefore possible, but if it had been, I might well have written him a letter of the kind he writes about: “A lone letter from a young man: that is fame.” Not least because I thought he was right: and it didn’t sound as though he had it in the bag, more like an invitation, as the needing in the Dream Songs generally has it over the bragging. For a time I thought I might become sufficiently conversant with the Dream Songs that I could play them as a parlor game: if someone gave me a first line, I would oblige with the number. Or even vice versa. To this day, #4, #14, #40, #69 (such naughtiness in the numbering!), #75, #78–91, #145, #146–158, #171, #219, #283, and #379 (among others) are in play. Others I could do to within maybe ten or twenty. No cigar. Ballpark. And of course I affected the ampersand as well.

  If you possess something for a long time, you tend to wear it down. The edges come off it, whatever garishness bleeds out of the colors; the creak goes out of the materials; and something emerges fluffy and tender and dusty and contourless. Blue lint. Kurt Schwitters. A childhood toy, an old book, maybe a teddy bear (as in #291 or #302?). The Dream Songs are what taught me to lie on my back when I can’t sleep (“& my thoughts are different & more straightforward / than on my side”); nostalgia for a plethora of morning mail deliveries in the 1920s; the meaning of “Do, ut des” (shorter and pithier than any Latin I could construe); vivid trembling through black-and-white films; the discreet charm of the broken-armed invalid, where “three limbs … take / the other for a cruise, like an elderly lover / not expecting much” (and Berryman sounds so unexpectedly like Zbigniew Herbert in his “Mr. Cogito” persona poems); little fragrant glimmerings of Japan and India from 1957, hefty big boisterous slabs of Dublin from 1966 to 1967.

  Berryman was of the first generation of American “professional poets”—the prizes, the residencies, the summer schools, the readings (the first creative writing department established at the University of Iowa by Paul Engle in 1947)—but never entirely in it. He thought about it a lot, the biz, the poe-business, sometimes drily, often in a sour or jaundiced way: about publication and publications, success, fame, tribulations, colleagues, and rivals. (There cannot be another poet who mentions The Times Literary Supplement in his poems as often as Berryman does, or who is so preoccupied with “honours”—the British spelling he retained from his two graduate years in Cambridge, in the 1930s.) He was an eager participant, all right, and painfully, vauntingly ambitious, but he seems on the whole to have been what in German is called ein Zaungast, a fence guest, semi-excluded by a mixture of luck, tardiness, unsuitability, and being stuck out in the Midwest (his stint at Minneapolis is coeval with the Dream Songs: both date back to 1955). He always had the feeling that he had ground to make up, that success came more easily to others, that universities and serious scholarship (his book on Stephen Crane; a long-mooted edition of Shakespeare, the wreckage of which John Haffenden assembled into the posthumous Berryman’s Shakespeare) had taken years from him that he would not get back. Now life reasserts itself, now literature, now teaching. Ex
istence was a perpetual round of rock, paper, scissors, and mostly he had the sense he was losing. Some of his most attractively heroic poems are about the virtue and necessity of teaching: “Sick at 6 & sick again at 9.” He has a poem about exams. He looks forward to himself as an object of scholarship and to his (infant) daughter making her way at Vassar or Smith. The newly institutional life of the American poet is nowhere better or more fully written about than in these poems and in Bellow’s 1975 novel Humboldt’s Gift, about their mutual friend Delmore Schwartz. Bellow would visit Berryman in hospital (“He was not there because he had broken his leg”), and be treated to new Dream Songs. Berryman made the connection himself: “A hospital is where it all has a use, / so is a makar.” It may not have been the institution one had in mind, originally, but hey, who cares! “Open the main!”

  Berryman pines for literature. He really can’t wait. He is pushing things through, like a panicky spy into a shredder. His poems—his poem, as he persists in thinking of it—are coming along/is coming along, but oh the agony! “I feel my application failing.” “My framework is broken, I am coming to an end, / God send it soon.” Was ever an enterprise handled with such pathos, with round-the-world yachtsmen and Gordon of Khartoum supplying epigraphs? “Lucid his project lay, beyond. Can he?” he cries pantomimically into the void. (It’s as though we should all shout out together: “It’s behind you!”) Then repeat, this time with fresh anxiety, that of surfeit: “with a new book in my briefcase / four times too large.” He doesn’t know whether to stick or twist, “whether to sing / further or seal his lonely throat.” He is on the point of applying to the president personally for help: “Mr Johnson has never written one / but he seems a generous & able man.” The Dream Songs are so laced with quotations and authorities and allusions, it’s as though they are preemptively literary; something with so much water in it, surely it can float. There’s even a song—the example that proves the rule—celebrating a book (the only book?) that Henry hasn’t read: Ubu Roi. It’s as though Berryman is set on amplifying the famous opening line of Mallarmé’s Brise Marine, “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.” Hence the Kafka, the Housman, the Yeats, the Wordsworth, the Rilke, and dozens more besides: companions, allies, antagonists, farther along by virtue of being dead and being their books. In this frantic vision, life is a race to posterity, and, once there, perhaps, a struggle for ascendancy. “While he begins to have it out with Horace,” Henry replies, contumaciously, of the barely cold Robert Frost.

  The Dream Songs show the antic dance of the poet, scholar, teacher, and all-round “human American man” at its best. Berryman’s style—Lowell after his death admitted, “I’m afraid I mistook it for forcing, when he came into his own”—breaks other components into an astounding new whole. It encompasses all his literariness, his versedness, I would like to call it, and all his creativity and demotic flair as well. There are astonishing things, priceless things, things that no one else could have done, not even—and he maybe comes closest—Ezra Pound: “whenas we sought, among the beloved faces, / eminence and were dissatisfied with that / and needed more,” “O Adlai mine,” “the weather fleured,” “Go, ill-sped book,” “Honey dusk do sprawl,” “she leaned an ear / in my direction, here,” “I will not come again / or not come with this style.” Lowell in his long initial bafflement referred deprecatingly to “babytalk,” Michael Schmidt compares it to Cummings, “but a cummings carrying a huge library on his back,” but the best is probably Adrienne Rich, noting that “Shakespeare’s English and some minstrelly refrain meet, salute and inform each other,” before going on to wonder: “The English (American) language. Who knows entirely what it is? Maybe two men in this decade: Bob Dylan, John Berryman.”1

  This knowledge is there already in the Sonnets and the Bradstreet, but chiefly it illuminates the Dream Songs, which seem to me to be written with as much freedom and—before a manner, a tic, could establish itself—as much necessity as anything I can think of. I love the extremes of courtliness and creatureliness in the Dream Songs, on the one hand such things as “Come away, Mr. Bones” (the occasion for Adrienne Rich’s first rapture), or “There is a kind of undetermined hair, / half-tan, to which he was entirely unable to fail to respond / in woman”; and on the other hand “Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat,” or “Henry / tasting all the secret bits of life”; or again, when the two categories are run together, as when Berryman remembers an adolescent amour: “while he was so beastly with love for Charlotte Coquet / he skated up & down in front of her house / wishing he could, sir, die,” or, perhaps most succinctly: “What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?”

  The best of the Dream Songs have a sort of radical delicacy. Here is one never, so far as I know, much regarded or anthologized, #19:

  Here, whence

  all have departed or will do, here airless, where

  that witchy ball

  wanted, fought toward, dreamed of, all a green living

  drops limply into one’s hands

  without pleasure or interest

  Figurez-vous, a time swarms when the word

  “happy” sheds its whole meaning, like to come and

  like for memory too

  That morning arrived to Henry as well a great cheque

  eaten out already by the Government & State &

  other strange matters

  Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat

  smiled into his mirror, a murderer’s

  (at Stillwater), at himself alone

  and said across a plink to that desolate fellow

  said a little hail & buck-you-up

  upon his triumph

  The poem is about dejection and money. It is unrhymed and almost unpunctuated, but rhetorically organized (“Here … here … that morning … smiled … and said”) into one strikingly cogent sentence. From the very first line—itself an extraordinary getaway or liftoff—the poem is a bristling and dazzling display of grammar: almost one’s first thoughts on seeing it are to do with agreements and (“here airless”) appositives! The first “here,” which Henry (or Berryman) is in such a hurry to quit, is the world, a world, further, in which the world (or something very similar—an apple, or a green apple, or perhaps Snow White’s poisoned—“witchy”—apple) falls into your lap, but without making you any the happier for it. The poem revisits the theme of Arthur Hugh Clough’s “So pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!” or Brecht’s “Song of the Vivifying Effect of Money,” but in an agnostic or unsatisfied mode, the mode, if you like, of Midas or, worse, a Midas with a paper touch. It is a poem of accursedness or ill fortune, set up as in a parallel world (the world of depression, or perhaps a mirror world, which would help account for the role of the mirror at the end of the poem in breaking the spell?) similar, say, to the “vast landscape of Lament” in Rilke’s Tenth Elegy (“Einst waren wir reich”—We used to be rich). From “whence,” from “departed,” from “airless,” from “that witchy ball” and from “green living,” I have a sense that the earliest Russian and American space missions—Gagarin and Shepard, both in 1961—may have played into the poem, and the very earliest satellite photographs of ourselves—mirrorings—from space. If one strand of the poem’s thought is cosmic, the other is monetary; it is there in the play on “interest,” “living,” and “green”—with its echo of “greenback”—in “buck-you-up” and the spectacular “Figurez-vous.” Berryman learned this sort of image cluster from Shakespeare, who is a constant pressure on his style. Typically, such literariness and ambition are balanced by an early use of the illiterate particle “like.” The verbs are conspicuously loose fitting and vitalist: “drops,” “swarms,” “sheds,” and “eaten.” It is out of the vegetable nature of these that the animal character of “Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat” is compounded. “Stillwater” in the third stanza is a penitentiary in Minnesota (Berryman, as one would have suspected, actually owned such a mirror); and “plink” is a bit of family slang. There is no one else in the
poem but Henry: it is he who smiles, who is “alone,” then “desolate,” and finally triumphant. Still, the very clever introduction of the murderer, as it were, flavors the poem (Berryman identified his particular area of expertise as a poet as the personal pronoun!). The murderer brings in society, depth, risk, an alter ego (“in feelings not ever accorded to oneself,” it says with stern magnificence). The poem is an authentic Dream Song, diffusely coercive, unconventional, complex, bleak, tender in adversity, rallying.

  The Dream Songs vary through every degree of lucidity and opacity: some of them, beautifully, add up; many others are at least consistent in their gestures; a few leave unanswered difficulties; but almost all make their own distinct mark on silence and the page. They are dramatic poems—few more so. Cliff-hanging or stalling episodes in a long-running series. Vainglorious or Pyrrhic, addled or plain: “His wife has been away / with genuine difficulty he fought madness / whose breast came close to breaking.” Often, they end up in rhetorical reaches most poems don’t go near: threat, prayer, promise, action, resolve. Berryman always insisted on their unity—“The Care & Feeding of Long Poems” was his special study—but that no longer seems a plausible or even an important claim, if it ever did. (Nor, analogously, does the siting or defining of Henry: he may not be Berryman, but he shares too many of the trials and tribulations of the twentieth-century American poet.) Reading through all the Dream Songs is like remaining in your seat while the lights go up and down on three hundred and eighty-five phantasmagorical-existential sketches. “He led with his typewriter. He made it fly.”