The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Things have been going well lately.” This, I felt, was more or less true. Two months had passed since the Maria incident, and Sadie’s anger toward me had subsided after a few days. Still, I felt vaguely embarrassed for a while longer, and I tried to compensate in the ensuing weeks by being an especially good listener to Sadie, who seemed to be growing more and more melancholy. She wanted to talk on the phone more often, and so most days—and some days twice—I made the half-hour drive down the mountain and talked to her in the Jeep. One day, as gently as possible, I suggested that she start looking for jobs. It might help to have a sense of purpose, I said. Look at you, giving advice, she said. But three weeks later—Sadie moves quickly—she accepted a position raising money for the Whitney. It started in June.

  First, she visited me one more time at House Above the Morning Clouds. This time we left the mountain once a day, spent afternoons in the valleys below. We tasted wine, went to fruit stands, bought eight-dollar cups of coffee. We walked through vineyards and along coastal paths and through dappled patches of oak savanna. There were new moments of friction between us but we worked through them, and that made us feel proud. These ventures into the real world, besides breaking up the pleasant monotony of our days, also brought us the pleasure of seeing our coupledom reflected and legitimized in the eyes of other people. “I love young love,” an old woman said as we walked past her arm in arm on a Napa street, and the rest of the trip we repeated it to each other as a sort of mantra or spell. Sadie, who had recently turned forty-six, loved that she’d been called young, and so did I, but I also wondered if our attachment to the woman’s comment belied an unspoken insecurity about our age difference. Why did we need other people to affirm what we already felt so strongly?

  I got used to life on top of the mountain. After a while you can get used to anything, as my mother often told me when I was a kid. The enormous rooms, which were gradually filling with furniture and art Dave’s wife had ordered—emerald chandeliers made from Mount St. Helens ash, a zebra-print rug made from real zebras, a classical landscape from the workshop of Titian—had come to seem normal-sized, almost cozy. The winds and gunshots faded into ambience. I’d become an almost competent swimmer. Even the security cameras Oscar installed, which allowed Dave to monitor my comings and goings, brought me a certain amount of comfort. And yet I was growing tired of being a house-sitter, of not having a home. I started to think about moving back to New York, reuniting with my friends, dating Sadie. Maybe I could get a job at a magazine or something.

  My out materialized just a few days later, when Dave showed up at his house unannounced, setting off the alarm. He and his wife had been fighting more or less continuously for the past few months, he explained almost jovially after I got off the phone with the security company, and he’d come to seek refuge above the clouds. I moved into the guest room on the lower level, and for several days Dave and I were uneasy housemates. I forced myself to sit at a desk all day, to prove to my patron that I was making good use of the space he had so generously granted me, but with Dave either watching TV at high volume or yelling into his satellite phone (sell this, buy that, hang on to this), I found it hard to concentrate on the selection of Berryman’s letters to his mother that I’d recently ordered. Evenings we descended in the Jeep, Dave singing along to the classic rock station as he took hairpin turns at 40 mph, and dined at the finest restaurants in Napa Valley, five-hour dinners at which we both got smashed well before the arrival of the olive oil gelée; the Reblochon; the chocolate crémeux with whipped Manjari anglaise, muscovado crumble, and peppermint sponge. Of our conversation I remember nothing, save for Dave telling me with apparent glee that all he’d really cared about his entire life was money, money money money money money money money, and he was right to, you couldn’t argue, he said, look at where we were right now—that and his pitch for a reality TV show (apparently he thought I could help get it made) about middle-aged divorcées reconnecting with their prom dates at dances organized for that purpose. He had the structure of the show all worked out: the first third would be devoted to the women’s tragic backstory and documenting their preparation for the dance; the second would be the dance itself; and the third would be the drive home, the kiss good night, and, maybe, if things went well—here was the climax—the invitation inside. He even had a name for the show: Prom Moms. I told him it sounded like a great idea.

  When it became evident in the subsequent days that he and his wife weren’t about to reconcile, I started making plans to move out. I’d fly to Minneapolis, where I’d spend a week at the Berryman archives. Then I’d spend a couple of days with my parents and continue on to New York, where I’d stay in Sadie’s guest room and look for a place to live.

  “And Sadie’s husband and son know you’re coming?” Laura asked.

  “They’re excited to meet me, according to Sadie.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m excited, too! Terrified, but excited.”

  “What will you talk about?”

  “I don’t know, what do people talk about? Sports? Ourselves? John Edwards’s indictment?”

  “Oh, that’s perfect, you should definitely bring that up.”

  I promised her I would.

  What I didn’t tell Laura was that I’d been harboring a fantasy—one I recognized would likely remain a fantasy—in which Sadie and Ryan invited me to become a permanent member of their family. I’d hit it off with Ryan and Ethan and become a sort of stay-at-home dad. I’d clean, do the laundry and dishes, buy groceries and cook elaborate dinners. I’d write little notes and stick them on the fridge. I’d take out the garbage. I’d water the plants. I’d pick up Ethan from school and walk him home or to a café or park, and most days I’d supervise while he did homework or read but sometimes we’d play games we invented or collaborate on a story. And I’d feel I was contributing not just to the household but to the world’s sense of what was possible. Meanwhile, I’d finish my Berryman book, then write another, and another.

  “Anyway,” I said to Laura, “I’ve gone on way too long about myself.” Night had fallen suddenly, without my noticing. No lights were on inside the condo, but there was enough light from the moon and/or the city to illuminate our portion of the room. “What’s new with you? How’s Dan?”

  “Dan’s great! You guys should meet. You’d like him. He’s a big Bulls fan.”

  “That’s all I need to hear.”

  “And he likes Woolf.”

  “Hey!” Laura loved Woolf. We’d fallen in love with her together.

  We sat for a moment watching moonlight on the river, then “Can I tell you something?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “A few days ago I told him I love him.”

  Maybe it was partly the whiskey but I felt tears welling in my eyes. “And?”

  “He told me he loves me, too!”

  I told Laura that was amazing. Nothing was better than being in love, I said, and how could she disagree?

  * * *

  —

  It was spring, 1940, and John Berryman found himself once again all alone. Beryl’s visit to New York had not gone well. They’d fought. Beryl had threatened to leave him. The war in Europe hung over all they did. Back in England, Beryl wrote him a series of letters in which she enumerated their essential differences: she was active, he was passive; she was an optimist, he was a pessimist; she needed people, he needed solitude. Of course, she still loved him more than ever. What exactly was she trying to say?

  Late that summer he began teaching literature at Wayne University in Detroit. He had 131 students across four classes and spent thirteen hours a week in the classroom. “I am as busy as death,” he wrote his mother. “Wayne will leave me in the hospital shortly.” He’d chosen Wayne over Columbia because Wayne offered him more money, which meant he could afford to pay for Beryl to rejoin him in A
merica sooner. The Battle of Britain had broken out, however, and Beryl told him she’d remain in England for as long as she could be of service to her country. She was training to become an Air Raid Precautions warden, dusting off her German and Italian. Berryman was stuck. “Disfigurement is general,” he wrote.

  By day he drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and taught and graded papers and met with students. By night he took long walks and visited bars. He went days at a time without eating a real meal; he went from gaunt to gaunter. He had a few flings, but they meant nothing to him. He almost never spoke to his fellow professors. “It is mainly the fatigue, and the terrible sense of waste I have, that makes me a spectre and a sad spectre,” he wrote. In December, after four straight days of grading, he collapsed. The diagnosis: “nervous exhaustion.” Try reading Dickens before bed, the doctor wrote.

  The Luftwaffe dropped bombs on London for fifty-seven consecutive nights. Air raid sirens echoed through the city. Smoke rose from the East End, obscuring St. Paul’s Cathedral. Almost twenty thousand civilians were killed, many in deliberate acts of terror. Beryl was tasked with administering first aid to injured victims, as well as with helping to recover bodies. During calmer moments she patrolled the streets to make sure no one was violating the blackout. Hurricanes and Spitfires roared above her. She wrote Berryman about the sky: “Still light out at 11 with our double summer-time…dirty blue, and dusty pink; slate clouds, white gold distance where the sun had sunk, silhouetted purplish trees and fantastic searchlights dazzling the rising stars.”

  His second semester played out much like the first. Class prep, classes, grading, student meetings. Late-night walks, poems begun and abandoned. “Violent headaches, insomnia, fatigue.” Collapse. A new diagnosis: epilepsy. That made Berryman feel a bit better. He started a poem about death and destruction and “heartbreak as familiar as the heart is strange.” He felt himself receding into the background again. When the phone rang he’d pick it up and slam it down, over and over again until the caller hung up. “I have been reading some notes by my dead self,” he wrote in his journal. “Of course it is not dead, I am depressed to say.” Not long after his best friend died of cancer Berryman got a dead-end teaching appointment at Harvard that left him no time to write. He lived with his brother and his brother’s fiancée in a run-down apartment near Harvard Square. If you pulled the blinds shut, his brother would later write, “you could look out through the walls.” Berryman taught, graded, met with students. His brother’s fiancée became his brother’s wife. “I hope they will be happy,” he wrote in his journal. “So much works against happiness now. For B. and me I see nothing—whatever might be is too long in coming.” Nine days later he was more optimistic: “I work and postpone my disappointments, delay my terrors—if she comes, I think forever. If not, they come and they will be more than I can bear.” Beryl never came.

  The final chapter of the Berryman-Beryl story is written in unsent letters. I found nine in the University of Minnesota archives, some handwritten, others typed, ranging from two to eight pages in length, the first one dated January 9, 1941, the last August 9, 1942. All of Berryman’s longing and self-loathing and generosity and self-delusion and excuse making and brilliance seemed distilled in these letters, elusive artifacts that inhabited some hazy territory between journal entries and letters mailed and received. “Dearest Angel,” they begin, or “Dearest Little Angel,” or “Dearest adorable blessed little Angel”—as if Beryl were a denizen of another realm. “It is impossible for me to live without you—without you is alone, is to be worthless and ill and empty and without faith or strength for anything, is not to exist or to exist only as a wound exists, is to be sorrowful and insane and angry.” He was always “insanely busy,” always sick, never had enough time for his poetry. His memories of good times he’d had with Beryl only increased his sense of detachment from her. “You are in my mind constantly.” Meanwhile, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, America was at war, the world was disintegrating every second. “We picked, you and I, in history,” Berryman wrote, “a poor scene for our love; that it continues at all is a miracle.” There were moments of hope, of happiness even, but it was best, Berryman argued, not to write about these moments, lest they vaporize in their articulation. “When you come the actual life begins.” Words not quite addressed to no one.

  When I held those unsent letters on my last day in the reading room, in the company of twelve or fifteen other researchers, I felt more acutely than at any other point during my project a sense of the onrushing moment-to-moment reality of Berryman’s life as he lived it. If he had sent those letters, I couldn’t help thinking, he and Beryl may well have gotten married, and if he and Beryl had gotten married, he never would have had the affair with Chris, never would have started seeing Dr. Shea, never would have written—though of course this can’t be proven—the Dream Songs that in large part emerged from those sessions. And what then? And what then? And what after that? When I’d first come across the Beryl correspondence, I barely remembered her from the biography I’d read; she had been one in a seemingly endless stream of women that flowed through Berryman’s life. Now, though, after a few days with her, she seemed like the key to his artistic development, the hinge on which his life turned. More than that, she was clearly an extraordinary person. Her writing was unfailingly lucid and direct, with moments of virtuosity. Even through the war she remained alert to moments of tenderness and beauty. And she seemed so good: honest and kind and shrewd and passionate and patient almost to a fault. She deserved posterity, I felt, as much as Berryman, whom she loved so well.

  Eventually her concern and annoyance and anger resolved into resignation. Her letters became less frequent, then stopped. She quit volunteering for the Air Raid Precautions to take a job working for the Foreign Office, then quit that job for one with the BBC. In February she wrote Berryman a letter effectively breaking off the engagement: “I feel and know now that our happinesses do not lie in each other’s hands.” Taking a page from him, she didn’t send it. Then, in July, she returned to the letter, framed it with a few further thoughts in the same vein—“I don’t think I shall fall in love again. I don’t particularly want to”—and mailed it.

  On the one hand, Berryman was devastated. “I was in a heart- and brain- and body-stupor of grief and desperation unspeakable,” he wrote in his penultimate unsent letter. On the other hand, now he was free to ask Eileen Mulligan, an aspiring psychiatrist, to marry him. Eileen was friends with a college friend of Berryman’s. He’d been dating her for the past year and a half. He’d wooed her on long late-night walks through Manhattan during which he’d talked about art and the death of poetry and his own shameful lack of accomplishment and his potential to write great things. He showed her his poems and she liked them. She liked his smile. They went to movies at the Forty-second Street Apollo. They danced the boogie-woogie on rooftops. After he went back to Boston to teach, he wrote her long, passionate letters. He sent them. She visited. They called each other “Broom.” His romance with Beryl he dismissed as a “phantom relationship.” Then Beryl ended it and it was the phantom of a phantom.

  While it’s true that Berryman was full of doubt about Eileen for much of the two and a half months of their engagement, and found himself reading Beryl’s last letter over and over, and confessed to feeling “terror” on his wedding day, and later called the October of his marriage “the most racking month of my life,” once it was over he settled into a new kind of contentment. Eileen moved into his Boston apartment, and the newlyweds stayed up late by the fireplace drinking hot chocolate and listening to Mozart. Life would be like that now—warm and rich and sweet and full of beauty. “How I lived unmarried I hardly know,” Berryman wrote in his journal. He felt reborn. Now teaching would cease to be a burden and he would write the great poems he knew he could and Eileen would be his muse and helpmate and partner in all of life’s joys and pains and sorrows. “I am certain that I will be happy
with her,” Berryman wrote Beryl.

  * * *

  —

  At the lockers outside the reading room, a woman I’d noticed earlier—her desk had been a couple of rows in front of mine, and my eyes had found rest from time to time on the nape of her extraordinarily long neck—struck up a conversation. It turned out we’d been sharing the Berryman archives all day; Deirdre was preparing a paper on his Shakespeare scholarship. Wasn’t it sad, I suggested, that Berryman had spent so much time on Shakespeare—years and years of his life, I’d read, much of it on arcane folio analysis—without completing any of the many books he’d planned to write on him?

  “I don’t think it’s sad,” said Deirdre. “He took so much from Shakespeare. Look at the Dream Songs; Shakespeare’s everywhere: in the form—the songs are basically exploded sonnets—the syntax, rhythms, the range of registers. I’d argue that the Dream Songs never get written without those years of Shakespeare study. Plus he made important contributions to the field, he gets cited all the time. And his essays are really good. Have you read them? Have you read ‘Shakespeare at Thirty’?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Read it. It’s a very strange, very revealing essay. Berryman reads Shakespeare as a proto-confessional poet. ‘When Shakespeare says, “Two loves have I,” reader, he is not kidding.’ That’s a quote.”

  “That’s a good quote. I’ll read the essay.”

  “Do. So what’s your story? What are you up to here?”

  “Well”—I felt embarrassed to say it—“I’m considering a new biography.”

  “Of—Berryman?”

  “Who else?” I said.

  “I don’t know, I thought maybe, like, I don’t know, JFK. Don’t you think you’d better read his essays on Shakespeare?”

  “I didn’t realize JFK wrote Shakespeare essays.”