A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Finding her husband in an oxygen tent attached to a respirator with a tangle of intravenous tubes protruding from both arms, Caitlin mournfully pressed her body against his. But in her drunkenness, she neglected to notice the effect of her weight on his lungs. His already labored breathing slowed dangerously, alarming his nurse, who intervened and banished her to an adjacent room. There she waited with Brinnin, whom she blamed for Thomas’s suffering, since he had concocted the slate of professional engagements and projects that eventually overwhelmed the poet. Brinnin foolishly responded by attempting to calm her with whiskey. Becoming increasingly agitated, she flew into a rage and began smashing her head against a window, which would have shattered if it had not been reinforced with mesh wiring. Medical personnel descended on her, and Brinnin backed away. Turning her roiling emotions on them, she ripped a large decorative cross from the wall of the Catholic hospital and swung it fiercely, first at Brinnin and then at the orderly. Now completely unhinged, she wheeled with the crucifix gripped in her hands like a baseball bat, shattering a statue of the Virgin Mary before the orderly could wrestle her to the ground, blood filling her mouth and flowing from his hand where she had ground her teeth. Once Caitlin was safely removed from the scene in a straitjacket and rushed to a psychiatric unit, Thomas’s mistress, Liz Reitell, whose presence Caitlin was unaware of, quietly crept back to his bedside where she resumed her vigil beside the wheezing patient.20 Amazingly, Reitell had managed to avoid the entire frothing melee—a violent blasphemy in this otherwise somber Catholic setting—without a scratch.

  Caitlin’s attack on Brinnin was motivated by her contention that the agent was overzealous and that the promotional engine responsible for building Thomas up had instead torn him down. Interestingly, among all the promoters of literary talent at the time, no one was more acutely aware of Thomas’s star power than Engle. The lasting effects of Thomas’s visit on the Workshop were visible more than a decade after he tore through Iowa City like a cyclone. Workshop graduate Edmund Skellings, for example, was acutely aware that the oratorical brilliance of Thomas had elevated his celebrity status to rock star proportions. He thus launched his own tour of American universities as “the American Dylan Thomas,” according to the caption of a giant poster of the poet leaning earnestly into a microphone, striking the unmistakable pose of a charismatic lead singer of a band. Along with the poster, the standard packet of promotional materials advertising Skellings’s “Electric Poetry” tour included copies of a descriptive pamphlet bearing Engle’s blurb from the Miami Herald in bold letters at the top, heralding the act as “A new direction for poetry itself.” Through Engle’s marketing connections with the commercial advertising industry, and with Thomas as inspiration, Workshop talent was clearly being packaged and sold as show business. “Edmund Skellings calls his unique performance ‘lyric theatre,’ and one critic has called it ‘spoken singing,’ ” according to the pamphlet. “But whatever one names it, this complex blend of rock and rhyme, humor, blues and psychedelics is a totally fresh exploration of how meaning happens in mind and mouth,” it continued, leaving no movement in popular contemporary music unmentioned. Marketed as “acted poetry with original lyrics in the conventional beat patterns of popular song,” Skellings’s show was performed in scenes drawing from the tradition of live theater. A small vinyl 45-sized record under the label “Professional Associates Dania, Florida” is folded in with the poster and flyers with a playlist of his numbers, “Testing, The Lecture, Down in the Ghetto, Nowno.”21

  Thomas’s impact on mass culture has not been replicated since, notwithstanding the efforts of Skellings, the self-described “American Dylan Thomas.” Based on his Collected Poems, 1934–1952, Thomas was arguably the era’s greatest living poet, perhaps best known for his lyrical masterpiece, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” a poem that eerily foreshadowed his own passing. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is directly addressed to his father but also functions as Thomas’s vow to live out his final days in bold defiance. Indeed, “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight” is a prophetic self-description.22 With the radio drama Under Milk Wood, which was later produced as a play, under way in New York City, Thomas died soaring at the height of his powers. By 1952, critics generally agreed with the proclamation by Philip Toynbee of the Observer declaring him “the greatest living poet in the English language.”23

  The Passing of the Torch

  When it came to defending the memory of Dylan Thomas no one was more ferocious than poetry Workshop faculty member John Berryman. In fall of 1953, Lowell had been kind enough to allow several literati from Iowa City who were not enrolled students to attend his seminar. These impeccably dressed urbane amateurs regarded verse as an affectation or fine verbal ornament to life, vestiges of the rhymer clubs and literary cliques of the nineteenth century who typically churned out third-rate poetry to be read at their own group events with no ambition for publication or professionalization. Many were fans of Lowell’s and were avid readers of Lord Weary’s Castle. (Berryman’s own accolades would mount in the coming years, reaching a zenith with a National Book Award in 1969 for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.) Lowell had invited these dilettantes to class in part because they could always be counted on to praise his work and lend credibility to his status. So when they appeared in Berryman’s class the following semester, in the winter of 1954, showing themselves as Lowell groupies by clutching their well-thumbed copies of Lord Weary’s Castle to their chests, they faced less welcoming circumstances.

  The poetry these affluent citizens wrote stayed within their own circle and thus uniformly received a self-congratulatory reception. Lowell only occasionally asked his non-enrolled followers to submit their work for the class’s criticism, which was politely vapid, much like the poetry itself, as Philip Levine recalled. When Berryman demanded a poem from one of the group, the poet received a brutal initiation into the workshop method. Berryman began politely enough, reading the poem, which commemorated the late Dylan Thomas, and asking the class for feedback. When he heard nothing, he delivered his own, refusing to treat the poem with kid gloves. Incensed, he lit into the piece. “No, no,” he said shaking his head violently, “it’s not that it’s not poetry. I wasn’t expecting poetry,” reflexively insulting the writer. A deeper moral principle had been violated, one that bore directly on the memory of the revered Thomas, whose manner of death might present the subject of a moving elegy in the right hands, but to Berryman was not to be treated with fictional flights of fancy. In this case, the poet had cast the doctors as the villains for losing Thomas, because they had subordinated his well-being to their own financial profit. Berryman, who had been extremely close to Thomas, raged at this conceit, charging, “it’s not true, absolutely untrue, unobserved, the cheapest twaddle.”24

  Poets, of course, have artistic license just as fiction writers do, to recreate and recast events to evoke deeper truths otherwise hidden by strict adherence to the objective reportorial facts. Anne Sexton—who attended John Holmes’s poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education with Robert Lowell (the two drove together and parked in the loading zone in honor of their ritual visit to the bars after each session)—was one of many poets adamant that the “confessional school” of poetry, which she had helped establish along with Snodgrass’s aching portrayal of his separation from his daughter in Heart’s Needle, had such latitude. “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward,” she insisted, was not autobiographical; instead it featured a created dramatic identity as its voice and central figure. But Berryman, since the writing in this case was so far below qualifying as poetry, and since it so grossly solicited the memory of Thomas as an object of sentimentality, felt he was in the presence of an intolerable lie that threatened nothing less than the historical memory of Dylan and his generation of great poets.

  He went on with his diatribe to set the record straight, emphasizing that the doctors who worked on Thomas “did not work for money.” Although he did allo
w that the medical personnel “did not know who the man was, that he was a remarkable spirit,” he insisted that their humanity drove them because “They knew only that he was too young to die, and so they worked to save him, and, failing, wept,” as Levine observed.25 Although Berryman did not name Thomas during his rant, Levine later confirmed him as the tragic figure of the poem who was too young to die. What drove Berryman into a tirade was the thought of Thomas being made a spectacle for the sake of saccharine third-rate poetry written by non-enrolled Lowell fans. Berryman, however, missed the poem’s indictment of the American medical industry, operating according to a free market model in which doctors are rewarded financially for their work. The underlying assertion of the piece, hidden from Berryman’s perspective, was that under the socialized medical care of Thomas’s native Wales, with its presumably more compassionate doctors driven to serve humanity for its own sake, the poet might have survived. As seen by Thomas’s own fierce defense of socialized medicine earlier with the doctor’s wife, the topic was prominent in the culture, and he harbored passionate convictions about it. So it was a fashionable subject to superimpose on the circumstance of Thomas’s death, but it became intolerably pretentious in the poem when overlaid with dripping sentimentality. Berryman’s diatribe dispatched the guilty party, visibly shaken, from the room. Emotion pouring through him—the thought of such mistreatment of Thomas’s memory in the popular mind struck him as profoundly toxic—Berryman was not able to continue, and thus dismissed the rest of the silent and stunned class.

  The exclusivity of the program was never so bluntly applied as under Berryman’s direction. This points to the changing climate at Iowa from its early days of communal cohesion, as recalled by Robert Penn Warren. The spring of 1941, the “most protracted” of his visits in Iowa City, was a time notable for “the pervasive and communal literary sense . . . the interpenetration of interests among faculty (or a number of faculty) and students.” He was struck by “how people of basically different interests and trainings could find a common ground, fruitful for all. I am sure most of those people never had found anything like that before or ever since,” Warren remarked, politely qualifying his praise in his next comment. “It is only natural that I should, over the years, have wondered if this atmosphere could survive the great public success and enormous size of the school.”26

  Frances Jackson, a disgruntled Workshop alumna, recalled a different culture in the next generation, which she believed suffered because “The workshop is just too big.” Citing competition among students for valuable funding and fellowships, and the unjust system of playing favorites, she complained: “Those with financial aid are always in the limelight, are in ‘The Hall’ all day, meet the faculty, become friends with them,” a scenario that put them on the inside track toward long- and short-term financial gain. “Then when it comes time for teaching jobs, more fellowships, grants, awards, etc. they are naturally the ones who get them,” she observed, her frustration with her own stalled career apparent. “Iowa can do a whole lot for the chosen few. In fact, because it is so large” (at the time, enrollment reached sixty), “I don’t think it can do as much for the average student.” In this urbane and elite culture, “To be a dominant figure at Iowa it would also help to be an articulate, intellectual, verbal person from New York City. . . . No one would ever guess it was in the Midwest by the tone that is set by New Yorkers. They are witty and verbally flashy and others dim by comparison.”27

  Of course this clashes with Warren’s utopic portrait of the program as a rustic idyll. He loved the sense of community at the time of his visit, mainly because he was already a full-blown literary celebrity when he arrived, and thus had students and faculty fawning over him. In his view, the program was intimate, but he also worried it had grown too large for its own good. Despite such a liability, he alluded to how “the record of achievement stands to be read” in the proliferation of student and faculty publications as testimony to the program’s success. Berryman and Lowell, essentially running the Workshop in Engle’s absence on a fund-raising trip to the East Coast, represented a key transition toward the cosmopolitan character of the program, and its status as a clearinghouse of dominant literary minds largely transplanted from more diverse urban locations.

  Thomas’s visit to Iowa City and Berryman’s subsequent defense of his memory were watershed moments reflecting the increasing cosmopolitan sophistication of the Workshop culture. Like Thomas, Berryman came to Iowa when his career was on the rise, but his personal life was in shambles. Thomas’s death had raised demons for Berryman that he grappled with his entire life. They were perhaps never more visible than during his semester teaching at the Workshop, in the winter of 1954, just one year after Thomas’s death. Berryman had been undergoing psychotherapy for six years before his arrival in Iowa City, a time of protracted anguish he was happy to escape through full immersion in the world of poetry on the remote Iowa prairie. He originally underwent the treatment, a battery of orthodox Freudian sessions of the “talking cure,” to appease his wife after she discovered he was having an affair. The affair foreshadowed his second marriage, more than ten years later, to a woman twenty-five years his junior. These personal circumstances mitigated Berryman’s professional life. Professionally, he was developing from a well-known to a world-class poet while tasting the personal liberation of psychological and geographical distance from his disastrous marriage.

  Berryman’s fierce stand on behalf of Thomas at the poetry Workshop was a testimonial to the life of arguably the greatest poet of the postwar generation, a fiery validation of the poet’s memory bearing the standard of excellence and seriousness, which Lowell’s followers pretentiously believed they could dabble in. Poets and poetry mattered more than mere diversion, and the project of producing professionals would be a demanding endeavor only for the fully committed. Further, Berryman’s deep sense of identification with Thomas derived from the uncanny similarity of their dual personae, of the public professional poet and the private romantic wild man. Berryman carried the torch of the mad poet in Iowa City, as his life there pivoted between brilliant, uncompromising teaching and savage altercations with both faculty and students alike.

  “Lowell left in January and Berryman came,” as the future poet laureate Levine identified the spark that ignited his career. “Jesus, did the whole thing tone up. I was working well and hard, and he—though he was tough on me—was very encouraging.”28 Levine was not always comfortable with Berryman’s methods, however. He remembered “Berryman being tough on one of my poems, a poem that showed I was growing, though not a very good poem.” Then “Don Petersen came to my defense, making the point that the poem was evidence of real talent and lots of hard work and development, and that’s what should have been said FIRST. Then rip it apart for what was wrong.”29 Berryman notoriously lacked such tact. A violent verbal altercation he had with Marguerite Young at a local bar ended with his arrest at his apartment, landing him in jail. Headlines in the papers the next day scandalized the university’s administration, prompting his immediate removal from the Workshop.

  The High Ones Do Not Go Gentle

  Berryman’s volatility at Iowa derived from the pain of losing “the high ones,” the great poetic minds of his generation who “die, die. They die,” as he wrote in The Dream Songs.30 Homage and elegy were sacred and fiery forms to him at the time, informing his vitriolic rejection of the Lowell follower’s poem on the death of Dylan Thomas. Thomas’s reinvention of the elegy as a modern poetic form appealed to Berryman, who worked his entire career to master the art of homage in his own writing. Berryman reserved special admiration for Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” proclaiming it “one of the profoundest elegies” written in English.31 The year of Thomas’s death, in 1953, Berryman had published his first major work, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which established him as a master of the elegiac lyric form. When asked in one interview why he wrote poetry, he said it was �
�For the dead whom thou didst love,” trusting that they will read it, “for they return as posterity,” citing a dialogue from Johann Georg Hamann quoted in Kier-kegaard.32 In Berryman’s hand, elegy was an eclectic and jagged concoction of grief, anger, and humor deeply influenced by the strange and moving music of Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake. Berryman was also an expert in Shakespeare, regularly demanding his students revisit specific plays in order to eradicate the palaver from their style. With the gruff confidence of a physician prescribing the perfect medicine, he told Levine on one occasion to reread Macbeth as a model for honing the technique and tone of his verse.

  Berryman’s The Dream Songs, published in 1969, points to the concurrence of acute psychological turmoil and a surge of creative power that began to overwhelm him a decade earlier in Iowa. “Dream Song 36” is an elegy to William Faulkner, but derives from the mourning of Berryman’s own father, whose passing haunted him his entire life, and clearly foreshadowed his own death. Like his father, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Clear Water Island in 1926, Berryman also took his own life, forty-six years later. Only twelve at the time of his father’s suicide, Berryman turned the demons of this crushing tragedy into poetry. Unlike Anne Sexton, whose poetry enabled her to face her dark thoughts directly and exert some degree of emotional control over them, Berryman did not grapple with depression by aestheticizing the circumstances of his own death.

  Berryman went in another direction with his darkness, focusing less on dialoging with the forces of suicide and instead on eulogizing the literary luminaries who were his contemporaries and, in several instances, close friends. Elegy in Berryman’s hands ran counter to maudlin mourning and sentimentality, for a richer pragmatic sensibility that he certainly shared with Sexton. Berryman’s poetic homage to Faulkner in “Dream Song 36” revealed the tragic self-immolation of the creative mind pervasive in a culture that believed “It’s better to burn out/ Than to fade away,” as expressed in the lyrics of Neil Young. Frost, Williams, and Eliot follow in “Dream Song 36,” which takes the shape of a poetic memorial to the great minds of his generation. He mourns the passing of Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and Louis MacNeice, a list that finally gives way to his personal intimates, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, the latter of whom achieved fame for imagining his own demise in a World War II bomber aircraft in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The gunner’s metaphorical birth is figured as an awakening “to black flack and the nightmare flares” that destroy him and lead to the cold, perfunctory processing of his remains. “When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose,” the voice reports from the afterlife with a knowing frankness about the hard coldness of the passage into death.