After thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman (DQR Studies in Literature)

“After thirty Falls” New Essays on John Berryman

38 DQR

STUDIES IN LITERATURE

Series Editors C.C. Barfoot - A.J. Hoenselaars W.M. Verhoeven

“After thirty Falls” New Essays

on John Berryman

Edited by Philip Coleman Philip McGowan

With a Preface by Richard J. Kelly

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

For Kate Donahue Berryman & Richard J. Kelly

Cover image: The manuscript image incorporated in the cover of this book is a facsimile of a handwritten draft of John Berryman’s Dream Song 281, which provides the title for the collection. The editors acknowledge the assistance of Barbara Bezat and Ahn Na Brodie of the University of Minnesota Libraries for helping to make this image available in electronic format. Permission to reproduce it here has been granted by Kate Donahue Berryman and the Manuscripts Division of the University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2219-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

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Note on Abbreviations

ix

Preface Richard J. Kelly

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Introduction Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan

1

The Black Book: John Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem Matthew Boswell

11

“Continuity with lovers dead”: Berryman, Lowell, and the Twentieth-Century American Sonnet Alex Runchman

29

The Written and the Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet Page Richards

45

Encountering Henry: A Roundtable on Dream Song 1 Ron Callan Justin Quinn Edward Clarke Kit Fryatt

65 71 75 81

Form and Discontent: The Prosody of The Dream Songs Peter Denman

87

“Dramatizing the dreadful”: Affective Postures in The Dream Songs Anthony Caleshu 101

vi Allusions, Etc.: Berryman, Catullus, Sappho Michael Hinds

121

“He lived like a rat”: The Trickster in The Dream Songs Stephen Matterson

141

“One grand exception”: The Dream Songs as Theodicy? Brendan Cooper

155

The Life of Berryman’s Christ Tom Rogers

173

“We write verse with our ears”: Berryman’s Music Maria Johnston

191

John Berryman and Shakespearean Autobiography Peter Maber

209

Love & Fame and the Self in Society Philip Coleman

225

John Berryman and the Writing of Silence Philip McGowan

241

After Berryman: Four Poets Lavinia Greenlaw Brendan Kennelly Maura Dooley Harry Clifton

258 259 261 262

Notes on Contributors

265

Index

271

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has its basis in a symposium that was held at Trinity College Dublin in January 2002 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of John Berryman’s death. For their assistance in making that event possible, the editors wish to thank Professor Nicholas Grene, former Head of Department in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Professor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, former Dean of Arts (Letters), Trinity College Dublin, and the Irish Association for American Studies, whose support for the event was crucial. The editors would also like to take this opportunity to record the assistance of those people who helped to make the symposium so memorable, whether they presented papers, chaired sessions, contributed ideas from the floor, or provided background assistance or support, and especially the following: Gerald Dawe, John Devitt, Eldrid Herrington, Benjamin Keatinge, Stephen Matterson, Sean Ryder, and Andrew Taylor. We are also grateful to Dennis O’Driscoll, who provided a photograph of Berryman that was used on the symposium poster, and to the Audio-Visual and Security staff of the Arts Building in Trinity College Dublin, who ensured that the event ran smoothly from start to finish. “After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman has two dedicatees: Kate Donahue Berryman, in recognition of the generosity she has shown to Berryman scholars over the past three decades and more, and for granting permission to use unpublished archival material in this volume; and Richard J. Kelly, whose invaluable work on Berryman is described in the Preface to this volume and acknowledged, implicitly and explicitly, by each of the contributors in their essays. A special word of thanks goes to Cedric Barfoot, for his scrupulous reading, and re-reading, of the manuscript as it has been prepared for publication, and to Marieke Schilling of Rodopi, who provided efficient and generous help at every stage of the book’s development. For their patience during the book’s somewhat protracted compilation and preparation, a word of thanks is also due to the individual

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contributors, especially those who came on board in the later stages of its progress. Seamus Heaney provided valuable encouragement at a crucial stage in this book’s development, for which the editors are extremely grateful. The cover image is a facsimile of a handwritten draft of Berryman’s Dream Song 281, the third stanza of which provides the title for this collection. The editors acknowledge the assistance of Barbara Bezat and Ahn Na Brodie of the University of Minnesota Libraries for helping to make this image available in electronic format. Permission to use it has been granted by Kate Donahue Berryman and the Manuscripts Division of the University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota. For their assistance in working with unpublished archival materials in many of the contributions to this collection, the editors and the individual contributors concerned are grateful to Barbara Bezat and Alan K. Lathrop, who have played a major role over a number of years in making Berryman scholarship not only possible but enjoyable. Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem “Snow Line” is reprinted here with the author’s permission from A World Where News Travelled Slowly © Faber and Faber (1997). Permission to quote from John Berryman’s work in this collection has been granted by Kate Donahue Berryman, executrix of the John Berryman Estate.

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from John Berryman’s poetry are from the following editions: Collected Poems 1937-1971, ed. Charles Thornbury, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989, and The Dream Songs, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. References to Berryman’s Collected Poems are abbreviated CP throughout the collection, whereas individual Dream Songs are referred to by Song number. All other references are explained in the footnotes accompanying individual contributions.

PREFACE RICHARD J. KELLY

What a pleasure to have a new collection of essays on John Berryman, most by a younger generation of scholars – and from the other side of the pond, as it were. Having immersed myself in the fertile waters of Berryman scholarship since the early Seventies, I have had the privilege to observe, and be part of, the ebb and flow of over thirty years of work on a man I believe will be remembered by future generations as one of the most notable and enduring poets of his time. This fine book gives heart to that belief. Writing a Preface to such a collection has afforded me the rare opportunity to ruminate on my own “thirty Falls” and more of involvement with Berryman scholarship. Looking back, the singular theme that seems to run through these years, in my case, is simply that one thing leads to another. Certainly, I did not set out to be involved with Berryman scholarship for three decades. It really began for me several years earlier, in the mid-Sixties, as a student of Berryman’s at the University of Minnesota. Unlike any other teacher I have ever had, he was, by the force of his enthusiasm, able to transmit the importance and relevance of literature to our lives, and by the intensity of his personal struggles, the serious enterprise that life is. Although he usually brought with him to class a small number of 3 x 5 inch note cards, he rarely referred to them. He liked, instead, to read key passages from the works we were studying – these were Humanities courses, ranging across the great works of Western literature from The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote and Shakespeare to Job, in the King James version, and Martin Luther – and then to discuss them with us, testing us to see if we felt their implications for our own lives. Smoking and pacing in front of the class, he gave these sessions everything he had, his shirt and brow

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often drenched with sweat at the end of them. Once, for emphasis, he threw a folding chair off the dais. More than once, our discussion became so impassioned he would reluctantly say “that’s enough for today” and break off early. I remember after one of these classes having to go home and lie down for a while. Another time, while reading a passage from Matthew’s Gospel, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”, he broke down and wept openly and unashamedly. Clearly, such books were not to be taken lightly. After having finished my degrees at Minnesota, I was fortunate to find a position in the University Libraries, where I was able to maintain some contact with Berryman, and to go on attending many of his readings and lectures. In paying close attention to his growing output of poetry and prose, as well, it occurred to me that it might be useful to compile a checklist of writings by and about him, and when I broached the topic with him, he kindly offered to be of whatever assistance he could. He did, in fact, provide helpful information and advice on several occasions over the ensuing months. Ever an avid library user, the last time I saw him was the day before his death, when I found him in the Reference Room of Wilson Library, engrossed in some religious tome: a volume of James Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, as I recall. We talked briefly and, unaware that anything was amiss, I left him to his reading. The next morning brought the terrible news of his death. John Berryman: A Checklist, published by Scarecrow Press, appeared later that year under wholly different circumstances than I had imagined, with a moving Foreword, “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of The Dream Songs” by his friend, the poet William Meredith and a heartfelt Introduction, “The Epistemology of Loss” by another of John’s students, Michael Berryhill. While compiling the Checklist, I learned that another young Berryman scholar, Ernest Stefanik, was working on a descriptive bibliography of Berryman’s work (it was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1974) and we began to correspond. Soon, Ernest hatched the idea of publishing a journal devoted to Berryman from his home in Derry, Pennsylvania, with the help of his wife, Cis, and asked me to be a contributing editor. It was, Ernest acknowledged in a letter of 15 September 1974, a “risky venture, with failure threatening at every turn”, but he hoped that “with the company of two Berryman fanatics, it might have a chance to succeed”.

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The first issue of John Berryman Studies, in which it is described as “a quarterly journal devoted to research-based articles and essays on the writings of John Berryman and other middle generation poets”, appeared in January 1975. It would also publish a limited amount of poetry. Produced by multilith, the pages 7½ x 8 inches in size, and the gathering stapled with the wrapper, the journal was clearly a labour of love published out of the Stefaniks’ home/office. An annual subscription was $5.00, with single issues available for $1.50. Number One had a Contents page, listing article titles and authors, but listed no page numbers (these began to appear in the second issue). In an auspicious beginning, the inaugural issue included solicited articles by Gary Q. Arpin (who would later join me as a contributing editor and publish two monographs on Berryman), J.M. Linebarger (author of the first published full-length study of Berryman), budding Berryman scholars Ann Hayes, Arthur Oberg and Michael Pavlovcak, poems by Samuel Hazo and William Heyen, and a review of Linebarger’s book by Ernest. It was inspiring for all of us to see JBS well launched and a pleasure for me, personally, to be involved, soliciting manuscripts, offering opinions and suggestions as submissions came in, and being in contact with a surprising number of scholars with similar enthusiasms. The list of those writers whose work appeared in this and subsequent issues is a virtual roll call of scholars who would go on to make substantial contributions to Berryman studies in the years ahead: John Haffenden, Peter Stitt, Jack Barbera, Laurence Liberman, Anne B. Warner, Larry Vonalt, Charles Thornbury, Kathe Davis Finney, Charles Molesworth, Susan G. Berndt, Jo Brans, and Linda Welscheimer Wagner. Also of special interest among the essays to appear were three by Japanese scholars Yuichi Hashimoto (Hokkai Gakuen University in Sapporo), Toshikazu Niikura (Meiji Gakuin University) and Shozo Tokunaga (Waco University), and one by the Italian scholar Sergio Perosa (Universita degli Studi di Venezia). Two of the issues were devoted to symposia. The first (Number 4), which I edited, was on Berryman’s “First Dream Song”, with contributions by Gary Q. Arpin, Jo Brans, Charles Molesworth, Ernest Stefanik, Jr., and Larry Vonalt. The second (Number 9), edited by Arpin, was on the “Last Dream Song”, with contributions by Anne B. Warner, Susan G. Berndt, Charles Thornbury, Kathe Davis Finney, A.J. Alberti and Peter Stitt. Number 8, a special poetry issue edited by Ernest and Cis, which I introduced, was a collection of poems by

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fifty poets, gathered in Berryman’s honor, with an Afterword by Gary Q. Arpin. This issue was simultaneously published as a monograph, entitled Once in a Sycamore. Filling out the issues, at intervals, Ernest and I, later joined by John Haffenden, provided checklists of new scholarship as well as of the many posthumous publications of Berryman’s that continued to appear. By 1977, however, Ernest’s concerns about JBS being a “risky venture” were being realized. The rising cost of print, of envelopes, of postage, and the need to continue, for the most part, to solicit submissions seemed to dictate the need for a change. Finally, after three years and eleven issues (the ninth was a double issue), the board of Rook Press, which the Stefaniks had formed to publish another journal, Thistle, as well as some poetry broadsides, voted to “suspend, not terminate” publication of JBS and concentrate on publications “that can pay their own way”. Despite a strong collective desire to do so, the journal was, alas, never revived. Still, it had been a heroic effort on the Stefaniks’ part and JBS had succeeded both in increasing interest in Berryman and encouraging scholarship in the early years following his death. Another milestone in Berryman scholarship, and one which would greatly affect the number of scholars working on the poet, occurred a year later, in 1978, with the acquisition by the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Manuscripts Division of the poet’s manuscripts and papers from his widow, Kate Berryman. Several years earlier, it had been my privilege, in part through my growing friendship with Kate, to be involved with placing the collection on deposit (pending a later sale) with the University Libraries, and at that time to curate an exhibit highlighting some of the more interesting documents. While limited access had previously been made available for a few scholars, with Kate’s permission, through Professor and Curator of the Manuscripts Division, Alan K. Lathrop, once the collection had been acquired by the University Libraries, its availability could be made more widely known, and many more researchers could apply to use it. As a result, Berryman scholarship began to flourish. Most of the scholars who went on to do substantial work on Berryman came, of course, to Minnesota to work with the manuscripts and I had the pleasure of getting to know many of them. In the same vein, in 1990, two other important Berryman collections were added to the University Libraries that would generate further research. The first was a remarkable gathering of more than

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seven-hundred letters written by Berryman to his mother over his lifetime. The letters had also been placed on deposit in the Libraries by Kate Berryman, following the death of the poet’s mother, Martha “Jill Angel” Berryman, in 1976. John and Kate had moved the elder Mrs. Berryman from Washington, D.C. to an apartment just down the block from their house in Minneapolis, in 1971, less than six months before his death. Lonely and shaken by her son’s suicide, she remained steadfast in her belief in his genius, telling me on two occasions that she was certain he had been someone special from his boyhood on. Because of the voluminous nature of the correspondence and because the emotional bond between mother and son was so consequential for his life and work, I thought the letters formed a natural unit, deserving of undiluted attention. Berryman’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, however, declined interest in publishing them. But, finally, after substantial editing of the letters, it was my good luck to interest an excellent and resourceful editor, Kathleen M. Anderson at W.W. Norton, in my proposal to publish a selection of them. This selection of letters – 228 of John’s to her, along with 19 of Jill’s to him – was published in 1988 as We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother to very gratifying reviews. In editing the letters, it was of course essential to draw on the recollections of many people in the Berryman circle. First and most crucial of all, Kate Berryman again gave me her complete cooperation and assistance at every turn, filling in some of the mysterious references made by mother and son. Another invaluable source of help came when I traveled to Bronxville, New York, to meet with Robert Jefferson Berryman, the poet’s younger brother and at one time an editor at Time magazine, who graciously spent a day sharing his thoughts and memories of both John and their mother with me and on numerous other occasions helpfully responded to my letter and telephone inquiries. I corresponded with Berryman’s first wife, Eileen Simpson, who answered many questions about their years together. Closer to home, again, I met and was befriended by Dr A. Boyd Thomes and his wife Maris (both of whom, you will recall, appear in The Dream Songs), who vividly called up memories of their friendship with Berryman during his Minneapolis years. It was Boyd and Maris who aided John in bringing his books to Minneapolis after they had been left in storage in Princeton for a decade.

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I met with E.M. “Milt” Halliday, Berryman’s closest friend at Columbia University, in his Manhattan apartment and was regaled with tales of their academic and amorous (at times competitive, here) adventures. “Milt”, who had gone on to a career as a Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and as a senior editor at American Heritage, had published an affectionate account of their friendship, John Berryman and the Thirties: A Memoir in 1987. Other Berryman scholars, most notably John Haffenden and Charles Thornbury, also helped shed light on murky references in the letters. And, to my delight, I was able to enlist Martha Berryman, John’s eldest daughter, to assist with the proofreading. As all researchers know, the satisfaction of such contacts goes far beyond the project itself. It is, doubtless, one of the things that keeps us at it. Berryman’s personal library of some 3,500 books and journals, also acquired in 1990 by our Rare Books Division from Kate Berryman, has proved to be a valuable complement to the papers. Moreover, it is, just for the volumes alone, a distinguished one in several areas, with an impressive collection of first editions of most of the important British and American poets, presentation copies of works by many of Berryman’s friends and colleagues (Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow, R.P. Blackmur, Edmund Wilson), and his more than 500-volume Shakespeare collection. What makes the library uniquely valuable, though, is the extensive pencil-and-ink record, evidenced throughout the collection, of Berryman’s passionate interaction with the books. Ultimately, in 1999, nearly three decades after first examining and cataloguing the library in the Berryman home, almost exactly as they had been organized at the time of his death, John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue, was published by Peter Lang as a commentary on the poet’s use of the books and as an aid to researchers. (It had not been practical to publish the Catalogue before the library became generally available to researchers.) Happily, several recent researchers who have since arrived in the Berryman archives have made good use of the library, including some of the authors represented in this volume. To celebrate the addition of these two collections (the letters and the personal library) and to honor John Berryman’s life and work, a national conference was organized at the University of Minnesota. As a member of the planning committee – together with Alan Lathrop, Curator of the Manuscripts Division, Michael Dennis Browne, Director of the University’s Creative and Professional Writing

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Program, Charles Thornbury, of St John’s University, Laurie Dechery, of Gustavus Adolphus College, Leslie Denny, the University’s Professional Development Office and Thomas Trow, of the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Office – we solicited papers and, in the end, were fortunate to bring together many of the leading Berryman scholars from around the United States. The three-day conference, held in October 1990, included a stirring keynote address by poet Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman”, and stimulating panels on “Berryman’s Early Writing” (Charles Thornbury, Larry Vonalt, Sharon Bryan), “Berryman’s Scholarship” (Peter Stitt, John Clendenning, Ernest J. Smith), “Berryman’s Middle Work: The Dream Songs” (Kathe Davis, Lea Baechler, Jerold M. Martin), “Berryman and the Tradition” (Paul Mariani, William Heyen, Charlotte H. Beck), “Berryman and Alcoholism” (Lewis Hyde, Roger Forseth, George Wedge), “Berryman and Women” (Christopher Benfey, Katharine Wallingford, Carol Ellis), “Berryman’s Late Work” (Joseph Mancini, Fred D. White, Alan Altimont) and “The Future of Berryman Studies” (Charles Thornbury, Alan Lathrop and myself). There were also readings of some of Berryman’s favorite poems by poets and writers Michael Dennis Browne, Patricia Hampl, Barton Sutter and Ted Wright, an exhibit, music, two films on Berryman, a reading of Berryman’s unpublished one-act play, Cleopatra: A Meditation, nicely-staged and acted by Chuck Nuckles and Linda Bruning of Gustavus Adolphus College and, finally, a performance, by the superb University of Minnesota dancer and choreographer, Maria Cheng, “She Dances Henry Away”, ended the conference with class. It was an emotional three days, not only because it brought together so many outstanding participants, but for the many close friends and relatives, scholars and students, and people from the community who attended. In addition to Kate, Martha and Sarah Berryman, Boyd and Maris Thomes and many other friends, the poet’s brother Robert (Jeff) Berryman came with his wife, Rose. Walking back over the Washington Avenue Bridge to Wilson Library, following Philip Levine’s keynote address, a beautiful tribute to Berryman as a teacher, Jeff said through happy tears how proud he was of his brother and how glad he was that he had come. At a party that night at our house – hosted by my wife Lois, who was there every step of the way during my thirty years of immersion in Berryman – I was talking with Philip Levine in our living room when the inside

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front door suddenly blew open, this windy October night. For some reason I was moved to say “come in, John”, and Philip noted, only half-jokingly (I think) that he nearly fainted. At any rate, John Berryman’s spirit was deeply felt throughout this event. A short time after the conference I was contacted by LeAnn Fields at the University of Michigan Press who, impressed by the conference participants, expressed an interest in publishing a selection of the papers. Alan Lathrop and I agreed to edit the collection. The participants – Philip Levine, Peter Stitt, Charles Thornbury, Charlotte H. Beck, Lea Baechler, Sharon Bryan, Christopher Benfey, Joseph Mancini, Jr, John Clendenning, Jerold M. Martin, Lewis Hyde, George F. Wedge, Roger Forseth, and Alan J. Altimont – polished their submissions, and I wrote an Introduction. Fortunately, with Kate Berryman’s permission, we were also able to include with the essays Berryman’s Cleopatra: A Meditation, written at Cambridge in 1937, with an Introduction and Afterword by Charles Thornbury. Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, the last book of essays on the poet before this one, was published in 1993. It seems clear to me now that it was as much Berryman’s spirit – felt so deeply at the conference – as his poetry and prose that has continued to sustain my interest in him over the years. After these “thirty Falls” (and a few more), he remains both a powerful voice and a vivid presence to me, challenging me to do better whatever it is I might be doing. He and the people and experiences inadequately sketched above, and too many more to mention, have greatly enriched my life, both scholarly and personal, one thing leading to another. Here’s to Berryman scholarship and to new Berryman scholars!

INTRODUCTION PHILIP COLEMAN AND PHILIP MCGOWAN

Following the death of W.B. Yeats in 1939, John Berryman wrote a letter to A.J. Putnam of Macmillan publishers in New York proposing to edit a collection of essays on the Irish poet. In the final paragraph of his covering letter, he said that the collection would be “the best tribute that can be afforded to the greatest poet of this century”; it would, he added, “be a permanently valuable commentary”.1 The collection was never published, but Berryman’s intense lifelong interest in Yeats, and his meeting with him in London in April 1937, in particular, are invariably mentioned in biographies and critical surveys of Yeats’ career.2 Berryman’s early essay on Yeats’ drama, first published in The Columbia Review in 1936,3 is rarely credited by Yeats scholars, but Berryman nonetheless played an important passing role in the public drama of Yeats’ life as a man of letters, the elder statesman of poetry who took the time out to meet “a burning, trivial disciple”4 (as Berryman later put it) at his club in London two years before his death. The event had such an impact on the shape of 1

This unpublished letter to A.J. Putnam, dated 16 April 1939, is contained in the Unpublished Non-fiction Prose file, box 2, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota. 2 See, for example, Terence Brown, The Life of W.B. Yeats, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999, 380, and R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II. The Arch-Poet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 580. Berryman’s description of his meeting with Yeats is given in a letter written to his mother, dated 18 April 1937, which is included in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988, 98-101. 3 See “The Ritual of W.B. Yeats”, in John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 245-52. 4 See “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 323.

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Berryman’s career that thirty years later, leaving Minneapolis with his wife (Kate) and young daughter (Martha) to spend an academic year in Ireland on a Guggenheim Fellowship, his thoughts continually returned to his earlier encounter with the figure he came to see as a “majestic Shade”, as he described him in Dream Song 312. Yeats’ presence, and the American poet’s memory of his meeting with him in 1937, is felt throughout Berryman’s poetry, and especially in The Dream Songs. His large body of work engages with a vast range of named and unnamed “others”, however, and one of the purposes of this collection of essays and reflections is to explore the roles played by some of those figures, from Shakespeare to Kierkegaard, Catullus to Beethoven, in the thematic and structural evolution of Berryman’s oeuvre. “After thirty Falls I rush back to the haunts of Yeats / & others”, he writes in the final stanza of Dream Song 281: with a new book in my briefcase four times too large: all the year I must in terminal debates with me say who is to lives & who to dies before my blessed discharge.

On one level these lines suggest the radical expansiveness of Berryman’s project as a writer, and the largeness of his vision. They also encapsulate his idiosyncratic subversion of conventional linguistic codes and structures, and signal his career-long interrogation of first and last things, origins and endings, questions he believed it was the poet’s primary responsibility to examine. The poet’s responsibilities, however, are not the same as the critic’s. In Dream Song 308, somewhat wryly, Berryman issued “An Instruction to Critics”: My baby chatters. I feel the end is near & strong of my large work, which will appear, and baffle everybody. They’ll seek the strange soul, in rain & mist, whereas they should recall the pretty cousins they kissed, and stick with the sweet switch of the body.

In the Dream Song epigraph he wrote for Berryman’s Sonnets (1966), later collected as Sonnets to Chris (CP 69-129), the speaker says of

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his “a-many songs”: “let boys & girls with these old songs have holiday / if they feel like it” (CP 70). Now, over three decades after Berryman’s death, it could be said that most major critics of American poetry have taken the advice of the speaker in Dream Song 308 a little too much to heart. Berryman’s poetry has not received the same degree of critical attention that has been given to the work of some of his contemporaries, including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. That neglect is being reversed at the present time, as the contributions to this book demonstrate, but the diminishment of his reputation in the time since his death needs to be acknowledged. It is worth stating, indeed, that one of the primary aims of this book is to revivify Berryman criticism, and to refocus critical attention on the work of a poet who played a pivotal role in the development of American poetry and poetics in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s a number of studies of Berryman’s career appeared: by Gary Q. Arpin, J.M. Linebarger, and Joel Conarroe.5 In retrospect, however, the most significant early contributions to Berryman studies were John Haffenden’s Critical Commentary of 1980 and his Life of John Berryman, first published in 1982. In terms of their perennial usefulness to scholars working on the poet, to Haffenden’s essential contributions should be added Richard J. Kelly’s Checklist of Berryman criticism, which first appeared in 1972, and the checklist that appeared as a supplement in an edition of the Literary Research Newsletter in 1982.6 Berryman criticism through the 1980s and 1990s was subdued to say the least. Of course there are many reasons for this – poets go in and out of fashion like anything else – but apart from Joseph Mancini’s incisive The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Strategies in the Poetry of John Berryman, which is now out of print,7 5 Gary Q. Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978; J.M. Linebarger, John Berryman, New York: Twayne, 1974; Joel Conarroe, John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. 6 John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, New York: New York University Press, 1980; The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. Richard J. Kelly, John Berryman: A Checklist, Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972; “John Berryman: A Ten Year Supplemental Checklist”, Literary Research Newsletter, VII/2 and 3 (Spring-Summer 1982), 65-115. 7 Joseph Mancini, Jr., The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Strategies in the Poetry of John Berryman, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987. Two valuable studies which look at Berryman in connection with other writers are James D. Bloom,

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Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan

the poet-critic Michael Hofmann is right when he says that “recently, although The Dream Songs have continued to sell, at least in the States, things have gone rather quiet around Berryman”.8 Occasionally articles and chapters in books have indicated a possible change in direction. Helen Vendler, Thomas Travisano, Paul Giles, and Edward Brunner have all written valuable accounts of Berryman in recent years,9 but generally speaking scholars of American poetry have not yet paid very much attention to Berryman’s work. One important exception to this is Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop’s collection of essays Recovering Berryman, which was published in 1993,10 but as Berryman himself put it in an interview in 1970, in answer to a question about “being cannon fodder [sic] for aspiring young critics and graduate students”: “The professional critics, those who know what the literary, historical, philosophical, and theological score is, have not really gone to work yet, and may not do so for a long time yet.”11 The title of Kelly and Lathrop’s collection indicates the extent to which scholars working in the field two decades after Berryman’s death felt that the poet had essentially gone off the radar, at least as far as a perusal of titles in library catalogues was concerned. Since Recovering Berryman appeared no other collection of essays on the The Stock of Available Reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1984, and Stephen Matterson, Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing, London: Macmillan, 1988. 8 See Hofmann’s Introduction in John Berryman: Poems Selected by Michael Hofmann, London: Faber and Faber, 2004, viii. 9 See Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets, London: Faber and Faber, 1995; Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1999; Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry, Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 10 Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, eds Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 11 See Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman”, Paris Review 53 (Winter 1972) 177-207, reprinted in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 28. Thomas’ collection, though valuable, is a gathering of earlier essays on the poet and does not constitute an original contribution to Berryman studies in its own right. The same applies to Harold Bloom’s John Berryman: Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House, 1989, which is a compendium of earlier responses.

Introduction

5

poet has been published. No book-length monograph given over entirely to examining the range of Berryman’s work has been published since 1987, though a number of the contributors to this collection, including Philip Coleman, Peter Maber, and Tom Rogers, are set to change that situation with projects currently in progress that will consider the poet’s work from a range of critical perspectives. 12 Other important books related to the poet need to be acknowledged: Richard Kelly’s invaluable edition of the poet’s letters to his mother, and his catalogue of Berryman’s library, for example, as well as E.M. Halliday’s memoir John Berryman and the Thirties.13 It seems, though, that there is now plenty of biographical and bibliographical material available about Berryman: a second edition of Paul Mariani’s biography appeared in 1996.14 What is lacking is the kind of sustained critical analysis that Steven Gould Axelrod has brought to the poetry of Robert Lowell or, to take a more recent example, the kind of focused attention on Randall Jarrell’s poetry provided by Stephen Burt.15 In short, Berryman’s poetry has not yet been given detailed and sustained attention by scholars who, as Berryman put it, “know what the literary, historical, philosophical, and theological score is”. Bringing together a group of thirteen new essays and a number of shorter critical and poetic reflections on the poet here, this collection aims to alter that situation by stimulating further research and debate about this fascinating poet as we move towards the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 2014. In Dream Song 159 Berryman writes that “there are secrets, secrets, I may yet – / hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme – / come on to understand”. This collection represents the work of 12

Samuel Fisher Dodson’s Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006) provides readers with a guide to The Dream Songs. Its stated purpose is “to provide the beginning reader and the scholar with a map for approaching this large work” but it is also valuable for its reproduction of several previously unpublished drafts of poems and other items drawn from the John Berryman Papers at the University of Minnesota. 13 Richard J. Kelly, We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988; John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue, New York: Peter Lang, 1999; E.M. Halliday, John Berryman and the Thirties, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. 14 Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 15 See Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978; Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

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Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan

critics who have attempted to probe the “secrets” of Berryman’s writing, not just as an act of “recovery” but as part of an attempt to celebrate and affirm the critical value of his persistently engaging “large work”. That “work”, of course, extends beyond The Dream Songs, and a full critical survey of Berryman’s career would need to include accounts of his poetry going back to the 1930s, as well as analyses of the later collections of verse, his prose writings, and his attempts at verse drama. Moving from a consideration of (published and unpublished) poems written in the unfinished Black Book of the 1940s through discussions of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Berryman’s Sonnets, The Dream Songs, Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc., the contributions to this collection do not waste time providing biographical details that are already available elsewhere, except where they are crucially relevant. Rather, “After thirty Falls” is a gathering of new and wholly original accounts of Berryman’s poetry and poetics that engage with aspects of his work that have not, until now, been adequately explored. The originality of the collection as a whole is accomplished primarily by the freshness of each contributor’s view of Berryman’s work, but it is further reinforced by the fact that a number of the scholars represented here have drawn on the poet’s unpublished manuscripts in their research. One of the things that this collection provides, indeed, is an illustration of the value of primary archival research in contemporary literary scholarship. At a conference held by the Manuscripts Group of the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries at King’s College London in 1979, the poet (and librarian) Philip Larkin argued that “a manuscript helps to enlarge our understanding of a writer’s life and work”.16 By drawing on various unpublished sources, the general understanding of Berryman’s professional life as a scholar and his work as a writer, and of the relationship between the two, will undoubtedly be enlarged by the essays in this collection, a number of which bring to the public’s attention materials that have not previously been aired in discussions of Berryman’s achievement. The process of enlarging existing understandings of Berryman’s poetry through the use of primary archival materials begins here with 16

Philip Larkin, “A Neglected Responsibility: Contemporary Literary Manuscripts”, in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1966-1982, London: Faber and Faber, 1983, 99.

Introduction

7

the collection’s opening essay by Matthew Boswell, which explores the complex textual and contextual layering involved in the making of The Black Book. The important insights afforded by unpublished sources described by Boswell’s essay are also demonstrated by Michael Hinds in an essay that includes a previously unpublished translation by Berryman of Catullus’ Carmina XXXIV. Hinds’ reading of Dream Song 4 stresses the densely allusive quality of Berryman’s poetics, but it also argues that conventional ideas of sequentiality – often applied to The Dream Songs – belie the strategically interrogative aspect of Berryman’s poetry, which tends toward a subversion of lyric as it has been traditionally understood. Unpublished materials are also used by Tom Rogers, in an essay that explores the relationship between Berryman’s unfinished “Life of Christ” project and his poetry through a period spanning over twenty years, and in Peter Maber’s account of the relationship between Berryman’s Shakespeare scholarship and The Dream Songs. Each of these essays makes extensive use of unpublished sources, throwing new light not only on Berryman’s poetry but also on the literary and theological interests that informed it. No more than The Dream Songs could be said to adhere to a linear narrative structure, the essays included here are not arranged according to an overarching editorial principle that strives towards critical agreement, although they are arranged in a loosely chronological fashion. Given the compositional interconnectedness of Berryman’s work, such chronologies are always open to rearrangement, and so this collection resists the temptation to impose a restrictive meta-narrative on the essays that constitute this book as a whole. Apart from the fact that each of the contributors recognizes the critical value of Berryman as a major twentieth-century American poet, each has provided a fresh perspective on his poetry, but not all of these are based on archival research. Peter Denman, for example, offers a reappraisal of the achievement of The Dream Songs by paying close attention to the ways that Berryman manipulates traditional prosody in that poem; while Stephen Matterson provides a compelling account of The Dream Songs that explores Berryman’s use of the Trickster figure in his longest long poem, situating his reading within the context of the emergent American Indian Movement in Minneapolis in the late 1960s. Readings of this kind cannot but alter the current perception of Berryman and develop the general view of his work’s engagements with contemporary American culture, a view

8

Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan

that has frequently been overlooked by critics who have insisted on a narrowly defined confessional designation of Berryman’s poetry. It is precisely this view that Philip Coleman interrogates in his essay on Love & Fame, which he reads as a text that embodies Kierkegaard’s analysis of the disjunction between the “aesthetic” and the “ethical” life in Either/Or. Further commentary on the relationship between Berryman’s poetry and the poet’s readings in philosophy and theology are provided by Brendan Cooper, who challenges the assumption – first articulated by Christopher Ricks in 1970 – that The Dream Songs is a theodicy, while in his essay Philip McGowan demonstrates the usefulness of the ideas of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas in reading what Berryman termed “the geography of grief” in Dream Song 172. Further essays by Alex Runchman, Page Richards, Anthony Caleshu, and Maria Johnston expand the terms by which we may discuss Berryman’s poetry and poetics by considering his contribution to the development of the sonnet in twentieth-century American poetry, the role of framing and performance in his work, and the importance of music in the formation of his poetics. The analyses of framing and performative strategies in Berryman’s poems offered by Richards and Caleshu represent a major step forward in terms of the historical and theoretical appreciation of his work, while Runchman and Johnston, in their accounts of Berryman’s interests in specific forms of literary and cultural expression, enlarge the frame of reference for reading his work in important new ways. These and the other long essays in the collection represent enthusiastic reappraisals of the value of Berryman’s work, but the book also includes a roundtable discussion that gathers four brief responses to Dream Song 1 by critics Ron Callan, Edward Clarke, Justin Quinn, and Kit Fryatt. Quinn’s voice emerges from this discussion as one of dissent, as he questions the success of Berryman’s project in The Dream Songs with a brief but trenchantly critical overview of the first Dream Song. This is countered, however, by the multiplicity of meanings unearthed by the other participants to this contribution, and especially Callan’s suggestion of an ethical basis for Berryman’s long poem, which is reinforced by Fryatt’s description of the “agile grammar” of Berryman’s poetic and Clarke’s exploration of its “unappeasable” intertextuality. The four pieces together demonstrate the provocative nature of Berryman’s poetry, its polyvalent possibilities and clear

Introduction

9

potential for promoting further discussion beyond the scope of this book. If discussions about his achievement in the three decades after his death were somewhat muted, this book shows that many critics are now keen to initiate a new and exciting conversation about the value of Berryman’s work. If critics have on the whole been rather silent about his status in recent years, however, Berryman’s impact on the development of modern American poetry has been significant. Though it has not been explored in sufficient detail, his presence may be discerned in the work of poets such as W.S. Merwin, William Meredith, Alan Dugan, James Tate, Michael Dennis Browne, Charles Simic, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Mark Levine.17 Each of these poets, at one time or another, has either written about Berryman or under the poet’s own “majestic Shade”. Berryman’s impact on the development of poetry in Europe has been equally pervasive, and this collection concludes with four recent poems, all but one previously unpublished, written with Berryman either in mind or somewhere in the background. The inclusion of these texts by Lavinia Greenlaw, Maura Dooley, Harry Clifton, and Brendan Kennelly, is intended to reflect Berryman’s own sense of the mutuality of creative and critical endeavour, but it also signals the persistence of his influence in the development of poetry on the European side of the Atlantic. The last two lines of Dream Song 373 will always trouble scholars new to Berryman studies: “will assistant professors become associates / by working on his works?” Given the current academic climate of restructuring in institutes of Higher Education in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and Ireland, collections of essays such as this are small beer where the pursuit of tenure is concerned. It is hoped, however, that the essays collected here will kick-start a new phase in the development of Berryman studies more generally. In the diversity of its approaches and findings, this collection shows that Berryman is a poet about whom a great deal remains to be said. In Dream Song 364 Henry commands himself to go “Back to the Folger!” – the library in Washington, D.C. where Berryman conducted so much of his own Shakespeare scholarship over a number of decades. The 17 For an account of Berryman’s influence on contemporary American poetry, see Stephen Burt, “My Name is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover John Berryman”, in Eric Haralson, ed. Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Iowa, University of Iowa Press, 2006, 233-251.

10

Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan

essays and reflections gathered here, ultimately, send us back to the published and unpublished work of a poet who, “like Lowell and perhaps more so”, as John Bayley wrote in 1973, “is the poet of the time whose size and whose new kind of stylistic being shrugs off any kind of enclosure”.18 The critical exegeses and disclosures of this collection confirm and reassert Bayley’s claim, showing that it makes as much sense today (“After thirty Falls”) as it did the year after the poet’s death. “Leaves on leaves on leaves of books I’ve turned / and I know nothing, Henry said aloud, / with his ultimate breath” Berryman writes in Dream Song 370. This collection attests to the permanent value and excitement that Berryman’s “leaves”, like Walt Whitman’s, are capable of arousing – “leaves” that “will do good to us so long as our language persists and the human race remains capable of interest in such things” as he said of Whitman in his essay “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”. 19 “All I mean to do here”, he added, “is to construct a crude approach that may prove helpful to the discovery of answers to the questions that these difficulties inspire”. The essays and reflections gathered here have been put together in a similar spirit of questioning, and the book as a whole is informed by a desire to know more about the achievement of one of the most innovative and prolific writers, across a variety of genres, of his own or any generation.

18

John Bayley, “John Berryman: A Question of Imperial Sway”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Harry Thomas, 192. 19 John Berryman, “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 227.

THE BLACK BOOK: JOHN BERRYMAN’S HOLOCAUST REQUIEM MATTHEW BOSWELL

In 1948 John Berryman began working on what he termed “a suite of poems” about the Nazi Holocaust that he planned to publish as a single volume called The Black Book. The collection was to comprise forty-two sections, and would be illustrated with watercolors or drawings by one of his former students, Tony Clark.1 Berryman had a highly ambitious, almost monumental conception of what his incipient project might ultimately achieve both as a poetic and a cultural document, going so far as to conjecture “a diagnostic, an historical survey”.2 The very title of the collection was itself a reflection of the historical import that he attached to it, with its reference to the many “Black Books” that emerged during and immediately after the war, which were amongst the first accounts of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in Nazi-occupied Europe. For Berryman, The Black Book was to be very much a poetic sequence. Indeed, the extensive lists and notes that he made suggest that this sense of sequence was the true raison d’être for many of the planned poems – poems which would be created of necessity as he sought to fill in the gaps of an ordering, and ever-evolving, master narrative. Unpublished hand-written sheets make diverse and fascinating suggestions as to what this master narrative might have

Author’s note: I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, without whose assistance the research presented here could not have been conducted. 1

John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 206. 2 Ibid., 205.

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Matthew Boswell

been: he describes his intention to “parody [the] Mass of [the] Dead”, 3 noting that the volume could take a “Mass-form; post-Corbière style”;4 elsewhere he suggests a “Requiem form”, 5 and there exists a plan for the sequence which is based on the structure of Mozart’s Requiem. (Berryman’s version of the Requiem, however, was to have had an extra section: in the plan this stands slightly adrift from the previous twelve parts, forming a kind of phantom coda in which the poet asks: “And where does horror winter? I sleep, I sleep / If all my friends burned, or I turn inside out.”)6 Furthermore, Berryman initially saw The Black Book itself as the first part of an even more ambitious poetic sequence that was to be based on The Divine Comedy: it would be a kind of Inferno, with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and “Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion” providing equivalents for Purgatorio and Paradiso respectively.7 Four sections of the cycle were published in Poetry magazine in January 1950, and three sections were later included in the short work His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt (1958).8 However, by around 1 April 1949 Berryman had stopped working on The Black Book;9 despite sporadic attempts to return to it in the 1950s, the sequence was never completed. 10 In an interview Berryman ascribed his decision to abandon The Black Book to the emotional strain involved in writing about such 3

Berryman, “who … inherited” (MS), “Black Book”, Unpublished Miscellaneous Poetry, box 1, folder 25, John Berryman Papers (JBP), Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries. (All titles of unpublished work from the John Berryman Papers refer to the first words on the relevant loose sheet. Subsequent references will be abbreviated.) 4 Berryman, “Mass-form” (MS), ibid. 5 Berryman, “the resolution for Death” (MS), ibid. 6 Berryman, “Mozart’s Requiem” (MS), ibid. 7 John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1980, 165. 8 The poems in Poetry were “not him”, “2”, “the will” and “waiting”. Poetry LXXV, October 1949-March 1950, New York, AMS Press, 1950, 192-96. “not him” and “2” (renamed “from The Black Book” [sic] parts [i] and [ii]) were also published in His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt, Pawlet: Claude Fredericks, 1958. (CP 15456) 9 Haffenden, Life of John Berryman, 205. 10 According to Paul Mariani, Berryman also worked on The Black Book in October 1954 and again in the summer of 1955. See Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 287 and 297. He also worked on one poem, “from The Black Book (iii)”, in 1958. See below.

The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem

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distressing subject-matter, conceding: “I just found I couldn’t take it. The sections published … are unrelievedly horrible.”11 Yet his failure to complete the volume clearly had procedural as well as psychological origins; or rather poetic procedure and psychology seem to have become increasingly interfused as the project developed. Above all, Berryman’s inability to settle on a definite final structure (which anticipates the trouble he would have ordering The Dream Songs) reflects a preoccupation with the psychology and historicity of form that may have placed internal halters on his outward ambition. In his biography of the poet, John Haffenden further notes that on the day he abandoned the volume, “Berryman wept on reading about the murder of the Polish professors in The Black Book of Poland”.12 Berryman’s journals, on which Haffenden based his account, are currently unavailable to scholars,13 but it seems that he was moved by a description of the murder of professors from the University of Cracow – a passage alongside which Berryman would have found, on a page facing a list of the names of 172 members of the University who were deported to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, a large facsimile reproduction of a poster advertising “A REQUIEM MASS for the seventeen Professors of the University of Cracow, who died in the German Concentration Camp at Orarienburg [sic] or as a result of their treatment there”. 14 The dates given by Haffenden suggest that this poster may have presented Berryman with evidence of a real historical requiem for the dead that caused him doubts about his ability to produce a valid imaginative equivalent; and while this poster alone is certainly not a categorical explanation for Berryman’s abandonment of the project, it highlights a root conflict between history and poetry, between factual occurrence and aesthetic form, that was a central concern of Berryman’s when he was writing The Black Book. Both published selections from The Black Book, and all the drafts and notes that Berryman made for the collection, begin with a poem

11

Haffenden, Life of John Berryman, 206. Ibid., 205. 13 These diaries are among papers given to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 1989 by Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife, and will not be made available for public use until 2019. 14 The Black Book of Poland, ed. Polish Ministry of Information, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942, Picture 128. 12

14

Matthew Boswell

that was originally called “not him”, and later numbered “from The Black Book (i)”:15 Grandfather, sleepless in a room upstairs, Seldom came down; so when they tript him down We wept. The blind light sang about his ears, Later we heard. Brother had pull. In pairs He, some, slept upon stone. Later they stamped him down in mud. The windlass drew him silly & odd-eyed, blood Broke from his ears before they quit. Before they trucked him home they cleaned him up somewhat. Only the loose eyes’ glaze they could not clean And soon he died. He howled a night and shook Our teeth before the end; we breathed again When he stopt. Abraham, what we have seen Write, I beg, in your Book. No more the solemn and high bells Call to our pall; we crawl or gibber; Hell’s Irritable & treacherous Despairs here here (not him) reach now to shatter us.

The uncomplicated, abbreviated language and syntax of the first sentence, the narrator’s description of the grandfather’s arrest by an anonymous “they”, and his or her over-simplified notion of causation, suggest a child’s eye-view of events. As the grandfather is taken away to some kind of internment or concentration camp, the subject matter becomes increasingly horrific. However, Berryman does not give us a realistic or plausible depiction of the man’s life in a Nazi camp: rather the grandfather is subjected to grotesque, almost cartoonish, acts of violence – “The windlass drew him silly and odd-eyed” – further intimating a child’s perception of barbarity. The time frame of this section is the recent past, but a vagueness about the temporality of the action complements the otherworldliness of the space in which the grandparent is brutalized; only the most basic form of temporal 15 In Charles Thornbury’s edition of Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937-1971 there appears to be a misprint in the second stanza, where the original “we crawl or gibber” is replaced by “we call or gibber” (CP 155). I can find no evidence to suggest that the change was made by Berryman himself, and will therefore use the text that appeared in Poetry.

The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem

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continuity is established through the repetition of the single word “later”. This uncertainty of time and location is representative of both the narrator’s naivety and the grandfather’s battered condition, of his disorientation and damaged vision: he is described as “odd-eyed” and witness to a “blind light”. The second stanza begins with another reference to his blindness: “Only the loose eyes’ glaze they could not clean / And soon he died.” Yet while the poem’s representation of “sight”, in both a physical and narratorial sense, is that of a faculty prone to failure, both character and narrator retain the capacity to hear and make noise: in the second stanza, for example, we are told that the grandfather “howled a night” before he died. Thus even as the poem is unable to make clear sense visually, through its infantile perspective on events and its opaque imagery, it does contain a certain sonic sense; and the sound of the poem, like the sounds of the events it describes, is violent: “blood / Broke from his ears before they quit.” The meter is irregular throughout, as are the end rhymes, yet they create specific acoustic effects. The first full rhyme is spaced four lines apart, and is relatively tame in semantic terms – “upstairs” / “pairs” – but then suddenly the rhymes close in towards the end of the stanza to form a macabre couplet that rhymes “mud” with “blood”. On the other hand, Berryman deliberately avoided certain rhymes, particularly those that would have produced an unwanted harmoniousness: drafts for the poem show that the final line of the first stanza had originally read “they cleaned him up a bit”.16 This earlier version would have created a full end rhyme with the preceding line, but the poet clearly wished to obviate this consonance. In its place “somewhat” suggests both semantic and sonic uncertainty, while interjecting a mannered Anglo-American voice into the poem which further contributes to the pervasive feeling of disparity and awkwardness. The second stanza recounts the abrupt and harrowing denouement of the grandfather’s story. The description of his “loose eyes’ glaze” evokes the physical violence done to him, and also the resultant disconnection between his inner and outer worlds, which prevents both narrator and reader from seeing exactly what has happened to this man, or understanding what inner destruction has occurred. In this 16

Berryman, “THE BLACK BOOK” (TS with MS corrections), Unpublished Miscellaneous Poetry, box 1, fol. 25, “BB”, JBP.

16

Matthew Boswell

way the victim is figured in an essentially negative relation to both narrator and reader: he is both “him” and, as in the original title of the poem, “not him”; someone whose terrible injuries and suffering are such that they place him beyond any of our familiar fields of conceptual or emotional reference. The grandfather lacks a human language: all he can do is “howl” like a wolf, and his ululating has a disconcerting effect on the narrator, who describes how it “shook / Our teeth before the end”. There is a dark irony in this reference to his family’s full sets of teeth: the reader knows that the grandfather’s murder – which is only accomplished after his release from the concentration camp – must in fact prefigure the rapid accentuation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, for whom the loss of teeth, through either malnutrition and disease, or as a result of the Nazis’ practice of extracting gold from the teeth of their victims, would become commonplace. The reference could also be biblical: after the description of “the loose eyes’ glaze” the mention of teeth in the next line forms a parody of the Old Testament moral code of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. And indeed while all Christian ceremonies, such as its rituals of mourning, are summarily banished from the poem – “No more the solemn and high bells / Call to our pall” – the narrator upholds the Old Testament tradition as represented by Abraham, whom he calls on to write in his “Book” of the historical crimes that “we” (himself, his family, his tribe, his readers) have “seen”. The poem’s biblical allusions portray the Jews as a people whose fate presents a challenge to the Christian God; so much so that the tribe of Israel comes to resemble the fallen angels of Paradise Lost in the final part of the poem. The final clause’s lineation is such that the first four words could be read as a self-description of the narrator and the rest of the Jews (whom he now seems to represent, or who now speak collectively through him) as being, like Satan and the fallen angels, “Hell’s / Irritable & treacherous”, with the adjectives of the penultimate line assuming the status of nouns. The layout of the final three lines of the stanza ensures that this false sense, or misreading, is actually retained by the reader as a more obscure full meaning is developed through the last line. A late switch to the present tense, a sense of rhythmic and syntactic urgency (the last clause is doubly enjambed, and covers three lines without being interrupted by any form of punctuation other than a short parenthesis), and the repetition of “here here”, combine in these

The Black Book: Berryman’s Holocaust Requiem

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last lines to make the Jews’ condition seem horrifically present. Yet their claim to authority, and to the reader’s attention, remains precarious: they “beg” Abraham that their story be told, even as they themselves disappear (Hell’s Despairs “reach now to shatter” them); and the victim himself is enclosed by brackets, and is thus only visible in terms of grammatical and linguistic negativity: “(not him)”. This apostrophe to Abraham – a narratorial apostrophe that could almost be understood as being targeted from within the poem at Berryman himself, as a generative poet-Patriarch – is thus beset by paradox and self-doubt. Even the way that the narrator(s) “beg” Abraham to write of “what we have seen” in a “Book” is undermined by the content of the poem, which constantly draws attention to the fact that we “see” very little. While a requiem would traditionally call for the peaceful repose of the souls of the dead, the narrator of the first section of The Black Book seems to doubt that the poet – his creator, his Abraham – will ever be able to complete this weighty undertaking precisely because the dead will not rest. In the final lines this rapidly maturing narrator seems to transcend the limits of his fictive corporeality, as though Berryman sends him out as an emissary into an obscure threshold space, an interstice where he meets with, and usurps the identity of, those who “crawl or gibber”, and finds an opening into their Hell. But as he reaches this point, the narrator’s vision of his own imminent annihilation warns the poet-Patriarch that even if he is able to lay the single soul of the Grandfather to rest by writing of it in this book, there are still souls all around with invisible bodies and silent voices, dead souls with Hell’s Despairs who will reach through and “shatter” his fragile song. In this way, this final stanza – which obliquely refers to the Nazis’ genocidal persecution of the Jews, but which also shows how that murder is already vanishing from within the very text which describes it – might be said to form a kind of template for the entire sequence, introducing the reader to the metaphysical, historical and representative parameters within which Berryman would craft the volume. The poem that Berryman originally proposed to place second in The Black Book, “Rising Hymn”, has never been published, and was never finished in a way that was satisfactory to Berryman. On what appears to be the last complete typescript of the poem there are large hand-written crosses against two stanzas, smaller crosses against key

18

Matthew Boswell

lines, and on the top of the page the blunt directive: “rewrite”. 17 Indeed the poem is a particularly turbid and contorted work; for example, a whole stanza is taken up by the single question: Who will complain when murmur must Such guest that instant entertain, Moving the spirit from its dust, Rooted, dividing cheek and brain?

As its title suggests, the poem is written in a traditional Christian hymn form, and its language and references derive from the Christian tradition; yet the historical subject matter of the poem, the Holocaust, was a predominantly Jewish experience. While “Rising Hymn” remains more of an experiment than a fully realized piece, the dialogue it consequently engenders between its content and its form significantly shows Berryman attempting to embody theological and historical argument through poetic structure. With Berryman’s failure to complete a satisfactory version of “Rising Hymn”, the poem that had previously been numbered (iii), and given the provisional title of “Warsaw”, became “from The Black Book (ii)”. It is the longest of all the completed poems, and also the most overtly innovative and ambitious in language and style, and in its drifting, oneiric narrative, in which both distant and more recent elements of Polish history are intertwined, as in this central section: ‘Boleslaus brought us here, surnamed the Good, Whose dust rolls nearly seven hundred years Towards Sirius: we thank that King As for the ledge whereto we cling, Night in the caves under the ruins; stars, Armbands come off, for which we could Be glad but the black troops gather.’ So those who kneel in the paling sky & shiver. (CP 155-56)

The final stanza of the poem, however, provides a stark counterpoint to the poem’s (and The Black Book’s) previous mixture of allusion, periphrasis and rhetorical bombast:

17

Berryman, “Rising Hymn” (TS with MS corrections), ibid.

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One officer in black demarches here Cupshot, torn collar by a girl unwilling Native & blonde through the debauch That kept him all night from his couch, Hurts his head and from the others’ howling Drove him out for morning air. Brooding over the water He reddens suddenly. He went back & shot her. (CP 156)

The girl’s murder is described in a comparatively straightforward manner, and this stylistic simplification suggests a kind of truth claim – one that is made all the more effective and morally emphatic by the more obscure stanzas that precede it. However, in a reversal of the technique used in the first poem of the sequence, where the past tense narrative suddenly becomes present in the last line, Berryman switches from the present to the past tense, creating a dividing gap between “then” and “now” which counters the line’s syntactic clarity. Up until this line a community of temporality is established through the use of the historic present, meaning that throughout the final stanza the reader is effectively placed alongside the officer, in his time and space. This remains the case right up to the point where the man (presumably a Nazi) reddens by the water; but between that moment of shame or embarrassment or feared discovery and the shooting of the girl there is a gulf that those of us who were not there cannot hope to bridge. The use of the past tense to represent the murder thus nudges this final act into a place where we, the readers, and perhaps even the poet himself, can no longer quite reach it, shifting it beyond a common temporality of ongoing-ness and into a zone of finitude and belated incomprehension. The third poem from The Black Book published in His Thoughts Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt was written over a decade after Berryman first began work on the project (a hand-written draft of the poem includes the note “16 July ’58, largely remade”),18 which is to say several years after he seems to have given up hope of ever actually finishing the sequence. This is nonetheless the only poem written for the collection in which Berryman makes unveiled reference to the most notorious features of the exterminatory process: 18 Berryman, “Lover & child” (MS), Unpublished Miscellaneous Poetry, box 1, folder 25, “BB”, JBP.

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Lover & child, a little sing. From long-lockt cattle-cars who grope Who near a place of showers come Foul no more, whose murmuring Grows in a hiss of gas will clear them home: Away from & toward me: a little soap, Disrobing, Achtung! in a dirty hope, They shuffle with their haircuts in to die. Lift them an elegy, poor you and I, Fair and strengthless as seafoam Under a deserted sky. (CP 156)

For this poem Berryman drew on a factual report outlining conditions in the death camp of Treblinka. The document, compiled from eyewitness accounts given both by victims and by persecutors, was written by Vassili Grossman, and was published in another Black Book – this one brought out just after the war, and entitled The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People (1946).19 Grossman’s narrative, like Berryman’s poem, begins with the moment when the deportees arrived at the infamous fake station in Treblinka. He describes how, during the thirteen months that it was operational, Treblinka became a “conveyor belt execution block”,20 with each new train’s arrival designed to coincide with the so-called “liquidation” of the previous batch of victims. As soon as the victims got out of the cattle-cars they were led to a square near the station, where they were immediately forced to surrender their possessions. They were then escorted into the camp through a barbed-wire fence. The men were told to remain where they were, and the women were ordered to go and undress in a nearby barracks. Grossman continues: And again the square resounded with the word: – Achtung! – Achtung! It is at such a moment that the peoples’ minds [sic] must be confused again; they must again be filled with hope, with rules of death given out as if they were rules of life. And the same voice shot out each word distinctly:

19

The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, New York: The Jewish Black Book Committee, 1946, 398-413. 20 Ibid., 398.

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“Women and children are to take their shoes off at the entrance to the barracks. The stockings are to be put into the shoes. The children’s socks are to be placed in the sandals, in the little shoes and slippers. Be neat.” And then again: “When going to the baths, take along your valuables, documents, money, a towel and soap … We repeat …” Inside of the women’s barracks there was a barber shop. The naked women were given hair cuts, and the wigs were taken from the old women. This death hair cut – according to the testimony of the barbers – convinced the women that they were being taken to the baths.21

Susan Gubar has theorized how verse is the ideal literary form for the practice of “proxy-witnessing”, whereby poets bear witness not to events themselves, but to the depositions of the victims. Berryman’s poem, with its evident dependence on Grossman’s text, displays many of the aesthetic features and representative strategies that Gubar suggests characterize this verse form: The shortness of verse; its deliberate placement of words in lines that do not necessarily accord with syntactic breaks; the use of rhythm or rhyme; the compression of a plethora of details into fewer and therefore more charged terms and images; the reaching for analogies, albeit inadequate ones; the suppression of logical, narrative links: these lead creative writers to take factual material … and, paradoxically, use their imagination to make it more palpably real .… Poets of proxy-witnessing attempt to return what they have borrowed “sharper” than they received it.22

I am dubious of Gubar’s contention that poetry is somehow able to make documentary accounts “more palpably real”, as this fails to account for poetry’s deliberate stylization of source material, and to foreclose the disjunction between historical reality and aesthetic representation that has formed the definitive agon of post-Holocaust poetics. However, it is certainly the case that our understanding of source material can be radically altered when a poet makes innovative use of the sorts of stylistic and formal techniques that Gubar draws 21

Ibid., 404. Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003, 149-50. 22

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attention to: for example, the dramatic and acoustic elements of poetry can give documentary material a greater sense of immediacy than it has in prose. The sound of poetry can also be used to create the emotional terrain for the action described in its lyric: in Berryman’s poem the prisoners “shuffle” to their deaths to the accompaniment of a sombre iambic pentameter. Verse form also allows a writer to generate a more dynamic interplay of emphases; so when Berryman rhymes “soap” with “hope”, he dramatically highlights the precise connection that the Nazis wanted the Jews to make. This is not to say, however, that Berryman sees verse as an art form that intrinsically sanctions the free play of the creative imagination. Other than in the final couplet, almost all the figures and metaphors that he uses actually belong to the discourse and pseudoideology of the Nazis themselves. For example, as the victims leave the cattle-cars they are described as being “Foul no more”, Berryman here drawing attention to the Jews’ place in the Nazi mentality as tainted and socially undesirable Untermenschen, while also showing how this conception of the Jew became literalized through practices such as the use of cattle-trucks, where Jews were treated like animals (like fowl). The reference to the soap that prisoners were given to hold as they were led to their deaths, and the description of how the gas would “clear them home”, also emphasize the way that the Nazis would physically stage their anti-Semitic construction of the verminous, disease-carrying Jew. For the Nazis, killing was above all a matter of hygiene (we recall that Zyklon B was a form of rat poison). In a subtle interiorization of this Nazi metaphor, it is not the Jews themselves, however, but rather their desperate, deluded hope that they would not be killed that Berryman emotively calls “dirty”. It is not only what the formal elements of poetry add to documentary texts, by way of an altered focus gained through rhyme or rhythm or a fragmentation of narrative, that can change a reader’s perception of that material: what poets leave out in their revisions of historical documents can be just as significant, and Berryman’s poem is a very good example of a poet becoming an astute editor of primary material. A key difference between Grossman’s prose report and Berryman’s poem is that any form of extended commentary on events is noticeably absent from the latter. In his report Grossman expands on the barbers’ interpretation of why they thought they had to give victims the “death hair cut” (they believed it was simply a way of convincing the victims that they were being taken to the baths), adding

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that the hair itself had economic value, and was sent back to Germany where it was used as raw material by the army and navy for such things as stuffing mattresses. 23 There is no explanatory or discursive equivalent in “from The Black Book (iii)”; but rather than extended commentary on events themselves, what we find in Berryman’s poem is a contemplation of the non-victims’ mode of relation to these events: a self-reflective consideration of encounter that is explored primarily through the writer’s control of poetic address. Berryman begins his narrative with a characteristic piece of babytalk: “Lover & child, a little sing.” The phrase “a little sing” seems to introduce a song, which is possibly a reference to the poem itself, and the suggestion is that the unidentified “Lover & child” are its addressees. Given the content of the rest of the poem, we assume that this “Lover & child” are victims of the Nazi genocide; and even if their identity is never made particularly clear, the possibility that the narrator might here be addressing the dead, along with the tender, private language used in the line, implies a certain narratorial intimacy. This poignant sense of personal contact between the poem’s narrator and its addressees also inheres in the fifth and sixth lines, where Berryman describes how the deaths of the Holocaust victims in the gas chambers “will clear them home: / Away from & toward me”. However, the narrator’s relation to the dead is here conceived of in terms of a more ambiguous double movement, as though it is their passing away from the living that brings them somehow closer to those they have left behind. The counterpoised forces of this double movement are also reflected in the reference to a “home” – a word with both domestic and theological connotations – which leaves it unclear whether the poet is describing a relation to things past, and the revisiting of a shared past through memory, or if the dead are here being conceived of as spirits whom the narrator hopes to join in the afterlife. This representation of simultaneous loss and contact, of immediate absence and premonitions of presence, could also be understood as a meditation on the role of the Holocaust poet: even a reflection on how Berryman conceived of his own personal relation to the murdered Jews whose deaths were the subject of The Black Book. The ambiguity of address might thus figure the poet’s uncertain relation to historical 23

The Black Book: The Nazi Crime, 404.

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women and children whom he feels compelled to write about, and yet with whom he fails to make complete poetic contact. In this context the relation between the narrator and his “lover” significantly has connotations of illegitimacy, even indecency, with the word “lover” displacing the more normative “mother” (while also evoking the Nazi practice of separating the women and children from men on entry to the camps, as described in Grossman’s report). The suggestion is that the male poet is illicitly infatuated with his own grievous subject matter. If the poem follows an abiding trajectory of descent, a katabatic plunge into the depths of history, into mass murder and the death camps, then the final three lines clearly describe a reciprocal movement of ascent, hauling the subject-matter heavenward in a manner that seems integrally bound to the production of the elegy itself. As the poem goes on, its imagery lightens, with the weighty “long-lockt cattle-cars”, wrenched together with firm, brace-like hyphens, giving way to ethereal “seafoam” and “sky” in the final two lines. The poet wishes to raise an elegy to the dead, and in a manner reminiscent of the call to flight in the opening couplet of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky”24 – he enjoins the reader to take part in this burdensome task. It is almost as though poet and reader, “poor you & I”, have become involved in a Dantean partnership of guide and pupil; and as we come out on the other side of this Gehenna we join together to tell our tale (and thus we perform the requisite task of all those who journey into the underworld). The reader is therefore directly implicated in the struggle to produce meaning, or, like a modern-day Atlas, to hold up meaning, after Treblinka; but the unexpected lightness and vacuity of the imagery at the end of the poem is profoundly at odds with our sense of the monolithic character of the elegy, and confounds our earnest attempt to shoulder the dead weight of the Holocaust. Rather than lifting up totemic meaning, we actually find meaning itself floating away, and the final two lines confirm that we are unable to lift even this increasingly flimsy-seeming elegy: the sky is “deserted”, void of elegiac commemoration and consolation and also God after the

24

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, in Collected Poems: 1909-1962, London: Faber and Faber, 1974, 13.

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tremendum of the genocide;25 and the partnership of poet and reader is termed “Fair & strengthless”, our fine Aryan heads of hair making our attempt to raise an elegy to victims whose heads were shaved seem like an incongruous, almost obscene sort of enterprise. The gap between the two key duos of the poem – the “Lover & child” on the one hand, and “you & I” on the other – widens, and the only simile of the poem, the comparison of the “Fair and strengthless” dyad of reader and writer to “seafoam”, emphasises our ineptitude, our elegiac labour merely washing around the outermost fringes of a vast, oceanic crime. The allusion to the birth of Aphrodite, who rose from the foam of the sea, again figures the poet’s obsession with history as a dubious kind of love affair, or worse: the way the word “foam” harks back to the “soap” that the prisoners were made to carry to the gas now makes this attraction almost seem repulsively necrophilic. The image of “seafoam” also brings to mind the writings of Primo Levi, and in particular his description in The Drowned and the Saved (1986) of how, even after the war, the victims were overcome by the “memory of the offence”: “The ocean of pain, past and present, surrounded us, and its level rose from year to year until it almost submerged us.”26 In contrast, Berryman imagines a union between writer and reader which clearly presupposes that neither partner was there. We remember nothing and, as a result, we can only ever skim the surface of an “ocean of pain” whose awesome depths remain hidden from us. The very fact that we have never descended in the way that Levi describes means that neither can we take it upon ourselves to represent any kind of ascent from the depths of history, thus forestalling the elegy’s implicit promise of imaginative resurrection. For Berryman, “you & I” remain the uninitiated: those who must act as the witnesses to the witnesses, yet who must continually falter in our attempts to lift them a befitting elegy of permanence. The handful of published poems from The Black Book represents a mere fraction of the forty-two sections that Berryman had planned to write; yet the voluminous notes and drafts that he made for the 25

For an influential interpretation of the Holocaust as a human equivalent of the mysterium tremendum, the terror-mystery of God, see Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981. 26 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Abacus, 1996, 65.

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sequence do at least offer some tantalizing clues about what other material might have been included. For example, a hand-written draft describes a motorcade heading towards a concentration camp: South thro’ unwintering boroughs the big cars glide Foreign & swift; officials snug inside; A tinkle from a foreign orchestra Startles the Polish fields. Until these arrive, The ceremonial fires delay, Eight thousand bodies are & are alive.27

Another hand-written lyric portrays “the crematorium at Maidanek”: So many bodies in a breathless space To dust & air! Your bloody body burns Three to an hour, save the bigger bones, Haircuts have saved the hair. 28

The published poems and drafts seem to indicate that Berryman’s suite of Holocaust poems would have mirrored the actual chronology of the “Final Solution”: the first poem is set in a period before the Nazi purges had reached their worst; the next describes a central precursor to the destruction, the establishment of Jewish Ghettos, and the murder of a single woman in Nazi-occupied Warsaw; a poem called “waiting” (published in Poetry) is a dramatic monologue spoken by a man who is about to be interrogated; the poems “the will” (also published in Poetry) and “Rising Hymn” are then set in Nazi camps; and the Jewish genocide is the subject of “from The Black Book (iii)”. As the sequence developed, Berryman thus moved deeper into the heart of the extermination process, tracing a gradual journey of descent, a Dantean progress through the worsening circles of this historical Inferno. George Steiner has claimed: “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is to risk the survivance [sic] of language as creator of humane, rational truth.”29 Berryman’s Holocaust sequence, however, suggests the 27

Berryman, “Dawn like a rose” (MS), Unpublished Miscellaneous Poetry, box 1, folder 25, “BB”, JBP. 28 Berryman, ibid. 29 George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman, New York: Atheneum, 1982, 123.

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opposite: that after Auschwitz the survival of a rational language is not a risk but a necessity, and that language, and also certain narrative structures (such as religious schemas of ascent and descent), have become even more redolent with meaning – albeit with direly inverted meaning – than ever before. A central feature of both the sequence as a whole, and of individual poems – most notably “from The Black Book (ii)” – is that as their subject matter becomes more horrific, Berryman’s style grows increasingly perspicuous. The volume was thus underpinned by a strong impulse towards clarity; but at the same time poems such as “from The Black Book (iii)” do, of necessity, confront the limits of Holocaust representation, and the difficulty – even the undesirability – of transgressing these limits. They do not concur with Steiner’s assessment that Auschwitz lies “outside speech”; but in drawing attention to their own inner silences, they do anticipate what Adorno would diagnose as art’s situation of permanent, disabling paradox after Auschwitz. For Adorno, any aesthetic representation of “the unthinkable fate” of the victims turns that alien fate into something potentially gratifying, with the result that “something of its horror is removed”.30 Yet equally, he argued, art could not not confront that past. So while “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, literature must “resist this verdict”.31 In identifying this aporia in the cultural representation of historical barbarity, Adorno seems to call for a self-scrutinizing and morally scrupulous art – an art that would aspire to document its own impossible position – and Berryman’s The Black Book precociously highlights the possibilities and the limitations inherent in Adorno’s vision of the legitimate post-Holocaust artwork, being both driven and stalled by the need to incorporate antagonistic ethical imperatives into its representative logic.

30

Theodor Adorno, “Commitment”, trans. Francis McDonagh, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, London: NLB, 1977, 189. 31 Ibid., 188.

“CONTINUITY WITH LOVERS DEAD”: BERRYMAN, LOWELL, AND THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN SONNET ALEX RUNCHMAN

“Why did I attempt that exhausted and contemptible art-form the Sonnet Sequence anyway?”1 The thirty-two-year-old poet had good reason, on 26 July 1947, to doubt the form he had chosen to record his extra-marital affair. As an American, writing under the burden of Walt Whitman’s dictum that “the expression of the American poet is to be transcendant [sic] and new”2 and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s contention that “we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe”,3 how could Berryman justify using a received form laden with European and courtly associations? The major modernists of his own century – T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams among them – almost entirely ignored sonnets. And even Harriet Monroe, who had chosen a Petrarchan sonnet by the now-forgotten Arthur Davison Ficke to begin the first issue of Poetry in September 1912, had conceded only six months later that “the sonnet is an exhausted form, whose every shade of cadence has been worked out and repeated until there are no more surprises left in it”.4 Monroe’s foreign correspondent Pound may have influenced this retraction, but with regard to Davison-Ficke’s poem of “isolate realms”, “empery” 1

Quoted in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 177. 2 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, eds Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, 2nd edn, rev. by Michael Moon, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002, 619. 3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”, in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff, London: Penguin, 1982, 104. 4 Quoted in Ian Hamilton, The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976, 52.

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and “the musking dusk of even”, every word of it is warranted and it must have sounded like a death knell for the sonnet in America a year before Berryman was born. However, the early twentieth century was not as devoid of American sonnets as is often assumed. Berryman and his contemporary Robert Lowell were able to draw upon the precedent of several earlier advocates of the form, the most influential of whom were Robert Frost and Lowell and Berryman’s immediate mentors, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Mark Van Doren. Frost’s first volume, A Boy’s Will, was published in April 1913, the very month in which Monroe wrote off the sonnet. The book’s four surprising sonnets owe much to the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth and Keats, but they are also distinctively American. “The Vantage Point”, for example, concludes: “I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant, / I look into the crater of the ant.”5 For the rhyme to be exact, “plant” must be given a short-voweled American pronunciation, appropriately since the juniper and bluet mentioned in the poem are native to North America. This contrasts with the archaic usage of a second syllable, required by the meter, in “bruisèd”. Such attempts to unite everyday American speech and a more literary lexis within a tight form are characteristic of Frost’s poetry, and anticipate the starker contrasts that abound in Berryman’s Sonnets to Chris and, later, The Dream Songs, as well as in Lowell’s late sonnet variations. While other American poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Claude McKay wrote plenty of sonnets, none of these was especially important to Berryman or Lowell, who ultimately came to regard themselves as Frost’s successors, and wrangled after his death for the position of top American poet. 6 Berryman also admired e.e. cummings, though his fragmented sonnets in Tulips & Chimneys (1923) and later books, with their words scattered across the page, were too erratic to suggest that the sonnet could survive in anything other than a mutilated state. A more 5

The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, 2nd edn, London: Vintage, 2001, 17. 6 C.C. Barfoot has written a useful account of Edna St Vincent Millay’s recognition of the versatility of the sonnet form, which is worth considering in relation to discussions about the sonnet’s place in twentieth-century American poetry. See C.C. Barfoot, “Edna St Vincent Millay’s Sonnets: Putting ‘Chaos Into Fourteen Lines’”, in Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth-Century American Literature, Culture and Biography, ed. Hans Bak, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004, 81-100.

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imposing figure in the 1940s was the recently Americanized W.H. Auden, but Sonnets to Chris marks the stage at which Berryman broke from Auden’s excessive influence on his early work, and Lowell was later to mock his elder contemporary’s insistently impersonal attitude, writing in “Truth” that “Nothing pushing the personal should be published, / not even Proust’s Research [sic] or Shakespeare’s Sonnets”.7 In time, Berryman and Lowell came to feel as uneasy about the Anglophile and formalist views they had inherited from Auden and the New Critics as they did about the sonnet form. Were these views sufficiently respectful of a varied American tradition? A spirit of rebellion against their mentors and against the sonnet tradition propelled both poets’ innovations. But, equally, both were plagued by apprehensions – artistic and moral – about their writing. They attempted, in contrasting ways, to reconcile the conventions and constraints of a typically European form with their American free verse heritage, but they also betrayed their doubts that this could be done or even that it was worth doing. In this essay, then, I shall consider the ways in which Berryman and, more briefly, Lowell negotiated the difficulties of writing sonnets in late twentieth-century America, addressing in particular their consciousness of the form’s history and their uneasiness about adapting it to treat their modern American love affairs. The sonnet form was still vital in 1947, but what place was there for courtly convention and idolatry of the beloved in modern American verse? And, while a sonnet such as Frost’s “The Silken Tent”, with its sustained conceit and simple but not especially modern language might stand alone as a traditional love poem, what place was there for the love sequence? Auden, Ransom and Tate had all written short narrative sonnet sequences, and Frost’s friend Merrill Moore, who was also Lowell’s mother’s psychiatrist, had produced an astonishing but unsequential thousand-sonnet opus. However, Berryman’s 117-poem work, like Lowell’s 104-poem The Dolphin, is much closer in design to the Renaissance sequences of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare – and, as we shall see, Berryman felt extremely ambivalent about Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular. 7

Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, eds Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, London: Faber and Faber, 2003, 697. All subsequent references to Lowell’s poetry (except Notebook) are to this edition.

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So why did he attempt such an outmoded and, to his mind, contemptible art form? Paul Mariani claims that he did so “to justify his obsession” by elevating it “to the level of art”.8 However, Berryman’s sequence is so imbued with shame and remorse that to suggest it justifies the relationship goes too far, and his own answer, while offering a plausible explanation, indicates no such certainty of purpose: Partly events seduced me, so that I was in the thick of it, with a dozen sonnets, before (I think) I much reflected. But partly I had several things in mind. I wanted one form … in order to record (form, master) what happened. Well, but not an invented form – I wanted a familiar form in which to put the new. Clearly a sonnet sequence. And this gave me a wonderful sense of continuity with lovers dead.9

About the same time, Berryman noted his belief that Americans should “see themselves as part of an English tradition”. 10 His use of sonnets to establish “continuity with lovers dead”, the most famous of whom were English or European, attests to this belief. The sonnets (or “songs”, as Berryman sometimes called them, recalling that the two terms were almost synonymous in the Renaissance and indicating their relation to his later long poem The Dream Songs) first appeared as Berryman’s Sonnets in 1967, twenty years after their completion. 11 On publication, Berryman added a prefatory Dream Song and seven new sonnets to the original sequence. The title, suggested by Berryman’s publisher Robert Giroux – who published a book on the authorship of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 198212 – picks up on that given by Thomas Thorpe to the original 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Quite possibly Giroux had more regard for Shakespeare’s sonnets than Berryman himself did, and hoped to make a grand claim for the book. However, readers already familiar with 77 Dream Songs must have found Berryman’s 8

Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 187. 9 Cited in Haffenden, 177. 10 Mariani, Dream Song, 228 (emphasis in original). 11 In his edition of Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury reverts to the 1947 typescript and consequently restores the original title, Sonnets To Chris. 12 Robert Giroux, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.

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Sonnets puzzling and regressive when they first appeared, and some critics have been irked by Berryman’s attempts to maintain an English tradition. John Fuller, for example, omits any of Berryman’s poems from his recent Oxford Book of Sonnets on the grounds that they are “over-reliant on revived Renaissance tropes”, 13 and Donald Davie’s reaction is just the kind that Berryman might fearfully have anticipated: “what did he think he was doing, dredging up from twenty years before poems that, for all their audacity and inventiveness, were irretrievably compromised by being in thrall to a rhyming and metrical straight-jacket long discredited?”14 Davie also calls into question Berryman’s motivation to put the new into a familiar form: For what we seem faced with is Berryman’s determination – supposedly in 1947, more certainly on publication twenty years later – that Petrarch’s sonnets should (must) be made to fit an adulterous (doubly adulterous, it appears) liaison in the United States of the 1940s. The ‘fit’ is just not there.15

Davie’s criticism is unjust for a number of reasons. Firstly, the sonnet had not been discredited, and still hasn’t. Secondly, it is misguided to chastise Berryman for appropriating courtly conventions to address an adulterous affair since courtly love itself was usually adulterous. Sidney’s Stella was a married woman. All the same, Berryman was just as conscious as Davie of the lack of “fit” between his consummated affair and the unrequited loves of most of his poetic ancestors. Also in Berryman’s defense is the fact that this “metrical straightjacket” encouraged him to contort syntax and foster an affected, hybrid language that would become surprisingly felicitous for him. William Carlos Williams, reviewing Lowell’s The Mills of the Kavanaughs in 1951, remarked that Lowell appeared “to be restrained by the lines” and to want to break them.16 The same observation might be made of Berryman in his sonnets, which veer between lyrical 13

The Oxford Book of Sonnets, ed. John Fuller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, xxvii. Berryman’s sonnets (7, 15, 36, 107, and 115) are included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, ed. Phyllis Levin, New York and London: Penguin Books, 2001, 221-223. 14 Donald Davie, “A Bee in His Sonnet”, in Two Ways Out of Whitman, Manchester: Carcanet, 2000, 92. 15 Ibid., 93. 16 Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, New York: Random House, 1954, 324.

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passages and gnarled obscurities, elegant enjambments and emphatic ellipses. Berryman often addresses Chris as “Lady”, but slangy modern lines also abound: “The damned sky clears / Into a decent sun (this week’s the worst / Ever I see-saw” he writes, for example, in Sonnet 74 (CP 107). Tensions between literary and contemporary diction are pronounced, more so than in Frost’s poetry. Berryman seesaws between extremes, and Sonnet 47 suggests that he was quite conscious of what he was doing: Double I sing, I must, your utraquist, Crumpling a syntax at a sudden need, Stridor of English softening to plead O to you plainly lest you more resist. (CP 94)

Those unfamiliar words “utraquist” and “stridor” are used precisely. According to the Oxford English Dictionary an “utraquist” “composes in both Latin and the vernacular”; “stridor” means a harsh sound. The lines defend the inconsistencies of register within individual poems: it may be necessary to crumple syntax, even at the risk of becoming incoherent, in order to respond to the urgency of a situation and, equally, the poet’s sometimes harsh use of English may have to be softened when he is appealing to Chris. The last of these lines enacts such a softening. Berryman’s combination of Latinate lyricism and modern slang is bizarre and unsettling, suggesting a mind ill at ease, but also feverishly all-accommodating. Sonnets to Chris marks the point at which Berryman first took on the challenge of reconciling his English and European literary influences with his American heritage. The sequence begins his progression, via Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, completed in 1953, towards the form and idiom of The Dream Songs, which is recognized by Christopher Ricks, among others, to be a “brilliantly adapted” and “preposterously distended” relation of the sonnet sequence. 17 The sonnets are Berryman’s first sequence and, as Stephen Matterson notes, Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, 77 Dream Songs, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest and, to some extent, Love & Fame also “achieved

17 Christopher Ricks, “Recent American Poetry”, Massachusetts Review, 11 (1970), 333.

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their finest effects through being considered as sequences”. 18 There may be no easy “fit” between Berryman’s contemporary situation and the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, but this disparity is what makes Sonnets to Chris vital and it compelled Berryman to adapt the form further and set up the drama of voices in The Dream Songs. For an American poet, the sonnet may be limited as much by its European associations as by its actual formal constraints, but Berryman is just as eager to challenge his poetic ancestors as to revere them. He often evokes Elizabethan sonnet conventions explicitly to distance himself from them. Sonnet 40, for example, with obvious allusion to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, implies that twentieth-century poets no longer have immortal longings for their verse: “Marble nor monuments whereof then we spoke / We speak of more”. Berryman found the claims to immortality of Shakespeare’s sonnets “tiresome (though justified)”;19 in this poem such claims are “A Renaissance fashion, not to be recalled”. Lowell shared Berryman’s regard for immediacy and spontaneity in verse over memorialization. “I have tried to write alive English and do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America”,20 he wrote in the Introduction to Imitations, his volume of versions of European poetry that has its own English precedent in Dryden’s classical translations. This sense of language, poetry and history as living things informs the whole of Lowell’s oeuvre. “Often a poem didn’t live until the last line cleared the lungs”, he explained to Ian Hamilton about his Notebook sonnets.21 In “The Nihilist As Hero” he wants “words meat-hooked from the living steer”, but gets only a “beautiful unchanging fire”. 22 Words, once printed, lose vitality, but Lowell nonetheless strives for as immediate an effect as possible. By loosening the sonnet form Lowell attempts to escape the rigor mortis he felt fixed line length and rhyme schemes might induce in his poetry. His collapsing of the sonnet into blank verse or prose and his erratic shifts of focus are equivalent to Berryman’s “crumpling a syntax at a sudden need”; and 18

Stephen Matterson, Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, 94. 19 John Berryman, “The Sonnets”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed. John Haffenden, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 285. 20 Lowell, Collected Poems, 195. 21 Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, 271. 22 Lowell, Collected Poems, 590.

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both poets’ adaptations of the form are responses to their anxiety that without challenges to the sonnet’s conventions their own poems might seem stagnant. In Sonnets to Chris, Berryman also competes amorously with his poetic ancestors. He is as protective of his lady’s beauty as an Arcadian shepherd. Sonnet 27 begins: “In a poem made by Cummings, long since, his / Girl was the rain, but darling you are sunlight” (CP 84). Somewhat unconventionally, Berryman writes “Cummings” with a capital “C”. The reference to cummings’ “i have found out what you are like / the rain”, however, is gratuitous, but for the opportunity it gives Berryman to claim, just as conventionally, that his girl is something better.23 In Sonnet 75, he compares his relationship with Chris to Petrarch’s with Laura, and does so with an equal measure of remorse and swagger. “He never touched her. Swirl our crimes and crimes” (CP 108). And his insistence on Chris’ blondeness is at once a snub to Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” and a refutation of the Renaissance association of fairness with purity. Spenser’s bride in his “Epithalamion”, with her “snowie necke lyke to a marble towre”24 and other pale attributes, may have epitomized chastity, but for Berryman Chris’ blondeness has purely erotic appeal, provoking him in the first poem alone to summon up a whole series of white or bright things: semen-like starch and melted ice cream – “Blond silky cream, sweet cold” – bright sand, and “a bone sunned white”. Perhaps the most striking of Berryman’s challenges to his predecessors – although it is made in an essay and not in the sonnets themselves – is his dismissal of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets as “mostly very bad poems indeed, contemptuous, trivial and obscene”. 25 However, this is more a manifestation of Berryman’s own unease about using the sonnet sequence – and even art itself – to record (form, master) his extramarital affair than it is a considered criticism. Anne Barton has shown in a review of Berryman’s Shakespeare that Berryman’s essay on the sonnets must have been written after the publication of Leslie Hotson’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated in 1949,

23 e. e. cummings, Complete Poems 1910-1962, ed. George James Firmage, London: Granada, 1981, 169. 24 Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe, London: Penguin, 1999, 442. 25 Berryman’s Shakespeare, 286, 287.

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and therefore also after the completion of his own sequence.26 By disparaging the “Dark Lady” sonnets, then, Berryman also implicates his own, at this point unpublished, poems. Poems that treat alfresco sex (Sonnet 71, amongst others) and sex in the car “(cave of our radical love)” (Sonnet 9), evoke fellatio (Sonnet 59),27 and pun with Jacobean relish on the words “come”, “die” and, in line 4 of the first sonnet, “will”, can hardly be expected to escape the charges of obscenity Berryman passes on the “Dark Lady” sonnets. Berryman – who never published one – claimed that Shakespearean sonnets were easier to write than Petrarchan ones and thought most of Shakespeare’s couplets weak.28 But in calling the poems “bad” he might equally be attacking their morality as their skill. The conscience-ridden adulterer, it seems, could not accept that “Love is too young to know what conscience is”. A further point arising from Berryman’s essay, elucidated by Barton, is that if, as Berryman believed (mistakenly, it now appears), Shakespeare’s sonnets were written as early as the late 1580s but not published until 1609, the period of time between composition and publication would be almost exactly the same as that between the composition and publication of Berryman’s sonnets. Berryman must therefore have reconsidered his opinion that “the middle-aged respectable Shakespeare”29 would not willingly have released such poems – an opinion shared by Auden who thought “Shakespeare must have been horrified when they were published”. 30 Berryman’s decision not to publish his own sonnets for nearly twenty years was informed by his unwillingness to make his affair with Chris public. However, it can reasonably be inferred that their artistic merit also troubled him and that he could not disentangle his apprehensions about them as good poetry from his guilt about the relationship. His continued ambivalence, even on publication in 1967, can be adduced from the prefatory Dream Song. “Has he the right”, Berryman asks in that piece, 26

Anne Barton, “John Berryman’s Flying Horse”, New York Review of Books, 23 September 1999, 66. 27 See Joel Conarroe, John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, 56. 28 Berryman’s Shakespeare, 285. 29 Ibid., 288. 30 W.H. Auden, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, in Forewords and Afterwords, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, 105.

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upon that old young man, to bare his nervous system & display all the clouds again as they were above? (CP 70)

This sounds like an ethical question. Should he allow his old self, like Henry in Dream Song 1, to be “pried / open for all the world to see”? “What does anything matter?” Why not burn up the songs and avoid public humiliation? These are not the questions of a man confident that it would be appropriate or valuable to make his early work – and infidelity – public. The reason given for not burning them is that “The original fault / will not be undone by fire” (CP 70). What is surprising, in the next stanza, is the revelation that “The original fault was whether wickedness / was soluble in art”. That is, the original fault was not the fact of the affair (which is simply “wickedness”), but the fact of having written poems about it in the hope that doing so might constitute some kind of atonement. Dream Song 26, in which Henry, after becoming interested in women’s bodies, falls “back into the original crime: art, rime” also voices the anxiety that writing might be primitive and sinful. How can a writer defend turning his transgressions into art? All the same, for Berryman to burn his sonnets would not destroy the fact that he had written them in the first place. He notes that “History” and Jacques Maritain (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Princeton from 1948) say, tentatively, that “wickedness was soluble in art” – and for Berryman to leave his songs unpublished would be to leave the question unresolved. Berryman was brought up as a Catholic, and his self-judgments are severe. “I did not foresee fraud of the Law”, he admits in Sonnet 45, the capitalization of “Law” indicating Mosaic Law: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”31 However, though Berryman felt despondent about his affair and the pain he was causing his wife, Eileen,32 he was also concerned about how his poems might reflect on previous sonnet lovers. “As a friend of the Court I would say, Let them die”, he admits in the prefatory Dream Song. Though he finally resisted this judgment, Berryman’s concerns about his poems’ unfriendliness to a 31 32

Exodus 20:15. Named “Esther” in Berryman’s Sonnets.

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genteel tradition jostle with the more confident challenges I have already noted. Such concerns are suggested in the not quite coherent conclusion to Sonnet 56, a poem which contemplates the possibility of divorce and which I would like to consider at some length (CP 98). The sonnet begins: Sunderings and luxations, luxe, and griefUnending exile from the original spouse, Dog-fights! one bites intimate as a louse The lousy other ….

The dense consonantal alliteration on “luxations”, “luxe”, and “exile” owes much to John Donne and, later, to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and is characteristic, as is the associative word play that follows on “louse”, “lousy” and “mouse”. (An allusion to Donne’s “The Flea” in the image of the “louse” is also apparent.) However, it is the poem’s difficulties, which attest to the modernist heritage Berryman never completely rejected, that are of most interest. Each of the poem’s unusual words – “luxations” (dislocations), “luxe” (luxury), and, a few lines later, “nulliparous” (used of a woman who has never given birth) – is liable to disrupt this poem preoccupied with breakages by sending its readers to the dictionary. There are also five ellipses, which are further interruptions (the first of them aptly occurring after “divided” and before “divorce”), marking points at which the reader must try to piece together a plot from fragments of narrative and unanswered speculations. In this respect, the poem makes similar demands to the sequence as a whole, whose narrative is punctured by lacunae.33 All but eighteen of the sonnets contain at least one ellipsis, and amongst these are the seven new sonnets Berryman added in 1966. These ellipses imply truncated trains of thought, but the final two especially also hint towards things left unspoken because they do not bear thinking about: I thought of you, – come we too to this vile Loose fagend? earlier still loves so defile? . . Could our incredible marriage . . like all others’ . . ?

“Could our incredible marriage . .” demands to be completed by a word such as “fail”. This requirement is evaded only by a pessimistic 33

Ellipses are also common in Lowell’s sonnet books, to similar effect.

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and hyperbolic afterthought: “like all others’ . .?” The question mark is left hanging as if in acknowledgment that the question itself remains incomplete (in the previous line the ellipsis follows the question mark). The Petrarchan form is better suited to this kind of open-ended conclusion than the Shakespearean, which would demand a couplet and therefore a greater sense of closure. There is also some confusion as to whom the pronouns in these final lines should refer, and this further complicates the poem. If “we” and “our” are taken to refer to Berryman and Chris, the “incredible marriage” of the final line must refer, symbolically, to their relationship. However, it is hard to ignore Berryman’s consciousness throughout the sequence that his actual marriage, to Eileen, is at risk, hinted at earlier in this poem by “exile from the original spouse”. Could this be to what he refers? Either way, the italicization of “our” indicates incredulity at the prospect of the marriage ending. The italicization of “still” in the penultimate line is more problematic. What are these “earlier still loves” that Berryman is afraid of defiling, and why should the failure of his marriage, symbolic or real, defile earlier loves in any case? Earlier than what? If Berryman means earlier than the failed unions of the “others” that he and (presumably) Chris have been discussing, then it is just possible that he has in mind the ideal loves of Petrarch for Laura, Dante for Beatrice, or Astrophil for Stella. Shades of another meaning of “still” – motionless – might also be present, inviting a contrast between Berryman and Chris’ restless and physical relationship to those of other sonnet lovers, unrequited and now unchangeably set in works of art; relationships that, “like all others”, were also doomed. Nor is it too far-fetched, in a poem that uses the word “nulliparous”, to make an associative leap from “still loves” to still births. The birth scene in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which culminates in Anne Bradstreet asking “Is that thing alive?” confirms that Berryman saw a Freudian analogy between giving birth and writing, as does Dream Song 124 in which Henry practices couvade. 34 Like Lowell, Berryman wanted his poems to “live”, but feared they would not. Sonnet 56 is highly enigmatic, but it does suggest Berryman’s apprehensions that his sonnet sequence of

34

Anne Bradstreet, who was noted for her poetry of married love, is the one person whose “earlier love” Berryman certainly defiles when he imagines having an affair with her.

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erotic love might sully the love tradition (adulterous though its premise often was) and ultimately prove fruitless. Berryman’s acute doubts about writing’s aptitude for purgation recall Sonnet 34 of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella with its rebuke “Art not ashamed to publish thy disease?”,35 and Lowell is similarly racked throughout The Dolphin. “Surely good writers write all possible wrong”, 36 he puns in “Summer Between Terms I”, wishing that writing wrongs would also amount to righting them. In fact, as he admits in “Dolphin”, it appears to have had the opposite effect of “not avoiding injury”37 either to himself or to others. Lowell’s use of “good” here, like Berryman’s dismissal of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets as “bad”, invites the question of whether a “good” writer is a morally upright one or merely an accomplished craftsman. Lowell also uses the language of moral evaluation to comment on his slackening of the sonnet form. “My meter, fourteen line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose”, he remarks in the “Afterthought” to Notebook. Lowell was (and is still) lambasted for, amongst other crimes, razing and de-structuring the sonnet.38 By using the word “corrupts”, he pre-empts such criticisms, but he makes no apologies and his next comment suggests that he would have liked to distort the form further: “Even with this license, I fear I have failed to avoid the themes and gigantism of the sonnet.”39 Whether or not one concludes that Lowell’s poems of this period ought to be called sonnets there is no doubt that they relentlessly break down distinctions – between “unrhymed blank verse”, “prose” and the “sonnet”, and between “book” and individual “poems”. This is reflected in their content. Pieces of throwaway conversation, letters, and comments by critics are all incorporated alongside literary references, mostly unacknowledged. In Notebook in particular, with its intuitive arrangement and its refusal to differentiate between great historical figures and visits to the dentist, contemporary politics and words for a 35

Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella and Other Writings, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson, London: Everyman, 1997, 36. 36 Lowell, Collected Poems, 658. 37 Ibid., 708. 38 See, for example, Calvin Bedient, “Visions and Revisions: Three New Volumes”, in The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod, London: Greenwood Press, 1999, 183. 39 Robert Lowell, Notebook, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1970, 262.

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guinea-pig, the formal collapse, however frustrating to the reader, appropriately mimics the breakdown of a hierarchy in the subject matter. Similarly, in History, distinctions between past and present – especially Ancient Rome and 1960s America – and between the individual, his history and his society are blurred in poems that also blur genre distinctions. “I didn’t find fourteen lines a handcuff”,40 Lowell insisted in a 1971 interview with Ian Hamilton, but while writing what would be his final book, Day by Day, he admitted that the form had, in fact, been constraining: “gone now the sonnet’s cramping and military beat.”41 And the tergiversations of his final sonnet, “Dolphin”, suggest that even after five years of sonnet-writing, five books, and over a thousand published poems, Lowell was not confident that he had breached the gulfs between England and America, the past and the present, or the personal and the public. The poet is guided through a “maze of iron composition” but by a “wandering voice”; he has plotted “freely” but is “caught in [a] hangman’s-knot of sinking lines”.42 Similar tensions between freedom and containment are registered in the form, which falls between the strictures of the conventional Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet and a characteristically American free verse tradition. With a wry nod to Emerson, Lowell admits: “I have sat and listened to too many / words of the collaborating muse.” This “collaborating” as opposed to courtly “muse”, is, in the first instance, Caroline Blackwood, Lowell’s third wife (an Englishwoman) and the “Dolphin” of the book’s title. However, she was not the muse for his other sonnet books: one might equally take this muse to be whatever it was that inspired Lowell to try reconciling distinct European and American traditions, as if his sonnets were the result of a collaborative venture between two different cultures. The conspiratorial overtones of “collaborating” and, in the next line, “plotted”, further suggest Lowell’s fears about the appropriateness of his endeavour. Lowell concludes “Dolphin”, and his entire sonnet-writing phase, with a botched attempt to align himself with Shakespeare, in his opinion “much the best English or American writer”. 43 Frank Bidart notes that Lowell believed himself to be quoting Shakespeare’s first 40

Lowell, Collected Prose, 271. Lowell, Collected Poems, 993. 42 Ibid., 708. 43 Lowell, Collected Prose, 289. 41

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editors Heminge and Condell in the final line of “Dolphin”: “my eyes have seen what my hand did.” As it is, he was mistaken, but the attempt is self-aggrandizing after the humble admissions of the preceding lines.44 This extra, fifteenth line hangs disjointed from the main body of the poem, denying The Dolphin (and “Dolphin”) a tidy conclusion and suggesting that both poem and book could go on endlessly, despite the affirmative, retrospective stance. Depending on how one reads “Dolphin”, the close proximity of the references to Emerson and Shakespeare either serves only to stress the tensions between the opposing influences or to unify them. Either way, Lowell’s allegiance to both is implied. Berryman’s Dream Song form allows for an equally broad scope. Although Sonnets to Chris is set around Princeton and treats a distinctly modern relationship, The Dream Songs is a more obviously American work. The references to African-American culture, jazz, minstrel shows, American politics and American writers, might seem untenably discordant in a classical sonnet, even (or especially) alongside the more literary references, but the Dream Song form absorbs them all. Unlike Lowell, Berryman does not appear to have found his new form a bind. The model is endlessly adaptable, even more so than the sonnet. Berryman himself points out that the Dream Songs are “not but mostly rhymed with great strictness”, 45 his odd phrasing stressing their formality and relative freedom all at once. A rhyme scheme established in the first stanza is not necessarily followed in the second and third, and sometimes a song that does not rhyme to begin with does later. Line lengths range from a single monosyllable to twenty-three syllables, and the form easily accommodates such variation. But the structural backbone of each song is never abandoned. Henry says of a friend in Dream Song 346, “he is too free, / he needs the limitations of Henry”; although he felt compelled to devise a more flexible form than the sonnet, Berryman nonetheless needed the limitations of structure – and this conforms with traditional defenses of the sonnet that emphasize freedom within bounds. A principle of compromise informs both poets’ innovative versions of the sonnet. High and popular culture, the personal and the 44

Lowell, Collected Poems, 1139. John Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of The Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 330.

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impersonal, the literary and the slangy, and the part and the whole, are set alongside and against each other. In part, such inclusiveness brings to the fore the dilemma of the generic American poet of the period, trying to make sense of a multiplicity of equally valid influences. But their inclusiveness also attests to the enormous ambitions of Berryman and Lowell as individuals. Considering their enormous range, it is impressive that Lowell’s sonnet books and Berryman’s Dream Songs do not succumb to the chaos that threatens to engulf them. Lowell’s loosening of the sonnet form, and Berryman’s experiments with it that culminated in his creation of The Dream Songs both represent attempts to find a middle way between earlier English influences and more recent American ones. In so doing, they become themselves unique, and if they appear to “corrupt” or “defile” the sonnet tradition, they also revivify and invigorate it.

THE WRITTEN AND THE ORAL IN HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET PAGE RICHARDS

John Berryman’s language has cornered much of the critical debate on his longer poems, especially Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs. Concerning poems, that seems inevitable. With Berryman’s poems, however, the inevitable is more literal than first meets the ear. There is already a problem with the language: “Spellbound held subtle Henry all his four / hearers in the racket of the market / with ancient signs, infamous characters, / new rhythms.” (Dream Song 71) Critics have noticed this extraordinary difficulty. As Kathe Davis says: “It was the language of the Songs that most startled and bewildered readers. Berryman’s style was perceived as so unusual as to constitute a separate ‘language.’ ”1 In her essay Davis deals with Berryman’s many and important allusions to dialect, the minstrel show, and the blues, but these observations are about the use and integration of oral and cultural materials. This essay does not further gloss or interpret these allusions, whether, for example, to AfricanAmerican or Native-American oral traditions. Instead it examines rhetorical acts of oral strategies – tall tales, for example – in Berryman’s written language, acts dating back to settler and postcolonial preoccupations with existence and voice. In an essay on The Dream Songs Ernest J. Smith comments on “the odd language” of the poems, the “shifting pronoun usage”, and “the gnarled syntax”.2 Edward Hirsch recognizes the critical history, attempting to preserve 1

Kathe Davis, “ ‘Honey Dusk Do Sprawl’: Does Black Minstrel Dialect Obscure The Dream Songs?”, Language and Style, XVIII/1 (1985), 30. 2 Ernest J. Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’ for The Dream Songs and an Instance of Revision”, Journal of Modern Literature, XXIII/3-4 (2000), 432.

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such shattered pieces in “dramatic monologues” which “allowed them to act as anonymous shape-shifters, to conceal secrets inside their exclamatory revelations.”3 In another essay Carol Frost suggests that: “The discomfort for the reader caused by unfamiliar phrasings, strong feelings, disjunctions of syntax, even the subjects of Berryman’s poems … have caused and continue to cause consternation.” What, then, can one say about poems that so literally force us to reconsiderations of what we think we already know about language? Frost argues for “the new convention” in Berryman’s poetry, “taking surprise to its limit: a tendency toward shock, where formerly the milder emotions satisfied”.4 The poet’s own notes for composition, Smith observes, emphasize the idea to “play more”, making it too easy to identify Berryman’s own language with newness or “experimentation”: “the main point of emphasis concerning language in the notes is on flexibility and experimentation.”5 Considering the problems of Berryman’s idiom, I suggest that we go in another (contrary) direction, towards an exploration of oral technique in Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, and especially his manipulation of traditional American procedures in the language of that poem. Arguing against any “obscurantist tactics” in Berryman’s dialect, Davis insightfully identifies “nonrational order” mistaken for thematic “lack of meaning”. But what deserves attention is a rhetorical rather than a thematic “lack of meaning”. The substitution of “a levity we need to face the grave world” for the thematically “incomprehensible” does not address the poetry’s tactics.6 Instead, observations on a lack of thematic obscurity register the traditions of American tall tale and frame humor. They need to be rediscovered because Berryman’s poems do not lead to levity as thematic conclusion, but depend from the beginning upon both trumped-up obfuscation and the anticipated levity (produced by such trumped-up obfuscation) not to settle for such humility in facing the world. This essay, therefore, will focus on language in terms of these longstanding forms which are oral in root. It will point out the absence of either formal newness or humility and reveal instead aggressive 3

Edward Hirsch, “One Life, One Writing!: The Middle Generation”, The American Poetry Review, XXXIX/5 (2000), 11. 4 Carol Frost, “The Poet’s Tact, and a Necessary Tactlessness”, New England Review, XX/3 (1999), 201. 5 Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’”, 432. 6 Davis, “ ‘Honey Dusk Do Sprawl’”, 30, 31, 42, 33.

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acts of language that demand oral reclamation. In an article on “Aggression in Children’s Jokes”, Sandra McCosh underscores the kind of verbal ambivalence that makes the listener feel like a fool in a shaggy dog story: “Here the teller relates a very long story, with as many details as he can manufacture, and ends with a punchline that doesn’t resolve the problem in the joke, and leaves the listener hanging.”7 In Berryman’s poems, when the reader is left hanging or “not being told something”8 that “something” is not due primarily to “loss”9 or inarticulateness but to an oral collusion of another sort. If we reclaim the oral background, we see the poetry’s history and humor in a different way. Too often critical assumptions begin by figuring how the language in Berryman works as written text. Even when arguments approach oral underpinnings, they begin with a written sense of things. Precisely when “levity” is what we need, for instance, to “face the grave world”, 10 we are given a case for what words represent, rather than for how listeners, in oral traditions, reintroduce words. Much of the levity and laughter of Berryman’s poetry, however, derives from language reorganized as talk. Moreover, Berryman’s body of poems is in a long tradition of American oral tales (shaggy dogs, frame stories, and rhetoric) and the language, therefore, should not be measured wholly in terms of written mastery. Humor is often derived from situations where someone is being or acting strange or peculiar, notfunny funny. In Berryman’s poetry manipulations of standard grammar reintroduce oral strategies into written language, making a written text “act oral”. Looking backwards, then, to American oral traditions in the remainder of this essay I want to attempt to uncover Berryman’s rhetoric and humor: I can do no more than give a few examples, but they are suggestive, I hope, of the unexpected coercive patterns of participation demanded by longstanding American oral strategies that nonetheless are never longstanding enough to reassure an audience of a narrative that exists or persists without them.

7

Sandra McCosh, “Aggression in Children’s Jokes”, Maledicta, I/2 (1997), 130. Kevin Young, “Responsible Delight”, The Kenyon Review, XXI/2 (1999), 161. 9 Roger Pooley, “Berryman’s Last Poems: Plain Style and Christian Style”, Modern Language Review, LXXII/2 (1981), 291. 10 Davis, “ ‘Honey Dusk Do Sprawl’”, 42. 8

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Whether approached thematically, psychoanalytically, 11 or stylistically (as Pooley does, parsing plain and Christian styles), Berryman’s poetry appears to “estrange us from the familiar and signal the presence of something in us that is deep and demonic, something wild and unruly, irrational, imaginative”.12 Young echoes a common response when he says that: “I should say here that my initial judgment of the Dream Songs was harsh and unequivocal: I hated them. They are difficult at best, dense and even offensive at worst.” But something else happened to Young concerning the poem’s difficulty, though it is hard to say what: “I cannot say what transformation made me laugh with them instead of at them, or stop worrying that he was laughing at me as a reader.”13 The transformation from “at” to “with” here is crucial. It identifies what Henry B. Wonham notices in the American oral tall tale as an “invitation for collusive agreement between a narrative performer and privileged members of his or her audience”.14 By the end of a tall tale, squash vines, for example, as Ariane Dewey relates, “grew so fast that farmers could ride them from one field to the next. A tendril could sneak up a pant leg and grow a cucumber in one’s pocket while one chatted with a neighbor.” This invitation in the oral tall tale is initiated by what Dewey calls “some ordinary factual event” that catches the reader off guard by being escalated, or we might say dropped, “to the ridiculous”.15 We can hear this escalation of an ordinary event in the opening lines of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet: “The Governor your husband lived so long / moved you not, restless, waiting for him?” (CP 133) It grows out of proportion with impatience – “lived so long” makes one 11

Sarah Provost, for example, looks at “ways in which the poems became his children”, in “Erato’s Fool and Bitter Sister: Two Aspects of John Berryman”, Twentieth-Century Literature, XXX/1 (1984), 76. For Luke Spencer, one of Berryman’s important motives in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is “his urgent need to examine and, if possible, expiate his guilt about his own adulterous relationships with women”. See Luke Spencer, “Mistress Bradstreet and Mr Berryman: The Ultimate Seduction”, American Literature, LXVI/2 (1994), 353. 12 Hirsch, “One Life, One Writing!”, 11. 13 Young, “Responsible Delight”, 161, 163. 14 Henry B. Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 23. 15 See Ariane Dewey, “Comic Tragedies/Tragic Comedies: American Tall Tales”, in Sitting at the Feet of the Past: Retelling the North American Folktale for Children, eds Gary D. Schmidt and Donald R. Hettinga, New York: Greenwood Publishing, 1992, 195, 196.

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wonder how “long”? – until at the end of the poem both “forever” and its counterpoint – “so long as I happen” – become humorously conjoined (CP 147, emphasis added). This is not a resolution, or the thematic absence of one, but a narrator’s nod to having brought the “audience to a peak of impatience” with more than fifty stanzas in between. Such oral exaggeration of “I” is complete. Selfdifferentiation by the narrator feigns its way into an agreement, an act of collusion with Anne Bradstreet that literally depends for its life upon such continuous talking. We also recognize, more simply, the organization of language: the first line (“The Governor your husband lived so long”) with the norm; the second line (“moved you not, restless, waiting for him?”) against it (defined in terms of conversational, standard syntax). In this sequence, the lines together generate a narrator, and the language immediately anticipates an attempted recovery by a reader toward the norm, leading into the written relief of syntax and oral joke on such reward of patience in the third line: “you were a patient woman” (CP 133). No wonder the feigning collusion of the narrator with Anne Bradstreet at the end of the poem is orally a relief – a “collective phew”16 – and seriously overwritten. This is not surprising because as early as the poem’s second line, we who are listening should be orally alert to the rhetoric of jokes. Through overwritten text, the rhetoric produces the map of an oral tale. Bent for knowledge, readers of course look for irony, gaps, “fracture”17 in Berryman’s poem, but as listeners we hear differently. Oral techniques going back to the American tall tales are originally designed to draw on the knowledge of insiders.18 These written versions, as we will see, draw out cultural and postcolonial insiders of language (in particular, traditions of the British English language) to make them part of history-making, becoming, in short, outsiders all over again; that is, potential new insider-narrators of American English. Listeners who find their way through to the last “so long as I happen” are ratified for still being there, but they have also been transformed back to there, changed – now part of the “with” – in collusion with the narrator, without ever fully recognizing or understanding their original distance from either the narrator or their own laughter as one of the narrators. 16

Dewey, “Comic Tragedies/Tragic Comedies”, 196. Frost, “The Poet’s Tact, and a Necessary Tactlessness”, 201. 18 Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 22. 17

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Berryman’s poems grow out of a tradition that, in Wonham’s terms, invites “interpretive commitment from listeners who lack either cultural experience or experience of the genre, or both”. As in an oral tall tale, Berryman’s language therefore insists that it has a problem with idiosyncratic interpretation – it, too, will “feign agreement” from readers “where none exists”19 until the reader, again, stops laughing at and begins to laugh with the idiosyncrasies. Indeed, such a strategy often leads to finding an excuse for a real narrator at the end who is often named as Berryman himself. Young says, for example, “by looking at the early work we can see what led Berryman not just to Henry, but to himself”.20 In this frame of collusion, Berryman remakes words and narrators, one by one. In most of the Dream Songs, Smith observes that “prosodic elements are inconspicuous, overshadowed by the sheer strangeness of the poem’s language”.21 Smith may sound nearly pejorative, but not if the language is seen within the oral tradition. This is exactly the point. In this American frame, the initial self-conscious and heavy written or syntactical convulsions noticeably outweigh the more subtle poetic gestures; they nearly drown them on the page and force the reader into making sense at the start of what is being written down. But to approach the text solely as a written document sends us in the wrong direction. If the text is heard in the oral tradition, however, it does just what it continuously proposes to do: it performs itself or, as Wonham heavy-handedly explains: “The meaning of a tall tale, in this oral scenario, is indistinguishable from the event of performance; significance is the product of a transactive process that occurs in the rhetorical space between narrative presentation and response.”22 Although Berryman’s poems are written, they vamp their own response by turning written language into oral counterpart. Even this more straightforward example needs its oral roots: “I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea, / spares from his rigour for your poetry / more.” (CP 133) One possibility of conventional syntax is: “I doubt if Simon spares from his rigour more than this blast, that sea for your poetry.” One can quickly argue here for Berryman’s poetic rendering, the rhyme of “poetry” on “sea”, his use of sibilance (Simon, blast, sea, spares) yielding to the final liquid “r”-sounds in 19

Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 24. Young, “Responsible Delight”, 163. 21 Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’”, 437. 22 Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 27. 20

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“spares”, “rigour”, “poetry”, and “more”. Yet the point of the highly self-conscious written syntax is that it anticipates precisely – it sets the stage for – this untwisting and subsequent shaping of the drama in language. The strangeness (of which lyricism becomes only a part) is put on or performed as an invitation – to be put out temporarily, leaving what is left, which is not closure but a bare opening for “more”. It is oral and, in this context, ripe for a common point of reference as communal assault against the “idiosyncratic interpretation” that the convoluted syntax exaggerates. One of Berryman’s phrases, “damned serious humor”, 23 comes out of this highly-written exaggeration, and does so in a context of equally exaggerated time travel. Such exaggeration laughs and nods historically to its status as misfit, especially in the non-visual rhyme of “sea” and “poetry” that self-consciously lends itself to poetry. At exactly the same time, the oral rhyming on “sea” and “poetry” squeezes literally “more” from itself, squeezes out an oral agreement to proceed from the same written joke. This is a deadly serious joke that substitutes oral talk and collusion for written meaning or designation of the idiosyncratic. One way to understand this almost adolescent dare-structure is to see Berryman in the context of traditional English-language American literary history and discourse. Its written history has oral theatre and performance built into it. The tension and humor of Berryman’s words reveal, in historical ways, an oral technique in written text, where insiders and outsiders jostle uncomfortably. “Hallmarks of orality”, notes Bonnie D. Irwin, include “reiteration of themes and typical scenes” and characters who are sometimes “narrating for their lives against seemingly impossible odds”.24 Critics have noted different American sources. For Jennifer Andrews, the stress is due to geography: as Americans went westward into unknown territory, the American tall tale “provided a way to cope with and make sense” of this expansion. 25 Wonham places the American tall tale in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and calls tall talk an adopted “national idiom”. I think, however, it is due to the special demands on 23

Cited by Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’”, 430. Bonnie D. Irwin, “The Frame Tale East and West”, in Teaching Oral Traditions, ed. John Miles Foley, New York: Modern Language Association, 1998, 394-95. 25 Jennifer Andrews, “Reading Toni Morrison’s Jazz: Rewriting the Tall Tale and Playing with the Trickster in the White American and African-American Humor Traditions”, Canadian Review of American Studies, XXIX/1 (1999), 91. 24

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audience that are rooted in American oral discourse. The American oral tradition projects “multiple verbal meanings at once by addressing at least two audiences” and the “utterance is calculated to mean something different to each”. 26 The written forms ultimately “depict the oral traditions from which they are derived” – and therefore the paradox of being written.27 Many of the interpolated tales “flourished in the oral tradition”, notes Bonnie D. Irwin.28 They immediately draw in listeners to affirm collective experience “at the expense of cultural outsiders”. Meanings for “privileged readers” are based on predetermined understandings between an audience and a narrator of what constitutes falsehood and fact, always locally determined. In the American tall tale, the line between fact and fiction is based on one of common cultural experience, such as “weather conditions, the habits of animals, or the hardships of life that are peculiar to a given region”.29 Berryman’s poems must be seen in this context. For poetry renowned for multiple verbal meanings, speakers, and narrative perspectives, there is a nearly neglected but comparable line demarcating a privileged understanding, historically bound to one particular kind of oral performance, one predicated on common speech: the grammar and syntax of American English. In America the Puritans landed writing. Thus the two, oral and written, are effectively simultaneous, and the written could on this edge be considered first. But the English language that Americans used, oral or written, posed special problems for them. In relation to English grammar, syntax, and meaning, the insider’s position, normally rooted in the oral and native, began instead as a written role of insiders who felt like outsiders to their own language for their new nation. In 1815, Walter Channing suggested that The language in which we speak and write is the vernacular tongue of a nation which thinks it corrupted on every other lip but its own .… Our descriptions, of course, which must, if we ever have a poetry, be made in the language of another country, can never be distinctive. 26

Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 21, 31. Irwin, “The Frame Tale East and West”, 395. Tall tales are one kind of frame tale, a genre which, she says, “occupies a unique place in the relation between orality and literacy” (ibid., 391). 28 Ibid., 392. 29 Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 22, 24. 27

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Channing explains that “peculiarities of country, especially the great distinctive characteristick ones, and manners likewise, can be perfectly rendered only by the language which they themselves have given rise to. I mean a peculiar language.”30 Postcolonial England’s domination, then, made many Americans come to see themselves back as outsiders to their own “insider” language. Searching for their own national language, Americans equated authentic language to something non-British: “Another reason why there are few original publications among us”, George Tucker writes, “may be found in our former colonial dependence, and in the identity of our language and manners with those of Great Britain”. 31 The postcolonial defensiveness – “To quote from Holy Writ, ‘We, measuring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves among ourselves, are not wise’”32 – reproduced oral American-narrators, who sought refuge from a language that was often perceived as borrowed from England. In their search for a distinctive language and literature, “genius” became associated with non-British, non-figurative: No matter for rudeness …. It is enough that all is our own and just such as we were made to have and relish. A country then must be the former and finisher of its own genius. It has, or should have, nothing to do with strangers.33

So in “new” oral narratives – that is, through oral techniques in written texts – the insider-narrator of England’s written English is transformed into an outsider and set up for the possibility of being reinstated as a new insider-narrator, one who can hear American English. Translation of English into English, therefore, took the early lead. The theatre became a forum for hostility. Theatre was considered, as 30 Walter Channing, “Essay on American Language and Literature”, The NorthAmerican Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 1 (1815), 309. Channing is among the most famous for explicitly identifying the problem of an overlapping language. 31 George Tucker, “On American Literature”, in Essays by a Citizen of Virginia: Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy by a Citizen of Virginia, Georgetown: Joseph Milligan and Jacob Gideon, Jr, Printer, 1822, 51. 32 Editor, “American Letters: Their Character and Advancement”, The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, and Science, I/6 (1845), 575. 33 Edward Tyrell Channing, “On Models in Literature”, The North-American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 3 (1816), 207.

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Jeffrey H. Richards says, “the province of our late enemy, the British”; antipathy toward theater “in nearly every venue” led to the practice of turning plays into lectures and began to make American history, like language used literally, especially popular.34 Each of these oral forms featured narration and a narrator, whether the theaterlecture or the American tall tale. This association became a general “defining character trait” and through it British attitudes about America were routinely “parodied”. 35 It is not surprising, then, that many of Berryman’s best poems, like many American texts, demand oral performance. Expectedly, they occasion self-rejection and conversion, like those of the tall tale from written language. As is often not true in the other traditions, however, these written (and traditionally) Protestant texts function to set up a continuous stream of outsiders, not insiders. These outsiders include, again, narrators, who, one by one, openly bury and re-present inert language as alive, strange, alien to the ear, if not to the mouth and hand. Look at this verse-sentence from Berryman, seven far-from-simple words: “I summon, see / From the centuries it” (CP 133). In this direct address, “you”, the subject of “see”, is hidden for a moment. “I” therefore is not the subject, as it appears, but part of the object. Therefore, the narrating “I” – the outsider “I” – is created from the inside out, when “I summoned” is recognized as framed by the narrating “You see …”. The whole thing is framed by a narrator who openly covers “see” in parallel next to “it” so that the buried “you” is reinvigorated as an insider to its own sentence. The narrator also sinks both narration (the fact of the frame) and “you” for a moment to make the words “see” and “it” disproportionately literal, odd, full of life, foreign to the ear, unmediated. “I” seems to be doing everything, summoning and seeing, but “I,” as it turns out, is not the subject. Buried “you” literally is. Thus, as points of the sentence’s momentum, “see” and “it” have undue importance, exaggerated literalness, each hanging upon the other in translation; in “see / From the centuries it” it is “you” who does the seeing. “You” is made an outsider to be refashioned as never anything but an eye, the “I”: a cultural insider. Drawing upon these early oral practices of American rhetoric and tales demands this elaboration. Otherwise, the crucial insider/outsider 34

Jeffrey H. Richards, Introduction, Early American Drama, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997, xii. 35 Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 39-40.

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relations are missed. Berryman’s collusion too draws on the American tall tale. What Wonham calls its “invitation for collusive agreement” is a transformed rebirth of the earlier modes of religious conversion, what Young momentarily renames by experience “transformation”. American tall tales, broadly, are designed to ratify convention and convert by pressure. For example, in “The catfish roll’d his eyes clean round till he squinted – when snap went the line, crack went his gills, and off he bounced like a wild Ingen”, everyone knows that a catfish doesn’t roll its eyes and squint.36 Moreover, these traditions, as we have noticed, finally reject the multiple meanings that their tales embody to draw in converts in favor of consensus. Their emphasis on repudiating literal understanding – the catfish squinting or the word as a substitute for the Word as the highest form of self-delusion – leads to broadening consensus, one by which an agreement to agree supersedes either multiple meanings or any single rendering of the truth. But in Berryman’s poems, as in American postcolonial traditions generally, literal meaning is not to be distrusted, as it is in the tall tale. As Berryman himself suggests: “an American historian somewhere observes that all colonial settlements are intensely conservative, except in the initial break-off point.”37 The reinvented literal meaning, like the rediscovered “it” in Berryman’s poem, is the only thing that makes a word a matter of movement, of living, of birth. As Gabór Bezeczky explains about literal language: It is impossible to tell a lie in this language because words cannot be used outside their proper fields of application …. This also prevents speakers from mistakes and “planned mistakes” or “calculated errors” as metaphors are sometimes considered.38

Refusing words inside their proper applications, Berryman’s outsider narrators undermine the application, and underwrite the literal, stripping the written function of the words down to sound. In Berryman’s work, social inadequacy is a means by which words – not silences – are generated and words are specifically not an expression of failure: “Versing, I shroud among the dynasties; / quaternion on 36

Cited by Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 39. John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 328. 38 Gabór Bezeczky, “Literal Language”, New Literary History, XXII/3 (1991), 609. 37

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quaternion, tireless I phrase / anything past, dead, far, / sacred, for a barbarous place” (CP 135). The carryover from the oral tall tale is clear in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. The “I” is buried by inhabiting two bodies at once. The outsider “I” is the insider “I” too, producing acts of simultaneous translation and conversion – and speech itself (“Versing”, “phrase”) – around a dead body, the historical “I”. Again, earlier, the use of “most” qualifies written narration with oral interjection: “we were, most, used up” (CP 134). Caught between modifying “we” and “used”, “most” reverts to itself, lying neither way, buried alive between its conventionally “heard” functions, reviving instead now simply as utterance from a character created inside out from another and earlier (Anne Bradstreet’s) narration. The narrator therefore dies as a teller of tales but lives in speech. Instead of achieving the “spontaneous activity of listeners” in oral performance, these written texts draw out humorously and to no end, written frames of multiple perspectives, parodying storytelling but not utterance. Framing also draws on the American oral tradition. In his prefatory “Note” to The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman initiates such frames: “Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work.” This self-conscious look at origins in language, which playfully defrays authorship, alludes to a national controversy one hundred and fifty years earlier. Fisher Ames defensively noted the absence of “original” authors. “Is there one luminary in our firmament that shines with unborrowed rays?” he asked, continuing: “giants are rare; and it is forbidden by her [that is, Nature’s] laws that there should be races of them.”39 In place of oral spontaneity, written frames produce a certain structure for jokes that offend their listeners – the supposed cultural insiders – by having their words mean exactly what they mean when spoken, not conventionally heard. But such texts deliberately discomfort the supposed insiders of the language; they make words from listeners (extracting language from silence) and authority from the literal (reclaimed) meaning of a word. Pascal Covici notes that “Although most significant American authors do not generally receive the title of humorist – more and more 39

Fisher Ames, Works of Fisher Ames with a Selection from His Speeches and Correspondence, ed. Seth Ames, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1854, 430, 437.

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of them, however, write humor – a great many of their works force readers into the same sudden shifts of perspective that humor brings about.” The “revelations brought about by much American literature occur in large part because that literature functions in many ways that humor does”, he adds, “even when it is essentially very unfunny indeed”. 40 Berryman’s poems would receive this title. However, his sudden shifts of perspective are also very serious not about being funny but about being, or acting, literally “funny”. This more literal and functional form of “funny” is hard to describe, but it is not as laughable as funny and not as meaningful as literal. The more the oddness is appreciated for what it is doing, rather than what it is saying, the more truly funny and moving it can become, without losing its seriousness as an act in history. As we have seen, words in Berryman’s poems are frequently made unfamiliar, deliberately drawn outside expectations of grammar and syntax and time, producing frames of multiple perspectives. His strategies also defamiliarize by making the conventions insiders of English both strange and literal: “When the mouth dies, who misses you?” (CP 133). By mouthing and defamiliarizing, Berryman’s insiders become outsiders – storytellers, speakers, narrators who exhort to themselves as narrators: “Talk to me” (CP 140). Outsiders no longer exist, except importantly as an act of narrating. Look at “Can be hope a cloak?” (CP 142) Its very subject – “hope” – does not immediately present itself, making space for an inaudible pronoun. In this opening note, someone is already buried. The beginning of a sentence is replaced with a middle. The ear attempts initially to revive and replenish “can be” with an appropriate pronoun or noun. Stripped at first of its subject, the verb “can be” acts positively, by sounding like an active verb, with “hope” as the object of its action: “can be [might have] hope.” “Can be” declares ultimately, by grammatical deformation, what the syntactical question attempts to remove: “hope” as literal: for a passing moment the phrase “Can be hope” replaces the rhetorical question that figuratively turns hope into a cloak: “Can hope be a cloak?” The question mark signals figurative language, a metaphor (“cloak”). As figurative, “hope” is laughed at, but the word “hope” is made unfamiliar, and is not laughed at – not at all. The action of deformed grammar and colliding syntax 40

Pascal Covici, Humor and Revelation in American Literature: The Puritan Connection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 3.

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therefore joins “hope” and “cloak” more closely into one sound, latched by a long “o”. The utterance mocks metaphor-making at the same time that it reinvents the sound of the word, “hope” (and “cloak”). By placing “hope” self-consciously near the act of making (“hope a cloak”, with a transformative “is” heard before “a”), the metaphor “hope is a cloak” is turned into self-conscious action. It shows the maker making literal and funny what should be a metaphor, revealing what it is meant to conceal. This is a good example of odd, unfunny humor. As local performance within itself, this action is funny. But in terms of the long frame of the poem it is also not funny. In truth, there is no pronoun or person speaking the subject’s part. “Hope” is formally the subject. Yet in the long view of the poem’s frame, the speaker created by the utterance is actually dead. “Can be hope a cloak” is attributable to a dead speaker, the female poet Anne Bradstreet. Thus the line declares itself self-consciously as a moment of narration, an instance of voice (regardless of initial statement). In the longer view, it frankly declares itself – against the odds of the common grammar and syntax of the insiders. The line is alive, but to or for whom? Once the initial pronoun or noun has been stripped to loosen the speaker’s identity, laughing at the utterance is laughing only at the character who has been made to say it. In particular, such a stripping allows the character potentially to include the listener. The sentence, therefore, refuses to represent anyone. It articulates everyone. All are invited by cultural insider awareness of grammar, and all are just as quickly rebuffed by alien syntax. Only “hope” survives literally as the subject. Funny from the point of view of form, it is also trivial and also serious. It is structurally amusing, dead-serious in its literalness of re-founding the word through sound. “Hope”, a word re-fitted by a narrator, makes a rebel of the reader reading. Many lines in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet read as these examples do, and it would be useful to describe the grammatical patterns. Prepositions generally move into subject locations. Verbs are frequently replaced by understudies of verbs, adverbs and adverbial phrases. Therefore, named verbs have less action than the other parts of speech enacting the verbs’ roles. Missing subjects are doubled to make pronouns appear, underscoring their proportionate absence. Run-on sentences are often resolved on an indeterminacy, just as midsentence beginnings draw attention to the artifice of origins. As Joseph Mancini argues, Berryman’s reader “accurately and

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simultaneously hears and speaks the poem”41 or, to put it another way, Berryman talked about hearing poems “with your eyes”,42 orally implementing a written text. By separating the prepositional phrases from their adverbial functions, by compressing time sequences into one, and by putting adjectives after nouns, the narrative breaks apart speaking from receiving, context from text, utterance from origins. The pattern isolates single words, “it”, “me”, “you”, “unchained”, making them peculiar, funny, literal, non-meaningful, un-word-like, moments of spontaneous action and sound. To hear such words is to say them again to oneself – to live. This pattern of utterance exploits the insider/outsider pattern that is a staple in the American oral tradition, making grammar careen in new paths. When outsiders stop being self-conscious about their own language, they become insiders, attuned to figurative language that they did not figure. In each case, a separation of pronoun from his or her action (whether by interruption, dislocation, or mixed grammar parts) removes the verb function, distributing its attributes among the surviving parts of speech, forcing them alive, or at least, momentarily to the center. The passing privilege of verb action is forced, invented by translating English into English. When English is asked to imitate English, new hearing is required. As in formal translation, a word as uttered is separate from the same word as received. The history of the tiny shudder between imitation and translation is a long one. Donald Carne-Ross, for example, resituates imitation as “translation”; for him, the original text is already a translation from the pre-verbal to the verbal.43 When “imitation” is perceived, more simply, to be linked with “borrowing”, 44 that is, to be specifically “artificial” and nonoriginal, translation became a literal enterprise away from a language that imitates itself upon utterance. In Berryman’s grammar, the smallest “it” reverberates. The uttered word “it”, for example, which we hear in “from the centuries it” (CP 133) is disproportionately loud. As utterance, it is spoken to insiders of English as definitive and 41

Joseph Mancini, Jr., “A Hearing Aid for Berryman’s Dream Songs”, Modern Language Studies, X/1 (1979-80), 58. 42 Cited by Thornbury (CP xxxv). 43 D.S. Carne-Ross, “Translation and Transposition”, in The Craft of and Context of Translation: A Symposium, eds William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971, 3-4. 44 Edward Tyrell Channing’s phrase is “borrowers and imitators” (see “On Models in Literature”, 205).

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representative. A pronoun, “it” stands for a noun. Here, however, upon being received, it is first indeterminate, literally no more or less than a place holder, withdrawn from figurative, and thus, language function. To suggest that it serves the noun “body” is precisely to suggest an absurd attachment, the tie to time and place that the word “body” defines, and specifically what its dislocation here rejects. It is it, a sound that is made funny by function: it rejects its body, here literally so, its noun “body”. It is serious in not warning against speech but in protecting speech itself.45 Techniques are fashioned in which a literal meaning is extracted back from a figurative one. For the purposes of re-establishing American English from English, this has an advantage. As Bezeczky says: “What gives relative stability [that is, literal use] will also give instability in metaphors and will lead to a new stability in dead metaphors.”46 Still a performance, then, this act of creating new stability, and the impossibility of lies, from dead British metaphors was a perceived necessity. To this effect, insider positions based ultimately in British English literary traditions were sacrificed. Creative, American outsider and narrator rhetoric grew large, exaggerated: it had to translate one’s own story and language back into oral, underlying conditions and beginnings. Strategies of stylistic fracture, like Berryman’s, are at the tail end of many oral techniques, including the American tall tale. Many written American texts create themselves back through the absence, of an oral tradition in America. Multiple meanings and single renderings literally fail to render what is already understood (by cultural insiders) or not (by cultural outsiders to their language). It helps to shift the terms of inadequacy from success or failure to participation (conversion) or rebellion. This makes language a physical matter of social placement. It becomes an element of time rather than truth. In this way, many of America’s stories and poems – from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” to “The Poem that Took the Place of a 45

The inexpressibility topos, by contrast, is noteworthy here. As Ann Chalmers Watts says: “Defined in its pure form inexpressibility centers on language, not the speaker: the point is not that the speaker fails, though the speaker does, but that any tongue fails.” She adds that “it acknowledges a struggle between word and not-word” – which is obviously a relevant but different struggle between word and word. See Ann Chalmers Watts, “Pearl, Inexpressibility, and Poems of Human Loss”, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XCI/1 (1984), 27. 46 Bezeczky, “Literal Language”, 610.

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Mountain” or “Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors” by Wallace Stevens – have frequently developed oral techniques in written texts as a way for written texts not to stay quiet. If such works – and Berryman’s poems in particular – are approached this way, they can no longer be measured in terms of written mastery alone. Instead, they must be seen as working within American oral and colonial traditions of survival, saying, and being heard.

ENCOUNTERING HENRY: A ROUNDTABLE ON DREAM SONG 1 RON CALLAN JUSTIN QUINN EDWARD CLARKE KIT FRYATT

HOW-TO-DO

RON CALLAN

Dream Song 1 is a “how-to-do” poem, a series of related strategies by which language is evaluated ethically, and, by which one survives. Survives what? This is not at all clear at any stage of the poem, but the italicized “do” in line five points in the direction of the problems: “they thought / they could do it.” The use of pronouns makes it impossible to be certain of the facts here – the details of the drama are denied to readers. However, there is a clear sense of a process of thinking (“they thought”) which presupposes and predicts a successful outcome (“they could do it”). By reflecting on those who think they can “do it”, Henry is in a huff, an understandable huff. The suggestion made by the figure “I” in the third line is that Henry does not think as others do; he does not think that he “could do it”. In assessing himself and others in this way, Henry chooses silence as a response and, as such, he hides himself away. The silence is recorded in the image of huffiness, the act of hiding, and the emphatic lacuna in the first line, which points to an absence when the expectation is presence. Indeed, that space presents a visual sign of Henry’s sense of otherness – Henry is at odds with others who represent, for him, oppressive behavior and values. Henry’s huff is not absolute, of course. He has someone to speak for him and the form of communication promotes a counter set of values. The alliteration, the lacuna, and the object of the verb “hid” being “day” point to a language that is not factual or prosaic, but literary and figurative, opposed to the notion of simple speech, and, by implication, to those who “do it”. To be “doing it” is paradoxically certain as it is vague; to “hid[e] the day” is paradoxically vague and certain: the certainty of doing “it” seems superficial and beyond questioning; to hide the day suggests a subtlety of mind and an interest

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in questioning. This initial difference indicates an important topic for this Dream Song and, indeed, for The Dream Songs as a whole: how to act and how to express actions – ethical issues. Henry is seen to be wrong to sulk and hide, and be “unappeasable”. While there is sympathy for him, it is clear that “he should have come out and talked”. Promoted here is activity – Henry should have found a means of expression and not hidden away. To “come out” suggests both a physical and an imaginative emergence, and is itself associated with the final image of the Song’s first stanza – the activity of talking. It suggests that language, expression, words, are key factors in the good activity. The stanza rests firmly with talking, with finding the means to bring internalized feelings and responses into language. Henry’s coming out is an act of being well and, indeed, of developing a society that is well: to hide is represented as dangerous in that it denies expression to thought; furthermore, it leaves the field open to domination by the others who simply “do it”. The beginning of the second stanza indicates why we should care for Henry. “All the world” alludes to Jacques’ “seven ages” of man in the speech beginning “All the world’s a stage” in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II, scene vii). Indeed, it serves as a context to undermine and trivialize Henry’s articulation of his own development. His inactive drama is weak by comparison to Shakespeare’s “comedy”. It is, in short, farcical as Henry’s world is “like a woolen lover”. A simile links Henry’s world to a “woolen lover” – an image of a lover dressed in wool (depending on the wool this could be an attractive or an unattractive option) or it could be a knitted doll or a teddy bear. It suggests a “once-upon-a-time” world when Henry sought and expressed a simple comfort zone. The comfort evident in the terms of the simile draw Henry towards those who could “do it”, even if it is by virtue of his innocence and, later, his silence – a woolen mind by implication. Henry’s developing experience, however, takes him beyond farce. His quotidian life and crises are revealed as noteworthy, the material for the complexity of an unfolding drama. While the “departure” is less a split with this woolen state of being and more a tear or fraying, it constitutes a harsh judgment on simile – the wool is being undone. This process occurs at the mid-point of the Song, lines nine and ten, where it seems poised on a fulcrum. Weighted against the representation of Henry’s difficulties and responses are set the terms of the non-woolen world. Here we are made aware that “nothing fell

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out” as it should (“might or ought”). “Falling out” in the context of language suggests an instinctive, thoughtless act, a tendency simply to “do it”. It suggests that Henry is severely at odds with society as he cannot simply let things “fall out” in acceptable ways. “Falling out” also points to a dispute between lovers, friends or colleagues. These “falls” are in marked contrast to the advice given to Henry in the first stanza to “come out” which suggested a thoughtful act, a desire to bring thought and speech into line, a more measured activity at odds with “falling out”. Finally, “fall” suggests sin (Genesis) and points to Henry – and his society/community – as fallible and human. It seems to me that Henry strives to face that legacy of the fall and is a figure striving to be true to himself. This is a significant crisis – how does one act? how does one speak? what “might” be? what “ought” to be? – and these become critical questions and they are raised by Berryman with considerable urgency in the first Dream Song. The inability of the figure “I” to see (“I don’t see”) is set against the world’s clear vision (“open for all the world to see”). Henry’s departure from the norm and the problems that arise because of it leave him not only “pried” but prised “open”. The inappropriateness of pry/prise calls into question Henry’s ability to survive, yet survive he does for the action is described in the past tense. Henry has managed to exist under immense pressure and so the “might” and “ought” (pointing to his ethical failure in “normal” terms) have been addressed in some way. Survival is a form of success and is surely drawn from an as yet undefined form of expression. The focus is on language and the context is an ethics of expression – simply “doing it” and staying silent is not an option. The fact that “All the world once did seem on Henry’s side” points us to “once upon a time…”, to the power of fairy tales, to a time when simile served the purpose, to the “woolen lover”. That was, as we are told, “Then”. The poem, however, deals with “now”. The present is a difficult time and place as the act of saying is a “long / wonder”. What is a “long / wonder”? The phrase is suggestive but not definitive. “[W]onder” indicates curiosity, surprise, or strangeness. Henry is seen, as he has been throughout the poem, as an oddity engaged by the complexity of being and committed to accuracy in expression. This phrase does not have the sound-bite likeness of similes, but is a form that represents more accurately the long song of experience. This singing is not that issued from the “top” of the “sycamore” but made of words that “the world can bear & be”. The ampersand significantly

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represents the flexibility of language, a sign (beyond the alphabet and at the same time related to it) that points to complexity and complementarity. The terrible division of the opening stanza becomes the catalyst for an expression to bridge the cataclysmic separation of Henry from himself and from the world. The final two verse sentences represent a conclusion of sorts. The first returns us to the world of “once-upon-a-time”. The figure “I”, dramatically in control of the narrative, achieves success away from the earth, high on a tree, singing. The image points vertically to the heavens as gladness lies in the status of being high above the earth, linked to strong, powerful, and phallic imagery, and “glad” (pleased, willing) to sing. While the occasion is undoubtedly in the realm of “once”, the language offers something beyond simile, something of his new experiences. The event is either factual (happiness was achieved by climbing a tree) or symbolic (happiness lies above, away from human interaction, close to nature, and pointing to the heavens and god). In the first stanza, Henry “should have come out and talked”; here the figure “I” is “all at the top, and [he] sang.” In the first, voice is promoted and encouraged to enter social circumstances, and isolation is seen as a force of repression; in the second, voice is delivered in isolation and is “glad”, and the imagery seems at odds with the earlier advice. The tree scene is an example, however, of the developing ethical voice. We know this partly by the use of “and” (and not the ampersand) because “and” links “come out and talked” with “all at the top and […] sang”. The figure “I” recalls the singing in ways which link it to his experiences in the present (the “now-once” construction). This context is effectively a new way to report an old event; this is part of his coming out, and there is not a simile in sight. The penultimate verse sentence establishes, through memory, a potent voice that understands and represents nostalgia without conceding to it. This new voice is most evident in the final two lines. Here the angle of vision shifts dramatically to the horizontal and to land. The complexity of the occasion is immediately evident as land clashes with another element – the sea. This immense battle becomes the site for the “now”. The meeting point is represented by the verb “wears” which suggests one being dressed (adornment) and/or one being eroded by the other (violation). This is not direct language, not imagery to be easily understood (“do it”). What we witness is a titanic contest as elemental forces compete: “Hard” against “strong”. The images of masculine attributes (“hard” and “strong”) and elemental

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agents (“land” and “sea”) point to an epic contest; yet this is on Henry’s patch. It is as though the figure “I” is best represented by images of contested space and the reality of his situation is best known by synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, symbol, image – but not simile, at least not now. Survival depends on accuracy. So how can we read the final line and the strange setting of “empty” with “grows” in the context of “bed” (flowers and sex)? The use of “and” is helpful here as it points us to the earlier usage and to singing and talking. But this is a winter scene with the beds paradoxically growing emptiness – growth signaling the inevitability of death. However, it also suggests cycle and renewal in the image of the “bed” and, again, in the embedded (carnal) image of the “Hard on” which suggests the potential for insemination (love and/or sex). The scene is obscure, a vortex of ideas and action, delivering a judgment that is firmly rooted in loss, winter and despair, as in renewal, spring, hope. The decisive action is essentially ethical, driven by a need to reflect experience in words to make us feel the veracity of complexity, the truth of paradox, and the capacity of language to reflect these issues – drawing the “ought” out of “thought”. 1 This is a damning judgment on the assonantal and alliterative world/woolen/lover images implanted in nostalgia by the powerfully restrictive “like”. Dream Song 1 is a portal for what is to come in The Dream Songs. It is a poem about nothing (we have no details of Henry’s actual crises) and a poem about everything (how should we express ourselves?). As I said at the outset, it is a “how-to-do” poem, about, for, and by Henry, who survives.

1

Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Ethics”, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd edn, London: University of Chicago Press, 404.

FAILED VISION?

JUSTIN QUINN

Of all the things that people can tell you about themselves, few are as tedious as their dreams. It is perhaps because dreams promise access to so much that is denied us in everyday life – freedom, beautiful forbidden bodies, terrible monsters – and yet when the story is told it conjures up a world which turns around the teller alone, that is, not the real world at all. Our dreams are endlessly, panoramically, luridly, violently, erotically about ourselves, and our egotism is measurable by the extent to which we think they are interesting for other people. The very word “dream” is extremely powerful, and poets have always known this. In English, there is the added advantage of the many words which rhyme with it: “stream”, “gleam”, “seem”, “seam”, “beam”, “ream”, “deem”, “supreme”, “teem”, “extreme”, “bream”, to give but a few. Line these up on the right hand side of a page and the poem will quickly spread out flush to the left margin, almost generating itself. That facility is of course a trap, as is evidenced by much poetry of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, and we value those poets who are able to use such acoustics without succumbing to them completely. W.B. Yeats particularly comes to mind in this respect. Connected with this also is the fact that his was a spectacular egotism balanced by an acute awareness of necessity in the grand sense of Moira. Berryman’s gambit, then, was considerable when he chose to write hundreds of songs about his dreams, especially given that he cared little about politics, history or culture in general, if these things could not immediately illustrate some aspect of himself. The rationale of the gambit is explained by Paul Breslin in his book The Psycho-Political Muse: “Because the one-dimensionality of the system was presumably ubiquitous, reaching even into one’s own psyche, the poet had only to

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look about him, or even into his own soul, to be confronted with the crisis of American society.”1 By focusing ever more closely on the self, the life of the nation would be revealed. However, the gambit never paid off for Berryman, and The Dream Songs is ultimately a kind of Grand Guignol that plays itself out in the cramped quarters of one man’s cranium. No wind blows through, no sun breaks in. Allen Ginsberg made a similar gambit, but successfully, as the public life of the United States during several decades is revealed in his poetry, along with the fugitive narrative of the nation’s secret desires and fears. One index of this failure is Berryman’s use of minstrel talk without any reference to its problematic racial aspects (there is only an occasional decorous nod towards African Americans, say in Dream Song 2, and passing references to Bessie Smith). It might seem that I am laying on the political correctness a little bit thick; however, my intention is not to judge Berryman morally, but to indicate how distant his psychic drama was from the sea changes that were taking place in American society during the period in which The Dream Songs was written. By the early 1950s Ralph Ellison and others had made the idea of minstrels problematic for a mainstream American audience. But Berryman, it would seem, never apprehended the nature of the challenge offered to American society by Ellison and his like. Berryman’s poetry, then, does not let us see America, rather it tries to blot it out and proclaim that the poet’s own ego is the only object of interest in the world. If a significant trace of this erasure were left in the poetry then it would be immediately more interesting. But Berryman exerts no imaginative energy in this direction: he merely takes the matter for granted, and gets on with rhyming another burlesque episode from his brain. The first of these, Dream Song 1, humorously considers “Huffy Henry” hiding from “the day” and sulking. The speaker, with a show of amused objectivity, remarks, “I see his point”. This sets up a distance between Henry and the Berryman-speaker, and it is a kind of narcissism. Indeed Berryman is not, in my view, a Confessional poet at all, as the idea of confession implies the acknowledgement of an ethical standard above and beyond the individual. Berryman is ultimately a narcissist who projects his psychic states into the poems 1 Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 17.

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and observes the subsequent punch-up. The second stanza condescends to Henry’s self-pity, but underlying it is Henry/Berryman’s outrage that he does not control the world in all its aspects. The last stanza contradicts some of things I have said since it provides a glimpse of the world without Berryman’s psycho-drama: it is immediately more interesting, and the pity of The Dream Songs is that it did not extend this glimpse to a vision.

BERRYMAN IN HIS SYCAMORE

EDWARD CLARKE

What is John Berryman as “Huffy Henry” hiding from the reader in Dream Song 1? Since his day has come, my reading does not attempt to put such an unappeasable poem to rest, instead I begin by getting into bed with the poet and his alter ego. But does Dream Song 1 allow its future readers, who alternate with black night, to become the poet’s second self when he is gone? Among these second selves, in the third line of the first stanza, “I see his point, – a trying to put things over”; not trying to put things down or right but “over”. In the final two lines of the second stanza, “I don’t see how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived”. As I pry into the word “pried” I find Berryman’s “I” has already pried it open. Voices speaking the poem anticipate how I would open it up to look closely at it, but “Then came a departure”. Dream Song 1 is portentous and oxymoronic in the manner of this line since a departure that came must have already departed for that which is to come. This subtly foolish poem came to us as we depart from it; when we would interpret the poem as a departure that came from our explications to come; but it is already prised apart for us to peer into as it is “trying to put things over”. Is Berryman trying to put one over? “I see his point”, which is not a full point but two points – a comma, then a dash – denoting the caesura and dividing the end-stopped line, which ends with “over”. But “I don’t see” how my reading can have survived the enjambment “pried / open” as the poem puts not things but its leg over, enjambing the expression, and prying Henry open for all the world to pry into, when all the world can see that all the world has already left Henry’s side – “and empty grows every bed”. Although “Huffy Henry hid the day” with no one at his side to put his leg over, the poem remains an invitation to peer into his lonely

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bed and even to prise him out of it. My suspicion is that this invitation is put “wicked & away” over my response because of the thought that I thought I “could do it”. Then my reading of the poem complains: “But he should have come out and talked.” Instead the poem responds to another kind of voice, which commands, “Write!”.1 Dream Song 1 is a scrupulous poem that pragmatically allows graduate students, associate professors, professional critics and all kinds of academics to empathize with it. But, it turns out, the poem is written in secret for the dead whom Berryman loves; it is sung for the ones that he believes will return to read him as posterity: the ideal audience that came as a departure. I ask, is it possible for posterity not to empathize with Dream Song 1? Can I stop projecting my personality or critical consciousness into the poem and die out of it, in order to join the readers whom Berryman has in mind when he writes? Finally, are the dead, whom the poet loves, reading Dream Song 1 as posterity or is the poem movingly but merely empathetic? Luckily for us, since we are not dead, we find posterity, conversing through the voices of earlier poets, in the sycamore of the third stanza: “Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang.” I wonder if the Berryman of the summer of 1947 in Sonnet 10, imagining Lise in her “stone home where the sycamore / More than I see you sees you”, would have understood that this sycamore is a different kind of tree – of a different genus – from Tennyson’s large-leafed sycamore in section XCV of In Memoriam A. H. H.:

1

The injunction “Write!” is part of “an old saying” or conversation between two voices, quoted by Søren Kierkegaard and repeated by Berryman in an interview when he was asked why being a poet is “just something you do”: “Write! – For whom? – For the dead whom thou didst love. – Will they read me? – Aye, for they return as posterity” (see “An Interview with John Berryman” by John Plotz, et al., in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 17). For Kierkegaard’s meditations on this old saying, see Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling / Repetition (1843), eds and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, 244, and Works of Love (1847), eds and trans. Hong and Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, 362. In the interview Berryman maintains that the saying is originally from the work of Johann Georg Hamann, but the Kierkegaard scholar George Pattison has assured me the quotation is actually from Johann Gottfried von Herder. See Herder, Abhandlungen und Briefe über schöne Literatur und Kunst, in his Sämmtliche Werke. Zur schönen Literatur und Kunst, I-XX, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1827-30, II, 45.

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…and the trees Laid their dark arms about the field: And sucked from out the distant gloom A breeze began to tremble o’er The large leaves of the sycamore, And fluctuate all the still perfume….2

Berryman as Henry once sang in a North American plane or buttonwood, Platanus occidentalis, but Tennyson sings of a shady ornamental pseudo-plane, introduced into Britain in the sixteenth century from the continent, and, in fact, a large species of maple, Acer Pseudoplatanus. Henry’s huffing is such as he opens his Dream Songs to half-perceive how the leaves of Tennyson’s climactic sycamore tremble in a creative breeze sucked out of the first line of Wordsworth’s Prelude (“O there is a blessing in this gentle breeze”3) and puffed back through “Tintern Abbey”: “The day is come when I again repose / Here under this dark sycamore”,4 which is certainly another umbrageous Acer Pseudoplatanus shading a poet. As Henry admits in Dream Song 116, “Chilled in this Irish pub I wish my loves / Well” and “I stand up for much, / Wordsworth and that sort of thing”. The I of “I see” and “I don’t see” came as a departure in “I was glad” and “I sang” because Henry is not such a big bad wolf to blow Wordsworth’s house down. Each poet writes of a particular sycamore, of whatever genus, and recalls a “spot of time”, but Dream Song 1 comprehends these trees as possessing generic characteristics. Berryman’s sycamore at once trembles over Tennyson and shades Wordsworth and as we climb up into it, it provides the vantage point from which we can discern the seminal leaves of Shakespeare’s sycamores, which are now grown into these poems. “Under the cool shade of a sycamore / I thought to close mine eyes some half an hour”, relates Boyet to the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “When lo, to interrupt my purposed rest / Toward that shade I might behold addressed / The King and his 2

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Maud and Other Poems, London: J.M. Dent, 1974, 129. 3 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, eds Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1979, 28-29. 4 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, London: Oxford University Press, 1950, 163.

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companions.”5 Boyet’s solitude under a sycamore is disturbed by a lovesick King and his Lords in the same way as Benvolio sees but does not approach Romeo during a lonely pre-dawn walk “underneath the grove of sycamore / That westward rooteth from this city side”.6 In both cases the sycamore foreshadows the approach of those who are lovesick (sick-amour), a pun apparent when Desdemona sings in Othello: “The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, / Sing all a green willow. / Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, / Sing willow, willow, willow.”7 The time is come again in Dream Song 1 when we behold all these figures addressed to interrupt Berryman’s purposed rest; addressed as he sang, “Once in a sycamore”. This sycamore foreshadows more than the sick-amour, it portends a departure from the “radar romanticism” Berryman found so “incredibly boring”,8 but as the poem looks before and after, singing to the dead whom he loves. The “I”’s of Tennyson and Wordsworth are of many voices in Dream Song 1 as Berryman compounds his “I” in the sycamore also out of attendant lords like Boyet and Benvolio, “To swell a progress”,9 containing, explicating and nursing Henry’s personal drama as it unfolds. These are the voices “all at the top” in Henry’s head: the dead whom the poet loves. In turn, these return to the poem to read it as posterity because the aftertime of Henry’s drama occurs as the poem unfolds and the poet makes us remember assistant professors are not attendant lords. All the time we must remember that Berryman’s American sycamore is of a different genus from the sycamores in Tennyson, Wordsworth and Shakespeare. In fact, it may be that Shakespeare’s sycamores are after all mulberry trees, which resemble fig trees. This Elizabethan misappropriation of the biblical Ficus Sycomorus, common in Egypt and Syria, is as large a transition as Berryman’s appropriation of Acer Pseudoplatanus by confusing it in his American poem with Platanus occidentalis. Now Henry is suspended in his sycamore singing not only to Lise but also to the chief among the 5

William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, V.ii.89-93, in The Complete Works, eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 298. 6 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, I.i.118-19, in The Complete Works, 338. 7 William Shakespeare, Othello, IV.iii.38-41, in The Complete Works, 847. 8 John Berryman, “Hardy and His Thrush”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 244. 9 T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, London: Faber and Faber, 1969, 16. I am not comparing Henry with Prufrock or Berryman with Eliot.

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publicans in Jericho, Zacchaeus: “And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way.”10 “In arborem sycomorum”11 Zacchaeus is converted: “And he made haste, and came down and received [Jesus] joyfully.”12 In a typological reading, Luke’s story partially redeems the fig tree in Genesis,13 the large leaves of which provide aprons for Adam and Eve; “that Sycamore, / Whose leaves first sheltered man from drought and dew” as George Herbert says in “The World”.14 This sycamore shades all of our poets. As Sin’s Sycamore is planted in the stately house that Love built in Herbert’s poem, we witness how Berryman’s sycamore, “Working and winding slyly evermore, / The inward walls and Sommers cleft and tore”. As Berryman sings to the dead we have assembled in his sycamore he is working and winding at the supporting beams of the traditional forms he has inherited from them. Dream Song 1 announces an old story, “Once in a sycamore”. The poet will speak of the love and the feelings of the sick-amour, no longer lovesick, but sick of love and figured as the survivor of a broken relationship. After Wordsworth’s poem of relationship and love under a sycamore, Tennyson is still not certain that love of Nature leads to love of mankind. In Dream Song 1, the reader is less assured of his relationship with the poet. Does Berryman comprehend what he has done as he writes for the dead whom he loves? Is there a leap of conversion or recognition out of the sycamore? As a poet Berryman wanted to see it and did not want to see it and he frequently teased his readers so that Henry and we could emerge. As an expired poet he still exudes through explications of his work. But every poet, however reluctant to be gone, should be put to rest. At least, then, he is greater than he knows. Now, Berryman’s second self is night, until youthful poets attend him. Then again, “Huffy Henry” is still having a lie-in, dreaming of an incident in a sycamore, and still hanging over us. Dream Song 1 is not composed of

10

The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version: Luke, 19: 3-4. Nouum Testamentum Latine: Secundum Lucam, 19: 4. 12 The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version: Luke, 19: 6. 13 “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons”, in The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version: Genesis, 3:7. 14 George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, London: Penguin, 1991, 77. 11

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“Rich Critical Prose” but Berryman makes it hard for us to leave “that fragrant area” (Dream Song 170).

SHAKESPEARE AND BERRYMAN: SONNET 129 AND DREAM SONG 1 KIT FRYATT

John Berryman was a dedicated and distinguished commentator on Shakespeare, but this essay has nothing to say about his Shakespeare scholarship. It does not seek to prove the influence of Sonnet 129 on the first Dream Song, nor does it suggest that Berryman’s poem definitely alludes to Shakespeare’s (I believe it does, but I cannot prove it). Rather, it is a reading which, as Deborah Madsen comments of the Jewish hermeneutic tradition known as midrash, “not only revives … meanings but seeks out all semantic properties of the proof text[s]”. 1 My title alludes to the essay “William Shakespeare and E.E. Cummings” [sic], by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, which was later revised by Graves and reprinted as “A Study in Original Spelling and Punctuation”. 2 This “exercise in irresponsible editorial restraint” 3 applies much misplaced ingenuity to Sonnet 129 in defense of the proposition that the punctuation and spelling of the 1609 Quarto should be retained by modern editors as most conducive to comprehension by “the plain reader”.4 Like practitioners of certain kinds of midrash, Riding and Graves put forward interpretations that

1

Deborah L. Madsen, Re-reading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre, London: Macmillan, 1995, 37. 2 Robert Graves, “A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling”, in The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922-1949, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949, 84-95. 3 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, 447. 4 Graves, “A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling”, 61.

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are “often very free and sometimes obviously fictional”.5 While they are not always to be trusted as scholars, there is something very engaging about their sprightly certainty on such dubious matters as how Shakespeare might have said “extreme” (rhymes with “lame”), how seventeenth-century readers heavily inured to printerly error and idiosyncrasy read punctuation (astonishingly, like over-ingenious modernist poet-critics) and most overwhelmingly, what is good for us “plain readers”. While scholars deplore Graves and Riding’s choice of a poem already plentiful in linguistic crises and ambiguity for further complication, it is also true that there is something peculiarly appropriate in their determined over-reading of a poem that is actually about perversity and self-delusion. Riding and Graves respond to Sonnet 129 at a level beneath analysis and scholarship, reproducing the poem’s excessiveness and illogicality, giving us an insight into its power in a way denied more responsible approaches. I want to argue here that Berryman’s first Dream Song shares its mood of perversion and illogic, and some of its erotic anger, with Sonnet 129; but further, that it is capable of being over-read in a way which reveals, and indeed enacts, those qualities. Its alliterative opening line, “Huffy Henry hid the day”, immediately recalls the Sonnet’s sour imitation of lovers panting in sexual excitement, “Had, having and in quest to have, extreme” (l.10), suggesting an erotic context to Henry’s sulk. This anticipates both the “departure” from lovers’ complicity with “All the world” in lines seven to nine and the Song’s final images of a scouring sea and a sterile bed. The semantic plenitude of the first line of Shakespeare’s sonnet also finds a fainter echo in Berryman’s first line. “Th’expense of spirit” has both a general sense of “expenditure of energy” and a specifically sexual connotation of “ejaculation”. Still richer, “a waste of shame” might signify “an absence of modesty”, ungrammatically but still powerfully, “a shameful waste”, and “a wasteful shame”, “an unworthy squandering of honor or of instructive shame”, a paysage moralisé containing a waste(land) called Shame, or even a pun on “waist” (there is some support in Hamlet, II.ii.231-35 for the anatomical imprecision). Some of these meanings are contradictory – it is hard to see how a whole landscape of shame could appear in the utter absence of modesty, for example. In a similar vein, “Huffy Henry hid the day” might mean “Henry hid himself for the whole 5

Madsen, Re-reading Allegory, 37.

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day in a huff”, “Henry concealed the day’s activities from his own or others’ memories with his sulk”, or “Henry obscured the daylight with the blackness of his mood”. That the first of these is the most likely does not become apparent until the sixth line, and even then, since “come out” might be a synonym for “talked” (as in “come out with it”), it is not certain that it is himself that Henry is hiding. Later in the Song, though possibly earlier in the sequence of events it describes, Henry becomes public property, an anatomical specimen: “I don’t see how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived” (ll.11-12). This gives support both to a reading which sees Henry hiding himself and one which sees Henry hiding the day: he might be prompted to conceal himself after humiliating exposure, or the sight of a body “pried / open for all the world to see” might be enough to obscure its surroundings. Very much depends on how we read the extended spacing of “hid the day”. It may be a lacuna or a hesitation, a missing rhythmic unit mediating the change from trochees (“Huffy Henry”) to an iamb (“the day”), or simply a waste, a waste of space or breath. Sonnet 129, like many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, employs a rhetorical grammar in which logical syntax is suspended. The adjectival description of lust in lines three and four refers grammatically to the quality of lust itself, and yet by extension also implicates the lustful person; from lines five to twelve the longer verbal and antithetical phrases may refer also to the person lusted after as well as one or both of the former, or all three. The lustful person and the object of his desire are grammatical ghosts, always implied but never made manifest as the subject of a sentence. The abstraction “lust” is concrete: those who give in to it waste themselves into syntactic shadows. “Hunted” (l.6) must refer to the object of desire, but once “had” she merges with lust itself, since both she and lust may be “possessed” by her desirer, with “hated” he is conflated with both of them, as he may hate himself, her, and lust as an abstraction. Our sense that the speaker of the poem is someone who has experienced lust and bitterly repudiates it must remain a conjecture implied by the perverse movement of its grammar. Force of expectation produces a lyric speaker, but there is no “I” in Shakespeare’s poem. Berryman’s Dream Song, by contrast, is spoken by a distinct persona, who appears in each stanza with a first-person statement. This figure at first seems quite separate from Henry, claiming to “see his point” in the third line but assuming a rather reproachful tone, “he

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should have come out and talked”, in the sixth. The speaker is again distinct from the group of people who have outraged Henry, but it is in discussing them that he begins to move towards being Henry, ventriloquizing his exasperation in a shower of fricatives: “It was the thought that they thought / they could do it” (ll. 4-5). In the second stanza the speaker’s ambiguously discrete status changes again. The first two lines, with their homely syntax and metaphor, “All the world like a woolen lover”, sound suspiciously like a rather self-pitying individual talking about himself in the third person. But then the speaker admits that he does not “see” how Henry can have survived his humiliating exposure, “pried / open for all the world to see”. This privileges the speaker even as it distinguishes him from Henry, bringing him closer to the hero and away from the generality. For him, seeing is synonymous with understanding; for “all the world” it is simply an ocular function. However, the speaker achieves this distinction between himself and the world only at the expense of not seeing. Henry’s capacity for survival remains hidden. Shakespeare also deals with what is universally understood but not seen, that is, understood on the level of experience: “All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” This concluding couplet combines an apology for hackneyed material with the psychological insight that it is difficult (perhaps impossible – “none knows well”) to learn from an occurrence of lust, the sin infinitely repeatable because it seems so heavenly at first. The repetitions of “all the world” and “see” in Berryman’s second stanza substantially replicate this experience of lust. “All the world”, which “like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry’s side” (there is perhaps a pun on “see” as well as “seam” here) becomes a gawping mob at his dismemberment; the speaker, not seeing how he could have survived, unintentionally evokes the same hellish spectacle. In the first and second stanzas of Dream Song 1 the speaker oscillates between being and not being Henry, so that Berryman’s protagonist appears to move into first-person visibility, only to hide again. It is a process analogous in many ways to the grammatical fluidity of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, which conjures a pair of protagonists – a lustful lover and his object – only to have them dissolve back into an abstraction and a moralizing conclusion. In the third stanza of Berryman’s Song, Henry and the speaker are decisively conflated:

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What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear & be. Once in a sycamore I was glad all at the top, and I sang. Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed. 6

The first person utterance here makes little sense unless it is spoken by Henry, but no conventions of direct speech, quotation marks, italics, even a preceding colon appear. And yet does Henry really speak, at any rate in this Song? We are told, possibly by Henry referring to himself in the third person, possibly by a separate speaker, “What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be”. What we get is not “a long wonder” (an extended fantasy or prolonged ponder) but an ambiguous memory and a brisk aphorism. The “long wonder” must refer to The Dream Songs as a whole, rather than these four closing lines, which opens the Song again to the possibility of multivocality, just when we thought that Henry was speaking to us plain. This wider reference, of course, applies as much to Shakespeare’s sonnets as to The Dream Songs. Our desire for narrative may produce protagonists in the individual sonnet or Song, who on closer inspection prove to be elusive. I hope I have made my case that both Shakespeare and Berryman use syntax to play on and with this narrative desire. But such play becomes serious when considered within the wider framework of the long poem or sequence. The personae of Shakespeare’s sonnets have been the subject of exhaustive and sometimes exhausting debate; similarly, the identification of Henry with Berryman himself threatens a tedious reductionism. These poems show that in both cases, the poet anticipates and supersedes 6

The sycamore has a Shakespearean and erotic context too: it reminds us, as Edward Clarke notes in the previous contribution, of Desdemona’s “Willow Song”, bizarrely transposed to a triumphant instead of tragic context. Instead of sitting singing beside a sycamore this character is atop it, a radical change in pastoral iconography. As the Arden edition of Othello notes, sycamores are not (unlike willows) associated with grief. Shakespeare’s choice of tree seems to be a macaronic pun (sick-amour), one he had used before, in Romeo and Juliet. The love-sickness that Henry suffers is not Desdemona’s or Romeo’s, though it perhaps shares their respective tragedies’ flirtation with the stereotypes of comedy. See William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. A.J. Honigmann, London: Methuen, 1999, 291. Benvolio finds Romeo in a sycamore grove in I.i.121.

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such criticism: the lyric and the dramatic are bound together in their agile grammar.

FORM AND DISCONTENT: THE PROSODY OF THE DREAM SONGS PETER DENMAN

When The Dream Songs was published in 1969, Elizabeth Bishop greeted it with a “Thank-You Note”, published in the Harvard Advocate.1 It is a slight and occasional piece, playfully punning on “berries” and Berryman’s name, but it nonetheless affords an entry into his work. In the first couplet – “Mr Berryman’s songs and sonnets seems to say: / ‘Gather ye berries harsh and crude while yet ye may’ ” – there are at least three allusions to works by poets from the English tradition. The first line recalls Donne’s Songs and Sonets, while the second conflates Herrick (“Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may”) and Milton (“I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude” from “Lycidas”). After these textual allusions to English poetry, the second half of Bishop’s poem moves on to a specifically American experience that is non-literary and of the senses, evoking the astringent taste of the chokecherry. If nothing else, this suggests that what Bishop calls the “thick-bunched” fruit of The Dream Songs is something of an acquired taste. Certainly, it presents an enduring puzzle: while The Dream Songs is the most elaborate and sustained exercise of his particular poetic methods, and arguably constitutes his greatest achievement, Berryman’s Dream Song structure does not seem to have entered fully into the corpus of late twentieth-century poetry as an exemplary form. “After thirty Falls” the degree to which Berryman’s poetry is being eroded by subsequent history seems remarkable. Where once he was an inevitable and insistent voice, he risks nowadays being consigned 1

Elizabeth Bishop, “Thank-You Note”, Complete Poems, London: Chatto and Windus, 1983, 207.

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to the status of a madman in our attic. It may be that the present generation of readers is left uncomfortable and embarrassed by the subject matter of many of the Songs. Sexual adventuring is now likely to be regarded as predation; alcoholism and depression are conditions to be treated and cured, and are not intrinsically interesting in themselves; social faux-pas are not to be repeated; and grief is to be kept within the bounds of decorum. Attitudes, which in their time seemed daringly individual and innovative, are now regarded as questionable and reprehensible. It is not unusual for a poet’s reputation to dip after his death. The details of Philip Larkin’s biography as they emerged had a notorious effect on his posthumous reputation, because these details were socially rebarbative to many of his readers. Indulgence of the poète maudit, confessional and uncomfortable, appears to have been replaced by an understandable preference that poets nowadays be genial, adept at working a wine-and-cheese reception, and able to exude affability on the book launch and poetry reading circuit that is the cockpit of contemporary reputations. In Berryman’s case the awkward aspects of the life are deeply embedded in the Dream Songs themselves, and it may be simply that nowadays there is less of a readership for poems based on a difficult and damaged life. The silent criticism of the poems is, in part, a stricture on the behavior. The prominence of Berryman’s own persona and experience has been an issue from the outset, right from his disingenuous remarks about the distancing of Henry. The distinction Berryman asserted between Henry and himself has not ever been taken at face value. His use of the stratagem is no more than a reminder of the distance to be understood between the poetic first-person and the author: The Dream Songs was, after all, written by a poet whose career was coincident with the heyday of New Criticism and its insistence on the exclusion of the poet as subject. The Dream Songs is characterized by Helen Vendler as a sequence of “Freudian cartoons”: with its repetitions and anecdotes in freewheeling, free-associating language, the poem mirrors the regular therapeutic interviews of psychoanalytic sessions.2 The Freudian reference is also a reminder of the complexity of the personality that is depicted through the different speakers and voices characterizing the 2

Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets, London: Faber and Faber, 1995, 31.

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Songs. This complexity is apparent not just in the multiplicity of voices and attitudes that the poems contain, but also in their structure. While there is undoubtedly an identifiable Dream Song form, it is a form characterized by variation and multiplicity. The usefulness of the structure of the Dream Songs is that it allows for different registers of language: for different voices, and different levels of what used to be called “poetic diction”. The changes in diction may or may not coincide with changes in voice. Denis Donoghue has shown this at work within a single stanza of the very first Dream Song. In its final stanza, the first voice is objective, the poet introducing his character, giving the gist of his theme. The second voice may be received as Henry’s voice, recalling the good times, sycamores and songs. But the third voice is different from either; it is generic, representative, apocalyptic, Mankind rather than any particular man, Henry or J.B. or anyone else. In this third voice the feeling is universal rather than local; it is consistent with the first and second voices, but distinct, as if its experience was the history of the world rather than the fate of a man. It is my understanding that these three voices are nearly as many as the poet requires for his long poem.3

The triple stanza structure also has a practical use in a poem that has three speakers, although the distribution of voices and diction is played against the tripartite song structure and does not at any time coincide with it. The presence of the alternative voice or voices is more for interjection and interrogation, punctuating and disrupting the larger progress of the song as much for rhythmic as for dramatic effect. The emergence of the Dream Songs and the characteristic form associated with them can be traced back to Berryman’s “Nervous Songs”. 4 These “Songs”, according to Berryman himself, grew out of his “admiration for Die Stimmen [The Voices] of Rilke”.5 “The Nervous Songs” foreshadow The Dream Songs in at least two respects. They have three six-line stanzas and they use putative speakers, as indicated by the titles: “The Professor’s Song”, “The 3 Denis Donoghue, “Berryman’s Long Dream”, in John Berryman: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom, New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1989, 22-23. 4 See “The Nervous Songs” (CP 49-55). 5 Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 210.

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Song of the Bridegroom”, and so on. The form of the titles, and the description as “song”, imitate Rilke. Two of Rilke’s nine pieces have three six-line stanzas, the basis of the form that Berryman adopts throughout “The Nervous Songs” and which later provided the shape of the Dream Songs. However, there are two significant differences in the stanza form as Berryman developed it for The Dream Songs. A distinctive feature of the Dream Song stanza is its use of shorter third and sixth lines. This is the crucial difference from the Nervous Songs, in which the basic six-line stanza is made up of lines without any patterns of variation, although “The Song of the Young Hawaiian” does use a short final line in each stanza. “The Song of the Man Forsaken and Possessed” drops a line in its final stanza. However, it is the short third line in the Dream Songs, typically containing two beats as opposed to the four or five beats in the longer lines, which allows for a turn in the progress of the Dream Song stanza. The prosodic break marked by the shorter third line of the Dream Song stanza, and the change in sense that is frequently associated with it, are important because they are instrumental in resisting the emergence of a steady progression through the stanza. Further, the final short line of the stanza allows for a variety of terminal effects that may range from closure to enjambment. Along with the shorter third and sixth lines, which become established as a normative but by no means invariable feature of the stanza, there is also the fact that the stanzas of all but one of the “Nervous Songs” are end-stopped. The Dream Song stanza is typically but by no means invariably made up of longer first, second, fourth and fifth lines, and short third and sixth lines. The normative long line of the stanza exhibits five beats distributed across ten syllables, and they conform to the standard iambic pentameter. Many lines fall perfectly into that pattern: “These lovely motions of the air, the breeze” (Dream Song 146) and “Transfixed in Schadenfreude like a mission” (Dream Song 202). The later Songs in the “Op. posth.” group (Section IV of The Dream Songs) follow iambic pentameter rhythms closely. In Dream Song 89, for example, all twelve long lines can be scanned according to that pattern, and the only departures from strict meter are variations in the placing of the first beat (lines one, possibly eleven, and sixteen) and an extra initial unstressed syllable in line seven. The underlying presence of the iambic pentameter throughout The Dream Songs as a standard measure from which to depart and to which to return is one

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of the features giving a formal continuity to the sequence. Furthermore, the use of the standard line of English verse in The Dream Songs aligns Berryman with those exemplary English poets evoked by Elizabeth Bishop in her “Thank-You Note”, especially Donne and Milton. The Songs and Sonets display a similar conversational “nervous idiom” and a range of sexual and emotional activity to The Dream Songs, while “Lycidas” foreshadows the elegiac quality that underpins so much of Berryman’s sequence.6 The third and sixth lines of each Dream Song stanza tend to be shorter, typically with three beats. Again, there are many departures from this basic pattern. For instance, in the final stanza of Dream Song 53, its third and sixth lines are among the longest in the poem, with fourteen and seventeen syllables respectively. The fifth line of the stanza is reduced to four syllables and two beats, and it might be argued that here one of the short lines has been moved to a new position in the stanza: Kierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read ’papers, and that was not, friends, his worst idea. Tiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything, a programme adopted early on by long Housman, and Gottfried Benn said:–We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.

The long third and sixth lines of this stanza can really only be reckoned by a syllable count and not in terms of beats. The prosodic variation here is not an extension of the line’s poetic rhythm but a departure from it. The lines do not admit of a regular scansion, and the beat pattern is abandoned for what becomes effectively a prose rhythm. In instances such as these, the overall rhythm does not derive from the placing of stresses and beats, but from a larger oscillation that moves between a poetically shaped phrasing and a prose phrasing. The second line of the sestet quoted above is perfectly scannable as five regular beats, with an unstressed syllable substituted by a pause between the beats on “not” and “friends”. The non-metrical lines in the stanza are those containing quotations or ideas imported from

6

Berryman further acknowledges his appreciation of Milton’s pastoral elegy in his 1957 short story “Wash Far Away”, which is included in The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 367-86.

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figures outside the poem, while Berryman’s own comment is cast in metrical form. Other departures from the matrix of the stanza structure result from added or interpolated lines. Dream Song 92 (subtitled “Room 231: the fourth week”) begins with a preliminary extra-stanzaic line, followed by a formally regular first stanza. The organization of the lines in the second stanza of Dream Song 99 (“Temples”) is radically disrupted, but in the final stanza there is a progressive return to formal regularity, complete with a terminal rhyme. In this instance, the final line is used to provide closure by returning to the rightness of the full rhyme on “wrong” with its self-referential comment on the song: “– Mr Bones, you too advancer with your song, / muching of which are wrong.” The very final words of the final Dream Song (385) are in the appended half-line “my heavy daughter”, which is extra-metrical. That half-line is typographically separated from the rest of the poem. It stands outside the triple stanza structure, a structure marked by a carefully observed rhyme scheme that has been completed by the full rhyme of the three-beat sixth line of the final stanza: “I wouldn’t have to scold”. The appended phrase is necessary in order to complete the syntax and the thought of the poem, but it disrupts the closely observed rhyme scheme, and also breaks out of the shape of the poem on the page, the form of the stanza, of the song itself, and even by extension of the entire sequence. The Dream Song triple sestet is a regular sustained stanza structure that allows for play against and within the form as the long sequence develops. It affords a unity with an unusual degree of variation. Berryman often uses it as a syntactically open form, in which the discursive flow of the sentence is not end-stopped at the stanza break but runs on. This open form, in which the stanza boundaries are subordinate to the flow and to the spatial rearrangement as lines are inserted or extended, reminds us that the overall form is that of a poetic sequence, in which an individual Dream Song links into a larger form. Between the levels of the individual song and of the full sequence are other groupings. They may reflect the composition and publication history: 77 Dream Songs (1964) was followed by His Toy, His Dream, His Rest in 1968. Then there are the seven irregularly sized sub-divisions marked by roman numerals; at a lower level there are groups linked by headings or titles, such as the fourteen “Op. Posth.” (Dream Songs 78 to 91), the two Songs headed “The Translator” (180 and 181), the three-headed “Henry’s Farewell” (276,

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277, and 278). Some are linked verbally, as in Dream Songs 83 and 84, where the last word of the former (“Plop”) is picked up in a very different context as the beginning of the latter. In addition, there are song-groups linked thematically: the poems about Asia or Dublin, the elegies for Delmore Schwartz, and so on. Occasionally, there are meta-formal references, in which the poems refer to their own form, as does for instance Dream Song 146, the first of the poems about the death of Schwarz, which announces its own ending in the last line: “I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried, / but they are past it all, I have not done, / which brings me to the end of this song.” Berryman writes nine more songs on Schwartz’s death (they are among the most powerful of all the Songs) and then commences the next poem: “Ten Songs, one solid block of agony, / I wrote for him, and then I wrote no more” (Dream Song 157). These are lines about grief, but the meta-formal description in the first of them shows Berryman thinking of the group as a unit. End-rhyme is used predominantly but not inevitably in The Dream Songs. When used, there is a great variety in the type of rhyme admitted, from full rhyme to slant rhyme and assonance. Feminine rhyme is used relatively sparingly. The rhymes are typically in three pairs within each stanza. Even though syntactically the stanzas are treated as open forms, it is rare for a rhyme to extend across a stanza break. However, within the stanza, the rhymes may fall in any pattern. Frequently the short third and sixth lines rhyme. The rhyme scheme is not consistent across the three stanzas of a particular song, and rhyme may be abandoned for part or all of it. The variety of rhyme patterns, and the frequent absence of rhyme, means that rhyme does not serve to define the normative form of the Dream Songs. It does not have a basic pattern throughout the Dream Songs, other than that it does not extend beyond a stanza. While the stanzas are open syntactically, rhyme if present tends to be closed and confined within the six lines of the stanza. Yeats, a modern master of stanzaic poetry and an acknowledged influence on Berryman, might be thought to have provided a model for the Dream Song form. However, the particular Dream Song sestet with its waist-like centre and the narrow pedestal of its final short line is not found in Yeats’ work. The overall arrangement exhibits affinities with the stanzas of Elizabethan and early sixteenth-century songs and lyrics. The closest twentieth-century model for the Dream Song stanza is perhaps to be found in Dylan Thomas’ early poetry,

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poetry that Berryman presumably knew given his contacts with Thomas.7 Poems such as “A Process in the Weather of the Heart” offer a close model: two lines of between eight and ten syllables followed by a six-syllable line, repeated. A similar outline shape occurs in poems such as “Where once the waters of your face”, “Our Eunuch Dreams”, and in the first section of “I, in my intricate image”, and other poems. These offer close precedents for the shape of the Dream Song stanza. Berryman departs from it principally in flexibility of rhyme and line length, and in the rhythms employed. There are also occasional traces of Thomas in the linguistic register and use of language in The Dream Songs. It is in Thomas that precedents for some of Berryman’s characteristic turns can be found. Were it not so well known we might have difficulty assigning Thomas’ phrase “A grief ago” to Thomas or Berryman.8 “Grief” and its variants are prominent in the Berryman lexicon, right from “The Ball Poem” and its “ultimate shaking grief” through to The Dream Songs (see, for example, Dream Songs 3, 36, 84, 121, 139, and 203) and the neoligistic “grievy” at the centre of Dream Song 385. “A grief ago” is a notable case of poetic linguistic deviation, and in Dream Song 15 we find Berryman following the paradigm set up by Thomas: “Let us suppose, valleys & such ago.” Scattered throughout the Songs are other lines that read like pure Thomas. Of course, there are many other registers of speech in The Dream Songs that are nothing like Thomas. The difference between the two poets is that, first of all, the Dream Songs move through a far greater range of diction than does Thomas’ poetry. Secondly, notwithstanding the occasional overlap of language intensity, there is always the sense with Thomas that the words are some way ahead of the lived experience. His poems generate a mood or attitude that is in excess of the sensed actuality. That is their strength: the poems create through their writing. In The Dream Songs one cannot avoid the impression that the space between what is represented in the poems and the lived experiential background is minimal: for Berryman, the work of the language is to make that experience transferable to the reader or 7

For an account of Berryman’s contact and engagement with Thomas, see Philip Coleman, “‘An unclassified strange flower’: Towards an Analysis of John Berryman’s Contact with Dylan Thomas”, in Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall, eds John Goodby and Chris Wigginton, Special Issue of The Swansea Review, 20 (2000), 2233. 8 See Dylan Thomas, Poems 1934-1952, London: J.M. Dent, 1952, 54.

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listener. The success of The Dream Songs is that it achieves this transfer. It was this immediacy of experience – its astringent chokecherry taste – that first won admiration for Berryman’s long poem. It is a quality, too, that reminds us that The Diary of Anne Frank loomed large in Berryman’s consciousness throughout the time he was writing The Dream Songs. It figured on his teaching courses, and at the end of his life he was working on an essay on it, “The Maturation”. The diary form, in which the development of the work, its composition, and the life it records, all proceed more or less contemporaneously, enables us to understand the form of The Dream Songs. Both works are, as it were, “written to the moment”; the life being recorded is a life under pressure; in each case the overall work is made up of separate parcels of writing that together are components of an eventual whole: the daily entries in the diary, the individual poems in The Dream Songs. A further, contingent, similarity is that our responses to both works are conditioned by awareness of events subsequent to, and outside, but intimately germane to their composition. Our knowledge of Frank’s capture, transportation and death is an integral and inevitable part of our reading of the diary. It was not always the case that our knowledge of Berryman’s suicide was integral and inevitable to his poetry (unlike the diary, the poems were in circulation before the poet’s death) but his suicide now colors our reading of them inseparably. Charles Thornbury offers a valuable analysis of Berryman’s language in his Introduction to his edition of the Collected Poems 1937-1971. Although this does not include The Dream Songs, many of the features that give the language of The Dream Songs its particular appearance, its nervous idiom, are attributable to the possibilities and demands of their prosodic features. These are not unique to The Dream Songs, for many of them appear in earlier Berryman works, but it is in The Dream Songs that they are deployed to the greatest extent and become integral to the fabric of the verse. The inserted blank spaces in mid-line may be rhythmical, put there to indicate a pause in the reading act without interfering with the syntactical punctuation or the overall lineation. As such, they are a typographical marker of the traditional caesura, but the caesura is much more firmly associated with grammar. They also create additional positions of privilege in line. Just as the line offers the possibility of highlighting a word by its placement at the beginning or end, the caesura-type space

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offers an additional position of privilege by placing a pause before, after, or between words; in that way it adds to the versatility of the basic form. It is a device that Berryman deploys in the very first line of The Dream Songs: “Huffy Henry hid the day.” The break marks off the opening alliterative string, and makes the verb ambiguous before the hesitation in deciding whether it is transitive or not: are we to take it that the day has in some sense been hidden by Henry, as the syntagmatic string would suggest or, more likely, are we to take “the day” adverbially, indicating the time when or during which Henry was hidden. In the last line of Dream Song 88 (“Op. Posth. 11”), “I didn’t hear a single word. I obeyed”, one can see that the space in the text before “word” offers a pause that operates in a radically different way to the pause at the full stop. The latter marks syntactical completion. The former separates the noun from its epithet and so cuts across a basic syntactical unit. It creates a pause that is dramatic; as placed here the delay seems to enact the “not hearing”. The absence or silence that ensues after “single” is that of a word, both generically and literally. A similar effect occurs in Dream Song 295: “so well it’s hard to think of anything you need”. Here the visual enactment of a pause corresponds to the difficulty of thinking, as of hearing in the previous example. Again, the pause is placed in the middle of a phrasal verb. As a result, the space generates an effect of double syntax. The first part of the line appears to offer a complete and absolute statement about the difficulty of thinking. This is modified by the completion of the line, which changes the import of the statement to focus on immediate and contingent requirements: “anything you need”. As the verb receives its momentarily delayed completion we move, with a faintly comic bathos, from the realm of philosophy to that of list making. The use of the suffix “-t” as opposed to “-ed” as the terminal mark of the past form of the verb rises as a stylistic mannerism of Berryman, but is directly related to reproducing speech and avoiding any suggestion of disrupting the metrical structure and syllable count of the line by sounding “ed” as a separate syllable. In the central stanza of Dream Song 5 we get a clear sense of the spoken quality: Henry sats in the plane & was gay. Careful Henry nothing said aloud but where a Virgin out of cloud

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to her mountain dropt in light, his thoughts made pockets & and the plane buckt. ‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’

For all the care in saying nothing aloud, by its end the stanza has slipped into direct speech, carefully rendering the elisions of the spoken word. Here the elisions are those of speech and are not primarily in the service of prosody. The same can be said of many of the utterances of Henry’s “friend”. Other phonetic niceties are more puzzling. Describing arrival in Ireland, Dream Song 342 tells how “The tender left the liner & headed for shore. / Cobh (pronounced Khove) approached, our luggage was ready.” The scruple to convey the pronunciation of the Irish place name looks like the sort of interpolated remark a poet might make when giving a reading, except that at a reading it would be superfluous, as the pronunciation and not the spelling would be primary. It is not altogether an interpolated comment, as the line with the parenthetical gloss has the same syllable count of twelve as the lines before and after. So this is a phonetic detail for the silent reader. The case is all the more curious in that the name of Cobh occurs also in the previous stanza, but the strangeness of the pronunciation is passed over in silence. Indeed, in Dream Song 306 he has already written “The green green fields between Cobh (Khove) & Dublin”. It is, however, a reminder of the spoken quality that is fundamental to Berryman’s poetry, and especially in The Dream Songs. Many commentators, following Berryman himself, have pointed to the presence of different voices in the poem, linked to different speakers. Vendler has linked the poems to the “talking cure” of repeated sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch. In addition to that, the generic name “Song” suggests vocalization. This virtual enactment of speech is further represented in details of the form and language. Berryman frequently has recourse to a number of devices in which qualities specific to speech are characterized and conveyed in print, among them capitalization, italicization, unusual spelling, typographical rearrangement, and straightforward verbal description. While these are markers of the “nervous idiom”, they also work hand in hand with the prosodic features of the songs to give them the distinctive formal qualities that individuate them as a form. Berryman does not scruple to mark a syllable with an accent when he wants it to carry a beat. He is one of the few twentieth-century

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poets (since the publication of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Poems in 1918) to use the device extensively, with the possibly more recent exception of Geoffrey Hill.9 Again, it is a feature that indicates the importance Berryman attached to the sound and prosodic structure of his songs. Dream Song 4 is a poem that, after the first stanza, becomes either dialogue or snatches of interior monologue. Yet, in the descriptive first stanza that sets the situation, the sounds of speech are formally crucial. The word “paprika” has two possible stress patterns in English; the primary accent may fall on the first or second syllable of the word. Berryman marks it to make clear that it is to be read as “páprika”, so making the entire line accord with a regular iambic pentameter rhythm: “with chicken páprika, she glanced at me.” This metrical regularity is important, given the abrupt disruption of the third line immediately after, which is reduced to a single syllable, “twice”. The pentameter also gives a pointer to picking up the fourth line, which practically mirrors the second: “Fainting with interest, I hungered back.” This again has ten syllables, in the same iambic pentameter rhythm apart from a trochee substitution in the very first foot, a standard variation. However, before finally establishing this metrical reading, there is a minor problem to solve. This line has a comma marking a pause in precisely the same place as in the second line, and before the comma another metrically ambivalent word: do we read “interest” as two syllables or three? The example of “páprika” invites us to follow its stress pattern, and say “int-er-est”. The next line breaks from the iambic pentameter pattern and enacts in its rhythm something of the impatient restraint of which it speaks. The rising duple pattern of the iambics is replaced by a rising triple rhythm, in which the beats are typically preceded by two off-beat syllables: “and ónly the fáct of her húsband & fóur other péople / képt me from sprínging on hér.” In a recording of Berryman reading this song, it is noticeable that he observes the integrity of the line structure in the opening stanza, marking the line endings with a pause. In the later stanzas, where the metrical structure is looser, the line endings are less marked in the reading performance.10

9

See, for example, Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech!, Washington: Counterpoint, 2000. As evidenced, for example, in the reading of the poem by Berryman included in Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath, eds Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, Naperville, Illinois: MediaFusion, 2001, CD3, Track 9.

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The use of an interpolated syllable such as “ha” or “ho”, or “O”, is frequent throughout The Dream Songs. These are apparently phatic syllables, signifiers without a signified that can serve two functions. They can be expressive of emotion, and they can fill out the metrical shape to a line without having to resort to awkward inversions or poetic diction. Indeed, if meaningless syllables can be pulled into service, it is also true that normal words are sometimes pressed to become rhythmical beats in their repetition, as in the use of “all” in Thomas’ line: “All all and all the dry worlds lever” [sic]. 11 Once noticed, it can be seen that this is a stylistic mannerism of The Dream Songs that is used with remarkable frequency, and goes considerably beyond the rhetorical device of repetition. It is often used as an opening device, where the artificiality of the repetition immediately establishes a rhythmic entrance to the poem: “Stomach & arm, stomach & arm” (Dream Song 163); “Love me love me love me love me love me” (Dream Song 192). Conversely, in Dream Song 147 the repeated “Delmore, Delmore” emerges as a refrain, an instance in which there is a clear formal carry over from one stanza to another. Moreover, in Dream Song 22 there is a repeated initial element through the first two stanzas as each line begins with “I am”, and then in the third stanza across the second-last line of the song: “in vain, in vain, in vain”. Similarly, in Dream Song 153: “a day, a day, a day.” To conclude, let us consider briefly some of the prosodic features that effect of one of the best-known songs, Dream Song 384, the penultimate in the sequence. This strong poem is one of the climactic poems of the sequence and it is remarkable how Berryman returns to prosodic regularity for this poem of extreme emotion. Here the meaningless syllabic fillers take on meaning, and become expressive where the “oh ho” of line 9 becomes an exclamation of grief, similar in function to the more conventional “alas” that follows in the same line. The poem has a full rhyme scheme that, unusually, follows a consistent abcabc pattern in all three stanzas. All the longer lines conform to iambic pentameter, with variations only in the first line (“flowerless”) and at the end of the third-last line where we have to let the first syllable of Henry carry the stress, although the rhyme with “see” in line 1 of the stanza, and the dominant rising prosodic pattern suggests its unnatural movement to the second syllable. In these pairs 11

See Dylan Thomas, “All all and all”, in Collected Poems 1934-1953, eds Walford Davies and Ralph Maud, London: J.M. Dent, 1993, 29.

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of lines linked by rhyme there is an interpolated “ha” that carries a beat, as does the “ho” in the short central line of the second stanza. In each stanza there is an unstressed middle syllable (“-er”): “flowerless”, “indifference”, “mouldering”. In the case of “interest” in Dream Song 4 we saw how the prosody there invited us to give that an unambiguous three-syllable reading. In each of these instances taken from Dream Song 384, the “-er” may be either elided or treated as an extra and supernumerary unstressed syllable. The short lines of this song mostly have three beats, except for the third line of the final stanza, which is cut in two. The equivalent lines of the two previous stanzas would, without the repetitions of “often” and “alas”, also have just two beats. The poem is about a repetitive and obsessive visitation. The stanzas move progressively through the tenses, from the past (“often, often before / I’ve made this awful pilgrimage”) through the present (“I come back for more, // I spit”) to the future (“I’d like to scrabble”). Nevertheless, it is trapped in repetitions and doublings: “often, often before”, “I come back for more”, “moan & rave”, “right down/away down”, “heft the ax once more”. The first rhyme word is one of completion (“done”) and the last is one of commencement (“start”), suggesting that this “final card” may not, after all, be all that final. Berryman’s poems can be read not just for their exuberant explorations of the self, in other words, but as exercises in formal and linguistic discovery. Their language has attracted much comment, but it is important to acknowledge too the way that this remarkable language is informed not just by the rhythms of idiomatic speech but by prosodic and structural techniques that have determined the character of poetry throughout its history and development, from Donne’s Songs and Sonets to Berryman’s Dream Songs and beyond.

“DRAMATIZING THE DREADFUL”: AFFECTIVE POSTURES IN THE DREAM SONGS ANTHONY CALESHU

Perhaps more than most poets, Berryman’s poetry relies on “postures”. While one might fruitfully explore his oeuvre to this end, I want to concentrate on The Dream Songs, where his postures take the forms of various performative fronts, often exploiting writer-readertext relations, acknowledged ironies, and necessary contrivances. Selfawareness of situation and sentiment is ever-present, but often comes second behind dramatic displays of denial, loss, ignorance, and pretence. These last terms, when linked with others I am going to be attaching to Berryman’s poetry – including “theatrical”,1 “unnatural”, and, to complicate my interest in “the affects”, “affected” – may seem to invoke the negative connotations one typically associates with the term “posture”. To be sure, Berryman’s postures manifest as emotional risks, complicated in their potential to incite reception of the poet as impostor, which is most readily apparent when a writer’s sense of self and subject are at odds with the audience’s desire for sincerity, credibility, and believability (issues with which Berryman himself was often concerned).2 Instead of being destructive, however, I want to explore how Berryman’s postures contribute to the mostly 1

For discussions about the often negative reception of the “theatrical” in the arts, see the Introduction to Performativity and Performance, eds Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, London: Routledge, 1995, 3. For an interesting discussion of the “show”, “falseness”, and the “theory of stage craft”, see “ ‘A Fan’s Eye View’: Bruce Springsteen interviewed by Nick Hornby”, The Observer Music Monthly, 23 (July 2005), 9-14. 2 See Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman” (1972), in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 18-44.

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positive affects of his poetry since the risks involving identity, formal technique, and melodrama enable a complicated reader response. Initially I am relying on a basic dictionary definition, exploring Berryman’s “postures” for 1) his stance as “poet” in relation to both reader and persona; 2) the physical carriage of his deliberate use of form; and 3) to take “posture” as an intransitive verb – the exaggerated or unnatural attitude assumed by the persona Henry in The Dream Songs.3 Inevitable to exploring a poet whose personality is so bound up with his poetry, these variable distinctions will often intersect. Further, as one might expect from what Berryman called a poem “strictly about a personality”,4 Berryman’s exploitation of the “dramatic” has its roots in dramatic monologue, where not only the poet but the speaker is hidden behind a mask of intentions (that is, Berryman dons the mask of Henry who dons the mask of Mr Bones). If we take it a step further and think of The Dream Songs as a selfconscious drama, overt in stagecraft, the postures of the poem are akin to the theatricality of its own vaudevillian act. Berryman’s desire, then, is both to build and break down the “fourth-wall” between character and audience in order to strengthen the possibility of our shared liability for the staged life which he’s unraveling before us. Complicating our reception, however, is that as quickly as the long poem professes a direct discourse of sentiment, it acknowledges that it is pretending to be something it is not: it is not about its author John Berryman (“not the poet, not me” reads the prefatory “Note” to The Dream Songs). Moreover, it is evasive about Henry’s past (why is he so hurt?), and discursive in plot (where is he going? what does he want?). All of this contributes to the tragic/comic paradigm: a dramatic show is being produced, not on a false stage, but on an intricately contrived one. Author, character, form, and language stand at militant attention as various poses and guises are assumed. If, at times, the expression of situation and emotion disguises the very sentiment being relayed (we laugh when we should cry and vice versa), we similarly have to acknowledge that this is part of the desired effect. For the artificial world of “loss” constructed in The 3

See “Posture”, in The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992, 1416. 4 In a reading in 1969, Berryman qualified The Dream Songs in terms of “personality” and Eliot: “The poem is all about Henry, just one man, and it’s done in terms of what T.S. Eliot said we must not do, that is to say it is strictly about a personality” (Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Italy, 1969).

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Dream Songs is a world of paradoxically naturalizing affect. As readers, we are asked not only to recognize it, but to indulge in the theatre of a poem which engages in a project of “dramatizing the dreadful” as Berryman puts it in Dream Song 146. The “Note” with which Berryman prefaces The Dream Songs is our first experience of Berryman manipulating poet-reader relations in order to complicate our engagement with his imagined worlds: Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work. It is idle to reply to critics, but some of the people who addressed themselves to the 77 Dream Songs went so desperately astray … that I permit myself one word. The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss ….

As an author, Berryman poses both direct and indirect fronts, explicitly offering us the posture of his “interpretive interest”, while similarly denying an interest in such, permitting himself only “one word”. Charles Altieri tells us that: Artists work hard to efface the signs of their interpretive interests so that the audience will take the sensuous properties themselves as the expressive register rather than treating them as only a meditation of what the artist “wants to say.” But there are also levels within the work where the awareness of affectively charged sensations does involve a relation to the artist’s purposive activity.5

Though one might argue that Berryman’s “Note” is not part of the art, it sets the very deliberate stage for the art. His “purposive activity” or “will”, as Altieri uses the term, directly contributes to his poetry’s “affective charg[e]”, thereby establishing the very bond he seems to wish to dismantle between writer and reader. In the late 1960s, at just about the time Berryman was writing his prefatory “Note” to The Dream Songs, the subject of authorship was being explored by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Though Barthes and Foucault had different goals in mind, Berryman offers a 5 Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, 237.

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perverted dramatization of what a destabilized author can achieve to his own end. Where another author might accept the faults of his text, in removing himself as governing force (the “opinions and errors” are not to be referred to him), Berryman assumes the posture of one without authority for the transgressions of the text (both Henry’s and his; both moral and formal). Further, Berryman bucks expectations by removing his character from fault, thereby defaulting “opinions and errors” onto a piece of the text itself, the “title of the work”. Significantly, they are not “My” Dream Songs or even “Henry’s” Dream Songs; but while “Songs” can exist in a nether space (that is, as anonymous songs), “Dreams” must be attached to someone in order to be affecting. To this end, the public’s need to attach The Dream Songs to someone – Berryman or Henry – is so strong that the posture of trying to remove the thing that is most human about them, ironically, draws the reader back to the very source which Berryman has told us they do not come from. Though Berryman has set the reader to work dismantling the unity of the author, in effect, the dramatic performance of protest in the “Note” ends up reinforcing it: he not only re-authors himself as “the poet, [the] me”, but in turn becomes more-than-ever the “imaginary character … named Henry”. I am not interested in reading The Dream Songs biographically, per se, but in exploring the affect of a posture that achieves the opposite of the poet’s expressed intentions. As frustrated as he was with the “critics … who … went so desperately astray” in reviewing 77 Dream Songs, as he writes in his “Note”, Berryman also, whether unwittingly or not, started an elaborate game with his readers and critics by denying them what they not only know to be true, but may have wanted to be true. One might wonder if the public’s inherent belief in the confessionalism of the times brought Berryman to write the “Note”, or if, alternatively, he wanted to pose an interesting challenge to the idea of confessionalism, which of course, he helped foster. Though Berryman wears the mask of Henry quite well in the early Dream Songs, by the later ones he is so obviously documenting autobiographical matter that one has to wonder why he offers the pose of the “Note” in the first place? In his Paris Review interview with Peter Stitt he explained: Henry both is and is not me, obviously. We touch at certain points. But I am an actual human being; he is nothing but a series of conceptions – my conceptions. I brush my teeth; unless I say so

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somewhere in the poem ... he doesn’t brush his teeth. He only does what I make him do. If I have succeeded in making him believable, he performs all kinds of other actions besides those named in the poem, but the reader has to make them up. That’s the world. But it’s not a religious or philosophical system.6

As quickly as Berryman singles out that they are “my conceptions”, he defers to the reader as creative partner. The reader, in other words, must contribute not only to the making up of Henry’s world, but to the making up of Henry himself. This not only ensures that the reader has to assume some of the responsibility for the “opinions and errors” that become Henry and the Songs, but ensures what Berryman, in fact, desires most – a close readership. Barthes tells us that “The text you write must prove to me that it desires me”.7 If only implicit in the “Note”, Berryman makes explicit his desire for an appropriate (that is, learned) readership in The Dream Songs. Note the famous beginning of Dream Song 35: “Hey, out there! – assistant professors, full, / associates, – instructors – others – any – / I have a sing to shay!” Berryman/Henry begins the poem demanding academic attention, but after the tenured professors and even the instructors decline the invitation, he moves on to accept the attention of those much lower down the ranks (be they academic or not): “others – any.” As I will discuss later in this essay, Berryman’s own sense of learnedness means he hopes to condition a complex affective response. If the “Note” made the writer-reader bond seem parasitic at worst, however, the promise of professional promotion in studying The Dream Songs (assistants and associates can become full professors) brings readers to writers in symbiotic union. From needing readers to needing the fame that comes with readers is not such a long jump, and Berryman was particularly concerned that the public-atlarge be interested in him as a celebrity poet. Indeed, his acknowledged sense of fame as a subject throughout The Dream Songs forms the basis for the complicated posture that he cares “less” for, that which “obsess[es]” him most: “As he grew famous – ah, but what is fame? – he lost his old obsession with his name” (Dream Song 133). The fame Berryman secured for himself with the publication of The Dream Songs had the knock-on effect of making him feel the need to produce for a readership which, in its expectancy, made the 6 7

Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 31. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 2000, 6.

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later Songs something of a chore: “I sing with infinite slowness finite pain”, Henry tells us in Dream Song 305. But by this point in the long poem, the question of identity has been turned upside down once again; Henry is no longer a product of Berryman so much as Berryman has become a product of Henry, the celebrated dummy speaking through the slumped posture of the defeated ventriloquist. In not achieving the removal of the author, Berryman manages to achieve reader empathy by living on as a character in Henry’s fiction. Not content in masking his own interpretive interests, Berryman masks Henry, as purported author of the Songs, in blackface and multiple voices. This foregrounds a posture whereby Henry is unrecognizable and fractured in places, but notably human in others: a real “human American man” (Dream Song 13). Complicating Berryman’s need to write the real is his attraction to making Henry an obvious fiction, a myth, and like the subject of most myths, Henry fulfills our expectations by being dead; not just dying once, but several times over the course of the 385 Songs. Of course, as we will find out, even the grave will not stop Henry from talking, and soon enough he is alive again (“Lazarus with a plan” as he puts it in Dream Song 91), which is all the better since he can now literally fulfill both his and Berryman’s raison d’être – to live to tell his tale. Teller of the tale in first person, positioning himself as his own reader in second, returning to become the interpretive critic of himself and his work in third, Berryman/Henry perpetuates a never-ending loop of narrative possibilities and strategies, which returns me to Barthes’ need to feel “desired”. Despite the fact that in the Song that begins it all we are told he is “hid[ing]” and “sulk[ing]” Henry’s constant sense of selfreferentiality shows him desiring an audience from the beginning. The posture put forth in Dream Song 1, then, is the grandest of all: for Henry, in fact, has never gone “away”. We are only told he has gone away in order to welcome him back to talk some more. The physical posture of Berryman’s poetry, particularly his sense of form, has often been discussed and debated, but I want to tweak the angle of the discussion here as I pursue my second point which concerns the interrelationship between affect and form. Berryman referred to long poems as poems of “scale” and indeed it is his “sense

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of scale” which ultimately serves as the major organizer of feelings in The Dream Songs.8 As Altieri writes: The arts rely heavily on feelings that emphasize the expressive quality of spatial relations. The most obvious of these are feelings organized by a sense of scale … along with related concerns for proportion and fit – both positively and negatively. Analogously, special fit or configuration draws immediate conjunctions among details and foregrounds the significance of the linked features … but most probably the most intense and intricate spatial feelings occur in relation to how boundaries and frames work …. Boundaries can repel connection or seem invitingly porous.9

The “boundaries and frames” which Altieri tells us are responsible for the most “intense and intricate spatial feelings” are similar, on a grand level, to Berryman’s use of subsections, the seven “Books” which link the 385 poems together under the title The Dream Songs. In interview, Berryman referred to his sense of form as “partly preconceived and partly developing … sometimes rigid and sometimes plastic, structural notions”, 10 and this rigid/plastic paradox seems particularly pertinent to the affect of both repelling and inviting reader connection. There has been much debate over the exact structural nature of the seven Books, and some of this has been stirred by Berryman himself who, in an effort to combat his anxiety over the reader’s desire for narrative drive, offered both that his long poem “has no plot”,11 and the idea that “each book … is rather well unified”.12 While one might puzzle over the exact nature of the “Book” as developmental marker, at the least, it serves as a grouping mechanism, figurative and fluid (or “plastic”) in a world without an absolute chronology of time or narrative. 13 My interest here is not in offering a 8 Berryman made this remark before a reading of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in the Library of Congress in 1962. 9 Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 235-36. Altieri cites visual arts as examples here. But, as he writes, “poetry is an art that almost equals painting’s interest in boundaries” (243). 10 Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 29. 11 John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, London: Macmillan, 1980, 52. 12 Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 29. 13 For an extended exploration of Berryman’s sense of structure, see Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary. Haffenden challenges the orthodox view embodied by William J. Martz’s understanding of the long poem as lacking structure,

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new structuring principle for The Dream Songs, however, but to explore the posture of the dramatic arc that is purported by virtue of what often seems a contrivance of beginnings and endings. For example, Book I ends with Henry’s declared death and Book II begins: “spring returns with a dance and a sigh” (Dream Song 27). The overarching structure relies on the three movements of dramatic acts: movement one introduces, movement two develops conflict (Henry vs. self, vs. family, vs. friends, vs. God), and movement three attempts to resolve these conflicts. However, the frames of the Books never offer any progression; exposition is stalled at the point when we first meet Henry. Questions as to how, why and when things happen are not so much addressed as broached and dropped. But still, the affect of Berryman’s “Books” comes in the wish to offer a sense of containment as well as a sense of sprawling narration; which is to say, the posture of sub-sections contributes to Berryman’s wish to have it both ways: to write a long poem that is both lyric in song and narrative in drive. To move between and beyond the seven Books empowers the reader to take part in Henry’s action and creation. As quickly, then, as the frames and boundaries work to contain the sprawl, the affect becomes one of liberation. Containment, or compression, is, of course, crucial not only to the form the poem takes as a large sequence, but in terms of its “linked features” (to use Altieri’s term), its individual Songs. As a young poet, Berryman’s sense of a poem’s formal qualities informed his ideas about affect in similar ways as they would in later projects such as The Dream Songs. In “A Note on Poetry”, which prefaced a selection of twenty of his poems in Five Young American Poets (1940), he wrote that: One of the reasons for writing verse is delight in craftsmanship – rarely for its own sake, mainly as it seizes and makes visible its subject. Versification, rime, stanza-form, trope … they provide the means by which the writer can shape an experience in itself usually vague, a mere feeling or phrase, something that is coherent, directed, since it “lacks plot, either traditional or associative”. He argues “that Berryman’s disquisitions on the subjects of Christology and eschatology are so insistent and cohesive as to function as a principle of structure”. He also charts Berryman’s own notions through letters and talks, offering a variety of structural interpretations including those of “thematic harmony” (a “calendar framework”) and literary models such as Virgil’s Eclogues, Dante’s Inferno, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Homer’s Iliad. See Haffenden, 41-54.

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intelligible. They permit one to say things that would not otherwise be said at all; it may be said, even, that they permit one to feel things that would not otherwise be felt …. Poetry provides its readers, then, with what we may call a language of experience, an idiom, of which the unit may be an entire complicated emotion or incident. (CP 287)

Berryman’s wish to maximize the expressive quality of his use of form – that is, the technical virtuosity of his craft – was one he picked up from admired influences: from Shakespeare and W.B. Yeats to his Southern mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, who required that “good poetry must be demanding, and must eliminate the possibility of simple affective response”. 14 Appreciating the formal aspects of Berryman’s poetry in terms of its affects is to begin to explore how “feeling” is naturalized in an artificial, postured setting. While Berryman would move beyond the preconceived structures of formal verse as such, he kept up the ghost of form precisely because he believed, as Tate and Ransom instructed, that poetry was responsible for engaging the “individual intellect”.15 For Berryman, a learned style conveyed a “complicated emotion”, which in turn conditioned the reader’s own emotion, ensuring Berryman’s respect and attention. As he puts it in Dream Song 297: “I perfect my metres / until no mosquito can get through”. Under the auspices of individual Songs, Altieri’s ideas of “scale” and frames are still functional. This is especially apparent in, for the most part, their contained sense of space: “18-line sections”, as Berryman had it, “three six-line stanzas, each normally (for feet) 5-53-5-5-3, variously rhymed”.16 Berryman’s imposition of a rigid formality to individual poems manifests as a desire to govern readerresponse while also serving to govern his own output (once he commits himself to the rigid pattern, he has to keep it up; and he does, with only a handful of exceptions). The sestets are more often than not end-stopped, but the space does not break up so much as contribute to the physical posture of rhythmic patterns. Broken body paragraphs, on a grammatical level, function figuratively as broken bones on a 14

Quoted by Stephen Matterson in Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing, London: Macmillan, 1988, 22-23. 15 Ibid., 22. 16 See Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 323-33; 330. Berryman’s language of distorted syntax and variable registers also contributes to the posture of his form.

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literary/anatomic level, so that when Henry advances – “Collating bones” as he puts it in Dream Song 30 – he is in effect collating himself via linguistic fragments. To explore Berryman’s use of fragmented language as it relates to spatial relations, is to explore his sense of syntax, which in its distortion sends signifiers flying well beyond their signifieds. As much as it contributes to slowing the reader down (in terms of understanding), it also works to move the poems forward with great momentum. In this respect, at times the Songs can read as if written in broken English, where verbs and subjects are inverted, and language spills down the page. “Henry rushes not in here” begins Dream Song 180, but the immediacy of the rush, as captured in the first two words is not negated so much as reconciled as an affective entity in its own right for its delayed “not”. Which is to say, again, that affect is preserved in the paradox of a rigid/plastic poetry. I would like to expand this to refer not only to structure, but to the ideas of artistic integrity and spontaneity. If individual Dream Songs are kept rigid in terms of the compressed three sestets, they retain a plasticity in their seeming spontaneity of experience and reflection. Dream Song 380 begins, “Wordsworth, thou form almost divine, cried Henry” and it is interesting to consider Berryman’s relation to Wordsworth’s most recognizable definition of poetry: All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. 17

The paradox between spontaneity and long and deep thought is paramount to the affects of The Dream Songs particularly since at every turn of line and phrase we are confronted by a calculated use of craft. In this way, Berryman aspires to a sort of sprezzatura, a display of effortlessness despite the artifice. Knowing, however, that artifice cannot be erased in poems that wear their formal technique and craft on their sleeves, the affects of the Songs rely on a tension between the wish to appear spontaneous and the wish to appear learned to the reader. 17

William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, in Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu, 2nd edn, London: Blackwell, 1998, 358.

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The point can be illustrated in relation to Dream Song 26, where Berryman dramatizes what amounts to a functionally dysfunctional relationship between his quest for “art, rime” (with all its learned affiliations) and a desire to express lust (in all its spontaneity). Over the three sestets of this poem, Henry’s friend will pose the same question three times: “What happen then, Mr. Bones?” The repetitions work as frames which invite Henry to expose how and why he has fallen from grace: for as he tells us in the poem’s first line, “The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once”. The use of “aria” here draws our attention to a series of antithetical gestures; the first being that Henry of multiple voices was once a solo voice (has anyone considered The Dream Songs as operatic in structure?). Further, the antithetical pun on “Aryan” highlights Henry’s former whiteness, which in turn highlights his postured blackness as “Mr. Bones”. As expressed earlier, one of the most dramatic postures of The Dream Songs is that Henry has a past, or more to the point, that his past was one of silence (as opposed to the chatty Henry which we have in front of us). The past, of course, duly affects the present, and brings Henry, like a displaced Adam, to entertain the same question posed in Dream Song 4: “Where did it all go wrong?” Indeed, as in Dream Song 4, it seems “Women’s bodies” were his downfall and yet, “his loins were & were the scene of stupendous achievement.” Berryman’s allocation of page space gives pregnant pause, juxtaposing and so annunciating with the gravity of delay the implausibility of Henry’s loins ever being the locale of “achievement”. It also exposes the typical reliance on ampersands as a mode of compression. The verbal tick of “My God” which Henry utters three times throughout the Song, as well as the conceit of dialogue with his unnamed friend, are further evidence that it is based on a pre-conditioned model of a particularly contrived physical stance. On one level, Henry is aware that the physicality of art and rime can be distrusted by those who read it as manipulation of originary emotion. On another level, one might read Berryman as perpetuating a laissez-faire attitude to grammar and syntax, “the original crime, art, rime”; though, of course, he is absolute about “the administration of rhetoric” (as he tells us in Dream Song 10). The jump between “the original crime” and original sin is not a big one, and soon we find that doomed Henry is damned, not only for violating women, but for violating the very “art, rime” he is perpetuating.

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As if Henry himself recognizes the posture of this physical and metaphysical attitude, however, he equates his death with a “most marvellous piece of luck”. The physical attitude of the poem – boastful of its craft and yet insecure about its affects – mirrors Henry’s physical attitude toward women. He is boastful about his sexual prowess and yet intimidated by a woman’s potential to destroy him. Throughout his life, Berryman found his technique and method the most ambitious quality of his work but, as his insecurities about his readership grew, he also feared his ambitions did not always pay off. 18 Considered as postures, however, his wish to reconcile “a personality and a plan, a metrical plan”,19 secures an “affective response”, and one which is anything but simple. I have begun to blur the boundaries between Berryman’s postures and those of his poetry. This is inevitable in a work which predisposes itself to be read as both personal experience and imaginative invention. In the next part of my essay, however, I want to address the expressive quality of Henry himself, and so I will begin by following up what I have already begun to assume: that Henry’s wallowing is a wonderfully dramatic performance. To lament any number of losses (and disgraces) becomes the subject of individual Dream Songs, but the posture is that these losses or disgraces in themselves are secondary, almost irrelevant when compared to the one that came before it all, the one that lords over all the others in its stupendous capacity to inflict pain some several hundred Songs later. Even as we near the end of 77 Dream Songs, the front of enigmatic loss is perpetuated: “Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry / did will not bear thought” (Dream Song 74). This coy ploy ensures that we do indeed “bear thought” about what has happened to Henry, and by Dream Song 101 we are still searching for a possibility while Berryman is still thwarting (and so maintaining) our desire for discovery: “I can’t go into the meaning of the dream / except to say a sense of total LOSS / afflicted me thereof…” (The capitals are Berryman’s). If “Dream” and “LOSS” are one in the same, one begins to wonder if a psychological model would fit, which is to ask, is his loss only imagined? In the last line of Dream Song 101, Henry tells us that “everything is what it seems” in this dream world, but again, a 18

See Haffenden’s John Berryman: A Critical Commentary for meticulous descriptions of Berryman’s compositional process as it relates to his self-examination. 19 Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 30.

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posture seems perpetuated, since nothing is as it seems in a world where “LOSS” has painted everything black, including Henry’s face, and the poem’s humor. To counter the relentlessness of despair, and to offer a semblance of relief, Berryman routinely relies on such moments of comic interlude, as in Dream Song 8 where we are told Henry has lost that which may well define him the most: “They took away his crotch.” Vital to a sense of posture is the fact that Henry never gives up the game of pain, and indeed in the final Dream Song (385), Henry is still addressing a nebulous past in a nebulous world where things were better – that is, where he knew those important things he no longer knows: “Off away somewhere once I knew / such things.” Henry is specifically referring to his past knowledge of whether turkeys “wish” they could fly better – a relatively inconsequential question which in itself is not interesting. What is interesting is the light it shines on the questioner. In Henry’s case, I would argue that the question exploits a front of ignorance and inadequacy, the very fronts which have allowed him to make his way through the Songs to this point. If we consider that Henry/Mr Bones is continuously downgrading his intelligence, sometimes even posing as an “idiot”, the question we have to ask, is: what for? To demonstrate modesty, humility, meekness? Possibly, since the meek are to inherit the Earth, as “blest” Henry well knows. As we read in Dream Song 364: There is one book that Henry hasn’t read: Ubu Roi. He feeling ignorant whenever his mind brings it up. Everytime anybody says – Mr. Bones, you has read everything – he singles out instead Ubu Roi, to prove he is an idiot and should be, as one, blest.

This is not, necessarily, to say that Henry is abusing his sense of loss to receive the consolations of his readership, but to say that his investment in such is substantial to the point that it influences our judgment and sense of sympathy. Altieri writes that: The best way I know to keep judgment and sympathy in balance is to return to the concept of expression, particularly to the ways that expressions can implicate both active and passive aspects of agency …. As an expression of the subject, an attitude can make visible and

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Henry certainly seems to have little control over his loss, and so over himself. If this makes him a passive agent of loss, however, it also makes him an active one in that he promotes himself as a victim in nearly every Dream Song. His investment in such emotion is conflicting since it both disables and enables his sense of self: both a “human American man” (Dream Song 13), and likewise “a clown” (Dream Song 199). If a martyr to loss, he is also a villain, and moreover the crime itself: “There ought to be a law against Henry. / – Mr. Bones: There is” (Dream Song 4). For this reason, we question the expressive quality of Henry and the poems as they construct an emotive front which requires us, as audience, to receive him as playing all parts. As Berryman puts it in Dream Song 143: – That’s enough of that, Mr. Bones. Some lady you make. Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man, I’ll sing you now a song the like of whích may bring your heart to break….

Henry, then, is aware of himself as performer, aware that the Songs he sings constitute a “show”, literally a theatrical performance, as acknowledged in the vaudevillian persona of Mr Bones. This is not just the black-faced minstrel’s language of “irregular verbs” (not to mention malapropisms, misspelled and mispronounced words, complete with excessive accent marks), however, but the language games of the Professor who, in Dream Song 242, transfiguratively becomes his own student. As might be expected, then, behind all the masks Henry wears, he is not simply iterating loss, but performing it, and like any good performer (or obsessivecompulsive performer), loss is not simply part of his act. For the line between Henry’s reality and the show has broken down. While we get glimpses of Henry behind the curtain, these moments are not indicative of a “reality”, so much as indicative of another “stage” of 20

Altieri is writing about the “agent” (speaker) of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Isolation: For Marguerite”, but his theoretical aside seems pertinent to all poetry, subjects, and agents (The Particulars of Rapture, 93).

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dreams. To ask if Henry is aware that his posture has become him, I would also argue that with the soft shoes of a veteran he is very aware that he is relying on reader empathy with well-worn subjects: which is to say that Berryman has adopted the guise of melodrama, which, of course, gets as bad a rap as “posture”. In their mixture of music and drama, The Dream Songs as a whole may well be read as classically melodramatic (as related to opera: I refer back to the “aria” of Dream Song 26), but what I am really interested in here is the modern sensibility of melodrama as that which exploits spectacle and sensation. Henry’s throwaway cynicism and self-pity thrust him into situations with dramatic aplomb, even if, more often than not, they’re imagined (which is to say, “dreamed” in the figurative sense of wished for). In Dream Song 4, for instance, Henry tells us that he has to be held back from “springing” on the Latin lady, by “her husband & four other people”, but chances are this is hardly the case. He holds himself back with insecurities and complexes to the point that he can only “advance upon / (despairing) [his] spumoni”. The irony of self-awareness is even more notable in the despair and need which drives Henry to commit exclamatory declarations of great derivativeness: “Love me love me love me love me love me” (Dream Song 192). Such melodramatic moments exploit Henry’s sense of self as subject, and it is at these times – in which Henry appears trite in spirit, and soul – that a complicated attitude is posed. Out of control, Henry forces us to bear witness to his loss and lusts so that his dreams ultimately become, if not always nightmares, places of death, drink, and disease: “All the girls, with their vivacious littles, / visited him in dream… // stroke four, put him on the wagon, Death, / no drinks: that ought to cure him” (Dream Song 350). And literally, the destruction he does to himself is for our reading pleasure: “On all fours he danced about his cage, poor Henry” (Dream Song 351). What is more, in what might have been considered bad taste, but for its exceptional posture of hyperbole, “Apoplectic Henry” appropriates historical atrocity, putting himself through Hell and metaphorically aligning himself with the “Armenians, the Jews, the Ibos” in suffering (Dream Song 353). Further, we are told he experiences “the sufferings of wood // when burnt” just so he can, not so much remember, but tell “what he saw, how he felt & smelt” (Dream Song 353). This not only refers to the heartache of the performer painted in burnt-cork (the minstrel’s painted frown), but refers to the pain of the

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black man suffering in a racist America (whether he is one like Bert Williams, playing the part of “coon”, or not). As such, he asks for our sympathy, love, tears, and the blackest of laughter; all of which is to say, he asks for our recognition: “nobody seems to know me” (Dream Song 241). This, of course, seems another posture, since Berryman and his creation, Henry/Mr Bones, are famously well known throughout the land: “The White House invitation came today” (Dream Song 302). I should acknowledge that, for the most part, Henry’s sense of self as ignored and displaced applies to those Dream Songs dedicated to Henry’s own person. Where Henry’s investment is supposedly in others, the melodrama seems that much less formidable. That is, his sense of loss seems less postured, and therefore more prosaic. For me this makes some of the Dream Songs just that bit less interesting. Though some might find the elegiac Songs for Delmore Schwartz of Book VI (146-159), moving for their natural speech and genuine wish to express pathos – “[expressive] of [the] objective condition” of mourning, in Altieri’s terms – these Songs seem to me places where Henry not only loses his sense of self, but Berryman loses his sense of Henry. The posture of dramatic language and form, and the intricacies of the poet/persona attitude, can seem negligible here, and perhaps, letting these poems fall flat for their reliance on pedestrian facts: “I imagine you have heard the terrible news, / that Delmore Schwartz is dead” (Dream Song 149); “His good body lay unclaimed / three days” (Dream Song 151); “I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation. / First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore” (Dream Song 153). Alternatively, in some of the Songs where Henry rises up to perform the attitudes he is best associated with, the poems serve Schwartz by involving him in the theatricality of poetic death and memorial. In the lines that follow from Dream Song 146, there is nothing “limp” about the dramatic posture of linguistic bravado and emotional utterance; instead, the affect is in the poem’s affectation – of solidarity and testament – as Henry on Earth does not act, but only contemplates, going down to the netherworld with Delmore: These lovely motions of the air, the breeze, tell me I’m not in hell, though round me the dead lie in their limp postures dramatizing the dreadful word instead

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for lively Henry, fit for debaucheries and bird-of-paradise vestures

In the second stanza of this Song, “lively Henry” continues to play as a Hamlet-figure, complete with “the new ghost / haunting Henry most”, but really it is the fact that his posture of commitment is so ineffectual that makes the poem so utterly convincing. Though, over the course of the 385 Songs, Henry kills himself off for less, note just how quickly he removes himself from Delmore’s sphere: ‘Down with them all!’ Henry suddenly cried. Their deaths were theirs. I wait on for my own, I dare say it won’t be long. I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried, but they are past it all, I have not done, which brings me to the end of this song.

Despite the self-deprecation, Berryman/Henry has done exactly what he tells us he has not: he has become as famous and proficient as the friends he has tried to be (“Ted, Richard, Randall… Delmore... Sylvia” as he writes in Dream Song 153). In positioning himself next to these of “limp postures” Berryman vents his poetic aspirations as intent on “dramatizing the dreadful word instead”: the dreadfulness being that they have all died instead of him. As poignant and dramatic as such mourning is, however, it is important to recognize that the poem also serves to announce that Henry, if only for the moment, has managed to survive them and so basks in the “lovely… breeze”. Though he has “tried to be them” it is interesting to consider the tone with which he attests, “they are past it all” – of sadness, yes, but also of triumph? Of pride? For as he concludes, he is, in fact, “end[ing]” yet another Song. One can almost see him looking ahead to completing more than twice as many as the 146 he has already written. This idea of posture as it accords to Berryman’s positioning of himself next to (and against) other poets is the last thing I want to consider since it shows Henry/Berryman as building on pretences which most would consider unflattering to say the least. My reading of this may make it seem as if I am showing Berryman in the bad light poets are famous for: a competitive spirit, lusting for fame at the derision of his poet-friends. But the point I am more interested in has to do with the way that the work’s energy and verve owes a debt to

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Berryman’s own sense of posture as theatrical insult. For just as he does not begrudge those of his generation, neither does he really believe Rilke was “a jerk” as he professes in the third stanza of Dream Song 3 (“A Stimulant for an Old Beast”). It has often been commented that Rilke’s Stimmen provided Berryman with a model for his earlier “Nervous Songs”, and over a decade later, a similar voice and structure contributed to the making of The Dream Songs. To “admit [Rilke’s] griefs & music” as governing his own compositions is an acknowledged counter-balance to the original slur. One need only pause to consider Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” to begin to understand the complex relationships poets have with their precursors, but Berryman’s anxieties are I think fruitfully made comical, which is to say often uttered in jest, and with tongue in cheek. To pay “Homage” to Anne Bradstreet, for instance, was not, of course, to salute her poetry, but in order to get her into the sack. It precedes the lusts of Henry in Dream Song 187: Miss Dickinson – fancy in Amherst bedding hér. Fancy a lark with Sappho, a tumble in the bushes with Miss Moore, a spoon with Emily, while Charlotte glare. Miss Bishop’s too noble-O.

The question becomes how do we receive Berryman/Henry’s positing of his famous foremothers as merely bed matter? As reduction? As victimization? Poetic rape? His awareness of his stance as preposterous belies a grand charade not of lust, nor even envy, but more self-denigration: “It is a true error to marry with poets / or to be by them”, he concludes Dream Song 187. As one who often admitted his faults as a husband through acts of adultery, he hereby indicts himself: the posture of sexualization may be read as one complicated by his own admitted sense of “error”, of machismo and braggadocio. Berryman’s name-dropping amounts to performances of rubbing shoulders with the greats, and this is perhaps best seen in those poems where he nods to Yeats. While Yeats serves as a poetic demigod – the subject of affective worship in many Dream Songs – another creator concerns Berryman even more. As Haffenden writes, “a consuming interest of the Songs (so prevalent as to be a dominate theme) is the

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very nature of godhead and immortality”.21 The last performance of posture that I want to mention, then, conflates Berryman/Henry’s sense of himself as one who both bows down to those above him and yet as one who is willing to assume the stance of God in order for his own voice to prosper. The third stanza of Dream Song 281 (“The Following Gulls”) reads: After thirty Falls I rush back to the haunts of Yeats & others, with a new book in my briefcase four times too large: all year I must in terminal debates with me say who is to lives & who to dies before my blessed discharge.

The last two Books of The Dream Songs are substantially longer than the previous ones, and if either of them, or even The Dream Songs as a whole, is the book which is “four times too large”, it is so for its attempt at expansiveness, and perhaps Berryman’s inability to decide between the “betters” and the “lessers” (as he writes of his mentors in Dream Song 364). Though Berryman assumes or likewise gives Henry the power to say “who is to lives and who to dies” (literally, which Songs, as well as which people, will be “discharge[d]”), Berryman well knows that, within the real world, life and death is, or should be, God’s dominion, and that neither he nor Henry can do anything but celebrate and mourn. That said, the word “blessed” does put the idea of “discharge” in his vested interest and confirms perhaps his sense of it as within his grasp (here the “terminal debates” becomes personal). Enabling this paradox of life and death, fiction and reality, is Berryman’s paradoxical sense of his own relationship with God: “God’s Henry’s enemy”, we are told way back in Dream Song 13, and yet, of course, Henry needs God’s love and acknowledges his “Goodness” as much as he does any “girl’s” (as in Dream Song 80). If Berryman’s sense of “divinity and death” is “reiterate[ed]” “earnestly” as Haffenden believes it is, then it is also reiterated within the great theater that comes with his interest in pending doom and salvation, which involves playing the part of both fallen angel and devoted servant. Dream Song 177 picks up on this thematic thread in the context of Berryman’s complicated sense of a problematic readership, which returns us to one of the sources and reasons for his 21

Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 52.

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use of posture in the first instance: “I am tame now. Undead, I was not killed / by Henry’s viewers but maimed. It is my art / to buzz the spotlight in vain…” The idea that Berryman “buzzes” on stage, looking to be seen, performing in the spotlight for any who will listen to his Song, explicitly announces the posture of servitude at which he has become proficient. The idea that he is “tame[d]” is another posture in a poem and a poetry which though expressive of “doubt”, is also one of known confidences (in form and subject). Time and again, Berryman’s postures amount to a dramatic performance, where he shines the “spotlight” on himself in all disingenuousness, ambivalence, love, crisis, fame, and solitude. For this reason, the affect of his art is well illuminated, and it is rare that he sings his Songs “in vain”.

ALLUSIONS, ETC.: BERRYMAN, CATULLUS, SAPPHO MICHAEL HINDS

As The Dream Songs confronts and then dispenses with a series of poetic fathers at one intertextual crossroads after another, initially I want to justify the comparison study of Berryman and Catullus. Most obviously, sequentiality links The Dream Songs and Catullus’ Carmina. The Carmina is read frequently as a sequence containing three distinct but nevertheless mutually informative poetic series: Carmina I-LX consists of short poems (assumed by many to have been organized by Catullus himself) written in a vast range of metres that establish a vivid social, literary and sexual milieu through the combined and constant use of public and private references. Catullus is one of its most avid participants and its most acute witness, just as Henry and others are both protagonists and commentators in the action of The Dream Songs. Poems LXI-LXVIII of the Carmina are longer poems, all composed in elegiacs, including epithalamiums and a miniepic. Of most obvious relevance to Berryman in this series are LXV and LXVIII, in which Catullus indicates how his poetics were recontextualized and reformed by the death of his brother, declaring an aesthetics of grief reminiscent of that which sustains Berryman’s writing about his father and contemporaries in his sequence. Berryman is also akin to Catullus in his candid and tenderly profane elegies for lost love, as with Henry’s “memory of a lovely fuck” at “the funeral of tenderness” in Dream Song 46. Berryman’s obsessions with love and fame, loss and friendship, personal lament and gossip combine with equal vitality throughout Catullus’ poetic series. The final poems within the Carmina (poems LXIX-CXVI) confirm this, as Catullus uses the love epigram to both relate back to some of the tendernesses of the first series while also to

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inveigh against particular members of the society which that opening series so brilliantly evoked. Inferior fellow poets, corrupt politicians, misers, hypocrites all get the treatment. Vitally, the characters that Catullus excoriates are members of the same polis as himself, and therefore he makes them into grotesquely alterior projections of himself. He knew the corruptions of fellow citizens as if they were his own, because to an extent, they were. The jaundiced analysis of cultural and political life, self-indulgence and recrimination (for others and himself) of Berryman’s poems about drinking parties and social cliques is also vital to the Carmina, and indeed is intrinsic to Catullus’ conceptualization of himself. This provides a doubly literary and therapeutic context for understanding how both Berryman and Catullus are attempting to fashion a sympathetic reader even as they rebuke themselves, a “big brother” or sponsor. The Dream Songs and the Carmina have been read as narratives of addiction, whether to love, loss or drink, and as texts that exhibit excruciatingly the dynamics of manic depression. So when Dream Song 97 refers to “Cats’ blackness, booze, blows, grunts, grand groans”, it could be inferred that we are talking about both an American and a Veronan cat. Economically, both Catullus and Berryman are readable as describing the inevitable alienation of the human subject in a commodified culture; and both are expert in the poetry of pleading poverty or the expression of material envy. 1 Some further consideration has to be made here of Catullus and Berryman’s positioning of the reader. The Catullan scholar William Fitzgerald complained that “Catullus is the Rilke of antiquity”, in that he excites a confessional response from critics which buries the memory of the original texts.2 Whether “Rilke was a jerk” (as Berryman writes in Dream Song 3) or not, it is worth remarking that if Catullus has been vulnerable to the projected confessions of scholars, then surely Berryman has to be seen as similarly vulnerable. Both poets insinuate and demand a certain confidence from the reader; certainly, Catullus’ reader is designed to be a student with aspirations to friendship. Catullus is attempting to make himself known to those who are worthy of him, and in the settling of scores that goes on in his sequence he demonstrates how false friends can be dispensed with so 1

For example, Dream Song 337 dramatizes Henry’s self-loathing and envy as he feels the quality of the fabric on the suit of his ex-wife’s new husband. 2 William Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 212.

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that real ones can be nurtured. Berryman and Catullus set about how to receive their restaurant pleadings and graveside orations, in effect attempting by accretion to make the reader into a doppelgänger of the poet. To offset the neediness of this pleading, there is also a considerable amount of braggadocio, what David Wray has termed “a Mediterranean poetics of aggression”.3 Berryman follows Catullus in employing a calculatedly obnoxious bravado, as with the dismissal of Rilke, or in the reductivist semiotics of the poem “Her & It” in Love & Fame: “I fell in a love with a girl. / O and a gash.” (CP 169) This heartless innuendo from a thorough cad (despite the pun on preserving the girl’s anonymity) conveys a profound sense of unshakeable inadequacy on the speaker’s part, a failure, as he fails to hear what the girl has “muttered”. Berryman’s laconic voice is recoiling from his initial aggression, her “O” provides a diminishing of his slender “I”, and Berryman turns out to have written a gynocritical demolition job upon himself. Progressively, as Lesbia rejects Catullus and as the world and the girl repel Henry, the reader is squeezed all the more jealously. Rather than producing thorough solidarity, however, the product of this process is a precarious and frail complicity between reader and poet, which can lead to the subordination of the poet to the confessional impulses of the scholar. For the remainder of this essay, I want to rescue Berryman from this consequence of his own poetic, and look at him and Catullus not as poets of the self, but rather poets who are seeking a way out of the impasse of the self: “I heard said ‘Cats that walk by their wild lone’ / but Henry had need of friends.” (Dream Song 135) In order to do this, they found their way to the lyric voice of Sappho, and through her they produced poems that enable a revived interrogation of the allusive dynamics of lyric. Richard J. Kelly’s John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue documents that Berryman owned a copy of Loeb’s Latin text of Catullus (the Heinemann edition of 1935).4 The volume also contains a translation of Catullus’ Carmina XXXIV on a loose sheet:5 3 David Wray, Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 113. 4 Richard J. Kelly, John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue, New York: Peter Lang, 1999, 62. 5 Thanks are due here to Kate Donahue Berryman, who kindly gave permission for these materials to be used in this essay. Berryman’s notes on Catullus’ Carmina are contained in his copy of the Loeb Classical Library Edition of Catullus, Tibullus and

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Girls and unstained boys we are Aspirants, and to Diana, dear; Unto Diana then our praise, Unstained boys and girls we raise. – “Child of Latona and Jove Whom by the Delian olive love Brought thy mother to her bed, Lady of mountain and green wood, Hidden grove, leaping river: By mothers lying down forever, Junico Lucina art thou known, Powerful Trivia & the Moon Of stolen light. You goddess give Bit by bit the year we live, You bless & fill (our hecatomb) With grain & fruit the farmer’s home, Holy by whatever name, Come as in ancient time you came, Keep – as you kept our fathers – us, Thy children, the children of Romulus.”6

This poem is Catullus’ astonishing hymn to Diana, in which the entire world is seen as being made massively reproductive through her menstrual ministrations. It finds expression in Dream Song 75 where: “Neither the menstruating stars (nor man) was moved / at once” when “Henry put forth a book”. On a larger scale, both Berryman and Pervigilium Veneris, eds T.E. Page and W.H.D. Rouse, London: Macmillan, 1935, which is held in the Special Collections Unit of the Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. Berryman’s scholarly fastidiousness is foregrounded on the title page of his edition, where he corrects the sole crediting of F.W. Cornish as translator by adding the name of Rouse. Berryman had noted the crediting of Rouse by Cornish in his introduction to the volume for provision of paraphrases for Carmina XV, XXI, XXVII, LXIX, LXXI, LXXIV, LXXVIII, LXXIX, LXXX, LXXXIX, XCIV, XCVII, C, CX, CXI, CXII, and CXIII. This indicates both the meticulousness of Berryman as a reader, alive to every detail of both text and peritext, and also his righteous sense of credit being given where it is due. Cornish acknowledged Rowse’s contribution on page ix of his Introduction, but Berryman promotes him to the status of co-translator. Berryman’s sensitivity to matters of correctness, status and meritocracy is as clear here as that shown by Catullus in his stringent commentaries on the nepotism and corruptions of Roman society. Berryman’s notes and hieroglyphs may be infrequent, but they are all the more pointedly valuable for their selectivity and scarcity. They are never merely pedantic. 6 This appears to be Berryman’s final manuscript version of the poem.

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Catullus find the ferocity of maternity to be a more abiding and decisive cosmic force than the perceived fallibilities of patriarchy. Berryman’s version of Catullus is at once an awed homage to his mother and to the marauding presence of the White Goddess.7 Berryman’s mother had in fact presented herself to her son in similar terms: I do love you most devotedly and concernedly, and must always do, I judge from the past, and the comet’s train on this is the need to know how things are with you, even or perhaps especially in difficult times. Now none of that need be said again for on some certain stands, of which this is one, I am fixeder than the stars.8

Although the poetic highlight of the translation of Carmina XXXIV is the word “Unstained”, a Keatsian intersection of innocence and foreknowledge that also seems aptly Catullan and Berrymanic in its sense of imminent corruptibility, the peritext of the translation also intrigues. Berryman notes meticulously that he has made “20 Eng” lines out of “24 Latin”, which proves the focus that he was bringing to bear on his reading of the Catullan text. On the left hand margin of the penultimate line, Berryman has written “AEH”, referring to A.E. Housman, who was to become a vital presence in the late Dream Songs, and whose combined personae of classicist, elegist, and sexual outcast provide a model for Henry the scholar-poet of Dream Song 4. For the immediate purpose of this essay, however, Berryman’s most significant annotation to his edition occurs on page 60, where he marks with a stroke the entire texts of Carmina LIa (the disputed coda to Catullus’ translation of Sappho 31 in Carmina LI) and LII. Furthermore, inside the back cover, the following note appears: “cf. DS! 60 (11 May ’59)”. “60” here refers to the page number in the Loeb edition, and establishes a direct correlation between The Dream Songs and Catullus LI and LII. This confirms what had first brought the relationship of Catullus and Berryman into my mind; that Dream

7

Dream Song 212 represents antique femininity in an equally awestruck but more hidebound light as the Bacchae persecute an Orphic Henry, who is then terrorized by a maternal Queen of the Night (“worst is the armed mother”). 8 John Berryman, letter dated 7 December 1954, in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988, 277.

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Song 4 reads as a version of Carmina LI.9 The shared mise-èn-scene should be readily apparent: that of eyes meeting across a crowded room, alluding to the presence of a love that can never become other than imagined. It is a scenario so pervasive that popular culture is unimaginable without this locking of gazes. The date mentioned by Berryman in his note is also particularly intriguing. On 11 May 1959, Berryman was in Minneapolis, between breakdowns and marriages (he had been divorced on 28 April 1959). It is tempting to conjure with the thought that Dream Song 4 began on this date, as Berryman’s lovelorn sense of isolation must have been more than usually acute at the time. 10 However, I want to use this detail not to license a biographical reading of the poem, but to insist that we focus more closely on its relationship to Catullus. For all the apparent spontaneity of Haffenden’s claim that Dream Song 4 was “written in the Gaslight Restaurant, Minneapolis”, 11 few other poems by Berryman make so much play of how haplessly Henry is enveloped by the poetry of predecessors, and few sense more deeply that he cannot ever be his own man. This sublunary restaurant could be renamed Diana’s Place, taking us back to that translation of Carmina XXXIV. In this environment, Henry may have begun by perceiving of himself as a predator, but he is forced into a realization that “she” is the hunter, and furthermore that he is unwanted prey. “She might as well be on Mars” as Venus, therefore, because Henry is an alien to both planets. From a promising beginning (after all, “she glanced” at him not once, but “twice”) in what might just be reality, Henry cannot suppress the precedent poetic voices in him that are seeking satisfaction, and he turns into a pedant who can only express himself in terms of rapidly multiplying allusions, while painfully sensing that there is a vestigial palimpsest of eloquent desire that is demanding to be expressed. The problem for Henry is not that the woman will not yield, but that he has her yield too readily to being made lisible, while resisting his desire to make her scriptible. She offers plaisir but withholds jouissance. Henry’s envy is as powerful as his desire; rather than having her, perhaps his deeper wish is to be “the 9

All translations of Catullus and Sappho in this essay are my own, unless indicated otherwise. 10 John Haffenden declines to speculate about a date for Dream Song 4 in “The Chronology of The Dream Songs”, in John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980, 157-64. 11 Ibid., 83.

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slob beside her”, who is apparently free from scholarly interests. In this poem, Henry is a randy pedant doing an imitation of a lovestruck Catullan poet, if not necessarily Catullus himself. This suggestion of imposture is vital to acknowledge, as it is also an intrinsic part of the Catullan text. Catullus’ Carmina LI is mostly a translation of the poem by Sappho that is by now best known for its inclusion in Chapter 10 of Longinus’ On the Sublime: Godlike is that man, who face to face, sits and listens to your sweet speech and lovely laughter. This raises up a storm in my breast. At the slightest sight of you my voice falters, my tongue is splintered. In that instant, a subtle fire runs through my limbs; my eyes are blinded and my ears crash. Sweat flows: trembling Binds me. I go paler than straw, teeter on the edge of death.12

Catullus maintains the Sapphic meter, while Berryman alludes to it with his shortening of every third line (as opposed to the fourth in Catullus and Sappho). One of the curiosities of this poem is how the reader is engulfed into Henry’s nausea over his inability to deal with reality except through the consolations of study. Reading Dream Song 4, running down intertexts and risking directionless pedantry, it is vital that we consider the predicament of Henry as he sits at the mensa. Just as Catullus could not have Lesbia in Carmina LI, Henry cannot have “her” except as a text, a “Dream Song”. 12

William Carlos Williams translated “Sappho’s Ode out of Longinus” in 1958, and may therefore have provided a stimulus for Berryman’s poem. See Williams, “Sappho”, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Christopher MacGowan, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1988, II, 348.

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Apart from that scribbled note in the back of Berryman’s edition of Catullus, is there any other reason for insisting upon Catullus’ poem, rather than Sappho’s, as the primary allusion in Dream Song 4? One answer lies in the vital adaptation of Sappho’s text that Catullus performs, and (in Pound’s phrase) the “austerity” that it introduces to the Greek original.13 Catullus adds a final stanza to the Sapphic text, a move that has caused scholarly consternation for the thousand or so years that the Carmina have been extant. Is this a stray fragment, a coda, or an integral part of the poem, as thoroughly incorporated into the text as anything else in it? Whatever, it represents a change in tone and style that finds its provocative and problematic match in Berryman’s final lines: “There ought to be a law against Henry. / – Mr. Bones: there is.” While this “law” remains unexplained, it retains its “Big Other” status and maintains Henry’s Kafkaesque helplessness. In Catullus, the law erupts into the poem in the final stanza to admonish the anarchic passion of the Sapphic voice and the miserable sloth of the Sapphically-inspired poet; and this admonition has consequences for Henry and Berryman alike. In a state of longing but also a desire for release, Catullus introduces a senatorial voice to declare himself a Roman again, stanching Sappho’s Hellenistic flow through him. Analogously, Berryman invokes the voice of “Mr. Bones” to assert an Eliotic law of bathos (that you must end with a whimper), a ruling related to the Darwinistic law that stipulates the overwhelming of meekly clever Henrys by ill-read hungry slobs, and confirmed by the Freudian dictat that you never will meet one like your mother, so stop trying. Helen Vendler’s reading of Dream Song 4 is that it is “unthinkable in American poetry before the postwar Freudian era”, as it presents a “picture of the Id at work, checked in lust by Conscience”.14 She also describes the poem’s blasphemous and comic engagement with the love poetry of the troubadour tradition, Berryman’s joyous travestying of the love poets of the past. However, the Catullan context demands that we read the poem otherwise, less as an exuberant travesty and more as an agonized homage to the beginning of lyrical time, eons before the troubadours and all that. The troubadours may have turned the concept of the planctus into a cliché, voided of psychological 13

Ezra Pound, letter to Harriet Monroe, in The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907– 1941, ed. D.D. Paige, New York: New Directions, 1950, 69. 14 Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, 50.

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consequence, although that is arguable. With Catullus and Sappho, we are reading the ur-texts that inspired traditional homages from Cavalcanti to Joe Jackson’s “Is she really going out with him?” The clichés are not theirs, but rather belong to their imitators; Berryman if anything uses those so-called clichés to signal a way back to the urtext. The girl has a “complexion latin”, alright, but it is the colour of papyrus and literary history as much as a literal suntan. The planctus for Catullus was already a mannerism electrified by an emotional reality, and signifies neither unambiguous masochism nor hollow formulaism. With every urging of Catullus’ desire he also experiences an agonizing counter-urgency of conscience, as he mimics Sappho, he is reading himself doing so. Maybe Catullus is not translating at all, and instead reciting automatically from a decadent memory, only to be interrupted by an interventionist voice of Roman self-governance. Sappho has erupted from Catullus’ consciousness upon the pricking of his desire, and her voice has to be subsequently codified as a siren song by the judgment of LIa. In effect, Catullus dramatizes the negotiation between Id and Conscience two thousand years before Freud gave it a name, and Vendler could claim it as a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon. Dream Song 4 is how it is because Berryman knew his poetry even better than his psychopathology, but, like Catullus, he saw them as instinct with one another. If literary consciousness is indivorcible from psychosexual reality, there are no such things as empty literary conventions. In Catullus, all imitation is meaningful as it provides flashes of a shared literary subconscious. Vendler’s appropriation of Freudian terminology is useful to comprehend the psychopathology of lyric consciousness-formation, but Freud is a symptom here rather than a cause. Reading Catullus allowed Berryman to tap in to an ancient sexual verve, but he could not ignore the pulverizing supervisory voice in LIa reminding him that so much unrequited love amounts to so much self-abuse. Henry’s table is crowded enough, what with two versions of Bones to feed amongst others, but beyond that “the restaurant buzzes” with both the noise of lyrical discourse and the regenerated heat of the “emotional concourse” that Longinus identified in the Sapphic

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original.15 For Sappho, Catullus and Berryman alike, the desire that the woman evokes in the poet is awful and awesome, too much to bear alone. The restaurant buzzes with the white noise that is crashing in the ear of Sappho, but it has been augmented with the static mess of something that has been felt and then written a thousand times. Berryman writes in Dream Song 30, “I took up a pencil; / Like this I’m longing with”, and this longing is essential in his fashioning of The Dream Songs as an American work of art. But Henry does not simply long for love or sex, he is nowhere close to a desire so palpable. In Dream Song 4, Henry longs to want – and that represents in turn a double or triple longing (to love, be loved, to be seen to be loved). This waiting to want further catapults Henry through time, and Henry’s longing becomes cosmic, if not sublime. To connect with his desire would allow for some delay in this eternal longing, but it also would mean the end of him. The true Sublime is where the Ideal and the Real are wrapped up in one another; it is a state of speechless unity in which there is no need for personae or poetry. Unable to articulate or cease his desire, Henry is at best a beautiful loser, borne back ceaselessly into the past. If he unleashes his longing, he screams with a noisy bathos and desperation: “Love me love me love me love me love me / I am in need thereof, I mean of love” (Dream Song 192). Sappho’s originating presence complicates necessarily the notion of an agon between Berryman and Catullus. If anything, Catullus is Berryman’s elder brother rather than his father, but they are all subordinate to Sappho, la belle maman sans merci, and the masculine academy that Henry represents turns out to be a matriarchal institution.16 Sappho’s ur-text exists as a constant value in the lyric that threatens male authority with deconstruction. Yet, while Berryman’s poem appears to be purely about containment, failure and inhibition, its allusive networking with the Sapphic origins of the lyrical sublime enables a radical feminine authority to erupt. Henry’s look of love turns out to be intrinsically emasculatory, as it was never a male gaze, but rather an impersonation of Sappho’s. Becoming Sappho offers Berryman a temporary release from having to be a man. 15

Anne Carson puts it neatly: “Sappho’s body falls apart, Longinus’ body comes together: drastic contract of the sublime.” See If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, 364. 16 Dream Song 208 signals Berryman’s awareness of the exclusion of female complexity from the poetic canon: “So many thinking & feeling, in so many languages / … women barred.”

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This respite from maleness is the abiding narrative behind the persistence of Berryman’s American contemporaries in their attempts at writing as women. Christopher Benfey’s essay, “The Woman in the Mirror: John Berryman and Randall Jarrell” has discussed this phenomenon, and his woman in the mirror could be our woman in the restaurant, offering a fugitive femininity to the conflicted poet. Benfey argues that conjuring with gender for these poets is an exercise in telling us “about the limitations of our own engendered selves”.17 Yet this socially specific formulation of Lacan does not allow for how Berryman is looking at poetry itself as a gendered practice. The woman in the restaurant may well be the projected other of Henry, but it has also to be admitted that Henry is a projection of Berryman. As such, the real other of Berryman is Henry.18 However, behind all of this Berryman is a projection of Sappho, and so the author of The Dream Songs is also its other. So the real subject of Dream Song 4 is Sappho. And there are others and others. Immediately we may read Henry as wanting the girl, but we simultaneously acknowledge that whom he wants to be is the man beside her. Wanting, that is, what Sappho wanted to be. So there are simultaneous and complex systems of reflection at work here; importantly, there is enough in the poem and Berryman’s edition of Catullus to suggest that Dream Song 4 is an implicating play on the entrapments of allusion rather than an accidental case of Lesbian interference with what is intended as a broadcast of impotence in plain American. “Writing the feminine” turns out not to be an option but rather an inevitability, it is what the lyric poet does. Dream Song 4 is a radical poem, because even though there is no selfdeclared assumption of a female persona by Berryman, it happens anyway. Even though Sappho is not cited by name (although she is in Dream Song 187, “Fancy a lark with Sappho”), her authority is everywhere. The Sapphic text underlying the Catullan allusions is in fact a more thorough rejection of virility as a repressive code than anything a more overtly “feminized” poem could have achieved. Berryman is a man pretending to be a man, like countless men before

17

In Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, eds Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 166. 18 As “Catullus” in the Carmina is the other of Catullus the poet.

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him, yet his scholarship intimates to him persistently that the male gaze he is projecting is in fact female. 19 In contrast with the poetic delicacy of the vivid inwardness of Sappho and the main body of Carmina LI, the Latin of Carmina LIa demands to be expectorated as much as read. The rasping admonition, “otium, Catulle, tibi molestumst: / otio exultas niminque gestis. / otium at reges prius at beatas / perdidit urbes”, with its unforgiving sibilants, is the senatorial voice of Roman measure that intervenes to impose sanction on the rampant liquidity that Catullus discovered in Sappho. The scholarly dispute over LIa is whether it is a bona fide and integral part of Carmina LI, or a fragment from another place altogether; the strophe represents a significant break from the temper of Sappho’s original, but at that it retains her lyric metre. At issue here is the question of whether the fragment is as self-constitutively significant a poetic event as any other. Berryman sees the value of LIa less as a fragment and more as an attachment. He sees the dramatic gain in the sacrifice of lyric isolation. So Berryman’s final two lines to Dream Song 4, in which he lays down his own understanding of the law, present a similar problem to the disputed final strophe in Catullus. They have the feel of an interruptive commentary upon the first three stanzas of the poem, but they are sufficiently dislocatory to suggest randomness or arbitrariness. They trample on the lyric, albeit with a laconic sense of comedy. Scholars have often pointed out the allusive dialogue that goes on between Carmina L and LI (principally because of each poem’s use of variations upon the loaded term otium), but Berryman’s markings in his text of Catullus insist rather upon a linkage between the coda/strophe/fragment LIa and LII.20 Carmina LII is an ancient version of Tom Lehrer’s crack about the futility of satire in an age 19 It is worthwhile referring to Berryman’s inveterate scopophilia. Dream Songs 233 and 247 describe seeing, and acting upon the desire provoked by it, with some trepidation. Dream Song 357 resignedly describes the end of desire, where Henry can only see himself: “Pained eyes, Henry’s, / Unmanly slovenly love took him at times.” Dream Song 69 revisits Dream Song 4, only the gap between the desired and Henry is filled with the effects of commodity fetishism rather than the reverberations of Sappho. 20 Otium can mean leisure, but also that which is hateful (as in “otiose”); it is the opposite of negotium, which is business and industry. Over the years, otium in Carmina LIa has been translated with a variety that conveys the perplexity of its translators and pays tribute to the complexity of the term: “ease” (Higham), “sloth” (Michie), “idleness” (Cornish).

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when Henry Kissinger could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As a degraded democracy effectively eradicates all reason for selfexpression or self-determination, the only reasonable option is to die: Die, Catullus, just drop down and die, The tumescence Nonnius fills a magistrate’s chair; Vatinius perjures himself, bags a consulate. Die, Catullus, just drop down and die.

The reason that intervened in LIa to admonish is shown here as having mutated into fatuous nihilism. Reason is exposed as pompous and pretentious, and the world is inescapable other than through death. Catullus’ world has become touched with a suicidal bathos. This is a wretched state of affairs, but also a comic one, as Dream Song 57 says, “a state of chortle sin”. For Henry, the law is a gag in a double sense; it is a joke that makes him mute. 21 He is speechless with desire and tongue-tied by an external consciousness of what the world holds for him; as Dream Song 46 says, in the world of responsibilities, “Fools elect fools”, so why persevere? We have seen how the law can be a poetic or psychosexual edict, but in Berryman’s linkage of Catullus LIa and LII we see that it is also political. Given things as they are, there is nothing to be done. Denis Donoghue’s astute remark about Berryman’s problematic quest to learn “how to be free and law-abiding at the same time” acquires acute focus here. 22 The problem with this crisis is that it does not exist in actuality; the law never goes away, and you abide by it inevitably. In this respect, Catullus in LII is unironical, and The Dream Songs (however ironically) are a project in which Henry is seeking to escape the entanglement of ironies, even though they are what keep him (and the reader’s interest in him) alive. It is remarkable how archaic Berryman’s poem becomes by simply mentioning the “law”, with its connotations of monolithic symbolic orders. Dream Song 4 has the ring of an ancient prophecy fulfilled, 21 The thick tongue that mutes Sappho and Catullus is a recurring problem in The Dream Songs: “When I had most to say / My tongue clung to the roof … of my mouth” (Dream Song 112); “coats upon his tongue formed, white, terrific” (Dream Song 122); “What thickens my tongue? / and has me by the throat / I gasp accused” (Dream Song 168). 22 Denis Donoghue, “Berryman’s Long Dream”, in John Berryman: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom, New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1989, 21.

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and itself prophecies the antagonism of law and pleasure identified by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text (1970) as an “old, very old tradition: hedonism has been repressed by nearly every philosophy”: “No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you: the political policeman and the psycho-analytical policeman; futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion.”23 The admonitions at the end of both Berryman and Catullus’ poems present illusions of irreversibility, but they are upstart statements of false authority, as the male word in lyric is always predicated upon a female one. Robert Graves, to whom Berryman paid tribute as “one of the shrewdest, craziest, and most neglected students of poetry living”, 24 advocates this fundamental and ancient power of Sappho’s Law clearly in his mytho-poetic masterpiece, The White Goddess: “woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing.” Thus, the male poet is a subordinate to her; by comparison, the woman poet “should be the Muse in a complete sense …. She should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, severe, wise”. According to Graves, Sappho took this responsibility. By comparison, male poets have always had to declare their deference, even when they are attempting to be at their most self-assertive: “However bitterly and grossly the poet may rail against her in the hour of his humiliation – Catullus is the most familiar instance – he has been party to his own betrayal and has no just cause for complaint.” Male poets forget themselves when they forget the law of the lyric, which is authorized by an awesome femininity: “Poetry in its archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral and religious law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse, or the ecstatic utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification of the Muse.”25 The male poet’s role is that of acolyte, and the poems of Catullus and Berryman acknowledge this, even as they rail. We are able to identify Sappho as the supreme influence on Berryman’s poem, while indicating that Catullus’ argument with that supremacy is what connects most vitally to Dream Song 4. The structure of Carmina LI 23

“From The Pleasure of the Text”, in A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, London: Vintage, 1993, 411. 24 John Berryman, Stephen Crane, rev. edn, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962, 273. 25 Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1984, 447-48.

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is thoroughly allusive, which is what makes it Catullan. To an extent, Catullus and Berryman are cowed into silence by the supervisory voice that admonishes them; but on another level it is the stunning example of Sappho herself. Woman is both the form and the matter of the poem. At the same time, Berryman’s poem allows him to allude to both Sappho and Catullus without reverting entirely to either of them. What Catullus offers to Berryman is a poetics of simultaneity: how to be Greek and Roman, lover and hater, prude and rake, Faustus and Don Juan, man and woman, homo- and hetero-sexual, “scholar and legionnaire” (Dream Song 63). Poetry is not just a means of ventriloquizing these separate beings, but of actively becoming them, however temporarily: “Failed as a makar, nailed as a scholar, failed / As a father & a man, hailed for a lover”. So in Dream Song 242, when Berryman writes, “I am her”, that is what Catullus is saying when he writes as Sappho. That song is yet another poem full of looks, which ends in a mutual flow of tears: “She did, I did.” The identity of Henry with the girl indicates gratitude (albeit expressed with intense solemnity) that in this play of glances he has been spared sex. Henry’s dream lover suppressed, he is free himself to become feminized. Berryman can give up on himself and talking “About that me”, and his relief is ecstatic. One could complain that my argument is that a male poet cannot even look at a girl without being full of Sapphic intent. Within a lyrical context, that is precisely my point. Looking and longing in lyric poetry has its origin in Sappho, and it takes a formidably solipsistic and iconoclastic poet to be able to resist wanting as she did. It takes the likes of Rimbaud, who in “Au Cabaret Vert” crushes the distance between subject and object, appetite and satisfaction, wanting and having. In doing so, he flouts the precise and tender geometry of desire that Sappho founded in the lyric, simultaneously making an unrepeatable poem. At this point, we should remark that while American poetry has conventionally aligned itself with Greek poetic projects, they have been epic. Walt Whitman can be termed the “American Homer”, but there has been less of a rush to identify an “American Sappho”. In part, what this is evidence of is a gap in conceptualization. The American lyric is very often in fact an elegy, a partial lyric or a metalyric rather than a lyric in the purest sense. The pure lyricism of Sappho is a rare phenomenon, unmediated and apparently direct. Berryman wrote that “some of the best kind of writing is really

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transparent … you get no impression of viewing art”, and it is this quality that is at work in Sappho and some of Catullus.26 The Dream Songs is not a sequence of lyrics, although some of its individual parts could well be described as near-lyrics. The most lyrical of all the Carmina is LI, principally because it uses Sappho’s metre and form (pedantically speaking, only the translations in the Carmina are lyrics). The lyrical highlight of The Dream Songs is Dream Song 4, which is the progeny of the Catullan text. The Sapphic transparency of Carmina LI and Dream Song 4 is what makes them the lyrical highlights of the collections or sequences in which they are primarily located. If they are so transparent that commentary is useless, then the point of law according to canonicity is made even more emphatically for Henry. If all commentary is idle, and all you do is commentate, then you may as well cease to be.27 I have been willfully complicating the most immediate and simple poems that these poets have to offer, principally as that simplicity is problematised because it has been excavated from Sappho. Anne Carson has commented on the radical force of Sappho making herself “transparent” in fragment 31, as in doing so she “plays havoc with boundaries and defies the rules that keep matter in its place”.28 Transparency is anarchy, and Berryman’s most transparently simple Dream Song turns out to contain a concept of lyric poetry as a deeply feminine art that revolutionizes how relationships of power are represented. Henry realizes that his authority over his own impulses – both poetic and sexual – is based on an illusory usurpation of feminine authority. Even the food being consumed is revolutionary. Hippokrates wrote that: The female flourishes more in an environment of water, from things cold and wet and soft, whether food or drink or activities. The male flourishes more in an environment of fire, from dry, hot foods and mode of life.29

26

Quoted by Thornbury in his Introduction to Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937– 1971, l. 27 This returns us to the logic of Carmina LII. 28 Anne Carson, “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity”, in Men in the Off-Hours, London: Cape, 2000, 152. 29 Quoted by Carson, Men in the Off-Hours, 132.

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But she is eating chicken paprika, and he spumoni, a cold creamy confection. In the Sapphic domain of the lyric, she burns while Henry freezes. Aphrodisiacs are only symbols; they are not desire itself, but indicators of the distance between desire and act. Food is as close to the woman as Henry gets, but it still lies between them. Their shared hunger established, suddenly that distance between them grows huge and cosmic. The woman is consigned to a role of allegorical mystery, deliberately recalling the lady in Milton’s Comus. “What wonders is she sitting on over there?” could be a schoolboy tribute, but it is also readable as an anxious speculation over the woman’s autoeroticism and polymorphous self-sufficiency as a sexual being. Catullus and Berryman both have to stiffen themselves in their codas, to legislate for the rampant sexual self-reliance of “she”, whether that is the beheld beloved or Sappho herself; but such phallocentric self-policing is also a passion killer. More radically, Dream Song 4 has set free what Carson calls the Sapphic phenomenon of liquidity, and all Henry can do is wait, wilt, and melt.30 Yet whatever the consequences for Henry of the gag upon him in the last two lines of his poem, Berryman’s use of allusion indicates that he is in control of his selfperception and his poem. The withering of his ardency is a matter of his creation, and even though the law may come for him, he has touched fire nevertheless. He has written a lyric, even if it was unfinished business. 31 The problem of reading Catullus sequentially is that it tends to deemphasize those poems that do not coincide with our notion of what belongs in a lyrical sequence. A similar problem exists with The Dream Songs, in that reading it as a lyric sequence sees emphasis fall upon the most lyrical poems, whereas reading it as elegiac sequence foregrounds the most elegiac poems. Most evidently, Berryman and Catullus both require a different and flexible terminology, and a reading after the same fashion. They are not so much sui generis, as in and out of genre. I have focused on the lyrical highlights of their collections in order to dramatize concurrencies in their art; beyond regarding the similarity of individual poems, an understanding is desirable of how radically these poets require us to have movable feet. 30

Ibid., 136. The Porlockian calling of the law also makes Dream Song 4 Berryman’s most Coleridgean poem. 31

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The reader has to become part of the overall structure of the arrangements of Berryman and Catullus, and must free the poet from being locked within a sealed self-perception. The reader will give release. Dream Song 75 confirms this anxiety that the reader relieve the poet of their duties as reader, as it is written as a form of retrospective envoi. The envoi is a poem with a substantial history in American poetics, from Anne Bradstreet through Whitman to Pound, one in which the tangled intimacy of poet, book and nation is made tangible. It also confirms, however, that American poetry is one of simultaneous loss and transmission, describing an inevitable lapse of innocence and authority that occurs as the book leaves Henryman and goes out into the world of text. The past tense of this envoi (“Henry put forth a book”) suggests that The Dream Songs was a book that was orphaned from its beginning, however, as opposed to Bradstreet’s sense of her continuing maternal bond with her book (a bond that we can also see in Sappho). As Catullus in Carmina I uses the envoi to suture poet, man and book together, Henry and Berryman are mutually identified as makers and senders of books in The Dream Songs; but both Berryman and Catullus must surrender to the knowledge that their poetry has departed into the mind of the reader. What the reader or friend has to realize is that the point of The Dream Songs is not to deliver Henry to us, nor is it to produce Berryman as a renewed individual, whether redeemed or damned. Turning it into an epic project, a Henriad, or a Tragicall History of Dr. Berryman The Overreacher, is the reversal of what is at issue. The tangible product of The Dream Songs is its reader. That achieved, the poet can disappear. More importantly, the reader has been created so as to understand why the poet wishes to disappear. This locates Berryman decisively within the traditions of American modernism rather than another cultural narrative. If the mission of the Carmina and The Dream Songs is the creation of a reader who can provide a proper friendly service to the poet, poems such as Berryman’s fourth and Catullus’ fifty-first present some acute problems. Whatever the urgencies of desire that prompted the occasion of the poem, both Catullus’ “Catullus” and Berryman’s Henry find themselves alienated from that desire not simply out of some psychological knot – because of the men they are – but rather by what they are as poets, makers of connotations rather than originators: it is because they are not Sappho. “Catullus” and Berryman as Henry

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see the girl, and even if the girl sees them back (as in Dream Song 4), the poetic mind asserts itself and directs matters back to Sappho. Henry muses on seducing his ideal woman, but is inevitably drawn to her opposite, the sublime woman-poet who will not be seduced or denied. The Dream Songs declare their lyric ambitions in their title, but that title also concedes that those ambitions are a fantasy. Berryman’s dream is to be a lyric poet, like Sappho, or at least to be a poet like Catullus who can dream of being Sappho. Contiguous with this fantasy is Henry’s desire to discover precisely the power of maternity (a power he had coveted already in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet), and to escape forever the dilemmas of the erotic. Dream Song 385, the last in the sequence, and the lyrical highlight after Dream Song 4, answers the desire that was imminent in the earlier poem. Conventionally, this final poem is read therapeutically as Berryman’s reconciliation with his responsibilities as a father. More profoundly, he has finally discovered how to think and write as a mother, and to speak with the authority of the huntress, the moon and the mother of the lyric: Sappho.

“HE LIVED LIKE A RAT”: THE TRICKSTER IN THE DREAM SONGS STEPHEN MATTERSON

Given the range of explication and analysis devoted to The Dream Songs over the last thirty years it is odd that there is no sustained commentary on Berryman’s use of the Trickster figure in the poem. There are strong and significant parallels between the Songs and the Trickster cycles and there are compelling reasons for considering Henry as a Trickster figure. Even without such internal evidence, there seems to be ample external evidence at least to suggest that Berryman had an interest in the Trickster. An erudite and widely-read scholar, it is almost inconceivable that Berryman would not have known of Paul Radin’s groundbreaking study The Trickster, published in 1956.1 It is equally likely that Berryman’s considerable research on Shakespeare would have brought him into contact with the parallels that scholars have seen between the Trickster and Shakespearean clowns, and he would certainly have known of mythological and classical avatars of the Trickster, such as Hermes. Even if Berryman showed relatively little interest in Native American cultures in his poetry, his personal circumstances meant that Native Americans were far from exotic or alien to him. He was born in Oklahoma less than a decade after it was widely known as the Indian Territory, and he lived in Minneapolis during a period (195472) that saw significant changes for Native Americans, many of which 1

Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. The Trickster is made up of renditions of two Trickster story cycles (“The Winnebago Trickster Cycle” and “The Winnebago Hare Cycle”) and a commentary by Radin entitled “The Nature and Meaning of the Myth”. Later editions of The Trickster include an introductory essay by Stanley Diamond, and translations of commentaries by Karl Kerényi and Carl Jung on the Trickster tradition.

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impinged on or were actually initiated in that city. These changes included the increasing urbanization of the Native American after the 1954 introduction of Termination as a policy, 2 the beginning of the Native American Renaissance, and the birth of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis itself.3 In this essay, then, I shall explore the strong links between The Dream Songs and Trickster tales, and focus on the relation between Henry and the Trickster. However, I shall argue that although Berryman made serious use of aspects of Trickster in The Dream Songs, he ultimately moves away from these in an effort to generate a cohering narrative, and also to endorse a Christian teleology in the sequence. Although in The Trickster Radin elucidates the basic characteristics of the Trickster figure, he also points out that the figure is something of a puzzle if we expect consistency or if we expect Trickster to be a God-like figure; in fact, one of the central points that must be made about Trickster is that he evades easy identification and rigid definition. He is a benefactor to humans, bringing fire and either making useful plants and herbs or showing humans how to use them, yet he is also a deceitful mischief-maker. He can be a comic figure inciting laughter but may also be cruel and vengeful. He is cunning but is also capable of ludicrous stupidity and thoughtless actions. He has special powers, such as the ability to assume the shapes of various animals, but he is by no means omnipotent and is frequently the butt of jokes. He is a figure of strong masculinity but he may also change sex, and s/he can be impregnated and is able to bear children. His other attributes include sexual prowess and appetite, and a sometimesconfused relation to his body parts, which occasionally take on a separate identity (in many cycles he has a talking anus). Trickster is also a wanderer. It is generally true that Trickster cycles include 2 The policy of Termination meant that tribes could choose to renounce the special status they had been granted by federal statutes. They would then become subject to state laws, and they could sell reservation lands to non-Indians. The policy was intended to facilitate Native American assimilation into mainstream American culture and society, and around one hundred tribes and bands were terminated. The policy resulted in vast amounts of Native American land being sold and in the relocation of Native Americans to urban environments. The policy was abandoned in the 1960s. 3 The AIM was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 to defend the rights of Native Americans, at first focusing on the plight of urban-based American Indians, then developing to represent all dispossessed Native Americans. See Russell Means and Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995.

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explanations for the creation of the world and various natural phenomena, but this does not mean that this is their primary purpose, or that they therefore function as originary myths do. Similarly Trickster’s sexual appetite (he has an enormous penis) does not suggest that the cycles are comparable to myths dealing with fertility. Regarding the relation the Trickster stories have to myth and religion, Radin points out that Trickster blurs the usually held distinction between gods and humans, embodying memories of an archaic and primordial past, where there as yet existed no clear-cut differentiation between the divine and the non-divine. For this period Trickster is the symbol. His hunger, his sex, his wandering, these appertain neither to the gods nor to man. They belong to another realm, materially and spiritually, and that is why neither the gods nor man known [sic] precisely what to do with them.4

In developing this insight Stanley Diamond argues (in an essay contrasting the Trickster stories with the Book of Job), that the Trickster tales were an antecedent or that they offered an alternative to the Judaic and Christian dualistic assignation of good to God and evil to Satan. Trickster may be both and for Diamond this suggests that in common with other pre-Judaic or pre-civilized stories, the Trickster tales represent the need to bear the realities and contradictions of this world.5 Several other aspects of the Trickster need to be mentioned at this point. Although the Trickster cycles vary considerably among Native American cultures, there are certain common elements and episodes. The cycles themselves are episodic and do not necessarily provide a linear sequence that involves any kind of development of character. The different cycles are characterized by the animal shape that Trickster has assumed, and particular Tricksters are associated with specific regions. Coyote is the trickster for the American Indians of the Central Plains, California, and the Southwest; Nanabozho (or Great Hare or Master Rabbit) for those of Eastern North America, and Raven (and sometimes Mink, or Blue Jay) for those of the Pacific Northwest. Also, it is important to mention that Trickster is by no means exclusive to Native American cultures. He tends to be 4

Radin, The Trickster, 168. Stanley Diamond, “Introductory Essay: Job and the Trickster”, in Radin, The Trickster, xii. 5

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particularly associated with Native Americans because those cultures sustained the Trickster stories and they were therefore available to anthropologists in relatively intact forms, whereas in other cultures the stories changed and developed, particularly after contact with Christianity. Radin claimed that very few myths were as widely distributed as that of Trickster, and that European figures such as the picaro, the jester, Pulcinello and the clown were versions of Trickster. As might be expected, Carl Jung saw the trickster as an archetype originating from shared human psychic needs and representing the earliest stages of human development.6 Others have explored the presence of Trickster in Greek or Roman myths, notably in the figures of Prometheus and Hermes. In African cultures, Trickster appeared as a monkey or rabbit, and has been transformed by African-Americans into familiar figures (Brer Rabbit being the most recognizable). This African-American metamorphosis of Trickster is especially interesting for consideration of Berryman’s use of Trickster in The Dream Songs. This is partly because of the possible links between Trickster and the minstrel tradition that Berryman uses in the Songs, having Henry perform sometimes in blackface, but also because African American versions of the Trickster have often focused on Trickster’s capacity to survive through the alteration of identity.7 That is, African-American stories have been changed in order to function as “spells for survival” in a way comparable to The Dream Songs. Trickster’s protean identity was of crucial importance to Berryman’s contemporary (and fellowOklahoman) Ralph Ellison. In Invisible Man (1952) Ellison created a powerful fusion of Trickster, the blackface minstrel and jazz in order to address urgent questions concerning racial identity. Having been impressed by the survival strategies of the novel’s true Trickster, B.P.

6

See Carl Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure”, in Radin, The Trickster, 195-211. 7 In his influential study The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores African American usages of the tricksters Esu-Elegbara and Jigue (see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Ralph Ellison’s essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (in which Ulysses is hailed as a Trickster) is important in forging links between Trickster and the minstrel (Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, New York: Random House, 1964, 45-59). See also Ishmael Reed, “The Tradition of Serious Comedy in Afro-American Literature”, in Writin’ is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper, New York: Atheneum, 1988, 13541.

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Rinehart,8 Invisible Man begins to imitate them. In a passage that has particular resonance for The Dream Songs, Invisible Man begins to wonder whether true identity is after all non-assignable, multiplicitous and variform. Tempted by the possibilities offered by the shifting identities of Rinehart he wonders whether embracing and performing different identities would provide a solution to his manqué romantic perception of lost identity: The more I thought of it the more I fell into a kind of morbid fascination with the possibility. Why hadn’t I discovered it sooner? How different my life might have been! How terribly different! Why hadn’t I seen the possibilities? If a sharecropper could attend college by working during the summers as a waiter and factory hand or as a musician and then graduate to become a doctor, why couldn’t all those things be done at one and the same time? … My God, what possibilities existed! … And that lie that success was a spiraling upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward towards success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time. How could I have missed it for so long?9

Trickster is here the exemplar of simultaneous multiple identities rather than serially chronological varied identities. As the figure of Rinehart he would provide a means of relieving Invisible Man from the burden of belief in singular identity and, temporarily at least, offers a respite from what Invisible Man has sought since his expulsion from the university: a means of both surviving and acting meaningfully in the world. Trickster does not seek to suppress the contradictory nature of identity but celebrates and performs it. Because of Trickster, Invisible Man is alive to the possibility that multiform identity is not necessarily an abhorrent and freakish condition enforced on the individual by the circumstances of family, society, history and racist stereotyping, but is actually the condition of all.

8

Although this is not mentioned in Invisible Man, in his 1958 Partisan Review essay, later published as “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”, Ellison writes that Rhinehart’s [sic] initials B.P. stand for Bliss and Proteus (Shadow and Act, 56). 9 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, New York: Vintage, 1967, 385.

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Even this brief outline of Trickster should be enough to suggest that there are significant similarities between Berryman’s Henry and the archetypal Trickster. (Indeed it should make us wonder why assessments of Berryman have paid so little attention to the function and presence of Trickster in The Dream Songs.10) Henry’s protean identity is the most obvious similarity: this is after all a song collection in which the main protagonist inhabits various identities, black and white, male and female, and who actually appears to die and be resurrected during one section of Songs. True to the Trickster tradition, Henry is possessed of an enormous sexual appetite, combined in The Dream Songs with an appetite for alcohol. As with Trickster, this sexual power is exaggerated into legendary or mythic status: “his loins were & were the scene of stupendous achievement” (Dream Song 26). In fact, it was this feature in particular which led Radin to speculate that the Trickster cycle began as “an account of a nondescript person obsessed by hunger, by an uncontrollable urge to wander and by sexuality”.11 This description is particularly apt for the overall representation of Henry, and is specifically relevant to Dream Song 311 where Berryman writes that “Famisht Henry ate everything in sight” and that “Hunger was constitutional with him”. At the same time, however, Henry has an uncertain and sometimes troubled relation to his body parts. He describes his body as a “pain-farm” (Dream Song 163) while Henry is a “fractured cat” (Dream Song 65) and in some Songs, notably 326, Henry’s body parts are dislocated from each other. Limbs seem to be constantly in danger of being broken or falling off, and the threat of being stripped of the body is also a constant one. This is especially evident in Dream Song 8, which begins with Henry detailing the loss of his teeth and half of his (“green”) hair, and ends with the loss of his crotch. Although the Song 10 In this respect, Kenneth Lincoln’s assessment of Berryman in Sing with the Heart of a Bear is particularly disappointing. Having published two outstanding and influential studies of Native American writing, Native American Renaissance, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, and Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, surely no critic was better placed than Lincoln to provide an informed perspective on Berryman’s use of the Trickster. In Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry 1890-1999, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000, he does point out that The Dream Songs provides “age-old Trickster stuff, the sport who out-wits the hero-king” (173), but he does not develop this in his assessment of Berryman. 11 Radin, The Trickster, 165.

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certainly echoes John Crowe Ransom’s poem “Captain Carpenter”, which Berryman particularly admired, it is also immediately recognizable as part of Trickster idiom. 12 Henry’s observations of his body in terms of its demands and appetites are partly comic and partly melancholic. He also, like Trickster, experiences a form of pregnancy: in Dream Song 124 “Henry is delivered” and Berryman writes that the male imitation of pregnancy, couvade, is “Henry’s favourite custom”.13 Overall, though, there is the sense, as with Trickster, that the body is somehow unassimilated to the self, remaining alien, unpredictable and uncontrollable. This feature is particularly evident in what may be one of the most explicit references to Trickster in the Songs, that is, Berryman’s echo of the “talking anus” of the Trickster cycles in Henry’s inability to control his bodily functions in Dream Song 134. There is also, and this is a feature of The Dream Songs that often goes unremarked, a kind of bestiary in the poem. It contains a large number of references to animals, which Berryman frequently links to human traits, or associates with particular individuals. These are far too numerous to detail here, but a cursory sample identifies a starved lion (Dream Song 6), a shark (Dream Song 7), bears (Dream Song 11), a mouse (Dream Song 12), rats (Dream Songs 7 and 12), crows (Dream Songs 24 and 93), a hound-dog (Dream Song 40), bats (Dream Song 63), a rabbit (Dream Song 62) and a lobster (Dream Song 84). Henry is explicitly or implicitly compared to or is identified with various animals. These include the cockroach (Dream Song 31), the rat (Dream Song 13), the raccoon (Dream Songs 57 and 66), and the pig (Dream Song 97), but he is most frequently identified with a “pussy-cat” and with the fox. Striking though they are, these identifications do not really suggest that Berryman is identifying a cycle of Songs with the Trickster cycles in which Trickster has taken on the form of a particular animal. The cumulative effect of Berryman’s bestiary is not that he is invoking some kind of fabular 12

See Berryman’s essay “The Sorrows of Captain Carpenter”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1976, 279-81. 13 This song is especially interesting for comparison of Henry with Trickster, since Berryman refers to a Trickster-like legend in which a bride bites off and ingests the penises of her successive husbands (all brothers), until the last husband, the youngest brother, uses a crowbar to reclaim the penises. Berryman refers to the legend again in Dream Song 335, where he acts like the youngest brother in calling for a “locksmith, to burst the topic open” in order to reclaim dead friends.

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code, or invoking a Trickster-like power to invest a self in particular animals, but that he is using animal identities to emphasize Henry’s profound instability of identity. Invoking the Trickster cycles as a model for The Dream Songs is particularly useful in the perspective it gives to some of the most vexed questions about Berryman’s poem. That is, whether or not the Songs incorporate a narrative structure and whether there is a dramatic impetus to the sequence, which involves the development of Henry’s character. The absence from Native American mythologies of the Judaeo-Christian story of the fall (or the later figuration of the fall with the moment of contact with the European) has been much commented on. In particular, it is often suggested that this absence results in a narrative that is not teleologically closed, thereby not leading to crisis and ultimately to some sort of resolution. The Trickster tales, true to the key features of oral tradition, involve cycles and repetition rather than linear plot development. Also, the Trickster stories are emphatically not narratives of character development. As in one of their later humanized manifestations, the picaresque novel, they comprise episodes that are connected insofar as they are focused on one figure, but they do not necessarily need to be read, told or performed in a set sequence. We do not expect the Trickster stories to obey a narrative framework that involves conflict, climax and resolution. Nor is there necessarily any psychological development or moral growth of Trickster. In his commentary on Trickster as archetype, Karl Kerényi wrote that he had been unable to discover “any such thing as the ‘inner development’ of the hero”.14 This, he argued, was an important aspect of the figure’s primitivism, his function being not to imply that there is a coherent solution to the apparent disorder of the universe, nor to supply some kind of order, but rather he worked to reinforce the sense of disorder, chaos and unpredictability of the world. In what could be a description of Henry’s function in The Dream Songs, Kerényi describes the Trickster as: a figure who is the exponent and personification of the life of the body: never wholly subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, for ever running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid in action. Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the 14

Karl Kerényi, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology”, in Radin, The Trickster, 184.

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trickster .… [The function] of the tales told about him is to add disorder to order ….15

Using the figure of the Trickster, then, we see that Henry is Berryman’s pertinent response to a painful and chaotic reality, to a universe apparently without order; a “world so ill arranged” as he calls it in Dream Song 164. The fact of a disordered and dark reality is frequently invoked in The Dream Songs and with it, Henry’s shifting and uncertain identity and the sharp transitions of tone in the Songs themselves. If Henry’s journey is without progression it is because no such framework can be imposed on chaotic reality. Furthermore the Songs frequently emphasize the mysterious, enigmatic and incomprehensible, although not in ways that make these attractive. To some extent they are embodied in the figure of Delmore Schwartz, especially in Dream Song 159: “His mission was obscure. His mission was real, / but obscure.” Seeing The Dream Songs as a continuation of a Trickster tradition can be liberating. It partially absolves us of the need to search for structure, narrative and character development in the Songs, since these are not necessary prerequisites of the tales. It reinforces the fact (too often easily disregarded by commentators) that Henry is an amenable construct rather than a confessional representation of Berryman’s life. It also encourages us to locate the Songs more certainly among post-modernist texts that question the validity of grand narratives and which endorse and embrace the apparently contradictory as a form of multiplicity and which suggest that the concept of a coherent identity is a fiction that should be discarded. Certainly this would bring Berryman’s use of Trickster into creative alignment with the use of him made by such diverse figures as Ellison, Ted Hughes, Gerald Vizenor and Louise Erdrich. 16 It also reinforces the relevance of Berryman’s belief that poetry was a restoration of a primitive impulse, something that is both a spell for survival and something that is a “terminal activity” which takes place “out near the 15

Kerényi in Radin, The Trickster, 185. Ted Hughes’ use of the Trickster figure as the basis for Crow is well established. Gerald Vizenor frequently uses the Trickster in his work, and contends that Trickster is a much more compassionate and less amoral figure than Radin proposed (Gerald Vizenor, Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Erdrich’s character Gerry Nanapush in Love Medicine (1985) is based on Nanabozho. 16

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end of things”. 17 His further explanation of this implies a strong link between the pre- or non-Judaeo-Christian Trickster and the impulse to poetry: “Poetry begins – as a practical matter, for use. It reassures the savage .… And medicine men are shrewd: interpretation enters the chanting, symbols are developed and connected, the gods are invoked, poetry booms.” As Trickster, then, Henry functions in The Dream Songs as the primitive’s response to elemental questions of pain, suffering and endurance. In part this has to do with Trickster’s mixed and uncertain nature. Trickster predates and therefore evades the Christian dualism that assigns goodness to God and evil to Satan, and his amoralistic combination of good and evil, mischief and unpredictability, beneficence and malevolence, is closely allied with the urgent questions that Berryman asks about the presence and nature of God, the direction of history and the moral nature of the self. As he writes in Dream Song 239: Am I a bad man? Am I a good man? – Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both, like most of we. The evidence is difficult to structure towards deliberate evil. But what of the rest? Does it wax for wrath In its infinite complexity?

Berryman withholds credence from the teleological and redemptive possibilities that are provided by the Christian or Jewish God, and consequently must find a way to endure and appease suffering. (It is of course relevant here to recall that The Dream Songs originated in “The Nervous Songs” and in The Black Book, both of which confronted appalling individual and public displacement in the twentieth century.) Using the Trickster tradition, Berryman occupies an alternative position to the Judaic and Christian traditions, from which he confronts the absurd and appalling realities of modernity. In so doing he avoids what Stanley Diamond, in his essay comparing Trickster with Job, called the “embarrassing denouement of the book of Job” and The Dream Songs really are, as Berryman states at the

17

Berryman cited in Charles Thornbury, Introduction to John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937-1971, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1989, xxix.

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outset, “a long / wonder the world can bear & be” (Dream Song 1). 18 Trickster is appealing to Berryman in that he provides a provisional answer to what are perennial human concerns and issues. Suffering has no meaning but it must be borne. Endurance, humor and the capacity to face reality are the most salient and even heroic responses to an unamenable and puzzling universe. As for Ellison, the invocation and embrace of multiple and shifting identities is a key strategy for ensuring endurance and evasion. Henry certainly possesses key Trickster characteristics, and his presence highlights some of the most fundamental features of The Dream Songs. But at this point I want to press the analogy between Henry and Trickster a little harder, in particular to explore what might be seen as a major conflict that is being examined in the Songs. As we have seen, Trickster is an appealing figure for Berryman, offering a non-Christian explanation of suffering and loss and seeming to provide a formulation of responsive identity in the modern world. But there is also another narrative being explored (or even performed) in The Dream Songs, which suggests that Berryman is examining the possibilities of the Trickster but that he ultimately rejects them. I want to argue that in effect there are two competing narratives in The Dream Songs. There is the Trickster narrative, non-linear, episodic, and liberated from teleology, focused on the protean Henry. But alongside this there is also a potential for structured narrative which unfolds dramatically in linear form, and in which Henry develops and changes before a conclusion is reached. It is certainly the case that Henry functions at times in The Dream Songs as the agent of confusion; to use Kerényi’s phrase again, the Trickster adds “disorder to order” so as to challenge us to see the “totality of life”. But in this respect the most striking difference between Henry and Trickster is Henry’s sense of guilt. That is, unlike Trickster, he has a conscience. At times this is comically invoked by Berryman, emphasizing Henry’s almost-eagerness to blame himself for the world’s mishaps and disasters. As he writes in Dream Song 5: Henry sats in de plane & was gay. Careful Henry nothing said aloud but where a Virgin out of cloud 18

Diamond is here referring to the happy ending of the Book of Job, which sees Job’s health and riches restored to him after acknowledging God’s absolute power over him (Radin, The Trickster, xii).

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Stephen Matterson to her Mountain dropt in light, his thought made pockets & the plane buckt. ‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’

Since he lacks any moral sense Trickster is unable to blame himself for anything, still less to apologize. By contrast, at certain moments in The Dream Songs Henry is represented almost as a scapegoat. He not only possesses special insight into the losses and hungers of others but burdens himself with them and is even likely to accuse himself of various potential crimes, including murder. Trickster is an attractive figure for Berryman, an escape from the burden of the self, just as he was for Ellison’s Invisible Man. But in both cases, the absolution from responsibility and identity is temporary. In fact, Trickster functions for Ellison and for Berryman almost as a brief holiday or term of respite from reality and responsibility (and thereby consolidates Jung’s suggestion that there is an intimate link between Trickster and the European tradition of carnival). Invisible Man will ultimately refuse to imitate Rinehart and reject the multiplicity of identity in an attempt to invoke and to act out a sense of social responsibility; he wills a form of acting in the world rather than only a means of responding to it. Henry may wish himself to be an animal – or, more accurately, Berryman wants Henry to perform as if he were an animal – obedient to instinct and appetite alone. He can act as if he were another incarnation of amoral Trickster, but he finds that his humanity persists, and with it, his excess of guilt and shame. Henry fulfills his various appetites but unlike Trickster he desires release from them, or he may see them as stages of progression through which he must pass, or he finds that they have inescapable consequences. In this respect, Dream Song 69 assumes special significance. In it Henry prays for “a personal experience of the body of Mrs Boogry / before I pass from lust!” The idea of passing from lust, of developing away from it, is directly counter to the Trickster’s, and for the most part Henry’s, indulgence of desires. Berryman indicates that appetites may be seen as part of a progression, and that they are not inconsequential. In fact, one of these consequences is the excessive intensification of conscience and the assumption of shame. (Perhaps this is nowhere more apparent than in Dream Song 29, the almost unbearable poem of alcoholic insomnia in which Henry wonders whether he is a murderer.)

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The point here is not only that Henry may be seen as a Trickster who has developed a conscience, but that there is a significant oscillation in The Dream Songs between the longing for multiform identity (especially associated with the lives of animals) that recalls Trickster, and the sense of responsibility towards a human identity and all that this involves concerning a moral sense; an identity that Berryman sees as synonymous with Christianity. After all, the existence of a conscience implies not just a potentially Christian sensibility but also an innate sense of the distinction between right and wrong. This oscillation of identity provides a useful perspective on a feature of the Songs that seems to be unexplored; the repeated suggestion that Henry has fallen into human identity from some other state, or that his membership of the human race is somehow voluntary: “Henry for joining the human race is bats” (Dream Song 63). This theme is particularly explored in Dream Song 13. Using the past tense, Berryman offers an evaluation of Henry’s life that masquerades almost as an obituary: “God bless Henry. He lived like a rat, / with a thatch of hair on his head / in the beginning.” Although the Song begins with the will to bless Henry, his humanity is immediately qualified in the first clause of the poem’s second sentence. The poem promptly invokes a tension that is repeated at large throughout The Dream Songs: the positioning of Henry in the human realm, with all that this implies regarding moral responsibility and conscience, versus his positioning as an animal, a gesture that invokes the amoral, guiltfree Trickster who is defined and controlled by his various appetites without understanding them or considering their consequences. This division is immediately broadened out into the conflict between a pre- or non-Christian mode of apprehending the universe and that provided by Christian belief. “He lived like a rat” echoes King Lear’s appalling lament at the death of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s most determinedly pre-Christian play: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?”19 However, “in the beginning” recalls the opening of St John’s gospel and consequently the start of the Christian faith, when God assumes human form. The Song’s second stanza asserts that Henry was after all “a human being … a human American man”. But this is then complicated by the statement that “God’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in business.” Thus, Berryman concisely lays out for us the terms on 19

See William Shakespeare, King Lear, V.iii.305-306.

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which he is constructing Henry’s identity and the implications that this has for the “business” of the Songs. If Henry is a Trickster (a rat, in this case) then he exists beyond the Judaeo-Christian God’s ordering of the world. But this brings him no comfort or assurance, because unlike Trickster he cannot evade an acknowledgment of an inner self that requires him to judge his actions morally. Yet if Henry renounces Trickster and inhabits human form he stands condemned by God (now his “enemy”). This is, ultimately the “business” of The Dream Songs: the exploration of what it means to be “at odds wif de world & its god” as Berryman writes in Dream Song 5 and, consequently, whether to counter this with the amoral, multiplicitous world of Trickster, or to reform the self and shape it to Christian faith. In broader terms, then, The Dream Songs simultaneously inhabits and explores the claims of two opposed ways of looking at the world, ways that Diamond characterized as Job versus the Trickster. In the story of Job, suffering and deprivation have a point, being ultimately redemptive. Henry is unable fully to accept the nature of Job’s God, but he eventually finds this story (even with its “embarrassing denouement”) preferable to the meaningless world of Trickster. While Trickster is used by contemporary writers, notably Gerald Vizenor, as part of a post-modernist celebration of multiple identities and nonlinear, interrupted and elided narrative, neither Ellison nor Berryman could be so affirmative. Both Invisible Man and The Dream Songs are significant examinations of the possibilities of Trickster in the twentieth century, but both ultimately reject him/her in favor of a form of modernist coherence.

“ONE GRAND EXCEPTION”: THE DREAM SONGS AS THEODICY? BRENDAN COOPER

“But how should a man be just with God?” (Job 9:2)

Christopher Ricks, in a 1970 review of contemporary American poetry, argues that The Dream Songs might be read as a theodicy: Like all good elegies (Lycidas as well as In Memoriam), the Dream Songs [sic] can’t but be a theodicy. Berryman’s poem, for all its fractures and fractiousness, is as intensely a theodicy – “a vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of evil” – as In Memoriam; as intensely, and as equivocally. “God loves his creatures when he treats them so?”1

This comment has been noted by a number of critics without any comprehensive investigation of its problematic nature.2 Ricks claims The Dream Songs to be an “equivocal” theodicy, and bolsters it here 1

Christopher Ricks, “Recent American Poetry”, Massachusetts Review, XI/2 (Spring 1970), 336. Ricks’ assertion is, of course, also provocative with respect to Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Though an investigation of that poem as “theodicy” is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that it culminates in a positive declaration of God’s “one law … To which the whole creation moves”, a resolution that is missing from The Dream Songs. 2 See, for example, Douglas Dunn’s “Gaiety & Lamentation: The Defeat of John Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 139-51. In The Poetry of John Berryman (New York and London: Kennikat Press, 1978), Gary Q. Arpin praises Ricks’ “excellent review essay” (66). John Haffenden notes that Berryman’s “life and work incorporates a theodicy, as Christopher Ricks has indicated” in his Introduction to Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972, London: Faber and Faber, 1978, xviii.

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with the standard dictionary definition, “a vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of evil”. Yet if that is its meaning, the term itself seems ultimately to demand an annihilation of equivocality in favor of a revelation of divine order, a replacement of equivocation with vindication. A recognition of the difficulties surrounding the concept of “theodicy” must underpin any assessment of Ricks’ provocative application of the term to Berryman’s long poem. The word “theodicy” is a product of the theological problem of evil, an issue that has been painstakingly explored by countless religious scholars and one that stretches back into the heart of scripture. The prophet Habbakuk laments, “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the Wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”.3 A suffering Job asks, “Is it good unto thee that thou shouldst despite the work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel of the wicked?”. 4 Human rationality struggles to accommodate the coexistence of manifest worldly injustice and a moral framework of justice administered by an omnipotent and loving God. The specific term “theodicy” appeared in the eighteenth century to describe the structured philosophical response to this problem, and was coined by G.W.F. Leibniz in his 1710 volume Theodicée, written in reaction to the skeptical arguments of his contemporary Pierre Bayle. The word stems from the Greek theos, “God”, and dike, “justice”: a theodicy, then, according to its etymological components, is the conjunction or reconciliation of God and right – the revelation, that is, of an intact divine moral order behind and within morally corrupted quotidian reality. Leibniz’s attitude is marked by a fundamental urge towards resolution: “Concerning the origin of evil in its relation to God, I offer a vindication of his perfections that shall extol not less his holiness, his justice and his goodness than his greatness, his power and his independence.”5 The positivity of Leibniz’s work was famously attacked by Voltaire, who felt tragedies such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake hopelessly undermined the notion that we are living in the best of all 3

Habbakuk 1:13. Job 10:3. 5 G.W.F. Leibniz, Theodicy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951, 61. 4

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possible worlds. And Voltaire’s Enlightenment antagonism towards theodicy anticipated by two centuries the assault on positive religious conceptions effected by the events of the twentieth century. After the Holocaust, Soviet genocides and the Atomic bomb, theological discourse was forced to reconstruct itself in accordance with a cultural reality that had for many people been irreparably evacuated of its teleological properties. Various prominent writers and thinkers have examined the ways in which mid-twentieth-century events served to challenge or undermine religion and metaphysics: Theodor Adorno, for example, wrote that the events of Auschwitz “make a mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence”; George Steiner, more recently, has suggested that “The twentieth century has put in doubt the theological, the philosophical and the political material insurance for hope”.6 Post-Holocaust debates on the matter of theodicy hence accept that “theodicy consists of fallible options”, that “no theodicy has the final answers”, that “we cannot hope for a universal solution, since we never agree on the statement of the problem at the outset”.7 Some theologians, such as Terence Tilley, have gone further, arguing that all modern efforts at theodicy are an outrage against the actual fact of human suffering that they attempt to justify: “I have come to see theodicy as a discourse practice which disguises real evils while those evils continue to afflict people.”8 Jewish theologians have struggled to reconfigure their theological understanding in response to the Holocaust and the threat to Judaic religious life caused by its occurrence. The radical theologian Richard Rubenstein argued that the Holocaust incurred a demolition of traditional deistic belief anticipated in the writings of Nietzsche, concluding that “we live in the time of the death of God”. The moral outrage of the Holocaust means that “the thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own

6

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York: Seabury Press, 1973, 361. George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, 7. 7 The statements, by John K. Roth, Stephen T. Davis and Frederick Sontag, form part of the collaborative symposium entitled Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1981, 8, 22, 141. 8 Terence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1991, 3.

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resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?” 9 Rubenstein’s bleak vision was controversial at the time of publication, but his attitude exemplifies the radical reformulation of religious conceptions that the events of World War II widely necessitated. More recently, Zachary Braiterman has examined the way in which “The catastrophic suffering born of mass death and the wholesale destruction of collective aggregates radically undermine social and symbolic orders”. As a counter to theodicy, he draws attention to antitheodicy as a “post-Holocaust theological sensibility” whereby an individual “refuse[s] to justify, explain, or accept” the relationship between God and evil.10 These postwar attacks on and reconstructions of religious thought provide a useful historical platform for a reading of The Dream Songs in response to Ricks’ provocative comment. Berryman’s poem extensively confronts the sociopolitical and religio-political conditions of postwar America to a degree hitherto under-acknowledged in accounts of his work. Philip Coleman’s recent ground-breaking research in this area has begun to address the problematic fact that a “view of Berryman as a poet whose work says something important about the state of the nation is rarely (and then uncomfortably) found in Berryman studies”.11 The profound impact the Holocaust made on Berryman’s work, for example, remains an insufficiently recognized fact. In 1945, Berryman wrote the story “The Imaginary Jew”, based upon a real incident in 1941 in which Berryman was mistaken for a Jew, and which addresses the question of collective human guilt for the Nazi atrocities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Berryman worked extensively on a long poem to be entitled The Black Book, which was to deal directly with the extermination of Jews in the Nazi death camps. Ultimately, he found the work too harrowing to complete, and was forced to abandon the project.12 But the subject matter of The Black Book clearly spilled over into his composition of 9

Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966, 151-53. 10 Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in PostHolocaust Jewish Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, 26, 4. 11 Philip Coleman, “The Politics of Praise: Influence and Authority in John Berryman’s Poetry”, PhD Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2002, 4. 12 See John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 205-206.

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The Dream Songs: one unpublished Dream Song manuscript runs “They’ll start burning Jews up again – Mr Bones, / they never burnt up no Jews. – No? How come? Why? / − They too sanitary”; another reads “It’s nice, + v. nice, if a-many Jews / are seen to die, and keen to kill them are / a good many Germans –”.13 These disturbing drafts are evidence that the subject Berryman strived to address in The Black Book continued to be a consciously thematic concern during his development of the Dream Song format. The personal readings that have dominated Berryman criticism have hindered adequate recognition of this politicized quality to his voice, and our examination of The Dream Songs as “theodicy” should proceed in recognition of the extent to which he confronts religious questions in terms of the traumatic events of mid-twentieth-century history. In Dream Song 97, Henry complains: My slab lifts up its arms in a solicitude entire, too late. Of brutal revelry gap your mouth to state: Front back & backside go bare! Cats’ blackness, booze, blows, grunts, grand groans. Yo-bad yōm I-oowaled bo v’ha’l lail awmer h’re gawber! – Now, now, poor Bones.

John Bayley was perplexed enough by the penultimate line here to read the Song as “laps[ing] delicately into gibberish.”14 It is, in fact, a transliteration from the Hebrew of the beginning of Job’s first speech: “Perish the day wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”15 Henry, having reluctantly returned to life from his “death” in Book IV of The Dream Songs, suddenly becomes Job, lamenting his own birth in the face of an apparently cruel and unjust God. Job’s anguish is comically thrust into the twentieth-century world of urban decay, the esoteric Hebrew bathetically juxtaposed with the litany of urban detritus described in the previous line. Braiterman identifies Job as an “antitheodic” figure, 13 Dream Songs (Unpublished), box 1, folder 4, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 14 John Bayley, “John Berryman: A Question of Imperial Sway”, in Berryman’s Understanding, 205. 15 Job 3:3.

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since he “reject[s] suffering and protest[s] providence”, a voice of religious rebelliousness that makes particular sense in a postHolocaust civilization.16 Berryman’s incorporation of the voice of Job hence may be read as constituting a moment of antitheodic rebellion. It is also part of a larger context of intensified interest in Job in the twentieth century; Jon Douglas Levenson has written that “Events of the twentieth century have called forth a more sympathetic reading of Job, and this new interest is part of a wider reappraisal of biblical theology based on recent history”. The Book of Job became a natural model for modern writers, since “in no other book are characteristic themes of the twentieth century – ‘disaster’, ‘unimagined evil’, ‘frustration’, ‘bewilderment’, ‘a sense of despair’ – so central”.17 But in Berryman’s Dream Song 97, Job’s suffering undergoes comic degradation. The “grand groans” of Job are spoken by a bestial Henry whose “grunts”, alcoholism, and drunken fighting make a mockery of the profound agony of Job’s expression. The gravity of the line is further diminished by the fact that the transliterated words resemble the baby-talk and blackface used so frequently by both Henry and his companion elsewhere in The Dream Songs. Henry cuts a ridiculous figure, as he jabbers a dialect that is nonsensical and useless in a postwar American society divorced from both the linguistic comprehension and the religious framework of Job’s speech. A few lines earlier, Henry is seen in a position of reached-for but failed supplication: “My slab lifts up its arms // in a solicitude entire, too late.” The nullifying lateness of Henry’s religious submission signifies that the cultural moment of its expression is posterior to any age of positive religious faith; and Henry’s anti-religious descent into ribaldry is subsequently stressed by the line “Front back & backside go bare!”, an allusion to a traditional English drinking song made popular by RAF pilots in World War II (“Let your back and sides go bare, me boys, / Hands and feet grow cold. / But give to your belly, boys, ale enough / Whether it be new or old”). Martin Buber wrote of the “Job of the gas chambers”, whose suffering does not take place within any scheme of justice and which is not answerable via affirmative religious propositions. 18 Berryman’s utilization of Job 16

Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 10. Jon Douglas Levenson, The Book of Job in Its Time and in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972, 2, 3. 18 Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken, 1967, 224-25. 17

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appears similarly to highlight a schism between the contemporary world and affirmative belief. The post-Holocaust spiritual scenery within which Henry conducts his life consists of corroded and disintegrated religious values. In his disharmony with both secular and divine realities (“at odds wif de world & its god,” as he puts it in Dream Song 5) Henry embodies the multivalent disconnectedness of modern man after the militaristic and genocidal cultural darknesses of the twentieth century and the dismantlement of collective religious faith. Unlike in the Book of Job, in The Dream Songs there is no religious orthodoxy, misguided or otherwise, offered as an alternative to Henry’s tormented and ambivalent religious rebellion. In a 1970 interview Berryman elaborated on the parallel between the dialogic structure of Job and the Henry-friend dialogue of The Dream Songs, suggesting that the friend’s role is that of Jobcomforter.19 But in Dream Song 97, the friend can offer nothing more than what appears to be a bland and empty comfort or admonition – “now, now” – in reply. Yet for all its apparent blandness and emptiness, the friend’s reply is charged with significance. It signifies the fact of present-day modernity – “now, now” – that renders Henry’s appropriation of Job not only anachronistic but futile, the dead matter of a religious tradition radically inapplicable to a postwar world secularized by a magnitude of mass death that tore apart teleological conceptions of the world and exposed the failure of cultural progress. Dream Song 97 therefore appropriates the antitheodic figure of Job, and presents Henry as a bathetic modern Job-parody, ridiculously attempting to re-deploy Job’s righteous anguish in a postwar America whose faithlessness and moral decay he himself embodies. The sinfulness of Henry, who lusts after “women’s bodies” (Dream Song 26) and “debaucheries” (Dream Song 146), is in stark contrast to the “perfect and upright” Job of the Old Testament. 20 The allusion is, however, an indication that Job was an extremely important model for Berryman’s poem. In an unpublished manuscript of Dream Song 1, 19

“[Henry] is suffering and suffering heavily and has to. That can’t be helped. And he has a friend, Mr. Bones, but the friend is some friend. He’s like Job’s Comforter. Remember the three who pretend to be Job’s friends. They sit down and lament with him, and give him the traditional Jewish jazz – namely, you suffer, therefore you are guilty. You remember that. Well, Henry’s friend sits down and gives him the same business” (Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with Berryman”, Massachusetts Review, XI/2 [Spring 1970], 346). 20 Job 1:1.

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Berryman noted that the first half of the first line, “Huffy Henry”, refers to “Achilles – insult, unused power, loss, viciousness, generosity”. But under the second part of the line, “hid the day,” Berryman wrote: “Job – war w. God; suffering.”21 This manuscript note signifies the fact that the first line of Berryman’s poem contains an allusion that no critic has yet identified, to the first line of Job’s opening speech. Berryman’s interest in Job was profound: he even began a translation of the verse dialogue of Job in 1956, a work which was never finished and never published. The time of writing is significant, just when many of the earliest Dream Songs were being written. Job crops up again and again in Berryman’s notes on his long poem, and various critics, such as John Haffenden and Joseph Mancini, have noted the fact that Job is in one way or another a model for Henry. 22 The allusion to Job’s opening speech at the very beginning of The Dream Songs enforces the validity of reading Henry as a type of twentieth-century Job-figure. Job desires a cessation to his suffering that he feels is only possible through an annihilation of his self: “For now I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest.”23 Job’s identification with those who “dig for [death] more than for hid treasures” finds a parallel in the reluctantly resurrected Henry, who is “Lazarus with a plan to get his own back” digging his way back down to his grave in Dream Song 91. 24 But Henry’s predicament involves a transformation of Job’s Old Testament religiosity into a twentieth-century context wherein Christian eschatology is continually threatened by agnostic or secular ontological perspectives. This ambivalence occurs throughout The Dream Songs: “we will not wonder, will us, Mr Bones, / whether either He looms down or wifout trace / we vanisheth” (Dream Song 220); “Am I a bad one – / I’m thinking of them fires & their 21

Dream Songs (Unpublished), Box 1, Folder 1, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 22 “It must be said that Berryman did see Henry as a type of Job, and does express personal suffering in The Dream Songs”, writes John Haffenden in John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, New York: New York University Press, 1980, 81. Joseph Mancini notes that in “a number of interviews, Berryman suggested the affinities between this work and his Songs” (see Mancini, The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Strategies in the Poetry of John Berryman, New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, 219-20). 23 Job 3:13. 24 Job 3:21.

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perplexness – / or may a niche be found / in nothingness for completely exhausted Henry?” (Dream Song 239); “I want rest here, neither below nor above” (Dream Song 256); “This place is not so bad, considering / the alternative with real fear. / Being dead, I mean. ‘Well it is a long rest’ / to himself said Mr Bloom. But is it that now?” (Dream Song 288). Henry’s sinfulness incurs an unassuagable terror of Christian eschatological tenets that he is unable to stabilize through the apprehension of positive religious faith. Berryman’s redeployment of Job’s condition in a context that is not ordered by stable doctrine therefore provocatively parodies and undermines the religious underpinnings of the Judaic text. In his essay on Whitman’s “Song of Myself” – published in 1957, again around the time when many of the earliest Dream Songs were being written – Berryman warns the reader against confusing the form and content of Whitman’s poem, and does so via an unexpected comparison: I must say first that its form is perhaps misleading, like the form of the Hebrew poem of Job. That mysterious work – never mind the prose folk-tale in which we find it imbedded – has at any rate the form of a theodicy; but that form is ironic for God’s justice is never vindicated at all, solely his power is demonstrated; so that we have to call the poem a theodicy of power – that is, no theodicy at all.25

The refusal or failure of God to provide Job with direct reconciliatory answers, Berryman argues, prevents the book as a whole from being acceptably defined as “theodicy”. Berryman’s identification of the antitheodic quality of the book of Job can be applied directly to The Dream Songs, as the absence of resolution upon which the poem proceeds precludes the occurrence of any ultimate theodic moment. This mode of procedure resembles less a theodicy than Braiterman’s antitheodicy, since the poem “refuse[s] to justify, explain, or accept” the moral disorder of the world in terms of an overarching framework of divine justice. But Berryman’s work is further dislocated from particular doctrinal frameworks than Braiterman’s conception of antitheodicy, as it lacks any consistently envisaged religious schema against which antitheodic rebellion might be situated. The non-reconciliatory mode of The Dream Songs thus explicitly and aggressively opposes the positive and constructive concept of 25

See “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 233.

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“theodicy”. All religious frameworks are fragmented and adrift since they are part of the disintegrated world Henry describes. “My framework is broken, I am coming to an end, / God send it soon”, Henry pleads in Dream Song 112. The appeal to God here is undermined by the lack of a stabilizing framework of religious values within which such an articulation might be made positively and with hope. The poem’s mode of progression is fundamentally entropic, creating an ambiguity of moral values so that the very notions of “divinity”, “evil”, and “justice” are radically destabilized. Religious images and allusions are unstable detritus: Paul Giles notes that while the iconography and aesthetic structures of Catholicism surround Berryman’s work, his “textual significations are so dense, multivalent, and indeed contradictory that it would be not only reductive but actually impossible to collapse their complexity in the name of any one systematic doctrine”.26 The grammar of Christian theology is used to express the distance of modern consciousness from positive religious experience. Henry’s subsistence is a continual Fall, a continual slippage away from divine order. In Dream Song 1 “nothing fell out as it might or ought”. He also “likes Fall,” and is “prepared to live in a world of Fall / for ever”. In Dream Song 57 he laments that “I fell out of the tree”, an image that echoes the nostalgic memory in Dream Song 1 of sitting “all at the top” of a sycamore tree. This tree may perhaps imply another powerful symbol of Eden, the tree of knowledge. It is also a sycamore that Zacchaeus climbs at Jericho in order to view Jesus as he passes by. 27 Berryman’s image of the sycamore implies a vision of Christ now lost and yearned for, a T.S. Eliot-like recognition of past religious feeling now replaced by contemporary faithlessness: “He who was living is now dead / We who are living are now dying / With a little patience.”28 In The Dream Songs, any positive adherence to a mode of Christian theology is always dropped in favor of a more skeptical or rebellious theological position. In Dream Song 56 Henry expresses sympathy for Origen’s heretical theory of apocatastasis, and 26

Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 237. 27 “And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him; for he was to pass that way” (Luke 19:3-4). The image recurs in Dream Song 328 where we are told Henry “flourisht like a sycamore tree”. 28 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, London: Faber and Faber, 1974, 76.

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imagines that “Hell is empty. O that has come to pass / which the cut Alexandrian foresaw, / and Hell lies empty.” But by line nine of the Dream Song a terrified bestial Henry’s “cleft feet drum”, and the language is powerfully that of disintegration and spiritual fear – “terror, & plunging, swipes”, “Crumpling, I– why,–”. By the beginning of the next Song, Henry is “In a state of chortle sin”, the pun on chortle/mortal exemplifying the playful blasphemy that constantly serves to undercut religious sentiments throughout the poem. Berryman himself responded ambiguously and evasively to Ricks’ assertion, stating merely that “it is a tough question. The idea of a theodicy has been in my mind at least since 1938.”29 Though keen to express a long-established interest in the concept, he was clearly reluctant explicitly to label his poem with the term “theodicy”. Moreover, the song from which Ricks quotes in support of his comment, Dream Song 266, is itself radically uncertain with respect to God’s justice and love, displaying Henry’s terror at a seemingly hostile God who directs towards him not love but a merciless and indefinite prolongation of Henry’s worldly pain: …Was then the thing all planned? I mention what I do not understand. I mention for instance Love: God loves his creatures when he treats them so? Surely one grand exception here below his presidency of the widespread galaxies might once be made for perishing Henry, whom let not then die. He can advance no claim, save that he studied thy Word & grew afraid, work & fear be the basis for his terrible cry not to forget his name.

Henry is “perishing Henry” who nevertheless cannot die: a self caught within a continual process of dying or disintegration that does not allow the release of annihilation. Elsewhere in The Dream Songs, “Henry is vanishing” (Dream Song 140), “dying” (Dream Song 199), 29 See “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 31.

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“dying / as all we all are dying: death grew tall / up Henry as a child” (Dream Song 144). His own entropic condition mirrors the disorder he finds in the surrounding world, “at the center of which is the ‘hidden God’, deus absconditus, who, by withdrawing from the world, has precipitated the corruption and the pain which now characterize it”.30 Henry’s fear is a perception of this lack of order, a perception that God’s love and the events of human reality are for him not reconcilable. In Dream Song 266 he gazes with terror upon scripture, since in doing so he perceives the yawning chasm between secular reality and the inapprehensible divine. J.M. Linebarger is misguided to claim that the plea of the last lines “is a wish for fame rather than for an existence in an afterlife of any sort”, since the lines set up a clear and terrifying contrast between the human system of naming and God’s eternal Word, between the “Word” and the poet’s secular “name”.31 The song circles around a heroic couplet: “God loves his creatures when he treats them so? / Surely one grand exception here below.” These lines begin as an assertion of God’s love – “God loves his creatures” – but by the end of the first line the language has fallen away into a question, the poet’s mind descending from belief to doubt to antitheodic rebellion. Henry is the “grand exception” to God’s love, a self-inflatory description that seems to exalt Henry’s condition to a level of historical uniqueness ironically and parodically comparable to that of Christ. But the language used by Berryman is carefully chosen to intimate cultural questions that extend beyond the personal doubts of Henry. Meaning “one thousand” in colloquial American speech since the 1920s, “one grand” is a pun; hence, at the very moment when Berryman seems to be expressing the uniqueness of Henry’s condition with particular intensity, he is simultaneously implying a broader collective cultural denial of divine justice. God’s supervision of the world is a “presidency”, a word that invites correlations between divine governance and the political governance of the American democratic system. And God is impertinently described here via the decapitalized epithet “his”, an impertinence accentuated by Henry’s 30

Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman, 29. J.M. Linebarger, John Berryman, New York: Twayne, 1974, 104-105. Berryman was born John Allyn Smith in 1914, but changed his name to John Berryman upon his mother’s remarriage after his father’s death. This name-change in his youth, one might assume, increased his sensitivity to the fact that his name was not an intrinsic or true description of his self, that truth and language are not one and the same. 31

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description of himself through the capitalized “He” in the next stanza, a typographical contrast that retains some force despite the latter’s position at the beginning of a sentence. Berryman engages in these kind of linguistic games throughout his poem. In Dream Song 26, for instance, Henry speaks of “the original crime: art, rime”, the word “rime” here displaying its own unoriginality and fallen-ness by echoing, copying itself from “crime”. The poet’s ability to so mischievously manipulate language displays its malleability but also its corruptibility, or corrupt-ness. Berryman’s employment of punning and “blasphemous” articulation in The Dream Songs is part of a profound preoccupation with unavailable Edenic primal silence and the fundamental imperfection of human language. In Dream Song 1, Henry recollects that “Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang”. The word “sang” paradoxically signifies vocal expression prior to the language of the poem; in other words, in describing song, it describes silence, an Edenic oneness with the logos that the word itself is only able to signify by becoming a linguistic indication of unavailable expression. Henry laments this fact elsewhere, as in Dream Song 48: He yelled at me in Greek, my God! – It’s not his language and I’m no good at – his is Aramaic, was – I am a monoglot of English (American version) and, say pieces from a baker’s dozen others: where’s the bread? but rising in the Second Gospel, pal:

This song was partly written in reaction to the “little apocalypse” of Mark 13.32 Henry’s frustration is caused by his entrapment within the ambiguities and uncertainties of human languages. John Haffenden has said “Song 48 hinges on the fact that Christ spoke Aramaic (l.3), and yet this pronouncement comes to us in Greek via the Gospels”, but there is more to Henry’s frustration since Berryman is pointing towards the double level of Christ’s language as explicitly put forward in the prologue to the fourth gospel: Christ’s Aramaic was human language that was also, simultaneously, an embodiment of the divine

32

Mark 13:5-37 (see Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 98).

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Word, o logos sarx egeneto.33 The above lines rage against the impenetrable forest of corrupt and fallen language that separates Henry from God’s Word; his monoglot of English and “a baker’s dozen others” emphasizes the post-Babelian corrupt-ness and multiplicity of the articulative mode by which he is entrapped. Henry’s description of his life involves a parodic mimicry of the logos, as his blasphemies and reductive puns enact language’s inability to reveal God. 34 In the final stanza of Dream Song 48 Henry is “full of the death of love”, a kind of walking antithesis to Christ. Berryman’s Dream Songs then assert the fact that human language constantly reveals the unavailability of God’s breath, the pure breath behind ehyeh asher ehyeh, the indivisible Word of God.35 The Dream Songs recurrently expresses this unrequited desire for a perfect, prelapsarian mode of articulation. Giles notes how “Berryman’s text strives to tear down delusive literary words in order to incorporate the primal silence of the Word”.36 In Dream Song 266, Henry’s desire for connection with God makes him aware of his failure to make such a connection, caught within a human system of naming that confesses its own corruption and imperfection. He articulates a desire for a lost Edenic past that the very act of articulation demonstrates to be impossible, since, as Walter Benjamin explained, language betrays continually its own fallen-ness: The Fall is the moment of birth of man’s language, that in which the name no longer remains intact …. The word must communicate something now, outside itself. This is really the original sin of the spirit of language. As it communicates outside of itself the word is 33

John 1:1-5, 1:14 (see Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 98). The intensity of Henry’s dislocation from God fundamentally involves an element of Christ-parody. In Dream Song 112 Henry tells us “I now must speak to my disciples”. His resurrection in Dream Song 92 brings not a sense of death transcended, but the recognition that there is “something black somewhere in the vistas of his heart”. 35 Exodus 3:14, see Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, 74: “[God] also indicates by his palindromic utterance, with its repeated ‘h’ and ‘sh’ sounds, that his is the breath that lies beneath all utterance and all action, a living breath which does not move forward yet does not remain static, upholding both speech and the world.” For a discussion of Dream Song 48 in relation to the Bakhtinian idea of heteroglossia, see Tom Rogers, “Representations of Christianity in the Poetry of John Berryman”, PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2004. 36 Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, 237. 34

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something of a parody, by an explicitly mediate word, of the explicitly immediate word, of God’s creative Word.37

Language is a vehicle of articulation that is forced to point back to an irretrievable and inarticulable past wholeness. Henry’s loss sits forever beneath or prior to his ability to express it, so the expression of his self is an enactment of that loss. The creation of art, of poetry, far from being a redemptive activity, expresses the impossibility of achieving such redemption. Dream Song 266, then, resolutely fails to answer the question around which it gravitates: “God loves his creatures when he treats them so?” To describe The Dream Songs as a “theodicy” is therefore to assert a reconciliatory energy to the poem that opposes the failure of reconciliation Berryman centralizes. Ricks’ assertion ultimately provides a helpful and fascinating catalyst for investigation of the poem’s religious qualities without accurately representing the mode in which the poem operates. Douglas Dunn is the single critic to have questioned Ricks’ idea, stating that “There is so much blasphemy and doubt in Dream Songs [sic] that its religious dimensions come across as an absence of faith, as spiritual torture”.38 Dunn’s assessment is incisive, though it is important to recognize that Henry’s “absence of faith” is not merely a personal condition but an expression of collective cultural spiritual desiccation in postwar America, part of what Coleman calls the poem’s “extended meditation on the vicissitudes of Cold War displacement and alienation”.39 This conflation of the personal and the religio-political is evident in the last song of Berryman’s poem, Dream Song 385. Here, the presence of Henry’s daughter in the opening line represents an attempt to assert the redemptive power of human love in the face of personal pain; yet this final Dream Song concerns itself with the irretrievable failures of communication between father and daughter. Alongside this personal sentiment exists a comment on the modern reduction of the religious meaning of the Thanksgiving festival to the mass slaughter of turkeys in the service of American consumerism. Berryman puns elaborately on the word “fall” so as to construct a narrative backdrop of the Thanksgiving season that is simultaneously 37

Walter Benjamin, Schriften, eds Theodor W. Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Frederick Podszuz, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955, II, 464-65. 38 Douglas Dunn, “Gaiety & Lamentation”, in Berryman’s Understanding, 140. 39 Coleman, “The Politics of Praise …”, 141.

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a metaphysical self-examination, an articulation of unresolved spiritual anxiety: … My praise follows and flows too late. Fall is grievy, brisk. Tears behind the eyes almost fall. Fall comes to us as a prize to rouse us toward our fate. My house is made of wood and it’s made well, unlike us. My house is older than Henry; that’s fairly old. If there were a middle ground between things and the soul or if the sky resembled more the sea, I wouldn’t have to scold my heavy daughter.

Here we are invited to read the word “fall” as signifying the physical activity of falling, the season, and the Fall of Man. The Dream Song therefore reveals the continuation of Henry’s condition as expressed in Dream Song 1: there, “nothing fell out as it might or ought”, and here Henry is still falling, and also is fallen, unregenerate. Berryman’s language is again an enactment of its own fallen-ness. In the second stanza, behind the repeated sounds of “praised”, “praise”, and “prize”, lie “pray” and “prayer”; they are the words Henry cannot say, his language failing to grasp onto the indivisible and inarticulable Word of God. “Tears behind the eyes almost fall”: Henry is trying to apprehend an enlightenment that will facilitate submission before a revealed God, but finds himself incapable of successfully doing so. In Dream Song 153 Henry had pondered, “I suppose the word would be, we must submit. / Later. / I hang, and I will not be part of it”. A position of submission or supplication before God is forever just beyond the reach of his ability, or his desire. In Dream Song 385 his praise, and his prayers, flow “too late”; just like Henry’s religious submission in Song 97, his devotion here is caught within a contemporary world that has irreparably lost its sense of meaningful religious experience. The absence of a “middle ground” in the final stanza articulates Henry’s failure to apprehend a connecting point between the divine and the secular. There is no synthesis between things and the soul, sky

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and sea, heaven and earth, temporality and the atemporal divine. In examination of himself as father, Henry perceives the yawning gap between himself and the divine Father, so that by the time the image of his “heavy daughter” reappears as the Song’s, and the book’s, closing phrase, it has become a metaphor for his anxious and fragmented spiritual condition. The image of the daughter frames Berryman’s song in a clear echo of Eliot’s “Marina”, but while the latter’s daughter becomes a figure of emotional and spiritual hope, Berryman’s daughter is a vehicle for the failure of such hope. Eliot’s post-conversion Christian faith is rejected in Berryman’s postwar skepticism and ennui. The final song simultaneously addresses both daughter and nation; Susan G. Berndt writes that, herein, the “poet speaks also to his nation as a father would ‘scold’ his daughter, or as Jeremiah scolded the ‘daughter of Zion.’ Berryman’s nation is one that has dispensed with its religious heritage and prostituted its moral character.”40 The “daughter” represents his human daughter, his contemporary culture, and also his poem, heavy because it is long, but also because it is nonredemptive, because it demonstrates his inability to ascend towards any kind of God or heaven. The continuity and futurity provided by the post-Holocaust contemporary world are devoid of teleological energy and spiritual promise. Gary Arpin concludes of this song that the “conflict between the notion of a benevolent God of rescue and the available facts, the aspect of the poem that constitutes the equivocal theodicy that Ricks pointed out, is, like the conflict in Henry’s rescue dreams, only partially resolved”. Hence, “if Henry cannot achieve a union with or a reconciliation with God, he will be satisfied with its possibility”. 41 In fact, Berryman’s poem provides no such image of possibility; instead he presents the antitheodic impossibility of reconciliation with God in an irretrievably post-religious, postHolocaust Western civilization.

40

Susan G. Berndt, “The Last Word”, in “A Symposium on the Last Dream Song”, John Berryman Studies, III/1-2 (Winter-Spring 1977), 83. 41 Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman, 72.

THE LIFE OF BERRYMAN’S CHRIST TOM ROGERS

For John Berryman, New Testament scholarship and the quest for the historical Jesus in particular was a major personal as well as academic preoccupation. The most dedicated of his numerous works that draw on the subject is his unpublished, and very much unfinished, “Life of Christ”: an unintentionally long-term prose project that he refers to as his “labour of love”. 1 After many false starts, Berryman made most headway on the project during the last year of his life, completing two chapters before his death in 1972. As archival material and published poetry reveals, however, he always maintained an ambition and enthusiasm for the Christ project that continually outweighed his achievement, at least in the form of a finished product. This essay describes the evolution of the work as far as it is realized; it looks at the particular critics who inspired it, certain of whom were as important and influential to Berryman as his favorite literary heroes, and it also demonstrates the way the poet often draws on issues raised by New Testament criticism as material for his poetry, particularly for his most famous work, The Dream Songs. Although he made no important scholarly contribution to the field of Christology, besides his teaching, he does offer us in certain Dream Songs a profound and entertaining artistic treatment of the problem of the historical Jesus, and, most importantly, its consequences for personal faith. It is this poetic achievement that finally led to a breakthrough in the writing of his prose biography of “the most interesting man who has lived”.2 1

John Berryman, “The Life of Christ”, unpublished typescript, Miscellaneous Prose, Box 6, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Subsequent references will be abbreviated JBP. 2 John Berryman, Preface to “The Life of Christ” (c. 1956), manuscript sheet, JBP.

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In his 1971 poem “The Search” Berryman describes his “historical study of the Gospel” as being prompted by an existential crisis: I wondered ever too what my fate would be, women & after-fame become quite unavailable, or at best unimportant. For a tooth-extraction gassed once, by a Russian woman in Detroit, I dreamed a dream to end dreams, even my dreams: I had died—no problem: but a mighty hand was after my works too, feeling here & there, & finding them, bit by bit. At last he found the final of all one, & pulled it away, & said ‘There!’ I began the historical study of the Gospel indebted above all to Guignebert & Goguel & McNeile & Bultmann even & later Archbishop Carrington. (CP 198-99)

Disillusioned with the worldly pursuits he describes in the first two parts of Love & Fame, particularly the notion of immortalizing oneself through writing, the poet (parodically echoing the opening to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress) sets out on an academic pilgrimage to find the truth. His lost sense of self-sufficiency is replaced by a disturbing feeling of absolute dependency for which he now wants answers. As he suggests in the poem, despite surveying “other systems, high & primitive, / ancient & surviving” (CP 200), his quest to unravel life’s purpose is from the start focused on the question of whether the claims of Christianity have any credence; in other words, “is Jesus Christ the person Christianity claims he is?” As Christian belief rests on the conviction that God, through the Incarnation, has specially intervened in human history, Berryman looks to the discipline of historical criticism as the most credible source of justification for any decision in the direction of faith. There does appear to be a creative ellipsis in his recounting of this journey in “The Search”. The incident in Detroit almost certainly refers to his brief, disastrous stay in the city during 1939-40, while teaching at Wayne University, Michigan: a period when his grip on reality

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seemed at times tenuous.3 However, although his writings in the intervening period are far from indifferent towards Christian themes, any serious interest in “the historical study of the Gospel” is not evident until the early 1950s.4 It was Berryman’s appointment as a Humanities lecturer at the University of Minnesota in 1955 that provided him with the opportunity to explore the subject in greater detail. He began teaching a course in “Christian Origins” as part of the University’s Humanities program, one component of a range of courses exploring the development of Western civilization. The main emphasis of the course, as Berryman describes it, is “on the New Testament and the Inferno of Dante”, but it also examines the cultural context from which Christianity emerged, as well as its subsequent impact on Western culture. 5 The approach Berryman took to the study of the New Testament was an “historical and documentary” one, encouraging students to look critically at scripture, unprejudiced by personal belief or skepticism.6 The aims were to determine what we can know for a fact about Jesus, to explain the composition of the New Testament, and to offer an account of the remarkable rise and cultural influence of this new religion. From very early on in his teaching, Berryman relied on a rather small number of New Testament scholars for his sources, most of whom he cites in “The Search”. Here Berryman parades the eclecticism of his influences, which do not appear to sit easily together, but portray a broad-minded, earnestly investigative individual determined to scour all avenues for the truth. What unites these critics (from Goguel and McNeile to “Bultmann even & later Carrington” [CP 200]) is that, despite their varying perspectives on the subject, they all regard Jesus Christ as the most significant figure in world history. The affinity that the poet feels with

3

For accounts of Berryman’s time in Detroit, see John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 112-28, and Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1996, 110-28. 4 A draft Preface for the 1971 version of “The Life of Christ” states that Berryman “became interested in the subject 18 years ago”. 5 From a draft Foreword for a planned textbook based on his “Humanities in the Modern World” (Humanities 54) course. See “Humanities 54” typescript, Folder 10, Box 1, Class Files, JBP. 6 See “Humanities 62” teaching notes headed “Newman”, manuscript, Folder 19, Box II, Class Files, JBP.

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them is expressed through the rather ironic use of Albert Einstein’s remark in the last stanza: When at twelve Einstein lost belief in God He said to himself at once (as he put it later) ‘Similarly motivated men, both of the past & of the present, Together with their achieved insights, waren die unverlierbaren Freunde’—the unloseable friends. (CP 200)7

The combined insights of the thinkers mentioned in “The Search” contributed to the kaleidoscopic perspective on Christianity that the poet now claims to possess. The most important of his “unloseable friends”, however, are Charles Guignebert (1867-1939) and Maurice Goguel (1880-1955). The “formidable sceptics of the Continent”, as he refers to them, are identified in the anxiety dream of Dream Song 322 as providing “the scholarly frame” for Henry’s complex and troubled religious outlook. As he notes in this Song, these New Testament scholars are associated with the “Ecole des Hautes Etudes”, a school of the Sorbonne in Paris where they both taught during their distinguished careers. They regard themselves, first and foremost, as historians, attempting to reconstruct a true picture of Christ and his teaching, as far as it can be authentically discerned, from the available historical evidence. Much of their reasoning leads them to dispute the figure of Christ that comes to us through Christian tradition, including basic tenets of the faith, such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Both take a rationalistic approach towards the Gospel miracles, rejecting the possibility of such “supernatural” events. Their picture of Christ is not that of the eternal 7 The quotation in this poem is derived from a memoir written in German by Albert Einstein for a volume of essays intended to mark his seventieth birthday. A parallel translation is provided by the editor: “The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it …. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights which they had achieved, were the friends which could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it” (Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes”, trans. Paul Arthur Schlipp, in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, the Library of Living Philosophers, Evanston: Banta, 1949, 5).

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Logos, but a Jewish prophet whose life and teaching has become misconstrued through the doctrinal development of a new religion. There are, however, differences between their two perspectives. Whereas Goguel, a proponent of liberal Protestantism, believes that the Synoptics can provide us with the basic outline of Jesus’ ministry, Guignebert remains resolutely agnostic: both in terms of his personal faith, and in the belief, as a historian, that the truth behind the Gospel accounts is now essentially irrecoverable. Berryman relies on both scholars for the basic historical outline of his own “Life of Christ”. In general, his attitude towards the Gospels is more sympathetic towards the position of Goguel, but the influence of Guignebert’s more radical skepticism and wit is particularly apparent in The Dream Songs. Historical criticism by itself, however, fails to satisfy Berryman in his quest for the truth, and he seeks out writings that may convince him about elements of the faith that the skeptics dismiss out of hand. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) for instance, the famous form-critic and existentialist theologian, takes an even more radical, but unhistorical view: hence the remark “Bultmann even” in “The Search”. He rejects altogether the relevance of the quest for the historical Jesus (whom he believes in any case to be irrecoverable) in favor of Christ’s existential significance – the meaning his teaching has for us now in our present situation. Bultmann still believes God has acted in human history through the “event” of Christ, and his inclusion in “The Search” represents the possibility of faith without the need for historical proof. Berryman also looks to more orthodox, but equally inspiring, exegetes who bring the meaning of scripture alive for him, including Philip Carrington (1892-1975), Martin Luther (1483-1546), Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), and Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626). He discovers a radical contemporary defender of the faith in Karl Heim (1874-1958), a Lutheran theologian who published a series of books reconciling the biblical and modern scientific worldviews. Berryman is clearly open-minded towards Christianity, but wants to make sure that any leap of faith he may be required to make is a well-reasoned one. The “unloseable friends” inspire Berryman sufficiently, by the late 1950s, to attempt his own “Life of Christ”. His “indebtedness” is illustrated by the fact that almost all of them are acknowledged at least once in the various draft Prefaces that he wrote for the work. Archival evidence reveals that he made no less than four serious attempts over an eighteen-year period to commit his “Life of Christ” project to a

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publishable form. Begun in 1956, this prose account of “the most important human personality, and the most important career, of which we have knowledge”, will take on a number of different formats over the next eighteen years.8 The existing manuscript and typescript material is produced over two time periods: the mid- to late-1950s, and the final two years of his life, 1970 and 1971. Each attempt at the book generally takes the form of a very carefully drafted Preface, accompanied by extensive notes and plans. The most successful attempt, on the evidence of what survives, is the final 1971 version, for which two complete chapters are typewritten; however, by this time, the work has taken on a radically different format to that which was originally conceived. Writing a Preface at the outset, before even drafting any of the main text, seems to have been an important creative aid for Berryman, serving both to inspire him, and to define the task at hand. Many abortive attempts at other prose works in the John Berryman Papers at the University of Minnesota include the same carefully crafted Preface. In the absence of anything approaching a finished “Life of Christ”, these unpublished texts are highly illuminating, supplying an important insight into the nature of the planned book, as well as the author’s own personal involvement with the project. The five Prefaces that exist from the two different time periods demonstrate how his approach to the venture evolved. They are, however, strikingly similar in at least two respects: they all exhibit a rather ironic, selfdeprecating attitude, which protests the author’s inadequacy to deal with the subject, and they also reveal a consistent reliance on the same limited sources. Two very distinct versions of the “Life of Christ” were attempted in the late 1950s by Berryman: one in 1956, and another in 1958. Their Prefaces illustrate his far from straightforward critical position towards Christianity, influenced as it is by his syncretic coterie of sources. The 1956 Preface declares: This volume is not of course intended as a substitute for the Gospel narratives to be found in the New Testament, a book easily available. These invaluable accounts of the most interesting man who has lived differ so much among themselves that they must be studied as wholes …. But the popularity of re-tellings of the life and ministry of Christ, 8

Draft Preface dated “4 Jan 1970”, JBP.

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especially when vulgar, sentimental, and theologically contemptible, suggests that many readers do not in fact study the New Testament; and some readers who do may be helped by having the material set in an order and, as compositions nearly two thousand years old, annotated. The annotations are drawn from English and American scholarship, chiefly Protestant, from the formidable sceptics of the Continent like Guignebert and Goguel, from the Fathers and from the Reformers; I hope they contain nothing original, but some of them have surprised me and I suppose they will probably surprise most readers. I may add that it is almost useless to read the Gospel accounts with settled incredulity, such as a conviction (based on what evidence or faith I have no idea) that what are called miracles cannot happen …. It must be understood that the Christian Faith and the Christian Church do not exactly rest upon confidence in the truth of the revelation contained in the Gospels and the Epistles. It is the other way round, and no one has ever put it better than Luther.9

Although Berryman draws largely from the “sceptics”, Goguel and Guignebert, he remains open-minded concerning the core elements of Christian doctrine: the rationalistic dismissal of which, by the more incredulous critics, he appears to find unpalatable. He is at pains to stress that any doubt he casts upon the historical truth of various elements of the written Gospels should not be viewed as an attempt to undermine the Christian Faith. Through his reference to Luther, he points out that the Gospels are above all a testament to the faith of the communities from which they arose. For Luther, faith has a personal rather than a purely historical reference …. Faith is not simply historical knowledge. Luther argues that a faith which is content to believe in the historical reliability of the gospels is not a faith which justifies …. Saving faith involves believing and trusting that Christ was born pro nobis, born for us personally, and has accomplished for us the work of salvation.10

9

No date is given on the typescript itself, but the Preface mentions the case “lately” of a doctor accused of murdering his pregnant wife. The famous case of Dr Sam Sheppard also concerns the subject of an unpublished poem, “My students have no trouble with miracles”, on the manuscript of which Berryman writes: “1st (or 2nd?) winter in Mpls.” Since he took up his Minneapolis post in 1955, it must have been written in either the winter of 1955-56 or 1956-57. The manuscript is contained in Folder 1, Box 1, Miscellaneous Poetry, JBP. 10 Alistair E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 439-40.

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Such positions hold an important safety net for Berryman as he attempts to ground his search in historical criticism, but, nevertheless, it is historical criticism that dictates the format of the work. It is clear, too, that he perceived his work to be filling a gap in the market; he intended it to be an annotated “harmony” of the Gospel. Gospel harmonies were, traditionally, an attempt to reconcile the four Gospel narratives into a single chronological schema. It is a process that fell out of favor with Gospel critics during the eighteenth century, as the emphasis shifted more towards synopsis.11 Berryman’s harmony was not intended to be a substitute for the existing Gospel accounts, but an annotated, chronological compilation of what he considered to be the most reliable elements. His approach, in one sense, appears to be a highly unfashionable and discredited one; but in another, it is actually quite innovative. Whereas harmonies were originally intended to integrate the different Gospels, despite their problematic inconsistencies with each other, into one, reverently presupposing their historical authenticity, Berryman’s harmony acknowledges the deficiencies of every previous attempt, and aims to create a harmony on the basis of authenticity itself. He says he will “use Mark as basis but including from other Synoptics, & John, what is plainly genuine that Mark omits; & from Paul & Acts” and he remarks that this plan “gives at any rate a chronology which is non-subjective; no harmonychronology is really possible”. He consequently aimed to resurrect an old discipline in the light of recent scholarly advances. In 1958, however, Berryman commenced work on a slightly different project, although it is uncertain whether he intended this to accompany or supersede the previous attempt. As the next blueprint, written almost twelve years later, follows the revised format, one would presume the latter. The self-deprecating, ironically apologetic tone of the Preface, which professes the insignificance of the book, remains the same: An apology may properly be expected for a book on this subject, but I offer none. I have written it for my own, not satisfaction but, instruction. I had no thought of entering the arena with either say Mr Jim Bishop’s florid invention or with M. Goguel’s magisterial enquiry in The Life of Jesus … and the opening chapters of The Birth of Christianity. I have small learning in this area; “lesse Greeke”, 11

Maurice Goguel, The Life of Jesus, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958, 38-40.

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experience in textual criticism, some familiarity with biographical evidence; it makes no equipment upon which I could advise any reader to rely, and I publish the book only for anyone similarly curious who has not happened to undertake a study for himself …. The present work, I hope, exhibits little sympathy with critics such as Bultmann, for whom “there is not one of his words which we can regard as purely authentic”, or with writers who find themselves able for example to inform us of Christ’s physical appearance. Guignebert’s survey of this latter topic is worth preserving. The appended book-list aims solely at the elucidation of references. Even among debts so numerous and deep I cannot forbear signalizing those to Goguel and Cullman, and, among older works, to Westcott’s great edition of the Fourth Gospel.

The new project is to take the form of an historical critical commentary. The extent to which he will base its format upon Goguel’s and Guignebert’s lives of Jesus is evident from his notes: “Draft out, with Harmony etc., from Goguel-Guignebert – commentators before really going into other authorities paying no heed to errors of any kind.” The book aims to evaluate systematically the life and teachings of Jesus as they come to us through the New Testament, in the light of whatever strands of scholarship appeal to its author. The Preface declares how Berryman aims to resist either of the possible extremities that may result from a life of Christ. He intends to occupy a middle ground between the antipodes of “dogmatic scepticism” on the one hand – the hyper-historicists, who render the “historical” Jesus unrecognizable, as well as those who reject his significance altogether – and on the other hand, the hagiographers who embellish history with doctrinal interpretations and pious inventions. A major flaw is clearly evident in the proposed book. Berryman is not, as he admits, a specialist in the field, and so is not consequently in any position to offer groundbreaking new research or original insights. Moreover, rather than provide an authoritative overview of contemporary critical debate, or of the history of Gospel criticism, the work unashamedly exhibits the personal tastes of its author, as well as the limited extent of his reading. Justifiably, therefore, he implicitly warns of its probable unreliability for anyone “who has not happened to undertake a study for himself”. Furthermore, is the Berryman name really significant enough at this point for anyone to care to read the arbitrary jottings of a self-professed dilettante instructing himself? The

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conclusion of its author would appear to be in the negative; he seems to anticipate the book’s drawbacks, from a marketing point of view, in the Preface, and, after making little headway on the project, he consigns it to the filing cabinet for the next twelve years. Despite the decade-long hiatus in his work on the “Life of Christ”, however, the 1960s was far from a period of indifference towards the subject for Berryman. As well as continuing to further his reading and develop his teaching in the area, he also poeticizes the quest for the historical Jesus in The Dream Songs, the epic poem composed during the late-1950s and 1960s. With the innovation of the Dream Song format, he found a poetic style that enabled him to capture the immediacy of his own experience: he was able, in other words, to assimilate all his intellectual and emotional preoccupations into the poem’s open-ended narrative; that is, the evolving personality of its protagonist Henry as he makes his way in the world. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that the historical problem of Christ makes an allegorical appearance in the very first prototype Dream Song, which was composed around 1955. There the “jolly old man” remarks: “Goguel says nobody knows where the christ [sic] they buried him / anyway but the Jewish brass. / … So at sweet dawn wás he gone?” This alludes to Goguel’s conclusion that the site of the Holy Sepulcher can never be known. 12 In The Dream Songs Henry’s religious quest is continually frustrated by the relentless difficulties thrown up by historical Gospel criticism. The problems do not stop there: Henry also has to grapple with the question of God’s existence, and his enquiries are mostly centered round the problem of evil. Henry concludes that God must be either inexistent, incompetent, or, as he suggests in Dream Song 238, “something disturbed”. God and Christ are not synonymous in The Dream Songs, and Henry has far more respect for the latter. Whereas the long poem’s portrayal of God is a wittily combative and irreverent one, the portrayal of Christ is more concerned with retrieving this “great man” from the clutches of misrepresentation (Dream Song 234). For this reason The Dream Songs may be described as “antiChristian”, but it is definitely not “anti-Christ”. Unless it is viewed as a trait of Henry’s characterization, The Dream Songs represents what appears to be a shift on Berryman’s part towards a more solidly 12

Goguel, The Life of Jesus, 546-51. The Dream Song is reprinted in Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 299.

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skeptical position on Christianity, which is closely aligned to that of Goguel and especially Guignebert. The Dream Songs does not exhibit the same openness to more orthodox interpretations as Berryman’s “Life of Christ” does. Whereas Henry doubts the existence of God, the existence of Jesus Christ, as a historical person, is taken for granted: as indeed, even the most skeptical of Berryman’s sources, Guignebert, affirms. Berryman has no time for the “Jesus myth” school; the question for him now is whether Christianity is a true reflection of the intentions of its founder. Dream Song 48 provides an example of one of Henry’s surreal confrontations with Christ, depicting a religious gulf between Christ and Christianity. The Song is constructed around an apparently disjointed stream of pseudo-critical utterances, pieced together to form an elaborate intellectual joke. An absurd phantasmagorical scenario is evoked in which Henry encounters the distinctly unhistorical Christ: a very defamiliarized, almost dehumanized figure, a kind of cultural Frankenstein’s monster, who is attempting unsuccessfully to get his message across, through the obfuscation of linguistic and cultural difference barring his authentic message. The Evangelists wrote their Gospels in Greek, whereas Christ spoke Aramaic. The argument of the Song draws heavily from Guignebert’s Jesus (1956). Guignebert, with a critical stance sympathetic towards that of the history-of-religions school, argues that the Greek influence of the Gospels is more than just language deep. He believes that the Hellenistic environment, in which the primitive Church settled after expanding out of Palestine, heavily influenced its doctrinal development, to the point, in fact, where it became utterly divorced from the religious intentions of Jesus.13 The Song exhibits a close adherence to this view as its argument progresses. Henry draws attention to his own language, consequently making a point about the intrinsic heteroglossia of all language. Multifarious cultural, social, and historical influences stratify the utterances he makes; he is, to some extent at least, a cultural construct, and of his time: just as he implies Jesus and his words, as they come to us in the written Gospels, are similarly cultural constructs. The first stanza functions to strike a skeptical chord, concerning Christian tradition, from the outset. The issue at stake, however, is about far more than 13

Charles Guignebert, Jesus, trans. S.H. Hooke, New York: University Books, 1956, 528-36.

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something being lost in translation. We are led on to what Henry perceives as the dubiety of Christian doctrine, based as it is on this cultural distortion of Christ’s life and teaching. What sounds like a very clumsily conceived word association game (“Where’s the bread?” as in “Where’s the Bread of Life?” or “Christ”) prompts a mock parable in the form of a baking metaphor in the second stanza. This life of a loaf of bread, from the sowing of the seed through to the eating, functions as a parodic conflation of the three seed parables in the fourth chapter of Mark, the “Second Gospel”. In the Marcan parables, Jesus illustrates how the Kingdom of God will flourish through his death and resurrection, and how the Word will implant itself in the hearts of his followers. However, the Dream Song parable demonstrates how a new religion, Christianity, has developed as a result of the cultural context that Jesus’ legacy found itself in after his death. Berryman derives the idea of this mock parable entirely from Guignebert’s account of the development of Christianity as it broke from Judaism. To Guignebert, the doctrine of the Resurrection is important from the historical point of view, but only “in so far as it concerns the foundation, development and expansion of the Christian religion”: By means of that belief [in the Resurrection], faith in Jesus and in his mission became the fundamental element of a new religion, which, after separating from, became the opponent of Judaism, and set out to conquer the world. It also rendered Christianity a favourable soil for syncretistic influences, by virtue of which the Jewish Messiah, unintelligible and uninteresting to the Greeks, became the Lord, the Saviour, the Son of God, the supreme Master of the Universe, before whom the whole creation bends the knee. The ground was prepared for it throughout the oriental world by the ancient myth of the dying and rising God.14

Berryman draws his parable directly from Guignebert’s own subversion of Jesus’ seed parables. The idea of the Resurrection is culturally favorable to the Greeks, and so the implantation of Jesus’ messianic legacy in Greek soil, once belief in the Resurrection has gained ground, enables a new religion to flourish. Furthermore, what Henry refers to as the “eating” of the risen God, that is the celebration of the Eucharist, is also, according to Guignebert, a specifically Greek 14

Guignebert, Jesus, 536.

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innovation. The French scholar states that “the Eucharist as a sacrament of communion with the Lord is wholly foreign to Jesus’ thought”, and, by interpreting the Last Supper as an instituting of the Eucharist, we “attribute to Jesus a concern with and a knowledge of things only shared by the Greek environment of Paul’s time and our conservative critics”.15 The perplexed pause between “occurs” and “eating” reflects how unpalatable Henry finds the relating of this doctrine to the authentic historical Jesus. “He said so” consequently becomes an extremely ironic and facetious assertion; it is the phony Greek Christ of the written Gospels who has initiated this doctrine. What Henry, as an “imaginary Jew”, finds “troublesome” is the way that this “Jewish Prophet” has become divorced from the intentions of his message, through the formation of a new Hellenistic religion. The third stanza depicts how the new faith has become what Guignebert describes as “the opponent of Judaism”. The Macbeth allusion illustrates the involuntary Judas-complex that Henry experiences on behalf of the Jewish race. Certain important questions arise from Shakespeare’s play: did Macbeth fulfill the witches’ prophecy of his own free will by slaying Duncan? Or was it predestined that he would perform this same act of murder, in the same manner, at the very same time, therefore being incapable of choosing otherwise? This is the anxiety of Macbeth himself: he is uncertain as to whether the “air-drawn dagger” is real or a manifestation of his evil intent.16 The Dream Song also parallels the predicament of Macbeth with that of the Jews, and their fateful place in God’s plan. “The Jews”, as the chosen people, were, according to the New Testament, prophesized to reject their Messiah and betray him into the hands of sinners, assisting the Roman authorities in his downfall. The question of free will is especially pertinent in the case of Judas: was he created from the outset with the propensity to betray his Creator? Could he really have chosen not to betray Christ? Many, throughout history, have misinterpreted the New Testament as espousing the guilt as collective on behalf of the whole Jewish race, especially with regard to the blood-curse of Matthew’s Gospel: another reason why Henry, as an “imaginary Jew”, also feels implicated. 17 15

Ibid., 365, 448. See William Shakespeare, Macbeth, II.i.33-51 and III.iv.62. 17 “And all the people answered, His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27: 25). 16

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In Dream Song 48 Berryman poetically visualizes certain problems raised by his readings of New Testament criticism, to the point here of dramatizing a passage from one of his favorite critic’s commentaries. The Song also portrays the implications for his own individual faith, and the anxious consideration of his response. The final line exemplifies his ambivalent attitude towards Christ and Christianity at the time of the Song’s composition in 1959.18 The accented stress on the word “ought” implies an inclination to flee this “troublesome” version of Christ, but also suggests “I óught to get going, but something makes me stay”. The poet is filled with profound doubts about the Christian faith, justified, as he sees it, by the grave problems historical criticism seems to raise. However, he is still greatly intrigued by the mystery of Christ; he feels sufficiently compelled to pursue the matter further and discover the truth behind Christianity’s origins. In The Dream Songs, then, Berryman successfully executes poetically what he had so far failed to achieve in a more conventional scholarly prose format. One of the reasons why his “Life of Christ” project had not progressed was that he was unsure of the nature and direction of the work he was undertaking. The first three versions he attempted took the form of critical commentaries, or annotated harmonies, of the Gospels. Yet, if, as Berryman himself admitted, the work would exhibit little in the way of originality and learning, then there was ultimately little point behind the exercise, beyond that of his own indulgence. Furthermore, his limited, and slightly eccentric, field of sources would result in a summary of the subject that would be of questionable reliability, and usefulness, for newcomers to life of Christ scholarship. He attempts a new critical work again in January 1970; it follows a similar format to the 1958 version, and little progress is made. By the time he earnestly takes up his “Life of Christ” again in 1971, shortly after his religious conversion, he realizes he has the makings of a stylistic format capable of transforming the Christ project into a highly effective artistic one, through the use of a persona well-established in his poetry. The persona of Henry had enabled him to incorporate sometimes complex theological inquiry into dramatic, often humorous, verse. After Henry,

18

Dated in John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980, 158.

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the poetic persona becomes the figure of the poet himself in Love & Fame, and it is one that is easily transferable to prose. The final version of Berryman’s “Life of Christ”, the one on which he made most headway, is a very different kind of book to that which was originally planned in the 1950s. Now, tentatively titled “The Life of Jesus Christ: (on earth) so far as we have record of it”, its intended purpose was transformed from being a useful study aid for the more discerning reader, to what he refers to as an “aid to meditation”. 19 The two complete chapters reveal the new, exciting and highly original direction the work had taken. It is to be relatively short and concise; the chapters each span only three pages, although, as plans indicate, the lavish work will include maps and original illustrations. The finished chapters are an enthralling culmination of his eighteen years of research, as well as his quest for a suitable prose vehicle for it. They contain some features characteristic of the earlier versions, such as a “harmony” of the Gospel materials, and “eccentric commentary” assimilating the work of his favorite critics, but these have been integrated into a distinctly literary framework. Under the title of the typescript Berryman adds the sub-heading: “collected for Martha at age 8 by her father (age 56), and high time.” The work does indeed take the format of the author narrating the Gospel story to his young daughter. The first chapter exploits this literary device to the full; it is a lively paced narrative, integrating synopsis, eccentric commentary, and asides to Martha, as the opening extract demonstrates: In ancient Jewish story – and perhaps in truth – the Lord God Yahweh (known too as Elohim and Shaddai) created the Sun and the Moon and the Earth, its seas and its lands, and then created a Garden eastward of Eden (over here is your map, honey) where He made the first man, Adam, and the first woman Eve. The first thing they did was sin.20

Beginning naturally with Creation, he achieves the remarkable feat of delivering a concise and lively summary of the Hebrew Bible, portraying the pre-Christian history of God’s revelation of Himself to mankind, in just three pages. The synopsis is frequently interspersed with this kind of parenthesized commentary and directions addressed to Martha as narratee. Some of this commentary, addressing complex 19 20

1971 draft Preface to “Life of Christ”, JBP. “The Life of Jesus Christ”, Chapter 1, typescript, JBP.

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historical problems, is wildly inappropriate for even the most precocious eight-year old, and it is obvious that the narratee is above all a literary device. The implied reader is his regular readership that is in tune with the Berryman persona and forgiving of, or indifferent to, what he refers to in the preface as his “magpie scholarship”. The extra-diegetic asides to Martha create an atmosphere of homeliness in the proceedings, enabling Berryman to overcome the selfconsciousness of producing a pseudo-scholarly work that “pretends to no original learning”.21 Poetry is also incorporated in the same illustrative manner: he uses a quotation from Robert Lowell’s poem “Leviathan”, for example, first published in Land of Unlikeness (1944), when summarizing the story of Cain and Abel: The Lord preferred to his offering of sacrifice, the fruit of the ground, the offering of his brother Abel, the firstlings of his flock; so Cain killed Abel. What this means is that the Jewish tribesmen were developing, against old-fashioned resistance, from a nomadic pastoral existence to a settled agricultural existence: as a friend of Daddy’s put the matter 30 years ago, When the ruined farmer beat out Abel’s brains Our Father laid great cities on his soul.22

As this extract shows, the higher-narrative level between father and daughter enables him to combine synopsis and commentary, as well as poetic emphasis and illustration. It is a highly effective means of assimilating his scholarly interest and attention to detail into an accessible and enjoyable retelling of the story. Altogether it is a very personalized, not to mention artistic, interpretation of the historical problem of Christ. Unfortunately, as unfinished as the work is, the most important aspect of the study – Berryman’s assessment of the actual person of Christ and his teaching – is never reached. His re-acquaintance with the Christ of faith is to be found in the devotional poems of the posthumously published collection Delusions, Etc., where, in contrast to The Dream Songs, God and Jesus do become synonymous. In 21

1971 Preface, manuscript, JBP. “Life of Christ”, Chapter 1, typescript, JBP. See also Robert Lowell, “Leviathan”, Collected Poems, eds, Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 894.

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“Vespers”, for instance, he muses: “Maybe it’s not God’s voice / only Christ’s only. (But our Lord is our Lord. / No vent there.)” (CP 233). One can only speculate on how this new insight would have influenced his quest for the “historical Jesus”. The final extant remnants of this work in progress seem to have been written during the summer of 1971, months before the poet’s death. The work that, after so many years of false starts, eventually showed so much promise, now exists as a mere glimpse of what it might have been. Fortunately, however, we do have a number of published and unpublished poems on the subject, which in many ways already embody the artistic expression of the Christ preoccupation for which Berryman so long searched, and which continues to stimulate and reward research on his remarkable poetry.

“WE WRITE VERSE WITH OUR EARS”: BERRYMAN’S MUSIC

MARIA JOHNSTON

Over the past three decades much of the criticism on John Berryman’s poetry has tended to focus primarily on biographical details, the poet’s troubled childhood, his mental health, alcoholism, depression and the tragic circumstances of his death. Berryman, along with Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, is regarded as one of the most outstanding figures of the “Middle Generation” of twentieth-century American poets, but the label of “Confessional” poet was one that Berryman himself held “with rage and contempt”. 1 Here instead was a poet consummately dedicated to the craft of poetry, always attentive to the possibilities of language, serving his apprenticeship under W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden and committing himself to a life of learning as he set about schooling himself to become a poet of remarkable technical mastery. Berryman viewed this process of apprenticeship as integral to the development of all artists, as he declared in an interview with William Heyen when he drew an insightful comparison between the composition of the sister arts of poetry and music: I believe in apprenticeship. Suppose I wanted to be a composer and write piano concertos. I don’t buy some music paper and sit down. I don’t know what an oboe can do! Isn’t that so? Okay. We serve an apprenticeship.2

1 Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry”, in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 21. 2 William Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir and an Interview”, Ohio Review, XV/2 (Winter 1974), 59.

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Although no sustained examination of the technical aspects of Berryman’s poetry exists – the breadth of his poetic resource is often overlooked – some critics have made passing mention to the musical nature of the work. Edward Mendelson, for example, has stated how the Dream Songs “are always patterned and often musical”, while Douglas Dunn has noted Berryman’s “use of musical-sounding verse”.3 Of the early, central influence of Yeats and Auden, Michael Dennis Browne – in an essay on Berryman’s work that enthuses over the “extraordinary art of these poems” and their “authority of music” – sees Berryman’s poetic mentors as masters of a similar “combination of passionate personal utterance and formal memorable music”. 4 Browne was first “struck” by the “sheer music” of Berryman’s poems at a reading Berryman gave in 1971: He read them slowly – more slowly at times than I would have thought possible – but there were also variations within this slowness, sudden bursts and accelerations, sudden drastic increases in volume. And the poems came over to the audience with an extraordinary combination of authority and intimacy – a kind of lyrical power that I had not heard in spoken poetry before.5

According to Browne, Berryman was wholly alert to the aural subtleties of language, the different registers of the human voice, the phonological effects and intricate patterns that shape poetry and the music of the line in verse. Heyen, indeed, has recalled that Berryman “was always noting lines, sounding out lines”.6 When asked in an interview about the process of beginning a poem, Berryman replied, “you get going with a pencil, and rhymes emerge and sentences emerge”.7 The attention to sound and form was, in other words, integral from the very start. In his introduction “Note on Poetry” in Five Young American Poets (1940), 3 Edward Mendelson, “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs”, in John Berryman, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1989, 53-69; 54, and Douglas Dunn, “Gaiety & Lamentation: The Defeat of John Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding, 141. 4 Michael Dennis Browne, “Henry Fermenting: Debts to The Dream Songs”, Ohio Review, XV/2 (Winter 1974), 77. 5 Ibid., 76. 6 Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir …”, 48. 7 John Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 13.

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Berryman testifies to the importance of technique in his poetry: “One of the reasons for writing verse is delight in craftsmanship – rarely for its own sake, mainly as it seizes and makes visible its subject. Versification, rime, stanza, form, trope, are the tools” (CP 287). He elucidates his own technique in detail referring to his poem “On the London Train”, again displaying a deep preoccupation with the way in which meaning is enacted through the sound and structure of the verse: In the third stanza, for example, occurs the first serious conflict between syntax and verse-form: “most / Embarrassing” and “this side / Satisfaction” are split in successive lines. The resulting impression of strain, torsion is useful to the subject. (CP 286)

As he puts it in an account of the evolution of his early pieces “Winter Landscape” and “The Ball Poem”, where he eschews secondary details in order to focus more clearly on the craft of the poem: “Art is technical”.8 On Yeats’ “A Prayer for Old Age”, Berryman wrote to his mother: “Like most of his poems it should be read aloud a hundred times sometimes only after weeks of reading have I understood an intonation.”9 That Berryman placed great emphasis on the sound of poetry is also apparent from his critical writings. “Let us listen to this music” he insists in his essay on Ezra Pound’s poetry for, he writes, “Behind this mastery lies his ear.” Here he also draws attention to what he calls “the equivalents for musical form, and the versification” of Pound’s work.10 Pound, of course, was also a music critic, theorist and a composer who wrote prolifically on the subject and used the term “melopoeia” to describe poetry “wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.”11 This definition applies very much to The Dream Songs also. In his essay on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Berryman meticulously notes “the quality of 8

Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976, 327. 9 Berryman in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to his Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988, 73. 10 Berryman, “The Poetry of Ezra Pound”, Partisan Review, XVI/4 (April 1949), 38889. 11 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, London: Faber and Faber, 1954, 25.

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the sound” of the play as he analyses the aural devices in the couplet “By the pricking of my thumb / Something wicked this way comes” in terms of rhyme, alliteration and assonance: “The word ‘wicked’ keeps the sound of ‘pricking’ going, the reader’s experience of the pricking of the witch’s thumb intensifies.” Ever conscious of the importance of sound structure in generating deeper levels of meaning, Berryman suggests that: “This play is certainly about Good and Evil, and we learn so partly from the aural organization of this couplet.”12 As T.S. Eliot puts it “The music of poetry is not something that exists apart from the meaning”. 13 Furthermore, referring to The Merchant of Venice in his essay “All’s Well”, Berryman describes the lovers Jessica and Lorenzo as “conversing in music”;14 the pure aural harmonies of Shakespeare’s love poetry could hardly be rendered better. As a poet who was deeply attentive to the particular sound effects of poetic language, then, it is no surprise, for example, to find Berryman recognizing, in an interview, that his Dream Song 147 “sounds like Troilus and Cressida”.15 His praise of other works is often given in musical terms as, for example, when he says of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that “Little, until the close, is impressive in itself, but much, when read in the poem and especially the close, affects me like some of the late, great songs in Winterreise and above all ‘Leiermann’”.16 Dylan Thomas is lauded for his inventive energy in the area of technique as Berryman lists his use of “[a]lliteration, internal rhyme, refrain and repetition” as the devices that go towards his making of a “language seen freshly, a new language”17 while Robert Lowell, on the other hand, is criticized as one whose “ear is not infallible”.18 Music was without doubt one of Berryman’s greatest pleasures. John Haffenden’s biography of the poet describes him “playing the Kreutzer sonata over and over again” as well as the music of “Bach, 12

John Berryman, “Notes on Macbeth”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 57. T.S .Eliot, “The Music of Poetry”, in On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 29. 14 Berryman, “All’s Well”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed. John Haffenden, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 81. 15 Stitt, “The Art of Poetry”, 22. 16 Berryman, “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 241. 17 Berryman, “The Loud Hill of Wales”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 282. 18 Berryman, “Robert Lowell and Others”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 291. 13

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Sibelius, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky”, and Haffenden writes that Berryman, throughout his life, “grew fiercely percipient about music”. As a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s he wrote the lyrics for a “Cradle Song” composed by Irish composer Brian Boydell.19 In an account describing Berryman’s first meeting with Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell witnessed how Berryman “jarred the evening by playing his own favourite recordings” on a gramophone that had belonged to the renowned musicologist Bernard Haggin, and of whom both Jarrell and Berryman were “disciples”. 20 (This same prized gramophone is later hailed in Dream Song 204.) Berryman was also an ardent fan of blues music, naming Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Teddy Grace as his favorite singers in this genre. Furthermore, his story “The Imaginary Jew” shows his sensitive understanding to the way music works on the senses and the memory as he summons Haydn’s “London Symphony”: One night when excited I dropped the pickup, creating a series of knocks at the beginning of the last movement where the oboe joins the strings which still, when I hear them, bring up for me my low dark long damp room and I feel the dew of heat and smell the rented upholstery.21

Berryman’s poems constantly attest to his passion for music. The sequence of Berryman’s Sonnets contains rapturous references to the strains of Bach, Schubert, Mozart and Monteverdi as the poet’s beloved appears in Sonnet 37, “flat on the bare floor riveted to Bach”, while Sonnet 117 wonderfully sings of how “Supine on the floor lay Lise / listening to Schubert grievous and sublime” (CP 129; 89). Dream Song 204 begins: Henry, weak at keyboard music, leanèd on the slow movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A & the mysterious final soundings of Beethoven’s 109-10-11 & the Diabelli Variations.

19

John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 88. 20 Robert Lowell, “For John Berryman: 1914-1972”, in Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, 112. 21 John Berryman, “The Imaginary Jew”, reprinted in Recovery, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, 243.

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And so, his late poem “Beethoven Triumphant” from Delusions, Etc. (1972) is an extended homage to the great composer, across twenty-seven separate stanzas of varying lengths. The number of stanzas corresponds with the number of years Beethoven enjoyed before his deafness set in, so the poem’s very formal structure speaks explicitly of its aural concerns. Indeed, that Berryman often had Beethoven in particular in mind is clear from his writings, where analogies frequently point to the great composer, as illustrated from his observation that “Shakespeare used as few stage directions as Beethoven used emotional directions” in an essay entitled “Pathos and Dream”.22 Also, Berryman hoped that his proposed study Shakespeare’s Identity would ultimately be comparable to “J.W.N. Sullivan’s book on Beethoven’s ‘spiritual development’”. 23 In “Beethoven Triumphant”, however, he engages with his cherished “master” in a most intimate way, mixing the quotidian with the mythological, the contemporary with the historical, as he weaves together pieces of Beethoven’s biography – letters, anecdotes, reportage – with his own thoughts and emotional responses to the music, paying tribute to the composer’s life and work. Constantly shifting, the active voice alternates restlessly between directly addressing and conversing with the composer (“Koussevitzky will make it, Master; lie back down” [CP 238]), or questioning – “What stayed your chosen instrument?” (CP 239) – and speaking of the composer with sure authority in the third person: “One time his landlord tipped a hat to him; / Beethoven moved” (CP 237). He also allows the composer’s own words to speak: “You grumbled: ‘Religion and Figured Bass are closed concepts. / Don’t argue’” (CP 239). Berryman explores Beethoven in his stark humanity as well as exalting his artistic powers, laying bare Beethoven’s mode of composition as he corrects Betty von Arnim’s claims about the composer’s “fluency”: “Fact is, he stumbled at the start / and in the sequence, stumbled in the middle, // often unsure at the end – ” (CP 238). In this way Berryman obliterates the boundaries that exist between music and words, fact and fictions, between past and present, life and death. Beethoven’s music is brought to life through the music of Berryman’s words. Here the poet describes the “Heiligerdankgesang”: 22 23

Berryman, “Pathos and Dream”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 53. Ibid., Introduction, lxi.

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“One chord thrusts, as it must // find allies, foes, resolve, in subdued crescendo” (CP 239). Sound generates sense here: the main sounds of “one chord thrusts” are born out of the preceding word “orchestra” while the rhyme on the accented “thrusts” and “must” provides the momentum for the sustained sound of the “chord” itself to reach across the stanza break. The volume and aural intensity of the language rises to convey the chord itself crescendo-ing, progressing in stages towards resolution, as it moves through the bright assonance of “find allies” – each stage underscored by the throbbing pentameter and the emphatic pauses provided by the commas, until finally the chord itself resolves and the “o” of “foes” resolves too, finding its echo at last in the resolved “crescendo”. The aural gestures work effectively from the very beginning, striking from the poem’s opening lines with their compelling, fanfare-like quality: “Dooms menace from tumults. Who’s immune / among our mightier of headed men?” (CP 236). Here the internal rhyme, slant rhymes and the repeated full, mouthy “m” and sibilant “s” sound their sensual music, setting the poem up as a solemn, timeless hymn of praise as the arresting caesura after “tumult” provides the pause after the grand opening statement and the strong, momentous beat coupled with the enjambment carries the music of the line as it surges towards its rhetorical question “Who’s immune?” in this true ode. The florid archaic diction and syntax also add to this aural effect. Berryman makes of us all a rapt audience but only “If we take our head in our ears and listen / Ears! Ears!” (CP 240). The sheer impact of Beethoven’s music is almost physical, he suggests: I’m hard to you, odd nights. I bulge my brain, my shut chest already suffers, – so I play blues and Haydn whom you – both the which touch but they don’t ache me. (CP 239)

Actual music sounds also as Beethoven’s greatest works – the fourth Piano Concerto, Diabelli Variations, the B Flat Major Quartet, the Eighth Symphony, the Appassionata Sonata, the “Heiligerdankgesang” from the A Minor Quartet – are summoned and come alive in the inner ear, their strains filling the air as they are worked into the sound texture of the poem on a purely musical level: My unpretending love’s the B flat major By the old Budapest done. Schnabel did record

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Maria Johnston The Diabelli varia. I can’t get a copy. Then there’s Casals I have, 101, both parts. (CP 237)

The lives of the composer and poet are connected then in a tactile, spiritual way by the same music. The composer’s presence is complete, the effects of his masterful music all-pervasive as Berryman concludes with a loud, triumphant, ecstatic roar: “You’re all over my wall! // You march and chant around here! I hear your thighs” (CP 242). This same intense attentiveness to music and to the music of poetry is apparent in The Dream Songs, itself a highly musical arrangement of 385 songs. As Berryman revealed in an interview, The Dream Songs has a very particular structure and sound: “Yes, well the stanza is complicated. It goes 5-5-3-5-5-3, 5-5-3-5-5-3, 5-5-3-5-5-3 – that’s the business – and it’s variously rhymed, and often it has no rhyme at all, but it sounds as if it rhymed.”24 Modeled on Whitman’s epic “Song of Myself” – a work which Berryman regarded to be “as deeply influenced by music as Eliot’s poems are”25 and which he described in musical terms, referring to its “movements” rather than its sections – many individual Dream Songs are sung by the main character in the poem, Henry. As he said of the poem in the same interview, “its plot is the personality of Henry as he moves on in the world”26 and the movement of the poem is directed through the truly dynamic and diverse music of the multifarious Henry. The poem is polyvocal, pronoun shifts creating a polyphony of voices and changes of register and key, as Henry talks both to us and himself. He refers to himself in the first, second and third persons and he quotes the conversations and writings of others. He converses with an unnamed character or interlocutor present in the text who refers to Henry as “Mr. Bones” and frequently interrupts the flow of the lyric to comment, question or advise in the style of the minstrel show. There is a vast weave of allusions to other writers and thinkers throughout the poem, so that the text of The Dream Songs in places may be read like a palimpsest that contains past and present voices and quotations woven together.

24

Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, 12. Berryman, “ ‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 233. 26 Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, 7. 25

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In an examination of Berryman’s notes and drafts for The Dream Songs Ernest J. Smith has attested to how the poet’s “attention to the concerns of rhythm and rhyme was clearly among [his] concerns as he wrote and revised Dream Songs”27 and of how: Among the aspects of style and technique, much of the notation on the Songs has to do with his concern over the poem’s diction, especially the problem of diction in relation to rhythm. At one point Berryman undertook a very detailed line-by-line analysis of the “jolly old man” Song …. His full-page critique identifies the number of beats in each line, the wide range of metrical feet occurring in each, and then offers a description of the type of diction employed in each line ….28

Throughout his long poem Berryman delights in words themselves, employing different languages, rare and obsolete words, newly-coined words. He is always alert to the specifics of punctuation, verbal nuance and colour, syntactical movement, and of the particular sounds and rhythms of words as they are brought together and set in arrangements that create compelling harmonies or dissonances. Sounds echo throughout individual Songs and throughout the work as a whole, unifying the structure of the work as motifs and aural harmonies, forging aural links. These words and themes constantly modulate to create a continually varying accumulation of meaning through sound across time. An examination of 77 Dream Songs alone shows this to be true with the word “away” – which is first intoned in the first song – appearing eleven times across Songs one to seventyseven. Words linked through rhyme such as “years”, “tears”, “hears”, and “ears” sound thirty-five times in the first seventy-seven Songs. Certain words accumulate a rich resonance as leitmotifs as the work progresses. The word “fall” with its proliferation of meanings is a pivotal motif in The Dream Songs, first appearing in Dream Song 1 as “fell”, referring, on one level, to the Fall into a world of sin that comes with birth. In his interview with Heyen, Berryman spoke of this same “great loss, from the controlled environment of the womb”.29 It recurs in a more comical setting in Dream Song 4 as Henry, eyeing a beautiful girl in a restaurant, must restrain himself from “falling at her 27

Ernest J Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’ for The Dream Songs and an Instance of Revision”, Journal of Modern Literature, XXIII/3-4 (Summer 2000), 436. 28 Ibid., 433. 29 Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir …”, 60.

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little feet”. It then modulates into the ominous “landfall” in the dark Song 12, then again in Song 33, which describes in archaic diction a death from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, where Cleitus must “fall to the spear-ax ah” – a motif further developed in Song 384 where Henry, at his father’s grave, wishes to “ax the casket open”. Dream Song 77 employs the noun “Fall” repeatedly as “Henry likes Fall. / Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll / for ever. Impenitent Henry”. Song 385 sounds the word “Fall” in its multiple senses, as: “Fall is grievy, brisk. Tears behind the eyes / almost fall. Fall comes to us as a prize / to rouse us toward our fate.” Henry laments his own mortality and the passing of generations. Similarly, the word “sea”, which again is introduced in the first Dream Song, carries a strong resonance throughout the poem, sounding in 35 of the 385 songs. Dream Song 76, “Henry’s Confession”, reveals it as part of the motif of death that permeates The Dream Songs, particularly the suicide of the father, one “who dared so long agone leave me. / A bullet on a concrete stoop / close by a smothering sea.” The word “rose” too appears in sixteen of the Songs, with Dream Song 77 proclaiming: “Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world.” Later however in Dream Song 145 the verb modulates to become laden with tragic tones as Henry again laments the suicide of his father who “rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window / and did what was needed”. The sound texture is one of echo and reverberation as particular words are carried across the entire work. The musical quality of The Dream Songs then is compelling indeed and is most strongly attested to by the existence of settings of the poem to music by modern day composers who have been influenced and inspired by Berryman’s poetry. The setting of poetry has always been a contentious practice for composers and poets alike. If done effectively, however, the composer will bring out something of the essential music of the poetry in the process. Steve Reich praises Luciano Berio’s Circles – a setting of poems by e.e cummings – as, “an ear and mind opener,” for: Here was an Italian who clearly understood that cummings’s poetry was largely “about” the individual syllables of which it was made. The first syllable of the first word “stinging” was separated into a very long held ‘ssss’ followed by ‘ting’ and finally ‘ing’ by the soprano whose sibilance on ‘ssss’ was answered by two sandpaper blocks rubbed together by a percussionist. The marriage of instrumental

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timbre with syllabic timbre went exactly to the heart of cummings’s poetry. It was a lesson in text setting without need of a classroom.30

In his study of the art of setting poetry to music, the composer Joseph Coroniti discusses his own setting of four of Berryman’s Dream Songs. From his own workings with the Songs, Coroniti came to realize how the rhythmic potency of Berryman’s work is a force that cannot be sacrificed for other concerns: “To try to follow exactly the tergiversations of Berryman’s mind in one of the Dream Songs, while neglecting his rhythms, is to invite folly.”31 As Coroniti recognizes, “There’s always something happening in terms of sound – ‘music’ – in these songs”, so much so, indeed, that as a composer Coroniti speaks of how “the poems, so rich in their own aural energy, require that I leave them intact”.32 This awareness brings him to see that his own composition must function only as a “re-harmonization” of Berryman’s words, thus enabling him to retain the integrity of the rhythmic workings of The Dream Songs. So he eschews overt programmatic and imitative devices, elucidating how his setting of Dream Song 76 deliberately employs disconnected musical shifts to underscore what he sees as the “obvious lack of any real communication between Henry and his friend”.33 His other concern here is with what Pound termed the poem’s Great Bass and so his setting of Dream Song 14 uses a repeated semi-quaver figure on marimba to capture this effect. 34 Another contemporary composer, Eric Chasalow, has set five Dream Songs (1, 48, 14, 22, 77 – in this order) to music in his work Dream Songs (2001). This work provides a point of entry into Berryman’s work, opening up the Songs to their musical possibilities and bringing out their aural effects in extremely interesting and stimulating ways. Chasalow has spoken of Elliott Carter and John Cage as important mentors and his work reflects these influences in terms of his professed attention to the manipulation of timbre, 30

Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000, ed. Paul Hillier, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 203. 31 Joseph Coroniti, Poetry as Text in Twentieth-Century Vocal Music: From Stravinsky to Reich, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, 44. 32 Ibid., 87. 33 Ibid., 89. 34 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer, London: Faber and Faber, 1978, 475.

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complex layering, rhythmic energy – heavily influenced by a lifetime’s listening to be-bop and jazz – and a preoccupation regarding “issues of processing elements of other musics and of history and musical memory”. 35 His work, like Berryman’s, “often includes literal quotations from older composers” to add “a particular resonance of memory to the music” and his Dream Songs contains musical allusions to Bach, Hector Berlioz and, by extension, Alban Berg. 36 Chasalow’s Dream Songs betrays a keen understanding of Berryman’s workings with language and the myriad voices of Henry. Scored for orchestra and tape, this non-tonal work is in five movements which move fluidly into each other. In order to remain true to the varying speech rhythms of Henry’s words the work is polymetrical. Chasalow employs a variable time signature and each movement also demands a change of tempo. This is entirely fitting as Berryman’s Dream Songs are after all very much concerned with the passing of time: as Berryman said, “Henry gains ten years”37 and even dies in Book IV of the long poem and then comes back to life in Book V. Moreover, in his notes for The Dream Songs Berryman considered the “unity of the year (seasons, but dreamlike)”38 as a structuring device for the poem. The Dream Songs, being a performance in time, embodies its own temporality and Chasalow too, describing his setting, has spoken of “the way that the sounds shape our sense of time passing, through phasing and the like, that carries the musical idea”.39 Chasalow’s Dream Songs brings out the music of Berryman’s words in terms of their sound and colour – the manipulations of the aural effects of syntax, diction, rhyme, tone and rhythm employed by the poet – as a brief examination of the first movement of Dream Songs will illustrate. Chasalow’s setting has the text of The Dream Songs on a tape recording that is played back in performance, sung by a tenor and 35

See Eric Chasalow, “Left to His Own Devices”, available online at: http://www.behindthebeat.net/genre.asp?g=198&ar=334#a334 (accessed 4 November 2005). 36 See Eric Chasalow, “Boston Connection: Programme Notes”, available online at: http://www.bmop.org/season/program_notes.aspx?cid=41&from=concert (accessed 4 November 2005). 37 Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, 7. 38 Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’ …”, 430. 39 This and all subsequent quotes by Eric Chasalow are from “Art of the States: Dream Songs”, available online at: http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/piece.pl?pid=226 (accessed 4 November 2005).

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variously spoken or sung by layers of other voices – at times at odds with each other, at other times harmonizing each other – often electronically manipulated and distorted to bring out the strange polyvocal quality of the poem and the isolation of the speaker from the world. As Chasalow explains: “this creates a disembodied voice that puts a distance between the words and the audience and maintains an illusion of the kind of internal world that the poem inhabits.” The fourth movement, a setting of Dream Song 22, which begins “I am the little man who smokes and smokes / I am the girl who does know better but”, is based on a canon, the pitch of which rises a tone as it repeats itself, and increasing its intensity as layers of voices, male and female, spoken and sung, build to a schizophrenic climax. The first movement, a setting of Dream Song 1, has the text enter after an intense frenetic opening by the full orchestral forces with tape. Made up of falling glissandi, percussive chimes, chromatic figures, rising and falling intervals, wild leaps upwards, sustained eerie harmonics and soft, plaintive gestures followed by abrupt bursts of rapidly ascending triplets and dotted semi-quavers on strings, woodwind and brass that build to a crescendo, the texture constantly shifts dramatically, encompassing – as Berryman’s poem does – extremes of registers, rhythms and dynamics and a whole array of timbres. The text then enters falteringly on tape, with a stuttered, spoken “Huffy Henry” gradually giving way to the orchestral forces as they intervene with a full, loud, accented passage of syncopated quavers, wild leaps downwards and glissandi. This then drops downwards and away as the violas resume a repeated semi-quaver figure on G, and the text then begins again, this time sung by the tenor. The caesura in the first line “Huffy Henry hid the day” is emphasized by a break for three beats in the vocal line during which the orchestra plays fortissimo ascending and descending semi-quaver sextuplets that come to an end as the vocal line resumes. The vocal line is fractured with rests, thus capturing the rhythms of the voice and its erratic syntax in Berryman’s text. Longer rests function as Berryman’s commas, dashes and stops. The stressed syllables of the meter always fall on the strong beat of the bar and the rhythm and phrasing meticulously match Henry’s speech as a variable time signature is employed throughout and the notation consists of short syncopated quavers, semi-quavers in triplets and quintuplets interspersed with brief rests as follows:

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The heightened emotion and repetition of “It was the thought that they thought / they could do it” of lines 4-5 of the same Dream Song are captured by the creation of a jerky, syncopated chromatic ascending and descending line which ends with an interval of an intervallic leap to octave Fs on the frenzied “away” as the orchestra loses restraint and explodes into forte sextuplets. The final line of the stanza is divided between sung and spoken voices. After a five-bar rest to separate the stanzas the vocal line resumes, breaking into a lyrical melody for “All the world like a woolen lover” which moves from a dark minor to a bright major sonority on “like a woolen lover”. The usually jagged rhythm here becomes lyrical and whole as the melody moves expressively by step on long, joined minims and crotchets to reflect the meaning of the words:

This soon breaks down, however, for “once did seem on Henry’s side”, as the dark tonality resumes accompanied by wide leaps and syncopated rhythms that sound the growing sense of panic, thereby capturing the inflections and contours of Henry’s manic utterances. This intensifies further on with the lines “Then came a departure. / Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought”, which are completely fractured as other voices intrude and the leaps between notes widen. Here also the oboe sounds a melody that will re-appear in one of the myriad voices in the fourth movement’s setting of Dream Song 22, entitled “Of 1826”. As the objective voice then enters with “I don’t know how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived” the line momentarily becomes less disjointed, proceeding by step until the word “pried” is sounded with a crescendo. The anguished “pried” is stretched into two syllables, divided between two long notes reaching from a B upwards to an E, mimetic of the enjambment that Berryman

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employs to signify Henry almost physically coming apart. Trumpets enter to sound a harsh accent to the word “survived”, the word appropriately drawn out as the syllables are broken up in a melismatic fashion that descends chromatically. The longer duration of both the words “pried” and “survived” also reinforces the rhyme that aurally links their meaning. After two bars’ rest the voice enters for the third and final stanza. Of this third stanza of Dream Song 1, Denis Donoghue has suggested that it is made up of “Three voices, two lines each, speaking in one stanza”. 40 Chasalow’s setting distinguishes three voices in different modes. “What he has now to say” is delivered in broken syncopated triplets which then move into an expressive line, rising and falling chromatically as the long vowels of “long”, “wonder” and “bear” are treated melismatically, each drawn out over three notes while “be” is held for almost a full bar and emphasized with an inverted B flat major chord in the tape and strings. The sound and structure then changes abruptly for “Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang” as multiple voices are electronically distorted, the line once again broken and more jagged. “All at the top” has the notes ascend to a high, precarious F on “top”, followed by a violent leap from a low E to a high E sharp on “sang” which is held for emphasis. The tone then changes again for the last two lines as the pitch drops back to the middle register. The notes turn chromatically around B flat, A, A flat and B natural, mimetic of the same “hard” wearing motion of the sea, this hardness enforced by the stressed syllables of “hard” and “land” while the words “strong sea”, linked by alliteration, are emphasized on strong crotchets and by an echoing turning figure on piano and violins that sounds a valedictory gesture. Furthermore, the long, emphatic duration of the word “sea” links it back to its homonym “see” from the previous line which is treated similarly. It ends with a mournful, broken line on “and empty grows every bed” with sparse instrumental accompaniment by strings and crotales in a despondent minor sonority. This exact attention to the subtleties of Berryman’s aural devices, motifs and turns of phrase is carried through the remaining movements. Much of the rhythmic and linguistic energy of The Dream Songs derives in part from Berryman’s absorption of the music of jazz and 40 Denis Donoghue, “Berryman’s Long Dream”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 153.

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blues, and it is therefore appropriate that contemporary composers such as Chasalow have found so much to play with in setting this work to music. Many others have, of course, picked up on the musical aspects of Berryman’s poetry: Dream Songs 40 and 68, for example, have been included in recent anthologies of jazz and blues poetry. Song 40 features in Blues Poems (2003), edited by Kevin Young, alongside a poem by David Wojahn titled “John Berryman Listening to Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues, January 1972”, which acknowledges, as it imitates Berryman’s idiosyncratic technique and subject matter, the poet’s keen musical interest. Dream Song 68, where Berryman pays homage to Bessie Smith, is included in The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1996) edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. This Dream Song, delivered in broken African-American dialect across one long sentence spanning thirteen lines and a shorter sentence of five lines as a coda, expressively moves and stalls, as Bessie Smith performs on stage – “Ms Bessie soundin [sic] good” – performing her “Yellow Dog Blues” and “Empty Bed Blues” with Pinetop and trombonist Charlie Green. The references to “Empty Bed Blues”, “Pinetop” and “trees” here link this Song back to the first Dream Song where “Once in a sycamore, I was glad, all at the top” and “empty grows every bed”, developing the leitmotifs of the loveless empty bed and the tree-top of creative fertility. Furthermore, Dream Song 2 (“Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance”) presents Henry as a minstrel and is dedicated to Daddy Rice, a nineteenth-century blackface performer who became famous for his song and dance act “Jumpin’ Jim Crow.”41 Dream Song 148 (“Glimmerings”) also includes lines addressed to Jelly Roll Morton. In Dream Song 40 Henry is described as “free, black & forty-one” singing the blues as Berryman here employs the stylistic features of blues songs. This piece is informed by the blues in a number of ways, technically and thematically. The six-line stanza here becomes reminiscent of blues poetry, particularly that of Langston Hughes, and the idiomatic, colloquial diction and tone attests to Berryman’s deep interest in this area. In true blues style the song centers on the self, opening with the troubled speaker’s cry of loneliness: “I scared a lonely. Never see my son.” The focus on the self looks set to move 41

See William Wasserstrom, “Cagey John: Berryman as Medicine Man”, in Berryman’s Understanding, 174-77, for a discussion of this Dream Song. Ernest J. Smith’s article also sheds light on how Berryman’s revisions enhanced the sound qualities of this Song.

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outward in the third and fourth lines as the speaker regards the world outside; however, this only serves to show the extreme contrast that exists between self and world, heightening all the more acutely the speaker’s isolation: “combers out to sea / know they’re goin somewhere but not me.” The use of rhyme here is mimetic of this failed progression as the subjective verb “see” of the opening statement becomes in the third line the external noun “sea” visually different on the surface but ultimately identical in sound as the “sea” and its associations only refer back to how the speaker can “never see”, offering no consolation. The focus then moves back onto the speaker with the repeated intensity of “Got a little poison, got a little gun”, the repetition underscoring the self-obsessed nature of the desperate speaker. Typical blues-like repetition is employed as both the first and last lines of the first stanza repeat the refrain, “I scared a lonely”. This is then repeated further in the first line of the second stanza, but here develops into “I scared a only one thing”. End rhyme and slant rhyme are omnipresent too, rhyme being an important stylistic element of blues songs. Asked in an interview about the influence of blues and minstrel shows on The Dream Songs, Berryman replied: “Heavy. I have been interested in the language of the blues and Negro dialects all my life, always been. Especially Bessie. I picked all of it up from records.” The interviewer then asked him who else he had listened to, in addition to Bessie Smith, and he replied “Victoria Spivey and Teddy Grace”, before breaking into song: He went away and never said goodbye. I could read his letters but I sure can’t read his mind. I thought he’s lovin me but he was leavin all the time. Now I know that my true love was blind.42

The lines that Berryman sung here are used as an epigraph to His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the title of which alludes to the well-known Fitzwilliam Virginal Book of music for harpsichord, wherein the songs “A Toy”, “Giles Farnaby’s Dreame”, and “His Rest” appear in succession.43 Musical references pervade The Dream Songs at every turn, in other words, and music is everywhere in Berryman’s poetry. 42

Plotz, et al, “An Interview with John Berryman”, 8. Edward Mendelson makes this connection in his essay “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 54-55. 43

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Berryman was a poet greatly influenced and informed by music, and he was deeply attentive to the musical possibilities of language. There is harmony and dissonance in his work, varying sounds and rhythms, a range of registers, tones and voices, combining in different ways to make a rich acoustic. His attentive detail to sound and the arrangement of sounds in structuring and enacting meaning and in shaping poetic form has for too long been neglected by critics who have instead concentrated mainly on extra-poetic concerns. While critics have often overlooked this crucial aspect of Berryman’s poetry, however, it has not escaped the attention of composers and musicians, many of whom have been drawn to the potent musical experience, and experiment, that is The Dream Songs. There can be no better testament to the art of the poetry than this. And so, the words of Dream Song 324 (“An Elegy for W.C.W., the lovely man”) are no less appropriate for Berryman himself: “Rest well, who worked so hard, who made a good sound / constantly, for so many years: / your high-jinks delighted the continents & our ears” – and they continue to do so.

JOHN BERRYMAN AND SHAKESPEAREAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY PETER MABER

The publication in 1999 of Berryman’s Shakespeare, John Haffenden’s superlative edition of Berryman’s protracted and extensive, often very brilliant critical work on Shakespeare, comprehensively unveiled a rich source for the development of Berryman studies. Though Berryman’s Shakespearean writings are worthy of consideration in their own right, their frequently investigative, biographically exploratory nature means that inevitably some of their hypotheses are dated; one of the strengths of Haffenden’s edition is its detailed Introduction which sets forth the current consensus on the issues of dating and authorship into which Berryman delved. What justifies even the more speculative aspects of Berryman’s work, however, is its creative importance to the author; indeed, it is some of the Shakespeare work’s very idiosyncrasies that most merit attention in the consideration of its artistic importance. With this eccentric yet enduring, fragmented yet cohesive body of work before us we are now in a position to assess the relations between Shakespeare’s works, Berryman’s Shakespearean scholarship, and the poet’s creative opus. As far back as his undergraduate days at Columbia University (1932-1936), Berryman was engaged in the serious study of Shakespeare, encouraged and inspired by his first mentor, the Shakespearean scholar Mark Van Doren. The early interest he had evinced in Shakespeare then intensified during his time at Clare College, Cambridge (1936-1938), where he pronounced that it was silly “ever to do anything but read Shakespeare – particularly when

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we’ve only one lifetime”. 1 Before long Berryman was writing about his obsession too: in his first year he produced a seventy-seven page essay on “The Character and Role of the Heroine in Shakespearean Comedy”, with which he failed to win the Harness Prize, and then in his second year he had more success, winning the prestigious Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship.2 Back in America in the 1940s Berryman tried to realize one of his Cambridge ambitions, working on a critical edition of King Lear. Over the course of his university career he lectured extensively on almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, once covering over twenty-two in a single course.3 However, Berryman’s greatest and longest-running Shakespearean enterprise was a critical biography, unfinished after twenty years of writings and research. Berryman began a study of Shakespeare’s life and work in 1951, and over the next two decades labored on and off at plans and proposals, drafts and prefaces for his “Shakespeare book”. The project underwent numerous evolutions, and through various contracts. In 1955 he signed an agreement for “Shakespeare: A Critical Biography”, and then in 1958 took on a commission for a “Shakespeare Handbook”; this, together with “Shakespeare’s Friend”, a work considering possible collaborations between Shakespeare and William Haughton, ran parallel to the larger-scale biography, but none of these ventures was ever completed. At the end of the 1960s the biography was still protean in its substance. Its changing names tell us much about its shifts in direction: by 1969 it had become the cautious and uncertain “Shakespeare: An Attempt at a Critical Biography”; in 1970 the work sounded far more confident, with the grandiose title, promising great revelations, “Shakespeare’s Identity”. In 1971 Berryman was describing his undertaking as “a large psychosocial critical biography,” and it was now to be called “Shakespeare’s Reality”, taking the model of the psychologist Erik H. Erikson’s

1

Quoted in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 85. 2 Berryman’s Oldham papers, which he kept, are in actual fact most peculiar as prizewinning essays. They skirt illogically over many plays, offer but the occasional aperçu, drop the odd critical reference, and protest repeatedly against the time constraints of the exams. See “College Papers”, John Berryman Papers (MSS43), Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis. 3 At the graduate summer school at Harvard University, 1954. See John Haffenden, Introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, lvii.

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Gandhi’s Truth.4 A strain that runs throughout the work’s developments is Berryman’s search to find Shakespeare the man; and it is this aspect of his long-running project, this particular personal quest, that reveals the true depth of his involvement. Berryman was no stranger to critical biography, or to the practice of reading texts not ostensibly autobiographical as biographical sources. The poet’s strong belief in the legitimacy of this practice is demonstrated in the wide range of authors whom he subjected to it. In his first, successful attempt at critical biography, Stephen Crane (1950), Berryman approached the author through psychoanalytical readings of his poems and stories, which culminated in the extraordinary chapter of Freudian insights, “The Color of This Soul”. In a 1949 essay on Ezra Pound, Berryman wrote of his former poetic master, W.B. Yeats, that it is Yeats himself who is “the subject of his own poetry” and, in the same essay, of Pound’s Cantos he remarks that “the persona increasingly adopted … is Pound himself”.5 The procedure is not to be denied by temporal constraints; of Marlowe, in 1952, he said “his sinister art ran exactly with his life”; and Berryman dismisses potential skeptics in a cutting aside, stating that “the existence of [correspondences] is denied only by very young persons or writers whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux”.6 It is taken for granted that most artists’ work interacts with their lives. This particular essay, “Marlowe’s Damnations”, casts further light on Berryman’s theory of biographysearching in its introductory remark that this kind of criticism demands that at least something is known to begin with of the author: “Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apart, only of Christopher Marlowe among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist’s life and his work.” Yet, in the case of Shakespeare, even the preliminary evidence is so elusive, ambiguous, and contradictory, that the task before Berryman would never be transparent. One explanation for the project’s altering courses is the sheer difficulty Berryman encountered (and what Shakespearean biographer has not?) in discovering “the true Shakespeare”. In 1952, when beginning his project, Berryman was 4

See Haffenden, Berryman’s Shakespeare, lxii. Berryman, “The Poetry of Ezra Pound”, in The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, 263, 268. 6 Berryman, “Marlowe’s Damnations”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 5, 3. 5

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perplexed by Shakespeare’s polymorphous nature and the impossibility of pinning down the man from Stratford once and for all: “that multiform & encyclopedic bastard” he shouted in mock-despair.7 One of Berryman’s earliest essays of Shakespearean biography, “Shakespeare at Thirty”, which was published in The Hudson Review in 1953, is prefaced with words of caution and restraint from the Nicomachean Ethics: “We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline”, it begins.8 Perhaps the following quotation from a “Plan of Work” submitted to the Guggenheim foundation, also from the early 1950s, placed alongside such reservations, explains why the biography never came, never could have come, into fruition: “The biographer must be capable of a book, a constructed and written book, clear, neither unduly confident nor perpetually reserved, presenting an image unified and acceptable to a reader sick of quarterShakespeares.”9 Clearly such a unified image would be reductive and would involve gigantic leaps of faith (like Kierkegaard’s “great leap … into infinity” in Fear and Trembling, also quoted as an epigraph to “Shakespeare at Thirty”): being the perfectionist that he was, with this image as his aim, his project certainly looked destined for failure. From the start of his project Berryman insisted that the known facts about Shakespeare’s life might legitimately be taken into account in the critical appreciation of his plays. In a Preface for the “Shakespeare Handbook” Berryman proclaimed that: Shakespeare was a man whose son died, who was publicly ridiculed and insulted, who followed a degrading occupation, whose mistress got off with his beloved friend, whose patron was condemned to death and imprisoned for years, whose father died. He wrote many personal poems about some of these things.10

Take, for example, Berryman’s writings on Hamlet. In the psychoanalytical lecture from the early 1950s, “The Crisis”, Berryman sets out to examine how Shakespeare became a tragic writer, and he relates the composition of Hamlet to the possibility of Shakespeare’s father’s death occurring immediately beforehand, and to the known 7

See Berryman’s Shakespeare, xxxiv. See “Shakespeare at Thirty”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 31. 9 Berryman’s Shakespeare, lix. 10 Ibid., lviii. 8

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fact that Shakespeare had a son christened Hamnet, who died five years previously.11 As others had done before him, Berryman saw Shakespeare in Prince Hamlet; in a draft from 1970 he attributes Hamlet’s “sex nausea and cosmic loathing” to the author himself. 12 Berryman, though, goes further, deducing, from observation of these features through other plays of the same period (Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Measure for Measure), that Shakespeare must have undergone a terrible crisis, only “being himself again”, albeit altered by the experience, by the time of Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Furthermore, identifying a similar nausea, loathing and insane jealousy in certain sonnets, but unable to date these at the same time, Berryman tells us that “we must conclude that Shakespeare twice in his life – during his late twenties possibly and in his middle thirties – underwent a kind of suffering that few men are called on by fate to experience at all”. Assurance infringes on the cautious: “During his late twenties possibly” but we “must conclude that” Shakespeare twice underwent these crises. In this typical instance Berryman speculates with supreme confidence. For Berryman it was not simply that the putative facts about Shakespeare might be applied to his work, but also that one might arrive at conclusions about Shakespeare the man from judicious readings of the plays: he believed in something analogous to Borges’ description of Shakespeare “leav[ing] a confession hidden away in some corner of his works, certain that it would not be deciphered”. 13 Increasingly Berryman went beyond reading into or out of Shakespeare’s works mere factual autobiography: towards the end he sought to discover what he called Shakespeare’s “spiritual status” and he scoured elusive passages from the plays concerned with identity (concealed or disturbed identities in particular) searching for the key to Shakespeare’s self. He shunned large-scale theories, accepting that 11

See “The Crisis”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 110-11. Berryman’s Shakespeare, lx-lxi. 13 Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”, trans. James E. Irby, Labyrinths, eds Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, 285. It should be pointed out that Berryman was at times contemptuous of the “passionate search for hidden meanings” in literature, finding such approaches “distasteful” in his essay on Joseph Conrad, “Conrad’s Journey”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 107-14. See also Joseph Mancini, Jr., The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Structures in the Poetry of John Berryman, New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, 206. Berryman’s Shakespeare readings evidence a belief in “hidden confessions”, however, as well as a belief in the unconscious shaping, and revealing itself in, poetry and drama. 12

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he could not reach a transparent or universal biographical interpretation of a play (such as the notion raised in “The Crisis” that Hamlet might project “an imagined life” for Shakespeare’s dead son Hamnet). 14 Perhaps the closest Berryman came to formulating a theory of his project is in the draft for an Introduction entitled “Shakespeare’s Reality”, from 1971. In this piece Berryman initiates a discussion on the concepts of “The I” and “The Other”, arguing that “The Other” is not confined to dramatic verse, nor “The I” exclusively to lyric poetry, supremely in the case of Shakespeare. “The I” and “The Other” are seen to be bound neither to genre nor to individual work; the poet may come and go in his work, personally present at one moment, removed at the next. As an example, Berryman draws attention to the French King’s speech to Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, in which the King mourns the death of Bertram’s father. These fifty-odd lines are unprecedented in Shakespeare’s work, Berryman believes, especially since they, for him, “contribut[e] nothing to the play”. Berryman’s reading of the speech is highly problematic, not least because he reads the lines “Let me not liue […] / to be the snuffe / of yonger spirits” as the King’s “anxiety not to stand in the way of the next generation”, whereas of course the burnt-out wick is the King himself, who fears being mocked by the young. But though flawed, Berryman’s account of the speech reveals the personal search he was embarked upon: he explains this apparent aside from the dramatic action by concluding that “Shakespeare shared the anxiety of his French King’s equally imaginary friend”, reaching this conclusion from the fact of Shakespeare’s retirement from the theatrical world at “a peak of his dramatic power”.15 Thus the French King’s speech is seen to contain a sudden surfacing of Shakespeare the man; after which, says Berryman, the author “remembered he was writing a play, and went curtly back to work”. This notion of an interchangeable “I” and “Other” has important bearings upon Berryman’s own work, and on his own descriptions of it. Berryman’s poetry is famous for its vagrant personalities which “shift, reify, dissolve, survive, project”, discontinuous personalities that make it difficult to distinguish between the original and the

14 15

See “The Crisis”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 116-17. “Shakespeare’s Reality”, ibid., 346-47.

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assumed.16 “The Ball Poem” and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet have been noted for their switches and mergers in which “I” and “Other” intertwine, overlap, and separate. Berryman himself identified one of his most important techniques relating to the subject of personality when he described discovering in “The Ball Poem” that ambiguous pronouns could be used to reserve “commitment of identity”.17 This technique triumphs in The Dream Songs, where Berryman is at his most tantalizing in his refusal to fix characters, to guarantee their homogeneity. The poet’s complex relation to the character Henry in The Dream Songs is a striking example of the interplay of “I” and “Other”: once described as a portrait of the author, another time renounced as an entirely distinct creation, Henry embodies the ambiguities of character Berryman delighted in creating; his life and identity both are and are not those of the poet.18 What emerges, placing Berryman’s poetry alongside his Shakespearean scholarship, is a singular inter-animation that operates at an almost personal level: Shakespeare was a source, a model, but also a driving force, a living inspiration. In the Fifties, when stumped in the middle of the second stanza of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Berryman acknowledged that it was his work on Shakespeare that inspired the poem’s continuation. 19 One of the reasons why the Shakespeare project was never completed and ran so long is that Berryman’s poetry – Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and then The Dream Songs – took off; but they did so with a debt to the scholarship.

16

See Berryman’s “Scholia to Second Edition” of Love & Fame (CP 290-92). “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 326. 18 Compare an unpublished preface for The Dream Songs, where Berryman writes: “nothing in the poem is imaginary. It all happened” (handwritten page headed “Version for Note”, Unpublished Dream Songs, box 1, folder 2, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) with the “Note” published in the first complete edition of the poem in 1969, which insists that Henry is “an imaginary character (not the poet, not me)”. Perhaps Berryman put it best in his Harvard Advocate interview when he said, “Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax.” See John Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 7. 19 Berryman’s Shakespeare, xiii. Later, Berryman believed that working on Shakespeare aided his recovery from chronic alcoholism, citing his critical biography as a “replacement for drinking” in his Alcoholics Anonymous Step One (see Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 374-76). 17

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It was not a handover, from scholarship to poetry, but a sustained symbiosis, continuing right up to the end of Berryman’s life. Berryman seemed frequently to be discovering, or perhaps rather drawing, parallels between himself and Shakespeare. Haffenden writes movingly that the practice of biography often tends, for the biographer, towards self-exploration; and indeed it is notable that in 1963, in the midst of his work on Shakespeare, Berryman began work on an autobiography (to open with his father’s suicide), though it was rapidly abandoned. 20 For Berryman the self-searching was not merely a by-product but a primary factor in the work, to the extent that his fervent personal involvement with the biography spilled over into his scholarship. At times, indeed, Berryman’s own self-perceived similarity with Shakespeare itself becomes the basis of his critical approach. The emphasis he places on Shakespeare’s sorrows, for instance, matches his own troubles, and their creative importance to his work. Angered by the Shakespearean scholar C.J. Sisson’s essay entitled “The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare” Berryman declared that readers skeptical that Shakespeare ever wrote out of his own heart were “stunted”.21 This anger, defensive and defiant, was surely stirred by Berryman’s first-hand knowledge of what it is to be a suffering, troubled artist. The extent to which Shakespeare was a model to Berryman is illustrated neatly by the publication history of Berryman’s sonnets. Berryman delayed the publication of his 117 sonnets by twenty years, and this was surely in imitation of the delay in publication of Shakespeare’s, at least according to his own dating (he places the Sonnets between 1588 and 1589, the Quarto being 1609; Berryman’s sonnets were published in 1966, nearly twenty years after their composition).22 The reasons Berryman gives for Shakespeare’s delay, that Shakespeare wanted to avoid hurting any of the people associated with his affair, including himself, are highly pertinent to Berryman’s Sonnets, dangerous in their explicit autobiography, without the disguises of persona of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs. Shakespeare is behind some of Berryman’s finest poetry. He is both a creative inspiration, and a direct influence, inextricably tied up 20

See Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 320. See “Shakespeare’s Reality”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 347. 22 For Berryman’s dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, see “The Sonnets”, in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 288. 21

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with both Berryman’s life and work. The following two case studies show how Berryman’s own biography, or identity, appears in what he conceived to be a Shakespearean mode. These examples come from the beginning and towards the end of Berryman’s career. The first is “The Architect”, the unfinished play from Berryman’s Cambridge years, which constitutes the first moment Shakespeare enters Berryman’s work. Shortly after his arrival in Cambridge, inspired by his reading of Shakespeare, Berryman had dreamt of writing plays: “great, incredibly great plays can be written, and I’m positive … that I can write them” he wrote, having read King Lear “over and over in a kind of frenzy”. 23 “The Architect”, begun in its first version in December 1936 while Berryman was on holiday in Paris, marks his first significant attempt at playwriting. The play was never completed; in the John Berryman Papers in Minneapolis there are notes on characters and action, as well as some speeches Berryman had begun to draft.24 In New York in 1938 Berryman returned to the play, revising and filling in the plot, and completing whole scenes; but it is the earlier manuscript material that is more interesting in relation to Berryman and Shakespeare. “The Architect” in its first version was to be a tragedy in three acts, observing the neo-classical unities, and culminating in the murder by the protagonist of his best friend, and the protagonist’s subsequent suicide. The play was planned as being partly in verse, and, in a letter to his mother, Berryman cited King Lear as a justification for writing verse plays.25 Berryman told his mother he was striving to avoid “Elizabethan pastel” (by which he meant “pastiche”); yet he wanted to capture the direct, what he called the “simplest & best”, power of Elizabethan drama, and he stressed his preference for dramatic effect over believable character.26 There appears to be a tension, however, 23 Letter dated 27 October 1936, collected in We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly, New York: W.W. Norton, 1988, 64. 24 For the following material I am indebted both to the Manuscripts Division of the University of Minnesota (“First Notes for The Architect: Paris, Dec. 1936” in “Prose”: Box 4, “Plays [Unpublished]”, John Berryman Papers), and to Charles Thornbury’s essay, “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices (1935-36)”, in Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, eds Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 77-111. 25 Letter dated 26 December 1936, in Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 82. 26 Letter dated 25 December 1936 in Correspondence, box 1, “1931-1936”, John Berryman Papers. Berryman’s remarks follow a performance of Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton, which he saw at the Old Vic

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between Berryman’s aim to avoid realism (which he said would pander to his audience’s taste) and his other main articulated aim, that the play should be, above all, “honest”.27 The architect of the title, the protagonist referred to as “H.” in the notes, was to have depth: as an architect he would be “a public as well as private artist, a man with social power & responsibility as well as acuteness & integrity”.28 The public and private sides to this character and the insistence upon honesty resonate throughout Berryman’s play. For the play is strongly autobiographical in its conception, as Charles Thornbury has observed in an essay on Berryman’s early years. H., the unstable protagonist whose father committed suicide ten years before, is clearly designed to represent Berryman himself. H.’s closest friend, “B.”, is compared to Mark Van Doren; and this character is also to be the father of “Jean”, H.’s former girlfriend, whom Berryman told his mother was “modelled, roughly” on his American girlfriend of the time, Jean Bennett. H. is recovering from the loss of this, his first love; Berryman had recently complained in his letters home of Jean’s long silences since he arrived in Cambridge in October, but in the play it is clearly H. who is to blame, having alienated his former love. We are left, then, with these two, strangely divergent strands. Is the coupling of this autobiographical honesty with (what Berryman felt were) the techniques of Elizabethan theater designed as a disguise? Or does it represent a particular affinity Berryman felt with the past?29 The influence of Shakespeare is revealed in the manuscript notes; Hamlet, which Berryman recently felt for the first time he “knew something about”, is particularly prominent. The character modeled on Van Doren is also described “as Fortinbras”. Jean has been driven to the point of madness by the loss of H.’s love and, Ophelia-like, she has disturbed lyrical speeches, songs, and moments of shocking before leaving for Paris: “It taught me that the Elizabethan aim was not character not consistency not persuasion, but drama at its simplest & best power.” 27 Letter dated 26 December 1936, in Kelly, We Dream of Honour, 81. 28 Letter dated 27 December 1936, in Correspondence, box 1, also quoted by Thornbury in “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices” (Recovering Berryman, 103). 29 Thornbury relates the projected stylized Elizabethan elements of “The Architect” to Berryman’s interest at this time in ritual (see “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”, 101-107). Indeed, Berryman had written to Van Doren that he would write plays as a “mask for my life, a discipline, a stylized order” (see Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 2nd edn, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 62). See also Berryman’s essay “The Ritual of W.B. Yeats” (1936), a review of Yeats’ Collected Plays, in The Freedom of the Poet, 245-52.

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bawdy. 30 The ghost of H.’s father was to appear to H. one night in his office; at one point H. was to be thought mad; and this character, having listened to the ghost of his father, was to debate suicide: whether to join the beckoning ghost (“Join me, join me” it begs) or to heed the ghost’s other advice, to survive and “study perfect vigor in [his] work”. 31 Though the ghost of the father appears to explain his death as suicide (“circumstances tired me, and I died”), revenge is, as in Hamlet, a prominent subject for the protagonist: H. is “seeking ‘revenge’ … but sees no enemy – ‘nothing’”, Berryman wrote in his notes, perhaps picking up Hamlet’s famous “nothings” in Act II, scene ii of Hamlet. Actors, Hamlet says, act “all for nothing”, whereas he himself has a purpose but “can say nothing”. Significantly, the first words sketched for H. in Berryman’s play are “Nothing, nothing”. 32 H. is “made … Hamlet here / For lack of what to kill”: like Hamlet before he receives his directive, or like Hamlet in his inability to act but for different reasons.

30

The following speech, with echoes of Ophelia’s death, and which clearly portends her own, is sketched for Jean speaking to H. in Act II, scene iii: Mad? Mad? I am not mad. I see merely The drowned, the unintelligible dead Among the weeds. There, there the faces are. They watch – but you – for they are sure of me: My welcome is prepared, as if a surgeon Slipped in the operating room and fell, Point down. Don’t wait for them to speak. They have An absolute late language of their own And hear no other – Besides, the flesh is fallen Finally – translation has nothing there. Listen… Already in Berryman’s work there is the pull of the dead upon the living, a seductive communing which cannot be wholly understood, nor resisted. Another draft speech testifies to her moments of bawdy: Are they not comfortable breasts? – whereon a king (When there were kings) might joyfully have lain? And put his lips? – Ah, touch them not, They are too proud with time to suffer you Now. Yet they are lonely.

31 32

Quoted by Thornbury in “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”, 103. In the draft opening to Act I.

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The Hamlet frame of reference and in particular the ambiguous words of the ghost, look forward uncannily to Berryman’s reconsideration of the events surrounding his own father’s death. Being unsure of the exact circumstances and motives of John Allyn’s suicide, Berryman returned time and again to speculate on the ambiguities and on the psychological effects of the loss. Thornbury points out that in 1954, in an interpretation of a dream of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, Berryman suggested that his father, like Hamlet the elder, was killed by an uncle – “Uncle Jack”, his mother’s name for Berryman’s stepfather, John Angus McAlpin Berryman.33 A scribbled note in the manuscripts indicating that H. is “later rechristened” suggests that Berryman’s replacement father was to have a bearing upon the play. Another foreshadowing of Berryman’s later work arises from Berryman’s choice of Hamlet as a model for the sections of the play about his father’s death: there are unspoken glimpses of the psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet, and of himself, Berryman would develop in the 1940s and 1950s. A theory articulated in “The Crisis” comes readily to mind: that Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because Claudius has fulfilled his own desires, the death of the father and enjoyment of the mother. Moreover, this is accompanied by Berryman’s theory that he himself may have suffered from an Oedipus complex, adopting some guilt for his father’s suicide: “I realise suddenly … – that I may have wished Daddy’s death” he wrote in 1947.34 When H. ultimately takes revenge upon himself might it be in acknowledgement of personal guilt in his father’s death? “The Architect”, as it stands, does not explore in any depth these psychological scruples. What it does show is that in his earliest creative work Berryman’s biography appears in Shakespearean mode: the Hamlet allusions conceal family, friends, and painful personal truths. Though at this stage the connection between Shakespeare and autobiography may appear circumstantial, there is a distinct bond between this early fragmentary play and Berryman’s mature opus. In “The Architect” lies the germ for both the influence of Shakespeare on Berryman’s poetry, and for his highly personal approach to Shakespearean biography. As Berryman’s search for Shakespeare the man moved increasingly beyond mere factual autobiography into the realm of the 33 34

See Thornbury, “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”, n56, 111. Quoted in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 192.

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soul and the self, something similar was happening in Berryman’s poetry. In The Dream Songs, begun in 1953, Berryman was turning his poetic attentions ever more inwards. Each metaphysical search affected the other; but in order to investigate the interrelations we need an example. In 1964 Berryman composed Dream Song 85, (“Opus posth. no. 8”). In the “Opus Posth.” Dream Songs (78-91) Henry is buried in his coffin, apparently having died, yet in a state between life and death, and in this particular Song his state of imprisonment brings about worries, and ultimately, in the last stanza, a crisis of self. Henry’s “I am” construction in the final stanza of Dream Song 85 (“I am – I should be held together by – / but I am breaking up”), the very construction of his being, falls apart: language and self disintegrate together, bringing about the “full stop” of both grammar and body. Not just the “I am”, but also the iambic rhythm breaks up: the double anacoluthon, “I am – I should be held together by – / but I am breaking up”, interrupts the rhythmic flow. His self fractured, Henry cannot go on. He turns in on himself, “fold[ing] / him over himself”, “collapsing”, motions which have connotations of death (in particular suicide) as in the “crumpling” of Dream Song 56 or in the “scrunch[ing] down” of Dream Song 81. There are many half-submerged literary references in Dream Song 85: John Clare’s “I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows”; Descartes’ famous cogito; Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, Hopkins in the plea to the Trinity, “Triune!”. Most explicit though are Shakespearean echoes which bind the poem together. Searching for Shakespeare’s “spiritual status”, Berryman focused increasingly upon passages concerning identity: “confusions of identity” and “crises of loss of self-recognition”, he said, were central to Shakespeare’s “most promising” plays.35 In this Dream Song Henry undergoes such a “crisis of loss of self-recognition”: his very being has become inert except for the process of decay impacting upon him – “I am breaking up”? In Dream Song 85 there are traces of several Shakespearean heroes in crisis: Richard II for instance. The reference to uncertain kings (“Who’s king these nights”), Henry’s loneliness and his concern about ending (“How will the matter end”), and the uncertain quotation (“O get up & go in / Somewhere once I heard”) bring to mind Richard imprisoned in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle, an unkinged King 35 From notes headed “At Last! … after 18 years at it”, dated November 1970, cited by Haffenden in Berryman’s Shakespeare, lxiv-lxv.

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harrowed by misremembered Biblical scruples, playing “in one person many people”, and longing to be “eased / With being nothing”. Perhaps the most striking Shakespearean King who influences Dream Song 85 is Richard III of whose climactic line, “Richard loues Richard, that is, I am I”, Berryman wrote, “having listened to Professor Erikson, we can say with confidence that what is in question here is an unmasterable identity crisis”.36 Richard’s identity crisis, like Henry’s, is expressed in versification: Berryman himself observes that “the pivoting of the line after its fifth syllable has no parallel at this date (1590). It obliges us to contrast three heavy first words, a strong unit, with the hesitant traipsing that follows”: “Richard loues Richard, that is, I am I.” After Richard’s effortless victory upon victory, after his unshakable confidence that Berryman described as “omnipotent ego” (asserted in his opening soliloquy by the hammering of “I”s after a thirteen-line reserve: “I – that am not shap’d”, “I – that am rudely stamp’d”, “I – that am curtail’d”), after all his luxuriating in the self, on the night before his crucial battle the eleven ghosts of his victims (and compare here Berryman’s fear of “ghastly frights”) appear to Richard, and he goes to pieces. The line which is supposed to comfort, to reassure, fails in its very utterance, and Richard contemplates flying from himself, revenging himself upon himself: torn apart by fear and self-hate, he doubts who he is. Berryman notably picks up on stylistic details from Richard’s speech. There are Richard’s absolutes, “Richard loves Richard”, “I am I”, which are traceable in “The cold is cold”; and even in “I am – I”, though here the second “I” begins a new construction. There is also the use of the third person. When Richard speaks of himself in the third person he is self-dramatizing, trying to be assertive; but this feature can also signify a distance from the self, and this is especially true of Dream Song 85 where the pronoun shift works backwards: “I should be held together by – / but I am breaking up / and Henry now…”, so that the third person coincides with the break up. Finally, there is the expression of inward-turning motion, of suicide: Richard frantically speaks of revenging “myself upon myself”, whereas Henry is more resigned, folding “him over himself quietly”. I would suggest also that the invocation of Shakespearean heroes in this Song in itself contributes to the identity crisis in as much as it places Henry at a 36

“Shakespeare’s Reality” (1971), in Berryman’s Shakespeare, 344. Berryman first considered this line in the earlier essay “Shakespeare at Thirty” (1953).

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distance from himself: his identity is threatened by usurpation through another’s words. Having said that, Henry in this Song ultimately undergoes his own identity crisis and not Richard III’s. What this poem demonstrates so forcefully is that Berryman’s work on Shakespeare had a profound, many-levelled impact upon his own creative work and, most importantly, upon his own process of selfscrutiny; in the midst of creating a poetic identity crisis, lines from Shakespeare that Berryman had studied and would study again, enter, producing some of his finest and most moving work. Shortly before his death Berryman underwent a crisis of confidence, despairing of ever completing his Shakespeare book: “I thought new disappointments impossible but last night (Thurs.) suddenly doubted if I really have a book ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’ at all, despite all these years”, he wrote at the end of 1971.37 While he thought himself a failure as a critic, and as a dramatist – “The worst disapp’t of my life, if I should die tom’w: no plays”, he declared in 195738 – and widespread interest in his critical writings and plays for their own sake has not survived, the same is not true of Berryman’s poetry. What we ultimately receive from Berryman’s Shakespearean scholarship, in other words, are his poems, and that in itself redeems and justifies the former’s vagaries and imperfections.

37 38

Quoted by Haffenden in The Life of Berryman, 418. Quoted by Thornbury in “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices”, 107.

LOVE & FAME AND THE SELF IN SOCIETY PHILIP COLEMAN

In the final two years of his life John Berryman completed two collections of poems – Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. – and he brought close to conclusion the novel Recovery, which was published posthumously in 1973. In a letter to Robert Giroux in May 1971 he described his “Present plan” in the following way: 1) vol. Essays/stories – Spr. ’72 2) Delusions, Etc. – Fall ’72 3) Recovery (the novel) – ’73? 4) Shakespeare’s Reality – ’74? 5) The Blue Book of Poetry (ed.) 6?) I am also doing a Life of Christ for Martha [Berryman’s daughter]: illustrated – e.g. Titian’s great “Scourging” in the Pinakothek.1

Berryman’s activity and output during this period of his life is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least because he spent a great deal of this time in hospital undergoing treatment for alcoholism, as well as carrying out his duties as Regents’ Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota. It is interesting too because, much to the poet’s dismay, the reception of The Dream Songs had more or less decided his critical fate, as Robert Lowell implied when he wrote that Berryman’s “last two books, Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc., move” but only insofar as “they fill out the frame” of The Dream

1

Quoted by Robert Giroux in the Preface to John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, viii.

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Songs and “prepare for his [Berryman’s] death”.2 Lowell’s remark is problematic for a number of reasons, but mainly because it suggests that the work Berryman produced in the last few years of his life in some sense pre-empted or prophesied his death by suicide in January 1972. It also relates to what I term the “narrow confessional” interpretation and designation of Berryman’s work, which seeks to underestimate and, indeed, erase those aspects of his poetry that engage with the social and political world outside of the private, domestic experience of the author. If, as Steven Gould Axelrod has argued, confessional poetry involves an interconnection of private and public matter,3 critics of Berryman’s poetry have tended on the whole to ignore his elucidations of the latter, preferring to read his work as a sustained examination and elaboration of the former.4 Lowell’s regrettable insistence on the connection between Berryman’s poetry and his suicide was rehashed recently by Michael Hofmann, in his Introduction to a selection of Berryman’s poems for Faber and Faber’s “Poet to Poet” series.5 Hofmann quite rightly notes that “things have gone rather quiet around Berryman” in recent years, as far as critical engagement with his work is concerned, but one of the reasons for this neglect has to do with the persistence of narrow confessionalism in Berryman studies, which insists that his poetry represents a kind of solipsistic inwardness and withdrawal from the world that precludes engagement with broader social or political concerns. Hofmann writes: I may of course be mistaken about both, but while I find it easy to think of Sylvia Plath without and apart from her suicide, I can’t do that with Berryman. It was a part of him for longer, and it’s harder to think what else he might have done.6

2

Robert Lowell, “For John Berryman, 1914-1972”, in Collected Prose, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, 116. 3 See Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, 98. 4 John Haffenden, for example, has written that “the poet is everywhere at the centre of his work”, but many of Berryman’s public interests and engagements remain unacknowledged (see John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, New York and London: New York University Press, 1980, 1). 5 Michael Hofmann, Introduction to John Berryman: Poems Selected by Michael Hofmann, London: Faber and Faber, 2004. 6 Ibid., viii.

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Hofmann is right to point out Berryman’s lifelong (personal and professional) preoccupation with suicide, but what modern writer – from William Shakespeare and John Donne to Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo – has not been troubled by the possibility of selfannihilation? Hofmann’s inability “to think what else he might have done” is more immediately problematic. At the very least, Berryman’s note to his publisher in May 1971 shows that in the months immediately preceding his death the poet himself believed he had a lot of work to do – and that he was capable of doing it. In the two or three years before his death Berryman knew full well that contemporary critical appraisals of his writing were tending towards the kind of negativity that is, ultimately, at the heart of Hofmann’s claim and the narrow confessional designation of his work more generally. When he wrote in the posthumously published Dream Song “Henry’s Fate” that, “All projects failed, in the August afternoon / he lay & cursed himself & cursed his lot / like Housman’s lad forsooth”, 7 he was on one level describing his disappointment with the extraordinarily constricted focus of many critical engagements with his poetry. This fundamentally negative and restrictive attitude towards his poetry was exemplified by Robert Phillips’ influential study The Confessional Poets (1973) where, in a chapter entitled “John Berryman’s Literary Offenses”, Phillips says of Love & Fame that: “Rather than displaying moral courage, these poems display instead immoral callowness. In place of love and fame, we have lust and notoriety”. “These tendencies were present in The Dream Songs, of course”, Phillips continues, “but were held in check by Berryman’s use of the Henry persona .... The Dream Songs are motivated [sic] by the ego; Love & Fame is sheer vanity.”8 Phillips’ account was first published in the winter 1971-72 issue of the North Atlantic Review under the title “Balling the Muse”. Whether Berryman read it or not is impossible to tell, but Phillips’ dismissal of his work, and of Love & Fame in particular, is based on an assumption of willful solipsism and self-indulgence – a lack of “moral courage” – that has been reiterated over the past three decades by many commentators and which has,

7

See John Berryman, Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972, ed. John Haffenden, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, 32. 8 Robert S. Phillips, The Confessional Poets, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973, 97 (emphasis in original).

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more troublingly, influenced the popular perception and transmission of Berryman’s later poetry as a failed project.9 I want to move on from this negative view of Berryman’s work, then, and explore some of the ways that his late poetry – and the poetry of Love & Fame in particular – works successfully in the opposite direction, towards an acute awareness of the difficulties and responsibilities faced by the self in society. Of Love & Fame Phillips suggested that: “Mr Berryman, well, Mr Berryman, alas, was toting up his relative successes in the game of love and the game of fame.” 10 Against that view, I read Love & Fame as a text that not only displays but also encourages a form of earnest ethical and spiritual inquisitiveness that allows us to place Berryman’s late work beside other important meditations on the theme of responsibility in twentieth-century American poetry. It accomplishes this in part by being modeled on the structure and treatment of the relationship between the “aesthetic” and the “ethical” life mapped by Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843). Reading Love & Fame is not just a matter of gauging Berryman’s “sincerity”, in other words, as Phillips attempted to do, 11 but it is a text that invites readers to consider for themselves a set of fundamental ethical questions regarding the nature of social responsibility. Berryman’s ethical viewpoint, indeed, could be compared to that of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom, as Simon Critchley has observed, “ethics … is defined as the calling into question of my freedom and spontaneity, that is to say, my subjectivity”.12 The development of Berryman’s poetry throughout his career could be charted in these terms – as a “calling into question” of the nature of human subjectivity – from his early interrogation of the “epistemology of loss” in “The Ball Poem” (CP 11) to the recurring examination of what he calls “the Facts & Issues” in the poem of that title in Delusions, Etc. (CP 262-63) The four parts of Love & Fame, broadly 9 Stephen Minot, for example, has argued in relation to Berryman that “It takes courage to conclude that a body of work by a talented and sincere writer has failed”. See Minot, “John Berryman and the Lure of Obscurity”, The Sewanee Review, CXI/3 (Summer 2003), 424. 10 Phillips, The Confessional Poets, 98. 11 Ibid., 103-104. Gary Q. Arpin challenges Phillips’ views on the “insincerity” of Berryman’s late poems in The Poetry of John Berryman, Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978, 93-100. 12 Simon Critchley, Ethics – Politics – Subjectivity: Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought, London: Verso, 1999, 97.

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conceived, map a subject’s movement from an obsession with the events of his past through to a realization that they are irretrievable, to an engagement with (and a commitment to) the realities of the hereand-now. In his Paris Review interview in 1970 Berryman said that Love & Fame “is very shapely and thematically unified, and in that it resembles a long poem”. 13 As a “thematically unified” work, the book is more linear in its development than The Dream Songs, which is characterized by narrative discontinuity and resists absolute closure. In Part I of Love & Fame, the reader encounters a speaker who is, as Berryman puts it in the “Scholia” to the second edition, a “distasteful Braggart”. (CP 290) This figure can only remember very vague details about the amorous adventures of his past, and by the end of Part I, in “Recovery”, he admits of his intense coming-of-age that: I don’t know what the hell happened all that summer. I was done in, mentally. I wrote nothing, I read nothing. I spent a pot of money, not being used to money, I forget on what, now. I felt dazed. (CP 187)

Forgetfulness and incomprehension about the speaker’s past dominate what finally amounts to a very scrappy account of his youthful encounters with a relatively small group of women – named in the text as Shirley, Garnette, Louise, Elspeth, and Charlotte – in Part I of Love & Fame. What Phillips rejected as Berryman’s outrageous autobiographical confessions, in other words, are reduced by the end of Part I to a scattering of vague anecdotes, tending very quickly towards the Keatsian “nothingness” alluded to in the book’s title. 14 In the “Scholia” to the second edition of Love & Fame Berryman wrote that: The initial American public reception of this book, whether hostile, cool, or hot, was so uncomprehending that I wondered whether I had wasted my time, until a letter came from Stanford seeing that it is – however uneven – a whole, each of the four movements criticizing 13

Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman” (1972), in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 36. 14 See John Keats’ sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (1818), in The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, London: Oxford University Press, 1926, 303.

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Reiterating the idea that the book should be read as a “whole” here, Berryman’s claim regarding its “ironic title” is significant. It is worth noting, indeed, that Berryman’s use of irony in Love & Fame is developed in the posthumously published novel Recovery in his creation of the “disrupter” and “tearer-apart of people” Alan Severance.15 Moreover, the broad Kierkegaardian structure of the novel – a text I believe Berryman conceived in part as a response to the “uncomprehending” reception of the first edition of Love & Fame in 1970 – may be applied to Love & Fame also. In Parts I and II the speaker’s ardent adventures and his youthful desire for fame are sketched out, but in Parts III and IV a more socially aware figure comes into focus, culminating in the second of the “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” (in Part IV) with an appraisal of the necessity of faith in “a damned strange world” where “Man is ruining the pleasant earth & man” (CP 216). Contrary to Jonathan Galassi’s view that Love & Fame “is devoted like all Berryman’s last work to the phantasies or delusions which dominated the poet’s life”,16 then, the book may be said to describe a self struggling with the pervasive uncertainties of modern life – and not just those experienced by the individual poet and private citizen “John Berryman”. The book’s overall design – from “Her & It” to the eleventh of the “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” – strives to convey a “Sense of a selfless seeker in this world” as Berryman writes in “In & Out” (CP 182). Berryman invited his readers to consider the retrospective, ironic structure of Love & Fame seriously, and in the “Scholia” to the second edition, having offered a reading of the book’s opening poem (“Her & It”) he adds: “Other readings will occur to anybody listening” (CP 291). During the brief period of the book’s composition – he claimed it was written in five weeks – Berryman sent drafts of the poems to Richard Wilbur and William Meredith, and Wilbur suggested on one occasion that Berryman “ought to write an additional poem or passage in which he explained that he was not writing a full literary 15

In his Introduction to Berryman’s Collected Poems 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury suggests that “Alan … is Celtic for ‘harmony’ and Severance means ‘tearer-apart of people, disrupter’ ” (CP xxiii). 16 Jonathan Galassi, “Sorrows and Passions of His Majesty the Ego”, Poetry Nation 2 (1974), 124.

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biography”. 17 Berryman took Wilbur’s advice seriously and in “Message” he declares, “I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends” (CP 201). That he was not writing straightforward autobiography, however, should have been clear already, and especially “to anybody listening” to the philosophical and cultural allusions in Love & Fame, which expand the interpretive frame of the book beyond the self of the author sitting at his breakfast table or lying in his lover’s bed. In an early essay on the work of Christopher Marlowe, Berryman wrote that: Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apart, only of Christopher Marlowe among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist’s life and his work, which interest an increasing number of readers in this century, and the existence of which is denied only by very young persons or writers whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux.18

A great deal is known about Berryman’s personal life, and there are clear points of contact between the self sketched in Love & Fame and Berryman’s biography. Having said that, the idea of Love & Fame as a self-contained imaginative work that is not principally concerned with achieving autobiographical exactitude has rarely been explored in Berryman studies. Rather than collapsing the work on the man who created it and reading it as an extended account of his “old college dates recollected at fifty”19 – which is easily done by collating names and dates – it is also possible to read Love & Fame as a self-contained literary work that encloses a rigorously determined ethical system. Understood in this way, we can see that Love & Fame has value above and beyond the disclosure of details about the personal life of its author. In “Away”, the opening poem of Part II of Love & Fame, the speaker says farewell to America – scene of countless flirtations and courtships – and sets sail for Europe and the “haunts of old masters where [he] may improve” (CP 189). In this poem a clear change in the 17

John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 362. 18 Berryman, “Marlowe’s Damnations”, in The Freedom of the Poet, 3. 19 Robert Lowell, “For John Berryman, 1914-1972”, 117.

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speaker’s interests is signaled. The salacious anecdotes of Part I are gradually replaced by descriptions of literary heroes and reading-lists as the speaker embarks on an earnest course of study and selfimprovement. The arrogance of the seducer described in Part I is now substituted by the figure of the aspiring writer and scholar, sketched here in “Monkhood”: I don’t show my work to anybody, I am quite alone. The only souls I feel toward are Henry Vaughan & Wordsworth. This guy Dylan Thomas though is hotter than anyone we have in America & hardly at all like Auden. (CP 194)

By the time we reach Part III, however, the protagonist is placed very clearly in the thick of things: “My world offends my eyes” he says in “Dante’s Tomb” (CP 207), and in a number of overtly political poems in this section the “distasteful Braggart” of Part I’s “Her & It” is replaced by a self acutely aware of his place, not apart or removed from, but intractably embedded in society. Not only does the speaker’s “world” change from “New” to “Old” in the first two parts of Love & Fame, then, but so does his worldview. By the end of Part II, and more distinctly in the course of Part III, he abandons his selfish thoughts of sexual conquest and fame and turns towards matters of clear social and moral import. Marking this important transition is the third-last poem of Part II, “Transit”, which begins with a description of the foreign scholar alone in the Old World (“O a little lonely in Cambridge that first Fall”) and ends with a series of reflections on the Spanish Civil War and a former classmate’s suicide: The news from Spain got worse. The President of my Form at South Kent turned up at Clare, one of the last let out of Madrid. He designed the Chapel the School later built & killed himself, I never heard why or just how, it was something to do with a bridge. (CP 197)

The phrase “I never heard why / or just how” here is important because it signifies a reluctance – or an inability – to provide the actual details of the suicide. The speaker is unable to “tell it all”, but

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this has less to do with self-censorship than it has with the fact that many details of the self are “occluded & lost”, as Berryman puts it in “Message” (CP 201). The occlusion of details implies not only that certain facts have been withheld, but also that the speaker has decided to leave the past behind him and move on. Parts III and IV of Love & Fame, subsequently, describe a movement towards ethical understanding that is comparable to the description of the poetic existence offered in the first and second parts of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. A speaker comes into being in Berryman’s work who comprehends the importance of “ethical continuity … over against aesthetic immediacy and the self-criticism of the conscience-bearing will is opposed to aesthetic enjoyment”, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has written of the shift between the first and second parts of Either/Or.20 The reference to Kierkegaard here is not perfunctory. Kierkegaard is not only mentioned in one of the poems in Part III of Love & Fame (“The Search”) as one of the speaker’s key interests – “Wellisch on Isaac & Oedipus / supplements for me Kierkegaard” (CP 200) – but the “transit” from the accounts of the “distasteful Braggart” and selfimportant seducer of Parts I and II, to the more ethically responsible (and “conscience-bearing”) figure of Parts III and IV, parallels the structure of Either/Or which begins with a description of the “aesthetic life” (containing “The Seducer’s Diary”) and ends with a lengthy meditation on the meaning of the “ethical life”.21 It is worth pointing out here that Kierkegaard’s importance in contemporary philosophical debates has also been undermined because of what some commentators see as the confessional emphasis of his work, as George Pattison, Steven Shakespeare, and others, have suggested in their interrogation of “the stereotype of Kierkegaard as the archetypical and apolitical individualist”. This view of the philosopher has, in the words of Pattison and Shakespeare: played an important role in the gradual marginalizing of Kierkegaard’s work in the period since the 1960s, when existentialism began to go out of fashion and we learned that all thought and

20 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Letter to Dallmayr”, trans. Richard Palmer and Diane Michelfelder, in Dialogue & Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, 97. 21 See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, ed. Victor Eremita, trans. Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992.

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Moreover, Kierkegaard’s unfashionable place in contemporary philosophy is described by Pattison and Shakespeare as a consequence of the transformation in thinking that coincided with the demise of existentialism and the casting of doubt “upon the coherence and transcendent worth of such notions as Subject, Author, and even Man himself”. In the context of Berryman criticism a similar critical backlash against the author-centered confessionalism that was seen to dominate poetic discourse during the 1960s may be held responsible for the widespread refusal to read Berryman’s later work as anything more than an autobiographical portrayal of the poet himself. Rather than read him as a poet for whom (as Pattison and Shakespeare have said of Kierkegaard) “the categories of the individual and the social are themselves called into question”23 critics have preferred to read Berryman’s poems, as Louise Glück has commented, as if they are his “fingerprints” – fragments of self to be reconstructed in the reading process. One aspect of what Glück terms the “mixed messages”24 of Berryman’s poetry is its blend of intellectual speculation and low comedy, characterized by the mixture of sometimes bawdy anecdote and philosophical inquiry in Love & Fame, and indeed the whole book seems to present a “mixed message” in the form of two distinct personalities. In “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic”, one of the pieces contained in Part I of Either/Or, Kierkegaard invokes the figure of Don Juan who, as Sylvia Walsh has commented, is “the embodiment of our primal, insatiable desire for enjoyment through an immediate gratification of the senses, especially sexual desire”.25 In this he is an archetype of the figure described in Berryman’s “Two Organs” who “stood up in the rowboat fishing to take a leak / & exclaimed as he was about it with excitement // ‘I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’” (CP 179). In The 22

George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare, “Introduction: Kierkegaard, the Individual and Society”, in Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, eds Pattison and Shakespeare, London: Macmillan, 1998, 1. 23 Ibid., 2. 24 Louise Glück, “Against Sincerity”, in Proofs and Theories, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995, 44. 25 Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, 70.

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Dream Songs, as John Haffenden has shown, Berryman used the model of Byron’s Don Juan in his conception of the long poem’s design.26 The figure of Don Juan is portrayed by Kierkegaard in Either/Or as “the representative of sensuousness in … demonic form”; furthermore, he represents, “on a spiritless level, the rebel in us, the desire within us to gratify our natural inclinations without constraints, without regard for others, in total freedom and total enjoyment of life”. 27 This description of Kierkegaard’s Don Juan might also be related to the seducer of Parts I and II of Love & Fame who, in the first stanza of “In & Out”, describes “The verve [he] flooded toward in Don Giovanni” (CP 182). That “verve” or energy is modulated in the course of Parts III and IV of Love & Fame, however, where Berryman, like Kierkegaard in the second part of Either/Or, concentrates his energies on providing the basis for a more balanced and ethically responsible paradigm for human existence. Walsh has described this movement in Kierkegaard’s text in terms of a distinction between “the romantic pattern of living poetically” and “an ethical pattern of living poetically”: In contrast to the romantic pattern of living poetically … in volume 1 of Either/Or – an ethical pattern of living poetically is etched in volume 2. Unlike the romantic design, which experiments with a multiplicity of possible self-identities, this pattern is modeled on a single paradigmatic figure within the context of an ethical-existential aesthetics that stands in continuity with the religious, or Christian, alternative to the romantic mode of living poetically…. The figure in which the pattern is exemplified in this instance is that of a married man, Judge William, the pseudonymous “author” of two long epistolary essays in this volume. … He thus mounts a concerted effort in the form of two “letters” to his friend, the romantic aesthete of volume 1, to make a convincing case for the aesthetic validity of marriage and the need for a balance between the aesthetic and the ethical in the development of personality.28

In Parts III and IV of Love & Fame Berryman mounts a similar defense of the importance of marriage, the family, and work to that described in the second part of Kierkegaard’s text. In the sequence that constitutes Part IV of Love & Fame (“Eleven Addresses to the 26

Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 64. Walsh, Living Poetically, 71. 28 Ibid., 99 (emphasis in original). 27

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Lord”), Berryman asserts “the need for a balance between the aesthetic and the ethical in the development of personality” that not only aligns him with Kierkegaard’s “ethical-existential” position but, more importantly, defines the tone and trajectory of Berryman’s later work as a whole. That tone is introduced by a number of the overtly political poems in Part III of Love & Fame: “Have a Genuine American Horror-&Mist on the Rocks” and “To a Woman” are particularly interesting examples, but a sense of ethical responsibility towards others is also registered by poems such as “The Hell Poem”, “Death Ballad”, “I Know”, and “Purgatory”. In these poems the charge that Berryman’s later work is grounded in a poetics of avoidance or withdrawal is countered by an anxious social and environmental criticism, evidenced in the first stanza of “To a Woman”, where the reader is encouraged to realize that “The problem is urgent, yes, for this hot light / we so love may not last. / Man seems to be darkening himself” (CP 204; emphasis in original). The theme of imminent environmental collapse is reiterated in “Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks”, where Berryman writes of some “14,500 six-ton concrete&-steel vaults of nerve-gas rockets, lethal” dumped on the floor of the Atlantic by the American military. This poem marks an important shift from the seducer’s self-centered uncertainties of the earlier poems of Love & Fame (described, for example, in “Shirley & Auden” and “Images of Elspeth”) to a more worldly sense of doubt concerning the future of the planet itself and life on it “in the long dark / of decades of ecology to come / while the 20th Century flies insanely on” (CP 203). “Man is a huddle of need” Berryman writes in the poem of that title, but in Part III of Love & Fame he is generally less concerned with describing physical or sexual needs than he is with exploring what he terms the “Protractions of return / to the now desired but frightful outer world” in “The Hell Poem” (CP 208-209). In a movement similar to the slow return to society described in the course of Alan Severance’s narrative in Recovery, then, the poems of the third section of Love & Fame map a subject’s confrontation with emotional and psychological breakdown and “the lies of Society” that, it is suggested, may have caused that breakdown in the first place. Those “lies” are described in “Have a Genuine American Horror-&Mist on the Rocks” as the secrets of an irresponsible American military that shows little or no concern for the environment or those who inhabit it, and they are bound up with Berryman’s sense of the

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“frightful outer world” of American society in general – “The American Nightmare” identified by Severance in Recovery.29 “Epictetus is in some ways my favourite philosopher”, Berryman writes in “Of Suicide” (CP 206). Epictetus, an Ancient Greek Stoic philosopher who believed in self-renunciation and the brotherhood of man, presides with Kierkegaard over the poems of Parts III and IV of Love & Fame to remind us of the importance of ethical self-awareness and responsibility to one’s family and fellow human beings. As Berryman puts it in the same poem, “A basis rock-like of love & friendship / for all this world-wide madness seems to be needed” (CP 206). In the second part of Either/Or Kierkegaard, through the persona of Judge Wilhelm, describes the importance of work, marriage, and friendship in terms of their role in establishing “equilibrium between the aesthetic and the ethical in the development of personality”.30 A similar effort is recorded in Love & Fame where the indulgences of the seducer-self described in Parts I and II are offset by a sense of responsibility for others and the world in general in Parts III and IV, as when the speaker assumes the role of mentor to fellow-patients in a psychiatric hospital, most memorably those named “Tyson & Jo” in “Death Ballad” (CP 209-10). The psychiatric disorder experienced by these figures is presented as part of a pervasive “world-wide madness” which Berryman suggests in “Death Ballad” is the result of an uncaring and irresponsible society that insists its most unfortunate citizens “don’t exist” (CP 210). Rather than accept this enforced erasure of the self, however, in the closing poems of Part III of Love & Fame the speaker prepares to rejoin his own family with a renewed sense of the strength that may be drawn from them and his work. As Berryman writes in “Purgatory”: “The days are over, I leave after breakfast / with fifteen hundred things to do at home; / I made just now my new priority list” (CP 211). The patients described in “Death Ballad”, on the other hand, have fled from society, and either “Apathy or ungovernable fear” prevents them from returning to or even contemplating it “through the window starlight”. The speaker pleads with Tyson and Jo to return to a world of love and friendship with him, but they “prefer Hell”, having been “forbidden to communicate / either their love or their hate” (CP 210).

29 30

See John Berryman, Recovery, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, 158. This is the title of the second section of Part 2 of Either/Or.

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“The Home Ballad” brings Part III of Love & Fame to an important conclusion by situating the protagonist back in society, facing up to his responsibilities before the thanksgiving of Part IV (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord”) and the rediscovery of faith described and celebrated therein. The speaker’s decisive abandonment of the empty pursuit of “love” and “fame” takes place in Part IV where he places his trust in the “Sole watchman of the flying stars” (CP 217) and celebrates God as the “Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, / inimitable contriver, / endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon” (CP 215). The rediscovery of faith described here may be read as the final rejection of the life of indulgence and selfabsorption described in the earlier parts of the book. Also important here, however, is the persistence of the theme of ecology and Berryman’s insistence on man’s responsibility to the world on a number of occasions in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”. The first “Address” begins with the image of the “Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring moon” just quoted, but in the second Berryman writes that: “Man is ruining the pleasant earth & man” (CP 216). Berryman’s earlier reflections on the fact that “Man seems to be darkening himself” in “To a Woman” (CP 204) are here reiterated with renewed urgency when he suggests that only God can protect wayward “Man”. In the same way that the preceding sections of Love & Fame played man’s self-destructive impulse against an awakening ethical vision, Berryman’s descriptions of the beauty of creation are counterpoised here by a recognition of mankind’s capacity for selfannihilation. As he writes in the second “Address”: Yours is the crumpling, to my sister-in-law terrifying thunder, yours the candelabra buds sticky in Spring, Christ’s mercy, the gloomy wisdom of godless Freud: yours the lost souls in ill-attended wards, those agonized thro’ the world at this instant of time, all evil men, Belsen, Omaha Beach,— incomprehensible to man your ways. (CP 216)

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Out of the vision of ethical responsibility described in the closing poems of Part III of Love & Fame Berryman arrives at an understanding of human endeavour in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” that is neither dogmatic nor precious in its meditation of faith. Rather, the “Addresses” – and Love & Fame in its entirety – posit a version of ethical authority that Berryman’s early master W.H. Auden conceived in terms of the “ethical hero”: one who is “happier than his inferiors because he is already in the movement away from the dark misery of ignorance and servitude to passion towards the bright joy of freedom in knowledge and truth”.31 Awakening into this understanding of ethical-existential liberty at the end of Love & Fame, Berryman imagines a figure who finds the strength to confront the problems of the modern world, from “the lies of Society” (CP 210) to “the gloomy wisdom of godless Freud” (CP 216). This is a figure who, through a series personal trials, has learned to reflect on a world that is fraught with difficulties not only for himself but also for others. As Berryman writes in the fourth “Address”: “Caretaker! take care, for we run in straits. / Daily, by night, we walk naked to storm, / some threat of wholesale loss, to ruinous fear” (CP 218; emphasis added). Although he has given up on human forms of authority and found hope in the possibility of a divine presence – “Under new management, Your Majesty: / Thine” (CP 219) – the speaker is still painfully aware of what Berryman will term the world’s “black corruption” (“this schwartze Verwesung”) in an elegy for Georg Trakl included in his final collection Delusions, Etc. (CP 243). If it can be said that Berryman maps what Auden described as “a movement away from the dark misery of ignorance and servitude to passion towards the bright joy of freedom in knowledge and truth”, in other words, then that “knowledge and truth” includes an intense awareness of modern man’s failings, the most significant of which is the delusion that he can avoid the movement toward social and ethical responsibility charted by the elusively “plain-saying” poems of Love & Fame. Against those readings that present Berryman’s late work as a catalogue of scandalous anecdotes, or interpretations which insist that self-obsession was the poet’s primary motivation in writing Love & Fame, the book may finally be seen – like The Dream Songs – as an extended meditation on the self’s 31

W.H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood; or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, London: Faber and Faber, 1951, 84.

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determination to confront rather than withdraw from the modern world.

JOHN BERRYMAN AND THE WRITING OF SILENCE PHILIP MCGOWAN

Berryman’s description in Dream Song 172 of a “geography of grief” summarizes his career-long charting of a textual and psychical space that is regularly occluded and effaced by traditional methods of literary interpretation. To narrow the gauge somewhat, and to facilitate a discussion of Berryman’s deployment of language to access such realms of intangible absolutes, his long poem The Dream Songs rises as the central work in his corpus in which language is pushed to the extreme in its attempts to write the unsayable. So numerous are the Dream Songs in which Berryman engages with the questions of death and suicide, that one encounters an almost insurmountable difficulty in addressing Berryman’s position in relation to his poetic subjects and the linguistic modes that avail his discussion of them. The Dream Songs represents an engagement with language and its disintegration as it encounters the void, be that a psychical internal one or the ultimate abyssal experience of death. Reading suicide as the ultimate incarnation not only of a personal subjectivity but also as the endgame to a philosophical imponderable restructures how we read the works of this generation and of Berryman in particular. The urge to commit suicide and the mental processes involved in such an act are instincts and articulations that are located within the individual’s mental world and, for Berryman, particularly within the philosophical debate that centers in the role and possibility of language. It becomes akin to creative endeavour, much as Albert Camus intimated: “An act like this … is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.”1 The comparison is 1

Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, 121.

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more than simply apt: the essential silence that preludes the creation of art preludes the commission of this act, the understanding of which pivots on whether suicide can be deemed to be creative or destructive. Berryman’s contemporary Anne Sexton muddies the waters of this debate, possibly with self-serving reasons. When she declares, in an interview that discusses Sylvia Plath’s death, that “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem”, 2 she simultaneously opens and closes a debate the terms of which once more rotate about the irresolvable question of language. If this sentence does relate Sexton’s own philosophy with regard to suicide, it produces a range of problems. If suicide is the opposite of the poem, then the reverse by this logic is also true, that poetry is the opposite of the act of suicide. The moment of suicide is one that leads to death; therefore, the moment of poetry must be one that leads to the opposite of death, to not-death, to life, birth even. Poetry then is not a birth as such but a conception, just as suicide is not death but an action of death, an action leading to death. For the two to be opposites, they must be located as threshold moments, prior to both the beginning and the termination of language. If poetry operates as the expression of the essence of language and as the possibility of discovering or encountering language at its source, suicide is itself an expression, an encounter with the moment of death, of death in its essence even if the totality of the experience of Death can never be realized (either through language or the act of suicide). As an act that may seek to accelerate the experience of death, suicide can never encompass Death; it may seem to offer access to a full encounter with Death, but the moment of its realization is the simultaneous moment of the impossibility of any such encounter.3 Acknowledging that the two events are recognized as opposed impulses, suicide becomes anti-poetry in this taxonomy, an impulse that is anti-language, or is the physical refusal or rejection of the possibility of language. It is the cataclysmic intrusion of the eradicated 2

Anne Sexton, No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985, 92. 3 Maurice Blanchot relates how the moment of suicide is remote from the actuality of death, connected more to life than to the abyssal beyond: “Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave, even so Thomas felt himself, at the moment he knew himself to be dead, absent, completely absent from his death”. See Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamerton, New York: David Lewis Inc., 1973, 36.

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self into the Blanchotian project of sustaining language in its essence. 4 It is the intersection of the biographical or autobiographical into the poetic to which language cannot attend. If the poem is language (as essence), the fact of suicide must exist outside of this signifying framework. Even in its opposition, or Sexton’s interpretation here of it as being in opposition, to the poem, suicide as an ethical or philosophical response to existence is configured in language: it remains for that moment part of a linguistic terrain, a place of opposed meaning to the prospect of the poetic, a geography all its own. Poetry creates its own geographies of meaning: sometimes these are geographies of love, or of death, of joy, or of grief. Suicide, and the encounter with the finality of its possibility, comes as the ultimate realization of the geography of grief in Berryman’s poetic lexicon. Berryman’s Dream Song 384 narrates a return to his father’s grave, the father also a suicide, “who tore his page / out” and who dominates the work’s recurring portraits and considerations of suicide. This selfdestructive act is simultaneously written as an act that counters the possibility of writing, a destructive resistance to the Work, the ineffable essence to which all writing tends.5 The act of suicide is the place where geography stops; it is a place beyond place, beyond location and locatability. It is a terrain where meaning ends, where the debates central to poetry and poetic creation, the debates about language and meaning and interpretation, are closed off, cut off, silenced, “leaving the page of the book carelessly open, / something unsaid, the phone off the hook” as Sexton relates in “Wanting to Die”.6 The language of suicide is as distinct as the geography it demarcates: Sexton’s declaration in this same poem that “suicides 4

Blanchot contends that “the poet produces a work of pure language, and language in this work is its return to its essence”. See Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 42. 5 Martin Heidegger postulates that “Every great poet creates his poetry out of one single poetic statement only. The measure of his greatness is the extent to which he becomes so committed to that singleness that he is able to keep his poetic Saying wholly within it …. The poet’s statement remains unspoken. None of his individual poems, nor their totality says it all. Nonetheless, every poem speaks from the whole of one single statement, and in each instance says that statement …. Since the poet’s sole statement always remains in the realm of the unspoken, we can discuss its site only by trying to point to it by means of what the individual poems speak.” See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, New York and London: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971, 160. 6 See Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, 143.

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have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build”7 is a necessary extension of this wholly other relation to existence; it goes with the territory. It is not just a coded version of language, but an altogether alternative register in which “why” is replaced by how, the why and wherefore already a decided issue. The philosophical issues that occupy other minds are of no direct concern to the suicide as they relate to an antithetical position, a world apart from “the almost unnameable” [sic] desire that occupies their own. Such logic leads to the language of disconnection, to broken connections in the worlds of signifying and communication: “leaving the page of the book carelessly open, / something unsaid, the phone off the hook.” This is not so much a failure to communicate as a refusal to do so, a refusal to be known, or to be included in processes of communication. Such poetry writes an alternative register of possible meaning, recognized in a final and ultimate resistance to meaning. The “almost unnameable” becomes the unnameable, the unsayable that voids language, the frozen moment that stands in eternal opposition to the poem. The space that death occupies is a nowhere, an absence, akin to the night. Blanchot recognizes it in midnight, the axis on which yesterday and tomorrow distinguish each from the other and from the present. Death in the moment of its occurrence becomes a negation of time, a denial of the present: “no longer a present, but the past, symbolized, as is the end of history in Hegel, by a book lying open upon the table.” 8 The personal history ended in suicide adds a “carelessly” to Hegel’s analogy of the book left open. It moves the argument into an arena where there can be no argument, the “something unsaid” something that can never now be said. Henry “alone breasts the wronging tide” at the close of Dream Song 172 unable to ascertain why and for how long he will remain untouched by suicide’s “torrent … of agony and wrath”. Dream Song 112, among others, discovers him unable to speak; Dream Song 335 writes the impossibility of communicating the experience of death: “no messages return, they preserve silence.” Unrepresentable, death resonates in a void of silence. 9 Inexpressive, 7

Ibid., 142. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 113. 9 Levinas notes how the “approach of death indicates that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other, something bearing alterity not as a provisional determination we can assimilate through enjoyment, but as something whose very existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken 8

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Henry is caught between the action of speech, a desire to speak and the silenced ability to speak: “When I had most to say / my tongue clung to the roof / I mean of my mouth” (Dream Song 112). For Berryman, the poem functions as a silent arena signaling the possibility of death, a venue that echoes Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” recalling the figure who “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”.10 The Dream Songs is littered with inarticulations and stopped-short attempts at communication, something that is not quite language and yet a something that is. Stevens is instructive again when, in “Adagia”, he comments that: “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence that takes its place as life’s redemption.”11 If, as Critchley suggests, “[i]n the face of a God-less world, individual authenticity produces itself through acts of self-invention and self-creation, where death becomes my work and suicide becomes the ultimate possibility”,12 it becomes possible to understand Berryman’s enduring fascination with the topic of suicide. For him and other writers of his generation, suicide became the only possibility, and the subject of death and the distillation of American geographies of grief their lifework. The numerous Dream Songs that speak of suicide and that attempt an encounter with death vibrate on the boundary that divides our physical world from the possibility of a world beyond it. Unable to name in full the desire for death that it seeks, such poetry represents this urge for absence as a gathering storm of physical instances this side of the leap into the wished-for space of death. The degree to which such a desire and such an act is a creative force, or whether it intimates a destructive potential is a highly debatable issue. The choice of suicide may emanate from a number of circumstances: insurmountable grief, incessant melancholy concerning the human situation, loss, nihilistic despair, death itself. 13 by it.” See Levinas, from Time and the Other, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 43. 10 See Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, revised edition, London: Faber and Faber, 1989, 7. 11 Ibid., 185. 12 See Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 25. 13 Emile Durkheim describes three basic forms of suicide: egotistic suicide, where the individual discovers herself disconnected from society, relying on her own abilities to form a world; altruistic suicide, as its name suggests, is the opposite of egotistic suicide and occurs when an individual’s identity is suppressed in favor of a group identity to which the individual belongs; and anomic suicide, resulting from an

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As the ultimate manifestation of the geography of grief, suicide names and is the condition of its own limit, its one act the realization and simultaneous denial of its own intimation of release. Suicide as the chosen moment of exchange of life for death circulates in a selfserving circle of contradictory belief: in offering the individual the ability when and how to chose their own death, its logic is based on a delusion if it believes that such a choice either equates the individual human being with the power of the Absolute (to terminate as well as create life) or provides them with an unending dominion over Death. The finite nature of our knowledge of the finite world is endlessly defeated when we turn to consider the eternal infinitudes beyond this existence. 14 Suicide, an apparition that tantalizes the individual with the possibility of becoming this infinitude, ties the individual to this finite world and, in the act of suicide, to the finite moment of that act. As Critchley summarizes the position: there is an almost logical contradiction at the heart of suicide, namely that if death is my ownmost possibility, then it is precisely the moment when the “I” and its possibilities disappear. In suicide, the “I” wants to give itself the power to control the disappearance of its power. If the resolute decision of the suicide is to say, “I withdraw from the world, I will act no longer” then he or she wants to make death a final act, a final and absolute assertion of the power of the “I”.15

Suicide wishes to make of death an act of the individual will, to reduce its infinite span to the mirror image of life’s finite term. This individual’s inability to cope with a sudden change in their economic or social position. See Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, London: Routledge, 1952. 14 As Emmanuel Levinas notes in his preface to Totality and Infinity, “the relation with infinity – the idea of the Infinite, as Descartes calls it – overflows thought in a wholly different sense than does opinion. Opinion vanishes like the wind when thought touches it – or is revealed to be already within that thought. What remains ever exterior to thought is thought in the idea of infinity. It is the condition for every opinion as also for every objective truth. The idea of infinity is the mind before it lends itself to the distinction between what it discovers by itself and what it receives from opinion.” He adds, “The relation with infinity cannot, to be sure, be stated in terms of experience, for infinity overflows the thought that thinks it”. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, 25. 15 Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, 68 (emphasis in original).

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myopic situation arises from the inability of the human mind to comprehend or begin to encompass the infinite and of our reserves of language to encapsulate a terrain of which it can never have knowledge. The suicide’s encounter with death, as far as it can be understood in language, is a short-circuiting of the processes of death, a detour to the end bypassing the normal, arbitrary means to that end. It is the willed translation of the self into everything that is not the self. As the ultimate act of the self, as the act of self-definition, it is the last act in which the self believes that it can be recognized. The deletion of the self sanctioned and executed by the act of suicide terminates all possibilities of the self. As the defining term of a “special language” it is the last word, the place where definitions, and the hope of self-definition, stop: rather than preserve the individual’s desire to imprint the power of the “I” over death, the reverse is the case, death’s domain and dominion is guaranteed and the “I” dissipates. To want to die, as Sexton’s poem intimates, is a yearning, a “lust” and a “passion” to defeat the inevitable fact of death by dictating the moment of its arrival, even though this arrival confirms death’s inevitability. Critchley questions the basis of such a desire with important consequences for interpreting Berryman’s poetry that deals with these subjects: “Death is not an object of the will, the noema of a noesis, and one cannot, truly speaking, want to die. To die means losing the will to die and losing the will itself is the motor that drives the deception of suicide.”16 Death is an unwilled entity: it exists beyond the will and the passions of the individual. The heightened visceral encounters that gather in The Dream Songs speak of a physically realized obsession with the moment of death which, when it comes, abolishes such physicality, translating this looming presence that dominates the individual mind into an infinite absence. For Blanchot, as for Critchley: the explanation is that you don’t want to die, you cannot make of death an object of the will. You cannot want to die, and the will, arrested thus at the uncertain threshold of what it cannot attain, redirects itself, with its calculating wisdom, toward everything that it still can grasp in the area around its limit. You think of so many things because you cannot think of something else, and this is not for fear of looking into the face of too grave a reality; it is because there is 16

Ibid., 71.

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“ ‘…It all centered in the end on the suicide / in which I am an expert, deep & wide’ ” concludes Dream Song 136. A fascination with the issue of suicide clots Henry’s abilities to function in The Dream Songs and also bleeds into Berryman’s later collections Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. The abstract nature of language, that produces its own failure to communicate, 18 underpins and simultaneously undermines these attempts to write that which circulates beyond language. The fissure that opens between the impulse to say and the resulting linguistic expression of that impulse becomes an abyssal breach that collapses the fragile possibilities of poetic expression. Linguistic disjunctions interrupt the translation of thought into word, cordoning-off the writer from the desired end product that writing seeks: the fallibility of the word divorces the poet from the possibility of the Word, of creating in language the absolute expression of existence:19 Error is the risk which awaits the poet and which, behind him, awaits every man who writes dependent upon an essential work. Error means wandering, the inability to abide and stay. For where the wanderer is, the conditions of a definitive here are lacking ….

Blanchot’s instruction lights the unbridgeable discordance that Berryman’s later writings encounter. Exiled from the possibility of the Work, the full articulation of the very essence of his thought, Berryman’s late works write the simultaneous and inevitable failure to produce the Work and to write the Word. Language cannot accommodate the absolute essence of its own possibility, though 17

Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 105. As Paul Bové argues: “All language is capable of authenticity and inauthenticity, i.e., it both discloses and covers up, often in the same movement.” See Bové, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 84. 19 As Bové notes, regarding Heidegger’s reading of Stefan George’s “The Word”, “the poet is ultimately confronted by the failure of language to articulate his final vision of what the ordinary and habitual obscures” (ibid., 147). 18

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poetry attempts to locate and narrate such essence. Indeed, as Blanchot continues in the chapter entitled “Literature and the Original Experience” in The Space of Literature: The risk is more essential. It is the danger of dangers by which, each time, the essence of language is radically placed in doubt. To risk language: this is one of the forms of this risk. To risk being – the word uttered when absence is spoken, and which the word pronounces by pronouncing the word beginning – this is the other form of the risk.20

In the face of the Absolute, either in the shape of death’s infinitude or of God, language falters in its ability to communicate. It is the final, incomplete and equivocating intercession in language’s encounter with what lies beyond its capabilities. Unquestioning, it replaces the prosaic demands of factuality and meaning; it denies language the possibility of its own expression. The Dream Songs, and Berryman’s later works, address the ultimate question of existence: how will I face my death? Death is the one constant that can be relied upon and it marks the transition from the finite into the realm of the infinite. Moreover, it is the absolute condition of the possibility of language, the place where signification is suspended, withheld, and returned to its finite circle encompassing what can be said about life.21 Encountering death, the subject simultaneously encounters the terminus of language. Answering the question of whether suicide is the ultimate act of subjective consciousness or whether it is the quintessential act of self-delusion,22 Berryman closes the breach in his poetic language that divides it from a comprehension of the Absolute with this final act.

20

Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 238 (emphasis in original). As Critchley argues: “Death is radically resistant to the order of representation. Representations of death are misrepresentations or rather representations of an absence” (Very Little … Almost Nothing, 26). Death is forever that which cannot be represented, my own death a certainty that I cannot represent because, once it happens, then it will be too late. Yet, the fact of my death and my response to that sense of my finitude is something that I can register, an intractable problem that, for Berryman, had one inevitable solution. 22 “Suicide is the fantasy of total affirmation, an ecstatic assertion of the absolute freedom of the Subject in its union with nature or the divine, a mystical sense of death as the scintilla dei, the spark of God” (see Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, 68). 21

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Death is not, however, an end-stop to the process of creating literature or art. Indeed, as Kristeva argues, death, while existing as “the inner boundary of the signifying process”, is what must be crossed if “art” is to be created: “Crossing that boundary is precisely what constitutes ‘art.’ In other words, it is as if death becomes interiorized by the subject of such a practice; in order to function, he must make himself the bearer of death.”23 Death maintains the individual experience of its inevitable presence; unable to be resisted, it is internalized, drawing it within the confines of the ability to speak, to relate and ultimately to be. Already acknowledged as operating within an alternative signifying system reserved for the suicidal, Berryman / Henry is Kristeva’s bearer of death: he carries its presence inside, a mortal affliction that negotiates his artistic production. The boundary at which death hovers is an abyss that must be accepted, not questioned. Facing an encounter with the Absolute, the individual subject cannot speak; indeed, speech can say nothing of this encounter. What Berryman’s poetry so acutely relates is a twinned acknowledgment of the failure of self and language: subjective ontology and aesthetic practice coincide and map the other as the output of the late collections funnels Berryman toward suicide’s irreversible abdication of the word to silence. 24 The Dream Songs is a manifestation of the bifurcated risk of which Blanchot speaks: language and self are beset with irresolvable tensions that destabilize the very structure of their possibility; the failure of words for Berryman is irrevocably intertwined with the failure of self for both have been established in symbiotic relation to each other throughout his work. This individual voice experiences isolation because of the absence of known routes of access or indicators of direction, the lack of textual mappings of the semiotic, of the unsayable. The particular geography mapped by poets in this situation, such as Berryman and Sexton, is a 23 Julia Kristeva, from Revolution in Poetic Language, in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 56. 24 Bové’s analysis is of further relevance here: “Representation and articulation both break down when the poet successfully destroys enough of the traditional habits to encounter this mysterious limit of articulation. Perhaps all that the poet does finally encounter in this way is the failure of language, which reduces him to gesture and bodily expression .… The poet moves beyond, transcends what the ordinary or habitual defines as life and at that moment is reduced to a non-verbal being. The necessary shared basis of language, its common referents and significations, disintegrate” (see Destructive Poetics, 147-48).

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landscape of such absences written in a language that initiates debate about its own possibility. It is an aesthetic that, aware of the limitations of its own practice, provides a route to the representation of what previously had been unrepresentable. As a means of access to the real, this poetry offers a map to an unrecognized geography that faces moments of trauma and ultimate despair: the navigation of this terrain unites these writers within a poetic practice that attempted to write that which resists language (trauma, grief, and death). The writing of or the attempt to write the unsayable becomes the central concern of their texts and their lives. Berryman faces these issues of authenticating the self through language, simultaneously aware that language betrays the impulse to communication, wiping out the tracks it has just formed as it moves toward an encounter with the absolutes of existence. With suicide as the endgame of such histories and geographies of grief, it comes as the final inscription of a language that has itself been vanishing as the final movements are made toward death. Suicide is the last word, the silencing avowal of a metaphysical selfhood that obliterates the physical “I”. The suffering that the human form undergoes both in life and in anticipation of death manifests itself in pain and also in our fear of that pain. It also arises in our fear of death itself, what it actually means to be dead. Berryman recognizes that death is necessarily other to meaning: it is beyond our cognizant realm of understanding, an abyssal condition that can be neither written nor resisted.25 In envisioning death, he not only seeks to disable the attendant horrors of its inevitability; he covets the certainties of its irreversible finality: “My desire for death was strong”, as Berryman writes in Dream Song 259. Death, or the power of death to instill fear, is at some level then, diminished as a result of such thinking. Suicide, however, clouds the waters here somewhat: by choosing an immediate death over both the processes of life and of dying, the suicide draws the abyss closer to 25 In Time and the Other Levinas argues that “The structure of pain, which consists in its very attachment to pain, is prolonged further, but up to an unknown that is impossible to translate into terms of light – that is, that is refractory to the intimacy of the self with the ego to which all our experiences return. The unknown of death, which is not given straight off as nothingness but is correlative to an experience of the impossibility of nothingness, signifies not that death is a region from which no one has returned and consequently remains unknown as a matter of fact; the unknown of death signifies that the very relationship with death cannot take place in the light, that the subject is in relationship with what does not come from itself. We could say it is in relationship with mystery.” See The Levinas Reader, 40.

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hand; rather than triumphing over the unfathomable proportions of its infinite reach, he submits to them. Suicide, then, comes as the final response to a fear, not of death, but of dying, not of life, but of living.26 “It seems to be DARK all the time” opens “Despair” from Love & Fame (CP 207). The vortex of silence, solitude and death into which the Berryman poetic spirals becomes the final condition of his poetic expression. Such silence and solitude is essential for this artistic process to occur even if it leads to the paradoxical double bind of the writer’s position as noted by Blanchot in The Gaze of Orpheus: a writer “is not free to be alone without expressing the fact that he is alone”.27 Alone, the artist or writer is not in isolation from language, the existence of which speaks his communal ties: such solitude is related by the artist through the very entity, language, which negates that solitude. Indeed, as Critchley argues, this becomes a necessary situation for the writer to experience if he is to write at all. Following this strategy of the “silence of solitude” that stands at the centre of the artistic process, he untangles Blanchot’s thinking with regard to what a writer actually produces, what he writes about, and what significance it has for a reader: Silence is then equated by Blanchot with the theme of nothing (le rien), the silent essence of solitude is nothingness. Nothing, then, is the material of the writer and the writer has nothing to express …. The writer has an obligation to say or to bring to language, to literature, the nothing or silent solitude that is the source of literature.28

26

As Blanchot indicates, “it is not certain that suicide is an answer to the call of possibility in death. Suicide doubtless asks life a question – is life possible? But it is more essentially a questioning of itself: Is suicide possible?” (see The Space of Literature, 102; emphasis in original). Is the promise that suicide appears to offer possible? Can suicide provide a definitive victory over dying (and thus over living)? The circularity of the philosophical argument recalls how Blanchot in Thomas the Obscure writes the remoteness of suicide from the actuality of death. It is an instant connected more to life than to the abyssal beyond. The moment of suicide is a moment of life, an instant irretrievably tethered to life and not to death; the disappointment the suicide feels is one of betrayal, that death has not been accomplished: the act of suicide reiterates the physicality of life, not the promise of death. 27 See Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis, New York: Station Hill, 1981, 4. 28 Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, 37 (emphasis in original).

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Writing in order to access language at its source, Berryman encounters the absolute conditions of silence in which the voided centre, the nothing that precedes literary creation, has its formative being. Recalling Stevens’ “The Snow Man” once more, the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” is precisely the moment and location of absence and possibility from which poetic language springs. The abyssal condition of language, of art, of the impulses that draw them into communicable entities, circulate in this terrain of dual yet necessarily silent possibility. This is the very condition that Berryman’s work narrates. In this location, however, what is absent becomes present through the language of the poem, a language that can only relate in its oblique significations the absence about which it speaks. This is “the silence that alone speaks” in Blanchot’s reading and which “speaks from the depth of the past and is at the same time the whole future of the world”. 29 This place of solitude is the core at the heart of signification without which language is not possible, the poet its translator even though what he translates is the essential silence of the encounter. Blanchot, elaborating upon Rilke’s concept of Weltinnenraum (or “world’s inner space”) comments that this space is where things “pass from one language to another, from the foreign, exterior language into a language which is altogether interior and which is even the interior of language, where language names in silence and by silence, and makes of the name a silent reality”.30 In order to create, the writer must return to this condition of silence in which the possibility of the word exists; coined in silence it enters the linguistic from this void without which it cannot exist. To this void the writer returns, moving ever further into its limitless realm where language at its essence forms in silence the words that will transmit his art, thought, and his silent poetic expression. The silence that eats away at the poet is death, the encounter with which awaits his journey to the end of language, the poem the intervening space that translates the invisible into the visible, the silent into the said, composed of the two but tending ultimately toward the voided absence from which and back into which all language flows. Facing across the open divide toward the Absolute, the poet

29 30

Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 114. Ibid., 141.

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temporarily substitutes words for silence conscious that his poetic language will disappear back into this vacuum: The Open is the poem. The space where everything returns to deep being, where there is infinite passage between the two domains, where everything dies but where death is the learned companion of life, where horror is ravishing joy, where celebration laments and lamentation praises – the very space toward which ‘all worlds hasten as toward their nearest and truest reality,’ the space of the mightiest circulation and of ceaseless metamorphosis – this is the poem’s space. This is the Orphic space to which the poet doubtless has no access, where he can penetrate only to disappear, which he attains only when he is united with the intimacy of the breach that makes him a mouth unheard, just as it makes him who hears into the weight of silence. The Open is the work, but the work as origin.31

A perpetual silence and a mouth unheard: Blanchot and Berryman / Henry travel to the limits of language, marked by death and silenced by the unsayable to which their work impels them. The ultimate possibility of human existence, whether perceived in the fantasy of suicide or the search for a language that precedes the essence of the word, hastens the poet’s journey through geographies of grief and despair seeking for the elusive Absolute, both there and not. The poet exists in an endless geography of grief, then, conscious of the “misery in the sound of the wind”, as Stevens puts it, accompanied by death and traveling irrevocably toward that end: At every time [the poet] lives the time of distress, and his time is always the empty time when what he must live is the double infidelity: that of men, that of the gods – and also the double absence of the gods who are no longer and who are not yet. The poem’s space is entirely represented by this and, which indicates the double absence, the separation at its most tragic instant.32

An abysmal condition, circulating the abyssal essence of language, the poet exists and acts to create within a centripetal momentum that draws him into the void. Caught between the possibilities of an Absolute that was and an Absolute to be, he interposes between humanity and the knowledge of its finitude. The poem is the transient 31 32

Ibid., 142 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 247.

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expression that both separates and connects humanity to the incremental absences of silence, death and God; the one facility that makes an understanding of these infinite dimensions possible, it forever speaks the fact of its inability to make them comprehensible in language. By writing, both the poem and the poet repeatedly recycle the silence that activates and terminates their existence. The possibility of God, or of humanity coming to an understanding of the Absolute, remains a necessarily abyssal encounter. God exists, and a belief in God exists, in this space, the “abyss”, a location without locatability, without precise dimensions or co-ordinates. The depths and widths, the crevices and ordinals of this space or entity that is termed God are unknown; indeed, they remain unknowable to the human consciousness. The attempt to access this location comes through language. The word of the Word, our way to an understanding of the Word, is the poem; the poem speaks the possibility of the Word through the intercession of language, writing the absence of God, the abyssal moment of God’s existence, in the perpetually disappearing footprints of the word: “Crackles! in darkness HOPE; & disappears. / Lost arts. / Vanishings” (CP 208). 33

33

Intriguingly, the late Sexton poem “The Big Boots of Pain”, released after her death, observes: “Somehow DECEASED keeps getting / stamped in red over the word HOPE.” See Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, 549.

AFTER BERRYMAN: FOUR POETS

LAVINIA GREENLAW BRENDAN KENNELLY MAURA DOOLEY HARRY CLIFTON

SNOW LINE LAVINIA GREENLAW

It was wet & white & swift and where I am we don’t know. It was dark and then it isn’t. John Berryman, Dream Song 28

Dying wasps crawl into shoes, settle and curl. I find them, wings askew, staggering up window-panes. They have lost an element to play in and must rebalance their weight. The call I want to make is ill-timed, unanswerable. A dream I had wanted? There is snow, feet deep on the overheated hill and falling. I walk slowly, lie down in it with care. All that talk when it could be simple!

THE GEOGRAPHY PAPER BRENDAN KENNELLY

It was the Geography Paper did it or was it? Anyway, he decided to kill himself so he said farewell to Leaving Cert and got a bus to Dun Laoghaire where he walked into the sea. The question is, where is he now? That’s another kind of geography. Maybe he’s a city somewhere or a village in a hot country where people sleep and work in him. Maybe he’s a lake of complete peace some folk love to gaze at imagining their hearts at rest; or he could be a hill near home his father never bothered to look at, took for granted. Dispersed like fields and water he changes with the weather yet stays the same. Most human eyes never linger long enough to know

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the difference. If he’s a dark valley he’ll relish those who dare to travel through him, enjoying his shade and light, his bumpy corners, quiet runs, startling angles, a dead badger smashed and flung into roadside grass, commented on by another Michael being driven to hospital by a tired, determined woman. Above all, he’s beyond questions and answers. Some set the questions, some provide the answers. All are ignorant of the bottom of the sea. That’s an enduring problem, too deep for you and me who live this side of the borders of geography.

TRANSIT MAURA DOOLEY

For John Berryman

Untidy life of faith and fear and the unfaith stretch your sexy span across the city an unforgiving breath from birth to bitter for he’ll remember every slight and kindness and know that we will likely someday mutter – I never heard why Or just how, it was something to do with a bridge – Under which flows it all ever endlessly water traffic the dreams the deeps the certainty that untidy love has him as its sweet kernel faithless fearless frightened closing the circle singing Tomorrow we’ll do our best, our best Tomorrow we’ll do our best.

IN SICKNESS: THREE POEMS AFTER JOHN BERRYMAN HARRY CLIFTON

1. WOLF HOUR

If I were to write now It would be poems, not of light Or love, or the luckily endowed, But of shortening breath, The watches of night, The solitude in the hour of death. At four in the morning I reach for your hand. It is given, blind. Unconsciously, a pact is made – You alive, and me returning To the land of shades. The first bird, the first car, And the wolf hour Dissipating. Ishtar’s daughters Moving about already, Waking the dead With the sound of running water. Dawn, a borrowed flat, And no-one to stop it, the dark alarm Announcing God knows what With hours, insomnias in its keeping – Gently I disengage my arm And you go on sleeping.

Harry Clifton 2. THE DOLL IN THE STAIRWELL

The doll in the stairwell – Look at it. Two storeys down And dropped from the hand of a child of three With a mind elsewhere, It might as well lie drowned On the floor of the sea. From the kingdom of loss It stares back up. Irretrievable Now, for ever and ever. Mother was here, and Mother is gone, And to go back as impossible As to go on Up the giant stairs, Frightening. All that remains Is to wait, in vertigo and terror, With heightened sounds above And smells below, for Her to return again. Abandonment, love – A moment’s inattention Then a Hand. And gravity-defying, Rabbit-soft, from out of the fourth dimension, Mother and doll restored And everything back to normal, Everyone lying.

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3. WRECKER’S LANTERN

Uncharted, brightening, Fading, vanishing into black – The wrecker’s lamp. Or is it a lighthouse Sending out its brilliant track Of signal or semaphore Across the muffled snore Of waves in the night, Of a chest gone tight? If Christ could walk on water Sleep is the glass-bottomed boat I make my bed on. Lying weightless, self afloat On darker self – The blue on blue, going down Through lung-tree, peristaltic valve, Breathing, making itself known From beyond the continental shelf And the realm of the drowned. “A light that never was On land or sea….” I see it, and it frightens me, Dilating, between three and four – Sternum-wreckage, legend, loss – From the other shore.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

MATTHEW BOSWELL completed a PhD on the Holocaust Poetry of John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and W.D. Snodgrass at the University of Sheffield. He currently works at the University of Salford. ANTHONY CALESHU is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth. Current projects include a monograph on the contemporary American poet, James Tate, a poet in the direct line of Berryman. His first book of poems, The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, was published by Salt in 2004. RON CALLAN is a College Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, University College Dublin. His book William Carlos Williams and Transcendentalism: Fitting the Crab in a Box, was published by Macmillan/St Martin’s in 1992. He is currently researching the work of Louis Zukofsky and other Objectivist poets. He was Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies (1997-2003) and has been on the editorial board of the Irish Journal of American Studies. EDWARD CLARKE completed a doctoral thesis at Trinity College Dublin on Wallace Stevens’ creative conversations with earlier English poets in 2003. He now tutors visiting students in American and British poetry at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. HARRY CLIFTON has published five collections of poems with Gallery Press: The Walls of Carthage (1977), Office of the Salt Merchant (1979), Comparative Lives (1982), The Liberal Cage (1988), and Night Train through the Brenner (1996). The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-1988 was published by Gallery in 1992 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A chapbook, God in France, was published by Metre Editions in 2004. His stories are collected as Berkeley’s Telephone (Lilliput Press, 2000). He has lived in various parts of the world, and is a member of Aosdána.

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“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman

PHILIP COLEMAN has published essays on John Berryman in Thumbscrew, the Irish Journal of American Studies, The Swansea Review, Etudes Irlandaises, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, and Tales of the Great American Victory: World War II in Politics and Poetics (VU University Press, 2006). He has also edited previously unpublished poems by Berryman for publication in the Times Literary Supplement and Metre. He is currently writing a book on Berryman for UCD Press and editing a collection on literature and science for Four Courts Press. He is a Lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. BRENDAN COOPER completed a PhD on John Berryman at the University of Cambridge in 2007. His article “‘We want anti-models’: John Berryman’s Eliotic Inheritance” is forthcoming in the Journal of American Studies. PETER DENMAN teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he is Dean of Arts. He is the author of Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement (Colin Smythe, 1989) and Rogha Dánta, translations/versions of poems by Sean Ó Tuama (Cork University Press, 1997). He has edited Poetry Ireland Review. MAURA DOOLEY has published five collections of poetry, including Ivy Leaves and Arrows (Bloodaxe, 1987), Explaining Magnetism (Bloodaxe, 1991), and Kissing a Bone (Bloodaxe, 1997) which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her collected poem, Sound Barrier, was published by Bloodaxe in 2002. She has also edited several anthologies and collections of essays and currently co-ordinates and teaches on the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. KIT FRYATT completed a PhD on allegory in modern Irish poetry at Trinity College Dublin in 2003. She has published poems, translations, reviews, and articles on contemporary literature in a wide range of international journals, and is currently completing a booklength study of twentieth-century Irish poetry. She is a lecturer in English literature at the Mater Dei Institute of Education, Dublin City University.

Notes on Contributors

267

LAVINIA GREENLAW has published three books of poems: Night Photograph (Faber and Faber, 1993), A World Where News Travelled Slowly (Faber and Faber, 1997), and Minsk (Faber and Faber, 2003). Her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover (Flamingo, 2001), won France’s Prix du Premier Roman, and her second is An Irresponsible Age (Fourth Estate, 2006). She also collaborated with the photographic artist Garry Fabian Miller on Thoughts of a Night Sea (Merrill, 2003). Her awards include a Forward Prize for best single poem and a NESTA Fellowship. She teaches at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, has written three libretti, and has made various radio programmes about light. MICHAEL HINDS is a lecturer in English literature and Head of the English Department at the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University. He has also taught in the University of Tokyo and at Trinity College Dublin where he completed a doctoral thesis on the work of Randall Jarrell in 2000. With Stephen Matterson he edited the collection of essays Rebound: the American Poetry Book (Rodopi, 2004), and he also edits the Mater Dei Institute journal REA: Religion, Education and the Arts. MARIA JOHNSTON is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin where she read for a degree in English Literature and Music. She is currently writing a PhD on Sylvia Plath and contemporary poetry. RICHARD J. KELLY is a retired Professor and Bibliographer in the University of Minnesota Libraries. A contributing editor to John Berryman Studies during the years of its publication (1975-77), he has written several articles on the poet for scholarly journals. He is also the author/editor of John Berryman: A Checklist (Scarecrow, 1972), We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (Norton, 1988), Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet (University of Michigan Press, 1993), with Alan K. Lathrop, and John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue (Peter Lang, 1998). BRENDAN KENNELLY retired as Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin in 2005. He is the author of several collections of poems, essays, plays and translations, including Familiar Strangers: New and Selected

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Poems 1960-2004 (Bloodaxe, 2004). His long poems include Cromwell (Bloodaxe, 1988) and The Book of Judas (Bloodaxe, 1991). PHILIP MCGOWAN has published essays on Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Anne Sexton and others in a range of international journals. He is the author of American Carnival: Seeing and Reading American Culture (Greenwood, 2001) and Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: the Geography of Grief (Praeger, 2004). He is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. PETER MABER completed a PhD on the connections between John Berryman and William Shakespeare at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He teaches English and American Literature at the University of Cambridge, and is currently editing Berryman’s unpublished drama and verse plays. STEPHEN MATTERSON has written extensively on American literature, and his books include American Literature: The Essential Glossary (Arnold, 2003), Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (Macmillan, 1987), an edition of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (Penguin Classics, 1991), and The Great Gatsby: The Critics Debate (Macmillan, 1990). He also edited Rebound: The American Poetry Book with Michael Hinds. He is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he is an Associate Professor and Head of the School of English (2006-2009). JUSTIN QUINN was born in Dublin and now works at the Charles University in Prague, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies. He has published two studies of American poetry and four collections of poetry, most recently Waves and Trees (Gallery, 2006). His translations of Czech poetry have appeared widely. PAGE RICHARDS completed her PhD at Harvard University. Her studies on American literature and her poetry have appeared in a variety of international journals. Her book Distancing English, on decolonization and framing in the United States, is forthcoming. She is currently teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Hong Kong.

Notes on Contributors

269

TOM ROGERS completed a doctorate on the poetry of John Berryman at the University of Sheffield in 2004, where he currently teaches English literature. He spent a period working with John Berryman’s manuscripts at the University of Minnesota in 2001. His book God of Rescue: John Berryman and Christianity will be published by Peter Lang in 2007. ALEX RUNCHMAN read for a degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford before completing an M.Phil in American Literature at the University of Cambridge in 2004. He is now a teacher.

INDEX

Abraham, 14, 16, 17 Adorno, Theodor, 27, 157; Aesthetics and Politics, 27; “Commitment”, 27; Negative Dialectics, 157; ed. (with Gretel Adorno and Frederick Podszuz), Schriften, 169 aesthetics, 8, 13, 21, 27, 121, 164, 228, 233-37, 250-51 African American culture, 43, 45, 72, 115-16, 14 (and see minstrelsy) Alberti, A.S., xiii alcoholism, 88, 146, 152, 160, 191, 215, 225 Allyn, John (father), 121, 130, 166, 200, 212, 216, 218-19, 220, 243 Altieri, Charles, The Particulars of Rapture, 103, 107, 108, 109, 113-14, 116 Altimont, Alan, xvii, xviii Alvarez, Al, The Savage God: a Study of Suicide, 241 American Heritage, xvi American Heritage Dictionary, The, 102 American Indian Movement, the, 7, 141; U.S. Termination Policy, 142 American Review, the: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, and Science I/6 (1845), 53 American tall tales, 45, 46, 47,

48, 49-50, 51-52, 54-55, 56, 60 Ames, Fisher, Works of Fisher Ames with a Selection from his Speeches and Correspondence, 56 ampersands, 67-68, 111 Andrewes, Lancelot, 177 Andrews, Jennifer, “Reading Toni Morrison’s Jazz: Rewriting the Tall Tale and Playing with the Trickster in the White American and African-American Humour Traditions”, 51 Aphrodite, 25 apocatastasis, 164 (and see Origen) Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 212 Arnim, Elizabeth von, 196 Arnold, Matthew, “Isolation: For Marguerite”, 114 Arpin, Gary Q., xiii, xiv; The Poetry of John Berryman, 3, 155, 166, 171, 228 Asia, 93 Auden, W.H., 31, 37, 191, 192, 232, 236, 239; The Enchafèd Flood; or, the Romantic Iconography of the Sea, 239; Forewords and Afterwords, 37; “Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, 37 Auschwitz, 26-27, 157-58 (and see concentration camps;

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The Holocaust) Axelrod, Steven Gould, ed., The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, 41; ed., No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, 242; Robert Lowell: Life and Art, 5, 226 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 194, 195, 202 Baechler, Lea, xvii, xviii Bak, Hans, ed., Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth-Century American Literature, Culture and Biography, 30 Bakhtin, M.M., 168 Barbera, Jack, xiii Barfoot, C.C., “Edna St Vincent Millay’s Sonnets: Putting ‘Chaos Into Fourteen Lines’”, 30 Barthes, Roland, 103, 105, 106, 134; The Pleasure of the Text, 105, 134 Barton, Anne, “John Berryman’s Flying Horse”, 36, 37 Bayle, Pierre, 156 (and see Leibniz, G.W.F.) Bayley, John, “John Berryman: A Question of Imperial Sway”, 10, 159 be-bop, 202 Beck, Charlotte H., xvii, xviii Beckett, Samuel, 227 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 2, 195, 196, 197-99; “Kreutzer Sonata”, 195 Bellow, Saul, xvi Benfey, Christopher, xvii, xviii; “The Woman in the Mirror: John Berryman and Randall Jarrell”, 131 Benjamin, Walter, Schriften, 168

Benn, Gottfried, 91 Bennett, Jean, 218 Berg, Alban, 202 Berio, Luciano, Circles, 200-201 Berlioz, Hector, 202 Berndt, Susan G., xiii; “The Last Word”, 171 Berryhill, Michael, “The Epistemology of Loss”, xii Berryman, John, aesthetics, 8, 13, 21, 27, 35, 121, 164, 228, 233-37, 250-51; affairs, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 115, 216; alcohol dependence of, xvii, 88, 115, 122, 152, 160, 191, 215, 225; ampersands, 6768, 111; birth of, 30, 141, 166; and the blues, 45, 195, 197, 206-207; Catholicism, 38, 164; and Catullus, 12139; and Christ, 7, 164, 166, 167-68, 173-89, 225, 238; and Christianity, 16, 18, 47, 48, 142, 143, 144, 148, 15051, 153-54, 162, 163-64, 168, 171, 174-75, 176, 17779, 181, 182-84, 186-89, 235; and the comic, 96, 102, 113, 118, 128, 133, 142, 147, 151, 159, 160, 199, 234; and confessionalism, 8, 72, 88, 104, 122, 123, 149, 191, 200, 213, 226-27, 229, 233, 234; and the dead, 12, 13, 17, 23, 24, 32, 56, 58, 76, 78, 79, 106, 116-17, 120, 147, 163, 164, 214, 219, 241; death of, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 4, 9, 10, 88, 95, 173, 189, 191, 223, 226, 227, 249; divorce, 39-41, 126; Dream Song form, 43, 44, 89, 91-100, 109-14, 159, 182; egotism, 71-73, 227;

Index elegies, 20, 24-25, 91, 93 116, 121, 125, 135, 137, 155, 208, 239; ethics, 8, 27, 38, 65-73, 228, 231, 233, 235-36, 237, 238-39; and fame, 105-106, 120, 121, 166, 174, 227-28, 229-30, 232, 238; and father, 121, 130, 166, 200, 212, 216, 218-19, 220, 243; Freudian readings of, 40, 88, 128, 129, 211, 203-204, 238, 239; and God, 16, 24, 25, 68, 93, 108, 111, 116, 117, 118-19, 127, 142, 143, 153-54, 15571 passim, 174, 176, 182-85, 187, 189, 238-39, 245, 249, 254-55; grief, 8, 39, 85, 88, 93, 94, 99, 118, 121, 241, 243, 245-46, 251, 254; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2, 212; guilt, 37, 48, 134, 151, 152, 153, 158, 161, 185, 220; history, 5, 11, 13, 18, 21, 24, 25, 35, 38, 49, 54, 57, 71, 87, 89, 138, 145, 150, 159, 160, 174, 175, 177, 181; the Holocaust, 11, 18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 15561, 171; humor, 46, 47, 51, 57, 58, 72, 113, 146, 187; influence on American poetry, 9; influence on European poetry, 29, 31, 34; influences on, 43, 44, 81, 93, 109, 118, 121-39, 192, 193, 202, 207, 208, 216-23; intertextuality, 8, 121, 127; and jazz, 43, 144, 161, 202, 205-206; jokes, 47, 49, 51, 56, 133, 142, 183; and Judas, 185; laughter, 47, 49, 116, 127, 142; letters, xv, xvi, 1, 5, 108, 125, 193, 217,

273 218, 225; library of, xvi, 5, 123; and loss, 23, 47, 69, 101, 102-103, 112-14, 11516, 121, 122, 138, 146, 151, 152, 162, 169, 199, 218, 220, 221, 228-29, 239, 245; and Robert Lowell, 29-44, 188, 191, 194, 195, 225-26; manuscripts of 1, 6, 7, 1112, 15, 17-19, 25, 26, 159, 161-62, 173-89, 215, 21720; music, 8, 12, 115, 118, 191-208; Modernism, 29, 39, 138, 149, 150, 154; and mother, xv, 1, 5, 125, 166, 193, 217, 218, 220; and mourning, 16, 116, 117, 119, 205; New Testament scholarship, 173-89; performative strategies, 8, 50, 54, 58, 101-120 passim, 202; philosophy, 8, 96; poem sequences, 11, 17, 19, 34, 36, 40, 86, 106-107, 121, 136, 137; on poetry, 107108, 149, 150-51, 192-93, 211; politics, 41, 43, 71; post-Modernism, 149, 154; and Ezra Pound, 193, 211; prosody, 7, 87-100; psychology, 13; puns, 37, 41, 82, 84, 111, 123, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169; Regents’ Professor of Humanities, University of Minnesota, 225; silence, 27, 55, 56, 65, 66, 67, 96, 97, 111, 135, 167, 168, 218, 241-45, 250, 252-54; and William Shakespeare, xi, 2, 7, 9, 3537, 42, 43, 66, 77, 78, 81-86, 109, 141, 153, 185, 193-94, 196, 209-23, 225, 227, 231; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,

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“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman 31, 32, 35-37, 40, 41, 42, 81-86, 204, 207; sonnet form, 8, 29-44; sonnet sequences, 29-44; suffering, 16, 115-16, 150-51, 154, 156-57, 158, 160, 161, 162, 213, 216, 251; teaching, xixii, xvii, 95, 173-74, 175, 182, 210, 225; theology, 5, 7, 8, 18, 23, 156, 160, 164, 177, 179, 187; and Dylan Thomas, 93-94, 194, 232; and the trickster, 141-54; use of baby-talk, 23, 160; use of blackface in The Dream Songs, 103, 113, 114, 115, 116, 144, 160, 206; use of slang, 34, 44; and Walt Whitman, 10, 29, 135, 138, 163, 194, 198; and witnessing, 15, 21, 25, 68, 79, 115, 121; and W.B. Yeats, 1, 2, 71, 93, 109, 118, 119, 191, 192, 193, 211, 218, 221 Works Criticism: “All’s Well”, 194; Berryman’s Shakespeare, 35, 36, 194, 196, 209-23 passim; “The Character and Role of the Heroine in Shakespearean Comedy”, 210; “Conrad’s Journey”, 213; “The Crisis”, 212-13, 214, 220; The Freedom of the Poet, 1, 10, 43, 55, 78, 91, 109, 147, 163, 193, 194, 198, 211, 213, 215, 218, 225, 231; Life of Christ, 7, 173-89, 225; “The Loud Hill of Wales”, 194; “Marlowe’s Damnations”, 211, 231; “The Maturation”, 95; “A

Note on Poetry”, 108-109, 192-93; “Notes on Macbeth”, 194; “One Answer to a Question: Changes”, 1, 43, 109, 193, 215; “Pathos and Dream”, 196; “Plan of Work”, 212; “The Poetry of Ezra Pound”, 193, 211; “The Ritual of W.B. Yeats”, 1, 218; “Robert Lowell and Others”, 194; “Scholia to Second Edition” of Love & Fame, 214-15, 229-30; “Shakespeare at Thirty”, 212, 222; “Shakespeare’s Reality”, 210, 214, 216, 222, 223, 225; “‘Song of Myself’: Intention and Substance”, 10, 163, 194, 198; “The Sonnets”, 216; “The Sorrows of Captain Carpenter”, 147; Stephen Crane, 134, 211 Drama: “The Architect”, 217-20; Cleopatra: A Meditation, xvii, xviii Fiction: “The Imaginary Jew”, 158, 195; Recovery, 195, 225, 230, 236, 237; “Wash Far Away”, 91 Letters: We Dream of Honour, xv, 1, 5, 125, 193, 217, 218 Lyrics: “Cradle Song”, 195 Poems: “A Huddle of Need”, 236; “Away”, 231; “Beethoven Triumphant”, 196-98; “The Ball Poem”, 94, 193, 215, 228; “Dante’s Tomb”, 232; “Dawn like a Rose”, 26; “Death Ballad”, 236, 237; “Despair”, 252, 255; “Drugs Alcohol Little

Index Sister”, 239; “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”, 230, 235-36, 238-39; “The Facts & Issues”, 228; “from The Black Book (i)”, 12, 13-14; “from The Black Book (ii)”, 18-19, 27; “from The Black Book (iii)”, 12, 18, 23, 26, 27; “Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks”, 236; “He made, a thousand years ago, amany songs”, 37-38; “The Hell Poem”, 236, 237; “Henry’s Fate”, 227; “Her & It”, 123, 230, 232; “The Home Ballad”, 238; “I Know”, 236; “Images of Elspeth”, 236; “In & Out”, 230, 235; “Lover & Child”, 19-20, 23-25; “Message”, 231, 233; “Monkhood”, 232; “The Nervous Songs”, 8990, 118, 150; “not him”, 12, 14-17; “Of Suicide”, 237; “On the London Train”, 193; “The Professor’s Song”, 89; “Purgatory”, 236, 237; “Recovery”, 229; “Rising Hymn”, 17-19, 26; “Scholars at the Orchid Pavillion”, 12; “The Search”, 174, 175-76, 177, 233; “Shirley & Auden”, 236; “The Song of the Bridegroom”, 89-90; “The Song of the Man Forsaken and Possessed”, 90; “The Song of the Young Hawaiian”, 90; Sonnet 1, 37; Sonnet 9, 37; Sonnet 10, 76; Sonnet 27, 36; Sonnet 37, 195; Sonnet 40, 35; Sonnet 45, 38; Sonnet 56, 39-41;

275 Sonnet 59, 37; Sonnet 71, 37; Sonnet 74, 34; Sonnet 75, 36; Sonnet 117, 195; “To a Woman”, 236, 238; “Transit”, 232-33; translation of verse dialogue of Job, 162; “2”, 12; “Two Organs”, 234; “Vespers”, 189; “waiting”, 12, 26; “Warsaw”, 18-19; “the will”, 12, 26; “Winter Landscape”, 193 The Dream Songs; Dream Song 1, xiii, 8, 38, 89, 96, 106, 151, 161-62, 164, 167, 170, 199, 201, 203, 205, 206; Dream Song 1 and responses to, 63-86; Dream Song 2, 72, 206; Dream Song 3, 94, 118, 122; Dream Song 4, 7, 98, 100, 111, 114, 115, 125-39, 199-200; Dream Song 5, 96-97, 15152, 154, 161; Dream Song 6, 147; Dream Song 7, 147; Dream Song 8, 113, 146-47; Dream Song 10, 105; Dream Song 11, 147; Dream Song 12, 147, 200; Dream Song 13, 106, 114, 119, 147, 15354; Dream Song 14, 201; Dream Song 15, 94; Dream Song 22, 99, 201, 203, 204205; Dream Song 24, 147; Dream Song 26, 38, 111-12, 115, 146, 161, 167; Dream Song 27, 108; Dream Song 28, 258; Dream Song 29, 152-53; Dream Song 30, 110, 130; Dream Song 31, 147; Dream Song 33, 200; Dream Song 35, 105; Dream Song 36, 94; Dream Song 40, 147, 206-207; Dream

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“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman Song 46, 121, 133; Dream Song 48, 167-68, 183-86, 201; Dream Song 53, 91; Dream Song 56, 164-65, 221; Dream Song 57, 133, 147, 164, 165; Dream Song 62, 147; Dream Song 63, 135, 147, 153; Dream Song 65, 146; Dream Song 66, 147; Dream Song 68, 206; Dream Song 69, 132, 152; Dream Song 71, 45; Dream Song 74, 112; Dream Song 75, 124, 138; Dream Song 76, 200, 201; Dream Song 77, 200, 201; Dream Songs 78-91 (“Op. Post.”), 90, 92, 221; Dream Song 80, 119; Dream Song 81, 221; Dream Song 83, 93; Dream Song 84, 93, 94, 147; Dream Song 85, 221-23; Dream Song 88, 96; Dream Song 89, 90; Dream Song 91, 106, 162; Dream Song 92, 92, 168; Dream Song 93, 147; Dream Song 97, 122, 147, 159-62, 170; Dream Song 99, 92; Dream Song 101, 112-13; Dream Song 112, 133, 164, 168, 244, 245; Dream Song 116, 77; Dream Song 121, 94; Dream Song 122, 133; Dream Song 124, 40, 147; Dream Song 133, 105; Dream Song 134, 147; Dream Song 135, 123; Dream Song 136, 248; Dream Song 139, 94; Dream Song 140, 165; Dream Song 143, 114; Dream Song 144, 166; Dream Song 145, 200; Dream Song 146, 90, 93, 103, 116-17, 161; Dream

Song 147, 99, 194; Dream Song 148, 206; Dream Song 149, 116; Dream Song 151, 116; Dream Song 153, 99, 116, 117, 170; Dream Song 157, 93; Dream Song 159, 5, 116, 149; Dream Song 163, 99, 146; Dream Song 164, 149; Dream Song 168, 133; Dream Song 170, 80; Dream Song 172, 8, 241, 244; Dream Song 177, 119-20; Dream Song 180, 92, 110; Dream Song 181, 92; Dream Song 187, 118, 131; Dream Song 192, 99, 115, 130; Dream Song 199, 114, 165; Dream Song 202, 90; Dream Song 203, 94; Dream Song 204, 195; Dream Song 208, 130; Dream Song 212, 125; Dream Song 220, 162; Dream Song 233, 132; Dream Song 234, 182; Dream Song 238, 182; Dream Song 239, 150, 16263; Dream Song 241, 116; Dream Song 242, 114, 135; Dream Song 247, 132; Dream Song 256, 163; Dream Song 259, 251; Dream Song 266, 165-66, 168-69; Dream Song 276, 92; Dream Song 277, 93; Dream Song 278, 93; Dream Song 281, 2, 119; Dream Song 288, 163; Dream Song 295, 96; Dream Song 297, 109; Dream Song 302, 116; Dream Song 305, 106; Dream Song 306, 97; Dream Song 308, 2, 3; Dream Song 311, 146; Dream Song 312, 2; Dream Song 322, 176;

Index Dream Song 324, 208; Dream Song 326, 146; Dream Song 328, 164; Dream Song 335, 147, 244; Dream Song 337, 122; Dream Song 342, 97; Dream Song 346, 43; Dream Song 350, 115; Dream Song 351, 115; Dream Song 353, 115; Dream Song 357, 132; Dream Song 364, 9, 113, 119; Dream Song 370, 10; Dream Song 373, 9; Dream Song 380, 110; Dream Song 384, 99-100, 200, 243; Dream Song 385, xiii, 92, 94, 113, 139, 169-170, 200 Collections: Berryman’s Sonnets, 2, 6, 39-44 passim, 195, 216; The Black Book, 6-7, 11-27, 150, 158-59; Collected Poems: 19371971, 14, 32, 95, 136, 230; Delusions, Etc., 6, 189, 196, 225, 228, 239, 248; The Dream Songs, xv, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 13, 30, 32, 34, 35, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 56, 66-69, 71-73, 75-80, 81-86, 87-100, 10120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 130, 133, 136, 138, 139, 141-54, 155-71, 173, 177, 182-83, 186, 189, 192, 193, 198-208, 215, 216, 221-23, 225-26, 227, 229, 239, 241, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250 (and see The Dream Songs, individual Dream Songs); Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 155, 227; His Thoughts Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt, 12, 19; His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 34, 92, 207; Homage to

277 Mistress Bradstreet, 6, 12, 34, 40, 45-61, 107, 118, 139, 215, 216; Love & Fame, 6, 8, 34, 123, 174, 187, 215, 225-40, 238, 252; 77 Dream Songs, 32, 34, 92, 103, 104, 112, 199; Sonnets to Chris, 2-3, 30, 31, 32, 34-37, 43, 216 Unpublished works: xvii, 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11-12, 15, 1719, 26, 159, 161-62, 173-89, 210, 215, 217-20; Life of Christ, 7, 173-89, 225; “Mozart’s Requiem”, 12; translation of Catullus’ Carmina XXXIV, 123-25 Berryman, John Angus McAlpin (stepfather), 220 Berryman, Kate Donahue (third wife), xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 2, 123 Berryman, Martha (daughter), xvi, xvii, 2, 92, 169, 170, 171, 187, 188, 225 Berryman, Martha “Jill Angel” (mother), xv, 1, 5, 125, 166, 193, 217, 218, 220; death of, xv Berryman, Robert Jefferson (brother), xv, xvii Berryman, Sarah (daughter), xvii Bezeczky, Gabór, “Literal Language”, 55, 60 Bible, the, xi, 16, 38, 79, 159, 160, 174-87; The Acts of the Apostles, 180; Book of Exodus, 38, 168; Book of Genesis, 67, 79; The Gospel According to St. John, 153, 167-68, 180; The Gospel According to St. Luke, 79, 164; The Gospel According to St. Mark, 167, 180, 184;

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The Gospel According to St. Matthew, xii, 186; The Letters of St. Paul, 180, 185; New Testament, 174-87 passim; Old Testament, 16, 161, 162 (and see The Book of Job; Job) Bidart, Frank ed. (with David Gewanter), Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, 31, 42-43, 188 Bishop, Elizabeth, 3, 87, 91, 118; “Thank-You Note”, 87, 91 Bishop, Jim, 180 Blackmur, R.P., xvi, 4 Blackwood, Caroline (Robert Lowell’s third wife), 42 Blanchot, Maurice, 8, 242, 243, 244, 247-48, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254; The Gaze of Orpheus, 252; The Space of Literature, 243, 244, 247-48, 249, 252, 253; Thomas the Obscure, 242, 252 Bloom, Harold, 118; ed., John Berryman: Modern Critical Views, 4, 89, 133, 192 Bloom, James D., The Stock of Available Reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman, 3-4 blues, the, 45, 195, 197, 206-207; blues poetry, 206 Book of Job, the, 143, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156, 159-63 (and see Job) Borges, Jorge Luis, “Everything and Nothing”, 213 Bové, Paul, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry, 248, 250 Boydell, Brian, 195 Bradstreet, Anne, 40, 49, 56, 58, 118, 138

Braiterman, Zachary, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, 158, 15960, 163 Brans, Jo, xiii Brer Rabbit, 144 Breslin, Paul, 67; The PsychoPolitical Muse, 71-72 Brontë, Charlotte, 118 Brontë, Emily, 118 Brown, Terence, The Life of W.B. Yeats, 1 Browne, Michael Dennis, xvi, xvii, 9; “Henry Fermenting: Debts to The Dream Songs”, 192 Brunner, Edward, Cold War Poetry, 4 Bryan, Sharon, xvii, xviii Buber, Martin, On Judaism, 160 Bultmann, Rudolph, 174, 175, 177, 181 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 174 Burt, Stephen, Randall Jarrell and His Age, 5; “My Name is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover John Berryman”, 9 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, Don Juan, 235 Cage, John, 201 Cambridge, xviii, 210, 217, 218, 232 (and see University of Cambridge) Camus, Albert, 241 Carne-Ross, Donald, “Tradition and Transposition”, 59 Carrington, Archbishop Philip, 174, 175, 177 Carson, Anne, 130, 136, 137; “Dirt and Desire: Essay on

Index the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity”, 136, 137; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, 130 Carter, Elliott, 201 Catullus, 2, 7, 121-39; John Berryman’s translation of Carmina XXXIV, 123-25; The Carmina, 121, 122, 128, 131, 136, 138; Carmina I, 138; Carmina ILX, 121; Carmina XXXIV, 7, 123-25, 126; Carmina L, 132; Carmina LI, 125, 126, 127, 132, 134-35, 136; Carmina LI and Dream Song 4, 125-35; Carmina LIa, 125, 132; Carmina LII, 119, 132-33, 136; Carmina LXI-LXVIII, 124; Carmina LXV, 124; Carmina LXVIII, 124; Carmina LXIX-CXVI, 124 Cavalcanti, Guido, 129 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, xi Channing, Edward Tyrell, “On Models in Literature”, 53, 59 Channing, Walter, “Essay on American Language and Literature”, 52-53 Chasalow, Eric, “Art of the States: Dream Songs”, 201, 202; “Boston Connection: Programme Notes”, 202; Dream Songs, 201-203; “Left to His Own Devices”, 201-202 Cheng, Maria, xvii Christianity, 16, 18, 143, 144, 148, 150-51, 153-54, 162, 163, 164-65, 168, 171, 174-

279 75, 176, 177, 178-81, 18283, 184, 186, 187, 235; Christian hymn forms, 18, 48; Christian teleology, 142, 148, 150, 151, 157, 161, 171 Clare, John, “I Am! Yet What I Am None Cares or Knows”, 221 Clark, Tony, 11 Clendenning, John, xvii, xviii Clifton, Harry, “The Doll in the Stairwell”, 263; “Wolf Hour”, 262; “Wrecker’s Lantern”, 264 Coleman, Philip, 5, 8, 94; “‘An unclassified strange flower’: Towards an Analysis of John Berryman’s Contact with Dylan Thomas”, 94; “The Politics of Praise: Influence and Authority in John Berryman’s Poetry”, 158, 169 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 137 Columbia Review, the, 1 Columbia University, xvi, 209 concentration camps, 13-14, 16, 20, 24, 25-26, 157-58 (and see The Holocaust; The Nazis) conference on John Berryman (1990), xvi-xvii confessionalism, 8, 72, 88, 104, 122, 123, 149, 191, 226-27, 233-34 Conarroe, Joel, John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry, 3, 37 Coroniti, Joseph, Poetry as Text in Twentieth-Century Vocal Music: From Stravinsky to Reich, 201 Covici, Pascal, Humor and Revelation in American

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“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman

Literature: The Puritan Connection, 56-57 Critchley, Simon, Ethics— Politics—Subjectivity: Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, 228; Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, 245, 246, 247-48, 249, 252 cummings, e.e., 30, 36, 81, 200201; Complete Poems 19101962, 36; Tulips & Chimneys, 30 Daddy Rice, “Jumpin’ Jim Crow”, 206 (and see minstrelsy) Daniel, Samuel, 31 Dante Alighieri, 24, 26, 40, 108, 175, 232; The Divine Comedy, xi, 12; Inferno, 12, 26, 108, 175; Paradiso, 12; Purgatorio, 12 Davie, Donald, “A Bee in His Sonnet”, 33; Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays, 33 Davis (Finney), Kathe, xiii, xvii, 45, 46, 47 Davis, Steven T., 157 Davison Ficke, Arthur, 29 death camps, 20, 158 (and see Auschwitz, concentration camps, the Holocaust, Maidanek, Orarienburg, Treblinka) Dechery, Laurie, xvii Dekker, Thomas (with John Ford and William Rowley), The Witch of Edmonton, 217-18 DeLillo, Don, 227

Descartes, René, 221, 246 Dewey, Ariane, “Comic Tragedies/Tragic Comedies: American Tall Tales”, 48, 49 Diamond, Stanley, “Introductory Essay: Job and the Trickster”, 141, 143, 150, 151, 154 (and see Job; Radin, Paul) Dickinson, Emily, 118 Dodson, Samuel Fisher, Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art, 5 Don Juan, 135, 234-35 (and see Byron, George Gordon, Lord) Donne, John, 39, 87, 91, 100, 227; “The Flea”, 39; Songs and Sonets, 87, 91, 100 Donoghue, Denis, “Berryman’s Long Dream”, 89, 133, 205 Dooley, Maura, “Transit”, 261 dreams, 71, 104, 115, 171, 174 Dryden, John, 35 Dublin (and see Ireland), 2, 93, 97 Dugan, Alan, 9 Dunn, Douglas, “Gaiety & Lamentation: The Defeat of John Berryman”, 155, 169, 192 Durkheim, Emile, Suicide: a Study in Sociology, 245-46 Eden, 164, 167, 168, 187 Einstein, Albert, 176; “Autobiographical Notes”, 176 elegy, 20, 24-25, 91, 93, 116, 121, 125, 135, 137, 155, 208, 239 Eliot, T.S., 24, 29, 78, 102, 128,

Index 164, 171, 194, 198; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, 24; “Marina”, 171; “The Music of Poetry”, 194 Elizabethan poetic/sonnet conventions, 35, 93, 217 Ellis, Carol, xvii Ellison, Ralph, 72, 144-45, 149, 151, 152, 154; “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”, 144, 145; Invisible Man, 144-45, 152, 154 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29, 42, 43; “The American Scholar”, 29 Epictetus, 237 Erdrich, Louise, Love Medicine, 149 Erikson, Erik H., 210, 222; Gandhi’s Truth, 210-11 ethics, 8, 27, 38, 65-69, 72, 228, 231, 233, 235-36, 237, 23839, 243 fairy tales, 66, 67 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, xv (and see Giroux, Robert) Feinstein, Sascha, ed. (with Yusef Komunyakaa), The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, 226 Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Italy (1969), 102 Firmage, George James, ed., e.e cummings: Complete Poems 1910-1962, 36 Fitzgerald, William, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position, 122 The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, 207

281 Five Young American Poets, 102, 108-109 Foley, John Miles, ed., Teaching Oral Traditions, 51 Forseth, Roger, xvii, xviii Foster, Roy F., W.B.Yeats: A Life, II. The Arch-Poet, 1 Foucault, Michel, 103 Frank, Anne, The Diary of Anne Frank, 95 Frost, Carol, “The Poet’s Tact, and a Necessary Tactlessness”, 46, 49 Frost, Robert, 30, 31, 34; A Boy’s Will, 30; “The Silken Tent”, 31; “The Vantage Point”, 30 Fuller, John, ed., The Oxford Book of Sonnets, 33 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, “Letter to Dallmayr”, 233 Galassi, Jonathan, “Sorrows and Passions of His Majesty the Ego”, 230 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 144 George, Stefan, “The Word”, 248 Gewanter, David (see Bidart, Frank) Giles, Paul, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics, 4, 164, 168 Ginsberg, Allen, 72 Giroux, Robert, 32, 225; The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 32 Glück, Louise, 9; “Against Sincerity”, 234; Proofs and Theories, 234 Goguel, Maurice, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179-80, 181, 182, 183;

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The Life of Jesus, 179-80, 181, 182 Grace, Teddy, 195, 207 Graham, Jorie, 9 Graves, Robert, 134; The White Goddess, 134; (with Laura Riding), “William Shakespeare and E.E. Cummings”, 81-82 Green, Charlie, 106 Greenlaw, Lavinia, “Snow Line”, 258 Grossman, Vassili, 20-21, 22, 24; The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, 20-21 Gubar, Susan, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, 21 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2; Guggenheim Foundation, 212 Guignebert, Charles, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181; Jesus, 183, 184-85 Habbakuk, 156 Haffenden, John, xiii, xiv, xvi, 3, 13, 118-19, 126, 155, 162, 167, 194-95, 226, 235; ed., Berryman’s Shakespeare, 35, 35, 37, 185, 187, 209-23 passim; ed., Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 155, 227; “Introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare”, 201; “Introduction” to Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 155; John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, 3, 12, 107108, 112, 118-19, 126, 162, 167-68, 186, 226, 235; The Life of John Berryman, 3, 11, 12, 13, 29, 32, 158, 175,

194-95, 210-11, 215, 216, 220, 223, 230-31 Haggin, Bernard, 195 Halliday, E.M., xvi, 5; ed., American Heritage, xi; John Berryman and the Thirties: A Memoir, xvi, 5 Hamann, Johann Georg, 76 Hamilton, Ian, 35, 42; The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors, 29 Hampl, Patricia, xvii Haralson, Eric, ed. Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 9 Hardy, Thomas, 78, 91 Harness Prize, the, 210 Harvard University, 210 Hashimoto, Yuichi, xiii Hastings, James, xii Haughton, William, 210 Haydn, Franz Josef, 195, 197; “London Symphony”, 195 Hayes, Ann, xiii Hazo, Samuel, xiii Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 244 Heidegger, Martin, On the Way to Language, 243 Heim, Karl, 177 Herbert, George, 79; “The World”, 79 Herder, Johann Gottfied von, 76; Abhandlungen und Briefe über schöne Literature und Kunst, 76; Sämmtliche Werke. Zur Schönen Literatur und Kunst, I-XX, 76 Hermes, 141, 144 (and see Trickster) Herrick, Robert, “To the Virgins,

283

Index To Make Much of Time”, 87 Hettinga, Donal R. (see Schmidt, Gary D.) Heyen, William, xiii, xvii; “John Berryman: A Memoir and an Interview”, 191, 192, 199 Hill, Geoffrey, Speech! Speech!, 98 Hillier, Paul (see Reich, Steve) Hippokrates, 136 Hirsch, Edward, “One Life, One Writing!: The Middle Generation”, 45-6, 48 history, 5, 11, 13, 18, 21, 24, 25, 35, 38, 42, 49, 54, 57, 71, 89, 145, 150, 159, 160; and Christ, 174, 175, 177, 181, 185, 187, 244; and poetry, 35 Hofmann, Michael, John Berryman: Poems Selected by Michael Hofmann, 4, 226-227 Holocaust, the, 11, 18, 20-21, 23-27, 157-58, 160, 161, 171 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 39, 98, 212; Poems, 98; “Triune!”, 221 Hornby, Nick, “‘A Fan’s Eye View’: Bruce Springsteen interviewed by Nick Hornby”, 101 Hotson, Leslie, 36 (and see Shakespeare’s Sonnets) Housman, A.E., 91, 125, 227 Hudson Review, the, 212 Hughes, Langston, 206 Hughes, Ted, Crow, 149 Hyde, Lewis, xvii, xviii Irby, James E., ed. (with Donald A. Yates), Labyrinths, 213 Ireland (and see Dublin), 2, 9, 97

Irwin, Bonnie D., “The Frame Tale East and West”, 51, 52 Jackson, Joe, “Is she really going out with him?”, 129 James, Henry, “The Beast in the Jungle”, 60 Jarrell, Randall, xvi, 5, 116, 117, 131, 191, 195 jazz, 43, 144, 161, 202, 205; jazz poetry, 206 Jeremiah, 171 Jewish culture, 16, 150, 157, 161, 176, 177, 184, 185-86, 187, 188; and anti-Semitism, 22, 157-59; and Christianity, 150, 176-78, 185-86; ghettoes, 26; Nazi persecution of, 16-18, 20, 22, 23, 26, 115, 157, 158-59 (and see concentration camps; The Holocaust; Judaism) Job, xi, 143, 150, 151, 154, 156, 159-63 (and see Book of Job; Diamond, Stanley), John Berryman Studies, xiii-xiv, 171 Jonson, Ben, 211, 231 Josipovici, Gabriel, The Book of God, 168 Judaeo-Christianity, 148, 150, 153-54 Judaism, 16, 150, 177, 184, 185; break from Christianity, 176-77; Christ as Jewish prophet, 176-77; theology, 150-51, 184, 185-86 (and see Jewish culture) Jung, Carl, “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure”, 141, 144, 152 (and see the trickster)

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Keats, John, 30, 125, 229; “When I have fears that I may cease to be”, 219 Kelly, Richard J., vi-xviii, 3, 4, 5; John Berryman: A Checklist, vii, 3; “John Berryman: A Ten Year Supplemental Checklist”, 3 (and see Literary Research Newsletter VII/2 and 3); John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue, xvi, 5, 123; ed. (with Alan K. Lathrop), Recovering Berryman, xiii, 4, 131, 217; ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, xv, 1, 5, 125, 193, 217, 218 Kennelly, Brendan, “The Geography Paper”, 259-60 Kerényi, Karl, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology”, 141, 148-49, 151 (and see the trickster) Kierkegaard, Søren, 2, 8, 76, 91, 212, 228, 230, 233-34, 236, 237; Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, 8, 228, 233, 234-35, 237; Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 76, 212; Works of Love, 76 Kissinger, Henry, 133 Kostelanetz, Richard, “Conversation with Berryman”, 161 Koussevitzky, Sergei, 196 Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, 250 Lacan, Jacques, 131 Larkin, Philip, 6, 88; “A Neglected Responsibility: Contemporary Literary

Manuscripts”, 6 Lathrop, Alan K., xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii; ed. (with Richard J. Kelly), Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, 4, 131, 217 Lehrer, Tom, 132 Leibniz, G.W.F., Theodicy, 156 Levenson, Jon Douglas, The Book of Job in its Time and in the Twentieth Century, 160 Levi, Primo, 25; The Drowned and the Saved, 25 Levin, Phyllis, ed., The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classical Tradition in English, 33 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 228; Time and the Other, 244-45, 251; Totality and Infinity, 246 Levine, Mark, 9 Levine, Philip, xvii, xviii; “Mine Own John Berryman”, xvii Liberman, Laurence, xiii Lincoln, Kenneth, Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry 1890-1999, 146 Linebarger, J.M., John Berryman, xiii, 3, 166 Lisbon earthquake (1755), 156 Literary Research Newsletter, VII/2 and 3, 3 Longinus, On the Sublime, 127, 129-30 Lowell, Robert, xvi, 3, 5, 9, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 40, 42, 43, 188, 191, 194; and John Berryman, 29-44 passim, 188, 191, 225-26, 231; and the sonnet form, 25, 39,41, 42, 43, 44 Works: Day by Day, 42;

Index “Dolphin”, 41, 42-43; The Dolphin, 31, 41, 43; “For John Berryman, 19141972”, 195, 225-26, 231; History, 42; Imitations, 35; Land of Unlikeness, 188; “Leviathan”, 188; The Mills of the Kavanaughs, 33; “The Nihilist as Hero”, 35; Notebook, 35, 41; “Summer Between Terms I”, 41; “Truth”, 31 Luther, Martin, xi, 177, 179 Madsen, Deborah, Re-reading Allegory: a Narrative Approach to Genre, 81, 82 Maidanek, 26 (and see concentration camps) Mancini, Jr., Joseph, xvii, xviii, 3, 162; “A Hearing Aid for Berryman’s Dream Songs”, 58-59; The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Strategies in the Poetry of John Berryman, 3, 162, 213 Mariani, Paul, xvii; Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, 5, 12, 32, 89, 175, 182, 218 Maritain, Jacques, 38 Marlowe, Christopher, 211, 231 Martin, Jerold M., xvii, xviii Matterson, Stephen, 4, 7, 34-35, 109; Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing, 4, 35, 109 McCabe, Richard, ed., Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, 36 McCosh, Sandra, “Aggression in Children’s Jokes”, 47 McGrath, Alistair, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 179

285 McKay, Claude, 30 McNeile, A.H., 174, 175 Means, Russell, (with Marvin J. Wolf), Where White Men Fear to Tread: the Autobiography of Russell Means, 142 (and see American Indian Movement) Melville, Herman, “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, 60 Mendelson, Edward, “How to Read John Berryman’s Dream Songs”, 192, 207 Meredith, William, xii, 9, 230; “In Loving Memroy of the Author of The Dream Songs”, xii Merwin, W.S., 9 Michelfelder, Diane, ed. (with Richard Palmer), Dialogue and Deconstruction, 233 Middle Generation, the, xiii, 46, 191 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 30 Milton, John, 87, 91, 137; Comus, 137; “Lycidas”, 87, 91, 148; Paradise Lost, 16 Minneapolis, xv, 2, 7, 126, 14142, 179, 217; and the American Indian Movement, 7, 141-42 Minot, Stephen, “John Berryman and the Lure of Obscurity”, 228 minstrelsy, 43, 45, 72, 114, 115, 144, 198, 206, 207; minstrel talk, 72 Modernism, 29, 39, 138, 154 Molesworth, Charles, vxii Monroe, Harriet, 2, 30, 128 Monteverdi, Claudio, 195 Moore, Marianne, 118

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Moore, Merrill, 31 Morton, Jelly Roll, 206 (and see Daddy Rice; minstrelsy) Mosby, Rebekah Presson (see Paschen, Elise) mourning, 16, 116, 117, 119, 205, 214 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 12, 195; Requiem, 12 music, xvii, 8, 12, 111, 115, 191208 Native American culture, 45, 14142, 143, 144, 146, 148 (and see the trickster) Nazis, the, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21-24, 26, 158 (and see concentration camps; Holocaust) New Criticism, the, 31, 88, 186 New York, xv, 1, 217 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 157 Niikura, Toshikazu, xiii Oberg, Arthur, xiii Oklahoma, 141, 144 Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship, 210 Oliver, Kelly, ed., The Portable Kristeva, 250 Once in a Sycamore, xiv Orarienburg, 13 (and see concentration camps) Origen, 164 (and see apocatastasis) Paige, D.D., ed., The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 128 Palmer, Richard (see Michelfelder, Diane) Paris, 176, 217, 218 Parker, Andrew, ed. (with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick),

Performativity and Performance, 101 Paschen, Elise, ed. (with Rebekah Presson Mosby), Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath, 98 Pattison, George, 76; ed. (with Stephen Shakespeare), Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, 233-34 Pavlovcak, Michael, xiii Perosa, Sergio, xiii Petrarch, 33, 36, 40; Petrarchan sonnet form, 29, 35, 37, 40, 42 Phillips, Robert S., The Confessional Poets, 227, 228, 229 Plath, Sylvia, 3, 117, 191, 226, 242 Plotz, John, et al, “An Interview with John Berryman”, 76, 192, 198, 202, 207, 215 Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 200 poetry, and the limits of representation, 27, 245, 24851, 254; as essence of language, 24243, 245, 248-49, 252-53, 254; opposed to prose, 21, 22, 65, 87-100 passim; and performative strategies, 8, 52, 101-120; and trauma; 22, 23, 26, 159, 251; and the unsayable, 241-55; and the unspeakable, 22, 23, 26; and witnessing, 20-21, 25, 68, 115, 121 Poetry, 12, 26 politics, 41, 43, 71, 122, 166, 226, 232, 236 Pooley, Roger, “Berryman’s Last

Index Poems: Plain Style and Christian Style”, 47, 48 post-Holocaust poetics, 21, 27, 157-71 post-Holocaust theology, 150-52, 154, 164 post-Modernism, 149, 154 Pound, Ezra, 29, 128, 138, 193, 201, 211; The Cantos, 211; Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, 201; Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 193; Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, 128 Princeton, xv, 38, 43 Prometheus, 144 (and see the trickster) Protestantism, 54, 177, 179 Provost, Sarah, “Erato’s Fool and Bitter Sister: Two Aspects of John Berryman”, 48 Puritans, 52 Putnam, A.J., 1 Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 151 (and see the trickster) Ransom, John Crowe, 30, 31, 109, 147; “Captain Carpenter”, 147 Reed, Ishmael, “The Tradition of Serious Comedy in AfroAmerican Literature”, 144; Writin’ is Fightin’: ThirtySeven Years of Boxing on Paper, 144 Reich, Steve, Writings on Music 1965-2000, 200-01 Richards, Jeffrey H., Early American Drama, 54

287 Ricks, Christopher, 8, 34, 155-56, 165, 169, 171; “Recent American Poetry”, 34, 15556 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 89-90, 118, 116, 122, 123, 253; Die Stimmen, 89-90, 118 Rimbaud, Arthur, “Au Cabaret Vert”, 135 Robinson, Edward Arlington, 30 Rogers, Tom, 5, 7; “Representations of Christianity in the Poetry of John Berryman”, 168 Roth, John K., 157 Rubenstein, Richard, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 157-58 Saint Paul, 180, 185 Sappho, 118, 123, 127-33, 12435, 136, 137, 138, 139; Sappho 31, 125, 129 Schmidt, Gary D. ed. (with Donald R. Hettinga), Sitting at the Feet of the Past: Retelling the North American Folktale for Children, 48 Schubert, Franz, 195 Schwartz, Delmore, 93, 116-17, 149 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (see Palmer, Andrew) Sexton, Anne, 191, 242, 243-44, 247, 250, 255; “The Big Boots of Pain”, 255; No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, 242; “Wanting to Die”, 243-44, 247 Shakespeare, Stephen (see George

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Pattison) Shakespeare, William, xi, xvi, 2, 7, 9, 31, 32, 40, 41, 43, 66, 81, 82 103, 141, 196, 20923, 227, 231 Works: All’s Well That Ends Well, 214; Antony and Cleopatra, 213; As You Like It, 66; Hamlet, 82, 117, 21213, 214, 218-20; King Lear, 153, 210, 217; Love’s Labours Lost, 77-78; Macbeth, 185, 193-94, 213; Measure for Measure, 213; The Merchant of Venice, 194; Othello, 78, 85, 213; Richard II, 221; Richard III, 222; Romeo and Juliet, 78, 85; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 31, 32, 35-37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 81-86, 213, 216; Sonnet 55, 35; Sonnet 129, 81-86; Troilus and Cressida, 194, 213 Sibelius, Jean, 195 Sidney, Sir Philip, 31, 33, 41; Astrophil and Stella, 31; Defense of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella and Other Writings, 41 silence, 27, 55, 56, 65, 66, 67, 96, 97, 111, 135, 167, 168, 218, 241-45, 250, 252-55 Simic, Charles, 9 Sisson, C.J., “The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare”, 216 Simpson, Eileen (first wife), xv, 13, 38, 40 Smith, Bessie, 72, 195, 206, 207; “Empty Bed Blues”, 206; “Yellow Dog Blues”, 206 Smith, Ernest J., xvii; “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’

for The Dream Songs and an Instance of Revision”, 45, 46, 50, 51, 199, 201, 202 Smith, Pinetop, 206 (and see Smith, Bessie) sonnet form, 8, 29-44 Sontag, Frederick, 157 Sontag, Susan, ed., A Roland Barthes Reader, 134 Spanish Civil War, the, 232 Spencer, Luke, “Mistress Bradstreet and Mr Berryman: The Ultimate Seduction”, 48 Spenser, Edmund, 31, 36; “Epithalamion”, 36; The Shorter Poems, 36 Spivey, Victoria, 195, 207 Stefanik, Ernest, xii-xiii, xiv Steiner, George, 26, 27, 157; Grammars of Creation, 157; Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman, 26, 27 Stevens, Wallace, 29, 61, 245, 253, 254; “Adagia”, 245; Opus Posthumous, 245; “The Poem That Took The Place of A Mountain”, 6061; “The Snow Man”, 245, 253, 254; “Thinking of a Relation Between The Images of Metaphors”, 61 Stitt, Peter, xiii, xvii, xviii, 4, 101, 104, 182; “The Art of Poetry:An Interview with John Berryman”, 4, 101, 104-105, 165, 191, 194, 229 suicide, xv, 95, 200, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226, 227, 232, 237, 241-55 Sullivan, J.W.N., Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, 196

Index Sutter, Barton, xvii Synoptics, the, 177, 180 Tate, Allen, 30, 109 Tate, James, 9 Taylor, Ronald, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, 27 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 195 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 76-77, 78, 79; In Memoriam A.H.H., 76-77, 155 theodicy, 8, 155-71 Thomas, Dylan, 93, 94, 194, 232; “A Process in the Weather of the Heart”, 94; “All all and all the dry world’s lever”, 99; “I, in my intricate image”, 94; “Our Eunuch Dreams”, 94; “Where once the waters of your face”, 94 Thomas, Harry, ed., Berryman’s Understanding, 4, 10, 76, 101, 105, 107, 112, 155, 159, 165, 169, 191, 192, 205, 206, 207, 215, 229 Thomes, A. Boyd, xv, xvii Thomes, Maris, xv, xvii Thornbury, Charles, xiii, xvi, xvii, xviii, 14, 32, 59, 95, 217, 218, 219, 220, 230; “A Reckoning with Ghostly Voices (1935-36)”, 217, 218, 219, 220, 223; ed., Collected Poems: 19371971, 14, 32, 59, 95, 136, 150, 230; “Introduction” to Collected Poems: 1937-1971, 59, 95, 136, 150, 230 Thorpe, Thomas, 32 Tilley, Terence, The Evils of Theodicy, 157 Tokunaga, Shozo, xiii Trakl, Georg, 239

289 trauma, 159, 251 Travisano, Thomas, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, 4 Treblinka, 20, 24 (and see concentration camps) Trickster, 141-54; Coyote, 143; Nanabozho (or Great Hare or Master Rabbit), 143, 149; Raven (or Blue Jay or Mink), 143; trickster tale sequences, 148 (and see Native American culture) Trow, Thomas, xvii Tucker, George, Essays by a Citizen of Virginia: Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy by a Citizen of Virginia, 53; “On American Literature”, 53 Ulysses, 144 (and see Ellison, Ralph; Trickster) University of Cambridge, xviii, 195, 209, 210, 217, 218, 232; Clare College, Cambridge, 209 University of Minnesota, xi, xiv, xvi, 1, 5, 12, 124, 159, 162, 173, 175, 178, 210, 215, 217, 225 University of Paris (Sorbonne), 176 Van Doren, Mark, 30, 209, 218 Vaughan, Henry, 232 Vendler, Helen, 4, 88, 97, 128, 129; The Given and The Made, 4, 88, 128 Vizenor, Gerald, 149, 154; Trickster of Liberty:

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“After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman

Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage 149 Voltaire, 156-57 Vonalt, Larry, xiii, xvii Wagner, Linda Welscheimer, xiii Wallingford, Katharine, xvii Walsh, Sylvia, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Poetics, 234-35 Warner, Anne B., xiii Wasserstrom, William, “Cagey John: Berryman as Medicine Man”, 206 Watts, Ann Chalmers, “Pearl, Inexpressibility, and Poems of Human Loss”, 60 Wayne University Michigan, 17475 Wedge, George, xvii, xviii Westcott, Brooke Foss, 177, 181 White, Fred D., xvii Whitman, Walt, 10, 29, 135, 138, 163, 194, 198; “Song of Myself”, 10, 163, 194, 198 Wilbur, Richard, 230-31 Williams, William Carlos, 29, 33, 127, 208; “Sappho”, 127; Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, 33 Wilson, Edmund, xvi Wojahn, David, “John Berryman Listening to Robert

Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues, January 1972”, 206 Wonham, Henry B. Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55 Wordsworth, William, 30, 77, 78, 79, 110, 232; The Prelude, 77; “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads”, 110; “Tintern Abbey”, 77 World War Two, 158, 160 Wray, David, Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood, 123 Wright, Ted, xvii Yates, Donald A. (see Irby, James E.) Yeats, W.B., 1-2, 71, 93, 109, 118, 119, 191, 192, 211, 221; Collected Plays, 218; death of, 1; and dreams, 71; influence on John Berryman, 71, 93, 109, 118, 191, 192, 211, 218; meets John Berryman, 1, 2; “A Prayer For Old Age”, 193; “The Second Coming”, 221 Young Kevin, ed. Blues Poems, 206; “Responsible Delight”, 47, 48, 50, 55 Zacchaeus, 79, 164