Berryman's Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art

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For Patty Taggart Dodson, Who introduced me to Henry’s Song so long agone

For my father, James Henderson Dodson, Who never knew Henry

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Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the support and help of many people. The Tarleton State University Research Committee provided me with two summers of generous funding that made the project even feasible. I’m grateful to Professor Pam Littleton and the committee as a whole. At the University of Minnesota Libraries, Professor Alan Lathrop and his assistant Ms. Barbara Bezat were most kind to me over the years. Richard J. Kelly provided me with encouragement and support back when I was a lowly graduate student; his late reading of the manuscript was the final push I needed. Professors Michael Skau, Linda Ray Pratt, Stephen Behrendt, and John Janovy steered me as the manuscript took on its early form. Professor Skau has been my academic mentor and dear friend for over twenty-five years: I can’t help it if I’m lucky. Charles Thornbury provided early consultation. Kate Donahue’s support, encouragement, and permission for manuscript use has been a blessing from start to finish. Chas Kestermeier, S.J., the better scholar, has been a friend and advisor through it all. Professor Nick Lilly offered many hours of both technical support and friendship, for which I am most grateful. Ms. Mary Etzel has saved me from doing physical harm to my computer on countless occasions. Saul Bellow, who answered an important question after his agent opened the gate, wrote a sweet letter; my gratitude is as big as Herzog’s. Both Paul Mariani and James Atlas were kind in responding to my questions. Tom Pilkington, Mike Pierce, Mallory Young, Chris Guthrie, and Mark Shipman have always offered me support in both my poetic and academic endeavors; they are the type of people one needs for colleagues. Ron Hansen, W.D. Snodgrass, and Tom Schatz, through their encouragement and own exemplary work, pressed me forward in ways they will never know. At Rodopi, Marieke Schilling offered consistent support and encouragement and C.C. Barfoot was an editor with a firm and true hand. Parts of this book appeared in articles in English Language Notes and Notes on Contemporary Literature. I also want to thank my large, extended, Irish-Catholic family for sticking with me through all of my schemes, dreams, and antics.

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CONTENTS

Preface Prologue Elegy as Theology: Henry’s Search for Death’s Answers

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1

Chapter 1 Henry’s Other Method: The Epic’s Freedom of Language in an Experimental Age

31

Chapter 2 The Paternal Elegies: The Dream Songs’ Shroud

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Chapter 3 Henry “pale & ill”: Berryman’s Elegies of Praise and the Last Word

89

Chapter 4 Posthumous Musings from an Active Coffin

127

Chapter 5 Henry’s Uneasy Rest

145

Bibliography

167

Index

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PREFACE The Dream Songs offer many obstacles for its readers; the Songs make up a modern long poem that few have read through in entirety and none without frustration at the obscurity of reference and the difficulty of grammar. John Berryman, this formal man, this writer of an introduction to The Monk, this Shakespearean scholar, knocked down the door frames Whitman had dismantled. He created a tight verseform for this long poem, then strayed from it when it suited his purpose or whim. He worked within himself, and he had much to work with. Berryman is conscious, even proud, of the crafted difficulty of his poem; he revels in the Songs’ congested meanings, learned and often esoteric references. In Song 373, the poem’s persona Henry muses on whether “assistant professors [will] become associates / by working on his works” after his death.1 Berryman’s difficult Songs derive complexity from the freedom both stream-of-consciousness and dream states (awake or asleep) afford the speaker. And Berryman wants his readers to see the 385 Songs as one poem. Early in the composition, Berryman realized, “... I was aware that I was embarked on an epic.”2 In his Note to The Dream Songs, Berryman refers to the whole as “the poem.” Many of the critics who have written on Berryman’s opus have a few favorite, individual Dream Songs they have examined with true illumination, but a view of the continuity of the poem as a whole is lacking and seems to always stem from early criticism that the work, while certainly interesting, entertaining, at times, and even important, folds when seen as a whole. This study’s purpose is to provide the beginning reader of The Dream Songs with a vehicle for approaching this large work and to find the unity through its elegiac structure. A close look at the poem’s language, stylistic innovations, epic qualities, author’s poetics, and most especially the elegiac movement will allow for even the novice reader to enter Henry’s world. The scholar will find useful documents and close examinations of a large number of individual Songs. The elegies as a whole provide the note of mourning 1 2

John Berryman, The Dream Songs, New York, 395. Interview with Paris Review, 14 (1972), 194-95.

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that is at the core of Berryman’s epic. In Song 327, Henry corrects Freud. Henry suggests Freud should have concentrated not just on early childhood but also on youth in his dream interpretations: “I tell you, Sir, you have enlightened but / you have misled us: a dream is a panorama / of the whole mental life.”3 Berryman tries to present “the whole mental life” of his persona Henry as a document, in art, of the consciousness of one human being.4 In a 1963 inaugural reading at the Guggenheim sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, Berryman coyly relinquishes any responsibility for Henry’s actions or politics when he retorts, “He’s sleeping!” In his Note to His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, Berryman claims, “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.”5 Given that

3

Dream Songs, 349. All quotations from The Dream Songs follow the idiosyncratic peculiarities of Berryman’s punctuation, diction, typography, and spelling. 4 When asked where he came up with the name Henry, Berryman replied, “Did I get it from The Red Badge of Courage or A Farewell to Arms or what? O.K., I’ll tell you where it came from. My second wife, Ann, and I were walking down Hennepin Avenue one momentous night. Everything seemed quite as usual, but it was going to puzzle literary critics on two continents many years later. Anyway, we were joking on our way to a bar to have a beer, and I decided that I hated the name Mabel more than any other female name, though I could mention half a dozen others that I didn’t like either. We had passed from names we liked to names we disliked, and she decided that Henry was the name that she found completely unbearable. So from then on, for a long time, in the most cozy and affectionate lover kind of talk—we hadn’t been married very long at this time—she was Mabel and I was Henry in our scene” (interview with Paris Review, 193-94). 5 Dream Songs, vi. In an earlier draft of the Note for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, Berryman tries to explain just what he’s doing in terms of his interlocutor and his persona. Berryman is responding to such reviews as noted below in the Prologue.

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dreams are “a panorama of the whole mental life,” and “Songs” are conscious artistic rendering of imagination and experience, trying to

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Berryman’s Henry

separate Henry’s reality from his dreams can prove as subjective as determining whether to sail closer to Scylla or closer to Charybdis in such narrow passage. Most fruitful explication comes from looking at Henry’s thoughts, actions, observations, and references, not the state of his consciousness. But keeping in mind Berryman’s strategy through the use of his dream vehicle can help in judging the poem’s effectiveness and comprehending its journey. Frederick S. Perls captures the potential in Berryman’s original and unusual structure: “The task of all deep religions—especially Zen Buddhism [which Berryman studied]—or of really good therapy, is the satori, the great awakening, the coming to one’s senses, waking up from one’s dream— especially from one’s nightmare.”6 Henry’s journey may help to heal Berryman’s life wound delivered so long ago by his suicide father.

6

Quoted in Joseph Mancini, Jr., “‘Freud Was Some Wrong About Dreams’: Playing the Parts Versus Saying the Parts in John Berryman’s Dream Songs,” Psychocultural Review, 2 (1978), 270.

PROLOGUE ELEGY AS THEOLOGY: HENRY’S SEARCH FOR DEATH’S ANSWERS

In his 1957 essay “Song of Myself: Intention and Substance,” Berryman explained that at the heart of Whitman’s famous long poem is less a celebration of an individual ego than a poetic heralding of the human spirit: For Whitman the poet is a voice. Not solely his own—let us settle this problem quickly: a poet’s first person pronoun is nearly always ambiguous. . . . A voice, then, for himself and others; for others as himself—this is the intention clearly (an underlying exhibitionism and narcissism we take for granted). What others?—Americans, man. A voice—that is, expressing (not creating)—expressing things already in existence.7

In 1971, Berryman wrote that The Dream Songs and some of his other works have made “play with an obsession” of “the dissolving of one personality into another without relinquishing the original. In the very long poem, of course, many personalities shift, reify, dissolve, survive, project—remaining one.”8 In 1973, The Times Literary Supplement explained that at the core of the Berryman/Henry dichotomy is not the poet’s ego: “Not the poet’s self but his attitudes towards himself

7

John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York, 1976, 230. For a full discussion of the Whitmanesque structural and aesthetic influences on The Dream Songs, see James E. Miller, Jr.’s The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman’s Legacy in the Personal Epic, Chicago, 1979 and Bo Gustavvson’s The Soul Under Stress: A Study of the Poetics of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Stockholm, 1984. Both critics draw from Berryman’s 1957 essay “Song of Myself: Intention and Substance” and his comments in the 1970 Paris Review interview. 8 John Berryman, Collected Poems: 1937-1971, ed. Charles Thornbury, New York, 1981, 291-92.

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become the theme. The mask replaces the speaker.”9 Berryman aimed for a poem that was original in its presentation of a human being’s personality. He was guided by R.P. Blackmur’s explanation that poetry differs from verse “by the animating presence in poetry of a fresh idiom; language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.”10 Some early views of the poem Unfortunately, many early and late critics of The Dream Songs failed to see the thematic unity of the poem. They missed the prominent connecting thread woven through Berryman’s paternal elegies introduced in the first Song and climaxing in the penultimate Song. This can be illustrated by looking at a review of The Dream Songs from 1969. Peter Davison praises the work as a whole, sees brilliance even if up to a third of the Songs make no sense to him or seem inferior poetry. Davison ends his review by making the absurd comment: It is in the matter of design that the poem falls short of its illustrious predecessors [other long poems]; for unless this reviewer is very much mistaken, there is no “formal or elaborate” design intended or achieved in this poem despite its recurrent themes of death and pain, love and grief, suicide and maiming, poetry and friends. It begins and ends in a crossfire of formalized fantasy, but its structure seems relentlessly dictated by “the spare, the hit-or-miss, the mad, I sometimes can’t always tell them apart.” If there is a design, it is presumably a design beyond the comprehension of most of us—the chaos, the madness, the self-pity, the “diverse lingue,” “orribili favelle” of our time. Such babble of tongues, such fearful ways of speaking.11 9

“Berryman’s Valediction,” T.L.S.: Essays and Reviews From The Times Literary Supplement 1973, London, 1974, 33. 10 R.P. Blackmur, The Legacy of R.P. Blackmur: Essays, Memoirs, Texts, eds. Edward T. Cone, Joseph Frank and Edmund Keeley, New York, 1987, 247. 11 Peter Davison, “The Clouded Miracles of John Berryman,” Book Guide. Even though the critic only has the benefit of 77Dream Songs, a particularly inane comment is in David R. Slavitt’s review in the Herald Tribune Book Week for May 10, 1964 (“Deep Soundings and Surface Noises,” 13-14): “Why Berryman should have thought it necessary or valuable or even interesting to assume the persona of the minstrelshow Negro named Henry Pussy-cat in order to deal with the world, or why he should have supposed that obliteration of grammar and syntax and an imitation of the

Prologue

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W.D. Snodgrass, a student of Berryman’s at Iowa, on more than one occasion has praised his teacher for his gift as a poet and as an original force in American letters. But in an interview as late as 1997, Snodgrass notes that while he admires many of the early Songs for their vitality and drama, As time went on, he kept trying to do the same thing, and in my opinion it wore a little thin. Some of the later ones work, but not many, and none are as utterly unpredictable as those early ones, with lines as improbable as, “Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.”12

The unique nature of this poem, that it has 385 individual, separate parts, may be why so many readers only see a few of the Songs as interesting and vital instead of looking to the whole as the sum of its parts. Adrienne Rich stood in awe of Berryman’s linguistic power in her 1964 review of 77 Dream Songs. Rich, a poet in full bloom at the time, celebrates Berryman’s accomplishment and joyously anticipates the completed poem: “But what is important, because always uncommon, is, first of all, the presence through the book of an effective unifying identity, and second, the power of that identity to define its surroundings so accurately.”13 The loose architecture of Henry’s house The Dream Songs may be like Joyce’s Ulysses in that many have talked and debated its merits and demerits but few have read it in its entirety. But the frame the Songs operate within is clear and crafted. The Songs’ design revealed itself to Berryman as he wrote them; the project grew from 30 or 40 to 72 to 76 to 77 original songs, the Muse stayed close by and the last Song (385), which was originally numbered at 161, gave way as the creative explosion lasted, in various forms of combustion, for 13 years. The number 7 emerged as an hipster’s colloquialisms would render any more directly the textures of experience, I cannot begin to guess. Absurd as these strategies seem in theory, their practice in 77 Dream Songs is even more absurd. Berryman complicates matters by varying his game. Sometimes he is Henry, sometimes he is Mr. Bones talking with Henry, and sometimes when it is convenient he forgets the whole thing for an entire poem, as in his invective against Eisenhower” (13). 12 W.D. Snodgrass, In Conversation with Phillip Hoy: Between the Lines, London, 1998, 23. 13 Adrienne Rich, “Mr. Bones, He Lives,” The Nation, 25 May 1964, 540.

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interesting challenge, and by 1968 the poet was left juggling 385 alike yet individual Songs to make up his long poem. An early note (1957) shows the poet’s initial strategy as he begins to map out the subjects he wishes Henry to pursue on his journey:

Prologue

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Berryman’s Henry

6

On 27 September 1966, Berryman wrote Song 293 in Ireland, its first stanza reads, What gall had he in him, so to begin Book VII or to design, out of its hotspur materials, its ultimate structure whereon will critics browse at large, at Heaven Eleven finding it was not cliffhangers or old serials but according to his nature.14

This is Berryman explaining that the personality of Henry, who is more like Hotspur than Prince Hal, has determined the poem’s structure. This is and is not true. Among Berryman’s papers is a note that seems to back up this desire to let Henry’s song flow without too much artifice, “Be v. careful how I Henrify poems—NEVER try to pull into series. Lean the other way.” But in a draft of what would become Song 77, dated 24 November 1958, Berryman has established “H— likes fall. He wd be prepared to live in a w. of fall.” These become lines 10 and 11 of Song 77. In the published version, “Fall” is capitalized and the first of the two books that make up The Dream Songs, 77 Dream Songs, ends with a reference to Fall and its double meaning of the season before death and of the biblical mythology pertaining to humankind’s plight in this world. This duality of the reality of human suffering and the acceptance of it all before death is Henry’s understanding: “He’d’ve run off to sea / (but for his studies careful of the Fall) / twenty-odd years ago.”15 The second volume (His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) also ends with the Fall as a healing and comforting time. Berryman was aware, to some degree, as early as 1958, of an emerging structure to the work, one crafted by thematic choices. The final Dream Song (385) was written on 25 November 1965; again, it was initially numbered 161, and while it had to move back numerically as the Songs flourished, it never lost its place of closure because that would have broken the unity set up by the problem established in the first Song—how Henry was to live with loss in this world—which is answered by the final Song’s gentle acceptance of life. Song 77 also offers that calming tone and both Songs are preceded by climactic Songs of anger and anguish directed toward Henry’s father. 14 15

Dream Songs, 315. Dream Songs, 158.

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On Sunday, 25 November 1962, Berryman wrote to his mother, “I’ve written out 14 new songs in the last week, and moreover have made a breakthrough: I’m now doing lower-keyed, narrative & necessary architecture, as well as flashing units as usual.”16 In August of 1962, Berryman notes, “Try a temporal arrangement”; he then maps out the poem’s seasonal breakdown beginning in “broad summer,” later he expands, “begin in great growth=horrible for H- / proceed to gorgeous (Autumn)—hurrah for H- / (hm) Winter / Spring / ?return to: heavy summer.”

16

John Berryman, We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, ed. Richard J. Kelly, New York, 1988, 350.

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In an unpublished Dream Song, dated 3 November 1969, upon just receiving the finished edition of all 385 Songs, a grouchy, but coy, Henry argues for the structure of the poem in its persona’s voice. This Song’s last line shows just how much Berryman and Henry believe in their long poem.

Prologue

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The thoughts refer back to Berryman’s examination of Whitman’s success in “Song of Myself,” but with Berryman, as with all moderns, we must adhere to D. H. Lawrence’s advice and trust the art not the artist. The outline printed below, while difficult to read, presents a complex breakdown of the language, themes, and symbols of the first eight Songs. Berryman views each Song as breaking down into four discernable categories: “I,” “Emotion,” “Fact,” and “Childhood.” What we learn from this is how the poet offers organized and reasoned thought to the chaos of Henry’s life and language.

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The Songs are a dramatic monologue. Randall Jarrell, two years before the start of the Dream Songs, claimed that the dramatic monologue “once depended for its effect upon being a departure from

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the norm of poetry, [but] now [has become] in one form or another the norm.”17 A dramatic monologue may be defined as a poem that reveals “a soul in action” through the speech of one character in a dramatic situation. The character is speaking to an identifiable but silent listener at a dramatic moment in the speaker’s life. The circumstances surrounding the conversation, one side of which we “hear” as the dramatic monologue, are made clear by implication, and an insight into the character of the speaker may result.18

Donald Smalley, writing in his introduction to the Riverside edition of Robert Browning’s poems, notes, “The dramatic monologue differs from the simple monologue or soliloquy in that while there is only one speaker, his words make us aware of both a setting and an auditor.”19 The auditor’s presence allows for the possible development of psychological complexity, irony, and pathos to move through the poem. Smalley explains, “The poet’s function was to give his reader portrayals of life and to fill them with such vitality that the reader would be stimulated by them to work out conclusions regarding their meaning for himself.”20 In the dramatic monologue the poet creates a persona (a mask); such a construction supplies a separation of the poet, persona, and reader that calls for the latter to examine the language of the persona for an understanding of the poem’s world. The poet is distinct from the persona no matter how similar their worlds may seem. Robert Browning created the Victorian flourish of the genre and saw the advantage of both distance and drama inherent in the form. In his introduction to Dramatic Lyrics, Browning explains, "Such poems as the following come properly enough, I suppose, under the title of 'Dramatic Pieces;' being, though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.”21 Elisabeth A. Howe notes,

17

Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age, New York, 1953, 13. William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, eds., A Handbook to Literature, New Jersey, 1996, 166. 19 Robert Browning, Poems of Robert Browning, ed. Donald Smalley, Boston, 1956, xxiv. 20 Ibid., xx. 21 Robert Browning, The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning: Dramatic Lyrics, New York, 1899, ix. 18

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Berryman’s Henry In other words by “dramatic” [Browning] means, not “exciting; full of conflict, tension, drama,” but “objective”: the speaker of the poem is not meant to represent the poet. This is the first criterion put forward by all the critics seeking to define the dramatic monologue.22

The drama is psychological, internal, and personal, hence lyric; the action may have already taken place or may take place in the future. Browning’s Duchess is already dead when the Duke starts his speech, Henry’s acts of infidelity, drunkenness, and poetic creation are reported in the Songs, and Prufrock’s attendance at the party may be only contemplated in his mind. Like Browning, Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry rely on the lyric to voice their viewpoint. Eliot and Berryman use the dramatic monologue to provide psychological studies of persona’s "at odds wif de world,"23 ineffectual rebels who sing songs of pathos and loneliness. Modernity reveals the paradox of the isolated individual in the crowded city; the ease and comfort of daily existence mingled with the hectic pace of urban life detaches humans from dependence on their neighbors. The tensions from such a hectic pace draw people inward, not outward. This isolation among the masses only highlights one's loneliness. Henry elegiac Berryman’s Henry is always anchored in the elegiac mode. Peter M. Sacks, in his seminal work The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats notes, To the American elegy’s more overt and uneasy focus on the isolated self of the griever, we should add its more nakedly expressive style. This is in part a result of the general departure from constraining conventions and decorums, a valuing not only of originality and freedom but also greater directness, of trying (in Whitman’s words) “to put a Person, a human being (myself ... in America) freely, fully and truly on record.”24

Henry is a white, middle-aged male who in the course of the poem 22 Elisabeth A. Howe, Stages of Self: The Dramatic Monologues of Laforgue, Valéry, and Mallarmé, Ohio, 1990, 7. 23 Dream Songs, 7. 24 Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, Baltimore, 1985, 313-14.

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lives through ten years of his life (ages 41-51). He is a poet, a professor, a drinker, a womanizer. He is and is not John Berryman. An unraveling of the poem could start with a look at its epic qualities as Berryman borrowed from Homer, Virgil, and even Dante, then move to the modern epic as seen through Whitman’s celebration of self. Berryman does not confine himself to only one source or to one scheme; the modern consciousness will not allow such singleness of purpose. The poet who is the rebellious son of Modernists does not feel the necessity for such constrictions of form, style, or content. Henry is at times Homer’s Odysseus, at times Dante’s Ulysses, but possibly more often than not closer to Tennyson’s restless Ulysses. In any case, Henry has the sporadic advice and tempering of the interlocutor, a Virgil-like guide who knows Henry all too well. The classic poet could portray a man of heroic stature, a man who could win wars almost single handedly (Odysseus, Achilles). The medieval poet kept the heroic nature of Ulysses but placed him in hell for his overwhelming pride. The Victorian Ulysses of Tennyson faces the frustration and limitation of a non-heroic society and may be closer to Henry, a man looking for love and purpose in a restless world of loss. In the Opus Posthumous fourteen-Song section of Book IV, Henry visits his own hell and remembers what he’s suffered and what he’s learned in his tortured life. Henry’s hell is centered more in this mortal world than Dante’s, which is decidedly in the next. But both versions of hell deal with what men and women do to each other in the grip of politics, lust, love, and power. Dante’s cantos are filled with political, religious, and societal musings as are Berryman’s songs.25 25 Berryman followed the epic tradition’s custom of revealing the politics of its created world. Homer portrayed warring Greek generals whose infighting stemmed from struggles for power and possessions in a world where glory and immortality could be won on the battlefield. Virgil showed the Trojan society as it crumbled under its own internal strife and the Greek oppressors. Glory and honor were still won on the battlefield, and the dream of an empire that ruled all it surveyed was conceived for these aggressive but defeated people. Dante brought in his contemporaries and either praised or condemned them according to their actions and their politics. In The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri provides a world peopled from the mythic and historic past as well as the very real present. Dante was both a politician (in and out of exile) and a poet. As the latter he dealt with both political and religious themes, always shading the subtleties of life in his God’s clearly-defined guiding light. Berryman carries on such specific political discussion with his treatment of Cold-War America from the Eisenhower era well into the Vietnam War. Henry’s politics concerning the issues of his times—civil rights, governmental control over the individual, and violence in the world—are discussed throughout The Dream Songs. But Berryman, as a twentieth-

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Berryman’s Henry

Henry is a man who feels great pangs of lust; he often acts on these urges, only to feel remorse afterwards. Berryman writes his most fluid and humorous poetry when musing on Henry’s sexual cravings. A look at the treatment of lust and the language used to convey desire would offer a further understanding of the personality the poem is presenting. But possibly the most accessible path on which to start a journey into Berryman’s poem is with its elegiac offerings, which move the poem from fragmentation to unification. Henry provides three types of elegiac Songs: those to his father (paternal), those to his literary friends (professional), and those (a bit prematurely) to himself (personal). The elegiac Songs reflect Henry’s pain and anger at his father’s suicide when he was twelve, his personal loss from those literary friends who beat him to the grave, and his own great desire for and fear of death. This latter group leads Henry into a struggle with God and faith. Yet Henry wrestles with his angel in all three types of elegies. This study is in no way conclusive. A work of 385 individual Songs, which makes up one poem, is a work in which a lifetime of scholarship could be spent in fruitful explication, analysis, and reward. Of course, the critic would have to be one of great patience and tolerance given the, at times, obnoxious, self-pitying, arrogant, adolescent, competitive, petty, braggadocio, sensitive, vulnerable, driven, compulsive, addictive, compassionate, insensitive, exasperating, and open personality of Henry. Areas of inquiry that seems particularly empty are such studies as Lewis Hyde’s “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” or Matt Djos’s “John Berryman’s Testimony of Alcoholism: Through the Looking Glass of Poetry and the Henry Persona” which focus on Berryman’s alcoholism as the cornerstone of the poem and the poem’s shortcomings. For Berryman, the art, the poetry, was seductive; a firstrate poet’s heart and soul were within the language. No matter how excessive his alcohol abuse became, Berryman saw the pearls he was cranking out as worth the price he was so desperately paying, at least for the duration of the Dream Songs’ composition. Beat scholar Michael Skau once noted that articles on alcohol’s or other drugs’ century man, does not enjoy the luxury of the certainty of his predecessors’ positions; his political views are ambiguous, even contradictory at times; and while he may long for it, he has no religious certainty to shape his judgments.

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effects on the artist and his art usually reveal the critic’s desire to express one of two personal postures: a sort of Carry Nation selfrighteousness, or a wish to live the wild life vicariously through the artist. Either way, little about the art itself ever emerges. Henry’s germination An acknowledgement of a poem Berryman wrote in 1941 and the Note to The Dream Songs is needed in order to begin to look at Berryman’s elegiac view toward death, loss, and suicide. The poem “The Ball Poem” was one of Berryman’s favorites; he always included it in his public readings. For Christmas the year Berryman and Eileen Simpson were married, the new couple sent out sixty Christmas cards with two poems professionally printed: “For His Marriage” and “The Ball Poem.”26 In this seemingly simplistic poem about a young boy whose ball bounces into a harbor, Berryman explains his first loss of innocence, the nascent awareness of “the epistemology of loss”—a glaring phrase in a poem of simple diction. The poem moves dramatically from a light tone—“merrily bouncing,” to the intense— “ultimate shaking grief.” The speaker warns the boy that loss is final, then intrudes into the poem proper, becoming and not becoming the boy: Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour. I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water Or whistling, I am not a little boy.27

The complete understanding of loss, its “epistemology,” is what Berryman began to explore in “The Ball Poem” and continued to wrestle with during the thirteen-year composition of The Dream Songs (1955-1968). Since ultimate loss is death, the question of an afterlife is part and parcel of Berryman’s elegies, which work toward the tenuous religious posture found in the late poem sequence in Love & Fame, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” Joseph Brodsky wrote,

26 27

Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, New York, 1982, 41. John Berryman, The Dispossessed, New York, 1948, 14.

16

Berryman’s Henry Every “on the death of” poem, as a rule, serves not only as a means for an author to express his sentiments occasioned by a loss but also as a pretext for more or less general speculations on the phenomenon of death per se. In mourning his loss (be it the beloved, a national hero, a close friend, or a guiding light), an author by the same token frequently mourns—directly, obliquely, often unwittingly—himself, for the tragic timbre is always autobiographical. In other words, any “on the death of” poem contains an element of self-portrait.28

W. David Shaw, in Elegy & Paradox: Testing the Conventions, reiterates, “Because one’s own death is always at issue in elegy, I assume the elegists deploy the ineffability topos for two main purposes: to declare the unspeakability of their sorrow, and to intimate that one’s own death is inconceivable.”29 Regardless which of the three types of elegies already identified Berryman is writing, Henry’s own death is never far from his next stanza. In the Note to The Dream Songs, Berryman introduces his hero Henry as one “who has suffered an irreversible loss.”30 This is Henry’s great dilemma, and Berryman’s. In what ways will the suicide of his father be “irreversible”? Will he never find his own peace with his grave early loss? Can a modern poet use the elegy as balm to such a wound? Traditionally, the elegist has had a meter and a formula for both expressing and assuaging his grief. From Theocritus’s “First Idyl” through Milton’s “Lycidas” to Tennyson’s In Memoriam, poets have carried on their private mourning in the public poem. The Dream Songs, in a sense, work through Berryman’s grief toward a socially acceptable view of death; the persona’s musings on the loss of loved ones, friends, and rivals, and on his own mortality unite the poem. In “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud notes that the work of “normal” mourning is freeing: “The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”31 The reader will have to decide just how close Henry is to this desired state by the end of his song. But Freud’s depiction of the close connection between mourning and melancholia (depression) offers insight into Henry’s (and Berryman’s) struggle to separate one from 28

Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays, New York, 1986, 195. W. David Shaw, Elegy & Paradox: Testing the Conventions, Baltimore, 1994, 5. 30 Dream Songs, vi. 31 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in On the History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement: Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, London, 1957, 245. 29

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the other, to not let the former lead into the latter; for Berryman this blending of forces continues to his suicide, but Henry’s existence ends with the last Song, one of calm, if determined, acceptance of loss, creation, and love. Henry enacts an active cycle of rebelling against and giving into what Freud explains as the persistent qualities of reacting to loss: The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in selfreproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning. The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same. Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved, contains the same painful frame of mind, the same loss of interest in the outside world—in so far as it does not recall him—the same loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love (which would mean replacing him) and the same turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of him. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription of the ego is the expression of an exclusive devotion to mourning which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests. It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem to us pathological.32

Both Freud and Henry did not have the advantage of Kubler-Ross’s insights into the grieving process and the subsequent contemporary understanding and acceptance of the structure of mourning. Berryman’s ability to create a clearly compulsive character, who sustains open eyes toward his grief, his loss, presents a personality with courageous dimensions in the face of both Henry’s grief and his depression. In “The Ball Poem,” Berryman explains what the boy must know: “How to stand up / knowing what everyman must one day know / And most know many days, how to stand up.”33 Jahan Ramazani argues that in the case of Milton, the poet has redirected “his affection from the lost friend to the brilliant artifact that is in some measure a replacement 32 33

Ibid., 244. Berryman, Dispossessed, 14.

Berryman’s Henry

18

for the man it mourns.”34 This seems true for Tennyson also, but will it suffice for the modern? Ramazani premises his work on the understanding that, Over the course of the twentieth century, poets have drawn upon and transformed an age-old language of mourning, allying the profound insights of the past with the exigencies of the present. Out of this fusion they have forged a resonant yet credible vocabulary for grief in our time—elegies that erupt with all the violence and irresolution, the guilt and ambivalence of modern mourning.35

Sacks argues, If American poets have a greater tendency than other poets to write about the unique and isolated self, this isolation is particularly troubling in the case of the elegist. For since its origin in a Puritan society marked by the severe repression and rationalization of grief, and partly owing to its schooling in the almost exclusively forwardlooking orientation of a long pioneer experience, American culture seems to have had particular difficulty in accommodating genuine mourning.36

Berryman abolishes this distancing in Henry’s graphic depictions of his father’s hopeless suicide, Delmore Schwartz’s ugly demise, and the cruel and often untimely deaths of so many literary peers and friends, which are all continuously wrapped in his own great fear of dying.

Berryman’s epic poem C.M. Bowra offers a standard definition of the classical epic: An epic poem is by common consent a narrative of some length and deals with events which have a certain grandeur and importance and come from a life of action, especially of violent action such as war. It gives a special pleasure because its events and persons enhance our 34

Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy form Hardy to Heaney, Chicago, 1994, 3. 35 Ibid., ix. 36 Sacks, 313.

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belief in the worth of human achievement and in the dignity and nobility of man.37

The epic must be substantial in length and breadth and give an accurate representation of the actions and experiences that affect the hero’s soul. The internal and external struggles imposed on the hero by the human condition need to be conveyed in all their social, historical, and spiritual complexity. The main character’s heroism is judged by the dignity and nobility he demonstrates in the face of life’s challenges. The ancient hero’s epic quest was not only to survive in the hostile world of his forefathers, but to win, to triumph. This world, while it had its own uncertainty and deadliness, was centered in absolute truths and heroic distinctions. The modern hero’s epic quest is to survive and find meaning, even thrive, in an empty, hostile world, a world of no absolutes, no heroes. Bowra allows that “Each poem [epic] succeeds in its own way; each makes its special contribution to the vision and understanding of life.”38 Berryman aimed for a poem that was original in its presentation of a human being’s personality. Upon leaving Henry’s world, one soul’s great pain is vividly known; reality acquires new dimensions. And just as important, one soul has survived a world as deadly as the stormy seas or warring nations of the ancient Mediterranean. Henry’s testament is epic in the courage and determination he demonstrates to portray himself openly and nakedly. Berryman presents a modern hero whose actions emulate traditional epic heroes. As noted above, Henry is patterned after Whitman’s personal persona in “Song of Myself.” James E. Miller, Jr. argues that Whitman redefined the traditional epic, which had stressed external accomplishments and monumental heroic deeds by supermen, into the modern personal epic, which places emphasis on the hero’s internal musings as he faces his modern world.39 This thinking-man’s hero ponders questions of love, death, and purpose that are central to an understanding of the human condition in the twentieth century. Miller suggests that the American epic tries to offer “a way of belief for an American in the modern world, or perhaps, for an American way

37 C.M. Bowra, “Some Characteristics of Literary Epics”, in Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Steele Commanger, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966, 53. 38 Ibid., 54. 39 James E. Miller, Jr., The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman’s Legacy in the Personal Epic, Chicago, 1979, 35-36.

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Berryman’s Henry

of belief (or an American way of living with unbelief).”40 Unbelief, caused by loss, is integral to Henry’s existential world and at the core of his epic struggle. No one can pretend that The Dream Songs is a direct equivalent to Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, or Dante’s Divine Comedy. But there are similarities between the four works that make a case for The Dream Songs placement in the epic genre. All four epics employ travel as a means of adventure and growth: Odysseus sails the Mediterranean in the grips of Poseidon’s wrath, Aeneas travels from Troy to Africa to Italy under the harassment of Jove, Dante’s persona travels from hell to heaven under the corrective guidance of both Virgil and Beatrice, and Henry with his internal interlocutor travels to India, Greece, Asia, Jerusalem, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, England, France, and Italy. Henry, as wanderer-hero, is just an observer in his world. The modern hero is powerless to effect great change just by the force of his will. Like a character from a Kafka novel, Henry knows the modern world does not need him. Yet he still travels the globe in search of understanding, adventure, and enlightenment. Walter Benjamin explains this modern dilemma of impotence: “the modern citizen ... knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with.”41 In a footnote to “A Wake Song” (Song 245), Henry charges “our officials moronic” with exhibiting “a lawyer’s stupidity” in acting like “Pharaohs.”42 In Song 295 Henry is suicidal from the stress placed on him by the day-to-day demands of civilized living. He is grateful to his wife for handling his “foreign” (to him) business affairs: “You dear you, clearing up Henry’s foreign affairs, / with your sword & armour heading for his bank, / a cable gone astray: / except for you he had hopped in the Liffey & sank.”43 All four epics employ a literal or figurative journey to the underworld. In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus goes to Hades to learn how to appease Poseidon and return to Ithaca safely. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas goes to the underworld to learn how to carry out his mission. Dante’s Inferno provides a detailed breakdown of hell’s circles of retributive pain and suffering. In Song 88, Henry reveals, 40

Ibid., 20. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, 1968, 141. 42 Dream Songs, 264. 43 Ibid., 317. 41

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“In slack times visit I the violent dead / and pick their awful brains.”44 Henry attributes his living hell to the actions of both himself and others. He admits his needy, addictive nature, yet continues to live a life style that forces him to hospitals for recovery from his own alcoholic poisoning. He then ignores his own troubles and focuses on the troubles of others; this, too often, does little for his own mental and physical state. In Song 353 Henry discusses the barbarism of the modern world: These massacres of the superior peoples, the Armenians, the Jews, the Ibos, all (cried apoplectic Henry) serve to remind us that culture was only a phase through which we threaded, coming out at the other end to the true light again of savagery.45

Benjamin’s poignant aphorism applies here: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”46 Henry vents his misanthropic disgust with “–Do I looking like a man spent years in Hell? / for that is Henry’s case: / and he remembers what he saw, how he felt & smelt.”47 Henry’s hell is on earth; the people who have become “the consorts of the Devil”48 make earth a living hell of suffering and massacre. All four heroes return to the world. Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante, and Henry all struggle on noble quests: Odysseus to return himself and his crew safely home to Ithaca after the victory over Troy; Aeneas to journey to Italy after the Trojan defeat and found a new Rome, a new civilization, a new world order; Dante to relate to his audience just what the good person must do to earn eternal salvation; and Henry to endure the loss and chaos of the modern world and to persevere by continuing to create through poetry and love. For each of the four, life exacts tragedies and losses: Odysseus loses all his men; Aeneas loses his wife, his father, his lover, and many friends; Dante loses any political ties he has as he must stand alone in both his exile and his

44

Ibid., 103. Ibid., 375. 46 Benjamin, 256. 47 Dream Songs, 375. 48 Ibid., 375. 45

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Berryman’s Henry

stern moral views; and Henry loses his father, two wives, and the numerous literary friends he elegizes. Roy Harvey Pearce in “Toward an American Epic” argues that in our hero-less culture the modern American poet must create a projection of something other than the organizing desire of his creator to make over the world, and the men in it, in his own heroic image. We would wish him [the hero] to be a person first and a hero afterwards—a hero in consequence of his being a person.49

Henry does not battle hostile armies, but rather his own and his society’s destructive urges. Miller explains that the modern, personal epic focuses “not on a heroic or semi-divine individual but on the poet himself as representative figure, comprehending and illuminating the age; and whose awareness, insight, being—rather than heroic actions—involve, however obliquely, the fate of society, the nation, the human race.”50 In a superpower nation during the Cold War, there was only the bomb; no glorious battlefields existed for man-against-man glory and honor. World War 1 dismissed all such tradition with the machine gun and mustard gas. Paul Fussell, in his seminal book The Great War and Modern Memory, explains that the well-tailored cavalry soldier upon his impressive and foreboding charger became impotent when facing the lead barrage of a machine gun. Fussell contends that this ironic scene is at the heart of the “one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic.”51 The next war brought the bomb which made war, and, for some, life, completely absurd. Kurt Vonnegut once said, I used to be an optimist ... Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twentyone was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.52

49

Roy Harvey Pearce, “Toward an American Epic”, in Parnassus Revisited: Modern Critical Essays on the Epic Tradition, ed. Anthony C. Yu, Chicago, 1973, 351. 50 Miller, 36. 51 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, 1976, 35. 52 Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions), New York, 1974, 161.

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The absurd seemed to some very real from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. Henry is struggling with this apparent meaninglessness of life left for those in the Atomic age. In creating an epic poem, Berryman faced the task of providing the twentieth century with an epic hero. While Henry at times is sketched from Homer’s Odysseus, Virgil’s Aeneas, and Dante’s Ulysses, he is ultimately his own man. Yet Henry shares with these illustrious forbears an epic struggle for self-realization through thought and action. Berryman, through Henry, draws freely and loosely from these earlier creations in order to present a hero for the modern world. Henry is rebelling against a society that wants to put him in a gray flannel suit. James Joyce’s famous nets—religion, nation, and family—are a convenient way of examining the rebel by recognizing the historical background of the traditional institutions he rebels against. While Joyce recognized the great pull these nets exerted, he saw them as traps luring people from their true selves. For the classical poets, Homer and Virgil, the self matured under the customs of these nets, which were viewed positively as guides to civilized behavior. With the help of the gods, Odysseus has a war to win for Greece. He can then return to his loving family, again, with the help of the gods. Aeneas has a sacred, fated duty ordained by Jove to rescue Troy from extinction by founding the Roman Empire. His son and grandsons will reap the benefits of his epic struggle. Dante’s middle ages witnessed the emergence of the selfish, greedy individual. Dante’s poem is a guidebook for the common man on how to use the controlling nature of these nets as a way to get to heaven. His Ulysses, who thinks of himself before all others, is no role model as he sits in hell. Henry knows the dual nature of the modern emergence of the self as either the healthy, democratic, acceptance of one’s being, or the destructive, nihilistic, torturous existence of doubt and anxiety. He struggles toward the former while being constitutionally drawn to the latter: “Hunger was constitutional with him, / women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need / until he went to pieces.”53 But as the poem’s next sentence explains, the poet takes what he has been given and creates from it: “The pieces sat up &

53

Dream Songs, 333.

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Berryman’s Henry

wrote.”54 In either case, the nets hold little weight of certainty for Henry. He has to redefine each in the light of his anxious world. Tennyson’s Ulysses is more like Dante’s than Homer’s. And like Henry, Tennyson’s hero tells us: “All times I have enjoyed / Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those / That loved me, and alone” (ll. 7-9).55 After all, Henry does have “plights & gripes / as bad as achilles.”56 Throughout The Dream Songs Henry complains of his treatment, from the opening “pried / open for all the world to see,”57 through “Henry’s pelt was put on sundry walls,”58 to wondering about the possible meaninglessness of his own life and death in Song 380: “Hopeless & violent the man will lie, / on decades’ questing, whose crazed hopes have crossed / to wind up here blind.”59 Tennyson’s Ulysses has been criticized as a father who cares very little about his son. He was not around to guide or protect him in his youth; and now that Telemachus is a young man, Ulysses plans on giving him his kingdom but not his fatherly advice. This is similar to Henry’s paternal display. Henry confesses, “I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son”;60 later he sums himself up: “Failed as a makar [poet], nailed as scholar, failed / as a father & a man.”61 Here Henry’s ego is not as inflated or blind as Ulysses’s. His son will inherit the kingdom created and revealed in his Songs; but, as Henry sadly acknowledges, miss a caretaker father while growing up. And like Tennyson’s Telemachus, Henry’s son, void of paternal mentoring, is called to deal with Henry’s subjects: he must “Make mild / a rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees / Subdue them to the useful and the good.”62 Tennyson’s Ulysses sums up his adventurous life: “I am a part of all that I have met,”63 which expresses the human psyche’s ability to pull from all experience in forming one whole human consciousness and is also an extraordinary projection of the individual ego. Henry’s 54

Ibid., 333. Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, London, 1969, 52. 56 Dream Songs, 16. 57 Ibid., 3. 58 Ibid., 18. 59 Ibid., 402. 60 Ibid., 44. 61 Ibid., 203. 62 Tennyson, 53. 63 Ibid., 53. 55

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epic quest is not to win honor on the battlefield, but to convey who he really is by struggling, through his Songs, toward a clear realization of self and all the experiences that have made him who he is. Henry’s Songs, very consciously, provide us with a record of a human being, one who is not always good, and often unheroic, but who is actively engaged in an epic quest for a true understanding of his world and his self. Ultimately, Henry shifts back and forth between Homer’s and Dante’s Ulysses. In Song 243, Henry, “Lashed here, with ears, in the narrows, memoried,” is Odysseus, ready to hear the sirens who represent “blue-black losses, / gins & green girls, drag of the slaying weed.”64 Thompson explains that Dante is sensitive to Ulysses being lured by the Siren’s song; after all, he started his pilgrimage because he was off course in his life.65 Henry wants to hear the Sirens sing but sails on like Odysseus. Yet in his real life, more often than not he acts like Ulysses, his adventures consisting of sex and the drugged selfishness the sirens’ melody offers. Henry began Song 243 saying he needed to “shuffle my poss’s.” Is “poss’s” a reference to his possibilities, where he might go linguistically or creatively, what adventures he might risk? Or are his “poss’s” his possessives, meaning the characters he creates and maintains throughout his epic? Does he view them as fondly as Yeats did his “circus animals”? And are they further like the men on Odysseus’s ship, his crew who count on him for safe passage home? Will his characters survive as poorly as Odysseus’s men, all dying before reaching Ithaca? Henry is aware that his “lorn men” have their fear “unlashed” and are looking for his guidance. He offers solace and courage: “... I’ll whistle bits. / Through the mad Pillars we are bound for home.”66 The “bits” could refer back to “the secret bits of life,”67 what Henry has learned on his life journey; but might also evoke snatches from the sirens’ songs, those teasing phrases and notes Henry has heard. For himself and his crew, Henry may not be offering guidance back to Ithaca, but the open door to explore the world. Dante’s Ulysses is not considering Ithaca when he exclaims:

64

Dream Songs, 262. David Thompson, Dante’s Epic Journey, Baltimore, 1974, 66. 66 Dream Songs, 262. 67 Ibid., 81. 65

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Berryman’s Henry I and my men were stiff and slow with age when we sailed at last into the narrow pass where, warning all men back from further voyage, Hercules’ Pillars rose upon our sight . . . Greeks! You were not born to live like brutes, But to press on toward manhood and recognition! (ll. 100-103, 110-11)

Dante’s Ulysses explains that this was the beginning of their “fool’s flight” (l. 117).68 Tennyson’s Ulysses admits his dwindling strength, yet still sees the quest for new experience as ultimately life affirming: He is “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” ((ll. 69-70).69 Odysseus uses the nets as signposts to guide his wandering life toward contentment. Aeneas feels the great loss his loyalty to the oppressive nets causes him personally, yet he still sees duty as a valid reason for such sacrifice. Dante’s Ulysses sees the nets as hindrances to the ultimate thrills which knowledge and experience offer his restless, wandering spirit. Henry’s existential despair and reckless selfishness often prevent him from using the nets as a controlling or guiding force in his life. Henry, throughout The Dream Songs, wants it all: the hearth and Little Twiss (this reference to Henry’s daughter Martha is explained in Chapter 2), the bottle and wild poetry’s comfort, the famous poet’s freedom of action, and the hipster “chic” to dance wildly and sensually at his funeral (Song 382) with the family nearby. In Song 14 Henry tells of the ennui—“Life, friends, is boring”— that has helped to make him “a child to Angst.”70 Henry has placed himself in this position of philosophical anxiety by his inquisitive and restless mind. Then in Song 15, he suggests ways people deal with this modern perception: “we struggle. Some hang heavy on the sauce, / some invest in the past, one hides in the land. / Henry was not his favourite.”71 None of these options will satisfy Henry’s longing for love and comfort. He has seen firsthand his own emptiness and the emptiness of relationships, encounters that will not sustain him in his

68

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi, New York, 1970, 136-37. Tennyson, 54. 70 Dream Songs, 345. 71 Ibid., 17. 69

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great loss. For Henry this loss starts with his father’s suicide and continues to permeate his relationships throughout his life. Henry looks for answers in the creation of verse and finds both futility and meaning. Arpin writes, “Berryman’s subject is the life of the modern poet, and that subject is not only personal but also national, political, and metaphysical; it is absolutely necessary that Henry be a broad enough character to be able to contain all those concerns.”72 In Song 43 Henry introduces the idea of the “makar” (an archaic Scottish word for poet) and then in Song 184 laments: Failed as a makar, nailed as scholar, failed as a father & a man, hailed for a lover, Henry slumped down, pored it over. We c-can’t win here, he stammered to himself.73

Yet in Song 279 Henry heads to Ireland on a year’s sabbatical to renew himself as a poet and a man; this is the act of one who is in search of the bounty that poetry’s muse has to offer, the gift of a fulfilled life. This parallels Odysseus’s desire to return to Ithaca and the life he left behind, and Aeneas’s mission to found another Troy in Rome. Song 352 states, as clearly as can be stated, where the poet’s mind was as he functioned in the real world of day-to-day obligations and responsibilities: During those years he met his seminars, went & lectured & read, talked with human beings, but his mind was not on it. His mind was elsewheres paid insurance & taxes; in an area where the soul not talks but sings & where foes are attacked with axes.74

Henry mixes his true desire to write—to create a semblance of order from the chaos, or at least to identify the chaos—with his anger at the world that often does not appreciate the efforts of “makars” and relegates loss to that which is just accepted. Life goes on. But life does not just go on for Henry; he broods over his pain with a poet’s heart, 72

Gary Q. Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman, Port Washington, NY, 1978, 61. Dream Songs, 203. 74 Ibid., 374. 73

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feeling intensely all life’s misery: “I sing with infinite slowness finite pain.”75 On one level Homer, Virgil, and Dante were offering meaning to the chaos of life by providing heroes whose goals and actions were clear, purified by their cultures’ simplistic nature of honor, glory, and duty. Henry tells us in Song 366 that: “These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort.”76 The “terror” comes from the chaos that is everywhere; the “comfort” comes from assigning meaning to the worthwhile—poetry, friendship, and daughters—all that can bring order. Henry, like his epic precursors, is given voice to express his world’s just and unjust ways. In Song 242 Berryman examines the alienation of modern life: the inability to express what is the matter, but the ability to feel it deeply, chronically. A woman asks to see Henry after he has just lectured, a lady who “looked beyond frown.” She has him shut the door of his office, and they have an intimate sharing of their souls: he bids her cry: She did, I did. When she got / control, I said ‘What’s the matterʊif you want to talk?’ / ‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.’ So. / I am her.77

These are the feelings of alienation, and this is the world Henry must courageously traverse. Henry’s dignity develops from his disciplined and open telling of his story. His courage to face life by exposing his naked personality to the world is similar to Odysseus facing the suitors and all the ugliness that has been ransacking his house, to Aeneas’s admission that at times he would rather die than complete a mission that is ruining his family, and to Dante’s search in hell for examples of all that is evil in men’s hearts. The Joycean nets fall away and Henry is left to make the broken pieces sit up and reconfigure themselves in a way that will offer some sense of meaning in “a sickening century.”78 Henry’s struggle for self-realization is the human struggle for a reason, between the cradle and the grave, to be alive. While Berryman was able to draw from Homer, Virgil, and Dante for contextual parallels, 75

Ibid., 327. Dream Songs, 388. 77 Ibid., 261. 78 Ibid., v. 76

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ultimately, he had to let Henry go on his own to define his world and his epic vision. The individual Songs have a consistent verse form with roots in Hopkins’s long sonnets. Berryman finds freedom in Hopkins’s experimental diction and syntax, and he launches from the late nineteenth-century poet’s lead. Mariani explains, Hopkins had come to stand for Berryman as the model of the poet as artist and as human being. But to understand Hopkins, Berryman explained, one had to understand the literary canon, for no “account of Hopkins’ literary thought which ignores his elaborate & profound comment upon Shakespeare, upon Milton, upon Keats” was worth attention. What he himself had especially noted in reading Hopkins were the contrarieties, the particular mixture of “vigor & fatigue, confidence & despair, the elegant & the blunt, the bright & the dry.” What he did not say was that he was now trying to get those same complex levels of diction into his own poems.79

Before the structure of the poem can be examined, a look at the text’s language, particularly in light of the modern epic, will bring the reader into Berryman’s fresh, original, and experimental craft.

79

Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, New York, 1992, 150.

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CHAPTER 1 HENRY’S OTHER METHOD: THE EPIC’S FREEDOM OF LANGUAGE IN AN EXPERIMENTAL AGE The classical epic framed lofty purport and serious tone in a language both elevated and distinct. Berryman’s modern epic, while framed in the structure of a set verse form, achieves its lofty stance through experimentation with its language.80 The resulting tone is serious, comic, capricious, melancholic, self-pitying, and euphoric, to varying degrees and at unpredictable intervals. Berryman’s Dream Song verse form looks highly structured when viewed as the pattern for 385 poems. But a closer look reveals that the possibility of such a controlling structure afforded the poet opportunity to freely experiment with and deviate from the pattern, all the time knowing the anchor his form provided. E.M.W. Tillyard sees the epic generated by a spirit that stretches and sustains the human will “to the utmost”; consequently, “the writer 80

Each Song follows a pattern (with some variance) of three six-line stanzas with a meter of 5-5-3-5-5-3 iambic feet. Rhyme is sprinkled with a sporadic consistency. Berryman, in an interview, referred to the individual poems as “rather like an extended three-part sonnet” (John Berryman, “An Interview with John Berryman,” Harvard Advocate, 103 [Spring 1969], 8). The individual Songs seem to follow a pattern of discussing at least two separate topics that by the end more often than not merge with each other. This merger may be thematically achieved, or it may just be brought about by Henry’s personality and grammar. In explicating individual Songs, the critic is faced with discussing seemingly disparate topics fused together in Henry’s eighteenline cantos. Song 16 illustrates this fusion of topics: “Henry’s pelt” is mentioned first; its treatment can evoke Henry’s self-pity or openness. The second stanza introduces “frozen daiquiris,” which by the Song’s end are personified into cocktail-party conversationalists lying to each other. In between, Sealdah Station, a crowded waiting station, often a bleak final destination for desperately poor refugees in Calcutta, is named. Henry has revealed his own need for recognition: “This is it!” (18); he then juxtaposes the affluent (“Two daiquiris / withdrew into the gorgeous room”) with the disenfranchised (“in Sealdah Station some possessionless / children survive to die”). Henry, a first-world man and a veteran of empty cocktail parties, merges his familiar world with one of great suffering that he witnessed on his trip to India. Through this unholy union the extremes of the contemporary world are exposed.

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of the epic must use words in a very distinguished way.”81 Tillyard adds, The epic writer must express the feelings of a large group of people living in or near his own time.... The epic must communicate the feeling of what it was like to be alive at the time.82

Berryman’s poem captures the anxious and tormented world of the Atomic age and the existential moments of doubt and need it inherited from the Victorians. In his 1960 essay, “Prufrock’s Dilemma,” Berryman describes the emerging and troubling awareness of humanity's position and condition within modern understanding: In one celebrated view, we have undergone three crucial scientific revolutions. The first was the astronomical, in the sixteenth century, which taught man that so far from occupying a splendid position at the heart of the universe, he lived in a suburb, and one of no importance. He digested this unwelcome information very slowly. Then he was informed, by Darwin and others, a hundred years ago, that he was not unique but continuous with the animals whom he had always patronized. Our periods of time are getting much shorter. He had barely fifty years in which to accept this biological insult, when the psychological revolution associated with the name of Freud informed man that he was not even king inside but stood at the mercy of gigantic unconscious forces within himself.83

With all that doubt comes a human need for something to believe in, some tangible belief to fill the void. That need for Henry is compelled by his sense of loss and his sense of mortality, which develops at an early age and never loosens its grip on him. Through his eclectic use of language, Berryman’s poem presents a linguistic revolt against the set patterns of earlier ages and the stifling political and social compliance of the 1950s and the early 1960s (“I am a government official & a goddamned fool”84), the period of the Dream Songs’ composition. In an eclectic age where technology and bureaucracy dictate the lives of many, while others revolt against the dross of

81

E.M.W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background, London, 1954, 5-6. Ibid., 12. 83 Berryman, Freedom, 272. 84 Dream Songs, 24. 82

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patterns of mindless paper work, the living, breathing language must be stretched “to the utmost” to capture the volubility of the times. Henry’s epic quest is to find life bearable in the personal and public hell of the modern world. Conarroe explains, The vitality, grave comedy, and outright buffoonery of many songs vitiate against an uncritical acceptance of the nightmares they contain. Like those Romantic odes on dejection that by their existence give a lie to the assertion that the sufferer is rendered incapable of creation, many of these songs, in their wit and high spirits, ward off the horror that is their source. It is, however, because the nightmares are recounted, the terrors revealed, the guilt expressed, that Henry, patient and analyst, confessor and priest, is able to go on dreaming and muddling through.85

Henry’s language informs the message. By mixing high and low words, common expressions, and poetic phrases, and by novel formulations of syntax and pronominal antecedence, Henry orders his world to attention and often to clarity. Arpin notes, “The language of the poem is, like Henry, a mixture of high seriousness and low comedy, and the juxtaposition of these two elements—often within individual songs—is one of the most striking aspects of the poem.”86 James Atlas, in his 1969 review of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, comments on the exceptional language in the Songs: “Jarring in their syntax, elegiac and colloquial, the Dream Songs stun the language into fury, then subside; their brilliance is symphonic, the last pages closing like waves over our heads and leaving us literally drenched to the bone.”87 The Song’s poetic expression is seen in Berryman’s use of Hopkins-like sonnet experimentation, sprung rhythm, startling anacolouthia, unorthodox pronominal reference, variance from the set verse pattern, subtle rhyme, and various registers, dialects, and lexicons. These techniques illustrate how Berryman’s linguistic choices not only help Henry express, confront, and accept his world, but construct the reader’s reception to the Songs.88 85

Joel Conarroe, John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York, 1977. Arpin, 76. 87 James Atlas, “The Dream Songs: To Terrify and Comfort,” Poetry, 115 (October 1969), 44. 88 The distinction between Berryman and Henry is often difficult to make. Henry is the living persona of Berryman’s poem and must be viewed as the independent entity his creator intended: “The poem then ... is essentially about an imaginary character (not 86

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Berryman’s poem follows epic conventions when he wants it to do so; he is acutely aware of this when he mixes in old forms with his modern intentions and liberties. In Song 282, Henry reminisces on how his generation took the past into its poetic movement: with the “Old World” in mind, they “coughed & sang / the new forms in which ancient thought appears.”89 Earlier, Henry explained that he “obeyed sometimes some strange old laws: / mostly he made his own, cupshot.”90 Henry is conscious of what he is creating, the tradition he is making: “I write what I design.”91 But in Song 343 Henry refers to himself as a “noted crook,” thereby admitting his ransacking of traditions and the language of others in order to find his modern voice. Modern language exercises great freedom of movement within registers and lexicons; Henry as a modern man must be true to his linguistic time. Berryman’s epigraph (one of seven) to The Dream Songs, “BUT THERE IS ANOTHER METHOD” is from Olive Schreiner’s Preface to The Story of an African Farm (1883). Schreiner defined two options for artists in portraying truth. Schreiner explains the reality she tries to capture in her art: Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that each character is duly marshaled at first, and ticketed; we know with immutable certainty that at the right crises each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes, the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest, they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows.92

the poet, not me) named Henry ...” (The Dream Songs vi). In this chapter I will refer to Berryman when talking about language choices since he is the creator of the poem, and refer to Henry when talking about Henry’s thoughts, actions, and words. Of course, it will still get messy at times. 89 Dream Songs, 304. 90 Ibid., 288. 91 Ibid., 350. 92 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, London, 1883, 15.

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While this message steered Berryman thematically and structurally, it also may have offered him the freedom he desired linguistically. At the heart of the Songs is the freedom implied in Pound’s dictum to make it new. In a Song where Henry tells Yeats he has to go beyond his influence and overpowering presence in modern poetry, Henry explains, “For years then I forgot you, I put you down, / ingratitude is the necessary curse / of making things new.”93 Berryman made the sonnet new; he referred to his set verse form of three stanzas of six lines each as “an extended sonnet.”94 J.M. Linebarger sees the pattern differently: “The rhyme pattern is more like that of three sestets than an extended sonnet.”95 Berryman had already played with the form from within in his experimental sonnet sequence; now he plays off the form from without. His eighteen-line poems, by offering a set stability, both metrically, stanzaically, and visually, allow him liberty to play fast and loose. The set metrical pattern of 5-5-3-5-5-3 iambic feet looms in the foreground as the ideal the poet does not feel any great urge to deliver, at least not exactly. Dona Hickey explains, “Berryman has developed a style that affords him almost limitless opportunities to surprise and delight his readers.”96 In Song 379, Henry is in Dublin voicing the melancholic realization that though he was there thirty years earlier, he will not be there again: “I will not come again / or not come with this style.” The “style” he is referring to is the Dream Song pattern. Earlier in the poem Henry explains, “he gave himself to end a labour,” which is the completion of his epic poem. This Song of stating, and hence making real, the quest to finish his Songs, begins by Henry heralding to the world his hard-won accomplishment: “To the edge of Europe, the eighteenth edge, / the ancient edge, Henry sailed full of thought / and rich with high-wrought designs.”97 Self-conscious, and full of pride, Henry is boasting that the eighteen-line pattern of his Songs has allowed him to go to “the eighteenth edge,” thus pushing an expression and articulation of life to its most intense edge via poetic structure and language. This Song physically illustrates this pushing of 93

Dream Songs, 334. Harvard Advocate, 8. 95 J. M. Linebarger, John Berryman, New York, 1974, 199. 96 Dona Hickey, “John Berryman and the Art of The Dream Songs,” Chicago Review, 32 (Spring 1981), 34. 97 Dream Songs, 401. 94

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the “eighteenth edge”; it carries over as an enjambment from the previous Song to create a thirty-six line poem. The previous Song (378) is a prime example of Henry’s flourish with his construction. Mariani claims this Song is “a rewriting of Hopkins’s terrifying Dublin poem ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.’”98 Virginia Ridley Ellis perceptively unlocks Hopkins’s “terrible sonnet” when she explains, Hopkins is not merely expressing his own love of dappled things, his sorrow at their passing. He is evoking these same feelings in the reader as strongly as possible in order to make the more sharply this poem’s whole point: if we go through life, through this world, as we go through the octave, blind to its warning, seeing only its beauty, regretting only that beauty’s transcience, we will come wholly unprepared to the final Judgement and the eternal rack of torment.99

Ellis points out that Sibyl’s message is not spoken openly but spelt out in the leaves of nature. Berryman’s Song finds nature “fouled” and the modern message a statement of madness from “Nietzsche’s avatar,” who is possibly Hitler or Heidegger. Either way, the fear of insanity and death is deep in Henry. A Hopkins-like use of alliterative sprung rhythm is in the last two lines of the first sestet: Henry explains, “They’re treading on toes notoriously tender. / The sudden sun sprang out.” The Song ends with the “violent winds” driving away Henry’s “birds.” Nature cannot overcome the modern world’s suffering—“I gave the woman & her child ten shillings, / I can’t bear beggars at my door, and I / cannot bear at my door / the miserable, accusing me, and sore.”100 Henry is not willing to accept his collective guilt in humanity’s woes. Mariani argues that late in his career, Berryman sees more of an affinity, theologically and philosophically, with Hopkins than with Yeats. Mariani notes, As his losing battle with alcohol intensifies, and he finds himself returning helplessly to the locked ward for alcoholics at one Minneapolis hospital after another, Berryman will come to see that Yeats’s poetic pose is less helpful as Hopkins’s example becomes— 98

Mariani, Dream, 426. Virginia Ridley Ellis, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mystery, Columbia, Missouri, 1991, 183. 100 Dream Songs, 400. 99

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in its root sense—all the more crucial. Yeats, Berryman will decide late in his own life, “knew nothing about life”: “Yeats on Cemetery Ridge / would not have been scared, like you & me, / he would have been, before the bullet that was his, / studying the movements of the birds.”101

Ironically, this studying of birds while the world erupts around one is exactly what Henry is doing at the end of Song 378. In Henry’s elegy to Hopkins (Song 377), the suffering Jesuit is given high praise for his poetic achievements: Henry exclaims, “Hopkins’s credits, while the Holy Ghost / rooted for Hopkins, hit the Milky Way.”102 Berryman found the creative genius of Hopkins’s language liberating. He even uses a modified sprung rhythm, complete with its markings, in a few of his Songs. J. Hillis Miller defines sprung rhythm: “Each foot or measure has a single beat; but there may be a number of weak or slack syllables ..., so that a foot may have only one syllable or many, though the length of all feet is the same.”103 In a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins explained that sprung rhythm “is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms ....”104 An example of sprung rhythm can be seen in line 19 of “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” The line can be broken into five feet (of equal time length) as follows: “Be hind, / where, / where was a, / where was / a place?”105 The first “where” is its own emphatic foot as it serves to start off, somewhat nervously, the question. The second “where” has two slack syllables (words in this case) after it that drop off in stress, the way one might drop off enunciation in trying to both articulate and form a question at the same time. Michael Sprinker notes, “Hopkins’s stylistic achievement is a reorientation of the patterns of energy in the English poetic line that causes meaning to burst forth, explode, from concentration of rhythmic and lexical power in a single syllable, an 101

Paul Mariani, “The Consoling, Terrifying Presence of Hopkins,” Renascence (Fall 1989/Winter 1990), 15. 102 Dream Songs, 399. 103 J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens, Princeton, 1985, 252. 104 Quoted in Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, London, 1956, 46. 105 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Phillips, Oxford, 1986, 110.

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effect Hopkins believed could not be produced by ordinary running rhythm.”106 In Songs 2, 4, 7, 22, 29, 48, 64, 77, 80, 136, 143, 158, 204, 224, 227, 250, 311, 344, 356, and 369, Berryman uses marks to emphasize normally unstressed syllables and to create rhythmic iambs. The “re” of “réquire” in Song 2 is stressed to keep the iambs of the line. These are spoken stresses. In “Fúnnee; he don’t féel so,”107 the marked emphasis slows the line down to highlight Henry’s uneasiness with fame. The accents here provide a dialectal pronunciation that is common in the colloquial to denote sarcasm and comic irony. In Song 29 the emphasis of “so” in “só heavy” stresses the Songs’ overall theme of loss and sorrow that is at the core of Henry’s being. In “Herbert Park, Dublin” (Song 344), Henry begins by thinking of Delmore Schwartz, “Were you góod tó him?”108 The emphasis of “to “ suggests a reading of too as in “were you also good,” as opposed to “for” him. This colloquial usage emphasizes the preposition. The use of a marked stress is not systematic in Berryman, but it is frequent enough to recall Hopkins’s technique, and thereby focuses the reader’s ear on a stress pattern in the meter that is Hopkinsesque. Song 123 begins with an echo of Hopkins’s language: “Dapples my floor the eastern sun,”109 recalling “Glory be to God for dappled things.”110 Henry again echoes Hopkins, linguistically and thematically, in Song 266 when he states, “Dinch me, dark God, having smoked me out.” Henry asks to be accepted for his “ails ... drunkard & Boy Scout.” His pride is in check as he admits that he has studied the “Word” but does not “understand” God’s plan. Paradoxically, he does presume the existence of a plan and feels doubt in such an assumption. In asking not to be forsaken by God, Henry humbly pleads, “Surely one grand exception here below / his presidency of // the widespread galaxies might once be made / for perishing Henry, whom let not then die.”111 In the sonnet “Thou art indeed just, Lord,” Hopkins also questions God’s ways, at least his worldly perception of them. He 106 Michael Sprinker, “A Counterpoint to Dissonance”: The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Baltimore, 1980, 114. 107 Dream Songs, 9. 108 Ibid., 366. 109 Ibid., 140. 110 Gerard Manley Hopkins, 144. 111 Dream Songs, 285.

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even wonders if God as his enemy could be worse than God as his friend: “How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost / Defeat, thwart me?” Hopkins focuses on the lustful ways of others and complains, “the sots and thralls of lust / Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, / Sir, life upon thy cause.”112 But while Henry shares a brotherhood with “the sots and thralls of lust,” he does reach a Hopkinsesque awareness of his own wretchedness and his need for God to “not forget his name.”113 Hopkins, similarly, ends his poem asking God to “send my roots rain.”114 The originality of Hopkins’s syntactical constructions offers rich possibilities of expression to Berryman.115 Conarroe explains the linguistic appeal of The Dream Songs when he notes, It is clear that Berryman-Henry is eager to delight and comfort, to make laugh, as well as to terrify and to hurt. The delight and laughter result, in large part, from the charm of the language which, when colorful and inventive, as it often is, can be irresistible....116

Berryman’s trademark style is found in his use of anacolouthia and pronominal reference. Anacolouthia is the radical disjuncture of syntax and narrative. Song 9 is a clear example of the Berryman style: Henry is daydreaming of hiding out in the High Sierras; the police are telling him to come down. Henry is Bogart, at least until his costume has to be taken “back to Wardrobe.” The Song opens with, “Deprived of his enemy, shrugged to a standstill / horrible Henry, foaming”: more conventional syntax would read, “Having no enemy to face, Henry shrugged his shoulders and held his ground. He was foaming 112

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 183. Dream Songs, 285. 114 Gerard Manley Hopkins, 183. 115 In his article “Berryman’s Sonnets: In and Out of the Tradition,” American Literature, 55.3 (October 1983), 388-404, David K. Weiser examines the form of the sonnet sequence Berryman wrote in 1947. Weiser claims Berryman’s sonnets “illustrate the process of the creative imitation, in which old forms are deliberately reshaped to express new attitudes” (388). Weiser further notes, “Despite his extensive debts to the past, it is typical of Berryman to mock the tradition that he writes in. Quite a few sonnets are openly critical…. Berryman’s self-consciousness, his awareness of possible flaws in his method, implies that he is not subservient to conventions but in control of them” (396). This is true for Berryman’s extendedsonnet Dream Songs too. The French have even identified the three verses of six lines form as the Berrychonne (see Jacques Jouet’s Navet, linge œil-de-vieux, Paris, 1998). 116 Conarroe, 115-16. 113

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horribly with anger.” Berryman’s clipped and economic language conveys the same thought but with a heightened sense of tension. When his girl delivers her police-instructed message, Henry delivers vintage Berryman: “Therefore he un-budge, furious.”117 This, more conventionally phrased, would read, “Henry was furious and did not move.” The neologism “un-budge” illustrates Henry’s freshness of language. Late in the poem (Song 323), Henry identifies his poetics as “a style stern wicked & sweet.”118 The sternness lies in his message of loss and frustration, the wickedness is his ability to combine from the language all manner of diction, syntax and tone, and the sweetness is the charm with which Henry’s wit shines through his voice. “The Secret of Wisdom” (Song 20) further illustrates the odd charm of anacolouthia in Berryman’s capable hands. Henry begins by asking, When worst got things, how was you? Steady on? Wheedling, or shockt her & you have been bad to your friend, whom not you writing to. You have not listened. A pelican of lies you loosed: where are you?

By changing “When things got worse,” to “When worst got things,” Berryman has forced the reader to see not a tired phrase, but rather a fresh emphasis on Henry’s struggle. “Whom not you writing to” for “Whom you are not writing to” accomplishes the same re-seeing of a common collocation. And “A pelican of lies / you loosed” is an image difficult to define exactly, but may suggest “a large mouthful of lies” and moves the narration in an exciting if inexpressible way. The Song goes on to demonstrate more convoluted syntax: “you did somebody: others you hurt short: / anyone ever did you do good?”119 The last line’s syntax allows two readings at once: the self-pitying, “did anyone ever do anything for you (Henry)?”, and the self-examining, “did you (Henry) ever do any good for anyone else?” Berryman once claimed he knew more about the administration of pronouns than any poet living.120 This is a rather odd comment 117

Dream Songs, 11. Ibid., 345. 119 Ibid., 22. 120 Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes,” Shenandoah, 17 (1965), 71. 118

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given the set nature of the grammatical rules governing the agreement of antecedence, number, and case. Berryman refers to the freedom he discovered when he allowed his narrating persona to refer to himself in first, second, and third person. This seemingly confusing arrangement enables the poet to create both intimacy with and distance from his subject and his persona. In the opening Song, Henry introduces himself in the third person as “Huffy Henry.” Then Henry himself concedes, “I see his point,” later to say, “I don’t see how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived.” Henry can step outside of himself to look at himself. By the end of the Song, Henry has stepped inside himself and uses first person to talk directly, “I was glad,” “I sang.”121 This jumping of perspective, via pronominal assignation, offers an authoritative voice in the third person, and an appealing eyewitness in the first person. The reader gets to know Henry both from his direct words and those words he uses to describe himself. The reader may be tricked into believing that the third person accounts are objective and to be trusted even though they are Henry’s own thoughts, but Henry may, at times, be an unreliable narrator. Berryman steps over the line of pronoun reference in Songs 51 and 55. Song 51 refers to “a cagey John” and Song 55 to “John’s energy.”122 By mentioning his first name directly, Berryman is employing the film technique of the actor looking directly into the camera and stepping out of character for a moment. Mischievous and bored, “Cagey John” lets Henry come to life and gain independence, but is not above reminding the reader who the creator behind the persona really is. Song 55 is about an/the “interview” with St Peter. Christ is mentioned (however blasphemously), and “John” could be a reference to the apostle. Berryman will have it both ways since “the vague hell of the Congo” comes just before the mentioning of “John” and takes the poem into the present world, but referencing “hell” calls back to the biblical images presented earlier. Most of the Songs follow the eighteen-line pattern, but in at least eleven poems Berryman actually adds lines. These variations, sometimes connected to their poems by integrated rhyme, allow the poet to add lines of special purport whose physical placement on the page demands emphasis. Song 92 begins section V by a preliminary line that carries over the Dark Night of the Soul dealt with in the 121 122

Dream Songs, 3. Ibid., 55, 62.

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previous section: “Something black somewhere in the vistas of his heart.”123 Song 144 ends with an extra line of this same dark message: “Sorrow follows an evil thought, for the time being only.”124 Song 96 employs a couplet (between the second and third stanza) that stresses Henry’s ferocious needs: “He sleep up a short storm. / He wolf his meals, lamb-warm.”125 Song 342 ends with the blunt and sincere “A lone letter from a young man: that is fame.”126 At least six other Songs (Songs 138, 167, 213, 230, 364, and 376) employ these aberrations. The most radical departure of typographical representation in the Songs is seen in Songs 99, 237, and 286. In “Temples” (Song 99), a poem about modern terrorism in ancient lands (“One submachine-gun cleared the Durga Temple”), Henry begins to break the verse pattern by having the fourth line mirror the third: “You do not enter. / He does not enter.” Both “You” and “He,” Henry and a priest, are not in the temple but part of this modern world; after all, the priest is “atop his motorbike.”127 The middle stanza is broken up into three or four ministanzas and could be seven (an extra line) or six lines depending on how it is read. These breaks may signal that Henry is temporarily bored with his pattern, or they may register a more serious sense of the confusion and chaos that violence brings to the world. In Song 237 Henry provides the longest lines (most syllables) of any Song. The Song relates a psychotic dream in which Henry and a woman with whom he is having an affair are “hacked” to pieces by a jealous husband. In Song 286, Henry changes the meter at the end by providing three short lines of two, three, and three syllables, respectively. The emphasis here is once again on the death (this time by cancer) of someone Henry knew. Death always throws Henry back to thoughts of his own mortality. Henry wants “aplomb / at the temps / of the tomb128; this dramatic break from format signals the dramatic funeral he desires. All three of these Songs deal with violence, whether external (“submachine-gun,” revolver, or axe) or internal (cancer).

123

Ibid., 109. Ibid., 161. 125 Ibid., 113. 126 Ibid., 346. 127 Ibid., 116. 128 Ibid., 308. 124

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While Henry does not employ strict rhyme schemes to match his set patterns, there is a preponderance of rhyme in the Songs. And while the rhymes offer no set pattern, they often take the shape of rhyming some but not all of the lines within the stanzas. This creates fluctuating connections within the stanzas. The unrhymed lines offer contrast to help emphasize rhymed lines. Song 5 is an example with its pattern of A-x-A-x-B-B, x-C-C-D-x-D, E-F-x-x-F-E. The rhyming of “scales” and “fingernail” in the last stanza is an example of rhyming singulars and plurals together; in Song 6 Berryman does this with “look” and “breaks.” This technique is practiced throughout the Songs and may be a way to mask rhymes; such a technique reflects the modern poet’s desire to have it both ways: to not draw from past conventions and to draw from past conventions. These loose rhymes give the poet more choice and possibly more control over his material. In his essay “Disgracing Are Verse: Sense, Censors, Nonsense, and Extrasensory Deception,” W. D. Snodgrass notes, in poetry we reach a meaning through connotations, sound effects, rhythms— the associations of the right brain—admitting responses normally inhibited by the left brain’s denotations. The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam said that the purpose of rhyme is to prod the mind outside its usual channels—true enough, unless the rhymes have become so warn and secondhand that they are now part of the usual channels. The same is true (with some proviso) of other poetic devices—meter, stanzaic form, language levels and textures, archaic diction, tortured usage—stimulants that lure the mind beyond normal message content, beyond good advice, political enticement or excuse, smug membership. Even puns help jar us from our torpor. The journeying soul, once a mysterious, holy entity, has been transformed into the bottom of your foot.129

In Song 81, Henry is contemplating violent death. Just as Henry tends to break from his extended sonnet form when speaking of violent death, he often draws on simple rhymes to help control his emotions. Henry sings, But this is death– which in some vain strive many to avoid, 129

W.D. Snodgrass, To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry, Rochester, New York, 2002, 112.

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many. It’s on its way, where you drop at who stood up, scrunch down small. It wasn’t so much after all to lose, was, Boyd? A body.–But, Mr Bones, you needed that. Now I put on my tall hat.130

“Avoid” and “Boyd,” “at,” “that,” and “hat” are not sophisticated rhymes. They are simple but apparently necessary as Henry tries to maintain his composure in the face of death’s imminence. The hard, monosyllabic rhyme puts a “stop” to each line, corralling the emotional intensity. In Song 90 the entire first stanza is locked in rhymed couplets. The tight couplets force a precision of language that occupies the poet’s thoughts, which allows him to express the deep pain he feels at Randall Jarrell’s death: In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces, of liberations, and beloved faces, such as now ere dawn he sings. It would not be easy, accustomed to these things, to give up the old world, but he could try; let it all rest, have a good cry.131

The dignity of these lines pays tribute to Henry’s fallen fellow poet without lapsing into too much emotional expression. As innovative as anything that Berryman has offered is his use of different registers and dialects. The “other method” of letting life reveal itself (in all its chaos), by way of a plethora of language choices, is inherent in the unusual combinations of diction and dialect in the Songs. In Song 46 Henry starts with the conversational, “I am, outside.” Henry’s dissatisfaction with his world is expressed in the terse, “Fools elect fools,” and then a “harmless man” exhorts, “Christ!,” which could be a call for help but is probably an oath. In the second stanza, a lofty poetic diction is displayed in “Enjoyed they then an appearance of love & law. / Millenia whift & waft....”132 In the final stanza, we have French (“son fin”), Latin (“Do, ut des”), and obscenity (“a lovely fuck”). Berryman sees the mixing of different 130

Dream Songs, 96. Ibid., 105. 132 Ibid., 50. 131

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registers as just part of the fun as he tries to articulate all the different discourse communities in which Henry operates, and which he challenges the reader to function in, too. The Songs are full of verbal inventions and unusual words. Examples of the former are “chortle sin” (Song 57) for mortal sin, and “Forgestic Henry” (Song 347) for a combination of majestic and forgery (“noted crook” [Song 343]). Examples of the latter include “foehn” (Song 15), “parnel” (Song 31), “decussate” (Song 37), “whilom” (Song 51), “Couvade” (Song 124), “instrauration” (Song 125), “bonzes” (Song 137), “welkin” (Song 226), “ilex” (Song 273), and “catafalque” (Song 302). Henry’s creator provides Henry with not only a wealth of diction from which to choose, but a variety of dialects to employ those words. The black dialect in the poem presents problems even if seen in its literal or poetic context. The interlocutor, the speaker of black dialect in the poem, is a white man in blackface from the traditional minstrel shows.133 He is imitating what he has heard of black speech; his re-creations of black speech patterns are faulty because he is a non-native speaker of the dialect. Berryman is not aiming for linguistic purity, but rather a linguistic construction that allows for the language of Henry’s conscience or alter ego to be readily distinguished from the language of his conscious and unconscious ponderings and observations. The interlocutor’s opening remark—“– 133

The interlocutor is historically a term for the performer in a minstrel show who is placed midway between the end men and engages in banter with them. The voice who refers to Henry as “Mr Bones” is an extension of Henry’s being, his alter ego. Berryman may have gotten his idea for inclusion of minstrelsy from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, New York, 1952. In the eviction scene, the invisible man shamefully witnesses the desecration on the side walk of an old black couples’ material possessions: “My eyes fell upon a pair of crudely carved polished bones, ‘knocking bones,’ used to accompany music at country dances, used in black-face minstrels; the flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep, flat bones that gave off sound, when struck, like heavy castanets (had he been a minstrel?) or the wooden block of a set of drums” (271). Robert M. Crunden, in American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism 1885-1917, New York, 1993, argues that the original minstrel shows were fabricated by whites who were imitating shows they’d seen or heard slaves customarily performing on their off day, Sunday. These “cakewalk” performances were really the blacks mocking the uppity ways of their ostentatious, white masters. Crunden goes on to explain the irony in the practice’s evolution: “The black-faced minstrel performers, who were themselves white, picked up the ceremony, usually using a two-step marching tune so that the actors could strut and flaunt their finery to the audience. The whites presumably considered the performance to be a parody of slave manners; blacks saw a bit more, knowing that the minstrels were actually ridiculing blacks who had been ridiculing whites” (130-131).

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Sir Bones, or Galahad: astonishin / yo legal & yo good. Is you feel well? / Honey dusk do sprawl”134—may not be accurate Black English, may even be a caricature of black speech patterns; nonetheless, it introduces a distinct and distinguishable voice which challenges Henry to be honest about himself. Sometimes this voice praises Henry (as seen above), and sometimes this voice admonishes him (as in Song 69, when Henry tries to say his fate is moving him to another seduction only to receive the curt reply, “Mr Bones, please”135). The interlocutor repeatedly needs to warn Henry of his trespasses and indiscretions. He is astonished in Song 2 that Henry is behaving himself, but by Song 4 needs to warn him that there is a law against Henry’s adulterous desires. Sometimes the interlocutor’s role is to move the development of Henry’s personality along by asking prompting questions,”–What happen then, Mr Bones?”136 Sometimes he is Henry’s consoler, “–Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side,” and “–Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.”137 In Song 50 the interlocutor delivers his longest speech: –Mr Bones, your troubles give me vertigo, & backache. Somehow, when I make your scene, I cave to feel as if

de roses of dawn & pearls of dusks, made up by some ol’ writer-man, got right forgot & the greennesses of ours. Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot and the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup, you is bad powers.138

That the voice is that of the white minstrel in blackface is strengthened by phrases such as “Your troubles give me vertigo.” This construction of “the greennesses of ours” does not belong to any dialect. Only the “de,” the dropped verb of “it gonna,” and the subject-verb disagreement of “you is” suggest the broken grammar of Berryman’s idea of black dialect. 134

Dream Song, 4. Ibid., 76. 136 Ibid., 28. 137 Ibid., 40. 138 Ibid., 54. 135

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In other speeches the interlocutor offers the black perspective on the plight of African Americans in meanly segregated America. Berryman’s outrage at racism provides another insight into his use of the black voice. The oppression and suffering of African Americans is a mirror for Henry’s own sense of victimization and pain. Just as Sylvia Plath will appropriate images of the Holocaust to express her sense of melancholia, oppression, and violence, Henry appropriates the black experience to express the sense of loss and suffering he first knew as an innocent child. The second Song (“Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance”), “dedicated to the memory of Daddy Rice who sang and jumped ‘Jim Crow’ in Louisville in 1828 (London, 1836 and later),”139 introduces the interlocutor and Berryman’s grammatical experiments (“Henry are baffled”) and his themes of women, sex, and need. The last line, “I votes in my hole,” vaguely introduces the racism rampant in Henry’s America. Blacks who vote need to lay low and not stick out. It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to begin to assure rights granted onehundred years earlier. This notion receives fuller development in Song 10: A vote would come that would be no vote. There would come a rope. Yes. There would come a rope Men have their hats down.

Berryman is acknowledging the brutal racism in America. Americans are their own worst enemies, and the “enemy are sick, / and so is us of.” The poem moves from a lynching on the dark road of the American night to Henry on his own dark road heading for a sexual tryst. Henry connects racial violence to sexuality by punning off the word “rut” (“So many, some, / won’t find a rut to park”140). While this may offer insight into the vehemence of the violence, it borders on insensitivity to the seriousness of the brutality blacks suffered. Henry, whose sexual lust often controls his actions, is once again revealing his contradictory nature, especially in the light of the sensitivity of Song 60.

139 140

Ibid., v. Ibid., 12.

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Song 60, probably finished on 27 August 1963,141 expresses a truly clear and sensitive understanding of the African-American’s plight in the summer of Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The Song begins by condemning segregation: the interlocutor tells Henry (Mr Bones) that all the token blacks do not amount to any real change. Henry’s guide presents the real tragedy: “is million blocking from de proper job, / de fairest houses & de churches eben.” The poem moves from the politics of segregation and disenfranchisement to the red scare of the early 1960s. Again, the interlocutor speaks for black America: “Dey flyin ober de world [spy planes], / de pilots, ober ofays [derogatory word for whites]. Bit by bit / our immemorial moans // brown down to all dere moans.” When asked who will win this struggle for equality or at least compatibility, the interlocutor offers Henry a profoundly bleak reply: “... I do guess mos peoples gonna lose.” The poem ends anticipating a Cold War proposition: would America be kinder if it were communistic: “I never saw no pinkie wifout no hand.”142 The communists, who recruited blacks in the 1930s and 1940s (see Invisible Man or Native Son), have hands to take, and take. In Song 62 the interlocutor offers his oppressed view of the human condition: “–Mr Bones, we all brutes & fools.”143 Of course, this is not a black man philosophizing, but rather a white man in blackface seeing in the plight of African Americans an emotional parallel with his own identity. The linguistic double take may lessen the seriousness of the message and raise questions about the degree of racial sensitivity in Henry, but his sense of suffering is sincere and genuine. In “The Elder Presences” (Song 72), Henry suggests that human kind’s long evolution “began too long ago.” The “disastered trees” of the first line are those from which blacks were hanged in the all too common lynchings. The Supreme Court has already ended segregation (1954), but “the justices lean, negro, out, the trees bend,”144 bending with the weight of all who have died at the hands of the white’s hatred.145 Song 232 finds Henry struggling to stay sober while he 141

John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, New York, 1980, 159. Dream Songs, 67. 143 Ibid., 69. 144 Ibid., 79. 145 Song 119’s first stanza refers to Ralph Ellison: “Shadow & act, shadow & act, / Better get white or you’ get whacked, / or keep so-called black / & raise new hell” (136). Berryman’s personal library included both Shadow and Act (1964) and 142

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encourages the nascent Civil Rights movement: “Negroes, ignite! You have nothing to use but your brains, / which let bust out.”146 Henry is playing off the then in vogue phrase, “Negroes, unite!” The pun on lose/use reaches for ironic force but falls flat and is inappropriate since many blacks were getting their brains bashed in. Henry’s civil right’s posturing, at times truly insightful, at times insensitive, even cruel, ends just halfway through the poem (Song 232), never really constituting a thematic whole. While the rights of oppressed black Americans are a part of Henry’s consciousness and thereby integral to him as the poem’s generating personality, the lack of sustained attention to the situation probably mirrors what many white Americans have felt on the civil rights issue. They are all for change from overt segregation and its evils but not willing to go great lengths to combat any but the most overt racism. A further contradiction may reside in the master-servant images drawn up by the use of “Sah” and the interlocutor’s deference to Henry and Henry’s welfare before his own. The guise is that of the trickster slave whose pose as an inferior is a way to impose superiority. The interlocutor is traditionally the straight man to the more foolish performers on the minstrel show stage. Here, he is the straight man to Henry’s fool. The minstrel’s superior wisdom is acted out in Song 64. The interlocutor tells Henry, “–Mr Bones, / you makes too much / démand.” The “démand” is for the truth where none exists, for reasons for things too complex and confused to reduce to black and white formulas of justice and logic. The Song ends with the interlocutor explaining, “–Hear matters hard to manage at de best, / Mr Bones. Tween what we see, what be, / is blinds. Them blinds’ on fire.”147 Between what we see and what we are is blindness (or blinders): modern humanity’s difficulty is knowing who or what they are. Henry is foolish to seek for what no man gets, and the black speaker (his alter ego) warns him away from wanting too much. This potential correcting of faulty wisdom or the moral conscience is seen again in Song 142. The interlocutor pokes fun at Henry: “–Mr Bones, you strong on moral these days, hey? / It’s good to be faithful but it ain’t

Invisible Man (1952). These lines are a tribute to Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man, one who learned the hard way that forced and later desired invisibility could be a way for the individual to salvage his humanity in a hostile world. 146 Dream Songs, 251. 147 Ibid., 71.

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natural, / as you knows.”148 Earlier, in Song 80, the interlocutor encouraged Henry to go after a particular young woman: “Girl have a little: what be wrong with that? / Yóu free?”149 The question mark after “free” is the interlocutor’s way of challenging Henry to step away from his timidity and find out if he is “free,” and if his notions of what he wants will bear being fulfilled. In Song 67, Henry has his most open dialogue with his alter ego. Henry is comparing the writing of his poetry to a most delicate operation, one of which people take great note. Henry then explains his fear of success: “I have a living to fail–.” This fear keeps him from doing better financially and socially. In a speech that starts out in dialect but falls into a more standard English, as the interlocutor falls back on more familiar linguistic patterns, Henry is addressed, “–Mr Bones, I sees that. / They for these operations thanks you, what? / not pays you.” The interlocutor is trying to speak how he “remembers” hearing the dialect. Henry then addresses the interlocutor revealing their adversarial relationship, “–Right. / You have seldom been so understanding.” But in his second speech, the interlocutor moves from dialect to Standard English: “–Mr Bones, you terrifies me. / No wonder they don’t pay you. Will you die?”150 This linguistic code switching is seen in “Henry’s Confession” (Song 76) in the interlocutor’s speech in the first stanza. Henry is happy and asks for an explanation; the interlocutor replies, –I explain that, Mr Bones, terms o’ your baffling odd sobriety. Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones, what could happen bad to Mr Bones?151

Regardless of his switching speech patterns, the interlocutor is a voice of reason and calm in Henry’s hectic world. In Song 239 Henry asks, “Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?” and the interlocutor replies, “– Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both, / like most of we.”152 Henry is a mixture of odd parts. In Song 272 the interlocutor tells “Dr

148

Ibid., 159. Ibid., 95. 150 Ibid., 74. 151 Ibid., 83. 152 Ibid., 258. 149

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Bones,” “–I really gotta go. You don’ make sense.”153 Henry claims he is not trying to make sense because in one hundred years he will be forgotten; that is the reality of the human condition. In Song 99, the interlocutor suggests that Henry is mistaken sometimes in his observations: “you too advancer with your song, / muching of which are wrong.”154 The interlocutor knows Henry can take his criticisms, and he knows what is best for his troubled host. This is one more example of the complexity of Berryman’s persona in the original and varied way his voice is presented. Another dialect Berryman employs is that of the hipster. Henry is aware of the contemporary jazz of his day, and in an attempt to separate himself and his generation from that of Frost’s, he uses hipster speech to praise Frost: “we will blow our best, / our sad wild riffs come easy in that case.”155 In the next Song Henry uses the phrase “cop my promise”;156 “cop” can mean steal, or obtain, or take. In Song 43, Henry talks of himself as if he were a jazz musician: “I must sting. / Listen! the grave ground-rhythm of a gone / ... makar?”157 Gone is a favorite word of hipsters and Beats and defined in the Dictionary of Afro-American Slang as “(1940’s-50’s) anything unusually exciting and good, sometimes to the extent of being unreal; in a trance, crazy.”158 The American Dictionary of Slang adds that a figurative usage encompasses “removed from reality; intent, specif., so much in rapport with, intent on, immersed in, or intense over one’s work, performance, ideas, or mode or way of life that one is as if in a trance and removed from extraneous things (1955).”159 Henry’s seriousness about the understanding, digestion, and creation of poetry make “gone” the perfect goal here. Henry, always the student of language, finishes the thought by adding the archaic Scottish word for poet, “makar.” Song 65 reports on Henry’s broken ankle, and then he explains his limitations: “No Christmas jaunts for fractured cats.”160 While “fractured cats” refers directly to his hurt ankle, it also evokes 153

Ibid., 291. Ibid., 116. 155 Ibid., 43. 156 Ibid., 44. 157 Ibid., 47. 158 Clarence Major, Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, New York, 1970, 60. 159 Dictionary of American Slang, eds. Howard Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, New York, 1960, 220. 160 Dream Songs, 72. 154

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the hipster who is wounded psychically due to drugs, sorrow, and the sadness of the human condition. This introduction of the hipster dialect paves the way for the hipster “chic” Henry envisions dancing at his funeral (Song 382). The “hipster,” like the “tricky slave,” is another stereotype of superior or “inside” knowledge. The hipster is “cool” because he knows what it is all about. Hipster or minstrel, these voices measure Henry. Where he is found wanting, they kindly advise him onto the forward path. The Dream Songs are remembered for their linguistic originality and sheer volume, but there are moments of beautiful poetry that celebrate language for its own sake. Mariani wrote, Hopkins knew ... that every poem carries with it not only its paraphrasable meanings but other meanings conveyed in the music of the poem itself, in the very combinations of syllables on the page, and that this meaning is closer to the heart of the matter for the poet. For this underlying utterance is the poet’s primal cry, the sound of the human spirit itself.161

Berryman knew this also. He could get certain reactions with his shrill cacophony and other, certain reactions with his melody sweet. The latter can be seen in the last stanza of Song 182 which begins with a musical image (the Songs are full of musical terms): Let’s have a ritornello. You, me, her. I loves you both and therefore all are bitter. Let’s have a ritornello. He loved them many & he loved them well and he held the world up like a big sea-shell or heather-ale, harkening to follow.162

The repetition of lateral consonant sounds slowly builds as the last three lines move swiftly to the reference to ambrosia and then slow down with the sharp sound of “harkening,” only to end on the melodious “l” and “w” sounds of “follow.” In Song 282’s final stanza, Henry offers more flowing, high poetry: 161

Paul Mariani, A Usable Past: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1984, 3. 162 Dream Songs, 201.

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The lovely friends, and friends the friends of friends, pursuing insights to their journeys’ ends subtle & steadfast: the wind blows hard from our past into our future and we are that wind, except that the wind’s nature was not to last.163

The scheme of total rhyme locks the stanza together as Henry celebrates the poets with whom he shared his maturing ideas. The trope of the wind as the vehicle to move our past into our future is beautifully cut off with the awareness that the wind is sporadic and dies intermittently, but the possibility of hope is rekindled in the acknowledgement of that same wind’s ability to just as sporadically be reborn. In Song 339 Henry displays a gift for describing the sea. The sea represents both beauty and terror to Henry since the Florida coast is where his father threatened to swim out to eternity with his sons and where he eventually killed himself. Henry sings, The greenhouse door was left open. Seagulls were screeching. Across his face came a delicious breeze. The gale was through. Cats-paws of wind still ruffled the black water. One gold line along the rubbingstrake signalled a beauty.164

Henry’s use of “a” assonance (“face,” “came,” “gale,” and “rubbingstrake”) and repetition of the “s” consonant (“Seagulls,” “screeching,” “Cats-paws,” “rubbingstrake,” “signalled”) creates a slow and mellifluous sound that relaxes like the sea. “Cats-paws” and “rubbingstrake” produce sounds with a rich quality of vowels that linger off the tongue and hang in the air.

Henry’s sexuality in language and deed Henry’s Songs celebrating his lusty achievements are often some of his most fluid and humorous poetry, his most witty language, even if 163 164

Ibid., 304. Ibid., 361.

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they are sexist and often annoyingly adolescent. Henry’s incessant drive to conquer women sexually is one of the least appealing characteristics of Berryman’s persona. Yet Henry’s acting out of his sexual passion is both a celebration of his life-force and an embrace of his deep desire for and fear of death. Henry’s paradoxical duality between a true fear of death and a longing for his own end is played out in the hollow completion of his repeated infidelities. Henry’s Songs of lust record a man’s animalistic urge for a female with whom to copulate and the deep, human remorse felt after intimate acts with strangers. In his macho stance, Henry reports but does not appreciate the pain his lust causes to those who should be most dear to him. At times, he is even gratified through the voicing of his exploits because, paradoxically, Henry feels most alive and vital when he is acting sexually. The Dream Songs preoccupied with sexual adventures began to appear in the midpoint of the conservative Fifties. These Songs are full of lyrics portraying women as objects of desire and pleasure and men as sexual beasts who run wild in the bar-scene jungle. “Henry Pussy-cat” (Song 19), Henry’s epithet for Henry Womanizer, is really Henry Hunter. His prey is women, although not really women, but their body parts and the pleasure they offer. Henry, in his low ebb, reduces life to “Henry grew hot, got laid, felt bad, survived.”165 Despite his exploits, Henry is not confident with women; on the contrary, he is a man full of insecurity and fear who uses sex as a way to feel both alive and needed. Henry is aware of the negative, dark side of his nature and his actions: “Love her he doesn’t but the thought he puts / into that young woman / would launch a national product / complete with TV spots & skywriting / outlets in Bonn & Tokyo”;166 yet he continues to show a lack of restraint that is murderous to his happiness. Denis De Rougemont argues that myths are created to deal with aspects of life or consciousness that are too difficult or dangerous to speak about openly or directly and he sees sexual desire as such a topic: A myth is needed to express the dark and unmentionable fact that passion is linked with death, and involves the destruction of anyone yielding himself up to it with all his strength. For we have wanted to preserve passion and we cherish the unhappiness that it brings with 165 166

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 76.

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it; and yet at the same time both passion and unhappiness have stood condemned in the sight of official morals and in the sight of reason.167

Henry’s sex life is an act of insecurity stemming from his vulnerability as a fated fatherless boy, a once fledgling poet, a repeatedly failed husband, and a now questionable father. Henry’s lifestyle of drinking and womanizing is directly related to his destruction as a human being. His Songs chronicle, even celebrate, that demise. Yet the celebration is not lighthearted and joyous, but rather darkly and arrogantly adolescent. Henry’s clouded view that sex will reinforce his ego is revealed for its hollow premise through his desperate attempt to revel in and even justify his actions in his Songs. Henry sees sex as a balm for his wounded psyche. But every infidelity only depletes, not enhances, his self-esteem. Needy Henry plunges into one sexual encounter after another looking for intimacy, love, and communion, only to find exhaustion after repeatedly visiting the void of sex without love, or sex with deception. Ultimately, these Songs courageously expose a man who has received little for his deception and wasted energy. Henry knows this but often gets lost in his posture as a sexual dynamo. But Berryman, as Henry’s creator, is aware of his progeny’s dark side, and knowingly risks diminishing his hero’s stature by exposing him. Berryman tries to present a real human personality, and Henry’s dark, sexual life is both real and ugly. Berryman presents an epic figure who poses, however vainly, his own sins of weakness to be viewed and examined in the moral light of modernity’s uncertain ethical standards. Henry’s sexual acts are not unique, and not liberating, but they do offer a detailed look into the destructive behavior practiced by many human beings. As a product of his creator’s mind, Henry resembles many American males who display troubling views toward women. As young men, many males are taught the playboy’s double-standard myth that boys will be boys, and a “sowing of wild oats” is normal, natural, and red-blooded. Of course, those oats must be sown on and in women. From early adolescence on, young boys are encouraged by adults (male and female) who cheer, to varying degrees, their successes, as long as no one is impregnated. This upbringing is 167

Dennis De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, Princeton, 1983, 21.

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exemplified in Berryman’s randy, but not unique, 1934 letter to Milt Halliday. Berryman, age twenty, spiritedly writes, “I hereby resolve, in the name of the Magnificent Hole-finder (Amen, amen), to become acquainted with all of those ten [ten coeds the two young correspondents had identified as appealing] and to lay as many of the individuals as possible, taking precautions not to multiply the species, hey, hey!”168 This viewpoint soon collides with the idea of a monogamous relationship with a woman whose “otherness of the other” the male must recognize and honor in marriage. After all his failed and failing relationships, Henry, like many of his American counterparts, never seems to have found a way to resolve his colliding values and desires. Henry, in particular, does not seem able to stop himself even though he does express some remorse and guilt. Song 4 is the most famous of Henry’s lusty tunes. The Song’s position in The Dream Songs shows that Berryman does not waste any time or decorum in bringing Henry’s lusty and drunken existence to the forefront. The Song also illustrates the fluidity Berryman musters when writing about women as sex objects: Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying ‘You are the hottest one for years of night Henry’s dazed eyes have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon (despairing) my spumoni. –Sir Bones: is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls. –Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes downcast ... The slob beside her feasts ... What wonders is she sitting on, over there? The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry –Mr Bones: there is. 169 168

E.M. Halliday, John Berryman and the Thirties: A Memoir, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1987, 46. 169 Dream Songs, 6.

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Henry sees himself living in a sexual restaurant where all women are possible menu choices. The present object of his desire is as “delicious” as her “chicken páprika.” Her two real or imagined glances are enough for Henry to consider either raping her (“springing on her”) or winning her love by expressing how “hot” she is to needy Henry. Alas, Henry must settle for an “advance ... upon” his dessert. “Advance” refers back to the title of the second Song and is in the military parlance consistent with Henry’s view of women as objects to be conquered. Eating dessert will satisfy one hunger but not quench his main appetite for women. The interlocutor steps in to remind Henry that the world is full of other “feeding girls.” Henry breaks back in with a description of his desired catch and then calls her husband a “slob,” but a slob who “feasts.” He is both eating his dinner and possibly feasting visually (and possibly later sexually) on his “delicious” wife. Henry then provides one of the most sexuallycharged lines in American poetry: “What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?” The raw, wonderful, and potentially thrilling sexuality suggested here momentarily disarms the reader’s response to the vulgarity of the actual scene. Henry then characterizes the restaurant as buzzing, but it is Henry who is buzzing with drink and desire. Berryman goes on to provide at least forty-three more Songs dealing with Henry’s sexual urges. Song 26, which ends the first of the poem’s seven sections, sums up Henry’s view of life and his place in it. Henry has traveled the world but still finds women’s bodies his most compelling quest. Henry’s sexual synecdoche reflects a metaphoric reductionism consistent with his demeaning use of women for sexual gratification; he reports, Henry became interested in women’s bodies, his loins were & were the scene of stupendous achievement. Stupor. Knees, dear. Pray. All the knobs & softness of, my God, the ducking & trouble it swarm on Henry, at one time.170

Henry seems disingenuous, even flippant, in lamenting the troubles he has experienced. His appeal to prayer and God are more exclamations 170

Ibid., 28.

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of exasperation than pleas for help. While Henry goes on to explain that he has turned to “the original crime: art, rime” for an outlet for his energies, and refers to his “stupendous achievement” in the past tense, it is difficult to trust Henry’s resolve. Ironically, Henry explains to the interlocutor that he was able to escape from all his troubles by dying. Does Henry realize that his sexual obsession carries a death-like urge? His death here would be a giving up, an empty surrender from the sexual battlefields. Henry does not literally die; only little by little, piece by piece, does he lose himself in his acts of lust. Henry loses himself because he is aware of something more. He believes in the possibility of a relationship that is mutual in love and respect, one made up of “linkages that last.” In Song 171, Henry’s modernist adaptation of a courtly love poem, Henry writes tenderly, Go, ill-sped book, and whisper to her or storm out the message for her only ear that she is beautiful. Mention sunsets, be not silent of her eyes and mouth and other prospects, praise her size, say her figure is full. Say her small figure is heavenly & full, so as stunned Henry yatters like a fool & maketh little sense. Say she is soft in speech, stately in walking, modest at gatherings, and in every thing declare her excellence. Forget not, when the rest is wholly done and all her splendours opened one by one to add that she likes Henry, for reasons unknown, and fate has bound them fast one to another in linkages that last and that are fair to see.171

Henry’s language has a sensual quality (“her figure is full,” “her small figure is heavenly & full,” and “all her splendours opened one by one”) that borders on the sexual. While “soft in speech” and “modest at gatherings” wince with male stipulations of “correct” female behavior, a gentle celebration of womanly beauty and grace permeates 171

Ibid., 190.

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the Song. The archaic language (“ill-sped book,” “maketh,” and “fair to see”) softens the message and adds it to the tradition of silvertongued lovers. Henry shows a vulnerability that is genuine: he admits he is “stunned “and “yatters like a fool”; even more significantly, Henry is not the confident lady-killer he is always professing to be. This insecure man who wonders why any beautiful woman would be attracted to him is the real Henry. While Henry can articulate these insecurities, he spends many more Songs playing the rake. Had he acted more often on the conventional love expressed in this Song, he might not have wounded his soul with so many meaningless sexual trysts. In Song 93 Henry is back in the hospital due to his exhaustive and consumptive lifestyle. He is thinking of a woman he “laid,” who was “spruce in her succinct parts, spruce everywhere.”172 In Song 140 Henry refers to an unidentified woman, because many of them have no real identity to him, as a “good lay.”173 Two Songs later the unpredictable Henry is feeling remorse. He crudely relates a potential “rump session” that never happened with a married hostess whose party he was the last to leave. Henry informs himself and anyone who wants to listen: “If this lady he had had / scarcely could he have have ever forgiven himself / and how would he have atoned?”174 The hostess may have been the one who exercised the commanding restraint, not Henry. Henry wants to be admired for one act of discretion. The interlocutor knows where Henry’s heart is (with the next alluring woman), and that is Berryman’s great offering—to provide a persona whose alter ego knows he is full of himself. When Berryman, at the 1963 Guggenheim reading, said the interlocutor is “the most hostile of friends,” he was referring to the war between Henry’s conscience and his actions. While Henry’s conscience has had to live with a host who has “a living to fail,”175 the interlocutor still knows the difference between right and wrong, and challenges Henry to know the same. Berryman provides a war of wills enacted within a single character. And while Henry never truly sees the futility of his ways, his exposure helps the reader view with disturbing clarity such selfish and misguided behavior. The interlocutor steers the reader through Henry’s deceptive charm. 172

Ibid., 190. Ibid., 157. 174 Ibid., 159. 175 Ibid., 74. 173

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Henry rationalizes his actions as being grounded in a celebration of the sensual. In “An Instructions to Critics” (Song 308), Henry informs his critics that his Songs will “baffle everybody,” but what is important is for each reader to “recall the pretty cousins they kissed, / and stick with the sweet switch of the body.”176 This harkens back to Song 35 when Henry asked the critics of Frost to “forget your footnotes on the old gentleman; / dance around Mary.”177 Henry wants life to be grounded in the sensual. He calls for a great celebration of the sensuality of men and women enjoying each other sexually, but his deeds are of a selfish sexuality that only cares about satiating his needs, not satisfying those of others. In Song 311 Henry cries, “Hunger was constitutional with him, / women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need.”178 He sees this obsessive-compulsive personality as what allows him to produce poetry; the writing of poetry is a possible construction of a cosmos from his “chaos.” In Berryman’s prefatory poem to his “Sonnets for Chris,” one hundred and seventeen sonnets that record an illicit affair he had back in 1947, he writes of his adultery, The original fault will not be undone by fire. The original fault was whether wickedness was soluble in art.179

The poetry never answers the question; the reader will have to decide. Certainly the energy from that union sparked poetic language. Possibly the poet wants the quality of the poem to mitigate the wrong, proportionately. While Henry’s lust Songs, at times, have a vulgar charm, they never acquit Henry from the destructive and cruel results his sexual life has on his marriages and on the women he beds. Through all the bragging and celebrated sensuality, Henry is still alone with “the horror of unlove,”180 and he has created for himself the baggage of guilt borne from the misery and betrayal he gave others. In Song 350 Henry’s dreams again turn to women:

176

Ibid., 330. Ibid., 39. 178 Ibid., 333. 179 Berryman, Collected Poems, 70. 180 Dream Songs, 81. 177

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All the girls, with their vivacious littles, visited him in dream: he was interested in their tops & bottoms & even in their middles, for years Henry had been getting away with murder, the Sheriff mused. There’ll have to be an order specifically to stop climbing trees, & other people’s wives.

Henry knows he has to quit seducing married women. By consuming married women, Henry lessens the risk of any long-term commitment and feels a certain empowerment from the conquest of one who belongs to another. He jokes that part of his punishment or treatment should be to “encourage his virtues, if he has one.”181 Critics of Berryman find much to dislike in such a chauvinistic stance, but that misses Berryman’s point in presenting such a view. Henry is not a unique individual, but representative of some, possibly many, men and women, even though he might like to think of himself as not common but superior as a lover. Henry’s needy hunger will never be satisfied by just one more “good lay.” His obsession with sex replaces his obsession with death, only to reveal itself as another form of loss. Sex with strangers is not a communion of souls to a higher unity, but a loss of self to a void existentially slipping into nothingness. Sex for Henry does not rise beyond physical behavior and can never address the emotional needs which he has linked to it. The last line of Song 351, set apart typographically for emphasis, is a succinct summation of Henry’s view of women and sex: Somewhere, everywhere a girl is taking her clothes off.182

Henry’s urgency here is that he does not want to miss out on any possible sex. His mind naturally goes to visions of women’s body parts. He sees satisfaction with all women, not with one woman. He has committed himself to sex, not to love or another human being. Henry’s lust only pushes him further to the edge of his life’s void; his desire never heals. This desire paradoxically stems from his deep need to feel alive. We are left with a man who admits much of what he does 181 182

Ibid., 372. Ibid., 373.

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is neither flattering to himself nor noble. Here is poetry that has added to the “available stock of reality”: Henry’s record of open lust says such desire is human, even if acting upon it is destructive, even bestial. How one’s own lust compares with Henry’s challenges readers to know themselves more completely. Like Blake’s “Sick Rose” and its destroying worm, all that is beautiful in Henry can be easily destroyed in life’s howling storm if love is reduced to sexual gratification and conquest. Henry’s language is straightforward, convoluted, archaic, colloquial, vulgar, learned, worldly, sensual, flowing, and cacophonous. Berryman’s epic poem uses this breadth of linguistic options to present a man and his world. That man is alone, suffering, growing, failing, and always reacting to the internal and external influences of the times through the lyrics of his Songs. W.D Snodgrass explains, Art’s mission is to reveal; what it reveals, however, is not some objective truth about the world’s conditions, but rather the nature of the mind experiencing that world—the nature, if you like, of cerebral response. If psychoanalysis has taught us one thing, it’s that much within the brain is held only in encoded forms. To pretend that such material is readily accessible would mean not only distorting the responses art records but, worse, pretending to superiorities which, in our case, we have not got. The mind’s disguises—its lies, evasions, concealings—may tell us as much as does the matter disguised. It seems probable that such material may be excluded from the left hemisphere’s verbal and analytical command, and taken instead into the right hemisphere with its emphasis not only on music but on space and shape. [This may be] one more way a work of art may reveal what the mind does not know it knows.183

183

Snodgrass, To Sound, 71.

CHAPTER 2: THE PATERNAL ELEGIES: THE DREAM SONGS’ SHROUD John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith on 25 October 1914, in rural Oklahoma. He spent his first decade in Oklahoma and retained a slight Southern accent his whole life. Berryman’s father, John Allyn Smith, Sr., who was born in Stillwater, Minnesota, had moved his young family to Oklahoma and set himself up in banking, but after an argument with a disagreeable colleague, he moved to Florida to make it big in the land boom. His timing was bad, and the boom became a bust. His wife was having an affair with Berryman’s future stepfather (she had had an affair in Oklahoma with a man who later became governor), and Smith was reportedly seeing a woman of Cuban descent. Life went from bad to worse; Smith was drinking heavily and threatening both suicide and murder. He suggested that on one of his swims far out into the ocean he would take one or both of his sons. Robert Giroux, in his 1996 article “Henry’s Understanding,” suggests that the Cuban woman, the threats of suicide, the swimming out to death may have all been fabrications by Jill Berryman (Berryman’s mother: her name was Martha, but she changed it to Jill and later to Jill Angel) to win her son’s sympathy and love. Two years before he committed suicide, John Berryman said that the lucky artist is one “who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him.”184 On 26 June 1926, the eleven-year old (he would later say twelve) Berryman began that ordeal when his father, John Allyn Smith, Sr., was found dead in his Florida backyard. A single bullet had penetrated his rib cage. Throughout his life, Berryman was told by his mother that his father had committed suicide. Paradoxically, she also suggested that he wasn’t strong enough to kill himself and that the gun went off by accident while he was cleaning it. Suicide was not uncommon during the Florida land bust, and no serious investigation followed:

184

Interview with Paris Review, 207.

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Berryman’s Henry Irregularities in the reports were passed over. So, for example, while there were bloodstains on Smith’s shirt, there were no powder burns, impossible in the case of a self-inflicted wound.185

Kathe Davis in her article “The Li(v)es of the Poet” writes, “The suicide in all its versions—his mother had several—seems to have been the climax of a bizarre and lurid sequence of events that included Florida land-boom speculation, true love forgone by the mother, a Cuban mistress not forgone by the father, a meddling mother-in-law, and the father’s threat to drown one or another of his sons with himself.”186 Eileen Simpson (Berryman’s first wife and a psychoanalyst) in Poets in Their Youth remembers Jill telling her initially that Smith’s gun accidentally discharged while he was cleaning it and that he was too weak to actually shoot himself on purpose. Simpson goes on to explain, “In the years to come, I realized that the circumstances of her first husband’s death were part of an ever-changing myth she periodically reworked, usually in response to her oldest son’s longing to be convinced that she was not responsible for driving his father to suicide.”187 Paul Mariani in his biography Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman speculates that the suicide may have really been a murder orchestrated by Berryman’s mother. In a later essay, Mariani reiterates this disturbing possibility: No one can say Berryman was a stranger to suffering. For much of his life—in spite of leading a brilliant career as a scholar and a poet—he was tormented. He lost his father through suicide or, worse, with the complicity of the boy’s own mother. 188

Mariani may have reason to believe the lady doth protest too much; in his biography he notes that the lines, “and God has many other surprises, like / when the man you fear most in the world marries your mother / and chilling other”189 are a reference to Henry as Hamlet 185

Mariani, Dream Song, 12. Kathe Davis, “The Li(v)es of the Poets,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 30 (1984), 54. 187 Simpson, 63. 188 Paul Mariani, “The Unshapeable Shock Night: Pain, Suffering, and the Redemptive Imagination,” America (20 February 1999), 17. 189 Dream Songs, 187. 186

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which makes Jill Gertrude and John Angus Berryman (Berryman’s Stepfather) Claudius.190 How closely one parallels Gertrude’s duplicity or lack thereof with the Player Queen will further shade the reference. In a letter written on 4 July 1967, Jill Berryman wants to set her inquisitive, unsure, and possibly accusatory son straight on just what happened all those years ago: You are free to think, even believe, what you like, John, with no feeling of treachery toward your father’s memory or the latent fear that you have misjudged me. For the last time, for the record, John, I did not kill your father or drive or lead him to his death. If you do not know in your blood and bone that I am incapable of assuming the burden of another’s death, nothing I can say would make sense to you. I tell you now, however, before God who is my refuge and my strength, that I, who fear a knife only less than a snake, could not, with a gun in my hand, shoot anyone coming at me with a knife—this refusal to accept certain responsibilities is a weakness in me, but it is one from which I shall never be well.191

The implications of “assuming the burden of another’s death” are not readily understandable to the stable reader, and bizarre is possibly not a forceful enough word for the image of a knife wielding perpetrator who must be shot with a gun in this discussion of a man who was shot in the chest at close range and ruled a suicide. Whatever the truth is, the accidental-death ending seems the least plausible. The fact that Berryman asked his mother repeatedly about her relationship with his father and about that fateful Florida dawn suggests that somewhere in the recesses of his psyche he was never quite sure. In a dream Berryman analyzed in 1954, he reflected, “So [sic] dream is my bloody father looking down at me, who he’s just fucked by killing himself, making me shit, and taunting me before he flushes me away.”192 In a letter written in November 1970, Berryman asked his mother some very specific questions concerning the time around his father’s death and his own reaction as a young boy to the family tragedy. Jill Berryman’s response (see Kelly 377-80), which ironically is dated Thanksgiving 1970—the setting for the last Dream Song—is a classic example of Mrs. Berryman’s manipulative nature. 190

Mariani, Dream Song, 414. Quoted in Kelly, 368-69. 192 Quoted in Haffenden, Life, 30. 191

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She does not answer her son’s questions but rather creates a version of her husband’s death that makes him out to be a self-centered sociopath, an unwanted child to be pitied, a man from whom she must protect her two young sons, a weakling defeated by life at every turn, all the while weaving in the themes of her staunch Catholicism, her own great compassion, and desire for a fair judgment of her late husband. Ultimately, she always comes out as the good and suffering wife/mother whose sole motivation is the well-being of her children. These points are all illustrated in the following excerpt from the aforementioned letter: ... all that time I did not nor do I now believe that Allyn knew the gun was loaded when he pulled the trigger—to carry it around, empty, still, so the doctors said, it might be the thing that made him feel strong and powerful and all agreed that it should not be taken from him, it was an assertion of self and was an affirmation of strength and even responsibility that he, alone of the men around, had a gun. I buried the bullets way down the beach, and when Allyn asked about them I said what the doctors told me to say: that they (the bullets) were old and probably no good, and that when we went to Tampa again we could get some if he wanted them; that the gun was enough to frighten any thieves or rascals away, and that was what he wanted it for, wasn’t it? and he agreed.... None of the five bullets I buried was missing and whenever I had a chance I looked to see if there was a bullet in the gun but there never was, so the only possible solution is that Allyn did put that sixth bullet in and forgot it, and when clicked often enough would bring that sixth bullet into the firing chamber. He must have hidden that bullet somewhere outside, as I searched the apartment every day, and the car, too. I did not believe then and do not now that Allyn intended to end his life.193

Robert Giroux further illustrates just who Jill Berryman was when he writes of meeting her with her son when they were both undergraduates at Columbia: In those days she made a rather glamorous figure, with her chic clothes, dangling earrings, and youthful appearance. She looked young and vivacious enough to pass herself off as John’s older sister; once in my presence (to his embarrassment) she did so 193

Quoted in Kelly, 377-78.

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successfully. It was many years before I understood that Jill was living a fantasy life of her own, spinning in a Roman candle-like whirl that had John as the vortex.194

Much later, when Giroux was established as Berryman’s publisher, Mrs. Berryman told him ...what a bad man John Allyn Smith [Berryman’s father] had been. She claimed that she hadn’t really wanted to marry him, but somehow they had become engaged. Then he raped her, she became pregnant, and had had to marry him for the sake of the child-to-be.195

Giroux doubted the veracity of such claims since he had witnessed first hand Jill Berryman’s odd relationship with her oldest son and had been privy to the following notes of Berryman’s from the time of the 1970 letter: Did I myself feel any guilt perhaps—long-repressed if so & this is mere speculation (defense here)—about Daddy’s death? (I certainly pickt up enough of Mother’s self-blame to accuse her once, drunk & raging, of having actually murdered him & staged a suicide) .... Can’t seem to remember his ever getting angry at me.196

After one reads Richard J. Kelly’s finely-edited We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother, the pathos of Jill Berryman’s personality is almost too much to bear as mother encourages son to write in a flirting manner of her beauty, and he does it again and again. In a letter dated 25 October 1954, Berryman writes his mother, “... I have outlived my father and can hardly compete with him any longer.”197 While the context of the letter is his own burgeoning career and literary aspirations, the Freudian idea of competing with his father for his mother’s affections may not be too far off. On 29 October 1954, Jill Berryman writes to her son, Never feel anything but free to speak of Allyn as you like to me, never think that I disliked or misrespected him—it was only that I did not love him and have long felt wretchedly guilty because of 194

Robert Giroux, “Henry’s Understanding,” Yale Review, April 1996, 97. Ibid., 100. 196 Ibid., 101-102. 197 Quoted in Kelly, 272. 195

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what came of us to him. This guilt I no longer feel, believing that then I could have done no other, more than he, but pain for the unnecessary loss and the suffering will be with me ever.198

As the master manipulator, Berryman’s mother always turns every episode, even another’s death, back to her own long-suffering martyrdom. In a letter dated 16 November 1957, Berryman tells his mother he compares her to Saint Teresa.199 While outsiders can truly never know the dynamics of the relationships of others, a few more examples of this mother-son correspondence will offer possible insight into just who Jill Angel Berryman was. On 4 August 1958, Jill wrote to her son, It may rest you a little to know that when I lie down to rest I dedicate to you the good of the rest that the cream may go to you to be a stay and a help, that when I labor I pray the burden may be heavier for me and so lighten yours. I gird at myself that I cannot do more. This is what it is to be a parent, to suffer inconsolably in the anguish or travail of the child (and that perhaps is the taproot of the difficulties between the generations, that to the parent that which she bore or which was ripped from her is still and always her child—this dream is the mist separating her from what the years and himself have made of the child, a substance he must fight against to be what he is and will become), with a pang greater than but not otherwise different from that endured when, an infant, he lay in high fever on a pillow across her arms. Not for one instant since I knew you were to come to this earth have I been me, alone, myself. A mother can only be the sum of herself and her child. The best good that can come of the relationship is that she cherish what is within her of this and release him to his proper place, alone and with his own.200

The subtext loudly proclaims that this selfless and tormented woman of great maternal prowess and quiet acceptance of her fate is at the son’s beck and call. In a letter of 7 March 1963, Jill has just explained to her son his genius nature and the exceptions to standard human behavior society must allow the genius; she has also addressed the nagging question of money she owes her son. Jill Berryman spent most 198

Ibid., 274. Ibid., 311-13. 200 Ibid., 322. 199

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of her life in financial straights and worked more jobs than can be counted; she seems to have never been able to hold on to these employments. Her son inherited an inability to manage money. But the interest in this letter lies in its representation of Jill’s manipulative powers: Love, it seems to me, between a man and his wife flows back and forth like the tides of the sea, while love between a parent and a child is like a river, flowing always on but in a curious way, with the child downstream after he comes of age as if he had gone past, and with his regard fixed ahead on his wife and children, yet perhaps if they are lucky in understand[ing], he is warmed by the conscious but not demanding love of the parent who remembers when the child was small and he was the downstreamer but only by a little, to stay close and comforting to the child learning life.201

While Jill Berryman may have felt martyred throughout much of her life, in the reality of her real life, she did not display the selflessness required of sainthood. Tom Travisano places the central struggle of The Dream Songs as that between mother and son, not father and son.202 He goes so far as to state, “Berryman’s relationship with his father, who took his own life when Berryman was a boy of eleven, is merely hinted at in a few Songs.”203 Travisano notes, “Berryman had reason to fear his mother, both as a possessive and judgmental presence in his life and as his father’s murderer.”204 And while Berryman’s relationship with his mother was certainly problematic (as was evinced by the above excerpts from their mother-son correspondence), this argument gives too little significance to the paternal elegies (Songs 6, 15, 76, 143, 145, 241, 384) upon which the central theme of The Dream Songs revolves. Henry is working through his loss of a father, not his wreck of a mother. And no matter what Berryman felt concerning his father’s death in certain moments of doubt, he lived his life as the son of a suicide. Henry must reconcile the violent loss and abandonment his father gave him. The introduction of loss in Song 1—“Then came a departure”—is centered in Henry’s childhood and begins the search of 201

Ibid., 355-56. Tom Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1999, 132-33. 203 Ibid., 53. 204 Ibid., 247. 202

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a fatherless boy for his manhood. Berryman writes at the bottom of a draft that Song 6 is part of a pair of Songs and then writes the equation: “(my ‘sound’< his ‘call’)”: my sound is less than his call. After his father’s death, Berryman and his younger brother were adopted by their mother’s new husband, John Angus McAlpin Berryman. Two years later Berryman entered South Kent School, a private boarding school in Connecticut. In 1932, he entered Columbia and after a rocky start finished strong under the tutelage of his life-long mentor, Mark Van Doren. In 1936, upon graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Berryman won a two-year scholarship to study at Clair College, Cambridge. In 1937, he became the first American to win the prestigious Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship. Berryman returned to America in 1938 and spent the next eighteen years working nontenure-track jobs at various universities including Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Iowa. In 1955, he landed a position in the Humanities program at the University of Minnesota. He stayed in Minneapolis until his death in 1972. From 1938 until his death, he made and maintained, in various stages of compatibility, friendships with most of the major poets of his time, including Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, and Theodore Roethke. Berryman was married three times and fathered three children. On 7 January 1972, he jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge which spans the Mississippi River connecting the east and west banks of the University of Minnesota. Berryman was fifty-seven. By placing suicide at the center of his grief—first his father’s, then those of some of his fellow poets, and finally his own often anticipated act—Berryman alters the modern elegy in two significant ways: he places an ignoble and self-destructive death as the cause of a deeply ambiguous kind of grief, one filled with both anger and sorrow, and he makes the suicidal self the subject of its own grief. Anger is mixed in with grief in Henry’s journey into new elegiac territory. Henry, being a twentieth-century man, does not have the Greek or the eighteenth century notion of suicide as the noble, self-willed act of courage. Henry’s culture starts with the nineteenth-century’s view of suicide, as both sin and a by-product of mental illness, and mixes it in with his own century’s stigma of shame and dishonor to the family of

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the suicide. Henry explains, “relevant experts / say the wounds to the survivors is / the worst of the Act, the worst of the Act!”205 In 1955, Berryman moved to Minneapolis and started The Dream Songs. Simpson writes, “On hearing that he’d gone to Minneapolis, my first thought was: He’s gone in search of his father.”206 John Allyn Smith grew up in Minnesota. A look at the actual Songs that directly deal with the lost father will reveal how Berryman took a personal horror from his real life and wove it into art. Berryman said his own work was “a process which is at once a process of life and a process of art.”207 A pre-Dream Song elegy to Bhain Campbell, a close friend who died too young, ends with a statement of the poet’s limitations in articulating grief: “Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.”208 Berryman would spend the Dream Song years looking for those parts of speech to present the syntax of his grief. In the opening Song, Henry is sulking in despair, apparently like Achilles in his tent after Agamemnon has refused to give him Briessa; but soon Henry reveals a pain much deeper than the bruised male ego of Greece’s fierce and most moody general. Berryman follows the epic tradition by starting in medias res: “Huffy Henry hid the day.”209 We are soon told: “Then came a departure. / Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.”210 Loss is subtly introduced. “Departure is conspicuous as the only end word in the first two stanzas not rhymed with another, thereby emphasizing its importance.”211 The poet feels the need to distance himself from his painful subject: his life without father will not be as it “might” or “ought” to have been. In a draft dated 8 April 1958, Berryman writes for line 13—“What I have to say is a long,” but in the published version he writes, “What he has to say is a long” (emphasis added).212

205

Dream Songs, 367. Simpson, 236. 207 Quoted in Davis, 66. 208 Berryman, Collected Poems, 282. 209 Dream Songs, 3. 210 Ibid., 3. 211 Ernest C Stefanik, Jr., John Berryman: A Descriptive Bibliography, Pittsburgh, 1974, 26. 212 Dream Songs, 3. 206

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Berryman can hide behind Henry, who is and is not the poet. A note on this manuscript reads, “... better than ever before, the rel.[ationship] betw[een] the poet & H.[enry]—the poet knows all about Henry.” This is in the third year of the Songs’ thirteen-year development, and Berryman is still discovering his vehicle for working his characters toward a unified voice.

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Henry hides throughout the entire poem, notably in Song 197 when the nightmares of reality overwhelm him. The opening Song’s second stanza’s first two lines suggest both the love of others and the lust of a “woolen lover.” This difficult phrase could refer to a woman in a sensual wool sweater or outfit, or to a lamb, as in the child-like, secure comfort of being a lamb of God. But these ideas are abruptly dismissed with the introduction of loss and its multiple layers at the core of the work: Henry’s father’s suicide, his own empty sense of loss, and his loss of innocence. This stanza ends with a tribute to modern courage: Henry is “pried / open” for all to see, and still he survives. The first two lines of the third stanza tell the reader that Henry is going to relate his struggle to make life purposeful and rich in the modern world: that is his epic quest. And as the reader listens closely to Henry’s individual Songs, his personality, layer by layer, shade, hue, and tone, is revealed. The next line introduces the sycamore tree of his youthful innocence from which he descended (“I fell out of the tree”213) into the experience of the bleak, modern world where he finds precious little solace: “empty grows every bed.”214 Berryman can have Henry’s life intersect his own, yet the poet is allowed the freedom of providing Henry with insights (sometimes via the interlocutor’s observations) and desires not the poet’s: all coalescing to present a modern American personality—complex, selfish, needy, disciplined, reckless, contradictory, but open. In Song 6, the first paternal elegy, Berryman’s changes from the MS to the published version show a further distancing of himself from his painful memories.

213 214

Dream Songs, 64. Ibid., 3.

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The MS is dated 20 June 1958; Berryman was not ready to face his anger and need head on. In line one he changed “my father’s walking” to “the father’s walking.” In line two he changed “by now down in the soft boards may I pass” to “down by the soft boards, Henry, pass.” And in line 8 he changed “my fate” to “Henry’s fate.” In this Song, the speaker looks back at his father’s death and does not know what to “feel or no” (know) [as a denial of death and loss]; he moves from a clear allusion to Keats’s Grecian Urn to a vague allusion to Ethan Allen’s connection to Henry (a distant relative to Berryman

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on his mother’s side), to an obscure allusion of a murder involving people named Day and Porter and a pope named Aeneas.215 The poet finds a feeble shelter in these allusions—a shelter that is of little protection from the “grapes of stone” offered in the Song’s closing line. Henry writes an elegy to his father but gets lost in references to art and his own genealogy. He is not yet ready to take any peace from what his own art can offer his loss. The longer poem will have to work toward that consolation. In Song 15, “One hides in the land” is a clever way of referring to Henry’s dead father, who is in his grave, but a continual source of Henry’s torment. Henry is trying to locate all the hidden layers of his grief and lack of fatherly advice. Earlier, Berryman used the phrase “In a foehn of loss”;216 “foehn” is a German word referring to a warm, dry wind coming off the lee shore of a mountain range. “Foehn of loss,” with its compelling assonance, shares a timeless quality of expression with “epistemology of loss.” A draft of 12 January 1964 illustrates Berryman’s desire to find the odd and powerful word for the one expected from standard English collocation. The poet changes “that she was heard by him, vibrant, sleazy” to “that she was heard at last, haughtful & greasy”; “In a foehn of loss / complete” becomes “In a foehn of loss / entire”; yet when the language gets too obscure—“one does in land”—the poet must clarify—“one hides in the land.”

215 216

This Song is well glossed in Haffenden, Commentary, 84-86. Dream Songs, 17.

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Henry directly refers to his father’s “defeat sublime”217 in the haunting recollection of Song 76 (the penultimate poem of the 77 Dream Songs):

–If life is a handkerchief sandwich, 217

Dream Songs, 162.

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in a modesty of death I join my father who dared so long agone leave me. A bullet on a concrete stoop close by a smothering southern sea spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.218

Berryman sets up an “if clause” (a rhetorical device vital to the final Dream Song) that is crucial to the poem: if life is tears, weeping in the mouth (“handkerchief sandwich”), then “in a modesty of death” (suicide?), I (Henry/Berryman?) will “join my father.” Henry sees only the great sadness of his loss, but senses/fears that some day he may not be able to “stand up” to life’s harsh realities. Henry is confessing his misplaced guilt at his father’s death: the Song is subtitled “Henry’s Confession.”219 This is one of the early Songs with a draft dated 1 September 1956. This draft reads, “In a modesty of death, I join / my father / who long so long ago left me: / “forgive / me, son” he failed to cry; / & shot his brains out on a concrete stoop, / at dawn– spreadeagled, lay–I / twelve tried to help my mo.[ther], how (in the next days) to live.” But the published version leaves out his mother since the Songs are centered on his father. In his biography of Stephen Crane, Berryman centers Crane’s central subject of war and the soldier’s reaction to the horror as compulsively generated from an experience when he was a boy. When Crane was twelve, he witnessed the stabbing of a white woman by her Negro lover.220 Berryman begins the Dark Night of the Soul section of The Dream Songs (Opus Posthumous) with a summary of Henry after the first 77 Dream Songs. Henry explains, “embarrassed Henry heard himself a-being, / and the younger Stephen Crane / of a powerful memory, of pain, / these stood the ancestors, relaxed & hard, / whilst Henry’s parts were fleeing.”221 Henry’s central subject is also compulsively being generated from the violence he witnessed at twelve (eleven for Berryman) with his father’s suicide and its aftermath. Simpson explained that when Berryman first told her of his father’s suicide, he behaved “as if he were confessing a crime he had 218

Ibid., 83. Line one is Henry speaking, line two, midway, is the interlocutor, who speaks through line five. Line six is Henry, who speaks through line 11. Lines 12-17 are the interlocutor’s, with Henry having the last word in line 18. 220 Berryman, Crane, 307-13. 221 Dream Songs, 93. 219

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committed, as if he had been responsible for his father’s death. Shame and culpability were what he clearly felt.”222 Freud’s connection between mourning and depression with the possibility of “a delusional expectation of punishment” comes to mind. This is reiterated in Song 76’s final line and the last stanza’s movement to a futile, escapist’s song which shows Henry’s inability to face his pain. In line 13, the interlocutor offers Henry the chance, the permission, to weep. This Song is a dialogue (see note 36). The interlocutor and Henry begin to work toward a resolution of grief, one not achieved until Song 384. This recollection turns to anger when Henry, sixty-seven Songs later, states, “That mad drive wiped out my childhood.” This crucial paternal elegy, where Henry directly addresses the painful loss of his father, starts with the already developed interlocutor speaking to Henry as Mr Bones, reminding him to act the “burnt cork” part. Henry must stay in blackface, in disguise, to face his loss: “be a vaudeville man, / I’ll sing you now a song / the like of whích may bring your heart to break: / he’s gone! and we don’t know where.”223 This may be the interlocutor at his most intrusive and most forceful; his active presence is another way for Berryman to expose a personality. The interlocutor may offer comic relief, but he is not a clown; his advice is wise. Henry, as aggressive, fumbling modern man, full of doubts, literature, and lust, needs sage counsel. The Song then refers to the repeated threat Berryman’s father made to take Berryman or his younger brother, or both, out on an ocean swim to eternity. In 1954, Berryman wrote to his mother after she had apparently told him that his younger brother Bob was the son who was threatened to join his father on his death swim: “For instance I’ve always thought it was I whom my father wished to drown with him.”224 And as late as 1970, Berryman wrote to his mother to ask, “Did I hear Daddy threaten to swim out w. me (or Bob?) & drown us both? or did you tell me later? when?”225 Of course, this memory could all be the fabrication of Jill Berryman’s constructed past. But Henry will not soften; remember, he bluntly tells all: “That mad drive wiped out my childhood.” Sacks explains elements in American elegies that differ from English elegies which reveal aspects of a national character: 222

Simpson, 61. Dream Songs, 160. 224 Quoted in Kelly, 282. 225 Ibid., 376. 223

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Further factors make the intense, personally expressive nature of the American elegy yet more vivid and more troubling. These poems are often volatile, and rebellious, as if the poets were unusually resistant to the very submission we now recognize as crucial to mourning. With less of a tradition of authoritarian hierarchies, and with an opposite legacy of egalitarianism, the elegist may be hard-pressed to accept or invent the kind of overruling figure of authority to whom his desires must be subjected. In this predicament, not only will the mourner find it difficult to achieve consolation but he may tend to oscillate erratically between postures of defiance on the one hand and victimization on the other.226

This Song feeds into Song 145 where Henry heroically accepts the task his father left him: I-I’m trying to forgive whose frantic passage, when he could not live an instant longer, in the summer dawn left Henry to live on.227

In both Songs 143 and 145 there is an attempt to reconcile with his father’s fatal decision: “I repeat: I love him / until I fall into coma,”228 and in the opening of Song 145: “Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong / for going on forty years–forgiveness time–,” which is followed in the third stanza by “I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong / & so undone. I’ve always tried....”229 Melissa Fran Zeiger, commenting on these lines, stresses Berryman’s use of The Dream Songs as a way of bringing unity to his fractured life: Repeatedly, he represents his father’s state of mind as an incomplete manuscript [again in Song 384], a text he cannot read; he stutters— “I-I’m”—in approaching even his own feelings about the subject. It is as though The Dream Songs reproduced, or tried to approximate, those missing pages.230 226

Sacks, 314. Dream Songs, 162. 228 Ibid., 160. 229 Ibid., 162. 230 Melissa Fran Zeigler, Lilacs Out of the Dead Land: Changes in the Modern Elegy, Diss. Cornell, 1986, 180. 227

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If Berryman through the composition of the Dream Songs does not have the consolation of religion or God, he does have the solace poetry offers, which he used to work through his archetypal and personal loss and to steady him in his religious doubt. Simpson said that after hearing of Berryman’s suicide, she first thought it was the poetry that drove him into such a desperate act, but then she realized: “It was the poetry that kept him alive.”231 The fact that Henry is trying to accept his father’s suicide and forgive is a step in the right direction, but to think “he’s done me no wrong” is far from the truth. In a late poem in his career (“Drunks”), Berryman wrote, “I wondered every day about suicide.”232 Simpson writes that suicide was throughout his adult life “a kind of undertow, sucking at him, sometimes feebly, sometimes with terrifying strength, always, always there....”233 Remember, “The Ball Poem” begins its final movement with the ominous foreshadowing: “Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark / Floor of the harbour.”234 In this most somber theme, Henry, who is often glib and acerbic, shows true vulnerability and pain when he admits: “Father being the loneliest word in the one language / and a word only, a fraction of sun and guns / ‘way ‘way ago.”235 Only one who has lost a parent while young can know how painful the formal reference to that person can be. In this elegy, Song 241, Henry remorsefully admits that like his father he is an absent parent, due to divorce and neglect: to acknowledge his shortcomings and to not revel in self-pity takes courage here. The Song reads, at one point, “Games is somewhat too, but yet / certains improve / as if upon their only”—Henry offers the opportunity for himself to be a better man. Interestingly, a draft, dated 27 April 1964, has “Genes” instead of “Games”; this version stresses more forcefully the possibility of a man’s desire to be noble and good overcoming even personality traits at his genetic core.

231

Simpson, 253. Berryman, Love & Fame, 13. 233 Simpson, 140. 234 Berryman, Dispossessed, 14. 235 Dream Songs, 260. 232

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Later in the Song Henry says “Daddy” instead of father because that would have been the familiar word when he last spoke to him at the age of twelve. Berryman, who throughout his whole life usually referred to his father as Daddy, is searching for peace, or at least a lessening of his sorrow, by expressing his deepest pain, his most vulnerable self. The Song ends with “Christen the fallen”;236 Henry 236

Dream Songs, 260.

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blesses his lost father showing a movement toward resolving his grief. T.S. Eliot noted that the “elegy is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.”237 Henry is searching for solace for himself and his father beyond an existential pose. Kate Donahue, Berryman’s widow, laments that the critics have missed the real life that is generating the Songs; the human need to find meaning in the world after Darwin, Freud, Hitler, Sartre, the bomb, modernity. She sees a life being lived in and through the Songs.238 The reader must allow that Henry can grow and change. In the penultimate Dream Song, the line between Henry and Berryman is ambiguous, as it often is in the poem; but the meaning of this Song is clear: The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done, I stand above my father’s grave with rage, often, often before I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn O ho alas alas When will indifference come, I moan & rave I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart

the mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start.239

Henry is struggling once and for all with the acceptance of, at least “indifference” to, his father’s ultimate act. He’s gone figuratively (Berryman never went as an adult according to Simpson, Mariani, and 237

T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, London, 1932, 336. Personal Interview, 10 April 1995, Minneapolis: Minnesota. 239 Dream Songs, 406. 238

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Haffenden) to his father’s grave to face his loss and vent his rage. Henry comes out of the hiding here that he began in his first Song; his healthy rage allows him to confront the “dreadful banker” who stole his youth. There are no elegiac or Whitmanesque lilacs to mark his father’s stark, imaginary grave. Henry, along with Berryman (“we’ll tear apart”), will examine the decaying corpse and do violence back to it. But upon voicing his anger, Henry does not have to go through with his own violence and violation. He can put the ax down, “fell it on the start,” come out of hiding, and feel a certain, albeit modern and hence transitory, calm. With the expulsion of this purifying anger, almost Learian, certainly Shakespearian (“O ho alas alas / When will indifference come, I moan & rave”) Henry is ready to move to the next phase of his grief—the final Song. This release may be what allows him to find a faith to articulate here and elsewhere, and its closure may be implied in the last word of the title of the second volume of The Dream Songs— His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Like Aeneas, who carries his father to safety out of a burning Troy, Henry has had to shoulder the loss of security and love his father’s last act created. Henry must carry his memory of his father to a safe place where he will be restored in his young son’s eyes. The shame of suicide is Henry’s inheritance. He uses his Songs to lessen the burden of that shame and to restore his severed relationship with his father's ghost. In “A Small Dream” (Song 132), Henry puts his daughter to sleep until tomorrow when he will “pursue my path of sorrow / & bodies, bodies, to be carried a mile / & dropt.”240 Henry, metaphorically and psychologically, carries his father on his shoulders until he puts him down in Song 384. Lawler writes, “In The Aeneid the note of warning always accompanies the note of praise: and there is another note, too, that in the end utterly draws out all others: the elegiac note, the Virgilian melancholy, the sense of loss and sorrow that pervades the poem from beginning to end.”241 Virgil’s poem begins with the defeat of Troy and ends with the brutal slaying of Turnus to avenge Pallas’ death. His lack of triumph and this “sense of loss and sorrow” are exactly what Berryman’s Henry faces throughout his Songs. Henry’s elegies strive for an acceptance of or a calling out to the life that continues to knock Henry down as so many close to him 240

Ibid., 149. Traugott Lawler, “The Aeneid,” in Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Tradition, eds. Michael Seidel and Edward Mendelsen, New Haven, 1977, 59-60.

241

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die. Lawler’s summation of Virgil’s final impression could fit for Berryman’s poem also: “The Aeneid is not about the heroic deeds of Aeneas; it is not a paean to the glory of Rome; at its deepest level it is a very human statement of the paradox that no human achievement, however great, is unaccompanied by human loss.”242 Berryman, like Virgil, is examining the human reaction to the “epistemology of loss.” Ramazani sees Song 384 as a “rhetorical act of grotesque exaggeration, the poet self-consciously carrying out a symbolic murder while parodying himself.”243 What he does not comprehend is that Henry is healed as best he can be. Plus, he felled the ax! The lack of a consolation residing in a concept of heaven or a merciful and concerned God torments Henry whose modern world continually threatens existential absurdity, but the poem fights to find a healing for his loss and doubt. Lea Baechler complained that the paternal elegies “do not evolve, poetically or psychically, toward the acceptance necessary for release from the stultifying grief into the liberating vision and embrace of the world and self that allows for the poet-mourner’s healthy return to the community of life and the living.”244 Baechler does not see Berryman ever forgiving his father. But Henry’s own push into parenthood (both literary—The Dream Songs’ completion—and literal—Little Twiss’s birth) is one sign of his acceptance of life and death, and that includes forgiveness. Before it can close, The Dream Songs need one more Song—the “beautiful last poem, …an appropriately contrasting diminuendo, softly elegiac after the crisis of [Song] 384.”245 Henry reluctantly accepts life; he celebrates Thanksgiving while lamenting the slaughter of turkeys. There is a calm resignation to life: “Fall comes to us as a prize / to rouse us toward our fate.”246 Henry’s present tranquility comes from expressing anger, loss, and heartache toward his father and creating a literary achievement: his long poem has brought order to the chaos started on 26 June 1926, the date of his father’s suicide. His art has allowed him to gradually, and possibly temporarily, replace his 242

Ibid., 74-75. Ramazani, 246. 244 Lea Baechler, “John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and the Elegy,” Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini, New York, 1993, 606. 245 Daniel Hughes, “John Berryman & the Poet’s Pardon,” American Poetry Review, 2 (1973), 21. 246 Dream Songs, 407. 243

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great fear of death with an acceptance that grows from expressing his personal pain over his father’s death. The lines “If there were a middle ground between things and the soul / or if the sky resembled more the sea”247 are a much gentler look at the world and its overpowering presence than the mock-Homeric flashing sky and yearning sea of Song 14 or the threatening natural world of Song 303: Working & children & pals are the point of the thing, for the grand sea awaits us, which will then us toss & endlessly us undo.248

This last Song was written almost two years after Song 385, but placed earlier in the text because Henry has not yet reached the peace his whole song offers. Berryman has created an extended metaphor where daughter equals both his own daughter, Martha, nicknamed Little Twiss, and his Dream Songs as his daughter. In Song 72, Henry introduces the daughter motif (“Henry is swinging his daughter”) that runs through the rest of the Songs and culminates in Song 385. Again, references to a daughter playfully refer to both Berryman’s Martha (b. 1962) and to the growing text of The Dream Songs, which he has conceived and nurtured (“The Care & Feeding of Long Poems” [Song 354]). Like Lovberg’s manuscript in Hedda Gabler, these Songs are as precious to him as a child. In Song 75, Henry refers to his daughter/manuscript as “Something remarkable about this / unshedding bulky bole-proud bluegreen moist // thing made by savage & thoughtful / surviving Henry.”249 By establishing this dual image, with all its implications for the significance of the creative process in human existence, Berryman has provided a connecting link between 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, making The Dream Songs one unified poem. Henry has not only faced his loss and defeated some of its psychological paralysis but created and nurtured two daughters to love and parent in his own private cosmos. In Song 122, Henry brags that, “He published his girl’s bottom in staid pages / of an old weekly. Where will next his rages / ridiculous Henry land?”250 The daughter motif is maintained as various Songs 247

Ibid., 407. Ibid., 325. 249 Ibid., 82, 250 Ibid., 139. 248

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appear in groups in numerous periodicals. The line, “his daughter won first prize”251 could be a reference to the Pulitzer Prize awarded 77 Dream Songs. Song 298 cements Berryman’s daughter motif in the text. The poet mixes the literal Baby Twiss’s future with The Dream Songs’ future. He is on TV (BBC Interview) with his baby daughters— Martha and the Songs—“my almost perfect child.” The Song goes into the very real father’s wishes for a grand American life for his offspring: “We’ll see her through Smith & then / swiftly into the Senate.”252 A final stanza sadly acknowledges that the real daughter may have to learn about her father by studying the literary daughter in school.253 In Song 330, Henry celebrates Little Twiss’s riding of a bike for the first time, which reminds him of his childhood in Florida: “all so near the sea / where never she has been.” But the paternal celebration turns to sadness as Henry later admits his own reckless excess and Martha’s subsequent fate: “tears & a child / and a father old & wild.”254 The final Song begins, “My daughter’s heavier.”255 This refers to Martha’s growth and The Dream Songs’ final heft at 385 poems. The poet hopes he does not have to scold his poems with his stern view of life’s important necessities: that is poetry and its pursuit at all costs. Henry feels the need to stay focused on life’s often harsh reality. The poet’s calm during the last Song comes partly from literary achievement and partly from the hope of the young daughter’s promise: order to chaos through the Songs’ stanzaic form, forced meter, and Henry’s portrayed life; order to life through the eyes of the innocent. The elegiac chord is the loudest, most sustained note in the Songs. Berryman, operating as a boy whose father died by his own hand, can know no other song but the mournful tune of loss. The 251

Ibid., 144. Ibid., 320. 253 In the line “Little Twiss prinked out ah as a bunny” (Dream Songs, 305), “Little Twiss” is Martha’s nickname derived from the idiomatic phrase, Twissy Bits. 254 Ibid., 352. 255 Ibid., 407. 252

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courage he showed in placing that loss at the poem’s thematic cornerstone is what makes his poem so brave, his song so sad, his voice so vulnerable, his art so human.

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CHAPTER 3: HENRY “PALE & ILL”: BERRYMAN’S ELEGIES OF PRAISE AND THE LAST WORD Berryman has employed the elegy to isolate his grief in a world that wants him to move on with life no matter what the loss; he uses the elegiac poem within his epic to hold together his life and his poem of loss. The poet had been vividly aware of death’s finality since age eleven; his age when his father committed suicide. Berryman’s elegiac Songs face the young boy’s loss inside the middle-aged poet’s heart; by bringing death to the forefront, they try to shape a vision and an acceptance of death in the twentieth century’s vacuum of doubt. His lamentations are brutally honest and full of anger, doubt, hope, love, fear, admiration, envy, and more doubt. Both Homer and Virgil provided panegyrics to their noble dead; Berryman continues the convention by producing encomiums to those who have fought the literary wars along side him; many of whom have committed suicide in the throes of their gift, their passion. Upon hearing of Randall Jarrell’s death on the radio, Henry tells us, All those deaths keep Henry pale & ill and unable to sail through the autumn world & weak, a disadvantage of surviving.256

The loss of friends, acquaintances, rivals, and confessors in middle age tears at Henry’s own fears of death and pressing desire to explore suicide. In a 1969 interview, Berryman said of his Dream Songs’ persona, Well he’s very brave, Henry, in that he keeps on living after other people have dropped dead. But he’s a hopeless coward with regard to his actual death.257

256 257

Dream Songs, 210. “An Interview with John Berryman,” Harvard Advocate, 103 (Spring 1969), 6.

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Sacks notes, “American elegies often have a frighteningly raw and immediate feeling, as if their speakers were fighting not just for an aesthetically acceptable form of consolation but for their own literal survival.”258 Reminiscent of Auden’s last request in his elegy to Yeats, Berryman wants his elegies to sing the note of praise.259 Lawrence Lipking explains how praise is conveyed in the modern world: “The way to freedom is praising: [the elegist must] ... perceive the tragedy of an era or the frailties of a man with clarity that conceals nothing yet indomitably sings.”260 Berryman is concealing very little when he starts his elegiac trilogy to Robert Frost with, “His malice was a pimple down his good / big face, with its sly eyes. I must be sorry / Mr Frost has left.” Later in the Song he reports, “I can’t say what I have in mind.” But the Song ends with a gentle note of praise: “For a while here we possessed / an unusual man.”261 In an earlier draft lines 16 and 17 read: “Gentle his transit, I doom you & command, / idiot diety [sic]” for “Gentle his shift, I decussate & command, / stoic deity” (41). The unpublished, earlier version has more vitriol toward God, the giver of death. Henry goes on to praise Frost even though he abhors the “industry,” the “Professional-Friends-Of-Robert-Frost,” that grew out of his death. But he does allow Frost to be on a par with Horace: “Let us listen: / –What for, Mr Bones? / –while he begins to have it out with Horace.”262 An earlier draft does not include Mr Bones here and asks the reader to listen “while he begins to talk with Horace.” The published version captures more the man who is not only Horace’s equal, but will not hesitate to bring him argument.

258

Sacks, 314. Auden’s famous elegy in some ways informs all modern elegies. Ramazani writes, “Apparently Auden learned from Yeats that the ‘personal note’ of an elegy like ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ required that the poet not only praise the dead but also suggest their limitations: in the Gregory elegy, one man was ‘much falling,’ another ‘sluggish’ (131, 133). To criticize Yeats in an elegy is to commend him for his opening up of the genre” (184). 260 Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers, Chicago, 1981, 160, emphasis added. 261 Dream Songs, 41. 262 Ibid., 42. 259

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Berryman is always ambiguous in knowing if what he is feeling is love, hate, envy, or threat. This competitive, aggressive poet must continually keep in check his desire to be the absurd number one. In Song 230, Henry remembers one of his meetings with Frost where the

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old man apologized for a slight he’d given the young poet in the past. In an earlier draft, Berryman wrote “I hate great men I love” but the published version reads “I love great men I love.”263

263

Ibid., 249.

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In the final of the three elegies (Song 39), Henry laments the deaths so closely together of three great literary figures—Hemingway, Faulkner, Frost: “Our roof is lefted off / lately: the shooter, and the bourbon man, / and then you got tired.” Three Songs earlier, Henry had referred to all three writers when Frost was dying. He ends by asking Frost to “be with us: we will blow our best, / our sad wild riffs come easy in that case”—Berryman, who loathed to be considered a Beat poet, strangely reverts to Beatnik language, this last line could come right out of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. And this trilogy of praise ends with Berryman’s highest tribute to the real man, the true poet: “your gorgeous sentence done.”264 Frost is revealed as a difficult human being but a great poet; the emphasis is on the latter. But knowing the former gives him a more human, more real dimension, and shows his affinity with Henry “adult & difficult.”265 Berryman’s elegy is much more of a tribute to Frost than Lowell’s vicious sonnet (“Robert Frost”). Lowell stresses that once “the great act [is] laid on the shelf in mothballs” what’s left is Frost’s cruel treatment of his own children and his selfish nature: “When I am too full of joy, I think / how little good my health did anyone near me.”266 Both elegists bring themselves into their poems: to stress the famous elder poet’s death highlights their own mortalities. Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Of Robert Frost” seems sentimental and naïve next to Berryman’s and Lowell’s poems. Brooks poetically defines Frost’s “specialness within,” but only captures the polished act, not the man. W.D. Snodgrass writes of a time he attended one of Frost’s readings during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Snodgrass remembers Frost goading his literary audience to the point of saying, ... every liberal that I know has the tendency when his enemy works up against him ... to try to remember if he isn’t more in the wrong than the enemy .... [A] liberal is a person who can’t take his own side in a fight.

As this went on, R.P. Blackmur had finally had enough and began “growling loud obscenities ‘You dirty old bastard! You rotten....’”267 264

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 102. 266 Robert Lowell, Selected Poems, New York, 1977, 180. 267 W.D. Snodgrass, “Dabbling in Corruption,” The Paris Review, 130 (Winter 1995), 210. 265

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But the vast majority of the audience was in awe of the great man. Snodgrass remembers, Of all the people in that packed hall, only Blackmur had recognized that Frost was not only triumphing over those of his audience he thought over-scupulous in conflict, but laughing at the probability of that audience’s imminent death. Now he would not have to die alone; he had had his full career; they would not. Meantime, they were so worshipful that he could mock them to their faces and receive, in return, not one but three standing ovations.268

Berryman wrote his most effusively praiseworthy elegy to William Carlos Williams (Song 324). The Song starts with a cablegram heralding: “Henry in Ireland to Bill underground.” Henry praises Williams’s work and kindness to younger poets. Henry, one who wants to have his cake and eat it too, commends Williams for having “many girls” yet loving his “one wife.” Henry is Catholic in his belief in marriage, yet hypocritical in his celebration of infidelity. Henry puns on Williams’s delivery of “infinite babies”—both as an obstetrician and in an extension of the baby/daughter metaphor of The Dream Songs as Berryman’s offspring; here he is referring to Williams’s Paterson. Like earlier elegies, the poem moves to Henry. Henry is envious of Williams’s achievement, especially “the mysterious late excellence,” and his death, “the being through.”269 Henry is saying that our “last bride” is a good death: death crowns our trials. In an unpublished Dream Song, Henry speculates on just how effective his hiding has been (since Song 1) and if he will be seen as a failure or a success, a recurring notion for insecure and needy Henry. Henry begins with “They say, The end crowns”: death offers the ultimate moment for the evaluation of life.

268 269

Ibid., 211 Ibid., 346.

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Addressing another of his poetic predecessors in “So Long? Stevens” (Song 219), Berryman pays tribute to Wallace Stevens. The Song starts by referring to “actuaries,” Stevens as an insurance executive, and then praises his “grandee crow”—“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Like Auden in his famous elegy to Yeats, Berryman imitates Stevens’s style: “Mutter we all must as well as we can.”270 These lines employ Stevens’s use of alliterative and rhythm stopping consonants (labial stops and nasals): “Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one, and bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”271 Lipking explains, 270 271

Dream Songs, 238. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium, New York, 1923, 95.

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Berryman’s Henry In the remarkable last section of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Auden tries to put Yeats’s linguistic virtues to use. As first published in the New Republic, in two parallel sections printed in a double column, the elegy visibly reforms on the page. The language simplifies; the broken hesitant rhythms and urban images of the beginning are healed into daring, old-fashioned quatrains. Suddenly we hear Yeats’s voice ... the plain-spoken tetrameter couplets direct source—“Ben Bulben.”272

272

Lipking, 158. See below for a reprint of the original format of Auden’s poem from the New Republic, 8 March 1939, 123.

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Berryman’s Stevens elegy starts out in appreciation but falls short: “he seethe; / better than us; less wide.”273 An earlier draft offers the possibility of “cannier than us” for “better than us”—is Henry holding back on his praise of Stevens’s wit?

273

Dream Songs, 238.

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Competitive Henry finds Steven’s art lacking “something”; he belittles him for being up beat, positive: “It is our kind / to wound.”274 Berryman does not truly appreciate Stevens’s depth and voice; possibly he is threatened by Stevens’s faultless ear or troubled by his absolute existentialism, his comfort with who he is and his celebration of pleasure. In an earlier draft Berryman wrote “gourmet’s heart” for “man’s heart” in line 10; gourmet was more praise than Berryman could allow. Ramazani explains, “In the end, Berryman manages to withstand the competition from fellow elegists, not only because he slyly puts them down, but also because, in putting them down, he bequeaths to later poets a newly enlivened mode of professional elegy.”275 An enlivened mode of the modern poem is certainly present in the Frost, Jarrell, Schwartz, and Stevens elegies. Yet with all the flourish of language and praise, Henry’s criticism of Stevens seems motivated by jealousy and mean-spiritedness. His reading of Stevens is a bit idiosyncratic in that he sees the poet as one who celebrates life, possibly from the sentiments in “Sunday Morning,” and somehow this is not acknowledging how painful existence is. Henry does not acknowledge the poet who wrote “The Snow Man” where Stevens writes, “For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” No frivolous celebration of life exists for those who hear “misery in the sound of the wind.”276 Possibly what threatens Berryman the poet is exactly what Edward Hirsch captured so stunningly in his elegy to Stevens “At the Grave of Wallace Stevens”: One imagines him as a prodigious morning walker And a lonely metaphysician pausing in the park, A rose rabbi, a sturdy man on a wide path Dreaming of a sky washed clean by doubt. One pictures him strolling under the umbrella Pines and buttonwoods on the way to work,

274

Ibid., 238. Ramazani, 243. 276 Stevens, 24. 275

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Imagination’s largest thinker conjuring up Songs of human radiance twanging in the mist. One thinks of him by the lake in a hard rain: Mirrors on mirrors mirroring the emptiness.277

Berryman continues this use of poetic imitation in “A Strut for Roethke,” an elegy that captures the perfect image for the proud parading of the poet of “My Papa’s Waltz” and “I Knew a Woman.” Berryman locates the dead “roarer” in his great Northwest homeland and pays tribute to his “cadenza” of “flowers.” Then the poet breaks the 18-line Song pattern of The Dream Songs to express the moment of death. Repeating the pattern by writing in a somewhat Roethkian manner, Henry explains: “The bluebells, pool-shallows, saluted his over-needs, / while the clouds growled, heh-heh & snapped, & crashed.”278 A draft dated 6-8 August 1963 does not yet include this stanzaic exception; the poet would have to craft such a gentle tribute. Berryman knows Roethke was needy like himself; in an earlier draft line 14 begins: “back from the deeps,” which suggests the true desperateness of both alcoholic and driven poets.

277 278

Edward Hirsch, Earthly Measures: Poems, New York, 1996. Dream Songs, 20.

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The published phrase “back from wherever” softens the tension and opens to the last stanza’s gentle remembrance and look at a real

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death; something Henry is utterly fearful of and attracted to. Henry calls his dear friend lucky for being dead and suggests that an afterlife is iffy and uncertain: “–drifted off upstairs, / downstairs, somewheres.”279 Berryman writes five elegies to Randall Jarrell (Songs 90, 121, 126, 127, and 259) whose criticism he had great respect for and great fear of. In Song 90, Berryman employs tight end rhyme in the first stanza as a way of keeping control over his emotions as he, with unguarded fondness, recalls their early friendship: In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces, of liberations, and beloved faces, such as now ere dawn he sings. It would not be easy, accustomed to these things, to give up the old world, but he could try; let it all rest, have a good cry.280

Structurally, this poem is the penultimate poem in the Opus Posthumous sequence that struggles with the Dark Night of the Soul. In Song 121, Berryman expresses his recurring envy that those who have died are free from “the whole humiliating Human round.” Jarrell is noted for the acerbic critic that he was, then praised as a poet and a man: “Honest & cruel, peace now to his soul.”281 In his personal copy of Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age (1953), Berryman has written on the back inside cover, “amusing & cruel” and “over personal.” Five Songs later Henry thinks of Jarrell’s grave, his poetry, his prose: “his griefs across the world / grievously understated / and grateful for that bounty.”282 An earlier draft has the word “regularly” for “grievously,” certainly a trademark of Jarrell’s writing. In the next Song, Henry addresses the question of Jarrell’s suicide (Jarrell was killed by a car, did he purposely step out in front of it?).283 The poem “seem[s] to be Hallowe’en,”284 (All Souls Day is the 279

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 105. 281 Ibid., 138. 282 Ibid., 143. 283 In Love & Fame, New York, 1970, Berryman implies that Jarrell’s was a conscious suicide: “Losses! as Randall observed / who walked into a speeding car / under a culvert at night in Carolina / having just called his wife to make plans for the children” (58). 284 Dream Songs, 144. 280

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liturgical designation for the day); “soul” is mentioned three more times in the poem. Henry’s soul is not at rest as he hopes Jarrell’s is. The Song ends ambiguously with either Henry’s soul wandering because he has not “come home” to death or Jarrell’s soul in limbo since Henry cannot quite grasp the death of his beloved friend. An earlier draft of Song 127 reveals Berryman’s need to pull back some from his raw emotion: “dangles” is used for the more confident “leaves,” and “longer than Henry’s pain” becomes “longer than Henry’s chill.”

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Later in the Songs, Henry admits both his jealousy of and longing for Jarrell’s intellect, poetic powers, and friendship when he refers to a paper a student gave him on a Jarrell poem—“which I barely can stand

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/ for excellence & loss.”285 The Song ends with Henry asking Jarrell to come back from the grave and provide some advice. These professional elegies, a term I am using to encompass the competitive nature of many of the male Middle Generation poets, swirl around Berryman’s most powerful elegy block which consists of fourteen he wrote to Delmore Schwartz. Song 146 starts the grieving process for Schwartz; Henry feels like he is in hell but assures the reader that he is “fit for debaucheries” and yet is angry with all those who have died before him. Like Odysseus and Aeneas, Henry is visiting the under- or other-world where Delmore Schwartz, “the new ghost,” now resides. In this dream-like state, the memory of Schwartz conjures the difficult phrase “coimedela crime / came the Hebrew spectre.”286 James Atlas, in his biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, notes that Joyce, as always, was his [Schwartz’s] model for the artist in the modern world. Why had Joyce chosen Bloom, an Irish Jew, to be the protagonist of Ulysses? Because the Jew “is an exile from his own country and an exile even from himself,” Delmore claimed, “yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.”287

Thoughts of Schwartz’s Jewishness and paranoia come to mind. Atlas offers numerous examples of where Schwartz felt persecuted in his academic endeavors because of his religion, even though he was often working alongside other Jews who did not share his sense of being wronged at their given institutions. Saul Bellow suggests that “coimedela” is a neologism—“John [Berryman] did coin such expressions. They did give him pleasure.”288 Bellow remembers that Berryman, as a huge fan of Don Giovanni, would be aware that one of the Don’s last shrieks was “oime” (also printed “ohime”), which is Italian for the interjection alas, but used in the phrase “Che strazio! Ohime! Che smania!” may be translated to “Undying pains await me”289 and is a lamentation of the devil’s due the Don is about to pay. Berryman may be hinting at the Faustian bargain 285

Ibid., 278. Ibid., 165. 287 James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, New York, 1977, 302. 288 Personal Letter to Author, 21 December 1998. 289 W.A. Mozart, Don Giovanni, Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, trans. W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, New York, 1961, 281. 286

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Schwartz struck with the world to be a poet/critic at the expense of those around him and ultimately himself. Bellow adds, “The rest I speculate goes back to Finnegan’s Wake [sic]. Coime may be a fusion of agony with coitus.290 Medela is also Yiddish for a small girl, or girlchild.”291 In this strange, coined adjective is a protective sentiment felt for the difficult Schwartz by seemingly all who knew him. He is a man, an often very sexual man even, but still a child, innocent in his ravings and desires, one whose very memory asks for comfort and acceptance even when toward the end of his life he was too difficult to be around due to his unstable mental state. Schwartz once commented on his own aggressive nature in a self-analytical note: “The super-ego punishes him after anxiety and sensitivity have led to acts of aggression—a prosperous period renews his narcissistic & megalomaniac hopes, leading to anxiety (sexual over-activity as an effort to compensate for other frustrations of the ego).” This, in brief, was the cycle of Delmore’s moods, from exaltation to despair brought on by dread of failure.292

In Song 147, Henry chants “Delmore, Delmore” three times and remembers the young Schwartz who sang in the “summer branches”; Berryman is drawing on the classical elegy for the refrain and the pastoral, only to be replaced in Songs 150, 151, and 156 by the urban Manhattan scene of a cheap hotel “wrong floor ... / fighting for air ... / his visions dying O ... / an unshaven, dissheveled corpse ...”, “His good body lay unclaimed / three days.”293 These brutally graphic elegies come after Berryman’s crowning elegiac achievement in Song 149: This world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be any more. Can Delmore die?

(“Gradually” is a key word in Berryman’s first major poem “The Ball Poem,” evoking the subtle, difficult, but necessary need to accept loss.) 290

No concordance of Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, or Dubliners lists coime or identifies any word of a similar construction. Scholars might look for the word as a neologism created from Gaelic roots: coime is a Gaelic construction as in the word coimeas or comparison. 291 Bellow, Letter. 292 Atlas, quoted in Delmore Schwartz, 257. 293 Dream Songs, 175, 170.

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Berryman’s Henry I don’t suppose in all them years a day went ever by without a loving thought for him. Welladay.

This is vintage Berryman: to wax sentimental then undercut the feeling with humor. Here, the humor is honest and gentle. “Welladay” is not a lament but a return to honesty; Henry did not think of him every single day: he was often too busy thinking of himself. When he does think of Delmore, he remembers, In the brightness of his promise, unstained, I saw him thro’ the mist of the actual blazing with insight, warm with gossip thro’ all our Harvard years when both of us were just becoming known I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref and grief too astray for tears.

Here Berryman reveals their great friendship and Schwartz’s wondrous intellectual gifts, while hinting at future trouble. An earlier draft has “deep” for “astray”—Berryman is often cautious to pull slightly back when his nerves are clearly exposed. Henry ends with the Jewish word “tref” (ritualistically unclean) and his overpowering sorrow: I imagine you have heard the terrible news, that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably and alone, in New York:

These lines ring of Ginsberg’s William Carlos Williams elegy “Death News”: Walking at night on asphalt campus road by the German Instructor with Glasses W.C. Williams is dead he said in accent under the trees in Benares, I stopped and asked Williams is Dead?294

294

Allen Ginsberg, Planet News: 1961-1967, San Francisco, 1968, 48.

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Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” also comes to mind. In the last line of O’Hara’s penultimate stanza, the speaker sees the picture of Billie Holiday on the cover of the New York Post: ... and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.295

O’Hara leaves out the horrendous reality of Holiday’s drug-filled existence and tragic death at forty-four; Henry pulls no such punches. Sacks clarifies just what death has become in the modern world: Sociologists and psychologists, as well as literary and cultural historians, consistently demonstrate the ways in which death has tended to become obscene, meaningless, impersonal—an event either stupefyingly colossal in cases of large-scale war or genocide, or clinically concealed somewhere behind the technology of the hospital and the techniques of the funeral home.296

Henry’s elegies bring Schwartz’s ugly death to the forefront to present just how truly sad his end was. The sterilized, compartmentalized modern death is just what Berryman goes beyond in his graphic depictions of Delmore Schwartz’s ugly demise. Berryman concludes, he sang me a song ‘I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz Harms & the child I sing, two parents’ torts’ when he was young & gift-strong.297

Berryman is parodying Aeneas’s opening lines in John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid. A Whitmanesque “Song of Myself” flavor emerges from Schwartz’s exhortation—the revelation of a human personality. “[T]wo parent’s torts” is a reference to Schwartz’s hauntingly prophetic autobiographical short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a story that sets a young man in a dream-vision in a 295

Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems, San Francisco, 1964, 26. Sacks, 299. 297 Dream Songs, 168. 296

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movie theater watching a reel of his parents’ courtship. He weepingly exclaims against their dating, imploring them not to create the subsequent wretched union that will produce the wretched child that he is. Berryman, as elegist, celebrates, ultimately, the youth and “giftstrong” promise of his tortured, dead friend, not disputing the wretch he became in the end. This quintessential elegy is made more forceful by the elegies that surround it. When Henry says, “I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved / but it is not so,”298 Berryman is not so much criticizing Schwartz’s work as he is adhering to his code to be honest—to see Schwartz and hence himself as they really are. Schwartz received great praise for his early work In Dreams Begin Responsibilities—“more critical acclaim than has come to any other poet of his generation” which placed Schwartz “in the hardest position for a young writer to sustain in a spot-lighted age, a beginning poet with a reputation to live up to.”299 In a letter to James Laughlin, his most loyal publisher, Schwartz relayed his own deep fears of not being able to sustain his early promise: “It can’t last, I can’t be being praised for the right reasons by so many people, it is much too soon, and it is taking my mind away from working.”300 In Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, whose title character is based on Schwartz, the protagonist, Charlie Citrine, remembers Humboldt’s New York Times obituary: “It said, in its tinkertoy style of knobs and sticks, that Von Humboldt Fleisher had made a brilliant start.”301 Charlie Citrine, like Henry, knew full well the exasperating later years of Humboldt’s (Schwartz’s) existence, but chooses to remember an earlier, better time: “But I saw Humboldt in the days of his youth, covered in rainbows, uttering inspired words, affectionate, intelligent.”302 In Song 151, Henry continues the great praise of Schwartz then sums up the fallen poet’s dignity and humanity, stressing that he was alone in “the failure of his administration / He was tortured, beyond what man might be.”303 This extended lament stresses “Flagrant his young male beauty”304 as it reveals Schwartz’s paranoia which lead to 298

Ibid., 169. Matthiessen, quoted in Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 230. 300 Quoted in Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 110. 301 Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, 1975, 118. 302 Ibid., 341. 303 Dream Songs, 170. 304 Ibid., 173. 299

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his isolation and eventual estrangement. The possibility of any sentimental pastoral world is shattered by the ugly, urban slum of his last days. By the time Schwartz was thirty-eight, he looked weary and worn: “For fifteen years, his body had suffered the assault of barbiturates and amphetamines, as well as massive doses of alcohol.”305 Berryman as the modern American elegist isn’t sentimental or maudlin; he exposes his subject’s sins as well as triumphs. In Song 154, when talking about Schwartz’s paranoia and hurtful accusations leveled at his best friends, an early draft reads “one cheated him out of a house, one withheld money,” but is changed to the more specific and painful “Dwight [MacDonald] cheated him out of a house, Saul [Bellow] withheld money.”306 Berryman’s elegies show Schwartz’s mental illness up close—his seemingly meaningless and frantic arrivals at all hours: He drove up to my house in Providence ho ho at 8 a.m. in a Cambridge taxi and told it to wait. He walked my living-room, & did not want breakfast or even coffee, or even even a drink. He paced, I’d say Sit down, it makes me nervous, for a moment he’d sit down, then pace. After an hour or so I had a drink. He took it back to Cambridge, we never learnt why he came, or what he wanted. His mission was obscure. His mission was real, but obscure.307 In an earlier Song Henry told of the night after this visit (chronology is not important to memory) in which Delmore, in a midnight phone call, tells Henry to quit his job and move his family to New York: “All your bills will be paid, he added, tense.”308 Bellow’s narrator speaks of Humboldt’s demise and then ponders the fate of the poet in the modern technological, materialistic world: 305

Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 303. Dream Songs, 173. 307 Ibid., 174. 308 Ibid., 173. 306

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This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here.309

Ramazani argues that in Milton’s “Lycidas” the poet has redirected “his affection from the lost friend to the brilliant artifact that is in some measure a replacement for the man it mourns.”310 Berryman has created an affectionate and stunning elegy-block that grows into a “brilliant artifact” to stand in for the lost friend and poet. And as crazy and destructive as Schwartz’s drug and alcohol abuse were, his need for acceptance in a generation of competitive men of letters only added to his demise. Maybe the crime wasn’t committed by Schwartz but against him by modernity’s inability to stop long enough to appreciate the medela or girl-child inside the poet man. The Schwartz elegies work through to two resolutions: one, for Delmore: “I hope he’s sitting with his peers: sit, sit, / & recover & be whole”311 (Henry asks that Delmore be cleansed and “recover” to wholeness—his poetic powers and fame restored); and two, for Henry on why to remain alive: “But there are secrets, secrets, I may yet– / hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme– / come on to understand.”312 Poetry, often the elegy in particular, is where this tortured generation looked for its sanest answers. As the Songs progress, Henry has said goodbye and moved on to voice other elegies for those he doesn’t know as well nor love as deeply. Often a thought in one Song conjures up related thoughts in subsequent Songs, the Songs jump-start each other. Song 344 works on a stream-of-consciousness level not unlike what Joyce employed in Ulysses. Henry is sitting in a beautiful park in Dublin on a bright October Sunday and he thinks of Delmore Schwartz: “That dreadful 309

Bellow, Humboldt, 118. Ramazani, 3. 311 Dream Songs, 176. 312 Ibid., 178. 310

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small-hours hotel death mars all.”313 Henry is alluding back to the Schwartz elegy block begun 194 Songs earlier. Joyce often resorts to this same concrete, but loose affiliation. Late in the second half of the Circe chapter, Stephen cries, “Hark! Our friend in the street,” which is referring back to Stephen’s conversation concerning God with his principal, Mr. Deasy, four hundred and forty pages earlier.314 Berryman writes elegies for Sylvia Plath (Song 172), R.P. Blackmur (Song 173), Yvor Winters (Song 193), T.S. Eliot (Song 224), Ernest Hemingway (Song 235), Loius MacNeice (Song 267), William Butler Yeats (Song 312), and Gerard Manley Hopkins (Song 377), and outside of The Dream Songs for Bhain Campbell, Dylan Thomas, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Henry’s constant insecurity is manifest in his competitiveness with his peers and elders. But for the latter he often shows great reverence. His elegy to T.S. Eliot is really a portrait of the closing of Ezra Pound’s friendship with Eliot. The poem sets Pound as an old man at Eliot’s funeral: Lonely in his great age, Henry’s old friend leaned on his burning cane while hís old friend was hymnéd out of living. Henry goes on to draw again from the pastoral tradition: Gone them wine-meetings, gone green grasses Of the picnics of rising youth. .... White is the hue of death & victory, all the old generosities dismissed while the white years insist.315 Berryman has “only the traitor body failing” in an earlier draft but softens the reference to Pound to “only the albino body failing,” probably a reference to the lack of sun in prison.

313

Ibid., 366. James Joyce, Ulysses, New York, 1986, 468 and 28. 315 Dream Songs, 243. 314

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In Song 218, Henry mentions Yeats, Roethke, Eliot, Pound, Jarrell, and Lowell: Fortune gave him to know the flaming best, expression’s kings in his time, by voice & hand,– the Irishman, the doomed bard roaring down the thirsty west, the subtle American British banker-man and the lunatic one fidgeting, with bananas, and his friend the sage (touchy, ‘I’m very touchy’) ... and already now let’s call it a strong age, not just a science age, as idiot, habit cries; I’m getting near an end, but I add on the Bostonian, rugged & grand & sorrowful.316 By offering a description of each man, Henry has paid tribute to each poet’s deep influence on Henry’s own life and work. He loves them for the common bond he shares with them: a life dedicated to poetry. Henry sees in Sylvia Plath’s face “the geography of grief,” and since he is suicidal, he takes her suicide as a personal questioning and awakening of his own threatened and threatening intentions. The elegy moves from Plath’s poetic “force” to “the screams of orphaned children” (Plath’s own) to Henry, who “alone breasts the wronging tide.”317 A draft dated 26 June 1966 has “filthy tide” instead of the Gatsbyesque “wronging tide.”

316 317

Ibid., 237. Ibid., 191.

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“Filthy” offers a less romantic posture to Henry’s fate, which is to live on and represents a recurring trope in all of these elegies. And the

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orphaned children remind Henry of what he could leave, and adheres to a double standard that it is more reprehensible for a mother than a father to “leave” her children. Berryman’s Dream Song elegy to Hemingway (Song 235) praises him as “that cruel & gifted man.” Henry praises Hemingway: he even sheds tears: Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway Hemingway in despair, Hemingway at the end, the end of Hemingway, tears in a diningroom in Indiana and that was years ago, before his marriage say, God to him no worse luck send.

But the elegy quickly centers on Henry’s and Hemingway’s awful bond: both had fathers who killed themselves with firearms: Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides. It all depends on who you’re the father of if you want to kill yourself— a bad example, murder of oneself, the final death, in a paroxysm, of love for which good mercy hides?

The poem ends with a call for “Mercy!” Hemingway is nowhere to be seen (he has already committed suicide), and Henry directly addresses his father: “my father; do not pull the trigger / or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger / killing what you began.”318 Berryman knows the life his father left him. In most of the paternal elegies, Henry addresses his father with the detachment and narrative focus of third person, but here he talks directly to him. The shared pain he feels with Hemingway allows him to open up. As noted above, the climax of this element of his quest takes place in Song 384. And a decade later, Berryman will follow Hemingway’s lead and commit suicide. Clarence Hemingway, who like Berryman’s father had speculated in land in Florida and lost money, decided on the morning of 6 December 1928 that he “couldn’t stand things” and shot himself in the head. Ernest Hemingway was twenty-nine years old. According to 318

Ibid., 254.

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Philip Young, Hemingway had suffered his major life experience on 8 July 1918 when he was blown up in Fossalta, Italy. Young argues that Hemingway had seen too much violence in Michigan as a boy, then experienced the painful wounds in Italy and spent the rest of his literary career writing to work through the trauma of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of course, Young did not have that modern, vague term, but Hemingway had the insomnia, the nightmares, and his father’s propensity for serious depression and paranoia. So ten years after Italy, Hemingway is faced once again with a violent death: this time of one he loved. Young argues that Hemingway and Nick Adams are similar to Mark Twain and Huck Finn: both writers and their creations have experienced too much violence in their formative years and are destined to focus on those experiences through their writing. Writing on Huck’s maturation, Young argues, It is absolutely essential to an understanding of either this boy or this novel about him to see what the effect of all this brutality has been. It is also very easy to see: an overexposure to violence has finally wounded the protagonist.319

As noted earlier, in his biography of Stephen Crane, Berryman centers Crane’s central subject of war and the soldier’s reaction to the horror as compulsively generated from an experience when he was a boy. When Crane was twelve, he witnessed the stabbing of a white woman by her Negro lover.320 Here we have the confluence of four major American writers who flow toward a deep and compelling need to “honor a stubborn and nearly hysterical preoccupation with the profound significance of violence in our time.”321 For Hemingway, one of his great achievements is not the misleading and diminishing criticism of confessionalism or flat autobiography, but his ability and courage to face his trauma and make it into his art.322 Five years later, in 1933, Hemingway began to write of his father’s suicide. This would eventually become “Fathers and Sons”; the story that ends Winner Takes Nothing. Michael Reynolds writes, 319

Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, Pennsylvania, 1966, 228. Berryman, Crane, 307-13. 321 Young, 246. 322 Ibid., 171. 320

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The story about his father’s suicide he first tried to tell at a distance, using a young boy discovering his father’s hunting death was no accident. After ten pages, he quit it, unable to deal with the real issues: the dead father and the dominant mother.... He wants to blame his father’s death on his mother, his own mother, because it is easier than admitting his father’s “nervousness” is like his own: highs and lows, cycling each time a little farther down that dark road he will one day call “black ass.”323

Hemingway first called the story “The Tomb of My Grandfather.” He, like Berryman, often had to put some distance between himself and his painful subject. But Young is mistaken to say suicide is not in the story.324 The narrator mysteriously explains the father’s death: “He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died.”325 This is no hunting accident but a coded message on the difficult life of a man married to an impossible woman, a man suffering from what we are only beginning to be able to name and understand in our advanced pharmaceutical age. Reynolds’s first volume, The Young Hemingway, suggests Grace Hall Hemingway was not so impossible as her husband was so intractable in his mood swings. They were both ensnarled in Oak Park Protestantism. And when the narrator tells us “The undertaker had only made certain dashingly executed repairs of doubtful artistic merit,” we are in the realm of Clarence Hemingway’s head wound. Hemingway sticks in the jarring adverb to alert his close readers. It bears repeating that Grace Hemingway may not have been the monster Hemingway made her out to be in life and in fiction. Reynolds argues that by 1912, Clarence Hemingway’s mood swings and depression left him unable or unwilling to continue the close, outdoor life he had had with his son up to that point.326 Grace was keeping both the house in Oak Park and the lake cottage running as smoothly as could be expected given the requirements of a husband who needed quiet and even solitude for his “nerves.” Hemingway in his late teens 323

Michael Reynolds, The 1930s, New York, 1992, 136. Young, n.285. 325 Ernest Hemingway, “Fathers and Sons,” Winner Take Nothing, New York, 1933, 228. 326 Michael Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, New York, 1986, 101. 324

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treated his mother with scorn and misplaced anger; so much so, that the following excerpt from a letter she wrote to Ernest in 1920 could be viewed as something her son earned. In this letter, Grace risks her son’s wrath by explaining to him the bank account of love children have from birth with their parents. In the letter’s climax, she writes, Unless you, my son, Ernest, come to yourself, cease your lazy loafing, and pleasure seeking—borrowing with no thought of returning—stop trying to graft a living off anybody and everybody—spending all your earnings lavishly and wastefully on luxuries for yourself—stop trading on your handsome face, to fool little gullible girls, and neglecting your duties to God and your Savior Jesus Christ—unless, in other words, you come into your manhood—there is nothing before you but bankruptcy: You have over draw.327

“Fathers and Sons” begins with a seemingly mundane example of obligations not being met: traffic lights that will soon be turned off. Here is the upcoming loss of direction that a dead father will not be able to provide. Nick remembers with the praise a son has for his father, a young son magnifying the physical prowess of a dad: “When he first thought about him it was always the eyes. The big frame, the quick movements, the wide shoulders, the hooked, hawk nose ...”:328 but adult Nick pulls back with the unpraise of “the weak chin.” He offers his father’s Victorian or puritanical views toward human sexuality, offers his own loss of virginity story, and then conveys his own odd beliefs on smell as an animalistic revulsion which is integrated into his loss. Yet Nick sweetens the loss with the permanent memories of good hunting: “His father was with him, suddenly, in deserted orchards and in new-plowed fields, in thickets, on small hills, or when going through dead grass, whenever splitting wood or drawing water, by grist mills, cedar mills and dams and always with open fires.”329 This is Hemingway exposed, vulnerable, and full of praise for his long-suffering father. The story ends with Nick making an acknowledgement of his manhood. He then offers a son’s pain: he was never good enough to please his father: “He was always very disappointed in the way I shot.” 327

Reynolds, quoted in Young Hemingway, 137-38. Hemingway, “Fathers and Sons,” 226. 329 Ibid., 238-39. 328

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His father’s fatal wound opens the son’s nagging wound. And this business of Nick saying to his son they will have to visit his grandfather’s grave is telling since they do not actually go there in the story. After his father’s funeral, Hemingway never did go back to Oak Park, though he did visit his father in his work. Reynolds, in his volume The Homecoming, argues that Hemingway had already put his father’s very specific head wound in A Farewell to Arms with the description of Aymo’s fatal wound.330 And even earlier, “Indian Camp” presages much of what will become this middle-class family. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s persona is able to look more closely at the suicide. Jordan tells Pilar that his father committed suicide; he tells her he understands it but does not approve of it. Later, he suggests he was cowardly for killing himself and cowardly for putting up with that miserable woman. But how much that is the hurt coming through the reader will have to decide. Hemingway did write, “To commit suicide except as a means of ending unbearable pain may be compared to cheating at solitaire, but a man making such a comparison is a confident fool.”331 Reynolds conjectures this enigmatic thought was written two years prior to the writing of “Fathers and Sons.” Nick and Henry are attempts at creating real men, art as life. Young argues, The hero [Nick Adams] is a twentieth-century American, born, raised and hurt in the Middle West, who like all of us has been going through life with the marks his experiences have made on him. The outlaws and professional sportsmen who have appeared along the way have taught the man to try to live by a code, but they are not the man himself. What is more, the lessons have not always been of the sort the hero can immediately master.332

In 1973, The Times Literary Supplement explained that at the core of the Berryman/Henry dichotomy is not the poet’s ego: “Not the poet’s self but his attitudes towards himself become the theme. The mask replaces the speaker.”333 Berryman aimed for a poem that was original in its presentation of a human being’s personality. Berryman’s art 330

Michael Reynolds, The Homecoming, New York, 1997, 214. Ibid., 212. 332 Young, 66. 333 “Berryman’s Valediction,” 33. 331

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offered him a separate peace with his early loss; Hemingway’s work, trapped in his guarded, Oak Park psyche, never dug so deeply nor proved as much comfort. An important early influence on Berryman, as for most poets of his generation, was Yeats. In Song 215, Henry records with a reporter’s accuracy his visit to Yeats’s cottage: “The goddamned scones came hot.”334 Then in Song 312, Henry decides “to have it out” with his “majestic Shade,” the ghost over his poetics. He explains that he has learned (or hopes he has) his lesson from Yeats’s oeuvre, but has had to put it aside in order to follow Pound’s dictum of making it new. Henry praises as follows: Your high figures float again across my mind and all your past fills my walled garden with your honey breath wherein I move, a mote.335

Henry is a speck of dust in the bright sun of Yeats’s verse. He is truly humble, but confident enough to mention his own work—“a book or two”—Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and 77 Dream Songs. In these last two volumes, Berryman has demonstrated his ability to go beyond Yeats’s influence into his own form. In Song 377, Berryman acknowledges his debt to Hopkins, especially his opening up of the sonnet form, by penning him an elegy. Henry is in Dublin, where the famous Jesuit-poet is buried. Henry has great praise for Hopkins: his poetry “hit the Milky Way.”336 He was out of this world not only because of his deep love of Christ, but also because of his radical use of language and syntax. Henry ends by disparaging Dublin, “this hole unclear,” on its drab and lonely Christmas day. Henry is as bleak as Dublin is grimy. Hopkins spent his last bleak years in Dublin, yet Christ’s birthday seems a most appropriate time to remember and praise the lonely, guilt-ridden Jesuit of rare artistic passion and prowess who harbored such deep love for Jesus as he brought sonic measures of language to brilliant, inescapable combinations.

334

Dream Songs, 234. Ibid., 334. 336 Ibid., 399. 335

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In Song 282, Henry remembers Blackmur,337 Jarrell, and Schwartz as he sails to Ireland and the Old World. In the middle stanza he states the poetics of these dead poets, which he also shares since he is included in the elegy: the poets “coughed & sang / the new forms in which ancient thought appears.”338 These moderns and their poetic sons have drawn on traditional thought and poetic technique to create a new understanding and modern form. Albert Gelpi calls Berryman and his peers Neoromantics; he suggests the Postmoderns are derived from a formula that is Modernism minus Romanticism.339 Berryman’s generation is not that far removed from Eliot’s. Gelpi explains, The Modernist work of art proceeded not out of a conviction of organic continuity or even correlation with nature but instead out of a conviction of the discontinuity between subject and object, and the consequent fragmentation of self and experience required the tight construction of the art object from the fragments. The Modernist artwork stood as an often desperate insistence on coherence, heroic considering the odds, amidst and against the ravages of time: the instability of nature, the unreliability of perception, and the tragedy of human history.340

Gelpi goes on to clarify, “The poets I am designating Neoromantic [Berryman, Lowell, Levertov, Olson, Roethke, et al] all believe, even in the face of the violence of contemporary history, that the word can effect personal and social change, that poetry can, almost against the odds, make things happen—psychologically, morally, politically, religiously.”341 Henry’s journey of elegy and self-awareness will not surrender to the forces of modern absurdity; in loss, the substance of life pleads to be made clear. This Song ends with a beautiful lament of High Modernism: The lovely friends, and friends the friends of friends, 337

Henry’s elegy to R.P. Blackmur (Song 173) may be his sweetest, most poignant professional elegy; Henry suggests he is a better man for having known Blackmur. In an earlier draft Berryman wrote and then crossed out: “I wish (said H–) people wd. Stop dying, / tearing fr. it rung my heart / leaving me in unmanly tears / American men don’t cry.” 338 Dream Songs, 304. 339 Albert Gelpi, “The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American Poetry,” The Southern Review, 26.3 (Summer 1990), 539. 340 Ibid., 518. 341 Ibid., 540.

124

Berryman’s Henry pursuing insights to their journeys’ ends subtle & steadfast: the wind blows hard from our past into our future and we are that wind, except that the wind’s nature was not to last.342

Berryman as elegist has explored and exploded the genre. He has used the elegy to isolate his grief in a world that wants him to move on with life no matter what the loss; he is not to be a little boy. Berryman uses the elegiac poem to hold together his life and his poem of loss. His elegies praise, criticize, question, expose, and weep. His elegies face the young boy’s loss inside the middle-aged poet’s heart. Berryman’s elegies try to shape a vision and an acceptance of death in the twentieth-century’s vacuum of doubt. Robert Lowell, revealing “I used to want to live / to avoid your elegy,”343 provides his own elegy for Berryman. In “For John Berryman” (subtitled: “After reading his last Dream Song”) Lowell, whose own life was as troubled and as tortured as his old friend’s, remembers the fallen poet for their dear friendship, with all its strained moments and early electricity, acknowledging Berryman’s humor then realizing that in death Lowell still needs his friend’s guidance: To my surprise, John, I pray to not for you, think of you not myself, smile and fall asleep.344

342

Dream Songs, 304. Robert Lowell, Day By Day, New York, 1973, 27. 344 Ibid., 28. 343

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We, like Lowell, can smile, since Berryman has left us Songs to greet loss, Songs to live with.

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CHAPTER 4: POSTHUMOUS MUSINGS FROM AN ACTIVE COFFIN Henry’s own middle-aged struggle with his father’s suicide and his reminder of his own mortality through the death of his literary peers brings him to write his own elegy, several of them. Henry longs to be viewed as a poet of the caliber of those he elegizes. This desire forces him to write his own elegies with the same note of honesty and openness his peers received. In these Songs Henry’s epic quest is focused on understanding and/or accepting God, nothingness, life, his own life, and his own death. The Dream Songs ends with Henry approaching with an open heart the net of religion, but never really believing. Berryman would reach for such religious comfort later in his career with the “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” in Love & Fame and the Opus Dei section of Delusions, Etc. Arpin argues, “TSD is the work not of a man with a sense of religion, but of a man who lacks such a sense and who is tormented by the lack.”345 This is similar to Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas. Barabbas wanders the Middle East after Christ’s crucifixion. He is a rogue and a murderer—but somehow different since his life was spared at Jesus’s expense. He eventually ends up a Roman slave, and survives to meet another slave Sahah who slowly converts him to Christianity. On his slave disk he has carved “Christos Iesus,” because he wants to think of Jesus as his master. When the Roman governor asks him if Jesus is his master (and not the State), with a punishment of crucifixion riding on the answer, Barabbas answers truthfully that he has no god, but has carved Jesus’s name “Because I want to believe.”346 Later, when Barabbas is finally crucified, he does utter: “To thee I deliver up my soul.”347 In a letter to Milt Halliday in 1936, Berryman wrote, “I ponder by the fire for hours over tremendous problems of time and life and God, have been reading Revelations and Job and New Testament and 345

Arpin, 70. Pär Lagerkvist, Barabbas, trans. Alan Blair, New York, 1951, 144. 347 Ibid., 180. 346

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wonder whether I can accept honestly Christianity as I should so passionately like to be able to.”348 Berryman had studied the New Testament and Christian theologians throughout his academic career. In a letter written on 10 December 1954, just prior to the initial Dream Songs, Berryman cites St. Augustine on sin and then tells his mother, Besides a Christian is bound to believe not only in sin but in the remission of sin.... Human responsibility is sharply limited; this is one of the major consequences of dogmatics; to indulge responsibility, except in its proper directions, is wanton—and in fact, psychologically, an overflow or distortion of something else. What that would be is, mostly, in some other way a sense that one has not been forgiven, or, more truly, that one has not merited forgiveness. But this is precisely not for the soul to say; it is why the Church exists. For this purpose, the issues of the Faith (which requires one to live at peace w God) and of psychoanalysis (which requires one to live at peace w oneself) are the same.349

Berryman’s Songs begin with a number of epigraphs, including “I am their Musick,” which is from Lamentations (3:63). Arpin argues, “In Lamentations, as in TDS, the cause of disaster is the Lord’s rejection— he has apparently deserted the people of Zion, the city has been destroyed: ‘Thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us [5:22].’”350 “Henry’s suffering is meant to embody ours.... Henry suffers not as Job—an individual bearing great personal pain—but as Jeremiah—an individual bearing our general pain, for what reasons he knows not.”351 Henry is suffering and trying to find reason to keep living, but he has very real doubts. In Song 17, Henry is confronted by Lucifer and searches for refuge in religion: I dove under the oaken arms of Brother Martin, St Simeon the Lesser Theologian, Bodhidharma and the Baal Shem Tov.352

348

Quoted in Halliday, 117. Quoted in Kelly, 282-83. 350 Arpin, 66. 351 Quoted in Haffenden, Commentary, 80-81. 352 Dream Songs, 19. 349

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Remember, in the Roethke elegy (Song 18) Henry is not sure where his old friend’s soul went after death: “Drifted upstairs, / downstairs, somewheres.” Arpin writes, “Henry is a man frantically seeking harmony and stability in a perversely inharmonious and unstable world.”353 Again, at the heart of the quest of the modern epic hero is the need to find some order, even if separate and personal, in the chaotic push of life without absolutes, without nets. Henry voices his doubts in God’s ability to rule such a world in “Henry’s Programme for God” (Song 238): Perhaps God is a slob, playful, vast, rough-hewn. Perhaps God resembles one of the last etchings of Goya & not Valesquez, never Rembrandt no. Something disturbed, ill-pleased, & with a touch of paranoia who calls for this thud of love from his creatures-O. Perhaps God ought to be curbed.

Henry provides a novel view of God: God as needy, not in control, even paranoid, one who needs to be curbed like a dog. God as “rough hewn” brings up Hamlet’s view of man as a product not perfectly made. This is a reverse of man made in God’s image; with God made in man’s image, both are imperfect. The poem’s last stanza explains the limitedness of our understanding and our options for response: “Our only resource is bleak denial or / anti-potent rage, / both have been tried by our wisest.”354 The Song ends with a reference to Hamlet’s father’s “unshriven” death and a note of praise for Goya’s courage to challenge common notions of God. Henry, like Hamlet, must deal with his father’s ghost. Both are leery of the ghosts’ ability to effect their lives for the worse; yet both need to lay their fathers and their feelings of loss to rest. Henry is stuck in a world steeped in violence with no sight of God beyond the desire or the need to always place Him in heaven. This is a far cry from the certainty of God’s grandeur and pervasive majesty in early Hopkins, an early influence on Berryman, but not so distant from the late, desperate Hopkins of the Terrible Sonnets. Travisano astutely 353 354

Arpin, 65. Dream Songs, 257.

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explains that Lowell and Berryman (along with their contemporaries Bishop and Jarrell) were faced with the problem of selfhood in the postmodern world. This problem derives at once from life’s immemorial fatality and from “the crushing superstructure of our civilization.” This crushing superstructure, still under mortgage, magnifies certain aspects of human fatality even as it minimizes others.355

Berryman draws on the elegiac tradition within the epic to find a way to frame the long modern poem, one that is always conscious of the age’s presentiment for disaster and death. Berryman’s suicide may have been a final, defiant act in the face of defining the self in twentieth-century America, but Henry’s Song remains a cogent and mysterious document of a time and place in human history. For Henry (and ultimately for Berryman) the self must be defined in terms of an all-powerful and observant God. Henry rejects God because he sees suffering in the lives of so many. Henry knows what men did to each other in World War I and World War II (“Death is a German expert” [45]). He has witnessed India’s Sealdah Station where “possessionless / children survive to die.”356 So he asks in Song 317: Does the validity of the dream-life suppose a Maker? If so what a careless monster he must be, whole, taking the claws with the purr.357

Henry is angry with God. Man is in the thick of the predator-prey mathematics of Darwin; did God’s plans for the world go awry? including that worst career, whose was it? God’s I seem to remember, he makes me wish I had taken up golf or the study of the stars.358

And yet through all of Henry’s doubt, sorrow, and anger at such a world of loss and destructive urges, he is still like Barabbas, still wanting to believe in something absolute and life affirming, still 355

Travisano, 266. Dream Songs, 18. 357 Ibid., 339. 358 Ibid., 357. 356

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hoping there is a “middle ground between things and the soul,” still wishing to see the connection that shows how “the sky resembled more the sea.”359 While Henry may appear to be unlike Barabbas, not to believe in a God he can trust; the fact is, Henry’s hostility toward God generates from his strong desire to believe in a God and to want Christ to be a meaningful and real hero in his life. Remember, Eliot said the doubt, not the faith, generates the significance of the modern elegy. In “The Carpenter’s Son” (Song 234), which on an earlier draft Berryman wrote, “Christ Song,” Henry draws heavily on Christian tradition: –Repent, & love, he told them frightened throngs, and it is so he did. ... Fasten to your fire the blessing of the living God. It’s far to seek if it will do as good whether in our womanly or in our manlihood, the great man sought his retire.360

Henry is as contradictory as Emerson, as Whitman. As Maude explains to Harold in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, “consistency is not really a human trait.” In an earlier draft of Song 17, Berryman wrote “opened prayer” in the margin. He also ponders being “bored w. evil” as he acknowledges Lucifer. The published line is “And Lucifer:–I smell you for my own,” but a draft reads “... I smell you are my own,” which is a more direct acknowledgement of the evil in Henry and by extension all men.

359 360

Ibid., 407. Ibid., 253.

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But Henry ends the Song by offering a search for peace in Christianity,

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in Judaism, in Buddhism. In Songs 20 and 21, Henry draws from Hopkins to plea for a presence of the Deity in our lives: An evil kneel & adore. This is human. Hurl, God who found us in this, down something ... We hear the more sin has increast, the more grace has been caused to abound.361

As Saint Paul explained, more sin equals more of God’s grace to combat it. And in the next Song Henry echoes the head nun’s climatic cry from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”: “Come down! Come down! / ... / ‘O come on down. O come on down.’”362 In Song 13, Henry asks for God’s blessing. The speaker explains, “God’s Henry’s enemy”: modern man is pitted against a seemingly uncaring and distant God. Henry is trying not to be a coward; he wants to face the human struggle with both eyes open, and possibly the beauty of an honest testimony from an authentic personality is a poignant rendition of how truly heroic it is to just live. Henry is not unsympathetic to God’s daunting task of ruling the universe in the twentieth century: “Complex his task: he threads the mazers daily, / sorts out from monsters saints and rewards them, / produces snow.” This is aggravated by “Cold dough: is not that the one thing that might matter?”363 In Song 256, Henry cannot believe in a God who has provided such a world of inferior products, echoing Hamlet’s “man delights me not” speech. Henry explains, “... long experience of His works / has not taught me his love.”364 Berryman’s ambiguous feelings toward a God are typographically presented in his sporadic capitalization of the Deity in The Dream Songs; even in Delusions, Etc. he does not consistently capitalize the pronominal references. Ten Songs later Henry (modern man) cannot understand a God who lets people get treated so badly: “God loves his creatures when he treats them so?”365 In an unpublished Dream Song elegy to William Meredith, Henry 361

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. 363 Ibid., 193. 364 Ibid., 275. 365 Ibid., 285. 362

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fumes at the possibility of an existential nothingness and wallows in his own fear of death and desire to reason our final end to some degree of acceptable understanding:

Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam makes a similar point, But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays. The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Here or There as strikes the Player goes; And He tossed you down into the Field. He knows about it all—HE knows—HE knows!366

366

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, eds. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair, Second Edition, New York, 1988, 1224.

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Henry is furious with a God who would play so fast and loose with human life. And that is the paradoxical dilemma Henry must try to resolve or at least accept. The chaos of the modern world seems so void of any higher organizing being; yet precisely because of this flux man longs for a controlling and just God. Regardless of God’s reality or relationship toward the individual, Song 266 begins with a Hopkinsesque phrase, “Dinch me, dark God,” and not only questions God (“God loves his creatures when he treats them so?”) but asks for mercy, Surely one grand exception here below his presidency of the widespread galaxies might once be made for perishing Henry, whom let not then die.

Henry qualifies that request by explaining the search he’s gone through: “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.”367 Henry is trying not to be a coward, yet he feels he lives “like a rat,” cornered, and knows he is “ornery,” testy. In Song 47, Henry relates St. Mary of Egypt’s experience at Christ’s tomb, but ends his sweet tale with the deistic note: “We celebrate her feast with our caps on, / whom God has not visited.”368 The next Song combines secular and religious themes and ends with a celebration of “the death of the death of love”—which is the survival or rebirth of love. In Song 56, Henry states, “Hell is empty”: Hell is empty because existentialism and modernism killed both God and the devil. But here Henry is down and out in the hospital with death thoughts—the Song ends with God entering as the One to be appealed to. An earlier draft has “live” written under “die” on the line “I am about to die.”369 Suffering Henry is trying to find reason to keep living and to reach a place of theological comfort, but has very real doubts. If Henry is not able to solidify his faith in God, he can at least see a reason for continuing to strive to live as seen in the final Delmore Schwartz elegy:

367

Dream Songs, 285. Ibid., 51. 369 Ibid., 63. 368

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Berryman’s Henry But there are secrets, secrets, I may yet– hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme– come on to understand.370

Like every consolation in Henry’s need-filled, alcoholic, searching, and tortured existence, this one is intermittent at best. Henry is typical of modern intellectuals who have lost their faith, for one reason or another, and look toward an absurd, violent, and existential world in which to find their way. In Recovery, Berryman has Alan Severance, his most thinly-veiled persona, early in his treatment reach a small epiphany through the humbling experience of being forced to work toward sobriety: That afternoon as I thought over what had happened I saw that a direct intervention had taken place and I recovered one particular sense of God’s being I lost as a child. My father shot himself when I was twelve. I didn’t blame God for that, I just lost all personal sense of Him. No doubt about the Creator and Maintainer, and later it became quite clear to me that He made Himself available to certain men and women in terms of inspiration—artists, scientists, statesmen, the saints of course, anybody in fact—gave them special power or insight or endurance—I’d felt it myself: some of my best work I can’t claim any credit for, it flowed out all by itself, or in fact by His moving. But I couldn’t see him interested in the individual life in the ordinary way. Now I did.371

Berryman would later explain in the sixth “Address to the Lord” in Love & Fame: Under new management, Your Majesty: Thine. I have solo’d mine since childhood, since my father’s blow-it-all when I was twelve blew out my most bright candle faith, and look at me.372

In an earlier draft, the second line has the verb choices of “sought,” “relied,” and “tried” all suggested.

370

Ibid., 178. John Berryman, Recovery/Delusion, Etc., New York, 1973, 48-49. 372 John Berryman, Love & Fame, 91. 371

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138

Berryman’s Henry

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If the fourteen Opus Posthumous Songs of Section IV make up an extended sonnet (as suggested by Charles Thornbury), then the octave, which reveals Henry’s lusty, gross (a boil is developed to Learian height—Song 85), and self-doubting nature, ends with the poet struggling with God and his creative ability to produce Henry’s vision: “Triune! My wood or word seems to be rotting.”373 These fourteen Songs are preceded by the seventy-seventh Song in which Henry refers to himself as “impenitent Henry”; this important Song, which offers temporary closure to the poem, echoes the word “wonder” from the first Song and allows for the theme of Fall, with its multiple meanings, to drive the poem toward its next four sections. The poet, religiously and creatively, now enters the Dark Night of his Soul, a personal journey traditionally associated with a desire to be rescued into a workable faith. These are Henry’s obituaries with a voice from the grave made a game, albeit a serious one, of death. It was a vaudeville act—a program radioed from a very active coffin.374

Henry, in epic tradition, has to visit Hell: Berryman’s modern twist is that he writes from the vantage point of both death and a living hell. The sestet is opened with Henry’s spiritual lawyer entering a plea on Henry’s behalf of “Not Guilty by reason of death” to the “august court.”375 Berryman is suggesting that modern humanity is not guilty of sin or meanness only in death. Yet the evil, at least selfish, nature of man asks for compassion and forgiveness. Song 86 enjambs to Song 87, where the speaker relays the rumor that “Henry may be returning to our life / adult & difficult.”376 Like Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dantepilgrim, Henry has visited the “violent dead.”377 Just what he learned is difficult to glean. He has no great conviction of the afterlife, nor does he find solace in their being through with it all. In Song 89, Henry, even in death, finds his thoughts turning to women and sex, but acknowledges that all that orgiastic joy is really, as the French say, a petit mal, a little death. In Song 90, Henry is struggling with his own doubts and guilt, but then remembers Randall Jarrell’s death. Henry

373

Dream Songs, 100. Zeigler, 13. 375 Dream Songs, 101. 376 Ibid., 102. 377 Ibid., 103. 374

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imagines an afterlife “In the chambers of the end”378 where he and Jarrell will be as they were on earth: critics and poets who sought fame and recognition but were themselves dissatisfied with both. The Opus Posthumous sonnet ends (Song 91) with Henry revealed as the modern, divorced, multi-married man with plights and “disencumbered ... many ills”:379 Henry’s obituary notice will have much of the real world in it. Alas, wily Henry will try to resurrect himself like Lazarus—and like Lazarus, he will need Jesus’s help. Song 92 starts a new section of the poem but employs an opening line that breaks the 18-line pattern and continues the Dark-Night-ofthe-Soul motif: “Something black somewhere in the vistas of his heart.”380 Henry is in the hospital, dead in his living hell with his cadaver near by. In Song 146, Henry, thinking of Delmore Schwartz’s death, explains that the living air tells him he is not in hell even “though round me the dead / lie in their limp postures.” Later in the Song Henry is exasperated: “‘Down with them all!’ ... / Their deaths were theirs….”381 Henry takes little comfort in his bereavement; he knows his time is near, but hopes not yet. In Song 101, Henry relates an obscure dream that includes his mother, friends, a lunatic asylum, and a policeman. It ends by suggesting the outcome of modern life’s bleak struggle with relationships and religion: I can’t go into the meaning of the dream except to say a sense of total LOSS afflicted me thereof: an absolute disappearance of continuity & love and children away at school, the weight of the cross, and everything is what it seems.382

One of the unifying components of any book of poems is the extent to which the individual pieces play off each other. The paternal elegy of Song 241 (“Father being the loneliest word in the one language”383) branches out into an elegy for the human race (Song 242). The plight of people everywhere pressed down by the human condition is a logical progression from the great personal pain the loss of a father 378

Ibid., 105. Ibid., 106. 380 Ibid., 109. 381 Ibid., 165. 382 Ibid., 118. 383 Ibid., 260. 379

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triggers. The mourning poet feels compassion toward a stranger’s great pain (the lady “beyond frown”), knowing her pain is like his pain since the human condition is one of pain. The poem ends on an existential note: “‘What’s the matter–if you want to talk? / Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.’ So / I am her.”384 “Nothing” is worth weeping for; something like pain comes from all our nothing. Henry-poet has a heart that feels for all who suffer in the alienated and anxious modern world. Another example of how the elegies within the poem influence each other is seen in the Memorial Day elegy (Song 268), which follows an elegy to Louis MacNeice (Song 267). Henry will weep for the living as well as for “my dead.” In an attempt at taking a crucial step forward in the grieving process, Henry is growing toward forgiveness in his grief. He wants to celebrate life, not mourn the dead—yet “the fear” (of death) always returns. Henry is obsessed with death: “dying / as all we all are dying: death grew tall / up Henry as a child.”385 Henry’s great fear of and desire for death, which runs throughout the Songs, is stated succinctly in Song 185: “The older you get, at once / the better death looks and / the more fearful & intolerable.”386 After his William Carlos Williams elegy (Song 324), Henry laments, “Our dead frisk us”387; his own mortality thrashes him every time one of his friends dies; it all gets continually worse. Berryman did say Henry was “a hopeless coward with regard to his actual death.”388 A. Alvarez writes, Berryman had always been a poet of bristling nervous energy; now his sense of grief and loss [in The Dream Songs] added an extra, urgent dimension to his work, impelling it through the whole process of mourning—guilt, hostility, expiation—which ends with the beautifully lucid acceptance of his own mortality. He ends, that is, by writing his own epitaph.389

This epitaph is contained in the Song 305’s Whitmanesque mission statement, relevant to the whole poem: “I sing with infinite slowness 384

Ibid., 261. Ibid., 161. 386 Ibid., 204. 387 Ibid., 347. 388 Harvard Advocate, 6. 389 A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, New York, 1972, 45. 385

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finite pain.”390 Henry may be terrified of death, but he heroically spies on, examines, dissects, and eventually confronts it Song after Song. Berryman’s epic provides a terrifying account of real loss and death, but offers comfort in the shared vision placed in the poetry. He knows he has turned the last bend in both his life and his literature: “Soon they dissever / the pen & the heart, the old heart with its fears / & the daughter for which it pines.” In finishing his self-elegies, Henry sees completion of his epic as a Herculean labor: “he gave himself to end a labour.”391 Henry is a self-conscious artist who tries to offer guidance and challenge to his audience, rememberʊ“These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort.” In Song 130, written on 10 July 1966, Berryman creates an odd reversal of roles—his persona is looking at the poet and offering sympathy for the state he is in: I saw my fearful friend, his nerves are bad ... our book is coming out in paperback, Henry has not ceased loving but wishes all that blood would flow away leaving his friend crisp, ready for all in the new world O.

Henry knows John Berryman is not well and wishes he could overcome his current troubles and “spring up & go.392 The art is sustaining Berryman: his own creation offers solace and encouragement. In Song 382, Henry offers funeral directions, or at least last wishes. A Beatnik/Hippie “chic” dancing with great abandon at his funeral would move “the terrible gay / occasion” to its Yeatsian end as the dancer “dances Henry away.”393 In this dance into oblivion, Henry’s fear of death will be swept away, even if his argument with God may only be beginning. In an unpublished Dream Song, Berryman outlines Henry’s pride in his poetic achievement and his view of his death, his funeral, his grave, his God: 390

Dream Songs, 327. Ibid., 401. 392 Ibid., 147. 393 Ibid., 404. 391

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By eulogizing himself, Berryman’s Henry has exposed his deepest fears and longings for acceptance. He has shown what it means to be human in an age of anxiety that threatens to become an age of insignificance.

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CHAPTER 5: HENRY’S UNEASY REST In his 1969 acceptance speech for the National Book Award for Poetry, Berryman explained the aim of The Dream Songs as “the reproduction or invention of the motions of a human personality, free and determined....”394 The contradiction of “free” and “determined” is the unstable reconciliation of the modern desire to believe human thought is original and autonomous and the fear that determining forces (religion, id/ego/superego, DNA, environment) shape that thought and one’s subsequent destiny. This reconciliation is often hostile and plastic. Berryman noted in 1970, “Henry to some extent was in the situation that we are all in in actual life—namely, he didn’t know and I don’t know what the bloody fucking hell was going to happen next.”395 Over the length of the poem, Henry has become as complex, realistic, inconsistent, and vulnerable as any person one meets on the street. This fusion of Berryman’s will and Henry’s personality with the chaos of life’s chance direction creates a persona who is deeply missed when his song is over. Similar to the reader’s reaction to leaving the main character in a psychological novel, Henry’s Songs have created so striking a character that he assumes a reality beyond the page. Henry has provided the reader with excitement, clever word play, honest wrestling with mortality, and ultimately, guidance in this tricky modern world. As a literary character, Henry has earned his place in the American poetic consciousness. Malachy Walsh writes, It is a mistake to identify personality with character. Character is an attribute of human essence: it is permanent, underlies the substance of action; and it is both intense and definitive. A man has character but he puts on a personality. Where character is the structure of the self, personality is the ability to reveal the self in all its many facets. 394 John Berryman, National Book Award Acceptance Speech, National Book Foundation, 1969. 395 Paris Review, 191.

146

Berryman’s Henry Personality is the ability to communicate a person or “to come across.”396

Berryman’s success lies in his painstaking effort to develop this personality. Henry’s personality is forceful, arrogant, gentle, dolorous, humorous, introspective, and naked. By the end of The Dream Songs, the reader can predict how Henry would act or react in most human situations. This is not to say that Henry can’t change or surprise himself and his readers, it’s just that we know Henry so intimately. Berryman’s genius is further seen in the creation of the interlocutor, who is both a guide to Henry and inside of Henry. The latter point suggests the possibilities for not only unreliability but a skewing of reality, a twisting that Henry is victim to as life asks him to see what is real while living within that reality. This wild and novel vantage point forces the reader to separate the interlocutor from Henry while all the time knowing that Henry provides some shape to the interlocutor’s thoughts. Possibly this is some of what Berryman was getting at when he wrote his mother in 1958, I have been writing brilliantly. I’ll show you next weekend. I have a style now pared straight to the bone and can make the reader’s nerves jump by moving my little finger.397

This equation is further complicated by the relationship between Berryman and Henry. Just who is in control, Berryman or Henry, is not always clearly discernable. The resulting effect is a testament to the vitality of Berryman’s creation in portraying human complexity. In Song 7, Henry, who has been introspectively examining himself and his actions since Song 1’s opening line, continues the self examination with mockery, insincerity, and honesty, all with a desire to know or be open about his true self and his life. Henry explains, “Henry is old, old ... / Now Henry is unmistakably a Big One. / Fúnnee; he don’t féel so. / He just stuck around.”398 Henry did stick around; through his Songs and because of his Songs, he survived.

396

Malachy Walsh, “John Berryman: A Novel Interpretation,” View Point (Georgetown University), X (Spring 1969), 5. 397 Quoted in Kelly, 319. 398 Dream Songs, 9.

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In Song 356, Henry lets loose a volley of emotion as his personality, once again, in all its contradictions and desires is “pried / open for all the world to see”:399 With fried excitement he looked across at life wondering if he could bear it more, wondering, in the middle of a short war with his wife, deep in the middle, in short, of a war, he couldn’t say whether to sing further or seal his lonely throat, give himself up. Tomorrow is his birthday, makes you think. The London TLS are mounting só much of him he could scream. There was a time he marched from dream to dream but he seems to be out of ink, he seems to be out of everything again save whiskey & cigarettes, both bad for him. He clapped both hands to both ears and resigned from the ranks of giving men. In a minute now he’ll wake, distinct & grim. I’m not, he cried, what I appears.400

Henry’s act is to sing his Songs. But other than his Songs, when has Henry been in the “ranks of giving men”? Here is Henry in his true realm: at war with one dearest to him, ambivalent about his success and the subsequent fame, aware of his bad habits, and fearful of the loss of his Muse’s guidance and his own lack of manhood. The Song’s final line deals with this latter point as it echoes the ending of “The Ball Poem”: “under the water / or whistling, I am not a little boy.”401 This defiance is at the core of Henry’s struggle: he wants to prove that he has gone beyond that character-defining time when, still a boy, he was left without a father, but he is never sure. Shifting through the life of his dead father, Henry was never able to find a model of how to be a man.

399

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 378. 401 Berryman, Dispossessed, 14. 400

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Henry’s wounded psyche requires an epic poem to work toward a healing. In his epic he struggles not only with loss but with the creator of that loss, God. As noted above, in “Henry’s Programme for God” (Song 238), Henry presents the question of humanity’s proper response to God as “Our only resource is bleak denial or / anti-potent rage, / both have been tried by our wisest.”402 The adjectives “bleak” and “anti-potent” suggest that there may be another response to God that Henry senses but is not yet able to articulate. In Song 194, Henry refers to God twice as “Dr God”; this is an appeal to a healing deity. Possibly what Henry wants is what Berryman came to believe a few years after The Dream Songs was finished; Berryman talked of discovering a God of rescue. He saves men from their situations, off and on during life’s pilgrimage....”403 In that rescue Henry may finally be relieved of the burden of his father’s suicide and given direction in his own search for manhood. In “Ode: To That Boring Shit James Thomson, Seasonal” (Song 231), Henry states what he has tried to do in his Songs and what has hampered him from success: Now gently rail on Henry Pussycat, for he did bad, and punisht he must be, by them & by them, & by all. He’ll lose his place (in the book) and each thing that ever he valued. He’ll lose his minstrelsy. Vainly will topics call for cunning putting to who smashed his lyre, drowned his harmonica, covered with foes, and coughed with horror, & gave uts.404

Henry, always self-conscious, is aware of his craft, which generates from a “lyre,” a reference to both Homer and the British Romantic poets. The lyre is replaced by the “harmonica,” a more modern instrument. But even that is silenced. By listening to Henry, many readers find guidance on how to live: Henry and his creator live on the edge of deep feeling and awareness of the genuine starkness of the 402

Dream Songs, 257. Paris Review, 203-204. 404 Dream Songs, 250. 403

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human condition. Critics such a Conarroe often identify Henry’s persona as like their own—white male, middle-aged readers. They find solace as Henry’s sings them through life’s temptations and pitfalls: It is because such a reader, secure in the quiet of his home, can get outside by an act of spiritual migration (rather than by leaping from a bridge) that this dangerous book is ultimately liberating and even protective. Our lives are all potentially disastrous, and artists like Berryman and Lowell who live perilously close to the abyss make it possible for us to journey over our threatening terrain, to experience its terror, and to return intact. Literature does not tell us anything; it permits us to participate in a life, to share an angle of vision, and often to make some crucial personal discoveries. In courting certain kinds of disaster, Henry spares us the necessity of doing so for ourselves, overpowering as the attractions sometimes are.405

Conarroe sees the Songs as a kind of guidebook for moderns, but the poem’s use of literary traditions is an effort to extend the poem’s meaning beyond an audience of white, middle-aged males. By drawing from Homer, Virgil, and Dante, Berryman has created a foundation for his epic to view modern life through the eyes of both our literary and philosophical forebears. Henry’s awareness of those traditions offers strategies for understanding the twentieth century, but Henry knows all too well that his time calls for new understandings of human existence. So he moves from Tennyson to Eliot, via Whitman. By drawing from the celebrated Moderns, Henry’s long poem tries to uncover the proper stance for living life in this age of uncertainty. These traditions are embedded in the text of the Songs, thus yielding a universal appeal to the expression and comprehension of the human struggle. The Songs’ reliance on and stretching of the elegiac tradition provides the reader with guidance in the struggle with mortality. Henry-poet’s soul is acutely aware of mortal human existence; his elegies to victims of suicide, along with his own suicidal longings, steer the elegy in directions fitting the nagging doubt of the existential void. “Death has no privileged import we can know in advance: to prevail over superannuated beliefs, its meaning must be tested and posited fresh in each new elegy.”406 Yet by the act of articulation, Henry has not given up on life; he is still looking for the “secrets, 405 406

Conarroe, 96. Shaw, 8.

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secrets, I may yet– / hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme– / come on to understand.”407 Ultimately, the overriding elegiac tone of the poem does “terrify & comfort” the reader. The Dream Songs ended with Henry achieving a resolution of acceptance with his father’s death and his current life as a father and a husband. Many critics, past and present, have missed the significance of the climax in the penultimate Dream Song and the rich dénouement of calm acceptance in the final Dream Song as the two concluding Songs unify the elegiac foundation of the poem. Henry allows himself a calm resignation to life: “Fall comes to us as a prize / to rouse us toward our fate.”408 Henry is now prepared to accept that after the fall, winter’s death will be upon him, and he will awaken (“rouse”) to his fate. Remember, the Song is set during Thanksgiving. His great fear of death has gradually been replaced by an acceptance that grew from allowing his personal pain and hurt over his father’s death to be expressed. As noted earlier, this Song was written three years (25 November 1965) before the finish of The Dream Songs, affording the poet time to shape and observe the architecture of the poem’s structure as it grew to completion. (In one draft the title of the Song is typed in boldface: The Last Dream Song: 161.) As late as the writing of Recovery, Berryman is still wrenching over his father’s death and its significance to his whole life409, so maybe art is only a momentary stay against confusion, but for Henry, whom we must leave when his Songs are sung, that will suffice. Of course, Henry’s voice is so ingrained in Berryman’s verse it is not surprising we hear his notes of woe, doubt, self pity, and desire to know death’s answers in Berryman’s late poems. Berryman would take his final two volumes of poetry to steer toward an acceptance of God and a purposeful existence. In Love & Fame Berryman writes his “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” in which the doubting Thomas of twentieth-century thought argues himself back to the Lord’s flock. These arguments are revisited in many of the poems in his final volume Delusions,Etc. “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” starts on a Hopkinsesque note, Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, inimitable contriver, 407

Dream Songs, 178. Ibid., 407. 409 Berryman, Recovery, 199. 408

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endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon, thank you for such at it is my gift.410

In an earlier draft Berryman had “father” first, then “author” crossed out in choosing to go with “craftsman.” In the tenth Address, Berryman changes “author” again choosing “limner” instead, a word further implying craft.

410

Berryman, Love & Fame, 85.

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154

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These conscious editing decisions reflect Berryman’s desire to praise God on what he considers the highest level—His poetics. Berryman’s language here is odd in its linguistic interminglings and seemingly anti-High Modernism, but it is one of crafted precision that still contains the quality of style he’d achieved when the Dream Songs were flowing out: a language “pared straight to the bone” containing calculation that truly does “make the reader’s nerves jump by moving my little finger.”411 Yet this first Address cannot sustain an unwavering faith and close connection with a Christian God; the speaker must qualify any overt expression of faith: “I have no idea whether we live again. / It doesn’t seem likely / from either the scientific or the philosophical point of view / but certainly all things are possible to you.”412 The second Address provides one more re-statement of the basic tenets behind twentieth-century existentialism: 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,–

Berryman then repeats his favorite quotation from the poet Ralph Hodgson, the same man who is gently praised in the final Dream Song: “’I don’t try to reconcile anything’ said the poet at eighty, / ‘This is a damned strange world.’” This Address ends with Berryman asking for his children to be spared God’s eventual reckoning with this world even as he searches for his belief: “One sudden Coming? Many so believe. / So not, without knowing anything, do I.”413 The next Address asks for guidance from the “sole watchman of the wide & single stars” as the speaker petitions the Lord: “grace soften my dreams”; this beautiful phrase was originally “tranquilize my dreams.”414 411

Quoted in Kelly, 319. Berryman, Love & Fame, 85. 413 Ibid., 87. 414 Ibid., 88. 412

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The speaker of the poem does not want to be oblivious to his reality or his dreams, just comforted in them. In the fourth Address, the speaker experiences his adult conversion: “I altered then for good, to become yours.”415 He reiterates this moment in the tenth Address: . . . Limner of the clouds up their phantastic guesses. I am afraid, I never until now confessed.416

Earlier, in the eighth Address, the speaker worked toward genuine humility (never Henry’s strong suit), which harkens back to the Barabbas story: “I do not understand; but I believe. / Jonquils respond with wit to the teasing breeze.”417 Berryman’s style and structure allow him to stick in such a gorgeous, poetic sentence right next to his simplistic right-to-the-point lines that make up much of the poetry of his last two volumes. Even the fragrant and ornamental jonquils, one of nature’s gems, must react cleverly to the living world. But such language is grown through the poet’s craft; an earlier version of this line offered the less interesting: “Jonquils respond with wit to the light breeze.” In the second Address, the earlier draft provides an even more dramatic example: “candelabra buds sticky in Spring” was originally “sweet softness of a summer breeze.”

415

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 95. 417 Ibid., 93. 416

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Ernest C. Stefanik sees Love & Fame not as a collection of lyric poems but as a narrative that traces the speaker’s quest for God and for self. Stefanik goes on to argue that Love & Fame moves from the remembrance of the speaker’s private school and college days of sex and existential questioning toward a mature and clear acceptance of a Christian God’s place in an individual’s life: “Through his suffering and courage both as ragged hero and as a foolish victim, he [the speaker of the poems] elicits and enlists the reader’s sympathies as he

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reconstructs his past, confronts the unknowable in a meaningless world, and finally adopts a posture of Christian acceptance.”418 But the Eleven Addresses end with a number of disturbing thoughts on the speaker’s road to salvation. The final stanza of the tenth Address harkens to the fierce tirade of the octet in Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”: Oil all my turbulence as at Thy dictation I sweat out my wayward works. Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ. Let me lie down exhausted, content with that.419

And the eleventh Address starts with praise toward an early Christian martyr, Germanicus, and a loyal servant, “Polycarp, John’s pupil, facing the fire,” and ends with the speaker asking for grace at the ultimate moment of life: Make too me acceptable at the end of time in my degree, which then Thou wilt award. Cancer, senility, mania, I pray I may be ready with my witness.420

At the end of “In & Out,” the speaker signs a nasty note to a Mr. Creeley (Robert?), whose poems are dull. Of course, this speaker, who is intimately related to Henry, knows full well his end will come at the hand of mania. And his faith is not so much rock solid as searching for a notch to get a toehold. Stefanik sees a much clearer profession of faith: Rising from the dark world of self in which he [Berryman] learned the futility of seeking affirmation or identity in shallow concepts of love and fame, the poet enters into a life of hope and faith through resignation of his will. The flight from memory halted and the inner conflicts confronted, Berryman is prepared to make the climatic

418

Ernest C. Stefanik, Jr., “A Cursing Glory: John Berryman’s Love & Fame,” in Modern Critical Views: John Berryman, ed. Harold Bloom, New York, 1989, 35. 419 Berryman, Love & Fame, 95. 420 Ibid., 96.

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statement of the sequence, to take Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, in “The Eleven Addresses to the Lord.”421

This moving on is only possible after Henry has sung his Song and thereby faced some of his deep-seated sense of loss and inadequacy. Berryman was always searching for love and for fame; in “My Special Fate” he remembers in his early college days when he, “dreamt at times in those days of my name / blown by adoring winds all over.”422 Not only does he want love and fame, he wants to be adored. The neediness of his desire for adoration is witnessed in the unrealistic and delusional views he holds of love and of fame: the former as sexual conquest and the latter as being considered the number one poet, in all the American absurdity of such a listing, in a generation of very competitive poets. “I had, from my beginning, to adore heroes ... / How I maneuvered in my mind their roles / of administration for the modern soul / in English, now one, now ahead another.”423 After Frost’s death, Berryman saw himself and his generation in line for the top spot. Like Henry, at times, Berryman’s poetic speaker knows the false or empty nature of his quests, yet he can’t stop the need inside himself that keeps sending him down hollow paths. In “The Search,” which begins part three of Love & Fame, the speaker maps out his intellectual religious journey; later, in a stanza in “Despair,” he offers his typical combination of serious thought and sex: I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer. I wrote: ‘There may be horribles.’ I increase that. (I think she took her little breasts away.)

The poem ends with a call for God’s help without any intellectual strings attached: “Utter, His Father, one word.”424 Berryman would write one more serious book to continue his journey beyond self. Delusion, Etc., Berryman’s posthumous last book of poems has for one of its epigraphs: “On parle toujours de ‘l’art réligieux’. L’art est réligieux.” The poet’s new found faith is maturing as witnessed by the speaker of “The Facts & Issues”: 421

Stefanik, “A Cursing Glory,” 44. Berryman, Love & Fame, 12. 423 Ibid., 25. 424 Ibid., 72. 422

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Thank heavens millions agree with me, or mostly do, and have done ages of our human time, among whom were & still are some very sharp cookies. ... I regard the boys who don’t buy this as deluded. Of course they regard me no doubt as deluded. Okay with me! And not the hell with them at all—no!—I feel dubious on Hell— It’s here, all right, but elsewhere, after? Screw that, I feel pretty sure that evil simply ends for the doer (having wiped him out, by the way, usually) where good goes on ...425

The poem goes on to honor Christ’s sacrifice on a personal level but ends with the speaker exhausted and wanting to be done with this world. And not unlike Henry, the speaker swings back and forth between elation and a despair where the above hopefulness seems a distant idea: I am so happy I could scream! It’s enough! I can’t BEAR ANY MORE. Let this be it. I’ve had it. I can’t wait.426

The ambiguity of the final line, that the speaker cannot wait for salvation or that the speaker cannot wait for a natural death, offers a troubling view of a man on the edge: one who has contemplated suicide, poetically and hence publicly, for the last thirty years, is struggling with sobriety, is ravaged from drink and loss, and longs for an end to the human sorrow. The speaker expresses an ironic and cautionary hopefulness that could only come from the creator of Henry once he accepted that the end of his theological quest rests in a simple faith. In “Matins” he summarizes: However, lo, across what wilderness in vincible ignorance past forty years lost to (as now I see) Your sorrowing I strayed abhorrent, blazing with my Self.427 425 426

Berryman, Delusions, 68. Ibid., 69.

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He’s not invincible but rather “vincible”; Berryman’s final work is seeped in a new quality not seen in his previous poems: humility. In the end Berryman is neither an existentialist nor a comfortable Catholic. Like Father Hopkins, he can see God in nature, “You certainly do not as I exist, / impersonating as well the meteorite / & flaring in your sun your waterfall / or blind in caves pallid fishes,”428 but cannot develop a New Testament faith of joy; he can only piece together a desperate faith of salvation. Shaw broadly argues that “As opposed to that absurd faith that consists in not thinking at all about faith, but in handing ourselves over in blind confidence to a power whose secrets are inscrutable, only a faith based upon uncertainty can become a form of saving faith.”429 Still wishing for the “middle ground between things and the soul / or if the sky resembled more the sea,” Berryman remains a Barabbas. With or without Henry, Berryman’s learned and ceaseless search for life’s comfort and meaning, as documented in his public poems, makes his uncertain conversion all the more poignant given his rocky journey. Henry is a puppet, and Berryman is a puppeteer. Berryman said, 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.... He only does what I make him do.430

While Henry is a character in American literature who deserves recognition for his wit and his open struggle with himself and fate, Berryman as active and vocal creator is always present. And when life imitates art, Berryman becomes Henry, and Henry pulls the strings. Edward Mendelson, in a 1972 article, writes, Finally the survivals gave out. Most of this essay had been written when the news finally came that the body of John Berryman had been found on the bank of the Mississippi River near the campus of the University of Minnesota. Berryman had walked to the railing of 427

Ibid., 4. Berryman, Love & Fame, 94. 429 Shaw, 7. 430 Paris Review, 193. 428

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Berryman’s Henry the bridge, waved to a passerby, and stepped off. Whatever the pressures and necessities may have been to which Berryman finally yielded, we probably have no right to know them. But his wave of farewell, so unlikely in those circumstances, was a thoroughly public gesture: Henry’s last.431

Henry’s suicidal tendencies were Berryman’s. The Songs had prepared and paved the way for the artist’s and his persona’s last act. The web of loss that was spun upon the first “departure” continued to trap Henry until he stopped his song. But the courage to sing, and the depth and breadth of the melodies, combined with the achievement of a separate peace with his initial loss, makes Henry’s Dream Songs Berryman’s grand opus to the human condition in the modern age.

431

Edward Mendelson, “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs,” in Modern Critical Views, ed. Bloom, 69.

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Baechler, Lea, “John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and the Elegy,” Columbia History Of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini, New York: Columbia UP, 1993: 605-30. Bellow, Saul, Humboldt’s Gift, New York: Viking, 1975. ʊ, Letter to the author, 21 December 1998. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, New York: Schocken, 1968. Blackmur, R.P., The Legacy of R. P. Blackmur: Essays, Memoirs, Texts, eds. Edward T. Cone, Joseph Frank and Edmund Keeley, New York: Ecco, 1987. Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views: John Berryman, New York: Chelsea, 1989. Bowra, C.M., “Some Characteristics of Literary Epics,” in Commanger, 53-61. Brodsky, Joseph., Less Than One: Selected Essays, New York: Farrar, 1986. Browning, Robert., The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning: Dramatic Lyrics, XI, New York: Houghton, 1899. ʊ. Poems of Robert Browning, ed. Donald Smalley, Riverside Editions. Boston: Houghton, 1956. Commanger, Steele, ed., Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1966. Conarroe, Joel, John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Crunden, Robert M., American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism 1885-1917, New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Dante, Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi, New York: Norton, 1970. Davis, Kathe, “The Li(v)es of the Poet,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 30 (1984): 46-68. Davison, Peter. “The Clouded Miracles of John Berryman,” Book Guide. De Rougemont, Dennis, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Dictionary of American Slang, eds. Howard Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960. Djos, Matts, “John Berryman’s Testimony of Alcoholism: Through the Looking Glass of Poetry and the Henry Persona,” in The Languages of Addiction, eds Jane Lilienfeld and Jeffory Oxford, New York: St. Martin’s, 1999,193-203. Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays, London: Faber, 1932. Ellis, Virginia Ridley, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mystery, Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1991. Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, New York: Vintage, 1952.

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Lipking, Lawrence, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Lowell, Robert, Day by Day, New York: Farrar, 1973. —, Selected Poems, New York: Farrar, 1977. Major, Clarence, Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, New York: International, 1970. Mancini, Joseph, Jr., “‘Freud Was Some Wrong About Dreams’: Playing the Parts Versus Saying the Parts in John Berryman’s Dream Songs,” Psychocultural Review, II (1978): 259-274. Mariani, Paul, “The Consoling, Terrifying Presence of Hopkins,” Renascence, 42.1-2 (Fall 1989/Winter 1990): 13-20. ʊ, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, New York: Paragon, 1992. ʊ, “The Unshapeable Shock Night: Pain, Suffering, and the Redemptive Imagination,” America, (20 February 1999): 16-21. ʊ, A Usable Past: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Boston: U of Mass. P, 1984. Mendelson, Edward, “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs,” in Bloom. 53-69. Miller, J. Hillis, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. Miller, James E., Jr., The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman’s Legacy in the Personal Epic, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979. Mozart, W.A., Don Giovanni, Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, New York: G. Schirmer, 1961. O’Hara, Frank, Lunch Poems, San Francisco: City Lights, 1964. Pearce, Roy Harvey, “Toward an American Epic,” Parnassus Revisited: Modern Critical Essays on the Epic Tradition, ed. Anthony C. Yu, Chicago: American Library, 1973: 342-54. Ramazani, Jahan, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Reynolds, Michael, The 1930s, New York: Norton, 1992. ʊ, The Homecoming, New York: Norton, 1997. ʊ, The Young Hemingway, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Rich, Adrienne, “Mr. Bones, He Lives,” The Nation, (25 May 1964): 538, 540. Sacks, Peter, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Seidel, Michael, and Edward Mendelsen, eds., Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Tradition, New Haven: Yale Press, 1977. Schreiner, Olive, The Story of an African Farm, London: Collins, 1883. Shaw, W. David, Elegy & Paradox: Testing the Conventions, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

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Simpson, Eileen, Poets in Their Youth, New York: Random House, 1982. Slavitt, David R., “Deep Soundings and Surface Noises,” Herald Tribune Book Week, (10 May 1964): 13-14. Snodgrass, W.D., “Dabbling in Corruption,” The Paris Review, 130 (Winter 1995): 201-213. ʊ, In Conversation with Philip Hoy: Between The Lines, London: Ipswich Book Co., 1998. ʊ, To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry, Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2002. ʊ, “Whitman’s Selfsong,” The Southern Review, 32.3 (Summer 1996): 572-602. Sprinker, Michael, “A Counterpoint to Dissonance”: The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. Stefanik, Ernest C. Jr., “A Cursing Glory: John Berryman’s Love & Fame,” in Bloom, 35-48. ʊ, John Berryman: A Descriptive Bibliography, Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1974. Stevens, Wallace, Harmonium, New York: Knopf, 1923. Tennyson, Alfred Lord, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longmans, 1969. Thompson, David, Dante’s Epic Journey’s, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Tillyard, E.M.W., The English Epic and Its Background, London: Chatto and Windus, 1954. Travisano, Thomas, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999. Vonnegut, Kurt, Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons (Opinions), New York: Delacorte, 1974. Walsh, Malachy, “John Berryman: A Novel Interpretation,” View Point (Georgetown University), X (Spring 1969): 5-21. Weiser, David K., “Berryman’s Sonnets: In and Out of the Tradition,” American Literature, 55.3 (Oct. 1983): 388-404. Young, Philip, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966. Zeigler, Melissa Fran, “Lilacs Out of the Dead Land”: Changes in the Modern Elegy, Diss. Cornell University, 1986.

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Index

Achilles, 13, 71 Allen, Ethan, 74 Alvarez, A., 141 Arpin, Gary Q., 27, 33, 127, 128, 129 Ashby, Hal, 131 Atlas, James, 33, 106 Auden, W.H., 90, 97, 98 Baechler, Lea, 84 Barabbas, 130-31, 158, 165 Bellow, Saul, 106, 107, 110, 111; Humboldt's Gift, 11012 Berryman, Jill, 63, 65, 67, 78; Letters to Berryman, 65, 66, 67-69, Berryman, John, alcoholism, 14; born, 63; education, 70; father's death, 63-69; henry's naming, xii; letters to Milt Halliday, 56, 127-28; letters to mother, 7, 67, 78, 128, 146, 155; marriages, 70; on suicide, 63; National Book Award speech, 145; WORKS: 77Dream Songs, 3, 6, 76, 77, 85, 86, 122; "The Ball Poem", 15, 17, 80, 107, 147; Collected Poems: 1937-1971, 1,71; Delusions, Etc, 127, 133, 150, 164; "Despair", 163; Dispossessed, 18, 80; The Dream Songs, xi, 1, 3, 16, 52, 54, 63, 69, 80, 127, 145, 150, 166; as dramatic monologue, 11-12; early

criticism, 2-3; as epic, 13, 18-29; epic conventions, 3134; epic quest, 73, 127; extended sonnet, 35-37; Henry's interlocutor, 45-51, 59, 73, 77, 78, 146; Henry's sexuality, 53-62; lust, 14; Opus Posthumous section, 13, 77, 103, 127, 139-40; "Drunks", 80; "Eleven Addresses to the Lord", 15, 127, 136, 150, 158, 163; "The Facts & Issues", 16364; "For His Marriage", 15; The Freedom of the Poet, 1n; His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, xii, 6, 33, 83, 85, 166; Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, 122; Love & Fame, 15, 103, 127, 136, 150, 161, 163, 166; "Matin", 164; The Monk introduction, xi; "My Special Fate", 163; "Prufrock's Dilemma", 32; Recovery, 136; The Search", 163; "'Song of Myself': Intention and Substance", 1; "Sonnets for Chris", 60 Berryman, John Angus McAlpin, 65, 70 Berryman, Martha, 85-86; Little Twiss, 26, 85-86 Bishop, Elizabeth, 130 Blackmur, R.P., 2, 95, 113, 123 Blake, William, 62 Bogart, Humphrey, 39 Bowra, C.M., 19

174

Berryman’s Henry

Bridges, Robert, 37 Brodsky, Joseph, 15 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 95; "Of Robert Frost", 95 Browning, Robert, 11-12; Dramatic Lyrics, 11 Campbell, Bhain, 71, 113 Conarroe, Joel , 33, 39, 149 Crane, Stephen, 77, 118; The Red Badge of Courage, xii Creeley, Robert, 162 Crunden, Robert M., 45 Dante, 13, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 139, 149 Darwin, Charles, 32, 82, 130 Davis, Kathe, 64 Davison, Peter, 2 De Rougemont, Denis, 54 Djos, Matt, 14 Don Giovanni, 106 Donahue, Kate, 82 Dryden, John, 109 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 3 Eliot, T.S., 12, 70, 82, 113, 115, 123, 131, 149; Prufrock, 12 Ellis, Virginia Ridley, 36 Ellison, Ralph , 45, 48; Invisible Man, 45, 48; Shadow and Act, 48 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 131 Faulkner, William, 95

FitzGerald, Edward, 134; The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 134-35 Freud, Sigmund, xii, 16-17, 32, 78, 82, 155 Frost, Robert, 70, 90-92, 9596, 100, 163 Fussell, Paul, 22 Gelpi, Albert, 123 Ginsberg, Allen, 108 Giroux, Robert, 63, 66, 67 Gustavvson, Bo, 1 Haffenden, John, 75, 83 Halliday, E.M., 56, 127 Harold and Maude, 131 Hedda Gabler, 85 Heidegger, Martin, 36 Hemingway, Clarence, 117, 119 Hemingway, Ernest, 95, 117, 122; A Farewell to Arms, xii, 121; "Fathers and Sons", 118-21; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 121; "Indian Camp", 121 Hemingway, Grace Hall, 119; letter to Ernest, 120 Hickey, Dona, 35 Hirsch, Edward, 100 Hitler, Adolph, 36, 82 Hodgson, Ralph, 155 Holiday, Billie, 109 Homer, 13, 20, 23, 24, 25, 28, 89, 148, 149 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 29, 33, 36, 38, 39, 52, 113, 122, 129, 132, 135, 150, 162, 165; sprung rhythm, 37-38;

Index

"The Wreck of the Deutschland", 133 Horace, 90 Howe, Elisabeth A., 11 Hyde, Lewis, 14 Jarrell, Randall, 10, 44, 70, 89, 103-106, 115, 123, 139; Poetry and the Ages, 103 Joyce, James, 3, 23, 28, 106, 112; Dubliners, 107; Finnegans Wake, 107; Ulysses, 112-13 Kafka, Franz, 20 Keats, John, 29, 74 Kelly, Richard J., 7n, 65, 67 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 113 Kerouac, Jack, 95 Kierkegaard, Søren, 163 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 48 Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth, 17 Lagerkvist, Pär , 127; Barabbas, 127 Laughlin, James, 110 Lawler, Traugott, 83-84 Lawrence, D.H., 9 Levertov, Denise, 123 Linebarger, J.M., 35 Lipking, Lawrence, 90, 97 Lowell, Robert, 70, 95, 115, 123, 124, 125, 130, 149; Day By Day, 124; "For John Berryman", 124; "Robert Frost", 95 MacDonald, Dwight, 111 MacNeice, Loius, 113

175

Mancini, Joseph, Jr., xiv Mariani, Paul, vii, 29, 36, 52, 64, 82 Mendelson, Edward, 165-66 Meredith, William, 133 Miller, J. Hillis, 19, 22, 37 Miller, James E, Jr., 1, 19 Milton, John, 16, 17, 29, 112; "Lycidas", 112 Mr Bones, 3, 45, 57, 78

Nation, Carry, 15 Native Son, 48 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36 O’Hara, Frank, 109 Odysseus, 13, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 106, 139 Olson, Charles, 123 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 22 Perls, Frederick S., xiv Plath, Sylvia, 47, 113, 115 Pound, Ezra, 35, 70, 113, 115, 122 Ramazani, Jahan, 17-18, 84, 90, 100, 112 Reynolds, Michael, 119, 121 Rich, Adrienne, 3, 70 Roethke, Theodore, 70, 101102, 115, 123, 129; "I Knew a Woman", 101; "My Papa's Waltz", 101 Sacks, Peter M., 12, 18, 78-79, 90, 109 Saint Teresa, 68

176

Berryman’s Henry

Sartre, John Paul, 82 Schreiner, Olive, 34 Schwartz, Delmore, 18, 38, 70, 100, 106-12, 123, 136, 140; "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", 109; In Dreams Begin Responsiblities, 110 Shaw, David W.,16, 165 Simpson, Eileen, 15, 64, 71, 78, 82 Skau, Michael, 14 Slavitt, David R., 2 Smalley, Donald, 11 Smith, John Allyn, 63, 66,67, 71 Snodgrass, W.D. , 3, 43, 62, 95 Sprinker, Michael, 37 Stefanik, Ernest C, Jr., 161-62 Stevens, Wallace, 97, 99-100; "The Emperor of Ice Cream", 97; "The Snow Man", 100; "Sunday Morning", 100 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 13, 16, 18, 24, 26, 149 Theocritus, 16 Thomas, Dylan, 70, 113, 150 Thornbury, Charles, 139

Tillyard, E.M.W., 31 Travisano, Tom, 69, 129-30 Twain, Mark, 118; Huck Finn, 118 Ulam, Stanislaw, 43 Van Doren, Mark, 70 Virgil, 13, 20, 23, 28, 83, 89, 149; Aeneid, 20, 83, 109, 169 Vonnegut, Kurt, 22 Walsh, Malachy, 145-46 Weiser, David K., 39 Whitman, Walt, 1, 9, 12, 13, 19, 131, 141, 149; "Song of Myself", 109 Williams, William Carlos, 96, 108, 141; Paterson, 96 Winters, Yvor, 113 Yeats, W.B., 12, 25, 35, 36, 90, 97, 98, 113, 115, 122 Young, Philip, 118, 119, 121 Zeiger, Melissa Fran, 79, 139