The Heart Is Strange (2 page)

To toast Berryman on his one hundredth birthday, Farrar, Straus and Giroux are reissuing his three major collections of poetry:
Berryman’s Sonnets
,
77 Dream Songs
, and the complete cycle of 385 Dream Songs. Each has a new introduction by a poet: April Bernard, Henri Cole, and Michael Hofmann. But these three collections are not all of Berryman’s published poetry. This New Selected volume includes generous coverage of Berryman’s other poetry: from his first collection,
The Dispossessed
(1948); the complete “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1953), which is his masterpiece, in the old-fashioned sense of the word—the early work that proves an apprentice is now a master of his chosen form; and from the moving two late collections,
Love & Fame
(1970) and
Delusions, Etc.
(1972). This volume also includes poems from the smaller collections published in Berryman’s lifetime, and for these I gratefully follow the texts established by Charles Thornbury in his
John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937–1971
(1989), with the exceptions explained below. Thornbury includes only verse selected and arranged for publication by Berryman personally: he leaves out, for example, the poems written very late in Berryman’s life and collected after his death by John Haffenden in
Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972
(1977). I have included poems from this volume among the selection in order to give as broad a sample as possible.

In addition to Berryman’s poetry published as collections, this New Selected volume includes also two poems by Berryman that have not previously appeared among his published poetry. The first, called “The Cage,” appeared in
Poetry
magazine in January 1950; the second, “Mr. Pou & the Alphabet,” was published for the first time in Richard J. Kelley’s edition of Berryman’s letters to his mother,
We Dream of Honour
(1988). These show us two different sides of Berryman.

Berryman went twice to visit Ezra Pound while he was being held at Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a mental hospital just outside Washington, DC. The first time, Berryman went with Robert Lowell, who was then Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, on February 14, 1948. The second time, Berryman went alone: it was November 3, 1948, and Berryman records in his notes that he wished Pound a happy birthday, which had been three days before. Berryman was in 1948 at work on a selected edition of Pound’s poems for New Directions publishers, and he wrote “The Cage” in response to the story Pound told him at the hospital. Pound recounted how he was captured at the end of the war in Italy, and then kept by the Americans, and Berryman composes the poem directly from the phrases Pound uses. Here we see Berryman as a young poet, working by re-creating the words of an older poet: following his predecessors but also setting himself apart.

Berryman’s son, Paul, was born in March 1957, and the following year his wife, Ann, left him, taking their son with her. Berryman remarried in the fall of 1961, and that Christmas he wrote a poem for his separated son. It was called “Mr. Pou & the Alphabet,” and it is an alphabet poem. It is tender and playful, but also a little somber. “A is for
awful
, which things are,” it begins, and “B is for
bear
them, well as we can.” This is an older Berryman, one worn down by the world but still enduring, and one who loved his children, who are an important presence in his poetry. The final phrase of the last of the Dream Songs is simply “my heavy daughter,” and among his papers at his death was the opening for a new long poem he hoped to write, on his three children and their futures.

The New Selected volume includes also a poem called “The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers,” which was published in the first edition of
Love & Fame
(1970) but removed by Berryman from the second (and subsequent) editions, and which does not appear in the
Collected Poems
. As Charles Thornbury explains,
Love & Fame
received negative reviews upon publication, and Berryman immediately asked his editor to delete six poems. Three of these described Berryman’s youthful love affairs, in sexually explicit detail; and three treat contemporary political controversies. The “Minnesota 8” were a group of anti–Vietnam War protesters who were arrested in July 1970 when they attempted to break into government offices with the intention of destroying draft records. Berryman’s poem was first published in the local newspapers later that month, and it shows—unusually and revealingly—the poet as a direct commentator on his political moment.

Any selection implies an interpretation. Berryman has long been seen—and often dismissed—as a merely “confessional” poet, and while the urge to narrate his own collapses was certainly a motor for him, he is also a poet of many more voices than this. Confession, of course, has a religious origin, and Berryman was a powerful devotional poet. This New Selected includes his two cycles of liturgical verse, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” and “Opus Dei,” in full. While he wrote these late in his career, the devotional impulse runs throughout his works. “What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be,” he writes in the first Dream Song, and the struggle to make sense of an apparently cruel world is one strand among these astonishingly rich works. I have hoped, in my selection, to show Berryman’s development as a poet, which was a movement through styles and forms. This introduction traces some key concerns and motifs throughout his career.

*   *   *

On January 10, 1938, Berryman wrote to his mother. “The problem of the name has arisen again,” he explained, for he had just submitted poems to two little magazines under two different names, John McAlpin Berryman and J.A.M. Berryman. He had already decided to divide his writing life by name—John Berryman for poetry and plays, and J.A.M. Berryman for the rest—so his confusion was understandable. Now he feared it might deter readers. He was twenty-three years old and planning for wide recognition.

The problem of the name arises only in part from Berryman’s great ambition; it is also a wholly sensible response to the deep uncertainty of his family structure. His childhood was a chaos of shifting names and uncertain relations. His mother called him Billy before he was born and until he was three, but he was christened John Allyn Smith, after his father. When his father died in June 1926—a suicide, it seems, although there is haze around even this—his mother soon remarried, this time to the family’s landlord, a man called John Angus McAlpin Berryman. It is customary for a woman to change her last name upon marriage, but Berryman’s mother changed her first name too. Martha Smith became Jill Angel Berryman and she renamed her son after his new father. The name John Berryman, then, is doubly borrowed, thirdhand. At school his friends nicknamed him Burrman, for he slurred his own name. Later, his first wife recalled him saying, “What I cannot forgive myself for not having done, was to take the name John Smith,” and in penance he repeated his actual name like a mantra or a curse.

He liked language that is particular to place. At school in Connecticut as a young teenager he collected slang: “hours,” “called up,” a “heeler.” He reported these to his mother, and when he arrived in England in 1936 he immediately wrote home to explain the local currency: “Sixpence is a tanner, the shilling a bob, the pound a quid.” He was on his way to Cambridge University, where he had been awarded a fellowship and where he dressed in tweed suits and changed his voice. He was twenty-one. “I suppose it is correct to say that I prefer their accent to the ‘American’ accent,” he wrote. For the rest of his life he followed English spelling both in private letters and his published work. W. S. Merwin was a student of Berryman’s at the University of Iowa in 1946, and he recalled his teacher’s voice: “[H]e snapped down his nose with an accent / I think he had affected in England.” Just as his voice was a copy, so too were his habits. In March 1937 Dylan Thomas visited Cambridge, and Berryman took up heavy drinking in imitation of the great Welsh alcoholic. In the summer of 1941 he was courting his wife-to-be in New York City, and one night they tried to find a restaurant for dinner. “How much easier it would be if we were abroad,” he told her: “Now, if we were in Paris, we could go to La Coupole.” He was imagining them as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or himself as Hemingway, figures of another generation.

Reading Berryman’s early poetry is like playing a guessing game: who does he sound like now? He is Thomas here, and then he is Yeats; here he is Auden and here he is Eliot. It is by walking through this funhouse of mirrors and influence that he became himself. The very early “Winter Landscape” rewrites Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” as it imagines a “morning occasion”—not “mourning,” but the sound is the same, and he is sensitive to sound, this man of accents—and as it pictures

The long companions they can never reach,

The blue light, men with ladders, by the church

The sledge and shadow in the twilit street.

This follows Thomas:

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water.

“Winter Landscape” was written in January 1939; in February 1940 he began “A Point of Age,” which turns oddly in the fourth stanza into Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter:

Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,

Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.

This becomes less unexpected when placed alongside the opening of Ezra Pound’s Canto I, which rewrites a scene from the
Odyssey
in that meter:

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping.

His titles echo others; he is borrowing his syntax and vocabulary; he is a young man, taking what is good, trying out what works. It is worth playing this footnote game now, for later, and culminating in
The Dream Songs
, Berryman will turn mimicry to his advantage and invent a poetics that is also an echo chamber. He will find a voice that is recognizably his own—perhaps the most distinctive voice of twentieth-century American poetry—but he will find it in the voices of others. To echo him: The heartbreak is familiar but the heart is strange.

In his first full collection,
The Dispossessed
(1948), he is often looking forward and anticipating what is ahead. “At twenty-five a man is on his way,” begins “A Point of Age,” and here he is fixated by the time of day and the time of life. “There was a kind of fever on the clock / That morning,” he writes in “Parting as Descent.” As poems about other poets and as poems about coming of age these are also, of course, poems about finding a place in the tradition. In “The Possessed” he pictures the dead before him:

This afternoon, discomfortable dead

Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,

Whittling memory at the water’s edge,

And watch. This is what you inherited.

The poem follows the poetic vocabulary of T. S. Eliot and also the terms of his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

This is the work of these early poems. Berryman is setting himself among the dead, counting up his inheritance.

There are also innovations, things particularly his, and since we know what Berryman became it is impossible now to read these early poems but with our own sense of anticipation; we know where he is going to get to and we wait for its first occurrence. Here are two early premonitions of the later Berryman. Berryman wrote “The Moon and the Night and the Men” on May 28, 1940, in Detroit. He was waiting for news from his girlfriend, who was in England; he had spent the winter alone in a freezing five-room apartment. This is a strange war poem, taking place at a distance from the war that had broken out six months before but which America would not join for almost another two years. The scene is an army base, somewhere in America, and it begins:

On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose

Late, a delayed moon, and a violent moon

For the English or the American beholder;

The French beholder. It was a cold night,

People put on their wraps, the troops were cold

No doubt, despite the calendar, no doubt

Numbers of refugees coughed, and the sight

Or sound of some killed others. A cold night.

A new confidence is shown in the handling of syntax, which here is a little twisted in order to open up and double the meanings. The delayed “no doubt” turns an observation of local conditions into a guess about what might be happening far out of sight. And slang here is important: “killing” takes both the demotic sense of making someone laugh and also something wholly more violent.

The second innovation is more striking, more severe. There are nine “Nervous Songs” in
The Dispossessed
, and they follow the same form of three six-line stanzas. Each takes a different voice: jagged, energetic, jumpy. “A Professor’s Song” is sung by a dusty, aggressive academic; “The Song of the Demented Priest” describes aging and an incipient loss of faith. “Young Woman’s Song” is anxious, taut, with something worried and sexual just beneath the lines. “I hate this something like a bobbing cork / Not going,” she says: “I want something to hang to.—” With this short cycle of poems, each in the same stanzaic form as the later Dream Songs, Berryman learned an important lesson: that the poem takes place between the lines. The young woman says, “What I am looking for (
I am
) may be / Happening in the gaps of what I know,” and this is true for Berryman’s own poetics, discovered through speaking like another.