The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems

by John Berryman

  His life—it is not glamorous to say so—was a parade of grants and fellowships. When he was in trouble, the academic world came to rescue him. On his return from Cambridge, he taught in the English department at Wayne University in Michigan, and was hired by Harvard in 1940. He moved on to Princeton in 1943, where he taught creative writing. He lectured at the University of Cincinnati in 1952 and taught briefly at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1954, and in 1955 he became a lecturer in humanities at the University of Minnesota. These universities provided the financial support that enabled him to become a poet, and something more than this. His biographer John Haffenden quotes one of Berryman’s students at Princeton, who remembered Berryman wearing a long, striped scarf and reading a book while he walked across campus. “He seemed above all things donnish,” said the student: “I remember someone saying nobody ever looked so much a poet.”

  He was “donnish,” like a don, and he looked like a poet: the universities gave Berryman a role to play and to play against. The Dream Songs is the product of this close, bookish world: the poems are specific on the protocols and hierarchies of academic life. “Hey, out there!” begins one:

  assistant professors, full,

  associates,—instructors—others—any—

  I have a sing to shay.

  We are assembled here in the capital

  city for Dull—and one professor’s wife is Mary—

  at Christmastide, hey!

  This Dream Song (35) has the title “MLA,” which is the annual conference of English departments in U.S. universities. The members of the Modern Language Association meet just after Christmas each year, and they jostle for status and jobs; assistant professors seek to rise in rank to associate professors. Later, in Dream Song 373, he returns to the joke as he imagines the scholars who will study him after his death:

  will they set up a tumult in his praise

  will assistant professors become associates

  by working on his works?

  He mocks the things he knows and loves.

  John Haffenden’s painstaking 1999 collection of Berryman’s various academic writings on Shakespeare reveals much about the poet. His early work on textual states was built upon his assumption that the differing texts of Shakespeare’s plays are different because they have been reconstructed by the actors who first appeared in them, and once we think of these as people’s voices rather than texts, then we might be able to retrieve the original. As he wrote in February 1946: “One must emend through the error to the copy, and through that to the actor, hoping to reach Shakespeare.” For Berryman, textual scholarship was an art of hearing human voices. Later, he became obsessed with tracking down Shakespeare’s collaborators and coauthors, and after this he sought to write a biography: describing himself as “sick of quarter-Shakespeares,” he wanted to tell the whole story of the man. He is always seeking people, and when he came to interpret the plays he found them to be testaments of intimate experience. “Shakespeare was a man whose son died, who was publicly ridiculed and insulted, who followed a degrading occupation,” he wrote. “He wrote many personal poems about some of these things.” In a superb lecture called “The Crisis” Berryman speculated that Shakespeare in early middle age suffered a nervous collapse, and he traces the symptoms through several plays, particularly Hamlet. Berryman read Shakespeare as the original confessional poet.

  Shakespeare gave Berryman an image of what a poet might be; he taught him also how to sound. In a moving elegy published in The New York Review of Books, Robert Lowell recalled a summer day spent with Berryman: “John could quote with vibrance to all lengths, even prose, even late Shakespeare, to show me what could be done with disrupted and mended syntax. This was the start of his real style.” Shakespeare’s late plays are marked by a thickening of language as images pile upon one another and nouns are switched with verbs, and the sense is hard to follow. As a single example, here is the description of a swimmer from The Tempest:

  his bold head

  ’Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oared

  Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke

  To th’ shore, that o’er his wave-born basis bowed,

  As stooping to relieve him.

  The convoluted phrasing of the Dream Songs follows this, as Berryman defers the subject from each description; his songs are often tiny plays, with two speakers, dialogue, and heightened dramatic tension.

  He borrows words and phrases too, particularly from the tragedies. Dream Song 91 begins “Noises from underground made gibber some,” and this follows Hamlet as Horatio describes a night in ancient Rome when “The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.” In Dream Song 48 Henry is “Cawdor-uneasy, disambitious,” and he is recalling Macbeth; Berryman’s question, “How come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death: / locate the restorations of which we hear / as of profound sleep,” follows the play’s famous account of sleep as “The death of each day’s life … / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course.” The imagery of King Lear runs throughout The Dream Songs, from the “Thumbs into eyes” that Henry fears in 226 to the haunting question “Who’s king these nights?” in 85. When Henry suffers from a “brain on fire” he is also Lear, “bound upon a wheel of fire,” and even more directly Berryman notes, “O ‘get up & go in’ / somewhere once I heard,” which is an almost-quotation from the play. The examples continue; Berryman’s poetry awaits the fully annotated scholarly edition he would have loved. I suggested earlier that Berryman never completed his book on Shakespeare, but this is of course untrue. John Berryman finished a great work of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. It is called The Dream Songs.

  The gorgeous convolution of late Shakespeare is certainly one source of the Dream Song style; a second is closer to home. Writing in The Harvard Advocate in the spring of 1969, Adrienne Rich declared, “A new language is evolving in the heads of some Americans who use English.” Where other countries have “the security of a native tongue, of a Dictionary,” Americans must improvise their own language out of the basic elements of another. The American language is

  this mad amalgam of ballad-idiom (ours via Appalachia), Shakespeherian rag, Gerard Manley Hopkins in a delirium of syntactical reversals, nigger-talk, blues talk, hip-talk engendered from both, Miltonic diction, Calypso, bureaucratiana, pure blurted Anglo-Saxon.

  Only two men, Rich concludes, understand exactly what this language is: Bob Dylan and John Berryman. Both changed their names; both found long-worked-for success in 1965, which was the year that Dylan famously went electric and that Berryman won a Pulitzer for 77 Dream Songs. Both created by theft, by allusion and borrowing, and both wrote songs.

  In Cambridge in 1936, Berryman was carefully listening to voices. He was surrounded by English voices, which he sometimes found hard to follow. “The rhythms of speech are very different,” he wrote to his mother not long after he had arrived: “Unless I attend very closely, I sometimes fail to understand several sentences at a time.” He was also paying new attention to the few American accents he heard. They were unusual, like rare flowers, and distance may make the familiar strange. He was reading, he went on, H. L. Mencken’s book The American Language: the fourth edition had just been published, and he described it as “really an extraordinary job, and a very good thing to be reading when I hear the island varieties of English so continually.” What he hears his Cambridge classmates speaking is not proper English, that is, but one dialect of it: one of the “island varieties.” This is in miniature the argument of Mencken’s combative and sprawling book. The American language is, for Mencken, marked by three characteristics. It is uniform, across the country; it is impatient with the rules of grammar; and it likes to borrow and to invent words. The first colonists needed new words for the things they had never seen before, so they borrowed “moose,” “skunk,” and “raccoon” from the Native Americans, and for the same reason they took words from Spanish. Mencken gives the
example of “cockroach.”

  Mencken quotes a 1914 study of the grammar used by students at twelve schools in Kansas City. “Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city,” he notes; this is the American language captured in the year of Berryman’s birth, and the study’s list of common errors reads now like a taxonomy of Dream Song style. The writings of these high school students displayed syntactical redundancy; there was incorrect use of mood, and a confusion of tenses; they misused comparatives and superlatives, and exchanged adjectives for adverbs. The verb often failed to agree with its subject, both in number and in person, and the pronoun often failed to correspond to its noun. “The chief grammatical peculiarities of vulgar American lie … among the verbs and pronouns,” Mencken summarizes, and it is precisely these uses of verbs and pronouns “which set off the Common speech very sharply from both correct English and correct American.” Pronouns tell us who is speaking and what is spoken of; verbs clarify the actions taking place; in that first Dream Song we are told “What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be.” The sense is clear but the grammar is not. Berryman, who spoke with an English accent, wrote the Dream Songs in American.

  This study of schoolchildren thinks in terms of errors, but Mencken does not share this prejudice, nor does Berryman: for both, a break in proper grammar is an opportunity, not a fault. In 1950, Berryman published a study of Stephen Crane; the book reads as closer to autobiography than biography, for Berryman seems to be writing as much about himself as his subject. Here he defines a writer as “a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right,” and here he considers Crane’s wayward grammar, particularly in his famous novel The Red Badge of Courage. “Crane’s grammatical sins consist mostly of difficulty in agreement, in reference, and in word order,” he writes, and observes that this at times leads Crane to “a gruesome awkwardness.” However: “This writer does not aim, as a rule, at smoothness, and of his oddest sentences some seem calculated.” He adds, as a rationale for this careful and creative abuse of the rules of grammar, one final proof: of all writers, Shakespeare’s grammar “was flexible.”

  The Dream Songs blur tenses, places, and people; they are not smooth. “A shallow lake, with many waterbirds,” begins Dream Song 101, and beneath the line is the footstep of iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s meter; the rest of the poem does not conform to this, but it is established here at the start and then recalled, like a ghost, throughout. We are at a lake: it is unusual for a Dream Song to begin with such a simple setting and soon it takes back even this. “I was showing Mother around, / An extraordinary vivid dream,” it goes on, and the line break switches the meaning. The speaker was showing his mother around the lake in his dream; the speaker was showing his dream to his mother.

  In the fourth line three more characters appear: “Betty & Douglas, and Don.” “He showed me around,” adds the speaker in an attempt at clarification, but now we are in a tangle of dreams and characters. A policeman arrives: “I askt if he ever saw / the inmates.” There was some trouble—“Don was late home”—but the poem refuses to explain. “I can’t go into the meaning of the dream,” the speaker says, “except to say a sense of total Loss / afflicted me thereof,” and we are back in a loose iambic pentameter. The poem’s informality of subject and association dances against a hard poetic formality. This is something like what Shakespearean American might be: a possible language for poetry, traditional and innovative, rich and strange.

  * * *

  In the end, John Berryman did two things, and in so doing he summarized two great themes of his life’s work. These are a gift to his biographers and biographically minded interpreters, for they put a neat and legible stop upon the fluid, misunderstanding-filled story of his life. They make it all look inevitable in retrospect. In Berryman’s last collections of poems—Love & Fame (1970), and the posthumously published Delusions, Etc. (1972)—along with his uncollected late poems, we can feel the poet sorting and arranging the materials of his unsettled life.

  First, he looked back. Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. set out a verse autobiography, as Berryman ranges over his time and his memories of what had made him.

  I fell in love with a girl.

  O and a gash.

  I’ll bet she now has seven lousy children.

  (I’ve three myself, one being off the record.)

  So begins Love & Fame, and the poems here are in loose quatrains, sometimes casually rhymed, informal and powerful. They consider Berryman’s young romantic and sexual entanglements, and his longing to be a poet. Often the desire for girls and the desire for literary fame are joined. “Images of Elspeth” begins:

  O when I grunted, over lines and her,

  my Muse a nymphet & my girl with men

  older, of money, continually

  lawyers & so, myself a flat-broke Junior.

  This collection displays what Berryman calls in that same poem “a sense of humour / fatal to bardic pretension.” He acknowledges his youthful absurdity. In another poem he recalls of his earliest poetry: “I wrote mostly about death.” Blessed by wryness, the older man looks back, with affection, upon who he once was.

  Berryman had of course done this before. In 1966, deciding to publish the cycle of sonnets he had written twenty years earlier, he looked back upon his previous self. In a poem added to the cycle at the time of publication, he describes writing these sonnets: “He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs / for an Excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv.” The childish spelling and past tense distance the younger man; twenty years become a thousand. In the autobiographical poems from Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc., he is warmer toward the younger man. What is perhaps most striking about these late poems is that he is writing the voice of his earlier self even while that younger self is—as an apprentice Great Poet—trying to work out what his voice is going to sound like. It is a switchback trick of sympathetic recall and a careful balancing act. He was hopeful and a little ridiculous, back when he was setting out. In “Two Organs,” he recalls:

  I didn’t want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats

  or exactly like Auden

  since in that case where the hell was I?

  But of course he learned by imitation; those italics lightly spoof his wish for originality.

  It might be tempting to read these late poems as the moment Berryman at last became a confessional poet. He narrates his studies in Cambridge and return to the United States. He finds success, has affairs and a first breakdown. He is increasingly explicit, about both sex and his life; he includes his home address in Minneapolis in one poem. But he warns: “I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends,” and we may see these poems in two slightly different contexts. Berryman was first admitted to the hospital for alcoholism in 1959, and for the rest of his life he was regularly in treatment: most often at the Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, where he wrote many Dream Songs (“I prop on the costly bed & dream of my wife”), and the Intensive Alcohol Treatment Center at St. Mary’s Hospital in the same city. In 1970 he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Their Twelve Steps of recovery insist upon self-evaluation. At Step Four, patients “Made a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves,” and at Step Five “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” These are also exercises for a writer: during 1971, as he was writing these last poems, Berryman was simultaneously at work on a novel—about a man undergoing treatment for alcoholism—called Recovery. The novel, while unfinished, is structured upon the steps of treatment.

  He was not thinking only of the shape of his own life, however. In his late poems Berryman turned to writing the lives of others: poets and artists, historical figures he admired. Delusions, Etc. includes a memorial poem for Dylan Thomas and the birthday song for Emily Dickinson; he wrote a biographical sketch of George Washington in seven fragments and a cycle
of mostly quatrains in which he addresses Beethoven. He describes Beethoven’s famous late style: “Straightforward staves, dark bars, / late motions toward the illegible.” In these last works—his own late style—Berryman is again experimenting with how to plot a life in poetry. Among the unpublished works collected by John Haffenden in the posthumous Henry’s Fate is a poem in which Berryman describes Che Guevara as an almost holy, Christlike figure. “I’m screwed if I’ll praise you,” he declares to him: “you open a hope / we’re not contemptible necessity.”

  Second, he embraced the end. His last two collections each include a cycle of devotional verse: “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” and the moving “Opus Dei,” which is composed of nine poems following the order of Latin liturgical hours. Like all devotional verse—and Berryman here sounds at times like George Herbert, perhaps the greatest devotional poet of all—these poems contemplate the limits of the self, and human life. Again, this embrace of a higher power is one central strand to the practice established by Alcoholics Anonymous: Step Two is “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” and the final step only comes once the patient has undergone “a spiritual awakening.” Like recovery, devotion is the art of imagining what might come next, outside this known world.

  This is a new poetic. Here, he is turning away from the self. In “Matins”:

  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.

  Here, he is trying to submit. In “Nones”:

  I am olding & ignorant, and the work is great,

  daylight is long, will ever I be done,

  for the work is not for man, but the Lord God.

  Now I have prepared with all my might for it

  The drama and the tension—the beauty—of these late poems is that of a man torn between the fascinations of the self and the chance of a greater order. He is never wholly convinced. He is at best a “pseudo-monk,” as he calls himself in “Terce,” but the cycle of prayers enacts a drama of submission. This is not easy. It ends: “This fireless house / lies down at Your disposal as usual! Amen!”