John Berryman

by John Berryman

  so that I got something out of Columbia—

  Plato’s uterus, I say,

  an animal passionately longing for children

  and, if long unsatisfied after puberty,

  prone to range angrily, blocking the air passages

  & causing distress & disease.

  For ‘children’ read: big fat fresh original & characteristic poems.

  My longing yes was a woman’s

  She can’t know can she what kind of a baby

  she’s going with all the will in the world to produce?

  I suffered trouble over this,

  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 what instead did I want it to sound like?

  I couldn’t sleep at night, I attribute my life-long insomnia

  to my uterine struggles. ‘You must undress’

  a young poet writes to me from Oregon

  ‘the great face of the body.’

  The Isolation so, young & now I find older,

  American, & other.

  While the rest of England was strolling thro’ the Crystal Palace

  Arnold was gnashing his teeth on a mountain in Sicily.

  An eccentric friend, a Renaissance scholar, sixty-odd,

  unworldly, he writes limericks in Medieval Latin,

  stood up in the rowboat fishing to take a leak

  & exclaimed as he was about it with excitement

  ‘I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’

  My phantasy precisely at twenty:

  to satisfy at once all Barnard & Smith

  & have enough left over for Miss Gibbs’s girls.

  Olympus

  In my serpentine researches

  I came on a book review in Poetry

  which began, with sublime assurance,

  a comprehensive air of majesty,

  ‘The art of poetry

  is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse

  by the animating presence in the poetry

  of a fresh idiom: language

  so twisted & posed in a form

  that it not only expresses the matter in hand

  but adds to the stock of available reality.’

  I was never altogether the same man after that.

  I found this new Law-giver all unknown

  except in the back numbers of a Cambridge quarterly

  Hound & Horn, just defunct.

  I haunted on Sixth Avenue until

  at 15¢ apiece or 25

  I had all 28 numbers

  & had fired my followers at Philolexian & Boar’s Head

  with the merits of this prophet.

  My girls suffered during this month or so,

  so did my seminars & lectures &

  my poetry even. To be a critic, ah,

  how deeper & more scientific.

  I wrote & printed an essay on Yeats’s plays

  re-deploying all of Blackmur’s key terms

  & even his sentence-structure wherever I could.

  When he answered by hand from Boston my nervous invitation

  to come & be honoured at our annual Poetry Reading,

  it must have been ten minutes before I could open the envelope.

  I got him to review Tate’s book of essays

  & Mark to review The Double Agent. Olympus!

  I have travelled in some high company since

  less dizzily.

  I have had some rare girls since but never one so philosophical

  as that same Spring (my last Spring there) Jean Bennett.

  Nowhere

  Traitoring words,—tearing my thought across

  bearing it to foes.

  Two men ahead of me in line in the College Study

  about the obscurity of my ‘Elegy: Hart Crane’.

  More comfortable at the Apollo among blacks

  than in Hartley Hall where I hung out.

  A one named Brooks Johnson, with it in for Negroes,

  I told one noon I’d some coon blood myself

  and he spread the word wide while the campus laughed.

  Magical mourning blues,

  Victoria, Bessie. Teagarden. Pine-top Smith

  the sightless passionate constructor.

  Anti-semitism through the purblind Houses.

  News weird out of Germany.

  Our envy for any visitor to the Soviet Union.

  The shaking incredible transcripts of the Trials.

  Cagney’s inventions in gesture, the soul-kiss

  in 42nd Street. Coop’s little-boy-ness.

  Chaplin emerging nonchalant from under the tarpaulin.

  Five Dietrich films in a day.

  Ping-pong at the Little Carnegie,

  the cheapest firstrate date in the Depression city.

  A picture of me in The New York Times

  with a jock-strap on, & socks & shoes,

  taken during the Freshman-Sophomore Rush:

  face half from the camera, hardly any knew me,

  praise God in St Bonaventura’s Heaven!

  Hours of acedia, pencil on the desk

  coffee in a cup, ash-tray flowing

  the window closed, the universe unforthcoming,

  Being ground to a halt.

  Inaccessible unthinkable the childlike enthusiasm

  of grand Unamuno setting down his profession

  in the Visitors’ Book on top of a Spanish mountain:

  ‘A humble man, & a tramp.’

  Long after, in a train from Avila

  I met a cop who called him Don Miguel;

  another of my Sophomore heroes.

  And David Hume stood high with me that year

  & Kleist, for the ‘Puppet-theatre’.

  Uncertainties, presentiments.

  Piranesi’s black & lovely labyrinths, come-ons like a whore’s.

  Gautier rapt before a staircase at the Alcázar

  winding up monumental through the ruin to give out on—nothing.

  In & Out

  Niceties of symbolism & identification.

  The verve I flooded toward in Don Giovanni

  A shroud, a spade.

  Sense of a selfless seeker in this world.

  I gave up crew and track after Freshman Spring.

  I had my numerals & no more time.

  No politics.

  I was watching Corbière doomed, John Davidson doomed, their frantic aplomb.

  Shapes of the white ape & his irresistible companions.

  My birthday the same as Burroughs’,

  I had a letter on ‘Tarzana’ stationery.

  He lost his knack later on.

  Corridors deep, near water. The surgeon looks over the parapet

  & looks straight down in the water. ‘Mordserum sie habe sagen.

  Wo ist Doktor Dumartin? Doktor Dumartin

  muss Doktor Dumartin finden!’

  When was I most afraid? Of eerie Wither,

  his nonchalance abandoned. Of fragile Elspeth’s opinion.

  Of a stabbed lady in a drawer at Bellevue

  one Saturday afternoon, we peered at Starr Faithful’s

  stomach in a jar, Exhibit H, avocado-green

  Down to the Princeton game with no brakes to speak of

  stopping by coasting into cars ahead

  I’d never seen such traffic

  Princeton had two complete Sophomore backfields

  & took us 19–0. But the Brown game,

  the last quarter ticking out, 7–0,

  a freezing rain on their 2-yard line

  & couldn’t bull it over

  neither Cliff Montgomery nor Al Barabas

  my friend with shoulders & bright

  who scored the only touchdown at the Rose Bowl.

  I still hear from him, wanting me to contribute.

  Money? for Columbia?? They use my name

  now & then. That’s ple
nty.

  I make a high salary & royalties & fees

  and brother I need it all.

  I sent $100 it’s true to Montana

  to fund a poetry prize in the name of a girl

  I liked in hospital, named Rita Lux,

  a suicide, witty & masochistic

  who was trying to get her priest to leave the Church

  & marry her, she beat a punching bag

  with bare fists until her knuckles bled

  cursing with every blow ‘John Berryman!… John Berryman!…’

  I learnt in one week more about prose from Pascal

  than ever from any Englishman I learnt

  though from John Aubrey something, Pascal’s polar.

  I was tickled by Whitman’s also.

  And the live magazines were gone,

  The Dial, Symposium. Where could one pray to publish?

  The Criterion’s stories & poems were so weak.

  Solely The Southern Review, not Partisan yet.

  After my dismal exile at my school

  I made at Columbia a point of being popular,

  by mid-November already I knew by name

  most of the nearly 500 men in my class,

  including commuters, touchingly pleased

  to have a soul recognize them.

  I liked them, a man of the world, I felt like them,

  barring my inordinate desire.

  Morose and slovenly, Zander thought like a tank

  the only man in college who understood Hegel

  agile enough too for the Tractatus

  I used to stop by his room, which he never left.

  Vistas ahead of what must be endured,

  cold girls, fear, thoughtless books . .

  ‘Dear Mr C, A reviewer in The Times

  considering 200 poems of yours

  produced over a period of fifteen years

  adjudged them “crushingly dull”; my view too,

  though you won’t suppose of course I read them all.

  Sir, you are trivial.

  Pray do not write to me again. Pitch defileth.

  Yours faithfully, Henry.’

  The Heroes

  For all his vehemence & hydraulic opinions

  Pound seemed feline, zeroing in on feelings,

  hovering up to them, putting his tongue in their ear,

  delicately modulating them in & out of each other.

  Almost supernatural crafter; maybe unhappy,

  disappointed continually,

  not fated like his protégé Tom or drunky Jim

  or hard-headed Willie for imperial sway.

  How I maneuvered in my mind their rôles

  of administration for the modern soul

  in English, now one, now ahead another,

  for this or that special strength, wilful & sovereign.

  I had, from my beginning, to adore heroes

  & I elected that they witness to,

  show forth, transfigure: life-suffering & pure heart

  & hardly definable but central weaknesses

  for which they were to be enthroned & forgiven by me.

  They had to come on like revolutionaries,

  enemies throughout to accident & chance,

  relentless travellers, long used to failure

  in tasks that but for them would sit like hanging judges

  on faithless & by no means up to it Man.

  Humility & complex pride their badges,

  every ‘third thought’ their grave.

  These gathering reflexions, against young women

  against seven courses in my final term,

  I couldn’t sculpt into my helpless verse yet.

  I wrote mostly about death.

  Crisis

  My offended contempt for the mental & stylistic workings of Ruskin & Carlyle

  extended to their advocate,

  who also mouthed at me Wordsworth in Hamilton Hall

  holding up my appreciation of that great poet

  for more than eighteen months.

  Later he wrote a book on E. A. Robinson,

  a favourite of mine (not interesting metrically

  but with the gist of it in him)

  which I went into with Schadenfreude

  gratified to find it insensitive & unworthy.

  O I come here to a tricky old scandalous affair!

  He tried to keep me from graduating.

  I may explain that this man had come to hate me personally.

  Not only did I give him hell in class:

  I saw my nine friends did. With ironic questions

  & all but insolent comment & actual interruptions

  we made Professor N wish he was elsewhere

  rather than in English 163.

  I must further explain: I needed a B,

  I didn’t need an A, as in my other six courses,

  but the extra credits accruing from those A’s

  would fail to accrue if I’d any mark under B.

  The bastard knew this,

  as indeed my predicament was well known

  through both my major Departments. Under the risk I ran

  with N, I took care to keep an elaborate notebook

  on all the readings Romantic & Victorian

  to flourish if he got funny. He got very funny,—

  leaving instructions not to post his marks

  till the last stated day, he sailed for Italy,

  and I found myself with a C,

  squarely in the middle of Hell.

  Luckily the Dean was down there with me,

  along with Mark & my advisor Gutmann

  & the whole senior staff of the English Department,

  because I had to graduate:

  not only had they put me in Phi Beta Kappa,

  they’d given me their major Fellowship

  for two years in England

  & the disgrace if I couldn’t take it up

  would be general: only embarrassing

  but very that: a plague. But what could they do?

  I showed my notebook around & pointed out

  the Apollinaire-like implausibility of my C

  considering all my A’s & my magisterial notebook.

  I didn’t have to mention personal spite.

  They held unhappy meetings for two days.

  To change the mark of a colleague in his absence?

  Finally, a command decision:

  they’d give me a second exam, invented by themselves,

  & judge it, & if my paper justified,

  they’d elevate the highly irrational mark.

  I took it—it was fair, hard—& I killed it.

  I never knew what I got, but the course-grade

  cranked upward to a B. I graduated.

  In my immediate section of the Commencement line

  we were mostly Phi Betes, & the normal guys would have nothing to do with us.

  I collected my first installment, more dead than alive

  from over-work & poetic theory & practice & Miss Jean B—

  a thousand dollars it was—and took off for Canada,

  to nurse my dark wounds & prepare my psyche for Cambridge,

  a still more foreign scene.

  Recovery

  I don’t know what the hell happened all that summer.

  I was done in, mentally. I wrote nothing, I read nothing.

  I spent a pot of money, not being used to money,

  I forget on what, now. I felt dazed.

  After some wandering days in Montreal

  I went to a little town where Dr Locke

  cured any & everything with foot ‘adjustments’,

  on hundreds of patients daily from all over North America

  outdoors in a hardwood grove in front of his clinic.

  I made vague friends with a couple, the brother in a wheel-chair,

  his pleasant sister looking after him.

  They were dull & very poor. I gave them tea,

  we talked ab
out what young people talk about.

  Weeks somehow went by. All this time my art was in escrow,

  I vegetated, I didn’t even miss Jean,

  without interest in what I was, what I might become

  never came up, as day by day

  I stood in line for the Doctor & gave them tea.

  I didn’t think much of the nothing I knew of Canada,

  half British-oriented, half-French, half-American;

  no literature, painting, architecture,

  music, philosophy, scholarship . .

  (McLuhan & Frye unthinkable ahead).

  I wasn’t unhappy, I wasn’t anything,

  until I pulled myself reluctantly together at last

  & bowed goodbye to my lame ducks

  & headed for Pier 42—where my nervous system

  as I teetered across the gang-plank

  sprang back into expectation. I kissed Jean

  & Mother & shook hands with old Halliday

  and I mounted to the Britannic’s topmost deck

  O a young American poet, not yet good,

  off to the strange Old World to pick their brains

  & visit by hook or crook with W. B. Yeats.

  Part Two

  Away

  Ah! so very slowly

  the jammed dock slides away backward,

  I’m on my way to Bumpus’ & the Cam,

  haunts of old masters where I may improve.

  Now we’re swinging round, tugs hoot,

  I don’t think I was ever better pleased

  with the outspread opening world & even myself

  O when The Nation took my epitaph.

  In fifteen minutes I have made a friend

  a caricaturiste for Vendredi

  who has been covering the elections

  & a young tall Haitian doctor joins us now

  It beats the Staten Island ferry hollow

  I used to take to Clinton Dangerfield

  to type out from dictation her pulp Westerns

  I’m impressed by the bulk of the ship

  Yeats, Yeats, I’m coming! it’s me. Faber & Faber,

  you’ll have to publish me some day with éclat

  I haven’t quite got the hang of the stuff yet

  but I swamp with possibility

  My God, we’re in open water

  I feel like Jacob with his father’s blessing

  set forth to con the world too, only I plan

  to do it with simple work & with my ear

  First Night at Sea

  I’m at a table with Canadians

  He translates Villon. Villon! What Canadian

  could English make of those abject bravura laments?

  He says he’ll give me a copy.