We walk the top deck in dark, Pedro Donga & I,
the Haitian proved a narcissist & we evade him.
He sings me a Basque folk-song, his father was Basque
passing through, his mother a Spanish lady
married, staying there. He ran away
at nine, with gypsies. At the University of Lyon
he assisted with experiments in resuscitation,
he says the Russians are ahead of us in this field.
He sang then for a night-club in Berlin
& got 50 sexual offers a week.
With Memel, the Belgian composer
he went to the Congo to collect tribal tunes.
I listened with three ears.
Now he lives a bachelor in Paris
thirty-three & he has to shave twice a day,
short, muscular.
We trade quotations of Lorca’s ballads,
grave news of the Loyalists’ fight to hold Madrid.
I have felt happy
before but not in the flying wind like this.
He says come see him at Christmas.
London
I hardly slept across the North Atlantic.
We talked. His panoramas,
plus my anticipations, made me new.
He drew large cartoons of me
reclining in my bunk; needing a shave.
(Dean Hawkes had said to me at the end,
about the British differences & my behaviour in Cambridge,
‘And, listen, for God’s sake, Berryman, sometimes shave.’)
Mr Wharton did give me his sad volume
of the medieval genius thief in Canadian.
I told his wife I didn’t know how to play bridge,
which (against my principles) was a lie.
Donga debarked at Southampton, tenoring ‘Christmas!’
I made up a brief rapprochement with the pouting Haitian
(when girls pout, I used to be available)
and then we docked, south of London.
I took with my luggage a cab to the ‘Cumberland Hotel, sir,’
near Marble Arch, the only hotel I’d heard of
& near Bumpus’ in Oxford Street:
we arrived & I looked at the entrance
reminding me of the Hotel Pennsylvania
no place for me, not yet met Bhain, not yet met Saul, O my brothers,
& said in American ‘Let’s move on,
I want a small cheap hotel near here, let’s go.’
In half an hour, alive after crossing Oxford Street,
that bloody lefthand traffic,
I was downstairs in Bumpus’, O paradiso
where I grabbed the Oxford collection of Keats’s letters
& the Sloss & Wallis edition of Blake’s Prophetic Books.
I went to feel the Elgin marbles, I fed at Simpson’s.
Ignoring whores, I walked to a naked night-club
off Piccadilly, leaving early,
& took a 9:06 train up to Cambridge.
The Other Cambridge
Tom Grumbold’s bridge has balusters set diagonally
(‘subtle & very effective’)
& a pie-slice of granite is gone from one globe,—God knows how,—
upon this exquisite famous by-me-crossed-six-times-daily bridge.
Clare itself in 1359; by Edward I’s granddaughter.
It’s not a distinguished college: Trinity
or John’s or Magdalene, or King’s;
but it is rather old. It burned & burned.
My Court is brand-new, named for the War dead,
M4 my number. My rooms look as if they had never been inhabited.
My bedder is Mrs Mizzen, pronounced ‘zed’ as she laughed with me.
My gyp: There are no stories about these rooms or this staircase or this Court.
Anecdotes I collected, inspired by Aubrey;
especially death-words & sayings in crisis.
At the trial of the Earls
ten years of venom flared forth in six words:
when the great Ralegh rose to testify,
Essex called out ‘What boots it swear The Fox?’
I liked documents, letters, Herndon’s Lincoln
for the study of one of the most interesting men since Christ.
Spires, gateways; bells. I like this town:
its bookshops, Heffer’s above all and Bowes & Bowes
but Galloway & Porter too, & Deighton Bell
& sparkling Gordon Fraser’s in Portugal Place
for days outranked for me the supernatural glass in King’s Chapel,
the Entrance Gateway of John’s, the Great Court of Trinity.
Slowly, as rapidly my books assembled every afternoon,
I strolled to look & see, & browsed, & began to feel.
Mother of Newton & Wordsworth! Milton & lazy Gray;
imperious Bentley, Porson wittier than Byron,
‘Yes, Mr Southey is indeed a wonderful poet.
He will be read when Homer & Virgil are forgotten.’
(Byron always spoiled it by adding ‘But not till then.’)
Drunks for six centuries while the towers flew
skyward & tranquil punts poled under tranquil bridges:
David’s forever new bookstall in Market Hill
where for shillings I bought folios
of Abraham Cowley of O delectable ‘The Chronicle’:
the 1594 Prayer Book by twelve Cambridge men
& one outlander: Peterhouse’ formal garden:
Queens’ Wooden Bridge which Newton put together
without a bolt or nail (at last rot began,
they took it down & couldn’t put it back,
now it’s all bolts & nails, so much for Progress):
Cloisters & the Fellows’ Buildings, the Combination Rooms
where wine o’erflows weak-noddled dons: Caius’ Gate of Honour.
Anthony Eden passed within ten feet of me
in a Chancellorship procession; a film star!
Images, memories, of a lonely & ambitious young alien.
Buildings, buildings & their spaces & decorations,
are death-words & sayings in crisis.
Old masters of old Cambridge, I am listening.
Friendless
Friendless in Clare, except Brian Boydell
a Dubliner with no hair
an expressive tenor speaking voice
who introduced me to the music of Peter Warlock
who had just knocked himself off, fearing the return
of his other personality, Philip Heseltine.
Brian used to play The Curlew with the lights out,
voice of a lost soul moving.
These men don’t know our poets.
I’m asked to read; I read Wallace Stevens & Hart Crane
in Sidney Sussex & Cat’s.
The worthy young gentlemen are baffled. I explain,
but the idiom is too much for them.
The Dilettante Society here in Clare
asked me to lecture to them on Yeats
& misspelt his name on the invitations.
Black hours over an unclean line.
Fear. Of failure, or, worse, insignificance.
Solitudes, sometimes, of an alien country
no book after all will ever read me into.
I gorge on Peek Freans & brood.
I don’t do a damned thing but read & write.
I wish I were back in New York!
I feel old, yet I don’t understand.
Monkhood
I don’t show my work to anybody, I am quite alone.
The only souls I feel toward are Henry Vaughan & Wordsworth.
This guy Dylan Thomas though is hotter than anyone we have in America
& hardly at all like Auden.
Pat’s reading Conrad through for the second time
‘to see if I was right,’ my new companion,
with 35/-a week from his solici
tors.
I buy him breakfast at the Dorothy
& we dawdle over it discussing suicide.
He only has two things left (his wife took him),
a carmine sports car & a large-paper set of Conrad.
Maybe I better add
an all but preternatural ability at darts
which keeps him in drink.
He is sleeping with both his landlady & his landlady’s daughter,
one on the ground floor & one upstairs,
he hates to go on across there back at night.
And I think in my unwilling monkhood I have problems!
He’s studying with Wittgenstein & borrowing Kafka.
A hulking sly depressed attractive talker.
* * *
I never went to see Wittgenstein or Broad,
I suffered a little from shyness, which was just arrogance
not even inverted.
I refused to meet Eliot, on two occasions,
I knew I wasn’t with it yet
& would not meet my superiors. Screw them.
Along with my hero-worship & wish for comradeship
went my pride, my ‘Satanic pride’,
as Delmore later, when we were preaching at Harvard
together as kids, he far superior then to me,
put it to my pleasure one day
out of his gentle heart & high understanding
of both the strengths & cripplings of men.
Did even Eileen ever understand me sharper?
Many write of me these days & some with insight
but I think of Delmore’s remark that afternoon.
Even Cervantes’ judgment has not yet wholly overcome me.
Will I ever write properly, with passion & exactness,
of the damned strange demeanours of my flagrant heart?
& be by anyone anywhere undertaken?
One more unanswerable question.
Views of Myself
Another old friend, long afterward,
in the Advocate devoted to my jazz
put it differently:
he called it my ‘bloody-mindedness’.
I will also roar you as ’twere any sucking dove
these twilight days
but I was hell young.
I did not censor anything I said
& what I said I said with force & wit
which crushed some no doubt decent & by me now would be spared
human personalities with shoes on.
I stand ashamed of myself;
yes, but I stand. Take my vices alike
with some my virtues, if you can find any.
I stick up like Coriolanus with my scars
for mob inspection.
Only, dear, I am not running in any election
I am not my gifted egomaniacal ally N. Mailer
The sorrows of the Hero, Alexander’s.
The terrors of the Saint,—
most people feel okay! Thoreau was wrong,
he judged by himself.
When I was fiddling later with every wife
on the Eastern seaboard
I longed to climb into a pulpit & confess.
Tear me to pieces!
Lincoln once wrote to a friend ‘I bite my lip & am quiet.’
Transit
O a little lonely in Cambridge that first Fall
of fogs & buying books & London on Thursday for plays
& visiting Rylands in his posh rooms at King’s
one late afternoon a week.
He was kind to me stranded, & even to an evening party
he invited me, where Keynes & Auden
sat on the floor in the hubbub trading stories
out of their Oxbridge wealth of folklore.
I joined in desperation the Clare ping-pong team
& was assigned to a Sikh in a bright yellow sweater
with a beard so gorgeous I could hardly serve;
his turban too won for him.
I went to the Cosmo, which showed Continental films
& for weeks only Marx Brothers films,
& a short about Oxford was greeted one evening
with loud cunning highly articulate disdain.
Then I got into talk with Gordon Fraser
& he took me home with him out to Mill Lane
to meet his wife Katharine, a witty girl
with strange eyes, from Chicago.
The news from Spain got worse. The President of my Form
at South Kent turned up at Clare, one of the last let out of Madrid.
He designed the Chapel the School later built
& killed himself, I never heard why
or just how, it was something to do with a bridge.
Meeting
One luncheon party in Andy’s rooms in Magdalene
was dominated by a sort of a beauty of a queen
whose charm the company kept enchanted to center on
whose voice & carriage seemed perhaps those of an actress
Indeed I caught on: the most passionate & versatile actress in Cambridge
famous for Good Deeds in Everyman
famous for Cordelia & the Duchess of Malfi
overwhelming in Heartbreak House
with a ballet career behind her in Italy
reading Modern Languages now at Newnham
& working up Katharine in Love’s Labours Lost
for a Garden production at Lord Horder’s place
down near Southampton’s old estate in the Spring.
I don’t think I said a word, although I knew
(as probably no one else there did)
the chance is good he wrote Love’s Labours
for the Earl & his friends down there in ’93.
I couldn’t drink my sherry, I couldn’t eat.
I looked; I listened.
I don’t know how I made it home to Memorial Court.
I never expected to meet her again.
But Cambridge is a small place, & a few days later
she was almost out of Portugal Place wheeling her bike
as I was wheeling mine in. She greeted me.
With heartburn I asked her to tea. She smiled, & accepted.
Tea
O! I had my gyp prepare that tea.
But she wasn’t hungry or thirsty, she wanted to talk.
She had not met an American before,
to talk with; much less an American poet.
I told her honestly I wasn’t much of one yet but probably would be.
She preferred Racine to Shakespeare; I said I’d fix that
& read her the King’s cadenzas in All’s Well
about that jerk Bertram’s father.
We mooted ancestry: she English-Jewish-Belgian;
me mostly English, traces of Irish-Scotch & so on
but long ago, before the Revolution.
Her father is an expert on sleep: praised, pioneered
by Aldous Huxley. Lives by counselling in London.
By six-fifteen she had promised to stop seeing ‘the other man’.
I may have heard better news but I don’t know when.
Then—I think—then I stood up, & we kissed.
She skipped dinner at Newnham.
Part Three
The Search
I wondered ever too what my fate would be,
women & after-fame become quite unavailable,
or at best unimportant. For a tooth-extraction
gassed once, by a Russian woman in Detroit,
I dreamed a dream to end dreams, even my dreams:
I had died—no problem: but a mighty hand
was after my works too, feeling here & there,
& finding them, bit by bit.
At last he found the final of all one, & pulled it away, & said ‘There!’
I began the historical study of the Gospel
indebted above all to Guignebert
& Goguel & McNeile
& Bultmann even & later
Archbishop Carrington.
The Miracles were a stumbling-block;
until I read Karl Heim, trained in natural science;
until I had sufficiently attended to
The Transfiguration & The Ecstasy.
I was weak on the Fourth Gospel. I still am,
in places; I plan to amend that.
Wellisch on Isaac & Oedipus
supplements for me Kierkegaard.
Luther on Galatians (his grand joy)
I laid aside until I was older & wiser.
Bishop Andrewes’ account of the Resurrection-appearances
in 1609 seemed to me, seems to me, it.
I studied Titian’s remarks on The Tribute-Money.
Bishop Westcott’s analysis (it took him 25 years)
of the first eighteen verses of St. John
struck me as of a cunning like Odysseus’.
And other systems, high & primitive,
ancient & surviving, did I not neglect,
sky-gods & trickster-gods, gods impotent,
the malice & force of the dead.
When at twelve Einstein lost belief in God
he said to himself at once (as he put it later)
‘Similarly motivated men, both of the past & of the present,
together with their achieved insights,
waren die unverlierbaren Freunde’—the unloseable friends.
Message
Amplitude,—voltage,—the one friend calls for the one,
the other for the other, in my work;
in verse & prose. Well, hell.
I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends.
Impressions, structures, tales, from Columbia in the Thirties
& the Michaelmas term at Cambridge in ’36,
followed by some later. It’s not my life.
That’s occluded & lost.
That consisted of lectures on St Paul,
scrimmages with women, singular moments
of getting certain things absolutely right.
Laziness, liquor, bad dreams.
That consisted of three wives & many friends,
whims & emergencies, discoveries, losses.
It’s been a long trip. Would I make it again?
But once a Polish belle bared me out & was kind to it.
I don’t remember why I sent this message.
Children! children! form the point of all.
Children & high art.
Money in the bank is also something.
We will all die, & the evidence
is: Nothing after that.
John Berryman Page 24