John Berryman

by John Berryman

  What of the Baltic States, my honest young man?’

  ‘Nothing can be proven, mother; let me alone,

  For I’m worn out with reading and want to lie down.’

  ‘O I fear for your future, Communist, my son!

  I fear for your future, my honest young man!’

  ‘I cannot speak or think, mother; let me alone,

  For I’m sick at my heart and I want to lie down.’

  October 1939

  Thanksgiving: Detroit

  Lockout. The seventh week. Men in the Square

  Idle, but the men are standing as they stood.

  Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Shall Labour

  Rejoice? Or curse? Shall Labour spit that turkey?

  In an elaborate spot on Six Mile Road

  The men at the bar and the women on the couches

  Are dancing, drinking, singing vainly.

  Thanksgiving. Shall the Liberal rejoice?

  Shall the pieces of the Liberal give praise?

  The Liberal is moving left, or rather

  The conflagration and the guns move right

  As the fuel and the ammunition blaze.

  The men at the bar and the women on the couches

  Are dancing, drinking, singing vainly.

  Thanksgiving, and more than turkeys underground.

  Opinion underground. Who shall be glad?

  Finks and goons in the streets of the city, cops

  Clubbing and watching the clubbing of men, men hide.

  The standing men are determined and sad.

  The men at the bar and the women on the couches

  Are dancing, drinking, singing—vainly.

  Epilogue

  He died in December. He must descend

  Somewhere, vague and cold, the spirit and seal,

  The gift descend, and all that insight fail

  Somewhere. Imagination one’s one friend

  Cannot see there. Both of us at the end.

  Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.

  Appendices

  Berryman’s Published Prefaces, Notes, and Dedications

  “TWENTY POEMS,” Five Young American Poets [1940]

  A NOTE ON POETRY

  None of the extant definitions of poetry is very useful; certainly none is adequate; and I do not propose to invent a new one. I should like to suggest what I understand the nature and working of poetry to be by studying one of the poems in this selection. It is not that I assume any poem of mine will serve as a satisfactory example of the art; but one’s special familiarity with one’s own work is an advantage too considerable, for this analysis, to be forgone. Perhaps the most direct approach is the approach by paraphrase. I propose to paraphrase the poem called “On the London Train”* and examine some of the differences between the methods of prose and of verse, hoping that the examination will illustrate what it is that a poem does in being a poem.

  “(I am leaving Cambridge; it is April, 1938; I am on the London train.) Although the face of the man across the compartment from me, on the seat opposite, has a look which I take to express loneliness (there are economic reasons for the loneliness of unmarried men at present in their twenties), no doubt many women, or certain women, are lonely also, on his account. Daily, as they are afflicted with his image or his presence, the possibilities of union daze them and glaze their eyes. They glaze their eyes; their absorption is in part voluntary. They are subject to fantasy: each imagines herself in his embrace, embracing him in a romantic place where water is running, having him secure. (Nor is the desire of these women desire only; it is need, and their traditional need for protection, for maintenance.)

  “(But nothing will come of this. Whether or not the man is aware of their desires—probably he is not—he will not, because he can not, satisfy one of them:) he is himself in love. (Nor is his desire simple: he requires a wife to cook, to mend, to counsel, to admire him; he wants children.) Desiring another woman, who is unsatisfied also, incomplete, he is sleepless at night, he endures an existence of day and night without differentiation or end, since day and night form a setting for love which is not enacted. He says to himself that he would undergo any humiliation, any pain—he would walk on his bare knees, voluntarily blind, eastward to humorous and frozen Tomsk or westward to the sweltering cities of California—if in the end she would let him enter her; or (he is content with less) if she would take him into her house and care for his wounds; or (he would be content with anything) if she would display any merely human interest in the suffering which is his devotion—would recognize it even. (But he is without hope.)

  “This situation, the situation of unrequited love, is unfortunate, but it is not singular; it is common in this time and it is usual in history. If you could summon a lover from a former time, or summon John Donne from his grave (a man who experienced or imagined this in all its complex distress), he would confirm most solemnly the testimony of men who have described the unpleasant ordeal, and the ordeal which above all others is humiliating, of loving without return—until the permanent bedroom is attained. And with union the lover’s exasperations do not cease. Consider that even Zeus—a god, the most powerful, the most amorous of gods, and (farther back in time than Donne) a Greek—was tormented by jealousy.

  “(The cause and the contrast occur to me together.) The sea-shell, undemonstrative and chaste, under the sea where it is protected from movement and desire, can puzzle its Maker, can amaze the course of things. For the shell alone seems to be exempt from the necessities of living creatures—under enormous difficulties, at their wits’ end, to win a mate, to breed, to achieve security. That this evidence of defeat should trouble the Maker who has plagued us, abstractly we are glad; but, out of the security of the sea, who suffer on the shore, nothing for our pain can be sufficient recompense.”

  It is true that this paraphrase is not complete—at almost any point it can be elaborated—and that it cannot pretend to be definitive. But it does at least state rather fully the principal subject; and I think the most casual comparison will show its substantial and technical inferiority to the poem. If to be direct, concrete, compact, is a virtue for the subject as it is here conceived, the verse has the advantage. In the process of translation the particular irony and wit escaped; the abruptness of juxtaposition and the violence were lost. What is easy and perhaps rich in the verse demands cumbersome expansion in the prose: compare the two versions of the passage beginning “If she’d but let him in.” These effects in the verse are consequences of form, of craft. One employs verse in order to be able to attain them, for they are unobtainable in prose. In the third stanza, for example, occurs the first serious conflict between syntax and verse-form: “most / Embarrassing” and “this side / Satisfaction” are split in successive lines. The resulting impression of strain, torsion, is useful to the subject. “Satisfaction” is allowed to stand alone, as no other word in the poem does, because it represents a climax. But a third conflict at the end of its line (“green / Difficulties”) recalls, as it should recall for the subject, the ordeal which but seemed to end with “Satisfaction.” None of these things can be done in prose, and to the extent that they assist in presentation, they are valuable.

  This may be put in another way. One of the reasons for writing verse is delight in craftsmanship—rarely for its own sake, mainly as it seizes and makes visible its subject. Versification, rime, stanza-form, trope, are the tools. They provide the means by which the writer can shape from an experience in itself usually vague, a mere feeling or phrase, something that is coherent, directed, intelligible. They permit one to say things that would not otherwise be said at all; it may be said, even, that they permit one to feel things that would not otherwise be felt. Two instances of this shaping occur also in the third stanza. The first line of each of the preceding stanzas runs into the second; but “So it is and has been.”—a full stop. A resource of verse-form makes the generalization possible. And after the four weak endings which precede it, the heavy regul
ar final line of the stanza takes up the metrical accumulation and acts, again, as generalization, moving from the earth into mythology—for such a fable as this, the absolute.

  Poetry provides its readers, then, with what we may call a language of experience, an idiom, of which the unit may be an entire complicated emotion or incident. The language is not the language of prose. It requires a different kind of reading and a different process of sensibility, and probably the most relevant questions raised for a reader by any poems have to do with the approach toward an ideal of reading. I hope it will be so with the following poems; it is to these questions that my note has tried to suggest answers.

  POEMS [1942]

  Dedication:

  TO BHAIN CAMPBELL (1911–1940)*

  The poems, although an arbitrary brief selection from work done during 1939 and 1940, are printed here in the order of composition. Most of them appeared first in The Kenyon Review, New Poems 1940, and New Directions 1941. “The Statue,” first published in Partisan Review, was reprinted in Five Young American Poets (1940).

  THE DISPOSSESSED [1948]

  Dedication:

  TO MY MOTHER

  NOTE

  With exceptions for a thematic reason, affecting Section One, the poems stand in what was roughly their order of writing. I have to thank the editors of Partisan Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Accent, The Nation, The New Republic, The Sewanee Review, Chimera, Poetry, The Commonweal, and the New Directions (edited by James Laughlin) and New Poems series (edited by Oscar Williams), in whose pages most of the poems, often in earlier versions, originally appeared. Eleven of them were reprinted in the first Five Young American Poets (1940), and five others are from a pamphlet Poems (1942), both published by New Directions. The first line of “Desires of Men and Women” varies a line by Delmore Schwartz. Parts of “Young Woman’s Song” are based on a published journal I once read. “Sweet when the lost arrive” in “A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away” is from the great mad poem of Smart. If there are other obligations that should be mentioned, let the present acknowledgment stand for them. I have felt tempted to add some notes, remarking, for instance, that the subject of “Winter Landscape” is not really the painting by the elder Breughel to which from start to finish the poem refers, that “The Good Life’s founded upon L. s. d.” (a translation of a refrain by Brecht) is alluded to in my line “The good life’s founded upon LST” (LST is Landing Ship, Tanks), that the opening line of “The Dispossessed” occurs in Pirandello’s Six Characters, even that “The Enemies of the Angels” depends in part on Genesis xix, and so on; but I believe readers dislike notes. One word about “Narcissus Moving”*: it is very early morning; the poet, upstairs in a house across the way, sometimes hears, sometimes watches, the young man’s departure, except in the second stanza where he generalizes; the speeches are the young man’s, overheard.—N.B. In the general dedication, exception is made for poems dedicated in 1942 to the memory of Bhain Campbell, and for others: “Winter Landscape” is dedicated to Beryl Eeman, “The Animal Trainer” to Mark Van Doren, “Boston Common” to Lieutenant F. B. Boyden, the “Nervous Songs” to my brother, Jefferson, and “Canto Amor” and “The Lightning” to my wife, Eileen.

  HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET [1956]

  Acknowledgments: The author wishes to record his deep gratefulness to Mr Moe and others for the Guggenheim fellowship which let this work be finished; and to friends; acknowledgment is made also to the editors of Partisan Review where it first appeared, and to a correspondent who supplied some of the notes at the end.*

  HIS THOUGHT MADE POCKETS & THE PLANE BUCKT [1958]

  Dedication:

  TO ANN

  Acknowledgement is made to the editors of Partisan Review, Poetry, American Letters, The New Yorker, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, where some of these poems first appeared. “The Mysteries” was made for the festschrift published on the sixtyfifth anniversary of Erich Kahler’s birth. None of my work in progress is included except some pieces of an old poem called “The Black Book.”

  BERRYMAN’S SONNETS [1967]

  Dedication:

  TO ROBERT GIROUX

  NOTE

  These Sonnets, which were written many years ago, have nothing to do, of course, with my long poem in progress, The Dream Songs. Sonnet 25 appeared in the fortieth-anniversary number of Poetry; the others are unprinted.

  Ballsbridge, Dublin

  October 8th, 1966

  LOVE & FAME [1971], Faber and Faber edition (England)

  Dedication:

  To the memory of

  the suffering lover & young Breton master

  who called himself ‘Tristan Corbière’

  (I wish I versed with his bite)*

  AFTERWORD

  The initial American public reception of this book, whether hostile, cool, or hot, was so uncomprehending that I wondered whether I had wasted my time, until a letter came from Stanford seeing that it is—however uneven—a whole, each of the four movements criticizing backward the preceding, until Part IV wipes out altogether all earlier presentations of the ‘love’ and ‘fame’ of the ironic title. Professor Gelpi was in a good technical position to take in what I was up to, being the ablest critic Emily Dickinson has ever had, since my lyric form here had its genesis in a study of hers. But the attack on these two notions begins in the opening poem, and little as I like to show my hand, I pass on to anyone interested some of the readings of it that occurred to me in two minutes when it surfaced from a reverie in hospital one evening last Fall, many months after its composition.

  1. Even this distasteful Braggart (Famous Poet & Scandal—note his bastard) is human (= weak) like us: he did (once anyway) genuinely love and can genuinely regret.

  2. He is more convincing than he knows: his insecurity about his fame (over-brandishing) matches his insecurity over this ‘true’ (exposed as false by his repeated infidelity to it) love he is so proud of, and we have pathetic before us an existential man, wishing to be (twice—cf. title) what is impossible to quick-silver (Luther’s word for man’s heart) Man. Our affect: recognition and pity for his unhappiness.

  3. Even this apparently genuine love is of course slipping from him (last line), as his apparently genuine fame will do too—which maybe the poor guy really doesn’t know, whistling in the dark, thumping his chest. Even I (me vigorous Reader) am superior to him.

  4. This guy is unreal, dreaming of an unchanged re[-e]ncounter after long years, when he can convince her of his success in life (which it does not seem he has very well convinced himself of). Just one more doomed oldfashioned* type (for all his paraphernalia of modernity—flouting morality & national borders, etc.): The Romantic.

  5. Memory failing, clutching at frantic data of life-achievement, obsessed with a vanishing past of happiness in his present loneliness & age, he moves us after all. Maybe we too, in the end—

  6. Current noisy psuedo-world-figure fixated on a local ancient unidentifiable whisper.

  Other readings will occur to anybody listening. ‘Gash’ is sexual slang, of course; the photographs might connect backward with ll.3–4; ‘all over’ might be taken in a secondary sense and the poem read as a Freudian dream culminating in the exclamations, with detumescence (waking) in the final line. And so on.

  None of this has anything to say about the poem’s merit—if it has any merit beyond conciseness, a certain explosive feeling, a certain administrative rhythm-set; and I may add that its weirdness is probably a product of two opposite circumstances: lack of practice (it was the first short poem I had written, almost, in 22 years) and veteran expertize** in an allied medium, the long poem (five of those years were spent on one, thirteen on another), where complexity of this sort, though uncommon, is not unexpected.

  Minneapolis

  20 June 1971

  Editor’s Note: Most of the “Afterword” to the FF edition of Love & Fame appears as “Scholia to Second Edition” in the earlier FSG second edition, revised, dated 25 J
anuary 1971. The concluding sentence of the penultimate paragraph of “Scholia,” but not in the FF edition, is “I have killed some of the worst poems in the first edition.” The last paragraph, which follows, is substantially different from the last paragraph in the “Afterword” of the FF edition:

  None of this has anything to say about the poem’s merit, if it has any. I notice it makes play with an obsession that ruled ‘The Ball Poem’ of 1942 as well as later, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1948–1953) and The Dream Songs (1955–1968): namely, the dissolving of one personality into another without relinquishing the original—here, that of the mature poet omnipotent and that of the aging man deprived and powerless. In the very long poem, of course, many personalities shift, reify, dissolve, survive, project—remaining one.

  DELUSIONS Etc. [1972]

  Dedication:

  TO MARTHA B,

  passion & awe

  *Editor’s Note: The page number of “On the London Train” in 20P is given here.

  *Editor’s Note: The dedicatory poem to Bhain Campbell is included in the text of CP.

  *Editor’s Note: The page number of “Narcissus Moving” in TD is given here.

  *Editor’s Note: Berryman’s “Notes” to Homage follow the text of the poem in CP.

  *Editor’s Note: The dedicatory poem to Corbière is included in the text of CP.

  *Editor’s Note: Berryman spelled “oldfashioned” as it appears.

  **Editor’s Note: Berryman spelled “expertize” as it appears.

  Editor’s Notes, Guidelines, and Procedures

  Besides Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in Partisan Review in 1953 and as a single volume in 1956, the collections Berryman selected and arranged are:

  “Twenty Poems” in Five Young American Poets (1940)

  Poems (1942)

  The Dispossessed (1948)