Bellow was especially close to Berryman at this time. For five months, the two friends shared an office in Temporary North of Mines (TNR), a wooden building north of the School of Mines with a view of “a gully, a parking lot, and many disheartening cars.”65 Their talk, as always, was of literature: “There was little personal conversation. We never discussed money, or wives, and we seldom talked politics” (p. 268). When Berryman broke his leg and his doctor, A. Boyd Thomes, later Bellow’s doctor, was called out in the middle of the night, “John said, as the splint was being applied, ‘You must hear this new Dream Song!’ He recited it as they carried him to the ambulance” (p. 269). Often Bellow and Berryman would stroll “about a pond, through a park, and then up Lake Street, ‘where the used cars live!’ ” They talked of Yeats and read each other’s work, in Bellow’s case, Henderson, and the short story he had recently written, “Leaving the Yellow House.” Berryman pronounced the story “delicious” (“a favorite expression”), though also “faulty, inconclusive. (We told each other exactly what we thought [p. 269]).”
The friendship between Bellow and Berryman had begun in Princeton after Berryman read a transcript of Augie March. According to Eileen Simpson, “after the first chapter, he said ‘It’s damn good.’ When he finished, ‘Bellow is it. I’m going to have lunch with him and tell him he’s a bloody genius and so on.” At this lunch, Bellow described his decision to break from the “Flaubertian standard” of Dangling Man and The Victim, thus, “unwittingly,” as Eileen Simpson puts it, giving Berryman “the push he needed to make the final break … with his hero-worshipping attitude towards father-figures, Yeats above all.”66 In his foreword to Berryman’s posthumously published autobiographical novel, Recovery (1973), Bellow quotes from the last letter he received from the poet: “Let’s join forces, large and small, as in the winter beginning of 1953 in Princeton, with the Bradstreet blazing and Augie fleecing away. We’re promising.” According to Bellow, “what he said was true: we joined forces in 1953 and sustained each other for many years” (p. 267). In an interview with Keith Botsford, Bellow names three figures as having been “great influences” in his life: Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, and John Berryman.67 In a note from 1958, Berryman mentions feeling close “w. 4 American poets just now,” but closer to Bellow, who alone gives him a “sense of sustaining ‘craft,’ ” a point he underlines with added emphasis: “My friendship w. one magnificent Amer. Novelist gives me more sense of inter-relating artistic life, trial, movement on.”68
Berryman was an alcoholic, in and out of hospitals and drying-out clinics. Drink, for him, Bellow conjectures, “replaced the public sanction that poets in the Twin Cities (or in Chicago, in Washington or New York) had to do without.… No one minded if you bred poodles. No one objected if you wrote Dream Songs” (p. 270). When, however, this view was invoked as a way of explaining Berryman’s suicide—on January 7, 1972, after years of alcoholism and depression, he jumped off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, plunging to his death in the Mississippi—Bellow wrote sardonically to Ralph Ross on August 13, 1973: “There’s something culturally gratifying, apparently, about such heroic self-destruction. It’s good-old-Berryman-he-knew-how-to-wrap-it-up. It’s a combination of America, Murderer of Poets, and This Is the Real Spiritual Condition of Our Times.”
That Berryman had few doubts about the heroic nature of the self-destructive artist is suggested in an exchange with Irving Howe. “Don’t you feel,” Berryman asked, “that Rimbaud’s chaos is central to your life?” Howe reports being “guileless enough to say no, I did not. And that, for Berryman, was the end of me: I might be a nice fellow, but I was not one of the haloed victims, not like the Delmore he adored as the suffering poet of the modern city.”69 By the time success came to Berryman, the chaos was ineradicable, as Dream Song 75, which he dedicated to Bellow, suggests. The Dream Songs, Berryman explains, “is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof.”70 Dream Song 75 begins: “Turning it over, considering, like a madman / Henry put forth a book.” At first this book, likened to a tree, evokes little response, but after “seasons went and came” and “leaves fell” it begins to attract attention. Its success seems to derive from Henry’s madness. Its “flashing & bursting” is what makes it “remarkable.” That Henry is “thoughtful” and “surviving” as well as “savage” is registered, but it is energy which makes both book and poem stand out.
That energy connects Berryman’s poetry to Bellow’s fiction. The “chaos” central to Berryman’s life, seen in part as a product of modernity, produces art that is exuberant, inclusive, comic. Even when most cast down, Henry’s accounts of his condition exhilarate. In stanza one of Dream Song 53, he’s in a very bad way, prone on a bed in some hospital or facility, a fallen Achilles (Berryman calls him “Pelides,” son of Peleus) pumped full of Sparine (an antipsychotic drug).71 In stanza two, Henry evokes the attempts of other literary warrior-heroes to ward off or withstand the chaos of modernity, what Wyndham Lewis, in a favorite phrase of Bellow’s, called “the moronic inferno.”72 First he quotes “the Honourable Possum” (T. S. Eliot), who says “I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,” then an unnamed novelist “hot as a firecracker” (Bellow himself, or so Bellow told John Haffenden, Berryman’s biographer, in a letter of September 16, 1972), who complains that “it takes me so long to read the ’paper / … / because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, / including the corpses, pal.” In the poem’s third and final stanza (most Dream Songs have only three stanzas) the heavy cost of an artistic vocation is communicated matter-of-factly, in a quotation attributed to Gottfried Benn: “We are using our own skins for wallpaper and cannot win.”
Bellow may at times have felt skinned alive but never as often or as intensely as Berryman, whom he loved but was unable to help. In the foreword to Recovery he recounts interrupting a conversation with Berryman about Rilke “to ask him whether he had, the other night, somewhere in the Village, pushed a lady down a flight of stairs.”
“Whom?”
“Beautiful Catherine [Lindsay, a writer, with whom Bellow had been involved], the big girl I introduced you to.”
“Did I do that? I wonder why?”
“Because she wouldn’t let you into the apartment.”
He took a polite interest in this information. He said, “That I was in the city at all is news to me.”
We went back to Rilke. There was only one important topic. We had no small talk.
In the foreword Bellow also recalls a time at Minnesota when Berryman apparently disappeared for several days. Bellow and Ralph Ross went to his home, forced a window, and found him lying facedown diagonally across the bed (like Henry in Dream Song 53, who “lay in the middle of the world, and twitcht”). “From this position he did not stir. But he spoke distinctly. ‘These efforts are wasted. We are unregenerate’ ” (p. 268).
Berryman described the sort of language he evolved for The Dream Songs as a “simulation of the (improved) colloquial,”73 which aptly describes the language Bellow evolved for Augie. W. S. Merwin says Berryman “flaunted” the originality of this language, but that it was “saved from affectation by the sheer authority and authenticity of the voice it embodies.”
The verse proceeds with an oddity skating on the edge of comprehensibility and frequently skipping well beyond it. Syntax, tone, diction, and movement—subjects that Berryman pondered fixedly for years—were deliberately arranged, syllable by syllable, cadenzas on carefully tuned strings. But the high artifice was countered by wild liberties taken with grammar, allusion, meter, and every pattern of expectation that the verse suggested.74
This passage recalls Martin Amis on the style of Augie, which “loves and e
mbraces awkwardness.” Berryman lived the language of The Dream Songs as he lived Henry’s condition. The eccentric emphases in his poems (“I seldom go to films”) became those of his daily speech.75 This is unlike Bellow, who resembled Augie in a number of respects, but did not talk like him, just as he did not talk like Henderson or write letters like Herzog. Bellow did not have to “dive” for his pearls, in Richard Stern’s phrase, as did Berryman. Bellow had more distance from his creations than Berryman.
Though the two men were different in character, they gained strength from each other, thought themselves “joint labourers” (Wordsworth’s description of himself and Coleridge).76 “Just now in Poetry I read four Dream Songs,” Bellow writes to Berryman on November 13, 1962, “and wish to say, this being an hour when strength is low, thank you. We keep each other from the poorhouse. If it hadn’t been for you there would have been many a night of porridge and a thin quilt. I will try and return the favor.” On August 1, 1963, Berryman writes to Bellow: “After the adrenalin heaved on me by your raving master-works Augie & Henderson—without which I would be dreaming out an agrarian existence—guess how I feel abt any counter-thrust.”
Bellow first showed Berryman drafts of Henderson when he and Sasha stopped in Minneapolis on their way back to New York from Nevada. Earlier, he had briefly described it in an undated letter in joke-French: “I have a sort of zany book [Seize the Day] coming in November. It isn’t exactly worthy of us, perhaps. C’est pour gagner la vie. But in addition I have accomplished something vraiment pas mal. Sans blague, Berrimon. I think you will be pleased.” Berryman had been writing individual Dream Songs since August 1955, but sometime after reading the Henderson drafts he introduced an unnamed friend of Henry’s who addresses him in blackface as “Mr. Bones” and whom, in 1962, Henry begins to answer in blackface, a language inspired at least in part by the language Bellow gives the African characters in Henderson. The language of these characters is openly artificial, resembling no real African voice, as other aspects of the novel’s Africa resemble no real Africa. In the spring 1959 issue of Partisan Review, Elizabeth Hardwick called the novel’s setting “a joke Africa with whimsical tribes” (“A Fantastic Voyage,” p. 300). The language of characters like Romilayu and Itelo, less so Dahfu, King of the Wariri, is the language of American “Negroes” in minstrel shows, described by Bellow’s friend Ralph Ellison in an essay published in Partisan Review in spring 1958 (“Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”) as “pseudo-Negro dialect,” “a ritual of exorcism.” “This blackfaced figure of white fun,” Ellison writes of the blackface minstrel, “is for Negroes a symbol of everything they rejected in the white man’s thinking about race” (p. 23) (a description that recalls the schlemiel of Yiddish literature, in Ruth Wisse’s words quoted in Chapter 1 of this book, “the Jew as he is defined by the anti-Semite, but reinterpreted by God’s appointee”). The Princeton professor Carlos Baker, in a review of Henderson in The New York Times Book Review (February 22, 1979), complained that “except for King Dahfu, all the natives talk like a combination of Uncle Remus and the Emperor Jones.” But as Catherine Fitzpatrick argues, in a study of the literary friendship of Bellow and Berryman, Bellow’s interest in Henderson is less with Africa than with “white American primitivist fantasies about Africa,” an interest shared by Berryman.77 In Bellow’s case, “that the imaginary Africans of the novel should turn out to talk, not like any real people, but instead in the tones of the imaginary black Americans of minstrelsy, is entirely appropriate.”78
It is hard to believe that Bellow was unaware of the resonances of the language he gives his Africans (“You no like dat, sah?” asks Romilayu; “Mus’ be no ahnimal in drink wattah,” explains Itelo).79 All during his second teaching stint at Minnesota, while the two friends read and discussed each other’s work, Bellow was writing Henderson. Berryman’s first datable use of blackface occurs in Dream Song 26, written in November 1958, some months after this period yet before he’d read Carl Wittke’s Tambo and Bones (1930), a history of the American minstrel stage. “Given the similarities between the two blackfaces,” Fitzpatrick argues, “and given that Berryman’s clearly developed later, it seems that Henderson, or even Bellow himself, in ‘private readings,’ was, at the least, a major source of Berryman’s blackface.” At the same time, “Berryman’s adoption of something that was clearly ‘minstrel,’ even at this early date, provides important confirmation that Bellow, from whom he was adopting it, understood the voice he was using in Henderson to be distinctly ‘blackface’ rather than generically ‘black.’ ”80
This interpretation of the language of the African characters in Henderson points to a more general feature of Bellow’s and Berryman’s writing during this period: their determination to treat serious matters comically. For Bellow, Henderson is “the absurd seeker of higher qualities,” as Henry for Berryman is Achilles on Sparine.81 The modern condition becomes a source of laughter (the laughter in Augie is different, has less of the absurd about it). As Bellow puts it in “Literature,” an essay he wrote for an Encyclopaedia Britannica publication entitled The Great Ideas Today (1963), “ ‘the inner life,’ the ‘unhappy consciousness,’ the management of personal life, ‘alienation’—all sad questions for which the late romantic writer reserved a special tone of disappointment, of bitterness, are turned inside-out by the modern comedian. Deeply subjective self-concern is ridiculed. My feelings, my early traumas, my moral seriousness, my progress, my sensitivity, my fidelity, my guilt—the modern reader is easily made to laugh at all of these.” Today, Bellow asserts, comedy is “our only relief from the long prevalent mood of pessimism, discouragement, and low seriousness (the degenerate effect of the ambition for high seriousness).” It is not that comic writing lacks seriousness or that the search for higher qualities is useless, only that accounts of its difficulty ought not to result in what Bellow calls “the popular orgy of wretchedness in modern literature.”82 These views were Berryman’s as well; his seriousness, too, is “comical-terrible,” inevitably, given the suffering he and Henry shared. As he declared in a note written in late 1955, each of the Dream Songs should have “one stroke of some damned serious humor,” “gravity of matter” should combine with “gaiety of manner,”83 a conjunction that marked Berryman in life as on the page. Here is Bellow on Berryman the man: “He was a husband, a citizen, a father, a householder, he went on the wagon, he fell off, he joined A.A. He knocked himself out to be like everybody else—he liked, he loved, he cared, but he was aware that there was something peculiarly comical in all this.”84
There were stages in the “inter-relating artistic life” of Bellow and Berryman. Augie was an influence in creating the voice of The Dream Songs. The voice of The Dream Songs was an influence in the creation of Henderson’s voice (along with Hemingway’s tough-guy talk and the bombast of Chanler Chapman85). The speech of the African characters in Henderson was an influence on the blackface of Henry as “Mr. Bones” and of his unnamed friend.86 It could also be argued that Berryman’s example encouraged Bellow to draw later novels undisguisedly from painful personal experience. By the end of the 1960s, a decade or so after their time together at Minnesota, Berryman had become a literary celebrity, interviewed in Life magazine, much photographed and profiled. 77 Dream Songs, dedicated to Berryman’s third wife, Kate, and to Bellow, had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965 and was followed by His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, consisting of a further 306 Dream Songs, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. In both volumes, as in what he said about them, Berryman maintained the distinction between Henry and himself, as Bellow maintained a distinction between himself and his fictional alter egos. Berryman did so, however, in a voice indistinguishable from Henry’s. “Henry does resemble me and I resemble Henry,” he told a student interviewer from Harvard, “but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair—and fuck them, I’m not Henry; Henry doesn’t have any bats.”
87
The closeness of the life to the work in The Dream Songs, especially when embarrassing or wounding aspects of the life are involved, was hard for readers to ignore. The success of Robert Lowell greatly influenced Berryman in this regard, and critics often linked the two poets, along with Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Sexton’s teacher, W. D. Snodgrass, and other “confessional” poets.88 That Berryman’s example inspired Herzog, the novel that follows Henderson, is suggested in their correspondence. In the letter of November 13, 1962, in which Bellow thanks Berryman for the four Dream Songs, without which “there would have been many a night of porridge and a thin quilt,” it is Herzog that he hopes will “return the favor.” Berryman’s response to Herzog was that “Nobody has ever sat down & wallowed to this extent in his own life, with full art—I mean novelists. I don’t know anything to compare it to, except you.”89
Berryman’s influence on Bellow lived on after his suicide, most obviously in the character of Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt’s Gift. The depiction of Humboldt grew out of feelings like those Humboldt inspires in Charlie Citrine: of love, affection, helplessness, but also guilt, at coolly observing a friend’s troubles, making use of him in one’s writing. As Charlie puts it, in words quoted in the introduction to this book, “I did incorporate other people into myself and consume them. When they died I passionately mourned. I said I would continue their work and their lives. But wasn’t it a fact that I added their strength to mine? Didn’t I have my eye on them in the days of their vigor and glory?” (p. 282). In Bellow’s account of Berryman’s last visit to Chicago in the foreword to Recovery all these feelings are evoked. Berryman was the William Vaughn Moody lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1971. He arrived to give a reading on January 27, a day after receiving a letter from Allen Tate attacking the first part of Love & Fame (1970), a recent collection of poems. The attack drove him back to drink after a period of sobriety.
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 68