The Receptionist

by Janet Groth

  But his stick-thin frame was shaken upright again by the ringing of the doorbell. Lunch arrived. He began again on the bourbon and cigarettes. Would not take hold of a morsel of bread, much less a bite of a sandwich. I could not conceive that he could give a public reading that night. Yet at 8:00 p.m., I sat in the third row at the Guggenheim, next to Jane Howard, who was to write about him for Life, amid several hundred New York literati, and saw him do it. He was shaky, but he was eloquent, and his weaving and slurred speech only seemed to add to the drama and interest of the occasion.

  Then one day I opened the newspaper to discover a photo of the bearded Berryman. Like everyone else in the literary world, I was shocked to read that on January 7, 1972, John had left his home, walked to the bridge that crossed the Mississippi on the left side of the Minneapolis campus, and jumped. I imagined him briefly looking down at the river as a block of ice floated by, waving to a young couple kissing on the campus-side bank. Whether he performed either of those actions, he did jump a hundred feet to his death, a pocket of his overcoat yielding only one document, a blank check.

  We who used to fill to capacity the auditoriums of the universities and museums in which he read met once more at the Donnell Library for a memorial service. Poet friends read, but John stole the show. His familiar voice—on tape—made what had been a solemn and bleak occasion rocket toward hysteria with its power to evoke in us a mixture of laughter and grief.

  In the years after his death, as I heard a sardonic Frenchman put it, “the dissertation bells went off all over the country.” I hated it when I heard the way he was being talked of by junior professors at Modern Language Association conventions and reedy-voiced sophomores in poetry coffeehouses—expounding on his death wish, lumping him together with three or four others who happened, like him, to be dead by their own hand.

  I found that those who had known him wrote or told about it as if the frazzled, badly behaved neuroses were him. How unjust! To me his value lay neither in the titillating gossip of his riotous life nor in the private gratification of having been admired by him. It is not the poems he left behind, though the poems loom large. It is the poet sage.

  Since I could not watch John make his poems, the next best thing was to watch him teach. As a poet-teacher he so invested his ego in his work that he was ego-free, a fleshless, selfless lover and sharer of enlightenment, pure spirit. This part of him is neither personal nor notorious nor recorded anywhere at all except in his poems and in the memories of his students, where he exists as the chief item in the little library of hours we’ve brought away from our lives in the university.

  For those of us who took his humanities course, this meant fifty minutes a day, five days a week, for five trimester terms. The course, called something like Western Civ, covered everything from the Greeks and Romans to Flaubert. As he taught it, it became a remarkable monument to the life of the mind—or whatever real education had better be called, now that to call it education is to give it a bad name.

  He came in a little late, but faithfully. They say now that he was often hung over, or on ambulatory leave from some local drying-out clinic or halfway house or mental ward. Perhaps the latter were only facets of the later years of his tenure. I recall his missing only one class in the one and a half years I attended the course. The occasion must have been more serious and predictable than a spate of illness; when he was merely ill, he came. On that one day, he had arranged for a substitute chosen to make up to us for his absence—and perhaps in the case of anybody else’s absence, it would have done.

  He sent us his friend Saul Bellow, a visiting professor from Chicago, a figure who should have delighted our glamour-loving selves. Yet the one who came in John’s stead struck us as dull stuff, a burned-out case to the likes of us, who had been fed on real flames of a real spirit. The day passed. Back came our man, passing the light and culture of the past through the shining honeycomb of his passionate personality, informing it with life and intelligence. With him we entered once more into the world of sacrifice and ritual, of meaning and conflict and beauty. Existential truth emerged and took on life and breath before us.

  The more I hear this man reduced to the wasteful contours of a faintly ridiculous fame as one of the “confessional poets,” the more necessary it seems to proclaim his real worth as manifested in his classroom.

  He was, as I said, usually a few minutes late—a deliberate design on his part. There were no chummy huddles with the prof up front broken up by the bell, no fidgeting at the blackboard while stragglers got to their seats. He got straight to the business at hand. There was a sense of ceremony in his greeting—“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen”—and in the way he set his bulging briefcase down on a chair beside the front desk, opened it, and extracted the text of the day. He’d lay it on the desktop and walk to the windows that ran along the right side of the room (his right, our left), twisting the cord of the window shade into spirals as he began the discussion.

  It never became clear why he brought the books that caused the bulge, since he referred only to the text at hand, and to his notes, if he brought any, not at all. Still, it was functional in a way, an outward and visible sign of all the background material he had gone through that now stood bulwark-like behind the easy command he displayed of his subject.

  There was no talking down. If, in the course of opening a book, he paused to give us a disquisition on the correct way to open books, it was never with an air of condescension. Rather, he managed to convey the idea that there was always a best way to do even the simplest things, and to credit us with wanting to know that best way.

  He began by pressing a few pages in from the back, opening flat, smoothing; pressing a few pages in from the front, opening flat, smoothing; then from the back a few, then the front, and so on, a few pages at a time, until he could lay the book open flat from the middle without breaking its spine.

  In the same spirit of making us his confreres in technical inquiry, he took us into his confidence regarding his choice of which translation of a given classic we would be using. He went far beyond the point where any of us could hope to follow him in his comparison of the merits of the Rieu versus the Lattimore version of the Iliad, for example, or the Cohen versus the Putnam translation of Don Quixote. What did come through to us was the sense of what a tricky, delicate, and complicated thing it was to transfer poetic expression from one language to another. He showed a regard for our pocketbooks, too, assigning works in paperback, or, if he assigned hardcover books, seeing to it that the campus bookstores were stocked with inexpensive used copies.

  He’d give us sample passages from rival translations whenever another version seemed to have an edge over the one we were using. But however good he thought the translation he had settled on, he never let us forget that we were getting only a fraction of the power inhering to the original. He read aloud to us in the original so that we might not altogether miss the aural contours of a work. This method made a vivid impression on me in two instances in particular. One, in a term dominated by Dante’s Inferno, came in the Paolo and Francesca episode.

  We were using the Ciardi translation, but we had samples of Longfellow, Sayers, and others as well. We were also grounded in the nature of the sin for which this pair of innocents had been condemned to circle through the whirlwind entwined in one another’s arms. He put it to us that in Renaissance Italy, romantic love was downright seditious, an act of wanton rebellion on the part of marriageable children. Noble parents engaged in delicate negotiations to secure the perpetuation and, if possible, enlargement of their properties through marriage.

  In such an environment the reading of any book of romance—certainly the book of Lancelot—in the company of a member of the opposite sex was flagrant disobedience. It was a reckless thing to do, never mind Francesca’s disclaimer, as we first met it in Ciardi’s notes: “We were alone, suspecting nothing.” Even those of us who knew no Italian gained a greater sense of poignancy from the original, “Soli
eravamo e sanza alcun suspetto.” Though I suppose it would require the timbre of his voice as he read it to convey the full pressure of Berryman’s feeling for these lines.

  The second instance was a line of Hebrew from the poem of Job that knocked us out. By the time we got to it we were already veterans of the historical-critical method of biblical study practiced by Bultmann and others. We were aware of the folk origin of the beginning and end of the book of Job—the story of Job’s initial state of happiness and the last images of how, after his tribulations, God restores everything he has lost and doubles it. We knew that these “frame narratives” were most probably added later than the core poem, which was the work of one “maker.”

  We plunge immediately into the opening lines of the authenticated poem, noting the progressive intensity with which Job calls down oblivion upon himself. The earliest stage of erasure is relatively impersonal: “Let the day perish wherein I was born,” et cetera. But see the fanaticism of his curses, the successive degrees by which he seeks to expunge his own existence. He will call back, first, the day and the night in historical time of his birth, then the calendar dates, then the weather, the light, the meteorological and chrono­logical particulars—all expunged in the specifics of the curses he hurls forth. Finally, Berryman tells us, the poet builds his poem in the Hebrew to a crescendo of outraged horror and revulsion over the moment of his conception, a cry so inadequate to the resources of English that the language cannot do it justice: “The night in which it is said, There is a man child conceived . . . That night, let thick darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let that night be barren; let no joyful cry be heard in it . . . Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning; because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.”

  “Listen,” said Berryman, “and you shall hear the cry of a woman in sexual climax RENDERED INTO WORDS!”

  We heard it. We who had never heard such a sound coming out of our own mouths—or the mouths of anyone we knew. We heard it, right there in room 123 of Johnston Hall.

  To see and hear Berryman lecture on a text he loved was to be in the presence of the transcendent. To describe it otherwise would be imprecise—and he was ever one for precision.

  ON WRITING, NOT WRITING, AND LUNCHING WITH JOE

  ALTHOUGH HE SAID HE doubted it, Jack Kahn posited my twenty-year employment flatline as my own eccentric choice. Closer to the truth than you knew, Jack. The choosing was all unconscious, however, so how much “choice” entered into it?

  The dream I had of being a writer, a dream I carried with me to The New Yorker, began in my teens with the conviction that I was meant to be one. I had long harbored these yearnings—inevitable, I suppose, since I had spent many adolescent hours immersed in novels about the artist as a young man. (The gender switch was made easily enough; these were fantasies, after all.) I even wrote and submitted an entry to Mademoiselle’s short story contest. More of a teen angst reverie than a story, really, called “Night Thoughts,” it featured the ineffable sense of loss that swept over the night thinker when a car’s headlights moved from one corner of the bedroom ceiling to another and was gone. I didn’t win that contest. Another blond with daddy problems won that year. Name of Sylvia Plath.

  The dream went with me when I left home in September 1954. I started my adult life as a scholarship student living in a large Victorian house on the edge of the University of Minnesota campus. It was called, quaintly enough, Mrs. Smith’s Tea Room. The scholar­ship covered books and tuition, the job at Mrs. Smith’s covered room and board, and Mom and Dad sent three dollars a week pocket money. My gig was cutting pies into difficult-to-calculate numbers of equal pieces—Mrs. Smith wanted seven slices out of the six-slice tins and nine out of the eight. A wonderful Kerouac look-alike whose name, miraculously, was Jack, liked to josh with me while he waited to pick up the desserts and serve them at his tables—full of adoring girls—in the front dining room.

  On my own at last, I found I need no longer be lonely. Suddenly I was among other people who liked to read. In the back room, tables full of graduate students—most of them male, with interesting, scruffy clothes and brooding looks—conducted passionate discussions about Miguel de Unamuno and Wallace Stevens within earshot of my pantry. I learned to smoke. I tried to look sophisticated in a blond chignon and mascara-darkened lashes and bought a trench coat—the first of a long line of trench coats—with epaulets! I was in heaven.

  Exempt from freshman English, I took a creative writing course, turning my adolescent traumas into short stories. My writing teacher, Morgan Blum, a frog-like man from a place he called “Looz-iana,” sat hunched over his desk in front of the beat-up lecture room in Folwell Hall, making me appreciate things like literary flashbacks, use of dialect, the Southern grotesque, and such. Professor Blum was especially well suited for Katherine Anne Porter and Faulkner, whose “A Rose for Miss Emily” he brought to vivid life. Several of the stories I wrote for him appeared, along with some poems I wrote for another course, in the campus literary magazine called the Ivory Tower.

  All seemed to be going smoothly until I discovered a near-pathological shyness in myself. In the writing classes I took, student work was regularly read for discussion. I soon realized that I suffered inordinately whenever attention was called to my writing. It mattered not that it was favorable attention. This nervousness rose to near trauma at a literary evening held at the Pillsbury Mansion that winter. I knew it would be attended by Allen Tate, a star of the English faculty and a major American poet. His “Ode to the Confederate Dead” was in all the anthologies. In anticipation of having to read one of my stories aloud in front of him and the assembled company, I developed a migraine so severe that I asked the hostess to show me the nearest bathroom in which to be sick. She did, and afterward, with great understanding, she helped me to a darkened room. There she insisted I lie down on her own bed and pressed a damp washcloth to my brow, assuring me that someone else would read the story in my stead.

  By the time sherry and biscuits were served following the readings, I was well enough to join the others. I was introduced to Professor Tate as the author of a story he’d heard earlier in the evening. I muttered something about wanting to tell him how much I liked his class in English poetry, but stammered that I was “having trouble verbalizing it.” He looked kindly into my face and said in the deep and mellifluous voice with which he mesmerized his classes, “My dear child, that is not your difficulty.” Such encouragement only seemed to worsen my self-consciousness. I went home in a state of helpless mal de mer, though the only water, the Mississippi River, was blocks away.

  Crowning the paroxysms of self-doubt that accompanied each distinction bestowed upon my work was the Delta Phi Lambda spring banquet in my third and final year. I was to be one of the honorees. First at cocktails, and then at the white-linen-draped table on a dais in the hotel ballroom, I went through agonies of discomfort. I was barely able to force down the overcooked peas and rubber chicken, dreading the moment when I would have to stand, be applauded, and receive a stiff parchment signifying that I’d won the Anna Augusta Von Helmholtz Phelan award for my short fiction. Thankful that I was not expected to speak, I took the parcel handed me and, had it been possible, would have pressed my left wrist and rendered myself invisible. Wonderful comic book, that. Wonderful heroine, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil.

  Why this brutal self-punishment should have accompanied my every moment in the sun was to be a matter of much discussion in later years of psychoanalysis. In that spring of 1957 I could only suffer.

  The difficulty pursued me to New York. It wasn’t as if I got no help from the writers all around me. In the early days of his tenure, and mine, at the magazine, Paul Brodeur was in the throes of his first novel. His office was directly behind my desk, which afforded us lots of opportunity to compare notes. Paul di
scovered that, in true My Sister Eileen fashion, I had a novel, too. Its first chapters lay in that very desk, in my bottom drawer. Paul did me the honor of taking it seriously and set up a meeting for me with Seymour Laurence, a publisher just beginning his own imprint at Delacorte. Mr. Laurence and I had a drink together at the Harvard Club after he’d read a chapter or so. He was impressed, he said, and would look forward to seeing more.

  The novel in the drawer, instead of being completed and shown to the encouraging Seymour Laurence, was discarded in a melodramatic gesture during a trip home to Minnesota in 1963. Before going down to visit Mother and Dad, I arranged to have a drink at the Radisson in Minneapolis with my old professor Morgan Blum, to whom I had sent the novel in progress. He wasted no time in delivering his opinion. “I am very disappointed in you, Janet.” His finger tapped the manuscript, which he’d hauled out of his battered briefcase. “I used to admire the honesty of your writing very much.” (He had, after all, arranged for me to win the fiction prize seven years before.) “Now,” he continued, “you are not only smoking with a cigarette holder, you are writing with one. I used to feel the humanity of the parents and adolescents you wrote about. These people!” Another tap. “I wouldn’t want to spend a moment with these people, and I don’t see how you can expect any reader to waste time with them.” There was more, but that was the burden of the message.