The Selected Letters of John Berryman ed. by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae

Abstract

Teaching at Harvard in early 1942 and about to have a pamphlet of poems published by New Directions for its Poet of the Month series, John Berryman rebuked the press’s founder James Laughlin for making public what was meant to be private:Whether his rage erupted from the letter’s contents, Laughlin’s careless impropriety, or both, Berryman understood that “in letters, as in no other form of writing, the man appears” (1). That thought, written in an undergraduate essay at Columbia, would resurface decades later in a letter to his seven-year-old son, Paul: “I would expect you to keep my letters, so that you can read them when you are older. It is a source of pain to me, still, that I have no letters from my father, who died when I was twelve” (500). When Berryman took his own life on January 7, 1972, Paul would be just shy of his fifteenth birthday.In June 1959, released but still “not at all well” (374) after a month’s stay at Glenwood Hills Hospital in Minneapolis, Berryman—haunted by a premonition—hastily wrote to Ann Levine, his recently divorced second wife: “In case of fatal accident or death by illness I wish this letter to serve as a will.” At the funeral, there should be no eulogies, but if “anything is to be read, perhaps the last four sections of Whitman’s Song of Myself would do,” and for music, “Beethoven’s Op 130 or St James’s Infirmary, King Oliver’s recording. But it couldn’t matter less.” He was not to be cremated and did not care where he would be buried, except “not in the Twin Cities or Iowa.” The manuscript of The Dream Songs “as it stands, on my desk in a black binder, I would like copied and sent to Faber & Faber for publication.” When Paul turns twenty-one, he is to decide whether the large manuscript of sonnets written in 1947 should be published or destroyed; also for Paul’s discretion, his “verse manuscripts” since “they may possibly prove worth money.” Berryman’s extensive notes on Shakespeare and the Shakespearean part of his library might be sold to the Princeton Library; “I doubt whether the 200-page Ms. of the biography of Shakespeare is worth bothering with in its present form.” And “all my journals & diaries & all such notes,” he requested, “destroyed at once unread; also my correspondence. I express the wish that there may never be a biography” (378–79).More than a decade later, Berryman’s widowed third wife, Kate Donahue, deposited his papers in the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Rare Book Division. It is unclear if she knew of his letter to Levine, and like many widows it was left to her to manage her husband’s effects. Since then, scholars and editors have gone through Berryman’s archive and have published poetry and prose, a selection of letters to his mother, critical studies of the poems, and two biographies. Now comes his Selected Letters, which “represent a direct testimony,” writes Berryman’s daughter Martha B. Mayou in the foreword, “in a voice that is substantially different from a biographer’s: the reader is listening in on the writer speaking about his life and work” (vii).The editors have chosen letters that “shed light on Berryman as writer,” yet note that he “rarely stops talking about his work: almost all of his correspondence is primarily literary correspondence, even when it is also deeply personal” (5). To help narrow their broad range, they have omitted letters that contain information about living individuals and letters already published to avoid “extensive overlap” (4) with previous publications. “Extensive overlap” achingly underdescribes the situation. For instance, between fall 1928 and spring 1932 as a student at South Kent, Berryman wrote “some seven hundred pages of letters” to his mother and, as the editors explain, “many of those South Kent letters” were included in Richard J. Kelly’s We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (1988). Kelly, however, published only seven letters from these years; the editors, five letters, having silently skipped over 1929 and 1931. (Kelly has two letters from 1929, one from 1931). No letters overlap.Milton’s lines from Paradise Regain’d—“the childhood shews the man, / As morning shews the day”—ring true for Berryman since these prep school letters show a cheerful, doting son eager to please his mother; to break this pretense, the editors have interspersed a brutally self-aware and painfully self-conscious letter to his stepfather that includes the confessional lines “South Kent is no place for me—there are nice fellows here who will be something in life and I never will be anything anyhow”; “I have none of the fine qualities or emotions, and all the baser ones. I don’t understand why God permitted me to be born. I’m undesirable and a nuisance everywhere I go”; and in the postscript: “I’m a disgrace to your name” (16–17). The last letter from South Kent to his mother, written on a cold, rainy day in May 1932, is a lengthy and apologetic treatise written “in a theme, in an orderly and rational fashion,” on why he should be allowed to transfer from the all-boys boarding school to high school. He was “very awkward and self-conscious” around girls (when he did see them) and had “come to regard girls merely as a bunch of organs, without taking into consideration their intelligence and individuality.” Another year at South Kent “would make it a long and very difficult task for me to accept girls as a natural and normal thing and to be easy and natural in relations with them” (19). Conscious of his reader, he made sure to note that “many fellows from sheltered preparatory schools go absolutely hog-wild when they get to college, you know.” He had acquired the “typical smug attitude of many fellows—‘Well, I’m a prep school fellow, and as such a great deal better than many of these men you see.’ A lot of the fellows up here even look down upon great men who haven’t had a good education, and while I’d never go that far,” he assured his mother, ‘I don’t think a year at High School would hurt a bit’” (20). His “strong habit of cursing and blaspheming,” too, had grown steadily. And although he possessed an “excellent” mind, he had “habits of loafing” he could not shake; besides, he wrote, “I feel that during the four years that I’ve been here, I’ve learned about all that the school can teach me” (21). “He was the first boy,” writes John Haffenden (1982: 51) in The Life of John Berryman, “in the history of the school to by-pass the sixth form and to go straight from the fifth into college.”Those who want “the fullest picture of Berryman’s college years” (4) should turn to E. M. Halliday’s John Berryman and the Thirties (1987). Berryman and Halliday, both prep school boys, matriculated at Columbia in fall 1932 and first met in February 1933 when they crossed paths pursuing the same woman who was studying at Barnard. Lively and detailed, the memoir has many letters by Berryman; but the substantial loss is Berryman’s muted voice. Halliday’s own account skips fall 1932, 1933, and 1934, and gives a few letters for fall 1935 and spring 1936. (Halliday notes that their correspondence increased in fall 1934 when he transferred to the University of Michigan). Halliday’s memoir may provide readers with “the fullest picture of Berryman’s college years,” but those years are still full of holes.Berryman had a “natural love of study” (20) and Mark Van Doren at Columbia and George “Dadie” Rylands at Cambridge sparked and fanned his interest in textual criticism and Shakespeare, “that multiform & encyclopedic bastard” (Berryman 2000: xxxiv). There are glimpses in the letters of Berryman’s struggle to complete his critical edition of King Lear, but the editors suggest that those “readers interested in Berryman’s relationship with Shakespeare scholars like W. W. Greg and George Ian Duthie should consult Berryman’s Shakespeare (1999), which has a chapter of Berryman’s correspondence on King Lear” (4). That chapter, “Letters on Lear,” has the advantage of allowing readers to experience a different timbre of Berryman’s voice that only a correspondence offers.When D. D. Paige wrote about editing Ezra Pound’s correspondence, Berryman was glad such a book was to be done, but wrote, “I don’t envy you any part of it, the collection, the deciphering, or the annotation. . . . I don’t see how you can avoid annotation, and unhappily the more the better” (203). In Selected Letters, the editors have kept the annotations “short and factual” in the “interest of including as many letters as possible while still producing a single volume” (7). Most of the sequential 1,270 notes gathered just before the index are a line or two, sufficient for titles of books and articles. There are exceptions, as A. E. Housman preached, to every textual rule and “short” often feels like an unnecessary editorial short cut. Space is saved, but readers pay the price with their time searching elsewhere for context.“It is a wise father that knows his own child.” Shakespeare was the wisest and best of Berryman’s unofficial teachers and that line from The Merchant of Venice may have been on Berryman’s mind as several moments in the letters to his son make painfully aware: “I haven’t seen you in so long, I don’t know how you talk or what you can understand” (405). He tried to be a parent from a distance: “You must be a good boy—obeying your very good mother— . . . and with respect for your father, who has not been the most useless man in the present American world” (405). Many letters are apologetic about disappointments: getting the wrong date of a birthday; being unable to write because of exhaustion; composing parts of letters in his head but failing to write them down; too busy with poems to reply; canceling an afternoon together; canceling visits for lack of money and ill health; or for a letter’s tone: “I’ll write more cheerfully next time” (622). The last letter to Paul in the edition is two scant paragraphs written a month later on a Monday in late November 1971 with the valedictions “In haste,” and “love,” before he marched through the snow to listen to eighteen Honors students “misunderstand H. James’s novel The American” (623).Berryman (2021: 57) began writing verse “because I had to and have to. It’s what I do.” Even though the mature poet abandons and distances himself from early influences (for Berryman these were W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Rainer Maria Rilke), advice from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet reverberated within him:Berryman “sacrificed everything” (2021: 79), and many of his letters are its testament. His womanizing, his divorces, his alcoholism, his poor health: “My health’s been so nervous,” he confessed to Robert Giroux, “and I’ve been very unwillingly writing so much, that I finally had to go into hospital. . . . But I’ve done, I think it is, eighteen Dream Songs this winter & spring, without wanting to at all” (355). After sending an extensive version of The Dream Songs to New York for spring publication, he confided in Ann Levine that he felt dead, “if the exhausted & ill & depressed can also be dead” (492). Love & Fame was composed “in one volcanic outburst of 5 or 6 weeks just before (near prostration) I went into treatment” (570).Berryman sympathized with the scholar-poet A. E. Housman: “one of my heroes and always has been” (122) he told the Paris Review. For Housman (1933: 47), writing poetry was like a passive “secretion”: “I have seldom written poetry,” he wrote in The Name and Nature of Poetry, “unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting” (48). Again, to the Paris Review: “He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvelous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar. And I’m about equally interested in those two activities. In him they are perfectly distinct. You are dealing with an absolute schizophrenic. In me they seem closer together, but I just don’t know” (Berryman 2021: 122). Berryman died believing himself to be a scholar-poet, but his hazy introspection did not fool Mark Van Doren, who several months before Berryman’s death tried to separate the scholar from the poet. Berryman, the poet, had published ten books; the scholar, a critical biography of Stephen Crane and a coedited handbook on the arts of reading. “I have seldom known you wrong about anything,” Berryman shot back, “but you couldn’t be more wrong about me as a scholar. Mark, I am it, Dr Dryasdust in person” (608). His works-in-progress were legion: “I used to ascribe my lifelong failure to finishing anything to my 24-year-old alcoholism” (607), he admitted to Van Doren. “But I can’t buy that.” That one vice had been a front for a trinity of “capital vices” (608): “Some bone-laziness but mostly DOLDRUMS, proto-despair, great-poets-die-young or at least unfulfilled like Coleridge & Co., all that crap” (607–8); “the opposite, fantastic hysterical labour, accumulation, proliferation” (608); and “over-ambitiousness.” The first, he believed, “has ceased to exist”; the second, “is coming under control; my pedantry is much less self-indulgent, I drop things once I have their direction & velocity taped or sufficiently indicated for my immediate purpose.” “It’s the third,” he confessed, “that’s the problem.”Around this time, Berryman had also written to the President of the University of Minnesota: “I suddenly realized that I am dealing with seven unfinished books and have to have time free” (610), he pleaded. “Actually, I have seen since that it is even worse than that: there are thirteen books in question (not counting half a dozen abandoned forever), of which nine were begun at least fifteen to twenty to twenty-five years ago and many are very far advanced.” Later that month he wrote to his first wife, Eileen Simpson: “I am more or less giving up teaching—not resigning—but will do one seminar this fall” (616). His health had been improving, though still subject to moments of rage that would land him in the hospital. “Dry six months today,” he continued, “and I will value the pin my pals will give me tonight rather more than my great heavy Regents’ Professor medal or the National Bk Award or the honorary degree I picked up in Iowa last month.” But that twenty-four-year-old vice soon reappeared, and several months later Berryman jumped off the Washington Avenue Bridge that spans the Mississippi River and joins St. Paul with Minneapolis.