John Berryman - 1

You can hardly call a writer Esoteric whose work is taught in two courses in the University. But the poet John McArdin Berryman, who visited Cambridge last month to great for the Advocate, enjoys a certain underground popularity in the East that is greater than the sum of the responsible remarks people make about him--partly because there is still a communications gap between the literary East and the no-less moneyed, no-less-well educated, but far less established West (Berryman lives and teaches in Minneapolis), and partly because his witty, original, finely wrought and somehow insurrectionary poetry offers a marked challenge to the Way Poems are Being Written in this country.

Rarely anthologized, sympathetic to many literary camps, but with a foot in none of them, John Berryman is as close to being sui generis as anyone but Blake, Trotsky and Christopher Smart. New York has adopted him only since the mid-fifties, for although his poems appeared n the Nation and the New Republic since the thirties, much of his earlier work and most of its critical acknowledgment were published in Chicago's Poetry. Today he is regarded by many as one who threatens the language and endangers the conventions it clings to.

That very reputation has made him a poet's poet, "that forlorn phrase," in William Meredith's words. And his role as an innovator relates directly to his role as a teacher and scholar. For better or for worse, Berryman is an academic--that once-unpleasant label that generated such a fuss in the late fifties. Most of his life has been spent in colleges and universities. Born in Oklahoma, in 1914 he was educated at Columbia, Clare College and Cambridge; since then he has taught "just about everywhere but the South," including Grinnell, Wayne (Detroit), Princeton, Minnesota--where he is now Professor of Humanities, on a leave of absence--and Harvard, where he was for two years an Instructor in English, with a Warren House office and an Appian Way, later a Beacon Hill, address. A student in his Freshman Composition course in 1941 remembers him as a cold and vigorous teacher who invited his students to his apartment, gave them drinks, played music and told them what and what not to like.

At Minnesota most of his teaching is done in large lecture courses, and he speaks of his students, vaguely. "I'd rather teach men than women, I suppose, Women are brighter, and generally work harder, but then they get crushes on you and you get crushed on them and that's no good...Men go on to law, or business, or something..."

Berrymar has united academic and creative pursuits more successfully than most recent poets. His Crane biography is the work of a strenuously intelligent man wrestling with one of his familiars; his first long poem, the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet(1953) treat a necessarily arcane subject, America's first poetress, the "tenth muse" Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). It is a work of scholarship in fifty-seven stanzas that took four and half years to research. And his most recent book cangles whimsically with that ever less unattractive, increasingly charismatic image: the college professor.

Seventy-Seven Dream Songs, a chunk of an unfinished long poem on which he has been working since 1955, was published two years ago by Farrar Strauss. The dream songs, in a word, are unexampled. All the difficult on a first reading; a few, for me, remain nearly opaque after many. Berryman's of-repeated description is helpful: "The poem is about a man named Henry. ('It is entirely about a man named Henry,' he told his Harvard audience last month.) He has a tendency to talk about himself in the third person. His last name is in doubt. It's given at one point as Henry House and at other points as Henry Pussycat. He has a friend, moreover, who addresses him regularly as Mr. Bones, or some variation on that," Finis. At Harvard, he added, "In general, he does not hear his friend, who has no name. That is, I know his name, but none of the critics have come on it yet," Henry proves to be a lonely, lecherous, whimsical, unstable academic hipster in the process of growing old, with an extraordinary talent for becoming the people and things he likes. His friend is an odd presence at his elbow who cautions, encourages and describes him in minstrel-show dialect-a cranky Still Small Voice in blackface who is a part of, and yet apart from, Henry Pussycat/House.

Henry sits in the bar and was odd,

off in the glass from the glass.

at odds wif de world and its god.

his wife is a complete nothing,

St. Stephen

getting even.

Many of the poems are dialogues. "Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law aganst Henry./Mr. Bones: There is."

These queer exercises in disjunctive verse don't observe the ethics of polite conversation. Henry is addressed as Mr. Bones by a cat who might himself be Mr. Bones, but isn't. Moreover, there are no quote-marks and no stage directions, and there is no clear distinction made between the two voices by the language itself. Some parts of some songs are in a mad sort of recent Jazzese, the language of the post-vaudevillian Negro entertainer, without the furniture of dialect ("The jane is zoned! No nightspot here, no bar/there no sweet freeway, no premises..."); some of them talk about Henry (which is really the role of "his friend") in ordered, even ornate English: "Henry's pelt was put on sundry walls/where it did much resemble Henry..." Some mix the two languages: ("Henry lay in de netting, wild/while the brainfever bird did scales;") while some present experience that is clearly that of Henry's Negro friend, speaking without dialect; for example:

There were strange gatherings. A vote would come that would be no vote. There would come a rope.

Yes, there would come a rope.

Men have their hats down, "Dancing in the Dark" will see him up, car-radio-wise

without a rut to park.

which gently and coldly present a lynching in the deep South. And some take Bonesian lyric postures toward experience that is clearly Henry's. The dream songs succeed in conveying all the angst and confusion of a nightmare--the hellish switchings of identy, the loss or mutilation of the physical self--in a form that is scrupulously lyric, based on the canzone, containing (usually) eighteen lines, and variously rhymed.

What do they mean, and why? Berryman is distrustful of most critical postures taken toward contemporary (really contemporary) writing. ("You know," he said, "I can smell a bad book without even opening it. I almost never review them,") And if he has little use for certain critics, resting on descriptive generalizations about his poems and resisting all the slick formulas, the critics have developed very little use for him.

The New Yorker review by Louise Bogan is perhaps the most dangerous, since it comes from someone who should know better. "Berryman is out to get language itself, to distort and maim it, not in the direction of wit but in the direction of funny grammar and burnt-cork comedy." She accuses him of "pulling human speech toward some totally disjunct and invertebrate set of noises." Such a reaction betrays a tin ear and a wooden sense of humor, for the dream songs may be one of the more successful experiments with wit in the language. The poem, taken as the whole it will someday be, acts on the imagination the way any good pun does, writ large. On the crudest level there is something cardinally and delightfully sylleptic about the fact that Henry can be both Henry House and Pussycat, Mr. Bones, the professor and the jazzman. What results is a comedy of tone. Humor depends on the way things are said. "My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist (women get under things)"; or from the best Eisenhower poem in years;

This is the lay of lke.

Here's to the glory of the Great White--awk--who has been running--er--er--things in recent--ech--

In the United--if your screen is black,

ladies and gentlemen, we-I like--at the Point he was already terrific--sick--

With the exception of Adrienne Rich and William Meredith, very few riters seem to have both understood and adjusted to the real design behind these poems, which, one imagines, will only be evident when all the remaining books of Dream Songs are published. There are over three hundred songs, in various stages of development; the next collection will contain eighty-four and will be called His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Until then the very best public interpretation of the man remains 'Miss Rich's" "Berryman earns (his diction) by generating verbal heat, consistently, from within...He is a bruised, raging and fiendishly intelligent man and he has found way of being all three simultaneously."

The immediate observation you are tempted to make is that Henry and Berryman resemble each other strikingly. Both are often teaches: both like jazz, women and Negroes; both are appelled by certain areas of human experience, like Nazi Germany; both are formal and a little old-fashioned; both emphasize beautifully.

All these facts are evident from meeting or hearing the man. The gentle formality that is evident in conversation, transposed to the podium, becomes a real knack for showmanship, a sort of comic modesty that winds up by making him his own master of ceremonies. "No use applauding; you don't know what you're getting," he told an audience at Emerson Hall. "To make sure the evening isn't completely wasted. I'll read a poem by another man first..."He prefaced dream song #29 with a mock-heroic line: "Prepare to weep, ladies and gentlemen. Saul Bellow and I almost kill ourselves laughing about the dream songs and various chapters in his novels, but other people feel bad. Are you all ready to feel bad?" And more sternly," this is not a cultural occasion. No instruction is taking place. It's all entertainment."

Old Henry has an extraordinary capacity for empathy. "This poem," he said of one of the dream songs, "is but in the mouth of a sheep, a sheep of the lost tribe of Israel, who can't hear the shepherd any more.

It's also about Henry. I mean, Henry adopts the guise of a sheep." Such aptitude accounts of the ease with which the dream-song form is adapted to occasions: he has a "strut" for Theodore Roethke, who died in 1963, some poems about Frost, and a fine eulogy for Kennedy, which appeared in Poetry and Power.

Berryman's remarks about his own work, of course, must be taken with a little salt and some cool water. They are devastatingly commonsensical. "There's been an effort, sponsored by Lowell and by other people, to identify me with Henry, which won't work, because I'm obviously not Henry, I mean I have a social security number, and pay taxes, and have an insurance policy and so forth; whereas Henry is a completely undetermined human American male, seeking his identity, and being dissatisfied with it when it is found. I don't buy any of that..."

Proust might have objected that he was real, while Marcel was in the book. What sets Berryman off from Henry is not the simple ontological difference between a character and a person, but the anguish and brilliance of Berryman's effort to make the distinction between the two of them clear and efficient. It is as if the poet, arguing from a feared poverty of emotional or experiential resources, has peopled his poem with a number of lively selves that cooperate in the restoration of personality. A bright, bitter, courtly, intensely human man is writing an autobiographical poem that turns autobiography inside out, and converts it into the sharp images of the hallucination, the cinema and the dream.