Haunting Dreams and Delusions

THERE IS something obsessive about the criticism that tags after posthumously published works. It is as if every line ever written by our fading literary heroes on the backs of envelopes and rolls of toilet paper must be exposed in a perverse invasion of privacy masked as scholarship. But what scholarship won't claim as its own, the best-seller world of business-oriented publishing frequently will. Take Ernest Hemingway's Islands in The Stream. The novel, published well after his death, has no merit whatsoever. It did, however, prove two damning points: Hemingway, suffering an unconquerable stasis, was over the hill; his widow, suffering financially, needed the money. Like Hemingway's, John Berryman's Recovery is an unfinished first draft, a rigor mortis novel. But unlike Islands, Recovery maintains respectability.

Saul Bellow's introductory sketch of Berryman adds a great deal to the novel. It's a rare piece, full of quaint anecdotes of their shared careers at Princeton and the University of Minnesota. Bellow knew the writer as a man first--as the man whose gruff arrogance was only a cover up for the frail alcoholic who was unable to manage his life and finally had to take refuge in hospitals. Bellow's sensitivity reaches even deeper. For he knew John Berryman the poet as well: the "Huffy Henry...wicked and away" of the Dream Songs, the narcissistic writer in Love and Fame "obsessed with a vanishing past of happiness in his present loneliness and age." Together, these intertwining images of the poet and the man set an appropriate mood for the curious confessional tone of Recovery. The novel is, after all, Berryman's own account of his attempted recovery from alcoholism.

ALAN SEVERANCE, whose name, through some pedantic trickery of language means "Harmony Interbreaker," is the protagonist/antagonist. He embodies Berryman's own tremendous ego and frightful delusions. Outwardly self-contained, he helps the hopeless alcoholics in his ward by dominating group therapy and confronting their inadequacies. But he rarely reaches into himself; he is blind to his own shortcomings. He is something of a Cain-figure, lost in a psychological maze of anger and nurtured rejection. Severance, a Pulitzer Prize winning scientist, art critic, and pop intellectual, feels that his status as a celebrity is the source of his troubles. Here Berryman projects his own sense of inadequacy onto Severance. But his strong personal tone doesn't jell with the Rennaissance-man character he creates. Many of Berryman's best poems have been exercises in self-purgation. He lived in and by his writing; it was a form of analysis for him; almost a religion. He could pick no stronger voice for himself than that of the real alcoholic crying for help. But because he is Alan Severance, who, he says, is suffering from severe delusions, Recovery poses a new turn of the proverbial screw. The novel projects itself so far into Berryman's personal reality that you are never sure if Severance isn't some unreal phantom of his self-deception.

DREAMS AND delusions have haunted Berryman from his very earliest writing. The Dream Songs are still his most laudable accomplishment. They are not, however, a celebration of any wondrous fairyland of the unconscious mind. Henry, its hero, has "suffered an irreversible loss," and experiences its intensity through his dreams. An earlier "The Ball Poem" reflects the same "epistemology of loss" in a young boy's missing ball. More than anything else, Berryman's dreams are real laments, laced with shattered hopes and withered ideals. Alan Severance too, has very little left to hang onto. His fight for some kind of self-respect is doomed from the beginning.

Alan suffers from frail misconceptions of himself and love and fame. His emotions play second fiddle to his career, even while he's in the hospital. His career of course, led to drink; his wives left him because of alcohol. The tension builds within as Alan tries to cope with his own identity in his work, his public life, his ultimate search for some sense of immortality. Like a boy, who, lost in the funhouse, finds himself confronted with a hundred ghastly images in the hall of mirrors, he can only cry in self-pity and disillusionment. His rage is never wholly realized.

What Berryman, i.e. Severance, does is to hide his emotions behind a powerful intellect (a charge often levelled against Berryman in his poems). Severance is cold and aloof, ever-curious to communicate, a witty though egotistical entertainer. But he is unable to relate to others on a basic human level. Only therapy forces him to confront his emotions. And you watch him turn to rigorous exercises in pedantic self-analysis. The same superiority that sets him off from his fellow patients makes him something of a father figure. When one of his symbolic children threatens to leave treatment, only he can dissuade her from going.

RECOVERY is divided into a series of Steps used by Alcoholics Anonymous as a guideline for its members. Only five of the twelve steps are here, although some recovered notes printed in the back of the book indicated that Berryman had planned two more sections. Of what is written, Alan Severance remains the key figure. Other characters are roughly sketched. A series of epiphanies of the more dramatic moments on the ward, of the personal breakthroughs and all too frequent relapses, lend a sense of the real powerlessness of the alcoholic.

Alcoholism was only recently recognized by the American Medical association as a disease. It has no known cure. Once an alcoholic goes dry, he can never have another drink in his life, or he'll be back on the bandwagon again. So it is understandable that Alcoholics Anonymous has chosen God to help its incurables against this mysterious disease. Berryman, baptized Catholic, became a non-believer at age 12 when his rather committed suicide. But he returned to the flock recently. In an interview shortly before his death, he said:

I lost my faith several years ago, but I came back--by force, by necessity, because of a rescue action--into the notion of a God who, at certain moments, definitely and personally intervenes in individual lives, one of which is mine...a God of rescue.

Love & Fame marked the publication of his first religious poems. While many were supercilious, even silly, a precious few bodied forth a new serenity. One cruel portentious line stands naked among these calmer poems: "I certainly don't think I'll last much longer."

ALAN SEVERANCE also believes in a God of rescue. And as he progresses in his treatment, this sense of religious dependence increases. His t-group rates highly his abilities to manage his life. And shortly thereafter Alan hears a rumor that he may be going home soon. But the tension has not yet resolved itself. Alan's strong dependency on his faith brings inevitable crisis. His Belief is finally circumstantial: turned off when his father dies, turned back on when his own death threatens. His notions of a benevolent God of rescue is threatened by his belief in a God of Wrath or an apathetic Creator.

Berryman's final book of poems, Delusions, etc. points to this funny twist of Irony in his Belief. The book is mainly a series of daily prayers, some overwhelmingly joyous, many serious addresses to God. Only a few of these last poems are sad. But then there is the title, and a picture of a smug Berryman staring out--is he laughing to himself or finally at ease?

John Berryman had so many friends in the literary world that he refused to write any criticism, despite many offers. He lived so deeply inside his writing, and sacrificed so much of his own being to it that it is hard to separate the man from his work. His suicide is the last unwritten chapter of Recovery; the book and memory of the man together will remain as testimonies to the fame that so bedevilled him.