77 Dream Songs

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Introduction by Henri Cole: “Deep in the Mess of Things”

  Author’s Note

  I

  1. Huffy Henry

  2. Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance

  3. A Stimulant for an Old Beast

  4. Filling her compact & delicious body

  5. Henry sats

  6. A Capital at Wells

  7. ‘The Prisoner of Shark Island’ with Paul Muni

  8. The weather was fine.

  9. Deprived of his enemy

  10. There were strange gatherings

  11. His mother goes.

  12. Sabbath

  13. God bless Henry.

  14. Life, friends

  15. Let us suppose

  16. Henry’s pelt

  17. Muttered Henry

  18. A Strut for Roethke

  19. Here, whence

  20. The Secret of the Wisdom

  21. Some good people

  22. Of 1826

  23. The Lay of Ike

  24. Oh servant Henry

  25. Henry, edged

  26. The glories of the world

  II

  27. The greens of the Ganges delta

  28. Snow Line

  29. There sat down, once

  30. Collating bones

  31. Henry Hankovitch

  32. And where, friend Quo

  33. An apple arc’d

  34. My mother has your shotgun.

  35. MLA

  36. The high ones die

  37. Three around the Old Gentleman

  His malice

  38. The Russian grin

  39. Goodbye, sir

  40. I’m scared a lonely

  41. If we sang in the wood

  42. O journeyer

  43. ‘Oyez, oyez!’

  44. Tell it to the forest fire

  45. He stared at ruin

  46. I am, outside.

  47. April Fool’s Day, or, St Mary of Egypt

  48. He yelled at me in Greek

  49. Blind

  50. In a motion of night

  51. Our wounds to time

  III

  52. Silent Song

  53. He lay in the middle of the world

  54. ‘NO VISITORS’

  55. Peter’s not friendly.

  56. Hell is empty.

  57. In a state of chortle sin

  58. Industrious, affable

  59. Henry’s Meditation in the Kremlin

  60. Afters eight years

  61. Full moon.

  62. That dark-brown rabbit

  63. Bats have no bankers

  64. Supreme my holdings

  65. A freaking ankle

  66. ‘All virtues

  67. I don’t operate often.

  68. I heard, could be

  69. Love her he doesn’t

  70. Disengaged, bloody

  71. Spellbound

  72. The Elder Presences

  73. Karesansui, Ryoan-ji

  74. Henry hates the world

  75. Turning it over

  76. Henry’s Confession

  77. Seedy Henry

  Also by John Berryman

  Copyright

  To Kate, and to Saul

  “THOU DREWEST NEAR IN THE DAY”

  ‘GO IN, BRACK MAN, DE DAY’S YO’ OWN.’

  … I AM THEIR MUSICK

  Lam. 3:63

  BUT THERE IS ANOTHER METHOD.

  Olive Schreiner

  “DEEP IN THE MESS OF THINGS”

  by Henri Cole

  There is no poet who sounds like John Berryman in his 77 Dream Songs. He is an underground poet who made up a new kind of poem. In 1965, when he was fifty, he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this daring sequence, and just seven years later, in Minneapolis, he jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge onto the ice of the Mississippi River.

  Berryman belonged to the new generation of poets emerging in the 1940s that included Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and Delmore Schwartz. Like his predecessors, he wrote skillful, intelligent poems, but he no longer felt adherent to T. S. Eliot’s cult of impersonality. Instead, his poems dealt with experience often at the edge of disintegration and breakdown. In 77 Dream Songs, Berryman discovered a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax in a caudate sonnet of three six-line stanzas. His protagonist, Henry, stumbles along through life, a kind of antihero or front man, who, according to Berryman, both is and isn’t him. “We touch at certain points,” he explained. “But I am an actual human being; he [Henry] is nothing but a series of conceptions—my conceptions.” Still, like Berryman, who suffered from alcoholism and depression, Henry is troubled, vulnerable, vehement, libidinous—and he is a white American in early middle age living at some outer boundary where the soul is in crisis. You might say that the speaker of the Dream Songs, Henry, is a modern day Saint Augustine—a writer of particular interest to Berryman—who talks about himself in the first, second, and third person. “Henry has a hard time. People don’t like him, and he doesn’t seem to like himself,” Berryman said about Henry. Sometimes he doesn’t even know his name: he’s either Henry or he’s Henry Pussy-cat or he’s Henry House. Sometimes the poems are dialogues with an unnamed friend who calls him Mr. Bones, though Berryman would put quotation marks around friend, “because this is one of the most hostile friends who ever lived,” who keeps questioning the author and speaking for him.

  John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in Oklahoma in 1914, and brought up a strict Roman Catholic in the small town of Anadarko. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Tampa, Florida, where in 1926 his father, John Allyn Smith, Sr., killed himself. In her sympathetic memoir Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife, writes, “John had felt a compulsion to go in search of his father’s ghost, a search which, though he wasn’t consciously aware of it, would lead him to a new poetic subject and The Dream Songs.” In Dream Song #42, Henry asks his dead father to remember him:

  O journeyer, deaf in the mould, insane

  with violent travel & death: consider me

  in my cast, your first son.

  Soon after being widowed, the poet’s mother married a banker named John Berryman, and her son took his surname before attending boarding school in Connecticut. Later, at Columbia University, he studied with the literary scholar Mark Van Doren, who is credited with sparking Berryman’s serious interest in writing poetry.

  Berryman’s classmate Robert Giroux was a quiet, passionate literary man who would eventually become his editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; while they were still students in the 1930s, Giroux published Berryman’s first poems in the college literary magazine. In an interview for The Paris Review, Giroux says that Berryman’s mother caused her son to have difficulties greater than his illness. He calls her “a campus mother who haunted him daily, from his undergraduate days at John Jay Hall to his wintertime suicide in Minneapolis in 1972.” She was so theatrical that when she phoned Giroux with the news of her son’s death, instead of reporting straightaway that he’d killed himself, she said, “Bob, John has gone in under the water.” Giroux didn’t at first understand what she meant, but one of Berryman’s suicide poems had spoken of him going in “under the water”:

  Soon part of me wi
ll explore the deep and dark

  Floor of the harbour … I am everywhere,

  I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move

  With all that move me, under the water

  Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

  [“The Ball Poem”]

  Berryman’s mother (who had changed her name from Martha to Jill at the request of her new husband) believed her son had slipped from the Minneapolis bridge and that it wasn’t a suicide. Forty-four years earlier, she hadn’t believed her husband’s death was a suicide either, though he’d shot himself in the chest outside their son’s bedroom window. She told her son that she’d removed all the bullets from the gun, which she’d kept around only “to frighten any thieves or rascals away.” All his life, Berryman felt guilt-ridden about his father’s death at the age of thirty-nine, and his poems often revisit the violent facts.

  In his own interview for The Paris Review, Berryman explains that the Dream Songs are not “confessional poems.” He understands the confessional “to be a place where you go and talk with a priest,” and he hasn’t been to confession since he was twelve years old. He sees himself as an epic poet and the collected Dream Songs are a long poem—with the greatest American poem, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” as his model. It too has a hero, a personality, and a self, but Berryman doesn’t think his poem goes as far as Whitman’s. He calls “Song of Myself” a “wisdom work” about “the meaning of life and how to conduct it,” but according to him, “The Dream Songs does not propose a new system; that is not the point.”

  If in poetry the first person pronoun—the “I”—is not the poet, it is even less so in a Berryman Dream Song, where the speaker modulates immediately into Henry. And when it comes to Henry’s religious and political opinions, they might not even be Henry’s, since the poems are a transcript of his tragicomic nightmares. And since there is no structured plot to 77 Dream Songs, it coheres as a work about the personality of Henry rather than as a continuous narrative. According to Berryman, all the way through his poetry there

  is a tendency to regard the individual soul under stress. The soul is not oneself, for the personal ‘I’, one with a social security number and a bank account, never gets into the poems; they are all about a third person. I’m a follower of Pascal in the sense that I don’t know what the issue is, or how it is to be resolved—the issue of our common human life, yours, mine, your lady’s, everybody’s; but I do think that one way in which we can approach it, by the means of art, coming out of Homer and Virgil and down through Yeats and Eliot, is by investigating the individual human soul, or human mind.

  Berryman believed that writing poems was a vocation that demanded the attention of his whole being. His friend Saul Bellow said that he drew his writing “out of his vital organs, out of his very skin.” He spent thirteen years writing the Dream Songs and in them rejects the decorous Anglophilia and formal versification that were fashionable during the previous decade. “I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendency in both American and English poetry,” Berryman said. Instead, we get a new kind of diction—ridiculous, grotesque, horrible, delicious—that better suits the generally extravagant situations in which the sobbing protagonist Henry finds himself.

  At a public reading, Robert Lowell described Berryman’s poems as being of a sort that people didn’t expect to see again. They are obscure, and they revive obscurity at a time when people thought it was finished (though this assessment ignores a countertradition in American poetry that includes Black Mountain, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance poets). “A lot of the best poetry of the century is extremely difficult,” Lowell tells his audience, and he doesn’t mean “such poems as ‘The Waste Land,’ which originally seemed difficult and is now simpler than Longfellow almost.” According to him, there are certain poems that remain difficult—like the “Atlantis” section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge—and great. After the Modern poets—Stevens, Eliot, Ransom, Moore, Crane, Pound, and Frost—suddenly poetry was clear again, Lowell says. People felt you couldn’t be unintelligible anymore. But then Berryman’s poems began to appear, and “they made all the clear stuff seem mannered and tired.”

  Berryman and Lowell met at Princeton in 1944, during the waning of the war, and Lowell found Berryman to have “a casual intensity” and the “almost intimate mumble of a don.” He loved Hopkins, Yeats, and Auden, whose “shadows paled him.” “Berryman might have grown into an austere, removed poet,” Lowell felt, “but instead he somehow remained deep in the mess of things. His writing has been a long, often back-breaking search for an inclusive style, a style that could use his erudition and catch the high, even frenetic, intensity of his experience, disgusts, and enthusiasms.” The Dream Songs, with their “racy jabber,” are “larger and sloppier” than anything Berryman had written before. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Lowell described their bruised world of “remorse, wonder, and nightmare”:

  The scene is contemporary and crowded with references to news items, world politics, travel, low life, and Negro music. Its style is a conglomeration of high style, Berrymanisms, Negro and beat slang, and baby talk … There is little sequence, and sometimes a single section will explode into three or four separate parts. At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder, and oddness … The poems are much too difficult, packed, and wrenched to be sung. They are called songs out of mockery, because they are filled with snatches of Negro minstrelsy … The dreams are not real dreams but a waking hallucination in which anything that might have happened to the author can be used at random. Anything he has seen, overheard, or imagined can go in. The poems are Berryman, or rather they are about a person he calls Henry. Henry is Berryman seen as himself, as poète maudit, child and puppet. He is tossed about with a mixture of tenderness and absurdity, pathos and hilarity that would have been impossible if the author had spoken in the first person.

  In a letter to his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell calls 77 Dream Songs “spooky, a maddening work of genius, or half genius, in John’s later obscure, tortured, wandering style, full of parentheses, slang no one ever spoke, jagged haunting lyrical moments, etc.” And Bishop replies, “I’m pretty much at sea about that book—some pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely. I am sure he is saying something important—perhaps sometimes too personally?” Elsewhere, she praises the “wonderful little things, in flashes—the glitter of broken glasses, smashed museum cases—something like that.”

  Before Berryman published 77 Dream Songs, his historical poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” had been called “the most distinguished long poem by an American since ‘The Waste Land.’” It was one of the famous academic poems of the 1950s, though today it is largely eclipsed by the more original, less shapely, occasionally volcanic, continually haranguing 77 Dream Songs, with its wild syntax that suggests a heavy heart and a frightened, self-pitying, angry, guilty, irritable, and generally aberrant mind. After the Bradstreet poem was published, there was a silence of two years before Berryman began writing the Dream Songs, which he continued working on until his death.

  The Dream Songs is a work consisting of 385 individual poems compiled in two books, 77 Dreams Songs (1964), which makes up its first part, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). In a note for the second book, Berryman writes that it “continues and concludes” the poem called The Dream Songs. Speaking in general about long poems, he says, “Both the writer and the reader of long poems need gall, the outrageous, the intolerable—and they need it again and again. The prospect of ignominious failure must haunt them continually. Whitman, our greatest poet, had all this. Eliot, next, perhaps even greater than Whitman, had it too. Pound makes a marvelous if frail third here.” Further complicating the publication history of The Dream Songs, a third book, Henry’s Fate and Other Poems, appeared posthumously, containing forty-five unpublished or uncollected Dream Songs.

  Among the best poems in 77 Dream Songs (#1, #4, #5, #14, #21, #26, #2
9, #37, #45, #46, #53, #76, and #77) are many lines that have entered American poetry’s consciousness:

  Once in a sycamore I was glad

  all at the top, and I sang.

  [#1]

  Filling her compact & delicious body

  with chicken páprika, she glanced at me

  twice.

  [#4]

  Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

  [#14]

  —I had a most marvelous piece of luck. I died.

  [#26]

  There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

  só heavy, if he had a hundred years

  & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

  Henry could not make good.

  [#29]

  He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back.

  [#45]

  Nothin very bad happen to me lately.

  [#76]

  Why write poems? I sometimes wonder, as Berryman did. The list of reasons is long: despair, pleasure, insomnia, selfishness, sublimation, habit, boredom, anger, jealousy, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, self-reform, self-delusion, hunger—for praise and prestige and posterity. But also for health. Despite a diagnosis of a cyclothymic personality (a bipolar disorder) and habitual excessive drinking, despite insomnia and frightening dreams, and despite a “severely grossly tremulous” existence, Berryman somehow found a way to assemble language into art that—in a psychiatric form—represented his world and himself. 77 Dream Songs, with its agonizing, volatile, obsessive, distorted temperamental boldness, is a triumph against his ordeal. And as Berryman himself put it, with characteristic black humor, “I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal … The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  These are sections, constituting one version, of a poem in progress. Its working title, since 1955, has been The Dream Songs. One is dedicated (2) to the memory of Daddy Rice who sang and jumped ‘Jim Crow’ in Louisville in 1828 (London, 1836 and later), and others to friends: Robert Giroux (7), John Crowe Ransom (11), Howard Munford (24), Ralph Ross (27), Robert Fitzgerald (34), Daniel Hughes (35), William Meredith (36), the Theodore Morrisons and the Chisholm Gentrys (37–38–39), Dr A. Boyd Thomes (54), Edmund and Elena Wilson (58), George Amberg (63), Mark Van Doren (66), Allen and Isabella Tate (70), Saul Bellow (75). The editors directing certain journals have been hospitable to some of the Songs here brought together: The Times Literary Supplement, The Noble Savage, The Observer, Poetry, Partisan Review, Encounter, Poetry Northwest, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Minnesota Review, Harpers, Ramparts, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review. Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work.