The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems Read online

  He liked language that is particular to place. At school in Connecticut as a young teenager he collected slang: “hours,” “called up,” a “heeler.” He reported these to his mother, and when he arrived in England in 1936 he immediately wrote home to explain the local currency: “Sixpence is a tanner, the shilling a bob, the pound a quid.” He was on his way to Cambridge University, where he had been awarded a fellowship and where he dressed in tweed suits and changed his voice. He was twenty-one. “I suppose it is correct to say that I prefer their accent to the ‘American’ accent,” he wrote. For the rest of his life he followed English spelling both in private letters and his published work. W. S. Merwin was a student of Berryman’s at the University of Iowa in 1946, and he recalled his teacher’s voice: “[H]e snapped down his nose with an accent / I think he had affected in England.” Just as his voice was a copy, so too were his habits. In March 1937 Dylan Thomas visited Cambridge, and Berryman took up heavy drinking in imitation of the great Welsh alcoholic. In the summer of 1941 he was courting his wife-to-be in New York City, and one night they tried to find a restaurant for dinner. “How much easier it would be if we were abroad,” he told her: “Now, if we were in Paris, we could go to La Coupole.” He was imagining them as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or himself as Hemingway, figures of another generation.

  Reading Berryman’s early poetry is like playing a guessing game: who does he sound like now? He is Thomas here, and then he is Yeats; here he is Auden and here he is Eliot. It is by walking through this funhouse of mirrors and influence that he became himself. The very early “Winter Landscape” rewrites Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” as it imagines a “morning occasion”—not “mourning,” but the sound is the same, and he is sensitive to sound, this man of accents—and as it pictures

  The long companions they can never reach,

  The blue light, men with ladders, by the church

  The sledge and shadow in the twilit street.

  This follows Thomas:

  Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

  Robed in the long friends,

  The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

  Secret by the unmourning water.

  “Winter Landscape” was written in January 1939; in February 1940 he began “A Point of Age,” which turns oddly in the fourth stanza into Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter:

  Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,

  Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.

  This becomes less unexpected when placed alongside the opening of Ezra Pound’s Canto I, which rewrites a scene from the Odyssey in that meter:

  And then went down to the ship,

  Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

  We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

  Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

  Heavy with weeping.

  His titles echo others; he is borrowing his syntax and vocabulary; he is a young man, taking what is good, trying out what works. It is worth playing this footnote game now, for later, and culminating in The Dream Songs, Berryman will turn mimicry to his advantage and invent a poetics that is also an echo chamber. He will find a voice that is recognizably his own—perhaps the most distinctive voice of twentieth-century American poetry—but he will find it in the voices of others. To echo him: The heartbreak is familiar but the heart is strange.

  In his first full collection, The Dispossessed (1948), he is often looking forward and anticipating what is ahead. “At twenty-five a man is on his way,” begins “A Point of Age,” and here he is fixated by the time of day and the time of life. “There was a kind of fever on the clock / That morning,” he writes in “Parting as Descent.” As poems about other poets and as poems about coming of age these are also, of course, poems about finding a place in the tradition. In “The Possessed” he pictures the dead before him:

  This afternoon, discomfortable dead

  Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,

  Whittling memory at the water’s edge,

  And watch. This is what you inherited.

  The poem follows the poetic vocabulary of T. S. Eliot and also the terms of his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

  No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

  This is the work of these early poems. Berryman is setting himself among the dead, counting up his inheritance.

  There are also innovations, things particularly his, and since we know what Berryman became it is impossible now to read these early poems but with our own sense of anticipation; we know where he is going to get to and we wait for its first occurrence. Here are two early premonitions of the later Berryman. Berryman wrote “The Moon and the Night and the Men” on May 28, 1940, in Detroit. He was waiting for news from his girlfriend, who was in England; he had spent the winter alone in a freezing five-room apartment. This is a strange war poem, taking place at a distance from the war that had broken out six months before but which America would not join for almost another two years. The scene is an army base, somewhere in America, and it begins:

  On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose

  Late, a delayed moon, and a violent moon

  For the English or the American beholder;

  The French beholder. It was a cold night,

  People put on their wraps, the troops were cold

  No doubt, despite the calendar, no doubt

  Numbers of refugees coughed, and the sight

  Or sound of some killed others. A cold night.

  A new confidence is shown in the handling of syntax, which here is a little twisted in order to open up and double the meanings. The delayed “no doubt” turns an observation of local conditions into a guess about what might be happening far out of sight. And slang here is important: “killing” takes both the demotic sense of making someone laugh and also something wholly more violent.

  The second innovation is more striking, more severe. There are nine “Nervous Songs” in The Dispossessed, and they follow the same form of three six-line stanzas. Each takes a different voice: jagged, energetic, jumpy. “A Professor’s Song” is sung by a dusty, aggressive academic; “The Song of the Demented Priest” describes aging and an incipient loss of faith. “Young Woman’s Song” is anxious, taut, with something worried and sexual just beneath the lines. “I hate this something like a bobbing cork / Not going,” she says: “I want something to hang to.—” With this short cycle of poems, each in the same stanzaic form as the later Dream Songs, Berryman learned an important lesson: that the poem takes place between the lines. The young woman says, “What I am looking for (I am) may be / Happening in the gaps of what I know,” and this is true for Berryman’s own poetics, discovered through speaking like another.

  It is conventional to describe Berryman as “confessional”: as one of a group of American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including also Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, for whom the use of personal material was a special and distinguishing mark. In 1962, the English critic A. Alvarez celebrated what he saw as “a new seriousness” in these poets: “I would define this seriousness simply as the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either the conventional response or choking incoherence.” This poetry would be open to all the experience of modern life, and particularly its grit: it would address suicide, depression, banality. This claim appeared in the introduction to a hugely popular anthology called The New Poetry, and Berryman was the first poet in it.

  More recently, Adam Kirsch has suggested that our attention to the apparently intimate contents of the works of these poets has distracted us from their careful artifice. “To treat their poems mainly as document
s of personal experience is not just to diminish their achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry,” Kirsch writes in The Wounded Surgeon (2005):

  Plath scorned the notion of poetry as “some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion”; Berryman insisted that “the speaker [of a poem] can never be the actual writer,” that there is always “an abyss between [the poet’s] person and his persona”; Bishop deplored the trend toward “more and more anguish and less and less poetry”; Lowell explained that even in Life Studies, usually considered the first masterpiece of Confessional poetry, “the whole balance of the poem was something invented.”

  The tenacity of the term “confessional” lies partly in a way of reading: we feel that the real biographical experience gives the poem weight, and yet this is also, of course, a deliberate literary effect. Particularly in Berryman, there is a careful balance of new freedom and old form. That which is hidden is set against that which is displayed, as if each poem were half a secret.

  Berryman was highly sensitive to form. In 1932, William Carlos Williams instructed his generation:

  Don’t write sonnets. The line is dead, unsuited to the language. Everything that can ever be said from now until doomsday in the sonnet form has been better said in twelfth-century Italian.

  Berryman’s whole career might be understood as a rebuke to this. In 1934, he wrote his first surviving poems: they are four Shakespearean sonnets, and they celebrate his mother’s fortieth birthday. The following year he tried to seduce a Barnard student by writing sonnets for her, and when in February 1947 he began an affair with a married woman he met in Princeton, he turned again to this form. “I wanted a familiar form in which to put the new,” he wrote in his journal: “Clearly a sonnet sequence. And this gave me also a wonderful to me sense of continuity with lovers dead.”

  Her name was Chris. The poems insist upon this: they are little boasts. He describes her blond hair and her clothes, her naked body as she sleeps. “You, Chris, contrite I never thought to see,” begins one: “Whom nothing fazes, no crise can disconcert, / Who calm criss crosses all year.” He repeats the name in puns: he favors words such as “crisis” and “syncrisis.” He lists the days upon which they met—July 3, July 4—and he wishes to invent a new poetic language to express their specific love.

  I prod our English: cough me up a word,

  Slip me an epithet will justify

  My darling fondle

  he writes, as if the language itself were complicit in their affair. In sonnet 23 he turns upon the traditional vocabulary and image-set of love poetry:

  Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast

  Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo;

  I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,

  As little false.

  He is trying to remake the familiar form so that it may hold the new.

  Yet perhaps the problem is precisely that these sonnets have what Berryman called “a sense of continuity.” Like the emotions, these poems are deeply referential: Berryman mentions or alludes to Marlowe, Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Hölderlin, Donne, the canon of love poets. They suffer the sadness of comparison. “Could our incredible marriage … like all others’…?” trails off one of the sonnets, as if understanding that this is only one more love affair in a historical sequence of lovers and their sonnets, of passions bound by time. The poems are aware of the world around them. Both lovers were married to other people, and while Berryman considered submitting a few of them to magazines under the pseudonym Alan Fury, he withheld them from publication. Twenty years later, after he had found success—77 Dream Songs was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry—he returned to these sonnets and edited them for publication. He replaced the repeated name “Chris” with the almost rhyming “Lise,” presumably to disguise his lover’s identity, but what is most odd about this—and what reveals most about Berryman’s deep ambivalence toward the question of confession—is that having begun to erase the traces of her identity, he only went halfway. He changed her name but not the elaborate system of puns and echoes built upon that name. The eighteenth sonnet, for example, now addresses “You, Lise, contrite I never thought to see, / Whom nothing fazes, no crise can disconcert.” He retains sonnet 87, which is an acrostic: the first letter of each line spells out “I CHRIS AND I JOHN.” This is a halfhearted discretion, as if he wanted to be caught. This is the poetic equivalent of the married man who leaves his lover’s lipstick on his collar.

  How does the poet stand in relation to his subject? What does he owe, and what is his duty? These are the questions behind confessional poetry, and they are the questions that Berryman is working out. In late March 1948 Berryman wrote the first two stanzas of a new, long poem. It opens with a question as the poet directly addresses his subject:

  The Governor your husband lived so long

  moved you not, restless, waiting for him?

  Anne Bradstreet is sometimes described as the first American poet. She arrived in New England in 1630 and her first volume of verse was published in 1650. Berryman calls to her across the centuries.

  Out of maize & air

  your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,

  from the centuries it.

  I think you won’t stay

  he fears, but she comes to him. In the fifth stanza, her voice begins to take over. “By the week we landed we were, most, used up,” she recounts, and tells him of her life, her early days in the New World, the first winters, and—in a rightly celebrated passage—the birth of her first child:

  One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous,

  unforbidding Majesty.

  Swell, imperious bells. I fly.

  Soon, she will not remain confined to history. The poet speaks to her, and she replies, flirting with him: “You must not love me, but”—she pauses—“I do not bid you cease.”

  “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” remains a startlingly bold poem, even today. It jumbles time, wrong-footing the reader with its inverted syntax and strange ellipses. Anne Bradstreet sees the ship on which they came to the New World rotting:

  The Lady Arbella dying—

  dyings—at which my heart rose, but I did submit.

  History is overwhelming the present here. She asks him, “Sing a concord of our thought,” and Berryman replies: “I am drowning in this past.” He goes on to describe a strange vision, a nightmare of guilt:

  I trundle the bodies, on the iron bars,

  over that fire backward & forth; they burn;

  bits fall. I wonder if

  I killed them.

  She replies: “Dreams! You are good.”

  * * *

  The first of the Dream Songs begins:

  Huffy Henry hid the day,

  unappeasable Henry sulked.

  I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

  The pieces come from elsewhere, but their density is new. A slang expression and a strange name; two characters, at least one of which is mysterious; meter jumping between iambs and trochees, and a fluid, unusual syntax. The gap in the first line appears to convert an intransitive into a transitive verb, although of course it doesn’t; rather, it only thwarts our expectation of reliable, decipherable grammar. What is Henry hiding? Or where? Perhaps he’s hiding (something) inside that space in the line. We move from past to present tense, and by the second half of the third line the pronouns have dissolved.

  In October 1954, Berryman moved to Minneapolis, to an apartment near a lake, and in the winter when it froze he liked to walk out on the ice. He began to keep a journal of his dreams. By the summer, he had 650 pages of dream analysis. In June 1955, he signed a contract for two books with Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. The first was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which was published in October 1956; the second was a biography of Shakespeare. Berryman never finished this book. Instead, he began writing what he called from the start “dream songs,” which he did almost exclusively for the next fifteen
years, at the rate of sometimes two a day. It is worth taking a short detour into the book that Berryman did not write to understand the ones he did.

  Berryman began working on Shakespeare in early 1937, in Cambridge. Specifically, he was interested in the textual states and chronology of the plays, which is a dry subfield of literary criticism but which he found enthralling. In February 1937 he wrote: “It’s awfully silly ever to do anything but read Shakespeare,” and this might sound like only a young snob’s boast, but he seems to have meant it. In May 1944 he won a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, for Shakespeare textual study; he worked by night in a small basement office in the Princeton University library, and when it was locked he climbed in and out through a window. In 1952 he was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation “for the critical study of Shakespeare” and in 1958 he claimed to have settled the date of Shakespeare’s early play The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “It is late 1592—early 1593 and I can prove it.” In 1964 he won another grant, to complete the book that was now called “Shakespeare’s Friend,” and he went to Washington to do research but spent all his time in bars. In 1969, on leaving a rehabilitation clinic: “A few months ought to see my biography at 500–600 pages.” In February 1970 he wrote a short lyric: “I’m hot these 20 yrs. on his collaborator / in The Taming of the Shrew.” In May 1970, on entering a treatment program for alcoholism, he made a list of “replacements for drinking,” and the first item was “work on my Shakespeare biography mornings & afternoons.” In June 1971, he applied for and won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for work on the book that was now called “Shakespeare’s Reality.” On December 17 of that year, he wrote a note: “I thought new disappointments impossible but last night suddenly doubted if I really have a book ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’ at all, despite all these years.”