John Berryman Read online

  After a little I could not have told—

  But no one asked me this—why I was there.

  I asked. The ceiling of that place was high

  And there were sudden noises, which I made.

  The nervous shifts in the girl’s thought and feeling enact her pain, and the final stanza holds the tempo down so that the penultimate line is expressed with greater power:

  Through leafless branches the sweet wind blows

  Making a mild sound, softer than a moan;

  High in a pass once where we put our tent

  Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.

  —I no longer remember what they want.—

  Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.

  Unlike the rhetorical repetition of “Spares, Spares, Spares, Looks,” the repeated line (“Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy”) is dramatically functional. The girl’s joyful memory of the time she lay awake in her tent is unexpectedly interrupted by her cry of despair and resignation (“I no longer remember what they want”), so that the repeating of “Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy” ironically merges her past joy and present suffering. “The Song of the Tortured Girl” also illustrates one of Berryman’s favorite definitions, by R. P. Blackmur, of the “art of poetry” that “not only expresses the matter in hand / but adds to the stock of available reality” (“Olympus,” L&F). The repeated line not only expresses the matter in hand (her present suffering) but also adds to the stock of her, and our, available reality (her past experience and her present memory of joy).

  “The Song of the Tortured Girl” illustrates how Berryman’s nervous style enacts a moment of high seriousness, but “A Professor’s Song” shows how his idiom—in the context of a realizable situation—may be comic:

  Alive now—no—Blake would have written prose,

  But movement following movement crisply flows,

  So much the better, better the much so,

  As burbleth Mozart. Twelve. The class can go.

  Until I meet you, then, in Upper Hell

  Convulsed, foaming immortal blood: farewell.

  Berryman discovered his jagged and jazzy voice when he mastered the dramatist’s cunning, how the finely made poem may be unmade, in a sense, by the individual voice, how the creation of personality and style may be a single enterprise.

  Robert Lowell’s description of Berryman’s mature style, “disrupted and mended,” is a useful way of thinking about how it works. Disrupted suggests that a harmony is temporarily broken, perhaps counterpointed, the premise being that there is a harmony to be disrupted. Mended suggests not only that the reader may mend the disruption but also that the syntax may somehow, paradoxically, mend itself. The first three stanzas of “Canto Amor,” dedicated to his wife Eileen and written in late 1944 and early 1945, illustrate how the disruption and mending may simultaneously address and enact the theme of the harmony and disharmony of marriage:

  Dream in a dream the heavy soul somewhere

  struck suddenly & dark down to its knees.

  A griffin sighs off in the orphic air.

  If (Unknown Majesty) I not confess

  praise for the wrack the rock the live sailor

  under the blue sea,—yet I may You bless

  always for hér, in fear & joy for hér

  whose gesture summons ever when I grieve

  me back and is my mage and minister.

  The style of the first line, neither surcharged nor weak, is appropriate to a harmonious marriage (not till later in the poem do we understand that marriage is the theme): “Dream in a dream the heavy soul somewhere.…” But in the second line, the juice suddenly increases in “struck suddenly & dark down” and then abruptly decreases in the third line, “A griffin sighs off in the orphic air.” The first line of the second stanza disrupts the ease of the previous line with the parenthetical “Unknown Majesty,” and slows to the heavy accents and consonantal r’s of the next, “praise for the wrack the rock the live sailor.” The stanza concludes with an unexpected turn in that the live sailor is “under the blue sea” and then turns again, stylistically, with the inversion, “yet I may You bless.” The stanza now breaks to emphasize the opening of the next (“always for hér”) and the heightening is sustained with heavy accents on “her.”

  Now these paced alternations of style create both a disruptive and a binding energy in that the speaker expresses uncertainty and inquires into it. For example, the disruptive placement of “You” in line 6 is both functional and revealing. It functions to emphasize “You,” and it echoes the speaker’s nervous desire to believe there is an “Unknown Majesty,” significantly the previous disruption. The mending thus takes place in the fusion of opposing beliefs and feelings: the speaker does and does not believe there is a “You” who protects his wife and makes his marriage harmonious. (The poem concludes that marriage is not harmonious but, rather, the “flowing ceremony of trouble and light, / all Loves becoming.”)

  A more complex disruption of syntax occurs in the third stanza of “Canto Amor,” “whose gesture summons ever when I grieve / me back.” Sense is tangled, in part, because the syntax places “me” as the indirect object of both “summons” and “grieve” (the line break “grieve / me” also emphasizes “me”). But the tangle of meaning may be regarded as a “passionate syntax”; once we see that “me” is the indirect object of both “grieve” and “summons,” several meanings intertwine: (1) “I myself grieve”; (2) “I cause my grief”; (3) “my wife’s gesture summons me not to grieve”; and (4) “whenever I grieve, my wife’s gesture comforts me.” The inverted phrase “ever when” similarly compounds meaning in that “ever” refers to both his own grieving and his wife’s “gesture” (meaning both a movement to express her emotion and something she says to convey her intention): (1) she “summons ever” (i.e., “I can always depend on her”) and (2) “ever when I grieve” (i.e., “I grieve always”). If commas were to set off “ever when I grieve” (i.e., “whose gesture summons, ever when I grieve, / me back”) “me” would clearly be the indirect object of “summons” and the feeling and meaning would be lost.

  Berryman’s jammed voice may seem to some readers as either affected or a lair of meaning from which they must free themselves. But to put the matter another way, his disrupted syntax also sets in motion a “marvellous energy from line to line.” His syntax provokes “a process,” as Berryman said of his ambiguous pronouns, “which is at once a process of life and a process of art.” His passionate syntax enacts the emergencies and gaps of the drift-of-life—swift movement, concentration, pauses, simultaneous connections and disconnections, overstatement and understatement, humor, irony. A style that disrupts readers’ expectations suggests a process in which they, initially, are mostly aware of Berryman’s self-conscious style. However, his self-consciousness—his refusal to guarantee readers’ expectations—generates another stage of the readers’ relationship with the words on the page: they experience, not simply see with their minds, only the thought or feeling or experience the words point to. The reader must “endure … the manner for the matter” (Dream Song 305), as Henry says, for Berryman mangles his manner in order to create an experience, an experience that enacts more completely the uncertainty of experience.

  Poetry as a transparent reality. Whether or not readers move from self-consciousness to a sense of transparency, Berryman himself made the leap. The language of poetry, he wrote in some notes for an essay to be titled “Poetry and Logos” (ca. 1965), came to mean to him “the creation of a situation in which something is said.” That is, words simply said and said simply with the view that what is said is so transparent that one has no sense of hearing (or reading) words. In a general way, Berryman’s newly simple style of the late 1960s seems a dramatic change from his packed and disrupted syntax. And yet, whether his style is simple or complex (there are moments in his last phase where his syntax is disrupted), he holds to the fundamental principle that style must be “fresh as a bubble breaks / A
s little false” (Sonnet 23) so that it “not only expresses the matter in hand / but adds to the stock of available reality.”

  In an interview in 1971, Berryman said that “some of the best kind of writing is really transparent … you get no impression of viewing art.” The interviewer asked for examples, and he replied:

  The Odyssey, the Paradiso … Beethoven’s late quartets, where the appearance of art disappears, everything becomes unbelievably simple. The artist just says what he thinks, or how he feels. For example, instead of making a long speech, he says, “I hurt,” or he says to the reader “are you hurting?”

  Asked to give an example of transparency in twentieth-century poetry, Berryman remembered a line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “At a certain point it occurs to [Eliot] to say ‘Humility is endless.’ How’s that. In verse.” Berryman might very well have in mind Eliot’s similar notion of the “auditory imagination”—“poetry so transparent,” Eliot said in a 1933 lecture, “that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry, poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry” (Eliot, too, cited Beethoven’s later works as an example of going “beyond music”). Both Berryman and Eliot owe something to Coleridge’s statement that the great poet has the “power of so carrying the eye of the reader as to make him almost lose consciousness of the words—to make him see everything.”

  This is the theory, but one reader’s (or writer’s) transparency may be another’s dark glass. In the same 1971 interview, Berryman offered a useful example of how he saw transparency at work:

  Take a line from The Tempest, “turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep.” Now, that is absolutely magnificent, but incredibly simple. The art comes in placing, pure syntax.

  Admittedly, “turfy” is good, and “nibbling” is good, and it’s nicely held together. That’s what happens, turf is what you nibble if you’re a sheep. But, it really is so powerful because “live” is so low-keyed. You expect something bigger. The height at the front of the line, and another height at the end of the line, so you want something way low-keyed down in the middle.

  Where linguists may see a parallel structure in “turfy mountains” and “nibbling sheep,” Berryman hears a heightening and diminishing of movement and sound.

  The eighth of his “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” illustrates a similar alternating intensity and delicacy: “Jonquils respond with wit to the teasing breeze.” The middle of the line, “with wit,” is heightened, almost a spondee; we do not expect jonquils to respond to the breeze with wit. (Another counterpoint might be implied in Wordsworth’s well-known daffodils fluttering in the breeze.) This memorable line, however, should be seen—and heard—in the context of the three preceding lines of the opening quatrain of “A Prayer for the Self”:

  Who am I worthless that You spent such pains

  and take may pains again?

  I do not understand; but I believe.

  Jonquils respond with wit to the teasing breeze.

  The voice of the first three lines speaks simply, and the speaker both makes a statement and poses an inquiry. If the question had ended with the first line—“Who am I worthless that You spent such pains?”—it would emphasize “worthless” and ambiguously refer to Christ’s “pains” (i.e., His suffering and care because “spent” denotes both expending and care). A more prosaic way of putting it—without the ambiguity of “spent” and “pains”—would be “Why did You suffer for worthless me?” The question continues in the short second line with a qualification and doubt, “and take may pains again?” Stated more directly, the question might be “You may suffer pains for me again?” (The question may also be a statement of hope.) Like “spent,” “take” suggests both taking on pains and taking care, that is, “to take pains.” “May,” placed so that one is tempted to read “take my pains again,” heightens the apprehension in the question, Christ may or may not “take pains again.”

  The complex question, so mined with syntactical and rhythmical depth charges, is answered in the low-keyed and direct iambic third line: “I do not understand; but I believe.” But then comes another unexpected turn in image, place, thought, and rhythm: “Jonquils respond with wit to the teasing breeze.” The juxtaposition of the two final lines plays out the alternating thematic movements of the whole quatrain. On the one hand, Berryman says that his doubt is calmed in faith; on the other hand, the winds of uncertainty—similar to the drums that beat outside the sanctuary of song in his youth and unlike Wordsworth’s “correspondent breeze”—are a “teasing breeze.”

  Berryman’s notion of transparency, then, aims, in Keats’s phrase, to “tease us out of thought” in a way that corresponds with his notion of “passionate syntax.” In his view of both transparency and passionate syntax, he shifts abruptly from one thought or feeling or rhythm to another, and he disrupts accepted conventions of linguistic structures. He provokes thought with the aim of creating intensity; the lightning shift, rather than the apt word, phrase, or image, is his transparent moment. The success of his passionate syntax and transparency very much depends upon the violations of conventions readers are willing to accept. His violations of accepted conventions provoke thought so as to render reality transparent. Since his style attempts to achieve the opposite of how it actually presents itself, on first reading readers may very well see and hear his abrupt shifts and violations. But if, after thought, incongruity and alternating calm and intensity are standards readers accept, Berryman’s passionate syntax creates, as Lowell said of 77 Dream Songs, a “risk and variety” that is nervously and transparently alive.

  The dramatic imagination: a process of life, a process of art. Like Robert Browning and Ezra Pound, Berryman was not so much interested in character in action as in action in character. His early experiments in writing plays raised the question of why and how characters reveal themselves. But his experience in writing poems, beginning as early as 1942 with “The Ball Poem” and “The Nervous Songs,” raised the question of his relationship, in the poem, to the characters and the selves he creates. His relationship, he seemed to realize in the mid-1940s, had something to do with his attraction to the primitive origins of poetry in which he expresses and creates his own personality.

  All poetry begins, Berryman believed, as a “practical matter,” because the poet is compelled to express and dispel his or her fears. Berryman suggested, drawing upon Robert Graves’s theory of the origins of poetry, that poems like Stephen Crane’s may in fact be “primitively blunt,” “like a series of anti-spells”:

  A savage dreams, is frightened by the dream, and goes to the medicine man to have it explained. The medicine man … chants, perhaps he stamps his foot … what he says becomes rhythmical … and what he says begins to rhyme. Poetry begins—as a practical matter, for use. It reassures the savage.… And medicine men are shrewd: interpretation enters the chanting, symbols are developed and connected, the gods are invoked, poetry booms.

  Berryman must have identified not only with the notion of Crane’s “anti-spells” but also with Thomas Beer’s observation, quoted by Berryman, that “the mistress of [Crane’s] mind was fear”—fear of abandonment, of uncertainty, of death. Whatever Berryman’s personal identification with the origin of poetry, this balance of authority and enactment in a primitive ritual applied to the design of a poem is potentially unsettling for the reader, especially as the balance abruptly shifts from line to line or poem to poem. It is a poetry that has, as Berryman observed of Crane’s, “the character of a ‘dream,’ something seen naïvely in a new relation.” Berryman came to understand that the alternations may also give the poem the “extraordinary combination of authority and intimacy” that Michael Dennis Browne heard in Berryman’s reading of The Dream Songs.

  Like the frightened primitive, Berryman suggests in his study of Crane, the poet desires most of all to be held in the sway of a ritual that dispels fears of the unexplainable and t
he uncertain. While his first experience with the power of ritual might very well have been as a Catholic altar boy, the encounter at the age of twenty-one with W. B. Yeats’s poetry and plays was probably his first conscious inquiry into how ritual may be at once a personal principle and a poetics. In his undergraduate review of Yeats’s Collected Plays, he defined ritual as the power to objectify experience—“a code or form of ceremonies, the formal character imposed on any experience as it is given objective existence.” In that summer of 1936 he wrote his first long poem, titled “Ritual at Arlington,” in which the poet memorializes (and objectifies) the known and unknown soldiers. Personally, he dispels his fear of the dead, particularly the ghost of his father, whose grave he alludes to throughout the poem. What seems to have crystallized in Berryman’s poetics in 1936 is his discovery of how the orderly form of ritual (or form) may make, or appear to make, the unknown objective and the uncertain certain. By 1940, in his “A Note on Poetry,” he adapted his definition of ritual to an explanation of the function of a poem, which is “to seize an object and make it visible.” The use of ritual—this act of making something visible and thus objectifying it—and what it does for the poet (and the reader) gradually became his fundamental principle.

  One of the cryptic epigraphs to The Dream Songs—“But there is another method” (Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm)—suggests that Berryman believed there were basically two forms of ritual open to him in the dramatic design of a poem. The first, Schreiner says, “is the stage method” in which we know what will happen to a given character in a given action, a sort of formal ritual with a predictable outcome transferred to the stage:

  According to that [method] each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know only with immutable certainty that at the right crisis each one will reappear and act his part, and when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness.