John Berryman Read online

  “But there is another method,” she continues (this method being Berryman’s own), “the method of the life we all lead,” in which we observe an unnamed character negotiating an uncertain outcome, similar in kind to the frightened primitive who goes to the medicine man:

  Here nothing is prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes, the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are the brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows.

  Berryman’s view of the music the masters make—“profound solemn & clear” (“Canto Amor,” TD)—clearly corresponds with Schreiner’s “stage method” in which there is satisfaction and completeness. Similarly, Berryman’s “other music”—the “flowing ceremony of trouble and light” (“Canto Amor”) in poetry, and Schreiner’s “other method”—“a strange coming and going of feet” in drama—are not so much complementary notions as they are similarly structured ways of enacting life’s refusal to guarantee one’s expectations. In his poetry, especially his long poems, Berryman “put people in action [to] see what happens,” and what happens is that life takes unexpected turns. “I’m a follower of Pascal,” Berryman said to an interviewer in 1970, “in the sense that I don’t know what the issue is, or how it is to be resolved.” The design and method of the poem, as Berryman saw it, renders the unpredictability of life; the problem was how to incorporate unpredictability without the form of presentation breaking down entirely. Stanzaic form was one way, but he also found another method: creating character in dramatic form.

  As Berryman weighed how to use dramatic form in poetry in the 1940s, he also struggled with the problem of how his own personality might be present in the poem. Although style is the surest sign of the poet’s presence, it was not enough. In the climate of the 1930s “New Criticism,” particularly Eliot’s “impersonality of the poet,” he did not want to break away entirely, and so he began to experiment with how he might be present in the poem without speaking in the first person. When he was writing his first play in late 1936, he discovered his fundamental dramatic method, a method that resembles Keats’s notion of the “chameleon poet.” The poet, Keats says in one of his letters, “has no Identity—he is continually in—and filling some other Body.” Similarly, Berryman wrote to his mother on December 27, 1936:

  I am beginning to see a certain justice in the references to characters’ being free agent[s]. To my critical consternation, I see what even cheap novelists and poor actors are getting at when they say “This character I am creating or playing is real & makes his own destiny; I but fulfill it.” The people literally possess one.… [T]hese persons that I have imagined in certain circumstances & actions have a quite uncanny faculty for developing themselves.

  Berryman discovered that he had the option of being less concerned about either the Whitman “I” or the Yeatsian mask of his experience. The matter of course is complex; one may persuasively argue, for example, that Berryman’s characters are his guises. But the act of creating characters, rather than “poems,” freed him from a self-conscious preoccupation with projecting only himself. As he pondered how he might be present in the poem as both creator and character, he began to inquire into the question of how his presence might be clearly manifest rather than blatantly overt.

  Berryman solved the problem of the poet’s presence in the poem with the ambiguous pronoun, through which, he said in 1965, “the poet himself is both left out and put in.” “A pronoun,” he continued, “may seem a small matter, but she matters, he matters, it matters, they matter. Without this invention … I could not have written … [Homage and The Dream Songs].” Henry, for instance, Berryman said in another context, “refers to himself as ‘I,’ ‘he,’ and ‘you,’ so that the various parts of his identity are fluid.” The reader, too, is forced to participate in the creation of an uncertain identity: “[T]he reader is made to guess who is talking to whom,” Berryman says. “Out of this ambiguity arises richness. The reader becomes more aware, is forced to enter into himself.”

  Berryman identified “The Ball Poem” (1942) as the work in which he learned that “a commitment of [the poet’s] identity can be ‘reserved,’ so to speak, with an ambiguous pronoun.” The first line appears to be the question “What is the boy now, who has lost his ball[?]” The second line clarifies the question—not “who” or “what” is the boy, but rather how he is to respond to the loss of his ball: “What, what is he to do?” In the next three lines, the “I” of the poem—the poet or the boy or both?—responds to the question by recounting what has happened to the boy: “I saw [the ball] go / Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then / Merrily over—there it is in the water!” The ambiguous “I” creates two points of view: the poet’s and the boy’s. But the two are one as they witness the moment of something lost. It may be that the two voices speak as a sort of chorus to the sense of loss all readers have experienced; it may also be that the poet desires to become one with the boy; certainly the reader must guess who is speaking.

  The pronoun then shifts to “he.” While the poet sympathizes with the boy’s loss (this particular ball is important to the boy because it cannot be replaced), he identifies a greater loss—and terror—buried deep within them both, their “ultimate shaking grief.” On first reading, an “ultimate shaking grief” may seem to be an overstated response to the loss of a ball, but it may be that the speaker has abruptly shifted to a larger inquiry into how one responds to loss. The poet does not intrude upon the boy; he observes what happens (just as the boy has) and identifies with the boy’s unarticulated discovery: “He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes, / The epistemology of loss.” The poet then speaks in a Whitmanesque “I”: “Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark / Floor of the harbour.” Although the poet may “suffer and move” (“my mind and my heart move / With all that move me, under the water”), he concludes, “I am not a little boy.” The poet does not disallow that he has, momentarily, become the little boy; he says, in a way protesting, he is not a little boy. So what began as an inquiry into “What is the boy to do now?” ends with the poet’s new awareness that he is not a little boy but is this boy at a particular moment. He identifies a loss buried deep within himself that is made particular in the boy’s loss. He simultaneously grieves over his own sense of loss and protects not the boy but the little boy in himself.

  Berryman said he also discovered in “The Ball Poem” that when “the boy does and does not become [the poet] … we are confronted with a process which is at once a process of life and a process of art.” He neither defines nor explains the process, but it is similar to a “special pressure,” described in his essay “The Development of Anne Frank,” of her accelerated maturation: “It took … a special pressure forcing [her] childadult conversion, and exceptional self-awareness and exceptional candour and exceptional powers of expression, to bring that … change into view.” In light of his view of the twin processes of life and art, we may say that Berryman is and is not writing an autobiography of his own moment of self-awareness in “The Ball Poem.” (That the title calls attention to its being a poem suggests his distance from his subject.) He is self-aware as he writes the script and empathizes with the boy’s feelings, but through the ambiguous pronoun, he simultaneously becomes the boy and plays out a role that is a part of himself (or a role that is not himself, even his opposite self). He simultaneously speaks for and with the character he creates—a “special pressure forcing child-adult conversion”—thus dramatizing the creation of himself and respecting the boundaries of a separate self.

  In his last volumes, Berryman continued to inquire into his own fluid personality in dramatic terms. Of the opening poem “Her & It” in Love & Fame, he wrote: “I notice it makes play with an obsession that ruled ‘The Ball Poem’ of 1942 as well as, later, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1948–1953) and The Dream Songs (1955–19
68): namely, the dissolving of one personality into another without relinquishing the original.… In the very long poem, of course, many personalities shift, reify, dissolve, survive, project—remaining one.” Berryman’s debt to Coleridge is apparent here, and although he limits his principle to the re-formation of the personality, in general terms it resembles Coleridge’s definition of the secondary Imagination which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create.”

  On the one hand, Berryman believed that the poet speaks in an objective voice (rather than an identifiable personality) for the experiences of human life. In 1948, when a friend suggested that the artist “moves towards himself and God,” Berryman disagreed: “I see [the artist] moving towards annihilation—towards becoming a voice: first a voice for the object, later (very rare, this) a voice for powers and passions and acceptances buried somewhere in men for good—Tempest, Magic Flute, Schubert C Major Quintet, last works usually.” In this view, the poet is like Keats’s “chameleon poet”: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in—for and filling some other Body.” On the other hand, Berryman regarded the voice of a poem as individual and subjective, that mysterious and delicate instrument by which we know ourselves as being different from and in relationship with another person. This notion of voice is like Berryman’s description of Whitman’s “orbic flex”: “The poet—one would say, a mere channel, but with its own ferocious difficulties—fills with experiences, a valve opens; he speaks them.” Berryman did not regard these two objective and subjective voices as being separate (one speaking as a medium for the human condition, the other expressing personal and “ferocious difficulties”); the two are, he says, “identical.” Although each voice speaks for and of different powers and needs, they are identical precisely in the way that the poet simultaneously becomes the boy in “The Ball Poem” and speaks for passions they both feel.

  Berryman’s dramatic imagination encourages a process of self-inquiry that aims at re-formation and self-definition in which he is willing to be uncertain. It is a drama that allows him to move at will and at need between the predictability of art and the uncertainty of life: form and process, formal speech and individual gesture, will and emotion, consciousness and unconsciousness, objective and subjective realities. In speaking to a character in a poem or in becoming that character, even momentarily, he plays out, neither forcing nor merely asserting, subjective and objective realities. The cunning of this dramatic mode allows him (and the reader), in Robert Langbaum’s useful phrase, to be “called into awareness.” As Henry says of himself, “When he dressed up & up, his costumes varied / with the southeast wind, but he remained aware. / Awareness was most of what he had” (Dream Song 370).

  No matter how differently readers may respond to any given poem by John Berryman, he invites them to engage simultaneously in a process of life and a process of art. In the end, as Berryman says, they may be “moved, impressed, perhaps changed.” Berryman’s use of poetry is an effort to reconnect broken connections. His moment is not that of T. S. Eliot’s “intersection of the timeless with time”; it is quite a different transfiguration, “a terminal activity taking place out near the end of things.” Berryman’s timeless moment speaks for, rather than of, “powers and passions and acceptances buried somewhere” in all readers “for good.” His terrified and delicate listening, his violations of forms and syntax, his creation of the discontinuous personality, and his rituals of finding the missing element in an uncertain world, all point to one hope and a single prayer: “Unite my various soul, / sole watchman of the wide & single stars.”

  September 11, 1988

  St. John’s University

  Collegeville, Minnesota

  Chronology

  1914 Born John Allyn Smith, Jr., October 25, in McAlester, Oklahoma; the first child of John Allyn (“Allyn”), twenty-seven, a banker in Sasakwa who was reared in South Stillwater, Minnesota, and Martha (“Peggy”) Shaver [Little] Smith, twenty, formerly an elementary-school teacher in Sasakwa, who was reared in St. Louis and McAlester. Christened November 29 at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in McAlester; nicknamed “Billy” after his father’s deceased brother, William J. Smith.

  1916 Family moves from Sasakwa to Lamar, Oklahoma, because father finds a new position at a bank (the family moves about every two years in Oklahoma, first to Lamar, then to Wagoner and Anadarko).

  1919 Brother Robert Jefferson—“Bob” as a child, later “Jeff”—born in McAlester on September 1.

  1921 Family moves to Anadarko in January; father is cashier and active vice president of the First State Bank. Attends West Grade public school.

  1923 First communion May 6 at Holy Family Catholic Church, Anadarko.

  1924 Serves as an altar boy for Fr. Boniface Beri, O.S.B. Father resigns position at bank and takes a job as local fish-and-game warden; mother takes a part-time job.

  1925 Confirmed at Holy Family in Anadarko on March 29. Parents and grandmother Martha May Little move to Tampa, Florida, where all three buy and operate the Orange Blossom Restaurant. John and Bob remain in Oklahoma as boarding students at St. Joseph’s Academy, a Catholic convent school in Chickasha near Anadarko, until mid-December, when they join their parents in Tampa.

  1926 Father speculates in land; crash of Florida land boom; parents sell restaurant and separate in early April. Mother and sons move to an apartment building owned by John Angus McAlpin Berryman, fifty-one, in Clearwater, Florida. Father threatens suicide; mother files for divorce on June 19, charging John Allyn with adultery. In same month John Allyn found shot dead outside their apartment and ruled a suicide; father buried in Holdenville, Oklahoma (near Sasakwa), next to his brother William. Mother marries John Angus on September 8 in New York City and changes her name to “Jill Angel”; John’s name is changed to John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (but not legally until 1936).

  1927 Family moves to Jackson Heights, New York, where John attends Public School 69. Stepfather John Angus is a bond broker in Manhattan.

  1928 Wins an essay contest on humane practices in the treatment of animals; places in community-wide spelling bee; writes a science-fiction “novel.” Enters South Kent School, a small Episcopal boarding school in South Kent, Connecticut. Family moves to Great Neck, Long Island.

  1929 Excels academically; first publications of short articles and reports in the school newspaper. Stock-market crash; mother finds employment as full-time secretary.

  1931 Family moves to Manhattan and stepfather works part-time. Young John impulsively attempts suicide at South Kent.

  1932 Enters Columbia College, New York City. Meets E. M. (“Milt”) Halliday. Family moves to apartment near Columbia. Mark Van Doren becomes mentor. Stepfather mostly unemployed.

  1934 Writes first extant poems, four sonnets for his mother’s birthday, July 8.

  1935 Publishes first poems and reviews (among them, a review of Van Doren’s A Winter Diary and Other Poems) in The Columbia Review, edited by Robert Giroux; wins several poetry prizes (and again in 1936); publishes his first poem in a national magazine, “Note on E. A. Robinson” in The Nation; gives first poetry reading. Meets Allen Tate. Stepfather’s health declines.

  1936 Publishes essay-review “The Ritual of W. B. Yeats,” on Yeats’s collected plays. Meets R. P. Blackmur. Graduates Phi Beta Kappa, B.A. (English major, philosophy minor); wins a Euretta J. Kellett scholarship to study for two years at Clare College, Cambridge, England. Engaged to Jean Bennett. Sails for England in September. Writes to W. B. Yeats and attends lecture by T. S. Eliot; meets W. H. Auden. Begins writing first play in Paris during Christmas vacation.

  1937 Attends lectures by I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and Stephen Spender; completes first play, Cleopatra, a one-act dance play; meets Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats. Summer vacation with Beryl Eeman in Heidelberg, Paris, and Ghent. Wins Oldham Shakespeare prize. Engaged to Beryl.

  1938 Publishes first poems in The Southern Review. Ret
urns to New York City; unsuccessfully attempts to find employment. Works on first long play titled The Architect. Beryl comes for extended stay with the Berrymans. Meets Bhain Campbell. Mother begins career in advertising.

  1939 Beryl returns to England in April. Part-time poetry editor for The Nation (and 1940); meets Delmore Schwartz. Mother separated from stepfather. Instructor in English, Wayne University, Ann Arbor, Michigan. By December mentally and physically exhausted, diagnosed petit mal, considered to be a form of epilepsy (later, his wife Eileen showed that this was a misdiagnosis).

  1940 Briggs-Copeland instructor in English, Harvard University (through spring 1943). Publishes first collection, “Twenty Poems,” in Five Young American Poets (others include Marion O’Donnell and Randall Jarrell), and “The Loud Hill of Wales,” a review of Dylan Thomas’s The World I Breathe. Bhain Campbell dies of cancer.

  1941 Meets Eileen Patricia Mulligan at her New Year’s Day party. Classified 4-F for the draft (poor eyesight, or perhaps the official diagnosis of petit mal).

  1942 Publishes first individual collection, Poems, one of a series of poetry pamphlets by New Directions. Breaks engagement to Beryl Eeman; marries Eileen, October 24, the day before his twenty-eighth birthday.

  1943 Gives Morris Gray Poetry Reading at Harvard; publishes “Shakespeare’s Text,” a review of W. W. Greg’s The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare; Harvard appointment ends; teaches English and Latin at Iona Preparatory School, New Rochelle, New York, for three weeks, but resigns when R. P. Blackmur arranges for a position as instructor in English at Princeton University. Meets Robert Fitzgerald, Erich Kahler, Ralph Ellison, Hermann Broch, Christian Gauss, Edmund Wilson, and Dwight Macdonald.