Authors: John Berryman
77 Dream Songs
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CONTENTS
Introduction by Henri Cole: “Deep in the Mess of Things”
2.
Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance
3.
A Stimulant for an Old Beast
4. Filling her compact & delicious body
7.
‘The Prisoner of Shark Island’ with Paul Muni
10. There were strange gatherings
27. The greens of the Ganges delta
34. My mother has your shotgun.
37.
Three around the Old Gentleman
44. Tell it to the forest fire
47.
April Fool’s Day, or, St Mary of Egypt
53. He lay in the middle of the world
59.
Henry’s Meditation in the Kremlin
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 will 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.”
