The Heart Is Strange
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Authors: John Berryman
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Contents
The Moon and the Night and the Men
The Song of the Demented Priest
A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953)
From
His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt
(1958)
American Lights, Seen From Off Abroad
The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers
1.
“Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake”
2.
“Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you”
3.
“Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me”
4.
“If I say Thy name, art Thou there? It may be so”
5.
“Holy, & holy. The damned are said to say”
6.
“Under new management, Your Majesty”
7.
“After a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean”
9.
“Surprise me on some ordinary day”
10.
“Fearful I peer upon the mountain path”
11.
“Germanicus leapt upon the wild lion in Smyrna”
Damn You, Jim D., You Woke Me Up
‘How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?’
From
Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972
(1977)
“Canal smell. City that lies on the sea like a cork”
“Gulls chains voices bells: honey we’re home”
“Henry under construction was Henry indeed”
“Long (my dear) ago, when rosaries”
“With arms outflung the clock announced: Ten-twenty”
“Good words & irreplaceable: serenade, schadenfreude”
“I’m reading my book backward. It sounds odd”
Introduction
John Berryman saw birthdays as imaginative opportunities. Lecturing at Princeton in March 1951, he pictured Shakespeare on his thirtieth birthday. “Suppose with me a time, a place, a man who was waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed, congratulated, on a day in latter April long ago,” he began: “about April 22, say, of 1594, a Monday.” A birthday is a chance to greet across time: to hail a predecessor. In a late poem Berryman addressed Emily Dickinson. It is December 10, 1970, and in “Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140” he raises his glass to her. “Well. Thursday afternoon, I’m in W——,” he writes: “drinking your ditties, and (dear)
they
are
alive
.” A birthday is a moment of invention. The climax of his long poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” is a violent, beautiful childbirth. “No. No. Yes! everything down / hardens I press with horrible joy down,” shouts Anne: “I did it with my body!” Close to the end of
The Dream Songs
, the cycle for which Berryman is best known, he writes: “Tomorrow is his birthday, makes you think.” John Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 25, 1914, and this edition of his poems is published to mark his centenary.
Bringing a man to life: this was his imaginative project. On March 12, 1969, collecting a prize at the National Book Awards, Berryman explained that his aim in
The Dream Songs
was “the reproduction or invention of the motions of a human personality, free and determined.” These poems describe a sad man called Henry. “So may be Henry was a human being,” he writes in Dream Song 13:
Let’s investigate that.
… We did; okay.
He is a human American man.
In producing him, they explore the conditions of his invention. “Let us suppose,” he begins, in Dream Song 15:
one pal unwinding from his labours in
one bar of Chicago,
and this did actual happen. This was so.
Just because we must imagine him does not mean that he is not real; nor is he exactly the same as Berryman. “The poem,” he asserts in a note, “is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry,” but the distance between the two remains a little blurred.
Berryman has not been canonized, quite; he has not continued to receive the respect, even awe, accorded to his great contemporaries Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. This may be because he appears a little less serious than they do. He is certainly funnier than they are, constantly mirthful about the process of critical celebration and literary canonization. “[L]iterature bores me, especially great literature,” complains Dream Song 14. “Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes / as bad as achilles,” it continues, and the joke is only half that Henry is no Achilles. It is also in the mismatch of classical literature and teenage ennui, balanced by the voice.
Berryman has, however, found a curious afterlife in the early decades of the twenty-first century. He appears unexpectedly and often in songs by indie rock bands. In “Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?” by the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the singer intones joylessly, “I came softly, slowly / Banging me metal drum / Like Berryman.” The Australian singer Nick Cave named one of his albums
Henry’s Dream
(1992), and in the song “We Call Upon the Author” from 2008 he returns to Berryman. “Berryman was best!” he yelps: “He wrote like wet papier-mâché, went the Heming-way.”
These bands take Berryman as an emblem of the hard-living, misunderstood poet: it is a Romantic vision of the man and hinges upon his alcoholism, suffering, and early death. Berryman committed suicide by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis in January 1972, and this is the moment these songs return to. “There was that night we thought that John Berryman could fly,” sing the band the Hold Steady in “Stuck Between Stations,” and the song invents the scene. “The devil and John Berryman / they took a walk together,” the song imagines, and it starts to speak for him: “He said I’ve surrounded myself with doctors / And deep thinkers. / But big heads and soft bodies / Make for lousy lovers.”
“John Allyn Smith Sails” by the band Okkervil River borrows Berryman’s original name and mixes his story with a classic pop song from the 1960s, the fortuitously named “Sloop John B” by the Beach Boys. This new version ends with Berryman’s voice:
I’m full in my heart and my head
And I want to go home
With a book in each hand
In the way I had planned
Well, I feel so broke up, I want to go home.
“With a book in each hand”: this is the final image of the first volume of Dream Songs,
77 Dream Songs
, as a worn-down Henry determines to keep living:
with in each hand
one of his own mad books and all,
ancient fires for eyes, his head full
& his heart full, he’s making ready to move on.
Outside the confines of his own published works, Berryman’s words and image have moved into popular American myth, blended with the Faustian backstory of the blues—a singer who trades with the devil—and the old notion of the artist as troubled outsider. Like the Dream Songs, these indie rock bands are supposing a man, someone halfway between the invented and the real.
These are all, however, versions of Berryman’s life, and when we turn to the works they may at first look tied to a particular historical period. Berryman’s poems are filled with the bric-a-brac of 1950s and 1960s America:
Ben Hur
, Ike, the Viet Cong, and Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire. We hear of medicines and magazines of the time: LSD, Sparine, Haldol, and Serax;
National Geographic
and
Time
. His characters eat chicken paprika and drink frozen daiquiris, and speak lines from old vaudeville shows. Berryman loved blues music and alludes to it throughout: Bessie Smith, Pinetop Perkins, “Empty Bed Blues” (“empty grows every bed,” ends the first Dream Song). In “New Year’s Eve” from Berryman’s first full collection,
The Dispossessed
(1948), the speaker is at a party where “Somebody slapped / Somebody’s second wife somewhere,” and the line conjures an age perhaps best known to us now from TV shows. It is easy to read these poems as historical documents.
This is, however, too narrow an understanding of Berryman’s sense of history: for his listing of all these temporary possessions and fashions is also in the service of an ambition outside time. He wishes to capture what it is to be a human, alive and present in the culture. Reading Berryman therefore involves a little time travel, and this is the magic trick of deeply sympathetic literature: to exist in one instant both in the past and present, in two places at once.
Berryman’s Sonnets
trace the story of a love affair, and one of them describes an evening when Berryman and his lover are far from each other. They have agreed to each separately at six o’clock go to a bar. “I lift—lift you five States away your glass,” he explains, and although she has never been to this bar—“Wide of this bar you never graced”—and although there are other, ugly sounds and interruptions—“wet strange cars pass” and “The spruce barkeep sports a toupee alas”—they are for this moment with each other. “Grey eyes light! and we have our drink together,” it ends. Written before an age of cell phones, this event seems oddly archaic, sweet and old-fashioned. It is also magical, in its faith in will over circumstance, and it is what we do—in miniature—when we read. Berryman invites us to drink with him. In reading his poems, we clink glasses across the decades.
