Readers familiar with John Berryman probably would not be surprised to learn he wrote the following sentences: “This all sounds gay but it ain’t, Klinker, it ain’t. I be in a berry bad state – sleepless & gruffgruff.” They may be surprised, however, to learn that this amalgamation of “black” slang, baby talk, twisted syntax, wordplay, and comic self-pity is not taken from his magnum opus, The Dream Songs. Rather it comes from a letter Berryman wrote to a friend when he was only 21, two decades before he hit upon the strange new style that would ensure his lasting reputation. This is just one of many revelations to be found in a new collection of Berryman’s letters, most now available for the first time. Impeccably edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, The Selected Letters of John Berryman is a welcome and overdue addition to our understanding of this controversial poet and the circumstances from which his work arose. The book’s editorial apparatus, which includes a brief introduction, helpful notes, a glossary of names, and a chronology, is well-designed and informative but also streamlined and unobtrusive enough for non-specialists.
The Selected Letters of John Berryman offers an inside view of the poet’s chaotic life and storied literary career — his growth from precocious boarding school student and Columbia undergrad to prolific, opinionated man of letters to flamboyant, boundary-breaking father of Confessional poetry. We also watch as Berryman stumbles through the primal loss of his father to suicide, three tumultuous marriages, adulterous affairs, short-lived teaching gigs, countless hospitalizations, and chronic struggles with alcoholism and depression, all of which would culminate in the final tragedy that has always defined his legacy: in 1972, Berryman leaped to his death from a bridge in Minneapolis at the age of 57. In these dense and rollicking letters, written to dozens of his illustrious friends and fellow writers, including Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Ezra Pound, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Adrienne Rich, Berryman rants and raves, gossips and preens, whines about enemies and opines about literature.
For all the drama and tumult of his correspondence, I doubt many would hail Berryman as a master letter writer, as he himself would probably have acknowledged (“you know how I hate letters,” he tells one friend). In contrast to writers who truly excel in the genre — from Keats, Hopkins, or Virginia Woolf to contemporaries like Elizabeth Bishop or James Schuyler — Berryman’s letters are not overflowing with memorable turns of phrase, lyrical or pithy remarks about his daily life or the natural world, shrewd observations about culture, politics, or philosophical issues, penetrating insights about craft or debates about poetics or aesthetics. Nor do they teem with signs of the poet’s warmth, charisma, and humanity lurking within the more intimate arena of his private life. More than anything else, these letters relentlessly tend to the unglamorous machinery of Berryman’s incessant literary business, or what he refers to in one letter as the “endless negotiation about teaching, magazine commissions, publishers & agents.” But what The Selected Letters of John Berryman does offer is a lively, expansive portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, difficult, and deeply troubled man, along with a wealth of information for anyone interested in this polarizing poet’s life and work and a revealing window onto the dynamics of the mid-20th century literary world.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Berryman cemented his place as one of the founding figures of Confessional poetry when he, like his friend and rival Lowell, shifted rather suddenly to a new, more personal mode in mid-career. These letters allow us to look over his shoulder as that transformation gradually unfolds. As he began writing what would become his innovative long poem The Dream Songs (which appeared in a first installment in 1964), Berryman seemed to have discovered a distinctive way to chronicle his own tumultuous life and probe his inner torment, through the use of an alter ego named Henry (closely aligned with, but not identical, to the poet himself) and the development of a highly idiosyncratic style that blends erudition, slang, wild linguistic play, syncopated rhythms, and lyricism. Throughout The Dream Songs, Henry – drunken, depressed, self-mocking, bemused at the absurdity and darkness of life – rummages around in his fantasies and nightmares, desires and anxieties, memories and sorrows, in tones that swing rapidly from elation to suicidal angst, maudlin self-pity to elegiac pathos.
Despite the originality and power of the Dream Songs at their best, Berryman’s reputation has long been haunted – tarnished is probably a better word — by his decision to deploy exaggerated “black” vernacular drawn from racist, 19th-century minstrel shows throughout the poem, which he uses because, for inexplicable reasons, Henry appears “sometimes in blackface,” as Berryman put it in prefatory note. For example, in “Dream Song 2,” Berryman writes “yo legal & yo good. Is you feel well?” and in “Dream Song 5,” “Henry sits in de bar & was odd, / off in the glass from the glass, / at odds wif de world & its god.” Why would Berryman, at the height of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, draw upon the shameful tradition of racist caricature that still stains America’s cultural history, and use it as one of the main ingredients in the Dream Songs’ stew of dictions and idioms? Although this question has been much debated, many readers continue to find Berryman’s appropriation of stereotypical “black” vernacular deeply problematic and nearly impossible to defend, both an aesthetic and a moral failure.
If you are coming to this book in the hopes of finding a smoking gun at last, or locating the key that might explain Berryman’s lamentable adoption of blackface minstrelsy, you will be disappointed; there simply isn’t much evidence here for either the prosecution or the defense, as Berryman almost never mentions his use of dialect, nor the subject of race in America, across hundreds of pages of letters spanning the nearly fifteen years he worked on the long poem. This omission, in itself, seems rather damning – apparently neither Berryman, nor his interlocutors, to be fair, seemed to think the poet’s mimicking of offensive, stereotypical “Negro slang” was a big deal or worthy of being discussed, defended, or explained.
If the letters fail to provide insight into the most vexing problem at the heart of Berryman’s work, they do give us an unvarnished look behind the curtain at the writer in his natural habitat, without the artifice and artistry of his best poetry. The result is rather like reading The Dream Songs if it were stripped of much of what makes the excesses of that long poem tolerable – you get all the self-loathing and narcissism, aggrievement and jealousy, bravado and leering sexism, but with little of the surreal imagery, compression, humor, verbal hijinks, literary allusiveness, and lyricism that animate the poems.
In one of the best and most famous Dream Songs (14), Berryman acknowledges the danger that his litanies of woe and complaint might grow tedious, for himself as well as for everyone else: “Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes / as bad as achilles.” Well, if you’ve been wishing you could hear a lot more of Berryman griping about his plights, you have come to the right place. To be honest, the Berryman of these letters – abrasive, cranky, vain, needy, sodden with drink, whiny, thin-skinned – is rather exhausting company.
The letters do make it clear that Berryman was swamped by self-hatred and despair from an early age. “I will never be anything anyhow,” the 14-year-old Berryman wrote to his step-father. “A fellow has to have something in him, and I haven’t got it. I’m a coward, a cheat, a bully, and a thief if I had the guts to steal.” Striking the same notes that would carry throughout his life and drive his poetry, the teenage Berryman writes “I don’t understand why God permitted me to be born. I’m undesirable and a nuisance everywhere I go.”
In his correspondence, Berryman continually toggles between this sort of extreme self-pity (as on his 40th birthday, when he writes “can the next 16 yrs be as painful & useless as the last?”) and almost comical vanity and self-aggrandizement, with barely a pause between the two. Who else would regularly tell his friends, unironically, that his own works are “masterpieces,” brag about every award and each shred of praise he’s received, or refer to his own poetry readings as “stunning”? Upon sending the manuscript of the first volume of The Dream Songs to his editor, Robert Giroux, Berryman doesn’t mince words about how he views his own lasting genius: “I shn’t be surprised if some of them proved more or less immortal.”
As this remark suggests, Berryman is constantly assessing and ranking everyone’s “greatness” and worth, not least his own. In one letter, he claims that W. S. Merwin and Anthony Hecht are “the best American poets younger than Lowell,” and in several others, worries whether he or Lowell will be deemed “the greatest poet in America” now that the elderly Robert Frost has died. His letters brim with harsh criticisms of others’ writing (“the first stanza is wretched” he tells one friend who had the temerity to ask for feedback), withering judgments of his own students (“ignorant, idle, frivolous, and stupid”), and dismissals of most contemporary poets beyond his own circle: “the young people bore me, they write like invalids. The really hot people – Saul [Bellow], Cal [Robert Lowell], Roethke, Eliz Bishop – are all my age or so. Truth is, we are much more promising than the youngsters, as well as better.”
For Berryman, the pool is even smaller for women poets, who apparently must be pitted against one another – as he tells Adrienne Rich, “With your book I feel deeply pleased. We now have 3 women at the ages – Miss Moore, up.; Miss Bishop, middle; you young.” In another letter to Rich that is suffused with condescension, he writes that “your new book, slight as in some ways it is, makes you the queen of ladies in my opinion, under Elizabeth. Branch out! Ransack!” As such comments make clear, Berryman’s persistent sexism and outright misogyny, which seem rather egregious even by the standards of his benighted generation, can be tough going – from an early diatribe in which some women of his acquaintance (“bitches all”) are cast as “distinctly neurotic and unsatisfactory specimens” (and worse: “I thought how much more beautiful than a woman is almost any animal”) to the 1961 letter in which he tells Delmore Schwartz about his new, much younger wife: “You would like her, she has black hair and is graceful beyond the ordinary lot of women and silent.”
Although all this can admittedly be rather insufferable, Berryman’s letters also hum with the sheer brio and weirdness, the relentless drive and manic productivity, that characterize his life and work. It can be quite moving to witness Berryman’s brave but ultimately doomed efforts to improve himself, to seek treatment, to find ways to survive, and above all, to keep writing despite it all. Between nearly every line, we can also sense, with growing discomfort, the fierce undertow of alcoholism and mental illness which ultimately dragged him down. A threnody to the poet’s “plights & gripes,” a hymn to both the excitement and the challenges of a life lived in poetry, The Selected Letters of John Berryman is a valuable collection for anyone interested in Berryman or American poetry more broadly, offering us the chance to get to know even more intimately the fascinating, tragic story of this gifted, deeply learned, deeply flawed poet.
[Published by Harvard University Press on October 14, 2020, 736 pages, $39.00 hardcover]