JOHN BERRYMAN A CRITICAL COMMENTARY John Berryman A Critical Commentary John Haffenden © John Haffenden 1980 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1980 978-0-333-27618-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1980 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Haffenden, John John Berryman 1. Berryman, John - Criticism and interpretation 811 '.5 '4 PS3503.E744Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-05044-4 ISBN 978-1-349-05042-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05042-0 Table of Contents Acknowledgements VI Introduction 2 'Bitter Sister, Victim!'-Homage to Mistress Bradstreet 9 3 'The Care and Feeding of Long Poems' 34 4 Love & Fame and Berryman's Luck 67 5 Notes and Commentary on The Dream Songs 79 6 Notes and Commentary on Delusions, Etc. 123 Appendix 1 The Chronology of The Dream Songs 157 Appendix 2 Berryman's 'Hunch of Heaven' 165 Notes 179 Selected Bibliography 199 Index 209 v Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to Kathleen Donahue {Mrs John Berryman) for giving me all possible help with my work, and for permitting me access to John Berryman's papers and library. This book has developed out of my postgraduate thesis at the University of Oxford, and accordingly I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Richard Ell mann, for his guidance and firm counsel; also John Fuller, who substituted as my supervisor for a short period in 1973 and prompted further efforts; and my external examiners, Professor Geoffrey Moore and Mr Christopher Butler, who encouraged me to publish. For putting information at my disposal, for interviews, or for help in many other capacities, I owe thanks to: the late Mrs Jill Berryman, Nancy Jewell Aldrich, A. Alvarez, Van Meter Ames, Sarah Appleton, Saul Bellow, Elisabeth Bettman, Brian Boydell, John Malcolm Brinnin, Bryan Bums,]. Alister Cameron, C. D. Corcoran, Brenda Engel, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Giroux, E. M. Halliday, Edward Hoagland, Mackie Jarrell, Richard]. Kelly, Jean Lanier, Alan Lathrop, William Meredith, Charles Monteith, Florence Miller, Howard Munford, Howard Nemerov, Timothy O'Sullivan, Sergio Perosa, Victoria Pope, Ernest C. Stefanik, Allen Tate, Boyd and Maris Thomes, Valerie Trueblood, the late Mark Van Doren, Andrews W anning, and Richard Wilbur; Sue Haffenden for her help and interest; my father, and Andrew and Geraldine Hillier, for their kind chivvying; Rosalind Duckmanton for promptly and un flaggingly typing and retyping the manuscript; and my colleagues in the Department of English Literature at Sheffield University for their good fellowship. I read Chapter 4, in slightly different form, at a John Berryman Special Session during the Annual Convention of the Modem Languages Association of America in New York, December 1978, where I was happily able to meet other scholars in the field specifically Gary Q. Arpin, Jack V. Barbera, Peter Stitt, and Larry Vonalt-whom I had otherwise known only by name and re- vi Acknowledgements Vll putation; my warm thanks also to Kathe Davis Finney, for her able and enthusiastic presiding at the Session. I am grateful to the StaffResearch Fund of the University ofExeter for a grant-in-aid which first helped me to the USA, and to the University of Sheffield for grants awarded from the Research Fund and the Foreign Travel Fund. I should also like to thank the following institutions for providing me with essential documentation: Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries; Princeton University Library; Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Chicago University Library; Office of the Registrar, Columbia University, New York; Columbia University Library; and Washington University Library. While completing this study, I have had the pleasure of reading Sergio Perosa's edition of selected Dream Songs and other poems (Canti onirici e altre poesie, Torino: Einaudi, I978), which includes an elegant and helpful Introduction, and good notes to the poems. Readers should savour the Italian renderings, for which Professor Perosa deserves congratulations and thanks. The author and publishers are grateful to Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc for permission to quote from Delusions, Etc., copyright© I969, I97I by John Berryman and© I972 by the Estate of John Berryman; The Dream Songs, copyright © I959 to I 969 by John Berryman; Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, copyright © I956 by John Berryman; Love and Fame, copyright© I970 by John Berryman; Sonnets, copyright © I952, I967 by John Berryman; Short Poems, copyright © I 948 by John Berryman, renewed © I 976 by Kate Berryman; Henry's Fate and Other Poems, copyright © I969 by John Berryman, renewed © I975. I976, I977 by Kate Berryman; Recovery, copyright © I973 by the Estate of John Berryman; The Imaginary Jew, copyright© I945 by John Berryman renewed © I 97 3 by Kate Berryman. February 1979 JOHN HAFFENDEN Introduction 1. All the way through my work ... 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 ofPascal 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, whichever you prefer-1 couldn't care less. I have tried, therefore, to study two souls in my long poems. 1 The two souls whom Berryman had in mind were Anne Bradstreet and Henry, the personae of his most significant works. It is my view that the soul under stress, and under observation, is Berryman's, and that the poet is everywhere at the centre of his work. His poetry may be regarded as the mythopoeic recomposition of his own experience. Berryman directs his attention always to versions of his own self. Robert Fothergill's term 'serial autobiographer' is applicable to Be~ryman, in the sense that such a writer 'constantly mediates between a provisional interpretation of his life's meaning and direction, and the fresh experience which may modify that direc tion'.2 In The Dream Songs, the work by which Berryman's reputation will ultimately stand, the persona 'Henry' acts as the focus for what may be called (borrowing a phrase from Roy Pascal) 'ideas and actions as effluents of a personality and a situation ... '. 3 Henry enacts Berryman's subjective response in states of identity consciousness which are continually altering, always insecure, de manding and defining. When all other schemes are exhausted, Henry is the unifying principle of the work. In an article on Ezra Pound, Berryman took a view which was to be realised in his own work: 2 john Berryman: A Critical Commentary 'Does any reader who is familiar with Pound's poetry really not see that its subject is the life of the modern poet? ... it is the experience and fate of this writer ... that concern him.' 4 This book aims to give a reading of what I believe to be the works of Berryman's maturity: Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, The Dream Songs (77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest), and Love & Fame. 5 My discursive chapters are centrally concerned with a study of Berryman's working drafts and note pages-the genesis of the poems-in order to understand the ways in which he gave artistic shape (exploring gradually emerging structural themes) to the events and other stimuli ofhis inspiration. In Love & Fame, for example, the circumstances of composition make for acute problems of in terpretation, since a double time scheme is in operation of which even Berryman himself was only partially aware. In much of Love & Fame he seems to be selecting and formulating experiences and episodes from an earlier stage in his life, but the final structure of the volume was strictly contingent upon changes in Berryman's life at the time of writing: that is, in his contemporary outlook. The second half of the volume stands to the first as Spenser's Hymne of Heavenly Love stands to his Hymne in Honour ofL ove, or as Blake's Songs ofE xperience stands to Songs of Innocence. What is in question is not a pattern of preconception (in which the last poems in the book repudiate the values of the first}, but the fact that Berryman changed his heart during the process of composition. It must be inferred that Berryman came sincerely to regret the secular indulgence of poems written not above a few weeks earlier. Similarly, in the writing of The Dream Songs, Berryman was often fashioning immediate events, concerns, and responses into aesthetic form, but he needed constantly to revise his plans for the structure of the poem as a whole, under the pressure of changing conditions during a thirteen-year period. Any analysis must take stock of that process of evolution and revision. I have chosen not to write a separate discursive chapter on Delusions, Etc., 6 mostly because the volume is not as unified as Berryman's earlier works; it presents much less sense of cohesion or necessity of structure, and more of a compilation of poems (one or two reserved from earlier years, some being highly accomplished, and others of poor technical quality}. It is possible to see that, even in composing the volume, Berryman tended to be desultory and uncoordinated, and that he had it in mind to repeat what was the relative success of Love & Fame, as we may infer from this letter to a friend: Introduction 3 ... writing Offices ... I began to 'do' them last month but found you really can't-or I can't-in the world; so started composing a 'Lauds' and then 'Matins'-interrupted then by a political anti prayer I called 'Interstitial Office'-broken off then by sudden absorption in a scale-poem on Guevara-and I only got back to Opus Dei (the 9-poem sequence) day before yesterday, w. the opening stanza of'Prime' and the last 3 for 'Nones' ... my sacred poems ... There are as many more of those now, occupying the same position-Part IV-in my next collection, Delusions. 7 I have worked on annotations to the volume in order to alleviate some aspects of its abstruseness. In addition, I have reserved an appendix for an analysis of the poem 'Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion' from that volume. This needs little justification, except to say that Berryman began the work in I 948 and worked on it purposefully if intermittently for more than twenty years, and that the poem was immensely important to his emotional and spiritual needs, for it recapitulated many of the crucial concerns of earlier work (notably, The Dream Songs)-the relation offather to child, filial respect, death, and the nature of immortality in the aspects both oflife and of art. It is evident that the finished length of the poem (as Berryman chose to publish it) is not in proportion to his grand sense of the work, to which he referred for many years as being of the scale and significance of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. 8 My discussion of Berryman's Sonnets will be found in the authorised biography (which should complement this book), since Berryman's life and the writing of that sequence unfolded pari passu. The real events of the summer of I 947 need to be distilled from the fictional construction which Berryman put upon them. He seems to have exercised at once a dissociation from the immediate pulse of experience and a form of double-consciousness which led him to arrogate life to art. The sequence of the sonnets can be seen as corresponding to a paradigm, but Berryman's procedure may be described more properly as being to annex the incidents and responses of his own life to a creative pattern. The moral scheme of the sonnets (which begins in reciprocal passion and ecstasy, and leads on to reproach and remorse) was in fact fortuitous, and not a premeditated plot. The end was not implicit in the beginning (as might have been the case with a fictional design illustrating perhaps the workings of nemesis), but corresponds to the outcome of a real relationship. The