John Berryman A Critical Commentary

222 Pages·1980·17.58 MB·English

by  John Haffenden (auth.)

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
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reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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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