John Berryman

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper


Joel Athey


BERRYMAN was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in McAlester, Oklahoma,


the son of John Allyn Smith, a banker, and Martha Little, formerly a schoolteacher. The


family moved frequently, finally settling in Tampa, Florida, where his father speculated


in land, failed, and in 1926 committed suicide. Three months later his mother married John


McAlpin Berryman, whose name was given to the son.


The new family moved to New York City, but hard times followed the 1929 stock market


crash; young John attempted suicide in 1931. The next year he enrolled at Columbia College


(later Columbia University), where he flourished under mentor Mark Van Doren, published


poems in Columbia Review and The Nation (1935), and graduated Phi


Beta Kappa in English. He studied two years at Cambridge University in England, meeting W


B. Yeats, T S. Eliot, W H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. He tried playwriting, won the Oldham


Shakespeare prize, and published poems in Southern Review (1937).


In 1939 Berryman taught at Wayne University (later Wayne State University) in Detroit


and served as poetry editor of The Nation. By December he was hospitalized for


epilepsy, although he was actually suffering from nervous exhaustion, a condition that


would recur in future years, exacerbated by alcoholism. His first collected poems appeared


in Five Young American Poets (1940), while Berryman taught at Harvard. Classified


4-F for the wartime draft, Berryman married Eileen Mulligan in 1942. The next year he


published Poems. Unemployed and desperate enough to briefly teach English and Latin


at a prep school, Berryman landed an instructorship at Princeton, having been invited by


poet R. P. Blackmur; this became home for a decade.


For the next twenty years Berryman established his academic credentials, beginning with


reviews of W. W. Greg’s The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, a critical


edition of King Lear (never published), and articles on Henry James, F. Scott


Fitzgerald, and Robert Lowell. He was promoted to associate in creative writing (1946) and


resident fellow (1948) at Princeton, and his work The Dispossessed (1948) won the


Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial award. He associated professionally and


socially with Lowell, Saul Bellow, and others. He was also meeting women, and in 1946 he


began his lifelong series of infidelities, recorded in Sonnets to Chris (written


1947, published 1967; also titled Berryman’s Sonnets). His intense diary entries


provide insight into his mania for sexual attention and adulation.


Berryman’s poetic and academic lives continued apace. He published "The Poetry of


Ezra Pound," defended Pound’s Bollingen Prize in a letter (signed by seventy-three


writers) to The Nation (1949). and published his psychological biography, Stephen


Crane (1950), which reveals Berryman as well as Crane himself (see John Clendenning in


Recovering Berryman, ed. Richard Kelley [1993]). He also wrote on Marlowe,


Shakespeare, Monk Lewis, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, and Bellow. In 1950 he won the


American Academy award for poetry.


In 1953 Berryman published Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in the Parisan


Review (it appeared in book form in 1956). This difficult poem, a tribute to the


Puritan poet of colonial America, took Berryman five years to complete and demanded much


from the reader when it first appeared with no notes. The Times Literary Supplement hailed


it as a path-breaking masterpiece; poet Robert Fitzgerald called it "the poem of his


generation." In fifty-seven stanzas of eight rhymed lines each, the five sections of Homage


were positioned symmetrically: Berryman’s invocation of the dead poet, a Bradstreet


monologue, a seductive dialogue between the two poets, a second Bradstreet monologue, and


finally Berryman’s peroration. Berryman addressed Bradstreet as both lover and listener,


extending himself through her tribulations as an exile in the Rhode Island colony. He


included personal tragedies such as her heart problems ("wandering pacemaker,")


as well as identified with her situation, where he awaits "in a redskin calm."


Their tension is evidenced even in the pauses:


You must not love me, but I do not bid


you cease


With this work, Berryman emerged as a major literary figure.


During these years, when he won the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award


(1950), the Levinson Prize (1950), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952), Berryman lectured


at the Universities of Washington and Cincinnati and at the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa, his


teaching described by poet Philip Levine as "brilliant, intense, articulate" (The


Bread of Time [1994]). Berryman’s astounding memory allowed him to quote poetry at


great length, and his short story, "Wash Far Away" (not published until 1975, American


Review), showed how seriously he considered teaching. His private life, however, was


crumbling on account of his alcoholism. He separated from Eileen in 1953 and was dismissed


from Iowa after his arrest for public intoxication and disturbing the peace. His treatment


by dream analysis he considered publishable. By 1955, assisted by poet Allen Tate,


Berryman moved to Minneapolis and was appointed lecturer in humanities (separate from the


English department) at the University of Minnesota, which became his home for life. The


cycle was nearly complete, as he now lived thirty miles from his suicidal father’s


birthplace. At this time he began The Dream Songs, his most significant


work.


Divorced in 1956, Berryman married 24-year-old Ann Levine a week later; the couple had


a son. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was nominated for a Pulitzer Priz

e in 1956;


the next year Berryman was promoted to associate professor, and the State Department


sponsored him on a lecture tour of India.


In 1958 Berryman was hospitalized for exhaustion; he also legally separated from Ann.


In 1959 they divorced, and Berryman was again in the hospital for alcoholism and nerves;


for the rest of his life he was hospitalized at least once a year. Over the next three


years, Berryman taught at the University of California at Berkeley, at Bread Loaf in


Vermont, and at Brown University, and he won awards, published a scholarly edition of


Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, and married Kate Donahue, age twenty-two,


in 1961. They had two daughters.


The Dream Songs (1964) won the Pulitzer Prize. In all, The Dream Songs, published


under that title in 1969, stretched to 385 songs and resembled a sonnet sequence, with


each song composed in a three-stanza format, eighteen lines with rhyme. Their protagonist,


Henry, is a white middle-aged American who talks about himself in first, second, and third


voices and listens to his unnamed Friend, a white American in blackface speaking Negro


dialect. Henry is greedy, lusty, petulant; he is essentially Freud’s Id. His Friend is


conscience, and their dialogue works itself out, as Helen Vendler argues in The Given


and the Made (1995), as analysis in the therapist’s office, each song approximating a


session on the couch. Henry, speaking with all of Berryman’s baggage–paternal suicide,


shameless libido, drunkenness–is allowed to aggress and regress, throwing his anger,


fears, and blasphemy up against Friend, a blank wall of therapeutic response. Their comic


poise is omnipresent, for example, when Friend condemns Henry for springing on another


man’s wife: "There ought to be a law against Henry" (Dream Song 4). At times,


Henry’s self-destruction is governed only by personified Ruin staring at him (Dream Song


45), and Henry remains "weeping, sleepless" (Dream Song 29).


To Henry, like Lord Byron’s impetuous Don Juan, life is boring (Dream Song 14);


however, Berryman’s twentieth-century man resists rather than indulges. Unlike his


Romantic predecessor, Berryman was disgusted with his isomorphic identification with the


persona’s desperate uncertainties, and in his volume of Kierkegaard, he underscored the


passage: "This form of despair . . . lowest of all, in despair at willing to be


another than himself."


Berryman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 to complete The Dream


Songs. He lived for a time in Ireland and continued to drink heavily,


eventually checking into a Minneapolis hospital for alcohol treatment. Meanwhile, he won


the Academy of American Poets and National Endowment for the Arts awards (1967). His


Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968) completed The Dream Songs and won the National


Book Award (1969) and the Bollingen Prize. These awards celebrated his distinctive poetic


voice, which the New York Times later described as "jaunty, jazzy, colloquial


… full of awkward turns and bent syntax" (8 Jan. 1972). In his acceptance speech,


Berryman explained his iconoclastic style: "I set up The Dream Songs as


hostile to every visible tendency in both American and English poetry."


After checking into alcohol rehabilitation once in 1969 and three times in 1970,


Berryman experienced "a sort of religious conversion" in 1970. He considered


Judaism, professed Catholicism, and wrote Recovery (1971), a vague autobiography


about alcoholic rehabilitation. His research on Shakespeare continued, but the fatal cycle


refused to be broken: haunted by his father’s suicide and with his youngest daughter just


six months old, Berryman jumped to his death off the Washington Avenue Bridge in


Minneapolis.


In a bathetic line, Berryman wrote, "For I am the penal colony’s prime


scribe" (Sonnet 73). Berryman’s reputation varied over his lifetime, from rising


star, to a poet of unrealized promise who was largely excluded from anthologies, and


finally in the last eight years of his life to the first rank of American poets, whose Dream


Songs became a rare book-club poetry selection. The poet’s acute insecurities and


neuroses manifested themselves in his public persona as a braggart, a womanizer, a drunk,


and an intellectual. But he unleashed the range of colloquial American language in his


verse with a lyrical intensity that Lowell called "more tearful and funny than we can


easily bear."


John Berryman’s papers are found at the University of Minnesota, cataloged in Richard


Kelly, John Berryman: A Checklist (1972). Berryman’s letters to his mother are


published in We Dream of Honour (1988). His essays and short stories are collected


in The Freedom of the Poet (1976). An authorized biography is John Haffenden, The


Life of John Berryman (1982). First wife Eileen Simpon’s roman ? clef, The


Maze (1975), gives an insider’s view of a manic poet; her Poets in Their Youth


91982) provides biographical detail. William Heyen, "John Berryman: A Memoir and an


Interview," Ohio Review (Winter 1974): 46-65, presents a vivid picture of the


vulnerable and frenzied poet. "Whiskey and Ink, Whiskey and Ink," Life 21


July, 1967, popularized Berryman in the Dylan Thomas image. Peter Stitt, "The Art of


Poetry," Paris Revew 53 (Winter 1972): 177-207, provides a famous interview


Berryman gave shortly before his death. Joel Conarroe’s John Berryman (1977)


is an excellent overview. An obituary is in the New York Times, 8 Jan. 1972.


From American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.


Copyright ? 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.


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