Homage to Mister Berryman

In a 1966 interview with the BBC, John Berryman, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his celebrated poetry cycle 77 Dream Songs, boasted that, in the entire world, he had a total of thirty good readers. He was being interviewed at Ryan’s, his favorite Dublin pub, and he was drunk. He made big, looping motions with his hands and he slurred his words, but his voice retained its distinctive learned tenor with a curious flat accent you couldn’t quite place—New York? London? Minnesota?

He smiled beneath his feral beard. “Now I call thirty readers quite a lot,” he went on. “Don’t you think it’s quite good? I’m impressed!” He peered at his drinking companion through his trademark horn-rimmed glasses. “Have you got thirty readers?”

“I haven’t got three readers,” his companion, the English poet and critic A. Alvarez, answered.

Berryman’s head tottered on his narrow shoulders. “Well, then, I’ve been boasting,” he said. “Thirty is too many. That’s a lie. Maybe I have eight. Does that make you feel better?”

“That makes me feel much more cheerful,” Alvarez replied.

Berryman took a drag on his cigarette. “OK, eight,” he said. “But those people are awfully bright.”

The exchange, captured in Carol Johnsen’s 1976 documentary on Minnesota’s greatest poet¹, I Don’t Think I Will Sing Any More Just Now, shows off Berryman’s fierce intellectual pride, as well as his droll self-pity. It’s also reminiscent of a sort of courtship—a suitor making a case for himself over drinks, teasing his date a little too much, then quickly making amends with another self-deprecating joke. In his life and his poetry—even in his first masterpiece, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the long, imagined dialogue between seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet and himself—John Berryman was a notorious flirt.

More so than prose, a poem is a conversation between the writer and the reader; great poetry feels as though you’re building it together as you go along. And whether as a poet, teacher in the University of Minnesota’s English department, husband, lover, or friend, Berryman loved dialogue. More to the point, he loved an audience, whether in his classroom at the U of M, at a reading at Harvard, or during a cocktail party in the mayor’s home.

Berryman ended his Great Conversation prematurely. After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship and completing a second volume of Dream Songs in Dublin (home of his hero, W. B. Yeats, with whom he had tea a year after graduating from Columbia), after winning the National Book Award and making the cover of Life magazine, he returned to Minneapolis as one the country’s two most prominent poets (his friend Robert Lowell was the other; Robert Frost had died in 1963). Berryman let his beard grow long and wild; he spent increasing amounts of time in the hospital “recuperating” from his alcohol addiction and making desperate last stabs at both the Catholicism of his youth and Twelve Step sobriety. Then, on a cold morning in January of 1972—just six years after reaching the summit of American letters—Berryman walked from his house at 33 Arthur Avenue in Prospect Park all the way across campus to the far side of the Washington Avenue bridge and jumped, hitting the frozen bank of the Mississippi River ninety feet below. An eyewitness said he waved just before he jumped. He was fifty-seven. He left behind his thirty-two-year-old wife, Kate, and their two daughters, eight-year-old Martha and seven-month-old Sarah, as well as a son, Paul, from a previous marriage.

Paula Rabinowitz, chair of the University of Minnesota’s English department, remembers that when she arrived at the U of M in 1987, she crossed the bridge to the library and visited the spot where Berryman jumped. Though Berryman’s work has been ignored in his former department and marginalized by the greater academy—Rabinowitz suspects one of the reasons for the disenchantment may be a PC distaste for Berryman’s inclusion of a black-faced minstrel in Dream Songs, who is given to speaking in a crude bebop jive—she says she considers Berryman “ripe for revival.” Berryman and his work continue to spark fresh interest, if only, so far, among mostly European scholars and the odd indie rock singer. According to Al Lathrop, the curator of the manuscripts division at the university’s Andersen Library, Irish and English students make pilgrimages to view Berryman’s letters and manuscripts. In the last couple of years, Berryman has also captured the imagination of all the sad young literary men in skinny jeans: Bands hailing from such indie rock strongholds as Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York, have recorded songs inspired by Berryman’s suicide.²

Of course, what suicidal poet hasn’t been fetishized in a rock song or two? Cause of death aside, there may be another reason Berryman is poised for revival: His haunting Dream Songs, though more than forty years old, are startlingly modern—confessional like a blog, with the abbreviated syntax of the text message, and infused with the kind of protective irony that permeates the Internet. Like an online role-playing game, Berryman’s poems even contain an avatar, “Huffy Henry,” when the poet was feeling intolerably eggheaded, and “Henry House, the steadiest man on the block,” when he was feeling more manly and stable. Berryman’s self-awareness is a prototype of our modern brand of ironic self-defense. Dream Songs anticipate the way we communicate now in a way the verse of his contemporaries—Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell—doesn’t. It seems as if the great Lowell, a morose, card-carrying alcoholic poet himself, never realized how ridiculous the persona really was, at least not in the same way his pal Berryman did.