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.

“Dream Song 14” can be read as one of Berryman’s many odes to today’s overexamined life:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
People bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag. ³

Kate Donahue is chopping leeks and potatoes in her kitchen at 33 Arthur Avenue. “You don’t mind if I cook, do you?” she asks. She runs water over the vegetables and wipes her hands on her apron. She is making a soup to take to her daughter Martha’s home for their regular Wednesday night supper. In her gentle Min-ne- soh- tah accent, she talks about her marriage to John Berryman as an “old-fashioned situation”—meaning she cooked, cleaned, and took care of the kids. She also chauffeured Berryman around because the poet never learned to drive.

“I was usually in the kitchen cooking,” she says, when he would call her from the living room. “Well, yeah,” he would shout, “would you come in here?” Berryman, she says, would be sitting in his rocking chair, writing verse with his thick Faber pencil, slowly drinking from the bottle of bourbon delivered every afternoon from Zipp’s. “OK,” she used to say, “I’ll give you my man-on-the-street.” She smiles at the recollection. “I used to be able to recite them. And when we were in Ireland, I used to type a lot of them.”

Kate’s cherubic features remind you how young she was when Berryman left her. After he died, she reclaimed her maiden name. “It just wasn’t healthy” to continue using his name, she explains. “I knew him for only his last ten years.” But she never left 33 Arthur. After eloping in 1961, when she was twenty-two and he was forty-seven, the newlyweds lived with Berryman’s mother in Washington, D.C., for a year, then spent the next year back in Minneapolis (in an apartment in the Wedge) before buying the two-story Prospect Park house with Dream Songs money. She’s never remarried either, though she says there were opportunities. “Remember, when he died, he left me with an eight-year-old and a seven-month-old.” She sighs. “The stinker.”

Kate stops chopping the leeks. “You asked me why I married him. And I thought, ‘Why did he marry me ?’ I mean, why would somebody who was middle-aged want a twenty-two-year-old at home?” She has thought about this, and she has two theories. “One, he wanted to start over again,” she says. “He was never comfortable with things that didn’t go well in his life. I don’t think he was good at forgiving himself.” And two? “Well, I don’t know how valid this is, but I’m not sure how comfortable he was with his alcoholism—his alcohol had gotten pretty far along without anybody dealing with it . . . and maybe he just didn’t want to hear it.”

In Berryman’s last book of poetry, Love & Fame, he begins “Of Suicide” with a typically unsettling bit of oversharing:

Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me.
I drink too much. My wife threatens separation.
She won’t ‘nurse’ me. She feels ‘inadequate.’
We don’t mix together.

It was Berryman’s friend, the acclaimed poet Allen Tate, who persuaded Ralph Ross, Minnesota’s English department chair, to hire Berryman in 1955, after Berryman had disgraced himself in a drunken early morning imbroglio with his landlord that ultimately cost him his professorship at the University of Iowa. In those days, Minnesota’s English department was a heady place to be: Robert Penn Warren had recently taught there, Tate was still on the faculty, and, shortly after Berryman’s arrival, the department hired another one of Berryman’s great literary friends, Saul Bellow.

For the first time in his life, Berryman had a steady income, accompanied by growing repute. He was already known for his first volume of poetry, The Dispossessed, and his critical analysis of Stephen Crane was well respected. Homage to Mistress Bradsteet, although written at other stops, was published after he arrived at the U of M, and he wrote both Dream Songs and Love & Fame while there too. His trusted doctor, Prospect Park neighbor Boyd Thomes (also an amateur scholar of antiquity), along with Minnesota hospitals and treatment centers (he spent time at both St. Mary’s Hospital and Hazelden, and he’d been prescribed the antipsychotic thorazine) probably kept him alive as long as could reasonably be expected for someone downing a bottle of bourbon a day. He loved his job here, and his colleagues covered for him when he was too sick to work.

By all accounts, he was a spectacular teacher, working his overflow classes like a Pentecostal preacher, performing without notes and sweating through his jacket at the podium. He would throw chairs across the dais while raging through a lecture on Kafka or break down in tears after reading a particularly meaningful passage from John’s Gospel in the King James version of the Bible. Such pyrotechnics, together with his frequent 3 a.m. phone calls to acquaintances and all-hours appearances at the Brass Rail, gained Berryman a reputation as a wild and crazy guy, belying his actual lifestyle. Despite what would now be referred to as manic episodes, Berryman was a deeply serious scholar who spent most nights at home in his rocking chair with a volume of Shakespeare or Kierkegaard in his lap, reading late into the night, making tidy notes in the margins, interacting only with the text and the day’s bourbon.

According to Kate, Berryman always considered Minneapolis to be a sort of exile and was acutely aware of the success of his contemporaries back East. Lowell had already won a Pulitzer, and Delmore Schwartz³ was New York’s critical darling. Marooned in the Upper Midwest, Berryman must have felt the kind of coastal bias athletes who play for Minnesota sports teams sometimes feel. He had come of age, after all, in Manhattan. His mother and stepfather lived in an Upper East Side apartment and sent young John to a prestigious prep school before he studied English at Columbia. Then, while developing a love for Shakespeare under Mark van Doren in that university’s English department, he cultivated a taste for Fred and Ginger on Broadway and dry martinis just off. In his tailored suits and expensive shoes, he was an elegant dancer and spent much of his surfeit energy pursuing fast city girls. In the summers, he played tennis at the country club in Forest Hills, occasionally matching his ground strokes with those of the great Helen Wills Moody. After graduating from Columbia, he studied at Cambridge and traveled around Europe for a year, becoming engaged to an Englishwoman, then returning home without his fiancée but with, according to his friend E. M. Halliday’s memoir John Berryman and the Thirties, a phony English accent.

Back in the United States, however, Berryman struggled to find work, teaching short stints first at Harvard and then Wayne State in Michigan. When an expected position as an assistant professor at Princeton was eliminated, he began to flail professionally and to drink heavily. Though his Columbia classmate Robert Giroux had published his book on Stephen Crane in 1950, Berryman’s writing career had stalled. He wrote a series of “narrative sonnets,” ostensibly a novel idea, but he failed to find his own voice. He was guilty of a sort of highfalutin karaoke—first channeling Yeats, then Auden. Even after being hired by the University of Minnesota, the strain of artistic disappointment proved too great for his first wife, Eileen (Simpson) Mulligan, and they divorced in 1956. His second marriage, to a young Minnesota graduate student named Anne Levine, produced Berryman’s first child, Paul, but the marriage lasted only two years, dissolving in 1959.

Through it all, he obsessed about his childhood, specifically his birth father’s suicide. Named after his father, Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, in Oklahoma, in 1914. Smith pere was a banker who had been born south of Stillwater, Minnesota; he had moved to Oklahoma to work at a bank with his brother. It was there that John Allyn met Berryman’s mother, Martha Little, a schoolteacher from a prominent Southern family. The couple married and Martha gave birth to John and his younger brother, Robert Jefferson. When John was a small boy, the family moved to South Tampa, Florida, where business opportunities were booming. But in June of 1926, John’s father—after a restaurant failure had left him near financial ruin and after petitioning for a divorce from Martha in order to marry a Cuban woman—shot himself in the chest with a .32 caliber pistol outside of John’s window. Three months later, John’s mother married her landlord, John Angus Berryman, who gave Martha’s two boys his last name.

Throughout his life, John exchanged elaborate letters with his aristocratic mother. The letters examined each other’s guilt and shame over their shared history and fueled John’s obsessive-compulsive need to explain everything—and his quest for literary renown. (The correspondence is now housed at the Andersen Library and collected in Richard J. Kelly’s illuminating We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to his Mother. ) When Berryman arrived in Minnesota, on the same wild prairies where his father was born, his fixation on his father’s suicide intensified.

After John died, Kate bought a duplex on the other side of Arthur Avenue with life insurance money and took in John’s widowed mother. “I never imagined I would be a landlady, but I took care of her,” Kate explains. “She tottered back and forth for her meals and stuff, and finally she moved in here for a while, [but] that didn’t really go that well.” Her voice trails off. “She wasn’t . . . comfortable. And she was fairly paranoid. But it was nice for the children to know their grandmother. They called her ‘Mir.’ She signed her letters that way.”

As is the case with most mama’s boys, no relationship with another woman would ever supplant Berryman’s relationship with his mother, who is buried next to him at Resurrection Cemetery in Mendota Heights. Nevertheless, his ability to relate to other women was extraordinary, if, at times, disturbingly needy. Women fascinated him—and vice versa. “Is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls,” he wrote in Dream Songs. Along with suicide, women were his obsession: He started obsessing about them in college at Columbia, and, as a poet, scholar, and grown man, he really never left college. “There were always women around,” Kate says.

Kate had graduated with an English degree from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul and was living in Southwest Minneapolis when she met Berryman, in 1960, through her roommate, who was taking a class from him at the U of M. Their relationship progressed quickly, but she had to fend for herself—they broke up the summer after she met him. A month later, she discovered he had begun seeing another woman when he taught a summer school course in Iowa. “Oh, I put a stop to that,” she says. “I told her this was my guy.” She brings a photograph of Berryman to the table; he is clean-shaven, his jaw line is firm, his eyes are sharp behind the familiar glasses. “See, the difference in our ages didn’t seem that great,” she says. “See, this is nice. [Later] he kind of let himself go—actually, I think it was depression.”

Still, Kate acknowledges that even after their daughter Martha was born there were other women around. His students would come to the house, and he would play Mort Sahl albums on the stereo. Kate opens another photo book and points to a snapshot of Berryman sitting at a picnic table with two pretty young women. “Oh, and here was his fan club,” she says with a barely perceptible frown. “See, here’s Dineen Peckinpah and Mary Hanson. Dineen was [film director] Sam Peckinpah’s daughter—John had her in one of his summer classes in California. She visited and actually stayed with us.” Berryman and Dineen “behaved,” says Kate, “but I found out later she had invited him on a trip to Canada and he was considering going. I hit the roof on that one.”

After his suicide, Kate, who had taught elementary school at one time, went back to college. She eventually worked for the Wilder Foundation as a grief counselor and as a family counselor in Eden Prairie. During the past couple of years she has taught English as a second language to Somalis and now also teaches a community ed poetry class for middle-aged Prospect Park ladies. Recently, she brought in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which the critic Edmund Wilson called “the most distinguished long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.’ ”

In Homage, Berryman engages in a sort of dreamlike dialogue with Anne Bradstreet, who’s often regarded as America’s first poet. Unlike Dream Songs, where he finally finds his own voice, it is a remarkable piece of poetic ventriloquism. Channeling Bradstreet, Berryman describes the painful inability to bear children and the even more painful process of giving birth.

“He really sounds just like her,” Kate says. “But he also enters into this sort of intimacy with her. Which really didn’t fit her at all, because she was a very strict Puritan. But that was one of the appealing things about John—he was so good at seduction. You don’t use that word very often, but, you know, that’s why women fell for him. He just had this sort of strength and vulnerability about him that women like in men.”

Toward the end of his life, Berryman attempted to have a conversation with God. In the last chapter of Love & Fame, entitled “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” Berryman entreats God to help him forgo adultery and whiskey and to “forsake me not when the wild hours come.”

You have come to my rescue again & again
in my impassable, sometimes despairing years.
You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves
and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.

Berryman’s last words to Kate came on that January morning—he told her he was going to campus to clean his office. He had never said that before, she says, but Kate, who was attending Al-Anon meetings at the time, was trying “not to manage this situation.” Berryman had actually been sober for several months following repeated periods of hospitalization, twice at St. Mary’s and once at Hazelden. “But he had developed a hum,” Kate says. “He would hum all the time. And he stopped talking very much.”

After his suicide, Kate found a note written on the back of an envelope in a wastebasket.

O my love Kate, you did all you could.
I’m unemployable & a nuisance.
Forget me, remarry, be happy.