Homage to Mister Berryman

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.