Homage to Mister Berryman

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.