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 Prize 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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