The Heart Is Strange (3 page)

It is conventional to describe Berryman as “confessional”: as one of a group of American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including also Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, for whom the use of personal material was a special and distinguishing mark. In 1962, the English critic A. Alvarez celebrated what he saw as “a new seriousness” in these poets: “I would define this seriousness simply as the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either the conventional response or choking incoherence.” This poetry would be open to all the experience of modern life, and particularly its grit: it would address suicide, depression, banality. This claim appeared in the introduction to a hugely popular anthology called
The New Poetry
, and Berryman was the first poet in it.

More recently, Adam Kirsch has suggested that our attention to the apparently intimate contents of the works of these poets has distracted us from their careful artifice. “To treat their poems mainly as documents of personal experience is not just to diminish their achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry,” Kirsch writes in
The Wounded Surgeon
(2005):

Plath scorned the notion of poetry as “some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion”; Berryman insisted that “the speaker [of a poem] can never be the actual writer,” that there is always “an abyss between [the poet’s] person and his persona”; Bishop deplored the trend toward “more and more anguish and less and less poetry”; Lowell explained that even in
Life Studies
, usually considered the first masterpiece of Confessional poetry, “the whole balance of the poem was something invented.”

The tenacity of the term “confessional” lies partly in a way of reading: we feel that the real biographical experience gives the poem weight, and yet this is also, of course, a deliberate literary effect. Particularly in Berryman, there is a careful balance of new freedom and old form. That which is hidden is set against that which is displayed, as if each poem were half a secret.

Berryman was highly sensitive to form. In 1932, William Carlos Williams instructed his generation:

Don’t write sonnets. The line is dead, unsuited to the language. Everything that can ever be said from now until doomsday in the sonnet form has been better said in twelfth-century Italian.

Berryman’s whole career might be understood as a rebuke to this. In 1934, he wrote his first surviving poems: they are four Shakespearean sonnets, and they celebrate his mother’s fortieth birthday. The following year he tried to seduce a Barnard student by writing sonnets for her, and when in February 1947 he began an affair with a married woman he met in Princeton, he turned again to this form. “I wanted a
familiar
form in which to
put
the
new
,” he wrote in his journal: “Clearly a sonnet sequence. And this gave me also a wonderful to me sense of continuity with lovers dead.”

Her name was Chris. The poems insist upon this: they are little boasts. He describes her blond hair and her clothes, her naked body as she sleeps. “You, Chris,
contrite
I never thought to see,” begins one: “Whom nothing fazes, no
crise
can disconcert, / Who calm criss crosses all year.” He repeats the name in puns: he favors words such as “crisis” and “syncrisis.” He lists the days upon which they met—July 3, July 4—and he wishes to invent a new poetic language to express their specific love.

I prod our English: cough me up a word,

Slip me an epithet will justify

My darling fondle

he writes, as if the language itself were complicit in their affair. In sonnet 23 he turns upon the traditional vocabulary and image-set of love poetry:

Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast

Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo;

I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,

As little false.

He is trying to remake the familiar form so that it may hold the new.

Yet perhaps the problem is precisely that these sonnets have what Berryman called “a sense of continuity.” Like the emotions, these poems are deeply referential: Berryman mentions or alludes to Marlowe, Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Hölderlin, Donne, the canon of love poets. They suffer the sadness of comparison. “Could
our
incredible marriage … like all others’…?” trails off one of the sonnets, as if understanding that this is only one more love affair in a historical sequence of lovers and their sonnets, of passions bound by time. The poems are aware of the world around them. Both lovers were married to other people, and while Berryman considered submitting a few of them to magazines under the pseudonym Alan Fury, he withheld them from publication. Twenty years later, after he had found success—
77 Dream Songs
was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry—he returned to these sonnets and edited them for publication. He replaced the repeated name “Chris” with the almost rhyming “Lise,” presumably to disguise his lover’s identity, but what is most odd about this—and what reveals most about Berryman’s deep ambivalence toward the question of confession—is that having begun to erase the traces of her identity, he only went halfway. He changed her name but not the elaborate system of puns and echoes built upon that name. The eighteenth sonnet, for example, now addresses “You, Lise,
contrite
I never thought to see, / Whom nothing fazes, no
crise
can disconcert.” He retains sonnet 87, which is an acrostic: the first letter of each line spells out “I CHRIS AND I JOHN.” This is a halfhearted discretion, as if he wanted to be caught. This is the poetic equivalent of the married man who leaves his lover’s lipstick on his collar.

How does the poet stand in relation to his subject? What does he owe, and what is his duty? These are the questions behind confessional poetry, and they are the questions that Berryman is working out. In late March 1948 Berryman wrote the first two stanzas of a new, long poem. It opens with a question as the poet directly addresses his subject:

The Governor your husband lived so long

moved you not, restless, waiting for him?

Anne Bradstreet is sometimes described as the first American poet. She arrived in New England in 1630 and her first volume of verse was published in 1650. Berryman calls to her across the centuries.

                                     Out of maize & air

your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,

from the centuries it.

I think you won’t stay

he fears, but she comes to him. In the fifth stanza, her voice begins to take over. “By the week we landed we were, most, used up,” she recounts, and tells him of her life, her early days in the New World, the first winters, and—in a rightly celebrated passage—the birth of her first child:

One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous,

unforbidding Majesty.

Swell, imperious bells. I fly.

Soon, she will not remain confined to history. The poet speaks to her, and she replies, flirting with him: “You must not love me, but”—she pauses—“I do not bid you cease.”

“Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” remains a startlingly bold poem, even today. It jumbles time, wrong-footing the reader with its inverted syntax and strange ellipses. Anne Bradstreet sees the ship on which they came to the New World rotting:

The Lady Arbella dying—

dyings—at which my heart    rose, but I did submit.

History is overwhelming the present here. She asks him, “Sing a concord of our thought,” and Berryman replies: “I am drowning in this past.” He goes on to describe a strange vision, a nightmare of guilt:

I trundle the bodies, on the iron bars,

over that fire backward & forth; they burn;

bits fall. I wonder if

I
killed them.

She replies: “Dreams! You are good.”

*   *   *

The first of the Dream Songs begins:

Huffy Henry hid        the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

The pieces come from elsewhere, but their density is new. A slang expression and a strange name; two characters, at least one of which is mysterious; meter jumping between iambs and trochees, and a fluid, unusual syntax. The gap in the first line appears to convert an intransitive into a transitive verb, although of course it doesn’t; rather, it only thwarts our expectation of reliable, decipherable grammar. What is Henry hiding? Or where? Perhaps he’s hiding (something) inside that space in the line. We move from past to present tense, and by the second half of the third line the pronouns have dissolved.

In October 1954, Berryman moved to Minneapolis, to an apartment near a lake, and in the winter when it froze he liked to walk out on the ice. He began to keep a journal of his dreams. By the summer, he had 650 pages of dream analysis. In June 1955, he signed a contract for two books with Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. The first was
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
, which was published in October 1956; the second was a biography of Shakespeare. Berryman never finished this book. Instead, he began writing what he called from the start “dream songs,” which he did almost exclusively for the next fifteen years, at the rate of sometimes two a day. It is worth taking a short detour into the book that Berryman did not write to understand the ones he did.

Berryman began working on Shakespeare in early 1937, in Cambridge. Specifically, he was interested in the textual states and chronology of the plays, which is a dry subfield of literary criticism but which he found enthralling. In February 1937 he wrote: “It’s awfully silly ever to do anything but read Shakespeare,” and this might sound like only a young snob’s boast, but he seems to have meant it. In May 1944 he won a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, for Shakespeare textual study; he worked by night in a small basement office in the Princeton University library, and when it was locked he climbed in and out through a window. In 1952 he was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation “for the critical study of Shakespeare” and in 1958 he claimed to have settled the date of Shakespeare’s early play
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
: “It is late 1592—early 1593 and I can prove it.” In 1964 he won another grant, to complete the book that was now called “Shakespeare’s Friend,” and he went to Washington to do research but spent all his time in bars. In 1969, on leaving a rehabilitation clinic: “A few months ought to see my biography at 500–600 pages.” In February 1970 he wrote a short lyric: “I’m hot these 20 yrs. on his collaborator / in
The Taming of the Shrew
.” In May 1970, on entering a treatment program for alcoholism, he made a list of “replacements for drinking,” and the first item was “work on my Shakespeare biography mornings & afternoons.” In June 1971, he applied for and won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for work on the book that was now called “Shakespeare’s Reality.” On December 17 of that year, he wrote a note: “I thought new disappointments impossible but last night suddenly doubted if I really
have
a book ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’ at all, despite all these years.”

His life—it is not glamorous to say so—was a parade of grants and fellowships. When he was in trouble, the academic world came to rescue him. On his return from Cambridge, he taught in the English department at Wayne University in Michigan, and was hired by Harvard in 1940. He moved on to Princeton in 1943, where he taught creative writing. He lectured at the University of Cincinnati in 1952 and taught briefly at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1954, and in 1955 he became a lecturer in humanities at the University of Minnesota. These universities provided the financial support that enabled him to become a poet, and something more than this. His biographer John Haffenden quotes one of Berryman’s students at Princeton, who remembered Berryman wearing a long, striped scarf and reading a book while he walked across campus. “He seemed above all things donnish,” said the student: “I remember someone saying nobody ever looked so much a poet.”

He was “donnish,” like a don, and he looked like a poet: the universities gave Berryman a role to play and to play against.
The Dream Songs
is the product of this close, bookish world: the poems are specific on the protocols and hierarchies of academic life. “Hey, out there!” begins one:

           assistant professors, full,

associates,—instructors—others—any—

I have a sing to shay.

We are assembled here in the capital

city for Dull—and one professor’s wife is Mary—

at Christmastide, hey!

This Dream Song (35) has the title “MLA,” which is the annual conference of English departments in U.S. universities. The members of the Modern Language Association meet just after Christmas each year, and they jostle for status and jobs; assistant professors seek to rise in rank to associate professors. Later, in Dream Song 373, he returns to the joke as he imagines the scholars who will study him after his death:

will they set up a tumult in his praise

will assistant professors become associates

by working on his works?

He mocks the things he knows and loves.

John Haffenden’s painstaking 1999 collection of Berryman’s various academic writings on Shakespeare reveals much about the poet. His early work on textual states was built upon his assumption that the differing texts of Shakespeare’s plays are different because they have been reconstructed by the actors who first appeared in them, and once we think of these as people’s voices rather than texts, then we might be able to retrieve the original. As he wrote in February 1946: “One must emend through the error to the copy, and through that to the actor, hoping to reach Shakespeare.” For Berryman, textual scholarship was an art of hearing human voices. Later, he became obsessed with tracking down Shakespeare’s collaborators and coauthors, and after this he sought to write a biography: describing himself as “sick of quarter-Shakespeares,” he wanted to tell the whole story of the man. He is always seeking people, and when he came to interpret the plays he found them to be testaments of intimate experience. “Shakespeare was a man whose son died, who was publicly ridiculed and insulted, who followed a degrading occupation,” he wrote. “He wrote many personal poems about some of these things.” In a superb lecture called “The Crisis” Berryman speculated that Shakespeare in early middle age suffered a nervous collapse, and he traces the symptoms through several plays, particularly
Hamlet
. Berryman read Shakespeare as the original confessional poet.