Refiner’s Fire: ‘Grace Soften My Dreams’—John Berryman

… for the man in fury,

possessed by his own tumultuous & burning energy,

to bring to a halt is hard as tungsten carbide

and crook his knees is harder than to die.

—“Back”

On January 7, 1972, John Berryman, poet and Regents’ Professor at the University of Minnesota, walked onto a Minneapolis bridge, waved to a stranger, and jumped one hundred feet to the west bank of the Mississippi River. He left no note. None was needed. Behind him were ten volumes of brilliant, troubled, troubling poetry.

As poets go, Berryman was a late bloomer. His early poems—collected in “Twenty Poems,” Five Young American Poets (19401, Poems (1942), and The Dispossessed (1948)—were received as competent, derivative efforts in the post-Eliot academic tradition. It wasn’t until Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a sequence based on the life of the seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Brad-street, published in 1950 when he was thirty-nine, that he received critical recognition. Writing in the voice of Anne Bradstreet and employing fractured, difficult syntax enabled Berryman to control and explore his own tempestuous sensibility. His success is reflected in James Dickey’s comment, “John Berryman [created] … in the birth sequence of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, what is to my mind the most daring and successful rendering of human experience ever to appear in American poetry” (The Suspect in Poetry).

An ambitious poet, Berryman took the innovations he used in Homage and reworked them in his next work, a long poem begun in 77 Dream Songs (1964), continued in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968), and finally collected in The Dream Songs (1969). For The Dream Songs he invented Henry, whom he described as “an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) … a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second” (p. vi). Like Anne, Henry provided Berryman with a voice and a personality to speak through. But unlike Anne, Henry provided Berryman with a voice and personality so like his own that few, if any, critics bother to distinguish one from the other. In fact Berryman himself frequently fails to make the distinction and uses Henry as a device and not as a persona.

The Dream Songs confirmed Berryman as a poet’s poet and brought him the acclaim he deserved. For them he won the Pulitzer Prize and election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1965, the National Book Award, a share of the Bollingen Prize, and election to a Regents’ Professorship at the University of Minnesota in 1969. Startlingly autobiographical (Berryman rejected T. S. Eliot’s dictum about the impersonality of poetry), they reveal him as a complex, difficult man, given not only to humor, drink, adultery, self-aggrandizement, and outrageous opinions, but to compassion, religious sensitivity, and, perhaps most of all, to fear, anxiety, and bewilderment. Behind it all is the haunting memory of his father’s suicide:

he only, very early in the morning,

rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window

and did what was needed.

… I’ve always tried. I—I’m

trying to forgive

whose frantic passage, when he could not live

an instant longer, in the summer dawn

left Henry to live on.

Usually considered his greatest achievement, The Dream Songs are often difficult and obscure. Two things, however, are clear: his father’s suicide resulted in a pathological sense of loss, and his alcoholism eroded his creative energy and his ability to cope with that sense of loss. Emphasizing this last aspect of the Songs, Lewis Hyde in his perceptive “Alcohol Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” takes exception to the unqualified laudatory response the Songs received. He writes, “The Dream Songs can be explicated in terms of the disease of alcoholism. We can hear the booze talking. Its moods are anxiety, guilt and fear. Its tone is a moan that doesn’t resolve.… These poems are not a contribution to culture. They are artifacts of a dying civilization …” (American Poetry Review, July/August 1975, p. 11).

Berryman himself realized that there are major shortcomings in The Dream Songs. He told Richard Kostelanetz, “Henry is so troubled and bothered by his many problems that he never comes up with solutions, and from that point of view the poem is a failure” (The Mass Review, Spring, 1970, quoted by Lewis Hyde, p. 10). He also realized that his preoccupation with himself and with fame could lead nowhere. He wrote in “Dream Song 133”:

As he grew famous—ah, but what is fame?—

he lost his old obsession with his name,

things seemed to matter less,

I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,

Yet I do my best.

It doesn’t matter, truly. It doesn’t matter truly.

In response to the shortcomings of The Dream Songs and perhaps also in response to his personal difficulties, Berryman risked his reputation and probably his mental balance in the poems of Love & Fame (1970). No one was prepared for the direct confrontation with his self that Berryman offered his readers. Without warning he opened Love & Fame:

I fell in love with a girl.

O and a gash.

I’ll bet she now has seven lousy children.

(I’ve three myself, one being off the record.)

Nor were they prepared for the self-centeredness of “Thank You, Christine” where recalling his past conquests Berryman claimed, “Once, when low, I made out a list—it came to 79—.” Most reviewers were embarrassed on his behalf and pondered his sudden, callous lack of taste. Tasteless as many of the poems are, the embarrassment was inadequate. Love & Fame is more than sexual braggadocio; taken in conjunction with his posthumous Delusions, Etc. (1972), it is a profound though disconcerting religious testimony.

Structurally, Love & Fame is divided into four parts. Parts one and two detail Berryman’s life, first as a Columbia undergraduate (1932–36) and then as a Cambridge graduate student (1936–38). These sections, explicitly concerned with love, which the youthful Berryman consistently confused with lust, and fame, which he sought as eagerly as love, are the source of the embarrassment; the reader feels unpleasantly voyeuristic. But in spite of this, the psychological and theological implications are necessary to the plot of the book; they set forth not only Berryman’s view of himself at that period of his life but his view of the fallen nature of man.

The events of part three occur in the late sixties in Berryman’s maturity. He is, in his words, “in hospital” drying out from a bout in his losing fight with alcohol. It is a hopeful section, based on the movement of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The poet descends into Hell, then rises through Purgatory into Paradise.

The Hell Berryman experiences is the whole confusion of his life to that point, a life in which all relationships rotate around his personal needs. Such a life enslaves him to himself, and he confesses, “After all has been said, and all has been said, / Man is a huddle of need.” This confession has a double meaning. Man is a huddle of need; and it is only as he goes out of himself to others that his need can be satisfied. From this beginning he opens himself to others and in opening slowly rises out of Hell. He reaches Purgatory (and remember, in Dante’s cosmography, Purgatory is part of Heaven) when Mrs. Massey, a cafeteria worker, asks him to write her a poem:

Tonight though she touched my elbow afterward

as I was bearing my cleared tray to the rack:

‘It gives me honour to serve a man like you,

would you sometime write me out a verse or two and sign it?’

O my brave dear lady, yes I will.

This is it.

I certainly will miss at 6:25 p.m. you.

And if you can carry on so, so maybe can I.

In his spontaneous, open response, all his egocentric desires are set aside; he experiences an exchange of genuine human love. And that exchange awakens in him the possibility of loving and being loved by God, the theme of Love & Fame part four (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord”) and of the posthumous collection Delusions, Etc.

The possibility of God’s love forces Berryman to assess his own life. The vanity of his fame, the emptiness of his adulteries, and the magnitude of his exploitive ego are seen as fit subjects for repentance rather than for poems. He says in “Somber Prayer,” “At fifty-five half famous & effective, I still feel rotten about my self.” As melodramatic and affected as his self-knowledge is, it is far closer to the truth than the blusterings of the randy, self-possessed undergraduate of “Thank You, Christine.” It is also a short step from such knowledge to the repentance and conversion he describes in the sixth address to the Lord:

Under new management, Your Majesty:

Thine, I have solo’d mine since childhood, …

… Confusions & afflictions

followed my days. Wives left me.

Bankrupt I closed my doors. You pierced the roof

twice & again. Finally you opened my eyes.

My double nature fused in that point of time

three weeks ago day before yesterday.

He makes the nature of his conversion even clearer in “The Facts & Issues:”

… It is plain to me

Christ underwent man & treachery & socks

& lashes, thirst, exhaustion, the bit, for my pathetic & disgusting vices.

These affirmations, however, do not lead to the cessation of Berryman’s problems; they mark rather the beginning of new and greater conflicts. He had to learn in his late fifties to control vices that had ruled him since his teens. The difficulty and the agony of his last years are expressed in what to me is his most eloquent and moving poem, the third address to the Lord:

Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me

against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me

to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain

my grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting.

Forsake me not when my wild hours come;

grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;

achieve in me patience till the thing be done,

a careful view of my achievement come.

Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.

When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.

Empty my heart toward Thee.

Let me pace without fear the common path of death.

Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter:

fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord.

Unite my various soul,

sole watchman of the wide & single stars.

Persistent and pathological grief over his father’s suicide, adultery, alcoholism and its debilitating anxiety and guilt, repentance and conversion, and finally suicide. The facts of Berryman’s life make little sense. Samuel Hazo in “The Death of John Berryman” wrote, “History says that a man is no more than what he was. And history is right. Poetry says that a man is no less than what he made. And poetry is right” (Commonweal 95:490). It’s hard to get around calling John Berryman a failure. But Jesus died for him. And in his last troubled poems Berryman found words to say what grace can do.

John Leax is assistant professor of English at Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.