The American poet John Berryman (1914-72) liked to excuse his excessive drinking and argumentative, sometimes violent nature by reminding himself that he was a genius and a poet. Paul Mariani, in his fine biography, does not absolve Berryman of responsibility for his conduct, which involved a lot more than colossal benders and the occasional fit of rage: Berryman routinely abused and neglected his wives and children, betrayed friends, demanded special treatment from university colleagues, and womanized as if there were no tomorrow. Nor does Mariani attempt to apologize for Berryman’s suicide in 1972, when the poet was fifty-seven. Although this book reveals some of the reasons for Berryman’s agony, Mariani does not, in the manner of some biographers of “Romantic” figures, either justify objectionable acts or deduce from them an index to the quality of the poetry that Berryman wrote.

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Born John Allyn Smith, Jr., on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma, Berryman was the first child of Martha Shaver and John Allyn Smith, Sr., a Minnesota native who worked as a bank officer. After losing a series of jobs in Oklahoma, Smith moved his family to Tampa, Florida, where they ran a restaurant, and then to Clearwater, into an apartment building owned by a wealthy bond salesman named John Angus McAlpin Berryman. Soon Martha was sleeping with her landlord. Smith retaliated with an affair of his own. When his mistress left him, Smith threatened suicide. Martha filed for divorce, accusing him of adultery. A few weeks later, Smith was found dead outside the apartment with a bullet wound in his chest and a .32 lying near his head. Weeks later, “unwilling to have her children remain fatherless,” Martha married John Berryman in New York City and changed her name to Jill Angel. Her son’s name became John Allyn McAlpin Berryman.

His mother’s inconstancy and the taking of new names would haunt Berryman for years. But nothing tormented him so much as his father’s suicide: “O journeyer, deaf in the mould,” he wrote in The Dream Songs (1969), the long poem that is his major work, “insane/ with violent travel & death: consider me/in my cast, your first son.” Years later, after Berryman had all but lost the ability to write so well, he was still fixated on his father: “Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me,” he wrote in Love and Fame (1971), published one year before he ended these enervating reflections for good.¹

Berryman’s mother and stepfather sent him to the academically superior and “proper” South Kent School in Connecticut, and from there he entered Columbia College in 1932, where, an awkward and sensitive boy determined not to be an oddball, he learned the name of every freshman, ran track, and rowed crew. He also read much contemporary poetry, including Muriel Rukeyser and the “amazing” Hart Crane. Despite a no more than respectable academic record—Berryman spent most of his time cultivating an image as, in his words, “the goddamest woman-thief on the campus”—he was awarded the prestigious Kellett Fellowship for two years’ study at Cambridge. There he rejected the chaotic influence of Crane and embraced instead Yeats’s more objective and disciplined vision. He even sent a poem to Yeats. When Yeats responded, Berryman was stunned.

Returning to the U.S. in 1938, Berryman took a series of teaching jobs—at Wayne State, Harvard, and Princeton—and began to experience bouts of severe depression. In 1947 he recorded his infidelity to his wife Eileen, whom he had married in 1942, in a sonnet sequence that he would suppress until 1967, when it appeared as Berryman’s Sonnets. (In the Collected Poems it has been renamed Sonnets to Chris.) Here began Berryman’s attempts to use poetry to placate the guilt brought on by his behavior. Though there is much lovely celebration in these sonnets—“Great citadels whereon the gold sun falls/ Miss you O Chris sequestered to the west”—there is also much about the “disgrace” and “cold rewards” of the affair, and about the “grand evasion” of his life. “Scars of these months blazon like a decree,” writes Berryman in one sonnet; in another, he dreams of death—the only way, it seems, of silencing a lying heart: “I am dreaming on the hour when I can hear/My last lie rattle, and then lie truly still.”

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In 1948 there appeared Berryman’s first book of poems, The Dispossessed. Many of the poems in this volume also focus, albeit vaguely, on the question of whether there is any hope for “repine blackmarket felons” like himself. In “The Possessed,” he counsels such “criminals” to

Think on your sins with all
  intensity.
The men are on the stair, they
  will not wait.
There is a paper-knife to
  penetrate
Heart and guilt together. Do it
  quickly.

It is hard, in fact, to imagine someone more deeply infected with a sense of guilt than John Berryman. An incident from those early days illustrates the point. One evening in the summer of 1941, Berryman, then living in New York, stopped to listen to a sidewalk haranguer who was arguing over the question of U.S. involvement in the war. Berryman began debating with him. At once the man stopped, pointed, and called him a Jew. Berryman protested, said there must be some mistake: he was no Jew. “You look like a Jew, you talk like a Jew, you are a Jew!” the man shouted, before demanding that Berryman recite the Apostles’ Creed to prove him wrong. Berryman, failing to remember the Creed, ran off, trembling with rage but also with a sense of inexplicable, groundless blame. This incident forms the basis of his famous story, “The Imaginary Jew.”

Berryman’s next book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), is, like Sonnets to Chris, a group of poems about a purloined mistress. In this case, however, the object of devotion is the American colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, dead for 300 years. For Berryman, a man with a history of craving and hurting women, the decision to choose an untouchable and therefore unbetrayable woman was only sensible. “I have earned the right to be alone with you,” he says to his pretend-lover, though his intentions nonetheless provoke feelings of culpability, both in him and in her, his surrogate. While working on Bradstreet, Mariani tells us, Berryman kept vivid in his mind the “example of Hawthorne’s Reverend Dimmesdale [in The Scarlet Letter], with his public confession to the community against which he has sinned.” This was how Berryman was beginning to view his poems: as confessions of disobedience followed by humble solicitations of forgiveness from an insulted citizenry.

In late 1954, after a disastrous stint at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Berryman got a job at the University of Minnesota. Arriving in Minneapolis, he began analyzing his dreams (in one, he hacked up women’s bodies and hid the pieces under houses) and reading consoling literature. His tastes in poetry were also changing during this period. “I am down on Rilke and the hieratic boys just now,” he wrote; “I don’t deny his sensitivity and his marvelous melody,” but Rilke was too cut off from his emotions. Berryman himself now wished “to get down into the arena [of life] and kick around.” The mixture of dream-analysis, study of redemptive literature, and a wish to “kick around” in real life resulted in the first of the Dream Songs.

This sequence of autobiographical poems occupied him for fifteen years. And they are autobiographical, even though the one-volume edition of the work is prefaced by a note in which Berryman insists that

the poem, . . . whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, 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; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones. . . .

The “irreversible loss,” of course, is his father’s death, a monumental event invoked straightaway in Dream Song 1:

All the world like a woolen
  lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Therafter nothing fell out as it
  might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see,
  survived.

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The enormous emotional cost of this “departure” comprises the often bleak subject-matter of The Dream Songs, an effort to achieve, through poetry, the salvation of a truly repulsive sinner. To be sure, there are poems on neutral topics like Berryman’s experiences in Ireland, elegies for Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, two poet-friends who died tragic deaths, and a poignant tribute to the “majestic Shade” of W.B. Yeats. Mainly, however, The Dream Songs divulge the “horde/of terrors fresh from Henry’s shaming past,” plus a hefty dose of anguish brought on by the attempt to wipe out this “horde of terrors” through nonstop drink and sex.

Pitiless and often difficult to take though Berryman’s self-scrutiny is in The Dream Songs, there is also much humor here, and occasional intermissions for the voicing of tenderness and regret, as in the affirmation of enduring love—a kind Berryman would never know—in Dream Song 171:

Go, ill-sped book, and whisper
  to her or
storm out the message for her
  only ear
that she is beautiful.
Mention sunsets, be not silent
  of her eyes
and mouth and other prospects,
  praise her size,
say her figure is full.
Say her small figure is heavenly
  & full,
so as stunned Henry yatters like
  a fool
& maketh little sense.
Say she is soft in speech,
  stately in walking,
modest at gatherings, and in
  every thing
declare her excellence.

Forget not, when the rest is
  wholly done
and all her splendours opened
  one by one
to add that she likes Henry,
for reasons unknown, and fate
  has bound them fast
one to another in linkages that
  last
and that are fair to see.

The components of Berryman’s formal genius are all here, and all crucial to the success of the poem: the flawless rhythms, the deft interpolation of dialect (“yatters like a fool”) and poetic language (“maketh little sense”), and the slight syntactical distortions that were Berryman’s trademark (“fate has bound them fast/one to another in linkages that last”).

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Good as some of Berryman’s writing was in the late 50’s and early 60’s, and the more lucid his goals as a poet became, the more he unraveled. During his rocky, eleven-year marriage to Kate Donahue, his third wife, a great amount of time was spent in hospitals for alcoholism and nervous collapse. These were also years in which he received much praise for 77 Dream Songs (1964), Berryman’s Sonnets (1967), and the final Dream Songs installment, the Bollingen Award-winning His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). In 1970, utterly overcome by his enslavement to sex and alcohol, Berryman, the Imaginary Jew, considered converting to the real Judaism. Instead, hard on the heels of another “sort of religious conversion,” as he put it, he returned to the fold of Catholicism. But religion was no balm, either. Dismayed by his inability to stay dry—he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1971—Berryman on the morning of January 7, 1972 climbed the railing of the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, steadied himself for one last time, and pushed out.

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The work of Berryman’s last years is uneven. The “mysterious late excellence” for which Berryman had praised William Carlos Williams in The Dream Songs was not to be his. Most of Love and Fame, notably the poems about his student days, is trite and carelessly composed. Only the eleven-poem sequence entitled “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” written in the wake of Berryman’s supposed return to Catholicism, maintains the power to impress. Here Berryman returns to his favorite theme: the “flicker of impulse lust” and the ensuing scramble for penance:

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 endeavors: husbanding
  and 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.

The grand ambition of The Dream Songs—to make human a figure of the profoundest deprivation—animates these lines, too.

This ambition, it bears repeating, never involved the exculpation of the guilty one or the minimization of his crimes. Berryman’s goal, to use language he himself applied to the character of Macbeth in a lecture delivered at Princeton in 1951, was to depict a moral transgressor “fully in alliance with the powers of darkness” and yet somehow “not lose the . . . reader’s sympathy.” On these grounds alone, his work should be distinguished from that of the other so-called “confessional” poets of the 60’s—Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton—with whom he is often lumped. For these poets, the banalities of life starkly transcribed were sufficient for poetry; any larger, transforming aesthetic vision was taboo. Berryman, whose talent was, for the most part, greater than theirs, aimed to go farther.

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Mariani’s biography is judicious, well-written, and eminently useful as a companion-volume to the poetry. One wishes one could be as cheering about the new Collected Poems 1937-1971. The book is very beautifully designed, but it is prefaced by forty pages of academic drivel by Charles Thornbury, a professor at St. John’s University in Minnesota. Thornbury, we are told, is at work on a critical biography of the poet, but to judge by the quality of his insights here, readers of his forthcoming work should be prepared to salvage yet another poetic reputation from yet another mediocre academic’s deathly grip.

¹ Love and Fame, along with The Dispossessed (1948), Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), Berryman's Sonnets (1967), and Delusions, etc. (1972), have now been gathered in John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971, edited by Charles Thornbury, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 348 pp., $25.00. Despite the title, the book omits The Dream Songs.