Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs
By John Berryman (edited by
Shane McCrae)
Faber & Faber. 192 pages. £12.99. ISBN: 978-0571400133
Reviewed by Tony Roberts
John Berryman’s first wife, Eileen Simpson, in her near-unmissable story of
their marriage and his literary circle, Poets in Their Youth (1982),
explained her reason for divorcing the poet as ‘his need to live in
turbulence’. And this dedicated Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Shakespearean
scholar and alcoholic certainly had that need. In 1970 his friend William
Meredith wrote to him lovingly, ‘The only thing in your brilliant life I
don’t envy is the hard way you have gone about being a great poet.’ In 1972
Berryman finally called time on it when he jumped off the Washington Avenue
Bridge in Minneapolis. Concerned wives, children, supportive friends,
passing lovers and fans aside, he left behind some fine poetry in The
Dispossessed (1948) and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), but
his best work came in The Dream Songs, a manic, ragged, comic,
supremely energetic collection (1964, 1968, 1969, 1977).
Shane McCrae has just edited another posthumous batch of Dream Songs,
Only Sing, ‘for a nonscholarly audience, to be read for pleasure’. He
has transcribed these from unpublished material at the University of
Minnesota. We are told ‘Only Sing collects 152 possible additions to
his “epic”, ‘each of which is worth reading for its own merits.’ I think
he’s been a little optimistic in his claim.
His idea of gathering these pieces is predicated not only on the quality of
the material, but also on a statement by Berryman himself. As McCrae reminds
us, the poet said in a 1968 interview, ‘Not all the songs about Henry are in
the books. If there is a third volume, it will not take him further. It will
be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.’
This implies, of course, completed poems. However, these in Only Sing
often don’t seem quite finished. They might follow the three verse, six line
form Berryman favoured in his Songs, but they do not all seem thoroughly
worked out. Do they enhance The Dream Songs? Some do. Do the others
entertain? Yes—for the most part. Berryman is generally entertaining when
entertaining Henry. But who is Henry?
A quote I remember from my student days fifty years ago went something like
this: ‘The maddest section of the novel is an abandoned tour de force
in which the lustful picaro did battle with the amorphous forms of himself.’
I can’t remember the critic’s name offhand and I think it concerned a
Bernard Malamud novel. But isn’t that just John Berryman’s Henry to a tee?
He is lustful, picaresque (comic and adventurous), divided and at war
with himself. In fact isn’t The Dreams Songs a satirical ‘novel’
itself, complete with its modernist syntactical shuffles and comic coinages,
a work in the tradition of Rabelais,
Shakespeare, Sterne and Joyce.
Berryman emphatically, repeatedly, distanced himself from his lascivious and
neurotic protagonist. I would argue that Henry is not, as this editor
suggests in his introduction, ‘a
representative twentieth-century American mind’, nor is he ‘the
sort of common person of whom nations are constitutes’. That would be
to devalue the poet’s colourful but vulnerable ego. Also, Henry is just too
manic. He is, rather, a psychological case study by the poet, with himself
as subject. The dream songs are —to me at least — a satirical autobiography
in which all is heightened for effect. His protagonist is a modern day
Shakespearian Fool and analysand, peeping through the three headed Berryman:
himself, Henry, and his Mr. Bones.
In his 1969 preface to The Dream Songs, Berryman himself sought to
dispel any confusion about his relationship with Henry. His protagonist, he
explained, was
‘essentially …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 and variants thereof.’
I think he muddied the waters a little in his ‘Paris Review’ interview of
1972, where he focused again on the problem: ‘Henry is accused of being me
and I am accused of being Henry and I deny it and nobody believes me.’ Later
in that interview he rowed back a little: ‘Henry both is and is not me,
obviously. We touch at certain points’. No wonder he could never shake the
identification with Henry.
Of these 152 Songs, is ‘each worth reading for its own merits’? To me that
can only be said of roughly fifteen percent (To a die-hard fan maybe
twenty-five— which will certainly give such a reader grounds for
satisfaction). Let’s look at some of the poems:
Among them are those which address, or make reference to, literary friends:
Robert Lowell (Cal),Yeats, Graves, Pound, Theodore Roethke, William
Meredith, Robert Frost, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt). Berryman likes to
name friends —and I suspect the
reader also likes him to —
though that perhaps hardly universalizes the character. One of the best
poems here —and one celebrated by McCrae —is a warm elegy ‘For
Louis MacNeice’ (‘Professional drinkers both, we rioted all one summer’)
which ends in a downbeat:
And now you are untimely dead, my delicious friend
and I never go to
London any more
if I can help it.
Then there are poems to a wife and to other unnamed women. Henry’s yearning
can be affecting or opportunistic. There are those with women seen but not
seduced. ‘Met, then, in the New York Public, over years’ is one (‘… in
harmless obsession with the girl there I / was alone with her & the
book’). He can also be courageous and loving. In the first of ‘Four Dream
Songs’ his delight is uppermost:
He stared at her for joy. Her open mouth
he had that second kissed, and
held her head
(a second) in his hand.
His heart tried to get out of
his chest.
There is also plenty of loneliness and the hurt of loss, as in ‘In the
living-room of slaughtered children’s beasts, Henry’. Anxiety and fear of
death are serious handicaps to Henry’s stability. In ‘I’m tugging with Ted’s
ghost. wrestling in a pal’s way’, his Roethke poem, and in ‘His fear
increased. Henry was on his own’, emotions are self-explanatory (‘Daily at a
distance his death / came over him, like flat oblivion’) but in the latter
poem the wit fends off despair:
Texas wants his ‘archive’. The utter bloody hell with that.
His fear
increased. I can bear only a little more.
If Sophocles bore it, pal,
can we?
Time and its inevitable changes bring Henry’s sensitivities to the fore. In
‘Even so, this is farewell. Tho’ the gestures are the same’, only the title
lines and the ampersand perhaps suggest his voice. He is in a subdued,
conventional mood —or Berryman is breaking from his Pierrot for a moment’s
fatalism:
brandy, & goodbye kisses. How we feel
hardly appears: we save it for the
years that lean
between this touch of awe
and our next meeting, when
our likely frames
of reference will vastly have differed,
so our good
talk will fog.
In the poignant ‘Three blue rooms, & one brown, where he thinks’, the
weeping Henry seems to catch at what encapsulates his fears: ‘Has he been
tried & found wanting, / tried
& found wanting.’
There are other poems to mention, such as 'The Dream of Immortality’
and the amusing ‘The beautiful fog. Two nuns swerve aft & stare at it’. And
even when not at their best, other Songs have good lines in them. And so I
am persuaded that that Open Sing is certainly worth reading… as long
as we are prepared for misfires (Henry is used to provisos). One has to pick
and choose.
Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick, remembering his friend toward the end of
Berryman’s life: ‘I was on a program for him in London. It centred on a
movie interview with [Al]Alvarez—John, close-up, just off drunkenness,
mannered, booming, like an old fashioned star professor. His worst. I think
of the young, beardless man, simple, brilliant, the enthusiast…buried
somewhere with the older.’
Berryman found Henry when he was between these two states and inclining
toward the latter. He made him shine in the heady1960s. And then, when that
wasn’t enough to save him from himself, as he says euphemistically in my
favourite Dream Song line (DS 76 ‘Henry’s Confession’): ‘I saw nobody
coming, so I went instead.’