LUKE SPENCER

’The pieces sat up & wrote’: art and life in John Berryman’s Dream Songs

Commenting on John Berryman‘s 77 Dream Songs in 1967, M. L. Rosenthal observed that ‘the confessional movement . . . may be just about played out‘ and that ’ . . . its practitioners may be overindulging themselves if they think that every nuance of suffering brought out on the couch or in reverie is a mighty flood of poetic insight or the key to a new aesthetic’.’ This was a radical qualification of the enthusiasm that had greeted collections such as Robert Lowell‘s Life Studies (1959) and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel(1965). Rosenthal in America and A. Alvarez in England had been among the first to praise Lowell, Plath and Berryman for what was seen as a fierce new honesty about the most painful kinds of personal experience. To Alvarez such honesty came as a welcome corrective to the complacency of much post-war British poetry. Yet, by 1967, Rosenthal was warning of the inadequacy of self-exposure as a creative principle. His brief discussion of 77 Dream Songs, quoted above, accuses Berryman of sentimentality, attitudinising and a tendency to ‘commandeer political themes too facilely or fashionably’. ’ These are perceptive judgements, but they do not sufficiently explain the shortcomings of the confessional mode as Berryman practiced it. To do that it is necessary to follow the growth of The Dream Songs beyond those first seventy-seven parts which prompted Rosenthal’s anxieties. It is also necessary to examine, in more detail than Rosenthal was able to, the historical and cultural conditions in which ’to walk naked‘4 became such a seductive motivation for American poets.

John Haffenden records a comment by someone who was close to John Berryman in the early 1950s: ’. . . his rages and tantrums and affairs were well known and gossiped about . . . “It‘s all part of my biography, that’s all“, he said once, when he was chasing some young woman around, and obviously embarrassing and hurting Eileen [his wife]’. Not surprisingly, the speaker here was unimpressed by Berryman’s off-hand self-justification. She probably didn’t consider it enough to say that one’s moral conduct happens with the impersonal force of a natural phenomenon - all part of the order (or disorder) of things and therefore to be fatalistically accepted. Probably she also caught in Berryman‘s words a note of hubris, an implication that its being part of his biography would excuse it , since he was someone who obviously merited a biography and whose lapses would come to seem venial when set against his creative achievements. To be sure, few of us would be fooled by such evasions

72 Critical Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1

- at least in other people. Yet what so clearly fails to persuade at the moral level has become a firmly established aesthetic defence of Berryman's most sustained piece of self-justification, The Dream Sotigs.

Commentators have tried many ways of detecting some overall narrative, thematic or chronological unity in The Dream Songs, but their best efforts have yielded poor results. Adrienne Rich's early review of 77 Dream S o ~ g s still offers the most plausible approximation to a structural rationale: '. . . i t is the identity of Henry . . . which holds the book together, makes it clearly a real book and not a collection of chance pieces loosely flung under one cover. None of the poems (except possibly the elegies) carries in isolation the weight and perspective that i t does in relation to the rest; partly because the cumulative awareness of Henry is built from poem to poem'.6

Berryman's satisfaction with Rich's review' must have included a large admixture of relief that someone had found in the first batch of Songs a species of unity that already allowed for, if i t did not actually anticipate, their projected expansion. Additional pieces of reminiscence, slapstick, lament or lucubration could henceforth be justified by invoking Henry's exfoliating biography. As Jack Vincent Barbera put it, 'The whole poem's "ultimate structure" is the ongoing and epic enterprise of probing and expressing that character - without, at the same time, developing some narrative action with a grand finale'. * Under the all-enabling rubric of 'dream' and 'songs' the sprawling continent of Henry's (i.e. Berryman's) psyche is opened up for a theoretically limitless series of lyrical explorations. What does not sing of Henry is sung by Henry. Every fragment is part of the 'House' that Henry is; i t helps put flesh on the poem's 'Bones'.

The absence of any structural necessity beyond the unfolding of Henry's life and thoughts nevertheless caused Berryman a great deal of anxiety. His readiness to entertain any and every kind of theory about the poem's supposed structure'' is evidence of a hankering for something more substantial than Henry House's biography on which to peg all those virtuoso performances. For one thing, where would it all end? The possibility of closure was ever-receding: the more Berryman spoke of finishing the Songs - let alone rounding them off satisfactorily - the more he was hag-ridden by a compulsion to go on with them: '. . . he was still writing Dream Songs at least as late as 1969 - straining always to release himself from the terrible incubus of his inspiration'.'" Haffenden insists on the helplessness of Berryman's situation, his inability to control his inspiration. Dream Song 26 prefigures the only possible ultimate solution to this dilemma, 'I had a most marvellous piece of luck. I died'. Berryman's death, tragic as i t was, authorised a last refinement of the argument for structural integrity. Joel Conarroe put it as succinctly as anyone: '. . . the Songs are built with pieces of the poet. At last there was no more'. If the demand for closure could not be satisfied by the dynamic of the poem alone, then reference to Berryman's

John Berryman's Dream Songs 73

life as the poem's ultimate raison d'Ctre and organising principle would surely settle the issue. If Henry's existence was, by the poem's own dream-conventions, inexhaustible, his creator's was not. Henry could be buried and resurrected I '

along with his other vaudevillian transformations; Berryman's suicide was, in contrast, the most emphatic of conclusions: '. . . if anything seals the poem, it is not some larger closed structure - actual or implied - but Berryman's death'. '' Thus The Dream Songs was converted from little more than a ragbag of transparently disguised confessions into a self-generating, self-completing object, the poem-as-life. To challenge the integrity of the poem would henceforth be like challenging the tragic truth of the life itself. Well-mannered critics could now safely concentrate on tracking down esoteric personal references and recondite scholarly allusions - activities far more congenial to most of them than raising awkward questions about structure and purpose.

Many strands of individualism, romanticism and formalism went into the making of the reified image of the poem-as-life; but more important than any of these was its ideological function in the marginalisation of the writer in American society after the Auden-inspired political engagement of the 1930s. For Berryman and his poetic generation (what Delmore Schwartz called 'the class of 1930') McCarthyism, cold war nationalism and the conditions of literary success itself foreclosed the option of a truly critical stance towards contemporary social reality. l J Their only recourse was to an aggravated and inevitably destructive solipsism. The tensions which characterised their anguished marginality are everywhere present in The Dream Songs, challeng- ing its claim to a mystified autonomy and problematising the notions of art and personal experience by which i t seeks to validate its project.

To begin with, there is the issue of the poem's manipulativeness, raised percep- tively by Edward Mendelson:

Berryman is smart enough to realisc that he presents himself in the least preposs- essing manner he can imagine: his personal offensiveness is not accidental but entirely deliberate, for what he wants from his readers is their critical approval despite their personal disapproval, their assent despite their awareness of what they are assenting to. What Berryman hopes to enjoy is not the power to delight or enchant, but the power to control those who are both conscious and unwilling. "

I am not sure how complete a consciousness of motive and strategy is to be inferred from the word 'deliberate' here. Nor am 1 satisfied that most readers are 'unwilling' to accept the unsavoury details of Berryman's womanising, drunkenness and ambition. Nevertheless, the idea of the poem as a form of rape is a productive one and entirely consistent with the exploitative attitudes towards people, especially women, Is which can be found throughout the sequence. 'It's all part of my biography' now becomes, in effect, 'It's all part of my poem', with precisely the same suggestion of inevitability. To be sure, the poem-as-life

74 Critical Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1

requires unflattering revelations in the name of existential truth, but only SO that we can be made to approve of them under the auspices of art .

A close look at some of the Songs will reveal how insistently the poem orchestrates our acquiescence in its most questionable - and least questioned -- meanings.

God bless Henry. He lived like a rat, with a thatch of hair on his head in the beginning. Henry was not a coward. Much. He never deserted anything; instead he stuck, when things like pity were thinning.

So may be Henry was a human being. Let’s investigate that. . . . We did; okay. He is a human American man. That’s true. My lass is braking. My brass is aching. Come & diminish me, & map my way

God‘s Henry‘s enemy. We’re in business . . . Why, what business must be clear. A cornering. I couldn’t feel more like it. - Mr Bones. as I look on the saffron sky, you strikes me as ornery. (DS 13)

The ideological assumptions which underpin the whole Dream Songs enterprise are very close to the surface here. Unregenerate individualism is given an easy victory over reductive sociological investigation. Human beings, especially American male human beings, are not to be mapped and diminished, even though they have their share of sexual frustrations (braking lasses) and financial hardships (aching brass). Henry may have lived like a rat, but when cornered by nosy researchers, or even a malign deity/destiny, he’s ready to fight back. We are expected to take Henry’s ‘orneriness’ as an instance of old-fashioned frontiersman-like independence coupled with new-style existentialist defiance. Homo Americanus can simultaneously fight his way out of sinister collectivist traps and negotiate the awkward corners on the high road of personal freedom. Questions of personal morality (cowardice, pity etc.) are glanced at only as authenticating evidence of honesty and courage. The real challenge of self- disclosure offered by the opening line is never taken up. Instead, the shock value of ‘lived like a rat‘ is dissipated in the thinness of the reference to thinning hair. For the remainder of the Song the flow of self-praise is barely interrupted. The world may be short on pity and long on problems, but simply being himself will help Henry survive. Survival occupies a special place in the poem-as-life: i t is a sii7~ qua nor7 of the poem‘s existence and a promise of its ultimate closure.

John Berryman’s Dream Songs 75

Though the strength of purpose i t implies is never set against the demands of constructive action, it confers a special authority on the experiences the poem records. Berryman commentators regularly pay fulsome tribute to Henry‘s tenacity while more or less ignoring the deficiency of moral being he works so hard to preserve.

The pattern of evasion is less obvious in Dream Song 14:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you‘re bored means you have no

Inner Resourczs.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.

The first obstacle to a critical reading of this Song is that its overt issues are so dear to the hearts of postmodernist readers. Cynicism about the consolations of art, nature and social being is regarded as a virtual guarantee of authenticity, especially when it is combined with a wry belittlement of the self. After a blunt opening declaration the Song curls its lip successively at the pathetic fallacy, the American Dream (with its emphasis on ‘Inner Resources’), other people, great literature and finally Henry himself, who is left with nothing but wag- gishness to mitigate his taediurn vitae. In the first half of the Song the rhetoric of fastidious argumentation is deployed with measured irony (’After all . . . moreover . . . I conclude’) and the break between stanzas one and two leaves an eloquent emptiness at the heart of that earnest advice about self-help. It is not until characteristic Henryisms like ‘heavy bored‘ and ’Peoples bore me‘ are introduced that Berryman’s general direction becomes clearer. There will be no examination of Henry’s predicament in either its social or its psychological aspect: we are to be offered only the wholesale disparagement of Henry’s miserable existence - the best of it along with the worst. Very well; we could perhaps make room for one more well-crafted statement of mid-century hopelessness. Yet even as a catalogue of shop-soiled commitments the Song

76 Critical Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1

disappoints. At the climax of its would-be confessional frankness Berryman’s language discredits itself: ‘Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes / as bad as achilles’. The decapitalised ‘achilles’ archly parades its cleverness under the flimsiest of anti-heroic cloaks. It makes a feint of self-deprecation the better to court our complacent approval. And our approval is expected here because, though we are allowed a frisson of mockery, the classical reference winks to us its assurance that the enduring truths are still enduring. Great literature is politely parasitised for the terms of its token dismissal. Under the mask of irreverence reposes a very bland conservatism. The Song now stands revealed as no more than a poetic Feast of Fools in which established values are satirically inverted as a means of heading off the genuine questionings that lead to change.

Henry’s mock-abasement is completed in the third stanza by the suggestion that he does not possess either the wholeness or the freedom of a dog that can at least control its own tail. Henry has a tail (tale) that wags him: he is a wag powerless to change the attachments that constitute his life. Many other Songs throughout the sequence end on a similar note of half-cheerful resignation to the incorrigible forces that shape Henry’s destiny. l6 The poem-as-life is no more to be willed in any particular direction than the life itself. What Berryman called, in another Dream Song, ’the lines of nature & of willf1’ are forever bifurcated. The poor man‘s Achilles is the plaything of a fate more inscrutable than anything in the Iliad. He has surrendered his moral will to a reified image of his own inexorable biography: the poem-as-life is also the life-as-poem writing itself with no intervening human hand.

The sort of rhetorical manipulations I have discussed promote an idea of art and life as organic and mutually validating processes. Yet the fragmentariness and drift that the poem-as-life and life-as-poem try to deny ceaselessly declare their embarrassing presence:

Hunger was constitutional with him, women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need until he went to pieces. The pieces sat up & wrote. They did not heed their piecedom but kept very quietly on among the chaos. (DS 311, 7-12)

Interrogating Berryman‘s tragic posture we could choose to see those last three lines as an image not of heroic survival, but of a mutually impoverishing art- life relationship. Going further, we could regard the voracious appetite that paradoxically nourishes collapse as representing the poem’s inability to achieve any principle of order beyond its sheer existential inclusiveness. In any case, it is fair to suppose that what would get written by pieces heedless of their ‘piecedom‘ would itself be fragmentary. And this we can demonstrate from the Song; for, despite its tone of frankness, it blandly underwrites the derangement

John Berryman‘s Dream Songs 77

it takes the credit for criticising. The damaging consequences of piecedom to Henry’s art and life are not engaged with at all. In fact, the Song ends with six lines about an imminent visit from an ex-mistress:

An old old mistress recently rang up, here in Ireland, to see how Henry was: how was he? delighted! He thought she was 3000 miles away, safe with her children in New York: she’s coming at five: we’ll welcome her!

This abrupt change of subject in the final stanza is more than just an irritating failure to hold a serious issue in steady focus: it is an instance of hunger as a creative motivation. The ‘constitutional‘ hunger that made Berryman a prodigious womaniser, smoker and boozer, when transferred from life to art, becomes an avidity for any stray item of memory or observation that can be corralled into the poem-as-life. It is a quantitative substitute for qualitative choice that Berryman found irresistible:

Pulling together Henry, somber Henry woofed at things. Spry disappointments of men and vicing adorable children miserable women, Henry mastered, Henry tasting all the secret bits of life. (DS 74, 16-21)

Henry‘s soi-disant mastery of life‘s recalcitrant materials comes from his weaving them together with the woof provided by the Songs. Every bit of life can thus, apparently, be subdued and enjoyed at will. Experience can be randomly repossessed as art. This is the very idea of a perfect reciprocity between art and life that the poem tries to impose on us. No matter how chaotic the life may be, it can be vindicated by an art made of that chaos itself. Berryman thinks he can reconstruct himself (pull himself together) and even penetrate the mysteries (‘secret bits‘) of life in the simple act of recording his fragmentariness.

A more overt description of Henry at work gives strong support to the argument that Berryman conflates the drift of biography with the direction of art:

Tides of dreadful creation rocked lonely Henry isolated in the midst of his family as solitary as his dog. In another world he’ll have more to say of this, - concepts came forward & were greeted with a kiss in the passionate fog. Lucid his project lay, beyond. Can he? Loose to the world lay unimaginable Henry, loose to the world, taut with his vision as i t has to be, open & closed sings on his mystery furled & unfurled.

78 Critical Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1

Flags lift, strange chords lift to a climax. Henry is past. Returning from his travail, he he can’t think of what to say. The house’s all about him, so is his family. Tame doors swing upon his mystery until another day. (DS 260)

’Lonely . . . isolated . . . solitary’, in a ’fog‘, Henry rocks on the tidal swells of his inspiration. Only from the imagined vantage-point of ’another world‘ can he envisage any possible detachment from his situation. In the meantime he must wait for ’concepts’ to volunteer themselves for his embrace. Of course, he has a ‘project’ for the future, but can he complete it? (The next Song speaks of his writing - presumably of The Dream Songs itself - as ’habitual - life sentence - will he see it through?’). Significantly, ‘Lucid’ gives way to ’loose’ as soon as the issue of completion is raised. Indeed, the sequence of adjectives throughout this stanza is an anthology of contradictions that offer themselvs to us as fertile paradoxes adumbrating the ’mystery’ of inspiration. But the ruse does not work. Despite the attempt at a consoling stasis in which positive and negative, active and passive, attributes hold each other in a mystified reciprocity of opposition, there is a perceptible, though unacknowledged, victory for drift. The assurances of lucidity and tautness are limply abstract compared with the (relatively) powerful images of befuddlement and involition. The process of creation is treated as something that happens as spontaneously as a lifting flag, as inexorably as a musical cescendo. But the supreme reification of what should be subject to human control is, once again, Henry‘s own life: ‘Henry / is past.’ His passive mediation in the reconstruction of life as art is over. Another day‘s quota of the poem-as-life is complete: ’Tame doors swing upon his mystery / until another day.’ Is the tameness of the doors an unwitting image of Henry’s submission to the muse of biography, or are the doors no more than a tragi- comic segment of the mundane material world that Henry can control? Either answer points in the same direction.

’Henry under construction was Henry indeed a late Song plausibly begins. There can be no denying that Henry House is forever undergoing structural extension, improvement and repair. The trouble is that the whole edifice is built on sand, for there is no way out of the trap created by the poem-as-life. Life is vindicated by art which is vindicated by life which is vindicated by art . . . and so on, with no escape route to a social or historical perspective (‘another world indeed!) that might enable both to be radically re-examined. Denied a critical social function by the subjectivist prescriptions inscribed in post-war American culture, Berryman could either try to construct a public role for his biography, as Robert Lowell did, or he could try to close the circuit of art and private life altogether. He chose the second option, but not without uneasiness

John Berryman’s Dream Songs 79

at its crippling limitations. Some of the most interesting Songs strain towards a recognition of public realities, l 9 but Berryman could not resist for long the master-urge to submit to the limitless appetite of the poem-as-life. And here we must remind ourselves of a crucial aspect of the poem’s manipulativeness: Berryman is as eager to impose a conviction of necessity upon himself as upon us. Though there are many traces of power-hunger and some of psychopathic tendencies in The Dream Songs, it is hardly conceivable that such a massive project of self-reconstruction should have been undertaken for the sole pleasure of fooling other people. Putting himself so relentlessly in the middle of the stage was both a symptom and an aggravation of Berryman’s social marginality. American society could be very generous to its artists for not rocking the boat, but their sense of impotence could never be totally stifled:

Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world & shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up and p.a.’d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand moment to Henry, ah to those less & none. (DS 77, 1-4)

Fellowships, prizes, lecture-tours, even a White House invitation, came Berryman’s way in gratifying profusion. But a growing toll of burnt-out contemporaries was a reminder of the exorbitant price-tag:

I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation. First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore. In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath. That was a first rate haul. He left alive fools I could number like a kitchen knife but Lowell he did not touch.

Somewhere the enterprise continues, not - yellow the sun lies on the baby‘s blouse - in Henry‘s staggered thought. I suppose the word would be, we must submit. Later. I hang, and I will not be part of it. (DS 153, 1-12)

All the poets in this list suffered from various combinations of alcoholism, depression and breakdown and Berryman clearly felt a special affinity with them as fellow victims of a malign fate. But what he, and they, experienced as fate was less inscrutable than they realised. Blaming ’god left unexamined the cultural predicament that drove them so far into their already obsessional selves that they could not get out. By a predictable irony their deaths become in this Song more fragments for the shoring-up of Berryman’s ‘staggered thought‘. Henry’s non-submission to death, his hanging on, masks a hopeless fatalism before the scale and scandal of his generation’s wreckage. Sheer survival fills the gap left by the absence of a critical engagement with destructive social forces.

80 Critical Quar te r l y , vol. 29, no. 1

Going to pieces was the definitive collective experience of Berryman’s poetic generation. Reading the epic that Berryman put together out of those pieces we should not look for the unity he tried so hard to create the semblance of for himself as much as for us. Instead we should trace the jaggedness of edges that do not f i t and the broken contours of a design that could not fashion wholeness out of the mutual parasitism of art and an alienated private life. It is in such tormented areas of contemporary experience that the recuperation of art as a force for understanding and change might begin.

1 2

3

4 5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19

Notes

The New Poets (Oxford University Press, New York, 1967), p. 123. See ’Beyond the gentility principle‘, introduction to The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez (Penguin, 1962 and frequently re-issued). Rosenthal, o p . c i t . , pp. 119-22. On Berryman’s treatment of political themes, see also: Luke Spencer, ‘Politics and imagination in Berryman’s Dream Songs’, Literature 0 History, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 38-47. Alvarez’s phrase, in op. c i t . , p. 25. The Life of John Berryman (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 219. ’Mr Bones, he lives’, Nation, CXCVIII (May 1964). Quoted in Haffenden, op. ri t . ,

Haffenden, loc. cit. ‘Shape and flow in The Dream Songs’, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. XXII, no. 2 (1976), p. 155. John Haffenden, John Berryman: a Critical Commentary (Macmillan, 1980), pp. 34-5. Haffenden, Life, p. 318. I refer to the ’Opus posthumous’ section, nos. 78-91. Barbera, op. cit. See Christopher Lasch‘s The Agony o f the American Left (AndrC Deutsch, 1970), especially his comments on what he calls the ’wholesale defection . . . from social criticism’ of American intellectuals after World War 11. See also Saul Bellow’s novel Hurnboldt’s Gift (Secker & Warburg, 1975), in which Berryman‘s close friend Delmoret Schwartz, thinly disguised as Humboldt, is presented as the victim of a ’business and technological America’ that values its poets only to the degree that their self-destructive alienation confirms the power of ‘American reality’. ’How to read Berryman’s Dream Songs’, in American Poetry Since 2960, ed. Robert B. Shaw (Carcanet, 1973), p. 40. Mendelson is good on Berryman’s treatment of women as objects: op. c i t . , pp.

For example, Songs 5, 22, 62, 114, 133, 197, 257, 283, 310 and 357. Henry’s Fate and Other Poems, ed. Haffenden (Faber, 1978), p. 46. lbid. , p. 10. Most notably, Songs 60, 66, 110, 162, 180, 181, 216 and 217.

pp. 326-7.

39-40.