Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir

...same year, not getting it...

...They had scored their own triumphs against a weakened Romantic tradition, and, in Pound's phrase, they had made it new...

...Here we reach the bottom line, more or less: Osborne is bragging about what a l i t e r a l and f i g u r a t i v e son of a bitch he is...

...I would guess that Berryman's poetry is overdue for reassessment and sustained critical attention...

...Eileen Simpson, who is now a psychotherapist, perhaps as a direct result of her marriage to Berryman, thinks Berryman had suicide as a psychic legacy from his suicide father, and no doubt there is truth in that view...

...Her knickers [i.e., panties] were flounced below her knees in a collapsed silky bag...

...Wordsworth was pondering the early deaths of Chatterton and Burns, but it is very much to the point that Wordsworth himself lived to be eighty...

...Even among writers, this represents high attrition...

...Childhood and early teenage years are now described as an awful ordeal of meanness, t a t t y living conditions, and down-at-heel relatives who lack any emotional resource except a raw p e e v i s h n e s s , v e n t e d first on everything around them and then on each o t h e r , expressed in a stream of ghastly cliches: _9 . .all chaos, shouting and tearful rebukes...

...The towering poetic fathers had placed a virtually unbearable burden upon these sons, and when poetry renewed itself in the sixties, it had to ignore Eliot and Yeats and move in an entirely new direction...

...We hear about their marriages and mistresses, their mothers and fathers, their adventures and their faults, their urges and their drinks, their literary views, and their political views--the latter usually ridiculous...

...The late Lionel Trilling used to argue that v.;riters are no crazier than bank presidents, the only difference being that they tell you all about it...

...Feminine" betrayal comes in every imaginable form except the rather appealing vice of promiscuity...

...After an early success based upon a couple of short stories, Schwartz, who had more problems than talent, destroyed himself through booze, drugs, and mania...

...He swayed and quivered . . . This amazing punch, delivered by a weedy teenager, evokes memories of Jungle Jim, Terry and the Pirates, or perhaps Rip Kirby (the British equivalent of the day was Dan Dare...

...When you read this volume, representing his entire career, the impression you get is of a major literary talent yet also of an achievement in which the parts are more interesting than the whole...

...He died the...

...rity only by the quality of the few ideas it encompasses, one is bound to wonder what went wrong...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 Both Dylan Thomas and Richard Blackmur, a brilliant literary critic and good minor poet, drank themselves rapidly into the next world...

...Berryman, Lowell, and the rest were frequently powerful writers, but in the circumstances in which they worked it was not enough to write very well...

...Both Pound and Joyce built upon Homer...

...In its foreground, this superbly stylish memoir is absolutely gorgeous gossip--the kind of book you pick up and cannot possibly put down, anecdotes about Berryman, of course, but also about Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Ted Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, R.P...

...Implicit in the n a r r a t i v e is t h e i r lethal, literally lethal, disability: The idea of the poet had been defined for them by Eliot and Yeats, and by the authoritative criticism of the period 1930-1960...

...Elsewhere, what little respect and affection there is in these pages is focused almost exclusively on men, most of them fairly pallid and wan figures: the t u b e r c u l a r f a t h e r who died when Osborne was a boy, a raffish uncle, a foul-mouthed Canadian journalist, a homosexual writer who takes a liking to the lonely teenager (but fails to seduce him), and a few others...

...But after that, in a surprising metamorphosis, Berryman in his "Dream Songs" wrote in the tradition not of Eliot but of Whitman, structuring his work brilliantly on the pattern of the black minstrel show...

...Sons of bitches have always been the b e s t - s e l l i n g line of his stock in trade, just as the center of his talent has been a flair for resentful abuse, driven by a compulsion to $pater les bourgeois...

...This shocked me, as I had never seen" him do anything so unconsidered .and spontaneous...

...Eliot certainly writes about his private struggles, griefs, and triumphs, but he projects it all in Dantean terms, from Prufrockian damnation through Waste Land Purgatory and on to salvation and the moment in-and-out.of-time...

...Its intention is to connect America to the English tradition, and in particular to the seventeenthcentury English tradition so powerfully evoked by Eliot in both his poetry and criticism...

...In his portion of the preface, Bruno Bettelheim says that he wrote five chapters of On Learning to Read, whereas the other eight were "based on the work of the entire staff and were written by both authors...

...But the story unfolds against a backdrop of tragedy...

...The great moderns also used a trick --and I hope the word does not seem irreverent--that eluded Berryman, Lowell, Schwartz, and the others...

...T h e n . . . . . . h e lunged forward and slapped me very hard across the face...

...A demand of this sort, and it was made in other terms by Yeats, Pound, andJoyce, made final literary success seem almost out of reach...

...POETS IN THEIR YOUTH: A MEMOIR Eileen Simpson / Random House / $15.50 Jeffrey Hart E i l e e n Simpson was married to the poet John Berryman, who committed suicide in 1971, and this is her memoir not only of Berryman but of an important group of American poets who aspired to greatness during the period beginning around 1940...

...They starve the boy of affection, ignore him, shuffle him about like a piece of f u r n i t u r e , are beastly to their husbands even when the husbands are dead, and constantly embarrass Osborne _9 with their clumsy or t r i t e handling of the Queen's English...

...But this facet of events, which might have introduced an awkward element of ambiguity, is not mentioned in the book...

...His long poem "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," concerning the seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet, seems to me a major work...

...Their battle cries were: "You've always had it e a s y " . . . "You didn't have to go out to work like I did when I was t w e l v e " . . . "You were always Dad's f a v o u r i t e " . . . "I've worked hard for everything I've ever had...

...The lost days of summer were recompensed for a few joyous moments as I looked on at the funniest, most enjoyable sight I had ever s e e n . That, at least, is the way he tells it now...

...If the term Lost Generation applies to any group of young writers, it is surely to those described by Eileen Simpson...

...The two best writers in Eileen Simpson's memoir, Berryman and Lowell, did not aspire to--did they even grasp?--the Epic Imagination...

...The son staggers out of his refuge under the stairs to the sound of a scream from his mother, who is in the toilet on the floor above: All the doors and windows had been blown out and the ceilings had collapsed...

...They employed what might be called the Epic Imagination...

...The incident of the slapping schoolmaster r e a p p e a r s , reminding the reader that Osborne is something of a dramatist...

...But beyond Schwartz, these young writers marched themselves across a Verdun-like psychic battlefield...

...Her face sagged, powdered and gaping black, her mottled chest heaving with her moans...

...I drew back my fist, not a straight gentlemanly left this time, and smashed my wild right into his moustache...

...Berryman and Lowell can write as welt as Eliot or Yeats, but the drama takes place in a limited spiritual context...

...Eliot, Jeffrey Hart is professor of English at Dartmouth College and author, most recently, o f When the Going Was Good: American Life in the Fifties...

...It is worth noting, however, that the story which earned him early recognition challenged comparison with Yeats...

...The adjectives apply as easily to his casual behavior with other people...

...Now John Berryman is a very interesting literary figure, and my own sense is that he remains vastly underrated...

...He makes great play of his supercilious attitude toward others, of his sneakiness and petty moral turpitude, and caps it all with t r e a t m e n t of his mother that borders on the psychopathic...

...The scene is interesting, however, because it is untypical of the book in so many ways...

...None of it makes sense of such treatment, and there are passages which contradict the impression of hatred...

...Osborne himself appears as a tepid, more or less spineless child a d r i f t in an irredeemably shabby family and social environment, thoroughly infected with the corrosive, foul snobbery of the lower middle class...

...Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate...

...But in this book--to put it bluntly but accurately - - h e smears her with excrement like a disturbed adolescent: an ugly son by his own account, i:ruel, ungratefial, ill-bred, vindictive, and so on...

...Of Eliot, writes Donald Hall in Remembering Poets: "No one since has embodied, or seemed to embody, such authority...

...Nellie Beatrice Osborne seems to have done her best for this difficult little boy, though she did i r r i t a t e and sometimes hurt him with an exuberant and horn-hided vulgarity (taking him to see his father's body, she remarks that the room will have to be "frumigated...

...but I have my doubts...

...Eric," annoyed (apparently) by the music and the screaming fans, bursts in, turns off the radio, and glares at the boys...

...Apart from the anecdotal information it provides, which is rich, often hilarious, and frequently sad, the central subject of the book is the failure of these writers to achieve greatness, and their own awareness of that fact...

...Oddly enough, the person who comes out worst in the sordid tale is Osborne himself, and he gives the impression that this is deliberate...

...About the doomed Delmore Schwartz we have now heard more than we really wanted to hear--from Saul Bellow (Humboldt's Gift), J ames Atlas (Delmore Schwartz), and William Barrett (The Truants...

...This ripens like a boil during his account of an air raid in which their house suffers a near miss...

...the anecdote of choice is the one in which he slips a used condom into a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich and then hands this to the lady writer Lynn Reid-Banks...

...Mary's College of Maryland and author of the column "An Idea of Freedom...

...It expresses hostility to a male authority figure, for example, and portrays the author as a righteous, if ungentlemanly, sort of chap...

...ON LEARNING TO READ: THE CHILD'S FASCINATION WITH MEANING Bruno Bettelheim and Karen Zelan / Alfred A. Knopf/$13.95 John R. Turner When a famous child psychologist, a man with a long list of distinguished titles to his credit, joins with an experienced associate to write on a subject as intrinsically exciting as teaching children to read, the result ought to be a fascinating book...

...Both Berryman and Jarrell committed saicide...

...Osborne smirks back at him " w i t h open scorn...

...All of them were tough, intelligent, and very major poets, and during the forties and fifties Eliot and Yeats were at the pinnacle of reputation and influence...

...and even more to the point that Yeats lived to be 74 and T.S...

...The drama became Spenglerian and cosmic...

...Berryman's poem is a superb piece of writing...

...There are visits from an older group: T.S...

...Again and again he implies and sometimes says outright that family, f r i e n d s , ambiance, or school are simply not good enough for him...

...Yeats wrote of Ireland and Maude Gonne, but played it in worldhistorical terms: Maude, thus, was also Helen of Troy...

...All these years later, s e t t l e d and plump with success, he sneers and sneers at the wretched woman, though he tells nothing about her to justify such Orestian loathing...

...But in comparison with Ehot, Yeats, and the other poetic forebears, it all seems lacking in additional dimension...

...But Berryman and his friends had the great modernists looming above them...

...The great modernists, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and the rest, were absolutely dominant...

...Osborne admires his mother's real talent for the difficult profession of barmaid (though he does mock her pretension in calling h e r s e l f a " v i c t u a l l e r ' s a s s i s t a n t " ) . He.has also kept the letters which she wrote and presumably still writes to him...

...Berryman jumped from a bridge and J a r r e l l threw himself into the path of a truck on a highway...

...The women are the worst part of all this, beginning with his chilly grandmothers and finishing with his adulterous first wife...

...The first question concerning a jointly authored book is who really wrote it...

...Simpson's title comes from Wordsworth's great poem "Resolution and Independence' ': We poets in our youth begin in gladness But thereof comes in the end despon dency and madness...

...When instead it turns out to be a work saved from dog-dead mediocJohn R. Turner is an administrative officer at St...

...In 1976, Lowell published his Selected Poems, a bid, I would guess, for a Nobel Prize...

...Although the five for which Bettelhelm takes sole responsibility are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 33...

...Yeats, and also Eliot, these were the standards against which such young writers were compelled to measure themselves...

...Eliot's authority as a poet was reinforced by his almost frighteningly intelligent literary criticism...

...He sets the scene with some of the schoolboys sitting together, listening to Frank Sinatra on the radio...

...But why did all his friends also destroy themselves...

...It was called "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities...

...Robert Lowell was frequently committed to mental hospitals, and clearly suffered from the burden of a New England aristocratic and Calvinist ancestry...

...The anecdotes are often ribald...

...He went flying over two trestle tables, which collapsed in a pile at the end of the room . . . . Slowly, dripping blood and cocoa, he rose to his feet, to my infuriated dismay, helped by several boys...

...The modern poet was the man who wrote, he said, with the culture of Europe in his bones-"from Homer to the present"--and Eliot meant it...

...This has evidently led him to follow (on paper) Oscar Wilde's classic recipe for life as an imitation of art...

...her malice, where it occurs, is p e t t y enough...

...Blackmur, Jean Stafford, and others...

...The repulsive trimmings, I suspect, have less to do with truth--for what that is worth--than with Osborne's instinct 'for his market...

...I wonder...

...She moved forward to the head of the stairs, bent at the knees, like a crazed gymnast, arms outstretched...

...The real historical exchange of slaps seems to have had less to do with "spontaneous" brutality than with the future author's deliberately provocative habit of making sneering remarks about the Royal Family...

...My mother was just visible, frozen to the lavatory seat...

...Eliot 77...

...If the reader can stomach the book's large dose of this he will find an interesting and pretty graphic account of what it _9 was like to inhabit the lower middleclass garbage heap of British society a g e n e r a t i o n ago, and of the life endured by an aspiring actor/,~,riter in the seedy realm of British repertory t h e a t r e in the fifties...