To Terrify and Comfort
MADOFF, STEVEN
To Terrify and Comfort Henry's Fate By John Berryman Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 94 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Steven Madoff The tumults, joy and agonies that governed the life of John Berryman who...
...John Haffenden seems to disagree...
...He is a manic force, the angelic demon living inside Berryman, who in writing of him, materialized him for the world...
...Indeed, one could say that Henry, in the potency of his manic self, pressed Berryman to realize the stupendous accomplishments of the most magnificent Songs...
...He began his poetic career in the 1930s, under the tutelage of Mark Van Doren at Columbia, and for the next two decades seemed ill at ease with his verse...
...The lines of nature & of will, that's impossible...
...Its various syntactical constructions and the poet's zeroing in on the character, his fusion with Anne Bradstreet, identified Ber-ryman's idiom...
...At one time his age is given at forty-one...
...Reading his substantial Introduction to this volume of 45 miscellaneous unpublished Songs, various previously unavailable later poems and four unfinished pieces, one gets the impression that he sees Berryman as a committee of poets rather than as an ambivalent man struggling to remain cohesive...
...A human personality, that's impossible...
...Henry House & his troubles, yes with his wife & mother & baby, yes we're now at the end, enough...
...Nevertheless, Henry is more than Berryman's Active, more fantastic self, achieving unmatchable feats...
...I give the whole thing up...
...It's all a matter of control (& so forth) of the subject...
...It has a plot...
...So the poem spans a large area, you see that...
...Here is the central subject matter, intention and struggle of the whole Berryman ouevre: the death-defying task of irrevocably welding the will and the personality, to keep them from disintegration and destruction...
...His first book, 77ze Dispossessed (1948), was constricted by its influences, primarily Yeats and Auden: The images that blazed there with a singular brilliance struggled against the author's strict poetic manners...
...There are several pieces in this newly-published posthumous work, edited by John Haffenden, that are on a par with, or at least as interesting as, Berryman's best writings...
...Even if Henry's Fate may be most useful to those already well acquainted with the poet, everyone will find some pleasure in it...
...Yet Berryman received international acclaim only after The Dream Songs came out?7 Dream Songs (1964) and its continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1967...
...The hell with god...
...In addition, the material from the period of Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc., and the closing section of the book, written very shortly before Berryman's death, illuminate the poet and his longer poems...
...Its plot is the personality of Henry as he moves on in the world...
...It came twenty minutes ago...
...The writer's lifelong striving to portray the oscillating but united self is summarized in this Dream Song (from Henry's Fate): I'm reading my book backward...
...In the very long poem [Songs], of course, many personalities shift, reify, dissolve, survive, project?remaining one...
...Upsurging and vacillant, humorous and despairing, this series of 385 poems, designed, as Berryman put it, "to terrify & comfort," showed us what politics, art, war, sexuality, academia, love, lust for money, celebrityhood, loneliness, alcoholism, and fatherhood meant to a 20th-century American...
...There's madness in the book...
...A student just called up about a grade earlier in the year...
...And my mother In Coming Issues Walter Goodman on Robert Coover's 'The Public Burning' Norman Hill on William B. Gould's 'Black Workers in White Unions' Richard King on William Humphrey's 'Farther Off From Heaven' ('Mir') did the indexes to this book...
...Only there resides a living voice which if we can make we make it out of choice not giving the whole thing up...
...And like Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, Henry would often take over Berryman: The author became his captive vessel, Henry's obsessed medium...
...The subject...
...It sounds odd...
...The reader well-versed in The Dream Songs is as familiar with this celebrated defense as he is with the subsequent realignment of critical consensus to the opinion that Henry and Berryman are closely related, but separated by an intensity, a magnification of being (like Gulliver and Pan-tagruel), and an outlandishness of action possible for Henry and impossible for his creator...
...Challenged with a Harvard Advocate interviewer's question/statement that 77ie Dream Songs lacked a plot, Berryman replied: "Those are fighting words...
...They present the same intellectual and emotional challenges: quirky syntax, complex ideas and dialects, bleeding fits of laughter, tenderness, anxiety, sincerity, and histrionics...
...The volume does make available the original drafts of "Washington in Love" and "The Children: Promeio," which reveal a good deal about the poet's working methods and his plans for the unfortunately severed future...
...and at a later point he's fifty-one...
...For the poet, more than any of his contemporaries, completely revealed his being and thus exposed the gamut of modern problems, questions and aspirations...
...The poem's very length (57 eight-line stanzas) introduced what was to become his working habit: the long narrative poem...
...Also, in Henry's Fate, as in each of Berryman's other books (this is one of his wonders), we learn about a whole generation, an entire sensibility...
...Because The Dream Songs are built on the dream sequence and dream logic of Henry/Berryman's life, and because Berryman's work in its triumph dilates to encompass all the poet's activities, a compilation such as this one, divorced from the sequence that gives it meaning, is merely a febrile homunculus beside its father, the teeming giant...
...Reviewed by Steven Madoff The tumults, joy and agonies that governed the life of John Berryman who committed suicide in 1972, at age 57were not always apparent in his poetry...
...This remains true regardless of the quality of the individual pieces...
...Yet there is a progression of growing self-empathy in Berryman's canon, from the omnipotent presence in "The Ball Poem" who both identifies with and is aloof from the poem's character, to Homage, where Berryman flickers in and out, conversing with and becoming Anne Bradstreet, to the psychic symbiosis of Henry/Berryman, to the final movement from a dream diary to a real diary, seen particularly in Love & Fame and the last section of Henry's Fate...
...The hell with students...
...Following the publication of the first volumes, Berryman, responding to the general critical contention that it was simply autobiography, wrote in the preface to the companion work: "The poem then, 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 black-face, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second...
...The Dream Songs, in other words, are dependent on a sequential narrative...
...Berryman wrote in the scholia to the second edition of Love & Fame (1970): "I notice it [Love & Fame] makes play with an obsession that ruled "The Ball Poem" of 1942 as well as, later, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1948-1953) and The Dream Songs (1955-1968): Namely, the dissolving of one personality into another without relinquishing the original...
...He was, in short, a gifted apprentice...
...In all the works listed above, moreover, one sees that the structure of the personality is determined by sequence: The order of experienced events reports on the character's psychological mutations...
...Henry gains ten years...
...And sanenesses, he argued...
...he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof...
...But it is important to recognize that Henry's Fate, like the Songs, presents several aspects of one personality...
...Still, there is much to be thankful for in Henry's Fate...
...Not until 1953 did Berryman find his own voice, when Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, with its tremendous technical and personal assurance, appeared on the literary scene...
...This is the modus operandi of the poet's vision...
...Finally, Berryman's range of feeling is joyfully and painfully apparent throughout...
Vol. 60 • August 1977 • No. 17
