Poets in the Flesh

...He concludes by insisting that "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 sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss...

...Each chapter also contains a portrait of one of the couple's friends, who likewise slumped into despondency and madness...

...Biographical information can in some instances be a red herring in reading poetry...

...Among her husband's colleagues, these melancholy lines proved only too true...

...In addition to being depressed by his joblessness and his wife's psychological studies in graduate school, Berryman was having an affair with another woman who was present at the party...

...But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness...

...Simpson and Berryman divorced in 1956, the same year he published his first major poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet...

...When the two men finally show up, we recollect that these are the Freudian '40s because they joke about "castration anxiety...

...Writers & Writing POETS IN THE FLESH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL WRITING HER Master's dissertation in psychology on "Poets' Responses to the Rorschach Test" intheearly 1950s, Eileen Simpson concluded that her research "did not uncover a universal poet type...

...Mimicking my gestures, retailing my shame...

...What a circle it was, though: Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Richard P. Blackmur, and Theodore Roethke...

...Mistress Bradstreet was vividly present in the apartment at all hours of the day and night (John's working schedule...

...Lacking Berryman's singleminded devotion to poetry, Simpson felt excluded from a world where men sat up all night discussing "Lycidas," or Yeats' three greatest lines...

...According to her, "As soonasthe waiter seated us, Delmore's mood changed...

...An apt warning, for although Simpson exhibits no rancor toward any of the people portrayed in her book, she still seems jealous of Berryman's "phantom mistress, Mistress Bradstreet," whose creation apparently brought about the final collapse of their marriage...

...Do they laugh at me...

...That "was what he was thinking," she asserts...

...He also lovingly imagined the birth of the child he was afraid to father in real life...

...black velvet, perched over one eye" plus "a chin veil sprinkled with little dots...

...IF SIMPSON'S courage is admirable, and her book fascinating, I nevertheless wish she had not linked so many poems to remembered incidents...

...Simpson had reason to feel disgruntled...

...Overall, it tells the story of the Berryman marriage, which began gladly indeed and after several high points started to decline: As the poet's fanaticism about his writing increased, his instability, alcoholism and compulsive philandering grew more pronounced...

...Berryman's reckless jaywalking foreshadows a flirtation with "the edge" that culminated in his suicidal leap from a Minneapolis bridge into the frozen Mississippi in 1972...

...Simpson had unwittingly taken the chair next to the wall, and the young poet could not bear to have people sitting behind him: Do they whisper behind my back...

...Her interest in thesubject stemmed from life with her husband, John Berryman, then relatively unknown outside his intimate circle of friends...

...Still, their creative madness seems to allow them to capture us with greater fidelity than we can capture them...

...In Henry, he created a unique character who is nonetheless more like us in our pain and glory than any man in the flesh we are likely to meet...

...Simpson relates how she learned about this in 1946 (before the publication of Lord H'eary's Castle), from a catty anecdote of Jean Stafford's claiming that Lowell was the world's champion reviser, sometimes with startling results: "A poem which had begun with the title, 'To Jean: On Her Confirmation...

...Simpson no longer refrains from generalizing about the manic creativity interspersed with self-destructive gloom that seems to make up the poetic temperament...

...Simpson believes that he really had fallen in love with his Galatea...

...Consider the pitfalls of Simpson's technique in her many references to Berryman's masterpiece, The Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus, Gir-oux, 407 pp., paper, $8.95...

...Simpson has compassion for the tormented lives of poets...

...Unlike the well-tailored design of Poets in their Youth, Henry's story is disorderly, confused, contradictory—an emotional rendering that seems much closer to life...

...He fell silent...

...When I asked him a question he responded in whispered monosyllables ?He kept looking over his shoulder, first to one side, then the other...

...Her background in analysis probably helped her to accomplish what many literary widows would not dare to attempt: a fair, dispassionate account of an unhappy marriage...

...Eileen Simpson is probably right about the difficult temperament of poets, how impossible it is to live with them...

...The same poem reverberates later in the book, when Schwartz attacks his wife at a party in a fit of paranoia...

...Berryman himself, in his Foreword, chides critics for trying to relate the principal speaker to the poet...

...At a restaurant, Schwartz is portrayed as the speaker of his "Do the Others Speak of Me Mockingly, Maliciously...

...Her life was so intertwined with ours it was sometimes difficult for him to distinguish between her and himself, between her and me...

...All these men except Jarrell seemed to her unfit for ordinary life, and even in his case she admits that "his illness, if not his death, as well as his late, openly autobiographical poems suggest that in psychological makeup he was not so different from the others in the group...

...finished by being called, 'To a Whore at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.'" Again drawing a connection between lifeand art, Simpson tells of the Berrymans taking Lowell to a garden party at Princeton, where he "drank quarts of beer, took off his shoes and tossed them up in the air, while John, who had drunk an equal amount and had climbed a sycamore tree, tried to catch them...

...In an "Apotheosis" that follows her chronicling the madness and premature deaths of Berryman, Schwartz, Jarrell, and Lowell, she dreams of them in a special heaven: "As Keats imagined himself sitting beside Shakespeare in a tavern in the next world, so they saw themselves separated from the rest of us, 'institutionalized,' surrounded by poets____They would recite one another's poems and talk for hours on end, free at last of worldly concerns about where the next advance, the next drink, the next girl or even the next inspiration would come from—free at last to be obsessed with poetry...

...Do they speak Of my clumsiness...

...When Berryman wrote an epithalamion for their wedding that described Simpson as "my terrifying bride," Delmore Schwartz told her, "One of the hazards of being married to a poet, and there are many?All poets' wives have rotten lives'—is that there's no telling how one will be characterized in verse...

...To reinvent the character of America's first poet (the Puritan wife of an early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony), Berryman stole his own wife's phrases, dreams and family stories...

...She vividly describes, for example, going to Penn Station in 1942 and waiting amid throngsof vacationing college students for Berryman to arrive with his best friend, the Wunderkind Delmore Schwartz: "Anticipation and excitement over the long weekend filled the wintry dusk that filtered down through the clerestory windows...

...Many of the people he elegizes appear in Simpson's book, too, yet because of a certain analytical detachment in her manner, one is left with an impression of how these men would look to an observer at a party without getting a sense of their depth and complexity...

...Because of the author's conviction that their poetic temperament doomed them, her book speeds to its conclusion with the relentless inevitability of Jacobean tragedy as, one by one, these bright figures are overwhelmed by shadows, gutter and go out...

...The sight of poets disporting themselves in this way may have entertained the other guests, but I was feeling that excess of alcohol made even these brilliant and attractive men tiresome...

...She tells us how she felt about them with less conviction than she brings to her physical descriptions: Intensity of feeling is left to Berryman to depict...

...Simpson's novelistic techniques give Poets in Their Youth a shape that keeps it from degenerating—as memoirs so frequently do—into a series of dinner-table anecdotes...

...Turning her analytical training on the incident, Simpson now connects it with lines in "Dream Song # 1." She surmises that "When he wrote, 'Once in a sycamore I was glad /all at the top, and I sang,' one of the things he meant was that at the top of the tree he had a moment of escape from the world below, and especially from the two women who were with Cal [Lowell] down on the ground...

...Berryman's poetry ranges wider, running the gamut from mawkish self-pity to mystical joy...

...Often Simpson uses a remembered episode to effectively illuminate a famous poem...

...Robert Lowell's mania for rewriting and altering his own poems is now so well documented that critics need hardly refer to it any more in discussing his work...

...She reminds us of the styles of that era, mentioning her hat, "the height of fashion...

...first published in 1969 in its complete form, and just reissued...

...the knowledge that "this really happened" is of little importance where the poet has fleshed out his creations...

...Poets in Their Youth is constructed like a novel...

...After the poem was finally published, he confessed to Simpson, "it really ought to be dedicated to you, but I decided to leave it all hers...

...The author of a novel and of many stories, Simpson has a sharp eye for detail and is deft at setting a scene...

...Now, more than a quarter of a century later, she has written a memoir of their marriage, Poets in Their Youth (Random House, 222 pp., $15.50), taking her title from Wordsworth's prophetic couplet: "We poets in our youth begin in gladness...