Pity the Monster: the letters of John Berryman

The American poet John Berryman (1914-72), not a great letter-writer, lacked the intuitive sympathy, vital energy, intellectual audacity and imaginative intensity of Lord Byron, John Keats and DH Lawrence. Berryman’s letters were often nervous, incoherent and unfocused, hastily written when he was agitated, drunk and depressed. Egoistic yet flattering, his witty and ironic lamentations described his poverty, emotional turmoil and mental breakdowns. He wrote poetry obsessively and feared sterility, consoled himself with alcohol and sex, reeled between hallucinations and mania, and gradually destroyed his marriages, his health and his mind.

Berryman knew his physical and psychological slaughterhouses of grief” were depressing, but sent them anyway. He constantly complained that he was run down and exhausted, had violent headaches and insomnia, was sick and sunk in misery. Still in his twenties, he was in pain and in bed after collapsing. He wanted to scream and smash things and would not be responsible – though he never was – for anything he said.

His mental malaise, his body tearing his anxious mind to pieces, was even worse. He was lonely, pitiful, worthless, wincing, weeping, miserable, paralysed, helpless, stupefied, suffering and raging. He broke off a terrible engagement and had an agonising divorce. He was penniless, didn’t own dinner plates and ate off shirt-cardboards – though he still could send shirts to the laundry. He hated people, had to pretend to be alive and lived in hell hour by hour. Echoing the cry of Saul Bellow’s Henderson: I want, I want, I want,” Berryman lamented, I feel a lack, a lack, a lack.” He summed up everything by stating: Life is shit.” Alluding to Job 3:3, he concluded it was better not to be born” into a world contaminated by all-pervasive evil that seeped into his soul.

Berryman’s troubled 1944 letter to the poet Mark Van Doren, his teacher and friend at Columbia University, contained the first of many suicide threats and expressed his Kafkaesque view of existence: It is very difficult indeed to live at all, even lacerated and essentially idle. Each year I hope the next year will find me dead, and so far I have been disappointed, but I do not lose that hope, which is almost my only one. I despair, placed as I am, of making anyone very happy, my own griefs are deep and ineradicable.” Looking forward to sex with his fiancée, he feared impotence. Even fame, which he craved, had its dark side: it is given to us to tempt our souls” and destroys those whom it visits. With astonishing lack of self-knowledge, he repeatedly protested, “I don’t complain, or invite sympathy.” He told his six-year-old son, two things a parent does not do to a child: “complain or seek sympathy,” and then burdened the boy with his angst. Yet he thought the creative artist had to suffer what Kierkegaard, a favourite author, called Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread and The Sickness Unto Death.

Berryman’s great theme was loss: of his father, jobs, money, friends, wives, hope, health, sanity, inspiration and reputation. He was an alcoholic and told his divorced second wife about this mysterious disease – progressive, incurable, fatal unless arrested, and indescribably difficult to arrest bec. the patient’s whole personality is as sick as his body and struggles to protect his illness as violently as his body chemistry craves alcohol.” In an illuminating letter of 1971, he explained why he never finished the edition of King Lear that he worked on for 25 years and that could have enhanced his academic status. Alcohol, laziness, hysterical labour, over-ambition and temperamental grandiosity ruined his work. He had insight into his problems, but couldn’t overcome them and change his way of life.

His teaching career, including several humiliating dismissals, was as erratic as his life. He taught briefly at Wayne State, Harvard and Princeton, before finally settling down with his friends Allen Tate and Saul Bellow at Minnesota. The wandering scholar also taught as a visitor at the Universities of Washington, Cincinnati, Iowa, Berkeley, Indiana and Brown. He was a shrewd judge of his younger American contemporaries. He admired the wildly funny, curt and brilliant” novelist J F Powers, and praised Richard Wilbur, W D Snodgrass, Anthony Hecht, James Dickey, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath before they had established their reputations. 

He tried to influence editors in both comically crude and hopelessly touching ways. He told Robert Penn Warren at the Southern Review, I confess I am amazed by your rejection of all of the last fourteen poems I have sent you. I am told and know that my verse is improving.” He also pleaded with Warren on behalf of his dear friend Bhain Campbell, who died at the age of 29: Mr. Campbell is very ill; indeed he is dying; and I beg you to decide on the poem more rapidly than you ever decided on a poem before. I do not exaggerate: if you want to print the poem, the knowledge may be important to Campbell, and every day of delay will decrease the chance of hearing it.” In a rare altruistic gesture, Berryman comforted Campbell by writing, I hope . . . that your breathing improves and that those sores disappear – if I could take them from you, I would.”

The editors’ annotations, here and elsewhere, are short and factual, and don’t explain the context. They don’t say if Warren actually published Campbell’s poem, don’t give the cause of his death for another 220 pages and don’t explain his ”embryonal adeno-carcinoma”. They identify T S Eliot and Saul Bellow, but don’t explain Berryman’s hospitalisation for exhaustion” (i.e. mental breakdown), why Berryman’s wives thought the poet-translator Robert Fitzgerald was impossible” and why a 1966 letter from Tate was a bitter pill to swallow”.

Berryman lacked the qualities of his main manic rivals: the prestige and charisma of Robert Lowell, the brilliance and wit of Randall Jarrell, the warmth and humour of Theodore Roethke, and was more rebarbative and contentious than all of them. Berryman’s best poems are his elegies for fallen friends. In Dream Song 153 he referred to Roethke, Blackmur, Jarrell and Schwartz and angrily lamented:

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.

The fathers of Berryman and Hemingway both lost a fortune by investing in Florida real estate. Berryman’s father shot himself in 1926, Hemingway’s father shot himself in 1928, and both sons suffered their fathers’ fate. Berryman exclaimed in a 1963 letter to Edmund Wilson that Hemingway’s defection bothered me; I cried; I didn’t blame him – it’s his own business – but I felt bad.” In Dream Song 235 he wrote of that cruel & gifted man”:

Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway

Hemingway in despair, Hemingway at the end,

the end of Hemingway. . . .

Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides.

Berryman’s best letters deal with death and self-murder, and he always identified with the victims. In a condolence letter to Bellow, who’d just lost his father, Berryman recalled: Unfortunately I am in a v g position to feel with you: my father died for me all over again last week, in a terrible dream which when I analysed it turned out to be about him not dying at once, as I was told he did . . . but living a while unable to move or call for help.”

Berryman was on the scene when his friend Dylan Thomas had a fatal stroke in a New York hotel in 1953, and sent grim accounts to Lowell and Robert Fitzgerald: it is certainly the worst thing that has ever happened in my experience. . . . Depressed, tired and harder-drinking than usual, he went into a coma in his room here at the Chelsea on Wed. night. Apparently his mind died then. He never recovered consciousness and had no pain.” Berryman saw the skull beneath the skin but ignored the warning. Thomas’s wife Caitlin went into hysterics at the hospital, smasht images & had to be put in restraint.” When released, he said, she offered to cut my throat with a knife and wanted me to go to bed with her.” Back in Wales, the villagers condemned Caitlin for sleeping with three men and complained that one of them wasn’t even a friend of Dylan’s – never knew him.”

Berryman’s letter to Adrienne Rich, after her husband, a Harvard economist, had killed himself, was unusually tender and as always self-reflective: It is easier for me to imagine the torment that wd drive such a lovely man to it than yr sorrow surviving. I hope you are not feeling responsible, but I suppose . . . you probably are: you must fight the feeling: that act is purely personal, & aggressive, and in our culture w. its taboo the actor is always deranged, out of control.”

His 1953 letter to his ex-first wife, Eileen Simpson, was suffused with self-pity and pleas of poverty – intensified with the prophetic threat of suicide in New York: sometimes for days I have had nothing – that is, twice a nickel, and twice nothing. I have been hungry & feeble, next to despair. . . . So unless something happens I have to kill myself. . . . What I am going to do is drop off the George Washington bridge. I believe one dies on the way down but I don’t wish anyway to hit anyone or be splattered on the pavement.” He felt searing guilt about his childish dependence, reckless drunkenness and sexual infidelity during his marriage to Eileen, and confessed his comprehensive & detailed remorse for my unspeakable treatment of you.” 

He spent his whole guilt-ridden life imagining disaster. In later letters he called himself suicidal, looked forward to death and declared that the enormous strain of poetic creation has opened up my grave and I am looking into it.” But at least, he thought, there would be no more fatigue, sorrow or pain. He also repeated the theme of loss: If I lose all things, I lose many things that one is wild not to have. . . . I have already in my life lost so much that few human beings dying can have less to lose.” 

Neither psychotherapy, alcoholic rehabs, infusions of drugs and the frequent stretcher-&-ambulance bit” in hospitals and asylums –

 which to Berryman were like daffodils to Wordsworth – could save him from guilt, drink, depression and mania. Inevitably, he joined the ranks of suicidal modern writers: from Vladimir Mayakovsky, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf and Marina Tsvetaeva, through Cesare Pavese, Hemingway, Jarrell and Plath, to Paul Celan, Anne Sexton, Arthur Koestler and Primo Levi.

Berryman egoistically shifted the emphasis from his father’s suffering to the impact of the suicide on himself, and attributed to his parent vengeance, hostility and malign intent. But his mother was even more guilty. After driving his father to suicide she was free to instantly remarry and focus her evil on himself. Possessive, manipulative and demanding, a compound of arrogance and selfishness, she preyed on his weak, gloomy character. Their meetings were inevitably harrowing, their quarrels intense, and he was crushed by her oppressive demands. Like Plath, Berryman felt liberated when his therapist gave him permission” to hate his mother, and his suicide was partly revenge against her.

Berryman believed that his father’s desertion” had ruined his life. But he punished his own children in the same way and killed himself only seven months after his infant daughter (with his third wife) was born. On January 7, 1972 he walked halfway across the 115-foot-high Washington Avenue bridge in Minneapolis and peered into the swirling waters of the Mississippi River. Then he climbed over the railing, leaned forward and dropped. Falling off the bridge was a dreadful kind of death. He did not die on the way down, had a few seconds to think about the tremendous crash and was (as he feared) splattered” on the rocks below rather than in the river.

The Selected Letters of John Berryman . Ed. Philip Coleman and Calista McRae. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2020. 726 pp. £25.00.

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