John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, Part 2 of 3: Content Connections

John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, Part 2 of 3: Content Connections

This is Part 2 of a 3 part series on Berryman’s Dream Songs. You can find Part 1 in an earlier post.

I was re-reading John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs and finished my re-read on the 45th anniversary of Berryman’s death. That is a creepy coincidence which I didn’t see coming.

Berryman committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in January 1972. You can read all about it, as well as various other aspects of his life, on the internet, so I won’t re-hash much of that here. However…

A few facts may be useful:

• Berryman’s father committed suicide when Berryman was 10 or 11 years old.
• He struggled his whole life with depression, alcoholism, and possibly what would be diagnosed as a type of manic disorder today.
• Berryman had three wives and several children (the youngest was about 6 months old at the time of his death).
• His relationships often didn’t survive his behavior — including infidelity, drunkenness, behavior that lost him jobs, and other behavior you might expect to be associated with his depression and alcoholism.
• During the last period of his life, he spent some of every year hospitalized as he tried to deal with his troubles.
• Despite his personal troubles, he was roundly admired as a poetic genius.
• He is credited as a an early practitioner–even founder–of the confessional movement.
• He is recognized as a teacher and mentor of many famous poets.
• Berryman’s quick wit and incisiveness–whether working at his own poetry, teaching others, or just in social situations, made him greatly admired.

Berryman Uses Offensive Speech to Exorcise the Offensive Parts of Life

At least, that is the best spin I can put on it. I have said before that I have often been put off of Berryman’s work by what I perceive as misogyny and racism.  That’s a big statement, so here’s my support for that view.

In part 1 of this series, I mentioned Dream Song 1, which introduced Henry, some of Henry’s problems, and the relentlessness of those problems — like waves beating down the shore.

But Dream Song 2 jumps right into affected blackface speak.

Offensive even when it was written (late fifties, early sixties) and I am sure Berryman knew he was being offensive and did not care. He was confessing his demons.

Therefore offense in the name of art or political statement is apparently OK.

What we should say is not that it is OK, but that it is protected.

Your right to be offensive is protected in this country. But your right to be offensive does not mean you have a right to no consequence of that offense. Nor that you have a right to be accepted in spite of your offensiveness.

The blackface speaker of the Dream Songs often functions as Henry’s conscience, his advisor, or the aspect of himself that realizes what he is doing and can name it. What reason Berryman needed to put that function into blackface, I can’t fathom. Nonetheless, he did so.

Dream Song 3?  Here’s your misogyny on a platter.

(–My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under

       things.

Well there’s a blow for inequality.

We can’t tell if the psychiatrist talk is about sex (lick) as it comes right on the heel of the “unkissed” in the line prior to it, or if it is more in the vein of “my dad’s bigger than your dad.” Knowing Berryman’s conscious effort and knowledge, I suspect he means both, a use of multiple meaning to make the poem do more and lean into meanings the lines otherwise would not mean.

But then what is with the “Women get under” and “things.”?

Women get under, coming after unkissed and can lick, surely cannot be meant to be non-sexual. Berryman meant all the meanings of the words he chose.  So women get under can be a directive to hide–and oughtn’t we, from these poems and this narrator in particular or anyone he represents? Or it can just be a statement, that’s what women do, they get under … the implication being the man — and then, after some hesitation, Henry/Bones/Berryman defaults to “things” — women should be more than sexually subjugated, they should be subject to “things.”

We can, maybe, take number 4 as a reaction to the misogyny and offensiveness of number 3.

You can listen to Berryman read this poem here.

Here we see Henry talking about a woman he considers beautiful (compact & delicious) eating chicken paprika who merely glances at him, twice. Henry for his part, is fainting with interest and would spring on her, or fall at her feet crying You are the hottest one…

Except her husband and four other people prevent him from doing so (presumably by their presence.)

The other person / personality present and speaking is Sir Bones, who comments that the world is stuffed with feeding girls. Henry considers the person beside her (not himself, because from his point of view she might as well be on Mars) a slob and asks …What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?

Then for a moment Henry becomes painfully aware of his abhorrent attitudes and says Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry. To which Mr Bones replies there is. (Note he has become Mr Bones instead of Sir Bones, somewhere between stanza 2 and 3.)

So we are only 4 poems in to the first 77, so far just 72 lines.  And look at what we have encountered.

On the one hand, Berryman has created almost a whole world in this small space. A man, his conscience / commentator, his drearyness, his weakness, his anger, his hatreds, his desires.  It really is masterfully created.

But one can very easily understand how Berryman felt a vehement need to deny that Henry represented any aspect of himself. Henry, he insisted, was a fictional white middle aged American sometimes in blackface who talks about himself in variant points of view, 1st, 2nd and 3rd person, who has an unnamed friend who calls him Mr Bones.

Methinks Berryman Doth Protest Too Much

Berryman would have been better off to just admit that Henry is an amalgam character, useful to show what Berryman saw going on in himself and, by way of exemplar, in society. Including some ugliness within himself. Including desperation. Including wrongheadedness. A character neither defensible nor wholly extricable from any one person–let alone the poet–but representing no single individual alone. One who stands as a metaphor for certain aspects of society.

And the poems of 77 Dream Songs do function in that way.

But if I recall my history of poets correctly, Berryman was nothing if not stubborn, and focused on his vision, and his vision alone. He had his story and he was sticking to it.

But 77 Dream Songs often rises above its issues

In the end, it is the misery of the depressed mind trying to right itself which has the most staying power. Which is the most compelling and, perhaps, instructive by way of providing warning through example.

These lines from the last stanza of number 67 say it all, don’t they?

I am obliged to perform in complete darkness

operations of great delicacy

on my self.

–Mr Bones, you terrifies me.

No wonder they don’t pay you. Will you die?

–My

               friend, I succeeded. Later.

From number 67 to the end of 77 Dream Songs, Henry’s fragile state of mind becomes more and more explicit:

From the end of 71

Came a day when none, though he began

in his accustomed way on the filthy steps

in a crash of waters, came.

 From 73

Elsewhere occurs–I remembers–loss.

 The first stanza of 74

Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry

did will not bear thought.

Feeling no pain,

Henry stabbed his arm and wrote a letter

explaining how bad it had been

in this world.

From the middle of 76, subtitled Henry’s Confession:

in a modesty of death I join my father

who dared so long agone leave me.

A bullet on a concrete stoop

close by a smothering southern sea

spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.

… which poem then ends…

–I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.

And finally from the end of 77, therefore ending the book:

thése fierce & airy occupations, and love,

raved away so many of Henry’s years

it is a wonder that, with in each hand

one of his own mad books and all,

ancient fires for eyes, his head full

& his heart full, he’s making ready to move on.

Berryman’s Henry presents a troubled figure from a troubled poet

I don’t promote the idea of artistic madness. The belief that to be truly genius one must be mad is pointedly false.  I also don’t believe that all true artists must be / are alcoholics.

In fact, what we see in Berryman, is a profound desire to create and to redeem himself, from and despite his state of mind.

Perhaps, one must encounter and/or create art to endure even the slightest of mental difficulty. That is, perhaps it art which opens the door to the chance at greater stability.

Berryman’s own depression and alcoholism “raved away” so much of his life — we can only imagine what he might have been able to achieve if there had been better ways for him to cope with his emotional state. By all accounts, we saw only a small part of his genius.

And aren’t we all slightly off-kilter?

Shouldn’t we all have art in our lives and hearts?

Berryman and the 2016 Election Season

I recognize I’ve put forth a not-very-positive spin upon the Dream Songs. This is in no way intended to impinge upon their artistic worth, which is high. 77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965 and the remainder of the Dream Songs, published in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. However…

If we cannot separate that which we value from that which we choose not to abide, we have lost our critical functionality.

At the risk of sounding like I am taking a political stance, let me note that the 2016 election season has been full of all-or-nothing statements. Each candidate is perfect and the other a wretch. Each policy will save or destroy the country. As a nation we have not admitted that very extreme positions rarely have the nuance to deal with real, day to day life.

I can admire the craft of Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs just as I despise some parts of the work within the book.

The ability to hold two partially compatible viewpoints in mind at the same time is akin to not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

As always, comments welcome.