John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, Part 3 of 3: Link Roundup
Here’s the third and final post in this series regarding Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. You can find Part 1 (Craft) and Part 2 (Content Connections) in earlier posts.
Lots of links for further reading and listening, but I warn you that the topics of depression, alcoholism and suicide will come up. Again.
But first, my rant.
The Internet Makes It Easy to Rubberneck
Isn’t the most respectful way to remember the dead to celebrate the positives they brought or achieved and use to good purpose the cautionary tales of their failures, excesses or negative traits? Maybe not every life is balanced. The positives may not balance the negatives. I’m not looking for neutral buoyancy here.
But, is the BBC interview with a drunken John Berryman really necessary? Or if valuable in a historical or biographical sense, is it useful to plop it out on the internet with little to no context? It’s unlikely that this is how Berryman would want to be remembered. He tried to get control of his alcoholism and depression, even through several hospitalizations. If he hadn’t cared to repair the difficulties of his life, he probably wouldn’t have tried to hard.
It’s a shame, really.
For him to be displayed this way. For anyone to be displayed this way.
No matter how many times people have commented that he is brilliant even drunk. Which says as much about us as about him.
If Berryman hadn’t been essentially hoping to start over, I don’t think he would have married so many times.
And, why with younger and younger coeds? Perhaps to recapture his first marriage–his wife was in college when they split? To get a do-over? Or, perhaps it was only girls of a certain age, with stars in their eyes, that found it possible to put up with his behavior. Because they expected to change him.
You have to be young enough, optimistic enough, and possibly self-deluded enough, to believe a situation will change when the only new variable is that you yourself are present.
So the whole situation is immensely sad. It’s not a pretty picture overall, so consider yourself warned if you click through all the links below.
The ruthless endurance of the internet…
Forget diamonds, electrons are forever. Even things not available initially on the internet have become available. The BBC interview is from 1967.
What if Berryman was alive today? How would it feel to have such horrible images of your behavior immortalized? Well, OK, he’d be 102 years old, so not likely this could happen, but just imagine. In today’s age of litigiousness, he might have a case against the BBC, especially with England’s stricter libel laws than what the US has (though perhaps not, depending if he signed a waiver, etc.). Or maybe he could use it to propel himself to higher celebrity status. In today’s environment, who knows? But the dead cannot be libeled.
So much of the internet comes without context. And people making a spectacle of themselves–past, present or future–draws the eye the same way a car accident on the side of the road draws the eye.
Imagine What He Could Have Accomplished
Just imagine what Berryman could have accomplished, how brilliant he could have been, if he could have coped better with his depression. What more amazing work could have followed on, looked back on, his Dream Songs?
What if he could have licked the alcoholism and had enough successful treatment for depression that he could see himself from the other side of the problem, as if coming out of a dark tunnel into the light.
Imagine if he could have seen himself as being, to his children, the father he always wanted to have, instead of seeing himself as the same as his own father, with all the damage thereof.
But whether treatment wasn’t available to him, the right kind or right approach, or whether he simply wouldn’t or couldn’t abide it, I don’t know.
The List Is Long
When you think of the poets (and writers and other creatives) that have committed suicide, it is a little startling how long the list is.
But of course there are so many others who suffer the same problems. Others who may or may not make it through treatment to something like equanimity.
Not being famous, not being literature-oriented, you don’t hear much about them, whether their successes or disappointments.
They don’t write about their struggles publicly. They don’t leave journals or creative work that get published. They don’t leave a trail of papers (electrons, now?) to follow. No one combs through the detritus of their life trying to understand them after the fact.
Unless they are celebrities, you don’t hear about them at all. They will neither show up drunk on BBC nor will we find much, if anything, they left as explanation. In the case of Berryman, we may not identify with, and may not like any explanation, but he left us the Dream Songs and other poems. And that will have to be explanation enough.
And perhaps it will be enough help to someone else. A mirror to what someone otherwise isn’t able to put into words. Telling the individual’s darkness as well as the light, unvarnished on both accounts, was an impetus of the confessional movement.
Telling the truth otherwise not told: of that, Berryman was a master.
John Berryman Biographical Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berryman
Berryman Reading Berryman & Links to Other Works
Also at the Poetry Foundation, links to over 40 of Berryman’s poems, several prose works he wrote about poetry and other poets, and several articles about Berryman or that reference Berryman’s influence on other poets, which are all listed on this page.
Commentary on Berryman
From a New Yorker piece by Henri Cole, 4/6/16, “My John Berryman, A Poet of Deep Unease” in which Cole says:
it is in part the pain of human voices (comical, sad, troubled, vulnerable, vehement, libidinous) that makes the dream songs still edgy and strange fifty years after they first appeared.
From the London Review of Books by August Kleinzahler, 7/2/15, “All The Girls Said So” in which Kleinzahler notes:
This was really the first generation of university poets, poets employed as scholars and lecturers instead of as physicians, farmers, bankers or insurance surety lawyers.
In other words, the first generation encouraged to live much of their lives inside their own heads.
From The Rumpus, 2011, by Helena Fitzgerald, “The Last Poem I Loved, Dream Song 29 by John Berryman” in which Fitzgerald says:
The Dream Songs are, at their best, incantations, syllables given to the unspeakable. And yet, here’s the really unsettling thing: They’re fun.
Reading the entirety of 77 Dream Songs in one go feels like spending a long, awful, legendary night crashing toward dawn on a bender with a highly self-destructive lover. You shouldn’t be having the time of your life, but you are. It’s awful and it’s horrible and you need to stop doing it right now and you never want to be doing anything else.
And I will give Fitzgerald the final word, excepting your comments of course:
The final line, nobody is ever missing, is instantly and hauntingly recognizable to any of us who have ever whispered “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right” to ourselves under our breath when it was not in fact at all all right.
Comments welcomed.