John Berryman - The Selected Letters of John Berryman

I think that in letters, as in no other form of writing, the man appears.

John Berryman, unpublished essay written at Columbia College, spring 1934

THE EARLIEST LETTER in this volume was written in September 1925, by a young boy who signed himself John Allynnot yet the poet who would become known as John Berryman. Sent to his parents, John and Martha Smith, the letter is formal, dutifully detailed, and determined to reassure them that their son is having funeven though he clearly misses them. His account of life at boarding school concludes: I love you too much to talk about. Slightly less than a year later, in June 1926, he was forced to confront the death of his father. The letters gathered here speak to that loss on many occasions (as when he writes in 1955 to Saul Bellow, my father died for me all over again last week). This strand of Berrymans storyof early loss, entangled with the depression, guilt, and alcoholism present for much of his lifeis familiar to most readers of his poems, and the letters references to what he called plights & gripes in Dream Song 14 can be wry, proud, and desperate, by turns. In August 1948, Berryman tells James Laughlin, Im happy Pound seems bettermaybe he & I can change places. Several weeks into a March 1967 hospital stay, he tells Arthur Crook of the Times Literary Supplement that I am a wreck, but Sir a gorgeous wreck. Writing to Ann Levine in the fall of 1964, he declares that a series of recent illnesses is simply my mind tearing my body to pieces with anxiety. While these letters delineate periods of immense stress, they also show an affectionate son, brother, partner, parent, and mentor, and they chart Berrymans development as one of the most original poets of his generation.

Berrymans letters began appearing in print several decades ago. We Dream of Honour, a generous selection of his letters to his mother, was published in 1988, edited by Richard J. Kelly. Other letters have been quoted in biographies by John Haffenden (1982) and Paul Mariani (1990); in E. M. Hallidays memoir, John Berryman and the Thirties (1987); and in Haffendens Berrymans Shakespeare (1999). This book represents the first wide-ranging selection from Berrymans correspondence. There are letters here to almost two hundred people, including editors, fellowship committees, family members, academic colleagues, and students who would themselves become well-known writers, such as Edward Hoagland, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Trueblood. As a sophomore at Columbia in 1934, beginning an essay on Horace Walpole, Berryman asserted that letters had a special capacity to reveal a persons character, but he tended to take a dim view of his own correspondence. I hate letters, he says to E. M. Halliday in September 1936, before going on to list everything he would discuss with his friend if they could meet in person (poetry, esp. mine & Yeats ; drama, esp. yours & Shakespeares). At such times, he seems to see letters as lacking the lively give-and-take of actual conversation; at others, he seems troubled by how much a letter might disclose. Writing to Eileen Mulligan in the spring of 1942, he declares that I have developed a habit of fulness in communication with you which does not let me appear much less disagreeable on paper than I am in person.

Many of Berrymans letters are short and practical. It is perhaps surprising that he found time to write as many letters as he did; he took on projects constantly (variously driven by aspirations, dedication, and financial exigencies), and put an enormous amount of energy into them. By 1928, at South Kent School in Connecticut, he was sending his family short stories and comic essays; a December 1930 letter to his mother refers to the student newspaper The Pigtail, on whose editorial board he served. By the other end of the 1930s, he would be poetry editor for The Nation. The letters he sent as Nation editor reveal a conscientious if at times downright cranky reader of contributors work: he could be passionately encouraging and insightful, or curt and dismissive. Later in his career, when he was no longer involved with magazines as a named editor, Berryman continued to be troubled by literatures place in American culture, as evident in a 1947 letter to Walter Stewart proposing the establishment of a literary review: a new, authoritative instrument of documentation and enquiry. Late letters show him requesting books on art history and philosophy, trying to organize a repeat of the 1962 National Poetry Festival, compiling an anthology, and drafting a long poem entitled The Children. Writing to his friend and former professor Mark Van Doren in 1971, he compares himself with A. E. Housman, who had what Berryman calls a really bifurcated personality, but Berryman himself appears not so much divided as overextended when he moves between the activities of editing and researching (on topics ranging from the identity of Mr. W. H. to The Historical Personality of Christ), grading papers and revising poems. His letters document a literary drive visible whether he is working on someone elses writing or on his own manifestly hard-won poems. Robert Lowell pointed to this quality in his elegy for Berryman: We asked to be obsessed with writing, / and we were.