John Berryman and the Thirties. - book reviews

National Review, June 24, 1988 by Jeffrey Meyers

KAFKAESQUE

JOHN BERRYMAN (1914-72) had a miserable childhood. He suffered from a weak father and a strong, seductive mother, and was haunted by nightmares of his parents' quarrels. To him, Martha Berryman was a monster who had driven her despised husband to suicide when John was 12--"i can't quite see my father; I don't know him"--and then focused her malign influence on himself. Mrs. Berryman devoured her son, an unwilling sexual substitute for his father, with an overwhelming passion.

This awkwardly titled but sensibly edited volume contains 228 of Berryman's more than seven hundred letters to his mother, written between 1928, when he was a student at South Kent School, and 1971, the year before he leaped to his death from a bridge across the Mississippi. These disappointing little "literary tirades" are filled with triumphs and complaints. They become increasingly fragmented as he rushes toward poetic fame, alcoholism, and mental breakdowns.

Martha Berryman encouraged her son's beliefs that suffering was necessary to produce great art and that the "genius" was free from the constraints of conventional behavior. He always had "a strong sense of impending nightmare" and confidently stated: "I do not expect ever to lack torment." His anguish engendered a style that was pared down to the bone and made the nerves of his readers jump at his command. His younger brother followed the disastrous family tradition with erratic employment, five wives, a horrendous car accident, and an infant son drowned in the bath.

Mrs. Berryman also encouraged John's egoism and self-pity, and competed with him in her ambitious business career. She had most of his vices, but none of his talent. She kept him captive, "grew increasingly possessive, manipulating, and demanding," and preyed on his weak, gloomy character --"a disagreeable compound of arrogance, selfishness, and impatience." He could not "bear to be crushed and obliterated under [her] stopless talking," and their meetings were inevitably harrowing. When they were apart he whined: "I had an abscessed tooth pulled & am exhausted & insomniac but otherwise fairly well"; "I was sweating & shaking very badly, w. great physical weakness, couldn't sleep or eat, tortured by remorse, brooding over my whole life, depressed." After one of their encounters he told her, "[I] tried twice to hang myself the night you left." Compared to Berryman's, Kafka's relationship with his mother was idyllic.

The three best, uncharacteristically impersonal letters vividly describe his youthful meeting with Yeats, his glimpse of the Pope during a Corpus Christi procession in Rome, and the personality of his newborn son. In 1937, two years before his death, Yeats appeared "taller than I thought and large; odd eyes in a great head; very weak now with heart asthma. . . . [He] gave me an impression of tremendous but querulous force, a wandering intensely personal mind." In St. Peter's in 1953, Pius XII "came toward us borne in his chair between aislebarriers. He waved his palms slowly toward himself, leaning slowly from side to side down over the chair-arms--so Italians wave--while the part of the throng near him shouted. It was all alarmingly informal." In 1957 Berryman's three-month-old son, like the poet himself, was "obstinate, fiercely demanding (& slow to forgive), has strong taste preferences . . . and still spends most of his waking time at visions, off somewhere, which he watches absorbedly."

BERRYMAN'S Columbia College friend E.M. Halliday--who is mentioned in the letters to Berryman's mother and whose friendship with the poet has been recounted in John Haffenden's biography--describes Mrs. Berryman as "a good-looking woman . . . always skillfully made-up, and she wore what impressed me as elegant if slightly bizarre costumes." But he does not mention her devastating impact on her son. Halliday includes excerpts from fifty Berryman letters, several unpublished poems, and many snapshots. Berryman's English fiancee, Beryl Eeman, discreetly disguised by an initial in the Letters, is named by Halliday; but he fails to identify Berryman's friend Pedro Donga, who is named in a photo-caption in the Letters. Though Berryman's jejune letters are not particularly perceptive, they do describe his friendship with his teacher Mark Van Doren, his earliest attempts at poetry, and the two years he spent at Cambridge University--the happiest of his life.

Halliday's trivial, superficial memoir, written in an excruciating artificial-jocular style, is largely concerned with the abortive gropings of sex-starved male virgins who discussed the mysterious location of the clitoris as if it were the source of the Nile. Berryman, tormented by the running sore of chastity, insisted, "We're going to fall in love with bitches, and we're going to be hurt." Halliday admits to embarrassing sexual mishaps with two willing-to-be-deflowered girls. During his first seduction, his drunken partner fell asleep and later asked if anything had actually happened.