John Berryman's short fiction: elegy and enlightenment

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1993 by Ernest J. Smith

We might find one symbol, for a circumstance deeply in Amer[ican] art, in Emerson's wife. We hear that she cried at night, long, cried every night; while the sage poured into journals, lectures and quasi-essays his measureless and unseemly euphoria. Varying an American political demand, we might express our desire for an open grief, more openly arrived at.

The bulk of John Berryman's lifework, his poetry and the non-critical prose, revolves around the central theme of loss and regeneration, an acute openness to grief that may ultimately lead to enlightenment. The title of the largely autobiographical, posthumously published novel Recovery, which Berryman left unfinished at his death, suggests what the author essentially regarded as a lifelong project. While Recovery concerns alcoholism and its treatment, the "primal scene" that Berryman spent much of his life revisiting was the suicide of his father when he was 12.(2) This event figures prominently in Berryman's major poetic achievement, The Dream Songs, in which, amidst many poems addressed to the lost father, he also proved himself the major elegist of his generation. Among its 385 poems, The Dream Songs numbers memorable elegies for Roethke, Frost, Hemingway, Jarrell, Williams, Plath, and, at the heart of the sequence, a 12-song "solid block of agony" for Delmore Schwartz. Robert Lowell, in his own elegy for Berryman, acknowledged: "I used to want to live / to avoid your elegy." Naturally, Berryman's persona in his Dream Songs, Henry, is also a self-elegist, chronicling his own journey toward death and a subsequent rebirth.(3)

Largely unknown in comparison with the poetry, but available in his posthumous prose collection The Freedom of the Poet, are four short stories, each of which enacts what Berryman in his early lyric "The Ball Poem" called "the epistemology of loss."(4) In particular, two very accomplished stories, "The Imaginary Jew" and "Wash Far Away," employ the tone and conventions of elegy, the latter story centering on the very theme of elegy, with a protagonist who works through his own sense of loss while teaching Milton's "Lycidas." Berryman's other two stories, "All Their Colours Exiled" and "The Lovers," concern lost love. The first presents a brief account of a couple's divorce, related to the narrator by the ex-wife. Originally published in The Kenyon Review in 1945, "The Lovers" is a tender reflection on a boy's first love, also narrated in a retrospective first person. Not as distinctly elegiac as "The Imaginary Jew" or "Wash Far Away," the story nevertheless centers on loss, both of first love and innocence. The setting is a summer island, underscoring the sense of transience that pervades the narrative. But what gives the story its power and poignancy is the way in which the narrator's adolescent infatuation with a girl named Billie is at once mirrored and thrown into relief by a summer acquaintance's silent devotion to the boy's mother.

"The Lovers" begins with a description of this unnamed visitor, "sitting stretched at full length but hardly at case," listening to the boy's voluble father, but observing the mother. The boy, so captivated by Billie, is both unnerved and intrigued by the apparent aloofness of this man, who "appeared to stand somewhere else, apart." Like a character out of James, the friend observes the social decorum of this particular set where he has imposed himself, politely listening to the father's personal or political reminiscences, sipping his expensive whiskey, and suffering in silence. Watching him, the narrator recalls, "I thought sometimes I could see pain, or longing." The event that begins to jolt the boy out of his adolescent dreaminess occurs one day when the father asks the visitor for a political opinion, and is met with a short reply that politics is not one of his concerns. Asked what does concern him, he declares, "Work! - a wife, and work!" Something in the intensity of these words arrests the boy and haunts him for the remainder of the story. As he and Billie caress and explore in the darkness of her porch, he simultaneously gropes to comprehend a deeper realization beneath the surface of summer romance. An essential truth looms, but remains ungrasped.

What the quiet devotee ultimately teaches the naive narrator is the possibility of self-preservation amidst loss. The story culminates with the dress ball that ends summer on the island. Suffering a devastating sense of betrayal because of Billie's attention to other boys and casual attitude toward him, the young lover encounters his older counterpart, the family acquaintance. While he fails to recognize their parallel situations as excluded lovers, the boy receives a valuable lesson, unacknowledged at the time, in the dualism of love and loss. After remarking that the enigmatic friend is neither dancing nor in costume, the youth hears the older man explain that he wears a constant costume "against danger." Although Berryman never overtly directs the reader toward this conclusion, we are clearly meant to read the boy's experience as catalytic in bringing him to the threshold of a mature recognition. In a note on a draft of Dream Song 221, Berryman wrote "Let's have some ruin, then regeneration" (Berryman's emphasis), twin axes that inform all of his art, including the three stories considered here. The probing of loss for enlightenment - which determines point of view in "The Lovers" - is an ongoing process of examination reflected in a draft variant of the end of Dream Song 221: "in wars & loves when we lost ground, how shall / we find out - & get over - what it means?"(5)