John Berryman's short fiction: elegy and enlightenment

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

Awareness of a dead self and the desire for reinvigoration matters, for ultimately the teacher's challenge is not so much to conquer loss as it is to find self-significance, and this realization, importantly, is also central to his reading of the poem. In preparing for the class, he discovers that the various voices in "Lycidas" constitute "a sort of trial," and then questions why the poet would choose such a metaphor. Surprising himself with his own insight, he concludes that it must have been Milton's "own inquisition" that led to the analogy. Then, when teaching the poem, he calls attention to Milton's self-questioning: "In his crisis of discontent . . . . To what end, then: self-denial, labor, patience, wisdom even? King's had simply vanished, and so might his" (377). The professor's own discontent and urge for renewal are reflected in the series of questions he asks himself throughout the story: "What could change?" "Does anything happen?" "What were teachers if not shepherds?" "What could a one-hour class do to change what he had become?" "But how deserve such confidence, this privilege?" While these questions of himself are crucial to his spiritual rebirth, the questions of the students in the class are equally vital and serve to recreate the inquisition or trial the teacher sees in the poem.

On his way to class, the professor is described as feeling "like a defendant facing the last day of a suit that had so far gone well: anxious and confident, pacing out the final hour of his imputed, fantastic guilt" (376). Once in the classroom, his self-absorption fades as the students not only pose useful questions, but also offer insights that lead to further enlightenment, both of himself and the poem. His early teaching, when he and Hugh had been working in tandem, was "disorderly, quick, dialectical, free," and despite his careful preparation to teach "Lycidas," we witness the teacher surrendering some of his control in his give and take with the boys. Stunned by a young man's simple and honest question of whether the critics might be mistaken, he reflects: "Perhaps it was after all an honour to be a critic, or even a teacher. But how deserve such confidence, this privilege?' Another student offers a fresh reading of a fine, and the sense of liberation intensifies. The class is not without its slower members and inconsequential questions, but even these are dealt with deftly by the instructor. It is the sharper insights that jar him, causing him to question his own reading of key lines and passages, so much so that he forgets to impart what he refers to as the "lesson." All the better, for in prior years he and Hugh had never concerned themselves with a "lesson" or "message." By the end of the afternoon, after sitting long in his office following the class, "he had moved into the exacting conviction that he was . . . something . . . not dead" (Berryman's ellipses).

This element of discovery and enlightenment parallels that at the end of "The Imaginary Jew." Early in the story the professor had felt himself "doomed to the past or an unalterable present," and when visited by a student whose older brother - a former student of the professor's - had been lost in the war, he had asked himself "Does anything happen? Why yes . . . yes . . . students in yellow sweaters die" (Berryman's ellipses). But by the end of the story we sense that the protagonist has begun to move beyond his preoccupation with death, and has found an appropriate means of redirecting his energies (see Sacks 8-9). In the process of coping with loss, a rebirth of self has begun. Berryman repeatedly alludes in his unpublished papers to what he saw as a clear connection between loss and freedom, death and rebirth. In a 1958 draft with notes of an unpublished Dream Song to be called "The Art of the Woodman," he cast himself as the woodman, a "perennial synthesizer" who would unite the two major strains of the poem, "Enlight. - freedom" and "death - sacrifice," what Berryman saw as "the 2 supreme instants of human history" (Berryman's emphasis).(7) Plotting the themes and shape of the second volume of Dream Songs, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, he considered an alternate title of "His Tomb, His Dream, His Rest," and outlined the movement of the book as follows: "down - tomb"; "up - resurr."; "across - reconc."(8)