Conversations with John Berryman

Eric Hoffman

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781496826336
  9781496826343
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496831453
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The poetry of John Berryman (1914–1972) is primarily concerned with the self in response to the rapid social, political, sexual, racial, and technological transformations of the twentieth century, and their impact on the psyche and spirit, both individual and collective. He was just as likely to find inspiration in his local newspaper as he was from the poetry of Hopkins or Milton. In fact, in contrast to the popular perception of Berryman drunkenly composing strange, dreamlike, abstract, esoteric poems, Berryman was intensely aware of craft. His best work routinely utilizes a variety of rhetorical styles, shifting effortlessly from the lyric to the prosaic. For Berryman, poetry was nothing less than a vocation, a mission, and a way of life. Though he desired fame, he acknowledged its relative unimportance when he stated that the "important thing is that your work is something no one else can do." As a result, Berryman very rarely granted interviews—"I teach and I write, " he explained, "I'm not copy"—yet when he did the results were always captivating. Collected in Conversations with John Berryman are all of Berryman's major interviews, personality pieces, profiles, and local interest items, where interviewers attempt to unravel him, as both Berryman and his interlocutors struggle to find value in poetry in a fallen world.

The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman

Peter Stitt / 1970

Conducted October 27 and 29, 1970. Published in Paris Review 53 (1972): 177–207. Reprinted in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, edited by Harry Thomas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 18–44. Reprinted by permission.

Peter Stitt’s introduction: On a Sunday afternoon in late July 1970, John Berryman gave a reading of his poems in a small “people’s park” in Minneapolis near the west bank campus of the University of Minnesota. Following the reading, I reintroduced myself—we hadn’t seen each other since I was his student, eight years earlier—and we spent the afternoon in conversation at his house. He had had a very bad winter, he explained, and had spent much of the spring in the extended-care ward at St. Mary’s Hospital. I asked him about doing an interview. He agreed, and we set up an appointment for late October.

Berryman spent a week in Mexico at the end of the summer and had “a marvelous time.” A trip to upstate New York for a reading followed, and by early October he was back at St. Mary’s. It was there that the interview was conducted, during visiting hours on the twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth of October.

He looked much better than he had during the summer, was heavier and more steady on his feet. He again smoked and drank coffee almost continually. The room was spacious, and Berryman was quite at home in it. In addition to the single bed, it contained a tray table that extended over the bed, a chair, and two nightstands, one of which held a large AM-FM radio and the usual hospital accoutrements. Books and papers covered the other nightstand, the table, and the broad windowsill.

Berryman was usually slow to get going on an answer, as he made false starts looking for just the right words. Once he started talking, he would continue until he had exhausted the subject—thus, some of his answers are very long. This method left unasked questions, and the most important of these were mailed to him later for written answers. In contrast to the taped answers, the written answers turned out to be brief, flat, and even dull. (These have been discarded.) By way of apology, he explained that he was again devoting his energies almost entirely to writing poetry.

An edited typescript of the interview was sent him in January 1971. He returned it in March, having made very few changes. He did supply some annotations, and these have been left as he put them.

One notices Berryman’s fascination with the term delusion. It occurs, like a liturgical refrain … in his last volume of poems, in his annotations to his Paris Review interview, and in dozens of places throughout Recovery. It is the Gloria Patri of the drunk in treatment.
—Roger Forseth, “Spirits and Spirituality,” 250

Interviewer: Mr. Berryman, recognition came to you late in comparison with writers like Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz. What effect do you think fame has on a poet? Can this sort of success ruin a writer?

John Berryman: I don’t think there are any generalizations at all. If a writer gets hot early, then his work ought to become known early. If it doesn’t, he is in danger of feeling neglected. We take it that all young writers overestimate their work. It’s impossible not to—I mean if you recognized what shit you were writing, you wouldn’t write it. You have to believe in your stuff—every day has to be the new day on which the new poem may be it. Well, fame supports that feeling. It gives self-confidence, it gives a sense of an actual, contemporary audience, and so on. On the other hand, unless it is sustained, it can cause trouble—and it is very seldom sustained. If your first book is a smash, your second book gets kicked in the face, and your third book, and lots of people, like Delmore, can’t survive that disappointment. From that point of view, early fame is very dangerous indeed, and my situation, which was so painful to me for many years, was really in a way beneficial.

I overestimated myself, as it turned out, and felt bitter, bitterly neglected; but I had certain admirers, certain high judges on my side from the beginning, so that I had a certain amount of support. Moreover, I had a kind of indifference on my side—much as Joseph Conrad did. A reporter asked him once about reviews, and he said, “I don’t read my reviews. I measure them.” Now, until I was about thirty-five years old, I not only didn’t read my reviews, I didn’t measure them, I never even looked at them. That is so peculiar that close friends of mine wouldn’t believe me when I told them. I thought that was indifference, but now I’m convinced that it was just that I had no skin on—you know, I was afraid of being killed by some remark. Oversensitivity. But there was an element of indifference in it, and so the public indifference to my work was countered with a certain amount of genuine indifference on my part, which has been very helpful since I became a celebrity. Auden once said that the best situation for a poet is to be taken up early and held for a considerable time and then dropped after he has reached the level of indifference.

Something else is in my head; a remark of Father Hopkins to Bridges. Two completely unknown poets in their thirties—fully mature—Hopkins, one of the great poets of the century, and Bridges, awfully good. Hopkins with no audience and Bridges with thirty readers. He says, “Fame in itself is nothing. The only thing that matters is virtue. Jesus Christ is the only true literary critic. But,” he said, “from any lesser level or standard than that, we must recognize that fame is the true and appointed setting of men of genius.” That seems to me appropriate. This business about geniuses in neglected garrets is for the birds. The idea that a man is somehow no good just because he becomes very popular, like Frost, is nonsense, also. There are exceptions—Chatterton, Hopkins, of course, Rimbaud, you can think of various cases—but on the whole, men of genius were judged by their contemporaries very much as posterity judges them. So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

Interviewer: What is your reaction to such comments as: “If Berryman is not America’s finest living poet, then he is surely running a close second to Lowell”?

Berryman: Well, I don’t know. I don’t get any frisson of excitement back here, and my bank account remains the same, and my view of my work remains the same, and in general I can say that everything is much the same after that is over.

Interviewer: It seems that you, along with Frost and several other American writers, were appreciated earlier in England than in America.

Berryman: That’s true. More in Frost’s case. Stephen Crane is another. Interviewer: Why do you think this is true?

Berryman: I wonder. The literary cultures are still very different. Right this minute, for example, the two best reviewers of poetry in English, and perhaps the only two to whom I have paid the slightest attention, are both Englishmen—Kermode and Alvarez. Of course, that’s just a special case—ten years ago it was different, but our people have died or stopped practicing criticism. We couldn’t put out a thing like the Times Literary Supplement. We just don’t have it. Education at the elite level is better in England, humanistic education—never mind technical education, where we are superior or at least equal—but Cambridge, Oxford, London, and now the redbrick universities provide a much higher percentage of intelligent readers in the population—the kind of people who listen to the Third Programme and read the Times Literary Supplement. They are rather compact and form a body of opinion from which the reviewers, both good and mediocre, don’t have to stand out very far. In our culture, we also, of course, have good readers, but not as high a percentage—and they are incredibly dispersed geographically. It makes a big difference.

Interviewer: You, along with Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and several others, have been called a confessional poet. How do you react to that label?

Berryman: With rage and contempt! Next question.

Interviewer: Are the sonnets “confessional”?

Berryman: Well, they’re about her and me. I don’t know. The word doesn’t mean anything. I understand the confessional to be a place where you go and talk with a priest. I personally haven’t been to confession since I was twelve years old.

Interviewer: You once said: “I masquerade as a writer. Actually I am a scholar.” At another time you pointed out that your passport gives your occupation as “Author” and not “Teacher.” How do your roles as teacher and scholar affect your role as poet?

Berryman: Very, very hard question. Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvelous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar. And I’m about equally interested in those two activities. In him they are perfectly distinct. You are dealing with an absolute schizophrenic. In me they seem closer together, but I just don’t know. Schwartz once asked me why it was that all my Shakespearean study had never showed up anywhere in my poetry, and I couldn’t answer the question. It was a piercing question because his early poems are really very much influenced by Shakespeare’s early plays. I seem to have been sort of untouched by Shakespeare, although I have had him in my mind since I was twenty years old.

Interviewer: I don’t agree with that. One of the Dream Songs, one of those written to the memory of Delmore Schwartz—let me see if I can find it. Here, number 147. These lines [recites the first four lines from “Dream Song 147”; see The Dream Songs, p. 166]. That sounds very Shakespearean to me.

Berryman: That sounds like Troilus and Cressida, doesn’t it? One of my very favorite plays. I would call that Shakespearian. Not to praise it, though, only in description. I was half-hysterical writing that song. It just burst onto the page. It took only as long to compose as it takes to write it down.

Interviewer: Well, that covers scholarship. How about teaching? Does teaching only get in the way of your work as a poet?

Berryman: It depends on the kind of teaching you do. If you teach creative writing, you get absolutely nothing out of it. Or English—what are you teaching? People you read twenty years ago. Maybe you pick up a little if you keep on preparing, but very few people keep on preparing. Everybody is lazy, and poets, in addition to being lazy, have another activity which is very demanding, so they tend to slight their teaching. But I give courses in the history of civilization, and when I first began teaching here I nearly went crazy. I was teaching Christian origins and the Middle Ages, and I had certain weak spots. I was okay with the Divine Comedy and certain other things, but I had an awful time of it. I worked it out once, and it took me nine hours to prepare a fifty-minute lecture. I have learned much more from giving these lecture courses than I ever learned at Columbia or Cambridge. It has forced me out into areas where I wouldn’t otherwise have been, and, since I am a scholar, these things are connected. I make myself acquainted with the scholarship. Suppose I’m lecturing on Augustine. My Latin is very rusty, but I’ll pay a certain amount of attention to the Latin text in the Loeb edition, with the English across the page. Then I’ll visit the library and consult five or six old and recent works on St. Augustine, who is a particular interest of mine anyway. Now all that becomes part of your equipment for poetry, even for lyric poetry. The Bradstreet poem is a very learned poem. There is a lot of the theology in it, there is a lot of theology in The Dream Songs. Anything is useful to a poet. Take observation of nature, of which I have absolutely none. It makes possible a world of moral observation for Frost, or Hopkins. So scholarship and teaching are directly useful to my activity as a writer.

Interviewer: But not the teaching of creative writing. You don’t think there is any value in that for you as a poet.

Berryman: I enjoy it. Sometimes your kids prove awfully good. Snodgrass is well known now, and Bill Merwin—my students—and others, and it’s delightful to be of service to somebody. But most of them have very little talent, and you can’t overencourage them; that’s impossible. Many of my friends teach creative writing. I’m not putting it down, and it certainly is an honest way of earning a living, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a poet. It is better to teach history or classics or philosophy of the kind of work I do here in humanities.

Interviewer: You have given Yeats and Auden as early influences on your poetry. What did you learn from them?

Berryman: Practically everything I could then manipulate. On the other hand, they didn’t take me very far, because by the time I was writing really well, in 1948—that’s the beginning of the Bradstreet poem and the last poems in the collection called The Dispossessed—there was no Yeats around and no Auden. Some influences from Rilke, some influence from a poet whom I now consider very bad, Louis Aragon, in a book called Crèvecoeur—he conned me. He took all his best stuff from Apollinaire, whom I hadn’t then read, and swept me off my feet. I wrote a poem called “Narcissus Moving,” which is as much like Aragon as possible, and maybe it’s just as bad. I don’t know. Then the Bradstreet poem—it is not easy to see the literary ancestry of that poem. Who has been named? Hopkins. I don’t see that. Of course there are certain verbal practices, but on the whole, not. The stanza has been supposed to be derived from the stanza of “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” I don’t see that. I have never read “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” to tell you the truth, except the first stanza. Wonderful first stanza. But I really just couldn’t get onto it. It’s a set piece, and I don’t like set pieces. I’ll bet it’s no good—well, you know, not comparable with the great short poems. Then Lowell has been named. I see the influence of Lord Weary’s Castle in some of the later poems in The Dispossessed. There’s no doubt about it. In the Bradstreet poem, as I seized inspiration from Augie March, I sort of seized inspiration, I think, from Lowell, rather than imitated him. I can’t think, offhand—I haven’t read it in many years—of a single passage in the Bradstreet poem which distinctly sounds like Lowell. However, I may be quite wrong about this, since people have named him. Other people, I don’t think so.

Interviewer: How about Eliot? You must have had to reckon with Eliot in one way or another, positively or negatively.

Berryman: My relationship with Eliot was highly ambiguous. In the first place, I refused to meet him on three occasions in England, and I think I mentioned this in one of the poems I wrote last spring. I had to fight shy of Eliot. There was a certain amount of hostility in it, too. I only began to appreciate Eliot much later, after I was secure in my own style. I now rate him very high. I think he is one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Only sporadically good. What he would do—he would collect himself and write a masterpiece, then relax for several years writing prose, earning a living, and so forth; then he’d collect himself and write another masterpiece, very different from the first, and so on. He did this about five times, and after the Four Quartets he lived for twenty years. Wrote absolutely nothing. It’s a very strange career. Very—a pure system of spasms. My career is like that. It is horribly like that. But I feel deep sympathy, admiration, and even love for Eliot over all the recent decades.

Interviewer: You knew Dylan Thomas pretty well, didn’t you?

Berryman: Pretty well, pretty well. We weren’t close friends.

Interviewer: Any influence there?

Berryman: No. And that’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Poet, Editor, Teacher—Looks Forward to Own Book
• The State of American Writing, 1948: Seven Questions
• Read a Book of Verse at Least Once a Year, Lecturer Urges
• Homage to Mr. Berryman
• Around the Town
• John Berryman on Today’s Literature
• Song of a Poet: John Berryman
• One Answer to a Question: Changes
• My Whiskers Fly: An Interview with John Berryman
• Interview with John Berryman
• Whisky & Ink, Whisky & Ink
• Pulitzer Prize Poet Visiting at Trinity This Week
• Berryman and Tate: Poets Extraordinaire
• Berryman Ends Poem of Thirteen Years
• An Interview with John Berryman
• Poetry Was Once Nonsense to Berryman
• Conversation with Berryman
• People Individuals with Values: Poet John B. Talks about Life, War, Death
• A Memoir and an Interview
• The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman
• A Truly Gentle Man Tightens and Paces: An Interview with John Berryman
• Who Killed Henry Pussy-cat? I Did, Says John Berryman with Love and a Poem and for Freedom
• Appendix: A Recommended Selected Berryman
• Works on John Berryman
• About the Editor