The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman
Peter Stitt / 1970
Conducted October 27 and 29, 1970. Published in Paris Review 53 (1972): 177â207. Reprinted in Berrymanâs Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, edited by Harry Thomas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 18â44. Reprinted by permission.
Peter Stittâs introduction: On a Sunday afternoon in late July 1970, John Berryman gave a reading of his poems in a small âpeopleâs parkâ in Minneapolis near the west bank campus of the University of Minnesota. Following the reading, I reintroduced myselfâwe hadnât seen each other since I was his student, eight years earlierâand 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. Maryâs 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 âa marvelous time.â A trip to upstate New York for a reading followed, and by early October he was back at St. Maryâs. 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 subjectâthus, 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 Berrymanâs 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.
âRoger Forseth, âSpirits and Spirituality,â 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 donât think there are any generalizations at all. If a writer gets hot early, then his work ought to become known early. If it doesnât, he is in danger of feeling neglected. We take it that all young writers overestimate their work. Itâs impossible not toâI mean if you recognized what shit you were writing, you wouldnât write it. You have to believe in your stuffâevery 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 troubleâand 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, canât 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 sideâmuch as Joseph Conrad did. A reporter asked him once about reviews, and he said, âI donât read my reviews. I measure them.â Now, until I was about thirty-five years old, I not only didnât read my reviews, I didnât measure them, I never even looked at them. That is so peculiar that close friends of mine wouldnât believe me when I told them. I thought that was indifference, but now Iâm convinced that it was just that I had no skin onâyou 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 thirtiesâfully matureâHopkins, one of the great poets of the century, and Bridges, awfully good. Hopkins with no audience and Bridges with thirty readers. He says, âFame in itself is nothing. The only thing that matters is virtue. Jesus Christ is the only true literary critic. But,â he said, âfrom any lesser level or standard than that, we must recognize that fame is the true and appointed setting of men of genius.â 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 exceptionsâChatterton, Hopkins, of course, Rimbaud, you can think of various casesâbut 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: âIf Berryman is not Americaâs finest living poet, then he is surely running a close second to Lowellâ?
Berryman: Well, I donât know. I donât 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: Thatâs true. More in Frostâs 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 EnglishmenâKermode and Alvarez. Of course, thatâs just a special caseâten years ago it was different, but our people have died or stopped practicing criticism. We couldnât put out a thing like the Times Literary Supplement. We just donât have it. Education at the elite level is better in England, humanistic educationânever mind technical education, where we are superior or at least equalâbut Cambridge, Oxford, London, and now the redbrick universities provide a much higher percentage of intelligent readers in the populationâthe 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, donât have to stand out very far. In our culture, we also, of course, have good readers, but not as high a percentageâand 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 âconfessionalâ?
Berryman: Well, theyâre about her and me. I donât know. The word doesnât mean anything. I understand the confessional to be a place where you go and talk with a priest. I personally havenât been to confession since I was twelve years old.
Interviewer: You once said: âI masquerade as a writer. Actually I am a scholar.â At another time you pointed out that your passport gives your occupation as âAuthorâ and not âTeacher.â 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 Iâm 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 donât know. Schwartz once asked me why it was that all my Shakespearean study had never showed up anywhere in my poetry, and I couldnât answer the question. It was a piercing question because his early poems are really very much influenced by Shakespeareâs 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 donât agree with that. One of the Dream Songs, one of those written to the memory of Delmore Schwartzâlet me see if I can find it. Here, number 147. These lines [recites the first four lines from âDream Song 147â; see The Dream Songs, p. 166]. That sounds very Shakespearean to me.
Berryman: That sounds like Troilus and Cressida, doesnât 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 Englishâwhat 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 wouldnât otherwise have been, and, since I am a scholar, these things are connected. I make myself acquainted with the scholarship. Suppose Iâm lecturing on Augustine. My Latin is very rusty, but Iâll pay a certain amount of attention to the Latin text in the Loeb edition, with the English across the page. Then Iâll 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 donât 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 Merwinâmy studentsâand others, and itâs delightful to be of service to somebody. But most of them have very little talent, and you canât overencourage them; thatâs impossible. Many of my friends teach creative writing. Iâm not putting it down, and it certainly is an honest way of earning a living, but I wouldnât 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 didnât take me very far, because by the time I was writing really well, in 1948âthatâs the beginning of the Bradstreet poem and the last poems in the collection called The Dispossessedâthere 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 Crèvecoeurâhe conned me. He took all his best stuff from Apollinaire, whom I hadnât then read, and swept me off my feet. I wrote a poem called âNarcissus Moving,â which is as much like Aragon as possible, and maybe itâs just as bad. I donât know. Then the Bradstreet poemâit is not easy to see the literary ancestry of that poem. Who has been named? Hopkins. I donât 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 âThe Wreck of the Deutschland.â I donât see that. I have never read âThe Wreck of the Deutschland,â to tell you the truth, except the first stanza. Wonderful first stanza. But I really just couldnât get onto it. Itâs a set piece, and I donât like set pieces. Iâll bet itâs no goodâwell, you know, not comparable with the great short poems. Then Lowell has been named. I see the influence of Lord Wearyâs Castle in some of the later poems in The Dispossessed. Thereâs 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 canât think, offhandâI havenât read it in many yearsâof 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 donât 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 doâhe would collect himself and write a masterpiece, then relax for several years writing prose, earning a living, and so forth; then heâd 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. Itâs a very strange career. Veryâa 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, didnât you?
Berryman: Pretty well, pretty well. We werenât close friends.
Interviewer: Any influence there?
Berryman: No. And thatâs ...