So may be Henry was a human being.
Let’s investigate that.
… We did; okay.
He is a human American man.
That’s true. My lass is braking.
My brass is aching. Come & diminish me, & map my way.

God’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in business… Why,
what business must be clear.
A cornering.
I couldn’t feel more like it. — Mr. Bones,
as I look on the saffron sky,
you strikes me as ornery.

Preamble: ‘We’re in business.’ Dogged readers will recall that this entire Substack began with a quotation from DS13. It is a crucial poem. Despite the inconsistent use of markers – the absence of either quotation marks or dashes, until the final minstrel interjection – it is a poem of dialogue, a wrestling between various positions and feelings. Much of its agony is characteristic of the rest of the book, but some of it is performed here for the first time. Certainly, ‘God’ has only appeared once before, fleetingly (‘At odds wif de world & its god’, DS5), but God – as the book understands Him – is a significant, even central, feature of 77DS.

The music: As in DS11, there is a rhyme scheme in which two lines in each stanza do not rhyme with each other. Internal rhymes – rat, thatch, much. Braking, aching. Lass, brass. Lots of ‘in’ and ‘ing’. Repetitions: Henry (four times), God (twice), human (twice). The poem is heavier on assonance than alliteration, though there is a lovely hum of m’s across ‘Come and diminish me and map my way’. The rhythm never settles. Much of the poem’s vigour comes from the drama of its voices, the contradictions and qualifications of its exchanges.

God, and other people:

‘God bless Henry.’

‘Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God’
(‘Carrion Comfort’, Gerard Manley Hopkins)

‘besides a sense of others, my God, my God,
and a jealousy for the honour (alive) of his country’
(DS26)

Berryman was a massive G. M. Hopkins fan, noting admiringly his ability to commingle ‘vigour & fatigue, confidence & despair, the elegant & the blunt, the bright & the dry’. (Combinations which we also, and not coincidentally, find in 77DS.) His love of Hopkins is attested to in the scholarship, but even if we stick solely within Inner Resources it is quite obvious: there are some flagrant allusions or pastiches in 77DS, and I would argue that there is also homage even (especially) at the syntactical level.

And, like Hopkins, Berryman dramatizes religious doubt, the wrestling with despair, a sense of wanting a relationship with God but feeling estranged. There are three really outstanding poets of religious doubt in the English canon – George Herbert, G. M. Hopkins, and Geoffrey Hill – and they all share the same initials. Can we add to that list the name of … Giovanni Henryman? (No.)

There are times in 77DS when Berryman quite consciously uses a phrase that sounds colloquial (for example ‘my God!’ in DS48, and ‘Christ!’ in DS46) but swiftly reveals it to have been sincerely theological. So it is with ‘God bless Henry’. It seems a merely fond and chatty opening, and is almost immediately forgotten in the welter of half-defended abjection and objectification that follows; but in stanza 3 it is retrospectively shown to be a real plea. For the phrase ‘God’s Henry’s enemy’ arrives unexpectedly, forcefully, as a revelation: and it surely means that the prayed-for blessing has been withheld or denied. The seriousness of the line is immediately reinforced – ‘We’re in business’. As if to say: finally, it’s in the open, let’s go. It is as if the shadowy persecutory agents of the preceding poems are now unmasked. We have seen the enemy, and it is God.

Plenty of commentators have related Henry to the Biblical figure of Job, and a number have explored the relevance of Kierkegaard. Even if Kierkegaard wasn’t explicitly referenced (in DS53) I would have wanted to mention him; the existential dread and despair of DS77 feel very Kierkegaardian indeed. Uncharacteristic digression: As a teenager I studied, for A-level, ‘Liberal Protestant theology from Schleiermacher to Bultmann’. A remarkable course, I now realize. The man who taught it was a chaplain who had studied philosophy, and fearlessly introduced a bunch of 16-18 year-olds to Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Tillich, Buber, and so on, and right up to Don Cupitt and Mary Daly. What an education: way over our heads, but of ceaselessly growing long-term value for me. (In retrospect, only one teacher at that school has had more of an impact on me: an English teacher who I know is reading this Substack, and to whom, neither for the first nor the last time, I would like to offer my profound gratitude and admiration.) Anyway, the whole tendency of that theological tradition, as far as I could make out, was to reinterpret Hell not as a place but as a state of estrangement.

Furthermore, the phrase ‘God bless Henry’ also invokes the famous song ‘God bless America’. Henry, as we have seen, and will see repeatedly, is sometimes Everyman (‘He is a human American man’), and is nearly always unhappy with that fact (‘diminish me’). Henry’s ambivalence about his country and what it represents, and his ambivalence about enjoying a sense of belonging while maintaining his individuality, are hard to disentangle from his sense of being unreconciled with God. I think this is precisely what Berryman portrays in 77DS: the hellish brain of a man estranged from both God and humanity.

To Hell then will it maul me […]?
I dare say not.
I don’t thínk there’s that place

save sullen here, wherefrom she flies tonight […] (DS57)

The first mention of God in the book, as we noted above, is the line ‘At odds wif de world & its god’ in DS5. World and God are often proximate in 77DS, just as brain and Hell are. At his most abject, Henry feels less than human (a word used seven times in 77DS). Hence, in defending himself, there is an emphasis on sticking around, not deserting, hence pity: things that connect Henry to other people. So, maybe (or ‘may be’ as he pointedly has it) he can become a human being. (Ophelia, in Hamlet: ‘Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be’.)

And other animals: Speaking of not feeling human… ‘He lived like a rat.’ The longer I have thought about it, the more this line has intrigued me . ‘Like a rat’? What does he mean? Which particular facet of a rat’s habitat or behaviour or life cycle is he referencing? Squalor, poverty, cunning, survival? (Communal living?) There is surely some sense of untrustworthiness, the resonance of ‘rat’ as a betrayer, a low-down, dirty rat; hence the quick qualifications, ‘not a coward’ and ‘never deserted anything’. But if he is not that sort of rat, what sort of rat is he? And though the question seems to be set aside, it arguably returns later.

‘With a thatch of hair on his head / In the beginning’: We linked hair-loss to castration in DS8, but here I think we can eschew the Freudian. It is simply age, surely; he had a lovely thatch of hair earlier, but now… (Not, one notes, ‘from an early age’ or ‘in his youth’, but the more calculatedly biblical ‘in the beginning’. ) And it’s not sudden hair loss (in DS8 the hair was decisively ‘halved’), but slow; the word ‘thinning’ in line 6 is applied to ‘pity’, but without doubt is meant also to link back to ‘hair’. This is a poem not of abrupt severance but of gradual diminishment.

Let’s investigate that: At first, it is all in the past tense, rather strangely, as if an obituary or an autopsy – ‘may be Henry was a human being’. But on examination he is a ‘human American man’. That examination introduces another voice, the impersonal and sinister voice we found in DS8, where it subjected Henry to indignities. Here it is simply and reductively wrapping Henry up, in the broadest identifying terms of nationality and sex, as on a passport.

What would a non-human or less than human American man be? In a book aware of racial inequalities and injustices, in a poem where the minstrel dialogue reappears for the first time since the lynchings of DS10, one answer to that question is surely ticking away underneath.

Outer Resources: Berryman later described Henry as ‘a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss.’ Shane Macrae, in his intro to Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, makes the astute remark that

With Henry’s verbal blackface, Berryman externalizes the racial anxieties of the white, mid-century American. And he seems to do so consciously. As seen above, in his introductory note to The Dream Songs, Berryman made a point of indicating that Henry is white—he wanted his readers to keep that in mind; in the context of the introductory note, he did not allow whiteness to be a default position …

Has anyone seen my screwdriver? ‘My lass is braking. / My brass is aching’ suggests the usual sexual anxiety, and chimes with the lines I quoted from DS57 above (‘wherefrom she flies tonight’), which continue ‘retrieving her whole body, which I need’. As we have seen from DS1 onwards, ‘world’ and ‘lover’ are constantly confused in 77DS; and so, in poems otherwise concerned with his relation to God and humankind, horny Henry is still bothered enough to worry in passing about not getting laid.

There is, though, another reading of these lines in the work of [Legendary Chief Berrymaniac] John Haffenden; a reading, I confess, which I am utterly unconvinced by; or rather, I am quite sure it is what Berryman meant, but I am equally sure that no innocent reader could see it that way. But, since we’re ‘here’, let’s do it:

Outer Resources:

My lass is braking. My ass is aching. (ll. 11–12)

Social and scientific research is satirised by allusion to the story of a man from Hamburg in Germany (although Berryman always associated the story with Unter den Linden) who sat contemplating his navel; eventually, unable to resist his enquiring mentality, he applied a screwdriver to the object of his gaze, whereupon his ‘ass fell off!’

[…] The very idea of Henry being a ‘human American’ is mocked by association with the story of a German whose investigative mind makes a machine of him. Berryman diminished his original phrase ‘my ass is breaking’ to the doggerel of the finished version in order to enforce the imprecation.

John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary (1980)

I’m sorry, but no reader even if they knew that story, could make that link. Even if ‘ass’ had not become ‘brass’. You need at the very least a screwdriver and a navel for this to be an allusion. A far better interpretation is the one I provided. I am, of course, open to others.

Fighting talk: ‘Come and diminish me and map my way’: To me, it is quite obvious that Henry does not mean this. It is weary sarcasm. Every fibre of 77DS suggests that even at his most beleaguered, Henry always has some fight left in him: and so the last stanza will prove. (In DS25 there is a very similar version of this in which Henry again sarcastically ventriloquises the enemy – ‘wipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us’ – and the parallels do not end there.)

‘Cornering’: as I have said, repeatingly, Henry is often trapped, encircled, cornered, etc; and especially in the poems leading up to this one. ‘Cornering’, surely, is meant to return us to ‘rat’, and the common image of a cornered rat for someone who, trapped, will fight with great ferocity. By using this precise word, Henry conjures once more some cinematic bravado, Bogart in High Sierra in DS9, the ‘weary, daring man’ in DS12. Hence the tough-guy snarl of ‘I couldn’t feel more like it’.

But this poem is an argument, and here comes his minstrel friend Tambo to deflate him: ‘As I looks on the saffron sky / You strikes me as ornery’. ‘Ornery’ is a perfect word, by the way, with its origins in the word ‘ordinary’ before it semantically drifted, via class snobbery, from ‘common’ to ‘low value’ to ‘lazy’ to ‘stubborn, difficult’ etc. The implication is that Henry is both difficult and (merely) ordinary. And the sky – as we saw in DS9 (‘only Heaven hangs over him, foul’) – represents the overwhelming and inescapable and dwarfing context for wretched Henry’s rebellious wrestling. That is, the whole poem has vivaciously performed a dramatic push and pull between absorption and alienation, with Henry doing most of the voices: but Tambo’s quiet put-down at the end gently mocks even that self-dramatization.

Outer Resources: I have just been reading – a perfect birthday gift from my pal the Contessa – Olivia Laing’s wonderful book The Trip to Echo Spring, a treatment of six alcoholic American writers. At one point she notes that Berryman’s writing in his unfinished novel Recovery suggested a greater degree of self-knowledge than the man himself was actually capable of:

Not everything about Alan Severance is drawn from life, and part of his power as a character derives from the ironic distance between his perspective and the reader's – which implies that Berryman possessed more insight into the disease than his stand-in […]

In John Haffenden's compassionate and exacting biography of Berryman, he points out that one of the ways in which Recovery parts company with the poet's lived experience was in his relationships with the other inhabitants of the ward. Alan Severance is generally well liked, though at times his educated diction and self-important claims, delivered at a roar, repel his fellow patients. They think he’s arrogant and deluded, but that’s par for the course and many of the sweeter scenes involve him engaging warmly with the others.

In reality, this wasn’t quite the case […]

And that, my friends, is exactly why I prefer to stick with Inner Resources, and why 77DS is a brilliant work of art despite the man who created it.

The song: I do hope y’all are listening to these each time, they are an important part of the, ahem, interactive visitor experience. Anyway, this one is perfect. I will rarely mention the later Dream Songs, for reasons covered in my first post, but in Dream Song 238 Berryman writes ‘Perhaps God is a slob’, and you’ll see why I have broken my own rule when you hear this (possibly forgotten?) 90s hit.

There is an eye, there was a slit.
Nights walk, and confer on him fear.
The strangler tree, the dancing mouse
confound his vision; then they loosen it.
Henry widens. How did Henry House
himself ever come here?

Nights run. Tes yeux bizarres me suivent
when loth at landfall soft I leave.
The soldiers, Coleridge Rilke Poe,
shout commands I never heard.
They march about, dying & absurd.
Toddlers are taking over. O

ver! Sabbath belling. Snoods converge
on a weary-daring man.
What now can be cleared up? from the Yard the visitors urge.
Belle thro’ the graves in a blast of sun
to the kirk moves the youngest witch.
Watch.

Preamble: I loved DS12 – ‘Sabbath’ – from the very first time I encountered it. Partly because I am a lifelong horror movie fan, and this poem, in stanzas 1 and 3, delivers a lorry-load of creaking Gothic furniture; but mainly for the strange poetic diversion of stanza 2, in which it sneeringly drops off some flat-pack Romantic furniture as well. Horror and comedy. And, O, the chutzpah! – for example, the breaking of the word ‘Over’ over not just a line break but an entire stanza break. It’s a technically impressive and entertaining poem; and that more than makes up for the fact that it does not represent any advance at all in terms of the volume as a whole.

Got me a movie, I want you to know: Tricky this. I promised you all last time that we’d go to the movies, and so we must. But I think we are straying perilously close to Outer Resources to do so. The fact is, we know from the scholarship of [Legendary Chief Berrymaniac] John Haffenden that just before writing this poem Berryman saw the film La Sorcière (1956), starring Marina Vlady as a young blonde witch. It is a French film, set in Sweden, and uses both those languages; there are English subtitles in the version I watched recently on YouTube, thankfully. But I am not sure many readers in 1964, let alone later, would have known the film, let alone recognized it as being in any way alluded to in the poem.

And yet … there is a user review on IMDB by someone who did see it in the US, many times, and I am so impressed by their own frank account of niche obsession that I offer it here in full:

In the summer of 1957, I went to an afternoon movie in Washington, DC to kill some time. It played, but I didn’t get up from my seat. It played again, after which I ran to the lobby and telephoned a friend stationed about twenty miles away. I told him he had to drop everything and come to this theater, where I would be watching the most amazing film I had ever seen. He came. He liked the movie, but honestly didn’t want to sit through it again (though I was willing.)

The story goes on for a half century. I saw the film several times in the next 10 years, usually at art theaters and once on TV. All of my friends knew of my obsession and in about 1980 one woman in my office actually located a print of the movie. I arranged to have it converted to a VHS tape (at some substantial cost) and make a point of watching it every year or so.

Furthermore, over the years I had memorized every scene, every note of the score and just about all the dialogue (in several languages!). With the advancement of the Internet, eventually I was able to tell my story directly to Marina Vlady through a letter to her agent in France. I must say she did reply, but only with a sort-of generic postcard.

If you remember this film — whoever you are out there — recall her running through the forest after the fawns, then falling to the ground and disappearing at the bitter end … her reflected image in the dark lake ... poling her boat to the cabin in the lake … stealing the sausage! And how about the trip to town for the shoes!?

So, the film was clearly around. But Berryman has as usual not rendered the film faithfully (see DS7 and DS9), with the male role misrepresented here. So can we reasonably say that a general reader would be able to link the film to the poem? Not sure. But since the misrepresentation of the film is itself of interest, I am going to allow it in.

At least doing so doesn’t involve Berryman’s actual biography, which is of course streng verboten in this Substack. I have an informed hunch, though, that my professorial pal will be itching to tie this particular poem to the Life: and since he appears to be the only person in 60 years to have done any serious work on DS12, that may be fair enough. I will be keeping my eye on the Comments!

The music: A sibilant opening – is, was, slit, strangler, mouse, loosen, etc – and a firm alliterative ending in witch and watch. And also: confer, confound, converge. Tight but nicely varied rhyme scheme – abcacb; aabccb; ababcc – with full rhymes nearly all the way, until the last three lines (man/sun; witch/watch). But it is the rhythm and rhetorical shape that really impress here. Take the opening line (‘There is an eye. There was a slit.’) , which I gather is an example of bicolon – two parallel syntactical units (though I’d want my rhetorical pal Sam to confirm that) – an arrangement echoed in line 3 (‘The strangler tree. The dancing mouse.’).

Both those lines are iambic tetrameters, and that is the underlying rhythm of the rest of the poem (a foot shorter than the iambic pentameter which Berryman has generally been using as his anchor). But his departures from the underlying rhythm are quite brilliant in stanza 2, where for three lines the jaunty pastiche of poetic diction in both French and English, and the invocation of three (arguably) Romantic poets (early to late), are all in perfect iambic tetrameter, with the fourth line acephalous (missing the first weak syllable) for dramatic effect, and then as the clownishness begins (‘dying and absurd’) so the rhythm stumbles and then collapses. It winningly recovers in the first line of stanza 3 precisely by deploying the second (weak) syllable of the broken ‘O // ver’:

ver. Sabbath belling. Snoods converge

(Note also the repetitions of ‘ver’, ‘b’, ‘n’, ‘s’.)

Am I alone in finding these arrangements playful, witty? The rest of the final stanza is gleefully anarchic: 7 syllables, 14 syllables, 9 syllables, 8 syllables, 1 syllable. I feel as if Berryman has sarcastically shown us a Parnassian mode in stanza 2 and then raucously disowned it in favour of something more modern in stanza 3. (I am also reminded of a Stewart Lee routine in which, after a well-received conventional gag, he turns to the camera and says, ‘See? I can write jokes, I just choose not to’.)

The poem: DS12 is a nightmare. The poem opens with an eye, opening; the whole stanza offers that sense of dilation (‘Henry widens’), of initial confusion, of seeing sinister shadows and shapes until things come into focus (‘confound his vision, then they loosen it’). Eyes are the main motif of the poem, from that first sentence through ‘tes yeux bizarres’ to the final chilling ‘Watch’. Early on I wrote a whole piece about ‘seeing’ in 77DS; I have had reason to link back to it in almost every post since. Worth noting that ‘watch’ is not entirely synonymous with ‘see’: it can imply active attention, or passive helplessness; protectiveness, or a warning.

‘Nights walk’ is creepy, somewhere between a transferred epithet or metonymy; things are walking in the night; at night, things look like they are moving. And ‘confer’ is good too: normally good things are conferred (OED: ‘To give, grant, bestow, as a grace, or as the act of a qualified superior’), but here ‘fear’ is provided instead. The line in its entirety chimes with a later poem, DS49, where ‘Dreams make crawl with fear / Henry, but not get up’.

‘The strangler tree’ is a parasitic growth which can eventually cover an entire tree, root to canopy; sometimes the host dies, and the strangler remains, a hollow column. ‘The dancing mouse’ is as obscure to me as it is to Henry, but I take it to be the sort of phenomenon in which a harmless creature appears more creepy in shadow and obscurity, as it does, for example, in the legendary work of Julia Donaldson.

There’s a memorable James Fenton poem, Vuccerìa, that reverses this perspective – of ordinary things looking creepy at night – and ends

Look! there’s a pair of socks,
Crimson with two black clocks.
Oh no it isn’t.
It’s a flayed head on a bedside chair.

‘Henry House’

Henry, as we know, is granted many epithets and nicknames in 77DS. ‘Henry House’ appears twice; the other incidence is in DS17, when Lucifer is bidding for his soul. Despite the sinister contexts in both cases, the soubriquet seems to represent Henry at his most stable and domestic (‘They set their clocks by Henry House, / the steadiest man on the block’). Hence the poem’s question – how has steady old Henry found himself in this disorientating nightmare?

‘Nights run’

This is deft. Another bicolon, arguably: ‘Nights walk’ / ‘Nights run’. The effect is to make everything feel faster, and more out of control. And the strict rhythm of the next few lines aids that sense of heedless, uninterrupted pace. (Also worth noting that it’s incredibly rare in DS77 – unique, I think – to have this many consecutive isometric lines.)

‘Tes yeux bizarres me suivent / when loth at landfall soft I leave’

Both these lines sounds like quotations, but they are not. As with ‘Hard on the land wears the strong sea’ in DS1, I feel that these overtly ‘poetic’ moments come tongue-in-cheek; and the following lines of cartoonish buffoonery serve to strengthen my suspicion.

‘The soldiers, Coleridge Rilke Poe …’

I am afraid that this section of the poem always makes me think, helplessly, of the British television comedy Blackadder, and the episode with Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (Season III, Episode 2: ‘Ink and Incapability’), in which Edmund Blackadder enters Mrs Miggins’s coffee shop and has a run-in with the Romantic poets:

(Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron are at a table. Shelley sits up holding a handkerchief; Byron stands very erect, staring straight ahead at nothing; Coleridge appears dead. As Shelley begins to speak, the person at the next table stands and moves to a table as far away as possible.)

(Edmund and Baldrick enter)

Edmund: A cup of your best hot water with brown grit in it — unless, of course, by some miracle, your coffee shop has started selling coffee.

Byron: Be quiet, sir. Can't you see we're dying?

Mrs Miggins: Don't you worry about my poets, Mr. Blackadder. They're not dead; they're just being intellectual.

Edmund: Mrs. Miggins, there's nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid. Why are they here of all places?

Often, in 77DS, we move swiftly between the sublime and the ridiculous. Fascinatingly, Coleridge, Rilke and Poe all did in fact do military service, and none of them well:

In 1793, Coleridge enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the ludicrous name ‘Silas Tomkyn Comberbache’ to escape debts incurred at university (drugs, gambling, women). He was a poor cavalryman in that he was unable to ride a horse. His family seem to have staged an intervention and had him discharged on grounds of insanity.

In 1827 Poe enlisted as a private in the US army under the alias ‘Edgar A. Perry’, also for financial reasons, rising to become a Sergeant Major, before attending West Point. I will lean on Wikipedia here:

Poe then decided to leave West Point by intentionally getting court-martialed. On February 8, 1831, he was tried for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, and church. Knowing he would be found guilty, Poe pleaded not guilty to the charges in order to induce dismissal.

Between 1886 and 1891, Rilke attended a military academy, where, as a sensitive and poetic boy, he did not thrive. In 1916, he was called up and had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Too feeble to be of any military use, he was transferred to the war records office and eventually discharged. (At least he did all this under his own name, eh.)

None of our three soldier poets ever saw any ‘action’. On this subject, I do recommend, if you are not already familiar with it, the poem ‘After Experience Taught Me’ by W. D. Snodgrass, here. A truly unforgettable piece.

‘Shout commands I never heard’

I read this line, which continues the mock-heroic military theme, as a refusal of poetic commands. (‘Give me 30 Petrarchan sonnets, you horrible little man, SIR!’) We last saw Rilke being teased in DS3. (‘Rilke was a jerk’.) But whatever Berryman/Henry feels about the poetic tradition is not easy to work out from the internal evidence of 77DS alone. To our ideal 1964 reader – well-read, curious, oddly au fait with the history of minstrelsy, and maybe even a devotee of Swedish-French art house cinema – the poem’s dialogue with the wider canon must seem mercurial and hard to systematise.

‘Toddlers are taking over. O // ver!’

I have always taken this to be a growly comment on the over-promotion of younger poetic talents, and, if so, it would moderate what I initially saw as the poem's mockery of the three canonised father figures above. (What if that mockery was itself an imitation of the attitude of callous and philistine young pretenders, etc?) Arrive a time when any professional sees, with fear, the inexorable rise of the young guns, snapping at their ankles, and views these newbies – just as they themself were once viewed – as ignorant and vicious, destined unjustly to replace their impotent seniors. A line from the British TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous: ‘If the models get any younger, they’ll be chucking foetuses down the catwalk!’ Or, contrariwise, as an erstwhile pal remarked to me some decades back: ‘The Wunderkinder will turn out to be midgets’.

That open-mouthed ‘O’ at the end of the stanza is also another moment of pastiche. The late scholar and poet J. H. Prynne devoted an entire lecture to the exclamation ‘O!’ in English poetry ( ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language’, 1988), and noted that (my italics)

the word O is one of the most difficult and exacting in the language of emphatical speech. More recent poetic usage is highly sceptical about such exclamatory particles, and will employ them only with muted or parodic intention …

Stanza 3:

A few general notes, a couple of details: The scene here does mildly resemble the film La Sorcière, in which angry head-scarfed villagers do converge in a churchyard, and the youngest witch does make her way through the graveyard to the church (Berryman uses the Scottish word ‘kirk’, not the only Scottism in 77DS): but the converged-upon weary and daring man is a figure more akin to Bogart in High Sierra (see DS9) than anyone in La Sorcière. In fact it is the beautiful (and innocent) young witch who is cornered and murdered. The male protagonist is a useless idiot. But Henry must always be centre stage, as we know, especially in a sequence (DS 8-13) of relentless and homicidal pursuit and persecution; and women, as we also know, tend to get more cursory treatment in 77DS.

Scattered thoughts: ‘Snoods converge’ is synecdoche, a trope used very sparingly in 77DS – there is a striking example in DS16 (‘Two daiquiris / withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room’). I do not know why the villagers are ‘visitors’, nor the meaning of ‘What now can be cleared up?’ The poem as a whole lacks, perhaps aptly, real coherence; it is wonderfully suggestive nonetheless, and a good reminder of how Berryman, with great economy, can create profound and effective moods and atmospheres.

So, I don’t know what it all means, nor how the middle relates to the beginning and end. (It’s not perfect: it’s the sort of poem, I fear, that will instead lend itself to a convincing biographical reading, in which each line is linked to a circumstance of the poet's life.) But I still love it. It gives me the creeps and it makes me laugh, and you can’t ask for more than that, surely?

while he was so beastly with love for Charlotte Coquet
he skated up & down in front of her house
wishing he could, sir, die,
while being bullied & he dreamt he could fly —
during irregular verbs — them world-sought bodies
safe in the Arctic lay:

Strindberg rocked in his niche, the great Andrée
by muscled Fraenkel under what’s of the tent,
torn like then limbs, by bears
over fierce decades, harmless. Up in pairs
go we not, but we have a good bed.
I have said what I had to say.

Preamble: As you were. Apologies for yesterday’s diversion. So, once more, with less feeling… This is not an easy poem, I think it is safe to say, but nor is it as hard as it looks, especially in the light of our work to date. Indeed, in John Berryman: A Critical Commentary (1980) by Legendary Head Berrymaniac John Haffenden, there is over a page on DS11, precisely to suggest that once the references are located – largely publicly available, though he does admit a minor biographical note – the ‘difficulties and obscurities of 77 Dream Songs are more apparent than real’. I aim to set out those names and references, then suggest a reading not far from Haffenden’s but with more attention to certain details, and will then winningly suggest that the poem is a deliberate mirror of DS6, which we covered here.

Music: By far the most effective sonic properties here are the propulsive series of ‘while’ clauses. (‘While’ is used 23 times in 77DS, rarely more than once in a poem, but 4 times alone in DS6 and 4 times in DS11.) The rhyme scheme is interesting: lines 3 and 4 in each stanza rhyme perfectly (‘gone’, ‘on’; ‘die’, ‘fly’; ‘bears’, ‘pairs’), and lines 1 and 6 nearly so (‘goes’, ‘knees’; ‘Coquet’, ‘lay’; ‘Andrée’, ‘say’). So, it would be a chiasmus, abccba, were it not that, in every case, lines 2 and 5 do not rhyme (‘then’, ‘breath’; ‘house’, ‘bodies’; ‘tent’, ‘bed’). Other repetitions are our old friend ‘come’ (or ‘came’) and – topping and tailing the poem – ‘bed’. Bed, as we know, is an important word in 77DS, and never more so than in this poem.

References: ‘Chen Lung’ should be ‘Ch’en Jung’, thinks Haffenden, and is surely right – one of the perils of transliteration, I guess, and indeed, Wikipedia favours ‘Chen Rong’. He was a thirteenth-century Chinese painter, famous for his depictions of dragons. I cannot find any corroboration for a further speculation of my own, that in DS30 Berryman describes another painting from that artist (or at least that period), this time with a tiger in it: ‘A tiger by a torrent in rain, wind, / narrows fiend’s eyes for grief / in an old ink-on-silk’.

‘Charlotte Coquet’: Haffenden says (Outer Resources) that she was a classmate of Berryman’s, and a later biographer Paul Mariani says so too. I was disappointed by this – another reason to dislike biographical info – because I assumed that it was a made-up name intended to evoke the word ‘coquette’.

‘Strindberg … Fraenkel’: This is a corking story, of which I was wholly unaware. Salomon Andrée was a late nineteenth-century Swedish engineer and balloonist who, with Knut Fraenkel (also an engineer) and Nils Strindberg (a young scientist and photographer), set off in 1897 to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. The expedition failed for a number of reasons, hubris being one of them. The balloon crashed within days. ‘Free flight lasted for 10 hours and 29 minutes and was followed by another 41 hours of bumpy riding with frequent ground contact before the inevitable final crash.’

Thereafter, ill-equipped and ill-prepared, the explorers wandered the icy landscape ineffectively, ending up on a deserted island (White Island) in Svalbard, where they all died. Their bodies were not discovered until 1930. The causes of death have been contested over the years. Strindberg would appear to have died first and been buried in an aperture in the rocks, covered with stones (‘rocked in his niche’): a large number of his photographs survived. Fraenkel may have died next, and it is possible that Andrée then committed suicide. The bodies had indeed been gnawed by bears, but probably posthumously.

The poem: DS11 is about various beds; it starts with the suggestion that ‘It seem we don’t have no good bed to lie on, / forever’, and ends with the suggestion that ‘Up in pairs / go we not, but we have a good bed’. But they are not the same bed.

Maybe, pace my earlier post on this poem, ‘the mother … goes’ does not have to mean death, but does mean separation. We move from childbed to the very first independent act of a baby, the drawing of first breath; to the skinning of knees (when maternal care is often still present); to (in Freudian terms) the transfer of libidinal attachment from parents to others (Charlotte Coquet). The torments of Henry’s adolescence – lust, and being bullied – imply the receding of adult care and oversight. Henry wants to die or fly to get out of his intolerable situations (both words, interestingly, linked to the doomed polar expedition).

And all the while, Chen Rong's dragon paintings survive, and the frozen corpses of Salomon Andrée’s doomed balloon trip also endure. But unlike immortal art, the balloonists are bear-nibbled, and in a cruel parody of infancy the younger man, Strindberg, is ‘rocked’ (wedged in with stones) in his crib-like niche, while in a cruel parody of the marriage bed, Andrée and Fraenkel lie next to each other. So, up (to bed) in pairs go we not – not with parent or lover – but alone to the death bed. Forever.

Haffenden rightly picks up on ‘safe’ and ‘harmless’ in lines 12 and 16:

During that period, when he was growing up, the three explorers were literally dead, and accordingly, in Berryman’s terms, enjoyed a paradoxical security (like childhood in that respect alone) because of being ‘safe’ from the depredations of time, immortalised in ice and so immutable. The bears that marauded their bodies were, strictly speaking, ‘harmless’ to them. While Berryman grew through childhood, safe in a different way, cared for by his mother, those men transcended time altogether, unknown to him.

It is at this point that one might wonder about the role of Chen Rong in all of this. It is, I think, and as Haffenden thinks, about a different form of survival:

Similarly, Ch’en Jung has passed not only beyond the time of his childhood, made secure by his own mother, but he too has transcended all time in the passage of several centuries, and shares the notional time of death with the explorers.

One is reminded of the ‘grapes of stone’ in DS6, persisting down the centuries. And in fact, the two poems are surely deliberately paralleled. We had ‘the father’s … his father’ in DS6; we have ‘His mother … The mother’ in DS11. We have the word ‘while’ four times in each, as part of a paralleling of comings-and-goings against a changeless piece of art.

We also have some syntactical trouble in both poems, always a sign in 77DS – we know this by now, don’t we? – of a subject which Henry is struggling to cope with. In DS11 it is the final passage: ‘under what’s of the tent, / torn like then limbs’. I think the missing word is ‘left’ (‘under what’s [left] of the tent’) and I think the messed-up word is ‘then’ and it should be ‘their’ (‘torn like [their] limbs’). Well, one could be fanciful here (and why not? Where’s the harm?) and say the word ‘left’ is difficult for Henry because it is about abandonment (‘my father / who dared so long agone leave me’, DS76), and that a possessive is turned into a temporal term (‘their’ to ‘then’) for similar reasons. But I am certain that some of you will have better, stronger ideas than that.

‘I have said what I had to say’ might be read in two contradictory ways – I have said what I wanted to say; I have said what I was compelled to say. It is one of a number of moments in DS77 when Henry refers self-reflexively to his own performance. Is it an acknowledgement that the previous line is at once a firm conclusion and yet also slightly and deliberately opaque? Henry’s mind has moved from childbirth to adolescence and art, but behind these thoughts lay the frozen bodies. DS77 often flinches a little when death comes into view. A third reading: I have said all I am going to say.

Before I go – thank you, as always, for sticking with this ultra-niche deep dive, especially those of you who comment (including my professorial pal Alan, whose ‘long agone’ PhD thesis I recently went in search of, and found instead a new friend). And sorry (not sorry) about some of the detours and, ahem, uncharacteristic digressions. But we are here at least partly to have fun, and I hope we will continue to do so. Next time, indeed, we will get a teeny bit Halloweeny, and return (hurrah!) to the movies. I feel y’all deserve it after the past couple of poems, which have been heavy on the heart, in so many ways. This week’s song is performed by Howard Devoto, and comes from the collaborative album It’ll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil.

His mother goes. The mother comes & goes.
Chen Lung’s too came, came and crampt & then
that dragoner’s mother was gone.
It seem we don’t have no good bed to lie on,
forever […]

(DS11)

There are only two references to Henry’s mother in 77DS (as opposed to the many references to fathers). The first of them, here, surely suggests she is dead. Is her very absence from the rest of the text significant? As I have mentioned before, I’m not a superfan of psychoanalytic lit crit, but given that these poems are dreams, and that they deliberately show ample evidence of slips and repressions around various traumas, I’m not wholly dismissive of it either. Sometimes it really is true that what isn’t said is as significant as what is.

Outer Resources: Berryman’s mother was a powerful presence throughout his life, and in fact outlived him. She was not the only mother in his life. His second wife was mother to his son. His third wife was mother to his two daughters. There is no sense in 77DS of the work of motherhood, the totality of the physical, mental and emotional labour involved, the ceaseless underlying anxiety, the self-sacrifice.

With less than a week to go before the baby was due, they decided to visit Berryman’s friends, Monroe and Brenda Engel, in Cambridge. Berryman’s behaviour now became very erratic. Loud and upset, he cried. He was admitted to hospital, under pressure […] where he spent the rest of the time until Kate’s confinement, hating himself and hating her. “I’ll never forgive you for this!” he bellowed at her. He experienced an enormous sense of resentment against Kate as never before or after. Kate herself stayed overnight with the Engels. It was arranged that Berryman would be discharged when the baby was due. Part of his trouble at the time might be attributed to his feelings of apprehension about the oncoming birth. His doctor in Maclean’s Hospital was of the opinion that he would be greatly upset and feel replaced in Kate’s affections…

John and Kate Berryman both returned home from their respective hospitals on the same day, Berryman still in an enormous cast. He began to get very drunk and accused Kate of neglecting him, true to the warning given a few weeks before. Kate became so upset that she threw a tray of dishes on the floor …

John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (1982), pp313-315

Outer Resources:

… but Berryman’s mother was the psychic force he could not bring himself to confront in his poetry. Jill Berryman makes very little show in the Dream Songs …

Michael Berryhill, ‘Henry and His Problems’; in John Berryman: Centenary Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Peter Campion, 2017

Outer Resources:

He had for many years suffered the conviction that his father's suicide had tragically violated his own life. Of late he had to recognise that the theory was simplistic and could not wholly account for the insistence of his self-conflicts and sense of guilt. For one important consideration, his mother had (as he conceded only intermittently over the years) as much influence upon his conduct as any other person, but he had put off admitting the full implications of that fact because to do so avoided further complications …

John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (1982), p413

Mothers can be, as Berryman’s clearly was, difficult people, and their difficulty can cast long shadows; but as a child ages, that difficulty can sometimes become more comprehensible, and less unmanageable. There is sometimes an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the nature and origin and effects of the difficulty, to the point where forgiveness is possible, or perhaps even unnecessary.

I’m not sure where I am going with this.

*

I drove my mother on the A20 between Maidstone and Barham countless times, journeys during which we would talk about anything and nearly everything, agreeably and with much laughter. During these redemptive conversations my mother would often recite, en passant, from memory, even at 91, reams of the poetry she had learned as a child. (She once rolled out an entire Rupert Brooke sonnet when, entre nous, a couplet would probably have sufficed. Or a word.) Did she pass the facility on to me by genetics or by example? Even in the hospital she murmured to the hopelessly young consultant Dr Milton (!), in a reference to her own lost youth, ‘in my salad days, when I was green in judgment’, and he was visibly startled – I could see in his eyes that he was wondering about her mental capacity, which was actually then the only thing about her not in medical question, and I hissed at him ‘It’s a quotation!’ (Of course there was a time when every consultant would have known their Shakespeare, but no longer, alas; not even when they are the enfeebled descendants of Milton himself.)

I drove my mother on the A20 between Maidstone and Barham countless times, usually for Sunday lunch and a card game with the family, and on all but one occasion she was in the passenger seat. On the day I crashed my car she was in the boot (or trunk, as my transatlantic pals would say), in a cannister not dissimilar to those in which you sometimes and more happily find bottles of whisky; the cannister itself was in a cardboard rectangular bag, not unlike those gift bags in which you (again, more happily) sometimes find bottles of wine.

There’s a great Matthew Welton poem, which was first published, aptly, in a matchbox, and which reads in its entirety: ‘You weigh, cremated, what you weighed at birth’.

I also had in my car a bottle of whisky (half full; half empty) and two bottles of New Zealand sauvignon blanc, which I had taken from my mother’s flat before I picked up, from elsewhere, the gift bag containing the cannister containing my mother. I mentioned this by way of hysterical conversation to the very kindly young policemen, while they diverted traffic around my wholly unbudgeable car, and they then, quite rightly, breathalysed me; but I was untroubled, because I hadn’t, at that point, started drinking.

I drove my mother on the A20 between Maidstone and Barham countless times, and I used to say that I could do the journey with my eyes closed. This turned out not to be the case. As I hit the kerb there was a loud bang (which occasionally still surfaces unpleasantly in my memory), and I was off the road, a grassy vista scrolling in my windscreen, and I must have jerked the steering wheel instinctively because then I was back on the road, and bouncing, actually bouncing, across it, across both lanes, and then we were at rest, and the car was dead – no electrics at all – quite dead. The front wheel on the passenger side was no longer meaningfully a wheel.

I was in the wrong lane of a 70mph road, but because nobody was coming at that point, nobody was physically harmed. In another version of this, more than one person is instantly killed, a truth over which I have sometimes unhealthily brooded, appalled. And I never saw my car again, nor indeed my spectacles, though I had searched both the car and the roadside for them thoroughly, anxiously, repeatedly, slightly madly, while waiting first for the police, and then for my family; and I took the bottles home and unwisely drank them with intent over the next couple of days, and I settled my mother in a cupboard in my garden office, where she remained for over a year.

The insurance company did not, I think, even look at my car, which they wrote off. They sent me a text saying, verbatim and in full: ‘Thank you for reporting the incident to us. You will receive an SMS from us shortly regarding how to proceed with your total loss.’

It is in the administration of rhetoric,
on these occasions, that – not the fathomless heart –
the thinky death consists;
his chest is pinched. The enemy are sick,
and so is us of. Often, to rising trysts,
like this one, drove he out

and the gasps of love, after all, had got him ready.
However things hurt, men hurt worse. He’s stark
to be jerked onward?
Yes. In the headlights he got’ keep him steady,
leak not, look out over. This’ hard work,
boss, wait’ for The Word.

Preamble: This poem will not require the sort of line by line analysis that others so far have; and not all of the subsequent poems will do, either. Despite moments of opacity, the subject is clear – a lynching in America – and what we need to think about is the treatment of that subject. The matter of Berryman, a white writer, using black voice in 77DS is fraught. The question of who has the authority to write about certain subjects is more fraught still. I cannot ignore my own vantage here, either. Readers will, I hope, forgive the absence of my customary levity this week.

My legal pal and I met for a drink this week, and we set about the poem together. He (regular readers will remember) is our innocent pair of eyes, coming at 77DS for the first time, unencumbered by any knowledge of Berryman’s biography or other distractions: he is also a voracious and properly thoughtful reader of both fiction and non-fiction, when unwinding from his legal labours, and has a fine, long-nurtured literary sensibility. (As teenagers, with university entrance exams looming, we gave each other tutorials on our then-favourite books of poetry: I gave him my account of Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, he gave me his account of Ted Hughes’s Crow.) His analysis of DS10 was very persuasive, and we differ only on minor details. (I want him to have the credit for much of what follows; I have been dithering, and distracted, and sometimes unhelpfully paralysed by various deadlines, obligations, anxieties, and I feel he has led me gently back to terra firma. ‘Without these friendships—life, what cauchemar!’)

The music: The rhyme scheme is tight, with a combination of ‘identical rhymes’ (‘rope’, ‘rope’), full rhymes (‘come’, ‘some’) and half rhymes (‘heart’, ‘out’). Good alliteration (the cluster of k’s in ‘stark’, ‘jerked’, ‘work’) and assonance (e.g., ‘thinky’, ‘pinched’, ‘sick’, ‘trysts’). Repetition – ‘vote’, ‘rope’, ‘men’ – which backs up a propulsive rhythm. The identification of aesthetic features has never seemed so trivial though, I confess.

The poem: The poem is unusually clear in its subject matter. ‘Strange gatherings’ (a conscious echo, surely, of Billie Holliday’s ‘Strange Fruit’); a vote which isn’t a vote (the kangaroo trials); the rope; the cars; the headlights. Re: the cars – my friend and I only disagree about one detail: he finds it indisputable that the poem’s victim is dragged to death by one of the cars. He is thinking of the horrifying and relatively recent case of James Byrd, which you can follow the Wikipedia link for if you have a strong stomach. Byrd was murdered in Texas 1998 by two white supremacists, Lawrence Brewer, and John King, who ‘are among the few white men to be executed for killing a black person in Texas since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s’. And dragging was indeed a method of lynching historically too:

A common perception of lynchings in the U.S. is that they were only hangings, due to the public visibility of the location, which made it easier for photographers to photograph the victims … Lynching victims were also killed in a variety of other ways: being shot, burned alive, thrown off a bridge, dragged behind a car, etc.

Berryman is not necessarily thinking of a specific case, and the sheer volume of cases which he would have been aware of is a grim fact in itself, but I wonder (Outer Resources) if, because it occurred in Minnesota, latterly his home state, and involved headlights, the Duluth lynchings of 1920 would have had a special resonance for him:

After Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie were killed, Clayton’s body was cut down or fell to the ground. The crowd gathered around their lifeless bodies, then illuminated them with car headlights and posed Clayton’s limbs. Dozens of white men stood smiling for a photograph, which was made into postcards sold as a souvenirs.

(Minnesota is still no stranger to organized racial terror a century later.) Regardless of the detail, Berryman is offering a description both particular and general, of a man being jerked by a rope, toward his death, in front of a crowd of men.

The treatment: There is a strong sexual undercurrent to the violence. At times Berryman could be describing a dance as much as a lynching: ‘Dancing In the Dark / will see him up’ could mean ‘the music gets him up on his feet’, or ‘the music will accompany his hanging’; ‘a rut to park’ evokes not just the wheel-furrowed mud, but also sexual rutting; ‘trysts’; ‘gasps of love’. It is interesting that in a poem very much about ‘men’ (‘Men have their hats on’; ‘However things hurt, men hurt worse’) the pronoun ‘he’ is so ambiguous here. ‘His chest is pinched’ could refer to the guilty onlooker or the terrified victim. ‘Often … drove he out’ cannot refer to the victim. And when we come to ‘The enemy are sick, / and so is us of’ (i.e., ‘we’ are ‘sick’ of the enemy, who is morally sick), the ‘we’ can apply as easily to the killers, convinced they are delivering ‘justice’, or the civil rights protesters of the era, angry at the disease of racism. But ‘he's stark / to be jerked onward’ is the victim.

I wonder if the flickering of the pronoun between victim and spectator deliberately raises a question about complicity and witness which then, inevitably, also confronts the writer and reader. This is one of the defences sometimes made of Berryman’s use of black voice; that it is precisely calculated to raise questions of complicity and guilt in a book which several times addresses American racism, and with unusually specific (for this book) references. In DS60:

Afters eight years, be less dan eight percent,
distinguish’ friend, of coloured wif de whites
in de School, in de Souf.

I quote those lines in particular because they bear on the question of waiting (see lines 17-18). The reference in DS60 is to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but in DS2 and perhaps here (the mater of ‘a vote … that would be no vote’), we are looking at enfranchisement, legal v actual: the stark gap between the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment and the reality for black voters would not begin to be addressed until 1965, the year after 77DS was published.

‘The administration of rhetoric […] not the fathomless heart’. Rhetoric, rather than justice, one notes. My legal pal thinks this passage is very much about the ways in which something evil is rationalised; that ‘the administration of rhetoric’ is a pivotal and acute phrase. Also the phrase ‘on these occasions’ , conveying a horrific aura of the routine (and arguably delivering a third meaning for ‘rut’, above). He also points out the use of the passive voice in the opening lines, a rhetorical manoeuvre famously used by people shying away from responsibility, and engendering here a sense of inexorability. ‘The thinky death’ – the death of proper thoughtfulness? Or the suppression of the emotional via rationalisation? (Note, conversely: ‘This is not for tears, / thinking.’ in DS29.) ‘The gasps of love’, on such a reading, might allude grotesquely to the allegations of rape that often formed the notional excuse for the murders.

It is certainly arguable that the steadiness and the rhetoric of the poem itself contribute to a self-reflexive, or even self-critical, undercurrent. The cool tone delivers a real sense of horror by the end, which is arguably more powerful than an overtly emotional treatment would have been. The final shift into minstrelsy becomes agonizing here, that ‘Boss’ recognizing the subordination of victim and complicitous bystander alike to the leaders of the mob. The appalling and understated acceptance of the grotesque, by all parties.

Which man, by the end, victim or conscious-stricken witness, needs to ‘keep him[self] steady’ and ‘leak not’? (That clinical ‘leak’ horribly poised between tears and terrified incontinence.) ‘Look out over’: the elevated victim, looking out over the crowd; but also, surely, evoking ‘look over Jordan’, from ‘I looked over Jordan, and what did I see / Comin' for to carry me home’? Which Word is being awaited; the signal to begin the execution, or the ambiguous deliverance implicit in that upper case W?

I’ll leave this here, if I may, with the obvious song.

Deprived of his enemy, shrugged to a standstill
horrible Henry, foaming. Fan their way
toward him who will
in the high wood: the officers, their rest,
with p. a. echoing: his girl comes, say,
conned in to test

if he’s still human, see: she love him, see,
therefore she get on the Sheriff’s mike & howl
‘Come down, come down’.
Therefore he un-budge, furious. He’d flee
but only Heaven hangs over him foul.
At the crossways, downtown,

he dreams the folks are buying parsnips & suds
and paying rent to foes. He slipt & fell.
It’s golden here in the snow.
A mild crack: a far rifle. Bogart’s duds
truck back to Wardrobe. Fancy the brain from hell
held out so long. Let go.

Preamble: Hello, friends. Here we are at the movies once more, in this case watching Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (1941). Don’t say we never do anything fun together. This Dream Song is based very heavily on the film, so it is in the differences and the details that we will look for its significance. It is a more complex poem than it first appears; it is also chock full of interesting technique and, yes, brio. Brio and panache.

A note on the title of this post – it comes from DS53, when Berryman quotes T. S. Eliot: ‘I seldom go to films. They are too exciting’. Shortly after this Berryman quotes an unnamed novelist as saying

It takes me so long to read the ’paper […]
because I have to identify myself with everyone in it,
including the corpses, pal.

I find that desperately funny, but also dark. In a book much possessed by death, there are a lot of corpses for Henry to identify with, and one, dangerously, in particular. But here he is identifying with Humphrey Bogart, at least until the final lines, when the costumes (‘duds’) are ‘truck[ed] back to Wardrobe’. As always with Berryman, it is unclear where we are situated, if anywhere: are we watching the film with Henry, or watching a dream in which Henry is Bogart, or watching Henry use the film as a metaphor for his own situation, or … but it is, of course, impossible to say. The point is that Henry has chosen this film, and has used it to render a sensibility.

The film: There’s a lot to be said about High Sierra, and I will necessarily be concise, because we are here for Henry more than Humphrey. A notorious gangster, Roy Earle (Bogart), is sprung from prison by a dying villain who wants him to do one last job. Earle has a heart of gold, curing the lame and robbing the rich to help the poor, etc, though he is also quite handy with fists and revolvers. He hooks up with a gangsters girlfriend, Marie (Ida Lupino), and a dog, Pard, and briefly it seems they might have a future together. Alas, it all goes sideways, and he ends up pursued and cornered in the mountains, where he is shot and killed, to the dismay of both dog and woman.

For a fuller and richer treatment, see this essay. I wish we could linger longer on the film, which I have wastefully over-researched, but Parnassus calls us.

From the film:

Roy Earle: You know, sometimes when you’re out in the night and you look up at the stars, you can almost feel the motion of the Earth. It’s like a little ball that’s turning through the night with us hanging on to it.

Velma: Why, that sounds like poetry, Roy. It’s pretty.

Roy legs it fairly sharpish at the mention of poetry, and who can blame him, eh.

The poem: As a whole, it has much of the excitement we found in the final stanza of DS7 (‘… where Hoot / is just ahead of rustlers’ etc), the cowboy genre giving way here to the gangster flick, with both still celebrating the outsider as the hero, positioned against a corrupt culture, and at odds with the law. Barring the opening and closing lines, where the focus is entirely on Henry’s inner state, the poem hews closely to the plot of High Sierra, but with some interesting twists.

The music: Tight rhyme scheme, abacbc in stanza 1, abcabc in the others. This made it easier to learn; as did the semblance of progressive narrative. Rhythmic without ever settling: the iambic pentameter is there, for example the first line of the second stanza (‘if he’s still human, see: she love him, see’), but there are various metrical arrangements throughout. I have belatedly remembered the word ‘logaoedic’, which Merriam Webster defines as ‘marked by the mixture of several meters. specifically: having a rhythm that uses both dactyls and trochees or anapests and iambs’. I could have done with this word from the start, and will doubtless be deploying it frequently, with relish or recklessness, ‘going forward’.

Alliteration – ‘horrible Henry’ (echoing clearly back to ‘Huffy Henry’ in DS1) initiates a profusion of ‘h’ sounds: who, high, human, howl, Heaven, here, Hell, held. ‘W’, ‘f’ and ‘sh’ are also prominent. A couple of repetitions – repetitions of repetitions, interestingly – first, our old friend ‘see’ (see ‘To see, to see’), in a conjunction which I oddly failed to list in that previous near-exhaustive post; and then our old friend ‘come’ (‘come down, come down’) in a conjunction we will meet again in DS21, as I discuss below.

1) Deprived of his enemy, shrugged to a standstill

We noted last week the oxymoronic qualities of this book, and here we are again. You are ‘deprived’ of something you need. Henry, we understand from this, relies on antagonism. What he cannot cope with is indifference. (‘Shrugged’ can work either way here, presumably deliberately; the world’s indifference, or Henry’s.) We have noted Henry’s fear of indifference, and of being undifferentiated (‘reduce him to the rest of us…’, DS25). It comes to the fore in a number of poems, one of which is DS56 (‘Hell is empty …’) where Henry wrestles with a theory of Origen’s, that everyone will one day be returned to a state of grace, even the devil. Let’s just note for now that although we don’t, at this point, know who Henry’s enemy is, by DS13 we are told that ‘God’s Henry’s enemy’. And note also that in DS9 we are about to encounter both ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’.

But before we go any further, even our very first reading has immediately re-established for us a familiar Henry: thwarted, grumpy and unheroic. ‘Henry … with his plights and gripes’ (DS14).

2) Horrible Henry, foaming

Impossible, I imagine, for UK readers at least, of several generations (either via their own childhood reading, or their children’s reading), to meet this phrase without thinking irrelevantly and irreverently of Horrid Henry, by Francesca Simon.

3) Fan their way / Toward him who will

My legal pal, who really enjoyed this one and wrote to me to say so, remarks:

Lines 2-4 are wonderful: "Fan ... who will" = "let them all come" which also = the roaring belligerent drunkard.

He is right: at first you imagine the sense will be conditional – ‘Fan their way who will [ X will nonetheless be the case] ’ – but in fact the clause is an entire sentence unto itself; bring it on. Again, an echo will be found in DS13 – ‘I couldn’t feel more like it’ – a piece of bravado sharply put down by his minstrel chum in that poem.

‘Fan’ nicely captures the spreading out of a search party, the casting of a net that will tighten: again, looking forward, DS56 gives us the Scottish word ‘tinchel’ – ‘A wide circle of hunters driving together a number of deer by gradually closing in upon them’.

4) The officers, their rest

‘Rest’ is a bit tricky, isn’t it? The rest of the crew? I am clueless. An echo of ‘arrest’? Dragged from their down time? Nothing quite works for me, I’m afraid.

5) With p.a. echoing

I had already noticed myself that the p.a. (‘public address’) features three times in 77DS; once when crows are heckling Henry’s lectures in India (DS24), once in the final poem when Henry ‘p.a.’d poor thousands of people’ about topics which they do not find as exciting as Henry does. But then I found the point had already been well made in an essay by Peter Campion titled ‘John Berryman’s Acoustics’ (2017):

One of Berryman’s favourite abbreviations, ‘p.a.’ for public address, here deserves attention. It shows up in Dream Song 24 when Henry lectures an Indian audience, as well as back in Dream Song 9, a poem remarkable for its own engagement with popular culture, electronic media, and state power: Henry’s mental anguish here finds an image of itself in the final scene of Raoul Walsh’s film-noir classic, High Sierra, when Ida Lupino speaks through a California state trooper’s microphone, attempting to talk Humphrey Bogart’s ‘Mad Dog’ Earl Ray [sic] down from a cliff. In all these poems, ‘public address’ suggests a parallel with the poet’s own acoustic art. After all, what does the poet do but address others through a conduit connecting collective and personal experience? And yet there’s also a certain embarrassment: ‘p.a.’ may suggest the eminence of the person speaking, but it also conjures those institutional authorities – the police, as well as academics – to whom people generally aren’t overjoyed to listen. In Berryman’s poems, p.a. systems often evoke a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of entrapment within structures of power …

I think that final line is perhaps ‘going it a bit’, but it is definitely worth looking carefully at forms of address in 77DS; who is being spoken to, and how. I should also note, en passant, that Campion has made two different mistakes with regards to High Sierra: one when he calls Bogart’s character ‘Earl Ray’ rather than Roy Earle, thus inadvertently conflating him with the assassin of Martin Luther King; the other regarding Ida Lupino (see below).

6) His girl comes, say … she love him, see

The verve of the next few sentences perhaps obscures the distinct oddity of the word ‘say’. It half-rhymes with the repeated ‘see … see’, and operates similarly, grammatically. But ‘say’ frames what follows as a hypothetical; in a lengthy description of a dramatic scene, it breaks the frame, and suggests that we have some agency in how we deploy different ingredients. And the switch from that hesitant ‘say’ to the assertive ‘see’ explains why she has been deployed, both by the fictional sheriff and by the ‘makers’ of this scene. We will pull away again in the final lines, when actor and costume are invoked: but ‘say’ is an earlier foreshadowing of that move.

‘Conned in to test // if he’s still human’ is also a distinctive phrase. ‘Test’ puts us right back into the grimness of the preceding poem, with Henry as the abject object of impersonal forces; and putting his humanity in doubt renders him as a cornered animal (cf both DS56 and DS57). It is a bitter line.

7) Therefore … howl

Here is where the poem first diverges from the movie, though few commentators notice, possibly because they didn’t watch it. In High Sierra, the sheriff tries to persuade and even bully poor Ida Lupino into calling Bogart down, but she refuses. So the way in which Berryman positions the love interest is surely significant. What does it say about self-pitying Henry that he re-casts her constancy as weakness? And fancy extending the aura of the bestial to her, with the word ‘howl’. (I have said it before, but women do not fare well in 77DS: in many ways it is a sexist and even misogynistic text, and readers will differ as to whether that fact is in any way redeemed by the book’s remarkable honesty and self-laceration.)

8) Come down, come down

Hang on to this phrase – later in DS21, we will encounter it several times, ominously, possibly as a welcoming of death itself. Because, for all the cinematic energy and colour in DS9, and its several witty touches, it is suffused by violent death, whether witnessed or anticipated.

In a scene with Lupino, Bogart talks of the despair of prison:

you might as well climb up on tier two and jump off … Some of them did … Top of the cell block. It’s a 40-foot drop and you land on concrete. I saw a guy take a dive once. He made quite a splash.

Later Bogart, shot, falls from a mountain ledge. Come down. In the final lines of the film, Ida Lupino asks tearfully what ‘crashing out’ means and is told that it means ‘free’. In a wobbly voice, Lupino repeats the word in hesitant triumph: ‘Free. Free.’

Earlier in the film, another character tells Earle: ‘Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you and him … He said you’re just rushing toward death’.

Even without any knowledge of Berryman himself, and just focusing on Henry’s protracted wrestling with thoughts of death, this poem gains retrospective depth and darkness as the volume progresses.

9) Therefore he unbudge, furious

I tend to read the preceding lines in a comically stroppy way – by the time I have got to ‘she love him, see’ I am doing a mocking babytalk voice (much as a teenager might say ‘she wuv him’ in teasing mockery). And therefore he unbudge is excellent, the deliberate refusal and defiance rendered through the unorthodox un- prefix (see the last line of DS45 for this gesture to be given the full treatment). The repeated therefores – for her action, then for his; the action and reaction – capture something of the film’s inexorable tragic trajectory at this point (but for the fact that, as we have seen, in the film it is the woman who refuses, and the man who, lured by a fond and foolish dog, steps out and calls her name).

10) Only Heaven hangs over him foul

Heaven in stanza 2, Hell in stanza 3. Every chime in DS77 is intended. So while one reads them figuratively – Heaven for sky, Hell for suffering – the Christian backdrop is more than decoration. Again, let’s pocket this for later: after a witchy DS12, in DS13 God will make a dramatic appearance and will never quite quit the stage thereafter; in DS17 Lucifer is circling; in DS20 we are in a G. M. Hopkins pastiche with souls at stake. 77DS is packed with some pretty heavy theology, and its religiose language cannot be treated simply as colourful metaphor.

‘Only Heaven hangs over him foul’ is almost Shakespearean, surely? Once again Berryman is able to move nimbly between high and low registers; it never jars. This is harder to bring off than it looks, and Berryman is bringing it off repeatedly. There is a facility here, in the braiding of disparate voices, which may be part of what draws his fascinated readers. It achieves linguistically an equivalent of the e pluribus unum vibe which we have mentioned before – Henry as an unlikely Everyman – and which Henry also (see above) fears as a threat to his individuality.

11) he dreams the folks are buying parsnips & suds / and paying rent to foes

‘Suds’ – I did not know this before – means beer. Because of the foamy head, see. (A little chime with ‘foaming’ in line 2? Maybe.) I love that he rhymes it with ‘duds’, also hardly a familiar word. Did they come to him as a pair, or did one suggest the other?

The image here is of the poor folk in High Sierra, suffering during the Depression while the rich (‘foes’) exploit them. The foes are not Henry’s foes. He is ‘deprived’ of an enemy. So while DS9 carries with it the anti-capitalist charge of the film, something deeper and darker is going on with Henry, however sympathetic he might be to his fellow underdogs; just as Roy is in the film.

‘He dreams’ is interesting, just as ‘say’ was earlier. Roy, on the mountain, dreaming of the poor folk back in the town? Or Henry, in his distorted dream of being in the film’s scenarios?

12) He slipt & fell. / It’s golden here in the snow. / A mild crack: a far rifle.

Odd order, as my legal pal quietly notes; surely he should fall after being shot (as he does, in a slightly muffed piece of stunt work and cinematography, in the film). There is no visible snow in the film, though it is referred to. Snow occurs elsewhere in 77DS, most notably in the nightmarish DS28 (‘Snowline’), but also, for example, with reference to recovered trauma (‘One sign / would snow me back, back’) in DS30; and the Holocaust in DS41. Here it is also a harbinger of doom, but oddly welcome, a sleepy surrender. My legal pal certainly feels that: ‘He's glad. He wanted it’, pointing out that ‘golden’ is a highly positive adjective – ‘perfect’.

‘Slipt’ is another of those archaisms which serve, in my view, to make us aware (as ‘say’ did earlier) that we are in a composition. (Berryman doesn’t always do this, is the point: e.g., he uses ‘crampt’ for ‘cramped’ in DS11, but ‘slipped’ in DS15. Going archaic in 77DS is a conscious choice, a brushstroke that draws attention to itself.)

‘A far rifle’ – whenever I read this, I mostly feel that Henry and Bogart have become disentangled, and Henry is face down in the snow, while Bogart is shot a fair way off: Thalia and Melpomene, farce and tragedy. But it needn’t be that. It could be that Henry/Bogart has been shot from a distance; though he doesn’t end up in snow in the film. In the film, the shooter has cunningly climbed higher than Roy Earle, and picks him off from above; and the dog, the moll, and the sheriff swiftly run up to the body.

13) ‘Bogart’s duds / truck back to Wardrobe’

‘Duds’ means clothes – the word is still in use, but verging on the old-fashioned, surely. It can also mean forgeries, and things which function poorly. But here it clearly means clothes, and in the form of costumes; which are already forgeries of a sort. By this stage – with the accumulation of ‘say’, ‘dreams’, and ‘duds’ – I think it is clear that our experience of Henry’s cinematic dream of Bogartian anti-heroism is being deliberately disrupted, that we are constantly being made to step back and see the stagecraft.

Henry is identifying with a man who gets shot; Henry is partly welcoming death himself. These are preoccupations throughout the book, whether displaced (as here), shied away from (as we saw in DS6), traumatically rendered (as in DS34), vicariously felt (DS36) or faced up to (DS75-76).

14) ‘Fancy the brain from Hell / held on so long. Let go’

This was one of the passages I most loved on first encounter, and specifically wrote down, all that time ago. As a young person who had suffered repeated and frequent deep depressions from the age of 12, it ‘spoke to me’, as people say. The constant torment of one’s own sick thoughts; the desperate desire to be free of your own brain. I do not know if this is why Berryman drank: it is certainly why I drank. I wanted to annihilate my mind.

Compare DS30 – ‘Hell talkt my brain awake. / Bluffed to the ends of me pain’ – and DS57 – ‘To Hell then will it maul me?’ – and DS58 – ‘having brain on fire’. The brain in 77DS is often inflamed (‘brainfever bird’; ‘roiling & babbling & braining’), and those fires are always at some level the fires of Hell.

The repetition in ‘Hell / held’ is brilliantly done, an awkward brief tug and catch over the line break. And then ‘Let go’. What does it mean? A hopeful interpretation would be that the hellish brain can finally release its obsessive grip. But it doesn’t feel like that to me. In the context of High Sierra and Henry’s own associations, it feels like a welcomed death for an exhausted man. So long.

This week’s song: I was thinking of Kate Bush’s wonderful ‘There Goes a Tenner’, about a heist gone wrong, because of these lines:

Both my partners
Act like actors
You are Bogart
He is George Raft
That leaves Cagney and me

but have gone instead for Spear of Destiny’s ‘Never Take Me Alive’. Enjoy.

The weather was fine. They took away his teeth,
white & helpful; bothered his backhand;
halved his green hair.
They blew out his loves, his interests. ‘Underneath,’
(they called in iron voices) ‘understand,
is nothing. So there.’

The weather was very fine. They lifted off
his covers till he showed, and cringed & pled
to see himself less.
They installed mirrors till he flowed. ‘Enough’
(murmured they) ‘if you will watch Us instead,
yet you may saved be. Yes.’

The weather fleured. They weakened all his eyes,
and burning thumbs into his ears, and shook
his hand like a notch.
They flung long silent speeches. (Off the hook!)
They sandpapered his plumpest hope. (So capsize.)
They took away his crotch.

Preamble: Nasty. Ominous. (Brilliant.) This is the first of a number of paranoid Dream Songs in which Henry is variously persecuted. As I said in an earlier post

In the course of the book, he will be pursued, encircled, cornered, trapped, reduced, diminished. He will be encroached upon, and he will be institutionalised. He will become a hunted stag, a shot racoon, Humphrey Bogart gunned down in High Sierra. This sense of ‘a cornering’ (DS13) […] is easily one of the most significant features of the book.

The trajectory and general mood of DS8 are horribly clear on a first reading; the details remain obscure. These details, these decisions, constitute a significant element of Berryman’s originality and success. One of the techniques, for instance, is a faintly oxymoronic quality, as when sandpaper is juxtaposed with ‘plump’, an adjective that can only be applied to something soft, and usually fleshy. ‘Silent speeches’ is another, though arguably it follows from Henry having been deafened by burning thumbs. ‘Hair’ cannot be halved, as such: it can be parted, or cut. ‘All his eyes’. You do not ‘shake’ a ‘notch’.

Wrongness in 77DS is absolutely deliberate; it is one of the most significant technical devices in the collection. It is not easily done. My legal pal reminded me only recently that the late British comedian Les Dawson had a routine in which he expertly played the piano just slightly wrong, with hilarious effect. This takes, oddly, real skill.

And while we are here – we can permit ourselves an ‘uncharacteristic digression’, can’t we, friends? – here’s the late Mark E. Smith, of The Fall:

I was trying to get the group to play out of time … taking musicians out of their comfort zone, getting them to think about timing in a distorted way.

It’s weird because I never sing in time. Last thing you want is a regular time…

Mark E. Smith, Renegade, pp115-6

Music: Tripartite structure very clear, as in DS5, and again deploying anaphora, each stanza beginning ‘The weather’. A tight rhyme scheme throughout, identical in stanzas 1 and 2, minor variation in 3. Internal rhyme (‘showed’ and ‘flowed’); repetition (‘underneath’, ‘understand’; ‘took away’, twice). Highly alliterative, with ‘f’ and ‘th’ notably running throughout. It reads beautifully, with a few lines of perfect iambic pentameter around which Berryman plays his elegant variations; nothing jarring here. The smoothness and formal neatness, offering perhaps a sense of the inexorable, are deliberately in tension with the cruelty and violence of the content.

The poem: Initially, we read this as a sequence of horribles visited upon Henry, culminating in his castration (a motif we have now encountered often enough for its significance to be unignorable). There is a surrealism to it which at first jars us, and then, perhaps, relaxes us too much – because deprived of an obvious or single explanation for these peculiarities and particularities, we might not pay them sufficient individual attention.

There is a dramatic structure, and even a measure of – not dialogue, no, but the rendition of different voices. Maybe almost a bad cop-good cop effect between the ‘iron voices’ calling, and the murmur of ‘enough’? – before the further crazed violence of stanza 3, and the little moments of – false hope? (‘Off the hook!), or surrender? (‘So capsize’), before the ghastly finality of the last line.

Let’s take a closer look at some of those details, then.

Details

1) ‘The weather was fine … very fine … fleured’

There’s no pathetic fallacy here. Instead, as Henry’s situation worsens, the weather keeps on improving, as indifferent and pitiless as Henry’s persecutors. In a later poem (DS52) we will encounter the phrase ‘under the sun’, with its Biblical resonances. Am I wrong to find an echo of that here too – the sense of totality and enclosure? After all, in the next poem, DS9, we do find the lines ‘He’d flee / but only Heaven hangs over him foul’.

There is an exchange in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead which I have had lodged in my head for as long as I can remember:

ROS: We’ll be free.
GUIL: I don’t know. It’s the same sky.

2) ‘They’

We do not know who they are; we are returned to the questions raised in DS1, the last time the word ‘they’ was used. Here it is used ten times in eighteen lines. Henry’s relations with a wider world are largely unhappy, as we know, with the exception of friends, many of whom are (though this lies ahead of us) dead. Hereafter in 77DS ‘they’ refers only to already identified people or things, with the exception of the sci-fi scenario of DS50 (‘In a motion of night they massed nearer my post’) and its evocation of anonymous hostile forces. ‘Other people’ in 77DS are rarely well defined or developed, and what comes across largely instead is a mutual hostility between Henry and ‘the world’, broken up by love and grief for specific persons, and occasionally an anguished and conflicted patriotism.

3) ‘They took away his teeth’

The castration theme which we have already seen in the earlier poems, with Henry worried about sexual failure, and references to blindness, etc, is very clear here; teeth, hair, eyes, crotch. (‘The dream-work represents castration by baldness, hair-cutting, the loss of teeth, and beheading.’ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams)

4) ‘White and helpful’

Does this refer to ‘his teeth’, or to ‘they’? Both work. ‘Helpful’ for the teeth would be bitterly humorous (‘hey, I was using those’), and for the sadistic dentists (is there any other kind of dentist?) it is bitterly sarcastic, given that the attention being paid to Henry is neither helpful or kind. ‘White’ – either those enviably well-maintained American teeth, or the white coats of the teeth extractors.

77DS deploys a limited colour scheme; the poetry is not especially descriptive, more allusive and associational. If Berryman uses colour symbolically, it is rarely clear to me what correspondences he has in mind. By far the most commonly encountered colour is ‘green’, followed by ‘white’ and ‘black’ (often because of racial topics); in the case of ‘white’ there is also snow, sand, and, ahem, the anterior sclera (‘the whites of our eyes’). It is ‘green’ which will reward attention (see below).

5) ‘Bothered his backhand’

Of all the elements that give this poem its Pinteresque air of menace (I am thinking particularly of The Birthday Party, when McCann and Goldberg torment Stanley Webber), this is one of the most wickedly effective: it is the bathetic incongruence, the juxtaposition of incommensurable items.

McCann What about the Albigensenist heresy?
Goldberg Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?
[…]
McCann: Wake him up. Stick a needle in his eye.
Goldberg: You’re a plague, Webber. You’re an overthrow.
McCann: You’re what’s left!
Goldberg: But we’ve got the answer to you. We can sterilise you.

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party

6) ‘Halved his green hair … So there’

‘Green hair’. Pointlessly strange? Mythical? ‘Green’ in 77DS (‘all a green living’ ‘the green lives’ ‘kindly green ... wood’, ‘greennesses of ours’, ‘green world’, etc) is nearly always related to nature, and often a mythic nature. So what is it doing in ‘green hair’? It surely represents life, vigour, youth. (As it does for so many writers. ‘In my salad days, when I was green in judgement...’) Which is one of the things that made me wonder – what if we are dealing here, at the very least in stanza 1, with a school-age Henry?

The reason I think this is that the iron voices who have announced to Henry his worthlessness and insignificance conclude with the phrase 'So there.’ It is a phrase of complete playground childishness. And reading back from it: the first time you have your teeth taken away is in childhood. ‘Green’ is youth. Tennis lessons are school. And we know that as a schoolboy, Henry is both bullied and beset by thwarted pubescent lusts because in DS11 it is explicitly laid out:

while he was so beastly with love for Charlotte Coquet
he skated up & down in front of her house
wishing he could, sir, die,
while being bullied & he dreamt he could fly -
during irregular verbs

Bullying induces in its victims a profound sense of worthlessness and humiliation that can persist for a lifetime. In this reading, ‘blew out his loves, his interests’ becomes broader in scope than, say, the cruel removal, by sinister figures, of adult Henry’s erotic appetites (‘wipe out his need’, as DS25 has it). School, especially boarding school, interferes substantially with a child’s natural interests and affections by replacing them with the institution’s own priorities, and by removing the child from their primary caregivers. ‘Blew out’: what’s the metaphor here? The extinguishing of a flame? Or (cf ‘blew out his brains’) elimination by a bullet, foreshadowing the later gun deaths in the book?

7) Stanza 2

I don’t have much to say about this stanza, except how well the dramatization works. He pleads to see himself less: they install mirrors. And then they suggest that he turns his gaze outward, with the Yoda-ish murmur ‘yet you may saved be, yes’. The matter of whether Henry is pried open or self-reflecting, raised in DS1, is still in suspense here.

8) ‘The weather fleured’

‘Fleured’ is a deliberately peculiar word; it’s not wholly clear why Berryman uses it. It isn’t a real verb, but used here it gives a sense of blooming and flowering, the weather at its very finest. Berryman (as we saw him do with ‘pried’ in DS34) is making the language itself warp & distort, just as the content itself melts into full-on surrealism. Yet somehow we know what he means.

I have seen it suggested (though I don’t buy it myself) that the francophone frisson is a smack at Wallace Stevens:

Through its formulaic repetition of syntax and its matrix-like structure, consciously or not, the poem echoes the experimental structure of Wallace Stevens's "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," which likewise employs variations on aesthetic images reimagined in increasingly complex language. Berryman's transformations occur more quickly—they must, given the limited form of the Dream Songs—but the progression of the opening sentence of each of the three stanzas, from "The weather was fine" to "The weather was very fine" to "The weather fleured," seems all at once to be mocking Stevens the aesthete, Stevens the experimenter, and Stevens the Francophile.

9) ‘They … crotch’

I think we have effectively covered much of this in the intro. There is a wrongness throughout the poem, and a general obscurity as to what is being done and by whom, but here it reaches a chaotic intensity, with great agitation, and little cries and wriggles of resistance or response: which then makes all the more effective the short, unhappy finality of the punchline.

The song: I struggled for a while to find a song for DS8, but then remembered the late, great Cathal Coughlan, and ended up spoiled for choice: ‘Ambulance for One’, ‘Bullwhip Road’, ‘And He Descended Into Hell’, and ‘High and Dry’, all with Microdisney; and ‘Wilderness On Time’ and ‘Valhalla Avenue’ with The Fatima Mansions. They all would have worked here to a greater or lesser extent. In the end, I have gone for ‘Wilderness On Time’; you’ll see why. I can’t imagine this will be the last time Coughlan appears on this Substack.

‘The Prisoner of Shark Island’ with Paul Muni

Henry is old, old; for Henry remembers
Mr Deeds’ tuba, & the Cameo,
& the race in Ben Hur, — The Lost World, with sound,
& The Man from Blankley’s, which he did not dig,
nor did he understand one caption of,
bewildered Henry, while the Big Ones laughed.

Now Henry is unmistakably a Big One.
Fúnnee; he don’t féel so.
He just stuck around.
The German & the Russian films into
Italian & Japanese films turned, while many
were prevented from making it.

He wishing he could squirm again where Hoot
is just ahead of rustlers, where William S
forgoes some deep advantage, & moves on,
where Hashknife Hartley having the matter taped
the rats are flying. For the rats
have moved in, mostly, and this is for real.

Preamble: Dream Song 7 has not attracted much critical attention, though I’d fancy it is one of the favourites of many readers; it’s certainly one of mine. Lines 7-8 and lines 17-18 are among those I copied out carefully in my twenties when first enraptured by 77DS. And how lovely to be so entertained by a poem about entertainments. On the face of it, DS7 is a humorous list poem whose burden is that the heroic spectacles of genre cinema witnessed in childhood have been replaced by something murkier and more compromised, and that there can be no return to that innocence: we live in a corrupted unheroic age. As if Larkin’s poem ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ were being applied to the movies.

But this is not Larkin, any more than last week’s ‘A Capital At Wells’ resembles ‘An Arundel Tomb’, despite both poems involving an error over a sculptural detail; and the juxtapositions are instructive. Larkin’s neat little lessons look small and almost platitudinous set against the less governed dramatic anxieties of the Berryman pieces: I say that as a longstanding Larkin fan, who can still recite several of his poems too.

And DS7, on the face of it a highly personal poem, is in fact a political poem, the first flash of politics, arguably, since DS2 with its subtle and confusing intimations of racial exclusion.

Music: The tri-partite structure is clear, as in DS5; each stanza has a different angle on the subject. No rhyme scheme. The rhythms are interesting – the iambic pentameter appears in lines 4-6 and then again briefly in stanza 3. In stanza 3 there is a gorgeous and proper sense of pace and excitement: note how beautifully line 14 pauses (‘rustlers, | where William’) as the iambs turn to anapaests, galloping us up to and over the enjambement into line 15:

He wishing he could squirm again where Hoot
is just ahead of rustlers, where William S
forgoes some deep advantage …

The pacing – for comedy, for darkness – is sure-footed throughout. And as we will see, beneath the skilled delivery of pace and tone, a few little words are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Title: ‘The Prisoner of Shark Island’ with Paul Muni

A number of films are referred to or alluded to in DS7. But The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) is given top billing. It is a biopic about Samuel Mudd (1833–1883), an American physician who was imprisoned for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth, having treated Booth’s fractured leg after he fled, wounded, the scene of his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Mudd was sent to a prison on the Dry Tortugas, referred to in the film as ‘America’s own Devil’s Island’. (In the film, as in life, Mudd eventually uses his medical skill to deal with a viral outbreak and is released.)

Devil’s Island is famous as the prison where Dreyfus was held, in the political scandal made famous by Emile Zola.

Paul Muni was regarded as one of the greatest actors of his era. He immersed himself wholly in his roles. Wikipedia notes that ‘At the age of 12, he played the stage role of an 80-year-old man, and in the film Seven Faces, he played seven characters’. Alan Alda’s character Hawkeye, in Season 4 of M*A*S*H*, referring to his own childhood, remarks: ‘You knew where you stood in those days. Franklin Roosevelt was always president, Joe Louis was always the champ, and Paul Muni played everybody.’

Muni played Emil Zola in The Life of Emile Zola (1937).

He also played roles in political films such as the prison-reform drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), and the anti-fascist film Commandos Strike At Dawn (1942). On June 8, 1949, the FBI released a report naming a number of prominent Hollywood actors as members of the Communist Party, including Edward G. Robinson, Paul Robeson, Danny Kaye and many others; Paul Muni’s name was on that list. While this accusation did not destroy Muni’s career, it nonetheless had evident consequences.

It is widely accepted that Paul Muni was not a member of the Communist party. It has been largely overlooked that nor was he, in fact, in The Prisoner of Shark Island.

But I don’t think that Berryman's title is a mistake. I think that by this juxtaposition – which first creeps under the radar, and then jars – he is showing us where to truly focus.

*
The poem:

Stanza 1

‘Henry is old, old’

The repetition of ‘old’ is extremely effective, in a way that is hard to explain; but try reading it with only one ‘old’ and you’ll see what I mean. The repetition is dramatic, theatrical: a weary realisation of the full weight of the word, and the world.

*

‘Mr Deeds’ tuba … The Man from Blankley’s’: I shall take the references in turn.

Mr Deeds’ tuba: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) was a romantic comedy in which a big-hearted tuba-playing rube (Gary Cooper) outfoxes city villains, wins hearts etc.

‘The Cameo’: As far as I can make out from extremely cursory research, The Cameo was an arthouse cinema in Time Square, showing foreign and art films (see Stanza 2), though it may also have at some juncture shown ‘adult’ movies. Not that the two categories are mutually exclusive, of course.

‘The race in Ben Hur’: This will be the 1925 silent film version. The chariot race, an extraordinary piece of cinema, is viewable on YouTube. It seems remarkable that a century ago, with no CGI, this could be pulled off, though I suppose in those days they didn’t have the ‘no animals were harmed during the making of this movie’ restriction. More here.

‘The Lost World, with sound’: The Lost World, a dinosaur action movie using stop-motion animation, released in 1925, was based on Conan Doyle’s eponymous novel of 1912. The Wikipedia entry is full of good things, for example that this was the first film ever to be shown as in-flight entertainment (‘In April 1925, on a London-Paris flight by Imperial Airways, The Lost World became the first film to be shown to airline passengers. As film stock of the era was nitrate and highly flammable, this was a risky undertaking on a wood and fabric-hulled plane…’). It does not help us explain what Berryman means by ‘with sound’, since it was a silent movie.

The Man from Blankley’s: This 1930 film is itself lost, alas. But the ‘caption’ reference is another slip. This was one of John Barrymore’s first ‘talkie’ films, and ironically its soundtrack is the only bit of it that does survive. So I think we can now be confident that these little mistakes of memory belong to ‘bewildered Henry’ and not to John Berryman.

NB: Apart from the Mr Deeds movie, all these films seem to have been pioneering in some aspect.

*

‘did not dig’

The jazz language – ‘dig’, ‘cat’ – which Henry deploys throughout 77DS is here just another element of tone. (In DS21 ‘dig’ works a bit harder.)

‘ … bewildered Henry, while the Big Ones laughed. // Now Henry is unmistakably a Big One. / Fúnnee; he don’t féel so.’

The epithet ‘bewildered’ joins all the other little comical brushstrokes which briefly capture our mercurial anti-hero in 77DS, from ‘huffy’ to ‘seedy’. ‘Big Ones’ is such a charming, child’s-eye way of referring to adults. ‘Fúnnee’ is perfect for enacting what the rest of the line says out loud: Childe Henry has never quite grown up.

‘a Big One’

We touched on this previously. ‘A one’, a formulation Berryman uses throughout, manages to concisely combine both singularity and type. There are times — e pluribus unum — when Henry is more than a middle-aged, white, alcoholic lecturer and lecherer; times when he gathers into himself the multitudes of America. When he plays everyone.

DS22 (‘1826’) is the outstanding example of this, but it occurs more subtly elsewhere and throughout. It might even be present in those oddities of tense or number (‘Henry are baffled’ in DS2 for example), and the way his burnt-cork blackface allows him to admit into the poems a Black experience without smoothing over any of the obvious difficulties of such a gesture: in fact, arguably (and it has been argued) Berryman takes care to foreground those difficulties, up to his lights.

‘He just stuck around’

Let’s note, briskly, a chime in DS13:

God bless Henry. He lived like a rat,
…
He never deserted anything; instead
he stuck, when things like pity were thinning.

Henry ages, but does not change, or grow. We have here another of those passages where a historical or cultural duration is paralleled (‘while…’) with a more personal one (see last week).

‘The German & the Russian films into / Italian & Japanese films turned’

What I took on first reading to be a generic matter (replacing Hollywood action movies with European and Asian arthouse cinema), or an account of changing cultural fashion, would seem to me now, surely, to be also a covert political reference.

If that deliberately ‘wrong’ title about Paul Muni is meant, equally covertly, to draw attention to political prosecutions and persecutions, then ‘prevented from making it’ surely alludes to the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). And at that point the fate of the great Russian and German filmmakers and cinematic styles pre- and post-WW2 becomes germane. We are invited to see all national cinema through the lens of the State politics which it either mediates or contests.

‘while many / were prevented from making it’

In an earlier post (‘Making It’) we discussed the importance of this punning phrase throughout DS77. The work of HCUA and the McCarthy hearings were in many cases career-ending: people could no longer make art, or a living. Or live: there were suicides, premature deaths. Two words quietly doing a lot of work.

Stanza 3

These final lines! Let’s pause to admire again how Berryman’s 18-line form can accommodate such a variety of pace and intensity. The ‘where ... where ... where’ has the same propulsive effect as ‘while ... while ... while’ in DS6.

‘Hoot / is just ahead of rustlers’: Hoot Gibson appears to have starred in heroic roles in an extraordinary number of cowboy films. More than one will have contained rustlers. Let’s leave it there, eh.

‘William S / forgoes some deep advantage, & moves on’: William Surrey Hart was an American silent film actor, also in cowboy films. I do not propose to work my way through his entire oeuvre either.

‘where Hashknife Hartley having the matter taped’: Hashknife Hartley was a character in the westerns of W. C. Tuttle, some of which were made into films and radio plays etc. All seem to involve heroic and morally upright cowboys besting corrupt sheriffs, criminals and the like; which I suppose takes us back to Mr Deeds in stanza 1.

‘For the rats / have moved in, mostly, and this is for real’

A devastating line, which in the context of all that we have just discussed, probably needs no elaboration.

This week's song is ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ by R.E.M., which mines that historical political moment for its political resonances in the 1980s, just as we ourselves might reflect on the echoes even now. The song samples a crucial moment in the Army hearings when McCarthy, finally, was undone by Joseph Welch: ‘Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’

Thank you all for coming along to the movies this week. Inner Resources will take a pause now, and be back in a fortnight, ‘bright-eyed & bushy-tailed’.

A Capital at Wells

During the father’s walking — how he look
down by now in soft boards, Henry, pass
and what he feel or no, who know? —
as during hís broad father’s, all the breaks
& ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer
back to the flying boy in mountain air,

Vermont’s child to go out, and while Keats sweat’
for hopeless inextricable lust, Henry’s fate,
and Ethan Allen was a calling man,
all through the blind one’s dream of the start,
when Day was killing Porter and had to part
lovers for ever, fancy if you can,

while the cardinals’ guile to keep Aeneas out
was failing, while in some hearts Chinese doubt
inscrutably was growing, toward its end,
and a starved lion by a water-hole
clouded with gall, while Abelard was whole,
these grapes of stone were being proffered, friend.

Preamble: I mentioned in an earlier post that I had memorised the seventy-seven poems in order. That, as Taylor Swift would say, was a lie. I memorised them in order with the single exception of DS6, which I put off & off until, until, until... until I felt ashamed enough to bite the bullet. It took ages to learn, because ... And here it hits me. Why is it hard to learn? Well, because every element is obscure and unpredictable. The syntax is tough and the grammar erratic. The allusions are cryptic and recherché.

And it is a difficult poem which also starts with – and then starts from – his father. That is not a coincidence.

77DS begins, let’s remember, with Henry hiding/pried open. We will shortly be encountering a succession of poems in which that tension is explored in a variety of wonderful ways. But what Henry is hiding from is not just the intrusive and reductive analysis of others; he is hiding from his own memories and feelings. There are moments in 77DS when that mental buck and recoil are palpable. Sometimes it is spelt out:

I’d say it will come with pain,
in mystery. I’d rather leave it alone.
I do leave it alone. (DS38)

Why should I tell a truth? when in the crack
of the dooming & emptying news I did hold back —
[…] it’s so I broke down here, in his mind (DS34)

But at other times it is evident only in the crumpled, corrugated, crushed grammar and syntax, for it is there there we see the wrestle between repression and disclosure at its most dramatic and unresolved.

It probably makes sense with DS6 to start with the overarching structure – much of which turns out to be simpler than it initially seems, being effectively a single sentence – and then work away at some of the knottier subclauses, like a physio kneading away a kink, before identifying as many of the historical references of stanzas 2 and 3 as possible.

Resources: ‘Hey, out there!’ – I've dug around as far as, eg, JSTOR and Google allow me to, mindful that we are allowed, and indeed encouraged, to do some research so long as we aren't leaning on private facts about Berryman. I am not an academic, although I’ve spent my entire life among them, from my childhood onwards, and have a deep admiration and affection for the women and men of academe. (Not for me the modish impatience with experts and intellectuals which has marred public life over the past decade.) But I can also be a critical friend, I hope, and in reading these poems together I want to come at them as general readers, without a theoretical method, letting the poems themselves shape our experience of the book, rather than pressing them into a pre-existing scheme. (Here there will be no Bakhtinian carnivalesque or heteroglossia, no Deleuzian rhizomes, no Derridean différance, no Kristevan chora. Good though those things can be, I’m sure.)

Interestingly, DS6 has in any case had relatively little scholarly attention: but the little it has had is incredibly helpful. In the reading that follows, I have drawn extensively on the work of John Haffenden, J. M. Linebarger and Jack V. Barbera, both in identifying the allusions and in an acute observation about chronology. Left to my own devices, I would have struggled, frankly. That said, from my very first reading, the last line grabbed me and never let go. Sometimes poems are highly effective even when (or especially when!) not wholly understood.

The title: ‘A Capital at Wells’. The reference is to a capital (‘the topmost, often decorative member of a column […], acting as a structural transition between the shaft and the load it supports’) in Well’s Cathedral, England. These capitals are decorated with various sculpted figures and scenes, including figures with grapes.

Music: There are some sonorous moments – the now-familiar deployment of perfect iambic pentameters (‘and Ethan Allen was a calling man’) between jerkier rhythms – and some lines which are quite hard to scan comfortably, like ‘for hopeless inextricable lust, Henry's fate’. There is a tight cluster of ‘l’ sounds in the third stanza (cardinals, guile, fail, hole, gall, etc). The rhyme scheme, as in DS5, firms up gradually as the poem goes on, until the third stanza offers us a faultless aabccb scheme. But the sonic properties of DS6 seem subordinate to the energy created by the pell-mell headlong tumble of its single sentence.

Breaking that sentence down we get ‘during [these things] and while [these other things were happening] these grapes of stone were being proffered [ie this sculpture continued to exist across centuries of human activity]’.

Time: Linebarger points out that the various events alluded to are laid out in reverse order. Barbera points out that Berryman nonetheless appears to make a mistake: Abelard is castrated before the creation of the columns. But Linebarger’s point is largely right, and (as we will see) pretty useful: if we start with Henry’s father, then his father, and ignore the impenetrable references to flying boys and ‘Vermont’s child’, we then go back through Keats (1795–1821), Allen (1738–1789), Milton (‘The blind one’, 1608–1674), Day killing Porter (1599), Anaeas becoming Pope in 1458 – and we then ignore the ‘inscrutable’ reference to China – and we come to Richard the Lionheart (1190s) … and then Abelard is castrated in 1117.

This scheme, whereby a historical period, a duration, is set against Henry’s smaller concerns, occurs twice more in 77DS, but differently in each case.

In DS11, where the ‘while … while’ format is repeated, exactly four times as here, Henry’s childhood biography is played out against a backdrop in which the frozen corpses of the members of Salomon Andrée’s doomed 1897 expedition to the North Pole continue to lie undiscovered in the snow. (They were recovered in 1930.)

In DS66, Henry looks back on a week (June 3–11, 1963) in which Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, set himself on fire in Saigon; in Britain, John Profumo resigned over the Christine Keeler scandal; and Pope John XXIII died in Vatican City. NB There is a further ‘mystery’ in DS66, a final news item, about a journalist, ignored by all critics because too cryptic, but clearly significant, and we shall return to it at the appropriate moment.

In each case, the examples used are not to be taken as randomly thrown together: we must examine what they might, in concert, mean.

The Poem (1): The Father

1 ‘During the father’s walking — how he look / down by now in soft boards, Henry, pass’

This would appear to mean, ‘while the (the?) father was alive’. The subclause ‘how he look down by now’ seems at first to refer to ‘the father’, but the nervy addition of ‘Henry’ makes us pivot. Henry looks down. ‘Soft boards’ most people take to mean ‘coffin’. Henry starts with the period of his father’s life, but immediately flicks forward to the son looking down at his corpse. (Remember that ‘an image of the dead on the fingernail / of a newborn child’ were the final lines of the poem immediately before this one. The relationship between adjacent poems in DS77 often repays attention.)

2 ‘and what he feel or no, who know? — / as during hís broad father’s’

The awkwardness around pronouns and articles continues; having had to insert ‘Henry’ to orient the ‘he’ away from the ‘the’ of ‘the father’, we now have an accented ‘hís’ to ensure that we know we’ve moved on to the father’s father. But who is the ‘he’ in the line ‘and what he feel or no, who know?’? It feels like it should be Henry, what with the other candidate being dead, and therefore surely beyond feeling – or no(t) – or knowing. That fussy bit of punning on ‘no’ and ‘know’ only adds to the unnecessary confusion. In all honesty, I’m helplessly reminded of Alan Sugar sorrowfully saying ‘What a bloody mess’ before pointing his wizened firing finger at one of the interchangeable sociopaths on The Apprentice.

Point is, Berryman revised and revised his poems, and he spent a fair bit of time ordering them and prepping them for publication. There are mistakes (e.g., DS53, end of line 12: what’s that quotation mark doing there?), but this is not one of them. He starts with a vision of his father and immediately becomes cryptic and incoherent. This isn’t the last time that’ll happen. What’s interesting is that the traumatic occasion for the poem (Henry looking down at his dead father as he passes the coffin) is relegated to a chaotic subclause in an 18-line sentence which races away from that event, rapidly backwards through more than eight centuries of poetry, murder, mutilation, conspiracy, war, etc., before arriving at its ambiguous ‘consolation’.

3 ‘all the breaks / & ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer // back to the flying boy in mountain air, / Vermont’s child to go out’

The cryptic references that form the bulk of this poem are rushed through in a way that makes it hard to see which phrases are simply qualifying a previous line, and which are fresh allusions. I would contend that without access to Berryman’s biography, little can be made of these lines. They do feel like they are the pivot from a personal family history to something wider (Keats, et al). So, let’s move on. There are good reasons why we don’t use Outer Resources here, as we will shortly see.

The poem (2): History

4 ‘and while Keats sweat’ / for hopeless inextricable lust, Henry’s fate’

Eccentrically shortening ‘sweated’ to ‘sweat’ requires that apostrophe, and therefore draws attention to a further clumsiness. ‘Sweat’ reads better and half-rhymes with ‘fate’, yes. But there are other ways to get there (eg, ‘while Keats would sweat’, etc); once again, an appearance of careless haste has been quite deliberately delivered here.

5 ‘and Ethan Allen was a calling man’

Ethan Allen was a founder of Vermont, and a ‘hero’ in the revolutionary war against the British. Why is he in this poem? Outer Resources: Berryman thought he was a descendent of Ethan Allen, sigh. Haffenden thinks that Berryman was identifying with Allen’s rebelliousness during – I can hardly bring myself to write this – some ‘interdepartmental rivalry at the University of Minnesota’. And that, my friends, is why we don’t do Outer Resources. If DS6 is a good poem – and I don’t think it is a bad one – reducing it to a neurotic fascination with ancestry and office politics isn’t going to elevate it.

Uncharacteristic digression: My father, teaching at Michigan in the mid-60s, on sabbatical from Oxford, found himself being lectured one night by a barman on how Britain should never have given up her colonies. When my father murmured gently the obvious point about what that would have meant for our American colonies, the barman swiftly terminated the conversation.

6 ‘all through the blind one's dream of the start’

If this is, as most commentators plausibly assert, a reference to Milton and Paradise Lost, the proper response is ‘well why not say so, then?’ But since Berryman has chosen to use this weird construction, we can note the following features: blindness (a theme in the book, see ‘To see, to see’, an earlier post, and a later point in this post); a canonical poet (in a book which references a lot of writers); the use of ‘one’, as in ‘hottest one’, or ‘the strange one with so few legs’, or ‘a one of valor and insights’, or ‘I knew a one of groans’, or ‘ Sleepless One’. The word ‘one’ occurs over 40 times in the book. It’s a tic. Let’s tick them off as we find them.

7 ‘when Day was killing Porter and had to part / lovers for ever, fancy if you can’

John Day and Henry Porter were playwrights. Day killed Porter in 1599. There seems to be very little material on this. Commentators who correctly identified the killing have completely (and understandably) ignored the subclause about parting lovers, etc.

I wonder, sometimes, if even John Berryman understood all of DS6. (There’s that great apocryphal line ascribed by G. K. Chesterton to Robert Browning, about Sordello: ‘When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant – God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.’)

8 ‘while the cardinals’ guile to keep Aeneas out / was failing’

This is a reference to the fraught election of Pope Pius II (‘Aeneas Silvius’) in 1458, not the Virgilian and Homeric hero, nor any of the other possible Aenean figures helpfully ‘disambiguated’ by Wikipedia. The election sounds fantastically murky, reminiscent of the excellent film Conclave (2024), starring Ralph Fiennes (and a host of other great performers). If you’ve not seen it, toss your copy of the Dream Songs aside, and watch it now. Like proffered grapes of stone, the poems will continue to exist while you go to the movies, etc, etc.

9 ‘while in some hearts Chinese doubt / inscrutably was growing, toward its end’

‘Inscrutably’ is a standard racial slur when applied to the Chinese. Readers will have to decide whether it is offered here with sufficient irony to redeem that fact. The other two references to Chinese people in 77DS are political (‘The Chinese communes hum’, DS16) and archaeological (‘A Chinese tooth! African jaw!’, DS30). This reference to ‘Chinese doubt’ must allude to a specific political or philosophical change at some point in, oh, the whole of Chinese history (though, admittedly, most likely between 1190 and 1458; maybe the Yuan dynasty, 1271–1368? But what?). This is one of the lines of 77DS that does very little for me, especially because every other line is about a person – indeed a specific sort of person – and this line is about a vast country.

I suddenly recall Quentin Crisp’s camp remark that Poland was ‘not so much a country as a state of mind’. What does ‘China’ mean to Berryman?

It is a shame about the question of racism here, because there is a certain impressive daring in using the word ‘inscrutably’ to describe someone else while writing a poem of massive and deliberate opacity where the emotional content is wholly and determinedly hidden.

10 ‘and a starved lion by a water-hole / clouded with gall’

Jack Barbera wins the Berryman Allusion Quiz Night, with this:

This allusion suggests an interesting bilingual pun. A hungry lion will go to a water hole to find game, and Richard, in France warring against Philip II and starved for money, laid siege to a castle to obtain treasure. Struck by an arrow and dying, Richard confessed that he had abstained from the Eucharist for the past several years because of his hatred for Philip. That is, Richard felt gall — bitterness — toward the “regem Galliae”. The Song’s allusion to Richard’s death fits in with the reverse chronological order suggested by Linebarger…

11 ‘while Abelard was whole’

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was a twelfth-century French philosopher, who famously had an affair with his student Héloïse. After they secretly had a son (wonderfully named Astrolabe) and got married, Héloïse’s angry uncle hired some men to castrate Abelard in revenge. He was, unsurprisingly, never the same after that.

12 ‘These grapes of stone were being proffered, friend’

It is a brilliant last line, and surely compensates for some of the less satisfactory steps that have led to it. NB It is a perfect iambic pentameter, a rhythm found throughout the Songs and one which (one might fancifully argue) all the other lines approach, or stray from, or reject.

In its syntax and tone, it feels at first consolatory, especially ending with the vocative ‘friend’; but the longer you linger with it, the colder its comfort feels. Grapes of stone. From the get-go, inedible, infertile. We are surely invited, in a poem about fathers, to recall Luke 11:11 –

If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone?

And is it a coincidence that the Abelard reference comes immediately prior to the ‘grapes of stone’, and that both ‘grapes’ and ‘stones’ are slang terms for testicles? I suspect not. Especially in a poem where there has also been a reference to blindness:

A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration. In blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that according to the lex talionis was fitted for him. We may try to reject the derivation of fears about the eye from the fear of castration on rationalistic grounds, and say that it is very natural that so precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a proportionate dread; indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper secret than a justifiable dread of this kind. But this view does not account adequately for the substitutive relation between the eye and the male member which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies…

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”

All the listed figures were poets: not just Keats and Milton, but Ethan Allen, Richard the Lionheart, Pope Pius, John Day, and Henry Porter too. And Haffenden argues that ‘they are all poets who suffered or caused agonising obstruction to life-work or even … to life itself’. So Henry, by starting with his actual father and grandfather, has arguably constructed a lineage of thwarted, damaged poets. Barbera concurs but with a hint of qualification:

Henry’s Song begins with a man who committed suicide, and it touches on the misfortune, hopeless lust, murder, guile, and doubt of others. It is true that Henry’s grandfather is described as ‘thriving,’ and the guile against Aeneas failed, as Aeneas records in his own hilarious memoir. Overall, however, the things Henry thinks of as happening since the Wells grapes were sculpted constitute a grim list.

Berryman has made (deliberately or not) a further error. The grapes are not being proffered but pilfered! Barbera raises the point, and this quotation from Matthew M. Reeve, in an online pdf , gives full detail:

…the fruit stealers capital begins with a scene of a youth holding a basket of grapes accompanied with an assistant who holds a billhook; in the second scene a labourer tells the farmer of the theft as it is taking place by pointing backward with his right hand; the farmer then apprehends the older man whose apron is full of grapes by the hood of his cloak; the farmer strikes the older man with a pitchfork, causing him to lose his hat and scatter his grapes on the ground.

13 ‘Friend’

If I am right about the ambivalence or ambiguity of the punchline, I’d further note that there are many parts of the world where ‘friend’, as a form of address, is far from friendly in its meaning. Certainly in 77DS, if you are referred to as a ‘pal’ then you are one, but if you are addressed as ‘pal’ it seems to have more of a snarl or sneer to it. At times, to my ear, an aura of Pinteresque menace. Now, when Berryman says ‘friends’, plural, he seems to mean it, just as I did earlier. And ‘little friends’ (in DS35, addressing mostly younger graduates and academics) is a blend of affection and condescension, in a satirical dramatic monologue.

There’s a lot to be said about the forms of address in 77DS, and indeed the forms of communication; but I don’t think here’s the place. Anyway, thank you for tracing and retracing the stony ground with me this week; next week, as a reward, we are going to the movies together.

This week’s song: I’ve decided on something suitably religiose, depressed and stony: ‘All Cats Are Grey’ by The Cure. It has the right vibe, and I am also going to fancifully suggest that in its eight concentrated lines it evokes both Hegel’s comment on the owl of Minerva and also Theseus’s tragic black-sailed return. (OK, I know, I know. Humour me.)

Henry sats in de bar & was odd,
off in the glass from the glass,
at odds wif de world & its god,
his wife is a complete nothing,
St Stephen
getting even.

Henry sats in de plane & was gay.
Careful Henry nothing said aloud
but where a Virgin out of cloud
to her Mountain dropt in light,
his thought made pockets & the plane buckt.
‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’

Henry lay in de netting, wild,
while the brainfever bird did scales;
Mr Heartbreak, the New Man,
come to farm a crazy land;
an image of the dead on the fingernail
of a newborn child.

Preamble: After the palate-cleansing pleasures of DS4 last week, we are being served something more challenging.

The whole of 77DS is at one level a prolonged tussle between occlusion and disclosure. DS5 begins with an image which represents something of that double quality, that tension between seeing into or through, and not seeing; and it ends, quite literally, in the occult. The opening lines are a monsyllabic masterclass in compacted, layered meaning and ambiguity, even though the scenarios of the poem – a man in a bar, a man in a plane, a man in a foreign country – are clear and simple.

Music: Formally, the tri-partite structure is the clearest it has been so far: each verse begins with the same word (a kind of anaphora, rhetorically); in turn, they take Henry through different places and situations. This structure made it much easier to learn.

There are moments in this Song when the rhythm has a distinct jauntiness (anapaestic: ‘at odds wif de world & its god; trochaic and iambic: ‘Careful Henry nothing said aloud / but where a Virgin out of cloud / to her Mountain dropt in light’), but it never settles for long. There are the repetitions which we have come to expect – ‘odd’, ‘glass’, ‘plane’, ‘nothing’. There are rhymes and chimes – ‘odd’/‘God’; ‘wif’/‘wife’; ‘Stephen’/‘even’; ‘wild’/‘while’; ‘pockets’/‘plane’/‘Parm’, etc.

The diction is quite varied. We have already had blackvoice in DS2 and DS4, but in each case as part of the Tambo–Bones dialogue. Here, for the first time, it occurs without that dialogue. And it is deployed in the opening lines of each stanza, but not the subsequent lines, which instead tend towards the mannered (‘to her mountain dropt in light’).

There is what appears to a deliberately disrupted rhyme scheme, in that stanzas 1 and 2 each have a non-rhyming pair of lines (abacdd; abbcdc): ‘glass’ and ‘nothing’; ‘gay’ and ‘buck't’. In stanza 3 the rhyme scheme operates perfectly. We need to consider whether our attention is being deliberately drawn to those variants: sometimes the refusal of a rhyme is itself significant. 

Resources: There are references in this poem which are pretty obscure. ‘St Stephen’ is no trouble, whether in 1964 or 2026. But ‘Mr Heartbreak’? He is identified by legendary Chief Berrymaniac John Haffenden as ‘Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur’ on the back of a gloss supplied by Berryman himself at a reading (‘crève coeur’ meaning heartbreak in French). Could anyone have got it otherwise? I am going to hesitantly admit it into our analysis, partly because Crèvecoeur, the author of Letters from an American Farmer, was known to Ethan Allen, who comes up in DS6. But it is borderline. Ditto the brainfever bird, and the fingernail thing. It's obscure, but all of it could be researched and it doesn’t rely on a knowledge of Berryman himself. So first I’d like to think about how it all reads without that detail, and then how it reads afterwards. And what that means.

Let's go.

‘Henry sats’

This odd little solecism, along with ‘de’ for ‘the’, is partly just Henry playing the minstrel. But it also allows two tenses to hover simultaneously: ‘sits’ and ‘sat’. (Note also, for example, DS37: ‘I like it so less I don’t understood’. Temporality in DS77 matters – different time scales, simultaneous events – as we will see in DS6, whose second and third stanzas deploy the word ‘while’ four times; and then in DS11, also four times.) And as this stanza of DS5 proceeds, it does evoke an image of Henry doubled, as he loses himself in his reflection.

‘Odd’

A tiny but hugely suggestive word. It chimes with the later phrases ‘at odds’ and ‘getting even’. As well as its most obvious meanings – in this context, a range of possibilities, including huffy, peculiar, drunk, ornery, or ill – it also suggests singularity, even before we reach the marital unhappiness of lines 4-6. I have never read this poem without my mental image being Henry drinking alone by a window and/or near a large mirror. (These days that image resembles the famous Edward Hopper painting, see above.)

‘Off in the glass, from the glass’

Until recently, I had read this line only one way, with Henry’s drunken (‘from the glass’) reflected face in the window of the bar (‘in the glass’), superimposed on the world outside, estranged doubly, from himself (‘off in the glass’) and from others. It reminded me of my earliest train journeys, they way you could watch your ghostly face race through the scrolling countryside. Louis MacNeice picks up on this beautifully in his poem ‘Corner Seat’:

Corner Seat

Suspended in a moving night
The face in the reflected train
Looks at first sight as self-assured
As your own face — But look again:

Windows between you and the world
Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;
Then why does your reflection seem
So lonely in the moving night?

But ‘glass’ can also mean ‘mirror’, which would work similarly, while additionally conjuring (in a poem containing explicit theological and spiritual references) the words of St Paul in Corinthians:  ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ The Greek word translated as ‘darkly’ gives us the English word ‘enigma’. That difficulty, that darkness, that current estrangement from God, is made explicit in the following line.

‘At odds wif de world and its god’

DS77 has been compared to the Book of Job by more than one commentator. This is the first reference to God, and to Henry's theological troubles; many more follow, including, strikingly, 'God’s Henry's enemy’ (DS13). There are also frequent references to Hell throughout, and one dialogue with Lucifer himself.

At least as interesting, though, is the reappearance of ‘de [the] world’. We had it twice in DS1, similarly in the context of Henry's estrangement (‘Then came a departure’), and once in DS4 (‘is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls’). It appears many more times (it is one of the most repeated nouns in DS77), most strikingly in DS74: ‘Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry / did will not bear thought’. So God hates Henry, and Henry hates the world: at odds, indeed.

‘His wife is a complete nothing, / St Stephen / getting even’

My first readings of DS5 read these lines as a clear indicator of marital unhappiness. Later readings simply fine-tuned that sense. As I said in an uncharacteristic digression during an earlier post, Henry acquires and loses wives, and gains children, all through 77DS. St Stephen is an early martyr, put to death by stoning. The grammar (St Stephen in apposition with ‘his wife’, given the comma) suggests that his wife portrays herself as a martyr, but in fact gives as good as she gets. The almost oxymoronic phrase ‘complete nothing’ has apparently received no critical attention that I have been able to discover. It's a horrible thing to say of anyone, suggesting they are of no value or significance. To me, given that Berryman was a Shakespeare scholar, a further intended meaning seems obvious. Shakespeare frequently punned on ‘nothing’ as a reference to female genitalia. Henry is calling his wife a cunt.

There are commentators who heroically try to rescue the passage from so dismal an interpretation. One suggests that the ‘St Stephen / getting even’ reference is because St Stephen was stoned to death and Henry is getting ‘stoned’ in the bar (‘stoned’ was still being used as a synonym for drunk when the poem was written, though its more common meaning today was already gaining ground steadily through the 1960s). Another proposes that when Henry says 'wife’ he is using babytalk and actually means ‘life’. This, I feel, is a stretch.

Stanza 2

Henry is ‘off’ in another sense; he's on a plane. But much else is unclear. My first reading of the poem had Henry, a little bit squiffy, keeping sneakily schtum, and deliberately rubbing up against a fellow passenger (the highfalutin’ description of the ethereal descent of the Virgin being mock heroic, a metaphor for a woman taking her seat, the laconic exchange bringing us down to earth, so to speak). I no longer think I am right about that.

But what is going on? I have seen commentators suggest that Henry has seen, through the plane window, a vision of the Blessed Virgin, or perhaps a mountain-top statue; the plane experiences turbulence; we are returned to commonplace reality in the plane. In another, this is all a dream, in which the Virgin really is traveling with him: and the exchange between them is therefore comically demotic.

‘His thought made pockets’ is an intriguing phrase. Is it a reference to air pockets, the turbulence that leads to the bump, and the drunken apology? Or is it a reference to keeping things hidden (‘Careful Henry nothing said aloud … his thought made pockets’)? My earliest reading had it as an erection – possibly because of the UK slang phrase ‘pocket billiards’ – but I no longer think that stands up.

Is stanza 2 deliberately unclear? Probably. The poem moves swiftly and ceaselessly between the sacred and the profane. By maintaining this controlled ambiguity, Berryman can have image overlaying image, suspended.

Stanza 3

In my first readings I did not find the word ‘netting’ as intriguing as I do now. I had a vision of Henry hungover or ill in a hammock. I interpreted the brainfever bird as Berryman's brilliant image of a relentless crapulous headache: the bird wasn’t real (but nonetheless usefully evoked a tropical location). ‘Mr Heartbreak’, I felt, was a self-mocking epithet, an allusion to Henry’s marital situation. ‘The New Man’ – scathing and ironic, at the expense of the idea he could start afresh. ‘Come to farm a crazy land’ – I took this, similarly, to be an ironic image of the pioneering spirit (the next poem, DS6, refers to ‘all the breaks / & ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer’). The fingernail reference I did not understand, it just added to a sense of the exotic and occult, a step away from the Christian notes of the earlier stanzas.

I don't think I was right, for the most part.

‘Netting’ now strikes me as more likely a mosquito net, though another interpretation is that Henry has had to be detained, like a beast, maybe straight off the plane. Several commentators think he is in hospital in stanza 3, whether for mental ill health or alcoholism. The Cervantes allusion (see below) actually serves to affirm this.

There really is a ‘brainfever bird’: ‘During their breeding season in summer males produce loud, repetitive three-note calls that are well-rendered as brain-fever, the second note being longer and higher pitched. These notes rise to a crescendo before ending abruptly and repeat after a few minutes; the calling may go on through the day, well after dusk and before dawn.’

‘Mr Heartbreak’ is, as stated in the preamble, Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French-American who wrote ‘a volume of narrative essays entitled Letters from an American Farmer. The book quickly became the first literary success by an American author in Europe and turned Crèvecœur into a celebrated figure’.

Haffenden glosses the lines ‘an image of the dead on the fingernail / of a newborn child’ as deriving from Cervantes's 'Colloquy of the Dogs’, in which the witch Camacha of Montilla (a real historical figure) was allegedly able 'to cause the living or the dead to appear in a mirror or upon the fingernail of a newborn child.' That dialogue, between two talking dogs, takes place outside a hospital.

You must know, my son, that there lived in this city the most famous witch in the world, called Camacha de Montilla. … She congealed the clouds when she pleased, and covered the face of the sun with them … She fetched men in an instant from remote lands; admirably relieved the distresses of damsels who had forgot themselves for a moment … To make watercresses grow in a handbasin was a trifle to her, or to show any persons whom you wanted to see, either dead or alive, in a looking-glass, or on the nail of a newborn infant.

Uncharacteristic digression: In Catherine Lacey’s The Mobius Book (which I liked so much less than my friends did; so maybe I am wrong?) there is both a reference to Berryman, and, elsewhere, a dialogue with a dog. But that’s likely a coincidence. Anyway, this is her drive-by reference to Berryman, which is reasonably relevant to today’s post:

The poet John Berryman was found lying facedown in bed and hungover as he shouted, We are unregenerate! These efforts are wasted! Berryman was trying to find God then, but what he was finding instead was that it was very difficult for him to stop drinking

That reference, though, to the image of the dead in a mirror (or glass), or on the fingernail of a child! In the context of the book as a whole, the death of Henry’s father looms over Childe Henry, and one has to assume that this is a coded gesture at that fact. But the overall effect is one of eeriness: those final lines are, dramatically speaking, ominous. And, as any modern-day horror-movie fan knows, as indeed did Edmund Burke (1757), the more obscure something is, the more ominous it becomes: ‘To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.’

Witchiness, by the way, occurs again in 77DS: in DS12, which is based around the film La Sorcière (1955) – ‘Belle thro’ the graves in a blast of sun / to the kirk moves the youngest witch’ – and in DS19, ‘that witchy ball’ (by which he means, success).

This collection of vantages and reflections in DS5 won't cohere for me, but that may be beside the point. Once again, Berryman has taken his fallible Everyman and sent him off, clumsy and clownish, for encounters of a grander and more elevated nature, bumping up against God, the Virgin, and the Witch. And Henry is never wholly reduced by the attendant bathos and irony; there is always something still to play for.

*

This week's song betrays my guilty enjoyment of prog rock. (Won't be the last time, I'm guessing. Sorry.) I am surprised and delighted by how many of the lyrics chime, however faintly, with the Berryman. The ending especially:

If I had enough money
I'd buy a round for that boy over there
A companion in my madness in the mirror
The one with the silvery hair

And if some kind soul
Could please pick up my tab
And while they're at it
If they could pick up my broken heart

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Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

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or falling at her little feet and crying
‘You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry’s dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. — Sir Bones:
is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls.

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—  Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast … The slob beside her        feasts … What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
— Mr. Bones: there is.

Brilliance, indeed.

It’s a relief, after the intense difficulties of DS2 and DS3, to arrive at this perfect slice of comedy, an apparently continuous narrative, a single dramatic scene. I’m not going to analyse the poem – it would be like explaining a joke – and am tempted instead to put in a blank paragraph here (like the blank spaces in 77DS; see later), for us just to pause, and appreciate it.

…

Mmmm. No wonder DS4 is among people’s favourites. If 77DS is a concept triple-album, then DS4 is one of the tracks that escape its powerful gravitational field to become a hit single, and is therefore known to a wider public than just the maniacal hardcore fans.

So, a hit poem, and just in time, some might say. No need to dissect it. What we can do perhaps is admire some of the techniques, and note a few of the features which relate most strongly to the other pieces in the book, and pick out some specific ingredients to chew over – like that stress on páprika, for example. I have always stressed the second syllable of paprika but my (often hopelessly contradictory) researches suggest that Hungarians stress the first; most Americans the second; and that the British used to stress the first, then either, and now mostly follow the American way, in this as in so many things. (Though a discussion of this with my siblings on WhatsApp is proving to be quite rowdy.) Anyway, if I am right, this is Berryman adding here a note of sophistication, in a poem that delightfully oscillates between the more and less refined. Or: he is mocking the pretension of menus and of stress-marks. I have seen both angles argued for.

The tension between the bestial (‘springing on her’) and the elevated (‘falling at her little feet’) is perfectly executed throughout. Note in those examples, incidentally, a seasonal frisson in ‘spring[ing]’ and ‘fall[ing]’, chiming with DS77 (‘Henry is tired of the winter, … & Spring (in the city so called … Henry likes Fall’), but perhaps that is fanciful. Maybe the páprika is seasoning enough. Either way, that ‘springing’ and ‘falling’, performed across an entire stanza break, describes another pratfall for bathetic Henry, more of the physical comedy of this minstrel show. How clever that the sentiment moves from base to elevated even as the language conjures the physical transition from elevation to descent, and from dominance to submission.

When we read it out loud, we’re maybe struck less by the music this time – though the music is there, particularly the profusion of ‘f’ sounds – and more by the comic timing (line breaks and line length, syntactical delays, etc) and the smart choice of words – even little words like ‘twice’ and ‘four’ for example – but again, no need to labour this. The diction has some of the medievalism in that we saw in DS2 (‘Sir Bones’) and the late great critic Helen Vendler wrote an oft-quoted passage on this which, while it isn’t perfect in every detail, is good enough to simply quote again here (my emphasis in bold):

We become marginally convinced, by such a poem, that the troubadours were Henrys too, and that Berryman is merely uncovering the unsalubrious, but oddly solacing, layer of psychic squalor beneath high artistic convention. And yet, at the same time, we see the negative of this truth: that even the lustful and coarse-minded Henry wants to call his ‘feeding girl’ by a name like ‘Brilliance,’ to see her eyes as ‘jewelled’ and her company as a ‘feast.’ These are all metaphors straight out of the love-tradition, and what is exhilarating in Berryman as a writer is the balance between the parodic and the ecstatic that he keeps alive, as he reveals both the body’s abject yearning for idealization, and the mind’s conspiratorial desire for buttocks.

1) Tambo and Bones

(Reminder: For convenience, I call the unnamed interlocutor ‘Tambo’ in the dialogues between him and Henry.) As DS77 goes on, an emotional and psychological depth and texture develops in the exchanges between Tambo and Bones, of a kind granted to few if any of the other passing players in our merry drama, and I look forward to tracing that – there are some moments of gentleness, late on, that completely break me. Here it is knockabout locker-room stuff. Note, though, even here the highly effective use of syntax (‘Is stuffed, de world, wif feedin girls’) and word-choice. Henry is addressed as ‘Sir Bones’ in the wake of his poetic rapture in stanza 2, but as ‘Mr Bones’ when his lustfulness and legal status are being looked at; a little like the reduction of Prince Andrew to Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, and for not wholly dissimilar reasons.

2) ‘Dazed eyes’:

As I laid out in an earlier post, eyes and seeing are important in 77DS. Henry’s eyes are dazed here, and dazzled in DS38; NB not seeing is often associated with not being able to think well in DS77. In DS4 the ‘Brilliance’ has glanced at him (twice), which is not much, but Henry generally needs little encouragement. Compare DS69 (‘Let it be known that nine words have not passed / between herself and Henry; / looks, smiles’). In a truly beautiful moment in DS24, Henry and the lepers acknowledge each other with their eyes (‘smiles & a passion of their & his eyes flew / in feelings not ever accorded solely to oneself’), reminding us how rarely eyes meet in DS77 (and ruinously in DS45). Later in DS4, the woman’s ‘jewelled eyes’ are ‘downcast’, which might carry connotations of sadness, or modesty; or maybe she is just getting on with her meal. Maybe she’s smart enough not to look over at Henry again.

Outer Resources: I won’t do this often, but I haven’t been able to get this passage out of my head since I first read it. From a great article by someone who knew Berryman:

I was, that summer, working as a bartender and bouncer in a place called Nick’s English Hut. The bar had two constituencies. One was students and faculty from the University. The other was people from what we in the university called “the stonecutters,” people who worked in the limestone quarries surrounding the town. There was no communication between the two.

One night Berryman was in the bar with Steve Marcus and a few other people, and he began putting moves on a woman at a stonecutter table. From behind the bar, I could see the hostility rising. After a while, I went over and said, “John, she’s with a guy, you’ve got to stop.” He said he would, but he didn’t, and I saw the guys at the stonecutter table getting more and more pissed off.

Any bartender or musician knows what I’m talking about here; rooms have rhythms and you know when they’re going discordant.

Finally I went over said, “This table is flagged. Nothing more for anybody.” They didn’t argue that but Berryman kept making moves on the woman at the stonecutter table.

Every bouncer knows its far easier to prevent a fight than to break one up, so I came around the bar and picked Berryman up and carried him out to the street. He was a skinny guy and didn’t weigh very much. Steve Marcus pounded my back saying, “Put him down, you brute, don’t you know he’s a famous poet?” I said, “Don’t you know I’m saving his fucking life?” Marcus and I never got on after that. Berryman never remembered it.

3) ‘Her little feet’:

Henry focuses a few times on feminine feet. In DS47, ‘When down she saw her feet, sweet fish, on the threshold’, the Mary of Egypt figure is suddenly ashamed, feeling that her feet (‘fondled by many’) are unfit to step into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In DS72, we have the fond and courtly line about his daughter ‘Her feet peep, like a lady’s in sleep sunk’.

4) The slob beside her | feasts’:

It’s now the second time we’ve encountered this typographic quirk, the extra space between words. In a poem whose drama is being driven by timing, mostly comic, the gap seems to be part of that timing. Is it a little pause while Henry tries to select the mot juste? As readers do we fill such gaps with all the possible words and phrases, for a split second allowing in every possible insult at once, without Henry having to name them himself? Or is it an emotional pause, Henry briefly unable to go on, while contemplating all the verbs at the underserving Slob’s disposal? ‘Feasts’ is rich in envy and disgust, and continues the poem’s interplay of food and sex (hungerings, fillings, stuffings etc), and in its medieval aspect is perhaps suggestive of status (cf DS58, where we also encounter medievalisms, rank, and indeed ‘the law’).

5) ‘There ought to be a law against Henry…’

Great comic exchange, this, and also a closing line (‘there is’) which resonates beyond its immediate comic effect, shading into something deeper and darker as it lingers. There will need to be a full post pulling together the many legal references across 77DS, and exploring what laws there might be against Henry, but for now this reminds me that a couple of weeks ago I met my aforementioned legal pal (the ideal ‘innocent reader’ of this Substack) in a bar in Covent Garden (one of several very happy encounters with old pals that day). And my legal pal gave me a Berryman-related present so generous, in its thoughtfulness and labour and expense, that I actually broke down for several minutes. (As T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘Without these friendships – life, what cauchemar!’ Thank you, pal. I know you are reading this. You mean the world to me.)

Anyway, the other reason I mention him in this context is (the rest of you will be glad to hear) more relevant to readers who aren’t actually him: the very first poem which he excitedly talked to me about when we met was DS4! With sheer joy at the comic facility on display. You see! It makes it all the more impressive that Berryman waited until track four to give us a ‘banger’.

6) ‘She might as well be on Mars’:

The interplanetary metaphor is agreeably hyperbolic. But it makes me ponder (as DS50 and DS51 do too, with their sci-fi and galactic touches) about what ‘Mars’ might have meant to writers in 1950s-60s America. Now, I don’t think those associations are hugely relevant here, by the way. Maybe ‘Mars’ in DS4 might as well be any other planet. But in terms of what Berryman has available to him, Mars is the go-to choice. From H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), and the infamous 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast of an adaptation thereof, to Ray Bradbury’s book The Martian Chronicles (1950), along with a lot of films – Flight to Mars (1951) Red Planet Mars (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953), The War of the Worlds (1953), etc – Mars looms very large in the Cold-War American imagination. (The name may well feel less exotic and evocative to us today, is my point; and may indeed have been ruined forever now by the vainglorious ambitions of one of the worst human beings in the world.)

Well, there were a few good candidates for this week’s song, for example ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ by The Only Ones; but really it could only be this one.

A Stimulant for an Old Beast

Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings.
—I’m not so young but not so very old,
said screwed-up lovely 23.
A final sense of being right out in the cold,
unkissed.
(—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under things.

All these old criminals sooner or later
have had it. I’ve been reading old journals.
Gottwald & Co., out of business now.
Thick chests quit. Double agent, Joe.
She holds her breath like a seal
and is whiter & smoother.

Rilke was a jerk.
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.
A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle & lurk,
Rilke’s. As I said,—

The music: You know the drill. Let’s read it out loud, slowly. The rhythm of iambic pentameter underlies the first few lines before the disruption begins. By now we know this disruption to be deliberate. Take the line ‘A final sense of being right out in the cold’ and read it again but without the emphatic ‘right out’. Or without the emphatic ‘final’. Smoother, isn’t it? But the speed bump of ‘right out’ is effective, and gets us ready for the dramatically short line ‘unkissed’, and the horribly long and metrically uneven line about psychiatrists and women. (The layout is so irregular that for months after I had securely memorised all the words, I could not confidently remember where the line breaks fell.) Thereafter, the changes of rhythm seem impulsive, though never dissonant. Conversational, for the most part, until the final lines.

The vowel rhymes (‘burnt’ / ‘myrrh’; ‘pricky’ / ‘stings’); the ‘v’ of ‘velvet’ picked up in ‘very’ and ‘lovely’ (and much later in ‘vile’); the continuation of the ‘i’ sound from ‘stings’ into ‘kissed’ ‘psychiatrist’ ‘women’ and ‘things’. There are lighter rhymes or half rhymes too, between ‘criminals’ and ‘journals’, or internally (‘Co’, ‘Joe’), or both (‘whiter’, ‘smoother’).

In the jazzy final stanza, with its arresting comment on Rilke, we have a little return of iambic stateliness – ‘and titled, spelled, all disappointed ladies’ – and a sonically gorgeous couplet (‘worse’, ‘circles’, ‘settle’, ‘lurk’) before the sudden rush from the stage (‘As I said,—’). It’s the first of a couple of poems in DS77 where the poem is deliberately abandoned before it has ‘finished’, eg DS45 (‘Henry nodded, un-’) and DS72 (‘whom they overlook. Why,—’), and perhaps DS48 (‘I óught to get going.’) Also DS19, which deliberately ends without a full stop, though the sentence is grammatically complete. Note also DS66, whose parentheses are open at both ends of the poem, in a manoeuvre surely indebted to e. e. cummings.

And again, as much as the sound and the rhythm, we see the abrupt shifts of register, vocabulary, tone, which Berryman is getting us used to. It’s nice to periodically un-familiarise ourselves – the strangeness is important. But notice too the relative and near-complete orthodoxy of grammar and spelling in DS3, compared with the preceding poem.

Preamble

In our continuing confusion (last week we failed to understand DS2), we need perhaps to cling tighter than ever to a point which Berryman himself lays out plainly, and which I disgracefully failed to mention in an earlier post (Ancient Signs).

After the dedication and the epigraphs in 77DS is a Note with a list of certain poems and their dedicatees, and then the standard acknowledgements of the newspapers, magazines and journals that have been hospitable to some of the poems. At the end of which Berryman says:

Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work.

The lack of logic; the juxtaposition of incongruous elements; the disorienting, hallucinatory quality; the fragments of memory and emotion. These are all features of dreams. The theatrical quality – the musical element that the book stresses throughout, the constant sense of audience and performance; we are not dealing with narrative, but with songs.

I restate this because I experience a temptation myself, always, to bring the poems, and the book as a whole, into view as narrative. What is going on? Who are these people? And a poem like DS4 (‘Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken páprika’) – one of the famous ones, and one I am sure we are all hungering to get to – seems like a clear-cut anecdotal piece, which lulls me further. But more often than not, we are reading a dream, and a performance, and sometimes both at once, as when Berryman accompanies his idol Bessie Smith on stage:

I heard, could be, a Hey there from the wing,
and I went on: Miss Bessie soundin good
that one, that night of all,
I feelin fair myself

Dreams of songs, songs about dreams. In DS49, an ailing Henry is sick, shaky, unable to eat (this is down to the booze, I assume, given the symptoms), and hiding out from at least one ex-wife

How come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death:
locate the restorations of which we hear
as of profound sleep.
From daylight he got maintrackt, from friends’ breath,
wishes, his hopings. Dreams make crawl with fear
Henry but not get up

DS3 is no clearer than DS2. There are Outer Resources available, alas, and I refuse to use them. I should not need to read John Berryman’s letters and journals to understand his published poems. These Outer Resources, courtesy of Legendary Head Berrymaniac John Haffenden in his John Berryman: A Critical Commentary (1980), cover the provenance of both of the lines of dialogue in stanza 1, and the nature of Berryman’s animus to Rilke in stanza 3. (They also gloss the journalistic detail of stanza 2, but, in my view, not wholly correctly. See below.)

On the other hand, we are allowed to research or reach for details which would have been available at the time, whether on Biblical symbolism or Cold War politics, especially if they appear in Time magazine, which a lot of readers would have had access to, and which Berryman apparently read studiously even when not much enjoying it. The reference to ‘Gottwald and Co’ would likely have made a lot more sense to readers in 1964 than in 2026.

Let’s go.

The poem

A quick thought about the overall shape. The poem brings together a strange collection of ingredients, in a consideration of, arguably, sex and death and art. Let’s start by going line by line, identifying those ingredients, as far as possible, and then we can consider what they do to each other in juxtaposition.

1 The title: Swinburne on de Sade’s Justine. ‘Usually the work is either a stimulant for an old beast or an emetic for a young man instead of a valuable study to rational curiosity.’

This stance on de Sade – whatever we think of it – may be relevant to the tussle between Henry and Rilke at the end of the poem.

2 ‘Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings’

We aren’t given any context for these words. Acacia and burnt myrrh go together, as scents perhaps, and symbols certainly. They both represent the threshold between the living and the dead. For example, acacia is associated with immortality; myrrh with embalming. Velvet on the other hand offers a contrasting opulence and sensuality. And the ‘pricky stings’ then contrast with that.

So already we have a confused atmosphere of (im)mortality and eroticism.

3 ‘I’m not so young but not so very old / said screwed-up lovely 23.’

Repetition, sometimes regarded as clumsy in a poem, is very important in 77DS, as we saw with ‘see’. The word ‘old’ appears once in the title and three times in the poem. Age – and the age-difference between the ‘screwed-up lovely’ speaker and Henry – is significant. (One recalls helplessly now, more in sorrow etc, Craig Raine’s poem ‘Gatwick’.) However old Henry is, he’s certainly feeling it. And DS7, four pages later, begins ‘Henry is old, old; for Henry remembers …’ But in the rest of the book it is mostly others who are described as old, elderly, senior. So maybe he feels old only in relation to this 23-year-old – who herself is feeling not young.

How old is Henry? In one of his personae, he is aged 41 (DS40), though there he is also ‘black’. In the Bessie Smith dream referred to above he writes ‘I cross which stage / even at Henry’s age // in 2—3 seconds’, which to me suggests older than 41, unless he’s hopelessly out of shape. So if this 23-year-old is an object of desire (and in 77DS I’m afraid that is almost always the case), any liaison would probably fail the ‘half your age plus 7’ guideline. Outer Resources: Berryman wrote the poems when he was in his forties.

Digression: Henry, we discover in DS5, has a wife. By DS43, ‘ex wives’ (plural). In DS44 he’s getting married (again, one assumes), and without much enthusiasm. In DS54 he refers to his first wife, his second wife, and his son; in DS56 to his ‘new wife’; thereafter to his ‘wife’ (DS62) and ‘wife & son’ (DS67). In DS71 he is swinging his … daughter. Hmm. We will do this in more detail soon, but one thing to note about Henry’s women is they take up a lot of his energy and yet receive very little by way of definition. The young woman in this poem is reduced to a gesture at her youth and beauty, and a cursory reference to her mental health. It’s impossible even to know if later, she is the same ‘she’ who is compared to a seal.

Digression 2: temporality in 77DS will need a post of its own some time soon. Berryman uses ‘when’ and ‘while’ a lot in this book, and occasionally ‘where’ in a similar sense. In particular, he stresses the simultaneity of public and private events. We will be looking closely at the politics of 77DS in due course, because opinions will vary as to the extent that the poems are political, and what that means. And this is then crucial to how we read the controversial minstrel act that runs through the book.

But not here. Henry is reading old journals, and feeling old. And the Gottwald material is not simultaneous with the personal, as it is in eg DS11, and most strikingly in DS66, when a single week (or so) of politics in June 1963 is paralleled with Henry being .... well, Henry.

4 ‘A final sense of being right out in the cold’

Is Henry getting the brush-off here? Has she (as some people read it) raised in him the anxiety (which recurs through the book) that he won’t get laid again, ever? His unsuccessful lust is a particularly dominant note in the first section of 77DS. Or is this a continuation of the woman’s statement? Which of them is out in the cold, unkissed?

8 ‘—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist’ is a nice gag. Impossible to tell from the typography who is making it. The double meanings of ‘lick’ – competition, sex – are, we can already see, typical of the volume as a whole. Indeed, see ‘under things’.

9 ‘under things’ A lot going on here. Beyond the various innuendos — garments or positions — is the acknowledgment that in psychoanalytic terms, women are working away in Henry’s subsconscious, for better or worse.

10 ‘All these old criminals’ As we are about to discover, Henry is speaking about Communist leaders. But that juxtaposition – with the old beast who is unsettled by a young lovely – brings us back to a theme I raised last week: Henry and the law. ‘Yo legal and you good’ (DS2), ‘old criminals’ (DS3) and, in DS4, ‘There ought to be a law against Henry’. As the book goes on, these legal references are often prosaically associated with the pursuit by ex-wives of their alimony, and Henry is merely cross about them; but Henry also suffers from greater guilts, and the Law which pursues him comes not in the form of ‘the offices’ and ‘the sheriff’ in DS10, for example, but something darker and larger and more implacable. So when Henry moves from considerations of age and mortality to the deaths of bad men, it’s hard not to wonder whether he is also subconsciously troubled by his own ‘criminality’.

11 ‘I’ve been reading old journals’

‘Journals’ is going it a bit. ‘Gottwald & Co’ can be found in Time, March 22, 1948. I’d call Time a magazine. ‘Journals’ makes me think of a scholarly journal, like, oh, John Berryman Studies, which apparently only lasted from 1975-77 and closed ‘for lack of funds’. (A few years later, that fact would be cited as a symptom of a rapid dip in Berryman’s posthumous reputation.)

12 ‘Gottwald & Co., out of business now. / Thick chests quit’

Klement Gottwald was President of Czechoslovakia, and chairman and secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and a Stalinist. In the 1948 piece, he and his cronies are attending the funeral of Jan Masaryk, who they pretended not to have murdered. Time March 23, 1953 records the fact that Gottwald five years later had attended Stalin’s funeral and:

Atop Lenin’s tomb in Moscow, Gottwald had stood for 90 minutes in an icy wind and 12° cold. He had been in uncertain health for years, and he was a heavy guzzler who often showed up tipsy at official functions. When he returned to Prague, he looked well enough as he briskly reviewed an honor guard at the airport. But the next day he was ill. A clutch of doctors, including two Russians, called to his bedside in Hradcany Castle (medieval seat of the Bohemian kings), diagnosed his trouble as pneumonia and pleurisy.

His thick chest quit. (Outer resources: Haffenden says ‘Other references in the poem include those to the relatively short life-expectancy of meso-endomorphs, in the phrase “Thick chests quit”’ — but I think the reference is surely to Gottwald’s almost poetic cause of death.)

14 ‘Double agent, Joe’

I just don’t know. Joe could be Stalin or McCarthy at this point of the Cold War, and the question of who might be a ‘double agent’ in those febrile times would probably require more research than this phrase merits. But the phrase ‘double agent’ may have wider resonances of a metaphorical nature in the poem, so we shouldn’t brush it aside.

15 ‘She holds her breath like a seal
and is whiter & smoother.’

Well, like I say, we don’t know who ‘she’ is, nor whether she is the same she as the woman in stanza 1. (There is a grim interview with the Rolling Stones where the journo asks ‘Why did you call your album “Some Girls”?, and Keith Richards guffaws “We couldn’t remember their names”.) But women in this poem are a stimulus and a provocation: and ‘whiter and smoother’ is unequivocal eroticisation. Seals, it turns out, can hold their breath for a very long time. But this determined silence, is it an impenetrable independence, or a huffiness, or is (for example, and less edifyingly) fellatio being invoked? The holding of breath places us on the threshold between life and death, perhaps. See below for further thresholding.

16 ‘Rilke was a jerk’

I think one thing that holds the first-time reader and even makes them eager to continue, despite the extraordinary difficulties of DS2-6, are lines like this. You don’t see it coming. And it’s street-fighting stuff; Rilke is a precious fellow in comparison to horny, boozy, brawling Henry.

In a book which we will come to understand as highly poetically competitive, Henry is knocking down someone whose aesthetic is very different from his own. My problem here is that I have consumed too many Outer Resources, and can no longer be sure how a reasonably literate innocent reader would go about working out the likely nature of Henry’s beef with Rilke.

17 ‘I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.’

Well, of course you do. Griefs and music, that’s what 77DS is all about. And also, alas, the ladies, though in Henry’s case, untitled and, mostly, unnamed. But quite possibly disappointed, yes.

18 ‘A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle & lurk,
Rilke’s.’

What is Rilke’s threshold, which is worse even than Dante’s vision of Hell? Is it, in fact, the fact that it is a threshold, rather than a whole-hearted occupation of a position? Are we reminded of the thresholds to the afterlife invoked in line 1? How does this relate to the wheezy death in stanza 2? Questions, questions.

19 ‘As I said, — ‘

Why does it end like this? Does he just mean, ‘As I said, [Rilke is a jerk]’? I suspect not. But as we go on, the matter of ‘saying’ or ‘not saying’ will feature consistently, and ties back in with that question of ‘prying’ open or keeping quiet. Note rapidly, en passant, ‘I have said what I had to say’ (DS11), ‘Why should I tell a truth?’ (DS34), ‘I can't say what I have in mind’ (DS37), and the countless variations thereon.

Conclusion: Plenty to think about, but I must needs wrap up now. My feeling is that as we go on through the book, the later poems will assist us in our decisions around these early and knotty ones. For now, I will leave you with an old favourite song of mine, ‘Old’ by Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

Preamble: a few remaining notes on DS1 before we (temporarily) take our leave of it. I have had, as Henry says, ‘the most marvellous piece of luck’. An old pal, unwinding from his labours in the Law, has grabbed a copy of 77DS & joined the journey: and being happily unburdened by any Outer Resources, he is thus able to share his unmediated immediate impressions. He summarises his first sense of DS1 thus:

1 his youth’s left him / his wife’s left him / his talent’s not recognised or he fears his talent has left him (but see 3.)

2 soon his life will leave him

3 still, he has songs to write on account of these matters

My pal then adds, rightly, of the blank space in ‘hid | the day, / unappeasable Henry sulked’

1 hid [for] the day (like: “hours, I waited”)

2 the day [his fate, events, etc] [was], unappeasable

I think those ambiguities are quite deliberate, a big part of the book’s ability to overlay two or more ideas at once, and this is an excellent take on how the mysterious blank space can be semantically effective. (And the ‘talent’s not recognized’ theory does help with the line ‘the thought that they thought they could do it’, which is otherwise very opaque. And does chime with some of Henry’s later gripes. ‘He … is … not … appreciated’, as Mark E. Smith would memorably croon. About himself.)

Also, another pal, who is in fact my actual brother, notes nicely ‘Not knowing the poem I was immediately struck by the gap after "hid" which seemed like a representation of a hiding place (thus hidden) but also carrying a metrical force – those opening lines would not be so arresting without it’. (So, both semantically and rhythmically effective. Not bad for something that isn’t even there.)

Anyway, to wrap up or summarise DS1, for now: certainly there has been a rupture – ‘once’ (we are told twice) things were good, as good as woolen lovers, or as singing atop sycamores, that good; but then something went (‘departure’); and now everything is very bad, and very sad – that sort of sad where the continued heedless activity of the rest of the world seems at best baffling, and at worst an affront. (‘How we hate you, busy, ordinary, undying …’ as Peter Reading wrote in C.)

Baffling... yes. The reader who turns from DS1 to DS2 in the fond hope that these questions might at least begin to be answered finds instead that Henry himself is – are! – baffled; and nowhere near as baffled as his readers, I would wager.

Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance

The jane is zoned! no nightspot here, no bar
there, no sweet freeway, and no premises
for business purposes,
no loiterers or needers. Henry are
baffled. Have ev’ybody head for Maine,
utility-man take a train?

Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip,
but is he come? Le’s do a hoedown, gal,
one blue, one shuffle,
if them is all you seem to réquire. Strip,
ol banger, skip us we, sugar; so hang on
one chaste evenin.

—Sir Bones, or Galahad: astonishin
yo legal & yo good. Is you feel well?
Honey dusk do sprawl.
—Hit’s hard. Kinged or thinged, though, fling & wing.
Poll-cats are coming, hurrah, hurray.
I votes in my hole.

A reminder: For convenience, I will refer to the unnamed friend of Henry who calls him ‘Mr Bones’ (lines 13-15) as ‘Tambo’. Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite right, but I needed a convention, and this is it. Just a convention.

The music: As always, let’s pause to read it aloud, and to hear it. The five ‘n’ sounds in line 1, the ‘ee’ sounds in line 2, and then the extended hissy sibilance of ‘premises’, ‘business’, ‘purposes’. A tight rhyme scheme in stanza 1, progressively loosened thereafter. The iambic pentameters in the first lines of each stanza. The enjambments and internal rhymes (‘skip’, ‘strip’; ‘poll’, ‘hole’) which help to change that stately rhythm into skips and tumbles. ‘Require’ is stressed, unusually, on the first syllable – réquire – because that is a stress, not an acute accent, used, as Gerard Manley Hopkins uses it, to ask us to stress the ‘wrong’ syllable. (We will have to return to Berryman’s typographical peculiarities, at some point, because they are lamentably inconsistent. For example, I will – gladly – give £50 or a kilo of Stichelton, to the first reader who can convince me that Berryman’s choice of either the ampersand or the word ‘and’ has a consistent rationale on each and every occasion through 77DS.)

The minstrel voice – the voice of a white performer crudely representing a stylised and insulting version of blackness – how are we going to read that out loud? It was awkward even when Berryman wrote it. It is magnitudes more awkward now. Outer Resources: he used to ask Ralph Ellison for advice on his rendering of ‘Afro-American speech’. Ellison later remarked:

During the period he was writing Dream Songs I grew to expect his drunken (sometimes) telephone calls, in the course of which he’d read from work in progress…. I can’t recall how many such calls there were, but usually he wanted my reaction to his uses of dialect. My preference is for idiomatic rendering, but I wasn’t about to let the poetry of what he was saying be interrupted by the dictates of my ear for Afro-American speech. Besides, watching him transform elements of the minstrel show into poetry was too fascinating. Fascinating too, and amusing was my suspicion that Berryman was casting me as a long-distance Mister Interlocutor—or was it Mister Tambo—whose temporary role was that of responding critically to his Mister Bones and Huffy Henry.

This controversial side of the Songs will receive careful and focused attention another time. For now, let’s just register the shock of it. The grammatical and syntactical smoothness of DS1 (however opaque its meaning) has been replaced by something far more unorthodox, disruptive, discomfiting. But even if the grammar weren’t awry, and the spelling weren’t at times clownish, and the racial aspect weren’t so unsettling, it would still have been a very tough poem to make out in 1964. (And even tougher for me, a non-American, in 2026.) Seriously: what is this poem about?

The poem

Title: Big buttons, cornets: the advance

Dedicatee: ‘The second Song is dedicated to the memory of Daddy Rice who sang and jumped “Jim Crow” in Louisville in 1828’.

In an earlier post we discussed the book Tambo and Bones, a history of minstrelsy from which Berryman drew one of his epigraphs. Here’s a flavour of the performance conjured by the title and dedication in DS2:

Another feature of minstrel performances was the band and the street parade. Whenever the minstrels came to town, their arrival was heralded by a street parade, in which the “silver” or “gold cornet band,” gorgeously attired in colorful coats and trousers, big brass buttons and striking hats, led the procession through the streets of the town to the theatre, followed by the entire company, perhaps in long Prince Albert coats or swallow-tails, with fancy vests or colored lapels, and high silk “plug” hats.

We’re off.

1 ‘The jane is zoned’

‘Jane’ means ‘woman’. (OED, US slang: A woman, girl, girlfriend.) Hence ‘Jane Doe’. I can find no other meaning.

‘Zoned’ has a number of possible meanings: 1. Located in a zone or region of the celestial sphere; 2. Wearing a zone or girdle. Hence, virgin, chaste. 3. Characterized by or arranged (naturally) in zones, rings; 4. Arranged according to zones or definite regions. 5. Town Planning. Designated for a particular type of use or development.

A later meaning – Of a person: intoxicated by drugs or alcohol – is not attested to by the OED before 1971, but is surely an option.

So, the most obvious meanings are ‘the woman is chaste’ (and given the later lines, including ‘one chaste evenin’, this is promising), and possibly ‘the woman is high’. We would not immediately assume that ‘zoned’ in its town-planning sense was meant. And yet the following lines are very much ‘town-planning’ words: ‘no nightspot here, no bar / there, no sweet freeway, and no premises / for business purposes’.

So is ‘jane’ a metaphor for the town? Or is the town a metaphor for a woman, with the nightspot, bar, sweet freeway, etc being, through innuendo, euphemisms for body parts out of bounds? I am reminded of Maria in Twelfth Night saying to Andrew Aguecheek ‘bring your hand to the buttery-bar and let it drink’. Until I saw a performance in which she placed his hand on her breast, I had perhaps naively not appreciated the innuendo.

That ambiguity is further complicated by the electoral references in stanza 3 (‘poll cats […] I votes’), because bars were indeed closed on election day in most parts of the US in the 1960s. And for decades afterwards too. Indeed, I now gather, from languid Googling, that there are US states (and Latin American countries) where this is still the case. (As if people might make even worse decisions because they were shitfaced, eh. )

So, is Henry after a drink, or a date, or both?

2 ‘Have ev’ybody head for Maine […] ?’

I do not know why ‘Maine’ has been chosen here, nor how far away it is, since we have no been given a current location for Henry. Were the bars open in Maine on election day? My idly cursory researches so far suggest the opposite.

3 ‘Utility-man take a train’

Apparently a ‘utility man’ is a versatile fellow, capable of taking any role in a baseball team. But I note that it can also mean ‘utility actor’, which is glossed as ‘An actor of the smallest speaking-parts in a play’. I would welcome transatlantic input here.

4 ‘arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip / but is he come’? I took this sentence as meaning simply ‘a time always comes when we lose our grip; has that time come for me’? I have see it suggested that there may be a religious meaning (‘has He come again?’), and though that doesn’t work for me personally, there are certainly later lines in the book that chime. 77DS has a hefty theological component, and we will have to devote some attention to it when the time arrives.

The word ‘coon’, OED:

3 A stereotype or caricature of a black person formerly common in minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, and early cinema, typically portraying African American people as lazy, ignorant, and clownish. Also: a singer, actor, or entertainer who performs in such a role, esp. professionally (now chiefly historical).

The word ‘coon’ is used four times in 77DS, but in one instance, in DS57, an apostrophe indicates that it is a shortening of the word ‘racoon’:

I recall a ’coon treed,
flashlights, & barks, and I was in that tree

[…]

I fell out of the tree

I mention this now in case the line ‘all coons lose dere grip’ is meant to chime in some way with Henry in DS57 as a ‘treed’ racoon (coon hunting is a sport in which trained dogs chase racoons up trees; formerly, so they could then be shot; latterly, for the fun, with the racoons going free) who loses his grip, and falls from the tree. It could be unintended, coincidental. But we are approaching 77DS as if every word is a decision, and as if the whole book coheres. That is the compliment we are paying it.

5 ‘Hoedown’

As discussed in a previous post, the hoedown was an integral part of the minstrel show:

By 1850, the form of the American minstrel show had become immutably fixed, as far as the minstrel semi-circle first part, and a second part variety bill, called the olio, were concerned. The last act in this olio, or second part, in the early days represented a genuine, hilarious darky “hoe-down” in which every member of the company did a dance at the center of the stage, while the others sang and vigorously clapped their hands to emphasize the rhythm.

6 ‘ one blue, one shuffle … Strip, / old banger, skip us we, sugar’

No idea. I do assume that they refer to aspects of the dance. I do not believe they have anything to do with striptease (see digression below), though equally I don’t think the word ‘strip’ has been used carelessly; there is a deliberate summoning of the erotic throughout, even as it is thwarted and short-circuited. Whatever is happening (or not) is ‘chaste’, hence Tambo’s mocking epithets for Henry, ‘Sir Bones, or Galahad’, and the sarcastic amazement that ‘yo legal and yo good’. But the very emphasis on chastity, legality, and goodness cannot but make us aware that Henry would be happier with their opposites.

7 ‘Sir Bones, or Galahad’

Henry refers himself, or is referred to, by various names (‘Mr Bones’, ‘Bones’, ‘Friend Bones’, ‘Henry Pussycat’, ‘Henry House’), and is further described by sundry epithets (huffy, unappeasable, careful, bewildered, horrible, gentle, friendly, elongate and valved (!), industrious, affable, stuffy, lazy, shaky, somber, seedy, etc). The mocking medievalism of ‘Sir Bones, or Galahad’ will come to mind again when we reach DS58, which is camply packed with words like ‘Sire’ and ‘serf’ and ‘Avalon’ – ‘me feudal, O me yore’. We might as well be in Spamalot.

(Note: Dialogue in 77DS is marked off by an em dash. So in stanza 3, the first 3 lines are Tambo, and the last 3 lines are Henry. Mostly the dialogues are between Henry and Tambo. But not always – in DS17, for example, Henry is talking with the Devil.)

8 ‘you legal & yo good. Is you feel well?’

The law, and legality, and lawyers, are invoked frequently across 77DS, with Henry largely on the wrong side of them, and may well get a post of their own. In this particular instance, I have seen it suggested that ‘yo legal & yo good’ means Henry is married; but the main thrust is surely simply that Henry is not boozing and/or philandering, much as he’d like to.

9 ‘Honey dusk do sprawl’. Some readers take this to be an invocation of evening (‘perhaps comforting him with a poetic image of an urban dusk’ etc etc). In DS50, Tambo refers to ‘de roses of dawns & pearls of dusks, made up / by some ol’ writer-man’; indeed, traditional and worn-out poeticisms of this sort are often undercut or knowingly framed in 77DS. But at least one reader has seen a sexual meaning (see digression below), and, again, a deliberate eroticism is surely plausible.

10 ‘—Hit's hard. Kinged or thinged, though, fling & wing.’

‘Kinged’ – raised up? ‘Thinged’ – treated like an object? ‘Fling’? No idea. ‘Wing’? Ditto. Is it about agency – that ‘fling’ is being helplessly thrown, and ‘wing’ is propelling yourself? Why the apostrophe in ‘hit’s’? At this point, the poem has surely collapsed into chaos and incoherence. Make of it what you can.

11 ‘Poll-cats are coming, hurrah, hurray. / I votes in my hole’

Again, I have found no consensus on this. It firms up the election day vibe. There is a tension between a public or civic act of participation (‘I votes’) and a place of retreat or abjection (‘in my hole’). There is a certain sarcastic scepticism about the electoral process (‘Poll-cats are coming, hurrah, hurray.’) Given that the question of race has been explicitly introduced via the minstrelsy in this poem, the theme of enfranchisement is surely pointedly significant? The 24th Amendment (1964) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were not yet in place a the time this poem was written.

When I try to figure out the meaning of this line, my mind ranges over the wide variety of meanings for ‘hole’: a pit, cave, den, hiding place in the earth; a burrow; a hiding place, a secret room; a dungeon or prison-cell; a small dingy lodging or abode; a position from which it is difficult to escape; a fix, scrape, mess; the orifice of any organ or part of the body; the mouth, the anus.

I wonder if Berryman would have appreciated the unforgettable Jesus & Mary Chain lines ‘God spits / On my soul / There's something dead inside my hole’.

*

A digression about sexual references

Just a quick one. Sometimes horny Henry is explicit about his lusts (and most noisily so in DS69 – where the frankly puerile choice of number is possibly not Berryman’s proudest moment), but sometimes there is just an aura or frisson of the erotic, and you cannot be quite sure. Is it you, or is it him? For a long time, I took DS5 to involve a little frottage on a flight (‘ … his thought made pockets & the plane buckt. / ‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’) but I have had second thoughts lately.

It’s possible, see, to overdo this. (A woman walks into a bar, and orders a double entendre. So the barman gives her one.) I have seen more than one academic suggest that the phrase ‘hard on the land wears the strong sea’ in DS1 is meant to rouse in us thoughts of a ‘hard-on’. While I can’t rule it out, I’m unconvinced. (‘Put it away please, sir’, as I sometimes murmured while reading Craig Raine.) Sometimes the cigar is just a cigar, etc.

So similarly, I came across a reading of DS2 which argues essentially that Henry, having failed to get off with ‘the jane’, is now pursuit of erotic dancers instead:

The voice of the first stanza tells Henry that the “jane” Henry is after is off limits while Henry—all of his fractured selves—“are” confused that he should be limited in this way. It is literally night time, “utility man take a train?,” but Henry is also in a moral darkness as he is attempting to “get” a girl. The voice of the second stanza seems to be tempting Henry to lose his “grip” by getting this girl to dance, strip, and go to bed with him. When the first voice returns in the third stanza, he seems to encourage Henry, who is “legal”—white—and “good,” to just take the girl when he chimes “Honey dusk do sprawl.” The second voice responds graphically, referring to his genitals—“Hit’s hard”—while cheering for the “poll-cats” who not only relate to the voting motif because of the play on “poll” but also remind the reader of actual strippers who simulate sex, and goads Henry to not intellectualize his choice but make it based on his physical desire.

I’m really not convinced. This reminds me of an excellent A-level student, the daughter of a pal, who, finding the word ‘hoeing’ in a Ted Hughes poem and being wholly and understandably ignorant of its agricultural meaning, made a point about disrespectful language and womanising.

The late Michael Donaghy used to maintain that a man had earnestly explained to him after a poetry reading that Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ was about bestiality. (‘My little horse must think it queer / [...] He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake’). Great gag though that is, I somehow doubt the encounter really happened. (Between Donaghy and the man, I mean. Not between Frost and the horse. Though not that either.) It does, however, enable me to trot out the best headline I ever wrote at the TLS, for a book about zoophilia: ‘Loins led by donkeys’. (And maybe we should look again at that ‘woolen lover’ in DS1, he added sheepishly.)

That’s enough of that. (‘Mr Bones, please.’)

*

So, is DS2 about not getting a drink? (There are enough boozy references in the rest of the book to make a small post of its own.) Or is it about not getting laid? There are enough poems – especially in these opening pages, but also throughout – to make that plausible, too.

What if it’s both? In DS44 the following appalling prospect emerges for married-again Henry:

Bars will be closed.
No girl will again
conceive above your throes

and in DS52, a back-from-hospital Henry likewise asks

Will Henry again ever be on the lookout for women & milk

(He doesn’t mean ‘milk’, old Pussycat. He means booze.) In last week’s post we noted the latent castration anxiety hanging over the whole book, and these fears are part of that. (NB, while I do like my slips Freudian, I don’t in general go in for all the ‘crummy textbook stuff from Freshman psych’, so you’ll not be pestered by the likes of Jung and Lacan and Kristeva in this Substack. I will be repressing them, ho ho.)

Or is it about being ‘black’? Again, that aspect of the poems is going to need a few posts of its own to do it justice – and justice is explicitly at stake in this area of 77DS (see particularly DS60, 68, 72). The disappointment of stanza 1 – whether sexual or alcoholic or neither or both – is the apparent trigger for the coarse minstrelsy that follows, and its enigmatic finale of sullen … disenfranchisement? Or electoral pessimism? Or defiance? But if Berryman were suggesting an equivalence between being excluded from a bar (or a woman’s body) and being excluded from the body politic, I think we would be looking at something rather worse than a violation of good taste.

My own current view is that Berryman wanted several different perspectives to stay in view simultaneously, within a performance of angry abjection and sulky defiance (the dominant mood of many of the early poems). And I believe that the discomfort and the difficulty experienced by the reader are quite deliberate – hence this poem appearing so early in the book. It’s a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down; and the challenge is both intellectual and emotional. (I’m hard work, but I’m worth it. If you love me, you’ll try.) I know I’m not alone in feeling that Berryman’s most jagged and contorted Songs are often those with the most at stake emotionally. What Henry is hiding, from himself and from us, has to be brought out gradually, with care. And sometimes cannot be.

It may come.
I’d say it will come with pain,
in mystery. I’d rather leave it alone.
I do leave it alone. (DS38)

Why should I tell a truth? when in the crack
of the dooming & emptying news I did hold back —
in the taxi too, sick —
silent — it’s so I broke down here (DS34)

But if I’m wrong, then at what point does opacity and ambiguity become bad writing? At what point does incoherence no longer have a rationale?

Anyway, I would love to know what anyone else makes of this. All responses equally valid and welcome, in my book. (Except maybe the pole dancers.)

This week’s song is ‘Dry County’ by the B52s.

Huffy Henry hid    the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point, –  a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

The poet and scholar J. H. Prynne once wrote a book-length commentary on a single Shakespeare sonnet, ‘They that haue powre to hurte’, moving word by word through the poem. What I remember most, aside from a sense of awe at the scholarship and philology applied, with such intensity, to a single poem, was my amusement at the opening line of the commentary itself:

1. ‘They’: we do not know who they are.

and, 85 densely-packed pages later, the words

And yet, within the ambit of these corrupted lilies, we still do not know who they are …

(I really don’t know even now why I’ve always found this so funny. ‘There are no stupid questions’, as I used to say when training people.)

So I did toy with the idea of doing it likewise line by line – ‘1. “Huffy Henry”: we do not know who Henry is, nor wherefore his huff’ etc etc. But (to steal a phrase) there is another method. As I said last week, there’s a lot to unpack in DS1, both in terms of the poem itself, and in terms of its relationship to the other poems in the book. So we will chip away at it, and in guerrilla raids. We will circle it, and charge into it, and wander off, and return.

This week, I want to think about repetition. Every word in a poem is a decision – or should be. (Even if that decision, taken at an earlier stage, was to work deliberately within an Oulipean restraint, or to allow randomness in as a principle of composition.) DS77 is composed of small, sonnet-like, (mostly) 18-line pieces, where individual lines can be very short indeed (‘Be.’), so to repeat a word is a significant choice. And there are certain words that come up over and over again (‘come’ is one of them, in fact), and some that come several times in a single poem. Sometimes twice in a single sentence. Sometimes twice in one line. Prynne again:

Reading texts intensively or extensively will often bring you to recognise specific words that seem to bear highly significant charges of meaning, as maybe even a stylistic fingerprint ... Eventually you will begin to develop from your reading your own minimal select concordances, carried in your personal memory as a kind of resonating echo-chamber.

In 77DS, aside from the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’, the most common verbs are ‘come’ and ‘see’. We will come back to ‘come’ another time: it is a word which features both in the earliest lines of the book (‘come out and talked’) and the last two poems (‘I saw nobody coming, so I went instead’ and ‘— Come away, Mr Bones’). The journey of that little word thus exemplifies the arc from bathos to pathos that Berryman pulls off in 77DS, and which, along with the music, is maybe one of the main draws for his audiences.

In DS1, as well as ‘I see his point’ we have the sound repeated in both ‘seem’ and ‘sea’, and the word itself twice in one sentence:

I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

It’s not the only time that Berryman repeats this specific word in consecutive lines, or even the same line:

I see sank underground.
I see. My radar digs. I do not dig … (DS21)

I'm scared a lonely. Never see my son,
easy be not to see anyone, (DS40)

I see you before me plain
(I am skilled: I hear, I see) —(DS42)

supplied of engines all to see, to see. (DS73)

I first picked up on this because of the way in which I learned the poems. I began at the beginning, with DS1, and worked my way through to DS77, and then stopped. I think it took around six months, start to finish. I’d start by reading a whole poem through, to fix at least some sense of its overall logic or direction. Then I’d read the first line or two, look away, recite from memory, look back and check. Once those lines were lodged sufficiently, I’d add another line or two. Each time I did this, I ran through all the lines I’d already learned, ie by line 13 I was having to recite the first 12 lines again before getting to my latest acquisition. Sometimes it would turn out that by the time I had done so, I had already lost the thirteenth line! And would have to go back to it. This sometimes happened again and again, and it could be very frustrating.

Similarly, once I had learned a new poem, I also made myself recite all the previous poems, to make sure they stayed firmly in mind; and to make sure that I really had learned the newest one properly, and not just had it under control in isolation and for that moment. As a result, I got to know the earliest poems very well indeed. And yet, a time would still come when I’d discover that I had begun to make tiny mistakes – of word or of word-order – and needed to brush up again.

Some readers might be saying to themselves at this point ‘where did he find the time?’ and ‘didn’t he have anything better to do?’ Well, like I said, there are no stupid questions, and those do seem reasonable ones. Even my friends and family struggled at times to disguise their real reaction to my project. The fact is that by the time I started this exercise, the second (and least bad) of three bad things had happened to me – crashing my car – and I had come to the realisation that I needed, for my sanity, a project requiring focused attention (and therefore enabling a concomitant distraction from the bad things), and also a sense of progression; so, no, I don’t think I did have anything ‘better’ to do at that point. But in any case, I walk a dog every day, for at least an hour, and memorising John Berryman is a perfect thing to do on a dog walk. I made use of time when I was already alone and away from my other labours, both professional and domestic, and was already doing something necessary. (A little digression – as if this entire post were not now already a succession of digressions – Henry seems to have a dog too – ‘the barker’ – and possibly also a cat – ‘lie-by-the-fire is waiting for his cream’.)

Anyway, two errors eventually crept into my corrupted memory of DS1. The first was

I don’t know how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

And the second was

All he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.

The first error came from my belief that Berryman wouldn’t repeat ‘see’ like that. (The second error, perversely, came from imagining he would repeat ‘all’ again. Which he does, but not there. I was all at sea, so to speak.)

So ‘see’, I saw, is very important to Berryman. We explored in the earlier post ‘Making It’ how ‘seeing’ in its most physical aspect is the first part of a process of making sense for Berryman (‘he couldn’t hear or see well – all we sift’), and the word ‘see’ quietly covers a remarkable spectrum of perceiving and receiving and conceiving and understanding and foreseeing in 77DS. The OED offers about 30 distinct meanings of ‘see’, and Berryman deploys a fair number of them. They range from foresight (‘I see no end’) to literal sight (‘who I don’t see here’) to psychological insight (‘to see himself less’) to comprehension (‘I sees that’) to revelation (‘Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw’); from idiomatic markers of attention (‘she love him, see’) to encounters (‘never see my son’), to witness or occasion (‘This edge of the galaxy has often seen …’). This is not exhaustive.

It is complicated by the fact that in some poems, not knowing if we are in a dream or reality, or not knowing if we are in allegory or narrative description (or both), we cannot confidently assign a single definition. The OED’s definition 11.11.a. – ‘To perceive (an object, person, scene, etc.) in the mind's eye or in a dream or vision; to have a mental image of’ – is pertinent here.

At this point, we might note a more general preoccupation in 77DS with forms of looking (there are many other references to looks, glances, eyes; once you have noticed this, you see them everywhere), and a particular focus on blindness. In the sinister DS8 (‘The weather was fine. They took away his teeth’), the ‘they’ who torment Henry and force him to ‘see’ himself also blind him (‘they weakened all his eyes’). In DS25, Henry rather bitterly parodies ‘them’ as demanding ‘Render him sightless, / or ruin at high rate his crampon focus’. In the famous DS29 we have the enigmatic and haunting line ‘with open eyes, he attends, blind’. DS49, one of the rare poems with its own title, is called ‘Blind’. (Again, this is not an exhaustive list.) It parallels the book’s careful oscillations between obscurity and revelation – between ‘prying to’ and ‘prying open’, perhaps (see last week’s post). And behind the phrase ‘a trying to put things over’, in DS1, do we also hear the ghost of the phrase ‘put one over’? Revelation and concealment go hand in hand. With open eyes, blind.

Another thing which might be worth holding in mind is the Freudian connection between blindness and castration. In DS8 ‘they’ didn’t only weaken his eyes, they ‘took away his crotch’. In DS25, that order to ‘render him sightless’ is accompanied by the instruction ‘wipe out his need’. Images of castration and sexual failure recur through 77DS: Abelard (DS6) and Origen (DS56) were both castrated, one as a punishment, the other by choice. In 77DS the ability to ‘see’ – to perceive, to comprehend, to connect, to have a vision – is a sign of life, of virility. Throughout the cinematic and psychological nightmares of the book, the threats of impotence, castration and death are barely kept at bay. The final line of DS1 (‘and empty grows every bed’) is, like so much of this opening poem, setting up a major theme.

There’s a lot more to be said about DS1, and we can and will come back to it often: but having strayed now into the territory of ‘empty beds’, next week we will look at DS2 (another one with its own title – ‘Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance’). DS2 is one of the hardest poems in the whole book (which may be why I have been dragging my feet a little, eh? Another one for Mr Freud perhaps). After the overture of DS1, DS2 is an all-singing, all-dancing opening number, the one where the minstrel act kicks off, complete with its hoedown … and as far as I can make out, nobody really knows what most of it means. This, fellow Berrymaniacs, is our opportunity, to share responses and trade interpretations and break new ground. See? This is what we came for.

Dream Song 1

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Huffy Henry hid            the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point, — a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

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All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

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What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

‘Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?’

Dream Song 1 is effectively an overture for the collection, deliberately placed first to set up the illusory arc of the volume. It contains many of the ingredients of the rest of the book. There’s a bathetic Achilles (‘sulked’), who we will encounter again in DS14 (‘with his plights and gripes /as bad as achilles’) and DS53 (‘more Sparine for Pelides’). There’s an Edenic fall, which we will encounter more explicitly in DS77 (‘Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll / for ever, impenitent Henry’) and perhaps by implication in DS57 (‘fell out of the tree’). We encounter for the first and second time, a much-used phrase ‘the world’ – here ‘all the world’, in a Shakespearean note that nicely prepares us for the theatrical performance ahead, but which also sets up the existence of (often hostile) other people. It’s a good start. It also has the typographical blank space (between ‘hid’ and ‘the day’) which we will encounter a few times in the book, and must therefore at some point consider the meaning or point of; and, pressingly, the pronoun problem; ‘Henry’, ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘they’.

But before we get into that – before we even consider the gist of what we have just read, let alone the pith – let’s linger for a while on the sound. Let’s read it out loud, slowly, and appreciate the density of the alliteration, and the hop and skip of the rhythms.

‘Huffy Henry hid | the day’ is so thumpingly alliterative that it makes me think of Anglo Saxon metre. The three ‘h’ sounds on the beat, and then the ‘d’ of ‘hid’ picked up in ‘day’. In the next line, the ‘s’ of unappeasable’ chimes with ‘sulked’ and the end of ‘sulked’ will be echoed later in ‘wicked’ and ‘talked’. The ‘p’ of ‘unappeasable’ chimes with ‘point’ and the ‘t’ of ‘point’ with ‘thought’ (twice) and ‘it’ and ‘out’ and ‘talked’. The ‘th’ of ‘things’ is also picked up in ‘thought’, which later rhymes with ‘ought’. From line 7, the ‘w’ and ‘l’ sounds wobble their way from ‘wicked’ and ‘away’ through ‘all’ (twice) and ‘woolen’ and ‘lover’ and ‘world’ (thrice) and ‘once’ (twice); and ‘lover’ also half-rhymes with ‘over’. A handful of sounds – especially P, T, S, and D – pop and spit through the whole of this first poem. I won’t offer an exhaustive account. Just roll it all around in your mouth. Sonically, it’s remarkably dense, packed tight with echoes and chimes.

Rhythmically, too, it’s beautifully paced and varied. The first line trochaic, the second line skippy and stumbly, the third line close to iambic pentameter, the fourth line a little bit anapaestic… it doesn’t settle, but it moves with a gorgeous combination of grace and agitation. I find ‘departure. / Thereafter’ clicks off the tongue every time. In that almost Yeatsian closing couplet (‘Hard on the land wears the strong sea / and empty grows every bed’) I would, if pushed, argue that it is a line of choriambic dimeter (— u u — | — u u —) and then an elegiac hemistich (— u u | — u u | —), but none of that is strictly the point (and I think identifying metre is more subjective than people ever admit). The point that I am trying to put over is that Berryman writes a beautifully rhythmic poetry, which can summon memories of very old traditional metres and also simultaneously deliver newer and jazzier sounds; just as linguistically he can switch between the conversational, slangy, mannered, poetic, cod-medieval, Biblical, pastiche, minstrelsy, and so on: often within a single sentence.

Once we have dwelt awhile on that music, what first impressions does the poem give us? Well, straight up: it’s incredibly confusing. Beneath the simplicity of its diction, there is much that is obscure. That pronoun problem, for instance. I mentioned in an earlier post that by the time Berryman published the next tranche of Dream Songs in 1968, he appended (Outer Resources) a semi-helpful explanation:

The poem then, whatever its cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.

It is hard to remember now, at a distance of so many years, how long it took me to realise that the ‘I’ and the ‘Henry’ were the same person. In DS14 (‘Life, friends, is boring’), a famous poem often encountered alone in the wild, the line ‘Henry bores me’ doesn’t help an unwary reader, who will surely think: ‘Who’s Henry?’ and ‘bit harsh’. In DS1 we have ‘I don’t see how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived’. There is a distance between ‘I’ and ‘Henry’ which then dissolves in the third stanza (‘I was glad’). Still, as the book goes on, I think that the evidence does pile up that ‘I’ and ‘Henry’ are the same, and that both are addressed by that unnamed friend as ‘Mr Bones’; but, as I have said before, it is not a surprise that early readers got confused.

Another confusion – between the poet John Berryman and Henry – fortunately needs not worry us in this Substack, falling squarely as it does into Outer Resources. But since we’re here, we might as well note that Berryman’s later insistence (‘not the poet, not me’) is both enigmatic (is there a significant distinction between ‘the poet’ and ‘me’?) and disingenuous. I don’t think there’s been a single commentator on the Dream Songs who hasn’t drawn the massive, obvious, unignorable parallels between Berryman’s life and Henry’s: parallels which in the later poems (some of which might as well be diary entries, frankly) are crashingly obvious.

More playfully, I can’t help noting that there is another poet, whose name also begins with ‘B’ and ends with ‘n’, who similarly wrote a long poem about a character beginning with ‘H’, and who also had to constantly insist, against widespread readerly disbelief, that ‘H’ was not ‘B’, and eventually gave up:

The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive … it was in vain that I asserted, and imagined, that I had drawn a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether — and have done so.

Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Preface to Canto IV

But the word I want to focus on today is ‘pried’. It’s a violent word. Henry is ‘pried open’. Now, for some reason that makes me think of an almost surgical prying open, as in a cracking of the rib cage. Forgive me another digression: there’s a great song by Fontaines D.C. called ‘Skinty Fia’, which I was introduced to by a pal, and it contains the remarkable line ‘I let her prise apart my ribcage like a crackhead at the blinds’. Which is magnificent, because the prising apart of the ribcage is already metaphorical, and the crackhead at the blinds thus a further metaphorical elaboration, based on both the horizontal slats and the rapacious vampiric greed of the singer’s obsession. And there’s also arguably a fair bit of metonymy and synecdoche in that line, but it’s so tangled I can’t actually break it down into its rhetorical terms; please leave a comment if you can, it’s been tormenting me. I can’t think of a comparable manoeuvre in any song or poem, though there must be other examples.

But what arrested me eventually about the word ‘pried’ in DS1 is the question of who is doing the prying. In stanza 1 Henry’s hiding, he’s in a huff, he will not (like Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence) come out to play. He’s been abandoned by someone, or something. So what’s with the prying open? (And surely the ghost of ‘prying into’ lurks here too – that getting into Henry’s ribcage is a bit nosy, so to speak.) And there are several other poems – notably DS8 – where Henry is subject to appalling and traumatic prying:

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                        They lifted off
his covers till he showed, and cringed & pled
to see himself less.
They installed mirrors till he flowed.

So in DS1, is he hiding because he’s been pried open? And how does that prying square with Henry’s relentless, sometimes cocky and sometimes self-pitying, self-presentation? In DS25, for example, ‘Henry … made up stories / lighting the past of Henry’, and perhaps the pain in 77DS is that these boastful stories are in tension with the reductive analyses of others (‘Reduce him to the rest of us. / — But, Bones, you is that.’) DS25 works through the problem really interestingly: it’s the sort of subject for which the ‘Mr Bones’ exchanges are particularly well-suited. That said, in DS67, Henry reveals himself as a poet-surgeon (‘I am obliged to perform in complete darkness / operations of great delicacy / on myself’). Is he pried open, or prying himself open? It’s in every sense a messy business.

The word ‘pried’ occurs once more, in DS34; and problematically. DS34 is a difficult poem anyway – it is about suicide, and as well as being unclear in its suicidal subjects (two different men), and its addressees (numerous, ambiguous), it is also arguably massively reliant on Outer Resources to resolve. It ends in a crumpled linguistic mess, obscure and ambiguous, as several of the poems do, and nearly always when they hover around losses, particularly, as here, those relating to fathers and suicides. The poem begins

My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide
in the mind, and tendoned like a grizzly, pried
to his trigger-digit, pal.
He should not have done that, but, I guess,
he didn’t feel the best, Sister, — felt less
and more about less than us ... ?

Now — tell me, my love, if you recall
the dove light after dawn at the island and all —
here is the story, Jack …

‘Your shotgun.’ Whose shotgun? (Outer Resources: Robert Fitzgerald, a former student, the poem’s dedicatee, who left it with Berryman having failed to get a permit to take it on a plane with him; Berryman then left it with his mother. But ‘Sister’ and ‘My love’ and ‘Jack’ are other addressees, in a bewildering profusion.) Which man, ‘wide in the mind’ etc? (Outer Resources: Ernest Hemingway. And a different shotgun. Other deaths will follow, for example Faulkner two poems later. And three poems later, that pair of great writers are referred to, rather casually, simply as ‘the shooter and the bourbon man’! But Hemingway’s is not the only suicide in this poem. It merges, not altogether clearly, with a father’s.) We will return to DS34 properly another time; there’s way too much in it to handle en passant. (This is not a drive-by shooting.) I just wanted to show that, in the general confusion, it is easy to overlook how peculiar the word ‘pried’ is here.

‘Pried / to his trigger digit’. The word, once again, separated by a line break from its partner (‘pried / open’). It’s perfect in DS1, enacting the violent separation. But ‘pried / to’? It is simply wrong. You cannot ‘pry to’. Yet, as a pal commented when I pointed this out: ‘But if it’s a mistake, what should it be …? It seems strange to make the first rhyme of a poem from the wrong word.’ And I don’t think many people notice it, not at first, if at all, because it actually feels right. It easily slips past. In any case, we know what he means. It somehow carries a sense of tight fastening, of inevitability, of not letting go of either the desire or the actual trigger … you cannot be pried away from it … it works. It shouldn’t work, but it does. I believe that Berryman knew exactly what he was doing there.

So much of 77DS involves several layers of associations laid on top of each other like transparencies, allowing different and sometimes opposing ideas and associations to appear simultaneously, but also creating a blurriness at times. So I think as well as the meanings of ‘prying’ and ‘prised’ in DS1, the ghostly homophone of ‘pride’ is there as well, the flipside to Henry’s shame and pique. The skilful performance of abjection requires a paradoxical confidence.

Next week we will continue to look at DS1, whose surfaces we have scarcely scratched. We’ll dive deeper into the word ‘see’ for instance, and the homophone ‘sea’, both of which are significant words throughout the whole book. In the meantime, this week’s song, as alluded to earlier, is ‘Dear Prudence’, written by the Beatles in India for Mia Farrow’s sister, who would not emerge from her tent. This is the Siouxsie and the Banshees version, with, I believe, the Cure’s Robert Smith on guitar:

My grandad always said, ‘You should never judge a book by its cover.’ And it’s for that reason that he lost his job as chair of the British Book Cover Awards panel.

Stewart Lee

The original cover of 77 Dream Songs, pictured above, need not detain us. I dearly wish I owned a copy, but I see that the last time one was auctioned it went for over £3,000, and so that will have to remain – sorry! – a dream. (Berrymaniac Sam Leith admitted in 2014 that he ‘spent a good chunk of the (small) advance on my first book on a US first edition of the 77’.) My own copy for the purposes of learning the Songs last year was the simple purple-jacketed affair from Faber (as seen on the Inner Resources home page). All through 2025 it fell apart gradually, not unlike its owner. Its pages were increasingly stained with coffee and swimming pool water, then it lost its flyleaves, and finally, irretrievably it seems, its whole body. (I have no idea where it is now, any more than I know where my spectacles ended up after I crashed my car that February.) Latterly I have been relying on my Faber hardback of The Dream Songs in toto, which is blue and huge and heavy, harder surely to lose; its cover bears a sketched portrait of Berryman which reminds me, and possibly only me, of the character Saul Berenson from the hit TV show Homeland.

What interests me more – given that we cannot know for sure that cover images and blurbs have come from the author – is the dedication plus quotation, and the three epigraphs thereafter.

To Kate, and to Saul

‘Thou drewest near in the day’

‘GO IN, BRACK MAN, DE DAY’S YO’ OWN’

. . . I AM THEIR MUSICK. Lam. 3:63

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER METHOD. Olive Schreiner

I love epigraphs. Starting any book is exciting, if you’ve chosen to read it; the mystery is total, particularly if you have also chosen (as I do these days) to know as little as possible before you start. Thereafter, understanding grows and deepens at the author’s own pace. I don’t even read dustjacket blurbs if I can help it; like cinema trailers, they seem to give away too much. But epigraphs are an extra frisson. They give a vibe, an atmosphere. You know they’ve been chosen for a reason; you just don’t know what that reason is, and you sometimes won’t until after you’ve finished the book, if then. They often establish a tone, a sensibility, an area of focus. They make connections, seen and unseen.

There are effectively four epigraphs to 77DS, though the first is marked off, by both pagination and typography, as a dedication. Setting aside, for a moment, all our Outer Resources, and continuing with the procedural fiction that we are still in the 1960s, what effect do these quotations have on us, what do we understand by them?

We do not know who Kate or Saul are. But friends or relatives of the poet, surely. Possibly a couple, but probably not; the comma, and the ‘and to’ suggest not. And friends who have offered comfort – ‘thou drewest nearer in the day’. Where is that line from? Of the four quotations, only one gets a full citation, from Lamentations, and another one gets at least an author attached (Olive Schreiner). The others are more mysterious.

I don’t think anyone ever goes off and thoroughly researches the epigraphs before getting stuck in to a book. So these lines in the first instance offer the new reader simply a tantalising hint of what’s ahead. This includes: a mixture of ‘black voice’ and Bible; two references to ‘the day’ (which interestingly will be joined swiftly by a third, in DS1); and, from the Schreiner line (‘but there is another method’), we perhaps get a confident assertion that the book will proceed on highly original lines.

In DS71, Henry is addressing a small group of followers in what I imagine as a forum of the sort seen in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a kind of Ancient Roman Speaker’s Corner.

Spellbound held subtle Henry all his four
hearers in the racket of the market
with ancient signs, infamous characters,
new rhythms. On the steps he was beloved ….

‘Ancient signs’ – 77DS reaches far back into various religions and literatures. ‘New rhythms’ – ‘I am their musick’ – well, there is a jazzy brilliance to the Songs, which plays so nimbly with its various and varying metrical arrangements and its often lush sonic effects. And as we read on, we will indeed encounter an initially disorienting and challenging mixture of registers, including the blending of minstrelsy and Biblical resonance (along with pastiche medievalism, Romanticism, babytalk, and sundry other styles, sometimes several within a single sentence). So, the epigraphs do gesture towards those elements of the text.

But if, later, we wanted to go back to the epigraphs and dig deeper – to drill down, as my erstwhile corporate colleagues all suddenly learned to say, apparently overnight, about a decade ago – what would we find? That first epigraph – ‘Thou drewest near in the day’ – we could confidently identify as likely also Biblical, or at least a hymn, and, although it wouldn’t have been among the better known texts even in a far more Bible-literate age, a Biblical concordance would make light work of it. Or, if we’d actually looked up the third epigraph (‘I am their musick’) we would already have discovered that both lines are from the same section of Lamentations; and that both lines take on an additional or different significance when in context.

57 Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not.
58 O Lord, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast redeemed my life.
59 O Lord, thou hast seen my wrong: judge thou my cause.
60 Thou hast seen all their vengeance and all their imaginations against me.
61 Thou hast heard their reproach, O Lord, and all their imaginations against me;
62 The lips of those that rose up against me, and their device against me all the day.
63 Behold their sitting down, and their rising up; I am their musick.

When I first read the epigraph ‘I am their musick’, I took it as a boast, as if it were saying ‘I am bringing you the music of our time’ (‘another method’). In context, though, it means the speaker has become the butt of his enemies’ mockery. And in the lines between both those verses, we have hope for justice, redemption. But I experience 77DS as a profoundly ambiguous work, careful to keep wholly contradictory motions and meanings in play, sometimes in a single word, and I think even in these epigraphs there is a nice balance between confidence and vulnerability, between high seriousness and slapstick.

‘GO IN, BRACK MAN, DE DAY’S YO’ OWN’ would, I think, have baffled everyone initially, though increasing exposure, as the book goes on, to the dialogue between Henry and the speaker who addresses him as Mr Bones surely clarifies it somewhat. Would we guess that it is not an imitation of actual Black speech, but of the version of Black speech performed by white entertainers? I have a partial idea, because in 1968 William Wasserstrom wrote, in The Centennial Review, an interesting essay in which he was able to confidently identify the source of the epigraph, as

the epigraph in a book on the history of blackface minstrelsy in America, Carl Wittke's Tambo and Bones (1930). Olive Schreiner's comment is taken from a work which has long haunted Berryman, Dreams …

He’s right about Tambo and Bones (and, oddly, wrong about Schreiner) though it isn’t clear to me how he found it out. Wittke’s book can’t have been on every bookshelf in the 1960s. Still, if William Wasserstrom could locate it, I’m going to let us admit it too. And it’s handy, because I recently learned from Tambo and Bones (a facsimile of which is available online) that part of the minstrel act is a ‘hoedown’, which will offer us some small help when we get to the supremely challenging DS2 (‘Le’s do a hoedown, gal, / one blue, one shuffle’), the poem in which Henry is first addressed by his nameless friend as ‘Bones’.

From now on, for convenience, I will call that unnamed friend ‘Tambo’; many a commentator has become so wholly confused that they have called him ‘Mr Bones’, when in fact Henry is Bones, of course. Berryman’s pal and rival Robert Lowell, in 1964, for example: ‘one of their characters is Mr. Bones, who keeps questioning the author and talking for him’. Doh! Wrong! Go to the back of the class, Cal! (Still, glass houses and all: I am uncomfortably reminded of the poet Ian Duhig responding quite fairly to a review that I had written, which contained at least one serious error: ‘Robert Potts concludes that my book is obscure. It would be a sight less so if he read it properly.’)

On the subject of careless errors – the Olive Schreiner phrase (‘but there is another method’) in fact comes not from Dreams, as Wasserstrom assured us, but from The Story of an African Farm:

Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing. Life may be painted according to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other.

It’s a great description of 77DS which is picaresque, disjointed, often self-consciously theatrical or cinematic, and in which grandeur and bathos always come hand in hand. Every strut ends in a pratfall, every bubble is burst. So, our epigraphs set us up for a book in which aspects of the sacred – a suffering man, much mocked, looking for redemption, in dialogue with God – are mediated through a sort of clowning. Wasserstrom puts it nicely:

… a more impressive intersection of form and meaning occurs when we restore, from Lamentations 3:63, that which Berryman has left off: ‘Behold their sitting down and their rising up: I am their musick.’ In this restoration we accomplish nothing less than the connection of minstrel show and holy text.

I described 77DS earlier as a profoundly ambiguous work, and even in these epigraphs I think we see already the complexity of the question of whose ‘musick’ this is: who is playing, and who is being played upon? And what happens when the God you appeal to to save you from your enemies is your enemy?

Next week, I promise, we are going to get down to business with DS1.

Outer Resources: Kate and Saul, by the way, neither mentioned by name in the book, are in fact Berryman’s third wife Kate Donahue, and Saul Bellow (who is the 'pal’ in DS16, and the ‘novelist’ in DS53).

Other Resources: A pal points out that Tambo and Bones are found in Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes (1927), which both Berryman and Wasserstrom would surely have known. These figures from traditional minstrel shows are named after their musical instruments; they are the ‘end’ men of a semicircle of performers, and periodically exchange comic banter with a ‘straight man’.

This week’s music (with thanks to my brother for the suggestion):

Henry grew hot, got laid, felt bad, survived.

This line, from DS66, could be used as a glib summary of the whole of 77DS, if one was feeling magnificently uncharitable. The word ‘survived’, though, is a lot weightier than it might seem, not just there but throughout the book, returning us, as it always does, to the opening poem, and its terms of reference: ‘I don’t see how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived’. (We’ll come back to ‘pried’ in a later post.)

It is not immediately obvious to an innocent reader, hitting these poems for the first time, that the character Henry is, like Berryman, any sort of writer, still less a poet. In the first twenty poems or so, he is (possibly) celebrated in DS16 (‘Henry’s pelt was put on sundry walls’), and awarded a ‘great cheque’ in DS19; he lectures abroad in DS24. (The reference to Rilke, Coleridge and Poe in DS12, is a clue, maybe?) But I’d say it is not until DS26 (‘Fell Henry back into the original crime: art, rime’) that he breaks cover as a poet. Up to that point, though – exactly a third of the way through the book – he has largely (and largely unsuccessfully) lusted after women, and thirsted after alcohol, all the while on the run from ... something.

On the run. In the course of the book, he will be pursued, encircled, cornered, trapped, reduced, diminished. He will be encroached upon, and he will be institutionalised. He will become a hunted stag, a shot racoon, Humphrey Bogart gunned down in High Sierra. This sense of ‘a cornering’ (DS13), however defiantly countered (‘I couldn’t feel more like it’ is the next line), is easily one of the most significant features of the book (and will receive a longer post of its own). And the threat (and reality) of madness and even suicide hovers throughout. But Henry survives; Henry makes it. And arguably he makes it by making.

Henry may not done much in the way of writing in Part 1 of this three-part book, but by the end of Part 3 he jolly well ... makes up for it. The final Songs see him selecting poems and publishing them as a book; they imagine audiences, either small and shrinking, or small and growing. And Henry doesn’t just survive – somewhat to his surprise (‘it is a wonder’) he emerges ‘duded up’, head and heart full, fiery-eyed, a mad book in each hand ... even if his addressees still don’t care (‘p.a.’d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand / moment to Henry, ah to those less and none’). The comical indifference or disappearance of Henry’s audiences is a running gag.

There is a distinct sense of ‘go, little book’ in those final poems – Henry begins the book all huffy and cloistered, but after the 77 songs and dreams – cinematic, cartoonish, phantasmagoric, blending memory and desire, the real and the surreal – Henry emerges because his book emerges. What is he, after all, if not his words? Huffy Henry has come out and talked.

Though Henry does not much mention his own poetic work until some way in, poets and writers are from early on flagged up as of great significance. (Digression: They’re all men, of course. All. We will be returning to that – ‘Henry and the Women’, as I’m thinking of titling the post, in a smart-arse allusion to another sexist writer – but forgive me for not stopping long for it here.) Mentioned by name are Rilke (twice), Coleridge, Poe, Faulkner, Frost (a lot), Eliot (as the Honourable Possum), Hardy, Housman, Gottfried Benn, Issa; elegised and/or alluded to are also Hemingway and Roethke; quoted without being named is Saul Bellow, the ‘novelist hot as a firecracker’ (though knowing that requires ‘Outer Resources’); DS41 is a clumsy homage to Paul Celan. There is, throughout, a reverence for poetic making – note too the terms ‘makar’ (DS43) and ‘ancient maker priest’ (DS73). And that is not to mention the many fainter allusive presences – for example, for me, the opening of DS20 is surely a nod at Hopkins (‘when worst got things...’), and the end of DS27 is arguably a dash of Cummings at his most cutesy; but those aspects are perhaps more subjective.

‘I don’t know how he made it’, Henry says of Frost, in DS37, the first of three wonderfully awkward, embarrassing and edgy elegies (which deserve, and will get, a post of their own). ‘Made it’? Of someone who has, precisely, and just now, not made it? It is an odd line, and would jar even more if those elegies didn’t already contain so very many jarring lines.

But ‘making it’, of course, can mean ‘achieving success’ as well as ‘surviving’, and probably does so here – the Faulkner elegy (‘The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who’s there?’) on the facing page (DS36) has already alerted us to that fact that, for all his self-deprecation, fame matters hugely to Henry, even if he often can’t enjoy it (‘without pleasure or interest’; ‘in fame but lost’). But might it also be that Henry doesn’t know how exactly Frost – ‘the quirky medium of so many truths’ – did what he did? How he made his poems? A question of technique – and probably more than just technique. Sometime all we can do is, in quietness, listen, and admire. (‘Let’s be quiet. Let us listen...’)

Listen, rather than read. The word making, and its variants, is one of the most frequently used in 77DS. But among the others are listening, and thinking; as well as seeing (in all its meanings), and hearing; but not reading. How we make sense of things (‘he couldn’t hear or see well; all we sift’, DS37) through sensation and then thought, how we make it out, is at the forefront of Henry’s poetic making. (I realise as I write this that the phrase ‘I won’t make it out’, in DS38, also has both our key meanings; and while, in context, ‘won’t make sense of it’ makes most sense there, I still hear, hanging behind it, the other meaning – ‘won’t survive’, i.e., ‘I won’t make it out alive’. )

But I’m digressing again – we were talking of listening, and how much it matters to Henry. Because listening isn’t just a more immediate form of apprehension than reading; it is how we encounter songs. Henry more often talks in terms of being a musician than a writer. Mostly a jazz player, something brassy, like trumpet or sax. ‘Hit a low note ... Hit a way down note … Hit a high long note’, in the Roethke elegy (DS18); ‘we will blow our best’ in the third Frost elegy, with ‘our sad wild riffs’ (DS39); ‘blowin like it too’, in the dream about performing with Bessie Smith (DS68). We must never overlook the fact that these are 77 songs.

A final thought, or two. Henry makes it, yes; but one of the largest burdens he struggles with in 77DS is the loss of others: from a formative bereavement slowly revealed, to the many deaths of idols and friends. The words ‘die’ and ‘death’ are among the most frequently used in the book. ‘Appalled: by all the dead: Henry brooded’ (DS21). ‘I sent my grief away. I cannot care / forever. With them all again & again I died / and cried, and I have to live’ (DS36). Henry’s decision not to kill himself (‘I refuse’) is hard won, and highly moving. And in 1964 the reader was spared the overshadowing and miserable knowledge which readers today cannot avoid; that Berryman did commit suicide, in 1972.

But we are going to set Berryman aside, of course, as far as we can. We are going to deal instead with ‘savage and thoughtful / surviving Henry’ and ‘one of his own mad books’. Next week we’ll make a start on that book, although – fair warning! – we may not get as far even as, erm, the very first line of Dream Song 1 quite yet. We shall see. Without being unduly Shandyesque about all this, there are dedications and epigraphs to consider first; and besides, we are not in a hurry.

Feedback

I wasn’t sure where to put this, but a postscript is what I’ve settled on for now. Firstly, a huge, heartfelt thank you to everyone who has shown an interest so far. I honestly didn’t think more than four people were likely to be enthused by this particular hobbyhorse, and I have been bucked up immeasurably by the real warmth (and unexpected volume) of the initial response. And as a result I’ve also been happily alerted to some great projects – far deeper and sharper than I can hope to be – which I will enjoy reading and liking and sharing. (Especially now that The Traitors has finished.)

A couple of specific responses, which I received by email:

My pal who I described as saying that ‘my general (and heartfelt) antipathy to biographical readings of any author is merely a product of the period in which I studied English literature’ points out that

I'm not sure that I said that your antipathy to biographical readings is merely a product of the period in which you studied (or if I did, I shouldn't have done). But it is surely in part that. Isn't everything?

And Sam Leith, a Berrymaniac of great distinction, picked up on the phrase ‘turning it over’ and wonders if Berryman had yet encountered AA and Step 3 – ‘We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him’. He adds ‘Maybe an accidental prolepsis; can’t remember if he’d tried to recover before writing the 77 and my hunch is not.’ But I’ll turn that over to you now, lovely readers, and – I hope these links work? – here’s this week’s song.

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‘We’re in business … Why,
what business must be clear.
A cornering.’ (DS13)

John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs (1964) is, despite its frequent humour and its jazzy music, a book about deep grief and lasting damage. Or: despite being a book about deep grief and lasting damage, it is also masterpiece of comedy and music. I have loved it for decades, and this past year (‘his unforgivable memory’) I learned it, in its entirety, each and every one of its 77 poems, by heart.

‘This was not done with ease’, but nor was it as hard as one might expect. The rhythms, rhymes, alliteration, and assonance (and in a few poems clear arguments, sequences or narratives) greatly assisted. I used other tricks for the stickier bits. (There will be a full post on memorising this and other poems at a later date. )

The project was partly, perhaps largely, therapeutic. But it was also something I had long wanted to do. Regardless of those motivations, the exercise necessarily made me more attentive to each and every word of the book: its sound, and its significance. I am not sure when I last paid quite such deep and continuous attention to a book of poems, even though, in the course of my work as a reviewer and critic, and in my leisure and pleasure as a reader, there have been a fair number of books to which I have applied myself with great and prolonged intensity.

Some of the Dream Songs are without doubt ‘difficult’. The broken syntax, the grammatical violations, the ambiguity, the polyphony, the riddle of how in some poems the three verses actually relate to each other, the allusions to theology, history, cinema, politics and the like: these are just a few of the many features that make individual poems tough to understand in different ways. Some of those individual poems, perhaps for this reason, have received little or no critical attention as far as I have been able to tell. And one thing I’d like to do with you in this Substack is truly work at those poems, to see what we all might make of them.

A lot of people come to the Dream Songs via DS14 (‘Life, friends, is boring’), a phrase from which gives this Substack its name; and DS29 (‘There sat down once a thing on Henry’s heart’), which has furnished epigraphs for so many other writers, as well as the titles of the four series finale episodes of the hit HBO show Succession. (Jesse Armstrong also slid in a reference to DS28, as seen in the image above.) Berryman has a wide variety of passionate fans - ‘Berrymaniacs’, in John Haffenden’s lovely coinage - even though his general reputation has declined significantly since his death, for a number of reasons (and, again, there will be a full post on that. Reputation mattered greatly to Berryman, arguably, too much: an anxiety that noticeably, indeed unignorably, marks several of the 77 poems).

So I don’t know how often 77DS gets read as a book these days. I don’t just mean cover-to-cover, though that in itself is probably not common. I mean as a single work, conceived and curated, a composition whose parts all talk to each other, relate to each other: one where, over the course of the book, things develop, complicating or clarifying earlier moments. Where every local detail is also part of a larger whole.

Berryman wrote hundreds of Dream Songs. His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, containing 308 more, was published in 1968, only a few years after 77DS; and another tranche of 152 (!) previously uncollected poems has been released very recently (under the title Only Sing). I agree with Adam Kirsch, who writes brilliantly about Berryman, that the larger outpouring offers diminishing returns: ‘For it is this initial collection that marks Berryman’s zenith as a poet, and the 300-plus poems that followed it can have the effect of diluting and domesticating its achievement’. The form was a breakthrough for him, but also, perhaps, a trap.

And when he first gathered the 77 - ‘turning it over, considering like a madman, / Henry put forth a book’ (DS75) - he agonized over his choices, and their arrangement. That ‘turning it over’ is nice, isn’t it? - it means ‘thinking it through’, but also conjures an image of manic fidgeting with all those sheets of paper. And also the act of releasing the book, of ‘turning it over’ to someone else.

Berryman was never going to be able to make all the Dream Songs cohere, and his later rationalisations were, with the best will in the world, mostly bogus. But nonetheless, 77DS was sent out, received, and rewarded, as a book. So what was – is – that book? Sixty years on we have so many distracting layers and encrustations of biography, letters, critical studies and so on (‘Now he has become ... an industry’, as Berryman wrote of Frost) , that retrieving the original book requires suppressing and ignoring those ‘Outer Resources’ and using – as far as possible – only what is there.

This may seem a quixotic endeavour. A pal of mine says that my general (and heartfelt) antipathy to biographical readings of any author is merely a product of the period in which I studied English literature at university, an accident of timing, of fashion. I’m not so sure.

One of my very favourite of the songs is DS71, about Henry’s audience, with its defensive line ‘It was not, so, like no one listening / But critics famed, and Henry’s pals, or other tellers at all / Chiefly in another country. No.’ (That well-placed ‘so’ and the echoing ‘no’ always make me smile, with their frisson of poutiness.) And this is not the only poem in which Henry isn’t thrilled that (like any prophet or hip priest) he is not appreciated in his own country.

Initial reviews by critics famed, Henry’s pals (Robert Lowell, for example), and other tellers at all, etc (eg Eric Mottram in the TLS), got elements of 77DS wildly, terribly wrong. But was that their fault? It was years later, as a result of widespread readerly confusion, that Berryman offered a partially clarifying paragraph about the different voices: ‘The poem then, whatever its cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.’

But my hard line on this is that – as we have often been reminded, by writers and thinkers from Socrates to Derrida and onwards – a book goes out into the world alone, without its author to hold its hand and make excuses for it. I don’t trust Berryman’s remarks on his own poem, and I don’t in any case want to rely on them. The (prizewinning) book must speak for itself.

There will be times in these posts, nonetheless, when I do draw on some of those Outer Resources, if only for entertainment or harmless colour. I’ll flag them up as such. And there’ll be times that I will suggest that, even in a work of such deliberate discordance, dissonance and disguise, Berryman has at times simply made a mistake – for example with a word or line which doesn’t work, on any terms. But mostly, I’ll use ‘Inner Resources’, in good faith, to argue that 77DS works, and works triumphantly, as a whole. We will try to recover a sense of being a reader in 1964, knowing nothing of Berryman himself, and getting to grips with a remarkable and highly original book. We will resemble the men, women and children in the allegorical scene that Berryman (self-mockingly) proposes in DS75, which I quoted from earlier. In this poem, the book which Henry ‘put forth’ has become, in a dreamy metamorphosis, a tree. (Normally it’s trees that become books, it now occurs to me.) And – great oaks from little acorns grow – gradually it attracts admiring attention:

Something remarkable about this
unshedding bulky bole-proud blue-green moist

thing made by savage & thoughtful
surviving Henry
began to strike the passers from despair
so that sore on their shoulders old men hoisted
six-foot sons and polished women called
small girls to dream awhile toward the flashing & bursting tree!

The next Inner Resources post will be a preliminary overview of ‘surviving Henry’ and his identity as, specifically, a writer. Thereafter posts will either be attempts to read individual poems (starting, sensibly, with DS1, and probably staying there for some time while radiating out across the book; but then more random, ‘directionless and lurchy’, as it were), or thematic – cinema, animals, ‘the world’, race, forms of address, music, etc. Wherever this takes us, we happy few, I hope it’ll be fun.