I think that in letters, as in no other form of writing, the man appears.
—John Berryman, unpublished essay written at Columbia College, spring 1934
THE EARLIEST LETTER in this volume was written in September 1925, by a young boy who signed himself John Allyn—not yet the poet who would become known as John Berryman. Sent to his parents, John and Martha Smith, the letter is formal, dutifully detailed, and determined to reassure them that their son is having fun—even though he clearly misses them. His account of life at boarding school concludes: “I love you too much to talk about.” Slightly less than a year later, in June 1926, he was forced to confront the death of his father. The letters gathered here speak to that loss on many occasions (as when he writes in 1955 to Saul Bellow, “my father died for me all over again last week”). This strand of Berryman’s story—of early loss, entangled with the depression, guilt, and alcoholism present for much of his life—is familiar to most readers of his poems, and the letters’ references to what he called “plights & gripes” in Dream Song 14 can be wry, proud, and desperate, by turns. In August 1948, Berryman tells James Laughlin, “I’m happy Pound seems better—maybe he & I can change places.” Several weeks into a March 1967 hospital stay, he tells Arthur Crook of the Times Literary Supplement that “I am a wreck, but Sir a gorgeous wreck.” Writing to Ann Levine in the fall of 1964, he declares that a series of recent illnesses is “simply my mind tearing my body to pieces with anxiety.” While these letters delineate periods of immense stress, they also show an affectionate son, brother, partner, parent, and mentor, and they chart Berryman’s development as one of the most original poets of his generation.
Berryman’s letters began appearing in print several decades ago. We Dream of Honour, a generous selection of his letters to his mother, was published in 1988, edited by Richard J. Kelly. Other letters have been quoted in biographies by John Haffenden (1982) and Paul Mariani (1990); in E. M. Halliday’s memoir, John Berryman and the Thirties (1987); and in Haffenden’s Berryman’s Shakespeare (1999). This book represents the first wide-ranging selection from Berryman’s correspondence. There are letters here to almost two hundred people, including editors, fellowship committees, family members, academic colleagues, and students who would themselves become well-known writers, such as Edward Hoagland, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Trueblood. As a sophomore at Columbia in 1934, beginning an essay on Horace Walpole, Berryman asserted that letters had a special capacity to reveal a person’s character, but he tended to take a dim view of his own correspondence. “I hate letters,” he says to E. M. Halliday in September 1936, before going on to list everything he would discuss with his friend if they could meet in person (“poetry, esp. mine & Yeats’ ”; “drama, esp. yours & Shakespeare’s”). At such times, he seems to see letters as lacking the lively give-and-take of actual conversation; at others, he seems troubled by how much a letter might disclose. Writing to Eileen Mulligan in the spring of 1942, he declares that “I have developed … a habit of fulness in communication with you which does not let me appear much less disagreeable on paper than I am in person.”
Many of Berryman’s letters are short and practical. It is perhaps surprising that he found time to write as many letters as he did; he took on projects constantly (variously driven by aspirations, dedication, and financial exigencies), and put an enormous amount of energy into them. By 1928, at South Kent School in Connecticut, he was sending his family short stories and comic essays; a December 1930 letter to his mother refers to the student newspaper The Pigtail, on whose editorial board he served. By the other end of the 1930s, he would be poetry editor for The Nation. The letters he sent as Nation editor reveal a conscientious if at times downright cranky reader of contributors’ work: he could be passionately encouraging and insightful, or curt and dismissive. Later in his career, when he was no longer involved with magazines as a named editor, Berryman continued to be troubled by literature’s place in American culture, as evident in a 1947 letter to Walter Stewart proposing the establishment “of a literary review: a new, authoritative instrument of documentation and enquiry.” Late letters show him requesting books on art history and philosophy, trying to organize a repeat of the 1962 National Poetry Festival, compiling an anthology, and drafting a long poem entitled The Children. Writing to his friend and former professor Mark Van Doren in 1971, he compares himself with A. E. Housman, who had what Berryman calls “a really bifurcated personality,” but Berryman himself appears not so much divided as overextended when he moves between the activities of editing and researching (on topics ranging from the identity of Mr. W. H. to “The Historical Personality of Christ”), grading papers and revising poems. His letters document a literary drive visible whether he is working on someone else’s writing or on his own manifestly hard-won poems. Robert Lowell pointed to this quality in his elegy for Berryman: “We asked to be obsessed with writing, / and we were.”1
For most readers, Berryman’s reputation is linked to The Dream Songs, the long poem that continues to provoke both poets and critics. Since the first installment appeared as 77 Dream Songs in 1964, its use of blackface has been one of the most persistent subjects of discussion. Though his letters rarely address racial ventriloquism directly, moments do suggest some assumptions about racist discourse and about race. In a letter from his first term at South Kent, for instance, he attempts to reassure his mother that a new friend is “not a Hebrew.” The same fall, he describes a Halloween party where one student dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan and another as a slave, while he himself went as a “Jew[ish] pawnbroker.” By his college years, he adopts blackface in his letters for intended humorous effect. Decades later, in an April 1963 letter to Poetry editor Henry Rago, Berryman’s perspective seems typical of a white postwar liberal in the United States; he quickly deflects from his own writing to more distant figures of stereotypically racist Southerners. The work of contemporary poets such as Cathy Park Hong, Tyehimba Jess, Claudia Rankine, and Lynn Xu, who have responded to Berryman’s uses of minstrelsy, speaks to how much of twentieth-century American poetry is intertwined with what Kevin Young has called “an elaborate ritual … to speak to the soul in crisis.”2
Berryman’s thinking on other social and political issues also emerges in these pages. In some early letters, as he struggles to articulate his masculinity, references to women can be demeaning, as well as obsessive and ambivalent. Other letters question the value of women artists. “Why do you need a poetass?” he asks James Laughlin in June 1940, when Laughlin was trying to find a female poet to diversify that year’s New Directions list. Berryman’s attitude softens over the years—his respect for the editor Catharine Carver and for Flannery O’Connor becomes evident, and he develops an epistolary friendship with Rich—but the change takes time to come about. The letters allow readers to evaluate this material directly, and to consider the extent to which it reflects broader trends in American society and culture in the middle of the twentieth century. They also provide contexts for understanding Berryman’s engagement with national and international politics, such as the Moscow Trials of 1938, the Second World War, the assassination of Gandhi, the “thermonuclear business” of the Cold War, and the National Supersonic Transport program. Though often glancing, his references to such events suggest the extent to which he registered and responded to the news around him.
Poetry, though, is usually Berryman’s focus, and it is a source of elation and pressure: “terrifying labour lies ahead if I can ever do it” he says about The Dream Songs in an April 1964 letter to Dudley Fitts, when the poem was still a work in progress. Struggling to prepare his first book in 1939, he tells Allen Tate, “I alternate between boredom and perfect arrogance; what it needs is a severe and disinterested reading.” That alternation, with its audible uncertainty and equally audible desire for affirmation, runs throughout the letters, in varying postures. A 1940 letter to Robert Giroux insists, “I get a certain amount of pleasure from some of my poems before they are published, and none after they are published; and I despise being talked about in print, which is a simple and usual outcome of publishing.” On the other hand, in an April 1964 letter to Kate Donahue, just after 77 Dream Songs was published, Berryman admits, “if somebody doesn’t write to me soon abt my book I am going to waltz out of my skin.” The letters also show Berryman’s keen interest in the physical production of his books. In addition to the correspondence with Giroux, there are exchanges with Claude Fredericks about the preparation of His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt (1958), and with Ben Shahn, who provided illustrations for the first trade edition of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956). These letters describe Berryman’s concern for his work at every stage, from manuscript submission to book design (for instance, he gradually warms to author photographs; he consistently gravitates to blue covers and bindings). The letters also problematize the idea that Berryman’s career can be divided into discrete phases based on the initial years of publication of his major works. They affirm instead the critical and creative interconnectedness of his writing life, as troubled and disorganized as it could often be.
…
It is important to stress how many letters have not been included. For example, between the fall of 1928 and the spring of 1932 alone, when Berryman was at South Kent, he sent some seven hundred pages of letters to his mother, only a fraction of which are represented here. One of our principles of selection has been to avoid extensive overlap with letters published previously; many of those South Kent letters, and later ones to Martha Berryman, are included in Kelly’s We Dream of Honour. Similarly, readers interested in Berryman’s relationships with Shakespeare scholars like W. W. Greg and George Ian Duthie should consult Berryman’s Shakespeare, which has a chapter of Berryman’s correspondence on King Lear. For the fullest picture of Berryman’s college years, Halliday’s memoir is indispensable. Other omissions, though, were forced upon us. Letters to some likely correspondents have not been located: for example, no letters to Ralph Ellison have been found, perhaps in part because by the 1960s Berryman chose to telephone Ellison, to read aloud from The Dream Songs. No letters to W. B. Yeats have been found, nor any to Dylan Thomas. Berryman writes to the White House in 1966, but that letter has not been traced, and neither have replies to high school students who sent him fan letters in the early 1970s. Some collections (such as the Claude Fredericks Papers at the Getty) are currently only partly open to readers and may yield more letters in time.
Some letters have been omitted because they disclose information about individuals still living, but many letters here do include private and sometimes unappealing material. Since one component of Berryman’s mature work centers on moral conflicts and failures, it is useful to see his firsthand records of personal experience and the “fulness in communication” he often reserved for those closest to him. Our main principle of selection was to shed light on Berryman as writer, but Berryman rarely stops talking about his work: almost all of his correspondence is primarily literary correspondence, even when it is also deeply personal. Many letters sent to lovers or family members also refer to his literary projects. Some of his most intimate letters contain unpublished poems; a letter to Levine in August 1955, for example, takes the form of a twenty-eight-line love poem, while several letters to their son Paul include nursery rhymes and light verse. The letters yield new poems and information on well-known ones (for example, when William Meredith asks about allusions in the Sonnets, Berryman writes back to explain; he answers Rich’s questions about obscure lines in The Dream Songs). They also give us a sense of what Berryman could sound like when he was not writing a poem. A 1942 letter to an inattentive landlord, for example, is a half-comic performance of indignation, and mentions writing only tangentially. Such letters help show Berryman’s full range of tones: bluff, whimsical, exuberant, grandiose, despairing, flirtatious, insistent, aggrieved, stiff, authoritative.
A chameleonic letter-writer, Berryman can sound like the quintessential New Critic when writing to Tate or Blackmur, and slangily telegraphic when writing to Pound. His epistolary styles—as created by diction, syntax, punctuation, even typography—vary widely, depending on correspondent and situation. Sometimes, for example, Berryman affects British punctuation and spelling. Although there is a degree of randomness in how he uses both single and double quotation marks from page to page, these changes sometimes indicate the stance he wishes to take toward himself or toward others. As in his poems, these idiosyncrasies—a non-standard verb ending, the use of a two-point ellipsis, an extended em-dash—often connote differing levels of agitation, confidence, theatricality, or formality. Since it would sometimes change the tenor of Berryman’s letters to standardize such minutiae, we have attempted to preserve them as much as possible. Titles are a good example of Berryman’s inconsistent expressive practices. For someone so scrupulous about his scholarly work, he can be erratic when it comes to these. When he does not underline the title of a book, or omits quotation marks around the title of a poem, it tends to convey casualness or haste; when he does underline titles or encloses them in quotation marks, it can suggest a heightened degree of meticulousness and seriousness. Rather than make titles uniform, therefore, we have retained as far as possible the intermittently jaunty, ceremonious, and perfunctory tones implied. Varying levels of formality also make for irregular practice with dates and addresses. Depending on the correspondent and the importance of the occasion, Berryman sometimes writes out a date or an address in full, and sometimes gives nothing at all. On a few occasions—for example, when announcing that he has finished “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”—he dates a letter at the bottom of a page, as he often dates poems. All addresses have been given as he writes them, but where possible, we supplement the dates with square brackets. Additional information has been derived from postmarks and content, as well as from notes made by recipients, archivists, and previous researchers.
This book does not aspire to facsimile, but rather attempts to strike a balance between readability and precision. It is often clear that Berryman’s idiosyncrasies, no matter how performative they appear, are at least partially shaped by his circumstances—a bumpy flight into Japan, say, or a lack of space at the bottom of a page. Except in a few circumstances (as when he is being playfully dramatic by writing the name of his newborn daughter in large capitals), we have regularized the shape of his letters, made indenting and lineation consistent, and used standard tabs for block quotes. We align signatures to the right margin, though Berryman often put them elsewhere due to typewriter settings, exigencies of space, or whim. Thus our transcriptions do not always capture the full feeling of disorder or spontaneity that a facsimile would suggest. For example, postscripts that run around several margins are ironed out in our transcriptions; see, for example, the afterthoughts and comments surrounding a draft of an unpublished Dream Song (“Baby Teddy”). However, where postscripts were written at the top of a page, sometimes creating uncertainty about whether positioning is to save space or to make an impression, we have retained the original placing.
A handful of other issues related to transcription need to be mentioned here. To indicate handwritten material on a typescript, we use italics. Most insertions are indicated by carets ^as so^; when a note cannot be tied with certainty to a specific point in the letter, it has been inserted between vertical lines, as in |marginal insertion| for handwritten comments on manuscript letters, or |marginal insertion| for handwritten comments on typescript letters. The rationale for this level of detail is to avoid information loss about Berryman’s epistolary performances: in some letters, he takes pains to type his postscripts (as when writing to Cleanth Brooks in 1939), while in others, he scribbles them on the envelope itself. (In our transcriptions, signatures are not italicized, even when Berryman does write by hand on a typescript.) But while Berryman’s handwritten, elided ampersands sometimes look like plus signs, we have used ampersands almost universally, given that this symbol is inevitably what Berryman types. Dashes have also been made uniform. In the interests of space, we have consistently omitted the recipient’s address, even though Berryman sometimes includes it at the top or bottom of his formal typescript letters. Unambiguous typing errors—especially those Berryman himself corrected, and those that do not suggest a larger context of agitation, haste, exhaustion, or intoxication—are silently corrected. When a mistake seems possibly revealing, it has been retained. Thus, while we omitted odd punctuation marks caused by a new typewriter in Mumbai in 1957, we retained errors throughout a 1968 letter to Meredith where Berryman announces he has “the Hong Kong flue [sic] and cannot think good,” since it seems at least in part a performance of illness, hurry, and a lack of interest in discussing Berryman’s Sonnets. We have tried to avoid frequent instances of [sic] but use it where there might be possibility for confusion. In the rare cases where Berryman’s handwriting is unclear (he had, for most of his life, a neat hand), the most likely readings have been placed in brackets [as so]. Moments where no conjecture is possible—for example, when the only available source is a faded photocopy—have been indicated by the placement of the characters we can identify in brackets or simply by the bracketed word illegible.
Many of Berryman’s letters exist as carbon copies at the University of Minnesota. In some instances, they contain notes that the recipients probably did not see; sometimes, as in later book orders to Blackwell’s, the notes are as extensive as the letters themselves. These kinds of substantial notes have been preserved. In a few instances, brief pro forma notes have been omitted: in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, Berryman occasionally wrote “copy” at the top of his carbon copies, and such notes have not been included here. Carbon copies are typically unsigned, although Berryman sometimes added his initials or a typed signature. In general, if a letter is a typescript from the University of Minnesota and lacks a signature, it is one of Berryman’s carbons; in a small number of cases, an annotation explains what seems to be happening on a letter.
Finally, in the interest of including as many letters as possible while still producing a single volume, we have kept annotations short and factual. These notes, usually attached to first mention, supply titles and dates for published works, and brief biographies for people including birth and death dates, occupation, and sometimes nationality (when an individual was not born in the United States). Some works mentioned are not annotated because they have not been located and may never have been published—such as Carolyn Kizer’s “Recurring Dream of a Hair Stylist,” mentioned in a 1962 letter.
In his published poetry, Berryman reflected on the role of letters on several occasions, contemplating the interest they can hold not just for those who first received and read them but also for many later, who never met the correspondents. In Dream Song 117, he makes this prediction: “Their letters will, released, shake the mapped world / at some point, in the National Geographic.” The letters he refers to are the imaginary correspondence between Henry and one of his lovers; ambitious, self-deprecating Henry seems to envision letters of such interest to readers around the globe as to merit publication in a photo-rich generalist magazine. Conversely, Berryman also dwelt on the limits of correspondence; as one of the epigraphs to The Dream Songs has it, in lines attributed to Victoria Spivey: “He went away and never said goodbye. / I could read his letters but I sure can’t read his mind.” A great deal remains to be known about Berryman’s life, work, and contacts. His papers at the University of Minnesota hold pages and pages of ephemera yet to be explored: unpublished poems and lectures, notes disintegrating on the paperback covers of science fiction novels, a map of the world drawn for a young son. The letters here gesture toward the uncollected Berryman, and a version of Berryman that is still very much a work in progress. There continue to be questions and gaps. With this selection, however, we may begin to understand Berryman’s mind and work in ways that have not been possible before, and to find new directions for Berryman scholarship in the future.