1925

[UMN, MS]

St. Josephs Academy

Chickasha, Okla.

[20 September 1925]

Dear Parents:

I received your postcards from Alexandria and Bogalusa, and thank you very much. I hope your trip finished favorably. I am getting along fine in school and am going to the fair this week. I will write you all about it next Sunday. I am going to devote the rest of the letter to telling you about the daily routine and my playmates.

Robert and I have a private room now. On week days I get up at 6:15, dress and go to Holy Communion in chapel at 6:30. I come back, get Robert up, dress him, make our bed, and go to breakfast at 7:00. After breakfast I play until 8:00. Then I get Robert and myself ready and go to Mass at 8:15. When I get out it is time for school. I get my books and go. Recess is at 10:00. I get my lunch and milk, and see that Robert gets his. Then we play till school. We get out for noon at 11:30. Dinner is at 12:00. After dinner we play till school at 1:00.

In the afternoon recess is at 2:15. We get our lunch and milk. We get out of school at 3:30. We play till 6:30. Then we study till 7:30. At 8:00 we are in bed.

Now, my playmates. There is a boy that wears glasses and is about nine years old. His name is Merril, and his mother is in Virginia. I skate with him a lot. Robert’s skates will not fit him and sometimes I let Buford, another friend of mine skate on them. Buford’s mother is in Missouri. He is twelve years old. Edmond and Elias Dobry have skates and I have a lot of fun with them. I don’t know what I would do without my skates. Rex Smith is a real nice boy, I’ll bet his mother gave him good training. I play with him quite a bit, he hurt his thumb quite badly. I play with Francis Nicks, a boy about my size, some, too. That is about all I know real well yet.

Paddy is getting along fine so far. I love you too much to talk about.

Your loving son,

John Allyn

Sept. 20, 1925.

1928

[UMN, MS]

Monday afternoon [early fall 1928]

Dear Mother,

Well, here is that long letter you asked for—not saying how long it’s going to be.

Last night, all the new fellows had a big picnic down by the lake—I ate six sausages in rolls, an ear of corn, two enormous pieces of pumpkin pie, seven cups of cocoa, and after my twelfth roasted marshmallow I lost count. Yesterday we got our first allowance, and last night they had “pop tent,” that is, down in the locker-room, Mac sells pop, candy, etc. It closed, however, before I got back from the picnic, so I still have my quarter. We had movies, too—Wallace Beery and Raymond Batton in “Behind the Front.”1 I’d seen it before, but enjoyed it again.

You asked about the fellows in my form in one of your letters. My especial chum is Lester Wittenberg. We are going to room together next year if possible. HE is NOT A HEBREW.

He lives in New Rochelle, New York, and was quite homesick for a while, but his parents came up yesterday and he is now O.K. He seems to be a fine boy, such as you would approve of, and I like him a lot. He had appendicitis in August and was operated upon, so he cannot go in for football as he would like to have done, and as he will do next year. He is not “dirty,” but his mother has told him all about things, just as you have told me. I liked his parents. You’ll meet him when you drive up. I hope and think that you will like him. I have made several other friends, also. There are two Third Formers here from Forest Hill, on Long Island, several from Huntingdon, and other places farther out, and one from Great Neck Estates. By the way, he elevates his elbows like I used to do, and has fearful manners. We all kid him unmercifully and call him “Fiji” or “The South Sea Islander,” “The Tasmanian Woofus,” etc. Thank Heavens, you broke me of that!

I blush to tell it, but South Kent played a football game Saturday with Litchfield High and was beaten—10 to 0. They made a beautiful touchdown, from nearly the whole length of the field, and followed it with a field goal, in the fourth quarter. However, we are not discouraged, as it was only a practice game.

Last night, Mr. Bartlett read the Second Form a dandy polo story by Rudyard Kipling—“The Maltese Cat.”2 Perhaps you’ve read it. It’s supposed to be the best polo story ever written, and was intensely interesting.

Miss Dulon is starting a dramatic club, of which I am a member, and we are going to act O. Henry’s “The Exact Science of Matrimony,” a funny story.3

Which reminds me, there is a splendid library here, with O. Henry’s Works, Mark Twain, the Book of Knowledge, Encyclopedia Britannica, and lots of good miscellaneous reference books and fiction. I spend a lot of spare time there, as you can well imagine.

I wrote to Uncle Jack Saturday, and will write to Uncle Jack this week. I got your Saturday letter this morning, making seven letters received from you so far. You have written almost every day, and I thank you lots—am saving them all.

I bet you like the new house a lot, and won’t I be glad to see it Christmas. I have three whole weeks then—isn’t that a long time? I wonder if Beauty’ll remember me—you know, I was gone only three weeks before, and I’ll have been away almost three months by the time I come home. I sure hope she does.

Last night, we were talking about ice-skating, and Mr. Bartlett said that he expected skating before Christmas—said that they’d had skating the week before Thanksgiving one year some time ago. I hope Robert gets along well in the new school, and likes his teacher. Tell the little scoundrel to write to me, or I’ll chew his ear off Christmas. Love and kisses from

Your loving son

John Allyn

[UMN, MS]

[fall 1928]

Study Hall

As it should be, according to Mr. Bartlett:

It is very quiet in Classroom D, New Building. There is no Council Member or upper former present, but the boys are industriously bending over their work; one is studying “A Tale of Two Cities,” another applies himself to the Math assignment, while a third is puzzling over his theme. A bee buzzes in and a truck rumbles past outside, but not one even thinks of looking up from his all-important work!

As it should be, according to the Second Form:

There is a great frolic in progress in Classroom D, New Building. There is no Council Member present. One or two of the boys are drawing on the blackboard or reading books, but thirteen or fourteen are divided into two armies, and are waging a battle royal. Most of the fighting is hand-to-hand, but in the back, a few expert shots bombard the enemy. Pieces of chalk, erasers, and paper wads fill the air. The mail-truck passes unheard in the general uproar.

As it is, according to those who know:

It is fairly quiet in Classroom D, New Building. A Council Member sits in the rear of the room, with his eagle eye peeled for any misbehavior. A boy turns his head to whisper to a neighbor, but is seen and reproved with “Get going there, Brown II!” The truck rumbles past, and a few incautious heads turn, but, meeting the stern eye of the Council Member, they meekly resume their work. However, the Council Member cannot see everything, and writing of letters, reading of books, and passing of notes goes on under his very nose. But these crimes are infrequent, for the punishment is dire.

Monday afternoon,

Dear Mother,

This is a theme I wrote today for English. I haven’t time to say much. I got my History paper (test) back this morning and found that I got 94. I also received my Latin test, in which I made 97. How’s that. I have an hour to work off in a few minutes for being late at assembly this morning. You see, if you don’t do your job well, or talk in study period, or are late at assembly, you get an hour, that is, you have to work an hour in the afternoon at some job that they give you. I’ll write again tomorrow. Barrels of love

Your devoted son,

John Allyn

[UMN, MS]

Friday afternoon [fall 1928]

Dear Robert,

I shouldn’t be writing this, as I said that you’d have to write first, but when I heard you had started a letter to me, I started this.

How do you like the new school? Are the teachers nice? Mother tells me that you have picked out a couple of “tough eggs” for buddies, and are leaving John and Jimmie Holstedt alone. Is that nice? Are you practicing to be a bank robber or a holdup man? If so, I’ll tell you that it is very dangerous but pays well.

Do you know that I have on my last pair of clean socks, and that I’ve worn them four days? That’s how low on clothes I’m getting. In a day or so, I’ll be parading around in my B.V.D.’s. Tell Mother that if she doesn’t send me that box, I’ll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

How do you like the new house and fireplace? They’ll be fine this winter, huh? Every now then [sic], we have a fire drill at night. Then we have to run down three flights of stairs and outside barefooted and in our pyjamas. Believe me, it’s not going to be any fun to do that this winter with snow on the ground.

I got my second allowance of a quarter today—have fifty cents in my pocket, and feel like a millionaire. By the way, will you please remind Mother that the “Amazing Stories” and “Weird Tales” should both be out by now. If you’ll be careful with them, you can read them.

I’m making up lots and lots of stories which I may tell you Christmas. Mind you, that is not a promise. And if you pester me in letters, I won’t tell them to you.

You must do well in your studies, or you can’t come to South Kent. And when you have to wash or wipe a few dishes, don’t feel abused, because we have real jobs up here. Two or three hours of garden or general improvement every afternoon and a regular job to be done twice a day, besides taking care of your part of the dormitory and waiting on the table of eight boys every eighth meal. Now you groan and tell a tale of woe. Give my love to all and keep a lot yourself.

Your big buddy,

John Allyn

[UMN, MS]

October November 1, 1928.

Thursday morning!

Dear Mother,

I’m mighty sorry I couldn’t write yesterday, but I really didn’t have one second of spare time. There’s never any time in the morning, and right after lunch, I hiked to Kent to see our third team play them. It was a bloody slaughter (25 to 0)—they have a wonderful team this year and little hope is felt for the victory of our first team over theirs. Well, I didn’t get back until 5:30. I had to hurry to get dressed for dinner (not in costume) and do my job. At 6:10 we had chapel and supper. Immediately after supper, we all went upstairs to get dressed in costume for the orgy to come. Then the orgy and at 10 o’clock, bed. So you see I really didn’t have a single second to write. But this shall be a long one, to make up for it!

I received your letter of Tuesday morning yesterday noon, and your letter of yesterday last night. I also got Uncle Jack’s letter. Please thank him for the very interesting clipping. I’m mighty sorry you didn’t get a letter Monday—I know just how you feel. I’ll surely write Friday and Saturday after this, if no other time.

It won’t be long now until we learn who will be our next president, will it? Don’t we learn next Tuesday. Boy, I hope Smith wins, but if he doesn’t, I think Hoover will make a pretty good president. It must be mighty nice to hear all the important campaign address [sic] over the radio. There are three or four here in the school, but no one but except the masters may listen to them.

I’m sure that Granny likes Great Neck and is having a splendid time there. Isn’t it wonderfully quiet in Burbury Lane—no automobiles, street cars, etc? Acting on your suggestion, I’m going to write to her this afternoon if I have time, if not, tomorrow.

You are correct in your supposition that it is the New England custom to have a midday feast—Father Kemmis says that we’ll have dinner about 12 or 1 o’clock—so you won’t have to bring evening clothes—I guess that’s a welcome relief, isn’t it? I know I don’t like to dress up my best, but perhaps you do.

I’m counting the very days and hours until you come. It won’t be so very long now—the time is flying. Wow, I’m going to have a good time during the Christmas vacation. I guess ideas about humor haven’t changed much since you were a girl—only one or two fellows learned about the razor (I man[a]ged to keep it secret from the others) and they were all for telling the whole school about it, but I managed to quell them, and my secret is secure for the time.

Now about “Pawling” or “Palling”—when I first heard the name, I remembered having seen it as “Pawling” and as the team had come from some town in New York, I thought it was “Pawling.” But in one of their cheers, I thought they said—“P-A.-double L-I.-N-G”, so I decided that it was “Palling.” However, on second thought, I believe they said “W.-L” instead of “double L.” So I apologize for my mistake and acknowledge you the victor. It is “Pawling.”

A little bit more about letter-writing. I know how busy you usually are, and won’t feel a bit abused when I don’t get letters. So don’t think that you are neglecting me when you don’t write. Of course, I love and treasure your letters, but business before pleasure, “n’est-ce pas, ma mère?”

The Second Form elects a president and a vice-president later in the year—after Christmas, I imagine. The form keeps the same officers as it progresses, unless they prove unsatisfactory. The Second Form President has very little, and the Third Form President has not much more, but when in the Fourth Fifth and Sixth Form, the president is always a council member or prefect (most enviable offices). By the way, I found out yesterday that the prefects are appointed by Mr. Bartlett, but that the Fourth and Fifth Forms each nominate four of their members to run for the Council, and the student body votes for them, two from each form being elected.

Just one more item of news before I get around to telling you about last night’s orgy. Whenever anyone loses anything, he reports it to the prefect in charge of assembly, who asks the school about it. That is how I got back a comb that I’d lost. Well, Tuesday night Breck missed a book of stamps, and reported it to Nick, who had charge of assembly that night. (By the way, if there are ever any allusions or references in my letters that you don’t understand and I haven’t explained, just ask me about it in your next letter—I’ll be glad to explain it). Nick asked the school about it and nobody said a word. Nick said that we’d hear about it later, and everybody was certain that we were going to have a “Who done it” after night study. But they were returned during dinner and so we didn’t have one. But we don’t know yet who did it. You are probably tearing your hair and screaming “What kind of jackrabbit is a “Who done it”?” Well at 9:00 the school assembles in the Schoolroom, and there she sits until whoever is guilty owns up. They have them for smoking, buying candy at the store, going out of bounds (that is, out of the school’s property) or for stolen articles. One time last year, Mr. Bartlett knew that someone had been smoking and they had a “Who done it.” The whole school sat there, perfectly still, for three and a half hours. They couldn’t move, speak or go to sleep. Every time some one did one of those things, they got five mighty swats and sat down again. At 12:30, Crocker owned up. The prefects broke ten paddles on him, and no one would speak to him for weeks, not because he’d been smoking, but because he’d made them sit there so long. Gee, I’ll bet they were glad to get to bed. Why, last night I was up till ten and could hardly keep my eyes open. Believe me, I won’t be asking to stay up when I get home Christmas. We’re all mighty glad to get into bed at 9:15, especially me, after my nice shower.

Now for the orgy. This is assuming the proportions of a Sunday letter or book, isn’t it. Well, this is the last part. I couldn’t think of a single thing to do for last night until on the way home from Kent last evening. I got a long pair of dark trousers from Brown and wore one of those white shirts that’s too small for me, leaving one sleeve down and one rolled half-way up. I wore a vest looking very different from my trousers. Both were too large for me, just as I wanted them to be. I wore a stocking, knotted, on my head for a skull-cap. Setting my glasses way down on my face nose, and looking over their top, I made a perfect picture of a Jewish pawnbroker as I walked along stooping and rubbing my hands and saying muttering “Hmmm. Money I’ll get out of dem! Hmm”. Can you picture me from my rotten and inaccurate description?

I’ll tell you about some of the other costumes. Bixby had on a towel turban and a brown Oriental uniform, a rifle and cartridge belt. He’s dark, with heavy eyebrows and made a dandy Sikh officer, “King of the Kyber Rifles.” One fellow was dressed up as a Klu Klux [sic] and was leading a cringing, submissive black slave by a chain. Echeverria was a magnificent pirate, with pistols, cutlasses and daggers sticking out all over him. Crocker had on a full dress suit, coat & all, but had on no pants, and his nose was painted a flaming red. “Boom-Boom” Cannon made a good “Betty, the Belle of Baltimore.” Goodwin had messed-up hair, a pair of pyjamas and a fire-extinguisher over his shoulder. He carried a raincoat over his left arm. It was very realistic. A group of fifth and sixth formers made up as the faculty. The resemblances were remarkable. They got first prize—a big five-layer cake. Bobby Blake was a Highlander with a dagger, kilt and feather in his cap. Ritchie made up as a slouching, suspicious-looking gangster, a bulge on his hip. Skinny Hamilton came walking in with a sign “Before”. Then Ennis came with a sign saying “Dr. John’s Cod Liver Pills.” Then Fat Brown came in, his sign saying “After.” That got a good laugh. There were lots of dandy costumes that can’t be very well described, but you simply must come up to Hallowe’en next year. Afterwards we had cider, doughnuts and candy—all we wanted. My, everything was good! Must get outside now. Love and kisses

Your devoted son,

John Allyn

[UMN, MS]

Sunday, November 18, 1928

Dear Uncle Jack,

Please don’t pay any more money on my tuition. With your consent, and I know you will consent after this letter, I am going to leave this school |→Thanksgiving| and go to work.

South Kent is no place for me—there are nice fellows here who will be something in life and I never will be anything anyhow. This nice place and advantages are wasted on me. You can talk about development, but a fellow has to have something in him, and I haven’t got it. I’m a coward, a cheat, a bully, and a thief if I had the guts to steal.

I think maybe the boys here realize that and I haven’t but one or two friends in the school, and they all pick on me, because they know I haven’t the bravery to resent it.

Maybe if I go to work, I can be of a little service to someone.

I’d like for you to go ahead and enter Robert’s application. I’m sorry that he’ll have my despicable reputation here to face, but he doesn’t seem a bit like me. He’ll make a nice, straightforward fellow, something I never could have done.

I don’t seem to have inherited any of my father’s honesty or my mother’s fairness, bravery and patience. I’m very sorry to upset mother’s pride about me and yours, but I can’t go on wasting your money and affections.

I have none of the fine qualities or emotions, and all the baser ones. I don’t understand why God permitted me to be born. I’m undesirable and a nuisance everywhere I go.

When my new suit comes, I’ll return it as it came, and perhaps you can return it and get back the wasted money. Anything nice is wasted on me.

You can tell Mother now or wait until Thanksgiving. Please let me know immediately which you have done. Otherwise I’ll continue to write her cheerful letters. I think my love for her and love and respect for you are my only good.

I am sorry to so upset your plans, but they will be wasted on me—

With love

Your son,

John Berryman

P.S. I’m a disgrace to your name.

1930

[UMN, TS]

Thursday afternoon [early December 1930]

Dearest Mother,

I am writing now, before I begin intensive study for the examinations, and I will only send along a short note Sunday. Exams begin Saturday; we have History at nine o’clock and French at two o’clock, so you can see how I’ll have to study tomorrow and Saturday. English is at two o’clock on Sunday and Latin is Monday morning. The last exam is Math, as usual, on Tuesday morning. The two hardest exams are the first day. I will say all I want to say before I come home now and then my Sunday note can be as short as time urges.

I am positive that I cannot possibly get everything I want to take home in my suitcase—it’s no fun at home unless I have all the things I want, and every term I collect things that I want to show you, like the pictures, etc. So I’m looking around for a stout box, in which to send home my Red Hood, skates, (the weather has been so warm that I am sure we’ll have no more skating here, and very doubtful if it will be cold during the vacation, but it’s worth the chance) phonograph records, etc. I only brought the records up because I thought that I could play them in the Common-room, but the Victrola there is broken, so it’s no use keeping them here, and I’ll want to play them in the vacation anyway. I will pay for its mailing out of my allowance, as it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to pay for a convenience to me.

I wrote Granny immediately after getting your letter, and hope that she received my letter soon. How is she now? Please give her my love and say that I hope she is much better.

Mr. Cuyler talked to me a long time recently about College Boards and the new Plan.4 Cram Week is to be eliminated this year. I’ll have to remember to tell you all about that during the vacation. I have an awful lot to talk about—hope I can remember the half of it.

The First Team Banquet was held Tuesday night and six ^(four)^ fellows in my form got letters—both Dawbarns, Harmar and Stump Jones I. Hewat and Colt got letters last year, but weren’t so hot this year and didn’t. Everyone on the First Team Squad got their numerals, and you can wear them on hats or sweaters now. I’ll get mine next year. There’s a long article on the banquet in the forthcoming Pigtail, so I won’t spend much time on it.5

I want to partially prepare you. My face is in a terrible state—it’s as bad as it ever was. I used that stuff the doctor gave me for a month and it peeled my skin off, but the pimples and blackheads and things kept on coming on the new skin and look worse than ever. I’m awfully discouraged—If I were anyone but myself I should be disgusted with the appearance of John Berryman and avoid him as much as possible. I’m afraid it’s permanent.

I arrive at twelve o’clock in Grand Central on Wednesday, December the seventeenth, with a big appetite and a tremendous need of a haircut, and I hope, good news about exams. Until then, adios. All the love in the entire universe to the family—I shall be so glad to get home,

Your devoted son,

John

1932

[Haffenden, TS]

Saturday [May 1932]

Dearest Mother,

I don’t like to type letters—it seems so impersonal—but this is going to be a long letter and I can clarify my thoughts better on the typewriter. This is one gift that I can never thank you enough for.

It is a cold, rainy day, so I have a long time in which to write this. I’ve thought the whole thing over very carefully, considering every aspect, and I have decided that I prefer High School next year to continuing at South Kent.

I have numerous reasons, and I’m going to try to tell them much as I would in a theme, in an orderly and rational fashion.

One of the most important reasons is girls. For four years now I have seen practically none of your sex for nine months of each year. Of course, we think and talk about them a great deal of the time up here and it seems to me that we get a distorted viewpoint. For fellows who go to a flock of dances each vacation and write to several girls, perhaps it is not so, but I know that most of us come to regard girls merely as a bunch of organs, without taking into consideration their intelligence and individuality. There is scarcely a conversation of any length here, whether between two fellows or a group, in which the talk does not turn to girls at one time or another, and the references are nearly always low. The fellows even talk of girls whom they doubtless respect and admire in a smutty way and I know of two or three who have no hesitation in referring to their sisters in that way. I think that another year of South Kent would make it a long and very difficult task for me to learn to accept girls as a natural and normal thing and to be easy and natural in relations with them. I think that my first year at college would be made much harder, if I had to learn to accustom myself to their presence as a regular thing. Now I am very awkward and self-conscious when any are around and in attempting to conceal it I do terrible things. It seems to me that a year at High School would allow me to get rid of my false ideas and accept them as a natural thing. I don’t mean that I want to cut loose and go to a lot of dances and neck and all that (many fellows from sheltered preparatory schools go absolutely hog-wild when they get to college, you know)—but I would like to be able to act as normally in the presence of any females as I would in yours.

Another reason is that I’d like to get rid of several complexes I’ve gotten up here. Because of ridicule of physical defects, I have acquired quite a budding inferiority complex, which colors my self-confidence and ideas and makes me very self-conscious. It has gotten such a hold on me that I am actually coming to respect the views of Wittenberg, whom I know to be my mental inferior. I’d like to get rid of that, and I think that starting absolutely fresh in a new school, I could make a good year of it, in thought, studies, sports and actions, which ought to help me rid myself of it. As you know, I’ve taken quite a riding about my eyes and it’s made me very self-conscious about them; in fact, I never see a reference to sight or vision or even the simple verb “see” that I don’t flinch inwardly. I don’t seem to be able to take it stoically; I’ve ceased, of course, to take any notice of it outwardly, but the kidding continues and it hurts quite a lot. It has affected me physically, too: although I can look at any object when alone quite steadily, even in ordinary conversation, I don’t like to meet the other person’s eyes, for I feel that mine are quivering and unsteady, as I think they really are. That’s not explained very well, but it would take a long time to explain it thoroughly. Anyway, I’ve become very sensitive about my eyes and I believe that another year of the kidding might make it a serious thing of which I might not be able to get rid later.

Also I’ve gotten the typical smug attitude of many fellows—“Well, I’m a prep school fellow, and as such a great deal better than many of these men you see”. A lot of the fellows up here even look down upon great men who haven’t had a good education, and while I’d never go that far, I don’t think a year at High School would hurt a bit.

During the first three years up here, my courses were not planned so that I’d have enough work to do, and I got habits of loafing that I’m having the devil of a time breaking and haven’t succeeded in doing by any means. This is one of my main worries about Bob. He and I both have excellent minds. If I, with a natural love for study which he hasn’t, acquired these slack habits, I’m afraid that he’ll get them so badly that he may never be able to break them. I think that starting fresh in a school, I’ll be able to settle down to work and not quit, which I’ll have to learn to do if I’m to do anything in college. Next year our whole Sixth Form will Study out, of course, and there’s going to be “horsing” galore, which means that the work I’d get done would be nobody’s business. About studies themselves: I can get Solid and Trig in any High School as well as I can get it here; Virgil I don’t feel that I really need—I’ll probably take it, but I know enough Latin now to teach it to myself, if I had to; in English, I could take College English next year: I’ll expect to do a great deal of extra reading and theme-work under your supervision, and I’ll learn more than any dozen Mr. Cuyler’s could teach me. In French I will miss Mr. Patterson, but I expect to correspond with him regularly and with my ground-work in French I’m sure that I can pick up the rest from books even if my teacher isn’t any good.6

Up here the only experience we get in elocution and speaking is the reading in chapel, and since that only comes once every three weeks for each fellow and is read, it isn’t very beneficial. I’d like very much to be able to speak well. I have a good mind for argument and debating, I think, and a clear voice when I am careful, and I might make a good debater. But even if I don’t, I want to be able to talk before a group or crowd easily, forcefully and interestingly. In most High Schools they have debating clubs and other things which correspond to them.

I have a strong habit of cursing and blaspheming, which I acquired in my Second Form year and which has grown steadily ever since. We hear little else up here—many of the fellows swear with every phrase and many of the masters are careless. I’ve tried conscientiously to break it this term, but haven’t succeeded at all. Of course, I’d hear that in a High School, but not so frequently, I think and besides I’d only be there for five hours a day, or six. At home I could stop it, and also acquire some table manners, which are not used here.

I’m not particularly well liked here and there are only about five fellows in the whole school whom I really like; Mr. Patterson is the only master whom I would like to continue to know: so my leaving would not be breaking any real ties. I got off to a bad start in the Second Form, not being very quick to adapt myself to new conditions, and have continued largely in the way I began. I think I’ve learned enough here to be able to adapt myself to any conditions fairly quickly, so I think I’d do well in a new school.

In short, I feel that during the four years that I’ve been here, I’ve learned about all that the school can teach me. And that is quite a lot, too—you get to be able to look after yourself up here, to know a bit about the trend of thought among the upper classes, to play football indifferently well, to appreciate popular music, to play tennis, to skate and play hockey, to get up early and think of physical discomforts as something to be avoided if possible but to be taken uncomplainingly if necessary, not to mind physical labor, to dress well (if money), to obey superiors, to take riding more or less philosophically or at least not to show outwardly that you mind it, to keep regular hours, to play Ping-Pong and bridge, to be extremely interested in sports, etc. But I don’t think that the Sixth Form year here could teach me much more of value, and I think that perhaps it gives fellows an arrogance that is taken out of them very quickly at college, but hurts in the taking. And I think that there are very definite advantages to be gained in a year at High School. Of course, after four years, I’d like to finish here, and it’s quite true that the name of a preparatory school of good standing would be of more value to me at college than a high school, but if I do well in college, my school won’t matter so much. And I don’t feel that I’m quitting, either; of course, next year would be by far my easiest, because I’d be a Sixth Former, taking only four subjects, with an assured place on the Tennis Team, and a probable line position on the Second Team in Football, with possible letters if I did well.

Of course, I may be too close to it to judge, but I think a year of High School would do me more good than the Sixth Form here and I think I’d enjoy it more.

It’s very hard for me to tell about Bob. He says he likes it here, yet he doesn’t seem happy, either. I know for a fact that he wastes a lot of time and even while he’s doing his work, he works at half-speed and fools a lot. I wouldn’t like for him to get the habit of loafing, as I have. He has picked up quite a lot, I know,—that dormitory is a filthy place, if ever there was one. He curses quite a bit, and all the rest of it. If I thought the place was going to have the same effect on him as it has on me, I’d recommend yanking him out for good at the end of this year, but he’s very different from me in many ways and it may affect him very differently—I don’t know.

You now know just as much about it as I do, and I leave the decision to you and Uncle Jack—do just as you think best.

I’m awfully sorry about how things are—I had thought that perhaps you could have this summer free, without any worries, but it seems not. We’re going to have a lot of fun anyway, though, aren’t we?

I love you with all my heart, Mother—

Devotedly,

John

P S—I figure my average to be 75, a real record for me. Patterson read off the Form’s English marks for this month yesterday—there were twelve in the sixties, two flunks, and six in the seventies, the highest being 78. I got an 85. So there’s something to rejoice about. And I’m getting the highest mark in Physics, about 80. But I’m also getting a complimentary 60 in Geometry, which ruins me completely. Love.

1935

[Haffenden, TS]

Sunday evening, 11:30 [early October 1935]

Dear Milt,

I have so damn incomparably much to say that—trash and kindred fornications! First I’ll toss to ye swine a few autobiographical details then I’ll answer your gorgeous and long-awaited letter. I wanted to write you but didn’t know where the hell you were caging up—and then you write Atherton first!7 By God, Klinker, where is our love going???

My course is the acne of Hell College. Three seminars—Senior Colloquium, Edman’s Metaphysics, the last year of the Lit sequence—and three others: V D’s wonderful Shakespeare, Weaver’s Renaissance and Odell’s Modern Drama.8 I average four hours sleep a night and meet myself coming and going and coming and going and coming (the damn needle is stuck … Jasper!) I hope, apropos of nothing but our great LUV, that your teeth survived their battles in fine and sharp shape, and that you are yet among us in joy.) You have never seen such a dull bastard as Berryman has become. Nothing but the grind—Bacon, Sh, Dante, Shaw, Plato, Hobbes, etc. etc. etc. I did rouse myself last night, called Carson and wended (quite tight) my way to the open dance, but it wasn’t so open that they’d let me in—are you in the dorm? says they, and I says no are you in the dorm? and they says yes so what? and I says Aristotle says … Well, when I collected the fragments, I’d taken Carson in a huff home and was in the grill, surrounded by my admirers. What a life!

This all sounds gay but it ain’t, Klinker, it ain’t. I be in a berry bad state—sleepless & gruffgruff.

Atherton broke like a bitch her date with me the night you left and went off with Ralph (spit!). I spent the goddamest evening of my career, sick with all the adolescent hopelessness, jealousy, rage, self-pity, love, yearning etc. But the next morning we fixed it up (impossible to relate these things, isn’t it? Eh, Klinker?) and I drove up with them. Smith is gorgeous and Morris House is better—was in her room and in Rockwell’s, Dotty not there.9 No rape, though. I wrote her every day for a week, then got sick and less frequently since. God damn her, she’s got to marry me whether she loves me or not—she must but she doesn’t. What the hell kind of a cycle is this? My other little objets d’amour were as nothing, Halliday—I love this Atherton with my eyes and my guts and my blood and my brains and my soul, whether I have one or not.

Something else has come up. As if life weren’t difficult already, Krutch gave me Thursday four novels to review or throw out.10 He may not print the reviews, but it’s a swell chance anyway—thru V D, of course. Cabell’s new book, two psychological novels and a historical epic.11 I feel a little small but unawed. Reviews have to go in this week—will let you know what happens. This also is devastating my time.

The game yesterday was lousy, but I see you got beaten—maybe even we can yuh, heh heh! Incidentally, Atherton writes me special to say they’re bombarding you to come. Far be it from me, but for some obscure reason I’d give both my right arms and several legs—save only P—to have you here that weekend. Can you at all? For Christs sake don’t let anything stop you if you humanly can! I don’t give a whistle in hell for anybody else, but you and Jane have got to be here. If you can spare the time, etc., fellow.

Down with Rosalie and hurray for Curtis—may she be fertile. A PtCounter Pt reposes not three feet from me, but to save me I haven’t time to look at it again—read it twice, swell.12 Cheers for your refuge and not dishworking, and work, Klinker—or by God I’ll dazzle you with my wisdom, I’m getting my four years of college in one year, my head is bloody but bowed and bent and broken not by bitches. Life is—

Wrote Rockwell some time ago & got a reasonably amusing return which I haven’t ackn. Jane writes wonderfully—your letter and hers are all that keep me head up, me hearty.

Sorry as hell to stop, but I’ve still got two Dialogues, Dinsmore’s Dante, a hunk of damnable Wordsworth (I’ve discovered that part of his name was omitted, it’s Words worth Shit), and a play to read tonight, believe it or not. What are you reading and how’s the work?

Write when you have time and I’ll do the same, answering or not. Best of fuck, ole man,

Castrate Klinker, the Balls of the Caribbean

I didn’t say anything about Rockwell a-purpose, but—she’s not to marry, Halliday—or maybe she is—I thought I had at last an opinion, however worthless, but I haven’t. Bless you, anyway. But if you forget her, swell. I can’t say anything at all, Milt, but I’d love to see you, damn your soul—

[Haffenden, TS]

Saturday night [?16 November 1935]

Dear Milt,

Christ! I’ve just read Richard II—listen:

No matter where;—of comfort no man speak;

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:

And yet not so,—for what can we bequeath,

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke’s,

And nothing can we call our own but death,

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:—13

How can a man write so? A few of the sonnets were beautiful and bone, but in the ten plays I’ve read there’s been nothing like this—a writing that can’t be learned and can’t be written, but it has been by some few great—a rhetoric that swells and transcends sound and was deathless when it began—Hopkins:

Thou mastering me

God, giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea,

Lord of living and dead:

Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,

And after it, almost unmade, what with dread,

Thy doing—and dost thou touch me afresh?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.14

Donne: God hath another manner of eternitie in him; He hath an whole eternal day; an eternall afternoone, and an eternall forenoone too; for as he shall have no end, so hee never had beginning …

At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow

Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise

From death, you numberlesse infinities

Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe,

All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’rethrow,

All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrranies,

Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes

Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.15

And on and on and on—I know damn well you know these and devils are my witness that I am without leisure to copy thus, but zounds! and other loud ecstatic sounds. To bed now, I’m worn out, and I’ll write thee tomorrow.

Monday—didn’t have a second all day yesterday, read “King John”, Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus, a dozen essays by Hazlitt and innumerable letters by Lamb (Get the Modern Library Lamb, a new Giant—it’s complete;16 I also have the Random House Coleridge now and it’s fascinating to tally the letters they exchanged), Damon’s study of Ulysses in Hound & Horn (the best I’ve seen), etc. etc.17 Incidentally, my library is augmenting (wrong use, I know) lovelily (take that and that), although I’m utterly penniless: have some astonishing volumes for you to peruse when you come, and get books to review all the time—Robinson’s King Jasper, Masters’ Invisible Landscapes, A E’s Selected Poems, etc. recently.18

The most important thing that is happening at present is that Van Doren and I are becoming real friends, I think. I am completely without awkwardness or constraint in his presence (which is something for me, as you know) and we talk interminably about everything most of the time. This Shakespeare is wonderful—I’m reading everything wholly and carefully, of course, and writing papers (no papers or notebook required, said he superiorly)—the progression chronologically is the most interesting thing I can off hand think of. When we talked Friday he told me that on the train to Chicago Tuesday he wrote a poem that grew out a conversation we had, and I asked to see it; he said he’d bring it up. Lo and behold, Saturday morning appears a letter from him, not a letter but an envelope containing a little blue exam book, with the poem, called The Happy Warrior,19 inside, inscribed to the yours truly you may have read about in a HORRIBLE book called Pishtush or why the willynilly slimies tend to sodomy. I haven’t time to copy the poem—it awaits thee. And I said Friday I’d never seen his “Now the Sky & other poems”20 and couldn’t find it: could I borrow his copy? Sure. So today he brings up a copy neatly inscribed to me, God bless him, and if I was indiscreet or something to ask it can’t be helped now. Anyway he’s a marvellous marvellous fellow, and the three of us are going to have a hell of a fine time Christmas.

Your letter was of course gorgeous—I must have been wrong about your writing only once, because I have your Ind game letter—it would kill me to think one of our immortal documents had gone astray. Your work seems to be gorgeous, like mine—and hooray for Rosalie. Hast thou layed yet? To be blunt about it. I pray for the fruition nightly, chaste one. I remain tightly at my task except (new paragraph for this)

I drove up to Northampton with Anne [sic] Atherton last Sunday, as you’ve doubtless heard.21 Had a fairly swell time and was witty and pleasant invariably (I hope—tell me what R. and A. said on this score), but I was shown clearly how goddam in love I am and how I’ve got to get out of it. You see, Jane has never loved me but she did desire me mightily last summer—the which is now gone. We went for a long walk alone in the wood there in the afternoon and once I offered to kiss her, but she said later and I never spoke of it or gestured again, not even at leaving. She knew I couldn’t in selfrespect ask again, but not a move made she, also knowing how I was being slowly murdered underneath it all—so obviously nothing but cursed fucking blasted damned rotted ghastly camaraderie of the chitchat variety remains. Hell and hell!!! But I bore it well, as needs must, and wrote her a very tender letter, Christ only knows how. Now comes the crowning insult: she didn’t think she’d be able to get down again before Christmas but she’s driving down this Friday with Bobby Winslow for the Brown-Col. game and having a cocktail party that afternoon for them (Mary and Kenny also coming, she thinks); she writes me,22 “Please come (to the party, this is), because I don’t think I’ll be able to see you otherwise, because I’m going to be on my very best behavior the whole weekend, because I hurt Bobby too much as it is.” Bitch bitch bitch—she not only was a bitch at the dance when she was down to the game and for my birthday,23 but the next morning she lied and went out with “Ralph” when she had expressly promised to have dates with no one else the weekend; now she gets righteous as hell and won’t even see me except at a party where the Winslows are guests of honor, she is hostess and fifteen god-knows-who’s mill in all directions. Boy, what a sense of honor, what a noble nature, what a kind disposition. I realize I sound absurd, and I’m not blaming her at all, I’m only realizing (and tough it is, too) what she is apparently like and trying to prepare myself to make my affection relax its death-grip on her worthless throat. Who the hell blames people for what they are? It’s when they act out of character that you give them hell, and that’s what I’m really doing—giving her hell in the hope that this is really out of character, or that she is really fond of me and hasn’t been lying because I amused her or because she liked to have someone mad about her (you see, I’ve learned thoroughly that she has only been popular for a short time—for years she knew Rockwell and Winanne at school but not otherwise, they never invited her to parties, etc.).24 I hope and hope that she really isn’t a bitch; but I know she is. So I don’t think I’m going to the party and while I’m going of course to continue to be affectionate as long as I feel affectionate (which I pray will be short), I’m not going to be a raving rug for her to clean her boots on, etc. etc. etc. Enough of that—I sound like a child and feel like one too. Where the hell is this philosophic calm I spoke about—the fact is that my whole devotion is engaged, strangely—I say “strangely” because I like and desire two other girls, Elspeth and Shirley, and I respect each of them far more than Jane, in ways, but I am perfectly convinced that if I have to live without Atherton it will kill me—in fact, I won’t, and that’s the end of it.25 She’s got to be human and love me—Halliday, why do I kick against the pricks???? So on and on ad nauseam.

I’ve had an invitation from Elspeth and a Miss Perera to a dinner-dance on December 27, and Elspeth says you should have one by now—for Gods sake, accept, and we’ll have a wonderful time. Formal and about forty people, Winanne, Bobbie, Elspeth, etc. and no Atherton or Rockwell. ACCEPT, you, or I’ll brain you. I had refused verbally when Elspeth told me she’d asked you also—now we’ve got to go.

I’ve mailed you out a copy of The Review—everyone in sight says this is absolutely the best issue ever. Giroux modelled the format on Hound and Horn and did all the work of makeup himself—it’s swell, isn’t it? And Elegy is well printed at last—what a hell of a rumpus that little poem is creating, believe it or not,—50 persons per day ask what it means, and VD and I sit tight and won’t tell.26 The damn thing is crystal clear and unambiguous, I think honestly, assuming some knowledge of Crane’s life and work—they fail to understand their own ignorance, the poem is simple enough. Look at my review also.27

Really must get to work—sorry I haven’t time to be amusing and as brilliant as you seem always able to be, but LIFE IS GRIM—write soon and bless your little heart, it’s only a month now—

John

Letter from Rockwell will interest you—

1936

[Princeton, MS]

408 West 115 St.

New York City

Monday [April 1936]

Dear Mr. Blackmur,

Your review is of course absolutely first-rate, and exactly what we hoped for.28 I wasn’t in fact afraid you’d ‘write down’ or be cursory, but there was the possibility. It’s a fascinating discussion; aside from the critique of his method and the comparison you instituted I’m most delighted by the statements on dogma arising in the practice of your (but you don’t name it) criticism and in Tate’s. With nearly identical views of the nature of the dichotomy, you take distinct but analogous approaches to ‘form’, he through ‘insight’, you through craft.

I’m sending up a set of proofs of the verse to be printed and read, in case you’d like to run through it before you come.—Thanks infinitely for letting us have your essay.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

Please ignore, by the way, my verse and reviews in the copies of the Review you have; I did them when I knew no better.

J.B.

[Columbia, TS]

April 16, 1936

Dear Dr. Butler:

The Boar’s Head Society of Columbia University invites you most cordially to be a patron of this year’s Poetry Reading, which is to be held in Harkness Academic Theatre at eight-thirty o’clock on the evening of Thursday, April the thirtieth.

Since we have no fund and no admission is charged, our only means of payment for prizes and other expenses incident to the Reading lies in subscriptions from patrons. The minimum subscription is five dollars; but we hope, at the least, for your permission to use your name.

The Reading promises to be very interesting, and I particularly hope that you will be sufficiently interested to honor us with your presence. Mark Van Doren will preside and speak on the criticism of R. P. Blackmur, our guest of honor; and students will read their own verse.

I hope very much that you will accept and attend; the check should be made out to the Boar’s Head Society and addressed to 404 John Jay Hall.

I wish also to take this opportunity of thanking you for my appointment to the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship for Cambridge for the next year: it was a great and unexpected honor, of which I hope to show myself worthy.

Sincerely,

John McAlpin Berryman

Chairman

[Haffenden, MS]

Stony Croft

Williamsburg, Ontario

September 3, 1936

Dear Milt,

I realize that I’m a double-damned worm for not having written; there are two facts: first, I have of course so intolerably much to tell you that I kept hoping somehow I’d see you; second, you know how I hate letters and how I won’t just sit down and do anything. If you’re angry, you’re a worm, because you know very well I love thee with my heart and soul, |OVER, darling| Beloved Beetle; in fact, I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not Beetle more.29 Consider the universe as a cosmic Beetle—the abstract essence of Beetle, to be intuited not perceived. Contemplate Beetle: Beetle will be discovered on examination to have two attitudes: Beetle is Inscrutable, and Beetle Bites. Heigh ho, ça suffit.

Halliday, I have got to see you before I go. You are the most important of the three reasons why I haven’t sailed long since—the others being my natural but incredible procrastination, and my health which is miserable—no germs, but endless fatigue, underweightness, nervousness, etc etc. The doctors three prescribed rest etc. So I’m up here in the wilderness (did you get my wire from Utica ten days ago?) sleeping and reading. Wmsburg is the habitat of the Ontario Myth, one Herr Locke, who has performed no miracles upon me.30 Wherefore I’m going up to Montreal tonight, thence probably to Quebec (j’avais une fois il y a longtemps grand désir à voir le sanctuaire de Sainte Anne de Beaupré—et je l’ai encore), and will be back in New York next week. I have to be in residence at Clare on October 3rd, which means sailing about the 20th, as I intend to take a freighter who will convey my books. So you got to come East practically at once, and no excuses!!!!!

God only knows what will happen in the next two years and I want to see you. I estimate we have about two hundred hours of uninterrupted talking to do—which if we don’t do now, we may have to do in Hell under rather difficult conditions—so come East! Please, Halliday! If you need money, wire me and I’ll send what I can, but come, my tru luv.

Outline of discussion:

(1) religion

(2) metaphysics

(3) contemporary worldview

(4) poetry, esp. mine & Yeats’.

(5) drama, esp. yours & Shakespeare’s.

(6) literature in general

(7) women

(8) Van Doren

(9) all our friends

(10) you

(11) me

(12) life

(13) the Beetle

So come oh come, my fran’, and let us burn the midnight pan.

Write me at home tout de suite and follow it in person. I’ll send a volley of postcards and write again directly I return to 408. God bless you, Milt—

John

I have your last letters (Jun 3 & July 1st) up here & have re-read them just now—they marvellous, you dog—yippee!!

[UMN, MS]

[4 September 1936]

A fascinating place, Mum—you’ve got to come upon vacation when you can. Mélange of strangeness & familiarity produced by the two languages everywhere. Je m’amuse beaucoup with cathedrals, books, shrines, exploration (I’ve walked miles), the harbor, etc. Superb cross this31—love

J

—

[Princeton, MS]

M.4. Memorial Court

8 Oct 1936

Dear Blackmur,

God knows why I didn’t write long since—find in my papers two typed pages to you on July 10 but unfinished, and dull in any case. Was ill most of the summer, then in Canada to rest (hoped to get to Harrington but it was too far for my purse), then usual frenzy of packing, etc. Forgive my incoherence, I’m devilish nervous this evening—been trying to work out a poem & can’t—Christ for a poem with all the uncanny shock of Yeats’ “Fisherman” or Crane’s “Paraphrase” and at the same time ordered strength, as Ransom or Stevens—I am beginning to understand how it drives you mad after a time.32 I wanted awfully to see you again, we had no chance to talk for hours and hours, as you have to—opinion, dozens of poems, theory, metaphysics and just hearing the voice of someone you respect has an intellectual quality—let me collect my scattered wits or I shall have to tear this up.

←(finished the poem in this interval, honest!)

I’m awfully glad about the Harcourt Brace contract and very pleased if your coming to New York for our dear little Bartholomew Boar Pig had anything to do with it. And I hope very much that that, and any other writing you’ve been doing, are going to your satisfaction—which is to say, perfectly. Have you finished the long poem, “ ? ’s Delight”?33 I should like to see it if you’ve a copy you don’t mind missing for a month. The sonnets “Judas Priest” are brilliant—lines keep recurring to me, in fact I have both ^(sonnets, not lines)^ by heart

So driven mad did he alone indict

the waste, the terror, the intolerable loss34

and the modulations of speed in the octet of I are beautifully done, and the formal character of the verse is magnificent. Forgive my little discussion—I am not continuing from any sense of courtesy or flattery.

I want to see the Yeats essay again: I have been studying Yeats since then and have discovered complexities, and vastness, I didn’t know were there. I liked the essay enormously, of course, wishing there were much more of it; but I wish the damned Southern Review would print it instead of announcing with great pride that they are going to print it; I’ve some notes and ideas to check against it—I’ll write in detail when it appears.35 I picked up No 46, signed of course, of “A Vision” for a guinea in London, by the way, and am just getting into it; will report on it when I know more. Also got “Stories of Michael Robartes” in Montreal—have you seen the books? If not, I’ll be glad to mail them over. Books are incredibly cheap here, incidentally—an ordinary $2 book of verse is 5 shillings, a novel ($2.50) is 7 / 6 and dearer books even less in comparison. Heffer’s [sic] have a Nonsuch [sic] Dante for £7 which I thirst for—gorgeous thing; how could you sell yours? I’ve already bought about twice as many books as I’ll ever be able to pay for—the shops here are superb and you open accounts at once everywhere and then just wave books when you want them and, obviously, I owe some ^£^18 already, to six or seven places. I have so much room here, two immense rooms and a kitchenette (called the gyp-room), I wish you or Mark could come and stay for months. Is there any chance of your getting over? “The Double Agent” ought to be published here, I’ve been thinking;36 but so little is known of American poetry—no Crane, no or very little of Stevens, Cummings, etc.—that it might be difficult. If you’re interested, I wish you’d let me do anything I can. Meantime, I’m getting everyone who matters—and whom I know—to read you and the aforementioned and Ransom, etc. The latter seems to me absolutely first-rate, by the way—esp. “Painting: A Head”, “Captain Carpenter”, “Antique Harvesters” and others—what do you think? As a matter of fact, I can’t think of anyone writing verse in America who is better (possible exceptions: Stevens, Tate, who else?). There is probably no sense in listing poets, but really what do you think of Ransom? Phelps Putnam I like immensely too, but only in four or five poems.37 Have you looked at Mark’s poems in The Southern Review?38 And see the lyrics in “A Winter Diary, etc” if you can. I’ve got Wheelwright’s book and a curious book it is.39 Nearly all the poems are interesting, but in a special way ^—or largely so—^ which I tend to think has nothing to do with poetry; they interest by reason of the man’s sharp, hard mind—matter, briefly, not manner. The verse, when it is verse, is in general formless even if it is metrical; much the same criticism you levelled so ably at Frost (a miserable book, that40)—for example, the fourth “quatrain” of “Would you think?” is hopeless as Frost is often hopeless, and for the same reason, though their minds are, of course, utterly dissimilar. Correct me on this if I’m wrong. I miss simply in Wheelwright

“And he that digs it, spies

A bracelet of bright haire about the bone,”41

So heigho and lackaday. Look, by the way, at a lovely, strange poem by Emily Dickinson that begins “A spider sewed at night”; have you thought of writing on her?42 Some one ought to, in the way you use—say what she is saying, how she says it, its value and place—and tell the ignorant world which poems of the hundreds are good and which are not, for no one knows. I feel, oddly, that she is unread except in anthologies or by a very few—Tate, Mark, you, me, etc. How can I know, for instance, that anyone has ever read with attention the poem I mentioned above; it’s brief but excellent and far less difficult (though the syntax of the middle 3 lines is defective) than many others, many of them good. Essential and neglected, I think.

Talked to Tate a good deal when he was in New York lecturing; delightful and very wise, spoke hugely of you—letter from him this afternoon about my poem—oh I hadn’t told you: I wrote in July a masterpiece of about 350 lines called “Ritual at Arlington” & sent it to the S. Rev. Contest—Tate & Mark judges. It didn’t win of course, but they put it 5 in some 500, he says, and “there are very fine passages in it, the best I thought in the whole contest.” Ah, I swell with pride—and am damned disappointed: the theme (description of society by analysis of the incremental ceremonies about death) is valuable, I think, and the handling adequate. I’d like awfully for you to see it—if you wouldn’t mind, say so and I’ll send it over.

Lectures begin tomorrow—I’ll be on Chaucer & Donne & Blake & Yeats mostly, this fall—beautiful town, really, but my mind is in such turmoil I can’t be still long enough to inhale this history—I hope this finds you and Mrs Blackmur43 well and joyous and busy, and you disposed to read such an interminable [mass/mess]—

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[Princeton, MS]

M.4. Memorial Ct.

11 Oct 1936

Dear Mr Tate:

Thanks very much for your letter and the criticism therein—your use of “form” still puzzles me a bit. I’m glad Jarrell won—he writes damn good poems.44 “Ritual” is probably too long but I’m a bat if I know what to delete; at any rate, I hope some one prints it.

Rough crossing on the Brittanic [sic] but I made a very good friend—Pierre Donga, the French (actually Basque-Spanish) caricaturist and political journalist (Les Hommes du Jour & Le Journal du Peuple), a charming and very wise fellow45—we talked all day and night the whole time. I wondered whether you knew him in Paris.

Cambridge is customarily breathtaking, tout à fait vert même maintenant et toujours, j’entends. I’m well settled and at work; a good supervisor, G H W Rylands of King’s—have you seen his “Words & Poetry”?46 Some excellent notes on Shakespeare’s style in it, and generally sound. He has a second edition, immense and gorgeous, that took my breath quite. I’m doing Chaucer and the 17th century now, a paper refuting Johnson and his moral vigilance contra Donne. There is by the way no possible justification, save an historical and arbitrary one, for the use of “metaphysical” & “conceit”; the first is useless in this sense and the second vicious—the OED says ^tells me^ Dryden shares the responsibility with Johnson. It’s a pity, for “metaphysical” has some meaning as applied to, say, “In Memoriam” or “The Emperor of Ice-cream”; I suggest “manipulative” as of some value, vs. “symbolist”, for “Painting: A Head” or “The Phoenix and the Turtle”—do you remember a curious poem by Emily Dickinson (A spider sewed at night) that resembles briefly the latter?47

I’ve been reading also an excellent essay by Ramon Hernandez [sic] (tr. in The Dial, March ’27)—“Art & literature are operative in the world of quality. The more things are qualified, diverse, irreducible one to another, the more the artist feels at ease and breathes freely. Now the aim of science is known to be to establish measurable relations between these same things.…. . The work of art forms an isolated whole … and stands up alone, so to speak, in the spiritual universe.… Thus, while scientific relations are anterior to a total conception of the universe, which, by the way, remains a purely hypothetical limit, artistic relations are posterior to the unity of the whole, being composed according to finalist exigencies of convention or combination.”48 But you probably read it anyway—not startling but sound. How can you dismiss Donne’s prose in so offhand a manner, incidentally—I love the stuff.

Sparrow I thought had some decent theory in the early part of his book, but the specific criticism sounded like Eda Lou or such.49 Though I’m damned if I like all of Mauberley—I’ve been poring over Homage to S. P., which is better knit & really richer, magnificent occasionally, I think.—Your revision of Dante betrays resentment overcoming the historical mind, M. Tate—now take the Bodleian manuscripts …

You’re wrong about the lectures: I learned a great deal—more than I’m likely to get from most of those here. Except Tillyard, the Milton authority, who is excellent on the Romantic Revival—and, thank God, puts Blake at the head of it, as the first and most uncompromising revolutionary, which no American I’ve heard or read does.50 Your Essays and Mark’s Dryden are much read here, by the way, but American poetry is practically unknown—even Rylands knows nothing of Ransom, Crane, etc.51 Horrible state.

I’d like very much to hear from you if you’ve time—what writing are you doing, and what about the play?52 Luck in all ways, and thanks for your kindness.

Ever,

John Berryman

1937

[Haffenden, MS]

4, Rue Cadet

Paris

2 Jan 1937

My friend, I feel magnificently filled! Poetry, poetry—I merely communicate to you my most profound emotion and it turns out to be iambic pentameter. Truth in cadence, and what cadence! What ecstasy! Poetry it obviously is, but of what kind? Dramatic, lyric or epic? Looks like dramatic: “My friend”—there we have direct address, two people involved and a relationship stated—what will happen? Directly, “I feel”—no shilly-shallying, concrete emotion—how do I feel? “Magnificently filled”—there is the inspiring period, conjuring up my days of starvation (verily, through a contretemps the night I arrived—I’ll tell you one day in anatomical detail—I became penniless; for four days I ate not, neither did I smoke—and this past week it’s been impossible to get enough to eat; came in at 10 tonight, discovered still hunger & went out to feast, whence I am returned, as I say, replete, even to the cigar.). Obviously dramatic (thought I’d given up, did you? Heh heh—little you ken the Kritic as bloodhound) but also lyric: note the delicate vowel-changes and rise to climax, the spissant alliteration, the chic feel-fill. Yet epic, epic—with what laryngeal abandon does the line break into “magnificently”! Ah, Muses!

Happy New Year, mon enfant! This incomparable letter of yours I found awaiting me (ears & penis pricked—you know, like Rin-tin-tin; Where have you bin? Why, come right in and have a spot of gin.) here, it doth cheer the antique cockles of my heart; you be happy & coherent, and have got an aim, the which really delights me. Granted it’s a hell of a business, the theatre, still it’s damn interesting;—curious that I should, the day before getting this letter, have written you from London, as I did, on the same subject. And I’ve taken my own advice: the day after Christmas, at noon, my brain began to operate and by midnight I had a whole damn play planned, characters set, the first two acts outlined & some 40 lines written!53 Have since got interested in Paris & done little more but I’m a-thinkin’, Jasper, I’m a-thinkin’ and I’m going to write it. Much more when I get back to a typewriter—I hope to the nine gods you read my letters to Mother and we’re now up-to-date—except you, you bastard. You ain’t told me nothin’.

Oh yes, about Paris … but it’s late & I be sleepy—tomorrow, m’ boy, will be, I predict, another day. More then—meantime, cherchez la clitoris!

Wed—10 p.m.

God damn it, Halliday, il faut il faut il faut that you come over in the Spring—this is fun, but when I think of how superbly (and as I write superbly my whole body is moving into my face with uncomfortable joy—I don’t know whether it’s peculiar to me, but profound emotion starts often in my arms and takes my entire system up—how is it with you?) how magnificently you and I could boil around Europe—and Africa and Asia (Gordon was in Turkey for a time and Pedro’s been all over Northern & Western Africa54—it’s no dream)!!! Two is simply inconceivably more delightful than one, and we two—!! Your German & French and my French (now absolutely reliable for travelling purposes) will take us nearly anywhere, and one of us will learn Spanish, the other Italian, and we’re set—and think of being completely & always together for weeks on end! Even starving would be fun, and penniless as we are, there’s not much danger of that. People will always feed two charming young Americans. For Christ’s sake, see if it’s possible—write marvellous essays for M. Hopwood, if necessary—but come!55 Costs much less, the way we’ll go, than mere living in America, and you can somehow get passage. Think, think, think—I’m going to bed and think about us in Morroco [sic], raising formidable hell with African morals and solving universal problems in our magnificent conversations—I’d give my heart for one of them now—Good night, before I get maudlin (excellent Haut-Barac, my love) and outrage Anglo-Saxon convention by saying I love you—which I do. & so to bed—

slightly later—in fact, ^Monday^ Sunday the Tenth

1:50 a.m.

I am endlessly sorry about this letter which seems to be all parenthesis, all fluff and no meat—as usual, I ain’t writ, only to Mother—and reams—Only one card to Jean, a bread & butter to the Frasers and that’s all!56 To London tomorrow, staying over to see the “Hamlet” at the Old Vic and up Wed. morning—promise to write thee factually from there—But now I be worn—Paris, my boy, is not a city: it is a process—

John

[Haffenden, TS transcript]

Memorial Court

25 Jan 1937

Dearest Granny,

Happy New Year! Forgive me for not writing sooner to thank you for the lovely Christmas box, but I’ve been frightfully busy since my return and have written only Mother. She has probably told you about the delightful Christmas I had here when I came up from London two weeks ago tonight. I spread out my feast of letters and cards and packages from you and Mother and Uncle Jack and Bob and Jean, and opened them with great ceremony before my roaring fire—first the immense envelope and some letters, then I couldn’t resist your gorgeous box so I opened it and began at once to eat—and a good thing, too, because I’d had practically nothing since leaving Paris at ten in the morning, went directly from station to station in London when I learned that the play I’d come over to is not given Monday nights. The box was in perfect condition and nothing at all disturbed except the chocolate cherries—the weather was too much for them, as it is for me. The fruit cake and little goodies were marvellous but the great joyous surprises were the packages of nuts. I still have a good many left after munching happily for two weeks. The pecans particularly delight me. The others all sent lovely things too, as you know, and I had an excited time. I’m awfully sorry that I didn’t send anything in time for Christmas—looked all over Cambridge, but you know how bad I am at finding things, so I finally gave up and sent money, which you probably have by—also repaying a long over-due five dollars, for which many thanks. I’m still looking and when I find something you’d like I’ll send it over. Glad that my card, at any rate, got to you before the Yule. I think one of my letters to you must have gone astray, for I’m sure I wrote thanking you for the birthday cheque—and I do again. We mustn’t forget too that you’re to write in the “Letters of John Keats” you gave me.57 A very beautiful book, that. I loved your card, and I think I’ve not told you how much I was pleased with the snapshot you sent me last fall. I wish I could really “come in to tea” or that you could come in to tea with me. It’s a fearfully cold day. I nearly froze when I went in to town this morning—but my fire is blazing brightly and the room is like toast and we could have a wonderful talk over tea. The room is so much nicer this term. I found new & excellent rugs down when I came back, and I’ve bought cushions for the couch, charming half-curtains for the long windows, another book-case, the room is very cosy, what with five chairs and three tables and the big book-shelves set deep in one wall, and the two others I’ve bought—one window seat is full of books, too. Jean has sent me a photograph and a drawing, there’s a study of Yeats over the heavy table where I’m writing, Rembrandt’s St Sebastian on the right wall, a Van Gogh on the mantel, and Donga’s “Harry Baur” on the double doors behind me that open into the bedroom.58 The effect of the room is dark wood, mostly—I wish you could see it.

Among the mass of letters from other people, I found a card from Murielle (amazing spelling!) Bellows (amazing name!)—the girl is apparently ravenous for a letter from England. I’ll send her a note when I get to it. I believe in giving people what they want, so long as it doesn’t cost you anything. Will write Sammy, too—was very sorry to hear of his Mother’s death. Are he & Thelma married? Remember me, will you, to Paul and Jimmie, and Mr. Croft.

Once I emerged from the holiday gloom, Paris was very pleasant—it is a fascinating city, I walked for all hours in nearly every part of it. Had very little trouble with my French, which surprised me. Remarkable weather, sunny and warm and clear. All the statblished [sic] things. Lunch on the Eiffel Tower, chocolate in the Boulevards, meetings in the Café de la Coupole, theatres in Montmartre, the Louvre, bookstalls along the Left Bank of the Seine, etc. Great building going on all over the city for the Exposition (World’s Fair) in April & continuing for six months. But I’m not awfully good at travel. I prefer Yeats and my own chair and a fire and friends on all sides. Reading Yeats (remember you gave me the Collected Poems?—I have twelve other volumes by him now, but that’s the one I use most) continually—I’ve been asked to lecture on him to a society in Clare next month and have accepted.59 It should be an interesting experience. Also at work on a play I began in Paris, but it’s not going very well—devilish things, plays—especially serious plays and in verse and in the present century. Will let you know what comes of it, if anything but a headache.

The very best of luck with the tea room this year, Granny—don’t work harder than you must, and keep well & strong—we are all, especially me, very proud of you and very loving of you—and thanks again for my lovely Christmas.

Dearest love,

John

[Haffenden, TS]

Memorial Court

Clare College

Cambridge

31 January 1937

Dear Milt:

Very glad indeed to have your letter; it is really fantastic, you know, that we don’t write each other more—once a month, at least. Suggestion: don’t write on both sides, but single-space, you can get more in, the paragraphs are better defined and it’s easier to find things later on—nor is it less difficult to read, contrary to our opinions, yours bred from term papers, which are apt and hoped to be long, and mine from term papers and verse, which is more pleasing in double-space. The damn paper is turning sideways like a crab. While we’re (I, my boy, I) on mechanical matters let me note that I’ve forsaken after an appropriate time the John McAlpin: use J. A. M. for everything here, and shall use nothing but John for writing & publishing if any. Bob has curiously dropped the Robert and uses Jefferson McAlpin—damn Berrymans and their names. When are you going to change to John Milton?

I am, probably, unreasonably distressed about Atherton and her imminent marriage (this typewriter is having fits—it’s such a beautiful clear day after so many horrible that the old boy jumps from foot to foot like Applejohn). Am ashamed of her and all of us. Wrote her yesterday, enclose the letter; I felt very strongly what I had to say and it came naturally in verse, so I was glad to write it in verse.60 Intellectually, it represents my exact opinion; poetically, it is damn interesting, as being without overstatement and imprecision, almost without metaphor, and, I think, rhetorical only in so far as I am trying to persuade her to alter her course of action—I was interested, for once, in putting down what I thought, as directly and emphatically as possible, not in being poetical and effective. Give me your two opinions—surely you’re not happy about the thing? We’ve had a hell of a course with women, haven’t me [sic]? Olive and company, for you; Garnette and company, for me; bitches all.61 Rockwell and Atherton are distinctly neurotic and unsatisfactory specimens. We both feel the same thing, and wish we didn’t: that copulation is an over-rated pastime, and man was not made to feel alone. I was watching intently the other afternoon the cat in the tea shop in Magdalene Street where I often go (there are in it—an Aran expression—two very pretty, vivacious girls of seventeen who fall in love with me by turns; many stories we’ll have to tell each other, my dear); it is beautifully marked and incredibly graceful in the most commonplace actions, and I thought how much more beautiful than a woman is almost any animal. Difficult, it’s true, to appraise aesthetically a nude woman, but think how wretched the proportions are. And how monotonous! If I take the trouble to undress a woman, I should at least be rewarded by fascinating markings of some kind or fur or something—but all I get is a dull expanse of white, ineffectual skin, two nipples more or less brown, a matt of hair, and two legs that coyly open on an odorous and impatient portal. I am sacrificing truth to wit now, but there’s something in it all the same. At any rate, I begin to understand Swift’s disgust as I never have before (have been reading him a lot this term, mainly the verse and the Irish tracts—a gigantic, uncanny man, riddled with mortal pride and terrible rage, and one of the central glories of English literature—I invariably feel a desire to laugh when I begin talking like this, but I am honest too).

How many acres of asininity would you give for one simple, natural statement? Have seen little of my mistress since coming up this month; principally bored, though I drop in every few days for an orgy. [C. B.], a painter studying Latin & anatomy (oh in many ways) here with a tutor before going to London next year to read medicine; dark, handsome, excellent body, particularly two perfect breasts; her main attractions are convenience without complication, pivotal skill, physical ingenuity (we arrive at the most complex positions ever contrived), and the delicious little noises of pleasure she makes while being stroked or entered. As I seem to remember telling you, she is pleasantly engaged to a chap who went down from St John’s last year and is in London, technician with a film company now. She also enters into the thing with more zest than anyone I’ve ever known, gives at least as much as she takes in a very adroit fashion. But limited, Halliday, limited, and I am but mildly fond of her. (The curse of indigo hell upon this typewriter, of which I am in fact so damn fond, these eight years, that it shall be buried with me—and not far away, that, either, what with a horrible toothache, ague, palsy and the creeping jitters that speak no English but make me to utter loud wretched cries in Arabic—The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart That got the captain finally on his back And took the red vitals of his heart And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.62) My love for Jean grows apace, as J B Priestley says,63 and I am wildly anxious to marry her—damn ceremony (the ‘benison’ in the letter to Atherton is doubly ironic) but I want to be with her continually and all the time: she is a lovely and able and generous girl and I adore her and think of her constantly. Mamale el cono a tu madre quando tenga el periodo! for not being able to see her and kiss her when I’m so cursed far away. Not that I mind at all your kissing her, I don’t. In fact and to be honest and frankly underneath it all, and really my dear, I am very glad to have the two persons I love most, beyond my own blood, love each other. Merrily, merrily, incest and adultery, here we go round the phallacious bush. But with all due respect, how could you find her sister anything but common and shop-girl and dull as hell? Round, true, but Halliday, Halliday, she is nothing—Jean is inexplicable in that family. It’s a pity I don’t know Sally—please tell her that I am automatically very fond of her—for I feel at a considerable loss about you when you speak of her.64 As you know, in general I should think facial absolute beauty of little matter, but for you, now, it may be incurably important, I don’t know. God bless you in working it all out. What really matters is that you and Jean and I, with or without some wife of yours, must live together until the end of time. Agreed? I think you should in every way possible counteract for a time your training in the body beautiful—it will stand you in vile stead, if undiluted, sometime or other; I have, believe me, always seen your point and followed to some extent, but what in god’s name is eight bodies beautiful against the way our minds work when we talk, you and I, or against Elegie XVI65 (which go immediately and read, if you read it but five minutes since), or against the single immaculate moment of finding what you want, writing? There is no comparison possible in these things, so I am wrong here, but your continued emphasis is deadly. I’m not writing well, but say you see what I am about, and think of it.

I am never able to see or hear ‘manic depressive’ now without thinking of Mr Deeds and the specialist with his chart—remember our seeing it together?66 Vast success in Paris, too, “L’Extravagant Mr Deeds”, so much better in French, a felicitous tongue for elaborate adjectives: “Cette piece, c’est formidable!” In a German film here last [sic] I kept hearing “Anastromisch!” or something like it—means ‘extraordinary’, I think, you’ll know anyway, but sounds very like “Astronomical!” a superb epithet and much neglected. I believe you can have no idea of the extreme pleasure, call it intoxication, with which I read and reread your letters, or you would write more often. About Paris I have definitely rare stories to tell thee, but obviously not now; when you’re next in New York, look into the volumes I wrote Mother from there, I think she has typed them out. (Travel letters are hell, I don’t pretend that I can write interesting ones: you are in a friendly way cockeyed about mine to Mother, which I’m glad you saw. I did this week write a well-knit epistle about Cambridge which tells rather more than the others together; be sure to see it.) We shall be in Paris together, and I don’t want to anticipate your vile young enthusiasm; I’ll be a good guide, walked for countless hours in all quarters, know more than about New York. A really fascinating city in various ways. London I know much less about, and am thus far less interested in. I am, as you may have gathered, God’s misfit as a traveller; ghoulishly inefficient about details and tickets and visas and trains and money and hotels, hate being away from places and things and books and people I know, am horribly upset by slips in (non-)management, always spend four times the maximum amount I can afford, and am very unhappy about the whole thing. With you it would be different, but alone it resembles Canto XXXIV of the Inferno, until I become painfully oriented in a given place and have established spiritual landmarks. If you wished for me in New York, think for a moment in what degree I wished for you in Paris, and with what desperation. What about this summer?

Don’t yet know about Easter vac; I shall stay here for some time after the end of full term and do some quiet work (social hell has set in, engagements and engagements—even today, Sunday, has been riddled by breakfast with the Dean, two hours’ table tennis at the Club in the afternoon practising for matches with St Catherine’s and Fitzwilliam House (Katz & Fitz to Cambridge) tomorrow night, tea with Mollison, Hall, coffee after Hall with Ramsey, Kitchin and a faffing, pale, plump, hyphenated ass from Trinity, then an hour or so of Paul Robeson records, and a long talk, after the others left, advising Kitchin about his fiancee, and dashing back to this court just before midnight, when one must be in, on fear of suspension, rustication, or simply, and finally, being sent down—and today is typical); after that, probably Majorca or Ireland. The summer is a perfect enigma, will doubtless be penniless by then and deported for non-payment of town bills; I owe (no whisper to a soul) some forty pounds for books here. And the college bills are staggering; just paid last term’s (an eight-week term, remember): seventy-six pounds odd. The item that most upset my delicate financial spleen was five guineas for ‘terms not spent’—allowing me to take a degree after only two years’ residence instead of three, they nevertheless charge a cover for the three terms I was blissfully not here. Heyhey. Living on the Continent is very cheap, mechanically, compared to costs in England and America, but I find, of course, that I don’t live mechanically; miserable, I spend fantastic sums. The books I do not in the least regret and think I never shall. I have excellent authority, remember Walton: “Mr. Donnes estate was the greatest part spent in many and chargeable Travels, Books and dear-bought Experience …”67 And so is mine, and the greatest of these is Books. (Do you remember, by the way, a discussion we once had of modernization or retention of old texts? Well, I recant. I am now become a pedantic fiend for being able to read things as they were written or first printed, and the more so since the period I am buried in at present is the seventeenth century: marvellously complicated and emphatic page they turned out, infinitely subtle punctuation and capitalization and italicization, at its best; compare (if you need comparison, which you don’t, but compare anyway, you Ibernian earthworm with a transverse anus) the completely modernized version of “The Retreate” in Van Doren’s World Poetry, and Q’s bastard version in the Oxford Book of English Verse, with any reliable text—almost any edition of Vaughan except the damn Muses’ Library, or the Oxford Seventeenth Century Verse, or Grierson’s Metaphysical Poems, Donne to Butler.68 And, if you are not faint with statistics, you will See What I Mean.) (Ha ha, you’d forgotten it was a parenthesis, but I hadn’t. Now I’ll look, with you, back to page three and find out where I was when Parenthesis bit again—very bad style, Berryman’s, but charm, you know, charm: like a labyrinth without a monster.)

Books and books. But I have bought none foolishly and few really dear ones (Here we go again boys hold on tight! Blake’s Prophetic Writings ed. Sloss & Wallis, the Grierson Donne, the Nonesuch Otway, a lovely German Montaigne, the Oxford Vaughan, a few others), and have got together a wonderfully useful set of books, none of which I intend ever to sell.69 The two hundred odd I’ve got for forty pounds (forty-five or so, really, I paid for some in London and here, and for all the ones I bought in Paris) would cost, supposing you could get all of them there, not under four or five hundred dollars in America, and should have cost sixty pounds here; ridiculously cheap, some, a sixvolume 1735 set of Dryden’s Dramatic Works for sixteen bob ($4), for instance, and two huge volumes of Cowley quartos, 1687 to 1701, bound together in leather, for ten bob.70 And Everymans and World’s Classics, and the Mermaid series and Oxford Standard Authors, are only two bob, 50¢, for the first two, and 3 / 6, 85¢, for the second two series. Besides amazing bargains you pick up on Market Hill and elsewhere—I discovered Tuesday in a corner at Deighton, Bell, for 2 / 6, the Second Edition of Traherne’s Poetical Works (Bertram Dobell, 1906—the poems were in Mss until 1903 / 4—do you know Traherne at all? He’s a strange poet and a very good one.).71 It is absurd to be here where the best bookshops in the world, literally, are, and not to buy books, if ever you intend to—and I, my love, have always intended. I have practically stopped now, though; have about all the ones I shall use most, and will wait till next year—to see whether, after all, I shall have to sell them in order to get back to New York. Contemplation of the American customs lists gives me, I will say it open, horrible nightmares nightly and little peace in the day.

I know well the letter of Donne’s you referred to last month—the dispiriting thing is that he had already written all the songs and sonnets, and what have we done? But for God’s sake don’t let that damn University get you down again, and I shall resist this. And give that Restoration mind of yours free scope—I’ve long thought it Restoration; this, for example, though eighteenth century, suits it admirably: “Gad I must go and investigate the matter immediately, and if she has wronged me, by the blood of the Scratches, I’ll bring the whole business before parliament, make a speech ten hours long, reduce the price of opium, and set the nation in a lethargy.”72 No? But you are a queer one, all right all right: I am quite serious about the Restoration quality of you, and at the same time I can think of ‘wistful’ as possibly characterizing you in some moods—and the Wistfuls are few and frantically far between, you know—I can think of no one else I’ve known to whom the word could conceivably apply. However, we will solve you another time, said he ominously. It grows late and ghastly late, 2:25 a.m., to wit, and I’ve been at this letter off and onn [sic] all day since I returned from Telfer’s breakfast, and I am very tired, and I have a rendezvous with a dentist at ten-thirty tomorrow, and a bleak morning it will be, and one ought always to start the week FRESH, haven’t you heard?73 and time is money no time is change (same thing) and there isn’t enough wit left in me to keep a whippoorwill alive—a small, wizened whippoorwill, mind you, with practically no teeth and many debts and a sour, silent look, altogether a contemptible bird, but could I keep it alive? No and again No, I say, and canker eat it.

I am in a sorry fatigue—I have been staring madly at the ‘to wit’ up there and thinking in Danish ‘to wit or not to wit, a momentous question’. I have also been thinking about the inquiry you put to me about ethics and aesthetics, and after all this time the answer has suddenly come to me. The answer is: Phallus. Look closely at Phallus, then look intently at Phallus, then look intensely at Phallus—and Phallus will inform you. If Phallus does not inform you, goe and catch a Lincoln car

get with childe a looping jade

examine closely where you are

and never Never be afraid, or J M Barrie will get you and cut you into little fat luscious pieces and feed you to A A Milne and you will be very unhappy and so I hope will A A Milne. The rest should long since have been silence. From this time forth I never will speak bird.

I feel, wherefore I know not, that there are many things in this letter which require reply—and I insist that they require immediate reply. For Christ his crucified grim sake, write me to oncet.

loveydovey ibbydibby toodles

Scratch

The Lodge,

Near Itch, in Body,

Human Being.

Satisfaction, Lord Scratch

to

John Milton Halliday, Esquire

on this day of disease,

February first,

in the year of our infirmity

mil neuf cents trente-sept.

Bodkins, Halliday, the sibilants are upon us!

[Yale, TS]

Memorial Court

Clare College

Cambridge

4 February 1937

Dear Mr Warren:

I hope you have not thought me, because I have not replied, unappreciative of the comment in your letter of last October. The truth is that I was last term in a most unsettled state in every way and had neither leisure nor effective peace. Returning this year after some weeks in Paris, I am better acclimated.

Your criticism of “Ritual at Arlington” is perfectly correct; Van Doren, Tate, and Rylands here, say substantially the same things. I am now very glad that you did not print it, too many pleasant failures are already floating about in ill-advised print. I ought probably to destroy the poem and forget; but it cost me much labor, the abstract plan I still think valuable, and parts of it are worth keeping. So I’ve put it away for a few months; then I shall re-work, and plague you again.

The enclosed cheque is for a two years’ subscription. I have here the first four numbers, Volume I complete, but no others; will you have the subscription start with the following (Summer 1936) issue? I await impatiently these last three numbers. The Southern Review is decidedly now the best literary medium in English; a pity it is not better known on this side. I wish only that you could include chronicles on the film; competent recognition, in The Southern Review, of the film as a formidable and legitimate art-form would, it seems to me, be worth any trouble or breach of policy.

I’ve written since last summer a fair amount of verse, but have been waiting until I had a group I could respect, before sending you anything. Which looks to be never. On the chance, however, that my judgment is decaying, as friends have inferred, I’ll select some poems when I have time and send them, confident in your expert opinion (you were, I remember, among other things, the first American critic to prefer Auden and deprecate Spender, for the right reasons—this is a sore point, for much is made here out of Spender’s popularity in the United States). I am at present plunged in Yeats, preparing for a talk I’ve been asked to give. Would you be interested, by the way, in a paper on Yeats as dramatist? Confronted critics still refer vaguely to “The Countess Cathleen” and “Fighting the Waves”: Yeats is more praised than read, and less understood than either. I once wrote on the plays,74 and I have recently re-read practically all of Yeats’ writings (thirteen volumes are necessary, I picked up “A Vision” fortunately in London, fantastic methods of printing and alteration he has); his characteristic excellences are non-dramatic, but he has, in the dance plays, developed a form unique in English literature and most useful to him, and I think his achievement in the field should be, for once, stated. I read Blackmur’s essay when he was in New York ten months ago, and he does not mention the drama, so we’d not overlap.

Have you considered printing letters from abroad, as The Dial and Hound & Horn frequently did? A good deal happens here: books appearing, the Surrealists, and the Spenser Society; the Abbey Players this month, “As You Like It” filmed and at the Old Vic, Louis Jouvet’s historic “L’Ecole des Femmes” in Paris, a brilliant production of “The Witch of Edmonton”, Olivier’s detestable Hamlet, “Thunder Over Mexico” and Continental films; Grierson down to lecture on Shakespearean tragedy, trend in criticism away from Bradley, from Knight even, to Rylands and merely poetic emphasis; Eliot up last term, continued undergraduate adoration; the cult of Richards here and its opposition, his lectures; exhibitions here and in London; Leavis vs. the dons; general neglect, scattered information, of American literature; young English poets by the dozen, all touted, nearly all bad; etc. etc.75 (I talked to Auden at length about Ransom, incidentally—one man who is informed.) If the suggestion interests you at all, I’d like you to say what general form such a Cambridge Letter might take, what would interest and what bore you, and I’ll write one.

Thank you very much indeed for your criticism and for the hope you gave me about future printing in The Southern Review. I have sent nothing elsewhere, and will, as I say, mail you some poems later this month. Please remember me to Tate and O’Donnell, when you see them.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[Haffenden, TS]

Memorial Court

Tuesday

16 March 1937

Dear Milt,

Your letter has just come and damn welcome it is too. None of your cavil. Don’t you realize that I’ve nearly gone mad about eight times here, that I am continually hysterical except for hours of intense work, that I have been drinking a great deal, that I am unspeakably miserable for the most part, and that if I sat down to write automatically (as letter-writing mostly goes with me) I should appear insane, wildly tedious, infantile? I was slightly drunk when I began a letter to Mother last night and with controls down, drivel it was. I dislike being thought pretentious when I’m not, rarely; style can form and inform my thought; and without it, God knows. It is not ‘fine, solid, impressive prose’ I want: it is not ravelled inanity.

You forget how slowly news reaches me; the marriage was not, to my knowledge, ‘set’ when I wrote that letter, and I really had a grotesque hope it might turn Atherton’s mind. Of course I sent it; of course it did no good; and of course it is not good verse. See Donne, Elegies, for good verse in that kind. I do not think Jane’s an admirable character and her mouthing little brother is a bloody tic. God rest them. Winslow is a staple in this unpleasant century, worth moral judgment only in example: individually we can avoid them. Aristocrats without blood or taste or personal tradition, without honour.

Nothing connected with Swift could sound dull except scholarship; I know little but I feel a hell of a lot; have read this term all his verse and scattered pamphlets and letters in a complete (except correspondence) 1856 edition I have.76 About 2000 double-column pages of the tiniest print ever, but most useful. Good luck with your Hopwood essays, on what are you writing? Delicious marks my boy. Not sure I’ll take a degree here, in any case no examinations until June 1938, unless practise ones this spring. Swift wrote marvellous verse, ain’t?

Young poets all over the place. Letter from Plochmann at Chicago, he’s living next Elder Olson, a callow lyricist but a thoroughgoing Aristotelian, for which Kim loves him.77 I spent week before last drinking and reading poems by the hundreds with, among seven or so mad ones, Dylan Thomas, a young Welsh poet who is highly touted and actually has some merit.78 Your little remark on Paul Engle

I am quite drunk and have lost the second page of this letter begun years ago (it’s Monday 22nd now) and the hell with it and you for not being here. Tuppence for the old guy. I’ve been ill, allowed up today and must go down tomorrow (energetic place England, first by doctor, second by Tutor). Pat and I are driving down to London, where we’ll consider possibilities.79 Irleand [sic] in any case. All that now interests me is chasing shepherdesses up dark lanes. Whee for pious penis. It’s time I left, nearly raped the wife of my best friend here yesterday, she willing we think. No harm done. Working on the fens to relieve the flooded natives gives chill and makes one if feverish frisky. Epigram. Flagellant tendencies to be investigated, also Emily. But the mouth, Halliday, the mouth; not Emily’s, Rosanna’s. Gorgeous it is, only instead of coming she sent me a lot of goddamed books. Books I’ve got, copulation I need. Economic planning etc. My amazement to find she can act, I’ve seen her lovely but incompetent in several plays, then in act II of something Saturady she was superb, eerie; dominated despite suicide the last act too. Cheers. Flowrs. Yips. Virgin I feel, but it can be got over. Hell with prejudice. Sick entirely sick with this place, you’d like Barton. Must now write the little Jean and finish a letter to Mother I once began, her last seven are unanswered, plague me like the Holy Ghost. I meant to explain poetry and morality in this letter, have worked out my views, but that can wait (a sweeping gesture here). Remaind me to get up in the morning. Good night to you my lord. Oh and the Revenger’s Radgedy was magnificent and the second talk on Yeats went infinitely better than the first. Tedium, tedium and a whirling head and letters that all come up together. You are an unmitigated bithc for not being here

John

[Yale, TS]

34, Bridge Street

Cambridge

10 August 1937

Dear Mr Brooks:

Thanks for your note, glad to find the poems not hopeless; I have begun to think they are, with three or four exceptions. I’m sending four recent poems, one an hour old, which might help you in making up a group, if one is to be made. Also to indicate a change in Last Days of the City:80 the first line of the tenth stanza reads

The barriers were down, they fell afraid

And ‘deep’ in the fifth probably ought to be ‘strict’ ^(or ‘exacting’)^; I hope you find that poem worth printing.

Delighted you printed Blackmur and Tate has written on him, I was staggered by Jordan’s Delight in Ms a year or so ago, first-rate; also some sonnets. English poetry is incredibly bad at the moment, even French is better; were I a literary patriot I could be hated with just cause here.

Measure for Measure is taped for the first time in history, I feel: would you be interested in an essay, and how long? Cambridge indolence has not quite mastered me, not quite.

Yours,

J. A. M. Berryman

Very sorry about Tate’s illness, please give him my regards.

I shall greatly appreciate comment on the verse, or suggested changes.

1938

[Yale, TS]

34, Bridge Street

Cambridge

12 February 1938

Dear Mr Warren:

Thank you for your October letter, which I’m very sorry not to have answered earlier; put it down to my distressing inclination to spend two weeks on a comma. You chose well: with two exceptions, the other poems I sent are bad, but these five seem to stand up. I enclose final versions of them; the changes are mainly in pointing and titling, but I’ve excised a stanza from “Night and the City”; should I have kept ‘contemptuous’ in the eighth line?

I am sending ten other pieces as well, one you have seen before in a primitive state, the rest new. Although the two Songs from Cleopatra81 seem to reinforce each other, either can be printed separately as “A Song from Cleopatra”; C. being a blank verse play I wrote last year, the scene her villa in Rome at Caesar’s return from the Spanish campaign in which he defeated and left to die in a cave Cneus Pompey, her first lover; you remember she was carried to Caesar first by stealth, in a flockbed (North’s word and Pope uses it);82 the Narrator sings. Similarly, the first of the “Two Replies on Fame” can be printed alone as “Reply to a Friend”.

More than anything else I appreciate your saying that you liked my verse. Before leaving America I’d written nothing respectable, and encouragement has been scarce; also criticism, since no one here is of any use. So if there are weak spots in poems here that seem to you in general good, I’d like you to tell me. This may be particularly true of “The Translation” (or “Toward Myth”?) and of “Meditation”, which Van Doren says wants prolonged reading.83 And I hope you’ll write as soon as you’ve formed an opinion.

Did Mr Brooks get the Vision I had sent to him? A mistake delayed it. I’ll send you a few more poems next month. What restrictions, by the way, are there on English publications of this verse?

Sincerely,

J. A. M. Berryman

[Houghton, TS]

408 West 115th Street

New York, N. Y.

2 August 1938

Dear Laughlin,

Forgive my not writing you before, I’ve been back some six weeks but I’ve been intolerably busy, keeping alive in the heat, writing, and seeing about a position for next year.

You spoke in Cambridge of going South this summer to see O’Donnell and some other people, and said there was a possibility I might go with you. Now for all I know you are sprawling in Mississippi at this moment and my inefficiency has cost me a chance to see Marion. But if you’ve not yet gone and still plan to and have room, I hope you’ll let me know.

I am engaged too in the unpleasant business of peddling verse; not having printed any in so long, I have about twenty good pieces on hand. The Southern Review has a group in their current issue, which you may have seen; all done a year or so ago.84 Will you clear up a point for me? I think you accepted in Cambridge three poems for New Directions 1938 and took copies of them: “The Return”, “Caravan”, and “Toward Myth” (which may then have been called The Translation). I certainly don’t want you to feel bound, by a chance memory of mine, to take them, but I’d like to hear about them. And if you do want them, there may be some revisions; I don’t remember how your versions go.

This is off to the stated address, I trust it will reach you eventually. When you are in New York, or passing through, I hope you’ll ’phone me (I’m in the directory) and we can have a drink or a meal together. Unfortunately I look to be here for some time.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

J. A. M. Berryman85

[WU, TS]

408 West 115th Street

New York, N.Y.

2 August 1938

Dear Marion,

I can’t tell you how pleased I was to have your letter, and so supernaturally soon. That I haven’t answered it till now is due to the whole complicated business of my return: mental adjustment, a terrible strain, which was unavoidable but which I had in no way foreseen. For days nothing but nervous agony. Also the weather has been exhausting, I’ve been seeing various people about a position for next year, and I’ve been writing steadily. And for a year now I’ve been engaged to an English girl; she was at Cambridge with me, and we spent our vacs together; in Italy now, she won’t be over for several more months. Add that separation to my other troubles, and you enter pathology. But the worst of it is now probably past, and in any case I should be thankful: the energy released has given me half a dozen poems.

Another blasted failure in correspondence has destroyed, I imagine, a chance I had of seeing you. Laughlin told me when I saw him in Cambridge that he would be driving South to see you and suggested that I come along. He sailed a few days before I did and I was to write him directly I arrived. I have described the situation; I wrote him this morning. If he’s with you when you get this, pour three drops of a julep on the ground in pure pity.

Of course it might have come to nothing, and I’m not certain I can get away yet. The ’bus fare is only thirty dollars odd, I learn; the difficulty being that my future is still unsettled and the present, meantime, decidedly penniless. I bought books like a madman for two years and have some debts. Scott Buchanan, now Dean at St John’s College in Annapolis, assured me of a post there several weeks ago; you have probably heard of the New Program he and Barr are operating, nothing could suit me better; but an unexpected item came up, necessitating budget revision, and now it’s not certain they can take me this year.86 What I shall do else I don’t know.

I’m very glad Laughlin is doing your book and hope he does it handsomely; is Ransom writing an introduction? “Death’s Photography” I like enormously, it has a kind of bite that the strictly meditative poems lack.87 You get wonderful authority at your best. The second stanza of the Song to Exiled Art, for instance, is very impressive: after the terrific catalogue, your statement has prophetic solemnity. (I didn’t, for weeks, like at all the opening stanza, which has a sort of Tate-political tone, but now it seems all right as introduction; the ‘blessed’ should be spelt ‘blest’, I think.) It is also, of course, eminently and legitimately obscure; but Ransom, I forgot for the moment, once spoke of that. I should think, without flattery, that you were one of the dozen living writers who deserve to be obscure. And I hope that isn’t the Scotch at my elbow talking. I’ve read your verse a great deal and respect it. I wish we could talk about it.

And about mine, which I am so immodest as to suppose is becoming excellent. I’d like very much to know what you think about the Southern Review group (the seventh line of the “Note” isn’t right, by the way) and the three pieces I’m sending with this. If another title for “The Return” occurs to you, tell me it; I dislike using one you and Bishop have used but I’ve not been able to think of a better.88 I was sorry, incidentally, to find the title of “Seasonal Poem for Christmas” changed in the Virginia Quarterly.89 “Survivor” I wrote late yesterday afternoon, just as it is after two false starts; it’s the first received narrative I have ever handled.90

During a weekend in Connecticut with Mark a fortnight ago I saw a good deal of the Tates. We talked about (pro) you, Auden, onion soup, Blackmur; (con) MacLeish, reviewing, S. Rodman’s anthology (which Mark gave Tate, Tate gave me, I gave the maid), all publishers but Thornton and Balch; (half and half) snakes.91 “The Fathers” is finished, you’ll be glad to hear, and the advance sale fine.92 Allen told me Ransom is editing a new quarterly, do you know any more about that?93 And if you don’t like my verse, Marion, for Wyndham Lewis his sake say so; I hope you may, that’s all, because I think we are trying to get at similar things.

I hope this finds you exceedingly well and happily at work; may it be a good year for cotton and the South altogether. Hereafter I promise to answer at once, I’d like nothing better than to have letters back and forth all the time.

Yours,

John Berryman

[WU, TS]

at the Allen Tates’,

West Cornwall,

Connecticut.

30 August 1938

Dear Marion,

I was sorry to hear from Laughlin last night that New Directions is not to do your book, but I think it may turn out to be a very good thing. And this is not Pollyanna speaking, since I’m as pessimistic as anyone in the country, and in any case he tells me there is no feeling on either side. It seems to me you’ll be much more satisfied in the future if you have selected a reputable, steady publisher to do all your books. They’re greedy fools for the most part, to be sure, but, even so, Macmillan or Putnam or Random House or Scribner’s ought to be glad to do it. Laughlin is a very tall, very young and, I gather, very wealthy young man; he is certainly able to an extent, but he’s not yet through college, he’s erratic as you know, and as Caroline says he may two years hence be in yachting instead of literature.94 Your work under his imprint has both for and against it a kind of bias which probably you don’t want; I think let it appear absolutely straight, especially if the work is as formal and orthodox as is yours. So much for that. I like Laughlin, incidentally, and think you would if you saw him; a very pleasant, bright, quiet man. The epistolary air I think he takes over from Pound.

I must confess that I feel something similar to the sere and yellow leaf tone of your letter, but I consider it absurd in us. You began a good deal before I did, but you cannot legitimately complain of neglect until you’ve published at least one book. And unless you really have enough first-rate poems for two volumes, say seventy, you oughtn’t to feel that accidents of publication have held you up. Silly on paper, I wish we could talk.

Nothing but bad news, I think it is the heat. B has cabled me she can’t come before October; and Scott Buchanan writes that it’s most improbable the St John’s budget will let them take me on this year. Also Laughlin brought over with him an unbound copy of New Directions, with mistitled and inaccurate versions of two of my poems; the third, Caravan, is right but that it lacks two commas. I may not have remembered to tell you that he took them in Cambridge, and the next thing I heard was that they were in print. One is The Return, which is now called The Possessed; Redivivus, which I thank you for, would have done, but Mother hit on The Possessed and I like it. The other should be Toward Myth, a companion to the last Southern Review piece; ignore the first stanza or so in Laughlin’s version. Caravan I hope you’ll like.

I’ve been here about ten days. Allen has been off fishing with his brother on Lake Ontario but comes back tonight. Caroline and I have had a quiet, delightful time since a large crazy most unfortunate birthday party a week ago last Sunday, about which I may sometime be drunk enough to tell you. Mark and Dorothy Van Doren we’ve seen a good deal, the Cowleys came to dinner one evening, and Laughlin last night.95 Swimming, drinks and talk, and Trollope; fine weather. The Fathers has come, I think it brilliant; scrupulously well done and very rich. The last section will amaze you. I’ve wished a hundred times that you were here, Marion; you must be as badly starved for talk as I was. We never begin talking about fiction or verse but I think of you and one of us mentions you. Blasted mess the world is. One of the reasons I so wanted to be settled in Annapolis with B. this year was my wanting you to come and stay for months; damn penury to the ninth circle. Allen thinks it would be better for you to get away, but if you can’t I’d love to come down in the autumn—again, if I can. What I shall be doing in New York I don’t yet know; there’s a chance I’ll be The Nation’s film critic, with which I’d combine odd journalism; or I may try advertising. I could probably get a school post but hate the notion. Directly I’ve any better information I’ll let you know.

I appreciate what you said about my verse and I’m glad that on the whole you liked it; instead of answering those remarks I’ll copy ‘Ceremony and Vision’ for you.96 I’ve done up here a birthday poem for my brother Jeff which Mark says is good, but the last line isn’t right and I’ll send it another time.97 “Arrogant apartments”: simple transference of epithet from possessor to object; I had in mind River House, etc.98 You are right about “Obdurate and anonymous”; but I think cadence and rhyme help my syntax over “for Who suffer on the shore”.99 I don’t believe you’ll find any Auden in C & V. We must spend a week talking about influence one time. I think it’s a rather subtle business and I don’t agree that Eliot has betrayed MacLeish and Bishop; one I detest, one I admire, and the whole thing is terribly complicated. All this, of course, you know as well as I do. My head’s not good today. What I am trying to avoid is discussion of Prokosch, whose person, prose, and verse are my favourite annoyance.100 Anon, anon.

My family have moved, I think to 41 Park; write me there unless I send a card saying elsewhere. I hope your grandmother is now quite over her nervousness and sorrow, Marion, or much better; and that in the business way things have improved for you. My parents always speak of you with affection, and were it not presumptuous, as of older friends, I should send the Tates’ regards. May this find you in all ways well.

John

[Haffenden, TS transcript]

41 Park

FANTASTIC ADDRESS YOU HAVE

New York

15 September [1938]

Dear Bhain:

Your letter has just come and the enclosure will go off with this in an hour or so. If anyone asks, you have been staying with me but—pity—you’ve only a day or so ago gone up to Connecticut for some time with a friend; where, I don’t know. Tell me when the New Masses is going to do the abstract.101

Thanks for Anableps. The business of getting the apartment in order, which should be over in two or three days, has rather reduced me and I shan’t go into the detail you probably want (an autobiographical remark, old boy). Also I’ve had a massive drink. The poem strikes me as undigested, like the food which lets his enemies see the invisible man: treacherous fragments are ‘subconscious’, ‘primeval thick blind flood’ etc. I feel very severe; ‘horrid kin’ is fake and ‘thighs’ ecstatic shriek’ is burnt to a crisp. It picks up at the fourth stanza and is delicious, despite ‘obscures the horizon’. Abstraction is the trouble; let the thing come out more simply and visually. I like the movement of ‘Yet, mariner, bi-focal fish / Be bird’ and the whole last stanza will do. As usual, I must atone for my honesty with a trembling sacrifice: the Letter to Jeff. Unnecessary (I hope) warning: the stanzas operate from one another, not independently as in Caravan. If I failed, this note will help it for you; if not, it doesn’t matter.

Read The Man With The Blue Guitar; there’s a simple fellow who is perfectly fearless and wonderfully careful. Not big but just. And Henry King, for beautiful versification.102 End of today’s lecture. I have a charming obscene poem about Shelley by Bishop,103 which if you were here I’d show you but can’t send. Au revoir. Write me some news.

John

[WU, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York

4 October 1938

Dear Marion,

Sorry about that last letter, I don’t know what I said but probably it sounded cynical. My inclination was to weep and rail; but I know how ugly more or less loneliness can be, and I wanted to encourage you. I simply took the wrong way about. Moreover, I’d no idea that you had actually submitted the book to any commercial publishers; I assumed that if you had done, it would have been taken. Their behaviour is decidedly fantastic. I had better be forthright and beg you not to be discouraged. And I have a plan. Here I am in New York, and if you’d let me, I’d be very glad to do everything I can with the houses you’ve not tried. You could send me the manuscript, and by interview I could get good readings for it; easier, too, to sell some one else’s book; and unhappily, selling is what it amounts to. Macmillan, Harpers, Putnam, Covici-Friede, Dutton, Holt, etc; all swine probably, but it’s inconceivable that one of them won’t take it. Do think about this seriously, Marion. Meantime—the bloody silver lining—you said yourself once that the book improves every time you put a new poem in and take an old one out.

I am a fine person to be cheering anyone up. Living here with my family, no income, unable so far to get any sort of position for this year; terrible gloom; B. coming this month, and when I’ll be able to support her I don’t know. The political world in crazy pieces and moral order a matter of toothpicks.

Laughlin’s remark sounds very unlike him; it seems to me possible, because of the remote source, that he was misunderstood or misquoted. To be sure, he is apparently very young and not entirely responsible. If he said it, I shall have nothing further to do with him.

As for The Southern Review, it is probably better to get impolite letters than none at all. I last heard from Warren a year ago, when he accepted five poems (of which he printed four), asked me for more to make a larger group, and asked me to send Brooks a copy of A Vision. I sent the book, and it was never acknowledged. I sent a dozen poems and he either lost or ignored them. Heigh-ho. And according to Cowley, for what he is worth, my poems are ‘very skillful exercises, based on the very best models’. Either a society writer, or a fake, I take it. Of course, if I had dug an odd ditch or two, he would take quite another view. I daresay he is very fond of Mr Kenneth Patchen’s verse.104

I’ll tell you about Prokosch. I detested the ubiquitous sex- and over-writing in The Asiatics, and both his novels I think very pretentious in some unpleasant way.105 Then he is exceedingly vain and wears shocking clothes. And I can’t help resenting his being fifty times as widely known as, say, Katherine Anne Porter on the one hand and you on the other.106 I admit the irrelevance of these items, but they are bound to influence, for a time at any rate, my opinion of his verse. I consider it has some obvious Romantic virtues, but it is altogether too loose and too easy and too extravagant for my present taste.

I’m very glad you liked ‘C & V’; Allen didn’t, Mark did. ‘Survivor’ now ends:

The Lacedemonians honoured their dead

With fire and anecdote and little praise.

They vowed to let their hair grow long and turned

Their quiet faces from the funeral blaze.

They gathered up their spoils. Othryadas

Was there, his giant shadow with the rest

Turned homeward silent from the long campaign.

They left the lighted circle with their guest,

Who in the dark, thinking it unseemly

That he, of those who stood in the tense air

For Sparta, come alone to Sparta, fell

Behind and hurled his breast upon his spear.

I continue to be, for me, very prolific: half a dozen short pieces and one of 120 lines, in September. I’m sending a letter I wrote to my brother from West Cornwall. I think Yeats is not too near the compositional base, and the stanza is formally my own. Barton, a friend of mine in England, told me the dream.

When you’re most despondent, read The Early Years of Thomas Hardy.107 For heaven’s sake keep writing and please let me see something. My parents join me in sending you affection.

Yours,

John

[Yale, MS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

1 December 1938

Dear Mr Warren:

It has been thirteen months since you wrote me last. During that time you should have had from me: a dozen poems and a letter; A Vision for Mr Brooks; another letter; two months ago, another letter and two poems. The mails cannot so err from their true course but that you owe me something in reply.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[Under JB’s signature, a small toy sword is attached to the paper]

[WU, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

10 December 1938

Dear Marion,

I wish I had written you weeks ago, but it has been practically impossible. Beryl arrived on October twenty-fifth and has been with us since, and I’ve been unspeakably busy in a dozen other ways.

Nothing you said pleased me more than the possibility that you may get to New York this winter. With B. here, I can’t put you up as I should greatly like to; but if you do come, I hope you’ll be able to spend a lot of time with us. There is no one I’d rather see. If I can help you in any way in the matter of arrangements or anything else, please let me know.

The great activity is mainly dramatic. I was well on with a play called The Architect when I dropped it last week for the time, to work on another piece which can I think be written very rapidly and may go into production late next month. I’ll say nothing else for the moment; nothing meets with more incredulity than theatrical talk. More later.

I’ve also been reviewing and am still a wreck from Laura Riding’s 500-page Collected Poems; I read every word, and much of it, as you know or can guess, is terrible.108 Why do people as good as she is print so much? I read Davidson’s book this week and liked it.109 Decidedly preferred the lyrics to the narratives. His blank verse doesn’t seem to have a sound metrical base, or he handles it badly; plain license in many places. I’ve written something like a thousand lines of blank verse since October and I’ve learnt a good deal. “On a Replica of the Parthenon” and three or four other lyrics really are first-rate. I don’t think the revision of The Tall Men went far enough, though the poem is brilliant now and then.

Morse writes me that you sent at his request “a very good poem, and for some private reason, Symons turned it down”, which is infuriating.110 I don’t like, either, Symons’ infamous use of your letter in his Preface to this American Number.111 The verse as a whole is better than anything I thought they could collect. “The Trial” is grossly misprinted, but I’ve given up hoping for justice from magazines.112 Warren I am going to kill when I see him; he owes me four letters, some money, and has had a dozen poems of mine for a year.

I hope Ransom is going to print the poem Morse says you sent him; I’m sorry not to see it announced for the first issue. A gruelling mischance may have prevented my having a piece in it. I sent the “Letter to Jeff, 1938” with two other poems to Ransom from West Cornwall in August, and apparently they were lost in the mails, Rice tells me in a very friendly letter that came yesterday. Pity, pity, for he says “I liked very much your poems in New Directions … and I am sure that we should be delighted to print some of your best work” etc. The magazine looks to be very good, don’t you think? God knows one is needed. I was amazed to find only verse by Jarrell and Lowell announced, but Rice writes, “So far we have had a very hard time finding poetry good enough to publish.”

A tedious letter, I waffle on like an old wife. Damn all the politics and mechanics of verse-writing and especially -publishing. I was very discouraged to hear you say you’d not done any writing; I hope you have by now. If not, a suggestion: make up some perfectly abstract human situation and write a piece of verse in its terms. Hardy did it continually. I am ashamed to say that even since I wrote you last I’ve composed half a dozen pieces that seem all right; the Demon is probably spending all his force at once, preparatory for a final parting next Tuesday.

There is a superb Matisse exhibition in town, which I wish you could see. Also Morley’s brilliant performance in Oscar Wilde, the best acting I’ve seen since Gielgud’s Joseph Surface.113 Do come North if you conceivably can, and as soon as possible. Beryl and my parents will be nearly as glad to see you as I shall. Forgive my tardiness with this, and write when you can.

John

Merry Christmas, Marion, if I don’t write again before then—and a good new year.

[Haffenden, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N. Y.

10 December 1938

Dear Mr Morse,

Thank you for your letter and the American Number. I hope you haven’t worried about the impossibility of immediate payment. The publication of verse is altogether so precarious that any contributor who growls must appear ridiculous.

I have already sent Symons a note about the misprints in “The Trial”: the omission of a comma after ‘spilt’, ‘and’ for ‘the’ in the third line, and the invention of an impossible comma after ‘Ignorant’. I don’t blame anyone, least of all you, but I was exceedingly annoyed when I first saw them; my sense is perfectly altered in two places. As for the address: I am neither in Annapolis nor in Cambridge, but here, and will be here for a long time.

The Enquiry, as solemn as a don’s square, seems to me preposterous.114 The twenty or thirty questions raised are not without interest, but they tend to be distinct questions, and real agreement on the answer to any one of them is probably unattainable. All the replies are of course imperfect, and mercifully witty. The quarrel about degrees of Americanism is fundamentally absurd; no one bothers about whether Hardy is more English than Hopkins. Or do they bother? It’s been six months since I was last in London.

Symons’ Preface is badly titled, badly written, and objectionably personal. As for composition and consistency, compare “this ‘breaking of the spirit’ they regard with a gaze made lucid and candid by the fact of their expatriation” with the “rabbit” and “anachronism” passage lower on the same page; here are two judgments, both grossly inaccurate, yet contradictory. And the second is almost as insulting as Allott’s statement, quoted by Symons with tacit approval, that Ransom “cultivates the Southern aristocratic virtues because they are a reference to a way of life which is neither American nor contemporary”.115 The conjunction I have underlined makes the question one of personal motive; what can Mr Allott pretend to know about Ransom’s motives? The last straw: that ‘the Southern aristocratic virtues’ are in fact both American and contemporary. Logic for Mr Allott: anything that exists at all can be said to exist, and those virtues can certainly be found in some parts of this country, in some people, at the present time. I hope you’ll be as severe as I am with this Preface, and a good deal calmer.

You have done a remarkably fine job with the verse. I never would have believed that so many of the best American poets could be got together between two covers, with new work. Of course, if each of them were at his best, you’d have a publication as important as Lyrical Ballads. But I think that is clearly not the case—indeed, it would be inconceivable. And since you asked me for some ‘merciless’ comments, I am sending you a sheet of notes which I hope may be of some use. When you’ve finished with it, by the way, I’d be very glad to have you return it; I’ve not done anything of this kind for a long time, and I should like to keep it.

I’m sorry Marion’s poem wasn’t printed. Doesn’t Prokosch’s reply to Symons strike you as insufferably arrogant? Who is Fritz Prokosch that he should consider only a dozen other American poets worthy to appear with him?116 I can name offhand rather more writers than that whom almost anyone would prefer to him.

If you survive this monstrous communication, I’d like very much to hear from you again. What work you’re doing, what you’ve been printing, how far you agree with me about the poems, etc. I want to thank you again for having “The Trial” printed; I revised one stanza, following a suggestion Eliot made about a year ago, and I had begun to think it would never see light.

Yours,

1939

[UMN, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

5 February 1939

Dear Morse,

I was very glad to see you, and sorry I wasn’t more human. Since then I’ve had another bout of bed but am now up, I hope for the rest of the winter. Cold and clear the last few days, very good weather. Though you dislike the city so much, I hope you’ll be down soon again; I trust you to let me know when it will be.

The death of Yeats is the only news I know; the world looks grey.

I like greatly Marion’s book, which I’ve had for a week or so; and it looks as if some house will certainly do it. Your suggestion about the transposition in “Death’s Photography” is ingenious.

I wonder if you will give me some advice. I have sent “The Trial” to Warren, who is arranging another group for me. Is this legitimate? Since T.C.V. mishandled the poem, I didn’t suppose Symons could object. In any case, I think Anne Bradby (of The Criterion, whose passing added to Yeats’ makes last month the saddest of the decade) once told me the copyright reverts to the author six months after publication.117 What about this, and the whole question of English rights? I shall appreciate anything you can tell me.

Magazines are a continual plague. They are all so damned irresponsible, even the best. I take a very poor view of Poetry, which keeps on printing more trash than any other three. Nor do I approve their sending rejection slips to serious writers; a group I consider excellent came back without comment some weeks ago. Partisan Review is a shining light: the new number, with a fine essay by Blackmur, is as good as the last.118 What and where is Chameleon?119 If you can conveniently send me the Eliot number of the Harvard Advocate, I’ll be grateful and will repay you; I don’t know where to get it.120

I am sending you, I hope for your pleasure, a poem that many people have liked and no one has printed. Let me see your reply to Symons.

Yours,

[UMN, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

5 March 1939

Dear Allen,

If I weren’t so timid about intruding on your time after your courtesy to me last summer, I should have written long since. Instead, I have waited for an occasion. Here it is.

Shortly after Yeats’s death, I began to think of collecting a Memorial volume, which as I plan it might include some direct homage, perhaps a few elegies if they can be found, but would consist mainly of the most responsible criticism to be had on Yeats’ work in poetry, drama, philosophy, essay, etc. I think such a book would be at once the best tribute we can offer and a permanently valuable commentary. Mark approves the idea; if you do, and Blackmur and Brooks will let their Southern Review essays be used, I’ll go to Macmillan and see what they say.121

Would you be willing to write an essay for the volume? The longer the better, and on any aspect of Yeats’ achievement you like; if not that, a tribute of some kind. I should enormously like a poem, but that’s a good deal to ask. I think also of asking Ransom, Warren, Bishop, Marion, Schwartz, Eliot, Auden, Pound, Spencer, perhaps Wilson if he has changed his attack since Axel’s Castle, to contribute.122 I shall be most grateful for your answer and for your advice.

I hope Caroline’s Indian novel and whatever work you have in progress are prospering, and that all of you are well.123 I have written a play and a good deal of verse; nothing else but occasional reviewing: I liked Davidson’s book and recommend Bridenbaugh’s early American study Cities in the Wilderness.124 Next year I shall probably return to the fold—I pray at St John’s, but their finances are still doubtful, so it may be Columbia. If anything comes your way, I’d be glad to know about it. I was delighted to see Marion and hope the Olivet project materializes.125

My best affection to Caroline and Nancy.126

Yours,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

7 March 1939

Dear Mr Auden:

Shortly after Yeats’ death I began to think of collecting a Memorial volume, to be issued probably by Macmillan. Elegy if any decent elegy could be found, and the most responsible prose criticism to be had on his work; neither fanfare nor bibliography, as little journalism as possible. Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks have agreed to write essays for it; I think also of asking T.S. Eliot, MacNeice, Spender, Pound, Ransom, Stevens, Blackmur, Bishop and Schwartz, perhaps others. I had intended to ask you for prose, and I was astonished and delighted to hear last night the poems. I am writing to ask whether you would consent to let them appear in the book. I shall be most grateful too for any advice you can give me about available material.

I suppose I ought to recall for you our very slight acquaintance, in case you know my name and are puzzled. We talked together one evening in Cambridge some two years ago, the night you read Upward’s story.127 Since then it is just possible that you’ve seen my verse in The Southern Review or somewhere else. Eberhart told me recently about the St Mark’s possibility.128 I am glad you are to be in this country for a time.

Sincerely,

[Yale, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

17 March 1939

Dear Mr Warren,

Mark lent me his copy of Night Rider last week and I have enjoyed it too much to keep silent.129 I read very few modern novels but I have had for one reason or another to get through enough muck during the last three years to know how outstanding the book is on any present comparative basis. Or past; I am reading War and Peace again, and Tate’s reference is perfectly accurate. The effect of accumulation, and detail properly disposed.

What impresses me is the great positive achievement of narrative and moral order in the novel. I think clinical psychology has been the damnation of prose fiction, and you march from station to station in your fable beautifully without it. Only the states of decision, of emotion, of passion, are given, and they are all that matter; transition is left to the critic. (The fine passage that begins Chapter Fourteen is the statement.) Minor triumphs that delighted me were Munn’s initiation, the negro’s speech when the knife was found, the death of Todd, Christian’s talk throughout. I wish the book were a gooddeal [sic] longer, and more complication left to hold the narrative through Willie Proudfit’s account, though I realize the summary value of that.

While I am writing personally for once, let me ask when a collection of your poems is going to appear at a reasonable price. I haven’t seen 36 Poems for two years, having quarrelled with the friend who has a copy.

I hope the novel is well received even by the New York Times Book Review and goes into nineteen editions.

Yours,

John Berryman

[Yale, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

11 April 1939

Dear Mr Warren:

I think you will find this much the best collection I have sent you. “Meditation” I am returning, finally, revised. I thought your criticism of the poem admirable and was very grateful for it; I wish you felt you could make the same kind of comment more often. The places you mentioned are precisely those I have substantially changed: what was the sixth stanza I have excised, the final line of the (now) seventh is entirely new, and the last stanza re-cast. Recalling and expanding the central mood (stated first in the second stanza), it seems now to provide a satisfactory major theme. There are also some minor changes, toward clarity. I hope it will please you.

The other poems are all new except “Elegy” which I have improved since you saw it, and venture to return. “Survivor” was the first poem completed of a series I intended to do from Herodotus’ History but never got on with; Tate says it stands quite well by itself, however, and so many persons have liked it that I hope it can be printed. If “Ceremony and Vision” satisfies you, I’d like it to stand last in the group printed.

What follows has nothing to do with The Southern Review. Can you tell me whether any position in English will be open at Louisiana State for next year? I have just accepted an assistantship at Columbia, but I should be delighted to throw it over if I could be there. I hold degrees from Columbia and Cambridge, where I was Kellett Fellow and Charles Oldham Scholar; there is no point in giving you details unless a possibility exists. I am anxious to be in the South again, particularly, for obvious reasons, at Louisiana. I shall be grateful for anything you can tell me about this.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[Dartmouth, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

17 April 1939

Dear Eberhart,

I can’t find your letter, my papers are in great confusion. I’ve begun to collect a volume on Yeats in which I am trying to interest Macmillan, I’m putting together a book of verse, have just finished assembling groups for The Southern and Kenyon Reviews, and I am literally faced with thirty-three books to review, mainly worthless. Hence chaos.

Thanks very much for speaking to Mr Parkman.130 I had a pleasant note from him, which I’ve this minute answered. Too bad, mais quoi. Something may change. Tell me how the W.H.A. venture comes out; I heard him speak recently somewhere.

A friend, Kurt London, suggested the other day that I send my Poems to Willard at the Oxford Press.131 Faber are his publishers, but he seems to think well of Oxford and likes Willard. Qu’en pensez-vous? I am in a perfect quandary whether to submit a book now and if so where.

Sorry about the distressingly professional tone of this, I am too busy to think. There is a saving principle, thought can be disastrous; but I’ll write better when the weather clears a bit; it is the most capricious Spring in memory.

I am sending the poem you wanted, a battered copy, the only non-carbon I can find. Keep it from the lame and the illiterate; I should hate it to be wrongly read.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York, N.Y.

20 April 1939

Dear Scott,

I suppose I have you to thank for my copy of the Report of the President. I find it very exciting and it was kind of you to send it. It was also a form of mental cruelty, because as time goes on I am more and more anxious to be down there.

I have accepted an assistantship at Columbia for next year which I shall be delighted to resign if St John’s has a place for me. What exactly is happening? Even if it cannot concern me, I should be glad to know how the college is making out financially. From the Report I gather that you and Barr are satisfied with everything else, at any rate. Has the musical programme done what you hoped it would? It pleases me to see that you have thought some verse-reading necessary. I am aware at times of an almost depressingly rigid air of science and logic; into which, to be sure, I wish I were initiated. I never feel so ignorant as when I think of what you are doing.

This year has been rather miserable but in one sense very productive. I have done a great deal of writing, nothing else in fact. A play, political and not too good; and a lot of verse. I expect to publish a book in the fall; it is ready and one publisher wants it. At present I’m doing the preliminary work for a volume of elegies and essays in memory of W. B. Yeats, which Macmillan are considering. I hope you will contribute but I don’t like to ask until a contract is signed; this is simply a warning.

Without resorting to formula, I’d like to wish you all possible good fortune. Do write me. I think I’ve written before and had nothing but a long-distance grunt.

Sincerely,

JB

[UMN, TS]

41, Park Avenue

26 April 1939

Dear Schwartz,

I have been thinking, as well as I can with a cold, about what you said of violence, and violence as accident. Usually all that can be achieved in any short poem is a sign, a metaphor. The test or measure of seriousness is how fully, by interaction, a body of work can communicate a sense of depth and urgency in the attitude. Irresponsibility, the refusal of the parts to force a conviction of integrity, is certainly a danger; it is by no means a necessary issue. If the craft is sound and the belief powerfully held, you have a moral poetry. For I see the violence of this age as not accidental but substantial; each disaster one manifestation of a central featureless violence, created not imposed, a mind or instinct preying upon itself with all weapons. In order to be able responsibly to refer to this violence, I found I had to embody it from time to time. It is not itself the subject, if you like, but it is the appearance of the subject, and I resorted to description. About a third of the poems in my book are occupied in one way or another with this, and putting them together I have the sense of an obligation fulfilled; I hope that my following verse will be able to assume them. (This is not Riding’s heresy of total interdependence; but one poem can be said legitimately to gain from others, and a thing done is done forever.)

Something like this was what I meant when I said that the violence of say “Ritual” was representative.132 It is as much a sense as a conviction, forced on me by experience, and as such can not well be argued. I never speak of it; I am telling you because I feel you may have some sympathy with it and because I’m anxious for you to know what I’ve been trying to do. What an abstract letter. I was very glad to see you and hope to soon again. One other thing occurs to me, but it’s a matter for conversation. Your “Parlez-vous français?” is a good metaphor;133 I wonder whether you’ve followed through the notion that even if this principle of violence did not exist as I say it does, journalism, which rarely touches the normal quotidian life, creates by pressure on the popular mind the concept and induces the violence.

Yours,

JB

[Princeton, TS]

41, Park Avenue

New York

27 April 1939

Dear Allen:

Thanks very much for your letters and for your offer to write something on Yeats. I had a successful interview with James Putnam at Macmillan about the book, and then, this morning, a letter telling how his fears were confirmed in discussion with his colleagues; all the typical language: ‘I wish that the times were such that we could be more altruistically inclined in our publishing’ etc. But he admits that it would be ‘a distinct addition to our list’—for him those words mean what we would mean by a valuable addition—and I am going to try some other houses: Random House, Holt, Oxford, Norton.

I think the North Carolina poetry series an admirable move and will be glad to have you use my name in any way you like.134 I am forced to see it as in some sense a retreat, but a retreat honourable, well-conducted and necessary; I wish you the best of luck. One thing only bothers me, the name; tags are unpleasant; I should think anyone might dislike being known as a Chapel Hill Poet. Is a name necessary?

For some time, in fact, I have been putting together forty of my poems in a book, which probably I shall submit to the Series when you’re ready for it. Meanwhile I should be very grateful indeed if you’d be willing to read it and tell me what you think; you helped me a great deal last summer. I’m a little tentative because I know you’re busy, and from what Marion and Delmore Schwartz tell me, you’ve already been an Academy of Advice for them. Mark, who saw the book briefly last week, thinks it good; I alternate between boredom and perfect arrogance; what it needs is a severe and disinterested reading. I hope you do come to New York next month. If not, let me know whether I may send the book down to you.

The context is bad for that ‘I hope’. I hope anyway and no matter what. I must warn you though, the weather has been mad and the Fair is opening. Come secretly, prepared for anything.

Yours,

John Berryman

My best regards to Caroline and Nancy.

[WU, TS]

Fountain Valley,

Reistertown, Maryland

25 May 1939

Dear Marion,

I’m sorry I haven’t answered your letter before. Events in New York were too much for me. I wrote a political play during the winter, out of which nothing came; I was unable to earn any money; I had bouts of grippe. Then B. left and I was attacked by an excited loneliness which is still with me and which has so far produced fifteen poems. And the misfortunes of some friends has weighed quite heavily on me. I understand Yeats very well:

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,

The sort of beauty that I have approved,

Prosper but little, has dried up of late.135

Not dried up, perhaps, but been embittered. Down here in the country, however, I am better and write letters again and less feverish verse. I was not out of the city all year, and all the familiar motions of the trees and wind over the hills are miracles to me. The weather has been perfect. Bees are humming just outside the screen and I can hear a rooster in the next valley, birdsong all day. This is my Aunt’s place, a 300-acre farm fifteen miles from Baltimore—fine land, but it hasn’t been properly administered for thirty years really: my Uncle was a gentleman farmer interested only in horses. He knew cattle but he didn’t care what happened to them after he’d bought them.

I’ve had some correspondence with Allen Tate about the North Carolina Series, and I take it that your book is settled there, for which I’m very glad. Probably I should have returned the copy you left with me, but I continue to read it and don’t like to send it down until I know you need it. If you do, let me know; I have it here. I am not so sure as I was that the transposition of lines in “Death’s Photography” is good; the movement at the insertion becomes studied. Some other things have occurred to me, you can ignore them if you like. I think the two Songs to a Logician and to a Humanist definitely weaken, even betray the rest of the book, and ought to come out. They seem abstract, contrived, like the first three stanzas of “Lacking Art”, and they are not redeemed as those stanzas are. By comparison with most of the other poems they are thin. The epithet ‘definitive’ seems wrong in the title-poem, and I cannot come to like the last line of “Talk of Friends”: besides letting you down on its own, it is imitative. Moreover it is untrue, Marion: if we wander in anything it is nothing so negligible as a mist.136

Am I right in supposing that the third stanza of “Return”, II, has been altered?—my Southern Reviews are in Cambridge. For me it has been revised into monotony which the fourth line cannot save.

“Talk in a Storm” and the new poem I like very much and thank you for.137 I wondered for a time who the other person at the tryst was, and why; finally decided it didn’t matter, though I disliked being led astray. What precisely is the motive, if there is one? Let me beg you to do something to

And a few others besides, asking of them

Their hard wisdom’s flawless civility.138

The first is cavalier to say the least, and the second asks too much for too little. Remember that the night has already been ‘hard’ in this poem, and that supremacy and happiness were ‘hard’ in “Prothalamion”. I like the insistence of this poem and wish it were longer. Both ought to be in the book, I should think. I frequently show friends the “Song: To Exiled Art”, by the way; for an unpublished poem it has had a remarkable circulation.

Very little reading during the last few weeks. I have developed a shameless and barbaric enthusiasm about Delmore Schwartz’s book, which I finally bought and have been absorbing.139 Johnson’s life of Pope is the only other good thing I’ve read recently, and it is brilliant. Have I told you about the Memorial volume to Yeats I wanted to collect? Some elegies, mainly essays by the best men available. Tate, Blackmur and Brooks promised me things; Macmillan’s were very cheerful and then turned it down; Cerf said “If they won’t, why should we?”140 And there it stands, the most recent crime of publishing. Later I may try again. I’d want something from you, of course.

I never heard from Rae Beamish.141 Tell me, could a man named Rae Beamish know anything about poetry? Rae Beamish. Now this is illegitimate but it is human. It reminds me of a Lincoln story, the discomfiture of J. Parker Green. Sandburg gives it: ‘A witness said his name was J. Parker Green. Lincoln cross-examined: Why J. Parker Green—What did the J. stand for?—John?—Well, why didn’t the witness call himself John P. Green?—That was his name, wasn’t it?—Well, what was the reason he didn’t want to be known by his right name?—Did J. Parker Green have anything to conceal; and if not, why did J. Parker Green part his name in that way? As he rang the changes on the name and shifted the tones of his voice in pronouncing the name, he took all dignity away from the witness; it was so ridiculous that boys in the street that day were calling at each other, “J. Parker Green”.’142

I’ll send you my Timothy poem.143 Don’t let depression of spirit set in, do forgive my silence and write me.

John

[Yale, TS]

Fountain Valley,

Reisterstown, Maryland

26 May 1939

Dear Mr Warren:

Thanks for your letters. I’m glad you now like “Meditation”; please add it to the two pieces you accepted earlier.

Since you neither return nor mention a group of four poems I sent you two months ago, I must assume you did not receive them, though something like this has happened before. Three of them, “Winter Landscape”, “The Councillors” and “Vigil in the Lakes”, I am sending you again. Also “Conversation”, in which you expressed some interest; four changes have been made in the last stanza. And four new poems.

I confess I am amazed by your rejection of all of the last fourteen poems I have sent you. I am told and know that my verse is improving, and I select with some care what I send you. I don’t know what to think. If you don’t like “Winter Landscape” or “The Disciple”, I think I had better retire and try archery.144

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

Fountain Valley,

Reisterstown, Maryland

2 June 1939

Dear Bhain,

I hope all is not over between us but I shouldn’t much blame you if it were. As usual, many things have operated together to produce my silence: I was ill at various times during the winter, I was depressed by lack of income, I spent a great deal of time on a political play which I finished, knew was bad, and had nothing from, I could not get any verse printed, I spent my time with B. while she was here and in plain loneliness after she sailed. Also, the sense of obligation may be good for some people, it is not for me. Unable to give my whole attention to a letter, I simply didn’t write at all.

And now I am really too busy to write at length, but I have waited too long and must do what I can. First, about the poems, of which you have now sent me ten. I don’t know what I said about them earlier, but you had better disregard it. And don’t take what I say now very seriously: we can get at whatever it is much better in talk, when we can talk. I feel that although the Christmas poem and SMALL ODE AFTER SMALL BEER are undoubtedly the most successful of them (I omit HIZZONOR, which we discussed last summer), their virtues are the virtues of Auden, and those poems don’t interest me as much as the defective CRUSOE’S PLOVERS and DAY FOR A PARTISAN, A LOVER, which do interest me very much.145 The general attack in these pieces is sound, though some of the detail is bad. This reverses the ordinary view (Tate, Blackmur) that the derivative work of an inexperienced writer will be better than the original. The fact is that in some respects your poems are ‘young’, but mainly they are absolutely adult, finished in their kind. Even the style of THE TASK, which I do not like, is fairly consistent: it is the fog of the style that kills that poem. Of course there are lapses (like lines 9–12 of DECEMBER); tags and shifts; but generally, in the best pieces, the drive keeps the poem steady. That you imitate Auden so skillfully is a good sign in another way altogether. I strongly advise you to read, and read very carefully, more verse than apparently you do. If you asked me who, I’d say Wordsworth, Yeats, Herrick, Hardy; what you seem to need is the example of simplicity. We begin at the wrong end, all modern writers are complicated before they are good.

How have all your projects got on during this wild year? Janus Caribou, and the Shelley, how are they? I’m sorry HIZZONOR wasn’t printed; have you sent Warren anything else? I recently read that poem again and was considerably moved by it, though technically it’s crude to the point of barbarity; I think there is real passion in it which gets over the formal insufficiencies, and wish it were in print.

I am flattered by some of your references to poems I wrote last summer, but quite fail to understand this: “Principally, I hope that you can one day add to the present dignity and clarity and penetration the passion you once had.” It’s the last five words that knock me down and grey my hair and blear my eyes. What is the basis of ‘once’? Am I really to be confronted with my great past before I have even published? O Campbell, what a falling-off is here!

Your interpretation of the Patrick Barton stanza is very ingenious and it may be right; certainly the guilt theme was important for me. Barton is a brilliant and erratic friend of mine in Cambridge. This was a dream he had. The poem, as LETTER TO HIS BROTHER, will head a group in the Summer number of John Crowe Ransom’s KENYON REVIEW.

I have news of one sort or another for you, but it is late and I don’t feel in the least like retailing odd scraps of recent history. I’m very tired, for several weeks I have been subject to an excitement that has produced a number of poems and other work but exhausts me completely at the end of each day. And I am doing editorial work and planning to which I am not yet accustomed and probably never shall be, selecting THE NATION’s poetry. They accepted my offer early this week, and I have begun to work up a two-page collection for July. I hope to see you anyway and we can talk it all out. From your letter to Halliday, I take it you and Florence are coming East this month; let me know. I’m sorry this is such a gloomy letter, I think the recital of my misfortunes at the beginning must have sent my spirit to ebb. Forgive me and write me, I am really very anxious to hear from you and to see you and Florence again. It’s been a long time and a lot of horror has passed under the bridges. I hope the worst of it is gone for you.

John

[WU, TS]

Fountain Valley

Reisterstown, Maryland

3 June 1939

Dear Marion,

I hoped for news but certainly didn’t expect either such good or such bad news as the Vanderbilt Fellowship and the automobile accident; I’m delighted about the first and very sorry about the last, may the arm and shoulder mend rapidly. This, with Delmore’s dejection and Morse’s sinus—a sad world. I wish I could show some affliction, but events have been treating me very well for a marvellous change. Wait, there’s one blasted whippoorwill who chants all night and lets no one sleep: I like birds on the whole but I am going to kill him unless he moves off.

There’s no doubt about the Chapel Hill series, is there? I have gathered from Allen’s letters that it’s absolutely fixed, and I’m especially glad about it because of your book, which he told me will be among the first six. I’m glad too that you thought my suggestions useful. I don’t know whether you ought to excise that RETURN stanza; it ought to be better but formally it ought to be there.146 Here’s a rewriting that occurs to me and probably you’ll despise:

And now the paralysis of afternoon

Comes fingering the grey and splintered boards

Of backyard fences, leaning, where the heat

Drifts up and clings, to press upon the wood.

I am very busy with, of all things, editorial work, having just begun to select poetry for THE NATION. We plan a two-page collection every other month or so, instead of a piece now and then, and I’m working up the first for July. I’d like very much to print your SONG: TO EXILED ART if it’s still unpublished; do give it me if you can, Marion.147 Or tell me what else I can read with a view to NATION publication. I’ll be grateful for any suggestions, too. I am anxious to create a sound and reliable medium there, God knows there are few enough in this country if any.

What is the MARLOWE you were typing, is it the novel?148 I hope the Faulkner article will be in the Summer KENYON REVIEW; I’ll have a group of poems there, and it would be pleasant to appear together.149

The best news of all is that you are in good spirits. Continue so and let me know about the SONG as soon as you can.

John

[UMN, TS]

Fountain Valley

Reisterstown, Maryland

23 June 1939

Dear Mr Stevens:

Thanks very much for sending ON AN OLD HORN, which I like extremely and am delighted to accept for THE NATION.150 I haven’t been able yet to identify the excitement in the last line but the excitement is clear enough and is there. Section I. is charming everywhere, the movement beautiful.

I hope that if later you feel like sending something out, you’ll let me see it. Or I’ll ask again and hope for the same courtesy.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

Fountain Valley

Reisterstown, Maryland

23 June 1939

Dear Mr Bishop:

Thank you for your letter and the poem. I am delighted, quite generally, to hear that you have a great many other poems nearly ready to send out, and would very much like to see some of them.

After a good deal of thought I am still undecided about 1914.151 If you want the poem to bear the double interpretation, some such title as 1914 is vital, for there is nothing in the text positively to complicate the domestic reading. But, as often as I have read it, the allegory always interferes with the fable; in fact, without the gloss you provided, and with the present title, I don’t think it would be clear that the mother, say, was a real mother or that a personal tragedy was being stated at all. I am afraid the poem would recede into vagueness, as Johnson on ‘batten our flocks’.152 And under a political title, it cannot be read simply.

I hope you’ll let me know what you feel about this; it’s quite possible that I’m wrong. I don’t suggest another title, by the way, because the title here must so closely affect the whole poem.

I’d like to print THE STATUE OF SHADOW if I may. Is the T.C.V. version correct?153 The fourteenth line looks wrong metrically, and apparently, as it stands, involves a pun on ‘longing’ which I have come to think unintentional. I want to use one or two other poems with it, if you can send me some more.

After all this, I feel I ought to tell you, what is true, that I have admired your poetry for years and wish earnestly that you’d publish in an available edition the poems written since NOW WITH HIS LOVE.154

Sincerely,

JB

[WU, MS]

26 Jun 1939

Dear Marion

I can’t write properly—gloom and fatigue—I feel worse than Coleridge. But I must thank you for your letter and say what’s going on.

No actual deadline: I’ll print a collection when I have one, which ought to be soon. So far, Stevens, Bishop, Auden, with half a dozen others in the air, mainly Delmore.—I wish I liked “Lacking Art” better, it doesn’t come to life for me until the fourth stanza. Are the “Trust” and “Talk in a Storm” with Warren? Do give me the “Song: To Exiled Art” if and when you can; I have been reading that poem to friends for over a year and I deserve to print it. Sometime when you feel reminiscent, will you write me your intention in the last four lines, if you can recover it—or at any rate your present main reading. I’ve heard ten interpretations and I have several of my own.

I am glad to have your suggestions. Never read anything by Brown, Fiebleman or Hudeburg [sic], so I can’t very well ask them.155 If you’re writing, you might suggest they send me something. I’ve been trying to get a poem out of Warren—not even a reply, though I’m so grateful to him for something else just now that I can’t be angry. I had written Moses and have five poems that are really very disappointing; I may use “Angina Pectoris”.156 Three from Morse—why does he attempt this devastating flatness? Jarrell’s recent poems I have not liked at all.

Sorry about this letter. I am airless, underground. Before I went down, however, I read your Faulkner essay with some pleasure—though why good poets should waste their time on bad novelists I don’t know. First Delmore, now you. It is a disease of the time.

John

[Princeton, TS]

Grand Marais

Michigan

26 July 1939

Dear Mr Bishop:

I’m very sorry about this delay: I have been moving about, unable to get at my papers, and am only now settled for the Summer.

I was greatly pleased by your action on the poem THAT SUMMER’S END, which I think a perfect action. Few things are more satisfying than understanding and agreement. The poem is of course excellent now that that burden is removed, and I am very glad to accept it. There is a typographical error in the second line, which I assume should read:

Tall doors that closed upon the afternoon,

And very very tentatively I suggest that the comma might come out: yellow wallpaper and polished floors may heighten as well as subdue light; it is the doors closed that do subdue. THAT SUMMER’S END and THE STATUE OF SHADOW will be in the first collection, which ought to appear shortly. Besides your poems, there is good work by Stevens, Auden, Schwartz and Moses, and I am fairly confident of the value of THE NATION’s present plan for printing verse.

Somewhat reluctantly I am returning the other poems you were so kind as to send. I haven’t space for another now, and I am not completely satisfied with either the graves poem or the lines AFTER PETRONIUS, which seem to me the best pieces. I am doubtful about the striking choppiness and turgidity, though I take these to be representative, in STONES, etc., and about the enormous weight of the twelfth line; also, ‘tang’ and in the alexandrine ‘last change but bone’ seem approximations that might be improved. But I decidedly admire the opening lines and the whole strategy, and later I’d like to see this again if you’ve not published it. The casualness of most of the Yankee Trader poem defeats for me the effect of ‘snow’ and the final lines.157 If my health were better I might be more helpful; the travelling has exhausted me; at any rate, I hope something here may be useful to you.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[Princeton, TS]

Grand Marais, Michigan

14 August 1939

Dear Mr Bishop:

To my astonishment I found that in the copy of THE STATUE OF SHADOW you sent the tenth line ‘In light and a vision of light’ is omitted. I decided that this couldn’t be right, and ventured to reinstate the line in the copy I sent to New York; you’ll have a proof shortly and can correct my error if it is error. The first stanza of the other poem I sent to press in the form you suggested: as in your first form except for the omission of the comma at the end of the second line and the correction of ‘tha’ to ‘that’ in the same line. You will do just as you like with it, of course, but it does seem to me best as it is; the colon seems too strong a stop, and the new, unmentioned setting off of ‘Hungry for honey’ by commas, unnecessary; both changes break up the movement. So much for textual matters, and I want to thank you again for letting me have the poems.

I am as sorry as you if I was right about the other poems; there are times when it is a blessing to be wrong. I hope they will come easily into shape. My correspondence with you, and the thought that I may have been helpful, are so far my most pleasant experience in this work for THE NATION. I have constantly in my mind my inexperience and a statement of Wordsworth’s, An accurate taste in poetry is an acquired talent.158 I should be most grateful if you’d tell me what you think of the whole collection when you see it.

I cannot help wishing I had known you were in Michigan for a time; I was then in Ann Arbor, and we might have met somewhere. I missed seeing you merely by a day or so, I think, last summer at Allen Tate’s, and I have been regretting that for a year.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[WU, MS]

Grand Marais, Michigan

23 August 1939

Dear Marion

I’ve been moving about and busy as Kafka’s mole, or I’d have written before this.159 Rotten with silence, I finally went up to New York for a few days’ talk and then came west with Campbell instead of going up to Yaddo with Delmore and Gertrude as I had thought I would do. Yaddo is hell, I hear, and I was anxious anyway for a complete change—which I have here in the Upper Peninsula: dune and storm and the Northern Lights, all very remarkable to me. I have been writing steadily, though plagued with editorial work and book-reviewing, and have even begun Greek, blundering through the Iliad. I pace and chant and have been extremely unhappy.

Allen writes me that the North Carolina Series has fallen through, for which I’m very sorry on your account; I hope the series may be possible with some other house, as he suggests it may be. Fortunately, for my peace of mind, I do not want to publish my book at all soon, so I am able to be stoical about it.

Let me see something for The Nation when you can. My first collection will be out in a few days—the proofs are here—and I’m having a copy sent you. Let me know what you think of the poems, especially the long one. I was lucky on the whole, I think. What I want for next time is your “Song”; was very glad to have the account you wrote me.

Did you get to the Tates’? I hope you did and are now thriving. Tell me what you plan to do this year. I am trying to change my Columbia post into something better at Wayne. Blest be all our projects.

Yours,

John

[UMN, TS]

Grand Marais, Michigan

29 August 1939

Dear Scott:

I wish I could have seen you, I have regretted nothing more all summer. Immediately after I had your note, I had to go up to New York about the NATION editing and some other things, then Bhain and Florence Campbell wanted me to come West with them, and this seemed wiser than returning to the solitude of Reisterstown. But it’s extremely annoying to have been down there and not to have got to Annapolis; one of my great objectives in going down was to have some talks with you. I was right, however, in coming out here. I’ve written half a dozen poems that would not have been written in the East, and my whole work is more satisfactory; also, I knew Michigan not at all and the Upper Peninsula country is most impressive.

And it is now possible that I shall have something better than the Columbia stop-gap for this year. Hillberry [sic], the head of the English department at Wayne University in Detroit, has become interested in me and seems to want to take me on if he can; registration determines the size of his staff, I shan’t know until the middle of next month.160 Wayne is I think a poor place and Detroit a worse one, but when the difference in living expense is considered I’d be paid about twice as much as Columbia now pays me. I could pay most of my debts during the year, and probably could send for B. at once, so this is very important to me.

There is something else. As you know, I’ve been anxious for a long time that my brother go to St John’s, and if I can get the Wayne instructorship, Mother and I might be able to send him. I’m sorry you haven’t talked with him, you’d understand how important it is that he go there and go this year if at all. He has at nineteen a fine, even a brilliant mind, but it is crammed with heterogeneous disorganized information and wants rigorous training; his intellectual curiosity, which is immense, is at present being wasted in undirected reading and random absorptions. His greatest talent may be scientific, it may be philosophical, it may be literary, I can’t tell. Four years at St John’s (he had a year at Columbia, 1936–7 but he’d begin again in the New Plan) would make that clear; I am convinced he’d come out certain of eminence in some chosen field, and I want to do everything possible to see him there. Will you tell me what his expenses in Annapolis would be for this year, and whether any part of my payments could be delayed? I’ll be grateful for this and for any other knowledge you think pertinent, such as the scholarships that might be available to him. I think he might be in some ways good for the College, Scott, and a wonderfully interesting student, once he has begun to work under someone he can respect.

I was glad to hear that the Reisterstown rumours are nonsense. My interest in the College becomes stronger, if it changes at all, as the chance of my being with you soon diminishes; let me know what is happening there when you can. Not that I despair. I borrowed Schwartz’s Greek grammar and am exultantly inching my way into the Iliad, which I should never have had the determination to do unless I hoped to find myself in Annapolis at last.

Sincerely,

P.S. Two things forgotten. If you felt you could write a letter to Hillberry saying you know me to be interested in teaching and capable of handling Freshman English satisfactorily, I’d be very grateful and some good might be done. It’s Dr C. B. Hillberry, Chairman, English Department, Wayne University, Cass Avenue at Putnam, Detroit, Michigan. Don’t write him if you’ve any objections either to writing or to my plans. Do write me, though, about St John’s expenses. My first NATION collection of poems will be out in a week or so, and I’m having a copy sent you; I hope you’ll like them.

[UMN, TS]

Wayne University

Detroit, Michigan

13 October 1939

Dear Miss Marshall:

I wish I liked this poem better.161 It has certain merits but it is decidedly inferior not only to most of Auden’s poems but also to all the poems he has printed recently (for example, the long piece in this week’s NEW REPUBLIC162), and I think it really defective. Generally, it is relaxed, mechanical in its handling; the imagery of the octet does not save the abstraction later; the ambiguities of the poem and of the parts of the poem are considerable and they are not valuable ambiguities. Particularly, the eighth line is weak, and the process of working up in the sestet falls badly off in the last line, which is, for some reason I am not able exactly to determine and cannot think sufficient, short by a foot. It is unpleasant to have to describe thus a piece of work by the best living English poet; I may be wrong; I very much hope Mr Auden will let us see other poems; but I cannot think that we ought to print unsatisfactory verse.

I am very much in favour of printing now and then, between the collections, single poems, especially if they are topical and only if they are good—when such poems appear.

My work at the University has been very heavy. I’ll send you the Lorca review soon.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

Detroit

22 October [1939]

Dear Delmore

I wish you would write. I am more and more lonely and more and more tired. My university work has increased, I’m not very well, and there is no one here to talk with except Campbell, who is nearly as busy as I am and at work on a poem. I don’t know whether I shall be able to get through this year or not; besides teaching, I am supposed to be doing work for two courses I’m taking at Ann Arbor and reading mss, though I’ve not yet had any time for either. I thought it was necessary to come to Wayne, but if I cannot do it, evidently I was a fool to leave New York. This is an interesting state of exhaustion if it were not for the loneliness, which is active and paralyzing.

Let me know what you are doing. Let me have a poem for the next collection. Let me hear from you—of all moments to cease writing, this is the worst

John

[UMN, MS draft of telegram]

[16 November 1939]

Can you let me see immediately a poem for the Christmas Nation STOP Send special to arrive Saturday if possible STOP Forgive this haste and my not writing I am belaboured and exhausted, Das Blut ist schwer, Manchmal glaub ich, ich kann nicht mehr.163

John

[UMN, TS]

26 November 1939

Dear Mr Steeves:

I have long intended to thank you for the very kind letter you sent in September, but my work at Wayne keeps me helpless in correspondence. I have four sections of English 1, 135 Freshmen and Non-Matriculated students: a weekly theme from each, consultations with them, and ten classroom hours. I am now fairly well accustomed to it; in the beginning I had no time for sleep. Dr Hilberry, the Department head, promises an easier load next semester—through errors in the Dean’s Office, my classes are quite unusually large.

The teaching itself, I can say without reservation, I like immensely. I find I am perfectly at ease in the classroom, and most of the students are endlessly interesting, particularly those in my night classes who are mature men and women working during the day at regular jobs. I lecture only occasionally; the materials of the course (elementary logic, the projection and organization of opinion, and a good deal of reading) can be handled much more satisfactorily in discussion; I simply initiate, direct and summarize.

I think of asking Dr Hilberry to write you about how he thinks I am getting on; you may hear from him. I continue to hope that you will consider me for an Instructorship at Columbia next year.

Please remember me kindly to my friends there, especially Dean Hawkes, Mr Weaver and Mr Krutch.164 I plan to be in New York next month and shall hope to see you. With best regards,

Sincerely,

[UMN, TS]

Wayne University

Detroit, Michigan

26 November 1939

Dear Allen,

I’ve wanted for a long time to thank you for what you said of the poems I published last summer, but Wayne leaves me time for nothing. I have 135 Freshmen, a weekly theme from each, consultations with them, and twelve classroom hours; I have aged ten years in two months.

I hope you’ll be able to find another publisher for the poetry series; I was sorry for the abandonment of it at Chapel Hill. What do you think of Laughlin’s quintuplet plan? He represented you as very much in favour of it, but I’d like to hear. I like his list of people, but I do not like the apparatus he wants, and I don’t know that I want to be omnibused before being published. Florence Codman, by the way, has asked to see a book, and I wonder what you think about that.165 Fortunately, I feel no desire to publish soon; of the seventy-odd poems worth printing, only twenty have appeared, and I am quite willing to wait.

If my NATION collection reached you, and you had any thoughts about it, I’d be glad to know what they were. I do what I can; in six months not one good poem has been submitted in the ordinary way. I am still hoping for something of yours.

It was surprising and pleasant to hear from Laughlin that you and Caroline are liking Princeton. I hope that it’s true and that you’re both writing. What are your Christmas plans? I shall be in New York and would very much like to see you. With best regards,

Sincerely,

J.B.

[Yale, TS]

27 November 1939

Dear Mr Brooks:

I hope the group you and Mr Warren have selected is better than I think it is; however, since I once committed the poems and you are kind enough to want to print them, I daresay I should hold my tongue.166 When do you think of using them?

I am sending corrected versions of the two oldest poems. I’d like the group called FIVE POEMS and arranged thus: DESIRES OF MEN AND WOMEN, CONVERSATION, HOMAGE TO FILM, SONG FROM CLEOPATRA, MEDITATION. The DESIRES poem, by the way, was sent privately to Warren, but eventually I should have submitted it to the REVIEW, so its being printed is all right.

Since I have been regularly misrepresented, even lied about, in various Notes on Contributors, I wonder if I may make a suggestion. I wish you’d say this, or something like this: “J.B. is Poetry Editor of THE NATION. Since his first group of poems in THE SOUTHERN REVIEW (Summer, 1938), his poems have appeared in THE KENYON REVIEW, PARTISAN REVIEW, THE NEW REPUBLIC, NEW DIRECTIONS 1938 and 1939.” Doubtless this is too long, and I know it looks like the public gesture of a private satisfaction; but it seems to me very important that any interested readers be told where other poems can be found, if the writer has not yet published a book, as I have not.

I am grateful for your invitation; I should of course very much like to see you. It is just possible that I may come to New Orleans at Christmas, perhaps with Schwartz and Laughlin; I’ll let you know. I must be in New York for a bit and I may be too poor to go anywhere else.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

Will you tell Mr Erskine that I have not received the Autumn number.167

[UMN, TS]

Wayne University

Detroit, Michigan

27 November 1939

Dear Mr Moses

I am sorry I didn’t know during the summer that you would be interested in detailed criticism; my present recollection can’t be of much use. I remember thinking abstract the polysyllabic stanza in the middle of HUNTER’S MORNING, and the material of the epithalamion did not seem ever brought properly into focus. ‘Worked into form’, as of FIRE, is a shortcut by way of cant; I meant that I did not consider the flatness of the opening quatrains effective, though I took it to be deliberate; some heightening, working up into the ‘little men’ passage, seemed to be necessary.168

It may please you to know that your NATION poems were very well liked. Most of the people who wrote me about the collection mentioned them, and several, Campbell particularly, were enthusiastic. I thought and think them excellent, as you know.

I was sorry, mainly because of your book and Marion O’Donnell’s, to hear from Tate of the abandonment of the poetry series at Chapel Hill. What do you think of Laughlin’s project for next year—the quintuplet plan, I think it might be called. He told me he had written you. O’Donnell seems to be in favour of it. I have not had sufficient leisure even to begin to make up my mind.

Sincerely,

[UMN, TS]

Detroit

2 December 1939

Dear Delmore

I was sorry to bother you with a wire; there was not time to write.

To be accused of admiring Patchen is a hard fate. I thought you knew my opinion of him. It is true I am stupid with fatigue, and that opinion improved somewhat during a tour of his beauties conducted by Laughlin; I found some tenderness.169 But if Laughlin said I liked the book, he exaggerated, and so I have written him. About the ‘opportunism’ I can form no opinion; it is Patchen’s formlessness and general vacuity that offend me.

Evidently L. does finally want me on his list—in a very special way. He must have told you his plan for next year: Moses, Jarrell, O’Donnell, Elizabeth Bishop and me in a single much-publicized volume. So far, O’Donnell is in favour, Jarrell against; Tate urges me to consider it. I have not had leisure or strength to make up my mind, and I would be very glad to know what you think. I dislike the apparatus Laughlin wants (introductions, portraits, facsimiles); of obscure and young men, they are a form of exploitation.

I am delighted about Eliot’s letter and glad you are going to New Orleans; probably you and Gertrude will enjoy it. Where are you going to be when this month? I hope we can meet for a few days; I am going to New York in a fortnight. My best wishes for both of you and for your writing,

Yours,

[Yale, TS]

Detroit

15 December 1939

Dear Mr Brooks:

Evidently I shall not see you for a while. Illness makes impossible what poverty would probably have prevented anyway. If I am able to travel I plan to fly to New York tomorrow (to save the trip by rail) and there I shall have to stay quietly unless my strength returns and I can get to Princeton to see Tate. I am sorry for this.

The announcement of the Hardy number has reached me.170 Since the summer I have had under way an essay on Tragic Irony in Hardy’s poetry, and I wonder whether you would be interested in it. If so, give me a deadline; I may not be able to work on it again for some weeks.

When do you plan to use the group of poems? I may publish a selection with New Directions next year, and I would want these to appear before that.

Yours,

John Berryman

Write me at THE NATION.

Where is Mr Warren and how is he?

[UMN, MS]

Monday morning [December 1939]

My dear Bhain

Another sleepless night, and under particularly horrible circumstances. Nevertheless like the insatiate fool I have been for twenty-five years I am going with Delmore to look at Picasso. You may prepare my coffin.

John

[Haffenden, MS]

26 December 1939

My dear Bhain

The new poem pleases me greatly. Speaking from the centre of my Cimmerian stupidity, I think you have got rid of all your bêtes noirs at once, and speaking as a bête noir I am delighted.

But that is the only thing which can delight me. I am worse—crazily weak & irritable, and I nearly broke my head last night. I have let Mother bring a Bellevue man in, and he seems not to be a complete fool, so I am doing as he says, even to continual sedatives. Unless I improve wildly, however, I shan’t go to Princeton—which is now imperative: Tate has gone out of his mind, he wants me to write my own introduction, and I must find out why. And, blast the stars out of their places, I will obviously not be able to finish my present labour before I return to Detroit if I do return; I can’t yet tell. Hence, disorder. Hence, disappointment and sorrow.

Thursday

Ultimatum from Laughlin. Otherwise I think I am somewhat better, though I haven’t yet been out of bed to try it. I am going out now. If this reaches you, you will know I got as far as a letter-box at any rate.

John

1940

[UMN, MS]

New Year’s Day [1 January 1940]

My dear Bhain

I am not much better but I am coming out by the 3:10 ’plane tomorrow, in case I can by Wednesday go on. Detroit Airport at 7:10 (check this)—can you meet me? My malady is in the headache-dizziness-insomnia stage, and how I will feel from day to day I simply cannot tell; if it improves, I can teach—if not, I may as well be there as here, for a time.

Of course I can’t do the reviews for P.R. and I told Macdonald so—plunging him into chaos, but it can’t be helped. Will you send back to him at once the books that will have come for me at Wayne? Dwight Macdonald it is, 117 East 10th St., N.Y.C. Thanks. What of my cheque, by the way?—its non-arrival has inconvenienced me.

Tate came on Friday and took me down to Princeton, where I had two good days—my only holiday.

I finally decided this afternoon to shelve my feelings and go into Laughlin’s anthology. I think I will regret this, but at present I have really no choice. I make one major blunder each year.

The Coughlin poem seems to me erratic, Bhain—we’ll talk about that and other things.171 My one pleasure will be seeing you & F. again. A demain, alors, dans la ville d’horreur et l’année de l’agonie—

John

[Princeton, MS]

1 January 1940

Dear Allen

I have decided that my own feelings are not of much importance and I am going into the anthology, depending on you to persuade L out of the damned Introductions and portraits—the facsimiles are silly and pretentious but less important.

Will you tell Caroline how much I enjoyed my stay, and thank her?—I would write if I were not so tired. I am, against all advice, going back to Detroit tomorrow so that if I am well enough to continue teaching, I can. Pray for us now and in our academic hour. I was very happy to see you all—my first pleasure in a long time.

Always,

John

[Columbia, MS]

Friday [5 January 1940]

Dear Mark

I write in haste, being back in Hell. I came out simply in order to go on if I was well enough, and I am. For how long I don’t know, but for the moment I am much better.

Allen took me down to Princeton, which was a pleasant interlude. I finally decided to go into the anthology—perhaps wrongly, but there I am—so you’ll see that collection; I’d like to send a copy to you before going to press, if you think you’ll be able to give reading time to it. I am very glad you liked the P.R. poems.172

I’m putting together some poems for the Nation’s 75th Anniversary; if you have anything unpublished, I’ll be grateful. My love to all of you—

John

[NYPL, MS]

10 January 1940

Dear Mark

You gave me several hours of excitement and shameless fear last night; I have not been so closely held by a story for a long time—I read from the first page to the last without pause. I like especially the concentration, Mark, and the deft painful working up of terror in Ray.173 The flash light’s lighting as it fell into the grave, and your use of that, are brilliant. I’d like to talk to you about the book—and about the conclusion, which simply amazed me: until I reread I can’t tell exactly what I think. All this comes to thanks and congratulation.

I have heard something about The Transients that will please you.174 One of my few friends here, George Thompson, read it during the holiday and talked to me excitedly for a half-hour last week before he discovered that I knew you.

“Winter Tryst,” let me tell you, is one of the really good and mysterious and moving poems of the time—I wandered about in the Collected Poems after W.C. last night. Zabel is wrong about the early poems, I think, and your best work is perfectly unlike Frost or anyone else.175—It will be good to talk again. I can’t even write properly. I am clubbed with work.

Always,

John

[UMN, TS]

24 January 1940

My dear Sir:

You are plainly either a fool or a scoundrel.176 It is kinder to think you a fool; and so I do.

Very sincerely,

John Berryman

[Houghton, TS]

Friday [early 1940?]

I have been in bed for ten days, following a collapse. At this moment I would like to scream and smash things, I will be responsible for nothing I say.

Delmore has unexpectedly and generously offered to do an introduction for me; that settles that, leaving the facsimile, which doesn’t matter, and the portrait, which does. Listen, Laughlin, give up the portrait idea.177 Writers should be heard and not seen. I am glad Moses is for the book. You had better work on Elizabeth Bishop; I would if I knew her, but I don’t. Who could take her place I don’t know. Harry Brown is impossible. I trust you, papa, but not as far as that.

The new title is good. I’ll print your masterpiece in the 75th Anniversary Number if I live that long (sometime in February) and sixty thousand people can wonder at it.178

If I am able to travel I’ll go East by plane tomorrow, to save the trip by rail, for which I am hardly fit. I’ll be at 11 East 30th; come and see me if you can.

Painfully,

JB

[Haffenden, MS]

19 February [1940]

Dear Jay

I am ill & must write briefly.—I would want each of my poems started on a new page; let the others do as they like. And, obviously, let each title his section or not, as he pleases. Printing only a small part of my best work, I would use no title. A preface is at present impossible—my doctors tell me to write nothing & in fact I cannot. Sorry. I am now opposed to the inclusion of any woman; but if “My Country” is representative of Emma Swan’s quality, you might ask her.179—What do the reviewers say, if anything, of my N.D. poems? Except the first & last, I think they are not much good.

Yrs,

John

[Bodleian, TS]

25 March 1940

Dear Mr MacNeice

I like the poem called “Suicide” which Miss Emma Swan sent me some time ago for THE NATION, although it seems to me below the level of your best work; but I think as Miss Swan does that the title is perhaps too obvious and could be changed to the poem’s advantage. How do you feel about this?180

I would be glad if you could let me see some other pieces also; it might be possible to use several in the collection that goes to press next week or the week after that.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

29 March 1940

Dear Mr Goodman:

I am sorry to have taken so long over these poems; you sent a good many, and when verse has both distinct merits and distinct defects it is hard to decide.

Generally, I think “Guernica” is the best of these, and I am keeping it to read a little longer. Several things in it puzzle me. For example, the only item in it from Picasso’s mural is the horse at the end, and I don’t see that the motto is relevant. Also, Guernica, as probably you know, is a small Basque town in the North of Spain; Andalusia comprises the most southerly provinces; and the exact relation of the two in the poem is difficult to make out. Finally, whinnying is the ordinary cry of a horse; Picasso’s horse, if he is making any sound, is probably screaming; and so yours ought to be, I think, for your effect.

Some of the other poems are witty and interesting from time to time, but all strike me as uneven. Thank you for sending them; I would like to see more of your work.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

Wayne University

Detroit, Michigan

29 March 1940

Dear Mr Hayes:

I like the Faust poem; it is cleanly written and extremely well organized; but I would like to venture two suggestions.181 First, I think the epigraph interferes with the poem’s effect and would be better omitted. Second, if it is “I” who beholds in the last paragraph (as the word “own” certainly suggests), grammar requires the form “behold” after “Who”; syntactically, at present, it is God who beholds or Adam’s bone who beholds, and the ambiguity is not useful. These are critical and not editorial suggestions. Tell me what you think.

The other pieces I am returning with thanks; probably the longest poem is the best of them, although it is uneven. I think, by the way, that “Faust Before the Mirror” relies somewhat on the manner of Delmore Schwartz; but this influence, if I am right about it, helps rather than hurts your poem.

Sincerely,

P.S. If you write me directly here at Wayne, instead of at THE NATION, it will save time.

[UMN, TS]

30 March 1940

Dear Horrell

I’m sorry to have had to let you wait, but what with illness and University work, everything has got out of hand. I am still in the venial area, working my way to the mortal—O’Donnell, for example, to whom I have owed a letter for six months. No, two letters.

I wish I had more cheerful things to say about the poems. Neither seems to me satisfactory in movement: the first erratic, often crabbed, “Blackout” really too casual, especially in the second and third stanzas, where your material is hardly worked into form. I like some of the detail in “The Sky Is Falling” but the whole poem does not strike me as coherent, despite the repetitive devices; and the imagery in the first half of the fourth stanza is unconvincing, mixed; so at the end of the next. The final line really is bad (“touch” or “teach” is it?) or I have no ear. Your conceit in “Blackout”, a seventeenth century matter, suffers I think from the laxity of frame. A detailed analysis would help here, but I haven’t time. You use Tate a good deal, incidentally; e.g., “If on a day’s tall grass the night fall” and the last four lines of the other poem derive from the Ode to Fear; I mention this in case you hadn’t known and would want to know.182 And all these remarks have no purpose but to be useful if they can. I hope you’ll let me see more of your work.

It is good to hear that the Gulliver paper is done or nearly done; I want very much to see it.183 Where do you think of publishing, and when? I’ll watch for the Southern Review article.184 Indeed, I spend my life watching the Southern Review for one reason or another; their editorial methods approximate chaos.

Sincerely,

[WU, MS]

2 April 1940

Dear Marion

This time I am absolutely repentant—I might at least have thanked you for the “Song”—which I now do: I was glad to get it and glad to print it. I’m sorry, by the way, that it had to be shifted out of the miscellany—considerations of make-up in New York. Many thanks.

All my sins have their ugly roots in my decision last fall to leave Columbia and accept an instructorship here; that is to say, OUT HERE. This was, from any viewpoint, an insane mistake, and I am paying—in health, in temper, in time. My brain, I say, languishes, mutters, is at the point of death. Some conversation at Christmas—otherwise silence & stupidity. Not that I don’t like my students; I do; but they require, they demand, and—this is it—I give.

Laughlin’s anthology I have no interest in, or I actively dislike; but I listened to Delmore, Allen and Mark, and I am in for it—if it ever appears. He is stopped for lack of a suitable female poet, and I have some hopes that the plan will fall through. If you really like it, I should be sorry on that account (I think you and Moses ought certainly to be published) but on no other.

It was good to hear that you like your work at Vanderbilt. I hope you have continued to, and are writing as well. Your Semmes poem I saw by chance the week it appeared, and liked; I have seen nothing since.185 Allen’s fishing poem turned out brilliantly, I thought; I wish he would write some more something.186 I had the feeling, when I saw him in December, that he was merely enjoying Princeton—not a negligible occupation, but hardly, for him, sufficient. I think he said you had sold the place at Belzoni—what do you plan, then?

Yours,

John

[Princeton, TS]

4 April 1940

Dear Blackmur

I am reading Henry James again, and it is with the greatest difficulty that I meet my classes or write letters or do in fact anything except read Henry James. But your poem is one of the few pleasant things that have happened to me in this sorry editing and I must thank you for it.187 I have for months been wanting a good political satire; what appears you can imagine. I like especially the casualness of the poem and the very surprising rime-shift in the last stanza. I’ll get it into print as soon as I can. It seems to me you have made out extremely well with a rather treacherous and (at present) unusual subject. Many thanks.

Have you any easily formulable opinion on the quality of the revisions James made for the New York Edition?188 This may be a taxing question; I ask it only because I suppose you familiar with the changes and I don’t quite know whom else to ask. He rewrote even the stories, I find in examining “The Pupil”, which I happen to have both in the original edition and in the N.Y. issue. But it’s the novels I’d like to know about, for reading. I am very pleased to hear you may or will do a book on him for Laughlin.

Yours,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

4827 Second Avenue

Detroit, Michigan

10 April 1940

Gentlemen:

To describe openly, but without any conventional or dramatic form, one’s personal needs and desires is somewhat embarrassing; I will do it as well and as summarily as I can.189

It is easy to say generally, however, what I would wish to do with any money I might be granted by the Committee: I would want to use it for living expenses, during as long a period as it would last, while I was writing. What I badly want at present is rest from all activities not directly relevant to my work in verse (except for the criticism and editing in which I regularly, at little expense of time, engage). I have no money now for the summer, and although my health is poor I may be forced to look for a lecturing post; certainly I shall have to teach next year. In short, I would treat the award very much as Guggenheim grants are treated by the responsible Fellows. I would provide with it for a summer and if possible for an entire year or more of uninterrupted composition.

Beyond this general statement it is not easy for me to go, because for several years, to the extent that I could, I have let the conditions of the immediate work on which I was engaged direct my travel, my residence, my mode of living. For example, if I continue the verse-play I am writing, I must be in New York for materials and consultation. If I do not, when the time comes, feel I can profitably go on with that, I will want to look out some isolated and inexpensive place in this country where I can continue with poetry. Or I may want to go to England, where I can live with friends for very little money and where the pressures of a war environment might be extremely useful in terms of sensibility.

I am sorry to appear thus undecided; but the necessities of the imagination are difficult to predict, and it is by them that I act when circumstances allow me to do so. I shall be glad to explain my plans in person before the Committee, if the Committee wish it. Thank you for your attention.

Respectfully,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

5 May 1940

Dear Delmore

From something in a letter that came yesterday I take it you have a Guggenheim.190 This is wonderful news—I hope it can’t be wrong—let me know. I expected it, but I am absolutely delighted. You seem to be entering a golden age and nothing pleases me so much.

If I wrote you when I liked, I’d write every week. Work has been intolerably heavy, and my health bad again—mainly violent headaches, insomnia and fatigue. Four weeks only are left: I plan to collapse on the day after classes stop, and pray I have not miscalculated. Nevertheless I do some writing; I have finished the revision of “At Chinese Checkers” and will send the poem with this.191 I don’t know what you will think of it.

I wish I could write at length about the complexity, insight and richness of “America! America!” which I like immensely.192 Another time. I hope the long poem is advancing without let.193 It has my best wishes, for what they are worth. I was pleased by the way to see Aiken come out strongly for the Coriolanus poem.194 Your work is penetrating our contemporaries also: I am printing a poem (Raphael Hayes) plainly influenced by your diction and metric—he does it well.

The Harvard news was disappointing, but I suppose that with the Guggenheim you won’t teach there. If you and Gertrude plan to stay in Cambridge, however, I might want to be there anyway—to whom should I write if I were to apply?

Laughlin has not yet found his poetess; Horrell writes me, indeed, that he is advertising for one. This is ridiculous. He’ll not find one, I think, who will be anything but a disgrace, and the search seems to me remarkably silly. Also, he continues to plague me about a preface which I have told him I am not able at present to write. I have been thinking all this over. My position is somewhat changed. With the completion last month of a poem called “A Point of Age”, my first book is complete; I shall add nothing to it; and I do not like breaking it up for publication.195 My aversion to being grouped, for a short time or a long time, with the other “young American poets” increases. I respect them; I want to see them published; but I do not want to be published with them. Finally, the prospect does not appear to me as gloomy as you had it in a letter last year. I have approached no one, and I know nothing certainly; but three New York houses, one of them a very fine one, have recently urged me to let them read a book. I have not answered any of the letters, although one circumstance forces me to consider them seriously: two publishers show a genuine liking and respect for my verse, and this is important to me in a publisher. I realize I have told Jay I would contribute to his anthology. Nevertheless I continue to think, and I would greatly like to know what you think.

My longest letter this year and probably the worst; in the present exhaustion I write prose like a cripple. Patience and forgiveness. My best affection always to you and Gertrude, Good night,

John

[Houghton, MS]

12 May 1940

Dear Jay

My health was better for a time and then worse, thanks. What are you doing in Idaho?

I am not impressed by your women. All I can say of Miss Pergament is that I hope you got her to bed and it was worth it.196 Miss Barnard is several miles better, as verse-writer I mean, but most of the poems here (a dozen only) are derivative and dry; none is perfectly good. I continue not to see why you need a woman at all.

Let me ask some questions. What size ms. do you want from each man? Would it be possible for me to retain copyright—or does that matter? How long would you want me to wait before publishing a complete book? My book is now finished, and this is important. Finally, could I expect any money from the anthology publication?—an estimate, how much if any?

I wrote a preface and tore it up; practically, then, I have not begun. I am busy, my condition is erratic, and there is a psychological impediment: for the first time I am to write, not what I want to write (I want to write nothing) but what I am told to write.

Yours

John

P.S. David Brodsky, a Scottish bookseller here, is worried about a ms. he sent you. And some woman in Florida is “baffled” by “When Does the Play Begin?”—I am defending you.

[UMN, TS]

Wayne University

Detroit, Michigan

12 May 1940

Mr Theodore Morrison:

I am writing to apply for a position on the English A staff at Harvard for this fall. I do not intend to remain at Wayne another year, and a friend of mine in your Department has suggested that I write to you.

My schooling was received at South Kent School (’33), Columbia College (A.B., 1936, with Honours and Phi Beta Kappa), and Cambridge University, where I held a Kellett Fellowship from Columbia, studying in Clare College, for two years; I was also the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholar in Cambridge University for 1937–8, and took an Honours B.A. in June of 1938. Last autumn I accepted an Instructorship in the College of Liberal Arts, Wayne University, and during the present academic year I have taught four classes of English Composition each semester. “Five Kinds of Writing” is the text in one of my classes this spring, so that I have now some slight familiarity with English A procedure.197

I am told that you may be interested also in a brief record of my literary activities. During the last two years I have published verse and criticism fairly widely in this country, and I am engaged to New Directions for a selection of poems which will appear probably in the autumn. I contribute more or less regularly to The Southern Review, The Nation, Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review and the New Directions miscellanies. For a year I have acted as Poetry Editor of The Nation.

Such a sketch as this is bound to be pompous and inadequate. The persons most familiar with my academic and literary abilities are Mark Van Doren (Falls Village, Connecticut), Allen Tate (16 Linden Lane, Princeton, New Jersey), Delmore Schwartz, and Herbert E. Hawkes, Dean of Columbia College; they will be glad to write you. Dr C. B. Hilberry is Chairman of the English Department here; if you are interested by this application—and I decidedly hope you will be, for I should very much like to be at Harvard—I shall be glad to ask him to write you about my teaching this year.

I shall hope to hear from you before June seventh, but if you do not write before then, please address me at The Nation, 55 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[Yale, MS]

Thursday [May 1940]

Dear Delmore

I don’t know what Morrison wants with poems but here are some. I am insane with worry—I can hardly think—B. has not answered my cable. Morrison asks me to come there by June 10th, which is difficult & expensive, for I have got to be here again, on the 13th. But tell him I will come, probably Saturday June 8th—it will be good to see you. I’ll write him when I can. A savage time: if the skill was to outrun the moral sense, the race should never have been begun—better not to be born

John

[Columbia, MS]

Sunday 3 May June [1940]

Dear Mark

No, no—I did not want you to take any action for me at Columbia. I am glad you did not. I must have been in a special mood when I wrote or I’d not have mentioned it. I did not want to be at Columbia and I attach no importance to Steeves’ action. C., you and Weaver aside, is a cemetery.

If I ever sent Steeves a “state” I was a fool.198 But I don’t think I did: when I am as I am now I simply don’t write. Men read into letters what they want to see; S. wants to see me hysterical: he does. Of course he is a fool on one count—I have discovered & proved that I am a damned good reader. But C. is no place for me.

I’ll write Giroux.199 I owe fifty letters, it is criminal. My work here is nearly finished; I go to Cambridge at the end of this week—Morrison wants to see me before the tenth. After that—I am blasted with poverty—I don’t know. I wanted to go to England for B.—impossible now.

I have not sent you any verse for a long time. I hope you’ll like A Point of Age: it’s the best trophy I have of the worst year I have spent on earth.

Yours

John

I don’t know where I shall be, write me at The Nation ^11 East 30th St., N.Y.C.^ after Thursday

Wednesday

Sorry, this my only letter in weeks got mislaid and is only now going off. I have not been to bed, in fact, since I wrote it three or four days ago, and I am somewhat stupid.

JB

Leaving tomorrow night.

[Columbia, MS]

11 East 30th St.

N. Y. C.

Tuesday [11 June 1940]

Dear Mark

You had given me up! Probably that whole situation was worse even than I supposed. But I am glad to disappoint you—or satisfy you—what I have most liked is your refusal to “I told you so.”

Good news of sorts (I can be at Harvard if I like) but it is too late. I am trying to get from Harcourt Brace & The Nation money for an English summer. I want to leave as soon as possible, and writing a book while there is the only way I can manage it. B. will not come here without long persuasion—possibly I can bring her back in September. Finally I would like to see and record what I can of the death of our kind of life. A book of letters: I think H. B. will do it.—More when I know more.

John

[UMN, TS]

4827 Second Boulevard

Detroit

Monday 18 June 1940

Dear Delmore

France this morning seems lost utterly. This may break everything to pieces; I will have to write as I would have written yesterday. I decided, then, on the way down from Boston, that my only practical chance of getting abroad immediately lay in a book of letters from England in wartime, to be written while over there. Laughlin has shown so little interest in my writing generally (and no interest in payment for it: I have written him again asking about advance and royalties, and again have had no reply) that offering it to him was out of the question, especially since he has published no such book. I talked with Giroux, who told me his firm would be very interested, if I would give them my book of poems—an instructive variation. I talked with Bendiner and learned that The Nation would be glad to have articles.200 To that point, excellent. Then Italy entered the war and the difficulty of crossing enormously increased. Neutral sailings were cancelled, the Clipper rates were prohibitive. I set in motion enquiries in Washington, and came back here to put my book of poems together.

I have not absolutely decided to leave Laughlin; tactics and necessity are the whole matter; but if I do, I can only think he will be relieved. He has been anything but enthusiastic, from the beginning, about publishing me. In December he wrote, apropos of something, “This is not an attempt to ease you out”; you will think of the proverbs as quickly as I did. I like Jay as a man, in short, very much better than I like him as a publisher. The pamphlet you suggest would not bring me much money, I think, and none now, and I need it now. If B. cannot be got here within the next few weeks I see no future at all.

After thinking it over I did not call Tate. I could accept nothing there now; if later I want to, I can call later. And one thing troubles me there (but let this die): your judgment and Mark’s and Tate’s coinciding, it was on a promise by Tate which has not been fulfilled that I finally agreed to make one in Jay’s five-ring circus.

No doubt I have forgotten many things; I’ll write again. Write me as soon as you can—I don’t know how long I shall be here nor where I shall go. Good luck with the poem, my best affection to you and Gertrude,

[UMN, TS]

4827 Second Boulevard

Detroit, Michigan

23 June 1940

Dear Mr Rice

Most certainly I have recovered from our exchange, and I was very glad to hear from you. I do not like being at odds with any of the few persons for whom I have some respect. Again let me say that I am sorry for the offending letter, which I hope you have destroyed.

I’ll be glad to do a review of Dylan Thomas’ book.201 May I assume that I can take issue with Symons if I like?—on the whole I did not like his article.202

I have just finished making up a book of poems and for the moment I am tired of copying. I’ll send you a group next week. Thanks for asking.

Sincerely,

[UMN, TS]

4827 Second Boulevard

Detroit

23 June 1940

Dear Bob

Many thanks: you tell me, in general, quite what I needed to know, and the need for haste has largely disappeared. First, before I go into what may be a horribly long story, let me say I am delighted that you liked the book at a first glance. Dans le temps, when we were happier being more ignorant than we are now, you were one of the first persons to take any intelligent interest in the verse, and your approval at this moment means a good deal. Let it be specific: I am of course still working on the manuscript, and what I would like is comment, descriptive and especially destructive comment. For a year I have sent Mark and Delmore almost nothing; I am resourceless here; I am out of touch with criticism. Tate’s at Christmas was the last detailed help I had. I do not mean, absolutely, that I lack praise; I do not, and that I could very well do without anyway. But I have had no external check for my impressions.

Here is what spurred me into action last week. On Wednesday arrived a contract from Laughlin having to do with the group of poems I promised him for his FIVE YOUNG AMERICAN POETS anthology. It is to appear sometime this fall, and he wants to retain exclusive rights for three months. Well, if you wanted to publish my book at any time before next Spring, this anthology publication was out of the question; I had to find out as soon as possible, and I supposed that only after all arrangements were complete could that be decided. However, I am free, on that consideration. Now I would like to know what you think, private and officially, of this. Would Harcourt Brace, in short, object? As I told you in New York, I have never much liked the idea, indeed I dislike it intensely in certain respects; it took Schwartz, Tate and Van Doren a month to persuade me to say I would let my work be used in the anthology. But publication the following Spring cancels some of those respects; and it seems to me that, from the publishing point of view, the project has a few definite advantages. Schwartz wrote me: “you will be widely reviewed; it will be obvious to anyone who counts that you are easily the best of the five”. And Tate: “It seems to me that you [and] Jarrell are the best of your generation, and I want to see you both published. So I am very sorry that you two are turning Laughlin down. I thought well of the plan … it has great advantages. You would be in the company of your peers, and the group exhibit would strengthen your claims to individual attention later on.” (Sorry about the apparent egotism of these quotations, Robert.) I am only partly in agreement with these opinions; but it does now seem to me that the anthology appearance would help the reception and sale of my book afterwards. Qu’est-ce que tu en crois? So that if I can reconcile myself to writing a preface, and to some other disagreeable features, and if you agree, I plan to sign the contract. About half the poems in the Ms. you have already have been published, and the anthology group would be made up of them.

This brings me to another part of your letter, that in which you say I am using the POEMS as an emergency device. First, I have not substituted it for the book of letters from England. That book is distinct, and is still very much in prospect; I am trying urgently still to get abroad. The only relation between them is that I would give you both, and that some advance for the POEMS is necessary in order to get me to England and make the other book possible. However, your description has in it some truth. I look on writing and publishing as distinct and entirely different activities, and in fact I have come more and more to dislike the idea of publication, so that some absolute spur is needed to get me to publish. For example, I had done a good deal of revision, but no arrangement and no copying; if L’s letter and contract had not come when they did, God knows when you would have seen the book. I have submitted nothing to any magazine this year except one poem to Cowley, although three of the quarterlies have asked me for work and although I dislike magazine publication much less than I dislike the idea of book publication. I think the reasons are two: 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. Thus, I heard the other day that that ass Untermeyer, in the Virginia Quarterly, has bracketed me as a follower of Crane (!); and this has caused me the most acute, even morbid annoyance.203 It is not the kind, it is the fact of mention: I would have disliked equally anything he might have said. No doubt this is stupid: certainly I endeavour from time to time to rid myself of the feeling; but it exists as a most active deterrent. Also, the pleasure I once felt in having work printed, externalized, is quite gone; each time I printed something last year I went through an absurd depression. Enfin, I require a stimulus, and the need of money is one of the most honourable stimuli in existence.

Well! The tone of the Confessions and the length of an autobiography. Mea culpa, mea culpa. I saw Russell’s statement quoted in the Times and was amazed.204 If he has taken up the axe I do not know what can make another man refrain. Why not! France is ashes since we talked, and the night comes on.

Yours,

[Houghton, TS]

4827 Second Boulevard

Detroit

26 June 1940

Dear Jay

Sorry to hold you up. I have had terrible news from England.

Many thanks for dropping the Detroit reference. I want, absolutely, not to be known as ‘from’ or ‘of’ any special place. This is not a whim. I think that one general place-reference might interfere between the reader and certain of my poems. Most of them do in fact operate from one place or another—the poetry is, in one sense, extremely local poetry—but the places are distinct and widely separated; and the places of future poems probably will be so also. It is therefore important that the author not be put in a category, if this can be avoided. Also, as I think I may have told you, I hate personal or author advertising.

Thanks for the N.D.39 cheque. I am glad for your sake to hear that the book sold out, and I think your procedure very decent.

The contract strikes me as fair and good; only one thing of importance seems to be omitted, the date of publication. But although I would like to sign it at once and have done with it, I do not see how I can sign until I know who the fifth writer is to be; I am surprised if the others have done so. Eve Merriam, as my brother would say, is no good, if I am a judge.205 Why do you need a poetass? Campbell, for instance, is very much better than any of the women. There remains the preface. It is very hard, believe me, for me to promise you this; I may be unable to write anything I’d be willing to publish. But I will try again this week.

Yours

P.S. Let me try once more, as of the second paragraph. I have no more imagination than Wordsworth in this matter: I write from where I am; as I move the scene of the poems moves. In so far as the author is to be ‘placed’ at all (I do not see why he should be, since he is not a regional poet) I want to let the poems place him.

[UMN, TS]

3 July 1940

My dear Miss Deutsch:

Despite the tone of your letter about the sonnet, I must suppose that you are interested in the truth of the matter. I am sorry, then, that I do not agree with you. In the first two lines “They” may be the characters in the pictures peering out between the shoulders of the spectators; and the title helps to make this, I continue to think, the first impression. Lovers, fathers and sons are neutral. Baedecker [sic], if I remember him correctly, has various tales about the Renaissance noblewomen who are in many cases the painters’ subjects; “revelry” is better in the Renaissance reading than in the modern. The girls are neutral. Priests again are rather Renaissance than modern, and their Italian cupidity is famous, although I admit that your phrase “the riches on which history dotes” does not refer to anything in the pictures very much better than it refers, as you consider it does, to the pictures themselves. The eighth line is probably neutral, unless diction sets it on the Renaissance side. Only at the tenth line does the reader discover that he has been put on the wrong track; he then returns, presumably, to the beginning, and closes his eyes to that half of the meaning, or that more than half, which is useless. But it is the business of the poet precisely to avoid this situation, precisely to guard against irrelevant ambiguity—to anticipate, in short, the reader. This I think you have failed to do.

I am sorry to have held the other poems for so long. “Europe: 1940” I like better than anything else you have been kind enough to let me see, but the third line I do not think good; particularly, the force of “in vain” interferes with the following line. Thank you for sending the poems.

Sincerely,

[UMN, MS]

Tuesday [early July 1940]

My dear Bhain

I am past smiling at anything. Moreover, I think you may be right about the base of Stevens’ limitation. Your has been is very interesting.

It is most unpleasant to hear that you are worse; I hoped, damn it, for improvement!206 Can’t you begin the x-ray again at once? It is too bad I did not go in for medical science: with this stimulus, certain I could have discovered some treatment profound & ultimate. Have you tried fixing the growth with a baleful glare?—I am very sorry, Bhain. If there is anything that can be done for you by me, let me know; I am staying here partly for that. Errands, letters, reading to you, anything.

Little news: I have written a savage new poem, which I hope will blow the heads off certain people. I also, finally, achieved a preface. If you feel up to reading (and writing) tell me what you think of it, exactly. I have not decided whether to use it or not. “Winter Landscape” is in print this week, and Auden has an article on Rilke in the same number; I am depressed when I recall how glad I would once have been to appear with him.207

Wednesday

M. J. tells me you were very much better on Sunday.208 This is news both good and infuriating—infuriating because you did not let me know. I hope it has continued. She also says a gramophone has been installed there. This is distinctly ominous: the advantages cannot possibly balance the evil. You had better clear your decks of that fellow, Bhain. When I hear that he talked to you from ten until two one night (four hours:—time, say, for The Ambassadors or Mont. St. Michel or a dozen poems or The Sacred Wood) I reel with indignation.209 Let me take an old privilege. You do not sufficiently respect yourself and your work when you let such a donkey trample your time. Precisely your finest qualities—generosity, kindness, loyalty—issue as weakness; they deliver you bound & stupid to animals; for your friend, it is a galling spectacle. I have much more to say on this subject, but I hope this may be enough.

Now collect your wits and write me a long good letter, or better still, come to see me. Or call—I tried to reach you and could not. Who knows when we will be within striking distance again—

John

[UMN, MS]

Monday night [mid-July 1940]

Our correspondence was interrupted by my visit; we must not let this happen again.

You looked fine, in the car, this afternoon. If you can eat more and no more mistakes are made, I am not hopeless. Remember that you talked about exerting will in the hospital. Good, but that is like holding northern France after the Nazis have the Channel. Now (in my best rhetoric) and all the time you must absolutely resist. Work your brain as hard as you like; do nothing with your body but what is essential. Be ruthless in your conservation of energy. Apply your will to your stomach and eat everything possible. Make other people do anything you want done—you keep your mind & strength on your health. It is a plain War: change your form of government. Find out what exercise, if any, is most valuable for you, in what amount, and take it; and do not move else. Learn to use dictation if you can. Save yourself every pain, every fatigue, possible. Sleep at night; sit in the sun. Get detailed advice on all these things (I’ll see Cowen or write Gene210 if you like) and follow it exactly. One night soon when I feel angry I’ll make up a list of proscriptions for you. Meanwhile consider yourself rheumatic, deaf and blind.

It is a fine letter, this last of yours, I have never had a better. It was good of you to take such accurate trouble over my stupid preface: your paragraph is better than its subject. If you can think of a convenient formula—ten words or less—for the writing of good prose, kindly tell it me.

Indeed, indeed, I fall into a chasm, I decline; my verse petrifies, my prose rots. Evil days! Also I am poor as a Dutch Jew and may have to go away lest I be thrown in prison. All, as I may say, for the lack of a sympathetic and intelligent mongoose.

Now there is a beast will eat its young, will play

Hopscotch with Mother’s bones on Mother’s Day!

I will write you something gay next time. Tonight I am sad & dull. I am sending back to honest people their unsatisfactory poems. Gayda predicts the offensive against England shortly.211 I say nothing of the commission you would leave me, because we talked of it and I hope I shall never have to execute it.

John

[UMN, TS]

17 July 1940

Dear Miss Swan

I wish I liked these poems better. Except for “The Voyage” they seem to me not at all good, and marred at times by what I can only call disastrous flatness, as in the eleventh line of “Poem” and the last line of “Silence”. The end of “The Voyage” and perhaps the end of “New Year 1940” are the best passages in the group, I think. I hope I am wrong. Thanks for sending them.

Possibly someone once showed me a copy of Furioso, I can’t remember; I’d be glad to see it.212 The Quarterlies aside, no magazine is worth a dried rat for verse at present, unless this one and the New Republic are, and if they are they just are.

You speak in your letter of the NATION’s “type” of verse. This is very depressing; I have hoped there was no such thing. What do you mean? I plead innocent of the magazine’s sins in the past, but for a year I have tried to print anything I thought genuinely good in any kind, and only that—for these poems I take all blame.

Sincerely,

[Columbia, MS]

Detroit

7 August 1940

Dear Mark

My health is gone again, such as it was. I am coming East as soon as I can travel—shortly—I think to Windham, New York, where I hope to rest this month or so.

I hoped to go to England, but that is past. Some letters here finally came from B. She is well and none of our closest friends is yet dead. She always sends you her affection, and she says particularly that she is glad about your Pulitzer.

I have an appointment at Harvard and will rot there this year. Are you again at Columbia? I suppose that will depend on your having completed the long poem—and have you? I wish I could see it. Forgive my news—I have withheld the worst—and send me a line at Windham to say how you are.

Yours always,

John

[UMN, MS]

Windham, N.Y.

Monday ? Aug [1940]

My dear Bhain

Not conspicuously well, but I hope to improve. I had a comfortable trip East, and it was exactly the comfort, air conditioning, that betrayed me in New York, where I was very bad. Some friends of mother’s drove me here on Saturday: an uninteresting but quiet hamlet surrounded by howling tourists: if I stay in town I shall be all right. At least I eat and the weather is bearable. Bob is well, very, and tall; he sends you his love.

Tell me how you are: disposition, energy, pains, paroxysms (??), everything to cloaca. I thought I saw a decided change for the better last week. Set your mind on death as little as you can: I believe we have all been too inclined to despair. The doctors admit they know, if anything, little; how can they know you will die within a time? Not! It is this: how insane to prepare for death if it may be the preparation that will let the cancer kill you. Rely on [Hett], and fight.213

This pen is miserably new and I am very tired; I had better stop. Send me the People & their Parks as soon as you conquer them.214 Dictate if you can’t write. My love to every body, and all my absolute hope for you,

John

Mary Barnard is elected, and Laughlin prodded me again today. I have committed a sixth preface, which I will send; if you are still capable of reaction to any preface of mine, let me hear it.—Also my table of contents.—I did not see Giroux—no one in New York except Kay Fraser, who came over with her baby a month ago. Gordon is in the Intelligence: I hope he finds out something.

[UMN, MS]

15 August 1940

My dear Bhain

Busy in that time & room of pain, can you speak?

Whose occupation is pain, and increasing pain,

Can you single or save or snatch or steal or take

Somehow time for the making, the reaping, the slain

And splendid trophy? High in the long hall,

After immense preparations, is ready the place,

And the people are waiting. The place is bare, the wall

Will be bare if you go no more to the chase.

Archaic metaphors, an ancient sport,

The kill and definition of action: a fire leaps,

The men lean forward from a leaping heart

About the teller of tales; he turns & weeps

For the names of men. This is dishonoured now,

Changed. It will change again. Say from that room

The names of your woe and your country’s woe.

They will hang in the ears that are waiting for them.

Consider, in your desperation, the need of all

Who walk and work under a blinding sun,

At a blind bench, or whose eyes must fall

Forever from their sons’ eyes when the son

Discovers his inheritance of need,

Hungers and whips. Consider this, and speak.

Name for them their need, and after their need

Their power, but of loose flesh a muscle make,

A mind. Speak to the men who have no voice

But your voice—

Unable to finish it, Bhain:

I send what there is—

Yours always,

John

[UMN, MS]

Windham

18 August 1940

My dear Bhain,

Before I obliterate

With drug or transform into dream

Book, pen, the painful night,

The images of fame

That are my worse disease,

Let me tell you a story.

A man walked through his days

Marvelling, rich with pity,

Dogged by an assassin:

Neither at midnight nor at noon

Was he free from that shadow,

Although the love he felt

And the justice of his heart

Held him guiltless, and the yellow

Sun of his honour lit his house.

From his childhood it was so:

As the boy, bucking the salt

Days that broke over his head,

Grew man, the assassin grew;

Together they encountered

Natural sorrow and the hot compassion

His heart bred in the man,

The perplexity and the woe.

One day, not long ago

(I was there) the assassin

Struck. Missed. But the man

Moved out of his sunlit house

Into a house of fear,

Of shadows and his despair.

He should not have come there!

He should have turned his use,

His good, the heat of his sun

To blast or bind the assassin

In the house he built and lit.

This he forgot:

Whatever evil comes,

Crime, loss, in the shot street

The hysterical roll of drums,

Man is his own fate.

Until the moment of death

The outcomes of the body

Find a full man ready

In pride and wrath

And strength, to resist.

He gathers, where he is attacked

Or troubled, into a fist

His desire. And no man dies.

Decisive, he takes at last,

As at all times he must,

With curiosity or dread,

Fatigue, passion erect,

Or passion fled,

The direction of his eyes.

John

[Houghton, TS]

Windham, N. Y.

26 August 1940

Dear Jay,

I think everything you want is here, except the photograph, which Fitzsimmons will send you this week from New York. There is even a holograph, although I hope earnestly that you have discarded that notion. You will probably not like the preface, but (I am ashamed to say) it was the best I could do; I wrote in all seven prefaces, and you would like the others less; it is difficult for me to write when I have nothing to say. The contract I am sending you also, signed, and I will now cash the advance cheque, for which my thanks. If my health had been better, you would have had all this earlier.

I have written Warren, Rice and Cowley for permission to reprint, as your Mr Moore asked me to do, and I will write the others. But is this necessary? I thought copyright reverted to the author after six months, and ‘permission’ was automatic or fictional. The acknowledgements you will find in my preface.

What arrangement you contemplate for the contributors I do not know, but I suggest alphabetical order as the only one possible. That puts Miss Barnard conveniently first, with Berryman, Jarrell, Moses, O’Donnell following impartially. Any other order, based on our ages, or on your idea of our reputations or relative excellence, will be misleading. R. P. God will rank us in the end; let us be arbitrary now.

Yours,

John

Write me at 11 East 30th Street, New York.

[Columbia, MS]

10½ Appian Way

Cambridge

29 Sept 1940

Dear Mark

As usual I am to blame for tardiness, but all your good wishes have been fulfilled. After some setbacks my health much improved; I am quite well; and Cambridge is more tolerable than I expected. Bob & I—he is here with me, studying at Boston University—found a house easily, and once the decorating of it has ceased to drive us from room to room I think we will be fairly comfortable. My classes began on Wednesday and look to be entertaining. Schwartz for a miracle is enjoying his also. I have three sections instead of two, meaning more work but more money: I may yet be solvent.—Remaining are Campbell’s illness, which will kill him some time this fall, and B.’s danger: these I bear with what fortitude I can summon.

It is good to hear that the poem is in some sort finished.215 I hope you will have time and the inclination to work on it during the year.—I have been writing very little, and that criticism. Laughlin’s stupid anthology will be out in a few weeks. If I have my wish, it will be ignored everywhere & permanently.

Harvard I don’t know much about as yet, except that Widener is the best library I have ever used and an entire blessing. My colleagues seem amiable and my students display a form of illiterate urbanity which will soon become very depressing. After last year, however, I am up to anything.

I am ashamed to say I forgot to leave for you in New York that Spenser volume, which reproached me all year. You will have it, intact, the first time I come down, perhaps one weekend next month. It will be good to see you again.

Yours,

John Berryman

[Yale, TS]

10½ Appian Way

Cambridge, Mass.

27 October 1940

My dear Oscar Williams

Thank you for your letter and for the request it contains. I have no objection to your using in NEW POEMS 1940 my “Conversation” and “Desires of Men and Women”, and I think Laughlin will have none, although since he has bought the copyright for six months, perhaps you ought to ask him for permission.216 I am sending you a copy of the other poem you want, “The Spinning Heart”, which I have not given to him but which is in other hands: W. R. Moses is printing it, I believe in December, in a magazine called ACCENT. You are welcome to use it if Moses agrees, but you had better find out; his address is 1014 South Oak Street, Champaign, Illinois. When do you think of publishing?—that is really the question here.

As for new poems, I am sending a piece called “The Moon and the Night and the Men”; it was written in June, but no one has seen it. You can look also, if you like, at a poem “Winter Landscape” which appeared in THE NEW REPUBLIC of July 8, 1940.

I am sorry to say that I dislike biographies and photographs; I hope that you don’t think them necessary.

Theodore Spencer tells me that some of my poems were printed recently in a magazine called THE LIVING AGE. If you were in fact responsible for this, I am surprised that you did not ask my permission, and I am amazed that you have not sent me a copy of the magazine nor said anything about it in your letter.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

I forgot to say that the publishers’ plan seems very fair.

[UMN, TS]

10½ Appian Way, Cambridge

Wednesday 6 November [1940]

My dear Bhain

You are writing a marvellous book. I see frankly no limit to its uses and excellence if it goes on as it begins, and I see no reason indeed why it should not greatly improve as it goes on. Some of the handling cannot improve—the first page, for example, or the portrait of your father, which is perfectly brilliant; but I think your sense of the uses of your narrative will sharpen. Or mine is dull now, and I would not be shocked to learn that it is; don’t think I set my judgment against yours when you are writing like this. I am excited and delighted as I watch. But I would say that the Fun passages in chapter two are not so well pointed as the characters in the first: they seem to want counterpointing, say with your religions of that time, or want shortening. I could have done with some people, too: Burgess, Madelon, others. If you are saving them for the college years, think carefully before you decide to do so. I would say Save nothing, in fact, Cram it with experience and people and ideas and emotions—as you mainly do.

The richness and variety of the prose I praise and praise: you have done nothing like it in the past. It is a genuinely and profoundly capable medium. I have very little to suggest. Watch periodicity—perhaps you work it too hard—and your run-on verb sentences. In the diction, watch academic jargon: the second parenthesis on 13 is an instance, and on 18 you probably mean ‘permissible’ instead of ‘accurate’. Certain particulars I object to: the ‘old men’ sentence on 3 is still a terror; there is some frantic imagery at the bottom of 7; the parenthetical clauses on 20 are a little superior. Had I time, I’d name everything. That time is what I have been waiting for, before writing you; I write now in despair of it. Let me urge one thing generally: Take none of your attitudes for granted, Bhain. I think the sympathy and compassion you absolutely feel for your father are not presented with sufficient strength to stand against the final sentence of your first chapter. Am I clear?—I am certainly exhausted and stupid with work. Be sure that what you give is your whole sensation or as much of it, as representative a much, as you can master in form. I know you, and I add, for the perspective; the reader must be given his perspective intact. Almost everywhere, of course, you have done it, and my admiration for certain episodes is inexhaustible: the grandfather’s shooting, your father’s reading (“Great Pa” is magnificent), the fight; your analysis in chapter two permits nothing at the level of these. Go on, then, hurry up, write some more, bless you; what happens? I wish I were there to help you, if I could help you. But I couldn’t: what you need you have. All I wish you are comfort and peace and time.

Do you get my letters? If you don’t, you must think me simply incomprehensible; and from Florence’s last letter I take it you do. I wrote you from New York, then, a week ago, a long letter from here, explaining in detail my labours at Harvard, which are monstrous. I have now to correct about fifty 700-word papers, seventy papers ranging from 1200 to 1500, forty examination papers, and three new sets of 700-word papers which came in this afternoon. But I can’t go through it all; if my letter went astray, blast it, and forgive and understand my difficulties in writing. We will talk very soon now—two weeks from tomorrow, Bhain! We will talk about the autobiography and we will talk about you and we will talk about me and we will talk about poetry and history and people and in short we will have us a conversation. I am anxious about the transfusion Florence mentions; ask her please to let me know in a note how it was. How much of my hope and affection you have in all this you know. Take care of yourself, husband your strength for its best use, be as happy as you can in a work going brilliantly on and in a life far far better lived than most lives are. I will write again in a few days. Give my love to Florence, I am very sorry for the pressure I know must be on her, I wish I could help; I hope Mary Jane is helping, my love to her also.217 You cannot imagine how lonely I am here and painfully I wish I were there.

[UMN, TS]

10½ Appian Way

Cambridge, Mass.

1 December 1940

Dear Mr Warren

I am sending you, to consider for The Southern Review, Bhain Campbell’s poem OF THE PEOPLE AND THEIR PARKS. I do not like to say anything which you may think an attempt to influence your decision, but I hope I may say privately that I think the poem is very fine. I hope you will be able to accept it. Campbell has been painfully unlucky with editors; this I know is irrelevant, but it is true.

Mr Campbell is very ill; indeed he is dying; and I beg you to decide with Mr Brooks on the poem more rapidly than ever you decided on a poem before. I do not exaggerate: if you want to print the poem, the knowledge may be important to Campbell, and every day of delay will decrease his chance of hearing it. After two weeks, that chance, if it still exists, will be very slight.

If you accept the poem, please write him by airmail (I send postage) at 25 Palmer E., Apt 80, Detroit, Michigan. His wife will read him the letter; please say nothing to him of what I have told you. If you do not accept the poem, do not write him at all, but let me know at once.

With thanks for this,

Sincerely,

[UMN, MS]

Monday night [2 December 1940]

Dearest Bhain

You look Russian and I feel Russian, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t say ‘dearest’ as Chekhov did. Damn the Anglo-Saxon: one’s emotions exist to be used, not to be suppressed. Cambridge is especially glacial in this; Delmore & I have decided to buy a remote & warm island, where we invite you to come & stay. After the staff meeting we endured this afternoon, I can see the advantages even of a cold island. More pretentious than Wayne and nearly as stupid: Harvard is a haven for the boring and the foolish.

I sent Of the People & their Parks to Warren, but taste has reached an interesting low among editors, and I am ashamed to say that I don’t know whether the best editor in America will print one of the best recent American poems. Delmore liked the poem very much and wanted a copy, which I gave him. I am sorry he has not got a magazine—we would not have to deal with whims and politics.

No news but the correction of papers and some new asininity by Laughlin. Having slept on the train coming back, I feel better than I might. I hope you are better than you were, in particular that your breathing improves and that those sores disappear—if I could take them from you, I would. The worst is that everyone suffers and a time comes when no one can do another good. I wish merely that the great good you have done me could return for you. In a way it does, and my love always does.

John

[UMN, MS]

Tuesday night [3 December 1940]

Dearest Florence

I feel as if I would never be warm again. What can I say? I hope you are as calm as you can be, and less bitter than I am. But he is better tonight—this is true—than he was: no sorrow, no fatigue, no pain.218 His life was a brilliant and strong life—he has a right to rest. At last it is a painful thing one puts off gladly. Weep and be quiet and do not be sorry for him. We grieve for ourselves—he is well.

John

What I can do I want to; tell me. When you will feel more like reading, I’ll write again.

[UMN, MS]

I am at 121 Madison Avenue in New York.

22 Dec 1940

Dearest Florence

I hope this finds you better than my last letter must have found you—although if I am to judge your experience at all by mine, I cannot think it will. No doubt time changes grief; whether it makes of it anything one can bear is to be seen. I don’t think you will want news, so I shan’t give you any, except to say that I am decidedly unwell again—not that it matters. I wish I could come to Detroit, but that is impossible. I am required to go to New York for a few days; then I will be here again. When you can write, do, and ask Mary Jane to write me. If I can do anything, you have only to name it.

John

1941

[Columbia, MS]

10 ½ Appian Way

Cambridge

22 Jan 1941

Dear Mark

I do not feel precisely wonderful but I have just had a cable from B—she is well—and I am certainly better than I have been at any time since Campbell’s death, so I seize the moment to say it was good to see you. Your virtues, Sir, tax credulity in remembrance: they require experiencing to be credited. The boys are fine—I am very glad they are developing so rapidly and well; extend my curse to John especially and say that I will beat him soundly next time. You and Dorothy look well too. I am almost worried lest you invite catastrophe with your arrogant well-being.

I am better in prospect than at present, for Howard Baker has agreed to take on one of my sections next term.219 This will probably mean that I shall be able to go to bed and sleep at night. The notion so excites me that I have begun writing again. I have created an eighty-line poem which is so exceedingly & complexly ironic that I think it will have a great success when it is discovered among my effects. I suppose, for convenience, that the people who discover it will be able to read; if my students represent their generation, this is supposition indeed.

May the Muse be at your elbow while you revise. That is a labour I do not envy you. I have shortly, or some time, to make several of my own unpublished poems presentable—for my conscience, not a public—and I slink from it. Anticipating collapse, I think I shall go back to Detroit before I do; the doctors here remind me of the Anthology: “Phidon did not purge me with a clyster or even feel me, but feeling feverish I remembered his name and died.”220 But this is not a way to lure you here, and that is my object. Can’t you think of some valid excuse for coming? Back in the Puritan air, be moral in the Yard, relax, relax, all things are fair at Harvard. If I could come away I would; my bank would not like it. Item, I remain, lonely and incoherent, wishing you and your family well.

John

[UMN, MS]

Friday 21 March [1941]

Dearest Florence

Your letter came this afternoon and I sit down at once to thank you. I am much to blame for not having written. My health is fair, with the usual reservation; what has prevented my writing you, or doing indeed anything I very much wanted to do, is a fairly complete depression of spirit. My faculties have been really, for several months, paralyzed, and silence is the unpleasant result. Please don’t let this worry you or Mary Jane.

I am very sorry for your experience with the reading; I take it to have been terrible and I understand it. What to say? I wish we could talk. No one, I think, can tell whether you will continue to suffer it—certainly I can’t. For the present, I wonder whether the risk to you can be justified. I put the question thus, not, as you know, because I wish to justify it, but because I feel the same compulsion you do. And, I ought to tell you, the same personal reluctance.—In one fear I think you are wrong, when you say ‘considering that with every passing month it will be more difficult to get any house to print it.’ The value of what we want to print does not depend on any mere topicality; and indeed, practically, publishing (in the War) is now so chaotic that I consider it will precisely be easier to publish later. About these things, for myself, I feel no urgency; and I feel none for Bhain. Perhaps it all vanishes—we are lost together at once, whatever we have done. Or it keeps on, it is submitted to judgment and pleasure, and his fame is safe.—Perhaps this doesn’t answer your question. I would say consult your own good as he would have you do.

It appears simpler, of course, in a letter than actually it is. The safety of the manuscripts is to be considered, the tenacity of your memory (for the editing as well as for any biography) is to be considered. We ought to meet if we can. I don’t know your plans at all; mine are extremely vague, and they are determined by my practice, still, of the ancient virtue of poverty. The Spring ‘vacation’ here is the week after next (30th-6th)—probably I shall spend it here, having no money to go anywhere. Where will you be? The summer is completely obscure: I shall be penniless and distracted. England, Mexico, New York, Cambridge, Detroit and Bangkok occur to me as possibilities.

Tell me how Mary Jane’s condition appears to you. I am greatly worried. Working there keeps her nervous, exhausted, hysterical, and I don’t see how that will change. Although we were wrong, by the way, it seems to me, about the special danger.

I am glad to hear that you ‘get along very well’ if you do; I hope you are not overworked. About my books there is no hurry, I think the Donne is the only one I have wanted.

I have much more to say but I want this to make the post. I hope you will write again as soon as you can. Give my love to Mary Jane and Gene—and to Mrs. Campbell when you see her; my regards to anyone you think I care about. Ironically, Detroit, which I mainly hated, now fixes me with nostalgia. My best wishes and affection,

John

Bob would immensely like the letter—he is writing you. How painful it is to be unable to pray.

J

Read Mary Jane whatever part of this you like.

[UMN, TS]

10½ Appian Way

Cambridge

7 February 1941

My dear Mary Barnard,

I have to thank you for your letter and Mr. C. D. Abbott for his flattering request.221 If I did not reply to Mr Abbott’s letter, it was not because I was insensible of the honour he paid me—I was both sensible of it and grateful for it—but because my reasons for being unable to do what he asked are rather complicated. It was difficult also for me to think the request a very serious one; I supposed it would be quickly forgotten. Now that it is repeated, I must explain as well as I can.

Such a collection as the Library is making has no abstract value. It must be valuable as it is useful; individually considered, the materials must be useful; and only the states of a poem which is in the end good, or the manuscripts of a writer who is certainly good, can possess any interest or be legitimate materials. The Director, in short, it seems to me, must be certain of the excellence of what he wishes to preserve. I do not see how in this instance he can be certain; but I am aware that it is his judgment which matters, not mine, and if this were the only objection I could with a clear conscience do what I would like to do: send the Library some manuscripts. Unfortunately it is not. In sending anything I am committed to an approval of the request, an approval even of the preservation, to which it is impossible that I should honestly be committed. This has nothing to do with modesty; it has to do merely with the impropriety, on my part, of any judgment. With regret, therefore, I am forced to decline. If at any time my opinion should change, I will be very glad to send you what manuscripts you like.

Sincerely,

[Yale, MS]

10 ½ Appian Way

Cambridge

5 April 1941

Dear Oscar Williams

Schwartz and I are surprised by the non-arrival of copies of the anthology. Will you do something about them? If the advertisements are to be trusted, you have been distressingly catholic but at any rate you excluded some of the worst blackguards: bravo.

Sincerely

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

10 ½ Appian Way

Cambridge

16 April [1941]

Dear Rusty

I had lost your address—that is my sad excuse—and until Jean sent it me today I couldn’t post the book which I have had waiting for you for weeks.222 It is now in the mail; I hope you will like having it; don’t read it.

I think of you more often than the small acquaintance we have would seem to warrant. The reason for this I don’t know, and it is one of the things I plan to find out this weekend, when I will be in New York and when I will call you.

John

[UMN, TS]

Friday 25 April [1941]

Dear Rusty

Gari-gari. Why do you celebrate Russian Easter? I know your letter doesn’t want an answer but I shall answer it anyway. It surprised me pleasantly the other morning, now it puzzles me. Not utterly but rather. This is in return for your attack on my writing. Nevertheless: if you really can’t read that (you have done handsomely with the worst parts) I am sorry, and Jean will translate. Try the script in the book. My affection for typing exists but it is limited.

Nothing happens here except music and the occasional murder of a man by someone whom he has irritated. The war is pushing farther and farther back in history for its parallels; if this continues, it ought to reach, before we die, a point very interesting indeed. I had rather talk about two sentences in your letter which strike me as mysterious. Not that I can. I have a notion that we know each other just enough, and little enough, to make correspondence nearly impossible. We miss the perfect freedom of perfect unfamiliarity and we miss the ease of any accepted knowledge. It shines; it constitutes a challenge; crescendo in the treble. Qu’en pensez-vous?

I should have liked the drink en tous cas; my present gloom protects me against disease, and I wanted to see you. Let’s forget the book-promise you say you extracted. You did not. I confess the book is not one I like to give either to friend or stranger, but the promise I gave freely.

John

[Yale, MS]

4 May 1941

Dear Oscar Williams

I would not have gone to your G.B.M. affair for a good deal of money; anything more depressing than twenty writers and forty hangers-on gathered together I cannot just now conceive; but I hope that it went well for you and that you liked it.

Thanks for my copy of the anthology. Not having read it carefully, I will spare you my comments except to say that it is very handsomely made and that it looks as if you had done a good job. I imagine the collecting was not easy. The photograph of me, which I am sorry to see you reprinted, should certainly be credited to J.A. Fitzsimmons; it is copyrighted (1940) and he will be fed up. I hope you can do something about this.

Sincerely

John Berryman

Fitzsimmons’ studio is at 47 West 8th St.

[Columbia, MS]

10 ½ Appian Way

5 August 1941

Dear Mark

If I don’t write it’s not for any failure of respect or gratitude or affection; it’s because I have nothing to say which can possibly interest you without depressing you. You were right about that poem: silence it is, or almost silence. And no friends. The truth is that, lacking B., whom I have not seen for more than two years, I have lost my capacity for human society;—I do not feel any common ground with anyone except in music, and it is not enough for Society although it is enough—Haydn & Mozart—to keep me thinking & feeling.

Consider this, if you will, as a bulletin from a place which doesn’t exist, and don’t answer it, and don’t think about it. When I improve to the condition of humanity I’ll write again. You & Dorothy & the boys have my love meanwhile & always, and B. sends you hers.

John

[Houghton, TS]

121 Madison Avenue

New York, N.Y.

5 September 1941

Dear Jay

My thanks for the statement, one of the most depressing I have ever seen, and for the royalty cheque, which I am returning; I owe you twenty dollars or so. I am sorry for you that the anthology did so poorly from every point of view. It seems to me that everyone is responsible: the publisher, the contributors, the reviewers, the public. An instructive procedure.

I wrote you a letter some time ago about a pamphlet; which may have gone astray, or your answer may have done, or you may not have replied. This is just to say I did; there is no hurry about replying. After September twentieth write me at 49 Grove Street, Boston.

Yours,

J.B.

[UMN, TS]

10 ½ Appian Way

Cambridge

Saturday evening [September 1941]

Dearest Broom,223

The moving finger writes, and having WRIT, moves on. The current at 49 Grove is D.C. I shall say no more on this painful subject except to say that unless Bob can find me an inverter (you know as much about this as I do) for less than fifty dollars, I shall have to play records this year with my fingernails, blowing the turntable.

Otherwise things have gone well enough since we arrived—on Thursday, not Wednesday. Bob went smash into the rear of a car below the Merritt, dislocating our lights, so we spent the night in Hartford. I am typing therefore also; my right wrist was scraped and is still stiff. The apartment is as I remembered it or better, the decorators are finished, the moving people arrive at eleven on Monday morning. Let that hour be one of national prayer. My office is excellent, especially in the matter of bookcases, and we have moved about 150 volumes into it, relieving the pressure here. Records we took into Boston this morning; as many books as we can take will go in tomorrow. What other news is there? My mind is a chaos of memoranda. Do this, do that, phone these, phone those, repair this, drown that, poison the other. And I am merely preparing for the Trouble: on Monday it begins. So does yours, doesn’t it. I hope it will all go well for you with our militaristic friends. Allies I should say after the President’s fireside phillippic (misspelt, I imagine); if we don’t declare war Hitler will—if he has a spark of honour left in him, the cad.224 In the copy of FIVE KINDS OF WRITING you borrowed I have found some leg-art over your name. What subtle propaganda is this? Twisting her red locks and tapping her teeth. Quelle undergraduate Broom you look. I have thought since Wednesday of various things to say to you and ask you but I can’t remember any of them. I don’t think they were important. I am too tired to be serious. What are you reading? Don’t miss me, little Broom; when I am in a tenement less exacting than this one I shall miss you enough for both. As it is, I am slightly stupid and confused and I feel a lack, a lack, a lack. Bob is muttering something to me: we shouldn’t go in town because we should get to bed early. True, true, Horatio. But we are vaguely hungry and my cigarette tastes like a drain. What a long letter I have written! Formally, formally: my affection to Marie and James, to Jean, to the waiter at Asti’s in the dogdays, to the R.C.E.225 After many a summer dies the instructor. I’ll write you a little more plausibly after I have dealt with Monday. Good night, little Broom, be a good little Broom and do not work too hard or be unhappy at all. Love on the typewriter,

I kiss you by hand—

John

[UMN, MS]

Thursday [fall 1941]

Dear little Broom

I have been expecting a letter of reproach from you, and now I am worried. I hope you are all right—in health & spirit. I am not. If I have stopped work since I saw you I don’t know when it was. I have missed four nights’ sleep. My irritation increases daily. And a most disagreeable incident has occurred: one of my stupid boys saw fit to copy his long paper instead of writing it. Probably he will be expelled. I have small sympathy with the fool, because he has lied to me, but inevitably I am sorry for him.

My radiator pipes are popping & I’m very hungry. How are you? In the end I gave Erskine “Poems 1939–41” for the catalogue; I wrote the other title down & it looked like a penny shocker. What labour & anxiety for nothing. That is a fair sample of my present existence. My feeling is constant that one more piece of student asininity will unhinge me. I have not of course got anything done. But tomorrow (mañana) I finish the last set of papers, a new one, and over the weekend …

I will certainly be down for Thanksgiving—whenever that is; I haven’t the energy to go & look. Mother & Bob are very particular that you should take dinner with us on the holiday. Do you think you can forsake Marie for three or four hours? In return I’ll go out there with you on Friday or Saturday. Eh?—Did you get the Budapest subscriptions? Send me a programme, swine: I want to study it. I plan to leave after noon on Wednesday & arrive in time for the concert with you. Gay, n’est-ce pas?

News you want, do you? All right. I went at some time in the disorderly past to a Stradivarius concert which annoyed me sharply. They played a good Haydn quartet fairly well, and a boring-exciting (exciting in the variation movement) Hindemith fairly well, but Beethoven’s op. 130 they took now to be a circus, now to be a sea-chantey, & I fled in the middle to escape their Cavatina. Either they did better last Spring or I had then no taste. The tone of the 1st violin—one Wolfinsohn—particularly was excruciating. God save me from the Stradivarius Quartet.

One more try at Society. I had John Brinnin in one evening (last week?) and we talked about verse. I was weak with fatigue & drank wine & persuaded myself that it was endlessly pleasant. What it was like actually I don’t know, & I don’t care. I think I shall go to Mexico. Do you want to come? We can live—in fact we will have to live—on beans & amour (French for love).

John

[UMN, TS]

49, Grove Street

Boston, Mass.

13 November 1941

My dear B. H. Haggin

I read on the jacket of your new MUSIC ON RECORDS what is very good to hear if it is true, that you write besides your column a monthly bulletin on records.226 If you do I want to subscribe to it.

Since I am writing, it would not be decent to fail to express my gratitude to you for endless instruction and pleasure and advice. From no other musical criticism except perhaps Tovey’s have I learnt so much; and without the 1938 book I do not know how I should have set about buying records.227 I hope, although the gaps of time between your publications are depressing, that you are continuing or plan to continue the analyses begun in A BOOK OF THE SYMPHONY.228 A study of Quartets, or of Chamber Music generally, would be invaluable; after that, of Concertos, or a miscellany; some Purcell, some Bach, some Handel, a dozen Overtures, some Berlioz, Strauss, Debussy, Delius, Stravinsky, even Hindemith, Warlock, Walton. But Quartets! Do you think it quite impossible to take up key-relations in such a work? Anyone, however ignorant, after he has worked through several analyses can read notation well enough to profit from your indicating modulation. I can; and no one could know less. The precise record measurements, which must cost you immense and tedious labour, would not be necessary again, I am sure; one learns quickly to recognize on the page what one hears.

Please forgive my presuming to offer you advice. I wish to make what return I can. In running through the new book I have noticed half a dozen omissions which I think are inadvertent, and I may find others; if a list would be of any use to you I will be glad to make one. And in another edition would it not be useful to mention some of the great withdrawn sets? They can occasionally still be had: I bought this summer some brilliant Schubert discontinued by the insensate companies, the Budapest D Minor Quartet and the Cortot-Thibaud-Casals Trio Op. 99.

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, MS draft of telegram]

Sunday evening

16 Nov. 1941

25 wds. reply prepaid

NO LETTER FOR TWO MONTHS ANGEL ARE THEY LOST SAY IF LOST HAVE YOU HAD MINE MY HALF DOZEN WE MUST AGREE SIMPLY SUSPENSE INTOLERABLE

LOVE

JOHN BERRYMAN

1942

[UMN, MS]

I thought you might like the New Year’s verse.

Friday evening [mid-January 1942]

I shall have to hurry to catch the mail. I have been almost perfectly miserable or I’d have written earlier this week. And you! Why didn’t you write me about the wedding? Mother told me a good deal, but not of course what you thought. We talked also about you & me; she repeated what she had told you, & I explained my own feelings thoroughly for the first time. You & I must talk. I would come down tomorrow if I’d any money: I am “free”—except for a set of long papers, the examination on Thursday next & the correction of it,—until February 1st. But poverty. If you feel at any time that you can come up here I shall be delighted. Your job is not going to end?—I hope.

The manuscript for Jay I have finished except for copying. There was room for very little; but I am satisfied with the make-up. Mostly political poems, & dedicated to Bhain.229 ^I have composed an Epilogue.^ Otherwise I have corrected papers, fought off a cold, talked to my students, played chess with Jason |learn to play chess, Broom.|, and done some serious reading—a novelty of late.

What about you? I was glad to hear of the evening with Giroux. What Mozart are you hearing tomorrow? (I have just talked with Mother.) I don’t think I can be musicless much longer.—Op. 135, by the way, I have, done by the Leners.230 I agree with you.

No servant yet. What of it? I am fed up with pretending to be alive when in fact I am not. And Harvard wants us to teach next summer—a service for which we may be paid and we may not. Such is the magnanimity of Harvard.—Good night, little Broom, hap have a happy dream, & be as cheerful as possible in this lovely new year of 1942—

I love you dearly.

John

[UMN, MS]

Wednesday—7 p.m. [?7 January 1942]

My dear Broom

Were you able to find the [?Linz] & the Brechts? Your note was very sweet & told me nothing at all. Shame on you. Have you been sleeping? I have. I have corrected a few papers too. I feel wonderful. And society! I had luncheon on Monday with Jason, dinner with Delmore & Gertrude, & coffee late (I was working in my office) with an interesting student named Works. I think I will move two Squares over & open a Salon.

In a few minutes I’m going off to hear a Philadelphia company do Figaro in English at the Opera House. Tonight opera & I come face to face. I am giving it every chance, but if it doesn’t please me, WOE!! I spent the afternoon reading the ridiculous libretto & listening to the Glyndebourne recording, in Paine Hall at Harvard.231 That good music should be spent on such trash—it seems to me at this moment—is just short of criminal. To make matters worse, the translation I saw is of a blackness & vice unspeakable. The translator invents & omits as if he had no original; whenever a lyric occurs in the Italian the son of a bitch writes a lyric of his own—and quite the worst lyric I have ever seen; I could have translated the thing as well myself. Not that that piece of trash is worth my time—worth Mozart’s how much less! Da Ponte’s technique is this:232 he takes a situation up to a point beyond which recovery (supposing that the audience is to recover also) is impossible; then he takes the situation well past that point (part of the audience sleeps & part of it froths with rage); and then he “recovers”. What Mozart did with all this I faint to see, or think I will faint to see—the recording omits recitative, of course. But Figaro’s aria “non più andrai” is one of the finest compositions I have heard, really magnificent. So off I go. I’m sure, by the way, that it will prove a mistake to do the opera in a language ^the audience^ understands or is supposed to understand: God help anyone who knows what is going on: I think he will rush out mad. I expect to check my brain with my coat, keeping only my ears. À bientôt.

—My impressions were very complicated. It’s late & cold; I’ll give you a few. Try to imagine the overture done without urgency or even continuity, in short without force. I wished I had checked my ears. Then the singing began, according to some observers. I could not be sure, but what I heard bore no relation to what I heard this afternoon. The Countess particularly was unbearable; she changed her costume in every act, but when I left at 11:30 she had still not produced a sound to which one could listen without shuddering. A tenor sang Cherubino, and he was—a tenor. I think he realized he had no voice and thought this defect entitled him to perfect freedom in the direction of buffoonery. The orchestra, from having been simply inadequate, became positively ragged; I had a sense that the conductor had lost control of it, and that at any moment any man might play anything. Some in fact did. Finally, the ensemble singing—from duets to all—outdid, for mere inefficiency, anything I ever heard or imagined.

Nevertheless I stayed to the end, I am glad that I stayed, I enjoyed some things casually & other things intensely, and it is possible that opera and I will get on after all. Very important, I learnt that my objections to Da Ponte’s libretto have no force as I listen & watch: I am absorbed in each scene & I worry neither about the past nor the future. Such continuity as interests me is musical; though the performance was so poor really that I don’t pretend to have heard the music well. Some I scarcely heard at all: the players & singers blocked it off. I had finally to cease to listen for what I knew I would not hear. Listening thereafter on a different level, I heard much that pleased me. The man who played Figaro, although he was very bad in the set pieces, had a dry, energetic way with recitative which I thought excellent. Antonio, the gardener, was wonderful in his first scene. Even the Count showed signs of life at the end of the Second Act and he made me roar with laughter in the Third. The translation, a new one by Sylvan Levin (the man who conducted), was vulgar now & then, but the audience liked it constantly & I liked it mainly; much was lost of course. I found English not so distressing as I expected, painful as the language is to listen to, sung; I would rather have heard Italian. After the end of Act II, in brief, I didn’t consider leaving. But neither did I expect any absolute Mozart. Well, preceding the moment and at the moment of the final discovery near the end of Act IV, things must have gone well on the stage and in the pit, and suddenly I found I could not breathe. The excitement of great music. It was as simple & as amazing as that.

And now I must go to bed. I’ll post this, dear, and wish you with it a quiet & sweet good night. My love,

John

[Houghton, TS]

49 Grove Street

Boston

Sunday 1 February [1942]

Dear Jay

This typescript was ready long ago; I lost it. Where? In this room. You ought to see the room. My mother may be here somewhere also; I can’t remember whether she went back to New York or not when she was last here. I haven’t yet found the copies of the contract, but I have just turned this up and I am sending it off at once. The contract I liked very well; you’ll have it, signed, as soon as I can find it. One piece of information I think was missing, the date of publication, but Albert told me November, which I hope is right.233 Towards the end of the year, at any rate. I don’t know whether you pitched on Hawthorn House as a kindness to me or not, but I take the choice as one and I am grateful.234

The Ms. was very easy to make up, since there is room in the 32 pages for practically nothing. It is closely unified, as I read it, and will not disgrace your noble house. The dedication is important; I want a blank page (page “6”) to stand after it and set it off from the poems proper. I studied lengths, by the way, allowing to a page title-and-25-lines or 30-lines-full, as in Baker’s and Prince’s; and I think you will find the Ms. exactly correct in length.235 It is complete here except for the Copyright page with acknowledgments, which I can’t finish just yet: two of the poems are unpublished and Ransom has them.

I have a slight bone to pick. One of my letters to you was exhibited last month in Widener and cost me two hours’ rage. If a possibility exists that anything of the sort will happen at any time in the future, I would like the letters destroyed or returned to me. Sorry, but I feel very strongly about this. Otherwise I am all goodwill. ND this year is much the best you have put out, although the verse as usual limps and creaks—if you could find more as good as your own you would do better. Especially the poem about the pencil in your pocket is very handsome.236 Come in and see me when you are near here again. I’ll play you some Warlock.

Yours,

John

[Haffenden, TS]

49, Grove Street

Boston

Tuesday 3 Febr 1942

Dear Milt

It is amusing is it not that after all this time I should be in a hurry when I write to you. However, je suis. I have only just got your address from your parents and I am going tomorrow to New York for several days: a place from which I never can write a letter to anyone. And I have a heavy cold and it is fairly late and I am at this moment back from one of the best concerts I have ever heard—the Budapest playing a late Haydn quartet, Mozart’s K.387, and the first Razoumovsky [sic], in case you care enough to be jealous. I must take a hot bath and go to bed.

Probably it is just as well, the hurry. What the devil are we to say to each other after such a lapse and at this moment of the world’s history? I don’t know even whether you want to hear from me. I hope you do. But what to say is a puzzle; I feel nine-tenths out of touch. I could ask you some familiar questions with unfamiliar intensity. For example, are you really married? The concept reached me but I have not been able to do anything with it. If it is true it is immensely important, as important as the concept and the fact that I am not married; but it can’t be understood as a piece of news, and that of course is how I had it. Tell me if you will. I could ask about You And The Army also, and I do. And what your state of mental health is. What is the censorship of letters like? I have no useful idea of what we can talk about and what we can’t.

There are a few to stand for hundreds. If they are unpleasantly abstract, remember the space they are supposed to cover, and attribute them in part to the music, which has exhausted, as usual in its particulars, my feeling at the moment for all particulars. What would you like to know about me? (That ‘about’, that external ‘about’, really touches the attitude.) My life goes on in the interesting path you know; but it has got very far down in the past year, in spite of the addition of Rusty and the addition of music. My brother and Barbara having moved to New York, I live alone in a comfortable, filthy apartment on Beacon Hill.237 I am still teaching at Harvard, a college I like less every hour. My health oscillates between the indifferent and the unspeakable; the Army have rejected me. I try to write and I don’t often succeed; I publish almost nothing, I see almost nobody. I am very gloomy. Well! Have I missed anything? If I have, ask me about it in the letter which you are going to write me—immediately, my boy.

Yours as usual,

John

I am going to airmail this letter because of the possibility your mother mentions of your being shipped off somewhere at any time. Please tell me as much as you can about the possibility, Milt; and about your training.

[UMN, TS]

Frequency modulation? overseas reception?238

49, Grove Street

Boston

8 March 1942

Dear Mr Haggin

Thanks for your letter about the machine. My mother, having recently suffered a complicated “business” misfortune, I don’t think now wants to buy it; but I do, very much, and if matters arrange themselves for me as I hope they may, I shall. I can’t know for several weeks, but meanwhile there are various questions to be answered, mine as well as yours, and I hope you will not object to the delay.

Before I try to answer your questions, or most of them, let me ask some of my own, since on your answers in part depend mine.

The whole sum of money involved being for me so considerable, I would like to know how old the machine is, to what extent its age has affected it (in need for replacements, for example), what expectation of life it reasonably has. How much servicing does it normally require, at what usual cost to you? Do you know whether there is anyone in Boston who can service it? Or install it, for that matter? How many tubes?—is it likely to get WQXR from here, with or without aerial? I shall need a converter; what wattage intake and output has the machine? The speaker I remember as being 15″, but whether single or double I don’t know, and I don’t know the frequency ranges of it and the amplifier. What cu. in. volume has the speaker-cabinet?—which I would certainly want. Transportation strikes me as the devil, the machine being so delicate; do you suppose trucking would be safe?

I am willing to do as you like about the radiogram-cabinet, to take yours or to have one built. If you decide not to sell yours, will the equipment fit into a small chairside cabinet?—this is what I would like best, but it may be very dear. Either the G.I. motor with weighted turntable, or the Garrard AC-DC motor, is satisfactory, I think you said. The Audax Pro-2 cannot now be bought, can it, if you decide not to sell yours; how much has use affected the pickup? What is the best other,—the Brush PL25? How good is it? If I understand what I have heard and read—it’s quite possible that I don’t—the frequency range of the whole machine is determined by the most limited range in it, whether the pickup’s, the amplifier’s, or the speaker’s.

That’s enough! Forgive me for so many questions, many of them no doubt stupid; how little I know, you are aware. I hope your new machine will be as fine as you expect.

I recently hunted down and copied the Sitwell poems used by Walton in “Façade”; it took a fair time, and I think the text is a help in listening, so I made two copies, of which I am sending one with this letter in case you may find it useful.239

Sincerely

[UMN, TS]

Sunday 22 March [1942]

Dear little Broom,

Try as I will I cannot remember what I wrote to you last—when was it, a week ago? ten days? two weeks?—but I have the feeling that the letter hurt or offended you. No doubt properly: I have developed, for worse, a habit of fulness in communication with you which does not let me appear much less disagreeable on paper than I am in person. I hope the tide has no farther to go; if it has, I will not be the same man when it returns. What has happened? Nothing has happened. To be sure, a few facts stare at me when I try to sleep, but their characters are so complex, and bound so in complex relations, that they hardly submit themselves to statement. I have almost abandoned hope for the rest of my poem. There is a whole area of experience and despair. The last word I have from or of Beryl is of November first, last year. There is another. The newspapers are another. It is plain plain plain that the murderous complacency, inefficiency and greed of the governments of America and England have condemned us to a war which will last needless and shocking years if we are able indeed to prolong it; or to Fascist domination; whatever I think can happen now, to the extinction of the possibilities of human life. In history, if there is to be any history, our period will look sordid and unreal, but as it unfolds day by day in its items it is real enough and no farther sordid than a flame. How did the American look? With an air of righteousness, and waving contracts, he walked to his doom. And he walked to his children’s doom, and the doom of the imagination. Very well. Condemned to my role, I am walked for. But my emotions as spectator are uncontrollable, and they are horror and grief.

It is not even clear how I am to make a living while our culture dissolves. (Forgive my irony; it is irresistible and proper for these things.) Delmore told me some time ago that the rate of payment which was being discussed in University Hall for summer teaching was $500; more than you remember I hoped for, and a very fair rate, being slightly over half what Harvard has to pay for the same amount of work under normal conditions. Nevertheless of course I was delighted: it would take up the slack of bills I can’t control during the year on $50 a month, it would pay some of my debts, and about half of it I planned to devote to two humanizing devices—Haggin’s gramophone, and a set of the 14th Britannica which I have found for an incredible $40. Handsome of Harvard, I thought; I breathed easily. I breathed somewhat too soon. Shortly thereafter I talked with Morrison; and I am glad of the earlier air, because I have not breathed since. I asked for the interview, wanting the summer job very badly now. He could tell me nothing definite about it. And when I went on to speak about next year, he could tell me nothing about that either! except that there would be no salary raises, and of course he hoped to be able to reappoint the men who would normally expect reappointment (I am one). Everything depends, he said, on the size of the enrollment. Which is a statement as close to a lie as any I ever heard from a man I consider honest. But the situation is complicated; ask me about it when we meet. What matters is that I may very suddenly and simply be without a job in the autumn.

Well, it is a small thing, but presumably I have got to keep on living, my lease here is an obligation, my debts I have always with me, and how I should find a new position I can’t see. Politics: university teaching is nothing else, and I have no talent for them. After two years at Harvard, I know exactly three men, all of them useless to me elsewhere. I have taught at times brilliantly, at times well, at times badly, and no one has given a damn except my students; in fact, no one has known anything about it. Reticence and solitude apparently are luxuries. My literary reputation, where it has penetrated, probably would do me as much harm as good if I were to offer myself about. And that is precisely what I cannot do—offer myself about, hawk myself. Can you see it? “Have some fairly fresh Berryman—going horribly cheap!” Delmore’s view, as usual, is novel: he took the news as good news, said he had been reading my poems recently with constantly fresh perceptions, and concluded that nothing could be better than for me to lose my job. His health is very poor, by the way, and he is as gloomy as I have ever seen him. We have had some admirable conversations. Yesterday we pounded Hart Crane by turns until there was nothing left of the poor fool except some beautiful and aimless images. These conversations and Henry James and music (late Beethoven, late Beethoven) are my diversions, my way of getting from one day to the next.

A ten days’ Easter interval begins on Thursday, but it is impossible that I should get to New York; I can scarcely feed myself. If you wanted to come up and could, then or later, (because of my poverty I hardly like even to say this) it would please me greatly. Write, at least; and forgive me if I hurt you, Broom. I love you dearly,

John

Say nothing to Mother of what is unpleasant here; perhaps you had better not mention having heard at all; I am writing her very differently.

See verso of p. 1.

I’ve not talked yet with a priest; my mind is not free and my temper poor.—What has happened chez Jerome Campbell? Chez Peter Hamilton & Barbara (is it?)? Chez ta tante? Chez Marie? Most important, what is your health like? And if you’ll give me Jean’s address I’ll send her a note on the joys of motherhood.

J.

Reading the verbatim 1938 ^Moscow^ trials, I find that Bukharin & the others were mainly & obviously guilty—but with what abstraction & complexity! The testimony is absolutely amazing.240

[UMN, MS]

Friday morning [27 March 1942]

What you tell me of Jean & of the way in which your sister was cared for is heartbreaking—the whole world is miscarrying—you & I ought to, by sympathy. Jean fortunately I hadn’t written; I have now, although I shall be amazed if she receives the letter—your writing of the name of the sanatarium [sic], Broom, is simply unspeakable: I scarcely could guess at it. Tell me how the miscarriage came about. I pray it resulted from an accident, was not natural.—If you sent my note on to Marie, I’m glad that luck prevented my speaking more, in it, about James.. I too wish you could take her away: no one ever more plainly needed or deserved a rest. If ever she stops loving her husband, God help her—if He will! He seems to be on vacation.

Or he is at 49 Grove St. I am writing—how well I can’t judge with precision—but writing.

It’s pleasant to hear of your raise, you wealthy old Broom. Now you can support me when Harvard finds me too feeble to quaver out assignments any more—which may be, as I said, any moment. I shall want three dollars a week, free, without obligation, and dog biscuits on Tuesday. In return for the dog biscuits I engage to write immortal verse. And well I may! Dog biscuits represent for me an increase in the standard of living.

What are the dates, as well as you can make them out, of nature’s outrage this time? I ask because if I really and incredibly am able to finish my poem during the next days, I shall certainly not be content to sit lonely until Monday next when Harvard marches on. In fact, I would desire a session, darling, with your white & beautiful body—unless my labour will have made me impotent. Pardon my lust. Kiss, kiss. I very much wish you were here now. I can work, as I told you, only at night—during the day I rage & wait. I shall want you to see the poem too—in that happy, far-off event. I’ll write again early next week & report. Save yourself, over Marie & Jean, what sorrow you can; I know it won’t be much.

My dear love,

John

[UMN, MS]

Tuesday night [spring 1942?]

Harvard needs me, summer, autumn, winter, spring. So I saw my bank, successfully, and am buying THAT GRAMOPHONE. I swoon with delight.

Probably I will be down again, therefore—on Thursday or Friday according to what Haggin & Mother write. I want to drive it up on Saturday if possible.

How are you, little Broom? Do you sleep nights? I don’t. Is the R. C. E. holding my Choral Symphony?? It’s crucial. I have corrected one million papers and talked to every student in Harvard College. Now for the rest—

Farewell & love,

J.

[UMN, TS]

49 Grove Street, Boston

Thursday 14 May 1942

Dear Bob

They came this morning while I was going through Antony and Cleopatra, and I read them this afternoon—with perhaps more charity, for that overwhelming difference, than they deserve. Since my mind is occupied, I think I will write down my impressions at once, hold the letter, and check after a day or so. I read the books completely but fast.241

Rhys, whom I read first because I knew him briefly in 1938 and liked him, is disappointing. How little the life he has been leading gets into the verse: how little and how clumsily gets in. One guesses and supplies and hopes, and it is not enough, not in any poem. The trick adjective, the sprawl of the versification, the uptodate syntax, the formless emotions; these block the life out, any sort of life. Some objects, a few perceptions, nothing else that I can see.

Alan Rook’s earliest poems are tidy and empty; he is a kind of undergraduate Swinburne. Then (in “Pre-War City”) ENTER AUDEN, the Auden of Look Stranger; and the poems improve instantaneously, they make pleasant reading, even where Rook’s characteristic lushness gets loose. But every poem thereafter in this book is dominated, everywhere Falls the shadow, and Rook seems to make no attempt to move out from under it, unless “Dunkirk Pier” is an attempt. Still, still, they are sensible for ‘war poems’: most of what we can expect will be much worse.

In Sidney Keyes I see nothing, so far, beyond the facility possessed usually by two or three boys in any large University. His last poem is the best; he may learn.

Wounded Thammuz interested me more than I would have supposed such a substance conceived in such a style could interest me; but that is not, frankly, very much. Although Heath-Stubbs looks after his metres, on the whole controls his diction, invents decently within his limits, now and then does a passage like III of “Midwinter Valley”, I would paraphrase Johnson: “It is done rather well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”242 Surprised and pained: I would like to talk with that young man for two hours. No doubt my sympathy with this verse—the neo-neo-classical—is defective. But the studied invocation of Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser; the rhetoric; the warmed-over similes; the ubiquitous Bridges!

Monday 18 May. I lack the patience to read them again, Robert, even for you. If I were attempting to arrive at a considered judgment I should have to; but you didn’t ask for that, and my curiosity is sufficiently employed elsewhere at the moment. Let me generalize my impressions of last week.

First I should say something of the levels of judgment, which are two here. For instance, I do not think MacLeish and Gregory very good poets, but it is clear that they ought to be published; their work pleases many perceptive readers, and it deserves to be made available for judgment.243 The “critical” level is stiffer than the “publishing” level.

On the critical: None of the four is mature, none has much energy, none has much originality. Rook and Heath-Stubbs are the best, Rook a fair example of period style, Heath-Stubbs a fair example of anachronism. Neither of them seems to be going anywhere, although nothing in the composition of verse can be predicted with much assurance.

On the publishing: All but Keyes are worth exhibition, and the two best may be worth importing. Rook, indecently publicized, might even become popular; he is hardly inferior to Rupert Brooke.

I doubt that the close study which I ought to give these books, and would give them if I were less occupied, would alter these opinions much.

I wish I could ask you to send me the biography of Yeats, but I have no money.244 Perhaps next month I shall; it is very doubtful. What I want nearly as passionately as I want that book is records, Columbia records: the Budapest Schubert Opus 163! their K.421! their Opus 131! Beecham’s Paris Symphony! Haydn’s 93rd! Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto! Franck’s D Minor! I have forgotten the discount you said you could get; torment me by telling me again. My cabinet I actually expect tomorrow, but I shall be very surprised if it comes. Nothing external has happened except that I printed a poem in The Nation last week and an anthologist has already written to ask me for it.245 The pace of life is rattling us to our graves.

Yours,

[Houghton, TS]

49, Grove Street

Boston

25 May 1942

Dear Jay,

The copies of our Agreement have come and I am studying them. Articles I and V I don’t like very well. I’ll write to you about them tomorrow or Wednesday.

I congratulate you on publishing, or making ready to publish, “Genesis”, of which Delmore let me read Book One last week. It will be certainly the first major work you have brought out; if you ever bring out another, you can count yourself immortal twice. My firm and clear opinion, based on Book One, is that “Genesis” is one of the greatest imaginative works of the century and a work with which, in penetration, range, intelligence, no other American poem of any period can comfortably be compared. Its steadiness and centrality bring to bear, in fact, on all recent poetry and on most of the poetry of the last century, a devastating perspective. For a comparison in English poetry, critics will have to go to the “Prelude”, a poem very uneven in inspiration, and to the greatest of the earlier works. I hope you will produce the poem in something like an appropriate form and can manage to break up the cabal of reviewers. “Genesis”, whatever they can do, will make its way through them, but they can delay it and can cause its author unpleasant hours.

Yours,

John

[UMN, TS]

49, Grove Street

Boston

15 June 1942

Dear Edmund Thompson

The return of the dummy has been delayed by a heavy cold and by contract delays; I hope that you’ve not been inconvenienced.

It will look very well, I think, as indeed every book of yours I have seen looks well. The only considerable changes I have made are on the dedicatory page, and on pages 7 and 11; three or four words and some pointing are altered elsewhere. The acknowledgments are to be inserted in the middle of the copyright page, without heading, in small print.

If one may without disrespect express preferences, I shall say that I would like the titlepage simplified: the “Poems 1939–1940” on a single line, the author’s name either above or below that line without “by”, and the “The Poet of the Month” made less conspicuous (as it was in Baker’s pamphlet last year) by being placed with “New Directions”, etc., and in the same face, all capitals. The cover I hope can be light blue (but without any red in it), and the stock yellowish, as A Letter from the Country was. On the cover, too, I want “Poems 1939–1940” to stand in a single line: the “Poems” standing alone, as it does now, misrepresents this very casual and slight collection.

Thank you for the trouble you have taken and will take with the thing.

Sincerely,

[Columbia, MS]

49 Grove St., Boston

6 July 1942

Dear Mark

Everything related to Beryl has been so painful to me during the last months—even you, of whom I know she is fond—that I seem to have forsaken human obligations altogether. Forgive me. I have still not heard, it is now seven months or so, and the relations are scarcely less painful in reality, but I am becoming insensitive. Not when I prepay the reply to a cable do I hear; I understand nothing and I am on my way to feeling nothing but stupor.

I have been stopped too by my wish to write you adequately about the Mayfield Deer and my inability to do it while I was absorbed—I don’t say profitably absorbed—by a work of my own. “Boston Common” has kept me thus on edge since February; and two weeks ago, on finishing it, instead of giving up verse forever, I went directly into something else, longer, more difficult, unfamiliar, which will occupy me for months, and keeps a critical letter impossible still.246 Resignation; so I send you “Boston Common.” My grandmother complained once to an old friend of her own generation, a doctor, that she thought she was losing the use of her good ear: ‘Never mind, Mrs Little,’ said the doctor, ‘We all hear too much anyway.’ We all talk too much, we talk too much about poetry. The point is to write it; when you can’t write it, read it & drink & sweat & don’t talk about it. If poetry is liked, that seems to me—at this very gloomy moment—enough.

I was glad to hear Columbia at last honoured themselves by creating you Professor. Are you writing? I hope you & Dorothy & the boys are all well in this third year of the War—the war which the American & British governments have obviously decided had better last a while longer. That extension means the death of certain Russians & Chinese & Czechs & Poles & Frenchmen—to say nothing of Americans & Englishmen, and the practical extinction of the Greek race—does not seem to bother our great leaders at all. War aims? An invasion of the Continent? ‘Nonsense. Underestimate production, exaggerate our victories. Take it easy. We can’t lose.’ And it’s quite true: we can’t lose. As for time: nothing is at stake except the possibility of civilization.

I am here all summer, teaching from early August on. No, I’m going to New York tomorrow or next day, for materials Widener hasn’t got & for my mother’s birthday. It will be odd: I haven’t been down for months. I take it you are in Connecticut like all sensible men, but I send this to 393 as safer, and I’ll ring up on the chance. A week or ten days, no more; I am passionate to get a good deal done before Harvard claims me again, and New York is distracting. Here I live like a hermit, and am a hermit except that I am your very good & affectionate friend,

John

In New York, 121 Madison, if you want to write. But I don’t see why you should want.

[Columbia, MS]

49 Grove St. Boston

9 / 10 August 1942

Dear Mark

I don’t know what interest you have kept, through the lacerations, in my affairs, but I think you will want to know that Beryl has written to dissolve our hopeless & terrible engagement and I have agreed with her. My love has hardly lessened but it has changed and meanwhile the kind of life which exactly I must lead has been impossible; I am three-quarters in pieces. She has been very ill too—two operations—has withdrawn altogether, she says, from feeling life & sticks simply, alive, to her job,—evidently an important one: assistant to the Continental Head of British Intelligence.

There is no need to say how I felt over this; but after ten days of it I looked at my life and I looked at my love for Rusty and I went down to Connecticut on Friday night & asked her to marry me. We sat all night in a restaurant in a town where neither of us had ever been before, and she said she would. So I have a chance—a chance at health & work, life even so far as the war will permit it. I am horribly nervous about the ceremony itself, as well as all the rest—and I don’t know when it will be—but I wanted you to know this much.

I wonder often what you are thinking & doing. At this hour—it is four-thirty in the morning—painful doubts arise: and my insomnia shows me this hour more than I like. I hope all is well with you. My conscience is troubled because tomorrow, or later today, I begin to give at Harvard a wartime English A which in fact has become a High School course, and I cannot resign, owing money. I am sorry for the boys—for everyone alive tonight. ‘Dream me some happiness.’247

Yours always

John

[Houghton, TS]

49, Grove Street

Boston

29 August 1942

Dear Laughlin

I was interested to find my pamphlet on sale in a bookshop yesterday—two months before the time of publication we agreed on. This whim of yours may cost me forty or fifty dollars: “A Point of Age” has been in the hands of The Kenyon Review for months, and Ransom wrote me in March that he expected to print it if the Review continued. The next issue appears in September. I am aware that the loss of forty or fifty dollars, and particularly my loss of forty or fifty dollars, is nothing to you; no more than a breach of agreement; but I am told that I should hold you responsible for the money if Ransom wants to print the poem and now cannot. And I hold you responsible.

I was interested also to find the title changed, either by you or by someone responsible to you. Which? And why? This strikes me as belonging to the same order as the “latest” and the other mistakes and nonsense of your blurb inside the cover. I planned to use the title Poems for my whole first book when it is published, and I am sorrier and angrier than I can tell you for the insolence of this change.

Kindly have sent to Jill Berryman at 121 Madison Avenue, New York, the six copies which no doubt you intended ultimately to send me.

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

49 Grove Street

Boston

22 November 1942

Dear Mr Hastings:

I write to you, as my landlord, because I am extremely dissatisfied with the way in which your agents, Wm. C. Codman & Son, have cared and are caring for the apartment which I rent from you, and because I have no reason to suppose that you are acquainted, as in so shocking a case I consider you ought to be, with what is being done in your name. The immediate and main story concerns the electric refrigerator in the apartment, and the story is grotesque; it might be humorous, even, if it did not involve the daily discomfort and exasperation of two victims, my wife and myself, and if the circumstances it describes had not cost me already, in money, not less than $75.

From the time I moved into the apartment in September of 1941, the refrigerator ran too hard: it froze solid nearly anything put into it and it made my bills for electricity very high. Protests to the Janitor had no effect, until suddenly, after a whole year had passed, without warning, without my knowledge or consent, the regulator was taken off and the refrigerator left useless. All the food in it at the time of course spoiled; I began to take my meals in restaurants. This was on the eleventh of September. I was told by your agents that it would be working again in a day or so; in a few days; in two weeks; in three weeks, in four weeks, in five weeks. When I went to New York to be married, late in October, I insisted that it be repaired by the time I returned with my wife. It was not. During this whole time no one at the Codman office saw fit to apologize to me, and no one there voluntarily gave me any information: I had always to call them. During the whole time I was forced to take my meals out, and my wife and I were forced to take our meals out; we had, in short, a furnished room, not an apartment. After two months—months of extraordinary inconvenience and expense and annoyance and humiliation—the regulator was replaced. This was on the thirteenth of November. The refrigerator then worked; but in what way it had been repaired was not easy to see: it ran still, always, too hard. Your agents had cost me time and anger and a great deal of money—for exactly nothing. And now the story enters the realm of fantasy.

The refrigerator worked for only six days. It or its generator then developed a high-pitched scream which would be heard everywhere in the apartment and made my wife so nervous that it had to be shut off; I called the Codman office and they sent a technician and he ‘fixed’ it. The next day the same thing happened. The next day the same thing happened. The next day the same thing happened. That was yesterday. Last night the refrigerator blew out a fuse, and for at least fifteen hours now, again, full of food, it has not worked. There it sits. And we have not the slightest reason—have we—to believe that what will be done to it by your agents tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will be any more efficient or any more honest than what has been done to it heretofore.

One expects such treatment in a tenement. In an apartment for which one is asked $60 a month it strikes me as unusual, and especially does it strike me as unusual in an apartment which is administered by agents who are said to have a reputation for honest dealing. I trust that it will seem to you so. I think, in fact, and I have reason to think, that you have known nothing of what has happened; that you have not had, until now, direct responsibility for it. For much that my wife and I have endured, unfortunately, nothing can be done now by way of restoration. What is important is that some radical revision of the rent for this period be made and that we be free from such irresponsible incompetence in the future. If this affair of the refrigerator were the only matter in which I had suffered—am suffering—at the hands of your agents, I might take a different view of it; but it is one of many. Last winter, for three weeks, the temperature in the apartment remained between 55 degrees and 60 degrees, and I suffered in consequence illness which necessitated my absence from Harvard. And at some time during the last few months my trunks and bags were moved, without my knowledge, from the locked storeroom in which they were to a storeroom which was unlocked: a trunk containing valuable books and papers has since been stolen. I am confident that these matters too can hardly have had your sanction, and that you will be as amazed by the whole account as I am sorry to have been forced, in final self-protection, to lay it before you.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[TCD, TS]

49, Grove Street,

Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

21 December 1942

My dear Brian,

I was listening today to Warlock’s “Curlew” and thinking of you.248 Where has the War tossed you? I don’t see you as a warrior, but then I as little saw you as having anything to do with a brewery or as a biochemist. I hope at least that you are well and have suffered as little as possible, in yourself, and through your friends. If this reaches you—I haven’t much hope that it will—it would be good of you to let me hear. I hear very little: Gordon Fraser is in Intelligence, Pat Barton I think is with the Army somewhere abroad.

Did you publish, ever, the settings of “Red Hanrahan” and the Joyce song and my Cradle Song?249 I often wish I remembered them better. If you have any curiosity about me, I can tell you that I listen to Mozart and teach at Harvard and write and have been rejected by the Army and am in a sort of coma waiting for the War to end. My best wishes for you always,

Yours,

John Berryman

1943

[Haffenden, TS]

5 January 1943

over, another PS

P. S. Forgive my not typing. I have just broken a finger correcting themes.250

Dear Milt,

The Spirits Ironic & Sinister must have spent their force on you by now. That is the only bearable inference I can draw from Harriet’s accident, for which I am as sorry as you can imagine.251 I hope she is mending quickly now or is quite well, and marked as little as possible. Our helpless sympathy to both of you.

The best I is do can to [sic] write you an amusing letter, but je n’en peux plus. My thoughts just now would amuse nobody but Satan who has a taste I am told bizarre bizarre; they make him howl. Later, if a certain View is correct, they will make me howl. So much for metaphysics. What ball do you mean? I have lost some myself, but I would be hardpressed to say that one less paralyzed me more than the others. Humph. All I know is what my students tell me.

The Life of William Ewart Gladstone

On a certain night in March, 1809, John Gladstone turned to his wife in bed and cleared his throat. This was the beginning of the career of William Ewart Gladstone, the greatest English statesman of the century.

Your surmise that I am now an assistant professor amuses Satan too. Halliday! the Army has turned your wits. I am precisely what I was three years ago, an Instructor, and I am paid less money, and the money buys less. If I were not by now unfitted by the universities for serious existence, I would get a job as a Postman. Fortunately I have as little desire for academic distinction as I have to become a Captain of Artillery; but unfortunately I early acquired a taste for food & clothing, et cetera, of which I find it difficult to rid myself. Harvard upon shit is I always say what.

Have you ever tried to buy a bar of cooking chocolate in Boston & its environs on the fourth of January 1943? It shouldn’t happen, as the Jew says, to a dog.

I hope you won’t go overseas. Explain to them that you never wanted to travel. But why do you hesitate about Officers’ Training if it develops that you will be sent overseas? Non-coms get killed quick I hear, and I want you to live a long time. My feeble congratulations, en route, on another birthday—November was it? Old, old, Master Shallow, both of us old & neither of us gay. Let us hear about Harriet.

John

Don’t think I am joking when I ask you to send us, if you can get it there, some Baker’s Chocolate. Several bars. And say how much it is. Chocolate at night (hot chocolate) has been our only resource against the bloody housewives who have stocked up on all the meat & butter & everything in the country and who stand in front of us in line at the grocery shops paying for their loot with twenty-dollar bills. I am now engaged on the sixth volume of my work entitled A La Recherche Du Temps A Manger; I call it Chocolat Disparu.

This month, or so, my boy, you and I have been friends for ten years. Find me ten worse years in human history and I will give you an ounce of butter (my last). Hands under the table. Drink to the next ten. “This is only the beginning” mutters Satan.

[UMN, MS]

7 Jan 1943

Dearest Florence

I am not that bad: the letter thanking you for the books must have got mislaid or went pooh in the mails. Many thanks, again, for all of them & for each one. Did Bhain ever mark books, do you know?—I think I never saw him do it, & I find none.

Now what else did I say in that letter? I have been reading some of his most beautiful poems—the Airport letter (which I used never to be able to read, because of my hatred, which you know, for my name—but now find marvellous) & the People & their Parks, & others; so I can’t remember anything.252 The public which did so little for him certainly does not deserve to read such poems.—How are you getting on with the ‘letters to you’? Copy them, I beg you, intact,—fuck & shit & all, if he used such words then; this not out of piety but for my passionate interest. I am writing to “Charlotte” & will tell you what I hear.

Did you see—I can’t remember—the photographs [?Jurist] took? He has sent prints & negatives to me, & I mean to have enlargements made, for both of us—unless you have some already. The full-face of Bhain is very fine; the one of you & him much less good.

Hordes of questions! And how secretive you are about your work. Also, what rumour is this—I had it from Brinnin ^whom I saw at Delmore’s last month^—that you are going to marry?? Are you dealing openly with me, small Florence? My most dear wishes for your happiness whatever you do & however you deal. Eileen’s also—a good year—

John

P.S. Would “Madelon” have letters, I wonder.

P.S.S. Have you dates for The Fire Tower & The People Sing?253

P.S.SS. Nothing here in news except that I am very hard, & I hope well, at work; weather filthy; health fair.

P.S.S.SS. I enclose this odd sheet I found: sorry it was lost.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Cheers!

[Columbia, TS]

49 Grove street, Boston

10 March 1943

Dear Mark,

I have been planning to write a very long letter estimating in detail & according to the best philosophical principles your verse of the last decade or so, but I have to send you some verse just now, and my head is in a Shakespearean whirl, and such letters never get written anyway, and it is a long winter, and adust adust. What set me reading back was your pamphlet—reading back, I mean, with an eye to the whole work so far.254 There, although the poems are not, each in itself, so consistently formed & impassioned as your best earlier poems, it is clear that a transformation of style is getting under way; especially in the details and especially in “Our Lady Peace” (beautifully imagined) & “Christmas 1941”—I’ve lent it, so I can’t instance others. When I saw “Our Lady Peace” in The Nation, in fact, I jumped.255 This began in the Mythology but it has gone far since then.256 It is waiting—if I can guess—for a subject: a subject of the size of the subjects of the magnificent poems in The Last Look volume.257 Nothing in the pamphlet, for my taste, is taken far enough to drive you to the end of the power of this style, so that the style doesn’t invent for you anything large & complete. I hope, even, that the subject will be “personal”—the Duino Elegies—but I have said too much already, since I can’t say enough. All this is as of short poems; large-scale composition, The Mayfield Deer, is something else; not now.

The verse I must send is the “Animal Trainer” poems, and I must send them because I am dedicating them to you & I want you to know what you are in for.258 I don’t approve of dedicating short poems & have never done it before; if I do now, it’s because I have for years wanted to present something to you, & because the presentation is just: you have trained your animals. Observe that I haven’t asked permission, the gift being private; but you must think it over; if I publish a book I shall want to record it in a note & shall ask. The polar “if”. At Delmore’s insistence I finished making up a book, which he gave to Harcourt Brace, & they are considering what excuse to give.

R & I are as happy as we can be under the general predicament & our special poverty & insecurity; you will be amazed & pleased to learn that she thinks me a very good husband; and she is an extraordinary, a perfect wife. Are things well with you? You are as public as Goethe: wherever I turn, you have done something. At once this delights me & makes me anxious. Fame, says St Ignatius, is given us to tempt our souls;—and it lifts away somewhere those whom it visits. Where are you? R & I send our love & blessings there.

John

Maestro, were you fair to Olivia in your book?259 I can prove that she dominates the first act, & her “You might do much” is one of Shakespeare’s great revelations; but he hadn’t anywhere to take her. Malvolio you hit exactly. He is the only important character left absolutely unreconciled in the whole of Shakespeare, isn’t he? He can rush off thus because although his faction didn’t appear in the play he has a faction: and it will rule England. I think I have solved his crux in Act II, “her C’s, her U’s, & her T’s …” etc.

[UMN, TS]

49 Grove street, Boston

14 March 1943

Dear Oscar,

It seems to me that “Boston Common”, if you want to print it, is quite enough of me for one year; but you can follow it, if you still want a group, with “The Ball Poem” (from the pamphlet I sent you at Christmas260) and any of three poems from the Five Young Poets selection, “The Statue”, “Winter Landscape” and “The Disciple”.261 About the pamphlet Laughlin published I am sorry to say that my feelings have hardly moderated, and I donot [sic] want anything reprinted from it just now.

I can’t send a new photograph because I have none which the human eye can bear to look upon, and with complete amiability I refuse to let you reprint the old one. Spare the public my face this year; next year, if we do this again, I promise complaisance. The biographical note:

John Berryman was born in 1914; Columbia and Cambridge; Instructor in English at Harvard; a group of his poems were published in Five Young American Poets, 1940; a pamphlet mistitled Poems, 1942.

“Boston Common” has not been printed.

Tomorrow, or shortly, I may write to you about another matter.262

With regards,

[UMN, TS]

49 Grove street, Boston

16 March [1943]

Dear Florence,

It seems to me time to begin, in a small way, & I am sending “Of the People and Their Parks” to Williams, whose anthology New Poems 1943 goes to press very shortly. Oscar W. this is; his taste is erratic but his collections are well reviewed and fairly well read; he regularly prints Delmore, Stevens, Auden, Dylan, me, etc. I hope you will give your consent, if he agrees to print it, as I urge. Needless to say if you dislike the idea he will return the poem to me.

This is a carbon of what he will see, an exact copy of the revised version dated 26 July 1940. Did Bhain revise it further?

I have been considering sending to him another poem or so, especially “The People Sing Their Name”; but I have not decided, and send this alone today. What do you think? My notion is to spread the poems slowly in anthologies—what saved Hopkins from oblivion—before risking a book. Consider, consider; but let me hear as quickly as you can: this week, my dilatory girl. I give you, as a correspondent, a short rope. Delay may lose our chance.

Love,

May I have this carbon back, to send to Halliday?

And if you give permission, would acknowledgment be made to Mrs Bhain Campbell or to Florence Campbell? And would you make up a biographical note?

Something like:

BHAIN CAMPBELL.

Born in Royal Oak, Michigan, 17 November 1911; died in Detroit, 3 December 1940. He was educated at the University of Michigan, and travelled in England, Scotland, and Russia. Returning to Detroit, he taught at Highland Park Junior College and Wayne University during the last two years of his short life. Only two of his poems were published during his lifetime. “Of the People and Their Parks”, which is now first published, was his last poem, written in July of 1940, shortly after the beginning of his fatal illness.

This tears my heart

[UMN, TS]

19 March [1943]

Dear Florence,

I am very glad to hear, I had worried. Write me at leisure one day soon & tell me how your emotions are withstanding the most unscrupulous period of modern history—since the Crucifixion, I mean. But in all save length your letter pleases me greatly: that you agree with me & that you understand me. It was important to make things a little tentative and “difficult” for Williams, so that I shall not tell him you agree until he has written; and to offer him nothing further until he has capitulated to The People & Their Parks. If my own work is not involved, I find I have a taste for this maneuvering—fortunately, for it is necessary. I once read Machiavelli, and I have Machiavelli’s grandson, Delmore, for model,—a man so devious that now and then in the mere ecstasy of the labyrinth he operates against himself.

Your changes in the biographical note are v.g. I blush for “Russia”; not since 1940 have I heard the Soviet Union called properly—one picks up these habits—and the old name I like emotionally anyway, through Russian literature. I wonder whether your marriage should be in the note, simply “He was married to Florence Johnston in 1937. Returning, etc.” I am certain now that you ought to give your name, in the acknowledgement, as you want to: Mrs Bhain Campbell. Mrs Yeats is still Mrs W. B. Yeats. Was it 1937 or 1938? There are so many the [sic] simplest things I don’t know about Bhain. Will you do me a great favour?—sketch for me in a long letter or in a series of letters his life & yours from the point where the autobiography stops to the summer of 1938 when we met. You might find—I think you would, although in prospect it will look onerous—the remembering & the writing of enormous interest, and I should bless you with gratitude. I am anxious too to see his letters to you. I wish we could meet.

Are you well? Your letter as I read it again strikes me oddly, and I hope you are neither under heavy strain nor ill. Where is your heart set now? I wish you good in everything. Halliday is a sergeant in Public Relations at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, living with his wife, otherwise very little happy. R & I are fairly well but so poor that we barely live from week to week, and Harvard is flexing its great muscles to toss me out. My dear, it is a pleasure—an exit visa from Hell—but what we shall do then is most uncertain. I hope New York where Life blooms still, friends are, talk is, one’s own past stands all about.

P.S. In order to encourage you to correspondence (by shaming you), and because your lending me Hopkins’ Poems & Notebooks set me off in this direction, I will try to remember for you a review I wrote yesterday afternoon of a new book on Hopkins (I wrote it in twenty minutes, foolishly taking no carbon, & it went to press directly.) I think it will entertain you.

G. M. H., Poet and Priest. John Pick. Oxford.263

The Oxford Press have done well by Hopkins in that most of his letters & notebooks are now handsomely available, but they have done him poor justice otherwise. The first biographer, Fr. Lahey, wrote from a special standpoint, being a Jesuit also, and displayed extreme unwillingness to admit that the subjection of Hopkins’ strong & original mind to the Jesuit training could have been less than ideal for his art.264 This new book, written in a style which violates every decency, adds to our knowledge of Jesuit training and of Hopkins’ last tortured years in Dublin, but in all other respects it is a book which no reputable press should have issued, and since what is new here could have been got easily into a five-page article, it can hardly be recommended to anyone whose interest in Hopkins is less than fanatical and whose indifference to the quality of what he reads is less than complete.

Some of its important shortcomings should be mentioned. No account of Hopkins’ literary thought which ignores his elaborate & profound comment upon Shakespeare, upon Milton, upon Keats, is worth attention; his criticism of the Sonnet form in English (to Dixon, 29 Oct 1881) is central also. No view of his general thought will be worth exposition if it ignores the letters to Bridges of 2 Aug 1871 (“Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist”—this letter would interest you, Florence) and 3 Feb 1883 (on “the quality of a gentleman”). To the criticism of Hopkins’ poems this author’s principal contribution is a method which closely resembles the method of a sports announcer; those who are interested may look at pages 92 & 146. This method would fail with any jack-poet; with Hopkins it is farcical. Many qualities make Hopkins a difficult poet to study in formal discourse,—especially, perhaps, the union, in his finest poems, of vigour & fatigue, confidence & despair, the elegant & the blunt, the bright & the dry.

Of the defects of Mr Pick’s writing no short description can be edifying, but I may instance: his grammar, his syntax, his paragraphing, his repetitiousness, his clumsiness, his transition, his naivete, his undergraduate employment of “so” and “But” and “For” and “Now”, “precisely and exactly”, “increasingly more and more central”. The Oxford Press have much to answer for.

I hope that this will teach the fool not to write any more books.

[Columbia, TS]

49 Grove street, Boston

13 April 1943

Dear Mark,

Ah you are very good to take such trouble. I hope almost that affliction may yet strike you wherein I may relieve you. The truth is that my experience during these last years of man’s indifference & savagery to man, & his deceit & greed, while it has not accustomed me to anything—so that I suffer each occasion as if it were the first—has weakened me to kindness: honesty, even, can nearly make me weep, and things done for me I feel as sharply as wounds. I have got a most incomplete shell against the world—but I hardly see how induration is possible to anyone: Evil is really on every side all day, and there are no lids to the eyes that look at it.

Here it grows more hardily than elsewhere, it bushes & skies, and if Morrison were not letting me go I should be trying hard all the same to get away for next year. Morrison’s reason, by the way—never mind his conduct just now—is mechanical: Harvard keeps no one longer than three years without giving him a five-year Faculty Instructorship, and none is open now except the one Delmore is getting. I would go anywhere I had to go, but only New York delights me, and delights R—“the girl with the crown of old gold and the mourning that was not as the mourning of Boston”265; and it seems to us impossible that I can’t find something there. Columbia I hadn’t considered, frankly, because of the draft-situation, but my old dislike has quieted away: whether theirs has who knows: at least, far from objecting, I’m grateful for your offer to ask. I’ve owed the Bursar money, you know, which I haven’t been able to pay, out of my Harvard salary, and he has badgered me as if I were not an honest man; that was part of my feeling. Queen’s & Brooklyn have nothing open, they write. I mean to try Hunter when I can afford to come down, as well as other women’s colleges, and even schools; one Mrs Tead at one Briarcliff College wrote to me “encouragingly”.266 Did you ever have to go through this gross show?—“Come & buy me: see how literate & intelligent & competent I am: quite cheap too, I hardly hope for enough to live decently on:” an insufferable business. In what other profession is a man nearly thirty, admitted valuable in this and in another profession which brings honour to this, paid so little and made so insecure? I hope your book on education—how surprising & interesting to hear of it—will hit out as well as in. Flexner’s is the only one I have seen worth a straw on our universities; a fine one might do great good.267 The Carnegie reports are paralyzing but no one reads them.268

I read some poems in the Morris Gray series at Harvard last week, and the Committee (HillyerSpencerMorrison269) were enthusiastic, so I must have failed completely; and yesterday I was asked for an “explanation” of ‘Boston Common’—“just a sentence”.

Yours

John

[Columbia, MS]

Boston, 14 June 1943

Dear Mark

If we could pack!—we’ve no place to send anything. But I am going to New York anyway tomorrow to try again: from my numberless letters something ought to result. Eileen will follow when her vacation begins, in ten days or so, and if we both get work we will stay, returning only at the end of August to move in earnest. If not (if by July 7th or so I have not got anything) we will see—and nothing will have been lost, since the Boston area, which I have ransacked thoroughly, offers me nothing, either temporary or permanent, and no prospect. In & near New York many things are still possible, and in Washington several are. Just are possible.

I haven’t heart to write much—I have had to write too much that is disagreeable. Rest, & write verse. I’m glad the book is done. Our dearest regards to Dorothy & the boys & you in that admirable place

John

But I send this to 393 as safer, & I’ll call you there from time to time. I am staying with Marie Mabry at 511 East 82nd St.—A wit here has made out the anagram of Harvard’s motto, VERITAS: It is I STARVE.

[Yale, TS]

511 East 82 street

New York 28. 8 Oct [1943]

Dear Delmore,

Blackmur could not tell me what the salary would be, but he was definite otherwise: as to the job’s coming into existence, and as to its being offered to me, within a day or so. Three or four courses, at a fairly high rate of pay, he thought. What you told me of the editorial job was very interesting, but you told me very little: I know only that it is an editorial job, with time for writing, and work for Eileen. This is not material for a decision if Princeton requires me to decide at once, as they may do. Can you tell me for whom and on what I would be an editor, and doing what, and where? You must have an idea by now of how completely I can hold anything secret. If the situation were a normal one, I would wait willingly enough; but I can’t delay long, for something tenuous, a return, which seems to be possible at Princeton, from delirium to rational life.

When do you think of coming down? You can telephone Regent 7-0088 ^at night^ and ask for me; I’ll try to ^reach you by phone^ again when I hear from Princeton. You sounded last night as I regularly feel, half-mad: I hope you will get some rest soon. Whatever your state is, it doesn’t show in prose; the review was very good, and very generous in its remark about my verse.270

In great haste,

John

Eileen sends love & so do I my crippled love

[Columbia, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue, Princeton NJ

9 December 1943

Dear Mark,

After a hundred more delays, we settled on Thanksgiving Day into our (one room) apartment and were at home for the first time in six months. Ulysses Berryman was glad to be there. Now we are living on practically nothing in order to pay debts; unless misfortune sets in again, we will be solvent by the summer. If P does not renew my appointment on March first, of course we wander again. But by March first there may not be a single large city left standing in Germany. One gets used to anything. My work is heavy and unrewarding, but it is so pleasant to live, simply, that I have no thought of complaint. The boys, all soldiers and Marines, are agreeable, unspeakably ignorant and overworked. The programme is confused and I am afraid not very intelligent; a hodgepodge of the liberal and the technical from which they learn almost nothing. Still they do what they can, and everyone indeed blunders amiably forward, tired and hopeful.

Rereading your Liberal Education, which I did yesterday and today through a sinus cold, cleared up for me several points on which I thought we disagreed: “will give each of its members as much liberal education as he can take”; the insistence on a remodelled elementary stage; and others.271 It is a fine book. I hope it is read far & wide & long. Most brilliant, for me, are the chapters on The Educated Person (where you rival Rilke in eloquence on angels) and The Levels, where your wisdom is as deep as anywhere. What may have been the hardest section to construct, The Liberal Arts in Action, ought to do its work for most readers; certainly it is very good; I am bothered by the terms, to which I have an old & irrational antipathy, and by your faith—what to call it! your faith (say) that the statists will come round. The scientists, I mean, in their invincible arrogance & resistance to all the humane operations. Thousands of exceptions, naturally; and I confess that a scientist even an sich is always attractive to me (so much am I a victim of the general heresy). They seem to know so well what they are doing; if they are musical also, and witty, and cultured, one is drawn to them much more than to literary people. Not that they do know what they are doing, except by way of description. It’s the “air”, the legend. Still I distrust them and partly despise them and they will certainly destroy the human imagination and the human race if their ascendancy continues. They have gone far already, in a century, to make the world uninhabitable—for the body as for the spirit. I agree that they have not done it alone, and they could have not have done it at all if the whole mind of man, his hold on Fate, had not somehow weakened and relaxed.

I did not mean to get into this. I meant to tell you that Richard Blackmur is your Educated Person,—more perfectly so than anybody I ever saw, one man excepted. His intelligence and moderation and wisdom, displayed endlessly in charming and spacious conversation, have astonished me every day since I came here. He is absorbed in your subject just now, convinced of the Unity of Knowledge, anxious for interpenetration and inter-interpretation of the existing disciplines (I give them a friendly name); and as a member of the Committee on Integration which is studying the necessity of reform in Princeton University—I believe this is not to be talked about—he is having some effect. He got the University to invite Hutchins a fortnight ago.272 Hutchins spoke to the theses: (1) Liberal education is practically non-existent in the United States; (2) Being so, War cannot ruin nor Peace revive it; (3) Liberal education is the education proper for man, holding before the eyes of the rising generation “the habitual vision of greatness”, and dealing with values independent of time or place; (4) Its subject is the Great Books, the Great Experiments, and the Liberal Arts; (5) Students should enter on liberal education not later than the age of 15 or 16; (6) Liberal education is for all men who are meant to be free, that is to say, for all men. He read the address, and read it less than well, but he repeated his theses at the close with a ritornelle effect that was exciting and impressive. The audience found him witty, as several times he was, and apparently did not listen to what he said, since I saw neither despair nor horror on the face of anyone present; nor hope. President Dodds introduced him and seemed to enjoy the speech very much.273 Gauss I didn’t see (he has been ill) but if he was present he listened and understood; when he had Eileen & Richard & me for tea six weeks ago, he attacked the notion of a Department of English Literature, as you do, rather than a Department (if one must) of Literature. Unfortunately he and Root are to retire, I hear, and Princeton may be a different & worse place shortly.274

Goodnight, good night. I haven’t written so long a letter for years. I hope it finds you and all yours well, and holding out. Have you seen Aragon’s Le Creve-Coeur?275 Eileen sends you love, we hope we will see you at Christmas, a dog is howling across the way, my throat feels like the devil in the dog, I am reading Logic, the gramophone works, none of the records is broken, and if you and Dorothy would like to come to Princeton one Sunday for dinner we would be delighted!

Always,

John

1944

[Princeton, MS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton

24 January 1944

My dear Hosts:

This explains itself.—But would you like to come in for music on Monday night next, at eight? I know Willard is busy; if you can’t do then, would you like to suggest a day (not Wednesday)? We are cramped here, but I promise you chairs to sit on and astonishing Mozart.

Yrs sincerely

John Berryman

On being asked to autograph a book, & refusing

One has one’s reasons,—yes—one always had;

And they are strong;—and one has never done,

And there is one’s consistency, and one

Is sorry at the time, but after one is glad.…

No doubt, no doubt! Yet is it not crude—

(Your host suggesting it, a glowing room,

The friendly end of day)—to blank and gloom

That fire & all those faces with a private mood,

And stumble reasons? Yes—one’s face is hot.

If reasons swarm, the reasons are not one,

One is impossibilities,—undone—

As always, that afternoon, I wished it and could not.

To Margaret & Willard Thorp

with apologies

John Berryman

[Columbia, MS]

23 February 1944

Dear Mark,

How often do three of one’s best loved friends read poems in one place on one night?276 Eileen is more excited than I am only because the Parcae have sent down another darkness on me; I have to make my pleasure out of sound, such as I can. Please an old admirer, if you will, by reading both of the age poems (the “little leaves” & “Will it be more of this that century day”) and “Winter Tryst”—I won’t burden you further.277 We are coming up with Richard, and we’ll see you afterward if you are not thronged. And Delmore—I haven’t seen him for six months. What a time looms!

Good wishes & love to all of you—

John

[Columbia, TS]

120 Prospect Ave., Princeton

1 March 1944

Dear Mark,

Your book came three or four hours after I wrote that note the other day, and I have had time to be grateful but not to read it properly.278 My eyes have been troubling me, I can’t read at all after dark now without chaotic effects, and I have had heavy going cleaning up my courses: I stopped teaching yesterday, when my appointment ended. Today I am not an academic man. All February I plunged up and down, in & out of despair; but now that it is here again, I don’t care; I need rest.

Not, as usual, that I plan to get any. I am going straight to my own work.

I have looked into the Sleepers, though, and been hit by some things I didn’t know, especially The Diarist and Down World, as well as the extraordinary long poems I did know. Your subjects are interesting: most, to me, Kierkegaard, whom I have been reading with passion since I came here, who has altered my life.279 I hear what I called the Rilke music in that poem too. Looking at this book has affected me oddly, since for months I’ve read no verse except Aragon’s Creve-Coeur; nothing, I mean, with attention.

I saw a Georgian with ideas on Sunday, Weltner, the new president of Oglethorpe.280 He said he was seeing you, and I hope he has; I’d like to talk with you on that subject on Thursday or Friday. Thursday: it’s tomorrow! I’ll ring up when I come in, noon or so, & see what plans are. Hurrah for you poets, friends, gentlemen.

Always,

John

Don’t mention my eyes; I’m sorry I have. They’ll clear quickly.

[Columbia, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton—2 May 1944

Dear Mark & Dorothy,

Very many thanks for letting me stay last week. Your house is a paradigm of excellence and order, and I always enjoy my experience of it with special acuteness, partly because it is obvious that the gods intend nothing of the sort for me; it is like reading a first-rate book which I could not possibly have written myself—without envy, in the spirit (so far as frailty lets me summon it) of Hardy’s “Let me enjoy the earth no less”.281 I was glad to see you both well, especially you Dorothy whom I never saw look better in spite of your labour.

About Kierkegaard, Mark:282

The important volumes published by Princeton are four:

Stages on Life’s Way

$6.00

Concluding Unscientific PS

6.

Fear & Trembling

2.75

Either / Or (2 vol)

7.50 ($22.25

and four more coming out within a month or so:

The Concept of Dread

2.00

| June | The Attack on Christendom

2.50

For Self-Ex. & Judge for You

2.50

| May | Training in Christianity

3.00 ($10.00

Samuels of the Press has agreed to give me a straight 10% discount and then a 15% “professional” discount, which is better than the Store’s and seems quite good: it brings the $32.25 down to $24.65, for which I am giving him a cheque today (he was dubious enough when he agreed to this, an hour ago, to make me think it not sensible to wait), picking up the first four works and posting them to you. The others I’ll send to you as they arrive; I can’t have them sent directly because I don’t think the Press would do this if Samuels knew that I was not buying them for myself. When I asked him about this some weeks ago, in fact, I was asking for myself, but the loss of the discount doesn’t matter, because I could never afford to buy the lot: I have The Sickness Unto Death and I shall go on volume by volume when I can. Toynbee I mean to buy as a lot, but only that, and that is in the future also.283 Have you read that extraordinary fellow?

The Oxford books are also, mystically, four:

Christian Discourses

$6.00

The Point of View etc

2.50

The Present Age etc

2.50

The Journals of S.K.

7.00 ($18.00

These I can order for you through the Store, at a discount which they cannot tell me exactly but which will be between 15% and 20%, part of it now and part at the end of the year. Shall I do this? If you wanted a biography, Lowrie’s large one done by Oxford at $7 would be best; but you don’t need one.284 (“For Self-Examination” and “Training in Christianity” would be on this Oxford list, but by luck they are being re-issued this spring more cheaply by Princeton, and are included above.)

I hope I am doing what you want. Suddenly these vast sums shake me; I shan’t go on with the books published by Oxford until I hear from you. What reading you will have!

Encore merci. Love.

Love from Eileen.

John

P.S. I got the books, took them round to the Store for wrapping, & have just posted them. Samuels’ receipt I am keeping here until the books due have come: then I’ll send it you. Method—! J

[Columbia, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N.J.

8 May 1944

Dear Mark,

Lo, the oil of mourning is the oil of strange good news: the Rockefeller Foundation has given me a Fellowship for the Shakespearean work I told you of, or for a year’s pursuit of it. No great sum of money—less than half, indeed, what my brother receives for his sufferings at Time—but enough for us who are used to nothing. We can stay in Princeton, except for occasional work in libraries elsewhere. Being numb I felt little, but Eileen after an hour of shock was like a bird singing. We are grateful to you for your part, the letter or so.

I’ll be in New York late this week again & will try calling you on Thursday or Friday; I’d like to borrow a book or so if you are not using them & to know whether you agree with me that Oxford, despite the failings of the American branch, is the reasonable publisher to talk with about King Lear.

Love to you both,

Yours,

John

No more Kierkegaard yet. Thanks for the covering cheque. I O U 19¢

[Columbia, TS]

Princeton, 24 May 1944

Dear Mark,

You were good to think of letting me know about Holt’s opening; but if it is for the present, as I assume, I can’t do anything: the terms of my Rockefellership, as Eileen calls it, forbid me to take any sort of work during the next year. If it is for the future, perhaps I should see Sloane, although the conditions of publishing, at best, appear to me unpleasant and degrading—being unable, I mean, to publish books that should be published (there is no great number of these, but each would be a sword) while one prints beautifully and trumpets books which were not worth even their authors’ time of composition; trading, bargaining, competing; the intolerable reading, painful rejections, uncomfortable interviews,—into all this I would not wish to go if it could be helped. I don’t know that it can. Each year it is more plain to me that probably there exists no way of making a living (available to me) which will be either agreeable to my sensibility or convenient to what I pretend is my work. It is very difficult indeed to live at all, even lacerated and essentially idle. Each year I hope that next year will find me dead, and so far I have been disappointed, but I do not lose that hope, which is almost my only one. I despair, placed as I am, of making anyone very happy, my own griefs are deep, ineradicable, and my hope of writing something of value, while it has not vanished, dwindles. In the lake of the heart, storm, the fragments of the houses of my youth.

I could not stop in New York last week but I may come next and borrow some Shakespeare. Two new Kierkegaard volumes go to you today. Forgive my delay in answering; I have not been well and am very busy, Love to Dorothy, luck to Charles.

Yours,

John

[Haffenden, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

16 July 1944

Dear Mr Sisam:

I have less hesitation in writing to enquire about the state of The Oxford Shakespeare since Mr John Marshall of the Rockefeller Foundation told me last week that he and Mr Stevens have been in correspondence with you about it. Would you be willing to give me some account of its condition at Dr McKerrow’s death, of such progress as has been made since, and of your expectations for it?285 Dr Greg in his memoir of McKerrow said, I believe, that several volumes had then already been set up in type, but I have waited for them in vain.286 I am anxious to know with what exactitude the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, or their Editor, intend to follow the lines announced for the edition in 1939. McKerrow’s proposals seemed to me, although highly interesting and useful, rather disappointing from the point of view of hope for a reasoned critical text of plays complicated in witness like Othello and especially King Lear.

What I will hear from you, if you are good enough to enlighten me, may a good deal affect my own work: the preparation of a critical edition of King Lear. If it had appeared likely that The Oxford Shakespeare would shortly reach the play and if the kind of attack its Editor indicated had been different, I should probably have been less eager to burrow myself, although I planned an edition fuller in commentary (both exegetical and aesthetic) and in other ways unlike what Dr McKerrow had in mind. The imperious need for a new text of Lear first got my attention when I was reading for the Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship examinations at Cambridge in 1937. Teaching however since my return to this country, and writing, have left me little time. Then Dr Greg’s monograph on the variants in the First Quarto was published, then his Clark lectures and Prolegomena in development of McKerrow’s, and (as he says) it appeared to be high time that someone set about the work of editing.287 But evidently no one did. There seems to be a darkness of knowledge, not unlike the darkness of ignorance, in which men find it impossible to see that what needs most to be done can be done; analyses accumulate, the problems ramify, until the major central justifying labour looks hopeless. Now I am far from feeling satisfied at thirty with my equipment either of learning or of experience for a task of such difficulty; but I knew of no one, among those better qualified, who seemed to be willing to try, so that when the Rockefeller Foundation generously offered some weeks ago to help me with a year’s freedom, I went to work with a clear spirit. I am following in general the recommendation of Greg, for whose care and insight I have long had the highest possible respect, although I have ventured somewhat to modify his procedure, in ways which I am glad to find that P. Maas anticipated in his extraordinary review of The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare.288

Later I hope very much that you will be sufficiently interested to consider my work for publication. Meanwhile would it be possible for me to have the use of proof-sheets (if they are not in more finished form) of the plays in The Oxford Shakespeare already in type? I need not tell you how helpful they would be to my editing; and I have been working along gradually, also, on the beginnings of a general—perhaps very large—study of Shakespeare’s imagination, of a sort not now existing, which would attempt to supplement Sir Edmund Chambers’s invaluable work on the material remains.289 For this favour, as for whatever account you can give me of your major edition and other projects such as the Clarendon Shakespeare Series, and for your patience with a long letter, I am most grateful.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Columbia, MS]

120 Prospect Ave, Princeton

23 Aug 1944

Dear Mark,

“The Concept of Dread” came this morning from the Press; now there is only “The Works of Love” to look for.290 These are both very tardy in appearing. But the weather here has been so infernal that I am surprised to see anything done in Princeton at all. Eileen & I escaped the last two weeks, the worst, by going to Cape Cod for her vacation—where we lolled & got badly sunburnt of course, & read Dante. Do you know Vossler’s study?291 If you don’t—but I suppose you do. I have had some happiness recently too from old friends of yours: Bartram & Thoreau (the Journals); and I bought Doughty.292 Mainly, however, text text text! All scholars who are not to be saved should be set, in Hell, to edit “King Lear”. The First Quarto—I have bad dreams. May you & all of yours have good dreams. I rub my eyes: can the war be really ending in Europe?

Yrs always

John

P.S. We were sorry to miss you in NY some time ago, but glad to see Dorothy, who seems to be working too hard.

[Houghton, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue, Princeton

1 November 1944

Dear Oscar,

Thanks very much for your request. “The Moon & the night & the men” I think is all right, “Conversation” bores me, and “Boston Common” seems to me better than either (although longer); but perhaps I am not a judge of my old poems.293 You may print whatever you like. There is a new poem “Rock-Study with Wanderer” which after it cools if it still has a taste I’ll send you.294

I have also written out for you in prose some ineluctable opinions of poetic war & sanguine poetry, with which you may enlighten the public.295

Whatever you leave out among the poems of the last war, Oscar, put in:

the amazing anonymous poem of the Dying Airman,296

Hardy’s “In the time of the breaking of nations”

& “The pity of it”

Iv & V of Pound’s “Mauberley” Part I,

Yeats’s “On being asked for a war poem”, perhaps

the “Irish airman” & “Easter 1916”,

Wallace Stevens’ “the death of a soldier”,

perhaps Cummings’ “I sing of olaf” (204 in Coll. P.)

certainly Frost’s “A Soldier”.

I mention only things of importance which it would be easy to forget. Owen was the most interesting personality.297

Of the present, Aragon’s “Les lilas et les roses”, & “zone libre” with or without a plain Englishing across the page; Marianne Moore’s “in distrust of merits”, which does not have the merits that the people who have just waked up to her, claim for it, but is good very good; and there must be other stuff less willed & illiterate than most of what I have seen.298 I haven’t been able to read your anthology carefully. Treece is tangential but the best I saw.299 All the Englishmen are tangential, I suppose to avoid Auden & Thomas.

I was sorry to miss the party: two hours after you telephoned, a sore throat & head-cold settled in. Come down one day next week for the afternoon & dinner, if you can: what do you say to Thursday?

Good hunting, regards,

John

PS Don’t lose the portrait of me, which belongs to my wife (who sends you regards). For how long do you want it?

1945

[Houghton, MS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N. J.

6 March 1945

Dear Laughlin:

I have no objection to your ^re^printing “The Lovers” in the next New Directions if you are willing to pay me something (not less than fifteen dollars, and in advance) & will not change title or wording & will not make any misstatements about me in your Contributors notes.300 You wd have to get permission from Kenyon & credit them, leaving the copyright mine.

For years your staff have been sending mail to me at “Howard College, Camb.”, a place which does not exist. Luckily I am world-famous and some of it reaches me here, but pray have them copy out the simple address above and use it. If they can learn to do this, possibly I will pay the $1.75 which I owe them.

Thank you for your pleasant word about the story.

Yours,

J. Berryman

—

[Haffenden, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N.J.

4 May 1945

Dear Mr Marshall,

Thanks for your letter. I had thought of the question of a review, which I agree is a sensible one. It would not be difficult physically: nearly the whole critical apparatus, and the text, are in a large litteratim reprint (i.e. one with only a few errors) of the Folio text; most of my commentary is contained in two notebooks, with lacunae, but consecutive and reasonably legible. These volumes—unlike my other notes, which would mean nothing to anyone in their present condition—could be shown. But I feel rather forcibly several objections to doing so, and since you ask me to write frankly, I will say what they are.

Naturally I have been eager to know what will be thought about my work, and I have wondered whether in lacking consultation I did not run a risk of blunders which experienced advice could save me. In Recension these senses were not troublesome, since I had fully in front of me an array of expert opinion on the nature of the texts, but as I began to solve detailed problems I worried and might have suffered if I had not for years been writing in a similar situation and got used to it. But I gradually ceased to worry: my main lines are fixed, for students to worry about after a complete demonstration, and on details I will certainly have advice before publication. Also I had no choice. The scholars I know here who could judge this work are so bemused with equipment or biassed by convention that their “help” would be simply a series of objections. My edition will meet these objections, I believe, well enough, both in theory and practice; I hope it will dismiss most of them, in fact; meanwhile I don’t want to argue. Shakespearean editing—especially its American branch—is in a stage of Primitive Complication, compared with classical editing. Simplicity, lucidity, finality—these are the desires farthest from its heart. Then there are the actual men. I take two professors and Shakespearean scholars, one at Princeton, one at Pennsylvania, as typical (and I may parenthesize that I like one and respect the other). One wrote his dissertation on the text of King Lear ten years ago; it included an edition of Act I in the Quarto text and was in other respects also as confused and inconclusive a mass of data as I have ever failed to learn anything from; later he wrote an essay on the mislineation in the First Quarto, which was patiently smashed to pieces—method and conclusions—by Greg a year or so afterwards.301 The other scholar—at a time when bibliographical study of the First Folio is desperately needed—spent years with a collaborator in a useful volume ^showing,^ what Malone showed 150 years ago, that the later Folios are of no real use in the determination of Shakespeare’s text; he then spent further years preparing a full-dress unreadable edition of 2 Henry IV which will be indispensable to anyone who undertakes a critical edition of the play hereafter (one is badly needed) and has no more immediate significance that I can see except to maintain our national scholarly tradition of accomplishing, at enormous pains and expence, what was scarcely worth doing anyway.302 I respect some of the achievements in this variorum 2 Henry IV, as a matter of fact, but I can’t help wishing that a little general intelligence and consideration of ends had accompanied them.

Now to men whose aims (if they have aims really and are not merely fishermen among materials, taking what comes) differ so from mine, I cannot be anxious to exhibit work half-done,—every page of which will raise for them questions only to be answered by my Introduction, which will not be before them. Adams, Tannenbaum, Rollins, Campbell, Parrott, and the younger men, all are committed (so far as I know them) to methods I am trying to get rid of.303 The only thing I can do, for myself, is to send separately to Greg and Maas a list of important readings as soon as possible if I am able to go on, and hope they will be interested enough to comment and help.

As you see—I am sorry to burden you with so long a letter—I feel difficulties; and there are others. Finally, the American Shakespearean critic with whom I feel most sympathy, Van Doren, is not in this sense an Elizabethan scholar, and although he will read my MS. later I hardly like to ask him to attack it in this scattered and tentative condition. In short, I feel nearly as unwilling to submit my unfinished edition to expert appraisal—and no other appraisal would be of much use either to you or me—as I am averse to showing verse before its final form. This habit, indeed, may influence my present sense. But if you can go ahead to consider the renewal without a review, I shall be glad.

Yours sincerely,

[NYPL, TS]

29 May 1945

Dear Mark,

I wouldn’t try to read that Ms., which is a mess. If I can remember the poem I’ll put it on the inside sheet here. It isn’t what it ought to be, but all I could do, (being wrapt up in a longer poem at the time) and as close at least to the occasion as possible. Your charming and unreal remarks on my performance I ignore—not that I didn’t wickedly enjoy them. But I will make an exact remark about the whole evening, as follows: if it is possible to behave perfectly in an impossible situation, you did it.

Aside from my trembling knowledge that after a while I would have to try to rise to my feet, open my mouth, and make sounds come forth, I enjoyed the party immensely & so did Eileen. To see so many of your friends (& so many indeed of mine!) was wonderful. Carl especially, whom I never saw before, I liked, and I admired without restraint Charley & Johnny.304 What can it have been like to you—it must have been like a dream of recognition. Life rarely provides such recapitulations, and when she does they mostly have a form of horror—pure accusation. That ghosts should praise one!

Now—pretending to leave this inexhaustible subject (it really is absorbing; Eileen & I talked for days of nothing else)—but all I wanted to know was what you said about Stephen Crane, and I’ll ask you about that when I come to New York again, so this letter is simply fascinated reverie after all. I’m very eager to know what you thought of it all, I’ll come soon.

Yours,

John

Twenty-five years to honour one,

Father scholar citizen

Extraordinary gentleman

Instructor of mine,

Of ours, so here we all set out

Nuts & cake & wine.

But not for Character I think

Our glances round the Rose Room link

Lifting his name like a stiff drink,

Not for the mild design

Of honourable days set out

Nuts & cake & wine.

Easily unto Spring Spring’s flowers,

Mark’s midsummer dreams and powers,

Leaves of young Fall brighter than ours,

To these our tributes shine:

Unto mysterious verse set out

Nuts & cake & wine.

Character we hope for, this

Imagination’s prickly kiss

We not expected nor would miss,

Until the startled spine

Responds, the heart pounds, we set out

Nuts & cake & wine.

[Houghton, TS]

Princeton, 19 June 1945

Dear Oscar,

I would have liked to do you honour this afternoon, because your anthology is remarkably good, but Eileen comes out of hospital today and going to New York is impossible. She was operated on suddenly for acute appendicitis last Wednesday night—a fearful evening & a bad week, but she has mainly recovered, very quickly. This and the extraordinary heat and the death of Gervase Stewart, which I never heard of before, have sent my nerve low.305 I don’t think I could bring myself to the party if it were across the avenue. There will be ghosts at it, too many, too hopeful blasted.

The War anthology is the best you have done, it will be useful to everyone for a long time, no one else would or could have done it, and I congratulate you altogether. Hardy, Owen, & Yeats give the book a standard, and I know of very little you’ve missed. In the opening section, Pound (I understand his omission but am sorry for it since IV & V of Mauberley, Pt I, are hardly surpassed by anything written out of the last war); in the second section, R N Currey, one of the most powerful Englishmen but probably not known to you.306 Selection almost everywhere admirable. Some of Stevens & MacLeish could have been omitted for their much better “Death of a Soldier” & “Memorial Rain” of the First War. The only idiotic pieces I have read so far are those by W Benton and P Ledward;307 for leaving out Gregory’s poems, Patchen’s, etc., you have deserved the award for Distinguished Reconnaissance. Nearly all the objections one might urge are very well countered in your Introduction, which is even better than the 1942 one. I ought to tell you that I’m grateful for at least a dozen excellent poems I never saw before. My own poems I think are not well chosen but this will not matter to anyone but me and is my fault anyway for not printing or showing you better poems.

I admire the way your taste keeps fresh and steady through so much stuff & so diverse.

Many thanks for your own book, which pleased me very much.308 The exaggerations in diction & cadence which sometimes diffuse your emotions are much less troublesome than in the other book. The poem new to me I like most is “The Man in that Airplane”—it is in the anthology also, and one of the best. That form I love—triplets in aaa / bbb—I think I first saw it in Hardy, who has half a dozen lyrics in it, most of short-line but the two best long-line; I used it a fortnight ago in the tentative first section of a poem which will probably not be called “Difficulty & Mystery of Berlin” when I finish it. Some of the poems we must talk about. It was the Fisherman’s wife, by the way, who wanted to be God (“The Catch”); the Fisherman asked for nothing whatever.309 We should emulate the Fisherman.

I don’t know what to suggest to you for Treece’s anthology.310 In Five Poets The Disciple, Parting as Descent, Winter Landscape; in the pamphlet The Statue, At Chinese Checkers, or A Point of Age—any of these. There are companies of more recent poems, but many untitled & untyped & difficult to select from. If you want to come down for dinner one day next week—Eileen will be convalescing and happy to see you—Princeton is hot but very handsome & arboreal—we can talk about this and anything else with proper indolence.

Yours ever,

John

Grigson’s title The Mint must be taken from the savage unpublished book by T. E. Lawrence311

[Columbia, MS]

19 August 1945

Dear Mark,

Eileen & I have been thinking of what the war’s end means to you & Dorothy, not only in safety for the boys but in rest I hope for Dorothy.312 We are very glad. You too, I gather from an interesting letter by Robert Henriques in—of all places—the Times Literary Supplement of 21 July, you too have been working very hard & ably, and we hope can stop.313 How extraordinary the end was—how horrible the bomb, and then how suddenly. So much it seems can begin again.

If you’re in Connecticut I hope your weather is more aestival than ours was on Cape Cod earlier this month; it gloomed & then it stormed & it never warmed. But we had marvellous sessions of talk, and later on Fire Island the sun shone, and we came back brown & well to find in the mailbox an illiterate note from Ransom saying a story of mine had won their first prize, so that we were very cheerful.314 I worked straight through the vacation—my textual study was going so rapidly I couldn’t leave it,—and very successfully. Among other things I hope to scare some scholars out of their damned confused ideas and set up reasonable objectives. I have also employed some time in thinking how to thank you for recommending my interest in Crane to your committee, but without success. There may be One who rewards these things.

Yrs always,

John

[Houghton, MS]

Princeton 11 Sept [1945]

Dear Jay

You have given me real pleasure & thanks for the book & thanks for the pleasure. Of poems I didn’t know, I like the “sunken bell” poem & (smaller) the “implacable girl” poem.315 You shd’ve printed the war poems—my god, every piece of writing hurts somebody—also an old poem about a lie you wanted believed and one about yr great grandfather & great grandmother which I remember exquisite.316 The burning books, the “play beginning”, & “What the Pencil writes” move me most: I know them best.317 You ought to write harder; don’t quit. Do you ever use a form?—you walk a tightrope without one (or with this slight one), and then, when you topple—as ‘Old Dr God’—nothing saves you, nothing breaks yr fall. Not that you fall often: you dance like a gypsy up there.

Thanks again,

John

[Lilly, TS]

A fine fog ^here^ last night. Does your [letter torn]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton New Jersey

13 November 1945

Dear Oscar,

Is that how to begin a letter? And do I sign my name at the end or in the middle? I haven’t written one for so long that I forget. The abominable and interesting habits of scribes and compositors and book-holders in 1608 have rapt me away.

Under the circumstances my judgment isn’t worth much on my verse. But if you selected from these, no great harm would be done probably: Winter Landscape, Desires of Men and Women, Young Woman’s Song (Partisan R. are printing this in the next issue318), Parting as Descent, The Statue, and a comparatively new poem which I’ll send you with this letter: Canto Amor |I can’t find it: when I do, I’ll send it along.| This last was accepted by Tate but hasn’t appeared, and now I hear Tate is giving up the Sewanee; if he does, I’ll recall it.319

I will indite an authorization at the bottom of the page, which you can cut off if you like.320

K Quinn of Accent, by the way, wants to put my Spinning Heart in an anthology of their stuff; do I need your permission for this, & if so may I have it?321

Blackmur’s poem I copied precisely, and Housman’s (which I’ve decided I don’t like), but MacDiarmid’s book isn’t in the library—I gave away my copy once—and no doubt the punctuation is wrong, although the words I think are right. How do you feel about Campbell’s beautiful poems, re-reading? I read a poem the other day which would be magnificent in the anthology, but unluckily it is in Italian and was written about 1290 A.D.

Now what else was I to do? I will do a good deal in response to these Holy Basil seeds, for Eileen and I thank you and Gene most fervently.322 I will even submit my physiognomy again, but this has to wait for film to turn up. I think I have now been in 1945 long enough, since the RAF, or the air arm of the British Labour Government, continues to massacre the Indonesians, and Chungking is negotiating with the Soviets for air transport behind the Red Chinese lines, and with your permission I will return to 1608. Good luck—whiiisssssssshhhhhhhh..

John

13 Nov 1945.    This is to give

permission to

Oscar Williams to print in his

forthcoming Scribner’s anthology

what poems he wishes of mine, _____________ Tell me what ones you want

at whatever rate is usual in it. ______ I wd say what the rate of payment is, but to tell

J. Berryman                                   […] truth I have for[gotten]

1946

[Haffenden, TS]

120, Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

7 January 1946

Dear Dr Duthie:

Having heard indirectly from Mr Sisam of the Clarendon Press that you were working on King Lear, I take the liberty of writing to tell you briefly of my own work, and ask whether you’d perhaps like to interchange opinions. I have had a critical edition of the play in hand for some time,—during the past year and a half almost uninterruptedly, thanks to the help of the Rockefeller Foundation. After recension I made up a provisional text and apparatus, with full commentary, finishing last summer; just now I am fifty-odd pages into the Textual Introduction, planned as a detailed study of the whole corpus of variation and corruption in Q and F. Naturally I am curious to know what you are doing, and especially whether you have been able to satisfy yourself about the shorthand. I transcribed from photographs everything relevant in Willis’s 1602 book (unhappily the British Museum copy) and study it at intervals; but for an amateur—I believe even for experts—nothing is very conclusive.323 I can’t find that the manuscript of Felton’s sermons taken conceivably by Edmond Willis has yet been examined; this might be interesting.324 Bright and Bales I agree are impossible.325 But my present opinion is that beyond this nothing can be certain, given our ignorance of opportunities, of Elizabethan memory, of alphabetical adaptations even by 1606–7. So far I have found nothing seriously to shake, and much to enforce, the hypothesis of memorial-theatrical provenance for the Quarto. Its character suggests that the copy must have been a transcription from a shorthand report (a stronger case can be made out in opposition, on line-division, than has been made, but still it does not come to much). The rest is ruling out: most difficult, memorial reconstruction of the order that must be involved in Richard III; less so, analogies with Othello, Troilus, Hamlet; easiest, what I suppose we may call ‘memorization’ (you have no doubt seen Kirschbaum’s primitive book), and revision.326 Positive relations with Pericles and the Deposition Scene are disappointing me.

This is more already than I expected to write, but the temptation to tell you of a riddle just solved is irresistible. As with other things, Greg is the only critic to observe that

Let pitie not be     beleeft there she shooke,

apparently indented, has really lost something after ‘be’; I think there is no doubt of this, and it makes the existing conjectures, which were implausible enough, quite impossible. But for months I couldn’t imagine, considering metre, what could have dropped out, until yesterday I saw that it must be an ‘O’ or punctuation—perhaps one of Q’s dozen dashes. Read then:

Let pitie not be—’ Beleeu’t, there she shook

which gives there at last its proper urgency, and rescues the whole line I believe from chaos.

Remembering the partial coincidence with Houk’s article327 (a mare’s-nest, I would guess) several years ago, I hope you won’t feel oppressed, on receiving this, with transatlantic labour; and I would like to send my good wishes with it.

Yours sincerely,

[Haffenden, TS]

120, Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

20 February 1946

Sir,—Two correspondents in your issue of 2 February raise again the question, immortal as a cat, of Shakespeare’s Greek.328

The remark of Edgar in King Lear that “Fraterretto cals [sic] me, and tells me Nero is an Angler in the Lake of Darkness” (iii.6.6), for which Miss Edith Sitwell quotes Pausanius, was long debated as evidence that the poet had read or misread Rabelais, who has Trajan fishing in Hell. Thanks to F. E. Budd, it is now known that Shakespeare remembered Chaucer’s Nero: “Nettes of gold threed hadde he greet plentee / To fisshe in Tybre”.329 All his other knowledge of Nero comes from the same section of The Monk’s Tale. The shade of the musical emperor was evidently suggested to him by his chief source for the mad-scenes of Lear, Harsnet’s Declaration, where a “Fidler” comes in immediately on the first mention of Frateretto, to provide “musicke in hell”; and the lake of darkness by Harsnet’s “stygian lake” just earlier.330 Mr Budd’s account, which appeared in The Review of English Studies in 1935, seems to me unexceptionable, and it brings us closer to the poet at work on these scenes than we have come before. This is not to say anything as to the dramatic meaning of the line. But perhaps we can come closer still. The remark opens the second mad-scene; Shakespeare seems to have had Harsnet open before him, and he takes us directly to Hell, where in a moment the King will conjure a thousand devils. Why did the Fiddler suggest Nero? Nero had stood as a type of parent-murder in King John and Hamlet, and it is Edgar, so accused, who is to speak.

Professor Rousel revives the similarity noted by A. O. Prickard between λόγχης ’άκμονες in the Persae (51) and “The Anuile of my Sword” in Coriolanus iv.5.115. It is necessary to see the metaphor in context.

Let me twine

Mine armes about that body, where-against

My grained Ash an hundred times hath broke,

And scarr’d the Moone with splinters: heere I cleep

The Anuile of my Sword, and do contest

As hotly, and as Nobly with thy Loue,

As euer in Ambitious strength, I did

Contend against thy Valour.

The accepted explanation of this difficult phrase is that of Steevens, who says Aufidius employs it because “he had formerly laid as heavy blows on him (Coriolanus) as a smith strikes on an anvil.”331 This must be right; the sequences lance-sword-contend-and twine-clip forbid us to imagine that the sword-shaping capacity of an anvil can be in question here. Coriolanus is the anvil, and Aufidius’s sword a hammer which strikes it. But without pretending to any knowledge of Aeschylus, I note that what seems to be the usual gloss, given by Dindorf as qui hastae ictus inconcussi ferunt,332 is parallel to an overtone in Shakespeare’s line which is supported by the preceding image, “hath broke”. “Here I clasp,” that is, “that which stood unshaken against me, on which the force of my sword was spent in vain.” A sword struck “hotly” on ^against^ an anvil would no doubt break, and the overtone saves our supposing that the metaphor ignores this.

Whether Shakespeare knew Aeschylus’s phrase is a different matter. After long enquiry, Anders concluded forty years ago that “We have no evidence that Shakespeare read any Greek author in the original”,333 and so far as I know none that is conclusive has been adduced since. A modern authority on his education, T. W. Baldwin, thinks that he may have read in Greek part of the New Testament; but later on the same page (Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 1944, ii.661) Professor Baldwin confesses that Jonson’s famous phrase “is still our strongest warrant that Shakspere had any Greek at all.”334 Until some undeniable debt is produced for a beginning, such as Capell made with Florio’s Montaigne by finding The Tempest ii.1.147 ff. based on a passage in the essay on Cannibals, an extreme skepticism is the only course.335 One cannot help feeling that if the poet had known Greek, we would be sure of it by now. So devoted a Shakespearian as the great Porson apparently recorded only two parallels, neither very close.336 We must expect a good deal of coincidence. I do not suppose for an instant that the parallels I have noticed while reading Dante are evidence that Shakespeare knew the Commedia; yet Lear’s line urging Kent to come to the point, “The bow is bent & drawne, make from the shaft” (i.1.145), and Virgil’s urging Dante, “Scocca / l’arco del dir che infino al ferro hai tratto” (Purg. xxv. 17), are probably as close as anything which has been cited from the Greek.

Yours, &c.,

John Berryman

[Haffenden, TS]

120, Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

14 March 1946

Dear Mr Ogden:

John Marshall of the Rockefeller Foundation told me some time ago that you might (in the midst of what I think of as your polymathy) know something of Elizabethan shorthand, or might know even of someone who can employ it, and he suggested that I write to you to ask. I’m loath to impose on your time, but I’d be grateful for your help. I’ll put my reasons for needing it as concisely as possible.

The First Quarto of Shakespeare’s King Lear, published in 1608, differs widely from what is clearly the authoritative text printed in the Folio of 1623, but not so widely that it can conceivably be a memorial reconstruction of the play. Its variants from the Folio appear often to derive from the manipulation and memory-failure of actors in performance, and it is difficult to ascribe some of them to any other agency; the most striking instance is probably the Quarto’s interpolation of the phrase ‘Come sir’ thrice at the beginning of speeches in Goneril’s part in a single scene (Act I, Sc. 4). The Quarto text is also very badly mislined and very badly punctuated in such a way as to suggest that the printer’s copy was altogether undivided and unpunctuated. What would produce such results except a transcription from shorthand notes is not easy to see. The matter is important because on the hypothesis of shorthand-reporting for the Quarto, a large number of readings in which it has been preferred by modern editors will be replaced by Folio readings in the critical text of the play I have been working at for several years; and for other reasons.

As probably you know, three shorthand systems had been published in England by 1607, when Lear was registered; but only the third, John Willis’s more or less alphabetical Stenography of 1602, or some modification of it either unpublished or now lost, seems to be relevant. The first two systems, Bright’s Charactery (1588) and a plagiarism of it, Peter Bales’s Brachygraphy (1590), were certainly too clumsy for play-reporting. Each had some 600 fixed symbols for the 600 most common words; other words were expressed by one of these symbols with a synonym or antonym mark with the initial letter of the word intended; there was no grammar. Plainly, too, they would produce a characteristic error—synonymous variants in the Quarto beginning with the same letter as the Folio reading—and the Quarto does not show this. ‘Stenography’, besides being essentially phonetic, provides largely for various abbreviation, and would produce no such clear sign of its use, unfortunately. I should mention our possession of slight but unshakeable external evidence of play-reporting by shorthand at the date of King Lear.

Now I wonder whether you know anything of Willis’s system or happen to know any expert who has learnt it. I have studied it, of course, but what an amateur can do is very limited. If you can help I’ll be very glad, and I’m grateful anyway for your trouble.

Respectfully yours,

John Berryman

[Haffenden, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N.J.

14 March 1946

Dear Dr Stevens and Mr Marshall,

I should have told you that I heard some while ago from Dr Greg. Did I describe my first letter to him?—I think not. After hesitating a long time, I decided to go as far as possible and run the chance of being called impudent and incompetent or at worst of losing quite the support I wished to enlist, his advice. So under guise of asking whether he could imagine an alternative explanation I presented him with new textual evidence which seems to me conclusive for the Quarto’s theatrical provenance. Then I attacked, as indirectly as possible, the theory of the play’s Elizabethan staging which he set out five years ago, and suggested my own. Third (since he is as eloquent on the necessity for emendation as he is resolutely skeptical of any particular emendation which comes to his attention), I proposed two emendations in Lear. His reply (a) could think of no alternative agency, (b) abandoned his view of the staging to adopt mine, (c) called both emendations plausible and gave them further graphic support. This should have cheered me up a good deal, especially since I was at that time very tired and gloomy, and no doubt it did; Greg also offered to read my Textual Introduction and wished me luck. But all this seems far back. I report it only because it is the first confirmation which your surprising confidence in me has received. You were very right (Mr Marshall) when you said that the second year of work would probably far outweigh the first; I was a novice still last summer; at present I know what operations to perform and how to perform them almost anywhere in the Shakespearian texts. I have performed a good many, by the way, although I shan’t have any time until I finish Lear to assemble results. Duthie I haven’t heard from yet. Busy with several curious discoveries and the problem of form in the Introduction, I have only just come back to shorthand and written to C. K. Ogden.

But I am hopelessly stale, and am taking advantage of an invitation to visit a college in North Carolina to force a few days’ rest; here, whatever my intention and fatigue, I simply work. On the way back I am going to stay in Washington and work at the Folger for a few days. One token of my state is my stupid writing: Greg is the greatest living textual critic but he is never “eloquent”, as I said he was above, and I am not “stale” as I said, but nearly exhausted.

yours sincerely,

[Princeton, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton

25 March 1946

Dear Allen,

Yes I’m very much interested. I wish I could talk with you, there are things I’d like to know and discuss. Above all I am sorry you are giving it up, after making it in a short time a major review.337 I send a biographical sketch as you suggest. Is this a firm offer? The temptation is to think only of the Review, but it would be difficult actually to decide without knowing more of the conditions in which we’d be living; and I’d want to be assured that the University wishes the Review to try to continue at the highest and most independent level possible.

Yours always,

John

I only found yr letter on returning from Washington—sorry for the delay.

[Yale, TS and MS]

120 Prospect Ave

Princeton, 26 April [1946]

Dear Delmore,

Bird-peeping as I came down to my office made me think how Oranges Schwartz would enjoy the Princeton birds for breakfast, made tender by a heavy rain last night. Wonderful name for a cat, Oranges Schwartz. Your genius at nomenclature shows again how ill-considered were those lines about names which our friend forgot to take out of Romeo and Juliet. He put some better ones into the opening scenes of Edward III:

But why should I sing of the Nightingale?

The Nightingale sings of adulterate love.

He was in some ways a careless hurried man as you say—qualities contemptible in an editor—and naturally I know Lear better than he did. But it’s horrible what there is to know. I only realized last week that two readings in the Folio,

I would divorce me from thy Mother Tombe …

&     ’tis the Duke pleasure, …

are not misprints but the old possessive without suffix he uses occasionally in other plays. Think of my chagrin and learned shame and violation of sacred trust if I had wickedly put an anti-Shakespearian ‘s’ on those naked nouns!

Sewanee seems very improbable. I haven’t decided yet, but I think the agreeable scents of a dying civilisation will keep me here, where I won’t be a professor but something fouler, an Associate in Creative Arts. Lord, we know what we are but we know not what we may be. Among other deterrents, Tate took the lid off Sewanee for me the other afternoon.

Is your anthology woman named Patricia Ledward? I had a letter from one such several weeks ago, not answered yet, but I don’t want to trouble you with poems if she and the one you wrote to Richard about are the same. Does she want published or unpublished poems?—I consist mainly of the latter but am freer with the former. A joke, a joke: no one will print my poems for pins, but my amateurish stories are seized on one by the O Henry coll. the other by the O’Brien cenotaph.338 Isn’t this gratifying? No. Over339

Your story of the students ^(Kenyon)^ moved me very much & we were delighted with your letter.340 About the Poetry Chronicle you’re right, and even if I were less fantastically busy I wouldn’t want to: except Lowell’s I haven’t seen a poem worth talking about for longer than I can think. I wish you’d publish a book, you prairie flower. I’m glad Lowell is. The old school tie Eileen fingers with loyalty.

Yours,

John

I met Jarrell recently & liked him—Lowell again, ditto, extremely. But this was at a party & I find I’m a fool at parties, they make me want to climb up the chimney with nervousness. I wish we could see you. If possibly we can come to Cambridge we will. Isn’t the movement of the nightingale lines astonishing?

[UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N.J.

3 May 1946

Dear Dr Guerry:

I wasn’t able to wait longer and have just accepted Princeton’s offer. I am sorry of course to lose the chance of a Review, but while waiting to hear from you I have been going over the situation in my mind and had practically decided against Sewanee before the week was out. The chance comes, unhappily, at a wrong time for me.

How important your choice seems to me I told you: I hope you will be able to get someone absolutely first-rate, and I wish you and him all possible luck. I’m very grateful to you for considering me.

Yours sincerely,

P.S. I was at Mr Gauss’s for a drink next day, I’m ashamed to say, and discovered that (relying on what some faculty member had told me) I’d misled you as to when he would be back,—for which I’m sorry & for which he duly reproached me of course when I told him you’d been here.

[Haffenden, TS]

120, Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

8 May 1946

Dear Mr Sisam,

When your frank kind encouraging letter came,—how long ago! I wrote at once a long reply, which on rereading I saw was full of excited judgments about the major edition that I couldn’t decently ask you even to listen to until I had done a world of work; so I put it away and wrote a grateful note,—which I wonder whether I ever posted, for my conscience has troubled me these two years. Forgive me if I didn’t. Nothing could have been more helpful or interesting to me than your letter. I suspected even then, what I now know, that past a certain point in Textual Criticism knowledge and ability give way to (and the text lies at the mercy of) temperament; and this is what one least can discover at my distance.

I decided not to write until, taking what time I could from King Lear, I had studied critically for myself all the Shakespearian substantive texts, and could thus hope to be listened to in the numberless things I wanted to say to you about your major edition. Well! but there are fifty texts, and Lear’s two alone are a nightmare, and it was a foolish decision. I haven’t yet finished the texts; only an amateur could hope to do in two years. Meanwhile not only my opinions on this subject, but matters to report of my own work, accumulated until simply writing a letter to you came to look like an Eighth Labour. ‘Away with it!’ (as somebody in R.E.S., I am glad to see, protests against Dr Maas’s plausive-delusive ‘inductious-dangerous’). Tonight I only mean to clear my conscience and, a little, the ground.

Thank you for letting me know through Stevens that Duthie is working on Lear. I wrote to him in January, but he seems to be as bad at letters as I am, and I haven’t heard. No doubt he is elaborating the dictation theory (for the Quarto) which he suggested in a review of Greg’s 1942 book. I have spent a good deal of time and space on this in the textual introduction, and can’t believe in it; I hope however that he’ll have answers to my objections. He is a very careful enquirer, and noone I think knows the ‘reported’ texts better except the Australian, Hart.341 On the other hand, he is a technician primarily, not a literary critic, with little interest I judge in editorial decision. Now in Lear to be a technician is not enough, because your data are not fixed (as they are in studying the 1603 Hamlet): they have to be arrived at by editing. The work of J. Q. Adams, Miss Doran, Kirschbaum, is riddled with errors that can only be avoided by a critical editor.342 But I didn’t wish to get into Lear, except to tell you that my edition is going I believe very well and will soon be finished, when I hope you’ll look at it. You remarked, by the way, on the strangeness of so much attention being given the play recently. It is strange, and partly a pity, much of the attention being misdirected; but in another way it’s not strange. Something has to be done. The two last editions (Ridley 1935, Kittredge 1940)—poor things to be sure—actually differ in five or six hundred readings. It’s more like a merry-go-round than it’s like one of the chief works of the Western imagination.

Do I dare ask again about the situation of the Oxford Shakespeare? I hope some of your difficulties have been solved, and especially I can’t help hoping that something new has come up. Much as I like Miss Walker’s published work, and obvious as are the advantages of dividing the burden of collation of forty plays among several persons, I confess I was disheartened by the two possibilities you spoke of.343 I don’t know whether it’s possible to get, along McKerrow’s lines, a really critical edition, but it’s clear that the attempt has to be made. So great is the prestige of a major edition that the accurate and formidable Cambridge edition of eighty years ago still enjoys, on these grounds, a ‘critical’ authority to which, frankly, it can lay (in the difficult important texts Richard III, Hamlet, Troilus, Othello, Lear) little claim. The Delegates have thus a heavy responsibility; the decisions of their editor may constitute our Shakespeare for generations. Also I see no reason why a first-rate Editor should not be able now to fix for us with something like certitude all but a small number of readings,—true readings that is (abbreviations &c I don’t mean). But to do this is a very different matter from editing Puttenham and Nashe, for whom learning, skill and industry will suffice. The editor of Troilus and Othello needs to be in addition sensitive, prudent, and bold. May Heaven drop this phoenix into Oxford. A necessary phoenix, I should add; nothing else will do for this author, and indeed an uncritical major edition from Oxford would be a disaster. I sympathize with your anxiety to get settled the most general controversial points, and the introductions on the witnesses, while your senior critics are available. Losing Greg or Chambers I hate to think of, can hardly imagine. But the truth is that once you have selected your Editor you can’t really control him. Unless he is a man of independent judgment he isn’t worth having, and such a man will discard in a moment a recensional statement (no matter by whom) as soon as he becomes convinced that it is in error. Above all, it isn’t the introductions that edit your text (except in the hands of the formula-people now gaining their way, I’m sorry to say, in literary studies). What counts most in Textual Criticism is the individual’s day by day decisions, based on everything he can summon, within his frame to be sure, but in the two magnificent plays just mentioned his frame is rather a mist than a house. This raises one of the difficulties with the ‘team’ you touched on as possible, but I’ve written too much already. Please don’t think I imagine these remarks contain anything new to you or expect you to reply to them; I only set them down conversationally and wish you luck in a decision I don’t envy you. I wish I still thought I could come over this summer—I particularly want to see Dr Greg and also Professor Maas—but alas it doesn’t seem likely.

Yours sincerely,

[Princeton, MS]

Princeton, 9 May 1946

Dear Allen

This final stage of editing is so obsessive that I hope you’ll forgive my several days’ delay in reporting that I’ve had to give up the notion of the Sewanee. Dr. Guerry came for a long talk, but after the period I mentioned to him had passed I still hadn’t heard; and by then, anyway, the whole possibility seemed unsatisfactory for me at present; so I took the Princeton job—whoosh, here we go again!—and wrote to tell him so. I hope someone first-rate will go there in the end. For your confidence in me I’m very grateful; I hope I wouldn’t have disappointed you.

The same damned busy-ness is why we’ve had to postpone begging you & Caroline to come down. Soon I hope. Amazing to see the Kenyon & such intelligent matters on the front page of Van Gelder’s review.344 May all go well with you both.

Yrs ever

John

[Haffenden, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton

31 May 1946

Dear John Marshall,

I haven’t much time, as I haven’t had time to come in: but the fellowship ending, I think I ought to write a general Thank-you to you and Dr Stevens, besides reporting the persistence of my impression that the Augean stables of King Lear will be more or less clean in another month. I cross fingers and hope my energy holds. Then I mean to send the whole affair to Sisam for appraisal (Greg has half the prolegomena now), and do something quite different, or perhaps nothing, for several months. A mere detail makes me think the Clarendon Press will perhaps be willing to print it; Greg has sent me the draft of a memorandum to The Review of English Studies withdrawing his theory of the staging to make way for mine.345 But I gather delay is very probable in England at present. This is well enough; I will have revision to do in the Fall. C. K. Ogden writes that he will help when he can, his phonetic expert on early shorthand having died during the war.

You won’t want a report, will you, on what I have done: it would be waste of time equally to write and to read. The edition however I feel sure will interest you, and this I’ll send you on the pleasant day when I can no longer do anything to it. I have just looked again at the ‘Project’ which in my innocence I sent you two years ago, and I am bound to report that only the most tenuous relation appears to obtain between what I expected to do and what I have actually done. But not being then a textual critic, could I be expected to understand how one behaves?—that queer animal, the textual critic? No; and I certainly didn’t. It is true too that if I had known more it is very doubtful whether I would have undertaken what I have done. No one so inexperienced should hope to get through such a job in two years. The beginnings of textual study, even if one possesses the abilities needed for it, are mere chaos. It is all cumulative. The two other worst plays textually, Troilus and Othello, I could probably edit now in a few months, though much less is known about them (and there is of course less to know) than about Lear. Needless to say, I don’t plan to do this!

About travelling: I have done much less than I expected because my work has been mostly of a kind I couldn’t predict. Unluckily I didn’t finish at the Folger and I have work to do at Widener either this summer or in the Fall, but I suppose the travel-allowances become inoperative, whether used or not, at the end of the fellowship. For a time I hoped to get to England this summer to talk with Greg and Maas, but that notion I’ve had to give up.

As soon as I can come into town I’ll let you know.

[Houghton, MS]

120 Prospect Ave, Princeton

2 July 1946

Dear Robert Lowell or Dear Cal or

whatever most friendly:

Eileen & I go to Maine at the end of this week for a fortnight with the Blackmurs and would much like to see you & Jean. What sort of plans have you? If you don’t wish to be interrupted, say so frankly. I am myself tired, & poor companyway ^company^ anyway. But Richard & Helen wd like to see you both also, and might drive us over if you wanted us at all & could put them up for a night. I believe it’s a distance.

So. Send me a note in care of Blackmur at Harrington; feeling of course no obligation to submit to this offered invasion.

Very best wishes,

Yrs

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

120, Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

1 December 1946

Dear Mr Eliot:

I can’t suggest this precisely with enthusiasm, but if Faber were willing to take on my verse I should be glad. Not wanting to trouble you with reading a whole book, I send ten poems, the earliest first, running from 1939 to 1944; if none of them interests you their companions unsent probably wouldn’t either.346 I am completely out of sympathy myself with the style of all but the last two, so I shouldn’t blame you. They have readers however and are perhaps worth publishing. I’m working now at something different, I believe better.

Let me say a word as to why, despite the paper shortage in England and the fact that the work of my friends Schwartz and Lowell has not yet been published there, I venture to submit mine to you. The chief reason though complicated in fact is simple in issue: circumstances have prevented hitherto, and seem likely to keep on preventing, my poems’ being collected here, and the situation interferes really with my working on. Twenty poems appeared in the first Five Young American Poets (1940), ten more in a pamphlet of 1942, both by New Directions; I sought neither and disliked both. Then one New York firm has thrice in six years asked to see my book, thrice seen it, thrice rejected it. These experiences have made it hard for me to take a reasonable view. I have never submitted it elsewhere, and for some years I stopped giving things to quarterlies, where I usually printed (Kenyon, Partisan). Among others Tate now wants to publish it with Henry Holt, and for various reasons I am resisting this with the rest. Please forgive this autobiography,—I thought I should explain. Residence at Cambridge before the War makes British publication seem important to me anyway. And I feel interest, which it wd be silly to dissemble, in discovering whether my verse so far is capable of engaging your attention. What your writings have meant to me I won’t attempt to say except to thank you for them these many years.

Yours sincerely,

[UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

23 December 1946

Dear Sirs:

You surprise me very much.347 The back cover of the issue of 21 December is given to an ad by the Agora Publishing Company, which claims to be “the established, recognized, authoritative source of factual, documented, dependable information on the activities of the Roman Catholic Church. Only AGORA has ALL the facts.” Who recognizes it, one is not told; no person’s name is mentioned, and no substantiation of any kind for this ridiculous claim is given. The company publishes pamphlets. Here are some of the titles advertised: How the Catholic Church Helped Hitler to Power, Japanese-Vatican Entente, Vatican Complicity in the Ustachi Atrocities, Religious Education and Crime, How the Papacy Came to Power. These are interesting titles; they suggest that the Church installed the Nazis, aided the Japanese militarists against the United States, produce criminals in their schools, and—but the instauration of S. Peter is so well known that what the last is about I cannot imagine. Some eighteen are listed, and the general impression they ^the titles^ convey is that Vatican parachutists will be here tomorrow morning. If the Agora Company exists for any purpose except to abuse Catholics and arouse hatred against Catholics, that purpose is carefully ignored in the advertisement.

Now I see no difference between anti-Catholic propaganda and anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Negro propaganda. If you see any, pray explain it, so that your Catholic contributors and subscribers will know where they stand. Meanwhile I am ashamed to have published a book review a few pages away from such an ad, and I repeat that I am profoundly surprised.348

Yours faithfully,

1947

[Lilly, MS]

120 Prospect Ave, Princeton N.J.

19 or 20 Jan 1947

Dear Mr Pound

Well, there is Chaucer’s Troilus, & I think The Faerie Queene (though I admit that Golding’s matter, being Ovid’s, is much more interesting than Spenser’s349) & also Par. Lost; you won’t agree; also Ulysses in ‘prose’. The big difficulty is Shakespeare, half a dozen plays. What do you say to the Ring & the Book? But the truth is that I didn’t look hard enough at yr word “possibly” and shouldn’t have put in that qualification at all.—I sent you today the Ovid translations (some of the others are good also) by way of thanks for introducing me to Golding years ago. Oddly I thought of sending you the book months ago but had no address. I’m happy that you wrote, because it gives me a chance to thank you however helplessly for years of pleasure. ‘I’ve got to cut my meaning rather fine’ as Davidson says, but your verse ‘utters somewhat above a mortal mouth’ when it is best;350 so does Yeats’s, & Eliot’s, and so does nobody else’s in this degree. I can’t possibly tell you how I feel about it, so I won’t try.

What is this name—‘de Fodre’—I can’t read it & know nothing of him—de Foudre? I’m curious. An historian of poetry? What a deadly lot they are except Vossler & one or two more of those I’ve read.

I found just now some of Wyatt’s finest poems I copied exactly from the critical edition, Foxwell, who shows by punctuation etc that she hasn’t a dim idea even of what the poems are about ^(but the versification is right, being Wyatt’s manuscript)^—but not knowing how long it is since you read Wyatt, & thinking of the Tudor rubaiyat stanzas in one of yr new Cantos, I’ll send them to entertain you.351 The poem to his Falcon Lux & the great allegory ‘They flee from me’352 in firmness a little remind me now of what is exciting in late cantos: the courage & beauty of passages sounding personal, especially in the one in Sewanee353 & esp. pages 63, 64.—I saw a superb medal of Sigismundo in New York at Christmas: Pisanello: at the Met.354—Are you comfortable, can I ask, & able to work?355 I hope you are both and as well altogether as possible.

Yrs,

John Berryman

[Lilly, MS]

Princeton, 14 Feby [1947]

Dear Mr Pound—

I’ve been walking about New York, thinking, living like a hobo & writing, or I’d probably have written sooner though I wasn’t sure you wanted to hear again until your wife’s very good letter came. I’m glad, immensely glad, to learn from her that you’ve been moved to where you’ve more freedom.

It’s painful to hear your Confucius & the new Cantos are delayed. Laughlin, frankly, is the most unreliable man in the country & he assembles assistants as bad as he is, so that when anything happens properly there one is surprised. (Your not receiving the Sewanee is the latest instance, so Palmer to whom I sent a p.c. informs me, promising to send one direct.356) For years after I left Harvard they used to send ^on^ mail, some of which reached me, to ‘Howard Coll., Cambridge Mass.’; and there are also serious irregularities of schedule, titling, payment, etc. I hope the books will be all right.

About magazines: NO there is nothing in America like the Little Review. The main reason I think is this. Without independence nothing is possible, and nearly all the serious magazines of the last ten years have been attached to universities in one way or another. They have printed some good work ^(& more, as you said, ‘pretentious bilge’)^, but not one has been really either (a) bold (b) learned; a good magazine wd be both I consider. Partisan with its defects is the best there is because it is comparatively free. After the War at least I hoped something new wd appear, but it hasn’t yet. Money is the devil—printing esp. is Teneriffe-high, & living is so expensive that everyone unless he has money requires to have a job of some sort—usually horresco referens teaching or writing for the glossy magazines in New York (Time &c)^—so no concentration.^ The situation seems to me rather different from the one you ^& Eliot &c^ initially faced. Thirty years ago the (‘intellectual’) public knew nothing, at present it is only too damned apparently-familiar with everything—among others, with all of you. A massive rather than a striking action (Criterion say instead of Little Review) is what is wanted. Or what I want. There is a whole school of now-academic criticism to be broken down also (Ransom Winters Tate Blackmur Warren), which I am convinced is stifling talent. Above all, writing needs a new stage where what will happen who knows? What is turned in to the present magazines I don’t ^only partly^ know but I don’t think we can be as torpid as they generally look with what they accept. Finally, there are no standards, of life or form or power or anything else. There is too much gentility—though no urbanity—as if everyone felt that the ‘daring’ had been discredited through the wretched examples now in force (surrealism etc). What we want is a new form of the daring.

More literary history when I’ve more time. A remark of Lewis’s has always interested me: speaking of all of you, ‘the experiment in objectivity has failed’;357—but he’s wrong. Tell me something, who is ‘Eileen’ in the Sewanee Canto? (my wife’s name) And for God’s sake don’t address me as Ph.D., a thing I never was, despise, abuse, refuse to be, and have suffered very cheerfully not being now for ten years—no, eleven. I only deal at the college here with some boys who want to write, my fate is not that.

With atlantean respect & affection

John Berryman

[Lilly, MS]

120 Prospect Ave, Princeton

15 Feby 1947

Dear Mrs. Pound,

Thanks for your kind letter. I’m very happy that he’s been moved where things are easier for all of you. What I could do I don’t know, but I wish you wd let me hear if you think of anything. Are the Govt’s charges absolutely dropped? this is what I’ve been most anxious for.

Should you like me to try to get J. P. Angold’s poems printed?358 I am on fair terms with most of the quarterly editors because I rarely give them anything, & wd be glad to set at them if you sent me the verse, saying where you tried yourself. Or did you mean publishers? that is more difficult I confess. In America publishers will do everything for a poet except publish his poems.

Pen dry—sorry.359

The delay must be maddening. If I can do anything with Laughlin I will; but this is his usual behaviour I’m sorry to say. I’m anxious to see the Cantos myself and I can imagine your state of mind & Pound’s (I address ‘Mr’ but it’s useless to try to think of him so). I hope at least his health is improving & you have what ease may be.

With all sympathy,

Sincerely,

John Berryman

Ford I’ve had much pleasure from, & some violent disagreement; Great Trade Rt I don’t know—will try.360 He’s good on S. Crane, very.

UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Ave, Princeton NJ

Friday [early spring 1947]

Dear Ezra Pound,

Sorry to be so long, students claw my time away, I have to thank you & Mrs Pound again for very good letters. Will you tell her that I’ve found a dozen poems by Angold in New English Weekly: 1939 (18 May, 29 June, 21 Sept), 1940 (4 Apr, 6 & 20 June, 19 Sept, 26 Dec), 9 Jan 1941, 1942 (25 June, 1 Oct), 1 Apr 1943; not all of these are worth reprinting but when I’ll be able to copy those that are I don’t know; have you & she the right to send them out? And what happened to him?—‘shot down’ might be dead or not, I hope not. He was working free of your influence in the best poems & interests me. Do you know R. N. Currey (second book, not first)? good also.

N.E.W. certainly instructive but paying so much attention to verse (hurrah) has to print a good deal of nonsense; and I’d call its reviewers very bad though it’s agreeable to see verse noticed at all. Such a sheet wd be useful here.

I think you are right about ‘not even apparently familiar’ and withdraw my remark. The difference is that the generation of writers (yours) with which the lit-public is now (un)familiar illuminated more & is more interesting than the generation with which the lit-public was familiar or not in 1915. It’s amusing, in a ghastly way, that the leading American critics have no interest in the social and psychological sciences just at the time—now—when those sciences are experienced enough to open up a great deal. Allen’s ethnology chronicle I was glad to see (he shd learn to write however). Writers go their way ignorant, the investigators go their way illiterate: having no magazines to meet in. One of the first important synthetic works in analysis, Fenichel, went wholly unreviewed so far as I know and no writer to whom I’ve mentioned it ever heard of it.361 The Criterion was indispensable; though a magazine with the same aims now wd operate differently.

You asked who I see as contemporaries. D Thomas, D Schwartz; a little younger, R Lowell. The best working reviewer is Jarrell; the generation hasn’t produced a critic or if it has I don’t know him. Prose has been dead for some time, but Jean Stafford is under way and M Lowry’s new novel is real (first real use of things invented in Ulysses, plus subject worth treating). Most of these now 32 like myself, but the war wasted energy.

Coincidence, yes, about Wyatt’s poem & Berry; I remember he wrote to me once & I hope I replied, but nothing Tudor.362 I’ve seen none of his work. A man I know here, encyclopedic, has a very similar Promethean plan for a world-poem, and by way of comment on both, while wishing them luck, I remember a flash of Kierkegaard’s against people who ‘play the game of marvelling at world-history’.363 Spengler & Toynbee &c are fine, wonderful; but poor limited beautiful Mauberley, for instance, satisfies my idea of an ambitious poem by a young man.364 Or, even more limited, la Rapsode foraine, of which my opinion (I was pleased once to discover) is exactly yours.

Enough for now. Many thanks to Mrs Pound for the papers, which I’ll send back (no?) though they say ‘Keep for EP’; if only one of ours were as interested in foreign letters aside from Proust-Kafka-Mann-Gide-Sartre.

Yrs

J.B.

[Connecticut, MS]

22 March [1947]

Coming back to my office in the bottom of the library at midnight to work, I find yr letter staring at me, read it again & am stricken with remorse about refusing to gratify Pound with a round-robin correspondence. But how can I? At any rate I’ll wait on yr reply.

I might try writing to him every day or second day. Cd I do that? I wonder. You & he have no conception—why shd you or how cd you—of how I am placed with regard to my own work.

How came yr envelope to be ^x’d out^ [as] return to me at the Nation, with which I’ve had no relation for years??

You don’t like the Volcano book: why?365 Or only not enough? What is better? I agree (to my astonishment) with Spender.

Yrs

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

Princeton, March 1947

Dear Walter Stewart,

The question of a literary review: a new, authoritative instrument of documentation and enquiry. First, why we have had nothing of the sort since the death of The Criterion before the War, eight years ago; then, what plans seem likely to secure what we want, and the cultural necessity of securing it; with some remarks on the possibilities.

I shall be as candid and brief as possible. I find in their attachment to universities a major reason for the unsatisfactory character of the serious magazines of the last fifteen years. Our cultural life at present proceeds largely through the universities, but apparently a direct connection damages a review; the mediocrity of the Yale Review and the Virginia Quarterly is typical. When these reviews have not been mediocre or bad, they have represented a single tradition, the Southern critics’: The American Review, the Southern, the Kenyon, the Sewanee. This tradition seems to me to be exhausted; and this sense was decisive when Tate asked me to take over the Sewanee last year. A fifth Tate-inspired quarterly, indeed, is being set up, to be run by three of his students, one wealthy; but I do not expect this to have any more relation to our real need than Luce’s ever-rumored literary magazine or the fact that Poetry, with new Chicago support, is raising its rates.366 Miscellaneous reviews to print good and fairly good work are not lacking, Accent being the most useful. We need a number of these, but we need something else as well. Partisan Review comes closest to being something else, owing part of its excellence to its independence and its location in a world-capital. Several simple and obvious statements about it will show how it differs from such a review as I began by defining. It is in several senses a cult-magazine; it continues now under an exhausted political impulse; it has shown little understanding of what is called conservative thought (whether literary, historical, or philosophic); it has outgrown real hospitality without acquiring authority; its reviews, few and needlessly uneven, exert little influence; its own literary standards drop, perceptibly, year by year. Its recent excellent Partisan Reader, episodic and prejudiced, falls hopelessly short of the ideal phrased by Eliot, that “the bound volumes of a decade should represent the development of the keenest sensibility and the clearest thought of ten years”.367 So, doubtless, would an anthology made from The Criterion itself fall short; but not hopelessly; and it is the plain difference in ideal that interests me, this ideal indispensable to a major attempt. Yet the authors questioned recently for the Rockefeller Foundation agreed, and they are certainly right, that Partisan is the best thing we have, the best literary magazine now published in English.

It seems to me essential that we get something different and if possible better.

A literary review is an instrument of enquiry,—serious, responsible, free. It wishes to discover which currents in the whirlpool count and to encourage them; to open shams; to supply information, to bring together, to see freshly and rationally;—to deliver in statements the results of its contributors’ reflection and discoveries. Its character and tendency are not therefore readily previdible. They will depend, and its success will depend, upon the relation which is to be established between the editor, those contributors regular enough to be seen as actual colleagues or collaborators, and occasional contributors. This relation should be close and delicate; if it is, and if the men concerned are sensitive and able enough, the report-of-results will appear both representative and authoritative.

Subject to these qualifications, however, a good deal can be said about the review I have in mind. Suppose a review edited by me from New York called The Twentieth Century. The model would be The Criterion, with the modifications (besides others) inevitably attendant on an American scene, a less organized culture, and a more anxious period. Although I think more can be done with verse and imaginative prose than for some reason Eliot was able to do, I do not have the impression that we live in a very creative period; I know of five or six writers who ought to appear together, and others must be at large. But the bulk of such a review will be criticism. In criticism its chief aims would be: (1) to create a standard of independence, originality, learning, and literacy, not now existing in this country; (2) to bring into existence critical work at a high level which as things are now we shall never get; (3) to call attention to whatever is being done seriously either here or abroad in areas of enquiry at present without intercommunication. The unsensational basis of all this is book-reviewing, which should occupy about half of a quarterly issue of 180 pages: men carefully selected dealing at length (4 pp. or more) with some twenty-five books also carefully selected. Conciseness and lay-lucidity paramount; no omnibuses, though books obviously related may sometimes be studied together; fiction unless talented wholly ignored; English and Continental works examined when important; so-called technical books in the social and other sciences described when important and learned reviews of them listed. Published books of real interest not reviewed will be listed by categories. Important articles will be listed and when necessary discussed; for instance “The Call to a New Britain” in the new Times Literary Supplement, Leo Stein’s “Ritual and Reality” in the American Scholar, Duhamel’s “Rimbaud” in the Mercure, Allen’s “S.W. Ethnology” chronicle in the Arizona Qu., “Henry Wallace” in the new Politics, “Yeats’s Revisions” in the Review of English Studies, “George Eliot” in Scrutiny.368

What is wanted at the outset in the general criticism I can indicate more precisely. First a study of the deficiencies of the school of critics which has dominated, partly for good, our serious magazines during the last fifteen years; then an attempt to replace their work with a criticism more fluid, bolder, more learned. The contents of the opening number would be selected from the following: Camus, “Sisyphe”; JB, “The Old Criticism”; Winters on Wordsworth; Blackmur on Henry James Sr or Van Gogh’s letters; Jarrell on anything; Read on Valéry’s poetics; Pound on Cocteau; Barber on “Ulysses”; Agee on Personality in film-construction; Shakespeare’s “Sir Thomas More” scenes, with a note; Goya’s “Colossus”, with B. Young’s analysis; Dryden on Pastoral, with a note on recent critics; obituaries on Bonnard, Morris Cohen, Henry Ford; Comment on The Morality of the Scientist; Ethics & Fees, the Macmillan case; poems by Lowell and Currey; a story by Sansom or Miss Stafford.369 Most of this is immediately predictable for planning. Political, historical, and philosophical critics would have to be discovered or developed. I want to revive the biographical essay, more concise and literate than Profiles, making use of the analytic technique at a critical level; who are to write them remains to be seen. Norris requires a tribute from even a literary review.370 Translation interests me, for instance Lope de Vega and Vossler’s criticism.371 There should be comment on broadcasting, films, plays. Without wishing to produce, exactly, a sense of the hectic, I think it should be possible to achieve something of the animation of The Dial and Hound & Horn,—to avoid that “innate lack of all urgency” of which a Criterion reviewer once complained in The American Review,—and at the same time maintain a standard so formidable that it would have to be reckoned with.372 There is no gamble here, I think, on a good Review; the gamble is on a Review really indispensable. Probably we must gamble. “The surest sign” writes the editor of the annual Cross-section 1947, “The surest sign of the crisis in American letters today is the almost complete lack of an authoritative criticism.”373

A final purpose which a literary review should serve I can show, after some hesitation, best by an image: the Fiery Serpent. When the Israelites, complaining in the wilderness, were visited by serpents who bit them and many died, they repented and Moses prayed for them.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent (a serpent of brass), and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.374

The people were to be cured, that is, by a vision of the form of the evil afflicting them as that evil passed through and was mastered by a superior sensibility,—a work of art even, a work of craft and thought. In a firstrate serious review the editor-collaborators-contributors would provide for a distracted public (or that part of it able to attend, and through that part for the rest) the understanding and feeling-symbolisation which may not indeed save us but without which we can have, I think, small sense that we are doing what we can to understand and to save ourselves.

Whether our society, the wealthiest of the world, can afford the $20,000 which such a review will initially cost is perhaps not a question. The question is whether the capable part of our society will afford it. Direct patronage is the only way. In the end The Twentieth Century might pay for itself; Blackmur estimates that the 6000 circulation of Partisan indicates a potential serious audience of 100,000, and thinks a review could be self-supporting at 10,000. This circulation I don’t hold inconceivable. But The Criterion (in a smaller country, to be sure, and it was very expensive) had only 800, with which Eliot was well satisfied, and it will be safest to assume that a large part of the expence will need to be borne by donors during the first years. What I should like is a guarantee by four persons of $5000 apiece each year for five years, or of whatever part of that sum is needed. The estimate is liberal. Perhaps we might once expend upon a centre of our culture some part of the money regularly lavished upon universities and science.

$20,000 provides for 2000 copies of four quarterly issues of 180 pages each. Mechanical expence, $6,500. Contributors, $6000 (at $8 a page for prose, $12 for verse). A Secretary, $2500. The Editor, $3500. The remaining $1500 should cover an office and other expences. Datus Smith tells me that printing costs, extremely high at present, may have lowered by the Fall.

A new, authoritative instrument of documentation and enquiry. From four persons, $5000 or less apiece each year. I mean to speak to Julian Boyd, and to Col. Franklin D’Olier and Mr Edwin Webster.375 Beyond this I have no plans, and I’d be glad of correction, advice, or help.

Yours,

[Yale, TS]

Princeton, Thursday [spring 1947]

Dear Dwight & Nancy,

I just replied to somebody in Pottsville Pa who wrote for an autograph and am full of ill-nature, a splendid frame of mind is it not for sending you my absolute gratitude for much hospitality and very good talk last week. May some rash rich bitch visit upon me before my plumage altogether goes (I hope you are enjoying this metre) one Villa, very luxurious.

There is no Oxford French book in town, so I copy the sonnet.

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,

Ou comme cétui-la qui conquit la Toison,

Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,

Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!

Quand reverrai-je, helas! de mon petit village

Fumer la cheminée; et en quelle saison

Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,

Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage?

Plus me plait le sejour qu’ont bâti mes aïeux,

Que des palais Romains le front audacieux,

Plus que le marbre dur me plait l’ardoise fine,

Plus mon Loire Gaulois que le Tibre Latin,

Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin,

Et plus que l’air marin la douceur Angevine. (Du Bellay)376

And Davidson has a poem “Thirty Bob a Week” which I’ll bring & read to you some time; it understands ordinary banal hard life as does no other poem I ever saw, and is in this respect one of the rare artistic performances comparable with “Factory Work” though with a strange intransigent acceptance peculiar to its great neglected author and above all to it.377

Toynbee i I’d have sent earlier but he is lecturing in Bryn Mawr soon, I think I may go, and have been running through the first volumes again.378 Soon.

I’ve dealt with Trilling and Barrett but am only slowly winding into my own subject, very troublesome and I’m afraid very long and “literary”.379 My attempt to locate it in my mind for Politics was a failure, like every such attempt I’ve made ^for other magazines^ except book reviews; I mean I’m afraid your readers wd wonder what the hell you were doing with “The Weathercock and the Poet”! Also it might have an air of magazine-feud; to be avoided. But all this is so premature that I hollowly laugh: the subject is the devil, and I want you to blow me up as soon as I get enough done. Will’s piece by the way I can’t like any better than I did, but after studying it I have more respect for it I’m glad to see.

Again all thanks & Eileen’s love too,

John

[Yale, MS]

8 Apr [1947]

Dear Dwight

Cut me dead, ostracize me, go ahead, I deserve it, but I’m finally sending you Toynbee i. Don’t read the abridgement, it’s not the work at all, & don’t be put off by the over-claims now (of course) raging. When you finish this, toss it back & I’ll send you ii & iii at once.

I turned up interesting things on cracking & poets before I got swamped in other matters again; but when will I get back to it?

We’re sending another package to Sämisch,—several of whose games with Alekhine I studied ten years ago I remember.380 These pathetic packages out of this fat smug country, it makes me weep. But you & Nancy shd be proud.

Haven’t seen new number—out?—Henry in it?381 Hope you’re all well,

radical affection

John

[Getty, MS]

120 Prospect Av., Princeton

Wednesday [?7 May 1947]

Clark just sent me yr address,382 I was delighted to see in the Times—Eileen showed it me—that you’re doing a Corbière.383 App. he can’t be got at all. I was going to have a dozen poems mimeographed & sent about when I cd afford it, when one night Erich Kahler complained he hadn’t the book, borrowed mine & offered to help me pay for mimeographing—then there was your notice. I hope you’re doing the indispensable rapsode Foraine; also La Fin, cris d’aveugle, Lettre du mexique (I once translated this but can’t now find it), rapsodie du Sourd. Very good luck!

I went once to the 52nd St address in vain. How are you altogether? I just finished several poems, a long story, and teaching the Bk of Job, & feel weak.

Yrs

John Berryman

[Lilly, MS]

Princeton, Thurs [15 May 1947]

Dear Oscar

Peccavi!! Sorry! I seldom make errors of this detailed kind (only major ones) & couldn’t suppose it.

The Times review shd do the book good.384

You ought to put Greenberg in if you ever revise; but if you ever revise, for God’s sake let me know.385

Ultimate fortnight of boys handing in masterpieces & misunderstanding real ones. Kawais-kitin! or however you transliterate the Arabic for Wunderbar.

best to both

John

I was glad to see Milder & Malder wh. I hadn’t since New Verse printed it ten years ago.386

[Lilly, MS]

Princeton, 23 May [?1947]

Dear Mrs Pound

I have finished teaching & am going to try to retrieve my status as a human being. Not only busy w. students these last months, but with poems & a story & too many reviews, and most with a bad conscience, so ashamed that I didn’t open, even, your last note for several days lest it lash me as I deserved. Please accept, & beg yr husband to accept, my groaned apology. I’ll write now as I can—to him in a day or so when I’ve ended a weeks-over-deadline quarterly-verse-review that Palmer is dancing up & down about and I am so sick of I feel like the siren that just split my ear with noon. You’re very good to ask me down or suggest it rather—I’m anxious to come, and will as soon as it’s possible.

Notes on all things to follow. At this moment I still feel a rat in a wheel & can’t remember anything, not even whether I wrote Pound to say his Kung is absolutely wonderful—in itself, & as one of the most acute prose translations of anything I ever saw387

Yrs always,

John Berryman

[Houghton, TS]

120 Prospect Ave, Princeton

23 May 1947

Dear Jay,

Chaos here or I’d have replied sooner.

A month wouldn’t be enough for such a symposium (as to which I agree with you that it’s doubtful whether some of the people Pound names wd be willing—the only one I have been in touch with is Olson). But this doesn’t matter at the moment, I think, since so far as I can see Pound only says that he wants you to print “a few sentences & suggestions”, for such a symposium, by himself: which ought to be interesting but doesn’t require the others until they’ve seen the suggestions.

I send the notes back.

Angold’s poems I’ll copy out some of the best of from New English Weekly as soon as I get a minute free. A good thing if you’d print them. Young Englishman killed several years ago, only publ. apparently in Eliot’s paper, I heard of him from Pound. The only editor I’ve tried is Jarrell who was taking one when the incredible Miss Marshall, lovely woman, taste all in her mouth, returned, took over and rejected the poem.

Listen, do send me a Cantos as soon as the ink is dry, will you; and get Delmore to publish five or six books.

Yours,

J.B.

[Getty, TS]

Princeton, 13 June 47

Dear Claude,

Very glad to hear from you, you sound excellent. When next I’m in New York I’ll try to ring up; meanwhile would you like to come out to dinner: fare is $2.50-odd, but a friend has lent me the Schubert Song Society albums, and I used always to like leaving the city anyway. How would next Wednesday (say the train leaving Penn Station at 4 p.m.) do you?

Thanks for the Orlovitz, the production of which I like very well; but I think I prefer WCW’s comment on the poems to the poems.388 When you regret not having got any reviews, think what the reviews might have been like.

Tell me, what did the book cost to make, can you estimate? (on the jacket)

You might juxtapose these statements by first-rate critics usually at odds with each other,—as a sort of two-point bearing with which the enquirer can feel safe:

Corbiere seems to me the greatest poet of the period. La Rapsode Foraine is, to my mind, beyond all comment … It is Villon whom most by life and temperament he must be said to resemble.

EZRA POUND389

La Rapsode Foraine and Cris d’Aveugle are probably superior to any French verse of the nineteenth century save the best of Baudelaire.

YVOR WINTERS390

For heaven’s sake don’t worry about printed rejection slips. They once offended me too, before I realized what a relief they constitute from the drivel of most editors’ attempts to explain their ridiculous opinions. The proper attitude is probably this: “A rejection slip? thank God.”

Yours,

John Berryman

[NYPL, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton N J

17 June 1947

Dear Mrs White:

Thanks for your amiable letter and message,—I was sorry to miss you and Mr White at Nela’s.391 When I have a story free, as I don’t now, I’ll be able to do something about it.

Having long since stopped sending poems out, I have some unpublished, of which here are half a dozen.

I was thinking of writing to The New Yorker, when I heard from you, about a recent item.392 For a large weekly the staff must be so numerous as to make occasional misjudgments unavoidable, but the magazine’s influence on its heterogeneous audience is so considerable that I am always sorry to see the anti-intellectual bias it sometimes exercises. Thus a characteristic passage from Kierkegaard will be exhibited derisively to readers many of whom must be only too anxious to despise what they can’t appreciate, and pleased to find support for their contempt; and so on. The latest case really needs comment, and I’d be glad if you felt like publishing the rest of this letter.

In a recent issue, under the heading “Funny Coincidence”, are juxtaposed several lines from Robert Lowell’s poem “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and a passage from Thoreau. Of course this is not a coincidence at all, the verse being based evidently on the prose. But the friend who showed me the item suggests that for some readers it will contain an imputation of plagiarism, and I think this may be so.

Such ignorance of the way in which poets work is probably involved in the assembling of such an item, that one may despair of making the matter clear in a few sentences. Originality in poetry consists less in the invention of materials than in the subsuming of materials into a moving and fresh unity. The poet invents some of his materials, and others he takes where he finds them,—from personal, conversational and literary experience; what he gives them is order, rhythm, significance, and he does this by means of style and the inscrutable operation of personality. When Milton adapted Shakespeare’s lines

More tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear

When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear

and reversed them into

When first the white thorn blows;

Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd’s ear,

he made them his own. So has Lowell done. Borrowing from verse, indeed, is more delicate than borrowing from prose, since what is borrowed from verse is already highly organized, as a rule, in a style different from that of the borrower. But for serious poets the question of plagiarism seldom arises. Hart Crane somewhat anthologized Samuel Greenberg to make “Emblems of Conduct”,393 and Mr Roy Campbell has been shown to raid French poetry,394 but even these exceptional cases are perhaps doubtful. There should be no question of an imputation so discourteous to Mr Lowell.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Lilly, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton New Jersey

27 June 1947

Dear Mr Untermeyer:

Thanks for your amiable letter.

A selection made from among the following would probably be all right.395 In Five Young American Poets (1940): The Statue, Parting as Descent, The Disciple, Winter Landscape; in Poems, The Moon & the Night & the Men. Then there is Canto Amor, in the Sewanee, which you know; and I send four more recent poems,—two in Partisan last year (Young Woman’s Song, The Song of the Demented Priest), one privately ptd. (The Ball Poem), and a recent devil-poem not yet printed anywhere. Whatever of these typescripts you don’t want, could I have back: I never have copies. And I’d be grateful if you’d let me send you corrected versions of whatever poems you decide on among those in print; uncollected ever in a proper book, my work is rather scattered, incomplete, & inaccurate.

What does Harcourt do by way of fees?

May I ask whether you have run across the very interesting work of a young poet who died during the War, Bhain Campbell,—a collection called The Task was generally ignored last year, but certain of his poems reach a much higher level of feeling, understanding and symbolization than almost any of the Leftist poetry of the Thirties to which they are allied. Of the People & their Parks, The People Sing His Name, and Letter from the Airport are among the best (I resist an inclination to ignore the last, which was addressed to me). I hope you are including, as I expect you are, Lowell and Miss Bishop.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Emory, TS]

Princeton 27 June [1947–1948?]

Dear Mr Paige,

Thanks for your note. I’m glad Pound’s correspondence is to be done; it should make a very useful book. I don’t envy you any part of it, the collection, the deciphering, or the annotation. For decades as you know he has not so much written letters as fired instructions all over the globe, and much must be lost; but a complete collection wd be intolerable,—the problem is to select, and then to make clear for readers what has been selected, since Pound generally writes an intellectual as well as verbal shorthand. I don’t see how you can avoid annotation, and unhappily the more the better.

It might be interesting (I mention this because you ask for suggestions) to begin with a not over-large volume of back-and-forth correspondence. I suppose his most important correspondence intellectually, so far as opinions go, may have been with Eliot, Yeats, Ford, perhaps Joyce, some disciples (Zukovsky) and others you will know better than I do. If you could get their letters as well as his, and permissions, the series wd make an admirable book. The Yeats-Wellesley and Bridges-Bradley volumes are much better than the poets’ letters wd have been if printed alone.396 Also much annotation cd be saved. Pound’s first letter to me took off from something I had printed, and later ones frequently take off from mine; if this is often so, the gain in printing (highly selected, of course) his correspondent as well as him is obvious.

As for my letters, they are so recent that I feel some doubt about using them for such a purpose; also I’m not sure they’re worth printing. At a later stage, if they contain anything important not duplicated in what you will have, let me consider it again. Meanwhile very good luck.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

[summer 1947]

11:20.397 Half the summer gone, and nothing done but these sonnets I hardly care about now since I can’t see far enough ahead even to believe you’ll see them—also they need endless more work, they came so fast, and I can’t see they’ll ever get it—I told Sidney that if anything happens he is to get hold of them if he can and do with them whatever you and he decide, only they can’t be published of course while Eileen & Pat are alive. Do you have any notion what I was like before I loved you?—I hardly remember myself, but I was a writer, with things to do, energy, fidelity, some honesty, will. I had decided to try to live as a writer instead of squandering my time & imagination teaching: I had the Crane book, the King Lear, poems, the long story, a short novel, essays, and two plays to do. I hoped to do in a long poem what no one else could. I wanted to set up a magazine which wd be firstrate & indispensable to a culture very sick and inarticulate. I still want all these things but how can I believe in any of them when I can’t imagine even tonight or tomorrow? they are unreal. You are the only real thing. I feel a little as if this were the last letter I would write to you, Chris—let me tell you I am sorry for all this in a way but I do not regret it, I am glad I love you, I cannot envisage a life without loving you. You asked me a silly question once, & again: why I love you. I think I put it in a poem—yes I did, though I forget which one—but let me tell you a little better. The real reasons are like the life of the sycamore: inexplicable, immediate, some harmony and flow in one direction. But there are things in you that can somewhat be written down. You are the unusual animal a personality—all you say & look & do has one style, has a style and has one style. Men & women either are nothing or they falsify themselves fifty times a day: you never do, you charm and seize me utterly whenever I let myself see you (when others are present I daren’t), whatever you are doing. You are as diverse as Cleopatra—and much more beautiful—but you are one, single, and even your body, every atom of which I adore, darling, produces always a single effect. Your beauty is all through you: your teeth and your nipples, your hair and your feet, are one. When you move, with grace that makes my throat ache even in memory, and when you rest, with the calm and marvellous ease I love you for, you are the same. And you are more fantastic still: with independence and vitality that could save a nation, you have an elegance the most absolute I ever saw. O my darling all these things are some of why I love you

[UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue, Princeton

4 August 1947

Dear Kimon Friar:

I write hurriedly since you want to hear at once & I’m going off tonight.

I’m glad to give permission for the use of Canto Amor and The Song of the Demented Priest, glad because the selection seems, so far as this is any of my business, a good one. I still have no idea what the anthology is, what it pays, etc., and couldn’t find out from Holt.398

Put the following, will you, in your own words: Born 25 October 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma; schooled in Florida, New York, Connecticut (South Kent); Columbia, and Clare College, Cambridge; taught at Wayne, Harvard, Princeton. Rockefeller Fellow 1944–6 preparing a critical edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Stories in the O. Henry and O’Brien collections. Contributor of criticism to the usual magazines. Married Eileen Patricia Mulligan in 1942.

As for ‘a note on poetry’ I’ve hardly time, but if you want to use the following you can.

Aside from the making of short poems that wish to be as true and as richly true as possible, I have been satisfied since I read it by Shelley’s notion of what he wanted to write: something wholly new, in relation to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful. We might diverge in what we mean by ‘wholly new’; and I should add that it seems to me probable that any work written now, satisfying this ideal, will be complex and offensive. Of course I can’t suppose that any of my published verse bears any relation to this ideal.

Sincerely,

P. S. The accent on ‘her’ was merely to meet my idea of emphasis in the line.399 I see I said nothing of verse-publications: ‘Twenty Poems’ in Five Young American Poets (1940), and a pamphlet Poems (1942); groups & single poems in the Southern, Partisan, Kenyon, Sewanee, Nation, etc.

[Princeton, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton

Monday [fall 1947]

My dear Erich,

I hope you are getting settled well, and find Cornell even agreeable. Very good luck with everything. Cy Black (in History here) tells me of two men he thinks interesting there, and suggests that you look them up: Dr Henry Guerlach, a Franco-American with both scientific and cultural interests, and E. W. Fox, a reviewer for the Times; both are in History.400 Fox has not been there long, I believe, and is perhaps newly married, so that his social life may be less well established. May you like one of them, or someone, profoundly! and go through Schiller like the wind! and come back as often as you can!

Affectionately,

John Berryman

Eileen of course sends love too.

1948

[Princeton, TS]

Princeton, 15 Jany [1948]

Dear Morgan,

These are all of a set called “Nine Nervous Songs”, except the first three which I gave PR and they printed several years ago ^in 1946^.401 Call them “Six Nervous Songs” or Three or however many you want, if any; and I think the present order is best (Bridegroom, Tortured Girl, Capt, Lecturer, Man Forsaken, Pacifist) but if you like some other order better, let me know. Those you don’t want, if any again, let me have back as soon as it’s convenient. Regards,

Yours,

John Berryman

Forgive carbons: the fair went to the publisher & I detest copying.

[Getty, TS]

I’m glad the Corbiere isn’t lost—I’d given up.

Princeton, 9 Feb [1948]

Dear Claude,

Unluckily I’m going to Washington Thursday for the weekend. What about next Thursday, for dinner? Let me know provisionally, meanwhile I’ll see whether Eileen has anything arranged or Richard has.

I was on the point of writing to you, because I found the other day your letter in the margin of which I jotted down Hardy titles for a selection. Here they are: The Oxen, The Convergence of the Twain, Darkling Thrush, Roman Road, Channel Firing, Weathers, In Time of the ‘breaking of Nations’, Drummer Hodge, The Pity of it, And there was a Great Calm, The Lacking Sense, Waiting Both, An Ancient to Ancients, He resolves to say no more, Hap, On an Invitation to the U S, Doom & She, In Tenebris I, Let me enjoy, When I set out for Lyonesse, Ah are you digging, In the Servants’ Quarters, The Garden-seat, We are getting to the end.—So much for five minutes; there are certainly others, but half a dozen more (making 30) might be enough. It wd make an interesting little book. If you are really interested, you ought to find out what Macmillan, who are bastards, would charge for permissions for these poems & a few others, in an edition of whatever size you think (1000 say?)—they might demand so much as to make thinking about it waste of time [sic] but explain that the point is exactly to make Hardy’s poetry better known (as their Chosen Poems, a v. poor selection, hasn’t) and so—ha ha—increase their own sales. Ask for a nominal rate, on this basis.

The book with Sloane I am publishing for money, they offered me more than Tate or anyone else, and it’s too big for handprinting anyway, a sort of selected poems, a hundred pp or so. I have another suite of poems far advanced, which we might talk about a small edition of when it’s done.

Yours,

John

[UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton N J

23 February 1948

Dear Mr Vaudrin:

Thanks for letting me see Gibson’s book.402 Nothing seems further developed than the “Letters to My Witch” which I read & liked in Partisan.403 This is a little disappointing, but also encouraging in that I suppose them recent and they are clearer of the obsessive Hopkins-Thomas working than most of the poems. But I haven’t time to study them just now, so don’t quote me. There are “Firstling” and others; the book was very well worth publishing.

Busy with two books for Sloane, and reviewing, I’ve not had a chance to lay out a prospectus for the “Oxford Book of Sonnets” I described to you last Fall as interesting me. But what I had in mind was an anthology of four hundred pages, or 800 sonnets, giving room I think for most of the sonnets in the language that matter, including all except Shakespeare’s weakest (re-arranged probably), and all the main successes of Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins, Robinson; admitting caudated sonnets (as Meredith’s), long-line (as Sidney & Hopkins), and even couple-sonnets (but not for instance Coleridge’s “Work without Hope”); attempting—what no one else has done—to gather all the early triumphs (as Wyatt, Surrey, Gascoigne, then Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, etc.); making some allowance for history (as I’d have room to) in Gray, Warton, Cowper, Bowles; very interesting are Clare and Hood, and later Bridges and Hardy and Yeats (both early and late); and the surprising Americans—from Boker and Stickney to Frost, Ransom, Cummings, Tate, Merrill Moore, and young men, as in England there are Thomas and even Manifold since Auden;—with a critical introduction.404 But all this comes simply out of my head. More detailed plans would need more detailed & directed work. What I’d like is an advance and about a year to do it in. I think it would make a valuable book.

Yours sincerely,

[Yale, TS]

[March 1948]

Your piece on Ghandi—I’ve never been able to spell that magical name—is a beauty, Dwight: the best, and characteristic.405

You were in a cross-mood the other night about my PR review & made me mad, so that I exaggerated.406 Instead of “ten or fifteen” letters praising it, I’ve had just nine: from a painter, two publishers, an editor, a pianist, an old friend, a printer, a young writer, Jarrell, and a man on Long Island—or maybe that is ten, but I counted somebody twice, it’s only nine. But the point is that the piece had (as well as defects, some of which you pointed out) actual merits, and not only actual but uncommon, in organization and reference to the general situation. I was glad to see these recognized (and depressed when you didn’t recognize them) because I meant the thing as a test-piece or preview, not intended for reprinting—as the essays I have in mind are intended. You used Eliot against me: well, but a wellknown city was not lifted overnight. And I don’t want praise from you. Only I look on you as the type of a first-class general reader (when you haven’t got some bit in yr teeth), as well as a friend, and I was offended by your violent lack of sympathy. To tell you the truth, I am interested—and have been for a year or so—in a more general criticism, with a sounder relation to the whole culture than our criticism has had for about a decade, with more energy, and with much more general self-criticism. But I am only just coming back to life, and it takes time. Also you have to work through the existing, narrow, very smug, stale, specialized intellectual situation in American letters; and this takes more time. I don’t hope to satisfy you for a while yet.

Five or six days have unaccountably passed, and though I’ve a great deal more to say I must stop—the galleys of The Dispossessed just came & have to go back like lightning. Lightning: listen, I doubt if you’ll like it, but if you do and if the next issue comes out by May (when my book is scheduled), print The Lightning, which I’d like in Politics.407 I’ll send my copy with this.

How silly, I suppose, but do you know that Eileen and I couldn’t settle down to work for hours after the excitement of seeing yr Wallace so prominently appreciated.408 I understand your indifference very well, but I haven’t been so pleased myself since the drums began to beat for Cal. I hate the drums, still no improvement of a general kind, no education, can take place until they beat, and then there is the animal pleasure of seeing a friend praised.

Love to Nancy, and from Eileen,

John

Alas I’ve been drinking again. Keep the big book till next week. It bothers me that I owe you money—I’ll pay it as soon as I possibly can. And don’t show this letter to anybody.

[Houghton, MS]

Princeton, 8 March [1948]

Dear Cal

Who wants to be a link?—but Jean & Gertrude both I like & see & there was no escape from talk about you, whom I represented as v. happy & independent & well-working.409 Mrs Dawson I suppressed, but this made it seem necessary to be as open as possible otherwise.410 Both of them seem well too, in fact; especially, everything considered, Jean.

As for the dispersal of attention, I took it as a corollary of your work, and got used to it. Friends anyway, with exceptions, don’t read friends.

I just finished my damned galleys & feel dull.

The Club sent me a bill, seven dollars or so, the other day: don’t let them bill you too.

I can’t find that Mantegna.411 Have you seen a v.g. new Everyman of Sidney, Ralegh, Wyatt, Surrey & Davies?412

E sends love

John

[Lilly, TS]

They’ve killed Masaryk or he killed himself.413 Gandhi, then Masaryk. A lovely year.

Princeton, 12 March [1948]

Dear Ezra Pound,

The best news I know is what Churchill said about Cripps (turning to Morrison) as Cripps was leaving a Cabinet meeting one day:414

“There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” Cf. ‘Because thou art virtuous, shall we have no more cakes & ale?’ A witty wicked man is better than a bore.

The publishing set-up is hard & ugly. The trouble is that they worry much less even than they used to about “prestige” and so will hardly take advice; university presses are better on the whole than New York but still bad. God knows why—after only ten years’ delay—a regular house decided they wanted my poems; Harcourt Br. for instance four times asked to see the book, beginning in 1940, and four times rejected it. Most ^Some^ of my friends have had similar pleasures. The committee you speak of wd have to be really famous, and the famous people are mostly half-dead or isolated, like Frost etc, indifferent to the general situation. You say: Williams, Eliot, Cummings, Tate; there’s (possibly) Miss Moore, R P Warren (energetic & influential now because his fiction sells), and if any such group should set itself up there wd certainly then appear others, including some you don’t like I expect but who have various merits, say Winters, Blackmur, M Van Doren, D Schwartz, Ransom. But what publisher, that’s the problem: which one of the Madison Avenue factories, or what other? I’m going to try to get Princeton to do Golding by the way.

It was very good to see you, & to see your energy. I’ll write you news every fortnight or so; damned busy, seeing my poems through, working on yours, and on Stephen Crane, but I will. I’ll enclose some short poems to amuse you when you feel occidental, don’t bother reading them unless you feel like it.415 Yr “Small Magazines” piece, wh I read the other day, is first-rate; all that stuff ought to be collected.416

Yrs,

J.B.

[Yale, MS]

120 Prospect Av, Princeton

14 April [1948]

Dear Robert Fitzgerald

I don’t write letters to people but I must tell you that your Odyssey-opening, which I’ve just read in the magazine Poetry, strikes me as wonderful.417 I once did the first 50 ll. of the Iliad in a verse not wholly unlike this (I never printed them), so I’m a judge. Also I am convinced of the need of line-for-line. Why don’t you go ahead?

Yrs

John Berryman

Perhaps ‘trying, trying’ for ‘try as he might’—the next runs better. Do go ahead.

[Huntington, MS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton N.J.

4 May 48

Dear Mr. Stevens

I doubt if you’d any idea when you wrote it how much I would be pleased to have your note. If only a few readers would hear them slowly, I think the poems might hope for something.

Yours very respectfully

John Berryman

[Yale, MS]

Princeton, 7 May [1948]

Thanks for the kindness of both your notes. I determined last year never to teach again but for various reasons I must do it one more year, so I accepted yesterday a job Princeton offered me as Resident Fellow so-called. I’m glad you’re taking a leave of absence; the whole bloody generation is wasting its abilities everywhere I look.

As for the other note I was amazed and pleased, and sorry you’ve no immed. design on the Odyssey & glad you’ve an eventual one. If you ever come down here, let me give you a drink, won’t you? We might exchange random brooding over ‘this damn’d profession of writing,

where one has to use one’s brains all the time’418

Yours

John Berryman

[Yale, MS]

Princeton 17 June [1948?]

Dear Dachine Rainer

Thank you for sending me Outside Time.419 In fact I think the sestina best, and especially

‘Shades: man gone, and shades of man here, green’

which is the finest line in the book, & beautiful. But your verse in general I can’t hear as natural; if you tried for naturalness, more thought as well as more feeling might come right.

Yrs sincerely

John Berryman

The new [?PP.] has a compliment for Retort.420

[Yale, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N.J.

12 July 1948

My dear Miss Beer,

I’ve not yet had a chance to examine the papers, but so far as glancing will go everything seems to be here; my thanks; let me know what I owe you. I’m sorry for the delay in acknowledgement: I was away part of the time, and the rest of it finishing a piece of work, not opening mail.

Of course I will write to Miss Crane if I decide to insert quotations from her letters.

Of course, too, an acknowledgement to you will stand in my preface—does stand there—for your courtesy in letting me study what remains of your brother’s Crane materials.421 Detailed indication is out of the question; your brother himself, a biographer, did nothing of the sort even where very large debts were concerned, and would certainly not want a critical book cluttered with “special permissions”. As I believe I said, I have not documented my book, which is designed for the general public; and my biographical debt, anyway, to your brother’s book is so considerable that to acknowledge in detail a fragmentary overflow would merely make him show awkwardly to the reader, oddly enough. If anything of the first importance were involved, perhaps that would be another matter; but nothing is.

Miss Trent remains your brother’s mystery alas.422

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

Thank you for vouching for me to Miss Crane—I’m afraid my study is a serious not a pious one, however.

[Georgetown, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, 17 July 48

Dear Mr Starrett,

Finishing my book on Crane in the American Men of Letters series I come suddenly on your new bibliography in Cataloguing at the library here—the purchasing woman is on vacation, so I wasn’t informed—still it’s odd, because I had them write to Valentine some time ago and they got some absolutely vague reply back, whereupon I gave it up as one more Crane venture announced & never fulfilled.423 When was it issued? But that’s a detail—I’m delighted to see it, it looks excellent and has already told me several things I didn’t know, especially about the Nancy Crouse letters, which I hadn’t been able to trace and which are why I am bothering you with this letter: can you tell me what dealer has them?424 Lily Brandon’s letters I had from her son, Amy Leslie’s seem to be gone, Helen Trent remains Beer’s mystery so far as I am concerned—there are no letters, nothing about her, in his meagre papers and Alice Beer knows nothing of her. Do you, though? I am glad to see you comment on the barbarous taste of the St Johns’ book about Mrs Crane (Bohnenberger’s sketch is even worse, as a matter of fact); but I don’t think Beer was wrong to “shirk” her, in the then state of Crane-feeling—except in so far as he whitewashed Crane generally, which is no longer necessary.425 The outcry over her wd have obscured the desired resuscitation. A very good picture of her you have (or you and Williams, as I mean throughout); if I ever saw it before, it must have been in bad reproduction and long since; when I sent my illustrations to press last month, I had to use the least awful of several inferior others; where on earth is this from?

Maybe the bibliography will save me having to give a check-list as I’d decided to, Stolper’s list being so miserable.426 Would you tell me how many copies you had printed? It strikes me as careful and an immense relief after all the prior work except Jones’s.427 In an hour with it, the only omissions I’ve noticed worth mention are among the contemporary reviews, as on Maggie the Lit. News, Lit. World, Bookman (London), Sat. Rev. (28 Nov. & 19 Dec. by Wells), Fortnightly, and some of these Bushman—whom you don’t seem to mention at all—doesn’t give either; and things in little magazines like The Shadow and The Fly Leaf.428 But I’ve not had a chance to study it, and mention these only by way of token gratitude for whatever help you may be willing to give me. If you’d like me to observe other omissions, let me know. One general criticism might be that since some unpublished material, such as Linson’s book429 (which I am trying, by the way, to get Princeton to print) and (to my astonishment) the Brandon letters, is listed, perhaps some general account of the rather important manuscript materials should have been given, the theses by Bushman and Wolf listed, etc. I ought to explain that my own book is chiefly critical, and only incidentally an attempt to set the life in better order than it’s been in heretofore; but naturally I have had to do some looking about.

Perhaps I may ask that you treat my letter as in confidence for the time being. I write hastily, wondering about the Crouse letters.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Colgate, TS]

Princeton, 28 Aug 48

Dear Bruce,

I never heard a woman sing Winterreise but it’s ridiculous. Wegweiser & Leiermann by a woman, even by Lehmann?430 ugh. I hear Schubert late on had some homosexual experience, and this makes the notion more painful than ever.

Your “mediocrity” troubles you. In the first place, there is no such thing as a mediocre person, properly considered, and the term stifles investigation anyway, which is what’s wanted. Take our friend Dorothy Wellesley, whose book I too was re-reading lately.431 A lovely woman: naive, irritable, vain, envious, and vulgar. Still, obviously talented; she writes much better verse than most British ladies, and has some sense of what to report (“Your nation is only a stuffed lion, ha ha!”432). She has stamina; and gall; and after all she fascinated Yeats, not an easy thing to do with a world-famous mumbling dim-sighted poet seventy [sic] who never listens to anything. You might call her “mediocre” and miss everything. Don’t imagine that the clouds will ever open and explain to you what your talent is. “Alas! nothing announces genius,” says Stendhal; “Perhaps stubborn persistence may be a sign.”433 Meanwhile one attends to the external world, and to oneself, and one worries, but doesn’t worry. Work; of course work is necessary.

In the second place, your “mediocre” poems, these two you send, are much the best you’ve shown me, and it’s interesting that in each the first stanza is wretched, the second vastly better, the last best. You work up. I can’t say either shows moral study; you just try effects, and hope (as “I wish my bone”, rather good). But the absolute end of each is excellent: thoughtful, and just in feeling, expanding downward. “O God, how could I know?”—O God, how cd you write this? Try an impersonal subject-matter. Take Gibbon in his garden & imagine his situation into a sonnet.434 You want control everywhere, also some means of finding out for yrself where you have gone utterly wrong. But the semi-dramatization of these poems is a v g sign; not to speak of an advance in the verse towards style—not your style yet (in fact, an early style of my own), but a style. They are not random. Take the v interesting clinic-watching you describe, & write it in verse, hearing it.

Eileen to my great relief was able to move home yesterday, and I’m too busy to write more. Let me see the story later. When people drive you crazy, explore yourself, and Doris,435—to whom our good wishes & love, as to you,

John

You know, you speak of refusing to accept a negative answer. This is the whole point. So long as one makes others happy ^(or tries hard to)^ and is useful and feels as well occupied as men seem generally designed to feel (wh. is not v. fully), this is the whole point: not to be told no.

[UMN, TS]

about 31 Aug 1948

Dear Richard,

Your letter is very funny, you are a worse clown than I am.

The Store has: 20 Tolstoy, 30 Stendhal and “33” Short Novels of the Masters (Nieder) and Reading Poems.436 Since 33 seemed to me silly, I added 10 more ordered to each—I take yr word for the 2 books and want all my boys to have them. I’ve seen Mrs Birch, Gloria actually, & ordered again desk copies of Nieder. S O B Cawley wanted to know when you’d be back & I told him the 16th; there is a department meeting on that Sat, he says, I told him I’d be away, & he was v affable.437 I detest that hypocrite. Many thanks for your dates; if I can get away, I will go, and if not I’ll be working like a dog, so I’ll leave the screening to you—I was unnecessary two years ago anyway as I remember. About precept hours who knows? I can’t even remember whether I have one or two precepts a week. Say Tuesday 2:20. Wd you tell my preceptees to read “Hearing of harvests” (p 112) & The Funeral (482),438 several times each,—as an introduction to the free verse they are all going to be afflicting me with. I think I will buy a metronome and run it during conferences, a great black one sitting on my desk at the boys’ ears. Oh yes, and I hereby authorize you to give me my students—and I have absolutely no objection to brains and hearts in them.

E keeps on being better. My work is better. You don’t say how your work is, or Helen’s; I hope well & well. They throw me over to the new library at the weekend. Ring us up the minute you get here & come for a drink & meal. Both of us have missed you very much, both of you. What a summer. I am now drinking buttermilk and wondering what sort of weapon to take into the Partisan office tomorrow.

Yrs,

[Georgetown, TS]

120 Prospect Av

Princeton

31 August 48

Dear Mr Williams,

I’m sorry to be long in replying to your very kind letter—even now I must write in haste. I went at once to see Swann, not mentioning you (as you told me not to do), and perhaps it was lucky because he is absolutely neurotic about the Crouse letters, as to which he feels someone had betrayed him; he only, at last, let me read a transcript—no notes, no quoting, alas, because they’re extraordinary.439 I have the story somewhat, but I would be extremely grateful for the use briefly of your copy as you offer; of course I will not mention you, although I hope you will let me record a general acknowledgement for help. Could you send it quickly, I am very pressed.

I don’t like to think there is any conflict over the L.B. letters. With much difficulty I once settled their dating to my satisfaction,—the family’s is wholly wrong; and they are so important from the standpt both of psychology and career that a kind of falsification to Crane wd be involved in my considering not using them. But the plan of my book did not permit elaborate quotation from them; I used extracts. They ought of course to be available in full, and I wd urge you to go ahead. As you say, there are problems, wh you can probably solve at greater length than I have and correct my errors. My book is not a biography proper. But L.B., I think, cannot possibly be Helen Trent, unless Beer is more wildly unreliable than I find him in general to be; he is very loose in details but all the circumstances here are different, not to speak of the dates (his dating of the Trent affair I consider right).

Where does “Nancy” come from incidentally? It’s not in the letters I believe. All “Miss Crouse”. Swann is v unsatisfactory about provenance. But perhaps he has the envelopes, I forgot to ask.

The Bibliography has after all been very helpful to me. Unluckily the Times had given it to Geismar before I asked.440 I’ll collect later some additions. It is v good to hear that the Sull Co sketches are at last to be collected; I quoted at length because of the inaccessibility of most of them.441 I don’t know Schoberlin but have heard of him in making Crane enquiries; wish him luck for me. I think the argument in the Bibliography (p. 14) for advancing the date of Maggie rather implausible, by the way; and it is contradicted by Crane in a letter of 1896. Surely (1) a copyright application wd give the name, not necessarily the pseudonym also, and (2) Crane can momentarily have hesitated about the title,—or the omission may even, since it is Crane we are dealing with, be inadvertent. There is correlative evidence not worth going into.

Adler I can’t remember whether I’ve met or not; if I do, or do again, I will convey your regards.442 He did a good job on S C twenty years ago. Many thanks for your help.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[Houghton, MS]

120 Prospect Ave

Princeton

31 Aug [1948]

Dear Jay

I’ve not been opening mail, I just see yr note.

I am going crazy over the ^nearly finished^ Crane book. Wait 2 or 3 weeks, just. I’m uncertain of the Canto selections, as I told you, and can’t give my mind to it at all at this moment.443 Tell Bower I can’t do anything ^about finding my^ translations for a little, either; but would he send me Edel’s address, I’ve got to put a note off to him even now.444 I’ll come see you in September. I’m happy Pound seems better—maybe he & I can change places.

Yrs

John

[UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N.J.

14 October 1948

Dear Mr Moe:

Your secretary told my wife on the ’phone this morning that posting today would do, or I’d have brought the application into town this afternoon. Now I am rushing for the post-office, it’s 5:45. I haven’t a photograph here in the office: there is one on the jacket of The Dispossessed, which probably the Committee will want to see, and two in your files from my applications (unsuccessful) in 1943 and last year—I hope this will be all right; if not, I’ll send one at once. I would have liked to see you about two matters, when you were in California: the difficulty explained now in my “Plans for Work”, and the question of sponsors: I think I have given all these three, Blackmur, Ransom, Schwartz, before—but I really don’t know who is more competent to judge what I have in mind—and I trust that you will not object. The country is not full of judges.

Yours sincerely & hastily,

[Yale, MS]

Princeton, 22 Oct 48

Dear Dwight & Nancy

I wish I had news of you. Eileen is not better, & after six months a little discouraged. As for me I am out of the worst depression I ever had, but not gay, and not able to work well. I’ve intermitted seeing Shea, not having trainfare even, so I rarely get into town.445 Are you going to yr woman again, Nancy? Life is circular; only the evils change.

Eliot was talking to Blackmur of you, Dwight, last week, & saying he hoped to see you again. So Blackmur says; I haven’t run into Eliot. I thought then of having you all in together, but the truth is that Eliot is being I gather so hunted here that I don’t feel capable of making a move—I know him very slightly, he hasn’t called & may not even remember me. It strikes me though that you might if you like drop him a note at the Institute for Advanced Study (not mentioning me of course) inviting him to call when he’s in town. You liked him, as I recall it. Ignore all this if you didn’t.

We would love to see you both ourselves. The Fall is handsome, I suppose. Could you drive down at a weekend, or any day indeed but Tues. & Wed. when I teach? Seeing you, too, wd cheer Eileen I think. I will do handsprings & backturns to entertain you, and Dwight must take some books away. Let us hear meanwhile quickly how you are.

Love

John

[Columbia, MS]

Princeton, 1 Nov 48

Dear Mark

There are some signs, suddenly, that an effect of my work is growing by creeps & grounds, and I needed this to nerve me to write to you, my news is in general, as usual, so bad. I never got in touch with you in the spring, about the dancing party, because there wasn’t any: Eileen fell from her bike, stirring up an old spine-ill, and has been mostly in bed ever since. About six months it is now, a long time it seems, though she has been wonderfully stoical & good, and is called at last a little better. Once more the very undesirable ^large^ operation has been decided against, though apparently the risk of it is permanent. She goes in town tomorrow for a minor operation which we hope will help, and she is getting back to her work somewhat. The long inactivity has been worse I think than the pain etc.—My own work, except verse, has been in shreds, for this & other reasons. The Sloane people are fed up, I daresay, with the delay over Crane, and Pound (& Laughlin) is dancing with rage over the other delay. However, I seem to be getting back, too. This note is only to send you & Dorothy our love, & warn you that I expect to see you soon. Also E. I’ll call.

Always,

John

[Houghton, MS]

120 Prospect Ave

Princeton, 30 Nov [1948]

Let me see proofs of both verse & prose, eh?

Dear Jay,

I can’t tinker any longer—I sent the marked Cantos to you yesterday (open it carefully, it’s full of slips) and here’s the essay. I hope you will like it. I can’t get it shorter, and I can’t do with less than the poems and passages chosen, so the book will have to be a little longer than you said. Keep it cheap. May be we can get Pound read.

I need money badly. Can you send me the rest at once. Also send Blackmur a Cant[o] I had to take—you (=Bower) never did; meanwhile I have an odd Personae I’ll return.

Very best

John

Sorry to have been so long: I went to a great deal of trouble (which I trust doesn’t show). I’m grateful by the way for the chance to take the trouble.

[Yale, TS]

Princeton, 9 Dec 48

Dear Edmund Wilson,

The Crane ought to be finished by the end of the month, indeed must be, in some form, and then I would be delighted to have you read it, either in typescript or proof. What a nightmare it is. They schedule it now for June.

I agree with you about the interest of Garland, on Whitman and whatnot, especially to me Riley and the Western people whom I know very little.446 There is a last remarkable glance at Crane on 393 of Roadside Meetings. I warn you though—doubtless you don’t need warning—Garland is almost supernaturally unreliable. I once drew up a comparative chart of his three main accounts of Crane (in 1900, 1914, 1930) and they differ among themselves even more violently than Beer differs, wrongly and rightly, from them, which is saying a good deal. Garland I look on, by the way, as a queer case. A shrewd woman named Mme Benzon predicted in 1900 in the Revue des Deux Mondes that ‘in his case the radical will be eventually swallowed up by the nature-lover’.447

It’s pleasant to hear from you. I hope you’re well and all well. I was very sorry to hear about an adverse Hecate County decision.448 I have not been myself very well in any way but I am coming back.

Very best, yours,

John Berryman

[Houghton, TS]

I am coming in next Friday. Perhaps meet?

120 Prospect Av

Princeton, 9 Dec 48

Dear Jay,

Your letter astonished me. My essay is deliberately SIMPLE-MINDED, the appearance of ‘difficulty’ comes mostly I think from the fact that it is one continuous argument. This I thought necessary for the subject (both as criticism & propaganda) and anyway I mean to write thus again, people will have to get used to it. But what to say to your proposal I don’t know: no time cd be worse for any decision, I am working all of every day this month finishing a book. I confess I see some justice in the notion of its introducing Personae, but what would Pound think of this (I could weep as I consider that actually it’s impossible to take his opinion seriously at present), and would it be attended to at all in a mere new edition, and the argument of the close is exactly designed to make the reader consider the first three cantos anew & at once, so they ought to be present: what about adding Cantos I, II, III and XIII to Personae, and perhaps also an in-section of half a dozen or so rejected poems, thereby giving the book some actual newness: I should say in this event it is important to get the bk reviewed, and a re-issue wouldn’t be. In any case I want to see the “Contents” pages, they are hell in the old Liveright one as I told you.

BUT. That leaves the Selected Poems. What audience do you mean? they are not going to hawk it at the corners you know. I want a large audience for it too but I have some sense of reality. I am passionately unwilling to let you put somebody’s silly rah-rah in front of it. Could not you & I in an hour hack parts out of my essay changing their order, I cd write continuity and whatever (more or less) you wanted new, and produce a very different come-on for the Sel Poems? If my piece is complete with Personae I’ve no objection to being bloody with it otherwise.

But don’t DO anything. Write me back, trying to think what will be best. My mind isn’t free at all, as I said. Thanks for the cheque & letter. I’m sorry for this difficulty’s arriving. Best,

John

[Yale, MS]

Dec 30th [1948]

Beloved children

I am sorry as hell, & Eileen is, we are not coming to you or you coming here. However I am a shell & a good loss. Nancy, what an error! I am being ploughed through by a work. Crane possesses me from his grave.

It is going better, though, better, & is worth doing. I may have my (broken) head out in about a fortnight.

Love & love & a happy new year

John

I hope you are sensible of Eliot’s compliment, Dwight—it really is the major compliment of this dying ^(dying, dying, damned)^ year.449 Keep well & happy, both of you, because I am going to need you soon for a strong & sweet carouse.

1949

[Newberry, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton

14 February 1949

Dear Malcolm,

Hello, I hope your work is going well, our best wishes to you and Muriel,450 the only point of this note is that I wonder whether you remember you once printed a piece of mine called “World-Telegram”451 and hurried me with the proof because it was a very “perishable” poem you said: I was comparatively young and extremely irritable and said to myself “The son of a bitch. The first anthology that MASTERPIECE gets into, I will announce the fact in a tone of ice to him”: well, it has never happened, and as you can imagine my feeling rather evaporated, but Untermeyer now writes me wanting to print that poem and though I am not encouraging him to do it, the sign of vague life in the thing after ten years reminded me of my ancient rage, and I thought the matter would amuse you.

Very best,

John Berryman

[Lilly, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton N J

14 February 1949

Another PS: My wife tells me some of the reviewers made a good deal of a poem called The Enemies of the Angels; and I have an impression myself that something will eventually be discovered in the closing piece The Dispossessed, of wh there was a long careful incorrect analysis in a Poetry Supplement, which I read.452 So these two might be added below. But let me now make it clear that I have no wish whatever to encourage you to use more than 4 or possibly 5, the number you had in mind when you last wrote. Forgive these PSs, I am tired & lazy.

Dear Mr Untermeyer:

Sorry to be dilatory, I have been finishing a prose-book & doing nothing else.

You mentioned these possibilities: Winter Landscape, The Ball Poem, World-Telegram, Moon & Night & Men, Canto Amor.453 The first two and the last are perhaps better than the others, for which it would conceivably not be wrong to substitute from among these pieces: The Song of the Demented Priest, Narcissus Moving, The Statue even, certainly Rock-study with Wanderer. But I haven’t the book by me, and luckily more or less forget what the hell is in it, and you must do whatever you think right. One recent poem which may interest you, from American Letters, I enclose |never mind.|454 A quantity of new unpublished stuff I don’t want to go into, just yet.

I have no idea what biographical information you have but it’s probably all right. I live in Princeton and have been teaching off and on (three years in six) in the Creative Arts Programme at the University. I think I won’t teach any more. My Stephen Crane comes out in June: a biography, a critical study, and an analysis. I have edited Pound’s Selected Poems which New Directions are bringing out with a long introduction after Partisan print the essay next month. My literary criticism mostly appears in Partisan; one poetry chronicle last February produced a surprising amount of correspondence, some professor is basing an article on it, and an anthologist is hacking it up for a work on the period’s poetry. One of my stories “The Imaginary Jew” gets reprinted everywhere. Never mind any of this, I am just wondering to myself (discourteously enough, in your presence) why it is that I have wasted my life so far. Regards,

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

PS One point that is worth mention, and which I must tell you because my edition of King Lear is still unfinished and unpublished, is that I am a textual critic. For several years with Rockefeller help I did very little except textual criticism, mostly Shakespearian, with extensive results which have still, as I say, to appear.

That ‘Conto Amor’ is just a damned misprint.

[Lilly, TS]

Princeton, 22 Febr 49

Dear Mr Untermeyer,

Born McAlester Oklahoma, 25 October 1914. I am not prompt with the first fact, for it strikes me that one ought to be identifiable with one’s birthplace, and this is impossible to me so far; I have lived mostly in New York, but before that in Florida, then four years in Connecticut, two in England, one in Michigan, three in Massachusetts, and now six here. It is twenty years since I visited the southwest, and my family for that matter were not southwestern at all but Northern & especially Southern, Ethan Allen an ancestor on my father’s side and a Confederate brigadier from Tennessee on my mother’s. A cosmopolitan mess, in fact. Please be very chary with any of this in print & of course don’t quote. I think all biographical facts ought to be posthumous.

I take it from your card that you are through with me for the moment as a poet, and I would like to offer a suggestion not as a poet but as a critic of poetry. A body of work like Frost’s, with which you are undoubtedly more familiar than I am (though whether you admire it more I am free to doubt), it would never occur to me to make a suggestion about, but I finished several months ago a careful study of Pound’s work and would wish if I may to urge you very strongly toward a selection rather different from the one I remember in your 1936 collection.455 Pound is always treated as important, but from the selections given in anthologies here and abroad one wonders why on earth he was found important, since the poems upon which that judgement ought to be based are simply not present or not in bulk: Cino, The Seafarer, The Return (sometimes not even this), The Garden, Salutation & several other exquisite small things, The River-Merchant’s Wife, Exile’s Letter, Near Perigord (esp.), Villanelle, Langue d’Oc: Alba, Propertius I, VII, XII, Mauberley (Pt I—I, II, IV, V, “Siena mi fe”, Envoi; Pt II—Medallion), Cantos I, IV, XIII, XLV, & a heavy selection of passages from Pisan Cantos. Pound is very uneven, but extremely brilliant here & there in each of his periods; the problem is great, and I hope you won’t mind my passing on to you my considered results or some of them. I feel freer to do this because my essay, which won’t be in Partisan anyway until April, they have held it up so, is an exploratory and descriptive introduction, not a judicial essay; there was so much misapprehension to correct that I thought it best on the whole to delay judgment. Now the reviews of the Pisan Cantos and the other day the Bollingen award have somewhat altered this since I wrote. But anyway I have little doubt that his value lies roughly in the major works I have enumerated and not in the horde of mainly early period-pieces where most collectors like him. I hope you will agree with me to the extent at any rate of looking through again the poems named and reconsidering the matter, unless, indeed, as I hope even more, you have done so already. Regards,

Sincerely,

John Berryman

I have been carrying this about in my pocket forgetting to post it—sorry. They have given me now something called the Shelley memorial award which I never heard of before but which seems to be for my verse though they don’t say so.456

[UMN, TS]

Princeton, 9 March 1949

Dear Helen,

The reviews of The Dispossessed seem never to have been sent to Eileen, as Mr Hood said they were going to be some months ago: would you mind seeing for me what went wrong?457

And two other favours if you will. I think I had two royalty statements for the book, but they covered only the first month or so after publication, when it had sold very badly as I remember, some 400 copies. Can you let me know whether the sale picked up after reviews appeared and in the Fall? In fact, how does it stand now, if this can be discovered without much trouble. If not, never mind. Also, interfering in what was not my business, I recall suggesting to you that the book not be advertised unless reviews should be such as to make it seem advisable; later it was suggested to me that an ad might be worth while in Partisan Review, to which I was a regular contributor, and I passed the suggestion on to Mr Hood. What I would be glad to know is whether the book was ever advertised at all. I believe authors tremble with rage at their publishers’ neglect of their marvellous works; this is not my state of mind in the least, but I would like to hear what the situation is.

Speaking with Miss Taylor yesterday about the possibility of a British publisher other than Methuen for my Crane, I ventured to enquire about a related problem, that of a British issue of the poems, and she said that your agent had been passing them about, without result so far.458 Can you tell me anything about this? I am interested, as I think you know, in Faber, and have been meaning to prod Eliot, but unfortunately I know the man and so am reluctant to prod him.

Best regards,

[Haffenden, TS]

Princeton, 19 March 1949

My dear Miss Stewart:

Permit me to gratulate you upon the authorship of the letter the most unsatisfactory and exasperating I have ever received. I am sorry that Miss Taylor has resigned; I was going on very well with her. With you it became obvious last year, and is now again obvious, that I cannot get along at all, and so other arrangements will have to be considered. Pray say to Mr Sloane that I will be in New York on Thursday and would like very much to have a talk with him, late in the afternoon, if he is at liberty. I wish to speak with him alone, upon business. Perhaps his secretary will send me a note.

For the firm’s information, in regard to Stephen Crane: the draft in your hands is being rapidly succeeded by a very different version, which will be much better. All reports and opinions upon the book so far, that is, are obsolete, like the draft in your hands. From my point of view, with regard to previous arrangements, September will be a satisfactory month for publication.

Of The Dispossessed it is interesting to have news after ten months, but I have nothing else to say that in the face of your letter I can say patiently to you; and so you may continue to do with it exactly as you like, that is to say, nothing.

I trust I may now claim the honour of the authorship of the most exasperating letter you have ever received; and so our pleasing correspondence closes.

Yours very sincerely,

[UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, New Jersey

1 July 1949

Dear Mr Evans:

I have several purposes in writing what may not turn out to be a very brief letter.

First, I would like to congratulate you upon your refusal to interfere with the decision of the Fellows in American Letters about the Bollingen prize, and upon your very dignified and sensible letter to The Saturday Review of Literature.459 It seems to me shameful, as well as unfortunate in the highest degree, that after your appointment of an exceptionally able body of Fellows, and after the establishment of a prize in which our Government does finally (as in other countries) take cognizance of our literature, and after the admirably independent action of the Fellows—it seems to me shameful that the venom of a poetaster and of a popular magazine can go so far as to discredit an award of which we should all be proud.

Second, I wonder whether legal action is not possible, since although the Saturday Review patronizingly withdraws its calumny of the Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, it has certainly not produced the evidence asked for in a crucial paragraph of your letter. Who could initiate such action?—it is difficult to see how the Fellows, scattered as they are, can defend themselves. Could not Mr Huntington Cairns, perhaps?460 To do nothing seems to leave in possession of the field, against the honour of the Library of Congress, Mr Hillyer: a writer of no importance whatever, whose work has been regularly despised or ignored by the kind of responsible literary opinion represented by the Fellows; a man whom I used to see half-drunk during the day when I taught at Harvard, who was finally permitted to resign the Boylston Professorship (an unusual scandal) and who was replaced in it by the late Theodore Spencer whom Mr Hillyer is careful to name as having participated in making the award. His motive, I suppose, is not far to seek: rabid envy. The motive of the editor of the Saturday Review seems to be resentment of the fact of the existence of “an elite” or what he terms “the control of poetry and the other arts by small groups of the elite who now have the power to pronounce judgment.”461 Of course it is not easy to imagine who else could possibly be expected to “pronounce judgment” and “give the nation’s highest cultural awards.” But at any rate he now expects “a revolution of no mean dimensions. We have been fooled and derided long enough.” He seems, in fact, to want an art by fiat. Art must not be difficult! Art must be “democratic”! This point of view seems to me decidedly fascistic or communistic, and very undesirable. No legal action can be taken against it, any more than action can be taken against Mr Hillyer’s fantastic assertion that the Fellows “defied all critical standards” in making the award to The Pisan Cantos; but some of the immediate by-products seem to be libellous. In particular, Hillyer’s charge that the Fellows violated their responsibility, and his sinister phrase “appointed privately, even secretly”, invite action.

Third, I would like to say as a literary critic that I feel certain the Bollingen Prize went to the best book of American poetry published last year. Next, but well below it, seem to me the books by Dr William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, and perhaps Randall Jarrell.462 The Saturday Review nominates Mark Van Doren, Peter Viereck, Archibald MacLeish;463 what Mr Cousins knows about poetry I have no idea, and Mr Van Doren is an old friend of mine, but these nominations as of last year strike me as desperately feeble, except perhaps for Mr Viereck ^and probably insincere.^464

Fourth, and personally, I would like to display for you briefly some ground for the award, since you write that The Pisan Cantos seems to you hardly poetry at all.

a man on whom the sun has gone down …

a man on whom the sun has gone down

nor shall diamond die in the avalanche

be it torn from its setting

first must destroy himself ere others destroy him.…

a man on whom the sun has gone down.…

that had been a hard man in some ways (pp. 8–9)

This solemn, resourceful, by no means hopeless lament, if you read it slowly as it tangles with other themes or even here isolated, I think can hardly help filling your ear.

—“You sit stiller” said Kokka

“if whenever you move something jangles.” (p. 11)

(And)         When the mind swings by a grass-blade

an ant’s forefoot shall save you (p. 111)

If these are not representations, as delicate as anything in the century, of some point almost upon despair, yet not there, then we have no American poetry at all. Or the tone opens:

To study with the white wings of time passing

is not that our delight

to have friends come from far countries

is that not pleasure

nor to care that we are untrumpeted?

filial, fraternal affection is the root of humaneness

the root of the process

nor are elaborate speeches and slick alacrity.…

writing ad posteros

in short shall we look for a deeper or is this the bottom? (15–6)

(And)     As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill

from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor (36)

Surely even these twenty-odd lines I have cited are not only poetry but poised, firm, beautiful, to the ear and mind; that is, good poetry. I will give one passage a little longer, for his exquisite interfolding of language not English:

when they elected old Brisset Prince des Penseurs,

Romains, Vildrac and Chennevière and the rest of them

before the world was given over to wars

Quand vous serez bien vieille

remember that I have remembered,

mia pargoletta,

and pass on the tradition

there can be honesty of mind

without overwhelming talent

I have perhaps seen a waning of that tradition

Pound’s verse looks episodic, but it is built for pace and sound, and scarcely any verse is better built. As for its content, the fascist nostalgia and the anti-semitism are two only among many attitudes and feelings given voice in his book. They are not attractive. Baudelaire and Charlotte Bronte hated Belgians, and were very explicit and vicious on the subject; do we therefore abandon these authors? Literature really cannot be judged this way. But for that matter, even worse than Mr Hillyer’s representation of Yeats’s lifelong admiration of Pound’s poetry is his misrepresentation of Pound’s attitude towards “niggers”—some of his affectionate, graceful, delicate lines about them are in nearly every Canto from page 12 to the top of page 97—

A black delicate hand

a white’s hand like a ham

pass by, seen under the tent-flap (p. 18)

This is poetry too, and the end of the Canto is:

Hast ’ou seen the rose in the steel dust

(or swansdown ever?)

so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron

we who have passed over Lethe.

Please forgive my trespass upon your time.

Yours faithfully,

[LOC, MS]

9 Aug 49

Dear Léonie Adams

I’m sorry about the contract difficulty, which I don’t understand: I sent them to you back some weeks ago, with a letter of some length about the abominable Sat. Rev. of Lit. affair, ^sympathizing and^ offering any help I could give, besides congratulating the Fellows & the Library on the award made. Was all this lost? At any rate you have my permission of course to reproduce the poems you selected, and if new contracts have to be signed I’ll do it at once. I am sorrier than I can say for your bad luck in being, after an action so honourable & independent, so shamefully & vulgarly misrepresented.

Very best

John Berryman

I’m delighted though to hear of your forthcoming collection of poems.

[UMN, TS]

10 October 1949

Dear Mr Moe:

I write at the instigation of Mr Edmund Wilson and Mr R. P. Blackmur, to ask you a question. Of my own accord I doubt that it would have occurred to me to write again. The question is this: does there seem to you to be any point in my applying to the Foundation a fourth time for a fellowship?

Here is how the matter came up. Mr Wilson exprest surprise recently on learning that I had never had a Guggenheim and urged me to apply for one. On learning that I had done, three times, to no purpose, he exprest greater surprise, but again urged me to apply this Fall, using him for a reference. Mr Blackmur has said the same thing, and if there is any likelihood of my receiving a fellowship I feel I ought to apply, since as it happens I am penniless. On the other hand, you will perceive that there is a good deal of awkwardness and apparent fatuity in applying for something already three times refused—even when urged to do so by men for whom I feel some respect—if circumstances are much the same as they were for the refusals; and then I cannot be anxious to waste my friends’ time again for nothing, if you are able to advise me that it is very likely to be for nothing again.

Now I am not asking, of course, for a revelation of the secrets of your Advisory Committees, nor on the other hand for any sort of definite assurance of success. I understand that you do not decide the awards yourself—pray correct me if I am wrong. I also understand that the funds you administer are neither yours nor your Advisory Committees’, and neither are the principles upon which they are to be administered—pray correct me if I am wrong. You and they, I take it, are in a position of trust—endeavouring to administer faithfully, upon principles by others laid down, funds by others collected—pray correct me if I am wrong. If these things are so, no doubt you account to yourself, if to no one else, for what the Foundation does. Now the truth is that those of my friends who are familiar with the fact of my refusals and who are able to judge the matter (most of them having, for instance, had Guggenheims) appear to regard it as rather remarkable. The only thing that gives their opinion interest is that they are men, as it happens, at least as distinguished as any Advisory Committee that you can possibly have. But I think this is bound to give their opinion interest, in the face of not one or two but three refusals; and in short I suppose, therefore, that you must have some explanation to give to yourself for this inability of mine to get a Guggenheim. Naturally I should be very willing to know what this is, but what I am asking is something less: that you should let me know whether in your opinion it continues to be sufficiently in force to render as futile as usual another application by me. That would save us all trouble, and be very kind of you.

I would apply for a fellowship—in the event that you should advise me to apply—in poetry, making no project as I have always done in vain: simply the writing of verse.

I suppose that the biographical sketches, etc., that you have already would do. Nothing much has happened since I applied a year ago, except that Poetry gave me a Guarantors Prize, my book The Dispossessed was given the Shelley Memorial Award for 1948, my selection of Ezra Pound’s poetry has appeared and Partisan published my essay on it, various critics read my Stephen Crane in manuscript last January with praise and I have revised it three or four times since for publication this winter, and one of my stories concludes the new Scribner’s Little Treasury of American Prose.465

Yours faithfully,

[LOC, MS]

120 Prospect Ave

Princeton N.J.

23 Oct ’49

Dear Elizabeth Bishop

I wonder if the library could pay me the recording fee for that reading done long ago, at once.466 I need money very much (so, he says, does Blackmur who also wants to be paid) and would be grateful for any expedition you can make.

May I wish you good luck with your year—nothing in the least resembling Miss Adams’s I hope.

Yrs sincerely

John Berryman

[Chicago, MS]

1 Nov 49

My dear Carruth

Proofs of both please as soon as you can. I never counted words in my life & am too tired now—drop or add a question or so should do. Let me hear what you think of the prose (not of course as prose); I worked.467

I wasn’t ready to print any verse but your ‘Desperately’ affected me, as an old editor. I showed these ^old^ things then to R P Blackmur who thinks ^tells me^ they will do; my judgment is useless if I don’t care. Call them “The Cage & some old poems.”468 Having decided to print I need money at once—can you let me have a cheque by return for whatever you want—nothing without The Cage—which I do still care about and don’t show it before we publish.

Yrs

JB

My husband wants to make a few changes [to] The Cage and Secular Hymn so asks that you send them back.

Eileen Berryman469

[Chicago, MS]

Friday [November 1949]

My dear Carruth

Ponderous is just the word for that stupid line; I will try to make it human. Please do be explicit & full with unfavourable opinion. I am surprised & interested by yr view of The Black Book. There are 13 sections, some long unfinished & some I can’t find—I sent you the best of those I found drafts of readable. More perhaps later. As for not printing poems, I never do unless askt & v. seldom then except after a long time. No hurry.

Glad you liked the Supplement. It is candid, anyway. I had to rush J C Crews and ought to add a line—expensive in proof?—how did the length work?470

These poems next week without fail, I must just get breath first.

I see yr point of course against payment before establishment of copy.

Data: just live in Princeton, the Dispossessed, Shelley Mem. Award 1948, Stephen Crane soon.

Thanks for ‘ponderous’. Which poem did you think weakest? Perhaps I can replace it.

Yrs, JB

[UMN, TS]

15 November 1949

Dear Sir:

After reflection, and upon advice, I have decided that it is my honest opinion that nothing in your letter is germane to your publication or non-publication of the Letter of Protest (which you imagine is a “petition”) and that your letter, as not sincere, is unworthy reply.471 You seem to me to be preparing ground for a new “conspiracy” or “smear” charge—as with a phrase like “the previous attempts to collect signatures”, of which I know nothing and therefore presumably you know nothing. Nevertheless, in obligation to the other signatories I reply, mentioning first that we are now eighty. To the names you have are to be added alphabetically these: Brewster Ghiselin, B.H. Haggin, Andrew Lytle, Richard McKeon, Josephine Miles, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, William Troy.

I did not write the Letter or “organize” anything; when I was shown it as of joint authorship—indifferent to me—and asked to help circulate it I was glad to do so. The “sponsor” you are so eager to find is or are evidently the eighty signatories—all mature persons, blazing with free will and (it appears) censure of The Saturday Review. No single message from the few authors addressed who did not sign (as unfamiliar with the controversy or critical of some phrase in the Letter) favoured your position; and so of course their names cannot be exposed to you for misrepresentation. The demand was equally fantastic and disingenuous.

With regret I renew my desire to learn either when the Letter will be published by you or that it will not be. Of course it will have to be made public otherwise anyway.

Sincerely,

1950

[UMN, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton, N.J.

January 7, 1950

Dear Mr. Oates:

Thank you for your letter about the Hodder Fellowship, in reply to which I should say that I would like to be considered for the appointment.472 I write verse, literary criticism, biography, textual criticism and other things, so that a year is not easy to plan ahead. But at any rate I would be finishing a new book of verse which is now about one-third done. The edition of King Lear I have had in hand since 1942 wants finishing also—I abandoned it several years ago to wait for Duthie’s limited one which he told me was imminent and has now finally appeared.473 Other Shakespearian materials have accumulated also and want assembling; I have delayed until the appearance of the Lear would make it certain that what I published would be attended to. I did correspond with Dr. W. W. Greg for a while, and he withdrew his theory of Lear’s staging to make way for mine (The Review of English Studies, 1946); I also sent Kenneth Sisam—the Clarendon Press being interested in my edition—a set of corrections and additions for Onions’ Shakespeare Glossary in the light of which Sisam observed that this standard work will eventually be revised. Greg has accepted, privately, various emendations also. Verse then and Shakespearian work would be probably what I would be chiefly at. $4000 I should call the stipend which would actually free me for a year’s work.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Colgate, MS]

Princeton, 11 Sept 50

Dear Bruce

I’m sorry about yr Army call. It is the devil & I shd think you cd be much better placed than in Tanks. The only good I can see in the thing, apart from service, let me mention—for you probably see none. It’s this. Your German war brought you back w. a cluster of feelings of hopeless superiority; from which, & ^even more^ from the reaction to which (feelings of inadequacy), your life & work have been suffering intermittently ever since.474 The trouble partly was that you had not earned the superiority, & knew this & suppressed it. Very likely a second, more active bout will let you master all that—a tiny rose, but something, among the great thorns.—Yes of course come to see us. We are seldom in during the day, so perhaps send a card. I haven’t seen Hopkins Rev. recently, I’m glad it’s improving.475 Auerbach on Baud., as spoken, was firstrate; I must see that.476 Poem? maybe. Very good luck w. yr orals.

Best,

John

Both our best to Doris.

Richard’s not back yet; don’t know just when.

1951

[Princeton, MS]

Princeton 5 Febr [1951]

Dear Erich

I am ashamed that I have not written earlier to you about your loss—though what can one say—and my spirits are just now so low that it seems to me the best thing we can all do is to follow your good mother as soon as possible. You will miss her, but she is at peace. It is clear enough where the advantage lies.—But you have important things to do and I hope they will help you through the immediate sharpness.

Quite unable to write letters I have done nothing until today about Miss Wolff, when I told her to go ahead.477 The poem is poor, very poor, but I can’t revive it yet. I am sorry about all this too.

What I am glad of is that you are free now a while. As soon as I ascend to conversibility you & Lili must come for a dinner.478

Love, John

[Haffenden, TS]

5 February 1951

Dear William Sloane

Let’s save Bill & John till the end of the letter, for a reason I’ll make clear. Just as an author to publisher, then:

Yes I was interested to hear from you, six or seven weeks after the Crane was published on Dec 11th, that you were reprinting it. This was effectively the first communication I had had from the firm for months, with two exceptions—an invitation to a publication-day luncheon, which I declined with thanks, containing quotations from a review (although I had repeatedly told Miss Stewart that I do not read reviews), and a telephone call from somebody “for Miss Stewart” asking me to give a radio interview. It is boring to have a publisher with whom one has no relation.

What happened, of course, is that Miss Stewart again indulged herself in the fit of rage that seems to accompany the publication of my books. For The Dispossessed the occasion was a letter I had written to her declining to autograph books, etc., and the publication-day luncheon was a nightmare of resentful non-communication. I heard no more about that book, except for a letter from Hood telling me (what I have never believed) that it had sold just half as many copies as your books of verse usually do. Then I was transferred to Miss Taylor, with whom I got on very well, and then Miss Taylor unfortunately left and I was unfortunately transferred back. I do not pretend to be entirely easy to get on with, and Miss Stewart has certainly from time to time made real efforts. But even in details she has not been very successful; I recall for instance a letter from her about Eliot’s rejection of the poems so patronizing and unsatisfactory that it was actually followed in a day or so by a letter from you, very different in tone, quoting Eliot at length. But over the Crane she has surpassed herself. This time the occasion seems to have been an elaborate complaint from my copy-editor and indexer Mrs Moore, an excellent woman but obstinate, ill, and hysterical. Miss Stewart permitted herself to refuse to listen to an account attempted by me of what had occurred. Naturally, business can hardly be transacted in such an atmosphere. That was early last fall and set a tone, familiar to me, for the publication of the Crane. But that was not by any means all. Miss Stewart or you then twice changed the publication date without informing me—once I heard (via a friend) from a newspaper, the second time (via another friend) from Time Magazine, of the new dates. This final and unbusinesslike self-indulgence in sullenness, followed by a total silence for the first month-and-a-half after publication, would I think have alienated permanently a man more patient than I am.

Now I have no interest in establishing the right or wrong of any of this, nor in blaming or having you blame, Miss Stewart for anything. It is all past history. One original difficulty, no doubt, was a social acquaintance very unlucky for business, and especially my great respect for her father,479 which put it out of the question for me ever just to tell her what was what, as Irving Howe tells me that he had to do, exasperated, the other day.480 The purpose of the present letter is simply, ^so far,^ to explain that my relation with the firm has been tortured; that I have not got an editor; and ^that^ therefore I have to take up with you the affairs of the Crane.

Your failure to advertize the book has puzzled many people, including me. Of course you did not advertize The Dispossessed; Miss Stewart, when I asked her about this, said that there had been a routine ad in Publishers Weekly and your budget allowed nothing more until sales reached a certain level; I assume they never did, and that was that. I would comment now that roundup-quotation ads serve a literary purpose; most readers see only one or two vehicles and have no idea what the critical response to a book has been otherwise; a serious publisher’s budget which makes no allowance whatever for something of this sort, in cases where there is any critical response, must be a strange one. But the Crane, a biography, is plainly another matter in any event. I gather it has had so far a full, and in part extremely favourable, press. Wilson’s opinion especially does not appear to have failed to interest a large number of people. It seems that you are not advertising any of your books at present, and of course there are the usual rumours from other publishers of your imminent collapse. But I would like to hear whether you have any plans whatever for trying to sell the Crane beyond filling orders if any turn up.

And this brings me to another point equally troublesome. The Princeton University Store ordered 18 copies and had dozens of requests for the book during the weeks before Christmas, none of which it could fill since no copies came till after Christmas, and so some of the 18 are still (or were recently) left. Some of the would-be purchasers, of course, may have bought it elsewhere—but not in Princeton, where the other bookshop, Zavelle’s had, I am informed, the same experience. Princeton is one hour from New York. If the book was not available here, was it available anywhere or widely available? The fairly brisk sale, comparatively, of which you tell me seems surprising indeed in the face of this Princeton instance. Most of a pre-Christmas sale must have been utterly lost. Of course some of these people will buy it eventually; if they are reminded.

Well, I have returned a long letter for your five and a half lines. You may as well ignore it all except for the requests for information. I assure you that it is a strange experience to be congratulated everywhere on a “success” when not only has one not heard one word from one’s publisher but, on past experience, may not do so for six months. Perhaps the situation may now clear up. If Miss Stewart is doing anything about the Crane, which I doubt, and cares to be polite and businesslike, very well; I will be also. About the Bill & John: they didn’t seem suitable to a discussion of a relation that has been intolerable with the firm but pleasant with you personally, and I have to thank you particularly for the goodlooking leather Crane at Christmas. I could give you a deal of news myself about the book but this letter is quite long enough.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

P.S. Some further points, however, on the main theme, since I now have two books published by you and we may as well understand each other if we can.

First, about advertising. I am a little tired of the American Men of Letters Series. I have excellent reason to be. The Columbia professors have been very handsome in their comments about each other’s volumes; and my friend Mark and my acquaintances Trilling and Krutch were pleasant about a draft of my Crane; but the Editors’ comment on it printed in your catalogue was so perfunctory and brief that I am not surprised to find it omitted altogether from the dustwrapper. It was about three sentences. Contrast, if you will, their florid joy about Professor Neff’s bloodless Robinson: “..Mr. Neff has penetrated to the secret of each subject as if it were something altogether unique.… his tragic intensity reveals itself in every sentence Neff writes.… magnificently.… a critical imagination which never rests or leaves any quality undefined …”481 Of course this is pure shit and probably not even sincere, and I am glad that such lies were not told about my book; but there is an unattractive element of condescension in nothing’s being said, especially in view of a certain fact. I wonder whether you are aware that for years I have heard a good deal of contempt from writers in regard to the American Men of Letters Series, as academic and superfluous. It is a fact that every volume so far except possibly Grossman’s is by a BIG Professor, and several are absolutely ineffective and unnecessary.482 Now I am not a professor of any sort, I am a generation younger than any of your authors so far, I have as a critic a certain credit in an area not open to any of the other authors, the life of Crane is much more obviously interesting than any of the other lives handled so far, and my book fills a distinct need long felt and long expressed. All this is as plain as the nose on Neff’s—Professor Neff’s—face. So that, although for the reason given I do not feel very amiable toward the Series at this moment and am far from pleased that you have given over ^to^ its prestige the entire back and back-flap of my book, I will freely point out that you have something to gain for the Series by advertising my book.

It is just a detail that although Neff’s other books are carefully listed in the front of his, and Mark’s are, and so on, mine splendidly are not, although you published one of them yourself.

And it was not worth mention, naturally, that I had an American Academy Award in 1950 citing inter alia exactly the Crane. This is another detail, typical of a number that ought to have discussion, if there were ever any discussion. I pause, hoping that you will read this letter carefully, with some sympathy for an exasperation well beyond endurance, and will let me hear from you.

[Chicago, MS]

Princeton, 5 Febr 51

Dear Karl

Christ. One of my worst habits is not even opening letters when I am to blame, as in correspondence I usually am. I thought this letter (of Jan 8th) was to say, of course, when the hell the Patria mia review?483 What now made me open it was finding ^(with horror)^ a stampt & addrest ^but not sealed^ letter of mine to you of Oct 10 thanking you for the Levinson award, obviously lost in the nightmare of my desk & forgotten.484 What you have thought of me on 3 counts now, I don’t care to wonder.

Well. I won’t send the Oct letter, because it was grateful-but-very-gloomy though not so gloomy as I feel now. Why you gave my stuff a prize God knows;—perhaps the others were even worse. The money was v. useful & gave me a moment’s breathing. The encouragement let me finish an atrociously bad poem I had (correctly) lost faith in.—My first ¶ dealt with the ‘Karl’ & ‘John’ matter ^you brought up.^ Let us.

Then Pound. O skeletons, I see I told you I was sorry I couldn’t do Pound’s letters for you because I’d promised to for Miss Marshall.485 So there are 4 counts. Well, I have been too low to do anything and she is still waiting ^(for the examination as well as letters)^. I have finally roused myself to some Shakespeare, & ^a^ Dreiser, but not Pound.486 SORRY. I gave up a comparison I’d outlined betw. Patria mia & America’s Coming of Age487 and laid out an article, taking off from Pound’s essay, on the ^American^ Poet’s ^current^ living-situation; if I write ^it^, I’ll send it you.

And now Delmore. Rotten luck altogether about Kenner.488 Is he any good, really? I mean has he any taste? So wonderful is our critical machinery that a man who couldn’t distinguish between Dante & Patmore’s odes489 might easily get a full professorship at Yale as a literary critic. Let me read the Vaudeville book carefully, I have not done so for lowness, and then—if you have not already got somebody else, because of my ostrichicity—maybe I can help. I’ll let you know in 2 or 3 days. But I’m doubtful.^—^Who else to suggest—? The writers who can hear poetry are not very numerous, and younger ones I know v. little about because I never read magazines any more or as seldom as possible. Wait a day or so.

Very sorry about all this mess.

Best

Yrs

John

[UMN, TS]

10 February 1951

My dear Mr Clemens:

I love Mark Twain—and who could fail to be intensified by your arresting proffer of Honorary Membership in a Society in which King Leopold of Belgium is Chairman of the Entomological Committee and the Duke of Marlborough is happy on the letterhead between Mary Roberts Rinehart and Bull Halsey.490 A qualm about Mr Eliot’s comfort between Mrs Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and the Duke of Somerset cannot detain me. I accept with passion.491

On the printed blank for return I perceive a space in one sentence. “I am enclosing herewith $_______ to help the Society carry on its activities.” Your letter, it is true, tells me “There are no dues or assessments” but my experience for 36 years tells me that nobody gets anything for nothing and besides, as an Honorary Member elect, I wish to contribute. The question was: what sum? After long calculation and reflection I have decided on 18¢, as the only sum representing a just compromise among my poverty, my dignity, Mark Twain’s dignity, and the needs of the Society. I enclose my cheque for this amount and hang out the window waiting for the Certificate of Honorary Membership.

Yours fraternally,

[Chicago, TS]

Princeton, Thursday [?spring 1951]

Dear Karl,

No soap. I feel like hell about this. I have written twice, a long piece (long I mean for a review) and it won’t do for either one of us, you or me. The proximate trouble is that my initial impression of Vaudeville for a Princess has not survived study; the only poem I thoroughly like is the “Spoils of Joy” one early on in it and this is not enough even though I devoted most of the piece to his career in general. Of course I could have reviewed the book on this basis, if I had agreed to (as, for the reasons I gave, I couldn’t); but I can’t do anything but say what I think, and it doesn’t make anything to follow an unfavourable review—being very friendly and respectful it is in fact probably much more damaging than whatever Kenner has written, and this is hardly our point. The ultimate trouble is exactly the intolerability of undertaking to follow or as it were counterbalance something unfriendly, when (as probably you do yourself) I read and reread until at last I find out what I think. It wasn’t a good plan, and how in the name of God I got into it (I can’t find our correspondence) I can’t think. I have done the best I could. My opinion of his earlier books remains unchanged over this study, and of course I have learnt a great deal about them that even I didn’t know before; but it’s of no use to us on this occasion. I’m sorry. Why don’t you kill Kenner’s review, if you have adequate reason for doing so; or, if you have to use it, write Delmore a note saying it ain’t your opinion and let him not mind. What the devil does one review matter anyway: it is the massed indifference that is really troublesome & makes it hard to write, not to speak of money, liquor, the horrors of expression, etc.—You’ve been very goodnatured all through this, though no doubt boiling, and even ask me for verse. My papers are all a mess. I’ll copy out on the next page the only poem I can remember—since I’ve remembered it 3 or 4 years it may be there is something in it. Early next month I’ll look about seriously. I am writing now but can’t tell how it is. Best,

John

(over)492

[Princeton, MS]

4 May 1951

Dear Erich

I only heard in Washington, where we were over the weekend, about Hermann Broch, and we are horribly sorry.493 It seems grotesque. This is just a line to send you my deepest sympathy

We are thinking of spending next year in Bangkok. I’ll call you later this week—let us have coffee and talk. The world gets gloomier & gloomier and I haven’t done any work for over a month except fulfil some trivial public duties.

How sorry I am. I hope it was quick.

Love

John

[UMN, TS]

10 May 1951

Dear Datus,

Thanks for your amiable letter of 6 weeks ago with its suggestion about the Shakespeare lectures, and my apologies for replying so soon—till I’d finished giving them I couldn’t decide anything and so delayed, then I slept for ten days and then had to lecture elsewhere and so on, in fact I haven’t yet made up my mind to anything. It’s true that they were planned as a draft of a critical biography of the poet. But they are very uneven, though; the second, which unluckily you heard, is worst, and the fourth not much better; and it’s hard to think just what to do with them until I’ve been able to rework especially those two. On the other hand, what kind of reworking I give them depends partly on what I decide to do with them: an unannotated book, somewhat still in lecture-form (which Kahler advises, amounting to a preliminary biographical and critical study), or an annotated one (it’s hard to decide to release them in any form without some at least of the annotation which wd be extremely useful to most readers), or no book at all (pending, at some time to come, a full biography, critical) but perhaps magazine publication (money here being involved, the which is horribly relevant), or both or all three. Forgive my sentence structure; the subject itself is confusing. I have had a letter from the Hudson Review asking to see the first one.494 The first one, in fact, is the least unsatisfactory, and I think I may do this,—though without definitely submitting it, so that I can withdraw it if I make other plans. I do think the series, rewritten, would make an interesting book of a kind not now (or ever before) in existence, and helpful to any kind of reader at all, but I have been walking up and down on this ground for too many years to be able to decide anything very rapidly. I only write really to thank you, to explain my intolerable delay, and to assure you that I will hold the invitation decidedly in mind. I have one or two other Shakespearian projects in mind—not to be done, probably, by me, unless just introduced or something of that sort—which would earn us the love and gratitude of students all over the world; if the occupations of the Press ever slacken, let me know and I’ll describe them.

Best,

Yrs sincerely,

[UMN, TS]

22 May 1951

Gentlemen:

Word got here lately that an American lecturer was wanted at the university in Bangkok, in English, and when I was in New York yesterday I talked with Mr Fahs495 and Mr Marshall at the Rockefeller Foundation about the place, at their suggestion telephoned Dr Bowles496 in Washington, and send you now a summary tentative application. I’ll tell you why I was interested. I’ve been for a long time much interested in Cambodia and Siam; my next book, or next but one, can be written better away from books than near them; I’ve not been abroad since 1938 and feel stale; Bangkok is as far away as possible; I’d like some experience of Asia before it becomes, perhaps, inaccessible. But for the post definitely open by Dr Bowles’s account, that of a lecturer on the teaching of language, I am not very suitable. Probably I ought to apply to you, if at all, under a research project—to do a book on the country, with probably some general university lecturing in literature, and such help given as I can to the writers there. In order to help you judge this, I must tell you some biography quickly.

Born 1914 in Oklahoma, degrees from Columbia (New York) and Cambridge (England), taught 3 years at Harvard and at Princeton off and on since 1943, visiting professor last spring at the University of Washington in Seattle. My last two books were The Dispossessed (poems, 1948, Shelley Memorial Award) and a critical biography Stephen Crane which was a sort of bestseller in the American Men of Letters Series this last winter. Kenyon-Doubleday first prize 1945 for a story “The Imaginary Jew” since often reprinted here and in Europe. American Academy Award 1950. This year I have been the Hodder Fellow at Princeton, giving this spring a series of public lectures on Shakespeare which form a draft of a critical biography of the poet, on whom I’ve been working a long while, especially as the Oldham Shakespeare Scholar at Cambridge in 1937 and a Rockefeller Fellow in 1944–6.

What kind of book exactly I’d want to do, I naturally don’t know. I am impressed, like others, by the dreadful need of a better understanding of the world by America and vice versa. Michener’s pieces in the Herald-Tribune I think excellent.497 After some study of the curriculum at Chulalankarana University I am not eager to do regular teaching but think I might be useful as an occasional or general lecturer. Mr Fahs says Siamese writers are ill-trained, spiritless, Communist-infiltrated; very likely I could help with this. I should mention that my wife is a clinical psychologist in both clinical and private practice with children, diagnosis (Rorschach etc) and therapy. She’d go too.

Yours faithfully,

[NYPL, TS]

23 May 1951

Dear Mr Shahn [sic]:

What I want to suggest is a Profile on William Shakespeare but I am not sending you now exactly a draft of one or part of a draft. These 40-odd pages are the first and third of four public lectures I gave at Princeton this spring, making up in effect a short critical biography. They are still in lecture-form, in which form they seem to have proved uncommonly interesting, and want rewriting no matter how I print them, though the University press has asked to bring them out at once as a book; but the rehandling they would need for you would obviously be different from the rehandling they would need for another magazine or for a book, and I wonder whether even as they stand now you can form an impression of whether and to what degree you might be interested in them recast as a Profile.

Much more is known about Shakespeare than most people, even most scholars, suppose, because—well, there are many reasons, but the chief one is probably that nobody has heretofore tried to take into account all the biographical material who is not either numb or ignorant in several of the numerous disciplines involved: historical, documentary, bibliographical, textual, psychological, critical, etc. It takes years, so this is not very surprising—not even the detail-scholars are generally aware of each other’s work; but it is a pity. It has left all cultivated people except professional Shakespearians at the mercy of every form of misrepresentation or stupidity, and partly accounts for their nervousness about Shakespeare, their truculence or awe. After fifteen years off and on at the subject I wanted to try to do something about this, being fairly equipped and at the same time having some credit as critic and biographer entirely non-Shakespearian.

As a Profile it is somewhat off your track but you do occasionally and pleasantly go off your track. I have an idea most of your readers and possibly even some of your browsers would be interested. The Profile would be more circumstantial and explicit than the lectures, it goes without saying. I’d be glad of advice if as I hope you should want to talk about it.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Yale, TS]

6 June 1951

Dear Edmund,

Thanks about the Oxford Jonson vols. ix & x, wh I’d be glad to have.498 That damned set costs too much; I still use Gifford.499 I think it is very amusing that we have no critical edition of Shakespeare but one of Jonson. Dover Wilson by the way is wrong, and you are right, about Falstaff’s not (of course) recognizing the Prince at the robbery and not smiling at all in “Mr Shallow I owe you a thousand pound”—which like you I’ve thought for years a great line; Shallow then says something like Indeed you do Sir John, let me have some part of it back, and Falstaff says “That can hardly be, Master Shallow”—hard to see how Wilson got so wrong, except that he is temperamentally crazy half the time.500 About the end of your piece: I distinguish betw. Hamlet-Othello-Lear as one kind of tragic hero and Macbeth as another; Richard II & Brutus look toward the first, Rich III toward the second; Falstaff breaks the frame more violently than anyone except Hamlet, but the reasons seem to me very different & impossible to put shortly (the Hamlet-reasons are suggested in my 3rd Sh lecture wh I’ll give to you to read some time, the Falstaff-reasons I only just had room to touch in my 2nd and must add).

Reading lately most of the stuff in yr Classics &c that I’d not before and rereading most of what I had. I like specially the treatment of Miss Austen, Time (118–20 & the whole piece), O’Hara (yes, precisely downhill), Swift, and the detective-pieces of wh the 2nd after 4 or 5 readings I think must be one of the most adroit things you ever did and entirely true.501 Agree about Elinor & Marianne; but think Emma artistically finest, Mansfield Park the richest & most Shakespearean; surely Northanger Abbey is much inferior to & rather unlike the others—I ought to explain that having read in order the first (finished) five some years ago, I reserved Persuasion for my age and am still refraining, so I don’t take this into account. Let me recommend to you that if you’ve forgotten or missed it something that astounded me last year, the portrait of Rosamund [sic] in Middlemarch, and ask what you thought of The Naked and the Dead if you’ve read it—I just did & think it ^a^ handsome and impressive case. I always read these hits years late in order to have a free mind. Isn’t it an omission, considering the book as a chronicle, not to touch writers like Miss Stafford and J F Powers: in the waste of younger fiction, two of the few who look to do perhaps something. Your writing is everywhere in the book enviably agreeable & cultivated and ought to shame me out of sending a letter as sloppy as this but I have been having root-canal work done in New York today and plead discomfort. It was very good to see you. I go on the 18th to Vermont to lecture for a fortnight at something called the School of Modern Critical Studies but will be back here most of July. Come if you’re anywhere about. Very good luck with your play.

Best,

John Berryman

My point abt. the younger writers is this: so few critics are judges of fiction that it seems to me you’ve some responsibility to help ^encourage &^ keep things straight. Charles Jackson told me lately of the awe with which he once received a remark of yours (adverse) about him; an example.502

[UMN, TS]

Mon 18 June 51

Dear Mr Weiss:

I had your letter last week; it came too late for any possibility of my coming to Bard during the week as you mentioned.503 But on account of my conversation earlier by telephone with Miss Brandeis I have rather expected to hear from Bard again before writing myself what I told her.504 The situation is surely somewhat confused and odd. Neither of you said what position Bard perhaps had in mind for me, nor was any salary mentioned. It seems to me that to ask me to visit Bard without knowing whether what you have in mind is something that I might be interested in runs the risk of wasting all our time and some of my money unless you were paying my expences. Moreover, as I told Miss Brandeis when she rang up from New York, I doubt very much whether I could move to Bard, so that a visit would probably be pointless unless you were willing to consider the possibility of my spending simply several days a week there (while continuing to live in Princeton), say two days a week if I were teaching part-time, three or four if full-time. This is what Robert Fitzgerald has been doing at Princeton, and while far from ideal for either the college or the man it is practicable. A further difficulty I mentioned to her is the possibility that during the second half of the academic year 1951–2 I might need a leave of absence for a poet-in-residence affair in the middlewest. She asked what I could or would want to teach—“would insist on teaching” she put it. Of course I would not insist upon anything, as I told her, but am most readily competent, perhaps, at Shakespeare, modern poetry and fiction, European drama, American 19th century. I have no idea, naturally, whether the qualifications that my circumstances seem to make necessary put me quite out of the question for you; but let me hear if you will before we think of arranging a visit. I will be lecturing here until Friday week.

Yours sincerely,

We met once at some crush in New York I think: hello.

[Yale, MS]

Wed 25 July [1951]

Dear Edmund

Thanks very much for the Jonson. The commentary is good but the rest rather overdone & more prickly than a major edition ought to be—Greg got under their skin. If you are not reviewing regularly for The New Yorker I wonder whether there’d be any chance in your opinion of my doing an occasional review-piece for them. Several of the characters they have don’t seem very good. On the other hand I have never been able to get to first base with The New Yorker myself and it would simply be a question of trial. But who would I write to there if you thought it worth trying? I am brilliantly hard up. Eileen sends love,

Best,

John

We’re here till Aug 1st,

then Princeton.

Marvellous weather

& I just wrote 40 lines

less stupid than usual

or the sun makes me

self-indulgent.

I hope your

work goes

well.

[Yale, MS]

26 July 51

Dear Dwight

My letting your letter go so long contradicts the delight with which I got it but my letter habits are known to you and the delight was real.—Eileen has just come out on the sunporch where I’m writing and tells me she has sent a p.c. to Nancy, at Wellfleet. To tell the truth I hadn’t the faintest idea what country or even what continent you’re in—one of my points in writing is to find out—but I’ll try Wellfleet then. What has been happening? Of myself there’s no news. Life seems to be an endurance contest without prizes or plan. I was exhausted after the Shakespeare lectures in the Spring and—for a change, instead of skiing through the sky—sank into stupor for weeks. Then I went to Vermont to lecture at a thing called the School of Modern Critical Studies for a fortnight on Crane & Hemingway. Blackmur, Cowley, David Daiches, Howe & a nervous bore from New Haven named Pearson were there.505 We all drank too much, though I behaved v. well, but I made some money and was absolutely charmed by Daiches, like everyone else: not a v. good critic but one of the ^most^ delightful talkers ever created. His stories don’t go on paper; I’ll tell you some when I see you. I haven’t met anyone so pleasant for years. Then I tried without success to interest The New Yorker in a profile of my friend William Sh., and am now up here loafing, swimming, & revising two of the lectures for the Hudson & Kenyon in order to eat during August. I’ve drafted some verse too and feel less listless, but v. discouraged however and somehow planless—an unusual condition for me and extremely disagreeable. It’s your plans, as well as the state of your emotions personal and cosmological, that I wish to God you would write me about. I think I am in very much the mind you’ve been drifting in & out of for several years. Perhaps we could help each other. The notion of going over one’s own past, as you were doing, attracts me. (The Crane-ish story by the way is astoundingly good; I agree with you, and would I think have recognized a sharp talent in it if ever handed me by a young writer.) But I’d like more foothold in the future first. There are just two things at present: the Univ. of Cincinnati seems to want me to come out as a sort of poet-in-residence during the second half of the coming year, and Viking wants me to sign with them for my critical biography of Shakespeare; I’ll probably have to do both, for money, but these are not at all the kind of thing I mean. I can’t get much either out of books or the careers of my friends. The only one who is suddenly going much better and very well is Blackmur, and this pleases me but does not much encourage me partly because the advance has been so long delayed and partly because it is heavily founded on his very painful divorce. I had lately to study carefully Delmore’s last book and it discouraged me intensely; of course a book is just an episode in a whole activity, but all the visible current episodes seem disheartening. He (D.S.) has also adopted, in various essays, a tone of complaint and either worldliness or entire withdrawal both of which seem to me undesirable. How shall we hit another way?—an ideality persisting in the world, active, learned, & fresh? where? Camus is one of the few working writers I read without boredom or dismay. (From Hannah Arendt’s book by the way, of which you wrote, I learnt a good deal, without its striking me so hard as evidently it did you.506) |I have the Yale story of yours in Princeton of course & will return it.|

Write to me when you can, eh? and if you go down to New York in August, ring up & come to Princeton—we’ll be there the whole month so far as I know. I hope you’re well & liking the Cape again if you’re there. My health is better this week than it’s been since early winter. Love to Nancy—Fancy—of whom I’d be very glad of news too—and Mike and Micky—not ceremonial but actual—

John

Longest letter I’ve written for years; sorry not gayer.

[Princeton, MS]

120 Prospect Av

11 August 51

Dear Fred

Here it is.507 Two requests: that if you want it will you pay me directly? I mean by mail back, I am v. bad. And when ^if you want it^ will you print it? There will certainly be improvements to be made before proof.

I’d be v. glad to know yr opinion ^of^ it, parts & procedure, annotation etc (I shd have liked to annotate more fully).

Ten days of marvellous weather but today Princeton is like a blast furnace.

Best

John

Write me some news too. What are you doing? I’ve taken up tennis again & I’m improving; two years I judge will bring me to where I was at 18. I’ve been studying the new British cosmology in an attempt to find out why life moves backward.

[Princeton, TS]

120 Prospect Avenue

Princeton N J

21 November 1951

Dear Ted Weiss,

Thanks for yr letter confirming the telephone call. Pearson I gather is not coming, he has sent me a note. What about Cowley? I don’t know that I can suggest anyone you haven’t thought of—the number of possible people is considerable and yet even of old friends it’s impossible to know how they are at such things unless you happen to have heard them at one and I very seldom go to them. Trilling I know is good, and Blackmur. But the real point is somebody also interested in the subject and this I don’t know about. Paul Goodman might be a possibility, as an insatiable creator of both verse & prose who often can’t tell the difference between them.508

What I will probably do myself is talk for three-quarters of an hour or an hour about (in a diagnostic way) Shakespeare, Walter Scott & Miss Austen, Joyce; Eliot & Hemingway, Whitman & Dylan Thomas, Faulkner & Graves, R Lowell & J F Power [sic] & possibilities. I can’t give you a title yet. What hour which day do you want me to speak, and when to arrive? can you tell me the hour of a good train from New York? Best,

Sincerely,

John Berryman

[Princeton, MS]

Princeton 12 Dec 1951

My dear Renée

I wanted to thank you & Ted again for food & drink & bed & talk & much kindness. Graham got off all right.509 I had been unhappily delivered to a 2 p.m. train that does not run on Sunday but probably the schedule had been lately changed and anyway after a short exasperation I forgave you. In due course, as soon as I can bring myself to communicate again with my ex-publisher Sloane, you’ll have a copy of my last book of verse by way of gratitude.

You remember I askt you the name of the boy they call ‘Shelley’ (no resemblance to my view)? Sheldon Snyder? Would you or Ted let me know exactly? For no reason known to God or man unless he askt for it as I think he did, he tells me that I undertook in Vermont to have him sent a copy of my Crane book; so I must.

I don’t think I knew David Schubert was dead.510

We are all children

We must all die511

Very best,

Sincerely,

John

[Princeton, MS]

Princeton, 23 Dec 51

Dear Ted & Renée

Thanks for the cheque so quique. It makes Christmas seem less spindling. Cincinnati are paying me a fortune for the Spring but how to live meanwhile?

There are always ironies in these affairs. I was sharing one with you, not accusing you of it.

I’ll tell you the end of the rime if you’ll tell me the beginning.

We are all children

We must all die

—Except Jock Graham!

The fairest of them all

He can dance & he can sing

And he can turn his face to the wall

—Fie fie fie for shame

Turn your face to the wall again.

This I have been singing to myself since, but the opening lines I forget utterly. Perhaps Jean Garrigue, to whom my regards, or somebody, can help.512 Graham threatened to descend on me here, but so far—just as well, for I’m working—no sign. Poor Graham. I had some talk w. him when we walkt the last morning—he is much better alone, like most people—he was charming on the subject of Gascoyne, who drives him (naturally) crazy.513 (I did, too, of course.)

Merry Christmas.

John

1952

[UMN, TS]

14 May 52

My dear Catharine,

Extraordinary interesting letter, to which I can’t possibly yet or now reply. I have workt here like a madman, 18 public lectures, endless official & social activities, and am not even yet through, but extremely done up, and still with accumulated masses of junk to deal with. Undoubtedly I have been a great success, which is the most wearying thing that anyone can be; everybody loves me and goes off like fireworks when I appear, and I have been extremely unhappy. About John Walcott’s novel: Christ, I think I once read it for Nela (his widow, old friend of Richard’s & mine) but what I thought of it I forget.514 It sounds good by what you say. Of course if Richard wd edit it, I wd say publish it like a shot. I am coming back June 1st & will call you the first time I’m in town. I have done a hundred pp of Shakespeare but nothing else. Very pleasant city; too pleasant. I’ll tell you about it. I have not been away except once to Detroit where Wayne offered me so much money to read my own stuff that I had to go: exhausting. If it was you who sent me Mary’s Bard novel & the Milton, thanks.515 This woman Clara Winston is good, she has amazed me, I think I’ll have to send Lindley a statement tho I never did for anyone before.516 Take care of yourself.

John

[Princeton, MS]

31 May 52

Dear Erich

I feel dreadful about not having written but this has been a fantastic circus. We fly out day after tomorrow & will see you very soon. Eileen & I were shocked by your not getting a Guggenheim; on the other hand we all know what that business is—I am convinced that mine was a clerical error. I thought your piece on Broch was extraordinary: a genuine accretion to human meditation.517 Love to you & Lilli,

John

We were delighted to hear from Lilli of your European trip

[Chicago, MS]

[19 June 1952]

Dear Karl Shapiro

Thanks for yr letter abt. the October ^issue^. I’ll send you the best thing I have by late next month, but what it will be I don’t yet know. There is a short poem—an express sonnet—which I wrote 5 or 6 yrs. ago & for various reasons only now care to publish; this I think is good.518 Then there are more elaborate things in various stages. Far the most important is one called ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’ which I’ve been working at over four years and which I have planned to “finish” this summer if I can;519 but this will run, depending on how much I can keep out of it, anywhere from 3 to 25 pages—I honestly can’t tell—and so it may be much too long for you, even if it’s done by August 1st, which I doubt.

Best regards,

John

19 June 52

[Yale, MS]

[late July 1952]

Dear Edmund

We are going in about ten days to Duxbury for a week with my chief Cincinnati crony, a classical scholar named Alister Cameron and his wife who have a house there: they’ve spoken of driving us out the Cape and I wonder if we could stop and see you & Elena if you’re there.

Your piece on Edna St V Millay is certainly one of the best things you’ve ever done.520 I’ve read it repeatedly & absorbedly. For the judicial part I only wish you had quoted her more; what you do cite is good. Nobody else living can recover & display a personality in this way. I hope the whole book’s gone well—I can’t wait.

Our best to you both,

John B

[Haffenden, MS]

[23 July 1952]

Dear Van

Chiaromonte’s letter is not intensely cheerful—he seldom is—but it may interest you.521 Let us hear, won’t you, as soon as they let you know.

I am unhinged by the heat ^(etc.)^ and have not even yet really got to work. I’m glad your Dewey piece got going.522 Eileen is well. I hope Betty is doing nothing. Don’t let her drink too much, though. Send Damaris from me an admiring wiggle when you write, & Christine a dignified bow. Sanford is on his own.523

We droop off to Duxbury in about a week where I dream of crushing Cameron at tennis as he did not refrain from crushing me when they were here.524 When this happens, or if I find my output lift to 4 lines a day, I’ll write again better. Love to you both,

John

23 June 52

[Chicago, TS]

[late July or early August 1952]

Dear Karl Shapiro,

As perpromise [sic]: I haven’t finisht the draft of the Bradstreet poem, so I send what seems the best thing I have unprinted.525

BUT, being superstitious, I don’t like to forgo the energizing coincidence of the near-ending of a long hard work and your special occasion, where probably the poem would be better read than anywhere for some time: busy as you probably are at the moment, can you send me a note (care of Alister Cameron, Cove st., Duxbury, Mass., where I’ll be for ten days) to say whether an extension of deadline is possible, and if so to when, and how tight the issue is, that is how many pages more than two you might be able to handle. Because the poem is very far advanced. Of course you may not like the poem, but if I finish it and you do, it wd be better than the sonnet. I think I shd withdraw the sonnet. Of course you may not like the sonnet either.

If there is a question of photograph, let me know. Any Poetry has are lousy, and there is a less lousy one I can send.

Best regards,

J.B.

[Haffenden, TS]

[?6 Oct 1952]

Dear Van,

We have just heard from Elisabeth about Unesco. I hope you are as happy and relieved about this, really, as I am. Once the thing came up at all, I thought you were absolutely right to reconcile yrself to the possibility, because you would have been uneasy not to. But now that it’s not to be, it seems to me you ought to rejoice, as being left alone to do yr own work, which is what matters. I think you could have done the Unesco business beautifully, but it wouldn’t have used you in the full way that one hopes to be used, which only pure work does.

But I can imagine you and especially Betty being momentarily disappointed, in which all our sympathy. Speed the sense of relief.

The scene is emptying. I expect we ought to be glad Santayana is gone, because of the loss and pain he was suffering, but it is hard to be glad.526

I wish I had written earlier; we wanted you very much to stop on us when you came East.

Did you get the Dewey piece done? I’d like to see it. His aesthetics was one of my chief enemies in college, I always liked his metaphysics much better. Thanks for McCarthy’s Eliot article; it seems to me very slow and extended and unaddressful but pretty good by the end.527 Do you want this back?

Oh my god! Shakespeare. That multiform & encyclopedic bastard. I am doing other things too, how badly I can’t tell yet. I did not finish the draft of my poem; but it inches on. Love to Betty & the children.

John

[UMN, TS]

[16 October 1952]

Also off BJ index: Sh!!528

Haughton

Women Pleas’d

See CBEL for Fletcher Wom. Pl |stacks & card cat.? |                                                         Year’s Work, ’23+

Haughton

? STC Old Meg. 1609 (Porter Ham, ‘Hobby-horse forgot’

Dear Jed,

Just a hurried note to ask whether you’ll tell me, if you conveniently can, what you’ve found if anything about Fletcher’s Women Pleased being a recast of an Eliz’n play? Dover Wilson brings this up in his notes to the Shrew induction and I fancy he’s right though his dating of it seems to me too early (because he antedates The Shrew, which I have good reason to think X and Sh. wrote in 98 or 99).529 His point is that the Lord’s account of the Soto part won’t fit the play as we have it. It won’t. But also: the lines near the end of IV.i ‘Away, thou pamper’d jade of vanity’ (Tamb II;—2 H 4, Eastward Ho) and ‘Shall the hobby-horse be forgot then’ (^LLL,^ Ham, Kemp 1600) seem better Eliz’n than Jacobean. ^Old Meg. 1609 (see STC)^ Cooke however has the second in 1611 and Jonson in 1614 & 1621. But I wonder if this play may not originally have been a Chamberlain’s play related to the lost Admiral’s Woman Hard to Please produced 27 Jan 1597. And I wonder if Wm Haughton was in that; his is the first name Henslowe gives later that year, and next year he did A Woman Will Have her Will (Englishmen..).530 Note in Women Pleas’d: in the climactic rime of V.1, women ‘desire to have their will’, and ditto the play’s final couplet. You’d think ‘fit as a fiddle’ wd be common enough, but actually Tilley (Dict., 1950) only knows two in Englishmen for my money and one here in IV.iii, and I haven’t found any others yet. I only pass this Fleay-like tissue on in case it meshes with anything of yours. Very good working to you, and best to you & Esther,531

John

16 October 52

Soto is Haughton-like or I wdn’t mention this possibility

[Princeton, TS]

[early November 1952]

Dear Fred,

Of course it is idiotic (as you kindly don’t say) to have held & tinkered a piece so long. I now quit. I am going to Washington tomorrow to see some books, taking the thing with me. On the train down, and back Sunday or Monday, with nothing to refer to about me, I’ll finish putting it in whatever shape is possible. I’ll give it to my typist when I get off the train, correct her typing, and send it to you. That will be Wednesday or Thursday.

I am extremely sorry about this. The piece covers what can readily be a lifetime’s study, and as a matter of fact I have been almost constantly at topics in it, for the purposes of other chapters in my book, and even of another book which I have suddenly had to begin and which I am supposed to give Viking at the end of next month. It is not laziness, I promise you. But it is silly, though the article is infinitely more accurate than it was. I should have let it go long since, and now I will. Mea culpa.

The other night as I sat listening to the horrible returns (I was for Stevenson) I came in the first quarto of Doctor Faustus—I had better explain that this has nothing to do with my article and that Eileen had gone despairing to bed—on the line Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris and went wildly out to find another Stevenson miserator.532 You were probably for Eisenhower, bless you. Our best to Connie.533 Let us meet, if you ever forgive me.

John

[Princeton, MS]

Thursday [November 1952]

Dear Fred

I gave the copy to my typist’s husband when I got back, & have just learnt of delay—she’s swampt, her typewriter’s broken, etc, she ‘can’t do it till Saturday’, hasn’t even begun. This for a change is not my fault. Apparently you’ll have it Mon. or Tues. then. It is, by the way, much better, much better.

I will need some offprints. What is yr practice abt this?

I found some markings apparently by Shakespeare in a book in the Folger—which he’s known to have owned, but nobody’s ever lookt inside.

Best

John

1953

[Haffenden, TS]

[8 January 1953]

Dearest Betty & Van,

She is convalescing beautifully and may even be home Sunday (this is Thursday).534 There has been no question of my taking up yr very sweet invitation yet, she depends too much on my visits. Then I have to bring her down, and then we have a woman coming to cook for a week or so, and again it’s certain I ought to be here. It was a long incision and she is going to be very weak for a while. It was delightful to talk to you, and we are not even mad at Van for not coming to see us when he was in New York (he was, wasn’t he?), especially since I owe you letters & letters. I’ll write properly soon. I came last night on a letter in the 2nd vol of Herndon’s Lincoln which is in all respects so inapposite that I must quote it to you.535 L had been highhandedly passed by in an important case he’d gone to Cincinnati to take, and so hated the city, saying to his hostess as he left: “You have made my stay here most agreeable, and I am a thousand times obliged to you; but in reply to your request for me to come again, I must say to you I never expect to be in Cincinnati again. I have nothing against the city, but things have so happened here as to make it undesirable for me ever to return.” The difference, then, between Lincoln and me is even greater than I supposed, which is saying a good deal.

Bless you both, and the children,

Love,

John

8 Jan 53

[Yale, MS]

[17 January 1953]

Dear Margaret

Just a note to say I am sorry about what everyone who has spoken to me seems to regard as the peremptory & shabby treatment The Nation has given you; and to wish you the best of luck. God damn that magazine. They were utterly wrong, I believe, in the Clem Greenberg business536—whom I did not feel free to join, when I was askt, solely out of ^because of^ personal feeling for your honourable activity in the SRL-Pound affair. Now I can watch their debasement with delight, except that I am worried about Haggin.

Miss Kirchwey, whom fogs choke, has sent back the Marlowe piece with a note decidedly perfunctory to a contributor for 17 yrs.537 Actually I am glad to expand it for printing elsewhere. I hope your change turns into fortune too.

Yours,

John

17 Jan 53

[Princeton, MS]

[27 January 1953]

Dear Allen

Eileen is fine. They took out 5 tumors, benign, & nothing else. She walks already, and sends you her love. I have been feeling like hell about not writing to you, because of our good agreement. Of course the reason I didn’t is that I’d nothing to send and was ashamed. Now suddenly last week & this my poem of the last five years has begun to shoot, and I have something to send, tho’ only the beginning. Only: don’t feel obliged even to look at it if you are right straight in one of your own sections—I can’t read or even think of anything these last days except it (so I’ll write you when I emerge what I was thinking about and in what ways how much I like The Buried Lake538) and perhaps you may be in the same tortured state of perfect happiness. Bless you

John

27 Jan 53

Mine is a love poem too.—I send what I’ve typed. The 10th stanza ends (but don’t read till after the rest):

Women sleep sound. I was happy once—

(Something keeps on not happening. I shrink?)

These minutes all their passions & powers sink

And I am not one chance

For an unknown cry and a batting of unknown eyes.539

[Princeton, MS]

[6 February 1953]

Dear Allen

If you’ve not had a chance to read the last sheet I sent, don’t of course read this yet—& don’t, ^please,^ read this note until after this sheet.

You see I have finisht the first part ^section^ and have got just into the second, which is different & even more difficult. I feel like weeping all the time. What keeps me from weeping is partly my ecstasy & partly the ^a daily necessity of the^ hardest, most calculated work I have ever done—and (though it never came to anything) I have done hard work.

By the way: I regard every word in the poem as either a murderer or a lover and I am not much less avid abt every mark of printing as destructive of or loving to the subject and I know there are hopeless stupidities & crimes in the stanzas you have, but I won’t bother you now with those I’ve expiated.

You understand the reason I am moving at this merciless speed is that I have been on this ground since 1948. One of my worst worries is that there still remain of pages of sketching, aesthetics, & notes, some 50 unexamined & so ^all of their parts^ unapportioned even to sections, much less to section-parts, Lord have mercy on us & bless you

John

6 Febr

[Yale, TS]

[26 March 1953]

Dearest Robert & Sally,

It’s Thursday 19 ^26!^ March. I finisht Sunday the 15th and have been in bed since except that I got up to read the poem ^this^ Monday night (hardly able to stand: I had been sick as a dog all day) for which Princeton paid or will pay, or is tipping, me 200 bucks. But this curiously relieved me of the poem, and who is complaining anyway? This is the first day I have been anything human and I write instantly to say that you were angels to me and I love you and I doubt if I could have got the third part done without your shelter. I went through very bad times again afterward: it took me 30 hours to get her five last lines done (that is, to let her die)—and before that, for several days I hated the world so intensely in my exhaustion that I was decided to abandon the poem where it was when you saw it (I feel no coverlet) and make her live forever in every sense. I got over that at last; then the 30 hours; then the awful coda, which I hope does not show the labour and excision it cost me. You will tell me frankly. The reading seems to have been what is called a success; I read well, and the poem was liked, so far as such a poem cd be liked at one hearing.

I have seen Allen. He is very low.

I am going to have a talk with Fr La Verdiere tomorrow if possible; I don’t know what about.540 Then I lecture at Bard tomorrow night and then I am doing nothing further before going abroad, with what money I haven’t the least idea.

The ‘holiness on horses’ bells’ I remember now. I didn’t object to your sleigh-association at the time, though actually I don’t believe in it. The image is that of an end to war: horses in the Old Testament are always war-horses: the particular passage is a dazzling one at the end of Zechariah.541

I haven’t been about to give any thought to publication yet; I mean in a magazine. Delmore tells me that Partisan wants part; I doubt if I want to publish part; and Wilson wants me to try the Atlantic, which is not I believe insolvent like PR—I am tired of being tipped, although I am lucky to be alive at all. Viking I suppose well bring it out in the Fall. Some friends here want to arrange a small (in numbers; but folio size) hand-printed edition, and Shahn is very hot about doing drawings, as I expected he wd be. I am losing interest in the poem. I did the best I could.

Curious thing: the night after I read it my next subject possessed me, with even its title—a subject I’ve thought endlessly about, but never conceived as a poem: only the Homage style, or something better, much better, would make it possible, and the form would be to find. But it’s years off (supposing I keep living). I don’t think I will be good for anything for months; and then I have two other poems unfinished first, and two books on Shakespeare, and I have to make money somehow.

I can now read. Be sure to let me hope with the Seminars thing as we agreed.542

You see how vague I am: that ‘about’ up there ought to be ‘able’, and ‘well’ shd be ‘will’, and now ‘hope’ shd be ‘help’. I am not well but I am able to have hope that I will be. But I seriously doubt if I will ever bear to write any more poetry.

You’ll have a Merck Manual as soon as I can get one for you; in gratefulness.543

Kisses to all poupies. Apr. 19: YES. Love,

John

[Yale, TS]

[13 April 1953]

Nancy, thanks for having them let us hear about the madrigal concert—I doubt if we can go, that is just two days before Tuesday 28th when we sail, everything is to do, and E’s practice goes to the last minute, and I am still able to do very little each day, I finisht a long work a month ago but the doctors here declined, on the score of exhaustion, to begin my shots until 3 days ago—Dwight, I’ve had this Ms forever & apologize, I turned it up in a tumble of mine this afternoon—it is very Crane-like, & rather good, you might have had a success in that direction too—but these are accidents to the occasion of my writing: I meant to write anyway: to hope that we might meet before I go abroad, or if not meet, resume at any rate somewhat in spirit, in however qualified a degree you like, Dwight, a friendship which meant very much to me and which I have long missed and which I don’t care to miss any longer unless it continues to be necessary. I don’t suggest studying over the past, when we were different men, nor trying to return to it, but only laying aside provisionally the burdens of resentment on the heart, mine as yours. Not merely do I feel them as disagreeable, but I object to their unreason. A man with less experience than you or I but a deeper intuition of life, Keats, has an account of this sort of thing which let me copy for you. ‘Things have happened lately of great perplexity … Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating—and parting for ever—the same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt—It is unfortunate—Men should bear with each other—there lives not the man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side. The best of Men have but a portion of good in them—a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames which creates the ferment of existence—by which a Man is propelled to act and strive and buffet with Circumstance.’544 Of course this fine passage, which I call true, could never persuade anyone of anything. It could only remind one, and I give it to illustrate my sense, not to influence yours.

I doubt if I express myself well. This is the first letter I have tried to write for several months.

I wish I might hear the concert, they are doing some Morley I don’t know.545 I don’t know. I will do my best in any event to call you this week or next, Nancy, and let us have the drink that something always prevented from the hospital—though even as I say this I am tapped into awareness that I can never again have any drink that I had or was to have before I got done this new poem, which is entirely different from anything I ever did before and much less bad and has left me different and less at the world’s mercy—not even drinks taste the same, it is as if each drink were at last related to something—before I embark on a philosophy of martinis I had better shut up & go to bed

John

13 Apr 53

[Columbia, TS]

our best to Gil, & Danny, et al.546

13 April [1953]

Dearest Elisabeth,

I finisht the poem a month ago, after struggles I don’t care to remember, but up to two days ago the doctors here still declined to begin the shots I need before going abroad, on the score of exhaustion, and I still can’t write more than two or three sentences with my right arm; besides there is no mail service between the 17th century & the 20th; therefore do not be angry with me for silence, which I break only to tell you so and to say that presently I suppose I will be back on deck. Your last letter is mournful and I am sorry. Immerse yourself in my poem and it will make you happy. I have sent it to Van & Betty to read, asking them to give it then to you to read. |show this to them| I regarded this as essential, despite my extreme shortness of copies, because the poem is the reason, physically, in time, and in money, why I am not after all able to come out to see you and them before we go abroad; and I regret this very much and want you to see the reason. I would also like to know anything that you or Van or Betty thinks wrong or weak. You can show it to Janet Emig if you like, and if so I’d be glad to have her sardonic opinion too.547

We are supposed to sail on the 28th, though I am able to do so little each day that I hardly see how. Eileen’s practice is very heavy also and goes to the last minute.

Don’t feel people don’t love you. They do, and as for those who don’t, the hell with them and so much the better. I hear there are as many porpoises as human beings anyway: loveless & frisking. But I send love.

John

14 Apr—A letter came this morning from a young friend in Oxford, a novelist-to-be, Walter Clemons, saying he has learnt he has diabetes—‘at which my heart rose’—but his letter is as usual notwithstanding so goodtempered & able, that oddly it has really lifted my spirits.548 And then I have been for so long so miserable (& exalted) that I am able to attack a real grief as something heartening and fellowing, without being cast down—my heart only lurched under the sentence in which he finally mentioned it.

One thing I must tell you out of the phantasmagoria of 1953 so far. My doctor sent me to Atlantic City some weeks past, for solitude—a curious idea but a good one as it turned out, I spoke to no soul there and did a little improve (you understand that after the terrible solitariness of writing, I had to give a public reading of the poem here—Princeton had offered me $200—which brought all sorts of golden opinions and human pressures I was not fit for, having got out of bed to read the thing, then just 8 days done)—well, on Good Friday what should I come on, along the Boardwalk, at Steel Pier, but the collection on display of the medieval torture instruments from Nuremberg, racks, pincers, shin-breakers, head-cages, wheels, and—impassive, large, beautifully carved, horrible—the Iron Maiden—the presence of the lady in the same city made me so nervous I fled home

[Haffenden, TS]

19 Apr 53

Dear Van & Betty,

I was glad of your letter(s)—very—since then the blackness I hoped I had avoided, being just physically ill, has clamped down—and this will be no response. Every phrase you cite (but one) I felt I heard a clap in heaven when I made up—it is strange to see them now in your letter when 3 months past they were scattered all in scattered notes, save some that did not exist yet, and one only was in a stanza. Betty, how I came on her I don’t remember—I find in a journal that I wrote the first stanza (which I invented, Van) on 22 March 1948—and this date astounds me because it was March 22nd I wrote ‘elfs’ and copied the coda fair, that is finished the poem, next night I read it—but there is nothing in the journal to say why—over the years by accretion & development the subject seemed to attach & embody the whole world—I did a great deal in Seattle in 1950, and far more in Cincinnati—I certainly at some point fell in love with her—of course I have always known her work but that is nothing to the poem—your last comments, Betty, are shrewd indeed I think, your whole note delightful to me. I used three shirts at a time, in relays. I wish I were dead. Yr notion of my resting & revelling without a care in the world—hm—battered by debts, puzzled & drizzled in negotiations for printing, lost juggling a decade’s mss to see what to take, savage w hatred, nerves standing on end, & worst w a strange unworthy sense of Look I have come through—life is a cheat—I am glad I didn’t know it when I wrote the poem—Bless you both & all—yes we must meet in Italy if E & I can stay so long

I hope you do get away well—you must—

John

[Yale, TS]

[27 April 1953]

Dear Robert,

The spring poem is delightful and in my fatigue mysterious—two words to thank you and for the loan which has lifted off today a host of raveners. We are nearly ready, |[hell / well not]| it is 9:30 at night, we leave at 8 tomorrow morning, and people do not stop calling up, my god how I hate people, their lives are not enough for them, do you know that, they want to live yours too, or they want you to live theirs, something or other obscene, Robin Redbreast grieves, I am only fit for converse with poupies, I met Betty Mackey in Nassau street today and Diana and I sat on the floor in the Bank and played a blowing game, Betty is one of my best friends and I have spelt her name wrong there, I feel an experasted exasperated inattention, bless you both for this goodness all the same549

love

John

27 Apr

[Yale, MS]

Paris 14 May 53

Dear Edmund

What are the names & addresses of the people you suggested our looking out in Rome? I’ve not lookt up anyone here but I hope I may be feeling less misanthropic after ten days of slow driving south. We leave in half an hour. Paris I haven’t liked much this time, some churches & monuments apart and the amazing Jeu de Paume which is new to me. I never saw such Renoirs—do you know a little one called La liseuse? Eileen has enjoyed herself much more. In a W C the other day I came on ‘Reponse in Russie’. That ecclesiastical flavour. Tout à vous et à Elena.

John

Amer. Express, Rome, for a month

Braque has a new ceiling in the Louvre, and under it is a monumental statue of an Etruscan & his wife, his arm about her shoulder, which ought to make the empty distinction of the ceiling (big Matisse-ish birds) ashamed of itself.550 The rooms with the Watteaus, naturally, are shut. Probably they are repainting them.

[Yale, MS]

Rome, 28 June 1953

Dear Robert—

Congratulations to you & Sally and the other poupies upon the advent of Barnaby. If it didn’t cost 2 / 10 / - I would order for you, ominously, an 18th C. poem called Drunken Barnaby’s Four Journeys to the North of England—Latin included. I know you won’t believe this; so I send the clipping.551 A pity about the black Maria, at such a time esp.—I hope you have got her replaced.552

We have been here a month, during much of which it wd be an exaggeration to say that I was in good spirits, but Eileen, exc. insofar as she has had to bear w. me, has liked it intensely. People have taken us about & been v. pleasant. Roethke told me his life-story one afternoon. He has a high regard for your work by the way. I have stopt drinking and developed a connoisseurship in mineral waters; don’t miss Nepi—Claudia is a full still one—Monticchio is good—and then of the more mineral, Appia & Sacra are better than Pellegrino—avoid the ubiquitous S. Paulo. Eileen was in Positano this week and thinks you might be well somewhere there near Naples; she is enquiring.

If you hear of a job anywhere this year will you let me know? I am in the worst kind of need of a job. Who is replacing you ad interim at Sarah Lawrence? The young man, I expect, you spoke of. I can’t feel v. hopeful abt. living. I am at any rate rid of the poem—thanks heavily to your generosity (that I had it to be rid of was heavily due to the same thing)—and have begun slowly work again; but how to live? It’s a facer, isn’t it, boys?

We go to London in ten days and will be in & about there (address: Amer. Express) until Aug. 16th, when we have a cut-rate flight back to New York. I expect we can meet then, no? after all. How is the Seminars thing coming? If you send me some to London, perh. I cd be helpful. I am a good editor.

This letter is dull but I can’t help it. Probably I may revive in London; a city which, I suddenly remember, I am v. fond of. I like Rome. Paris I didn’t like at all this time, monuments apart of course—that people has changed.

Love to Maria. Love to Benny, and a swift kick purely imaginary. Love to Hugh. I wd adore to read them an Oz chapter one evening, despite the wonderful picture you conjure up. A kiss to Michael. A devout stare at Barnaby. What a name.

Blessings to you & Sally

John

Correcting this morning a skeleton biog. Who’s Who sent me I thought of the amusing plans we had for yr Kunitz is it? thing and how Jarrell wd do it—‘—; Jee! Losses, 1948;’ etc. I never did that Kunitz thing & had no chance to test our theories. While passing on self-notes: I find Italian anthologists have not only been translating but reprinting the Engl. of my stuff. All on a small scale of course but without fee or permission; only someone as paranoid as I am wd object to this. A normal man wd object to the scale.

[Bodleian, MS]

Rome, 30 June 53

Dear Louis MacNeice

I take it Hedli’s arrangement here fell through—we had hoped to see her.553 I wonder if I can ask a considerable favour of you or her. We get to London about eight o’clock Friday evening next, July 10th, and we hear the city is still crowded: could you make a reservation for us (by ’phone—don’t of course go) for that night & the next at some pension or small hotel you know & like, not dear? This may be a serious imposition—if so, never mind; but often one knows places and it isn’t—as the place I like in New York is The Little Hotel, 33 West 51st. I used always to stay in Cartwright Gardens, near Russell Sq., but I forget the address & name and probably the house was bombed. Any part of the city will do. We’ll be in London a month or six weeks and if we liked the room would stay.

Perhaps we might have a late dinner together that evening if you’re free? or Saturday evening? I seem to remember Hedli was going off before you and hope she has not gone by the 10th. We’ll telephone when we get in, on the chance. The 8th & 9th we’ll be at the Hotel des Saints Pères in Paris VI (65, rue des Saints Pères) if you can send a note.

Best

Yrs

John B.

If my long poem turns up with you from Pryce-Jones at TLS just hang on to it: I’ll explain when I see you554

[Yale, MS]

c / o L. MacNeice, 2, Clarence Terrace, London, N.W.1.

31 July 1953

Dear Robert

Your letter delighted us & was welcome esp because Eileen had to go into hospital here with a recurrence of the disk business as soon as we arrived. She was v. uncomfortable off & on in Rome, flew to Paris but had to be in bed there, and a specialist here put her flat. She has slowly improved at last and is due to come out in 3 or 4 days. She bears it well. I have been beside myself. I expect you have heard of Tom’s death, which it seems hard, taking everything into account, not to regard as suicide.555 I have had a heartbroken letter from Saul. Somehow it has been impossible to work up the meditative strength for bearing these things ^properly^. Everyone is very kind, particularly the MacNeices w. whom I’m staying, but somehow I am never alone. English writers stand up & drink ale all day and are if anything more disorderly in their lives altogether even than our people. I broke free to go to Cambridge last weekend: for two days I spoke to no one & lived in a dream of sunlight. One thing I had forgotten abt Cambridge, that it can be the most beautiful place I think in the whole world. The dank London summer is stunning the natives. Eisenhower & Dulles, seen from here, look the worst executives in a difficult situation that we have ever visited on ourselves.556 France & Italy can hardly govern themselves, and I am afraid on this morning’s bulletin that Taft is going to die.557 It also looks as if the chief result of the Korean truce wd be to break the United States & Britain apart. More good news in my next letter.

Allen however is in good spirits—very good—and I am not so gloomy as I seem just now. Neither of us is drinking much; an improvement. Yes he wants me to try for a Fulbright & I will. There is also a possibility of the other half of Cal’s job at Iowa. You will be as glad as I was that Cal has the next Elliston at Cincinnati; that is one job I rescued for civilization, after ol’ Coffin.558 But I think I had better write a note of enquiry to Mizener and if you felt like doing the same (a note, mind) I’d be grateful.559 Certainly Mizener is an idiot but it is idle enquiring into the credentials of functionaries. I have a good Mizener story from Mike Oates to tell you, much like Wilson’s & similarly subhuman. I am glad Doubleday are bound. You must not do too much for the Seminar report. We fly back to NY, Aug. 16th, and maybe I can help in counsel. Please kiss each Poupie for me, and congratulate Sallie & yourself all over again from me, and accept our loves.

John

By the way, the best Catholic bookshop in the world is Duckett, 140 Strand; new & secondhand both.

Richard has roused himself to go to Salzburg & I pray may be recovering.

[Yale, MS]

360 West 23rd St

New York 11

Sat 12 Sept [1953]

Dear Robert

I’m sorry I have very bad news for you & Sally. Eileen & I have separated.

I shd have told you before but I was too desolate to go into N Y or to call or write or see anyone—I must have been up in the studio when you called. I have had a room here for two weeks now and feel if possible even more desolate. Perhaps I am a little light-headed; I have only ^had^ four meals since I moved in town, 3 with the Mackies and one w. my mother.

We might meet on Tuesday if you want to call my landlady (Ch. 2-2622) and leave a message. I can go anywhere at any time, the worst company in the world.

Love to you both, & all

John

The fairest wheel—not when you get on—as don’t tell that adorable boy

[UMN, TS]

360 West 23rd St, New York 11

5 October 1953, Monday 1:30pm

Dearest Broom,

I can’t seem to stop weeping, today, but I must write.

I am bound to admit at last that to the present I am not able to make out. In some ways I am better, for instance I feel a touch of pride that I have not quarreled with anyone in New York since I moved here, and moreover am easy even, self-possessed, goodnatured & helpful, as two long parties showed over the weekend; I have done a certain amount of work, two stories and two articles, besides endless negotiation about teaching, magazine commissions, publishers & agents; until today I felt almost steadily more hopeful. But there is nothing in all this that matters.

I have not had a cent, since I came, that was not borrowed—in cheques of $25, $35 & $50 from Mother, and Cal prest $20 on me (in addition to $5 for a dinner) that I had to take. My mother can spare the money just now, and realistically I have been able to bear this—it is $235 now—so long as I knew (or “knew”) I cd repay it shortly and so long as I cd envisage an independence. It did not keep me easy. Four times, sometimes only for hours, sometimes for days, I have had nothing—that is, twice a nickel, and twice nothing; I have been hungry & feeble next to despair; but for example I was only once, for six hours, without cigarettes, and anyway I cd imagine a difference. The cheque I deposited in Princeton was a personal loan from Giroux, $120; I tell you because you will need to know. The only actual due money that has come in question was $5 owed to me for the last year by New Directions, which I tried hard to get, in vain, and $25 as an anthology fee from the N Y Times Bk Review coming I don’t know when. I have tried hard in many ways to get money, and of course I would eventually get some, but not yet. Now the crux is the insurance. My grace is up Thursday and I have not got it. In fact I only have $2.15 to live through the week, till Saturday or whenever Mother gives me another cheque. (I also have my rent, $12, but that was due Saturday and has to be paid today.) You must understand that money in New York is not the same as money in Princeton; not that this matters. I am going to try this afternoon to borrow against the policy but I have no hope, especially since I have not got the policy and since two days only remain. Of course I could borrow $50 to pay it (41) and live through the week, from Toner or somebody else. But I cannot borrow any more money without knowing that, and when, I can repay it. The Iowa job is nearly certain—Cal said they wd jump at me, and has written since that they do badly need somebody to replace me & that he’s written off to Engle (away somewhere) from whom I ought to have heard, he wrote, by then—a week ago; it’s $2700 for 3 months of one class twice a week, no lecturing, and against this certainty I wd be willing to borrow; Engle offered me years ago jobs at $5000 and $9000; but I have not heard from him. Giroux told me weeks ago that Harcourt wanted to take over all my four next books, paying me an income during the next few months to work on “Shakespeare’s Friend” & bringing out the Bradstreet poem in the spring; but he hasn’t got in touch with me, and when I have seen him about other things he has said nothing further abt this except “We have to have a talk”. I was to give the four pieces I’ve done to an agent I think will do, Marie Rodell, today; I think they are worth between $1000 and $2000, and at any rate they are saleable unless of course I am wrong abt all four; but two are not quite finished, and in any event whether she will want to handle them, and when, and with what success—all that is time invisible.560 There are other things, small & large; I have agreed to review Jarrell for the New Republic, and poetry for Partisan, a chronicle in December; Collier’s may later on in the year reprint The Blue Hotel and use an article of mine on Crane with it, as their chief fiction editor writes that she is very sorry indeed not to be able to do now; and so on.561 But I can count on nothing. All the immediate teaching things failed.

In short I can’t live, and my insurance, the only sure way of paying my debts, expires on Thursday. So unless something happens I have to kill myself day after tomorrow evening or earlier.

This is most of why I have been weeping. In the first place I am afraid to die. In the second place it will make you & other people wretched. It tortures me to think how wretched some, like the Fitzgeralds. You will understand better. In the third place it will throw a foul light backward over what is bad enough, my life, and scandalize my work such as it is. In the fourth place it is a bad example and it leaves everything unfinished, my energy not being exhausted, things there being still I want to be and discover and do. In the fifth place I don’t like it in regard to my family, My father & mother & brother. I have no choice though.

What I am going to do is drop off the George Washington bridge. I believe one dies on the way down but I don’t wish anyway to hit anyone or be splattered on the pavement, and in case my body is not found nobody has the bore & cost of burial. If it is found, don’t burn it up. Put it as cheaply as possible in Princeton, where I could not stay.

Of course I do not believe any of this. On the other hand I believe it, it is real. I see a good: you will be able to remarry, as I hope you will do, someone who will love you as much as I do and show it better and whom you will love.

For me you must not think it is all cowardly or all loss. I have tried, it is not for me to say hard, but as hard as I could. Besides the cowardice & the bravery are difficult to make out. The vision of whistling air frightens me; it sounds like the beginning of my poem about the Demons—which is now being put in a Penguin anthology in England—but when they are to pay me they don’t say.562 I am not perfectly sure that I am going to be able to do it. And I hope I get some freedom—from issueless dependence, from last night of insult-nightmares & insomnia, from today; though of course I may not. But if I lose all things, I lose many things that one is wild not to have. If not, not so good. I don’t know how far God’s mercy goes. On the evidence, I wouldn’t say very; but I look at better people, above everything for many years I have lookt at you, and I don’t know. One thing clear to me is that I have already in my life lost so much that few human beings dying can have less to lose. Here is a horrifying consolation. And part of myself did the major part of it itself. As for my innocence and honour, they have to go with the rest of it. There is what is wrenching & unutterable in the notion of becoming “it”, but something saving too.

I weep all the time but in spite to that I am trying to say what I think such as it is. I see I went wrong saying that few dying can have less to lose. I meant: dead in the middle of life. A point of age is to weaken & ease all this—one dream becomes another, or no dream. No. There are three great scores at least upon which the loss is deep & true. For the first time in years I feel myself harmless. Your opinion of me cannot descend, my damage to you is neutralized; and I seem not dangerous to others, for a strong change. That’s one thing, and a loss to me not to live in it. And if nothing is ever to be straightened out, nothing to be made up, that’s another. And third I said I feel powerful still, incipient: if you take the Bradstreet poem as purgatorial, I meant The Black Book to be a hell-poem, Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion paradisal, and The Cross563—a poem about his life—to make four; then there were the two Shakespeare books, and King Lear, and other things. Years I have been already at them all, and I imagine I could have done them. But, in fact, I couldn’t. I mean I didn’t. And I can’t even point to a successor: nobody else cd have written Bradstreet: they are all loss.

But I wonder if I am not drifting without dignity into vanity. They were only dreams, long studied, that I hoped to do, like Mirabeau.564 The world has lost so much in art & thought that nobody can care about it. I am thinking of my own life (which was at service, like an artist’s: that’s how I got astray here). For my art, the Bradstreet poem will be enough, for a while. How long it takes attention to come, no matter.

My books are worth money. I wd use Dauber & Pine in New York; perhaps you can first get Princeton (Heyl) to buy the poetry collection, the Shakespearian collection, and the Crane collection (mostly in the attic), for the Poetry Room which needs stuff exactly such.565 I leave you everything, except the collection of journals & papers which I got from the bank vault & will leave tomorrow with my mother, so as not to bother you with them at any rate—she may have to ask you what to do with them, I once gave you instruction. Don’t sell my typewriter, it’s worth nothing, have it broken up; the new ribbon is worth 88¢, or was this morning, which is why I am not dining tonight; for twenty-five years I wrote badly on it, and for a few months well, and I loved it well; break it up. My “W H” notes are probably really valuable; I don’t know what to tell you to do except ask Ged’s advice, I can’t imagine myself who can follow out impartially my lines. About the biography of Shakespeare I am afraid nothing can be done; it is only seven draft-chapters, with everything missing. The lecture on the Tempest can be published separately.566 I will try to have these articles & stories finisht tomorrow, and have Miss Rodell deal with them for you; but I may not be able to do this. All the manuscripts for the coming poems destroy. Don’t let uncollected short poems be reprinted or printed. But if you buy back the whole Dispossessed rights from Wm Morrow for about $60 as you can (the correspondence is somewhere), this will be worthwhile in terms of reprinting rights. Giroux will advise you. In difficulty, ask Cal. If you don’t care to deal with any of this stuff at all, as you may well not, turn it over to my mother. I want no one to feel any trace of duty towards me.

I have been looking at your last letter, of Wednesday, which came Saturday: you will be coming in town from the 15th. Is it possible567

[Houghton, TS]

Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd

14 Nov 53 NY 11

Dear Cal,

The Iowa business finisht this afternoon with a telephone call from Engle, and I have been waiting for this to thank you for all your goodness to me, also my brains are broken by Dylan’s illness & death, which is certainly the worst thing that ever happened. It is a long long story, sometime I’ll tell it all to you, but briefly: he had a stroke in his room here (I have moved to the Chelsea) Wed night, and apparently at that moment the mind died: he was got into Emergy [sic] at St Vincent’s and was in continuous crisis for four and a half days until he died at about twenty minutes of one, Mon noon. I was with him when he died, and unluckily was the only man who was, because I had to tell everybody. He was never conscious for a moment and had no pain and there was never any hope. In the middle I had to go lecture at Bard and never cd have got through without Saul. Dylan was one of my oldest friends but the general loss I feel far worse still. Caitlin arrived from England Sunday morning and went into hysterics at the hospital, smasht images & had to be put in restraint.568 I spent hours with her last night after the memorial service yesterday: alternately she offered to cut my throat with a knife and wanted me to go to bed with her, then she wept on my shoulder (thousands of people have wept on my shoulder lately—I weep on my own shoulder)—luckily there were ten other people about & so I still have both my throat & my chastity such as it is, but she came by here today to leave a note requiring to see me again, so God knows. Thank god she leaves Tuesday for London. I feel as if I had been kickt to pieces. I’ll write again soon. Love to you & Elizabeth, and don’t pass any of this letter out, of course, and thank you.

John

Harvard have asked me to give their Shakespeare next summer & a writing course, so I’ll be near Duxbury hurrah.

Dylan murdered himself w. liquor of course, tho it took years

[Yale, TS]

Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd St

New York 11, Thanksgiving Day [26 November 1953]

Dear Robert,

It seems a good day to tell you how deeply I feel all your and Sally’s kindness to me this year. I would have been in a different position altogether without it.

—Dec. 2nd. Having begun thus, I found that I was already late to a duck dinner w my mother & my brother & his wife—and since then I’ve been through intestinal flu, boring but trivial, so I only now go on. The reason I’d not written before is that I passed a worse period, to tell you the truth, after you left even than I had before, and was barely getting on deck when Dylan Thomas’s catastrophe occurred. This occupied several weeks (after his death I had to help look after Caitlin and after she finally left I had to help look after the people who had had the chief burden of her) and I am hardly over it yet. In some ways I will never be over it; it is certainly the worst thing that has ever happened in my experience. Some time I will tell you the whole story. Very briefly: depressed, tired, and harder-drinking than usual, he went into coma in his room here at the Chelsea on Wed night. Apparently his mind died then. He never recovered consciousness and had no pain; they workt on him very hard but had never any hope and truly there was almost nothing they could do but maintain breathing & nutrition, keep him clear of mucous, administer anti-convulsants. His body died Monday noon about twenty minutes to one. Unluckily I was the only one there because Caitlin went into hysterics when she arrived on Sunday & tried to strangle Brinnin & had to be put in restraint, and the others were all downstairs. His death was utterly quiet. The autopsy showed bronchial pneumonia at the end, following on the real cause, cerebral edema (water on the brain). Of course he killed himself, taking 20 years to do it.

From the start, severe brain damage, looking to paralysis or idiocy, ^was so likely^ that it ought to have been impossible to hope that he would live. Hope is very strange. He was my oldest friend still a friend, except Giroux, but not personally close for many years, and my grief in this is nothing to my horror in the general loss. He was one of the greatest poets who ever lived.

All this has murdered my interest in things, but I must tell you my plans such as they are. I have Cal’s job at Iowa for the second term, and Harvard have askt me to give their Shakespeare & a writing course next summer; for the moment I have some money from a Rockefeller-Iowa grant of $1000 for writing this Fall, most of which went to Princeton bills. These are lucky. My agent has not been able so far, however, to extricate me from Viking, and so I have still not been able to sign with Harcourt to bring out the Bradstreet poem in the Spring as they want to do, or for anything else, and am extremely at a loss. I have not been able to do much work. I am having a complete physical check done at the hospital in Princeton, and so far the picture does not look bad; a battery of lab stuff tomorrow will tell me where I stand. Eileen I have now seen twice, and she is well, in fact she looks wonderful. What her state of mind is I don’t know. My room on the 6th floor here is more comfortable & efficient than the other place and costs hardly more. Tell Maria my toof came back yesterday (my first false tooth; feels odd).569 Sympathy to yours. May you all be well, and well. Please write, I loved hearing.

Love,

John

[Huntington, TS]

Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd St

New York 11, 15 Dec 53

Dear Mr Aiken,

Your wonderfully generous and surprising letter was slow in reaching me because I have moved and I am slow in thanking you for it owing to personal convulsions. I do thank you entirely. Of course I hope the poem is good—it took me five years altogether & nearly killed me—the question is how good, and that I will never know, but your so liking it is one of the best signs I have had. I’ll be glad to learn where it is still not clear, I workt v hard to get it clear or as clear as such a thing desires to be. I would be happy to come for a drink, I have to go to Washington today to lecture but I’ll be back over the weekend and will call you as you amiably suggest, I’m living in the city now until February.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[Houghton, TS]

Hotel Chelsea, W. 23rd

29 Dec 53

Dear Cal,

I need to know what textbooks or anthologies you have been using with the seminar and the workshop, and how far roughly you’ve gone with them (or will have gone), because the Dept. is after me to order, and I don’t want to duplicate. Will you let me know as soon as you can?

I wish you cd tell me too, briefly, what you’ve been doing with the seminar. I hope we can talk, either there or in Cincinnati, but I’d like to have some idea of where to take up before I decide on the books to be used, which I have to do right away. For instance have you really been doing modern poetry, or general Engl. & Amer., or French, or Dante, or scooting about (how?) or what?

About the Iliad. I have been looking at Pharr, out of which I taught myself such Greek as I know, and my God I couldn’t possibly with any conscience teach the Iliad in Greek if it’s a course taken for credit.570 Is it? If not—if it’s an ad lib affair—you might tell yr students that I will have a first meeting with them, and we will consider whether we want to do anything, and what. I am going, in fact, to be reading the Iliad and the lyric poets, unless I decide to read the Aeneid this winter, but teaching them is another matter.

I’ve had an idea. Perhaps Jane Cooper could write to me describing the seminar if you find this burdensome (I always hate myself to describe what I am doing).571

Have you or Elizabeth been able to find me a place? I have Elisabeth Bettman, one of the most knowledgeable women in Cincinnati, looking for one for you. When do you go to Cin.? I think of going there myself about Feb 1st to spend the week before I have to be in Iowa City; or I might come straight out.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.

John

1954

[Yale, TS]

Hotel Chelsea, 222 W. 23rd St

New York 11, 2 Jan 1954

Dear Robert,

Hurrah 1954. Damn that old fearful & wonderful 53, down with it, kick its teeth out. Vuole venire per mangiare l’anno scorso?

I hope you got the letter I finally wrote. Gist was: I was better. Then I got worse again, and my last exploit was losing on Christmas Eve in some bar my hat coat & all my gifts (to give, that is, not gotten). Now I am on the wagon: not a pure wagon, because after 72 hours of that I began to feel ominously virtuous, so I take two drinks a day, not in succession, and subsist on hogsheads of coca-cola, fruit juice, buttermilk, iced tea, coffee, etc etc. I had a complete medical check showing me all right. I can’t wait to get out of New York at the end of this month (when, as I wrote you, I go to Iowa to do Cal’s job, then in the summer to Harvard to give Shakespeare & a writing course). My hat, by the way, turned out to be at Conrad Aiken’s & he gave it back. The reason I was there was that he wrote me out of the blue a wildly flattering letter abt the Bradstreet poem & askt me for a drink; I recall arriving but not leaving.

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to all of you. Pound tells me he is making notes for new Cantos, so why shd we despair? Please let me admire some Odyssey soon as possible. I ain’t done not’ but some articles & stories & thinkings. My book contracts are still screwed up. My head is still screwed on. My heart is not broken. My bank accounts are zero, but D. G. I can pay you back in the Spring. I read this week the galleys of a kid named Tony Hecht who is one of the only two younger who look to me as if they were going to be really good maybe; he is best, as yet, at Yeats and Lowell, less good at Ransom & Auden; hasn’t caught on to the uses of curtness; nor pathos; hasn’t been beaten half to death yet.572 Father D’Arcy went lately to Japan and mentioned over the BBC that Buddhism was academically discredited but v powerful still, esp Zen Buddh., in the lives: “a leading potter told me of his concentration on the clay and how love of self is exchanged for love of the object to be made.”573

Have you & Sally read Anne Frank’s diary, or wd you like to read it?574 I mean again. I will send it quick, if so. Also a Dr Doolittle (all right? I used to love him) for the poupies.575 Also do you like full accounts of criminal trials—good ones. There are some ravishing ones in paperbacks now I can send. What other books do you want?

Good luck in the War w the Young, and wily voyagings. Why not send some of yr translation to Pound, or send it me first and I will.

We must hallow the everyday also, as the hasidic Masters have it. My poor blessing on you all.

love

John

[Morgan, MS]

606 South Johnson, Iowa City, Iowa

Tuesday [9 February 1954]

Dear Maximilian,

How are you? Let me hear.

I arrived at six Thursday evening, tired enough, spent a pleasant two hrs w. my old friends ^who are^ here, unpacked what had arrived, and, overestimating my knowledge of the dark hall, pitcht down a flight of bannisterless stairs & thro’ a half-glass door, landing in a shower glad to be alive. My landlord & landlady appeared & got me upstairs, where there was a good deal of blood but nothing apparently wrong, so I went to bed. That was my 3rd sleepless night. In the morning my teeth were still chattering & I’d decided my wrist was probably broken—it was—at the hospital, after several hundred x-rays & so on, they put me to bed for shock & exhaustion. Now my ankles are badly swollen still but I can walk and I’m getting back the use of my fingers, which protrude from the cast (left wrist, of course); however, something is wrong w. my right forefinger, and in general I am not up to much as yet. But my ^real^ duties don’t begin till next week. I was v. lucky indeed to get off so light. My landlady by the way broke her left wrist on the same stair a year ago. I’ll write again as soon as I’m easier.

Love,

John

I met 30 professors yesterday & today, or 27 too many

[Chicago, TS]

606 South Johnson, Iowa City

8 April 1954

Dear Saul,

Christ; hello. That is relief at the idea of speaking my mind: for one thing, I first tried typing yesterday and it goes all right; for another, I have only tried to write to E. & A.,576 and of course I can’t give either of them any broad idea of my state of mind (for sounding complaining, hanging on, etc), and I’ve no one here to talk to. I haven’t not written to you because of the 50 bucks. It is true that until last week I was still—STILL—living on borrowed money (from the bank here, against salary), as I’ve been doing for almost the whole last year, and this was a crucifixion to me; and I can only now repay you, with all thanks—I hope you haven’t suffered for it; no, I just couldn’t write.

I must give you a sketch of what the universe has been doing to me—not fatal, and in fact a sort of tag-end that I ought to have expected, but not good. Not good, old boy. Still here I am, and coming out I think. Yesterday and today are different in effectiveness from any days in many months; low-keyed but going. I was still half-sick both days but hell I am used to that. The point is that I don’t feel paralyzed. Also to be in touch w somebody, even on paper, is pleasant. Since I’ve ceased to be able to write to E & A I’ve felt completely isolated.

First tell me what you’re up to will you? Work, Sondra, plans.577 Then news.

This thermonuclear business wd tip me up all over again if I were in shape to attend to it. Therefore my pvt troubles I may smile on as good distractions, or boot camp. Smile now. I hardly know how to lay out the story. What you might think wd have knockt me down, at one end,—my fall, not sleeping w anybody since I left our friend, the loneliness—are not really it: the first only mattered in the situation, the second my health has minimized, the third was in a way a relief. Nor at the other end do the waking nightmares I rang A up about (if she hasn’t told you abt these, or you are not in touch w her, the hell w them—they were terrible but have not come back) explain anything: they were just the worst of several crises. No, put other things together. Colitis, severe, & remitting; that is, not one day has passed for 2½ months or so during wh I’ve not had violent diaoerrhea etc. I am used to it but it’s enfeebling, and was less tolerable the first month here in that I expected to get rid of it as soon as I arrived, with a bland diet I cd prepare myself, and exercise—and here the fall was unlucky, because w one hand I couldn’t cook and for six weeks I hobbled. Malnutrition: for weeks at atime here I have averaged less than one meal a day. Sleeping: the strangest of my whole life: 17 hours a day, days on end, not sleeping of course but dozing, with an average of two nights a week winkless, as a rule not troubling to go to bed at all. Shortness of breath, for less than half an hour in the morning, and two or three hours at night: worst. This is the physical situation. I don’t think it accounts for a want of energy so extreme that I’ve barely been able to prepare & get thro’ my one Workshop hr & my 2-hr lecture each wk. I am v good at these, of course, and maybe it does. I admit it probably does have something to do with the Todesangst I’ve been grieving away from. This sometimes means something else. Whether it does for me I’ve no idea. But throw into all this the sudden beginning of a hard-demanding unwelcome poem, and surround that w a sense of financial dishonour & injustice & despair (as to how to live—the dishonour I mean in relation to debts), and let the poem become overwhelming, and then my friend you have something resembling my bloody stupid situation. As I said I believe I am getting out of it, of the emotional parts, maybe. I have got to get some energy free from something for something else. Other contexts, for wh I have myself to thank as for everything else, are my publishing stymie and the prospect of interminable solitude. And the hell w them too. If I can work I can bear anything. Or so I say, although it is exactly the main work itself that I cannot support in this (I hope vanishing) state. There was an element of lucklessness in my fall’s making it impossible to settle down, after a few days’ rest & acclimatization, to steady writing of some (pressureless) sort, and also in the only other man in my Hebrew class being just a divinity student taking a course, so that I got so far ahead that I cdn’t bear to hear him recite any more & had to drop it, as anything I cd go to & have regularly on me. The poem was laid out as a letter to you and the instructor—or perhaps A told you—but is now called Testament from In Here, and I don’t know how it will wind up if ever. If I felt well three weeks I think I cd write it. Enough of all this crap, wh please don’t report to anyone.

I don’t need sympathy. Just off my chest.

Cal & Elizabeth have separated. That’s not so good, though he sounds all right. Why doesn’t somebody stay married.

I think maybe I can get Tony Hecht a Rockefeller-Iowa grant if he will write to Paul Engle, Harriman, N.Y., applying with a history and sending his book. Did his wedding come off? A wrote that everybody was against it, for what sounded sufficient reason. How is Paolo?578 Give that wise man my affection. Want to hear some great poetry by one of the little girls at Grinnell? This is from a thing called “The Airmen”:

Nor can a cloud request a job,

For only God pats their white heads.

They’re not restricted by a mob,

Nor are they forced to go to bed.

Are we able to call them fools,

When we are just another glob

Who sit upon our little stools, etc.

My students here are amazingly good, however, best I ever had. Tell Tony he wdn’t have to come out here by the way if he got one; there are no strings whatever; grants vary from 1000 up.

I haven’t been to Chicago (or in fact anywhere—it’s next weekend I go to Grinnell) except the hours, very very tired, between trains coming, when I went to the toy dept of Marshall Field, where I was when a kid, but felt nothing, and to the astonishing art gallery. Augie was splashing in the book windows.579 Iowa is boring in that there is no spring and most of the best kids are very screwed-up, though I suppose that’s true everywhere. One of my boys, just married for the second time, gave me a poem abt a “disabled penis.”

Bless Sondra for looking after Anita in that mess. Love to you all,

(John)580

I’m making Easter a watershed

[Delaware, TS transcript]

606 S. Johnson, Iowa City

22 May, 1954

Dear Tom:

I believe Don Justice is now applying for an Iowa-Rockefeller grant in poetry, and I wd like to support the application in very strong terms. I should place him very close to W.S.Merwin and Anthony Hecht, who seem to me the best American poets younger than Lowell.581 Justice is less experienced than they are and has published less, but I am speaking of achievement in individual poems and above all of promise. Those three are more or less of an age, and what they do in the next five years matters very much, partly because there are so few real poets at present under fifty, even—for instance, the semi-generation between theirs and mine, people like Nemerov, Kees, Ciardi, Moss, seems already to have petered out completely without having accomplished anything.582 Neither Merwin nor Hecht is really good yet, I think; Justice’s original and effortless production, in his few best pieces (recent), in some ways surpasses them; but he has no body of work yet, and so there seems to me to be some urgency about getting leisure for him if it’s possible.

Best,

John

[Morgan, TS]

606 S Johnson, Iowa City

Sunday [?23 May 1954]

How does it feel to be twenty-one? Yes I know my advice was stupid, I mean abt taking it easy and so forth. Wait till we talk. I am in no shape to write letters at all, but I can talk; though lately I haven’t been able to talk to anyone here and so I haven’t been seeing anyone.

I was immensely relieved, yes, to hear what yr doctor said abt the pregnancy. I wish you had told me earlier. It doesn’t solve certain remains of interior responsibility (solely in myself) but it does settle a fact, like an explosion of luck.

Darling, I could kill you. You know I am rocklike in some ways but intensely suggestible, and yr casual suggestion that I write a poem all for you has cost me hell: because within a few hours I had begun experimenting with the notion of addressing flatly to you my completely unformed but far advanced long-poem; and on that reef I stuck, ignes fatui flashing all around me, for I don’t know how long—I doubt if I’m off yet—that is, I’ve not yet utterly rejected the idea though I’m positive that I must, and quick. Naturally, I can write you a poem; though I won’t undertake to do it in one hour. It’s the wish coming into a large & troubled work which bombs me. Of course I’m not cross at you; you criminal.

You owe me descriptions of two parties, Sondra’s and yours. I loved your last letter, though you sound harrowedly uncertain. Let me say this: please don’t try to solve all of life at once, will you? Maybe you won’t always be very young, as you say, but Christ you are going to be very young for some days to come, and weeks to come, and months to come, and certain years to come.

I’ll arrive in New York either June 2nd or 3rd, depending on whether I fly or ride. I have a seminar here the night of the 1st.

I can tell you one amusing thing: if you appeared with me on the streets of Iowa City, traffic wd stop. I wish I cd describe this place to you, but I hope you will stop me if ever I begin.

I have fifty end-of-term things to do, hence the inconsequentiality.

I see among the litter on this never-sufficiently-to-be-cursed table something agreeable. I have a Japanese student doing a book on Japanese poetry (he writes poems in both languages) and it is so absorbing, his exposition I mean, that in the course of God knows how many hours of helping him with it, I’ve become deeply interested.583 Here’s a particularly fine waka I just saw:

Komanishiki

She lies down, untying

himo tokisakete

the girdle of Kama-

nurugaeni

brocade: How lovable

ado sero to kamo

she is to say then,

aya ni kanashiki

“Let us make love.”

The vowels are rather like Italian; the whole chanted, and faster than you’d think. The point of the poem is a double-take, ‘untying the girdle’ being used often exactly to mean making love, whereas here it means untying the girdle. This is an unusually simple waka but delicious.

Love

John

[Yale, TS]

606 South Johnson, Iowa City

1 June 1954

Dearest Robert,

First abt yr marvellous translation.584 I have been reading, or rather gloating over it (because I am so delighted for you, and so glad that something is happening somewhere, and a trace proud that I tried to kick you in this direction years ago before we even met), for weeks, but have been in such atrocious shape & unwell that I wanted to wait until I cd write properly; but down w that; I have to write. The great merits to my mind are clarity, steadiness, fluency, music. Above all clarity. I felt as if I’d never read the Odyssey before. I find three spots only where there is trouble: 1–16 B (I use T for top of page, M for middle, B for bottom) ‘too’? 54–72 B ‘in honor given’? 73–93 ‘nymph in … of’—and in the line below, possible transpose to ‘let depart’? Is ‘mid Argos’ (325 B) exact? (I aint got me Loeb ’ere) And does the final line equal: dreaming? As for music, on 36–53, l. 4 is awkward—Athena, below, is wonderful. You are specially good with, and without, the permanent epithets. ‘hands went out upon’ (135–156) is a stroke. Bless you forward. It seems to me that this is bound to become the standard English. To speak truth you are doing it even better than I expected, and I lookt high. I hope your Gugg. is renewed. Is it, is it? I get no news here but bad news, so I trust it will have been. Now shall I keep this copy or send it to somebody (did you show it Cal, whom I’ll be seeing later this week) or back? |(write me at Hotel Chelsea, 222 W. 23)| You have somehow by the way solved the diction problem. Versification everywhere handsome. I can’t wait.

I’m dreadfully sorry abt the illnesses and landlord-dispute. May you be going all to be gay & busy & at peace at Brunnenburg. My own problems are so grievous that I can’t speak of them incidentally: I wish I cd talk to you: perhaps I may write to you from New York: June, there & in Princeton, will have to be crucial for me. Unhappily I am as crazy as Cal, and more helpless, but there is nothing I can do, or has been nothing: there has got to be. One thing: I don’t owe banks any more, thanks to my work here, and I can pay you back the whole 500 from Harvard. You never shd have lent it me, you saints. Yes, Cal went offside, had shock, was weeks in Jewish Hosp in Cincinnati, Elizabeth (a wonderful woman) went out & put him in, took him then to N Y where he is in Payne Whitney for 6 wks but well enough (Eileen wrote me day before yesterday) to go up to the American Academy to collect some honour, now back in. I wish I cd have the room next. He will gradually be all right: a long psychotherapy, at last, it appears. I wish they may stay together, but she tells me she is very tired—I must tell you, but not as critical of him, that he threw her out saying he had to marry an Italian girl, and so on, and then there was all the exhaustion. Are any of us fit to live with anyone? Yes, you are. Children help, though.

I can’t recall, to my shame, if I answered yr Dec. letter or not. Of course the ‘Wan dolls’ must be from Corvo, and there must be a note on it in my Mss, which somebody is studying, because I always note such things for myself.585 I had however forgotten it totally, except that when jogged I had an idea there was an analogue for the phrase; I’d no idea it was identical. The only avenue I can think of—I’ve never seen the book—is an article on Corvo in the London TLS, if there was one, quoting the phrase. I’ll throw this information over to my glosser if he doesn’t come up w it himself, and thanks. What I meant was lustless Byzantine figures: is that Corvo’s idea? He goes off suddenly (the poet I mean in the poem) as far as possible from her ‘concord’. I recorded the whole poem the other day, and my right calf seems to have taken the strain: by nightfall I cd scarcely walk. Doubleday tells me Auden wants 128 lines of it for an Anchor anthology; I wonder which 128 ll. A new poem, undesired, has been killing me for three months: there are hundreds of lines now and I have not even determined the stanza; I hope it is going to be very short, not over a hundred, at the criminal outside; it begins in Iowa City & winds up in the Pleiades; part is in Hebrew, which I’ve been learning here, and later there is another Hebrew wd, meaning ‘thanks’

Péretz consoles my syntax, when I’d grieve

in the ancients’ tongue. Todáh, Péretz.

Look for me

where cupshot Mars cases the Pleiades

on winter’s breaking.586

Peretz is Bargebuhr, my Hebr. instructor, from Hamburg, 11 years an architect in Israel, now an Islamic scholar, who is going to Granada & then Cambridge (Engl.) this summer and wreck their chronologies for the Alhambra.587 Touch Benny gently on the head for me (Ransom was here lately and mentioned in the middle of a poem by Hardy ‘You can see he lived gently’) and kiss Maria and Hugh and Michael. The baby & I have no personal relation as yet. What is Sally doing? I love you both

John

[Morgan, MS]

Tuesday [?15 June 1954]

I think about you all the time, and also I am very pleased w. myself: so last night I spent 3 or 4 hours wishing I could write to you, only I’d no idea whether you’d want me to or would even read a letter—a chilling reflection; so I read on and studied from time to time yr picture on the mantel opposite me, trying to decide whether you are more beautiful than Han Suyin.588 I decided you are, which is a compliment if you were to read & like her last book as well as I’m doing—from which I take my view of her even more than from her photograph. I only put your picture up yesterday. I never did except two or three times in Iowa City. I’ll tell you why. It is a very good image, far better than I thought it at first. You are stunning. But there are two things about it, and the reason these matter is that it always looks straight at me. First, it is really a loving picture—I not only knew you made it for me but it looks so; but I have ^mostly^ not felt, for six months, worthy of your love or anybody else’s, and it made me nervous. The second thing is that, in spite of its essential character, it also looks a little as if you were about to give one of the bright, hurt, self-sufficient looks with which you signal most of the disheartening and wounding things you say to me; and when I feel, as I largely did in Iowa and did the other day at the Statler, that you might legitimately make such a remark, you can see my flinching a little from the picture.

I put it up because I feel pleased with myself: tentatively, but pleased. You spoke in one letter of needing occupation. So do I. Except when resting, or dreaming & preparing, I detest myself without occupation, and I haven’t had any for a long time: therefore I drank, against self-dislike & boredom—of course I do well the jobs set me, but they give me no peace—use “peace” as a very active term. I’ve been so low most of the time you’ve known me that you’ll hardly believe what small things, how quickly, made the difference. Of course I was absolutely on the bottom, and also I was extremely ill—a climax of illness, pleurisy & gastritis especially—Thursday Friday Saturday and most of Sunday—so that when that night I found myself in less pain and able to take what passes for nourishment, and to do something, the sense of recoveringness spread like fire all over. All I did was lay out my Harvard Shakespeare course ^(the exact plan, that is)^ and later, still unable to sleep, write two sheets of a story—the night before I’d not slept at all, that night I got two hours—and all I did yesterday was write a long letter to Shea and half a dozen others, unpackt & sorted all my papers of the last 8 months & back, began working out my fiction course, reckoned my bank accounts & bills—and yet in some thirty hours my whole sense of myself changed. I began to feel on deck. Last night I got four hours sleep, and my stomach is better still, and I’ve been busy with the same sort of trivial but indispensable things today, and soon I’ll be able to work. I wanted to tell you. It was good to hear yr voice just now. I love you.

John

[Morgan, TS]

7 Ware St, Cambridge, Sunday [?25 July 1954]

I wrote you a long letter as soon as I got here, much too affectionate and even devoted, you wouldn’t have liked it, so I didn’t send it. Since then, no time. My programme requires me to imitate a jet plane. Last weekend & this I’ve not even got away; the first I spent with the Camerons in Duxbury, where I amazed the children by sleeping 24 hrs in two nights. During the week I don’t get much. But my work is very interesting and I don’t mind. My health has improved enormously. It was a measureless relief to be out of the city where you are or go back & forth to. I seem to have been here five years, though the time goes so rapidly. Perhaps you hardly remember me at all. What are you doing besides balling on the beach? If you have a Shakespeare about, read the first 50 lines of Act V, As You Like It; they are delightful. Has Grand Central Station cleared up? It would be delightful to hear from you if you felt like writing. My apartment is not bad. I have a companion. At a formal dinner the other day, my favour was a zebra-fish, whom I named Malvolio and talk to in Italian. I must get him a black mollip589 so he won’t be lonely. He has taught me in two days how lonely I am, but I’m so busy that it doesn’t matter. I hope you are getting some of the respite & ease of mind that for a long time you have desperately not had. I hope so, darling. Saul & Sondra when I saw them last gave me the impression that yr father’s death was now at last on you. The little black-&-white animal you gave me is with me and stares enigmatically up at yr veiled portrait. My god New York was terrible. Bless you.

John

[Delaware, TS]

Hotel Chelsea, 222 W. 23rd St

New York 11, 2 Sept [1954]

Dear Don,

Forgive me you and Jean will you for my hopeless delay in congratulating you on the delightful Rockefeller. I had to work so hard at Harvard that my health had to improve and so it did; but there was no time for letter-writing. I only got away from Cambridge even for two weekends the whole time. The poem-letter began good. How did it work out? And did you finish the degree? a matter not quite clear to me, Dr Justice. And is Jean luxuriating in non-librariating? I’ll send this to Florida though for all I know you may still be in Iowa City. Engle wants me to come out again, but we’ve not arranged courses etc. Cal is much better by the way and will be in Boston this year. I haven’t seen him yet, got in only yesterday. If I do go to Iowa I wonder if I cd get your apartment on E College: I think I’ll send the super or owner there a note. Also cd you give me Don Peterson’s [sic] address if you know it?590 I’ve no addresses and no idea who’s out there just now. This does not by the way pretend to be a letter. I’m too tired still to write one. The hurricane brought down four trees in my yard, flooded my room, and made the 4½hr trip yesterday take over 10 hours—during the last few hours of which I was philosophical, attending to Unamuno.591 He has a pleasing argument right away to the desirability of man’s being defined as a feeling animal not a reasoning animal: “More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly—but then perhaps also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.”592 A wonderful man. He also speaks of a German philosopher as having first murdered his humanity and then buried it in his philosophy. In fact he is a poet. Let me hear how you both are, what doing, what planning (NY is very expensive, let me tell you) and who making fun of at present.

Best,

John Berryman

[Skovbroten, MS]

2509 Humboldt Av. S.

Minneapolis 5,—Wed [6 October 1954]

Dearest Shirley

I have a comfortable apartment & good for working. I’m less tired than I thought; this city is delightful. I talkt w. the Humanities people here on Mon. and probably I’ll be giving Dante and a Modern seminar this winter. I just moved in today—I’m 3 blocks fr. the Tates—and will be here at least six weeks. I am drinking very little. The Iowa City business is receding fast but as you see I can’t write a letter yet. One of the loveliest small lakes in America is 50 yds off & I walk around it every day, 3 miles. It seems I feel statistical. I went to an opening last nt. at the Art Institute, of borrowed 18th C. French stuff to show off the Chardin “Attributes of the Arts” they just bought: it’s big, 44 × 54, and spectacular, not altogether characteristic except for the stunning painting of the books on the left & the coins; the still-life they had already is better. But I spent an hour looking at Watteau’s little “Danse dans un Pavillon” fr. Cleveland, and there are some magnificent things regularly here, esp. Rembrandt’s “Lucretia,” a Renoir of San Marco in Venice (a painting like a bomb) and one of the best Gauguins I ever saw, a Tahitian landscape with green in the middle you’d like to eat. I hope I am going to be able to work.

Love

John

[Skovbroten, MS]

Mpls, 25 Oct 54

Dearest Shirley

Bless you w. luck at Indiana—be very stuffy & formidable. I am 40 today and find it quite pleasant. The next 16 years can’t possibly produce less than the last. I am working steadily, week by week on short things. Weather’s like summer. I don’t teach till after Christmas. I’m very sorry abt the delay for your father.

You shdn’t have sent me anything—I mean the small package you speak of (which hasn’t come yet, but it’s only noon—mails are poor). The Funeral I will be absolutely delighted to have and will require of you presently. I was reading “Trees” lately: it’s certainly yr best piece so far: but what is it about?

Louis & Hedli MacNeice it’s a pity you cdn’t hear. They were extremely good here & said they were even better in Iowa. They came & found me out and we spent 48 hours very agreeably—thank heaven, because Allen is feuding w. them, and they were paranoid over an experience in Kansas much like mine in Iowa, and also I was very happy not only to see them but also to reduce my sense of obligation for their goodness to me in London last year. Caitlin Thomas jumpt out a window lately, breaking a collarbone & ankle; also got drunk w. a seaman in her house at Laugharne and they tossed all the furniture into the sea, then ript the doors off the hinges and went to London. The villagers are losing their tolerance, because she is sleeping w. three men, one of whom, they complain, ‘wasn’t even a friend of Dylan’s—never knew him’.

Your picture just came. Thanks infinitely! It’s very good—bushy as to hair & silky as to shoulders

The fragment is sad—thanks also—it’s better w. ll 7–8 gone—yes, the last line is the best; 3–4 borrow Cummings, and the first 2 are as you say weakest—begin the power earlier

I saw a Michelangelo film yesterday—his final statues unbelievable

love

John

[NYPL, TS]

2509 Humboldt Av. So., Minneapolis 5

25 October 54

Dear Mark,

I’ve been helping Allen, vaguely, with selections for an anthology he’s doing and he showed me last week a staggering poem by you that I’d always missed: a Civil War poem, called I think that.593 I don’t think I ever read a better or more profound short poem of yours.

Long time no see; I get news now from X, now from Y. Have you abandoned Columbia now to its own devices? Harvard askt me to give their Shakespeare this summer, and I assaulted a motley crew in Sever 11, ranging from people teaching Sh themselves in various colleges and schools down to little freshmen from Vassar (eight feet high, that is, and in shorts) with two nuns thrown in, with 33 lectures in 7 wks, besides conducting a fiction-writing course in the afternoon; I never workt so hard, for somebody else, in my life, and I enjoyed it v much and thought of you repeatedly. One of the nuns, troubled by my psychological views, disposed of 50 yrs of science by asking me one day “Mr Berryman, isn’t it all just Fallen Nature?”

I am forty years old today and feel very gay. Can the next 16 yrs be as painful & useless as the last? no. But I finished last year the only thing I’ve written so far that’s any good, a long poem on Anne Bradstreet, which if you ever see I hope you like. I moved here just to write, I won’t be teaching (Dante) till after Christmas, and am passionately fond of the country. My father was born nearby, at Stillwater, but I’d not been here since I was a boy. Have you heard the terrible question Herbert Read’s little boy Benedict put to Richard Blackmur: “Tell me,” he said, “what are the holy cities of America?”594 But this feels like one of mine, and I am pleased by the size of the sky. I hope you and Dorothy are flourishing like this sky.

love,

John

[Chicago, TS]

2509 Humboldt Av. So., Minneapolis 5

25 Oct 54

Dear kid,

If you’ve ever had any worries abt becoming forty, don’t. I made it today and I feel like dancing. Can the next 16 yrs be as bad as the last 16? no. Hurrah!

Iowa was impossible this fall; I cdn’t find a decent place to live, I had to teach with that dope Marguerite Young, and so on, so after ten days and various adventures (w which I’ll horrify you some black night) I moved here.595 I love it here, where I haven’t been since I was a boy though my father was born just 30 mi away at Stillwater. I’ve got the best working apartment I’ve had for years, three blocks from the Tates and other agreeable people, tho exc weekends I hardly see anybody & just put one bloody word after another, and even nearer a beautiful small lake with two bushy islands, round which I walk every day or try to. After Christmas I teach Dante & a Modern seminar in Humanities here, wh Ralph Ross is running. So if you go to Iowa City, as I blew on Engle that jerk to ask you,

Whom on the wharf of Lethe waiting

Count you to find? Not me.596

How is your prose? I’m finishing short things & gathering momentum. Give my love to Sondra and tell her to be good to you. Two more anthologists have askt for long stretches of the Bradstreet poem but not the whole thing; I think you must be right and am going to tell Auden et al to go ahead. Louis MacNeice & Hedli were just here and I’m uptodate on Thomas’ widow. I told the rough time she gave me, well she’s still at it. Lately she hopped out a window but hit a ledge, only breaking collarbone & ankle. Before that she got drunk w a seaman at her house in Laugharne (pron. Larne) and they tossed the furniture into the sea and then ripped the doors off the hinges and went to London; luckily the kids have been at school & elsewhere, one with Hedli. The villagers are getting down on Caitlin, because she has been sleeping with three men, one of them, they complain, “wasn’t even a friend of Dylan’s—never knew him”. Blessings on yr typewriter and heart,

John

[Morgan, MS]

2509 Humboldt Av. S, Minneapolis 5

Tuesday 26 Oct [1954]

Hi!

I’ve no particular reason for writing, only that I feel very happy for the first time in God knows when. I wish you may too. I couldn’t stand Iowa this fall and moved here, where I have an excellent apartment near old friends (the Tates), live quietly exc. weekends when everybody tries to get Allen & me drunk, write steadily, and am delighted with the city & country. After Xmas I’ll be giving Dante & some other recondite subject but now I’m just working. I hope you like dealing with the poupies. I took out your picture last night & was studying it. Even allowing for the diff. in lighting, there’s a great diff. between left & right: Left witch-like, all Id & dark, Right ravishingly beautiful & open,—though a little witchy too, and the left has beauty. It doesn’t cost me much pain to notice this. Besides I was very gay yesterday. It was my birthday: how old & wise can you get? and instead of regretting my wasted life etc etc I thought ‘Hurrah! here I am!’

love

John

[Chicago, MS]

Minneapolis, 13 Dec 54

Dear Mr Rago:

No, I’ve not had a letter about this prose business before. It sounds a programme worth trying; how it works out, of course, will depend on what sort of pieces people do for you. I stopt reviewing poetry seven years ago, because I was tired of handling in public the work of my friends, foes, & acquaintances; but I don’t know personally any but one in the roster of ten you mention and will be glad to do a piece.597 Let me know an approximate length—I’d like this to be somewhat flexible, depending on how interesting the books turn out to be and what I find to say abt them. What are your prose rates now, and also verse, for somebody was asking me. A deadline at the end of Jan will be all right, if you can let me see the books directly.

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

Who is editor now?

That review of Aiken sounds abominable: surely it ought not to have been printed. I thought the explanation inadequate.598

[UMN, TS]

you put ‘2059’ twice—2509 Humboldt Av So

Minneapolis 5, Friday [late 1954]

Dear Catharine,

Of course I ought to have written to you long ago, in particular to thank you for the Cummings, and I’m sorry.599 My adventures are too long for recital in a letter. The upshot is that I am very comfortable, very busy, and gay as a bird. Yes I’m taking Isaac’s place;600 I begin after New Year’s, and it will be pleasant to have some material to deal with for a change—the New Testament, Xtian Documents, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante—instead of pretending to teach people how to write—how to write! when I don’t know myself, though I have some shrewd ideas, quite incommunicable except to a friend as experienct as myself and similarly devoted. Good or not is another matter, which let’s leave to those illiterate passivists our descendants. Anyway I like Minneapolis extremely. I am glad to think of you on 94th street, by the way, difficult as it is to visualize; only keep out of the hospital, it’s worrying. “Never mind,” you say, “self-inflicted, self-inflicted”. The worst kind, the worst kind! How is yr friend making out, and his wife? and you now?

Cummings I was delighted to have and very grateful for, the more as the poet I had about just then was Pope, whom I feel a positive reverence for in certain stylistic respects but it is nice to have also someone more frequently free-wheeling. Tate, anthology-making, had just shown me a beautiful poem I don’t know that I ever read before, the ballade p. 259.601 This is certainly a more respectable production than the old Coll. Poems and I imagine the credit is all yours. Cummings is good, very good, my surprise at how good never fades. He shd have cut the number of poems in half, however. He must love himself immoderately, like Wordsworth, and with less justification.

Would you give Delmore two messages for me if you see him? One, I was revising this fall a piece on The Tempest that he once read, and I found that every passage he’d initialed did indeed have something wrong with it, and thanks. Two, I laughed aloud at “the double standard has been succeeded by open house”.602

Cummings I often laugh at too. He is not so witty as Pope; but funnier. Burns is my favourite poet at the moment. I had an attractive lyric from a young friend in New York the other day, which I think I’ll copy & enclose: if you like it show it to the boys and if they like it let me know and see if she’s willing to have it printed. She may not be, I don’t think she’s published anything and I haven’t her permission to show it, in fact I only thought of it after my declaration about Burns. I meant I’ll see; but you could—her address is 42 1st Ave, wherever that is, Apt 8. Don Justice is good, yes. And I see, though, in yr note abt him that you say you’re not accepting any poems at PR, so just enjoy Adamine privately.603

Minneapolis is resilvered with a new snow, just when the old was looking gritty. There is a lovely lake, overpoetically called the Lake of the Isles, with two bushy islands in it, close by me here, which I walk around every day or so—it’s about three miles around—and this afternoon instead of walking around I walkt across.

I agree with you in hoping that Wm Gaddis will get a hearing.604 I am glad I am not reviewing his little book though. I read the whole thing, perhaps not every word, out of loyalty to you, and for occasional interesting things, but it was some time ago. He has many talents, one of which is that he can do a thing shortly when he wants to, and indeed the crucial violences are curt as a rule and effective. But. But. He uses techniques for 1000 pp wh wd only do for a 200pp book unless it’s an out-&-out masterpiece, Ulysses or Faulkner’s top stuff. At a given point, late on, one truly does not remember whether a given major character is dead yet or not. Completely unreasonable demands on the reader, esp since it takes a week to read the damned book. I also got v tired of the Counterfeiter stuff.605 And Otto, who takes so much space, is profoundly boring. The best character is the painter (e.g., p 250). Also, tho I’ve read first novels that suffer from more eccrisis, this suffers like fire. Compare with Malcolm Lowry, or Styron; inferior.606 But I wish it luck. The work it must have cost you too! It has v few errors, by the way; an important point, because he ridicules his characters’ errors so. Just as a matter of curiosity, what is happening on p 642??

Love,

John

1955

[Chicago, TS]

Mpls, Tues [May 1955]

Dear Saul,

you have got my deepest sympathy, I wish it cd help.607 I hope you are getting all right. I only heard, from Anita, last night. Unfortunately I am in a v g position to feel with you: my father died for me all over again last week, in a terrible dream which when I analyzed it turned out to be about him not dying at once, as I was told he did (he shot himself, on an island in Florida where we lived, when I was twelve), but living a while unable to move or call out for help, but then in the dream he said “saved”—as of his soul, I mean. His father’s death is one of the few main things that happens to a man, I think, and it matters greatly to the life when it happens. I can’t help feeling that you are lucky to have had yr father for so long, and then just to have seen him again as A says you did. The trouble with a father’s dying very early (not to speak of his killing himself) is not so much just his loss as the disproportionate & crippling role the mother then assumes for one. The three men I chiefly think of all lost their fathers when you have. The results as I make them out seem to be: grief, remorse, loneliness, and an entirely new strength. Shakespeare was probably in the middle of Hamlet and I think his effort increased; also he then wrote Othello, within about a year. Freud was 40, and wrote to Fliess a week later: “By one of the obscure routes behind the official consciousness the old man’s death affected me deeply … the whole past stirs within one. I feel now as if I had been torn up by the roots” and his self-analysis gained in intensity and it was exactly a year later that he recognized the Oedipus complex.608 Luther’s sec’y wrote to his wife: “The news of his father’s death shook him at first, but he was himself again after two days. When the letter came, he said, ‘My father is dead’. He took his psalter, went to his room, and wept so that he was incapacitated for two days, but he has been all right since.”609 May you be now or soon.

I hear your book is going fine and I wish I knew what it was about. I also wish I knew more abt yr father; tell me some time. I was enchanted to hear of yr Guggenheim. I just threw off a depression and have been working very hard all through: I never learnt so much in my whole life as in the last six months. When I finish this lecturing I am going to start writing at abt 800 miles an hour. Read Edmund’s marvellous piece on the Dead Sea scrolls in this week’s New Yorker.610 Love to you & Sondra & Gregory, and may all this go off and leave you free & stronger,611

John

[UMN, TS]

2509 Humboldt Av. So., Mpls 5

30 April 55

Dear Robert,

I was ill last weekend, had to cancel my lectures on Monday and in consequence have been behind all week—I’m lecturing on the Reformation, not one of my lifelong areas of expertise, and barely keep up; hence delay.

No, I hadn’t heard of yr leaving, and am shocked at your postscript.612 It seems to have been a combination, far from ordinary, of ingratitude and bigotry. They are bound to go straight downhill; which, if you feel vindictive, will be agreeable. It is specially pleasing that Eliot went with you. I really think you ought to be proud about this.

Farrar Straus are lucky and yr situation sounds delightful. I’m very glad. I expect it will be & is already a thousand times better, as my quotation from Mother Julian wished to say—that was once quoted to me, as passing for consolation, at an atrocious moment of privation, and I have been aching to use it triumphantly ever since and this was my first chance.

I would like nothing better than to sign with you for the Bradstreet poem. As you know. But how can I? I haven’t been able yet to repay Viking the thousand advance on the Shakespeare biography, and so my contracts with them for that and The Black Book are still in force, and the clause forbidding me to sign with another commercial publisher for any book is still operative. Everything is just the same as it was eighteen months ago, except that I heard from them lately for the first time in two years: an amiable letter from Best wanting to know about the biography, just as if nothing were wrong. I have not answered it as yet.

My whole work is in a doldrum on this account.

First, it is discouraging to have the only important thing I have done so far, the Bradstreet poem, unreviewed and unavailable; especially when large parts of it are appearing in anthologies here & in England. Viking didn’t refuse it. They said they wanted to wait & see (two years ago). But I don’t want them to publish it and am not prepared to ask them to. I have no resentment against them any more, but after what’s passed I just can’t see an amicable relation over the several books involved. Second, for this last reason I feel no anxiety to get on with the Shakespeare, because I can’t see what’s going to happen to it. Third, I can’t get on with anything else with any happiness, because I am not allowed to arrange to publish it. All this is peculiarly exasperating, as owing to my very demanding work here this winter, I am finally recovering my energy and peace of mind, from the chaos of the last few years, and am wild to be writing.

Well. The obvious thing is for me to repay Viking the $1000 and be a free man. But I haven’t had it, and won’t till next year, if I have all of it then. I have been paying off debts—and here at last is half anyway of what you with indescribable kindness lent me. I’ll send you the rest as soon as I can. All my thanks.

You are coming out here? Splendid. Let me know beforehand, or call me at the University (MAin 8158, ext. 6723) or here (KEnwood 8829). Many thanks for writing and for wanting the poem and hurrah for yr change. Always,

[UMN, TS]

2509 Humboldt Avenue South

Minneapolis 5, Minn.

24 May 55

Dear Robert,

Hurrah. Best took his time about replying but makes no difficulty. Here is what he says—I have suddenly & mysteriously become “Dear John” to him—then:

It was a pleasure to hear fr you & to know that you do not harbor resentment. I don’t like to admit that we have turned cool toward your projected books (I said nothing about this). We entered into the agreements in good faith and wd be happy to have published the books if they had come in as scheduled. (Hm)

So much time has gone by, however (and at this point I breathed a sigh of relief), and there has been so much change in publishing conditions, that I think we shd accept yr request to be released fr the contracts upon repayment of the $1000 advance.

Upon hearing fr you again & receiving the payment, we shall be glad to draw up a formal cancellation.

So hurrah.

I have got intoxicated with the Shakespeare again, since seeing daylight, and have an entirely new view of it; I plan a much more free operation than I did, a book in fact bearing hardly any relation to those stupid old lectures and that boring piece in the Hudson. I am going to document it to the hilt, at the back [illegible] I mean in the writing, and in the intellectual & [illegible] design. I think now I am going to spend the whole [illegible] producing an entirely new draft of it, I can do [this in] about three months I believe. That I can then work on next year. I am now very much against the prolonged strain on the reader’s attention that I’ve always hitherto gone in for in prose. Hit a point, & then move: hitting them in an order that of itself moves the reader’s mind (while it satisfies mine as of truth) in a way that can’t otherwise be got at. But it wd take hundreds of wds to describe what I mean, and you’ll see; I hope you’ll criticize this draft for me. I have located the audience too. I am going to write the book for you & a woman I know & Edmund Wilson.

I shd think the Shak’s Friend ought to follow this, not precede it, supposing it works out; I am anxious to get a draft of it out too; I have no doubt that I am right abt the Taming of the Shrew part, but I can judge much better the plausibility of the other parts after a fresh survey of the whole life & work, especially now that King John seems solidly fixed very early. Here too I want to create a book, not a piece of drab pleading.

Then there is another book, which I have begun not so much writing but putting together in recent months. This I think will be really helpful to people, but I won’t describe it now. It’s an historical & religious work, of a kind that incomprehensibly does not already exist.

When do you think about doing the Bradstreet poem?613 I have written a prefatory note (but I want you to criticize this) and there is a dedication. The PR text is exactly right except for a misprint for ‘slipshod’ in stanza 39, and I’ve never decided whether Cal is right in arguing for a dash at the beginning of st. 5. There is a question of using, or not, some of the notes a man has supplied me with, and perhaps some of my own. Then there is the question—you can judge this better than I can—of whether it is worth quoting remarks on the jacket. Tate called it “a masterpiece”, Aiken “far more than a tour de force of empathy and immersion in zeitgeist, though it is certainly and brilliantly both of those: no, it seems to me to be one of the finest poems ever written by an American, a classic right on the doorstep”, Maritain “From beginning to end [the] poetry never fails, never makes any concession, is always pure.”614 Now these are from private letters & cdn’t be used, but I suppose others cd be got. Finally, Ben Shahn talked about doing some line-drawings for it, and we might get in touch w him to see if he has or wants to.

How is the possum?

Blessings on all your labours,

always,

I forgot: yesterday came Traversi’s book on the late plays and Flannery O’Connor’s stories from H-B and I don’t know who to thank, you or Catharine Carver.615 Is she still there or did she move with you or leave? Anyway I am very pleased to have both, and many thanks to somebody. That woman Robert Fitzgerald’s friend is an absolute genius, she stands me on end. Traversi is one of these bores who is generally right without somehow its mattering, or so my impression has been heretofore; like Wilson Knight only not so suggestive; but some of this I haven’t seen before.

[UMN, MS]

Wed aft [22 June 1955]

Dearest Ann

You bad Mabel: you have no fortitude. But I’m glad you are sleeping better. For days I’ve slept so badly that I sometimes don’t bother to go to bed at all. The weather here at the Theatre, half a mile north of Bishopsgate, is excellent, and Kyd Peele Mundy, Evil Kit & Big Will, are cutting up no end.616 How could I come to New York? I’d want a time-machine. The chapter’s half done; last 3 days on other things, waiting for books fr. Iowa—my papers are a bloody radiance of order. This dating of K John shd have been established long ago; Arden of Feversham (Q 1592) imitates it.

That Latin grammar is Allen & Greenough.617

There is no news except that you missed a rainbow over Linoleum Louie’s and while drying one of those cocktail glasses the other day I broke it. I had been drinking Scotch neat: perhaps it resented this. I’ve not called or seen anyone since the Lees eight days ago—I am too busy, also I’m beginning to get my correspondence in order—oh I’ve called Ross but he appears to have gone to Persia—no hurry.618 I have paid a lot of bills too. Thanks for the revised cheque which I will add to my hoard. I found a March cheque from New Directions yesterday & the bank almost refused it. A kiss in some improper place—

Love

John

[Logan, TS]

Saturday afternoon!! [late June 1955]

Dear Don,

It is no use your going on, you have reached the highest point of all yr greatness so far as the capacity to give happiness is concerned. If you live a thousand years you will never again make anyone so ravishedly happy. I almost fainted when I saw them, I am fainting now and smoking two cigarettes at once. My god, trembling I opened one of the two small ones, and !!! editions, editions, annotated over twenty years by me—35 volumes so far—and I am too excited to go on opening, I’ve put a small box and a big box on my shelves in their intoxicating order, and when I think that as much more remains to be opened I am convinced that Heaven not only exists but has been established on Earth, and today, and in this room, and by you. Chambers! the two 1930 volumes with my corrections & additions & developments in them since 1936—for the second volume alone I wd have walkt backwards to Alaska; Sh’s England! Raysor’s edition of STC! Ebisch & Schucking w a thousand additions! and Marlowe, Jonson, Heywood, the Apocrypha! & I know Schmidt’s lexicon is in one of the others.619 And Dante, Freud, Montaigne, Plato; and dictionaries; and my working books in dramatic theory. No, I am dreaming. The Apocrypha especially I have been burning for, most of tomorrow will be spent in it, w my own notes on Fair Em, Locrine, STM. Now if Peele Greene Kyd Lyly Porter & Dekker are in the other cases, as I think they are, I will kiss the nearest star and declare myself the servant of virtue forever.

You will understand better the intensity of my feeling when I tell you that I signed this morning w Farrar Straus to deliver the biography at the end of June 1956—they are bringing out the Bradstreet poem meanwhile—and I am working 18 hours a day w perfect happiness and now some accommodation. Infinite thanks,

Yours always,

John

[UMN, MS]

Mpls, Sunday 26th [June 1955]

Dear Catharine

It must be you I have to thank for these books and I do. In a lethargy after finishing my lectures I treated myself to a reading of Nostromo and Richard, and I must say Richard is very impressive (Conrad is still more so, but no fair)—I was v. glad to have the new collection & I hope it makes out beautifully.620 I am saving Flannery O’Connor till I have finisht two chapters of my own; I am working like mad at Shakespeare. She is a genius, that woman, one of the best natural storywriters living. She horrifies me. “Good Country People” (wh. I read when Tate had a carbon) is just amazing. Traversi I won’t get to for some while—I’m in 1590, wh. is well behind him. No gt admire of Tr.: he contrives to say things that are perfectly true in such a way that it really doesn’t matter. But of course he may have improved. I wish you wd write me a long letter some time & tell me how you are. I signed w. Farrar Straus yesterday (not a word abt this till my Viking release comes thro’) for the Bradst. poem & Sh., and I am in a state of bliss because my books just came fr Iowa, 4 cartons. I’m going to stay here & work thro’ at least 3 ch’s (entirely new draft.) Everybody’s gone, it’s delightful. I am dancing w joy & in splendid order. I hope you are.

Love

John

I owe you $12 fr. some time—or more? Tell me if it’s more—here’s 12 anyway

[Skovbroten, TS]

Saturday morning [2 July 1955]

Dearest Shirley,

Something was wrong w me yesterday: chest pain, trouble breathing: of no moment except that I barely cd read a few hrs & cdn’t write. Today I am better; not much, but gratefully. Yr wire came and ten min ago yr letter. I felt sure you wdn’t be able to come; and if I am going to be ill it’s just as well. Plan to come another weekend why don’t you? As I remember it the ’plane service is in fact atrocious, but there are night trains that aren’t bad at all (Joan Gr I think used to take the ’bus, yes she did, but the hell w that).621 I will be here several weeks at least yet; I am not teaching, till the Fall again, but I want three chapters done before I go East for a bit—I’ve started an entirely new draft of the Shakespeare biography, having scrapped that stupid Sh-at-30 piece and altogether lifted my sights. Let me know yr plans & dates again. I had yr Xmas card all right (I like it, though I think the incongruous influences, Byzantine and then that of the great early sculpture—as Autun—produced a mixed style, inferior for a long time to the originals; tell me if I am wrong abt this, Expert) and a letter sent fr. New York: I have never left Minneapolis for a night even since I moved here. The winter was bracing & I likt it thoroughly though I admit it went on a little too long. In spite of various rough moments I got through my job all right. It was extremely demanding but worth the trouble; I’m not sure I ever learnt more in six months, and it got me back into the habit of hard regular work. Iowa again wd have been terrible in this regard and there is no doubt it was my guardian angel shoved me in trouble there, to save me. A slow process, but under way. St Paul, Luther, and Cervantes, all of whom I was supremely ignorant, taught me most perhaps. If you want to study something, there is nothing like lecturing on it 8 or 9 times a week. On the other hand I never cd have got thro w credit if there hadn’t been other large areas that I was already reasonably familiar with: New Testament scholarship, and Dante, particularly. This year will be v much easier, partly repeating the courses (except the Fall quarter: Greek); only I require of myself this year at least five hours a day on Shakespeare, no matter how much trouble the lectures take, and so I will be busy. I was not able to do any writing at all this winter & spring except some short poems and a story or so drafted.

Question: where is that print of The Funeral? Sooner or later I am going to have to move into a larger apartment, in order to send to Princeton for my library, and I’d hate that print to sit in Iowa City for a year. Let me see the College Art J piece.622 Now I have to re-read some of the most tiresome plays ever written, Alphonsus, Alcazar, John of Bordeaux, ugh; I’m looking again at the whole early drama in relation to King John, which seems at last to be solidly located in 1590–1, which wrecks and illuminates everything.623 It was lovely to talk to you. Have a frisky Fourth—during which national celebration I shall be re-reading some more of the most tiresome plays ever written, James Iv, Edward I, Jack Straw, George a Greene. Maybe I better go get a bottle of whisky; maybe I better not.

Love,

John

[Skovbroten, TS]

Saturday [9 July 1955]

Dearest Shirley,

Please forgive my ringing you up when high: I was still v tired from my workfest of the weekend—in fact I am only fully over it today, when I feel superb, partly because I suddenly realized that I hadn’t had a proper meal for weeks & was faint w hunger & went & had some lamb chops—and when I finisht in the library at ten I decided it had been too long since I’d seen a familiar face, so I went & had a drink w a man I know, a perfect slob as it happens, and I felt disgusted & my drinks hit me. It is God’s mercy, indeed, that you didn’t come this weekend, because I have just suddenly got hard into something else and am going to be running a three-ring daily circus for a bit. You come as you like. I don’t know, as I said, that New York is very good. I am not going there until my work and arrangements have reached a certain stage, and there is no telling just when that will be; esp now. Also there are people in N Y & Princeton whom I have got to see; I’ve been away nearly a year and pleas accumulate; I just had a violent one from Saul Bellow. I ought to go to Duxbury too but I don’t know about that. It all depends on my work. Or my works.

Your work seems to be breaking out all over. Those signs are useful like tacks thrown down in the road against the pursuers (Have-I-talent, Where-is-five-dollars, How-is-it-that-nobody-loves-me, What-a-country-to-live-in, etc). Your article is really good (thanks by the way: I didn’t mean of course to give it me, only to lend it), and what an unpromising subject. ‘Motivational’ is an intolerable word, ‘drafty’ a good one; what is the ‘apt opposite’?624 Ashley Montagu is called both names—I’ve known him for years, a v highclass fake w a stunning library; syntax of 1st sent., 2nd par., 243, impossible.625 Excellent job & must have sounded very well. It’s good news about the poems. For your course you might find Collingwood helpful.626 He is one of the least dreary aestheticians extant. And Maritain’s Creative Intuition is firstrate.627

Hurriedly, love,

John

[Smithsonian, TS]

P.S. The anthologists began to take up the poem last year even; it looks as if it may make out.

2509 Humboldt Avenue South

Minneapolis 5, Friday [summer 1955]

Dear BenShahn [sic],

I was going to write to you last Wed morning but my stuff got going & I put it off till evening by which time I’d seen yr portrait of Malraux & was so stopped by the coincidence that I didn’t then either and since then it’s been so hot here that I cdn’t write to St Peter for a visa if I knew he was waiting.628 Stunning picture by the way; best portrait of a man I’ve seen for a long time.

The only subject was this: my poem on Anne Bradstreet, held up by my screwy contracts with Viking, from which I’m now free, is finally being brought out as a book by Farrar Straus. Gollancz wants to publish it in England but I’d rather have Faber who haven’t seen it yet apparently. It has notes but is otherwise just the same as in Partisan. Now in the confusion after the reading in Princeton, either you or somebody else (not baby) spoke of yr making some drawings correspondent to situations in the poem, maybe the Spring stanza (31) I think I once told you on the train, the Hell stanza (37), etc. I expect you never thought of this again; but if you did make any, or want to, I’d like to know so we can see abt using them if you want in this edition. If not, just say so on a postcard. And listen, Ben, what is the name of that marvellous paper-place you took me to southeast of Penn Sta? I found it once, then lost it. I hope you are flourishing, obviously your stuff is, and best to Bernarda.629 I was very tired in Europe for a while, then Eileen & I separated and I went downstairs for a year, but now I am going beautifully again—if I don’t melt.

John

[Yale, TS]

Mpls, Friday [summer 1955]

Dear Gertrude,

I am contrite, and very sorry for yr anxiety, but Heavens I thought of course you had probably gone and why on earth wd you remember my books after all the months? That you did remember is a virtue of yours, not something to be expected. Why Justice didn’t get in touch with you I have no idea, nor how they got in—which I thought wd be very difficult, and warned them so, but no, Justice said it was easy. I can’t imagine their taking yr dictionary, but why don’t you ask him? he & Jean are in Ray West’s house.630 I hope you’ve found it before this, though. Anyway he can tell you how they got in. By the way he is very nice, don’t you like him?

I am glad to see you understand Paul E’s character, as many people don’t. I’m sorry you have to work with him, or elect to. Very good people named Aspel will be back there in the Fall; if you aren’t fascinated by Alex I’ll be amazed.631 Else I think I never even met (though Cal had praised him to me), so peculiar is Iowa City.632 One of my students named Phil Levine will be back too, a real tough guy & sensitive. Ray & Lou I went on a picnic with into Wisconsin last week; they are flourishing as usual.

In an old journal I came on today, of eight (or ten thousand) years ago, I find I called you “Black steel” one day, as of your hair, and you threw back “Blue flame”. A mysterious exchange. This was 1947, in Princeton, and you kissed Richard, you bad girl. Then you were “very tentative”, you told me, about Chris Haynes “because I’m Libra too”. Pat, whom you liked better, is a psychiatrist at Walter Reed now, unscrewing Air Force generals who get to shouting secrets; I see them whenever I go to Washington to lecture or read.633

You know, much as I attended to it, I wonder if I ever made head or tail of Delmore’s character. Because from what you say he was as a husband roughly as impossible as I was (am) whereas for years I regarded him as an idyllic personality, only persecuted by the impercipient world. I doubt if he made me out any better: he used sometimes to call me “Don Quixote”, with a mixture of affection, consternation, & envy. Of those emotions I suppose only the second survived.

No, not a novel: an entirely new draft of my biography of Shakespeare. I swore I’d get 3 chapters done before going East, and I’m still stuck in the first. I’ll probably go for a few days late this month or next. I’m lecturing in Humanities here again this year. Did I tell you I finally got free of my Viking contracts, so Farrar Straus are bringing out the Bradstreet poem this fall; Gollancz want it in London but that’s not settled. Have you written any stories? I wrote one about a saint and one about a bastard, both perhaps all right, but I haven’t sent them off yet. I also just writ two poems; but I don’t really write short poems any more.

Eileen is staying w Nancy Macdonald at Wellfleet. Tomorrow is her birthday.

Love,

John

[Skovbroten, MS]

listen: I just had an idea. If Shahn has not done drawings for the poem, do you want to? I’ll let you know as soon as I hear from him, but think it over. See stanzas 31, 37, etc.

Friday [22 July 1955]

Dearest Shirley

Of course: whatever you do, I will understand.

I am in a raging stage of deep analysis; I have been v. unsteady but am getting violently better. ^yesterday was the most valuable day I ever spent in my life.^ This had to be intermitted from January and it took a while to get it going again.

Also I am getting underweigh in general. Gollancz wants to publish the Bradstreet poem ^at once^ in England; I like this but I like Faber better—so I have to stall until my publisher (Amer.) is in London next month—and I am very anti-British on this subject ^(owing to my exper. w. the BBC & TLS over the poem)^, so Faber (Eliot, in fact) have to show me they want it. Meanwhile I am dealing with 100 details of the Amer. edition, |I’ll have galleys soon; notes are following the poem. No dedication.| fighting heat, combatting solitude, pushing my prose book on, conducting a murderous analysis, and causing as little trouble as possible. Do not be mad at me.

Love,

John

Write to me. I’ll write again shortly.

[NYPL, TS]

Mpls, Sunday [1955]

Dear Father Divine,

If I had knew of any college jobs, I wd of tell you. It is nice to hear abt the Catwoman’s familiness; let’s hope it’s human. On Dryden the best criticism is Mark Van Doren’s (book), on Herbert a nutty piece by Robt Graves in one of his early books and Ros Tuve’s recent book, on Hopkins there is stuff all over, and on Emily Dickinson pretty good essays by Tate & Blackmur; for pimples the only thing is martinis before breakfast followed by martinis for breakfast, repeated listening to The Three-penny Opera, insults to anybody you meet Tuesday afternoon, and the Good Life generally.634 Any more questions? I am glad editors are being taken in by your lousy poems. Don’t worry much yet about revision of old ones. Lift out the good parts and write new ones. Any more questions? I have to pause now and read the Iliad, which I begin to lecture on tomorrow. So Franny is from these parts?635 so, yes, shoot up here when you get a chance, giving me plenty of warning or at least two hours, so I can make my will, do push-ups, and get the drinks ready. Love to you boths,

John

I’m reading proofs of the Bradstreet book—they’re v. pretty, old sport—waiting for Shahn to make his drawings.

[UMN, MS and TS]

Saturday night [30 July 1955]

Darling,

Black week—very black—I finally had to see a psychiatrist, on Thursday. Only $30 & it was worth it. The hell with it. Life is atrocious.

Our worst periods seem to coincide. I’ll tell you abt this particular chaos when I see you—it’s too long, & too close. But if you write things down, why not send them—like the one about your mother. I can take it; & it wd give me some sense of contact w. you, which I’ve only once had. Maybe you are quite right to hate yr mother, how do I know? What was wrong w. the weekend at Enid’s? And what did Joan say that so upset you? I agree she is tiresome, in her attempts to be in on the ground floor particularly. I don’t believe in being too charitable. I only believe in taking as good a view ^of others^ as possible by way of contrast w. 1) my atrocious arrogance and 2) the difficulty I have in regarding myself as anything but intolerable. She bent my ear abt the Lees & horrified me w. something else too good to put in a letter, wh. I’ll tell you. On the other hand she told me Mrs. Trite’s history—whom I hadn’t liked at all, and now do. In fact I prefer her to her daughter. But Marie-Lorraine is all right. They took me swimming today, and I have had six cold baths, and nothing helps. It is 2 a.m. and I doubt if it’s down to 80° yet. I am dripping & can’t write more. Kiss good-night. I wish you were here.636

Sunday morning. What a night. I lay and decided that the Devil created the Universe & administers it; God is just the Opposition, with great influence and able to secure certain measures, but never voted into office, and His beneficent attempts to get me obliterated at the age of 10 or 11 failed.

You asked me to tell you about something happy. The happiest thing I have seen lately I’ll clip to the front of the letter.637 My own good news has given me the reverse of pleasure, again in ways too long to explain on paper: I’ll have specimen pages of the Bradstreet poem shortly; Gollancz wants to bring it out in England—a good publisher, but I probably prefer Faber, who may be agreeable. I have gone on with the chapter since I wrote but it’s not finisht yet. Directly I decide I can’t get three chapters done I’ll give up & come east; but I haven’t done that yet.

At the lakeshore yesterday I noticed an intense absence of your legs and body and head and walk and voice.

Love,

John

Try to arrange some pleasure for yourself, Monkey. The Japanese film “Gate of Hell” opens here Wed and I am actually looking forward to this.638 And please try to write me a letter.

[Yale, TS]

2509 Humboldt Av So

Mpls 5, Tuesday [?2 August 1955]

Dear Gertrude,

Equally hastily—

My books are here, the two Dons sent them some weeks ago (Justice & Peterson [sic]), but about yr dictionary I don’t know anything, I hope nobody’s taken it.

I hope you are all right now. I am nearly dead with the heat. I finally gave up today and went & bought one of these big window-fans, so that my apt has some air in it for the first time in I don’t know when. I know it has been terrible there too. I decided in June not to go east until I had got three chapters done, and am still stuck in the first. May you be going better. What are you staying there for? Richard I hear has two airconditioners in his place in Princeton, which I call effete. Let’s go pour vodka in them.

Love,

John

[UMN, TS]

Mpls, 3 Aug 55

Dear Bob,

I have been waiting to hear fr Big Ben but haven’t; maybe he doesn’t write letters, or is travelling, or prostrate. A number of people have died here fr the heat, and so many have collapsed in the laundries that it’s hard to get clothes done. I can’t say that my book has been moving like a jet plane. Yesterday however I bought one of these vast window-fans, apparently the last in the Twin Cities, and will now I trust be better. I thought it wd cost less than a funeral.

Various details abt the Bradstreet poem, but first thanks for Fr Gerard’s autobiography.639 I don’t know how I failed to hear abt this. I never read anything like it. It is much more remarkable in itself than Fr Weston’s, and I’m grateful indeed.640 A trouble is that my sympathy with the regime is being impaired through all this; but it makes me watch Sh more carefully, to see if his ever was. The last paragraph of Greene’s introd is v interesting, by the way. A number of passages in my book go into this strange & unattractive moral smoothness of Shakespeare’s, and I may quote Greene somewhere; I am not sure I ever saw the uneasiness (amounting almost to contempt) put better. Against it, in one corner, I shd put a passage of great strength in Henry V which I think I quoted to you once before—not H.V, where he acclaims Essex in a chorus, but the lines in Much Ado about

favourites,

Made proud by princes, that advance their pride

Against that power that bred it.

This is one of the most formidable immediate warnings anyone ever received. Essex paid no heed & did not live long. It is also to the point that, as Chambers says (who doubts the allusion, but I don’t, given the v close dating & the linkage thro Southampton), such an allusion wd be v dangerous for the playwright.

About Bradstreet poem:

1) Yes the prefatory note I spoke of is just that note of acknowledgment. No other front matter except that as “By the same author” two books might be listed, The Dispossessed and Stephen Crane. Yes, the parenthesis preceding the text might look better as you say on a half-title.

2) Mispr in Notes: on 33.5 ‘grands’ shd be feminine, ‘grandes’; and in the next note maybe ‘or the hero’ ought to be ‘or with the hero’. If you think any of those notes ought to be deleted, or if anything remains signally (but only in detail I mean) unexplained, I wish you’d tell me. I can’t judge.

3) Gollancz is a good publisher but I agree with you that Faber ought to have first look, if possible. No, The Disposs. was never publ’d over there; it was reviewd in TLS but is so rare that a Penguin anthologist complained to me several years ago not even the Brit Mus has a copy (please by the way do not let a copy of the Amer Bradstreet go to TLS, but by the way I wd like review copies sent to Commonweal, Thought, and Jubilee); Eliot wrote Sloane’s agent abt it that he likt my work (huh) but when other Brit publ’s were not sharing the obligation to make Amer poetry available, etc. If you can negotiate641

[UMN, TS]

9 Aug 55

Dearest Ann,

Wakes me wet, fear. Iced Instant. I’m uneasy,

hours. However, it’s over. You’re not here,

I see your midnight hair

mouth eyes

in eleven hundred miles of humid air

nowhere and you don’t speak to me either,

and I feel hopeless & lazy.

And I move back to bed. I recall you crossed

strange ways to me, I too to you, longer,

we both came here marred.

Men lose.

This is a small trouble we have, hard.

Silences, heats, darken. You’re not here.

Heaven is courage or rest,

like the untidy & delighting Furnivall

all a lifetime’s boating skill-less to swim,

skimming with light heart

in the risk

& wizard light by Datchett meads; a part

for myomantic men if they undim.

Rest is a folded figure, full,

a lady, swathed in stone, of the Kymers: she’s

not looking up, on a Dorset tomb: she’s stone,

turbulent colourless cold

light loss.

If are here these things (as we hold)

imperfectly, still with me our chagrin

and comfort my surprise.

love,

John

[Delaware, TS]

Mpls, Tuesday [summer 1955]

Dear Witch of Coos [sic],

I hope Jean is back and you are feeling better. Today is so very beautiful & brisk & bright that if you were here you certainly wd be. Thanks for the Ms (for which if you apologize any more I will not only blot out yr name fr the Bk of Life but predict you a fame like Laevius, who has lived for 2000 years to be talkt abt as follows in the Oxf ClassDict: “Surviving fragments suggest a cleverish rococo unlatin latinity. Ignored apparently for two centuries, L was then desultorily read & admired by archaizing illuminati.”642 End quote), which I am reading with attention, slowly. There was no irony, Flincher, in saying I might be able to help more if I saw the Ms.: point is, I needed an idea of length & also it cdn’t be less good than I knew it was already fr the poems I knew and was v probably better & therefore I wd be able with honour to be louder. Now, wd you like me to write immediately to Wheelock?643 I will be very glad to. Or wd you rather wait? Length is a point; the extraordinary difficulty of getting a book decently done is, and nearly everyone has begun this way—people’s “first book”, that is, is usually not their first book-form publication but their second (Shapiro, Jarrell etc, and the cases of Roethke & Lowell are similar): the first just gets the stuff out of your way & lets you go on to other things, and gets the stuff some attention, and whatever’s good you carry over into your first real book.

Maybe ‘one or two’ in Thus, and the third line of the 2nd stanza, could be even better. This poem is a beauty. Never change things because someone suggests it; but if you like I can make various remarks of this kind all thro the book—but only if you like. I’m glad you’ve left the end of Eden alone. I wish the Sestina were more musical, esp first stanza & last 3 lines of all, e g “They round me circle on the hill” which is better form too. Lines 18–19 are specially good. What are you going to call the book? You’re right to discard the Xmas tree ditty. Landscape is delightful. I’ll report further in a few days. Let me know about Wheelock. Did I ever tell you Auden’s remark abt him? “Oh, he’s what they keep chained in the basement at Scribner’s to rewrite Cardinal Spellman’s poems”. Actually, v nice man I’m told and have found, so far as I’ve had to deal with him, which has been only over anthologies.

Proofs of my Bradstreet book came the other day and they’re stunning: Beilenson did the design.644 No date is set yet because of Shahn’s drawings, which apparently he ain’t done yet.

I’m busy as sin & gay as virtue, working up my lectures on the Iliad and why the 20th century is so unpleasant to live in; both of which begin next week. I am also, only ten months late, reviewing a lousy lot of books for Poetry including the poems of the wife of the Canadian High Commissioner to Australia.645 She’s not bad, not bad; better than other Canadians; and if only Rilke hadn’t written all her poems before, I could make her welcome indeed.

Please enjoy your teaching. The first year is wonderful though violent. What are you giving?

Best to you boths,

John

[UMN, TS]

2509 Humboldt Av So

Mpls, 10 Aug 55

Dear Father Lynch,

It is only lately that I can read anything in any way connected with the disastrous Miss Appleton,646 so I only now thank you for the issue with yr Comedy paper and then this last issue; I do thank you.647 I stopped writing because I was simply imposing on you (though not to the extent of wanting direction about Sally, which I didn’t need) and also because I cdn’t bear the strain—one of yr letters, unluckily, for a terrible period I thought must be from her, until I finally opened it. I have had a long battle, which I have not by any means lost or given up, but which I can’t say I’m winning; I have several times thought so, and then there are new convulsions over her—two just lately; still I recover from them. I have not acted very badly, all things considered: I have only written to her twice, in seven months: after ten weeks a postcard, with 3 words—literally 3: ‘10 wks’ obedience’—this was sent in great bitterness; and some time later a short letter just asking if we cdn’t correspond in a friendly way so long as I promised to be perfectly quiet and matter-of-fact and to keep wholly out of view the fact that I loved her. Of course she didn’t answer either; I didn’t really expect her to, in fact not even to open them ^second^, which is why (besides not wishing to run the risk of upsetting her again) I didn’t ask what I most wanted to know—whether she has forgiven me. Her anger, or her dislike, or her disapproval, or her sorrow, is a steady nightmare with me; any of that, all of that, is. But there is no way to get any such knowledge.

What I really wish, but can’t bear either, is that she has forgotten me or thinks of me when at all without resentment. But I am learning to suppress my willfulness: it took me months to agree with myself not to dedicate the Bradstreet poem to her. I got free at last of my Viking contracts, so Farrar Straus are bringing it out this Fall (either Gollancz or Faber in London), and I chose the epigraphs to her—one from Don Quixote, Pt II, Beatrice’s reproach ‘Come degnasti d’accedere al monte?’, and one from Luther—but after a long time I saw she wdn’t want her whole name used, so I cut it to initials, and saw she wdn’t want that, and cut it to ‘S.’, and even ‘To someone’, and even just to the epigraphs, and finally I saw that she wdn’t want any connection, so the poem is undedicated & has no epigraphs, and sometimes I am still so angry about this that I can scarcely breathe; but I treat it as a right that of course I do not have. My brain and my heart are better towards her (though not my heart in the sense of being less in love with her), it is the will that is hardest: the suppression of will, and use of will to direct brain & heart solely to the end of her peace.

I hear time is a great help, but I don’t find it. However, it’s only seven months. I haven’t dared come to New York yet—I don’t mean, to see her; I mean, not to see her.

I am too keyed up to write more now. I am still at the psychological work (which the translators of the Philokalia also call the indispensable prerequisite to prayer: self-knowledge) and at religious enquiry.648 At least I know more of the Church than I did six months ago: I was amazed in particular by two things during the winter, how after using Augustine she righted herself from his final extremity, and how (inspite [sic] of the nightmare at Trent, as Lord Acton lays it out) she purified herself after the Reformation. A thing I don’t understand, given the importance for the Church of the ideas of Historicity and Freedom, is how Fr Weigall in his very interesting ecumenical piece can just toss out the word ‘logical’ on p 6, when what wd seem wanted is a real reply to Cullmann’s Peter, similarly expert, learned, and (reverent goes without saying) candid; and yet such a thing, as matters stand, is really inconceivable, isn’t it?649 I read the Comedy article with pleasure; it seems less developed, at present, than the first two—I specially thought Section V, the heart, shd be expanded. The first article, of which my offprint now has come from Iowa, is certainly the most marvellous of the three, and to me one of the most interesting articles I ever read; I lately restudied it very carefully. My stupid poem was certainly written for the author of this article. The second I haven’t been able to go over yet again. In the third I missed Jane Austen repeatedly, esp on p 24 ‘The one offence . .’ her remark that ‘Perfection makes me feel sick and wicked.’650 I too was fascinated by the Shepard case, and in fact have written a poem about it which I’ll send you when it’s polished; you know she was pregnant as well, and then (probably after you wrote yr passage, but very closely on his mother’s suicide) his father died; I used the thing in lecture when discussing miracles.651 There’s a slip on p 20, Henry II for Rich II. There are good formulations and insights everywhere. Plainly this a book. I am very anxious to see the paper on Time. In a week or so I will be beginning myself my consideration of Shakespearian comedy and will be rereading you. I have bones to pick w you in yr notes but there’s no hurry. I hope that, amongst inevitable difficulties, you are enjoying all the mental and physical health and sense of virtue that I decidedly am not, and more.

yrs affectionately,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

p.m. Aug 11—next day

Wednesday night [1955]

Dear Fr Lynch,

Excuse conflation of ideas: writing quick & anxious to end, I telescoped my own sense of Trent and Lord Acton’s account (of course) of the machinations leading into the Vatican Council, maybe because of his remark abt the Council of Trent somewhere in that astonishing paper, that it perpetuated by its decrees the spirit of an austere immorality; which I quoted in a letter to somebody of the winter.652

A structure that has just turned up in a dream I have been working on this evening will interest you. Here is the dream, a short one of April, No. 58 in the remorseless series that has now got to 107.

“bar in station—Christian Gauss was bartender—I knew that he was retired but not that he was dead”

The ‘bar’ is the cross-beam, patibulum, in a ‘Station’ of the Cross: Christ carrying it Himself, bar-tender; but He is also on the Cross, his body ‘tender’ from the bar, and gives us from it His blood to drink; ‘retired’ then to Heaven, ascended, but not dead. This is perfectly clear, as I give it, but I had to reach it myself of course through various blocks, and it came with shock. There are at least six other structures that I know of (including a chain that makes certain a [flock/flick]-reference to Nietzsche in the final clause, alas): a family-structure, two sexual-, and two social-, and: Christian died in Penn Station—Erich Kahler saw him an hour before—very ‘tired’, and anxious to get back to Princeton, but never made it. My own fear (I took the nom-de-plume ‘John Christian’ once). I see now there are two scandals in the dream too. These things are virtually inexhaustible.

Yrs

J.B

[UMN, TS]

1929 South 3rd Street

Minneapolis 4, Minn.

29 December 1955

Gentlemen:

Will you please send me copies, secondhand if you have them, if not, new, of:

Soncino Old Testament, vol 4 (Job, ed Reichert), 1946 or later653

McNeile, Introd to the New Test., 2nd ed.

G D Smith, ed, Teaching of the Catholic Ch, 1-vol ed, 1952

Goguel, Life of Jesus, 1954

Shakespeare Survey 7 and 8

New Arden ed, Romeo & Jul, Cymbeline

Oxf Nursery Rhyme Book

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

C S Lewis, Eng Lit in the 16th C (excluding drama), OHEL

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the new J Strachey transl in one vol.

J Fattorusso, Kings & Queens of Engl & France vol I, David Nutt. This I want in leather, blue (3 / 15 / -).

Oxf Junior Encycl., vol XII, The Arts.

Thank you very much & season’s greetings.

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

The typed address above is now permanent and where they shd be sent.

1956

[Chicago, TS]

1929 South 3rd Street

Minneapolis 4,

Thursday [early January 1956]

Dear Mr Rago,

My head is unbloody but bowed. Luckily I finally got the chronicle done over the Christmas break: I am finishing now Hugh MacDiarmid, the last poet (and the only one), and revising.654 You’ll have it Monday or Tuesday. I think it pretty good reading, considering the materials, and hope you will like it. Title is “Ladies and Gentlemen and a Poet.” I reviewed everything you sent; one you listed, AJM Smith A Sort of Ecstasy, never came.

There were several reasons for this perfectly inexcusable delay, with which you don’t even reproach me, in the letter that came yesterday (forwarded from my old address). The reasons are mostly related. First I never saw such stuff as most of these books are (or rather I used to just throw them out when I was doing chronicles for PR) and they depressed me; second I misread your letter—I have only just this week, when nearly done, read it right—I missed the passage about only a paragraph for each and maybe just a sentence or so for some; so, third, I saw (thought) I would just have to make up the whole article myself, as it were, out of nothing, and though I can do this—I have in fact now done it—I prefer naturally to have something to talk about to the reader, instead of just entertaining him. As it is, the piece is in part a sort of Lower Depths, but has I believe enough range & vivacity to make it useful. I was also bloody busy all year (two brandnew lectures every day) and worried by Rumors that Poetry was folding; but these reasons were less important. I am glad you are okay there, and grateful for yr forbearance (though—I reluctantly confess—I do better when prodded). With all best wishes, and Happy New Year,

Sincerely yours,

John Berryman

[Smithsonian, MS]

Minneapolis, 15 Jan [1956]

Dear Ben

They’ve sent the photostats of the drawings. I took them very slow, for over an hour—during which hour I learnt more about drawing (not how to do it! but what it is) than any time since I got wild about Piranesi & studied him two years ago—since then, the 1st hour, I’ve just enjoyed them. They are beautiful, Ben. Concise, wonderfully imaginative & complete—a whole view of all that stuff—without a trace of illustration—independent of the poem, & not overbearing it. I’m awfully happy at having had anything to do with the coming into being of these things. You are very hot right now. I like specially the small houses, & then the wonderful forest—the drawing of the woman knocks me out both for force & Babylonian extravagance—and what an Elder! The pedestalled Indian Cupid I guess is the most brilliant (left leg amazing, & head), but the House is marvellous, for the crumple & thrust at the right, and the flower-drawings are ravishing—the gorgeous close-up and the silky, withdrawing distance. I wish to God I cd see the originals, I doubt if these photos do your blacks justice and I’m interested in the paper the small houses and then the forest are on—these two drawings image a continent right well. Your Puritan is good too—mouth, nose, eyes, fingers, hat. Your treatment of the woman’s hair is stunning. Forgive all these stupid adjectives. You ought to publish a big book of your drawings, no? Everybody here is excited about these & abt your drawings altogether. I hope you & Bernarda have a good crossing & trip—did she get the Greek grammar OK—thanks for so much visual & thinking delight—I have a crazy new way of writing poems, I’ll send you some pretty soon—

John

[UMN, TS]

Mpls, Sunday Jan 18th [1956]

Dear Bob,

They are beautiful—a whole independent view of all that world, and yet related to the poem in style (their conciseness, and boldness) and carefully not overbearing it. I wish to God I cd see the originals, for the blacks and the paper especially of the two most spare, the Small Houses and the Forest.

Here they are exactly in the order they came (except there was a duplication of the woman, which I took to be inadvertent and don’t return—if you want it back, let me know right away). I liked that order at once, and after long thought think it exactly the right order. That is, the House as frontispiece; the Woman and the Elder for the first part of the poem; the Flower-closeup and the Cupid for the middle part; the Small Houses, Forest, Puritan, for the third; and the Distance-flower design at the end of the book. Tell me if this will work out as production. The pedestalled Indian Cupid is unquestionably the most astonishing of them all; but what a House.

I hope to Keynes the book will not have to be too expensive. How much?

From your haste, wanting them tomorrow, I take it that the book is thought of now as coming out at once. This is what I very strongly want, for reasons that I’ll tell you in a long letter immediately if you’ll tell me immediately if this is what you don’t plan. But if you do plan it, let me know too.

I feel as if maybe I were coming back to life.

All best always,

[Chicago, MS]

Wed [early 1956]

Dear Mr Rago

I agree abt the title—n. g. But I can’t think of anything except “The Fortunes of Verse, and a Poet”—or a friend suggests “The Art of Sinking in Poetry”. Do you like either of these? Have you thought of anything? (“Nine Poets”, say, just won’t do.)

I am very pleased by what you are good enough to say about the piece and say so well—esp. that “trying to think out the justice.”

Well, damn Abbe!655

I see you are regular editor: congratulations, and good luck.

All best,

Yrs

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

Mpls Thursday [?22 March 1956]

Dear House Mouse,

I’m bloody sorry for all the new hell w yr mother. Take it easy in Pittsburgh & come on back.

Nothing has happened except the Poetry proofs came & have gone back and I’m racing through the Claudel translation, over which I see Dorati Saturday morning.656 My phone rings all the time but I haven’t seen anyone except Ralph five minutes (w Helen McInness—shhh) and Phil five minutes. However, tonight I go to Phil & Ellen’s for dinner, tom’w out with Ralph & de Walshes (a placid evening), and Saturday guess who the Blums’.657 I am certainly not feeling splendid but I feel today much better than usual. I don’t understand that phone business at all, how could you have talkt to anybody here??? Here’s the invitation I just made up for the party at Marie-Lorraine’s next Sat.

Sir, finding you and your Lady conuenientlie in this City we are bold to send to know whether saturday (31st March) may be in your grace to visit 2722 Irving avenue south where if you come drest after nine we shal rest honoured

euer at your command

the Earl of Ross

Lord Berryman

Ralph & Phil are hanging back on the Turkish bath but I think I’ll go anyway tomorrow or Saturday. I had nightmares about an idiot relative of STColeridge’s all night. Now I have to trot out with laundry and come back and make French English. How can I have to give all those courses beginning Monday? I’ll have to anesthetize myself from 9:30 to 12:30 every day, or maybe I’ll just glare at them and fire quizzes left & right. Love & a kissing up,

John

[UMN, TS]

29 April 56

Dear Ralph and Dean Cooper:

Just to set down and expand a bit what I said to Ralph the other day.

(1) There seems to me to be a real & increasing disproportion between the services I render to the University or the College and the Department, and my year-to-year status, extended now presumably to three years. I am grateful to both of you personally for your confidence in me, as of these very difficult and unfamiliar courses (which I think it’s fair to claim I now have well in hand and steadily improving), for leaving me as free as I’ve always been left elsewhere of subsidiary stuff (committee-work, advising, etc.) or nearly so, and for salary raises. But I am thinking of the college and Department in re me. This is a sort of day-labour situation, whereby after three years (or 2 and 2 / 3 years, besides my American Studies course this summer) the institution has no commitment to me at all—a situation badly corresponding to (a) what seems to be a reasonable success here as a teacher, (b) my experience, which covers seventeen years teaching in universities or on fellowship, (c) my reputation, which is of some use to us now and will very likely accellerate [sic] when my long poem comes out in the Fall and my selected poems in England, (d) my usefulness to the Department as a public lecturer. Or it seems to me to correspond badly. I find it hard to take this seriously, because I never aimed at an academic career. But now that I find myself far advanced in one (in some ways), I am obliged to consider whether I am being treated justly.

(2) It is a lamentable fact, as the Physics affair shows, that the Dean can be pushed, and it can hardly be said that he has dealt with us very well anyway. Last quarter was a nightmare. If you agree to the justice of the case I have laid out, I request that you push him, for an exception, taking my record if he likes to the Berninghausen committee, for an exception. There is a vita in Who’s Who. Moreover, I should like an agreement about what courses I am to give (it is a fact that until Alberta rang me up last quarter to ask when I wanted my three courses to meet, I never knew that any of us ever taught three courses); and I very much wish that my senior-college courses could be arranged in two-hour sessions, so that I could get some work done. I teach hard, as Miss Szasz and Mrs Siegelman can tell you, who have heard me, and without free days it will hardly do.658

(3) I have been talking about the thing solely from the points of view of justice and self-interest and self-confidence. But, from all three points of view, there is more in it.

We need high-level appointments. What happened last quarter was partly a matter of mal-status. Without high-level appointments we will be subject to the same sort of thing again and again. There are two things, prestige (reputation) and status (university rank); these protect you from insult and inroad—a matter of self-confidence and self-interest. As a member of a threatened group, all this affects me; I cannot deal on even terms, in temporary status, with Holmer say or various members of the English Department all less well-known than I am, and the group suffers as well as me; the loss of Isaac and now Ben is very bad indeed.659

But there is also a question of justice involved.

We ought not to be peripheral in the College, but central, and for this we need graduate courses, as soon as possible. We ought to be a training center, for the simple reason that people need to be trained to give these courses and for the tactical reason that graduate students in other departments need, as well as their own major work, the sort of courses that we ought to be giving. In Humanities, Ralph ought to give a course, and Tate, and I will mention rapidly three courses any of which I would be happy to give:

First, a course in Epic, drawing on the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, the Purgatorio, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, Song of Myself, and The Waste Land.

Second, a course in Textual Criticism: recension, editorial decision, exegesis, emendation. Two chief areas of study: New Testament (Cullmann’s Peter would be the first text) and Shakespeare (Rom. & Jul., King Lear, Hamlet, and cruxes), with reference anywhere. Start with Pollard’s article in 11th E.B., after the concrete & momentous problem “You are Rock” in Cullmann.660 This, and the next course, would be as clear, pilot, interdisciplinary courses, as any that occur to me; they would have few students, until people heard about them.

Third, a course in Final Works: drawing on: Oedipus at Colonus, the Paradiso, Shakespeare’s romances, Zauberflöte, Beethoven’s Op. 130, 132 (Sullivan for text),661 Schubert’s C major Quintet, Goya’s Disparates (text by an Australian who alone has ever made sense of these),662 Shelley’s Triumph of Time, Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, Wm James’s answers to a questionnaire and a 1910 essay by Henry James,663 Yeats’s final poems and “Purgatory”. Such a course would not fail to educate students at all. The attempt would be to discover the laws, if any exist, that such final utterances obey, and to decide (or fail to decide) whether they are fulfilments or sequels or intimations, pre-visions.

Sorry for such a long letter.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

[25 May 1956]

A’s B

Brooding rather on birthdays,

for I age & she has one; bruiting,

Birthdays are proceedings of earth

circling, circling—why mirthdays?

Saints’ days, name-days, yes,

but these ought to be earthdays.

Saints’ days, name-days,

from the I’m I of childhood when

air-cover came, when

came what we mutter when identity frays

or shies . . I suffer my name like a kiss . .

these would be better & stuffier than this.

A Cloth of Gold? Month to month years yes we wait.

What comes? How has she to be reminded or tolled

to relish an unwhistling restless earth?

A birthday would be to celebrate

an almost dying of something strong savage & old

and of something hard sad glad & new we hope an almost birth.

More like a poem, so I sign it, dearest Mabel

John
25 May 56

[NYPL, TS]

1929 South 3rd St

Mpls 4, 2 July 56

Dear Bob,

I’m near the end of the Second Act of a play—I didn’t want to waste time on the phone about it, but that’s the current reason I haven’t written. I wound up the academic year exhausted: Saul & Sondra Bellow arrived to spend several days with me the evening of the last day I lectured: after they left I was ill a few days, then I suddenly began to write very fast, and I have got to get this draft finished before I begin teaching week after next (a second-summer-session of five weeks, course in Crane & Howells). It’s a prose comedy in three acts, laid in Washington DC right now, abt a State dept character etc, and so far it is the worst play ever written, but by the time I finish I think it won’t be. Present title: A Tree, A Tree. Saul by the way thinks the Dream Songs are marvellous, which is a great relief. His new book, about half done, is a beauty; which is a great relief.

Authorization enclosed. Thanks for advice abt Morrow. Directly I hear from them I’ll let you know.

Anxious to see book. I hope the drawings print blacker than they do on these sheets; otherwise I am all admiration.

About copies to people. But first, do you agree that late September is a good time for publication? And if so, what date? Then, may I have a dozen copies here as soon as it’s convenient? As for other people, you say Aiken, Fitzgerald, Tate & Lowell are taken care of: I’d suggest also (but do as you like about this, but let me know what you do):

Blackmur

M Cowley

Edmund Wilson

Louis MacNeice

Maritain

Mark Van Doren

Roethke

Saul Bellow

Pound

I’ll have to write another time about Shakespeare. Thanks for Astrachan’s novel (very interesting for the subject, but can’t tell yet whether he’ll be any good I think) and Wilfred Watson, who has a real gift—so far he relies wholly on Dylan Thomas and Yeats’s final poems, so that the music is not his own, but the poems have a most agreeable music, nearly all of them.664 The biography of Southwell looks absorbing, as I said. How fast all that area is filling in!

Very good to hear your voice, and Eileen’s last night. I feel utterly isolated out here. Wish me luck & dialogue. Blessings,

John

Waited for book, to report on it—but no come

[NYPL, TS]

Mpls, 6 July 56

Dear Robert

I tried to be explicit just now in the wire but actually this anthology situation is complicated.665 So far as I can see, four things are involved:

1) interference with your edition—in America, I take it; I don’t quite see this interference, from your wire; I shd have thought, offhand, that it wd just be extra publicity—but you are certainly a better judge than me;

2) the nature of my moral commitment to Auden, with whom I never had any correspondence personally about this at all, but whom I was glad liked the poem of course at a time when it was almost completely unknown, and I shdn’t like to offend so good a poet anyway—as I once did by rejecting a bad poem he sent me at The Nation;

3) the fee, which your wire doesn’t mention (Doubleday offered $40, which I ^agreed to^ accepted only because of Auden & because I was horribly hard up);

4) my unwillingness, hereafter, to let parts of my poem be used at all; I only did this, with Engle, Auden, and Tate, because of personal friendship & need of money & the poem’s need of attention; from now on, with your assent, I shd say that anybody who wants the poem will have to take it all, and pay well for it, in the neighbourhood of $150–200. But this present arrangement, made years ago insofar as it was made at all, need not be affected by that decision, for I did give permission for part of it to be used: just what part, by the way, was never clear. They said “16 stanzas” first, then St’s 42 thro’ 54 (which is only 13 stanzas), and now your wire says “sixteen final stanzas”. This wd have to be clarified. Point is, I didn’t like the look of part of the poem in Engle’s anthology, which is the only one of the 3 that’s come out; it didn’t make sense.

Now you know everything. Can you clear me up a bit?

Your catalogue looks splendid. Could I see the earliest possible copy of Beatty’s Washington book???666 Very surprising to see “Madame Pig”, since all year I’ve been making up a children’s book called “Mister Pig”, whose first adventure is with “Lady Pig”!667 It’s a fine list altogether, Bob. Specially Chapin’s jobs and Sewall and Edmund W.668

Odd there’s no colophon in Bradstreet. Copies ought to go to Auden, Delmore Schwartz, and Father Lynch, though I certainly wish I cd inscribe these last two. A bad smudge under the Cupid’s chin must be in my copy only? Inking of the drawings is certainly well below all the other features of production: compare for blackness & clarity of line the trees above St. 16 with the trees opposite or indeed any other drawing. Can I have some copies out here as soon as possible? better say 15. All my thanks for everything. Maybe we got a pretty good book.

Always,

John

[Chicago, TS]

Mpls, Wed nt [summer 1956]

Dear Saulism & Sondraness,

Marvellous about the baby. House sounds good too. Now congratulate me: I am nearly at the end of the Second Act of the worst play ever yet written, the Washington comedy. I have one more to go, then the real work begins, though I’ve done a lot backward in the First Act while creeping through the second (I wrote the first in 5 days or so, very soon after you left, and that’s just how it reads). Unluckily I am giving a damned course beginning Tuesday next, wh runs for five weeks, but only one hour a day, and I expect to have a whole new draft of the play out by the time I finish. Then I expect I’ll faint and drift rapidly East to see if anybody wants to publish it or produce it or kick its ass or anything of that sort. I will then dearly love to come see you—to see how Renderson the Hain-King thrives I hope, and to plot campaigns of no small size against Broadway. Tell Geoffrey I was just a jerk when I was seeing him years ago, and have now improved (you may go so far) to the extent that he might like me. My book is ready and of course a copy is on its way to you or will be shortly (Augie as I told you was one of its chief inspirations); it looks good. Publication is October. The last third of it is in Auden’s anthology which is suddenly coming out both in NY & London this fall, the first third of it is in Tate’s ditto, ditto, ditto, and I wonder what the hell the British will make out of it without the middle part, since Faber’s edition is not till next year. Dear me. Ann sends love. Make up a good baby now and a good book. Bless you both,

John

I haven’t been reading much, but I’ll tell you one thing: Strindberg is not so high as I always thought—it’s all personality (& absol. brilliant playmaking)—there’s no independent creation of character. Huh-uh.

[NYPL, MS]

[15 July 1956]

To Bob

—to whom the physical existence of this thing is due,

and after 20 years of unbroken friendship,

& more particularly: I was dying,

not in brain but in heart &

spirit, when you rescued me

with this—so that I can

hope to do some more—

w. admiration & affection

John

Mpls

15 July 56

[Haffenden, TS]

[3 September 1956] A ROOFER, TO BOYDISM

Peachie & Katherine, frisky as brooms,

swung on the swing and woofed in the rooms

of Maris’ and Boyd’s house. ‘Agreeably swirls

about us a daughterdom,’ said Maris & Boyd-up,

and so they were never or seldom annoyed-up

by things that for some make life seem a void-up.

The whole world should be filled with little girls.

“Survival Sam”

alias John Berryman

Mpls

3 Sept 56

[Virginia, TS]

1929 South 3rd Street

Minneapolis 4, Minn.

21 October 1956

Dear Mr Faulkner:

I think the aim of the project, even though in whatever degree imperfectly attainable, is more important than the risk of its being used as a political catspaw.669 However: the day I had one of your letters (following me about from an old Who’s Who address) I heard on the radio Stevenson charging that the Republicans had done nothing for “culture”, and I agree with anybody who thinks the first meeting ought to be postponed until after the election.

Here are the suggestion-sheets back, with comments.

Some other semi-ideas. First, Direct.

1) We ought to know in detail what steps have already been taken—junkets, exchanges, translations, etc—and with what degree of estimated success. The job is surely one of implementing & extending, as well as initiating.

2) Many authors teach, and some are good lecturers (public lecturers I mean, never mind academic): exchange professorships, and lectureships, ought to be extended and made particular for writer-teachers as against just teachers; there ought to be two categories.

3) Real writers should be sent by the government to the various congresses (which don’t matter in this country but do abroad); for instance, at the poets’ congress in Brussels, as Lloyd Frankenberg reported it, were he and John Brinnin—which is fine, but perhaps Lowell, Roethke & Cummings wd have been better.670

4) There ought to be governmental funds for American writers’ travel; this wd be hell to administer, but the truth is that our people wd write more about other countries if they were able to travel more; and then pains ought to be taken to get this stuff translated into other languages—as well as pains taken to get translated what exists already (G Wescott’s Greek book say).671

Second, Indirect.

1) Mark Twain’s hatred for Congress is standard for us; the 1930’s only intensified this feeling that runs through these suggestion-sheets. Our writers’ suspicion of government—which is as healthy artistically as it’s unfortunate politically—might be affected if the government wd take two steps: first, do something vivid about the way we are taxed, and second, set up pensions, something like the British Civil List, so that one might feel that the government—for which, in a way, one is working damned hard, as an author—felt some awareness, gratitude, & responsibility in return.

2) The remedying of certain crying shames—the cases of Charlie Chaplin, Ezra Pound, Arthur Miller—which hurt us abroad as well as here—wd help too.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

Pound once said “Writers are a nation’s Foreign Office.”672 Something in this.

[UCD, TS]

1929 South 3rd St

Mpls 4, Minn.

23 October 1956

Dear Jack Sweeney,

Readily; but may I certainly have these five leaves back when they’ve served your purpose? I have the entire manuscript, except for some hundreds of sheets I threw away as I went, and I’d like to keep it together.

I’d send you the first stanza but it is in a leaflet which has also drafts of four or five other poems all but one still unpublished and I don’t like it out of my hands. Lately I noticed, in old journals, that I invented that stanza on 22 March 48 and chose the last word of the poem—‘elfs’—on 22 March 53, making it five years to the day for the work; this will do for a coincidence.

Regards,

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

I’d like to see the display myself: I’ve not seen Ben’s drawings ^exc. in reprod.^ and am curious abt the paper, textures & blacks. But it is a little distant.

[Chicago, TS]

Mpls, Saturday [early December 1956]

Dear old pal,

Thanks for sympathy, which means more to me because I am not giving myself any, and Ann needs a great deal—though, deep depressive days aside, she is doing bravely & good. I admire her. And luckily 1) she is ravished by the baby and its plunging about and so on, and 2) we have no real social life to knock out—we see only Ralph and the Thomes & McCloskys, all of whom I thoroughly like.673 (Mitzie by the way tells me that after two attempts she did finally write to you 3 or 4 days ago; Danny was ill as hell for a while, and they were down accordingly.) (I saw Floyd P’s gorgeous fight at the house last night; Boyd & Herb feel they discovered Floyd, so I was for Archie, calling them renegades to our generation—Flourish Old Men!!674)

Your lovely door-open makes me know that what A & I wd like best, instead of going to South Dakota or Chicago after my divorce on the 19th (God willing), is to shoot past NYC to you & get married there, staying a few days (expenses shared) during which we cd talk & I cd see more Henderson etc.675 Problem is can I afford fares. I’ll see.

Now: normal I wd accept yr “No” just like that, about the lecture.676 So general an idea wd make me feel exactly the same way too. BUT, since you be so broke (& I’m sorry as sin to hear this), consider two possibilities: Just take yourself as a writer-of-fiction and general-intellectual-human-being and critic, and say what Freud in bks & in practice has come to (con & pro) in yr art & life. That cd be interesting maybe; and they are so keen here to get you to talk that that wd do beautifully. Second poss is this: discursus on one or two authors whom Freud direct hit, like Kafka, and to what extent & how & what profit; and / or discursus on Freudian & neo- studies of authors—same kick. But I am not trying to persuade you, kid. Give it half an hour’s thought with a pencil and see if it wouldn’t—as I think it might—be both easy & interesting, besides non-dreadful. If no, just tell me on a postcard again no.

Now for God’s sake I have a piece of good news. I opened a letter from PR the other day, with an empty brain after opening a questionnaire abt my work-habits from some damned psychologist of art at Penn State & an invitation to join the P.E.N., and—they want to give me a Rockef fellowship in poetry, 4000 bucks. Whee! Bliss! Did you have anything to do with this? are you the angel in heaven who thought of me? If so—well, nothing cd improve my liking for you, but a bold try wd be in order. This is the first really good news I have ever been able to give Ann—and the time! the freedom! Kiss me, brother. I am going to write so good the trolls of language will scream & come over to my side.

I have no whole new Dream Song for you but a bloody gd stanza I wrote the other day, but I won’t look it out right now because: (I am in a condition of perfect happiness:) when W B Stevenson’s Schweik lectures on the Poem of Job came out 9 years ago I decided that I was the man born to translate that great work into English verse, and this afternoon I finally got my tone & rhythm right and did the first nine lines.677 They are much more literal than any transl into Engl I’ve ever seen, and therefore I think simpler & more lucid & truer—the work is complex & mysterious beyond any other, but not senseless as all the translations discontinuously are. And I’m building the meaning in to such an extent that I’ll only need 3 notes on the first 9 lines—for instance, behind the celebratory night—not in front of it—hangs the cursed night of conception. Here they go:

JOB

Perish the day’s fire into which I was born, and that night’s joy crying ‘A boy!’

That day let God enquire not for, no brightness burn there,

But a dark of midnight claim, a black cloud seize it quite,

Let all that stains & shrouds terrify that day.

Disjoin out from its fellow days it, exiled from the toil of the months.

Stony that night turn, joyless, empty of all song;

Enchanters mark it curst, whose baleful power calls up Leviathan;

Its twilight stars be dark, unseen the eyelids of its dawn;

For it shut not the doors of my womb, but let me out to trouble.

I long ago saw that the Hebrew (4 plus 4) wouldn’t do, except at too great cost, it wd have to be 4s & 3s, but that invited balladry, wh had to be excluded utterly. This is only draft, still I am pretty well satisfied. Tell me how sounds. I think I can now get on. Some 750 lines—for the moment I’m accepting most of Stevenson’s delenda, transpositions etc, and chiefly controlling him only w Reichert’s commentary—maybe mid-february will see it in some sort of shape.

Viva Henderson & Sondra & The New Child. Was ever anything in life so terrible as the Hungarian agony—for long hours I think of nothing else—

Ann’s love too,

John

Change—let’s try ‘in where’ for ‘into which’, line 1. Polit. news here good: the dean stiffened himself against the attacks on us, & then this week the President stiffened him further.

[Haffenden, MS]

27 Dec [1956]

Custer, So. Dak

We haven’t been down here yet, but I was ridge-walking today at 6000 feet & feel delightful

Happy New Year to all of you and your preposterous parents

John Berryman

(& Ann B.)

1957

[Yale, TS]

2900 James Avenue south

Minneapolis 8, Minn.

Wed 27 Mar [1957]

Dearest Robert,

I can’t believe you are so close, even though Allen says you are. I have a thousand things to tell you and a thousand apologies to make and a thousand things to ask you about. Can you really be here, I mean in the country & even in the middle west?? Allen said he was meeting you in Chicago late this week and I said that I wd go down & meet you both; but are you? and I don’t know now whether I can or not. My child was 3 wks old yesterday and is formidably stubborn besides being as passionate as his namesake Paul. Will you let me know if you are? Another possibility is that I have to run sessions of something in Chicago on April 17th & 24th—cd we meet then, or maybe I cd come to South Bend if you are truly there. Or cd you come up here at any time? I can put you up, and I want you & Ann to meet if we can. This is no letter, such as I owe you, or I wd say how infinitely superior all the later poems in yr book are to the earlier678—like a gift new-born—and say how much your wonderfully generous statement abt the Bradstr poem was—it was quoted in the Sat Review of all places the other day in a rev by of all people Ciardi679—but please my love to Sally & poupies as you write. This is just a quick sign to hope to hear where you are & will be when. You cd call me collect: TAylor 5-9634. Hurrah!

Love,

John

[NYPL, TS]

my phone now, if you ever need it, is Taylor 5-9634

2900 James Avenue South

Mpls 8, Minn

14 Apr 57

Dear Bob,

Hello! after so long! I have been swampt w. speaking engagements, and having a son (named Paul), and Ann has been ill, and I’ve been writing—both serious things and most recently a poem abt Eberhart that may endanger your life with laughter when I show it to you. Even now I can’t write properly because I’m getting ready to preside over two things in Chicago and am dead-tired: I am going to arrange five days off late next week and get some rest.

But first something important: Something is very screwed up about my mail there, and I really wish you wd give somebody a wigging and fix it up. I just had three letters from the Virginia Quarterly, and even this one enclosing letters of January & March (neither of wh ever reached me at all) was misdirected by FSC to my old address. They offer me $100 for a poem, and in general I truly have to have my mail forwarded properly.680 This is crazy.

Thanks for the proofs of Ciardi’s generous surprising & intelligent review. Tate agrees w me that he never did anything like it before to our knowledge. I was sorry however to see four atrocious errors in the quotation from the childbirth passage. It was pleasant to see an important passage quoted & actually talkt about.

How are you? Is there any news? I thought the Trebizond book delightful (thanks) and my mouth watered.681 There is a possibility that I may go to India for the State Dept in June and my mouth waters. It looks as if my tenure appointment—delayed now for 18 ridiculous months—will go through very shortly, so that I can both plan and work. My dream-song sketching has been going beautifully, but I have not been able to get to Shakespeare yet and this is a bore. Here are three lines:

The shadow of my father’s shaming death

lay over a youth.

Phantoms suckt at my chances.

One very fatiguing thing is that my modern course has so jammed with people that every morning at 11:30 I talk to 104 students. My department has never had anything like this before, and I can do it all right, but it is a strain. I hope everything is flourishing w you personally & at the office. Let us have good hope for better things.

Affectionately,

John

I’ve written a ^short^ poem to the baby wh. Saul ^(who’s here now)^ & Allen think is stunning; I’ll send you a copy when I make some.682

[Columbia, TS]

2900 James av so

Mpls 8, Saturday [May 1957]

Dearest Puggy,

O rumor! ever right & ever wrong! I was in Chicago twice, running a writers’ workshop, & was in hospital there with a badly sprained foot, but am regularly lecturing here and can’t get away alas. If I were in Chicago I’d come like a shot. Not only do I have to wind up my courses, one of which now has 104 students to whom I am wise at 11:30 every morning, but I’ve agreed to go to India for the State dept next month & am preparing & working out lectures for that. I’ll be in Japan a while first, and afterward meet Ann & Paul (who has only just started giving us, or his visions, volleys of smiles, after months of a humourlessness comparable only to Oedipus’) in Italy; this Fall we’ll be in Spain. All this is hell so far as my passion for seeing you & Hamish & Starky (who cannot—this is my considered opinion—be 13) goes. December is a possibility. How about December? I am coming back then to give a reading at the Libr of Congr (won’t compare w St Tropez), date still unsettled, & begin my regular junk here in Jan. Maybe we cd all Christmas together ^(here or Cin’ti or the East)^??? I am dismayed at Ann’s not knowing you, & vice versa. Besides Hamish & I have many things to talk over, little as (I daresay) he is willing to admit it. This is just a rapid note—I’m swampt—& proposal. I’m abt to send one to Van too, note that is. They gave me this week a thing called the Harriet Monroe award, wh I never heard of, & the NY Times insulted me by referring to me as a “young poet”—Let’s face it, with pleasure: I am middle-aged: hurrah!—and I have to make faces on television next week; but there was 500 bucks too, always a help—as the doctors & the government swarm to the kill. Perhaps H cd find it in his black heart to write me a letter, w at least this much on-the-spot news: eh? O. I’ll fix him, fr Bombay; grr. wuv,

John

[UMN, TS]

2900 James Avenue South

Mpls 8, Minn.

18 May 57

Dear Mr Munford:

Thank you for yr excellent letter, and please forgive the delay that intermittent illness combined with very hard work has occasioned in my reply. I have been thinking over your proposals and like them very much, all of them. I’ll work up a lecture, then,—in fact, I have been doing—on Crane & Dreiser, with some background and some reference forward to Augie March; and one, or probably two (for I’m not keen on repeating myself more than is necessary), lectures—with readings—on modern American poetry, Frost & Pound down to Roethke say. As for the panel things, I just don’t know who they read, but I should think certainly Hemingway & Faulkner, and my friend Allen Tate who was there lately tells me they know more than one wd expect of our poetry. I am all right I think on Hemingway—that is I have read all his books at one time or another and understand him pretty well; but Faulkner I cooled off on, years ago, except for “The Bear” and some other stories and two or three novels of the Thirties—if you’d let me know what you plan of his to be talking about, I might look at it. Of course I like “The Old Man” too. Frost might do as a panel subject, what do you think? I will certainly be touching Whitman also; it’s of interest, for this, that he was influenced by the Gita etc.

Two things. You speak of there being “four of us”, whereas I had understood there were only two: who are the others and doing what? And I cannot learn from Mr Howland’s letters how long, roughly, we are expected to be in India—that is, how many of these four-day symposia are scheduled.683 Do you know?

As for drama, it wd be difficult to convey briefly, I shd say, much sense of what our current drama—Arthur Miller & Tennessee Williams I mean—is like; but we might try. I have a high regard for these two writers.

I too am looking forward to this odd experience with much interest. I have wanted to go to India all my life and can’t say that I ever really expected to. With renewed apology, and regards,

Sincerely,

[Haffenden, TS]

2900 James Avenue south

Mpls 8, Sat 25 May [1957]

Dear Van,

Commiseration! but what a mystery: I too exactly fractured my wrist when I fell down a flight of steps in Iowa 3 years ago, and this Spring I had to be hospitalized in Chicago with a foot (right) wickedly sprained when an unsecured shag-rug (on an ice-slick floor, like a drawing-room) in Mrs Stevenson’s guest suite shot out from under me as I got up for an innocent purpose about 1 a.m.684 I tell you I don’t know how Adlai stood it all those years; and later she insulted me on a street-corner suddenly for no reason whatever; a real madwoman. But there is something more than mortal in all this. I hope you are mending. I was kept immobile 48 hours & limpt a month & am okay.

I was delighted beyond measure & toucht by yr letter in March: the only one I had that displayed any ^true^ feeling for what was happening. Paul has only very lately now begun smiling, and as the smile shows forth through his features it is like a change in man’s fate. Mostly he is a very solemn, obstinate, self-sufficient creature; perhaps demented; with a piercing vocal capacity that comes from I can’t imagine where.

Your waking me up to Zen will finally come to practice next month, when I hope to be in Kyoto a bit, on my way to lower India for State. Then I’m meeting Ann & P in Italy, for Spain. I wish I thought we cd see you & Betty somewhere there. It will have to be here; make Puggy show you my letter of this afternoon |& show her this, if you will| for more news & a suggestion. Can Sanford be at Harvard? When Damaris (wiggle!) goes there, I faint. My awe to Christine, and my love to you all. How did Eileen seem to you, Van? I never read books any more either; but I have a stunning new poem going through.

Get well!

John

[Amherst, TS]

2900 James av so, Mpls 8, Minn

Sat 25 May [1957]

Dear Richard Wilbur,

A minor apology first for delay: yr letter came slowly but got here Thursday last: I haven’t written, until today, 5 letters in the last three months, and I often don’t open letters until I can answer them, and yrs is unopened. I take it though that it is abt my wire of course, & understandably exasperated, and before I open it I want to say something. That wire was not sent to you but to you-at-Columbia, where I knew you were not (I did not know where you were, whether teaching somewhere or abroad). It was a purely personal gesture of anger; it was not intended to be delivered. And in fact after some hours an operator rang up & said you were not to be found at Columbia, whether among students or faculty, and I said “Kill it then” and she said she wd. But after some more hours, next morning, another operator rang up & said they had found you at Wellesley & did I want it delivered and I said “No” and she said all right, but then she rang up later & said it was too late, it had been delivered. I am sorry for the entirely unintentional insult. I am sorry; I felt like a man who curses in private, as we have a right to do, and finds he’s overheard. My anger was this: I do not collect merit badges, but I was informed by competent people that my poem did not receive even an honest consideration for the Natl Bk award and when the Pulitzer went the same way I cd not help feeling briefly that the poem—which, whatever its merit, took five years to write—had been twice insulted on its own ground, in its own country; especially since I had that day after my lectures made eleven new lines of a poem wh is like a slaughterhouse of grief, whereas my impression of yr early work (all I knew) was of work skilful industrious effortless & fireless—I apologize for this unsolicited opinion: I am explaining the occasion of the wire. I thought of wiring you congratulations, but found I cd not do so sincerely, since I had not read yr new book & so cd not say whether you deserved the awards or not.685 The two impulses joined, & by accident reached you; to my sorrow.

Well. Now I open yr letter.

But either this is the purest & most savage irony, or I don’t remember my wire correctly, or they garbled it as frequently happens.

Anyway: if I offended you, forgive me, and let us be friends. The first thing I am going to do when I get back from India & Spain is get hold of a copy of yr book and read it from cover to cover. Every good luck,

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[Amherst, MS]

30 June [1957]

Dear Richard Wilbur

Wire certainly mal-transmitted or almost certainly, but I don’t now remember what I said.686 Conceptual & metrical vigour all yr work I’ve seen clearly has; no such irony wd do at all. Best of luck, & hope for a meeting some time, if I do not melt in India

Yrs

John Berryman

[WU, TS]

2900 James av. so., Minneapolis 8

26 June 57

Dear Mr Dickey,

Thank you for yr letter, which I am going to have to answer more shortly than I would because I leave almost at once for the Orient.687

Yes, Campbell & I were very close friends. He was my closest friend from our meeting in New York early in 1939 until his death. He had just been to see Granville Hicks, upstate, where he had been staying with a lawyer, Bart Breed, and he & his wife Florence & I spent an afternoon talking at the other end of the George Washington Bridge, down left at a Greek restaurant with a parapet. No longer exists. I could say why he struck me, but that is part of my history & wdn’t interest you. Most of that summer we spent in Grand Marais, on the Upper Peninsula. He was working on the sea-poem & other things. I was writing a compost-heap called “At Chinese Checkers”, etc. We worked closely together. He was my senior but I was more experienced and I was trying to get him out from under Auden. In the Fall I gave up my job at Columbia so that we wd be able to work together at Wayne; as we did; living first at his mother’s cottage on a lake north of the city, then in an apartment in town (Detroit). I published “Of Gramatan’s Transaction” in The Nation.688 Then first my health got bad, then his, worse. He died very slowly, over many months, of one of the most atrocious cancers; embryonal adeno-carcenoma [sic] it was called, grade 4. Gene Shafarman, who had been my physician also, did what was possible. When I last saw Campbell, a few days before his death—I had gone out from Harvard, where I had a job, for the Thanksgiving break—he was saffron-coloured, his eyes danced, his teeth shot from retreating gums like a madman’s, and dying he was full of the senseless hope (encouraged by his mother who sought quack remedies) that tubercular patients have at the end. So he died. I thought life wd bring me nothing like this again; but then Dylan Thomas died—but Thomas, though I had known him before Bhain, was never except at the beginning an intimate—and he had done his work. Campbell died as he became free. He got no chance to use it. In person: He was an attractive man (I have photographs you can see if you like) & made no use of it; absolutely candid; considerate, & gay; uncontentious—indeed, innocent, for all his political wishes; loyal; I am obliged to say: virtuous; I never knew him to do an ill action; devoted to verse; brave.

Your questions. So far as I know, all the poems worth preserving are in that book called The Task. Certainly the novel, wh must have been an early affair, was never published; he was working on a book on Shelley which perhaps his widow has. Two poems were in Friar-Brinnin 1951, “Final Poem” & “the Task”,—not his best—and one, Final Poem, in an anthology of Oscar Wms’s 1955.689 I wish I cd agree w you that “It is hard to understand the comparative neglect of an author of his calibre”. It is easy. Achievement & fame even after 2000 years may not correspond; far less at once. Nobody paid any attention, so far as I cd discover, except the late Don Stauffer690—on my evidence, until your letter, which comes, oddly, as I go off to read “Of the People & their Parks” around Central India: Bombay Poona Hyderabad Calcutta Cuttack Ahmadabhad Nagour. Bhain wd be amused. I hope he is amused.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

Tokyo Grand Hotel,

Monday 8 July [1957], 10:30 p.m.

My dear Mouse-Mouse,

Well, I’m in, and I cdn’t be more surprised by everything, and if my maid & I have understood each other I am to have a massage in half an hour. At present I am having a “Nippon Stout”—very like Guinness—before an open slide-window in my 4th floor room, sweating (temp is 78°, whereas this afternoon at Shemya in the Aleutians it was 42°, everybody wore parkas & gloves & I froze) & listening to the horns that the Japanese sound on all occasions, driving like mad—in many ways the city is like Paris—, & writing this. I am not fresh but feel fine and became excited when Japanese land showed below: every tone of green & brown, in early dusk, looking both graceful & wild. We were 9 hours late here, coming in at 7:30 tonight instead of 10:40 this morning. ‘Distributors’ held us up at Anchorage—whatever they are. Landing at Shemya the two right wheels burst, & all 4 blades of the far right propellor [sic] scraped; it lookt as if we wd have to spend tonight there, but they fixed the jinxed plane up. Landing here, both motors on my side ^(left)^ burst into flame—flames that came almost to my window, which was on the wing—the pilot’s voice said at once ‘Passengers will prepare to leave the plane immediately.’ I thought ‘Ha! I almost reacht Asia.’ Then some safety affair went into operation & put the fires out. We were all glad to leave that ’plane, the Air Force major who retired 6 days ago after 20 years and is going back ^(after a [?visit] on Okinawa)^ to Potsdam (N.Y.) Teachers College on the G. I. Bill, the boozing Merchant Marine guy ^w. steel-rimmed glasses,^ set for 2 months’ vacation in Japan, the blonde ^v. young^ heiress from Milwaukee meeting ^joining^ her G. I. husband in Manila, the big shot Pepsi-Cola engineer ^who flies 120,000 miles a year^, the Will Rogers type from Yonkers, & my middle aged Japanese businessman |an atomic industry director, actually| seatmate ^(Katsuichi Murayama)^, & me too. I feel they ought to give it the Purple Heart & put it on the Peking run: out, out.

How is Mr Poo, & after the trip you, & Mother whose birthday this weirdly is??—the 7th never having existed for me at all.

My own time is getting short. I’ll have to see with the Embassy & airlines tomorrow what gives. I hope I can still go to Kyoto, but I am awfully sick of travelling, & tired. All the beginning of the ride in here from the airport I was fascinated, I wd have liked to stop everywhere—lanterned open shops, gongs, ladies in kimonos clopping along—then a stretch of Brooklyn—then strangeness again—but long before we arrived, my back & coccyx ^(wh. is better)^ had had it & I cd have shouted. I went then for a walk, cased a bookshop, failed to find a flower, saw within 3 blocks of this fairly posh hotel, down an alley, a whole family in one bed ^(or was it just the floor?—yes, probably)^ taking up the whole room brightly lighted, door open, a daughter’s leg thrown up over the covers six feet from me as I passed—there seemed to be four of them but may have been 5 or 6. Seeing is really different from knowing. I’d like a day or so’s loafing before I begin to look.

5/6 of a moon rose over Tokyo as we circled down, and transoms of jagged light survived above & below murk; it was Oriental—at least I never saw such a sky before.

_________massage character came: a young lady not much bigger than the Poo but notably stronger. I nearly went to sleep half a dozen times, & now must. Method unlike Swedish—less energetic, less work on neck, more on chest, mostly feet & legs, lengthier, no pinching. Her name seems to be “City Handle” & she charged me 300 yen, or 85¢.—I keep on having this sensation that my room is tipping & dipping & throbbing—good night! a kiss! x x x x

Tues morning—even w. massage & seconal I slept only 3 hrs., then fitfully, then horns made it a farce & I got up & had breakfast at 7:30. The day begins early here. City boiling & honking away. Heavy overcast, but fresh air. Big taxi- & bus-servicing area below my window, ‘Mobilubrication’ place to left, but Jap. character-signs visible everywhere & big trees, & just out to the right a ravishing Japanese hillside rising from (& with) old stone walls, crazy paths wandering up it, vines, odd shrubs & trees, crowned by a low villa: cdn’t be European or American.—I miss a typewriter!—Girl called back in distress “Boiled egg hard or soft?” I said ‘Soft’ & she sent me 2, hard, excellent coffee. After a search I decided Ralph Razor was no go: enigmatic convers. w the desk—she sent girl, pretty as a film star, who showed me a switch that lookt like anything but, & I am abt. to use it. Bathtub is higher than ours, shorter, not rounded at all, & has a step into it; shower too. All the hundreds of people I can see looking out here are Asiatics; how peculiar. I am delighted to be here. I certainly wish you & the Poo were. How is the mountings?691 I may stay over today & poke about. Tell mother I am smoking “Pearl” cigarettes (60 yen—15¢): sweetish, not bad. My room is ¥1900, or $5.15 say, minus 5% because I’m w. the State Dept.—fact they inferred ^(how?)^ when I later put stuff in safe & askt abt Amer. Embassy, wh. is 2 or 3 blocks off. Timeless grey light: I’m having a 2nd pot of coffee ^(inferior)^: I cd sit here all day, eager as I feel to go about. Peasants w. gigantic loads pass ^bent w. peaked straw hats (boshi)^, sep. fr. the taxi-servicing garage by two laundries & some gardens & a small dwelling that must have 30 persons in it. Freshness is going to make me a new man. I don’t feel myself at all; what a pleasure. All my own thoughts & griefs seem shed. I am ears & eyes, I am attention.

Tues. aft—all OK—I’m going by train to Kyoto tom’w a.m.—back Fri. nt. This water-lily seemed best; they pressed it for me in the Imperial Hotel where I just had lunch

love, & love to Poo, &

love to Mother

John

[Haffenden, MS]

[?Sun.] evening [?14 July 1957]

This is one view—a startling one—of the most perfect & satisfying garden ^[even]^ in Japan, [the] one I came to see.692 I will explain it to you; meanwhile [re]flect. It is 15 stones on sand, [w.] moss; 450 yrs old, & a product of Zen thought. I have never been so happy in my life as here in Kyoto, but must go [o]n. Bless you both & all,

Love,

John

Let’s us all go somewhere some time together.

[UMN, MS]

Kyoto, Sunday [14 July 1957]

Dearest Mabel

It’s only 7:30 (morning) & already the heat is savage. I was going out to glance at some temples, but I don’t know. This afternoon I’m to go to some Noh plays, & back to Tokyo by night-train, & out to Calcutta tomorrow midnight. I hate the idea of moving. The Cultural Affairs officer here is enthusiastic abt me & I may be askt out to lecture next summer, whereby we ought to be able (you & me & Poo) to stay a while here at the Tawaraya, the loveliest inn in the entire world.—The stone garden at Ryoan-ji is more astonishing even than I expected, and yesterday I had a long talk abt it w. Shigemori himself, who lives here in Kyoto!693 and cd not tell me how to get a copy of that bk of his (he’s written dozens of others, and created dozens of gardens also) but invited me to the tea ceremony, where was likewise a Zen priest, the gravest, calmest man I think I ever saw.—First day in Kyoto I wandered & shopt: I have a stunning Kimonō (w obi & cords) for you, & one for the Poo (& a jacket, & a suit, & a swimming whale, & 4 adorable ^tiny^ dolls)—it takes so long to ship things & is so dear that I think I had better bring them. My excess weight is lucky. To Mother I sent 2 dolls, then a vase that I hope she will like & another doll. You are going to love your sandals (& socks) too.—Last night I got into a staggering festival ^(Gion)^, one of Japan’s 3 greatest & not of recent institution (970 A.D.). A man’s relatives got me into unprecedented position—atop the oldest & most splendid float, where the gongs nearly drove me crazy and the lights & shouting were almost perfectly incredible. I have been very lucky here altogether and feel wonderful. The Japanese too are like Italians—vivid, friendly, gay, & honest! But Nijo Castle (1600, roughly)—an early shogun’s—I found as intimidating as it was elegant. It’s useless however to try to describe things briefly in this heat. My sketching-out for the book’s prelude has gone v. well. How I hope an Olivetti is awaiting me in India! Shigemori looks like a wise & handsome monkey, expressive & voluble. I saw a yellow chrysanthemum outside Nijo (there are 1000 of them stylized inside—it was the shogun’s symbol ^no—imperial crest^) the size of a melon.

Off to see temples!

8:30 p.m. After several disappointments, the day was magnificent, tho’ I repeatedly came near dying fr. heat. I have to pack in a hurry—ugh—& get off. Kiss the little Poo for me & be a good Mouse. I love you. I hope there may by now be a letter in Tokyo

X X X

John

[UMN, TS]

The Ritz, Bombay—Thursday noon [late July 1957]

Carissima,

They say—sign on the telephone here—Olivetti for rent, but this is a Remington of the period of the Mutiny, I shd say, and I don’t know how long I can stick with it.694 Besides somebody is coming for an interview shortly and I have to lecture at Wilson College on Eliot at 3 and pack to leave for Calcutta at 7 tomorrow morning and there’s dinner with various Indians at the Neumanns’ tonight.695 Yesterday I gave an interview to the Times of India & lectured at St Xavier’s Coll. That will make 7 in 9 days and I hope to God Calcutta is quieter; only one of the seven has been repeated, too. I haven’t seen Bombay at all, except the Hanging Gardens, the Cages, and a bit the bazars which are marvellous. This is a ratrace. AND no boat gets out to Elephanta during the monsoon, so unless the weather has let up at the beginning of Sept I won’t see it, just 6 miles out as it is.

My health has been very good, not a trace of anything except that I wake at six & never get back to sleep. Weirdly, I cdn’t get any riding in Poona, though, and can’t raise a masseur here, and ain’t started Yogi yet—but I bought a book and will be doing Salabhasana soon if my schedule ever lets up. My temper is good also—an item worth mention since the Indians are the most exasperating people on earth.

The Karla cave-temple was magnificent.

The new pictures of you & the Poo are delicious too, though it’s true yours don’t do you any justice at all. This second letter, or note, just came. We got back from Poona too late on Sat. to post this letter, and so it was no good sending it to NY. (I must tell you that Indian postmen have a habit of lifting high-value stamps off letters, so they have to be cancelled in one’s presence or they may not go anywhere; if any of my earlier letters haven’t arrived, that’s it—except of course from Japan.) Alas I haven’t written one word to anyone exc. you, and one letter to Mother, unless I sent a postcard or so to Ralphism & Boyd-up & my brother, as I fancy & hope I did from Tokyo or somewhere. So far, letter-writing has been impossible and this machine is for the squirrels and I hope your Atlantic crossing will be (will have been) wonderful, and you & the Poo stay well and like the Riviera and hold the fort till Shouting Jack comes West—the Daily Express photographer just arrived in this chaotic room & took some shots—I begged him to shoot me: dead at this typewriter; but he declined, in Oxford English. Now I have to go off

Well, the lecture etc & the interview took four hours, and very tired indeed I’m off to dinner. Lie in the sun! lie in the sun!

love to Poo & Fitzgeralds, & kisses,

John

[UMN, MS]

Sat morning, 17 Aug [1957]

Darling

I came on here w. Howard for a rest, after a heavy stint in Patna (Wed. I was busy from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. without break except for a nap after lunch)—and it’s been marvellous.696 This passes for the oldest inhabited city in the world, as well as the holiest in India, and is like nothing I ever imagined. The hotel is also the most agreeable place we’ve been in since the Turf Club in Poona. Sight-seeing apart, I’ve just slept, & feel much refreshed. Now we fly back to Calcutta for an elaborate tea this afternoon that initiates a cruel 5-day symposium there next week. I am half done, thank Heaven. I hope to God there is mail waiting, I have had nothing for weeks!! I watcht a mongoose kill a snake on Thursday & felt similarly irritable. Are you in Italy? A week ago you were supposed to dock. I got you a staggering gift here, & Poo a silver rattle. How are you? & friend Poo, how?

[UMN, TS]

Harington Chambers, 8 Harington st,

Calcutta—Tuesday 27 Aug 57

Dearest House Mouse,

What a relief your letter is. I felt horrible over a situation, for wh I was responsible, so lonely & comfortless. I’m glad Babs came, glad the place is less impossible, glad esp abt the Italian girl, glad abt the subletting, glad abt yr cabana. I had forgotten it takes time to know the Fitzgeralds—Eileen & I thought them impossible at first—I didn’t allow for this, and I’m sorry. I hope Susan comes soon. But in fact I’ll be there soon myself. I miss you & Poo ferociously. The crowing picture of him you sent has been some help. I can’t imagine what he’s like now.

Whatever-I-had took a week. It wasn’t until yesterday morning that I felt myself, and by the afternoon even then my vigour was gone, and I have a severe heat rash at the back of the neck, and the situation of our lectures yest’y infuriated us, and they have piled new things on us this week in add to the 8 scheduled lectures and today my head cold is heavy again. Still we are all right. But we have received exactly one per-diem check (a month ago, in Bombay) and Stumpf is on the phone to Delhi right now raising hell, but we are fed up.697 Howard was in the Navy 3 years & is more philosophical than I am, but not much. He says the fucking government pays you in the end, but in fact a fellow-officer of his after months of no-pay had to resign his commission and take a new one in order to get any pay at all and he never did recover any of the back-pay. They have also workt us far too hard.

Well, nobody knows abt the money and we are going down now to cash cheques—I’ll write tomorrow

Love, darling—excuse irritibaiity

John

Just found what I wrote you from Benares

[UMN, MS]

Ahmedabad, Mon. evening,

2 Sept ’57

Darling

I was pretty ill in Bombay, after nearly strangling several times during my Friday lecture in the East, so I got in a serious doctor (English) yest’y who put me on Achromycin & 3 other things and I cancelled a dinner last night, stood the trip here all right today, gave my lecture without strain just now, and am beginning to feel human again. He thinks it is not serious, just the Calcutta business of week-before-last never got over (virus, whether pneumonitis, influenza or bronchitis, he can’t tell & doesn’t care), and ^believes^ that 4 days of medicine—even lecturing—will see me O.K.; only I’m to have a chest X-ray tom’w. ^(He wanted me to stay today in Bombay for it, but of course I couldn’t.)^ I feel decisively better already, am without spasms, sweatless, and the utter weakness has receded. You are not to worry.—Everything here has been re-arranged for more ‘mileage’: today & tom’w here, Wed to Bombay & then Nagpur, Thurs-Fri. lectures there, Sat I go fr. there to Delhi and they have promist to get me out of Delhi either Mon. or Tuesday. The flight to Italy is a long one: if I can break it at Athens I will, for health, for intense interest, & because I’ll feel better ^in future^ abt my Greek course after just a look. I’ll cable you of course abt my arrival, Mouse-Mouse, and what a joy & relief & excitement it will be to behold & hold you.

We are extremely comfortable here, in the house of an American textile chemist, but are over-socialized as usual & I have to give an extra verse-reading tom’w morning—when however we also expect to see some mosques & walk to a nearby village. This is a wealthy city, very surprisingly, with Le Corbusier bldgs & a general Western air. I’m off to a damned Indian dinner this second.

Tues a.m. not too good: I woke w. coughing paroxysms at 5 a.m. & have little energy for the ridiculous day Neumann has arranged for me: 2 lectures, 2 social meals, visits here & there—into wh. I have to fit an X-ray & some look at a few of the magnificent mosques & wells here. But we walkt at 6:30 ^a.m.^ out to a village & enjoyed that. Excuse this talk of my health when I fear you are miserable yourself. It will soon be over, or at any rate changed: they cannot keep me doing this useless lecturing forever—where moreover all was so ill arranged that our audience ^here^ is the smallest ^(30)^ since Poona—i.e., it’s pure waste. I’ll be cabling, beloved & much-missed & greatly-desired Mabel Mouse—

love,

Lion Henry

Add weirdness: a professor here has been using the Bradstreet poem in a seminar—apparently the part in Auden’s anthology (last 3rd) but he asks qu’s abt the childbirth so somehow he must have seen that. No introducer of me in India has ever even named the book until today.

[UMN, MS]

Madrid, 6 Nov 57

Dear Milt

Were you serious abt the evening in May with Marilyn Monroe? I haven’t met her, but when Miller was courting her he was staying w. friends of mine—Saul Bellow & his new wife—in Nevada, & when he was not on their telephone to her he was bending their ears w. ^her^ praises; they stayed w. me on the way back East then & bent my ears. I’ve never had any interest in her.

When did I get yr letter—in Italy I think, and I sympathized w. yr operation. I picked up something indefinite in Calcutta which lasted into Bombay & Ahmedabad, & had to spend weeks in Italy resting. When the weather began to close in, we moved (21 pieces of luggage) to Barcelona where the baby howled all night & Ann got a ganglionitis which a doctor there cd make nothing of, tho’ it turns out to be epidemic there—so it wasn’t diagnosed or treated till here, 3 wks later. And the baby, otherwise adorable, howls at night. However, I saw 3 of the chief present matadors work in Barcelona & was again twice in Saragossa ^Chamaco, Ordóñez, & Dominguín^; and was v. happy for some days lately in Toledo. I suppose Kyoto, Benares, & Toledo have been the highest points of the tour—for reasons I’m trying to describe in a chapter & won’t bore you with. I wrote in Lèvanto a chapter on the Taj, which alone is worth going to India to see;698 also a poem abt American life which I hope will make some people laugh & some people cry, when I print it.699

We’re going to move to Seville shortly—it’s fine here still, but a thought chilly, & I’m sick of Spanish hotels, I want an apartment. Madrid anyway, apart from the Prado of course, & where you can get to fr. Madrid, is not v. interesting; it’s like any big city in Europe. But it’s good for shopping. I got hold yesterday of the most marvellous working ed. of Don Q in existence—it has Clemencín’s entire commentary, besides all sorts of other stuff—and found too a small wooden San Pedro, mid-15th C., that I’ve fallen in love with. Most of his gildings & some paint is gone, but both in character & style (transition in Castile fr. Gothic to renaissance) he is beautiful.700 One is large & open, preaching, one narrowed, withdrawn, in sorrow. Day before yesterday I bought a vellum ms. book of about 1600, containing a whole theological treatise I haven’t been to the Nat’l libr. to identify yet; this was 50 pesetas (a dollar)—the statue was 250. And a triple dry martini comes to 20¢. Why do we live in Byzantium?

If you’re in NY at Xmas, call my mo. or bro.—we sail mid-Dec & may be about. Greetings to your distinguisht family.

John

[Haffenden, MS]

Avila, 17 Nov. 57

Dearest Maris,

Forgive me for bombarding you w. letters this way, letter-writing is just a habit, and I (don’t) have it. But I have a verse wh. Ann thinks Boyd will like & I’ll tuck it into this when I go back to my hotel. It is about my illness in Calcutta, Bombay & Ahmedabad, Ann’s in Barcelona, Zaragoza & Madrid, and Poo’s health. We are all fine now, with our 21 pieces of luggage divided in half. They are in Seville, I’m making a 4-day swing Segovia-Valladolid-Salamanca (marvellous place)-here; I go down le lendemain. There till we sail from Cadiz on Dec. 9th; please write me some news. I hate to keep asking, my dear. If you don’t write now, it is the end.—I left in very bad shape, as Boyd knows ^& I hope forgives^: all the same, I was right to go, because after the hiatus of the long trip I became so happy & quiet in Kyoto that I made out beautifully thereafter, though Calcutta in the monsoon is no rest cure. I gave 26 lectures; repeat, 26; wow. While that indolent bastard Boyd luxuriated on Long Island—you see I have my sources of information. Truth is, we hear he arrived ^in the East^ pale & shaken, while you were blooming. I’m glad you got there anyway. Ann was a little depressed! She said, “I don’t like to think of Boyd being anywhere but in Mpls”—whatever that means. It is past nine and soon I can hope for one of these tardy but delicious meals; which will go into a man who was on his feet in Salamanca from 8 ^this morning^ to 3 (no time for lunch, & breakfast never), in a train 3 to 6:30, etc etc. A mas tarde …

Ah. I was collaborating with a waiter in the creation of what may be the first martini ever drunk in Avila, and very good it is. Your health, Boydism! Salud.

_______________

next day.

Henry pickt up in Calcutta something or other

viewed differently by doctors in Bombay & Ahmedabad,

Mabel something epidemic in Barcelona,

the baby is as healthy as Sweden, the hell with the old,

& howls half the night proving that he is perfect.

Voilà!

I have been round the astonishing walls of this lovely city, now I must go look at a few thousand churches, convents, hermitages, shrines & other points of solicitation. I feel the date—Avila makes you feel this—to be about 1510.

Love,

John

[Yale, MS]

[7 December 1957]

7 Dec—Piece of luck, in Tangier last week I came on a Fr. transl., Frobenius’ Histoire de la Civilisation Africaine, and he is as marvellous as you once told me.701 He not only helps explain various things I saw in India & elsewhere, but the book is a masterpiece of understanding altogether and—I don’t just how [sic] to put this—an immense relief to find after a long & fantastically variegated tour that began in Kyoto six months ago. Thanks for the tip.—Around the world people have askt me what I tho’t of your situation, and I told them freely, whether I was on official business or not, that I thought it monstrous & a national shame besides what is wicked & ungrateful in the Government’s refusal to act. I hope you keep your marvellous courage and are in health & that Dorothy is well. I’ll come to see you, if I may, when I get back.

Yrs,

J.B.

[Yale, MS]

[10 December 1957]

10 Dec.—I was studying ^(out of envy)^ Hebrew in Iowa when yr marvellous piece on Genesis came out702—one of the most original essays I ever read (I did think of Witte’s great first-fruits, “How Not to Read Dante”)703—and I was lecturing on the New Testament at Minnesota when yr staggering thing on the Scrolls helpt out another of my ignorances704—and I was equally amazed & delighted to learn ^(from yr statement)^ you really liked my Bradstreet poem—and I’ve had lots of other reasons to write to you; but my life has been miserable & convulsive in recent years, till now. Now I seem to be okay. I divorced w. agony, remarried, & have an adorable son; I have a good job—no damned creative writing—at Minn. in Humanities (Greek, Xtian, Renaissance, modern—I have them read ^(& buy) ((and the course is popular—it has about a hundred, every quarter))^ the Finland Station705 in the last); I was in Japan & then in central India all summer lecturing for the State Dept, then, after a rest in Italy, two months in Spain; and I’ve had an entirely new sort of poem going for the last 3 years which will tickle, shock, make think, & please you if I ever get it done—I hope. I hope you & Elena are as well & happy as such people ought to be.

Affectionately,

John

I wish I cd hope to see you both some time; in fact I do.—What you wrote abt yr father moved me v. much; my father killed himself when I was 12.

1958

[Princeton, TS]

2900 James Av So, Mpls 8, 17 Jan [1958]

Dear Toner,

I am busy in the apparently unending way one is after being off for a long time but want to answer at once. I was extremely glad to have yr letter. Princeton has lately figured in the most astonishing fashions for me, after the Great Silence, but yours is the most detailed news I’ve had & very welcome. I’d ask about Richard, whom you don’t mention, but Ralph Ross just saw him & says he’s splendid.706 Eileen I gather is very well also; and is said to be interested in someone, which I’m glad to hear. This is off the record.

The reason I never come is that for a long time Princeton seemed to me the scene of my life-failure and all thought of it cut my brains open. For a long time I needed my energies for the overwhelming problems of Reentry—using the word in the space-travel sense. Now however I seem to be more or less all right, and may take up yr amiable suggestion late next month. I have to give a reading at the Library of Congress on the 24th, a Monday, and expect to be the long weekend before in New York and may very well come to Princeton. I’ll let you know. It was marvellous seeing Erich, and of course I have missed the Mackies very badly too. I was sorry to hear about the Hartles’ smash, Pat wrote to me a couple of months ago, or that’s when I got the letter.707 I replied, by the way, at once, very exceptionally for me, but had to send the letter from Spain and it may never have reached her; will you tell her? How is Bob making out on his own? Best to him; he probably needs it. Man was not meant to live alone, and I don’t know how you can stand it, old boy. Will you give Helen Bl my love if you see her?708 How is she? Greet Ted for me & bless his new domicile. What’s with the Babbitts?709 the Oateses? Ditto greetings; and do you ever see the Pittendrighs, whom I always thought very gay though Eileen said Mikey as a matter of fact was depressive.710 I guess that’s pretty much the Princeton story, as of people still there. Marriage-breaks aside, real catastrophe seems to have passed it by, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of Dylan Thomas’s death, and Jim Agee’s, and Bob Warshow’s and Isaac Rosenfeld’s—leaving disaster strewn about.711

About the very serious question you raise. I wish we could have a talk about it, and maybe we can. I have never truly understood, as you probably know, why you taught at all. I gathered you didn’t need the money, and I’m not in favour of artists’ wasting their time if it can be helpt. I did see that for some personal reason you wanted an institutional connection, and the self-respect that comes in America from earning a living; so of course I never objected; but I never really approved of it. And once you feel uneasy yourself—that is, once you begin to fail to get back what makes it worthwhile—then I shd say The hell with it immediately. But there is probably more in it, that I don’t know. Tell me more if you feel like it. It seems to me you run a two-ring circus anyway: your composing and your musicianship, and my God that ought to be enough. There are two ways to look at this sort of thing. One is from the standpoint of responsibility, and the other is as of pleasure; and when they join, as they seem to do here, yr path is clear—or, with my very imperfect knowledge, seems so to me.

I wish I cd hear yr de la Mare thing.712 I feel strongly about him. The Baum book I a hundred times was going to sit down & thank you for, and now DO.713 As for the Bradstreet poem, there was some blunder either by me or the publisher because my list shows a copy sent to you. Anyway another is en route, just as good as the first. You would like some of my new work, which is decidedly crazy. I also wish you cd know my wife, whom I am pretty sure you will like. She is too young of course but she can’t help that and there is nothing much else wrong with her. Be sure to go to Kyoto & Benares next time you are abroad; I expect you’ve been to Toledo. They are whole worlds.

Affectionately,

John

Did I tell you I workt w. Dorati for months last year on an immense cantata & he nearly drove me off my rocker but it was rather interesting. Not the cantata!

I have two little Spanish wood-statues you’d like, not to speak of a Jain palm-leaf drawing of the 13th century. Come & see us one day.

Here is my Calcutta distich:

Bannerjee, Chatterjee, Mookerjee,     Datta, Das Gupta, Sen,

These are the usual names       of most of the Indian men.

(chant!)

[UMN, TS]

2900 James Ave So., Mpls 8

21 Febr 58

Dear Ted,

I have been knockt out the last eight days w some sort of infection, wh penicillin is now loosening, or I’d have written you earlier. I think I did write you once or twice, by the way, to the Ct address, either from here or abroad, about yr book and so on, but evidently you never got the letters.714 I read the whole book again when it came and liked it even better than the first time. You wound it up good, too: which you hadn’t yet done in Cambridge, you only described it verbally. In a way it’s too bad yr father was wrong about the effect. I wish more people took writing really seriously so as to be really offended by it. The Library of Congress has asked me to read my poems there Monday night and one I’m going to read is a savage nursery rime abt the State Dept, Eisenhower, etc which I wrote in Italy last Fall and my wife thinks it will get me put in Alcatraz but actually nobody will pay any attention or I’m afraid they won’t.715 Better address me next at Alcatraz, though. If I find a spare copy of this poem—I promised Bellow one—I’ll put it in this letter.

Problem of girls & work; insoluble, and then it works itself out. As for one’s best friends’ girls, two things to be said. One, they’re partly to blame always, the girls. Hither, hither. Writers are attractive to women, for some reason; I think they seem an irresistible combination of Good-and-Strong, Profoundly-Unappreciated, and nice-and-weak. Two, writers are likely to have more masked-homosexual-component around than other people, and heading for friends’ wives or girls is really a way of getting closer to friends. Of course I am not talking about actual queers, of whom there are plenty too, but with different problems. Just being a bastard is not the question at all. Besides, as you say, you probably don’t see enough girls. But this is very important, because if you see very few you may choose in desperation. Do you want to marry a plant, or a very brainy woman? a beauty or not (I wd think, absolutely a beauty, but they certainly take more thought)? a vine or a staff? mother or daughter? a tramp or a citadel? The decision to marry an American woman is a very troublesome matter all by itself. Etc. Again, great difference betw a mistress & a wife; one do beautifully as one, hopeless mess as the other. Best to think as much as possible before the temperature rises, v hard to think after.

I’m glad if you got something out of me in Cambridge. I was engaged in a big Survival-operation and not much of anywhere. You lifted my spirits v considerably yourself, not merely by being so gifted but by being devoted to it. I often think of you, with great pleasure.

I finally got divorced, and re-married and have a son, and three years ago I got my next poem started. Meanwhile I have been earning a living for a change. In fact I’ve done all sorts of things in the last few years, but nothing has come to anything yet. Getting the Bradstreet poem published at last was a help, and Faber are bringing it out later this year in England, though fuck England. I see Cat Man is in paperback, which is good; I wanted to give copies to people but it cost too much so I only lent mine. I was in Japan & India & Spain much of last year, partly for the State department, and am much less ignorant than I used to be. You wd like my wife; come see us some time; I mean it. 30,000 words strikes me as splendid, I wish I cd see them, what’s the hurry about an actual fight? You are one of the damnedest most thorough characters I ever knew. How are the words, do you like them? Bellow has been writing a masterpiece abt a guy named Henderson & he tells me this week he started all over again on Labor Day (I read hundreds of pp about a year ago) and has done 500 pp. Hurrah! I really regard the world as largely dirt at the moment but I’m happy to see so much light shooting around. Write again! Write again! Tell me more!

Yrs

John Berryman

Never mind “Mr”

Tell you a v. good poem—Issa’s self-portrait:

Hiikime ni

mite sae sumui

soburi kana.

=    Even considered

in the most favourable light,

he looks cold.716

[Houghton, MS]

2900 James Av. So

Mpls 8, Sat 1 Mar [1958]

I couldn’t call at 5:30 because I mislaid yr address & number—I just found it in the other suit I took—but it’s odd: I remembered “Salerno” & only found two in the ’phone book, neither relevant. No matter. I didn’t go to see Pound after all—I was busy at the Folger, or so I told myself—I think the real reason was that I don’t like his politics, tho’ I try not to think abt them & seldom do. Then, that night, I met a poor sad woman I know whom it turns out he tried to make [take] a job with this infamous young Kasper.717 Not a nice thing.—Mary’s drops helpt very much and after a bit of huskiness in one poem I got through all right.718 I hope NY obliterates Florida for you both. It was very good to see you again. Flourish!

John B.

[Dartmouth, TS]

2900 James Avenue South

Minneapolis 8, Minnesota

25 April 1958

Dear Mr Frost:

If a stranger may be allowed to express his grateful sense of the nobility of your labour on behalf of Ezra Pound, I would like to do it.719 Some of his views are painful and even disgusting, but he had long since suffered for them enough and the thought of his dying there was worse than any view he ever held.

Since I am writing, let me add my thanks too for half a lifetime’s delight in your work. It has been clear to me for almost a quarter of a century that you are one of the most nearly perfect poets—for pathos, for insight, for beauty, and for risk—who has ever written, not in this language only but in any literature I know. The man who introduced me to your work was Mark Van Doren, this must have been in 1934, when I was nineteen, and I went on from there. Many of your most daring and brilliant things have come into being since then. I hope your health and supernatural ability continue with you for years, to the national honour.

Yours respectfully,

John Berryman

[Yale, TS]

2900 James, Mpls 8, 26 Apr 58

How old is Jim Powers? He is good.

Dear Dwight,

Cozzens’s letter is easy to explain.720 He is just a man who has gone into orbit; he’s not with us any more. What he thinks of course is that we’re not w him, and baby is he right! I am glad you fixed ’im.

About these younger people: all double-talk aside, it is hard to say any of them really come up to the mark. Defects of either energy or passion seem to be absolutely general. Is 35 young? No; yet all one can see is promise. I liked Bill Styron’s start, but what happened then? Ditto Mailer.721 I like Edward Hoagland very well (novel called Cat Man, worth reading) but he’s very young. If Flannery O’Connor is under 35, her. Poets are even more uncertain. Bill Merwin & Tony Hecht are the most accomplisht but both still write as if nothing had ever happened to them; they haven’t waked up. Wilbur, far better, is over-age I guess. I like an almost unknown writer, Donald Justice; you cd look up his stuff in New Yorker where he sometimes prints ^(has a book out this month w. Scribner’s)^. Sorry not to be more definite, and no direct quotation please.722 Exc those mentioned & a few others, the young people bore me, they write like invalids. The really hot people—Saul, Cal, Roethke, Eliz Bishop—are all my age or so. Truth is, we are much more promising than the youngsters, as well as better. But don’t say I said so. I’ll ring you when I’m in town next weekend. Best, John

[UMN, TS]

2900 James av so, Mpls 8, 18 May [1958]

Dear Robert,

A lot of things. Here’s a rapid selection:

1) May I have half a dozen copies please of the Bradstreet poem? at the above address. FSC’s last statement was sent to where I haven’t lived for three years, and other things come through them to where I haven’t lived for 18 months. It’s true that the current Who’s Who has me at a street address where I never lived, in Princeton; but if all my addresses cd be unified at FSC I might get mail better.

2) May I have back the copy of that Taj piece, and the sketched table of contents for ISA—I can’t find my drafts for the latter & need it.

3) Do I owe you sixty bucks? I’m very sorry if I do; please let me know. I’d repaid the whole old loan, I thought, but going through financial stuff—for 3 years’ income tax—I found record of only one payment.

4) Giving readings in Washington & Chicago I received complaints—a good many—that my book was not available in bookshops at all in those cities; and when I went to the Adirondacks several weeks ago to help educate some 40 college deans assembled from all over the country, the foundation responsible confirmed and extended this. Apparently each copy has to be ordered individually; is that right? If so, it helps to explain the FSC statement I spoke of, which records less than 100 copies sold in six months—though even so, I am puzzled, since I happen to know that—I suppose—the Government ordered 50 copies in that period, to be sent to India, as they were (letter fr Calcutta, of Dec 10th), and so just 50 copies then were sold? I do not suppose that there is any eager demand for the book, and I observe that 145 copies were returned during that six months. But I am informed that FSC not only did not advertise my book but did not advertise any books for instance in the NYTBR in the months following publ’n of AB and I simply wonder whether any attempt has been made to sell the book at all, in the light of the further fact, which I learnt when I gave a reading here lately, that the book is not even available in Minneapolis. I am not able to believe that the selling of eight copies a month, throughout the whole United States, is a reasonable matter in view of the attention the book had, and has. In the current Sewanee, for example, the critic James Dickey: “the marvellous John Berryman, who began quite ordinarily as one of the better disciples of Yeats and Auden, and after twenty years of wrestling with the problems of syntax as it operates within the poetic line, emerged to create, in the birth sequence of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, what is to my mind the most daring and successful rendering of human experience ever to appear in American poetry.”723 There was the Harriet Monroe award last year, a national matter. I am wondering what is businesslike and what is not; I am not expecting the American people to be interested in poetry. If 8 copies a month is businesslike, there’s no problem.

5) My health’s been so nervous, and I’ve been very unwillingly writing so much, that I finally had to go into hospital. Now I’m under heavy drugs for the time being. But I’ve done, I think it is, eighteen Dream Songs this winter & spring, without wanting to at all—that’s between a quarter and a third of the whole poem; and as of some of them, I don’t really see how expression can become more exact. Of course I am still absolutely nowhere, as of the whole poem; but my style has got on to an entirely new level. I thought my Bradstreet style was as short as you could get; but I was wrong. Here’s the section called “Henry’s Confession”:

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.

How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,

terms o your bafflin odd sobriety.

Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,

what could happen bad to Mr Bones?

—If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father,

who dared so long agone leave me.

A bullet on a concrete stoop

close by a smothering southern sea

spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.

—You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

I offers you this handkerchief. Now set

your left foot by my right foot,

shoulder to shoulder, allthat [sic] jazz,

arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,

hum a little, Mr Bones.

—I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.724

This is the equivalent, of course, of a Bradstr stanza. Don’t show it please. I thought of publishing one or two at the end of my Faber volume (which is postponed till spring because I couldn’t deal with that ancient junk while in poor health and writing thus) but have pretty well decided not to. I also thought of giving a dozen odd ones to the printer Claude Fredericks who wants to do a small pamphlet of mine in a ltd ed this summer but am pretty well against that too.725 None is printed yet. I’ve written some short separate poems too that seem remarkable; maybe I’ll give him some of them. I have turned rather against the “American lights” poem, by the way, which Partisan printed. D’you still like it?

6) My Crowell textbook job, held up by all my own work and two changes of editor there, seems to be turning, to my delight, from an editing to a handbook job, far more directly in line to the next version of my biography. After this week I will be spending the major part of my time at Shakespeare again.

7) How is Cal have you heard? I hope you are personally weathering satisfactorily this humiliating & profoundly gloomy period for the United States. Is Eileen moving to New York do you know?

Yours,

[Getty, TS]

2900 James Avenue South

Mpls 8,—18 May 58

Dear Claude,

I was very glad to hear and sorry to be late in answering—for which the reasons are so numerous that I won’t bore you.

Good luck with your novel. I have never had time to write one, which I count as a rare blessing life has vouchsafed me, in the middle of The Stuff.

About the pamphlet: I am not in a position, with regard to any of my long poems, to release anything; but I’ll be glad to give you a group of short poems if you want them and if Farrar Straus don’t object—or perhaps even if they do—I wrote to them this afternoon. I think the title might be

BELOVED, DO NOT THINK OF ME

and the table of contents something like this:

Venice, 182–

Sonnet 25

Scots Poem

Not to Live

Of Isaac Rosenfeld726

Orpheus

A Sympathy, A Welcome

American Lights, Seen from Off Abroad

Note to Wang Wei727

That is probably too long; you say 8–12 pages; but I can scale it down from there; I might also put in a piece or so of The Black Book. I am doing, very slowly, a study of all my finished short poems for a large selection that Faber & Faber want to publish with the Bradstreet poem, and can’t just tell yet how things are.728 I don’t think much, by the way, of Eberhart or Miss Gibbs, but would always be much pleased to be in series with Miss Bishop, but on the whole care nothing one way or the other about company, if you are doing the series.729 If you go on with it, let me know a deadline. I’d like the extra 50 copies you propose, in lieu of royalty, except for $10 token royalty (in all)—this latter, for income tax purposes.

Enter a subscription for me for Miss Bishop’s pamphlet, if all this comes off; and let me know, if you will, the proposed publication date for mine as well as the deadline. One thing: I must see proofs.

What in the name of God & Pluto do you do in Texas all winter?

There is an “Elegy for Alun Lewis” I once printed that might go in there too. Yes. Very likely; perhaps instead of the piece abt Isaac R.

Best,

Yours,

John

D’you ever have word from anywhere abt Tony Clark? What is that deranged genius up to?

[UMN, TS]

2900 James Av So, Mpls 8, 21 May 58

Dear Howard,

Life has been fair to me hitherto, taking into account my crucial disasters; but it has lacked that characteristic of continuous passionate universal enthusiasm for my work which one wd desire—in moments of laziness & despair. It was therefore interesting to have yr student’s paper and in the same mail a letter from a young critic named James Dickey directing me to his violent praise of my book in the current Sewanee. You are lucky to have such students; none of my present ones could have written this.730 There are various errors (it is not “a series of short poems”, “lest not I” is misquoted as usual on p. 2, the coda has four stanzas not three, etc.) but fewer I think than most of the professional reviewers committed. Of course she had not the burden of judgment on her, and her ^in^experience prevents her from estimating the formal rigour of the stanza, but there is a refreshing absence of pomposity everywhere and page 4 seems to me really sensitive. It was even a pleasure to see her mesmerized by my diction, though in a critic I shd deplore it. I hope I meet her some time. I have always had complicated feelings about the name Deborah—which was the name of a celebrated beauty, Deborah Choate, who was my great-great-grandmother, and also the name of the Tates’ stupid maid, one summer when I was staying with them, who had a flourishing mustache: Miss West shall henceforth tip the scale towards my distinguished ancestress. I repeat, you are lucky. My students strike me, with few exceptions, as ignorant, idle, frivolous, and stupid, and they depress me.

I have been writing too much—this winter & spring I must have done betw a quarter & a third of my next poem—and had to go into hospital at last. I also gave readings in Washington, Chicago & here, and went to the Adirondacks for a week to educated some 40 deans collected there from all over the country by one of these ridiculous foundations—I found them docile but for the most part not quite human—but it made a pleasant break in my lecture-routine and there was a fine blizzard, this was 10 days ago. Coming back, the temperature round me rose 70 degrees in a few hours and I was nearly prostrated.

A. Campbell’s book I’ve not seen but I did see the life: the photo didn’t do justice to that couple in Cuttack.731 All my books finally turned up from Calcutta & Bombay, can you believe it? Karen Stumpf’s mother came up to me after my reading here and we had 20 seconds’ chat.

I’ve been dawdling over my selection for Faber & Faber, out of lack of sympathy with my early poems, so it’s postponed till spring, and I expect they are cross because they gave it space in their current catalogue but being British they didn’t say so. I think I am going to be publishing a small book ^of short poems^ here this summer; if so I’ll send it you. I hope yr family are flourishing. Ann’s mother is very ill, but otherwise mine is. Yes, let us meet wherever & whenever possible and soon. I saw yr friend’s book on Frost is out: how is it? It is a delight to have Pound free, wicked old man though he is.

Affectionately,

[UMN, TS]

17 July 1958

Dear Russell:

Here is the story, so far as I know it, on the Hungarian boy I just spoke to you about. His name is Gabor (Gabriel) Stein, 20; he got out to West Germany after the Freedom Fight and ‘made top marks in all subjects’; is anxious to take an engineering degree here in the United States. Immediate problem is money. Parents both here, but not established as yet: Dr Stein is an engineer, who got out in January 1957 through a conference in Vienna, and is negotiating now with a large American company on some patents; mother a trained librarian. All three have various languages including English. Their financial sponsors are the Godfrey Blochs, who own Duraloom Carpet Mills.

A cultured intelligent able family, on my mother’s report (who knows them): I hope the boy can be given a scholarship to IT. I am writing to see what his address and records are. Meanwhile many thanks for whatever you can do.

Yours,

John Berryman

Dearest Jill—732

Problem is time of year—scholarships go in the Spring. But the President (of Univ. of Minn.) set up a fund to help Hungarian refugees and Cooper promises to go to work at once. I need the boy’s academic records if possible, and his address—both these as soon as may be. Love,

John

[Chicago, MS]

18 July 58

Dear Saul

I don’t think I wrote you since I read the 1st ch. of Henderson on the ’plane going to the Adirondacks. I was knockt dead. I thought it was marvellous when I read it here when you were on yr way East from that lake but I had to read it fast, and it wants chewing, like nuts—in all senses. This is out of line with earlier anything, by anybody. It is gorgeous; make that a real word again. The following of his thought is the great strength. I am wild to see the book. I hope you’re done.

I’ve got to teach for a while beginning next week. Then we think we’ll come East a bit. Everybody is fine. God damn our government to hell, with its dangerous muscle-flexing after all its weakness & brainlessness. My work’s been going better than it has for years, and also I just sent 2 books to press—one London, one Vermont—which makes me feel respectable.

Love to S & Adam fr. all

John

I hope you got the Don.

[UMN, MS]

23 July ’58

Dear Robert

Please forgive my keeping these so733—I’ve sent two books to press in recent weeks and written two chapters (or one & part of a 2nd) of a third, and have been very busy. I am also lecturing daily again, curse the world; and the State dept, by all means curse it.

I likt the last poem far the best, but the next to last well too (exc. 4th line, & ‘Again. / again’). There is a certain absence of verbs in “Farewell”. The 1st two of “Three poems..” seem not up to III, where something seems insufficiently workt out in the dramatic last 3 ll.734 The title of the poem that stands first I like better than the poem (wh. seems v. little individualised); but the Franco title is awful though the poem is rather moving—“Andrew Jackson” might be better for either more Pound or less—at present it’s betwixt & betw., like E L Masters. All these impressions are probably wrong. I think the stuff seems well ahead of what I saw before. One thing to remember is that verse is either singing, or thinking, or both. And is so all the time. For instance the ‘Washington . .’ line betw. ‘The poor. .’ & ‘Warned . .’ hardly seems up to the scratch of the two on each side.735

I’m glad to see The Fifties out—looks good—transl’s a good idea & well done (bravo to Chris?).736 But Reynolds’ first poem strikes me as weakest of all & shdn’t have had pride of place? And Winters is n.g. now but is it worth being against Longfellow—(who was a good poet, besides)? Yr intent w. Brown is charming; yes, TLS is ‘a v. diff. publ’n’. Good luck to you & the Duffys—to whom & to Carol my best—737

hurriedly

John B

[UMN, TS]

2900 James, Mpls 8, 16 Aug 1958

Dear Allen,

There’s a lot of statistics! How are you? I have another week of lectures and am so tired I can hardly see straight. All the same I’ve done one chapter & seven articles of the Shakespeare Handbook my editing job for Crowell turned into, and my poem goes on, and I’ve sent two books to press—one to London, one to Vermont. Eliot was made extremely nervous by the foreword I wrote to my collected poems for Faber, just possibly because it was a splendid piece of Anglophobia; I killed it in the end, at their plea. What is the story on this textbook of yours & Ralph’s?738 Ralph spoke to me some weeks ago about going into it and now I have a letter from Hawes which appears to take it for granted that I will and is otherwise also unsatisfactory. Of course I have nothing to say to it until I hear from you. How much have you done? Do you really want me to go in? Doing how much? If so, for what deadline, as of your part? I gather Ralph’s is all finisht. I never had much idea of what the book was until this afternoon when I talkt to R on the phone, and I still haven’t seen a table of contents. What do you hear or see of Cal & Elizabeth?—my love if they’re about. I hope you have been writing verse. It’s been abnormally cool here. Ann’s mother is very ill in Pennsylvania and she & the baby flew there this morning, so I am tiresomely alone for about ten days until I go to New York. I adopted that suggestion of yours, yet for but, in the poem to Paul last year, and it is just now, so Ann tells me on the telephone, in The New Yorker, which has suddenly taken to printing poems of mine much too good for it, which is not saying much for them either.

Affectionately,

[UMN, TS]

Saturday afternoon [23 August 1958]

Dearest Toukerbou,

There’s no Northwest coach flight after 11:30 a m exc one at 9 p m which the hell with, and I can’t make the Monday 11:30, so I’m on the Tuesday 11:30. I’ll call you from yr mother’s when I get there in the early evening. If I change my plans I’ll wire. I feel so unwilling to do anything that I don’t see how I’m going to get out; but since I have practically nothing to do I probably can. If Ralph will leave me alone. One of the most exasperating demands of my entire life unfortunately came up precisely when I finisht on Thursday, resolved not to give anyone the right time for one month: John Clark in an elaborate letter wants me to give vast lectures this fall & spring for the English department, with no compensation naturally exc my great pleasure in doing my duty to the department—he actually says this, and for 20 cents I wd take a taxi across town & kill him—his letter is so stupidly unclear that I don’t know whether I am to give two lectures fifteen times or one lecture five times—I have to call that jerk Steinmann & find out, & decide what to do.739 Ralph is no help. Naturally Tate has not replied to my letter either, and so all that other business is maddeningly uncertain. Ralph has four holes in his head. Hawes’s letter to me proposes that I shall do this textbook job for no advance at all, and in fact the whole world seems to have gone crazy and begun sucking my blood.

If I had had yr letter which just came I cd have understood the conversation last night a little better, but really the data are inadequate for understanding. You will have to tell me the whole story.

Marian just called & I said you’d get in touch w her thro Ellen when we come back. One problem: Etter wants to know what abt the carriage which is in the coal-bin that has to be filled soon with coal: will you send him a note.

Love to Sir Spoon-control & Toukerbou

John!

[Haffenden, MS]

6 a.m., 14 Sept 58

Dear Boyd & Maris,

I came East for a little vac, being as I fancied a little tired, and to do some general thinking abt my poem (not writing: structure) before I have to put it away until next summer. I never got any rest, dear friends, and have lost interest in my poem. After a few sessions with a publisher, a fine man behind whom I cd see the polisht fronds of the jungle shivering over the Lever Bldg, I judged it best to have a few sessions with my psychiatrist, who thought I seemed a little tired, and put me here. Now, after only two days, I am fine: I no longer require ^any^ sleep, and have lost interest not only in my poem but in all my other work, in all human beings including myself, in liquor, in sex, in money (never too strong there), in fame, in the future, in the present, & even in Sung landscape & other people’s poems. I am a free man. The excruciation that I appeared ^to^ be suffering, however, before I became so fine, was hard on Ann, and perhaps this period ought not to be characterized as a ^really^ happy one. My ^(very private)^ room has nothing of a hospital about it—they specialize in this—leather tables all over, vast easychairs, a shining bath in yellow & grey, not even the bed is a hospital bed, and the nurses leave me wholly alone exc. for ^(useless)^ medication & (very good) meals;—a corner room, w. 3 large windows, from ^each of^ which I can see the polisht fronds of the jungle shivering over, etc.—not that I care. I have no plans.

love & kisses

John

Call Ralph if you will & tell him where I am & say I’m for this reason not likely to be back for the proposed textbk conference in 3 days (Tate’s date). Thanks. I probably can’t write another letter. I see no one, talk to no one. Tell R. tho’ that Allen’s call to Crowell had no effect at all; the same [day] moneyless shameless pressure continued, solely abt their book.

[Getty, MS]

Thurs aft., 16 Oct [1958]

Dear Claude,

I’ll send you the proofs tom’w—this is a fast note abt the title, which I’ve changed. The title is now His Thought Made Pockets and the Plane Buckt. I hope you like this as well as I do (it takes over after the final poem). Also, I’d like the stanza from which the line comes put on the f-p with it. Design’s up to you—I like the proofs extremely, by the way—but I thought of the 1st 4 wds on 1 line, rest below, like:

HIS THOUGHT MADE POCKETS ← (maybe 1st

AND THE PLANE BUCKT740   line in

larger letters,

by John Berryman                              or in colour)

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.’                ← this is “ORRRIGHT” & “PARM ME”

Claude Fredericks

Or something like this maybe

(Of course, any way you want to handle the dedication is fine, so long as it’s not on the page of the 1st poem, eh?)

I hope this is possible & you like it. Saul Bellow thinks the book is splendid.

Very best,

John

[Princeton, TS]

2900 James Av So, Mpls 8, 1 Nov [1958]

Dear Allen,

Thanks for the 200 of some weeks ago. I should have written earlier but my health has seldom been so bad—on my birthday a week ago I weighed 134 or less than for 27 years—and any energy I’ve had to spare over my courses has gone off in resentment of Clark who is following Hornberger’s policy of pretending I don’t exist, except for chores of course.741 But we’ll have to get this textbook out of the way and I still have some hope of being done by the 15th; not at all sure. What I’m doing is four general discussions, in Fiction, or maybe only three: first as of what fiction is, using some Old Testam. narrative, some Jane Austen, perhaps Hemingway’s “Clean Well-Lighted Place”; then “The Open Boat”; then Babel’s “In Odessa”.742 Then 4 or 5 stories with just questions on. As for Drama, I think a short Chekhov comedy, “The Proposal”, and Macbeth, with a prior general discussion maybe using the Chekhov, maybe only scenes or parts of scenes; I then think it wd be a good idea to print Hedda Gabler, with just questions. What do you think? If you have some Poe treatment around, I think that wd be excellent; and it may be that some of my “Prufrock” stuff in the Freshman Engl lecture I have to give in December cd be used, though I’ve planned for several years a whole article on Prufrock for one of the magazines and if I get that done might not want to slice into it first.743 I’ve been held up by an inability to stop writing verse.

I heard that you were uncomfortable, then that you were comfortable: may the latter continue, and any remaining Muses smile on yr typewriter. I am angry & gloomy over the Pasternak business. It is a disgusting age, the hell with it. I hope you are enjoying Oxford. A moderately insolent Frenchman has written me three letters wanting me to send him some stuff so he can translate it—named Alain Bosquet, is he any good do you know?744

Affectionately,

John

Faber haven’t sent me proofs yet—I don’t know what’s with them.

My little Amer. bk is called (not ready for 2 or 3 wks more) “His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt.”

Good luck to yr anthology.

[UMN, MS]

1 Nov 58

Dear Jim

Thanks for the copy of Poetry & yr amiable wd abt the birth-passage in the Bradstr. poem. If the rest of W. T. Scott’s poem is like what you quote it must be filmy to the pt of invisibility. He publisht a long review of my poem, in wh. I don’t recall anything particular.745 I was on a programme w. him once yrs ago at the New School; he read some light verse I liked.

Best

John Berryman

^David^ Wagoner lent me his book—alas—not acknowledged yet—nor Ted’s.746 I’ve been writing.

[Getty, TS]

1 Nov 58

Dear Claude,

I am delighted that you find it mesmeric.747 That is just what it is supposed to be.

It is not exactly a fragment, but the second stanza of a highly polisht draft of one section of my new poem—new I say, but it was begun in the summer three years ago, and there must be now done some 25 or 30 sections; maybe I am half through, that is. Here’s the whole section. Second stanza takes place on a world-tour (3rd st. India): plane is passing over Mt Athos, the Holy Mountain of eastern monasticism, dedicated wholly to Our Lady. He is drunk of course. I have often thought of making ‘Parm’ all caps but always decided against it.

Next section begins:

O servant Henry lectured till

the crows began & then

he raised his voice & lectured on some more.

This happened again & again, like war,

the Indian PA’s, such as they were,

a weapon on his side, for the birds.

Vexations had a field-monsoon.

etc.

Could I see a proof of the title-page?

Best

John

1959

[Haffenden, TS]

Mpls, Sunday [early 1959?]

Dear Maris,

They’re amazing. I wish I knew how to begin to thank you for the wealth & fascination of this correspondence, but I consider w relief that nobody cd do it adequately. It’s clear to me how we come to have poets: the development of an organizing intellectual power just remains compatible in a few people with the persistence of a child’s capacity for expression. Tell Peachie not to be alarmed if she finds her “little spider dangling deadly down” somewhere in my next book or so. Steve’s menus show one of the most detailed imaginations I’ve ever seen in operation.

At least I shd make some return, but I feel about equally dull & lacerated—truth is, all these marvellous remarks are nearly the sole lights in a very bad period. Responding from the end of life to its beginning, do you know about the French sage whose last words were these: “J’ai grand difficulté d’être.”748 And Valéry’s last words I learnt only the other day—they were scrawled partly in blue pencil—“Le mot amour ne s’est trouvé associé au nom de Dieu que depuis le Christ.” As for Henry James, he is supposed to have said: “Here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

Yr wicked offer of the pheasants is as generous as irresistible. We’ll come loot you directly Ann is a little more solid with the car. My apartment is for the first time in its history becoming a little presentable, and I hope soon to discover whether you can be lured out for a drink and something to eat. Love to the Boydism & girls & boys & all,

John

Tell me, how are you making out w the Scriptures?

[Columbia, MS]

2900 James Av. So.

Mpls 8, 13 Jan 59

Dear Mark,

Please forgive my troubling you with this but I need some time to write if I’m not to go mad listening to my own lectures.

Yes Faber are doing a sort of selected poems; I returned page proofs the other day. I’ll send you that TLS insolence abt Emily Dickinson when I turn it up749 (I keep everything, but where is it?)—also my pretty new ^little^ American book, which is ready, as soon as the printer is good enough to vouchsafe me copies. Over the fall I did another dozen sections of my poem (none of which is in either book) and kept out of hospital—having been hospitalized twice for exhaustion already in 1958. Three times? Too much, I decided. How d’you manage yr Apollonian existence? Two really useful books I have come on lately: Cedric Whitman’s Homer & the heroic tradition and, far more original, Philip Carrington’s Primitive Christian Calendar of 1952.750 A friend promist some while back to lend me your autobiography, so I didn’t buy it—since 9 / 10 of my own library has been stored in Princeton for so many years, I’ve almost stopt buying books—but I’m damned if he has done it, so I shall break my rule this week.751 I hope it is selling like that wicked affair Lolita.

All the best all year to you & yours,

Affectionately

John

Next time I type out some Dream Songs I think I will pester you with two or three; I believe you will think they (or it) are (or is) insane, except for the versification diction & tone which are rare. (Shame on me.)

One Shak’n thing is this, privately: I discovered 6 yrs ago who was his collaborator in The Shrew & can prove it; and other things, one sensational.

[UMN, TS]

Minneapolis, 22 Febr 59

Dear Mr Hawes:

Thank you for your kind words about the “Prufrock” analysis, but what I have been expecting from you is a written undertaking to let us draw, for different audiences, on our parts of the textbook—Mr Ross and I, that is; for Mr Tate the problem hardly arises. I will need to draw on my “Open Boat” study for the revision of my Stephen Crane when I take that up, on my “Prufrock” study for a book for the general public that I have had projected for several years, and for which indeed I did it, only allowing it to be used here because the poetry section turned up rather short, and on my Macbeth study for my critical biography of Shakespeare under contract to Farrar, Straus & Cudahey [sic]. Mr Ross wrote to me on February second that you would be writing to me about this. Please do.

I have been in hospital eight days trying to avoid a nervous breakdown after having written nearly the whole second half of the book in five or six weeks, and will be for some time to come. Little remains to be done, however. The “Open Boat”, at p. 9, is half-done, Macbeth, at p. 14, is nearly half-done; then there are only exercises on a farce of Chekhov’s and a scene of Ibsen’s, and these final glossaries, and that’s that. Three or four days, when I can work again; I daresay, shortly.

In view of the proportion of work respectively done, I must withdraw the suggestion—adopted so eagerly by Mr Crowell—which I made about the order of the authors’ names: I suggested, you will remember, that Ross’s and Tate’s names come before mine, since the book was primarily theirs. That is no longer so, and the contract order will not do. It will have to be Ross-Berryman-Tate. Please let me hear about this, and also whether any change is proposed in the proportional royalties.

When I wanted to discuss the Shakespeare Handbook, you and Mr Crowell did not want to. At this time I do not want to.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

Glenwood Hills Hospital

3901 Golden Valley Road

Minneapolis 22, Minnesota

24 Febr 59

Gentlemen:

I am in hospital for the third time in a year and have not your bill with me, so I do not know the amount, but enclose my cheque in the amount of one hundred dollars. If this is insufficient, please let me know. Besides overwork & illness in recent years, I contracted bad bill-habits as an undergraduate; I am tired of them; suppose I send you henceforth either fifty or a hundred dollars (or whatever my bill is, if there is a recent cumulative one) three times a year, beginning now—in February, June, October, that is. I am putting this in my pocket diary ahead, so as not to forget it.

I need, secondhand if you have them, otherwise new, copies of:

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church752

F P Wilson’s new recension of McKerrow’s Nashe; quickly, please

G B Harrison, Second Eliz’n Journal

New Arden Shak:        All’s Well, ed. G K Hunter

Timon, ed H J Oliver

Christiane Rochefort, Repos du Guerrier

Pelican History of Art: the Chinese volume (reprinting, I hear; please put me down, if you’ve no secondhand or new one in stock).

Please put me down also for an immediate copy of Thomas Campion’s Works, new edn, OET

M. Cunliffe’s new Geo. Wash.

Can you let me know what Elizabethan Bibles you have in stock, especially Bishops’ & Genevan?

Yours faithfully,

John Berryman

Send to my home address

[Getty, MS]

25 Febr 59

Dear Claude

I don’t know that you will think much of the signatures but they are the best I can do with a completely unfamiliar pen on difficult paper and too nervous to practise much (I am still in hospital, & will be for some time to come).753 I send 28 so that you can throw away the two worst.—The L.C. copyright still hasn’t come—oh, I remember now the explanation, exactly as of two of these copies, greedy gov’t.—Pelikan proved unprocurable, so I used Higgins.

‘Fabricated’ is unhappily a fair word, I expect, for The Mysteries—but ‘dishonest’? I included it for certain effects in rhythm & phrasing; I don’t like it much; I overworkt it. In A Sympathy.. the fall is the actual foetal-fall, Man’s fall behind, and the falls the new-born baby will suffer later ahead. There are other assimilations to Xtian legend in the poem, too, but all well out of sight & quite unconsciously done by me. I don’t write for clever fools like Cleanth Brooks. I’m pleased that you like it; I do too.

I don’t ‘disdain’ Miss Gibbs’s poems—heavens! I just don’t know them and can’t read verse at present. Thanks for her book—very good looking it is; and I’ll let you know when I read. I confess though I am far from keen on the only one I’ve peered into, “Japanese Virtuoso”.

I’m glad to hear you are writing verse again. It is bloody hard work but one way of bearing the world.

Best

John

[UMN, TS]

Sunday morning [1 March 1959]

Dear Ann,

Here is the revised Song of the Acct Exec, wh may amuse you. It’s too bad abt the first line or I cd print it in the New Yorker; they used to publish Arno far rawer than this, but verbally they have never been willing to go anywhere.754

I will be here about another fortnight, apparently, as I said, and am using the hospital as a return address now. But of course most of my mail will be going to 2900. Now I am not prepared to be hung up on again, so I shan’t call any more, but I want my mail. Hundreds, and more likely thousands, of dollars will depend on my mail during the next few days; will you please put it on my desk every day through Thursday? What I can do about Friday & Saturday I don’t see. I am particularly interested in any letters from ACLS, Crowell, and Reader’s Digest.

If you want to talk to me, you can call me. In all my experience it has been the person in hospital who is telephoned, anyway; so let’s normalize one thing.

One other matter: shopping on Friday afternoon I lost my pocket diary. I had only been to the main P.O., the Mpls Surplus, a five-&-ten, and the Wizard Weaver (mending my jacket) where I discovered the loss; unless I lost it in the taxi that took me to the P.O., but Blue&White Lost & Found don’t have it. My name & address are in it, so I hope it may be returned; if so, I wd like it immediately also. There are papers in it.

I slept eight hours Friday night and seven hours last night, without barbiturates either time, though heavy Thorazine and at 4 a m chloral hydrate; and am feeling enough better to trust Thomes’s & Haberle’s confidence that I will sooner or later get out of this state.755 I cdn’t have lectured yesterday or Friday, but tom’w I certainly can and I expect to take everything this week. Expect, I have to say.

John

I am writing (prose) again.

THE SONG OF THE ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE

Full by his crystal balls have I the world

and do not you forget it, brother (..jerk).

A milkshake for my ulcer. Black to work!

I went down to St James’s agency

for a bit of a wake: their clients, like the Money Pit,

my baby: P prayed loud. I’m rich with it

while all the same I love it with my mouth

and I am a real American misleader. I go south

as a toupee drops, and unstuck I fly back,

my Hoopers are in trouble. My Caddie? upkeep. On the whole,

I dying am of upkeep, bless my ^their^ soul,

my prior wives; while as for Eloise. .

I did need winning, but where is the tape

I hit at nineteen? Races come to spare

necks horned heels only? A shiver at the nape

keeps Buster at it, adding, which amounts

to nothing in, and for, spades. All I know is

lung cancer’s raising hell with my accounts.

J.B.

Febr ’59

[Getty, MS]

6 March 59

The copyright came. I wish I had known there was no hurry abt the signed sheets; will they do? I am getting better (nervous exhaustion was it) and may be out in a week or so.—Thanks for copies; may I have about 35 more? It isn’t that I have friends—maybe I do—but I have obligations. Where did you send review copies.

My poem keeps on going like a forest fire, as it’s been doing for 13 months. Tell me, what wd it cost, roughly of course, to print abt 25 of the songs in a very limited edition—say 15 or 20 copies—within the next few months? Is an estimate possible & wd you be interested in undertaking such a thing? Of course this wd never have occurred to me but for yr sugg’n of a preliminary ed’n of the whole poem, a different matter.

Best

John

[Utah, TS]

Mpls, 6 March 59

Dear Brewster Ghiselin,

I am still in hospital and don’t know what I can do about pictures; maybe Farrar Straus & Cudahey [sic] would send you one. My doctors expect to have me out in a week or so, however, and then I’ll set about it.

I think you can use the title “Cross-fertilisation in International Poetry” for my lecture. I have been wanting to work up this theme for years but have never got around to it. Of course if this subject does not seem attractive to you, let me know. My files are loaded with unpublished public lectures.

As for biographical information, I suggest the article in Who’s Who in America, though it’s years out of date in most respects since I never write to them; they even have me living in a town I moved away from six years ago, at an address on a street where I never lived. My recent books are 1) His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt (poems), Claude Fredericks, 1958; 2) Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and other poems, Faber & Faber (London), 1959 (publ date, 10 Apr). I have also just sent to press, with Thos. Y. Crowell, a book done with Ralph Ross & Tate called A Critical Reader, which may be out by June. My present title is Associate Professor of Humanities and English, Univ of Minnesota. Mrs Berryman will be finishing some academic work here and won’t be coming.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

If Cheever can’t make it, what abt Flannery O’Connor?756

[Emory, MS]

Mpls, Sunday [March 1959]

Dear Ted,

Your story is an absolute beauty, one of the best I’ve read since Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses”, and entirely characteristic; even better written than your novel, and better still to think back ^over^. If there is anything to criticise I haven’t noticed it yet.

I got out of hospital where I’d been a month, just a few days ago & am not at all well, so you’ll forgive just a note. I’m glad you’re (1) reading (2) off the political kick. I’d like nothing better than to see yr novel. I’ll be here (new apartment) all the time betw. April & August except the latter part of June in Utah.

Yrs

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

[20 March 1959]

Three blue rooms, & one brown, where he thinks,

only from his typewriter blurts sound,

here’s Henry free,

with none of his beloved wives around,

no telephone, no friend for miles.

Quite so.

Why then is Henry weeping like a child

& feeling out of his mind

or desperate in it, in it?

The wooden desk hurts. Miles? Here’s a new wound.

Has he been tried & found wanting,

tried & found wanting?

Murdered he, long, a love of someone who,

alone, cared about Henry,

& he cared back?

Wood, tears, a raw breast, the blue of the sea

in the other rooms where he’d drown

only he blurs & thinks.

love

John ex-Henry House

20 Mar ’59

I thought I had abandoned the poem, when this came. I may not write any more.

[Houghton, TS]

1917-4th St south

Minneapolis 4

Sunday [spring 1959]

Dear Cal & Elizabeth,

I’ve been so sick & sunk in misery since I got out of hospital, and there too, I haven’t been able to write any letters or anything except some sections of my poem and a short poetry review a magazine wanted,757 for which Cal’s book came too late though there is a good deal about you in it anyway, and I can’t thank you properly yet for yr good letter abt my little book, much less write properly about your big one (except I love the lines

Dearest I cannot loiter here

in lather like a polar bear

and, holy God, how could you cut the Ovid stanza out of the first poem???????), only gratefully.758 This is just a short note to Elizabeth about business, which I promised Saul Bellow to do weeks & weeks ago. He & some other people are starting a pocketbook magazine, called The Noble Savage—I am sort of in this too—and we hoped maybe you Elizabeth wd do us a piece. Not literary criticism, we prob shan’t print any of that at all. We had two ideas: A Character, say, a La Bruyere, imaginary but real.759 Maybe 20 pp or so. We want a series of these from various people and thought maybe if you were interested you could provide a model. We want the first number as hot as possible of course. Or maybe a piece on the literature of Boston, ranging (HJames, Amory, Last Hurrah, anything).760 Alas deadline is July 1st which is why I have to get this in the mail today though I am dizzy w sorrow. They pay I think 5 cents a word. Cd you let me have a note? Apologies for no-letter, and love to you both, and Harriet whom I expect Paul wd adore (he is the most ravishingly beautiful child in the universe)

John

The end of the Santayana poem is marvellous, Cal761

[Haffenden, MS]

Glenwood Hills Hosp.

Monday [late spring 1959]

Dear Boyd & Maris

Four days in & I ain’t well yet! Christ! canst thou not medicine to a mind diseased?? Yes? Yes?

It’s not really the mind though, it’s nerves nerves nerves. Good signs: I eat & eat, I eat everything, I starve all the time—after all, I have six months’ famine to make up for. And I less often desire to kill my interlocutor, whoever she may be. And for 3 days I did absolutely nothing and didn’t worry much. Bad signs: I only sleep in little bits, even w. 3 & 4 sedatives, so I’m nearly dead all the time. And in spite of heavy Sparine, after half an hour of any kind of work, I feel as if I were having a nervous breakdown—today I began work at 4:30 a.m. (it’s 2:15 p.m.) and I have had this feeling with intolerable continuity.

So much for your ol’ fren’ Henry Jackass. I’m going over to give four lectures tom’w but then I’m coming right back—for maybe 10 days? What wd you say?

Hope all’s well,

love

John

I am divorced.

God bless all married persons & everybody else too.

[UMN, TS]

[23 May 1959]

THE PLEASURES OF MUKERJI

Brr-cold in May, what happy shall the Mook

look eager to for her birfday?

A chatter of the little Pookerjook,

a weather-spin, a picnic by the lake,

and if dark’d Henry had his way

a stōry for her bedtime, wif a riff & break,

about the Princess of     the Tea-rose, or Mr Pig,

the richest of all blue dresses,

fishes to catch, not small but not too big

to frighten Mukerji, an unsnarled line,

enacted out of Chaucer happinesses

to make her great eyes startle up & shine,

with no more educations or such stuff,

an end to dokitors, a strapping house

in Vérmont, in the countree, far enough

no sadnesses remember, a freeing, so,

from luckless Henry kind time nows,

Florence without quarrels, a stroll in Toledo,

cante hondo sobbing thro’ a bar,

head to head, around in Echegaray,

confoundment to her enemy, a faithful car,

a flash of unescaping crab, freedom,

whirly dancing till they say

We never saw somewhat so blithe & lissom,

a giddy brightening of yellow sun

out from savage cloud, like a stall,

a stallion in the surf, a vacation,

posh in her gold & wine Benares sari

stately moving, the praise of all

for grace & brain & being lovely Mukerji.

with love,

John

for 23 May ’59

[UMN, TS]

1917-4th St So, Mpls 4

Minneapolis 4, Minnesota

14 June 1959

My dear Ann:

In case of fatal accident or death by illness I wish this letter to serve as a will.

1) I hereby will, devise, & bequeath everything of which I die possessed, either to you and Paul my son jointly and equally, or to Paul alone absolutely, whichever you prefer. If an executor is necessary, I would like Alan Stiegler to act; but this is subject to your approval.762 The “everything” includes my literary property and manuscripts. But I would like what books and objects they want given as bequests to my mother and brother and Eileen Berryman and my friends, with your approval.

2) The manuscript of The Dreams [sic] Songs as it stands, on my desk in a black binder, I would like copied and sent to Faber & Faber for publication.

3) I want all my journals & diaries & all such notes destroyed at once unread; also my correspondence. I express the wish that there may never be a biography.

4) There is a large manuscript of sonnets written in 1947: when he is 21, Paul is to decide whether these are to be published or destroyed; if he desires advice, he is to consult Robert Lowell if he is still alive, or Donald Justice, or Ralph Ross, or another.

5) I wd recommend paying off the Community Credit Co. loan in order to save my library and Mss. in Princeton; this can be done from insurance. The Shakespearian part of the library and my Shn mss ought to be kept together, especially for discoveries: the Haughton-Taming of the Shrew-Sonnets business, which will make someone famous, and there are also probably enough emendations to make someone else famous. I wd advise seeing whether the Princeton Library will buy the stuff and keep it together. I doubt whether the 200-page Ms. of the biography of Shakespeare is worth bothering with in its present form. My verse manuscripts should be held for Paul; they may possibly prove worth money.

6) I don’t care where I am buried, so long as it is not in the Twin Cities or Iowa; but I do not want to be cremated.

7) I die outside the Church, and care very little about the sort of service for burial, except that I do not want any eulogies. If anything is to be read, perhaps the last four sections of Whitman’s Song of Myself would do; if anything is played, Beethoven’s Op 130 or St James’s Infirmary, King Oliver’s recording.763 But it couldn’t matter less.

I’m sorry for the hasty form of this. If my premonition is false, I will put it in order. I ask your forgiveness, and the forgiveness of all those whom I have offended; I very seldom intended harm; if anyone feels any guilt towards me, it is forgiven; I kiss my son and bless him and hope that he will be a good man. I hope you and he may be happy.

John Berryman

Signature witnessed by: Ved Sharma764

[UMN, TS]

Monday 13th July 59

Dear Ralph,

The essential reason I haven’t written is that I had nothing good to write and didn’t wish to break in on yr travels with bad; in particular I cdn’t tell you that I had been able to finish up the rest of our book, which I felt worse about since Allen had let us down so. I still haven’t done that, but I do have some good news, or fairly good, considering the welter of disaster that has overwhelmed my health & spirits during the last year. The British have suddenly become rather interested in my work. First there was a brilliant review in The Observer by Alvarez,765 then a letter of congratulation from Faber on the early reviews, then a long discussion of the book on a BBC Home Service programme called The Critics where half a dozen men sit around every Sunday & trade views on some new book (they decided mine was difficult but impressive); meanwhile the Third Programme had written at once to ask me to record the Bradstreet poem for broadcast (I did this last Tuesday); etc. Of course there is another part: the two best-known members of the current British poetic ‘establishment’ (neat, passionless, relaxed), John Betjeman & Philip Larkin, at once declared against me, in the Manchester Guardian & the Daily Telegraph; and so did the New Statesman.766 I am glad there are two parties. I like a fight. The Times has not done it yet; I had however the other day a letter from them wanting something for a special American number they plan on the Amer Imagination (I am thinking of sending five or six Dream Songs).767 A letter of ‘intense admiration’ came from the very able Oxford Elizabethan historian A L Rowse, and Spender in Utah suddenly caught onto my work, calling The Dream Songs (of which I read eight or so sections) ‘marvellous’. All this is encouraging to a man at the bottom of the universe. I expect it will please you too. What the upshot will be, and whether it will have any effect here, remains to be seen. That nice brainless Education-man Beck sent me a reprint of Alvarez’s review in the main English-lang paper in Israel.768

I don’t know that this will reach you before you sail, so I’m carboning it to your father’s in New York. I hope you & Alicia will have a gay crossing (with car, teeth & eyes properly Swissed).769 Long trips by sea have always appeared to me to be one of the few things worth having offered us by this black world.

I had to go straight from the Spring Quarter to Utah for the two weeks Writers Conference, where I worked like a workman amid constant insomnia due to the altitude & heat wave that was killing people in those States. The mountains and canyons I liked, and one day Herb Gold & I went swimming (briefly) in a lake at 10,000 feet.770 I’ve spent the fortnight largely in bed, except for doing the BBC reading (with introductory remarks on the poem), and now hope to get our textbook finished up before I start teaching here next Monday. If not you’ll have to help. I have been able to write nothing, since that work on The Open Boat in hospital that got me put on the locked ward, apart from a bk review for The American Scholar (which got quoted at length in Newsweek then) and my Utah lecture on International Poetry and those BBC remarks. But I feel today (so far) better than I have done for a long time: remote, hopeless, and faintly active. Only my stomach is giving me hell, as usual. It will be very fine indeed to have you back. What you wrote from Zurich about ‘avoiding all your friends or doubting that they are your friends’ was quite right.

love to you both,

[UMN, TS]

1917–4th St South

Minneapolis 4, Minnesota

19 July 1959

Dear Mr Rowse,

Please accept my apologies for the indecent tardiness of this response to the great kindness of your letter. I was away in Utah when it arrived here and I’ve been unwell since I came back. It is a pleasure to be able to respond in kind: I have known & used yr Elizabethan work for years (I am a Shakespearian student, originally textual criticism, now biographical etc)—indeed if I had thought of picking out people I wd like to satisfy, on the doctrinal & historical sides of the poem, perhaps I wd have thought of Perry Miller here and you there.771 I’m delighted to hear the theme of yr new book—the Eliz’ns & America—and will be happy to have it and signal you thereon.772 I am not from the Midwest and my name has only been Berryman for thirty-odd years: when my father died and my mother re-married, my brother & I as schoolboys______But I see I left out a sentence, preceding this last one, which I’d invented but failed to put down: I’m afraid I can’t help, I was going to say, in the Cornish matter—well, we found having a different name from our mother an awkward affair, and took our stepfather’s. My own stock is nearly all English but a long time ago. I believe everyone except a maternal great-grandmother, who was Canadian, has been here since before the Revolution; but where from in England I don’t know, I rather wish I did. But we are all, here, originally displaced, and it matters less. I recorded the poem for the Third Programme lately, with some introductory remarks of which I’d be very glad to know your opinion if you should hear the broadcast—they have not told me the date. Again my thanks,

Yrs sincerely,

[Chicago, TS]

That Silkin poem has been published in U.S., alas.773

1917–4th St so

Mpls 4, Minn

Monday 11th? Aug [1959]

Dear Saul,

Sorry to be behindhand with these and with writing—I got back from Utah so worn out and since then my Henry James ^course^ has been killing me, when I’ve not been in bed, that I cdn’t scrape together till yesterday the few hours & brains necessary to put the Taj piece right, as I hope it now is. Ann writes a fine account of you & Sondra: splendid! It has been so hot here (& so it was in Utah too—from heat wave to heat wave for a change) that you wd have to look at me v carefully to see me; I have had to take in even my belt and have given up all pretence to eating or sleeping. Crowell & Putnam are pushing me too, and my socalled seminar in HJ & SCrane has 50 people in it. Life is shit or will be till September. These five Dream Songs are the ones in the order that after long consultation with Ellen S I sent to the London Times (and I’m sorry I did bec the bastards haven’t yet reviewed my book);774 I want to tuck in two more for the Savage but can’t till I finish The Wings of the Dove—another day or so, meanwhile you can see what you think of these.775 About this poetry-editing: what authority & procedure did you think of going by? it’s sort of news to me tho I’m glad to help out as I can, but I can’t really either reject or accept as things stand. Up the rebels! up the self-analysis! down with all the features of my current existence! Many thanks to Sondra for letter, buss Attu for me, handshakes & blessings,

John

How is Savage shaping?

If we use these D. Songs, the printer shd be instructed to preserve exactly all idiosyncrasies, spacing etc

[Colgate, MS]

Tuesday 10 Nov [1959]

Dear Bruce,

Many thanks for your very goodlooking book which I have just read at once from cover to cover, discovering at the end that you set it yourself.776 You are handier than you used to be. Needless to say, you also write better. I think I like the 3 larks for a loony best but there are attractive moments in many of the poems. Olee & Poet Who are pleasing as wholes. Sometimes yr diction & phrasing are still so close to Yeats or some other poet that individual impact fails (esp. the Ballad)—but congratulations & good luck.

What are you up to these days?

Best,

Sincerely,

John

[UMN, TS]

Mpls, 2 December 1959

Dear Mr Epstein,

This is all I can send you tonight; on Friday the rest, I think.777 There’s just another page or so on Imagination, and Sincerity, and then the life, and I am thinking of folding into the life the third section (Popular culture, Defoe, Orwell etc).

I hope you will read this and find it so good (I say this wholly without pride, wholly) that you can pass it on to the people over you and quiet them; but I wd like to hear every objection you have, or the copy-editor has, but more yours.

I know how troublesome this has all been—to me also—and I am very grateful for your forbearance.

The Housman poem goes—which you once askt about—what I remember—

As into the garden Elizabeth ran,

Pursued by the just indignation of Ann,

She trod on an object that lay in her road,

She trod on an object that lookt like a toad.

It lookt like a toad, and it lookt so because

A toad was the actual object it was;

And after supporting Elizabeth’s tread

It lookt like a toad that was visibly dead.

etc—It’s in Lawrence Housman’s book on his brother778—of which my copy is stored

I have a staggering matter up my sleeve, a play called Guy of Warwick of the early 1590’s, part Nashe’s, with an attack on Shakespeare not Nashe’s, which I’ve been studying for years and thought I might get into this: but no. Please do not speak of this, though the real point is its connexion with Sh’s King John.

Be confident—once my notes are made I write fast—

1960

[UMN, TS]

Monday 16 Jan 60

Dear Ann,

My health has been failing so fast now—there was a serious change, in this last fortnight, from the fortnight before even—that I am far from sure I am going to be able to get through July. I don’t complain, or invite sympathy, or offer the fact as an excuse for my delinquencies, and I don’t want you to feel any alarm about it—I don’t—but it seems to be a fact that you are going to have to take into consideration, unless there is an arrest, or better change, against the deterioration. Maybe there will be.

I was bitterly sorry for your and Paul’s (and my) disappointment on the day after Christmas. I did not borrow more money and go East to see Paul for an hour on Christmas Eve and two hours on Christmas morning. I was too ill even to talk to anyone, much less see anyone; please say so to Paul, who may understand when he is 46 years old if he ever has to go through what I went through the day before. Ten hours of Mother’s plangent babbling is about nine hours and twenty minutes more than I am able to stand. Moreover she had collected in the Southwest, and showed me the first pictures of my father I have seen since I was a boy thirty-five years ago; and they bombed me. Moreover there was the great excitement of finally finding you and finally seeing Paul, after a longish trip, on edge. But it was the anxiety, then, that made me sick. You were angry about the police. I don’t know why. The roads were bad, so bad that Mother nearly wrecked us going down, you’d had trouble with the car the night before, you were many hours late returning home, according to Seymour (the coldest-blooded bastard I’ve ever been shocked enough to know), and were not at Bud’s nor Susan’s, and where could you and Paul be?—off the road somewhere?—since the phone business seemed all straightened out, and yet a dozen times there was no answer. Well, it doesn’t matter now.

I have written more than I can. I am sorry about the cheque being late and will try not to let it be again. The Mayo cheque I found by accident, just this afternoon, when I’m trying to pay some bills.

Tell Poukie, if you will, that I love him and am sorry I was sick and will write some more poems as soon as I can and how is his train and everything (and the razor is no sweat, they fixed it for five bucks, so he needn’t feel bad, though he mustn’t touch other people’s things, even his Daddy’s) and I will write to him soon. I hope the Peekskill situation keeps on being good for and to you. I want to thank you for the shirt, which was the only gift Henry Pussy-Cat received—and since he is a jealous Cat he was happy not to be neglected. It is a splendid shirt.

Love,

[UMN, TS]

1917-4th St South

Mpls 4, Minn.

24 Jan 60

Dear Mr Borah,

I have been rather under the weather, but here are the forms.

I was a trifle disconcerted by the description of the courses—‘ballad, lyric, ode’ and ‘essay and short story’: not that I can’t readily give such courses (of course I have done) but you named them to me on the ’phone as ‘the reading of poetry’ and ‘the reading of prose’ and that is how I had been sort of laying them out. Then I came down to your ‘There is very wide latitude in … choice of readings’ and noticed your ‘etc’ for the poetry course. So I hope that to some extent at any rate I can choose my own texts, although I shall be grateful for counsel, either from you or from Mr Ostroff (to whom I’ll fire a copy of this letter); I haven’t used a textbook for years, only whole ordinary books, and am rather out of touch.

Can we tip the prose course a little, in the direction of longer narrative and exposition? I had thought of pivoting it around 1984 (high essay-content) and Ulysses (not all of Ulysses—here also there is a good deal of essay-content) and Anne Frank’s Diary (very largely essay). If you don’t disapprove, perhaps these might be ordered. A story-anthology I haven’t decided on; I used the Tate-Gordon House of Fiction at Harvard half a dozen years ago and liked it.779 Ralph Ross, Tate and I have just done a book for Thomas Y. Crowell called The Arts of Reading, an anthology both fiction and nonfiction with very elaborate commentaries, which I’d like to use; this will be out in mid-March (I never confronted this problem before, beyond ignoring my own stuff in anthologies I used to teach and putting my Crane on library reserve in my James & Crane course, but colleagues tell me that using one’s own books is normal practice—actually I wd be using mostly Ross’s part of the book). Then I planned on some Biblical narrative & ethic, and some of Shakespeare’s prose, against Orwell’s, prob. 1 Henry IV. Could the first couple of pages of Crane’s “The Open Boat” be dittographed for the opening meeting?

Also could ‘A handsome young airman’ (in Auden’s Oxford Book of Light Verse) be ditto’d for the first meeting of 111B? If not, I can put it on the board. Warren & Erskine’s Six Centuries of Great Poetry (Dell, 50c) looks good.780 I haven’t picked a modern anthology, they all seem to me so eccentric. I had planned to head the course toward epic (which I hope your ‘etc’ allows for): Whitman’s Song of Myself and The Waste Land. If this seems acceptable, the Laurel Whitman (ed Fiedler, brilliantly omitting Whitman’s two finest short poems) and Harcourt’s Waste Land & other poems might be ordered.781

Perhaps you would let me hear how you feel about these proposals—just proposals. And if you should hear of a room or small apartment near the campus and near a shopping center. Thanks.

Yrs sincerely,

[UMN, TS]

[early spring 1960?782]

Humanities 132—Berryman

Dear Ralph:

In unbelievable haste, Sat a.m.

131 I ran as a very methodical course, after an historical & philosophical introd to interdisciplinary method and then a shake-up operation of diverse experiences (some Goya, Botticelli, several Buddhist stories, some Beethoven, the Buber anecdote, a poem of Dylan Thomas, etc) designed to show the antecedent improbability of the intellectual shd work best in isolation). These latter seemed very casually put together, partly to baffle them. Then at the beginning of the next session I explained fully their order and meaning for us in the course.

Albright, From the Stone Age to Xtianity783

Cullmann, Peter

Auerbach, Scenes fr the Drama of Eur Lit784

we studied carefully and in great detail as examples of disciplinary cooperation. They did reports on parts, but still I did most of the talking, and we stuck to the subject.

Then I did for them an elaborate job on The Waste Land, from nine points of view, and on twenty-six types of literary criticism.

Then Schrodinger’s What is Life?785 By then the good students (Hamilton, Brown, Gottlieb are the best carry-overs into 132) were coming alive to where a man departs from his discipline without even realizing it.

Finally, I gave them a run-down on the aims and methods of Textual Criticism (I’d assigned the very good article in Brittanica [sic] Eleven) as by its nature unable to escape the responsibility of crossing disciplin’y lines.

Malinowski and Sherrington we didn’t reach, and I brought them over into 132.786

This quarter (132) has been much more free-wheeling (133 I planned to make more systematic again). The subject is the very general one: The Meaning of Life—whether there is any, or many, or was one, for whom, etc etc; and I spent the first session handing out difficulties with the enquiry, the second session (after they’d read Malinowski’s ‘Magic Science & Religion’) handing out warnings (e.g., the question would itself have no meaning for a savage—Of course life has meaning and it is this and this—for us it may be depressing to have to raise such a question, despite the opinions of Freud & many many others—discursus on relation betw opinion and wisdom.

Then I read them aloud the whole of ^(1) “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (negative, almost) (2)^ Tolstoy’s Master and Man ^(highly positive, though matter-of-fact & ironic: then ecstatic)^—one of the wisest & most shattering moves I ever made as a teacher—partly in order to have some actual Life before us in the course, partly to introduce them to T’s lifelong sense of Love as policy against his deeper sense that it is a crisis-gift (like Zen’s satori and the Xtian kingdom of heaven). I didn’t discuss the story much at the time, but have been referring back to it ever since.

Then two great religious systems, Buddh & Christian, contrasted in their ethics, their estimation of human life and its meaning (Nirvana is attainable: theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. One session I appointed, the week before, two students (White and Miss Gainsley) to monitor the discussion from opposite ends of the room, putting forth topics etc. and asked four students to make themselves responsible—as of our subject this quarter—for one of the Gospels: but it didn’t go well, wasting time. They don’t know enough, and unfortunately they are too used to listening to me. |bad (Sept ’60)|

Then, with Xtian texts analyzed in great detail (Blessed are the poor in spirit …; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself), into a general discussion of 1) love 2) immortality or rather survival. Then, using Broad’s California lecture on Human Personality and the possibility of its survival, into the meaning of this particular widespread sense of a deepest meaning for Life.787

That’s where I am now, and they have read Alan Watts’s new Zen book (necessity but senselessness of striving) and Whitman’s Song of Myself (difficulty but necessity of unity—like Broad, Xtian thought, etc.788 I have been emphasizing the line that makes the Body very important).

The remaining texts—but you mustn’t think of these as all done with, unless you want to (I have been moving rather freely around, as more and more topics come into play and we have more and more opinions and analysis before us)—are two scientists, Sherrington and Freud (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), and I planned to wind up with some study of art and music, and also of death (about which I have said a good deal already), assigning the essay on death in Julian Huxley’s Essays in Popular Biology etc.789 Anything you want to do will be fine. It’s hard to say just how the course has been going, but I think pretty well; they seem hypnotized by it, and I’ve found it very interesting myself. I hate leaving it.

133 I planned, as you know, for a study of a more specific but still very difficult topic: The American Mind or Character (thinking; doing). Whether there is national character at all (you sugg’d Otto Klineberg to me, I remember790)—our immigrational origins, shifts in geographical power, the frontier, response to national crises. Can it be studied apart from history. Tocqueville and D H Lawrence. Van Wyck Brooks’s dichotomy: Edwards vs Franklin (cf Scarlet Letter vs Moby Dick). D W Brogan & Santayana.791 The papers delivered to the Columbia Seminar on Amer Civ, with their very interesting & critical discussions. Architecture, poetry (Poe, Hart Crane, Lowell; Frost). Expatriation, the in-tide of European genius in the last three decades. And so on. (I am not making suggestions, naturally, to whoever gives the course, you or Ben or whoever—just saying how I planned the year)

Also the TLS on “The Amer. Imag’n,” 6 Nov 59.

[Houghton, TS]

Friday [early 1960]

Dear Conrad Aiken,

God will forgive me—I don’t expect you to—for my delay in answering. My health’s been so poor and the pressure of my duties so great that I can never do anything I want, and must even now write quickly. I did however ring up Giroux at one point and urge him to let you have the poem at as low a rate as possible—it wd have been easier, perhaps, if you’d mentioned a fee.792 Of course I was delighted to hear from you on any occasion, and deeply pleased that you wanted the whole poem, which I am getting sick of seeing broken up. I read it all for the BBC last summer, after the Faber volume, and it’s had a good deal of British attention. You were the first distinguished stranger who ever really hailed it, threw me a large & generous word from the blue when I was in the mud, as I have been for a year or so again (but maybe I am about to get out); and if I were to live longer than I hope, I would never forget it or cease to be grateful. I hope your work is blowing & triumphing. I am in my fifth year of another poem some of which I hope you will like some time.

Very best

John Berryman

If I can help further, a line to me at the Dept of Speech, Univ. of Calif, Berkeley 4, Calif., will be answ’d at once.

[Haffenden, TS]

2525 Durant Avenue

Berkeley 4

Friday evening, 1st wk [early 1960]

Dear kid,

Well, I have got my courses under control, which considering how unbelievably sick I have been is no mean achievement (night before last I had to leave a film after an hour’s almost-choking and strangers’ passing me lozenges), and my apartment is in perfect order also—will you believe it, I have spent about 75 bucks in miscellaneous shopping, not counting clothes. But I am rather lonely tonight. I didn’t think I ever would be again. But I am. It has been very agreeable, how they have all (or mostly) held off this week about social life. But here I am, mildly proud of myself with nobody to talk to or tell me anything. This could go on too long! Wow! I took no vows, after all: what gives? Has Henry entered on his destined role, pariah?? And nobody has written to me—by nobody, I mean you, old sport, and Harriet; what the hell gives?

I may see you in about three weeks. Brandeis are keen to have me receive in person and offer all my expenses; maybe I can stop off in Mpls (and even pop to Rochester) on my way back. Meanwhile my phone was installed today, and there’s nobody to call, and nobody to call me—nobody I expect or want to call me. What am I to do? I don’t write—I haven’t written a line in the week I’ve been here, and have no plans for doing. I don’t read—I have lost all interest in pastime reading, and am too tired for serious reading, though I’ve bought some mathematical & philosophical books in case I get with it (the bookshops, just here in Berkeley alone, are fabulous; after 23 years’ search, I found at once, when after days in bed and days universitying I extended my living-shopping to a bookshop, vol. ix of the great 2nd ed of the Cambridge Shakespeare, 1893–1905, with complete apparatus to Pericles, the poems and the sonnets: I wd have paid $10 for this, it was marked $2, when I brought it to him he marked it down to $1).

So what do I do? I plan to go to SF tom’w, for the first time (exc for the McCloskeys’ Chinese dinner a week ago), and look and walk, if I feel good enough; and there’s advertized a Japanese film I’m mad to see. But sooner or later I am going to have to talk to somebody; I think so. Perhaps I am a hopeless bore, whom everybody has caught on to?? What gives zest to this is that whenever I meet—in the Speech office, or the halls—the two people I know, Borah and a colleague Ostroff, they explain how wild everybody is to meet me, in that dept. and in English, and they look shamefaced, as not having invited me. Until this afternoon and now, pure joy. Yet—well—…

(At which point I telephoned you.)

[UMN, TS]

Tuesday afternoon, 1st March [1960]

Dear Ann,

I hope this cheque doesn’t bounce. California payments to me are still problematical and my acct has got ruined yesterday & today, with $296 air tickets etc etc—Brandeis will repay me this, they say, but when? and I hope the grant will be forthcoming at the ceremony but I won’t be able to deposit it until Monday and then there’ll be clearing. Besides, as usual I have no idea how my acct stands.

My flight possibilities don’t let me go to Rochester, but I am wild to see the Pouker and if possible on his birthday, so I’ve arranged to arrive in Mpls at 2:40 Saturday afternoon, not leaving until 5:30 Sunday afternoon—this is rough enough, since I have a nine a.m. Monday morning and an eleven—then I can go to bed for 24 hours, though, with nothing till Wednesday. A bus is possible, I guess, but in the middle of this heavy travel I hope you will be willing to drive him to Mpls on Saturday, so I cd see him that afternoon (and give him whatever I have been able to find most dramatic at F.A.O.Schwartz—I am really looking forward to this, as not to the Brandeis award, which, trivial as it is, my sense of worthlessness tells me I don’t deserve and which I’ve several times almost declined, and which also, in view of my almost absolute conviction of the unfuture of my talent such as it was, seems a heartless mockery, though nobody will know it) and maybe even Sunday too, if you stay over. Can you send me a note about this to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Fifth & 9th St?

I feel like an empty house, where people used to romp and make, but then they all went abroad, forever. I was deeply pleased however by the decisive improvement in both yr social life & the teaching just before I came away, and I hope it’s all continued.

love

John

[Haffenden, MS]

[early March 1960]

I have tho’t of moving out here in the Bay793—fr. the hill I see it constantly—but the social atmosphere here is so like I imagine it there that I haven’t bothered yet.—The P-C card was delightful. Maraini’s passage goes (p. 58), ‘The night is therefore essentially the domain of the male, who plunges into it like an agile, silent, uncommunicative, aggressive cat, with bristling fur & shining eyes … and it is unanimously agreed that of all female cats the Japanese are by a long way the sweetest, most charming, most tender.’794 Alas.—Arrive Mpls by NW 2:40 p.m. Sat. aft., Paul’s birthday.—Damn J. & D.—

love

John

[Haffenden, TS]

Berkeley, Saturday [late March 1960]

Dear junior pussy-cat,

I’ve or I’se been sick all week. The weather here is perfect, havenly [sic], and everybody is sick all the time. So many were out of my eleven o’clock yesterday (six of thirteen) that we gave up & went for coffee. I was going to have luncheon with the English dept. (finally) and had to call that off. On Thursday Ostroff & I were to go to Josephine Miles’s for tea and all three of us called it off.795 It’s like being in Paradise, with anthrax. I have been running my classes, but just; many people haven’t. One fundamental difficulty is insomnia (produced in part by brooding and rage over my isolation, which ruined the whole previous week). I never slept at all Sunday night or Tuesday or Thursday, so that I had to teach all three following mornings more dead than alive. Yesterday I went to bed after that eleven o’clock and only woke up this morning after nine, which will give you an idea. I feel comparatively bright-eyed & busy-tailed [sic] too, comparatively. I even went & had a haircut, and am thinking of clearning [sic] up this chaos I pay rent for. I even ate breakfast, perhaps the first breakfast I’ve had in Berkeley.

The social business has finally been explained, with top-level apologies. For the English department: relations between it and my dept are so non-existent that nobody there even heard I was here until a few days ago. As for my own department, it is so leprous with faction—with which everybody is also so busy—that nothing is getting done at all, either socially or otherwise. It was just my luck to run into so fantastic a situation, after my long Mpls isolation and with my flowing paranoia. Now some repair will take place, with a party run by the acting-chairman’s wife next Sunday and a dinner party by another high woman member of the dept either Fri or Sat. I thought it as well to throw some difficulties in their way, after all this time, in spite of their apologies (people do not seem to understand that their apologies are just as insulting as their neglect), so I had the things postponed, explaining that I’d be away this weekend; and in fact I planned to go to Carmel and the Big Sur country. But not only do I have to get this place in order, and pay bills and put my hopeless finances into comprehension, and am too tired to go anywhere anyway, but the damned Nashe page-proofs—all of them—have suddenly arrived and must be shot thro’, by Monday if possible. So here I am, with no social or travel plans except to spend this evening at the McCloskeys’, whom I haven’t seen since the night I arrived, six weeks ago.

Poor fuckless Maureen, but boy she is not the only one. Your warning to ‘stay out of’ Miss Peckinpah amused me.796 It was quite unnecessary, though: I haven’t even seen her for weeks, except once or twice in class (she very seldom comes, because she owes me a paper on Dylan Thomas and feels guilty)—but I hear she is thriving: the film director Jean Renoir is here this spring, and after harrowing tryouts for a play he is doing, she won the lead. I don’t know why I don’t call her, I just don’t. And I still haven’t found my lovely & immoral Japanese girl. But it’s true that my far from lovely Japanese student, who is probably very stuffy in addition, looks better and better to me every day, especially since she did a brilliant reading and speech in class this week—and in the end I may find her beautiful indeed and descend upon her with the entire weight of the desperate Pussy-cat. I shdn’t think it likely though.

The Noble Savage has just come, at last, and it looks good. There is a splendid piece on the Spanish war by Jos. Herbst, and Ted Hoagland’s gorgeous story.797 I’ll send you a copy Monday (PO closed today), so don’t buy it. They only sent me three, damn them. One goes to Ostroff & wife, who’ve been very nice to me. I may have to order one for Ann, to whom (truth told) I am not very anxious to give it—and Poukie, poor old fellow, he can’t read good, and there ain’t no pictures—but after all she inspired some and various lines and suffered through several of the dozen (in fact some of them broke up our marriage or helpt) and then caused, by nearly killing me, others, so I guess I ought. She is the ‘Mabel’ of Number Two, wh was written before our marriage, indeed it was the first one; I may perhaps leave it out of the final poem.

The only thing I’ve finished here I enclose a draft of, not to be shown to anybody, even R. What I had in mind with the phone call you say you don’t remember the substance of, was: that seeing him any more, in any romantic way, might be a very bad idea for you (and not much good to him, possibly). I’m not so much working in terms of jealousy, I think, as of just what my own lamentably wide experience tells me. And Alicia, by the way, you couldn’t be more right, is jealous of me, intensely so. I wonder that I never saw it. I called Ralph the other day to talk about several business matters. She answered, he was asleep, and we talked and talked and talked. It didn’t seem polite to ask for him at once, so we chatted—I expecting her every minute to say, ‘Wait, I’ll get Ralph’—and as she didn’t, I became fascinated, remembering our conversation, and decided not to ask myself—and by God she never did! How’s that???? I was very angry, and if I weren’t worried about Ralph—in addition to the rest, Phil on the way to the airport confirmed my sense of his manic withdrawal—I wd take it up with him. Dead silence on this too, sweet baby. Dear little (big, fine) thing, I sorry you not having more social. Blind rats. At least we had a very unusual weekend. I was deeply touched, and laughed aloud, at the news of your inability to walk or lift your legs. I was also pleased to my soul to hear you liked the Pouker good. He was a greedy bastard, wasn’t he, wif his ice cream to you; he’ll learn. I’m glad you’re eating better and like Beverly fair. To me she looked like a dope. Well, dopes are okay, dopes are desirable, after Maureen Diane & Co. Yes, living with somebody—anybody—must be a pleasure, and I’m delighted you don’t have to keep the lights on. And I hope you don’t hear things, and I hope you don’t pee the bed—as in fact I did once here in Berkeley, I was so miserable; that’s a pure hate-operation, I imagine, or almost pure, the sex-imitation lying well behind. But I never read anything on the subject and am guessing. I never was troubled with it as a child, it happened a year or so ago, out of fury & loss, and thank god it has only happened three times I think, each time drunk, so the controls are down. I get through the most marvellous quantities of liquor here, by the way: wow: I dont drink as much as I did in Mpls, but I enjoy it much more, because I don’t go to bars, I just order it in and settle down with it. But that’s by the way: I was thinking about you. I’m glad them pills is helping. But you been bloody unlucky with men. I worry about this. Leaving out Jay and other characters, there was your profoundly unsatisfactory husband, and the supersexy ratty Eddie, and Pussycat (Boyd’s remark about him tickled me—how did you keep from laughing, if you did?): some collection. I perhaps wd claim to be better than the others, as a human being and a man and for usefulness, but still. Then you been also unlucky with women, beginning with your mother. Now, one great thing is not to get pushed by one into the other. You are such a brilliant sexual operator that you would probably be able to make happy an oak log; wd it make you happy back? Well, as I told you Shea once told me (my NY analyst), any genital satisfaction is desired; and then you have big ol’ power-drives (Senatism) that are compatible with a denigration of men. Only I would keep Rita & co. at a physical distance. They are terrific & wonderful, but they have no cocks, dear, which I think you like. As for men, some of them don’t either—an entirely different problem for another letter, and Christ I have passed the whole day writing to you—don’t you dare say I never write X X X

[UMN, TS]

Tuesday [early April 1960]

Dear friend Poutz:

Well, I am up & staggering about after three more days on my back; there are no classes at the University this week, which helps. I hope you & yr mother are seeing much less of doctors than you were. I wish I knew how her ear was. A few days ago I started a new rhyme for you but it ain’t finished yet. How did you dig the one about Krinker and his difficulties? I have a handsome award-diploma in a leather-case for you when you are older? Have you shot any particular bears of late? I think I will go over to San Francisco tonight—I don’t believe I have been since I arrived back from New York—and if I have any grand adventures I will rush you the news. Be a good fellow but don’t take any guff from anybody.

Love,

Daddy

[Emory, TS]

late Fri night [spring 1960]

Honourable pal, co-thinker, boss, co-sufferer:

Fifty years!! Christ. I am back from a reading by Stanley Kunitz, which has started so many thoughts in me that I will tell you all about it sometime, but I start with your parents’ anniversary.798 You read in the papers but I never knew anyone—look at us. And I know from you of their most difficult times; and there or here they are. I am not at present even speaking to my mother, who crucified me when I was in New York for the Brandeis business, and my father shot himself when I was twelve—I am older than he was—it is amazing, and: (you askt me a question) I think taking the baby there for the dinner is the gift beyond anything you could possibly otherwise do. Aren’t there family air-fares that cut it ’way down? If you can at all afford it, that’s what’s to do: be there, with Alicia and the boy. You probably, Ralph, have no conception of the stately satisfaction and joy that your father and mother take in your distinction—and as you’ve told me, they love Alicia—and they must be mad to see the baby. They are lucky to be together. I wd like to send something myself—is it Arthur G.? and what’s the street address?? I have no memory any more.

You don’t say a word of Ann & Paul, your letter else (you see it has flashed me into action) is the most acceptable and needed by me in a long time. Only you don’t tell me anything about the baby. Give me a rundown; remember, I am a recent expert on the woofiness etc.

Tuesday morning. My God, I feel quite well. Not sick in any of my five usual ways, and I ate breakfast, and I even feel briskish & responsive to the flaring day. Maybe I will go swimming in Strawberry Canyon, after writing some letters (I owe everybody) and paying some bills (ditto a fortiori) and doing some chores and finding the notes I made some weeks ago on Literary Influence—I have to speak in Oakland tomorrow, I was conned into it.

I’m glad Phil and the resplendent Boydsss are liking the book. It must be getting about faintly; Thom Gunn told me yesterday he liked it very much, esp. the Macbeth piece (which I expect he began with)—where he got a copy I don’t know & didn’t ask.799 He has the Somerset Maugham Award and will be four months in Berlin, on leave from here; attractive idea.

At the gayest dinner party I’ve been to in I don’t know when, Saturday evening, at the Watts’, along with the Schorers (who have developed most agreeably) there was a man named Charles Muscatine.800 He is a Chaucer scholar, spent last year in Rome on Fulbright, was one of the “17” here who refused to take the oath years ago (hero, fired, out 3 yrs, reinstated with back pay), and is chairman of a committee that is exploring the setting up of Humanities courses. I told him all I could in a couple of hours about our set-up, and offered to let him see our book-lists, which he very much wants to do. All this was entirely unofficial and friendly, so maybe it’s better if I give them to him than if you do; but I’d like then to give him permission to ask you questions if that’s all right. He’s a very intelligent, quiet, able man, and though everything is very tentative, this might prove interesting to us as well as helpful to them. So wd you have the girl send me all our current lists, and I’ll pass them on, with a covering note, when I borrow a book he & his wife have promised to lend me. Unless you feel this is giving away our secrets; to me it seems a good & generous idea—what really have we got to lose? Book-lists are not courses, and he is alive to the difficulty of getting competent staff. The point here is to strengthen his hand, if possible, against a faction here that wants the courses entirely non-historical; he thinks more as we do.

I’m very glad Allan Bloom is working out so well.801 Can we keep him? How about that? He couldn’t sound better? What’s his primary field, maybe classics? Who has Morgan got his knife in at the moment, with me away? That Hungerland man, who was impossible (I agree) in Cincinnati, is better on his own ground, by his own swimming pool, and his drinks are impeccable, and the company was first-class, a young poet-playwright named Jim Schevil who says he sat in at some society at Harvard when Delmore & I were there during the war (he was undergraduate) and an architectural critic who goes to the Institute for Adv Study for a year before taking up a full professorship at Harvard (wife was ballet, polio, wheelchair, said she met me 20 years ago, we proved it was my brother with his second wife).802

So Kegan is that way; good. My other adversary, Temko, is too—Ostroff says the only thing all factions in the Speech Department agree on is the intolerability of Temko.803 What is more agreeable than to learn that it was not one’s own fault?

Hurrah for the Burke ended.804 I wish I had finished something. I have to come back to life first. I hope you’re setting me for 54 this fall rather than 61. I have so many things I want to do, I could dance, if I cd do them.

Love to Alicia & Pancho & all friends, esp any named Thomes or Siegelman or anyting of dat sort.

Always,

John

My old student Snodgrass got the Pulitzer, did you see? I was pleased, even over Lowell, because he’s younger and besides Cal had it once of course. He once wrote me a poem with the refrain

“Snodgrass is walking through the universe”

which I hear he’s got in his book still.805 he didn’t send book or it was lost. Various other books of former students have come, Justice’s best; I’m trying to help them get him here.

[UMN, TS]

Saturday [14 May 1960]

Dear Ann,

I’m very nervous, except when teaching or working at my short poem or at public appearances as yesterday in Oakland, but it’s no use waiting till I can write a decent letter. I’m very sorry for the cheque’s being so late anyway. I still don’t see how what you wrote cd have been understood in any way but as I did (‘My nerves too. I resigned and will look for a job in N.Y. next week. (Am leaving P. at Mrs Cook’s in Mpls.)’).

The pictures of Paul were marvellous and I’m very glad of the one of you. A friend drove me down to the Big Sur country where I got some postcards that I’ll send him now. Henry Miller’s mailbox is light green and I swam in a hot sulphur pool. I have started swimming (twice this week) in the men’s outdoor pool here, and enjoy it, but have no hope of better health until I get some rest—a month before the Minnesota 2nd summer session and then a month after, God willing. I am cool enough when operating (and need to be—I was on a panel with four other writers of verse, subject ‘Literary influence’, and was introduced first, and all the others did was praise & expand what I had said, except for a lady poetess who talked her whole time abt the Bradstreet poem & Hopkins), though two or three nights a week I never dare go to bed at all, with classes at 9 and 11 coming. I forgot, I think, the other night, to ask again about your ear, does it keep better? I went this evening to see one of my students who is in hospital two blocks from here with a nervous breakdown, taking her half a dozen of my paperbacks, and learnt that her worst immediate anxiety is the long paper she owes me; so I was very glad I had gone—I joked her out of it. If only somebody wd joke me out of something. Last night I had a dream of deciding at some age either to have my head cut straight off—connections then being made at once down into my trunk ^(—from machines?)^—or become a camel; and my nights are easy.

To prove I exist, I’ll tell you the new first stanza of my poem, Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion:

Sozzled, Mo Tzû, after a silence, vouchsafed

a word alarming:—We must love them all.—

Affronted, our fathers jumped.

—Yes, he went madly on, and waved in quest

of his own dreadful subject,—O the father,

he cried, must not be all.—

Whereon upon consent we broke up for the day.806

At least I hope it goes like that. The poem is going very badly, apart from details. I am sorry I took it up, I cdn’t help it. The subject is Paradise, and I began it in 1948 but have none of the Ms with me, so I started over, and it’s supposed to be short, 7 7-line stanzas, but is already too long, I may have to scrap everything but this stanza and set off again.

I had no social engagements this weekend, so I went last night to see one of my students in a dance-recital but was too nervous to stay beyond twenty minutes, and tonight, after I visited Miss [R.], I went to see another of my students—the major actress on campus, named Deneen Peckinpah—in the lead of a play, but was too nervous to stay for the second act, damned lousy play by Jean Renoir. Deneen is marrying a Beat poet next month named Lew Brown who proposes becoming Lew Peckinpah, not to let the name get lost. The only real friend I have made here, a young English writer named Tony Tanner, goes back to Cambridge next week after two years here (Berkeley & US) on a Commonwealth; one of my closest friends there in 1936–8 was his tutor; poor guy fell in love, after two years, ten days ago with one of the prettiest girls in northern California, booming affair, brilliant for both, and off he has to go.807 It’s pathetic, because though ebullient & wild in general he has no self-confidence with women—and now perfect—and off—and he loves this country too, God knows why. The lying, candor, hypocrisy, and ass-stupidity of the Govt over the spy-plane have almost completed my divorce from organized human life.808

Please be cautious in how you report to anybody in Minnesota or New york [sic] what I write to you. I am very careful in anything I say about you. The whole academic and literary country is one sink of gossip & malice.

Yes, as I said, I never changed the medical insurance, so, so far as I know, and I recently paid it, so it’s up to date, you are covered as well as of course Paul. What the legal situation about that is, though, I have no idea. About the tax-exemption: when I took all my stuff to Zimmerman, he asked why I was not claiming Paul as an exemption, and I told him the lawyers’ agreement that you now rehearse to me. He looked grave, and said that the Federal tax people have no interest in lawyers’ agreements, they are interested solely in where money comes from and where it goes, and plainly, on the basis of support, I was entitled and even required to claim dependency. Therefore he drew up the papers that way. He used to be in Internal Revenue himself, by the way, and is a highly respected and extremely conscientious expert—he doesn’t let Ralph or me get away with anything. He did not, however, I now realize, tell me to tell you this, he just didn’t say anything about it, and it didn’t occur to me—I was in the mad rush, you remember, of my final lectures there, briefing my successors, dismantling the apartment and getting off. So if we both claimed a dependent, I suppose that’s wrong. Maybe better let it go, this late, since there was obviously no wrong intention involved. Is it likely to come to notice? I have no understanding of these things, I barely succeed every year in supplying Zimmerman with enough data to make it out.

Thursday. It took me days to get this far and then I was paralyzed with the crisis, which is more dangerous I think than anything in the whole fifteen years. I hate the thought of your going to New York. It isn’t Krushchev [sic], unfortunately, but the ideologues and the military, who may very well just now want war, in which case we’ve had it. I don’t care much, for myself, but my last faith in man seems to have oozed out from under my fingernails during the last few days. What a world Paul is going to get, if he gets any world. Tell him the rhyme

I love little Pussy,

His coat is so warm,

And if I don’t tease him

He’ll do me no harm

and kiss the little fellow for me.

Sorry for so tardy & scrappy a letter. The extra $25, remember, is for a personal gift from P to you—which, if you can get him to understand that he’s doing, fine, if not, no matter.

Love,

John

I’m reading in Los Angeles next weekend, if I don’t collapse first.

[UMN, TS]

Berkeley, 27 June [1960]

Dear Anne [sic],

I suppose you have left and gone to New York, and I need an address. I don’t know where to tell you to send it, though: it isn’t clear even yet when I am going to be able to leave here, I hope later this week, and but it still depends on how soon my health lets me pack up and ship and travel. I expect to go into hospital straight from the airport but I can’t say write there because it’s not arranged with Haberle yet. If not I’ll be at a hotel but maybe best write to Ralph’s—he can give me the letter.

I feel very bitter about not seeing Paul, maybe I can in Sept if I have enough money to go East. The crisis I have been going through is worse physically than the one last year, and worse intellectually, but is not attended by the same stupefying grief, and I hope I may soon come out of it. I can’t act or think, is the trouble: after five minutes’ thought I am ready to abandon all three of my professions, and at the end of half an hour I am suicidal.

I hope the year’s ending and moving has helped you and that you get a job you like. My gift was books having nothing conceivably to do with teaching, the funniest novel I have read since Lucky Jim, T Southern’s Flash and Filigree, and 3 Haggard adventures, marvellous.809 Everytime Fl & Fil comes in, though, it sells out at once—even though they promise to hold me a copy, someone else is on duty or they forget, it’s over a month now, and I wanted to send the books together. I still have no copy, and now I have no address. I’ll just have to order them in Mpls.

Please write me a little news of Paul occasionally, won’t you? And of yourself. My news has all been bad, except for a few new damned Songs. Love to you both,

John

[Chicago, TS]

Berkeley, 27 June [1960]

Dear Saul,

I wished I cd have squibbed for you, I tried, but you said 10 days, and brother I cd hardly sign my name I was running down so. I have now I hope completely run down and am or soon will be on the way back. It’s the same as last year only I feel less grief.

I tried a Chessman bit,810 then a bit on Time (which I think we really ought to get after), then a bit on a young English socialist I met here, but nothing worked out. I have to be feeling really bad to write verse, fairly well to write prose. Maybe there’s something in this: Is it really necessary, in Pasadena say on Sunday, when you have to buy stamps from a machine, to have to read, on the cardboards they come in, “You love beauty and refinement and appreciate the finer things in life” and “Things may be slow in coming, but what you gain will be on a solid foundation” and “You should drive on relentlessly toward that goal you sense and desire”. Gopher Prairie and the postal service (the worst, of course, in the world, notorious throughout the world). If the Postmaster-general would kindly keep his deep thoughts to himself and just have letters delivered as rapidly as occurs in civilized countries, it wd be agreeable to me. I remember when, in a southwestern town a third of a century ago, there were three mails a day.

Here is a poem by Louis Simpson which I think is pretty good.811 I told him we wd let him know quick (I’d asked for it after hearing him read it in Oakland) and now I’ve had it for weeks mea culpa.

Also: Ian Watt, an Englishman who’s been here for years, did a fine piece on the Kwai film for the Listener (another version in PR)812—he was in a Jap camp near there several years: I proposed he do us a piece on his sense of Amer life, he said maybe or on the POW camps, reminiscent or fictional. He’s good. Next time you write Meridian wd you ask them to send him a copy: Dept of English, U of Cal, Berkeley—he hasn’t seen it & we might get some hot stuff out of him. Nice guy too—oddly I knew him at Cambridge in the ’30s, when he wasn’t much of anything.—Hope East in Sept. to see you. Bless Bummidge.

John

[Haffenden, TS]

Berkeley, 27 June [1960]

Dear old Boyd,

‘Wondered at’ is right; still I read every word, studied the daring charts with boiling blood, and in general did everything I could with these wonderful papers except understand them.813 Tell me, what is cerebral thrombosis?—never mind the therapy, even the anti-coagulant therapy, what is the thing itself? I hope I never know by experience. I found your unaided paper less murky than the other one, though, and I hope both are setting everyone by the ears. Thank you, pal.

May no new disasters have arisen among the important and fascinating Thomeses. In particular I hope Maris’s health is good and that Stephen is having a good summer. I enclose a clip that will interest him if he didn’t see it.

I love the hills here, and some aspects of SF, and some people, but on the whole the Bay area bugs me—because, I suppose, I came out in such bad shape (though it is a fact that I have heard very very hard opinions of this campus of the University of California from dozens of people here, and found it myself—with many exceptions of course—smug and cold, as well as amazingly mediocre in area after area, though they speak of Harvard as ‘the Berkeley of the East’ ha ha)—if only I hadn’t come too, I wd have liked it much better.

As it is, I have gone almost steadily down hill, until now I can’t think or act: if I think five minutes I decide to abandon all three of my professions, and after half an hour I am semi-suicidal. I am much less griefstricken than I was last year, but otherwise hardly better, especially physically; but I am more successful at avoiding thought—and even at not writing although I have some hot new Songs. I am now trying desperately to extract myself from here to go ‘home’ later this week, though what I most need is REST. Do you think you cd edge me into Abbott for a few days, straight off, if Haberle (whom I detest) can’t get me into Glenwood Hills?

Love to Peachie & Katie,

John

[UMN, TS]

610 W. Franklin

Monday 16th Oct [?1960]

Dearest Ann,

I’m horribly sorry again to be so abominably late with the cheque. It isn’t negligence, I think of it thirty times a day, and the money was in the bank both times: it’s that it seems impossible to write. There’s nothing to say. I am all over complaining to anybody about anything—I want no sympathy, see noone, talk to noone—and any news I might give you would not only have that intolerable air but might distress you either for past affection or human feeling or on Paul’s account. I can’t bear any of that. But today I feel notably better: I got up, not sick; and ate. I don’t know where the change came from. I have not been depressed, but hopeless; in pain at both ends, but chiefly the state wd be best described in Hopkins’s words during his terrible last years ^(worse far than mine)^ in Ireland, ‘weakness’ and ‘melancholy’. I can only look back or forward, back to horrors that no longer even matter to me, forward to death which I dislike. But today I am better, for no reason; and have cleaned up some of my pigsty, and taken shirts out, and actually plan to go buy a pair of shoes tonight (sale at Rothschild’s), and have written your lawyer Schwartz a cheque & letter, and will do mine—maybe by March, bombing my mid-month cheque.814 I can be clear of them anyway; and am sitting here at my typewriter, for perhaps the sixth time in as many months unless typing Songs or academic stuff. I am glad to ^be^ teaching: it mitigates my unbearable (but quite acceptable, energy-less) loneliness by simulating a sort of social life, and also works against my sense of utter worthlessness.

After all these months I still have no plate, I eat off shirt-cardboards. But I am going now to fix that, if this change stays; if. I defrosted my refrigerator today. It took hours, but there was nothing in it. Then I went & bought food. If ‘they’ keep on not bombing me, I’ll eat it, and keep on cleaning up my pigsty, and maybe my next letter will be better. I am amazed not to die—if I don’t—in the state I’ve been in for so long. I hope you & P flourish. My deep thanks for his pictures.

love,

John

I bought this stationery in Snyder’s (drugstore) weeks ago wondering if I wd ever use it. I have!

[UMN, TS]

610 W. Franklin Ave.

Mpls 5

12 Nov 60

Dear Dean Crawford:

This is just by way of being a letter in application for one of the Faculty Summer Research Appointments in 1961.815 The project is the completion of a monograph, running 100–125 pages, called Shakespeare’s Friend. The basic research was done in 1952: what is needed is re-immersion in it, and the writing out, which I have never been able to do while teaching, and I have taught every summer since then except one when I was in India for the State Department and one when I was working on a long poem. I believe the thing could be finished in two or three months.

May I venture to express the hope that the Committee will treat as perfectly confidential the substance of what follows? It was communicated in a registered letter to Henry Allen Moe in 1953, and is known to Professor Bentley of Princeton, I think, but to no one else.

The monograph is in two parts, the first addressing itself to a problem, or problems, of authorship, the second to a biographical problem; then there are appendices. It is based on a discovery, or discoveries, made in 1952. I was working on a general critical biography of Shakespeare (still unfinished, under contract to Farrar Straus, its substance was delivered as the Hodder Lectures at Princeton, then the Ellison Lectures at Cincinnati—I enclose here the first and the penultimate chapters), on a Guggenheim, when one day it suddenly seemed humiliating that we should not know the identity of Shakespeare’s collaborator in The Taming of the Shrew, though there has been general agreement for a long time among conservative scholars that the play is about half his. I went to work, using chiefly proverb-analysis, and determined very quickly that the collaborator was probably William Haughton, author of Englishmen for my Money. The point then was to prove it, using about two dozen other lines of analysis; and this is the first half of the monograph. I think it will be generally admitted, almost at once, that the identification is probably correct, though it has never been proposed before and Chambers confesses indeed that no serious proposal has ever been made. I hope incidentally, in this part, to establish better than has been done before the date of the play (Shakespearian chronology is one of my chief subjects), and one appendix is devoted to new suggestions about the Haughton canon—several anonymous plays, including Wit of a Woman, are very likely, on the evidence, his.

The second part of the monograph is devoted to what is I suppose the leading literary-biographical mystery of English literature, the identity of the Friend of the Sonnets. To my way of thinking no really serious candidate has ever been proposed (cf. the enclosed “Shakespeare at Thirty”, pp. 192–5). I would now propose William Haughton—not as the Friend, but as a candidate, whose claim henceforth ought to be a matter for very serious investigation. Apart from the collaboration, the name Houghton (the names are the same) is one of the most dramatic in modern Shakespearian biographical scholarship. Chambers noticed briefly in 1923, and forgot in his great work of 1930, and then took up at the end of his life (jogged by Oliver Baker), the real possibility that a Lancashire bequest in 1581 by Alexander Houghton to a “William Shakeschafte”, apparently a player, was to William Shakespeare using one of his grandfather’s forms of the name.816 Much work, so far inconclusive, has been done in this area since Chambers wrote; and the second half of my monograph will hope to help advance it. Everything known of Haughton will be passed in review, and everything of “Mr W. H.”, and all the dating considered.

If the present application should be favourably regarded, I would like the appointment to be for the second summer session.

Yours respectfully,

John Berryman

assoc prof, Humanities & English

1961

[Chicago, TS]

415 Erie St, SE, Mpls 14

Wed., some date or other [August 1961]

Dear pal,

I am down with bronchitis, sparingitis, otitis, and other goodies that have been building up, so this will be just a signal and to give you some news. I’ll write next week; that’s a threat.

Ralph told me some months ago that you were thinking of marrying again. I thought, my God what courage. And now I am going to do it myself, in fact it was to be this afternoon but is postponed till Friday bec of my illness.817 Heaven help us, pal. Wish me luck, as with my complete heart I do you, if you are going ahead. She is a very very good woman, one of the sweetest-natured and most womanly and most loyal I have ever known, I can’t describe her at all. In addition she is a raving beauty, tall, black-haired, shaped like a willow, like which also she moves, and elegant beyond praising. She is also a furnace. There are two little problems. She is 22, and a Catholic. It took us six months—and has destroyed both her father and her best friend, according to them. Wish us luck, because we are going to need some at last.

Tell me about yours. Mine is named Kate, by the way, and has been educated for the last 16 years by nuns. Brother.

I have been saying to myself for many months: now how can a man who loves another man as I love Saul come to owe him four letters. Answer: he can’t, it’s impossible. But a fact. Solve. One, it is certain that such a man would write, if he existed. Two, but he didn’t. Therefore, he didn’t exist.

Maybe I will again now.

But I have been writing good though or imagine so. Some have you in mind; I’ll throw on when I finish revising as I come on them in the general work-over I now plan. I’m thinking of saying to Faber, How wd you like to put out 75 as a book, a dry run. I am getting very tired of having so much work so out of sight and consideration. Maybe I cd get on with the poem as a whole if I had a little encouragement. Do you know that I’ve heard a great deal about the Savage ones but the only letter I ever had about them, or one of the few, came from Venezuela or somewhere down there—no, that’s just the only recent letter, but there were very few from strangers. Robert Fitzgerald by the way thinks they’re ‘marvellous’ (we just did a job at the School of Letters, at Indiana, together).

I lifted mss from two gifted kids there for you to look at for the Savage; will send on soon, next week.

“Herzog” is splendid. The letter-structure fascinates me. Guy not like Augie or Wilhelm, not at all like Henderson. I take it that’s the first chapter. How’s it going?? Bless it.

Ralph said you thought I might be cross still abt Harriet. False, forgiven, forgotten—as I pray to be forgiven. And throw me a letter, kid. Happy grindings,

love,

John

[Haffenden, MS]

Mpls, 31 Oct 61

Dear Poukie,

I haven’t seen you in so long, I don’t know how you talk or what you can understand. Again & again I’ve hoped to be able to come to see you; but this is a large country and I live far away, and I haven’t had—you won’t understand this, nor will your Mother be able to explain it to you, you are too young, darling—I just haven’t had the money. One reason, the big one, why I haven’t had the money to come see you is that—but you won’t understand this either—I send money to your mother for your living.

I miss you. I miss you very day, and I have done every day since I saw you last. I have long dreams ^(one last night)^ abt you. (Draw me a new picture, like of cliffs and sand-dunes below and where we are; your mother will explain this.) I also get to have long talks [?about you now & then818]—with people who know you—the Sieg’s, the Rosses (you might remember Peter & Stephen—Stephen, his mother tells me, got down on all fours lately & said ‘I’m Alice’—Ellen, his mo., said ‘You can’t be Alice—that’s a girl’s name’—he said, wumphing across the floor, ‘I’m Alice the Dog’; when he ^then^ called ‘Alice! Alice!’ Ellen said ‘But why are you calling that? That’s your name’—he said ‘I’m talking to myself.’)—and I also can talk abt you to:—just myself, and in lectures (yr Mo. will try to explain this), and to a good lady who (after years) is my new wife. We look at pictures of you, so far off.

Now, you must remember what I say:

1) It is not poss. for me to see you, much; if ever again. But you are to know that I love you. I will come as soon as I can. There is more to say abt this.

2) You must be a good boy—obeying your very good mother—heading to [?some] end outside yourself (far later, your mother will be able to explain this)—and with respect for your father, who has not been the most useless man in the present American world.

3) Then kick it all aside,—exc. for yr veneration for yr mother,—and do what seems necessary and consonant w. yr gifts, training, & allegiance.

4) Strong fathers crush sons. You are spared this, I think. (I am not able to form any conception of how my work will be regarded.) Go on.

Yours, and w. love,

John Berryman

[Buffalo, TS]

415 Erie St., S.E.

Minneapolis 14, Minn.

10 Nov 61

Dear Tony,

Hallo: I thought I had answered your letter of a year ago last June several eons ago, but I don’t find my reply-date on it, and also I never heard back, so maybe I never did. So it goes. Anyway I couldn’t say anything but “Sure, maybe, What do you want me to do?” because I couldn’t and can’t tell whether you wanted—want—me on the receiving end or the sending end. That is, to be criticized or to criticize. If to criticize, it wd depend on the poem; if to be criticized, my stuff is obliged to lie open, being in print, but whether I wd want to respond wd depend again on the poem you chose.

The idea is a good one, I think. That on Roethke is much better than the Wilbur, where there was a good deal of dead wood.819 You picked yr Roethke piece with great astuteness, and the critics too (tho’ the company is a little fast for poor Miss Deutsch), and they did themselves proud, esp Ransom to my astonished delight. I was glad to see Kunitz come down on stanza four; so do I; inspiration failed, I’d say, and management took over, as so often in D. Thomas. It had a certain carnival interest, too, to see that Ted can under optimum circumstances take criticism. I wdn’t have believed it.

I hope you and your splendid spouse had a splendid year, during which nothing irreparable happened to your splendid son and much splendid free writing got put down. I may get free next year if the lawyers & banks will leave me alone. Frost can’t sleep at night, and said here lately one of the couplets he then makes up:

“Forgive O Lord my little jokes on thee,

And I’ll forgive thy great big one on me.”

Regards to anyone I know, and my best,

John

[UMN, TS]

415 Erie Street, S.E.

Minneapolis 14, Minn.

10 Nov 61

Dear Mr Mayewski:

The wandering letters have reached me, and of course I am as glad as I am surprised to learn that a Polish poet has been sufficiently admiring and rash to render my poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet into another language.820 Mr. Maritain spoke once of putting it into French, but so far as I know it has not been translated before.

I am writing by this mail to Farrar Straus, whose job it is to fix the fee, and I expect they will be in touch with you. For my own permission, it is herewith gladly given. I wonder, though, if you or Mr Iwaniuk would send me a copy of the issue with the translation, supposing it is printed. My thanks, and I should be happy if you would transmit to Mr Iwaniuk my interest and gratitude for what can have been no easy task. (It was hard enough in English!)

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

Mpls, 12 Nov [1961]

Dear Paul,

I can’t come to see you now because—your mother will try to explain this to you, but fail, because you are only a little fellow—I pay for your living. But maybe I can come in the winter, and I can certainly come next summer. I have a job in Vermont, and maybe I can see you both before it & after. I think abt you every day & write you letters unsent. Here’s a Song you may like:

The juggler is a special man—

up go the plates, and catch them he can—

somewhere his wife is weeping on her knees,

we’ve got to see to that—full at his ease

he whirls the flashing risky plates—I sees

it’s up to Pou to say to that good wife

‘Alas—and yet’ and cuddle up to her

and be her mage & minister

and be his own strong on-going Pou for life.

dear love,

Your father,

J.B.

A sea horse, fr. the Bay of Bengal, is coming.

[UMN, TS]

415 Erie SE, Mpls 14, 12 Nov 61

Dear Mr Cook,

Thanks for your good letter. I take the points in your order.

You are generous about the arrangements for Mrs Berryman; my thanks. Of course I’ll be happy to give a reading or lecture: perhaps a reading (unless one of the subjects I’ve been hot at for years—Olive Schreiner’s life & work, a psychoanalytic study of Campion’s lyrics and Heart of Darkness, dozens of others—bursts into flame: would there be any limitation on the subject-matter?)—I like to begin by reading with comment poems by other people, then some of my own work.821

Eliot is a problem. I could work up a new course, leaving him out; but the present course, a version of which I gave with what was repeatedly declared to me to be with sensational success at The School of Letters this summer, is precisely directed toward the American pinnacles, Song of Myself and The Waste Land—and I need Prufrock as leading to the major poem. These are the only poems of Eliot’s that I will touch (with perhaps Ash Wed. IV), and Eliot I won’t be concerned with at all; so that Miss Drew’s course will probably be very different, dealing I’d guess to some extent with the men (WBY, TSE, WHA).822 Isn’t she the author of the admirable Discovering Poetry, a Norton book as I recall, that fascinated me when I was a kid?—very sensitive woman. The point of my course is to push down through all other considerations, but neglecting nothing except explicitly, to the primary governing formal insight without which the work could not have come into being; and it is strictly original. I can’t imagine much overlapping. Your letter is so considerate that if I could replace Eliot I would, but as you can see it’s hardly possible. Maybe scheduling the courses at the same time is a good idea, as you suggest. But let me try to match your consideration: if you dislike this, let me hear. I think it is the hardest, most speculative & plunging course I ever gave anywhere; and I’d like to try it again, before perhaps making a book of it—as many people have urged me to do; but I cd certainly devise another course. There are some European poems, by the way, but it meets your ‘major concentration in the Amer. field’ all right. I’ll do some substitution here when I’ve time.

[Haffenden, TS]

415 Erie SE, Mpls 14

Thurs [fall 1961]

Dear Ann,

I’ve tried to call you several times; no luck. Thank you for your good letter. Mr Schwartz apparently called off the hearing—demands being met. I have so many things to say I don’t know where to start. I ought to say that I have been in bed mostly for days now, from overwork, but am coming back. I’ll take it at random.

Thanks for the summer remission of two months. It makes life seem possible. I never yet got through I think without borrowing, just for myself, and now there are two, and we think Kate may be preg. Too soon for tests, Boyd say. Please wish us luck.

I sent Schwartz six predated cheques, and he sounded satisfied, on the telephone, and say he throw copies (I got up at 3 a.m. to write that letter) of my long letter to my invisible attorney and you.

The crazy insurance you are absolutely right about; I got in touch w Archer again and now have here documents from Occidental making the second policy ‘irrevocable’ (I was wrong about this, but who could be right?) to Paul: copies to California and you. I didn’t give a damn whether it was to Paul or you—what’s the difference? but ‘wife’ won’t do at all, and in fact it was plainly screwed up, exactly as you said. I hope you do not dream of blaming me for this, these sharks Schwartz and Archer being haywire.

The medical business totally eludes me, and I will write you about later. There are bills incomprehensible to me from the Golden Valley clinic years ago and from Peekskill.

Now: owing to your account of Paul’s analphabetism and music, I got excited, and that night drafted out the Alphabet I enclose.823 I don’t hear too much about Poukie, and when I hear I jazz. I wanted to write it out proper, and all I lack is paper ink and nib; so do pray read to him. I have thought of sending to the New Yorker; would you object on his account? I will send him betw. Xmas & Nyears a fair written-out copy. McCosh he find me McGuffey’s readers and will send Grades 1–2 (he only have Grade 6) as soon as come in. Or rather, I want to study them first.

I just finished reading all the prosem papers plus fifty or sixty 61 papers; besides new pref & bibliog note to paperback Crane for March; besides other things; why so tired, besides the Fall general’. I have no special feeling of course that the N’Yorker wd take the Alphabet, but I tho’t of sending. Pouk is living it up: I got his own Christmas card from him. I will make notes in the Readers for him. I don’t got no Christmas cards, and I do not know what sort of game he would like. Please offer suggestions to me about the Alphabet; I do not know his present interests. I did the best I could just with my brain. Perhaps you and he wd come visit me at Bread Loaf in the summer: Ralph say is physical beautiful beyond imag’, and that egomaniac Frost invite to his cabin. Howard, my pal, only 12 mi o824

[Haffenden, TS]

415 Erie St., S.E.

Minneapolis 14

16 Dec, Sat evening [1961]

Dear Delmore,

How did we fall out of touch, all those years ago? I can’t remember that we ever quarrelled. It is this damned American geography; I haven’t been east for two years; and of course money.

This note had no purpose as I moved over to the desk to write it except suddenly, for no immediate reason, to say hello and send love and brilliant wishes. (I just met two or three deadlines and have one or two more to meet and have spent the last 48 hrs largely in bed, and my mind is relaxed and I thought of old friends, especially you.) But now it occurs to me that I’ve agreed to do a jazz at Bread Loaf next summer. Kate and I then will be in New York both before and after it, and why don’t we meet if you are anywhere around? You would like her, she has black hair and is graceful beyond the ordinary lot of woman and silent, though in the middle of this sentence she threatened me with her purse for some unclear reason. She is making dinner.

All around the country, for ten years or more, whenever I hear something good of you I am delighted and if I hear a thing bad I feel miserable; that’s all I set out to say. There are signs, I think (though I’m partly guessing, since I almost never see periodicals or critical books), that your marvellous poetry is making its way as it did at first. I have never understood why you haven’t printed the whole of Genesis done, and your essays which Warren and I, do you remember, thought the best then being done in the country. I hope you are not alone for the holiday but have around a little friend or new wife: join the Club, as I dared do in September and Saul did last week: the May-Sept or 3rd-Wife Club, which I just invented. So this is an affectionate signal.

Yours,

John

[Haffenden, TS]

415 Erie St., S. E.

Minneapolis 14

17 Dec 61

Dear Betty,

You thoughtful characters (I mean you and Van—my schizophrenia does not allow me to address, apparently, two people at once): if you knew the pleasure the book and picture give me you would not have sent them, I do not deserve it.825 I am if poss. even more interested in the picture than the book, but let me begin (and I am not going to be long, for I have deadlines, NY deadlines, to meet quick quick) with my satisfaction in learning—after all these years—that you Betty write so well. Van I knew did. The book is delightful and I will write to you properly about it after these deadlines. I propose that you take up a literary career and put me and Van in the shade, kid—which won’t be difficult, though, come to think of it, except for Van. With Van you are going to have a problem; you see, he knows things, which we don’t; we have to flash it up. Ah, but it appears (which I always knew, frankly) that you know things too. So bomb him.

The picture, the hurrah picture. Congratulations to both of you and even to Christine who did most of the work no? She looks as omnicompetent as ever. You Betty look like the baby’s sister; no insult intended. Van looks noble. Offhand, not taking it big, but ready (if all goes well, in the right direction) to break into an incommensurable grin. Damaris does not look wiggly. So it goes. She also looks as if the lamp had a hand on her good-looking shoulder. Sanford looks like a story once told me at Smith (I was a junior at Columbia) about the U S Marines—I’ll save for when I see you next, or have I told you already, or ten to one you know it already. What is he up to?

Now listen. Since I am already so much in your debt, make me more so. [Hurl?] me scurrilous news of the Hamishes (all 3) and Randolffs (what is Danny’s nice wife’s name?) and even the triumphant Ameses!! In return I will reveal to you that I founded in Sept. a May-Sept or 3rd-Wife Club, which Saul Bellow joined this week. Daring, I called it. Kate she is named, and she is as pretty as you are, and makes weirder faces.

Greetings & love,

John

[UMN, TS]

415 Erie Street S.E.

Minneapolis 14, Minn.

31 December 1961

My dear Sir:

You were good enough to instruct me, with your usual courtesy and elegance of style, to ‘Ponder my query’; and I have done so.826 For some weeks now I have been puzzling as to whether I should reply to your unexampled letter, and, if so, what I should say. What I can do is simple: nothing. All my Stephen Crane materials are, and have been for nine years, in dead storage in Princeton, completely inaccessible somewhere among 36 or more large cartons, in the custody of Bohren’s, containing the bulk of my library and other papers. I will, when they become available, which may be next year, so advise you, and at that time I will—not indeed become your research assistant as you seem to propose, with your usual insolence—but I will answer detailed questions and supply you with what in detail you ask for then. I will not, of course, send you the mass of papers from which in part I compiled the book, and it is a measure of your weirdness that you should request it—perhaps, my dear sir, you would care to see my diaries? and love-letters? which may very well be mixed in, alongside verse-manuscripts, with the elaborate Crane-stuff. Who do you think you are, the Library of Congress? which has indeed asked to buy my papers.

It has been pointed out to me that your anxiety to use my ‘notes’ for the book which in Crane’s Letters you sneeringly describe as ‘a version of Beer’ is odd.827 But everything about you is odd, my good Sir.

Now allow me to say to you that your letter is the most impudent and fantastic communication I have received during a career of almost thirty years as a writer. You repeatedly in it recognize this yourself, passing back and forth between self-reproach and patronizingness; but I wish to make clear the degree of it. Of course part of the insufferable unsteadiness of tone is due to the incompetence of your writing, but not all.

You refer me to Mr Levinson for your bona fides, or—as you put it—‘character appraisal of my honesty’.828 He is in England, as perhaps you knew. Another colleague, Mr Brom Weber, I thought would do instead, and he tells me that he is taking you to court.829

Allow me to say further that no one in a comparable situation has ever before thought it necessary to supply me with a character reference. It argues a bad conscience; and of course you and I know just what your conscience is like. I learned ten years ago when you reprinted from the Scovel letters only what I had printed, without applying to me for them as a whole. Ironically, at that point I could have sent you the file in ten minutes.

You will be happy to hear that I sent to press recently a new preface and some bibliographical additions to the Meridian edition of my Stephen Crane which will be out in March. Happy New Year.

Yours faithfully,

John Berryman

P.S. Cannot you learn that, here, you are nothing and I am nothing and even Beer is nothing—it is Crane who matters. No; you cannot.

1962

[Buffalo, TS]

415 Erie St., SE

Minneapolis 14, Minn.

4 March 1962

Dear Tony,

I’ve been very busy; excuse delay. I was glad you liked my piece, and more glad when I learned from Wilbur & Nims of my blunder over the Miltonic quotation.830 It’s queer. Bk 4 is my favourite book and I’ve been familiar for two decades with Cal’s Milton-jazz but I seem to have pushed straight through that matter to its source, and hypnotized by that never thought of PL. Reason must be my current hatred (five years) for that poem. Doesn’t matter, since the others correct me. They also make much more than I did of the ‘uplift’ at the end of the poem; I don’t hear so much of that, and I doubt if they are right. But whichever one—Wilbur—takes up the voyeurism is right. I saw this, of course,—it makes the bridge from the fairy to the illness,—but in a poem by a friend I just decided to let it lie; no doubt wrongly. I am ready to criticize Cal and did, but I didn’t feel like exposing him. This sort of thing is why in general I quit reviewing in 1948. Nims’s piece was creditable, I thought; rather fussy perhaps. Wilbur’s I confess I was disappointed by, though as you say it’s good too. Thanks for sending them. I’ll be curious to see what Cal writes. (I had a cheering note from Tate, to whom I threw a carbon: ‘This is magnificent. I envy Cal’ etc. This is private of course, but was pleasant to a blunderer.)

Your queries: top of 7, ‘affect’ is the technical psychological term, and on 2 ‘appearing’ is right. And need we insert the other authors on 8??? My God, those works are pretty well known. But if, on 8, five lines below, we can change ‘tears down houses’ to ‘lets houses fall down’, that will avoid an inadvertent extravagance of expression; though I don’t know that it’s fair to change anything once the pieces have gone to the poet.

About your proposal to ground a symposium on something of mine, let me think a little. I am very sensible of the honour implied in the invitation, since your choices have so far been so good. But for this purpose a piece should be substantial in length, and independent, and almost all my work for years has been done on long poems. Those Noble Savage Songs are only sections of a long poem; they possess a certain independence, like many other sections that will soon be appearing all over the place, but hardly enough—the critics wd have to do too much guessing and extrapolation, even if we took two or three of them together, bringing the line-total up near Skunk Hour’s. I’m very doubtful. ‘Scholars’ is too long, as you thought, and unfinisht too.

Very best, and to your lady, and to that charming man Woodrow Borah when you see him,

John

[UMN, TS]

415 Erie St., SE

Mpls 14, Minn.

Sunday [March 1962]

Dearest Poukie, and also Sir Paul:

Have you ever had a letter on official stationery? Here goes.

I am deeply sorry I got wrong the date of your birthday. You will find that Big Ones are lousy peoples and do these things sometimes. We must all be patient with one another and eventually rescue will come.

But now that you are such an old fellow (although really you are only a little fellow—and what a pleasure that is you won’t know until too late) it is hard to know what to get you. I thought of a balsa-wood airplane glider that you put together yourself, with a rubber attachment, to shoot through the air, now that Spring is coming; but I have been so drowned in chores, even during the week’s vacation, that I haven’t been able to go downtown to look for it. Would you like that? Or perhaps you will name two things that you particularly would like, and we might see about one of them. I don’t know what you are up to these days, you see; although Mommy sent me some pretty good pictures of you, for which my thanks to her.

Meanwhile have you mastered the cards? and here is a verse I have made in honour of your birthday. It is about Whinger Dinger Diff, and is called “Whinger Dinger Diff’s Come-uppance”—a tough word that Mommy will explain.

Whinger Dinger Diff,

lazy on a cliff,

lazy in the sun

hating everyone,

said to a fly

that lit by his nose

‘You are only a fly,

I will fix you in a jiff,

I am Whinger Dinger Diff,

as everybody knows.’

The fly gave him a hard look

and hit him with an unusually large book.

So you see that laziness rage & arrogance do not pay off; not on a cliff.

Our snowbanks here are still many feet high though filthy dirty, and diminishing. The sun has forgotten to visit Minnesota for a long time.

I have a little good news. I wonder if I can explain it to you; perhaps Mommy will help. This week came from England a very pretty little Penguin book with poems in it, called The New Poetry, and guess whose poems lead off.831 Daddy’s. Then come Robert Lowell’s, and we are titled “The Americans” and everybody else is titled “The British”. You probably don’t know yet what a coincidence is, but in the same mail came a long letter from Lowell—an old and loved friend whom I haven’t heard from for several years—partly about an essay I wrote on a poem of his called Skunk Hour (you remember the little skunk I sent you?), which ^(the poem)^ is also in this book. Now this is the sort of thing that people are accustomed to boast about, and you must never boast. Boasting is out. But if anybody boasts about their father, it is all right for you to think privately: ‘Well, my father did something that was thought interesting five thousand miles away and years later and that nobody else could do.’ I think your mother will tell you that that is all right.

I believe it is not boasting if I tell you this, because we should trade good news. What is your best new good news? Who is your best friend at present? Do you brush your teeth with bronze regularity? (I’ll bet you do.) Have you got away with anything spectacular lately? Daddy has been asked to read his poems at a convocation (tough word) in Northrop (a great big place that Mommy knows) a week from tomorrow, at noon, and also at the Walker, in May; your Mommy will tell you how unusual, for me, these invitations are, and so this is good news too; and an American Studies area conference to meet in St Paul early in May has asked me to talk to them about the intellectual and emotional background (wow!) of a poem I once wrote about Anne Bradstreet—this will be a pleasure—and, poor fellow, you will probably have to read that poem some time. Now I’ll copy out for you a stanza from a grown-up poem which I was working at in California three years ago (and in Princeton NJ fourteen years ago): it’s called “Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion”:

Sozzled, Mo Tzû, after a silence, vouchsafed

a word alarming:—We must love them all.

Affronted, our fathers’ shades jumped.

—Yes,—he went madly on, and waved in quest

of his own dreadful subject,—O the father

(he cried) must not be all.

Whereon upon consent      we broke up for the day.

When you come to understand this stanza, and why I have now quoted it to you, you will be an educated Poukie or Paul-sensei.

My dearest love,

John Berryman

I liked yr pictures, esp. the TV boy (as I wrote Mommy). Perhaps you wd make a picture of Whinger Dinger Diff.

[Buffalo, TS]

415 Erie St, SE

Mpls 14

23 Mar 62

Dear Tony,

Can’t find yr last letter but no matter, it’ll turn up. Meanwhile an idea. I had moving and even wonderful letters fr Lowell & Catherine [sic] Carver abt my piece and other things—and in the same mail w Cal’s came the new Penguin The New Poetry which starts off w my stuff and then comes Cal’s, we are the only Americans, and his winds up w Skunk Hour, how’s that for coincidence? But the point is this: a friend of mine suggests that—as you broke yr rule about new poems for Kunitz’s of twenty years ago—you might break yr rule abt whole poems, for part of the Bradstreet poem.832 I wd not have been receptive enough to this idea to report it to you if I had to make the selection, but in fact Alvarez reprinted the childbirth section (stanzas 17 thro 21) so that in suggesting that to you as a possibility, I don’t have to take any responsibility for it. I don’t say at all that I in any way think it the best part of the poem; it has however the further vouching—for that Ciardi (of all people) raved it up in SR, mentioning the—get set—storm scenes in Lr and the best of Faulkner. So in passing on my friend’s (Mr Ralph Ross’s) idea, I think it’s likely that the section is worth study. (Is Kunitz’s poem much good really? Im doubtful and was bored by the Symposium exc for obiter dicta of Cal’s). The 5 st’s come to 40 lines, your normal length: as to whether the critics wanted to take into acct the rest, up to them. You’d need permission from FSC, Amer pub’rs. One point more: if you take up the idea, I cd let you have for copying for the critics my prefatory remarks for the BBC reading, which I’ve not published.—Mislaid letter, as I said, but sorry to hear of yr lady’s fall and glad no worse.

Yrs

JB

[UMN, TS]

News of God

Old P-cat

‘. . Appalled’833

415 Erie St., SE

Mpls 14, Minn

23 March 62

Dear Catherine [sic],

How lovely to talk with you and before to have your adorable letter. Having misspelt your name—that damned name has always bothered me, like birthdays, which I get almost right—I will write to you properly shortly. Proof I was about to: letter of 23 June 61 with handwritten postscript ‘I’ve taken a place at 10 Bayard Lane for Sept 1’ etc. I always wondered if you did. I never write to my friends (or if I do I lose the letters, as I lost December letters to: Saul on his marriage, Delmore for not [sic] reason, Van & Betty Ames in Cincinnati, all 3 of which Kate just recovered from what we call The Hole, a junkheap by my chair & in the corner) but I never cease to love them and almost constantly send radar to their destinies. I have no destiny; yet your letter and Cal’s showed so much of the thought and useless care that I have for many years spent on both of you that I felt Renaissance’d. After I talked to you I called the blessed Mackies, and was delighted but had a shock: Geo Rowley is dead.834 Yet to be in touch with them and with you and with Cal seems to me rare, paradisal, I can hardly believe it. Saul bums around the world; I do, without moving. It’s not a life one wd wish a dog. I wish you were happier in Princeton, much happier. I think you wd like my loved friend, Ed Cone, composer and pianist: wd you call him and say I tend to think of him every week for the last nine years? He is a generous and good man who was cursed with money, so he never knows what the hell to do. Richard is off. Tell me what your place is like, and what you do besides running (to its infinite merit) everything.

Business: Can you or do you or they want to fit these Songs or any of them into NWW 21? They are pieces of a long poem, in hand since 1955, of which I’ve printed only 5 in the TLS Special on The Amer Imag’n, and 12 in Noble Savage. I don’t know if they are any good and don’t care. Jim Wright tells me Donald Hall tells me [sic] they have affected the young British poets, insofar as there are; slim comfort. I have got thoroughly depressed at have [sic] so much work—hundreds of pages—out of sight for so long; so I decided to throw out—to requests here & abroad, and other places. So I sent 14 to the New Yorker; all rejected. I thought of giving up writing or at least showing. But I’ve recovered from that; Alvarez’s anthology and yours & Cal’s letters helped. So I’m sending these three to you (they shd be called Three Dream Songs and numbered so, or Two DS or A Dream Song), and seven to PR, and then to all the other places here and abroad that have been boring me, from The Observer to (getset) the NYTimes. Now a question: what’s the jazz on foreign & here publication?? Can I send the Observer, Encounter, some Belgian, some Indian periodicals stuff already published here, etc, or not?????? Write me a letter. My friend Ralph Ross proposed letting Ostroff do a symp, on st’s 17–21 of Bradstreet.

Love,

[UMN, TS]

1) God bless H.—

2) “The Secret of.” (taken)835

415 Erie St., SE

Minneapolis 14, Minn.

24 March 62

Dear Sir, Or Mr Kilmartin:

I laid aside two songs to send you after yr amiable invitation of 14 July 59 but then decided against printing any more sections—these are parts of a long poem, seven years in hand—beyond the 5 I gave Pryce-Jones for the TLS on The Amer Imag’n, and 12 to Saul Bellow for The Noble Savage here. I now have begun spraying around, and throw you Two Dream Songs, to be numbered I and II; I haven’t so numbered them bec you may only want one (or of course none). Though the second is a carbon, it has never been submitted anywhere; I can’t find the fair.

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

My postscript, 2 1 / 2 years ago, ran: It is pleasant to hear that you plan to print serious verse, as no Amer paper does. (I will add to this: that I had a letter of 15 May 61 from The NY Times wanting something, and my wife and I have been unable to find anything worth the mere idea of giving them, because my poems such as they are are all the work of an actual human being.)

[Bodleian, TS]

415 Erie St., SE

Minneapolis 14, Minn

24 March 62

Dear Stephen,

It is good, or delightful, to learn that you’re coming here—we hope of course to see you (I have taken, like Saul, the violent action of remarrying). Read ‘Polar Exploration’ will you? But this is just a business note to see if you want the Two Dream Songs enclosed.836 I wouldn’t want either printed alone. After seven years’ work I have got tired at having so much work invisible—except five I gave Pryce-Jones and 12 to The Noble Savage—and have started spraying around.

Forgive, or approve, shortness.

Best,

yours,

John

Alvarez’s Penguin just came: his ^prefatory^ comments do not make it clear to me why he did not use you & Auden etc. & why he did use Cal & me at all.

[UMN, TS]

11 April 62

Dear Mr Bloom:

Thank you very much for your letter and for the offer it contains. I feel strongly inclined to accept this offer, and gladly; but it is just 24 hours since your letter came and in a place as large as this the wheels are numerous and the wheels grind slow, and I am not quite yet in a position to accept, although I had long talks this morning with both the Dean of the Graduate School and the Dean of SLA and have just written to President Wilson.837 Both the Deans agree in principle, and I am sure the President will, and my immediate chairman (Ralph Ross of Humanities) did also before he left for Texas to harangue the ignorant. But there are other matters and other people involved. I think, though, that as soon as I hear back from the President, and Ross returns from Dallas,—I expect both on Friday, day after tomorrow,—I will be able to send you at once an effective acceptance. The formal acceptance will inevitably be delayed a few days.

Provisionally, a word about my courses. The advanced exposition and fiction courses; okay; and I wd not dream of suggesting any interference with your poetic-composition set-up (wd you say to Mr Damon that I remember vividly his pioneer essay on Ulysses in H & H? and work on Blake). Now for the other. I would like it very much if I did not give any other courses the first term, though I have absolutely no objection to occasional lectures or readings or whatever. The reason is that I am burning with anxiety to finish a large job of Shakespearian research (book-length) and am also deep in a long poem; and owing to the university here giving me the whole fall off with pay, I am oriented to a maximum of autumnal freedom. But in the spring I’ll be glad to give a third course as you propose. Suppose: graduate, with hotshot undergraduates; seminar-style; one evening a week, two hours or so, three credits. Termpaper, midterm, final. Here are five poss’s:

1) Deep Form in Poetry Lyric to Epic; Amer. emphasis, but Europ & Oriental poetry & theory will be drawn on.

2) Henry James & Stephen Crane: polar types in Amer Narrative.

3) The Age of Hamlet: 1600. Materials literary, religious, philosophical, institutional, political, biog’l, psychological; emphasis on original texts.

4) Studies in Mod Europ lit. 1984, Yeats, Ulysses, The Trial, Anne Frank, etc.

5) Shakespeare’s Utopian plays: LLL, AYL, Timon, Temp. Readings also in Tho. More, Montaigne, James I.

I like three and five best myself. I haven’t seen yr catalog so don’t know about overlap.

Yrs sincerely

[Texas Tech, MS]

415 Erie St., SE

Mpls 14

12 or 13 April 62

Dear Ted,

It is true that I am a rat—a whiskery rat (I remember you loathe rats, only rats: cafeteria, Harv. Sq., 1954, summer heat)—for not answering letters, but (1) I think very constantly of my friends and love them at all times all the same, and (2) I have re-married—six months ago—and now sometimes do answer letters, and it is delightful to have yr card & to learn that yr new stuff is going good & that you & Walter (to whom I owe letters as vividly as I do to you) are friends: as you both know, you are two of my most (almost only) ^admired^ Young American Prosemen: you are if possible an even more devoted artist, without making a fuss about it, than he is, and he is if possible an even better man than you are—though maybe I only think so bec. I know him better.

Forgive that sentence. I am in hospital, where my doctor thrusts me when I show an inclination to walk up & down the walls, so full of drugs. So I haven’t any of either of your letters by me, and will only write sketchily: in thanks for card & to get back in touch.

Damn it, I cannot even remember whether I ever congratulated you on your marriage ^(I do!),^ or wh. I ever wrote to you abt the fighter novel and to W. abt The Poison Tree.838 The reason for this idiocy of oblivion is that often, on some thought or none, I compose letters in my head to friends (& enemies, & enemies; & God) and never afterward know whether I wrote them or not; everyone I imagine does this, but me very. I am prone even to writing letters & mislaying them before I send them. I suddenly at New Year’s or so wrote to 3 old friends and my wife only found the letters last week—one was to Saul, who had just equalled my leap (3rd marriage—A. Miller has since joined the club; that is, come to think of it in the good old statistical American way, almost half the editors of the Savage—where yr brilliant story was highly admired, by the way).

Nurse w. another shot. no more now

_______________Tell Walter a Harpers editor named Jack Something depressed me w. word his novel wasn’t going well; hope changed; all best & affection.—There is a brilliant-like boy here, 17, son of my doctor, who thinks the sun rises and sets by Hoagland. Ever,

John

You both write damn good letters. Now you sort of each owe me one. Give. And I’ll tell you about me.

[UMN, MS]

[late April 1962]

Dear Tiger:

Don’t be so damned grateful, will you?839 It’s oppressive. I suffer from sort of hopeless gratefulness myself—to the men & women who have done for no reason marvellous and good things for me, or just been such that the universe seems (almost) worth living in. It’s stupid, for there is usually a bit working the other way—e.g., our case. In six years I cd not explain properly the joy you gave me that summer—and not only joy, but—I don’t feel witty enough to put a name to it (I lectured to several thousand people yesterday, twice, and my brains are briefly broken)—so I’ll pass you on a staggering sentence of Einstein’s. He’s been talking abt his early (12 or so?) loss of religious faith, and then says: ‘Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights which they had achieved, were the friends which cd not be lost’840—only the German is on another plane, ‘waren die unverlierbaren Freunde’—the un-lose-able friends. You seemed to give me then, gave me, a fresh hard glad look at what I tho’t I knew something about, the artist’s conscience. I have tried to use that standard since—but I won’t say successfully. So no more gratitude; we’re quits,—not that I have ever been able to do anything for you. But you see how easy it is to fall into error—maybe that’s wrong too—maybe my passionate admiration at that point was helpful to you, who knows? (It got me thrown out of Iowa, anyway; and good riddance; and a piece of luck.) I’ll bet you understand me completely. But it isn’t understanding, it’s feeling, so I’ll throw you two examples besides us. Two of the men I feel most grateful to, with full reason, are Saul & Cal Lowell: I try to remind myself, against prostration, that when Saul was in real doubt over Augie—the ms. was then 900 pp. or so—I cheered him, & I’ve helped him, by being around, a hundred times since—and so with Cal: he wrote me last week for no reason a letter so generous & vivid abt my poem (7 years in the works, and he saw some 20 sections when he was here just before) that you wd think you cd never get even—so: I try to remember that I helpt him in Maine on the proofs of Lord Weary fifteen years ago & helpt make his Amer. reputation w. an endless review in Partisan841 & held his hand many times, between marriages (his & mine), in New York, and when he was going out, and just did a living essay (in a symposium—w. Wilbur & somebody) on his “Skunk Hour”, for New World Writing. I try. As for you, pal, succeed, no quantity of reminiscence takes the happy burden of gratitude from me.

Kate & I—she is taking a nap: a small monster is on the way, 8 months hence—are eager to see yr Amy.842 I love that name, and I never knew nobody named that. Conceivably youse wd come stay w.us in a weird place called Providence Rhode Island (only it don’t seem to be—we study maps—no island) where I have agreed to be a writer-in-residence next year; if yr horrible & enviable travel-plans allow. PLINK.

John

P.S. Shall I answer yr letter?

1) Can’t I tease you? I did twice, abt ‘rat’ & I knew you wd misread my ‘better man’ passage & dance w. outraged pride until you caught on. Only yr report of it was beyond even my expectations.

2) I know it’s wicked to tease friends.

3) Please write back soon, or have Amy do. Kate refuses. She loved yr letter & besides I told her long ago all I know abt you. But when I proposed her writing to Amy, she jibbed. Well, women are peculiar.

4) I hope you show my letters to Walter, whom I love. And if my wishes cd make his novel go, it would. You are lucky to have him for a friend; so is he.

5) There is another saint ^& gifted Amer. writer^ living in Italy. His name is Robt Fitzgerald: poet, translator of Odyssey, wife Sally, 6 or so kids; Catholic. He just bought a castle near Perugia. Why don’t you or Walter telephone or go see843

[Houghton, TS]

415 Erie St SE

Mpls 14, Minn

Sunday 29 Apr [1962]

Dear Cal,

I have been so entangled & crusht in money’s problems or rather crises—delinquent insurance, delinq. taxes, an old bank calling me—that I’m slow in return to yr marvellously generous & free letter, and being still so crusht must still be quick in reply. You truly encouraged me with your hope. I am going, w. Kate’s help, to get off 75 or so to FSC & Faber. God knows what they will look like, I hardly care, but alas I have a responsibility to the poor things. The grand problems are two. They are partly independent but only if—as Saul does ^(is)^—the reader is familiar w. Henry’s tone, personality, obsessions, friend, activities; otherwise, in small numbers, they seem simply crazy (but I was a little bucked here, the same day yr letter came, by one fr Spender, to whom I’d sent two of the craziest of all, taking both—the only reason this mattered was the New Yorker’s having rejected three ^14^ and New World Writing fourteen ^3^ (but turn those figures around)—to be unpublishable after so much work seemed hard, hard). Second problem: the poem is hopelessly unfinished; so the 75 Dream Songs, say, will be just a dry run, and may not convince anyone, including me, and why should it? Yet slabs of these things have made people laugh & cry. And I have another little feeling, which perhaps I wd only tell you: after the long-drawn artistic austerity and daring—if those terms are not exaggerated—of the Bradstreet poem, it seems to me that I might be trusted a little by such readers as care. Even you, and you seem to do. Only, if they seem inchoate in the 75 or so, don’t mind; don’t praise me, but don’t mind; give me another year or so, and I’ll be rid of the bloody thing forever and can go back to writing self-sufficient workable poems, ha. You are a lucky genius to do so. I have one I began twelve or more years ago, and worked on hard in Berkeley 1960, called “Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion”—a Chinese paradisal operation, scroll-style, fluent but abrupt, at maybe 60 lines (and I mean 60 ll., though—Christ—up to the last minute, after five yrs of work, I saw the Bradstreet poem as nestling into 50 or 60 lines: then, with the hundreds of pages of notes and months to go, the poem began). Would you like to hear a stanza I like? Maybe Elizabeth wd. Scene: Heaven. The scholars talk. There have been three big jobs of task on this, 49, 60, and a few months ago: I can’t at the moment place this one:

Sozzled, Mo Tzû, after a silence, vouchsafed

a word alarming:—We must love them all.

Affronted, our fathers’ shades jumped.

—Yes, he went madly on, and waved in quest

of his own dreadful subject:—O, the father,

he cried, must not be all.

Whereon upon consent      we broke up for the day.

That’s the stanza-form, how do you like it. What I am most grateful to you for is an opinion that ‘a first version wd do no harm’ of my long poem. I can’t help feeling that it’s irresponsible to publish—not 16 and 30 cantos as Pound did—but a large number of sections which I still however retain completely [sic] control of. I wonder, wonder. But you cheer me up.—Enjoy yourself—please—with our unworthy Skunk Hour pieces, and Kate & I will be in NYC in mid-June: maybe we cd look in on Harriet? Love to you one and two and three,

John

Here’s the dedicated Song: not adeq. to ded. to you—I’ll do better later.844

[Haffenden, TS]

May 1962

REPORT TO MR CLARK ON KERSTIN PEDERSEN845

letter-grade: hard to decide: her own papers were less competent than Mr McCabe’s, though more sensitive to literary values, but her teaching is so much more gifted than his, that let’s say B plus.

Her handling of her classes differs a good deal from hour to hour (one class, admittedly suffering from fantastic traffic outside, so that I could hardly hear a thing myself, there was a good deal of whispering among the students, unreproved; another, discipline was perfect), but she is a really talented teacher, and her range is wide: she was good both at Pope and at Whitman, she is wonderfully clear at assignments and at reference back and forth in the course, better at integrating lecturers’ remarks than anyone I think I have visited, and in general first-class. She reaches the students wholly; teases them, lightly, with possibilities; uses gesture more, and better, than any young teacher I’ve watched; probes their minds; is quite willing to leave questions open (the end of “When lilacs last …”846: ‘is this a Christian resolution or not?’—after an admirable enquiry into the matter). She is also modest and keeps in constant touch with them: ‘Am I making myself clear?’ (she was)—and puts proposals to votes, by the results of which, if the vote was sensible, she then abides. She is amusing and fluent, equally on the nature of balance in Pope’s couplet, his opinions of women, and the administration of space in Whitman’s elegy (she was excellent on the physical lilac-bush). She is gentle with their foolish suggestions but turns them gradually into some plausible channel.

Contra’s:

She lets the students scatter (one day when there were only 16 present) all over the room, so that they can often not hear each other, especially if there’s traffic; and sometimes talks exclusively to one side of the room, though on other days she swings well back and forth.

She doesn’t read aloud very well,—for the reason, I think, that she reads passages (and rather hurriedly) rather as purely illustrative; being precisely opposite to Mr McCabe in this respect.

I thought her grading and comments unexceptionable, severe but fair, and generous in praise (‘Bravo’, ‘Excellent idea’, etc.)

One genuine weirdness, though, I may as well mention. She spoke in one hour of hearing on the radio of FDR’s death and of her emotion (this must have been in regard to Whitman and Lincoln). So far, so good. Then she went on to ask ‘I just wondered whether any of you had’!—from their cribs?? I was astonished and baffled by a sudden wonder whether she really knew how young these people were, while managing them so admirably.

Respectfully submitted,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

121 TNM, Univ of Minnesota,

Mpls 14, Minn.

13 June 1962

Dear Mr Cook,

Many thanks for your last letter,—which however overwhelms me with remorse for having neglected, in the press of fantastic business and complications here, the matter of books on reserve: it is true that I teach largely, in both these courses, from the books strictly required (and, in the poetry course, from texts ditto’d), but still of course I want things on reserve; the specific reason for the delay is that I have meant to give the paperback purple-eaters a complete rundown on relevant stuff—only that is a big job and I have never got to it; the reason I thought it necessary is that the paperbacks often supersede (as my Stephen Crane, Meridian this spring, does) the original editions.847 But libraries often don’t have them and that’s another problem, conflicting. As for Hourly & Three Day & Inside Cage & Outside Cage848 (I am not using that James story), not knowing the circumstances I can’t judge at all. I give a big lecture and a little seminar, not so little, here, and it’s hard to tell even with them. So may I just put down some standard items, and leave it to your secretary or somebody familiar with the operation (number of students and so on)—not you—to adjudicate?—

DEEP FORM:849

Marjorie Crump, The Composition of the Aeneid (titles may be wrong, all my stuff is stored)

Goethe, Conv’s with Eckermann

TSEliot, Selected Essays

Yvor Winters, In Defence of Reason

RPBlackbur, The Double Agent, and a pb

on Walt Whitman: Gay Wilson Allen’s biography (an unworthy), and an Evergreen pb WWh’s Poems by Allen and Chas T Davis

Helen Gardner’s study, pb now, of Eliot

Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age

EMW Tillyard, The English Epic and its background

JAMES & CRANE:850

HJ’s Notebooks, ed Matthiessen etc (pb now)

The Art of the Novel, HJ’s prefaces, ed Blackmur

Percy Lubbock, The Craft of fiction

E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Leavis, The Great Tradition

Howells, Criticism and Fiction

J Berryman, Stephen Crane, Meridian 1962

I can’t tell the level of the students, I have had graduate students with such widely varying abilities at Harvard & here & Berkeley & the old Sch of Mod Crit Studies at Burlington and the Sch of Letters at Indiana. Cannot some books be sent up after I can tell?

Howard Munford has bitterly disappointed me with his news of Mexico—I’m glad for him but I have never met his family nor his mine. Still, there are years to come.

Yrs sincerely,

[LOC, TS]

121 TNM

University of Minnesota

Mpls 14, Minn.

17 June 62

Dear Roy Basler,

Your letters (and copies of them) shot all over the country for weeks—Princeton, Berkeley, and so on—and at last arrived when I was moving and got mislaid until now. What a mess. And even now I don’t know whether to reply to you or to Mr Munford—for his letter has never come, only a copy of it, and I feel decidedly odd about answering a copy of a letter. I hope this will do, with respect, for both (I can’t imagine that the Librarian of Congress is burning to hear from me).

Now: yes, I will be glad to come, and thank you for the invitation. I am to read Tuesday afternoon, October 23rd, and take part in the morning sessions. I suppose I can arrange this with my chairman at Brown, where I’m writer-in-residence next year, with light duties but still duties—on Monday and Wednesday.

But I’ll tell you: I wish your people had favoured the people invited with a list of the people invited. I personally would not care to have anything to do with a circus where Mr Sandburg (whose poetry I happen to admire) and Jack Kerouac were the triumphant performing seals. I am accepting partly out of a natural respect for the Government and partly to see various old friends whom I think have probably been invited and may accept. Could the Library not, even now, let the people involved know who have accepted? I know myself one celebrated writer who has been (maybe still is) extremely hesitant & skeptical, and I was surprised recently to learn that James Wright had not been invited—are there to be no young writers? Forgive the criticism, please; such an affair is a matter of public responsibility.

Yours amiably,

John Berryman

I’m off to Bread Loaf: my next address.

[Haffenden, MS]

Tues. evening [late June 1962]

Dear Papa Thomes & Lady Thomes & Boa Constrictor & Monsterism-fr.-Outer Space:

Now that we’re all together (has Peachie done this? has Katie done that?—has anybody done anything???),—well, kid—

Boyd (K. tells me to tell you), my sore throat clear up. You good doctor. Me good writer.

After boring trip, old home week: Saul my bro. in NY, Pouk’ in Peekskill, old school (So. Kent), Mark Van Doren this aft. in Ct. Guess what?!—Cal (Lowell) doing 1st half at Harv. next year, Mark doing 2nd: Christ, I’m dancing. Harv, both too cowardly & too arrogant to replace Macleish at once; ask, & I’ll tell. BUT: one hour fr. one of my loveliest colleagues, & then, my oldest friend, WOW.

Brain coming awake: parts of one of 3 Songs late this aft’n:

It’s June in the Wm Cullen Bryant house.

_______________

I open his rancid vol, & I browse,

I pee in the Wm Cullen Bryant house.

The toilet flusht good.

Love

John

[Lilly, TS]

Bread Loaf, Vermont

30 Aug 62

Dear Carolyn Kizer,

I remember in Berkeley a couple of years ago when you asked abt stuff I said I’d promised some to Spender for Encounter and undertook to let you have them here: well, I am delinquent abt printing but they will be in the next number (Sept), he says, and here are copies if you want them. They’re called “Two Dream Songs” and numbered 1 and 2, in the order

’Scads . .

The weather851

I’d like to see a proof ^or if poss. two proofs^ if you use them.

Best regards (I learnt from my old friend Robt Fitzgerald last summer that you saved his life, socially, when he was out there),

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

Address after another wk:

c / o Dept of English

Brown Univ’y

Providence, R.I.

[UMN, TS]

Bread Loaf, Vermont

31 Aug 62

Dear Aaron Asher:

Many thanks for Isaac’s book.852 The editor did a good job and so did Saul and so, clearly, did you and I was not only delighted to see it but deeply interested reading it and then I did the best thing possible with it: I passed it on to a young Jewish, strongly anti-Jewish because his neighborhood was anti-culture pro-money, writer & scholar here for the summer, John Bernard. I figure Rosenfeld will re-establish him in his cultural tradition. For this alone—if Bernard does later, as I think he will, books that do us credit—the collection was worth doing. Congratulations. Vasiliki must be pleased too.853 I hardly knew him; by accident I took the place he abandoned at Minnesota because (as our chairman Ralph Ross said to me) he was too comfortable there & too popular and went to Chicago to die, God damn it. His Solomon story is the most brilliant thing he ever did.854 He was getting hot. But how many reviews are readable years later? Brother, his are. Right on the ball, with the relevant schema, full judgement (only he underrates Orwell no?), a decent style; a professional. That young. Maybe the finest is his jazz on Wouk, ‘For God and the Suburbs’.855 It’s as comprehensive and splendid at its length as Wilson’s holocaust once of a lady-shit named maybe Anya Seton for her most recent bestseller.856 (Don’t know if reprinted; was in New Yorker.)

I feel like chatting, but the mail has to go.

Where the hell is Saul?

I don’t write blurbs, but if you want to lift anything out of that paragraph, OK. Only let me see.

I am kind of an author of yours now: cd yr sec’y send me addresses & current editors’ names for: Yale, Hudson, Kenyon, Sewanee. I am isolated on a mountain top.

More later,

Best,

[UMN, TS]

5 Oct. sent857

Bread Loaf, Vt.

4 Sept 62

Dearest Catharine,

Hurrah I spelt it right. I have been working so damned hard I can’t think when I last wrote or what but we are in the hands of the great God as Father Lowell puts it and I woke up this morning determined to throw you a letter and then in the ten o’clock mail (we get two a day on this mountain) came Ostroff’s opus, which I here thank you for.858 It’s just a collection of poems, isn’t it? I can’t care much about that, though it’s worth printing (but at 3.95?—Christ!) and Im [sic] glad for him & Miriam. Like best a woofy quatrain one rather in my own present style sort of in the middle of the book (can’t find it at the moment), maybe beginning ‘So..’ or so titled. Can’t send no blurb, even if you wanted it (my name is not worth anything, as you know). I just wish him luck.

What I’ve been working at, besides two stories and an article, is mah pome. Three weeks ago, when we moved over here after a wild six weeks of two lectures a day and so much social life that I counted nine parties in one week, the thing was nothing but a seven-year mess filling a whole bag. Now there’s a register of 130-odd revised & typed, so that I can find anything, plus alphabetized carbons of most of them, plus alphabetized mss., plus more than a hundred others deeply drafted, plus 8 or 10 folders of programmatic notes & arrangements, plus (separated) hundreds of sketches in various stages of development. Plus, plus, but that’s the main story. Praise me. Only damn it I keep writing them; two last night. I keep writing, writing: when all I want to do is arrange and revise. I send you one I got really hot now. |Lay of Ike859| Read it aloud to yourself, and as soon as Kate & I come to Princeton I will read it to you—it goes staccato, rapid—and (fuck Aiken, who kept me from reading the—stupid—‘American lights..’ at the Library of Congress five years ago) I am going to read it at the National Poetry Carnival late next month. That’s what I’ve been doing. Besides thinking.

There is an empty & cracking swimpool at the bottom of the lawn. It is silent. Higher mountains ring this mountaintop. We have fires every night, woodfires in a firstclass cemented-stone fireplace, and see rabbits deer a heron driving in & out (us, that is). Goldenglow is seven feet high. Kate is so preg I call her The Whale; bulbous; we ought to have a trolley to get her around, from our one room to our other room. Frost invited us over and turns out to be utterly different from either his lecture- or his party-styles, when you see him alone; I am obliged, with love, to feel that he is a Great Man as well as (this I’ve known for 25 yrs) one of the best poets who ever lived. I feel a little worried abt him, Hemingway last summer & Faulkner this, having gone out. I have a Song abt this in the Poetry 50th anniv. issue.

Rago took all the four (rather good, to my sense) ones I sent him, almost too late, for the number.860 I felt like a kid abt this; I all but danced. (I like to be with colleagues; besides, the Americans have given me hell—I told you the New Yorker refused 14, and then your people refused 3, and then the Virginia Quarterly refused three; whereas meanwhile The Observer had taken a weird one and Encounter two weirder ones; I felt bombed, and have written about it.) Partisan have also taken two (of the 7 I told you) and of course others will.861 I am ignoring Cal’s advice, which was to pay no attention to periodical jazz pro or con and just publish a hundred. Which brings me to what I had no idea of saying to you when I woke up or until now:

Would you or will you make my peace with Robert? I wrote him an angry letter years ago. I shouldn’t have done; though I felt even more justified when I saw an ad in some paper later that they were remaindering the Bradstreet poem for a buck,—I felt he shd have told me, and moreover I cd have bought some myself. Still I felt very bad abt the letter, not only personally (he is one of my oldest friends and I love him) but professionally because he may be asked at meetings ‘What the hell is with this outstanding account with whatever-his-name-is-Berryman?’ and so I may have put him on the hook. You know more abt this than I do. Yet I am still (vaguely) angry, and cannot help feeling (I wish I could) stuffy; especially since the bloody advance—for the Shakespeare biography—is down to a thousand dollars or less, owing to the dim accumulating sales of Homage to AB. They—whoever ‘they’ are—have not lost Money-&-Prestige on me. But I am BORED, I confess this, by their failure of interest to want another poem from me, over six years; when my last one was not precisely a failure here, and did rather good in England,—for which I never received one penny (except from the BBC), nor has Giroux ever sent me one cent of the $75 (extra) we required from Auden, etc. Now—but I feel very angry again—rehearsing this—I have other avenues. I can write to Robt myself—but I am afraid I cd only do this with bitter citations—or I cd get our beloved friend Wm Meredith to intercede. Say what you think.

I had & have many more things to say but as K points out to me I got furious during the Giroux paragraph and I had better shut up. We had to take an expensive house, with much room, at Brown, and want you PLEASE to come see us. I toss you another one—not for printing—an assimilation of North African story-telling to Indian, on the ghats |‘Spellbound’862—you felt wounded at my showing to Kate your letter, so I have just told her I am not showing her the end of this: Catharine (everybody else, even Lowell, seems to call you Katie) I love you

[UMN, MS]

13 Sept ’62

Dear Father,

I realize w. sharpness that it was none of my business but I had come to like & respect you so, this summer, that I felt as a pain your misassignment (as it seemed to me) by the Order; and I tho’t of this vividly at p. 30 or so of Jim Powers’s novel, and I wondered if you wd like me to throw you on my copy, after Kate & a friend have read it.863 An advance copy came today and I plan to sit up all night & wire him tomorrow. It is wildly funny, curt, and brilliant—as I expected—but I love that man (the best Catholic writer, I’ve long felt, in the country) and it’s being finisht is the bursting news.

Yrs v. resp’y,

John Berryman

If you’d like to see it, toss me a pc. Only, may I have it back.

[Powers, telegram]

[14 September 1962]

MOST VIVID CONGRATULATIONS, FIRST ON FINISHING, THEN ON THE PRODUCT. IT ONLY TODAY CAME AND I AM ONLY ON PAGE 38, FOR LAUGHING AND WAITING FOR NEXT BOMB. THANKS FOR IT. I WILL SPREAD IT AROUND. YOU WRITE SO WELL I FEEL LIKE A HICK. HURRAH. SLEEP WELL NOW

JOHN BERRYMAN DEPT OF ENGLISH BROWN UNIVERSITY

[NYPL, TS]

24 Congdon st

Providence

5 Oct 62

Dear Ralph,

How are Alicia & poupies? K looks like a whale; is fine. These nice little classes I have are misleading, everybody is so happy to have me here that they’ve given me their collected works—I read 90 pp by one lady alone one day; I’m only just, in the third week, getting them under control, I finisht 2 min ago the last paper till new sets come Monday. Still it’s a nice miniscule schedule, Wed eve 7:30 for two hours and Th 2–4, and it’s odd being in the east—I’ve met the President of Brown repeatedly, people want books autogr’d, articles in the paper, young writers all over, I’m reading at Harvard Nov 15th, & so on. Providence is nothing but I like Brown and we spent one weekend with the Camerons at Duxbury, the next at Tivoli with Saul & Susan864 (Hamish and S both direct you their best, as have many others including a Burke Newsletter man at Bread Loaf—scrubbed bore with a nervous grin and (bad) dirty jokes), and Meredith & a friend came here last weekend from Ct. One feels civilized; yet Brown is a little small (I both enjoy this and don’t) vs Minn, and Mpls is a proper city vs Prov. My kids are surprisingly good; a few duds I’m encouraged to throw out; many auditors & visitors, yet never more than 18 altogether; and they’re working their heads off for me. Most surprising, the embargo on the Songs seems briefly lifted: besides the two in this Encounter & the four in Poetry this month (hasn’t come yet), the New Rep will have two in the Fall Bk No., Harper’s one, others elsewhere.865 The “75” is very far on and I hope to have it in order as a birthday gift to myself (and FSC and Faber). That month in the cabin on the mt in Vt saw more work done than since I was in the middle of the Bradstreet: 128 revised & registered, a hundred more separated out as next to finish, hundreds more sheets filed as sketches & planning. Some of the new ones tickled Saul and I hope will you. (To my dismay: you were right abt Jack and Sondra—Saul tho’t everybody in Mpls knew—and it’s still going on; Christ.866) Henry is not exactly making his way but he’s not been counted out yet, like fluid Patterson [sic]. How’s your work been going? I had a weird (to me) intelligent letter today fr a guy at Notre Dame who’s got a fellowship to do his dissertation on me & Lowell & Wilbur; makes you feel like coughing & quitting. If these Evanses (I enclose), also at Notre D, tho different dept, didn’t bug him, and he didn’t them, the coincidence is electrical.867 I abhor missing the Sieg’s and don’t understand it at all, have you got an address for them? It isn’t like them. New bk on Davidson, Yale last year:868 pretty clear suicide, but evidence of bullet-holes far from clear; and a selection of his poems, also last year, with pref’s by Eliot & Macdiarmid (the other Macdiarmid)—pleasure.869 Swinburne piece by Wilson in current N’Yorker, haven’t read yet, looks good.870 Jim Powers finally finished his novel—begins better, brilliantly, than it goes on. Shit-pieces by Fiedler & Shapiro in Partisan.871 Saul’s redone play completely, prob to be prod by Roger Stevens w Zero Mostel next fall; novel only a month or so to the end of; they’re back in Chicago about now.872 K’s father cracked up, hospital, I called (Maris) to have Boyd go check on treatment, but haven’t heard back; private, this. |don’t read.| Who’s taking my courses? How are POLITICS, w Pheverish Phil and Backstairs Berryman gone and Morgan the Mad & Joe the Hollow wholly ours? Is Allen okay?—but I’ll see him at the L.C. Circus later this month. I got things to tell you of Frost you willl [sic] barely believe. This staccato communication, at a tiring week’s end, is just to get back in touch.

Love,

John

In particular, what have you got done & mean to do next? Are Lynn & Helen thriving?873

[Lilly, TS]

24 Congdon St.

Providence, R.I.

5 Oct 62

Dear Carolyn Kizer,

Reading yr electrical letter I composed an answer to it in my head, as I often do, but now I am so dazed w student papers that I can’t remember whether I wrote it down & sent it or not. (Ive [sic] never been here before and the kids are dancing giving me their collected works, and Im rather out of practice, not having given a writing course for eight years.

Yes, you’re welcome to “The Secret of the Wisdom”. It ought to stand third, then—the whole contrib’n titled THREE DREAM SONGS, with 1 and 3 titled after the numerals, 2 just headed ‘2’. I half-promised it to some people here for a little thing called The Brown Review but I can hand them something else.

Of course I supposed you don’t pay; but Ive never objected to prize money. We agree there. Only, poor as I am, I wonder whether prizes ought not to go, in general, to younger writers. Up to you, naturally.

I didn’t see the summer Kenyon; be glad to. Jos. Herbst’s admiration is worth having.874

The Nat’l Poetry Circus ought to be amusing. I shd think the hotel will have to be remodelled afterward, tho’ I can’t find that the stalwarts Conrad & Ted are going and in fact everyone I know jibbed as much as I did before agreeing.875 Something, however well intentioned, idiotic abt it, considering the public inexistence of poetry with us.—More sections of my insufferable poem will be in Poetry, New Republic, Harper’s.

Best,

Yrs,

John Berryman

[Princeton, TS]

6 Oct 62

Dear Allen,

Being me I bet I never thanked you for the note on my promotion, which I’ve just come on, turning over papers and wondering why we work entirely for the Federal & State govts, insurance companies, and in my case Paul (who receives far more money from me annually than Harvard used to pay me, aie!!!). Who can promote us? Yet I confess I felt immensely relieved and grateful (and I like to feel grateful—and I gathered you & Ralph got it against all odds done—I never expected it—and two men do not exist to whom I wd rather feel grateful) at being taken off the hook with the English Dept; for whom I was doing services and enduring insults whilst my talents for giving courses, much desired elsewhere in the country, were treated with negligent contempt. I hope your work has been going. I did a vast job in a cabin on a mountaintop in Vt, for a month, after the Bread Loaf labour; and now the seven-year-old poem is visualizable. We hope to see you & Isabella in Washington, at the Circus. Funny: I jibbed, skeptical & reluctant; so did you, so then did Mark (whom I stoppt to see on our way north and who sends you his love) but Dorothy said to me aside ‘He’ll go’ and then so did Frost but Kay Morrison said to me aside ‘He’ll go’.876 Makes you wonder abt freewill.

Love,

John

New Songs in Encounter, The Observer, Poetry, PR, Harper’s, New Rep., etc. I’m letting them out.

[Ransom, TS]

24 Congdon Street

Providence R.I.

11 Oct 62

Dear Mr Stiehl:

Thanks for your letter to Minnesota (I’m off for a year at Brown)—it’s pleasant to have a reader; and thank you for the invitation; and I’m glad to see a serious magazine in hand,—I have never been able to bear any of them except Thought (when Fr Lynch was running it) and Jubilee (years ago) and very occasionally Commentary & the Benedictine Rev at St John’s. Let me wish you good luck. I suppose you know that like Lowell & Tate I am lapsed or renegade, long, though from a ‘cradle’-status; but I never heard of my friend Aiken approaching the Church, so I expect you plan to deal also with outsiders, and that’s excellent. During the years when Commentary was the best general magazine in the country, I thought, it printed non-Jews regularly. I was an outsider there too.

This letter is private of course.

You speak of ten pages or so. I can give you that readily, and feel inclined to do, but let’s see what the situation is, pending (1) the arrival of the issues, which I hope I will be delighted to see, and (2) your feeling about the enclosed Songs, carbons of the five I sent yesterday to TLS.877 They are sections of a long poem begun in 1955 and worked at since. I am bad at sending stuff out. Eventually however I responded to TLS’s request for the American Imag’n Supplement with five, in 1959, the first printed, and then Saul Bellow used those five with seven others in the Noble Savage. Then lately, pushed by friends, I threw out some more: two are in Encounter, 4 in Poetry (50th Anniv’y), 3 in The Observer, others coming in Partisan, New Republic, Harper’s, etc. I like large groups of them printed (so I’m glad of your query); they make sense individually but only a certain sense. Still I’ve no idea if they’ll do for you. If, in general, so, I can add whatever number we want, or rather I propose and you decide, to the five here,—which are not submitted but only shown you.

I hardly write short poems any more though I pray to return to that happiness,

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

P.S. I mean add 5 or 8, say, to whatever ones of these 5 you think you’d want.—Some 140 sections are now fully revised; many more in stages.—Of course I’ll have to wait to hear from Crook abt these.

[Morgan, TS]

24 Congdon St

Providence R.I.

13 Oct 62

Dear Sir:

I wonder if I may solicit your assistance, or that of one of your people, in a matter that will take five minutes. The author of a middle on Dryden in the TLS that has just come quotes Keats as saying the poet is “continually informing and filling some other body”.878 I don’t think we can have this: cavalier treatment of what I’ve always regarded as a crux of capital importance in a blazing passage in what is possibly the most important letter ever written by an English poet. As I recall the letter—you have it—the passage reads “continually in for and filling”; and what he meant I’ve never been clear. (Maybe he used an ampersand; that doesn’t matter.) But this was years ago when I looked it up there, and I’d be grateful if somebody will check and let me know. It’s in the great journal-letter to his brother & sister-in-law here, I believe. I forget how the Formans deal with it and have no books here (I’m only at Brown as visiting professor) and the University library is shut at the moment. The printed stuff I’ll look at on Monday but meanwhile I will be very grateful if you can help with my recollection of your actual text.

Yrs faithfully

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

Providence, Sat—[late October or early November 1962]

Dear Mark—

It’s odd, two of the people there Kate & I expected & wanted most to see, you & Wm Meredith, we hardly saw at all. Delmore’s scrape was a problem; parasites were; the constant sessions were; Cal’s absent illness was for me. Wilbur I got fond of—whom I knew only by correspondence—& Snodgrass, who once as a student of mine handed me the refrain

‘Snodgrass is walking thro’ the universe’.

What I am writing to you about is

1) joy in hearing Cal is not ruled out at Harvard but will be there along w. you in the Spring—hurrah.

2) It was a happiness to me well beyond description to hear you & Blackmur read so brilliantly stuff so good. I would even have felt proud to think that I got you all those years ago to review The Double Agent; only somewhere I lost my pride—your Dunce Songs—the last things you read (where are they?) & his ‘Mr. Virtue & the 3 bears’ surprised & delighted me beyond the rest.879 You are a more natural poet than Richard is; but he’s real too.

3) Delmore—I conned Wilbur to help get him out of jail, after his girl called Kate to get me to get him out880—K. was tired & had gone to bed, I was at a party for Frost—we did—the wittiest remark of the week—next day, somebody askt W. what happened,—‘He hurt his room’. D. had, in his suite at the Lafayette, pulled the ’phone out of the wall—howled, threatened,—beat the poor wall w. it,—sat down & tried to reach long distance numbers & was enraged when he cdn’t. Let Dorothy hear this, since she cares for Delmore; but no one else. The last thing he shouted at the police capt. was ‘I’m acting under the direct orders of the Pres. of the United States.’ Wilbur: ‘He hurt his room.’

After my reading, Mark, people buzzed me—from Mr Ransom down to Snodgrass—Ogden Nash(!)—& the BBC etc whereas you & I know that my stuff is probably no good at all

John

[NYPL, MS]

Providence, Sat [November 1962]

Dear Ralph

I wrote at once, air special, to Morgan—v. briefly, as you said—also to his mother. Mary told us on the ’phone a frightening thing: the last coherent utterance to her was ‘Life is very lonely’.881 Ah, it is, but I’ve hardly ever known a lonelier man than Morgan. I hope for him his Christian hope is right.

Kate, for a little, thought I was callous to expect his death, as Mary & you tell me to do. But she is young. I know, & have done since I was twelve, that people die. See the song abt Faulkner in Poetry—of which I’m having them send you 3 copies, in case you want to give one to yr father or somebody.882

Sorry to have bothered you at my usual hour. Let this true apology stand for 1000 such.—The Wash. circus was very gay, really, except for Delmore’s state & scrape. He really thinks Gov. Rockefeller has been persecuting him for years, trying to get him indicted for attempted murder,—that Saul is his enemy,—that Dwight cheated him out of his house,—that his girl is just using him,—that the police robbed him of $500. The story’s too long for a letter, but I come in for wild hostility too, because (1) I was abroad during his Bellevue jazz in ’57 (2) I cannot pretend to hate Saul & Dwight (2) his girl knew many of my poems by heart before she met Delmore 2 years ago. Kate noticed this last point—obscured by ambivalence, like everything else—over the hours before he cracked up, he kept urging her to recite my poems to me—the very last thing on earth the embarrassed girl wanted to do or I to hear. So: his final howl to her, being dragged out of the hotel, before she had to call Kate to get me to get him out of jail, was ‘Go sleep w. Berryman’. His last shout to the police captain, as Wilbur & I & the girl were taking him away, was ‘I’m acting under the direct orders of the President of the United States.’ Yet D. is in a hundred ways as lovable as ever—it made me v. happy to see him—and was much of the time ^affectionate &^ perfectly rational.

Love to Alicia & poupies

John

All this is strictly private, kid.

[Ransom, MS]

Providence, 2 Nov. [1962]

Dear Mr. Stiehl—

Many thanks for the copies (the Minn. ones came too & I passed them on to the most promising young men here, Dan Hughes & Gregory Poletta).883 You & yr colleagues have made, I think, such a good start that you may have trouble holding the standard, tho’ the stuff listed as coming looks interesting, esp. on Baron Corvo & Casement,884 men who badly need treatment. The British writer Rex Warner885 & Hughes & I had a public discussion lately: on my mentioning Rolfe it turned out that both were as vivid abt him as I am, but it was clear that nobody in the audience had heard of him. Abt Casement I am puzzled.

Yes, you’re welcome to those 5 Songs; only hold them & I’ll send more shortly. Thanks for the suggestion abt the contest. Okay, why not? But does ‘put on public display’ (Rule I) exclude Songs I read at the Libr. of Cong. last week or may read at Harvard on the 15th, etc? And I can’t make out Rule VII at all: would the stuff not be free to me for my own publishers—FSC and Faber & Faber? Another problem with Rule I is that I have agreed to read again for the 3rd Progr. of the BBC next week & may include some I’ll give you—what abt this?

Catholics were rare in Oklahoma. Everything was rare in Oklahoma—I use the word in the pejorative sense.

Sumptuous format you have. Where’s all the money from? I’ll try, but I’m busy, to write more in detail of the magazine, when the 3rd number drops in.

Yrs sincerely

John Berryman

[UCD, MS]

Providence, 2 Nov. [1962]

Dear Jack,

Please forgive delay—I was away. (But I’ve an odd déja vu feeling that I did answer yr letter.) Thanks for the Committee’s dinner invitation, and Mrs B—will be there, D.V.

About recording may I think a little? Monroe Engel tells me it’s only for the private use of students: is that right?886 But everyone now wants things taped—and I usually agree, whereas I never used to—but Elizabeth Drew ^& I^ agreed this Summer in Vt. it really is unreasonable & economically injurious. (Oddly: the BBC asked me to do another reading, after the thing in Wash. last week: I knew they insist on using their ^own^ tapes, but I proposed—this was before you wrote—their sending one to you, and using that—only then it turned out they don’t like ‘live hall’ readings: so after all I have to do it cold in a studio next week. I prefer people I can see.)

Where is the reading, by the way? And several people have wanted to have people in afterward—I didn’t know what my social commitment was—can you throw me a word as to freedom or?

Yrs sincerely,

John

My new pen is plagu(e?)ing me—but what joy after years of ballpoints.

[NYPL, MS]

Let me, if I have credit w. you, support Phil’s sugg’n abt Oya Kaynar—she attended I think, assisting me, every lecture I gave.887 She was as good as Dow or Sharma.

Sat evening [early November 1962]

Dear Ralph—

Again: if there’s anything abt Morgan, please let me know, we haven’t heard fr. Mary since the call. Kate’s father—I forget if I told you—is out of hospital, & resuming work ^(in his other job)^ in a situation he likes better (retired fr. the newspapers, where he’s been unhappy for years, on part-pension). 936 thanks for a view of Phil’s effusion—I enclose you back Ellen’s which came the same day & traverses different ground. Travel!! XX with children OW!!! May I have Ellen’s back?—only perh. let the Boyds see. |this too888| I’ve answered her. The passage in yr letter depressed me, Ralph—‘I suppose one has to be in the East … before all the chances come alive . .’ I don’t feel this. It’s accident: I have a large, flourishing (sort of), unknown, deliverable work around, and have been invisible myself for years, that’s all. ^What bothers me here is if you feel out of circul’n; that’s intolerable.^ I’m introducing Britain to Henry Mon. at 10:15 a.m., & Harvard ditto Th. 4:30. Poor England & Harv. Here’s the current one, 3rd hopeless version:

Baby Teddy, baby diddy, drop him too a pat

Endow him all his own a little post

so he won’t feel lost

wifout the ol’ Attorney Generalship:

it hurt him sore in his million to miss that:

now in ^from^ his chubby grip

see ^drips^ fertile Boston, anyway: the star

of the ^our^ new Senate—‘Here, Senator. There, Senator.

Senator, the bathroom.’

Meanwhile the least of them are crawling too—

our lower age-limit ^the age-jazz^ for the House will hardly do—

to accommodate their boom

the Cabinet must stretch, for brandnew bodies

I’m sorry there are so many Kennedys

I like the Kennedys

and I like pride—^like^ Ralegh’s, ^like^ Swift’s—which I don’t see.

Gold & gall I see. Let every true-born new-born Kennedy

be elected at once, like knees.

Hrs. later: I think is OK.

I wanted this right for Cambridge, partly out of contempt for TK, partly as counterprise to “The lay of Ike”, which will bring down the house—

love,

John

(The Pres’t & Old Joe used to be in it, but I let them out.889) |More fixing.|

[UMN, MS]

McLean Hospital, Belmont, Mass.

29 Nov. ’62

Dear Father, Son, & Brother—

Where are the glorious Halliday epistles of yore—I must have fifty, of 20 pp. each, stored w. all my jazz in Princeton. Are we reduced to this trickle?? Still it’s lovely to hear at all, and I was delighted to learn fr. Ostroff, in Washington, of your translation. You was never made for academic life, my boy.

Did you hear that I met yr lousy ex-wife when I was in Berkeley, & we had a rousing quarrel—over politics, as I remember—how well you are rid of that cold & seeking person.

I am in hospital for a little, w. violent overwork: my long poem (since ’55) has come to a sort of head—as pimples do—and I squeezed, and landed here. Be out soon & call you. My home (for the year) is 24 Congdon St., Providence, tel. 351–4812. But I’ll call you. My wife is babying in 2 weeks, so New York may have to wait a little.

Ever,

John

[Haffenden, MS]

24 Congdon St

2 Dec ’62, 3 p.m.

Dear Maris & Boyd

Martha was born an hour & a half ago—7 lb., 4 oz., v. frisky, much hair all black, no forehead yet, heredity atrocious (I just got out of hospital myself in Boston yesterday—payment for writing 14 Songs during Thanksgiving week after giving stunning readings at Harvard & elsewhere), fate unknown. Kate is radiant; the labour abt 10 hrs, never bad. Father survives too, owing no doubt to double dosages of chlorpromazine & dilantin.—She’s in Providence Lying-In, Convent & Maude Sts, if you want to send her a Beastly Card—‘Don’t wrap it up, I’ll eat it here’. I’ve tried repeatedly to get you on the phone but it’s always busy so I write.

Maris, yr letter is adorable. I like the idea too. In fact I’d thought of seeing abt recording 4 or 5 & getting a dozen discs of it for Xmas gifts. But putting that notion, & yours, together with the fact I’m reading a dozen or more for the BBC, at Station WEAN here, if I ever get around to it (Brown, arranging it, goofed, and I got fed up & let it go,—so the BBC people are still waiting), makes an interesting set of poss’s. I’ll go into it this week, & write.

Hastily, with love,

John

[Lilly, MS]

Jane Brown Memorial

6 Dec ’62

Dear Carolyn

I like the Hair Stylist best of these though not the last line (nor ‘just ask Voltaire’, end of the third), but the view of a man in hospital with a broken ankle is unlikely to be worth considering. The ‘Eve’ poem seems too abstract, turgid. The best subject I think is ^that of^ the ‘Long line of doctors’; something may be amiss in the treatment, hard to say what, but look at all the adjectives! and often I don’t hear the rhythm.890 I’d rehandle that from scratch if it were mine. As for editors—their ways are inscrutable, as you know. The New Yorker exceeded even my expectations by returning a batch of fourteen Songs last winter or spring. I doubt, however, that your subjects wd seem to any likely editor unacceptable; we can now it appears write abt anything and Mailer lives it up w. rectal intercourse—Kilmartin writes that you’re welcome to those Observer sections. Best

John Berryman

If you keep the hair-man’s last line at least make it ‘I fail.’

[Ransom, MS]

24 Congdon St., Providence

8 Dec ’62

Dear Mr Stiehl

I’m just out of two hospitals—one last week in Boston, one yesterday here—and my broken ankle is killing me (on the uneventful day between, my wife had a baby), so I’ll be short.

Yes, all right, I’ll enter the contest. I hate contests—there is really no competition in art (is the Ramayana fighting it out w. the Popol Vuh?)—but this seems an amiable one and God knows, if the Songs should win it, I could use the money. I’ll send you 20 or so more, then, in a week or so, with indications of where among them to fit in the five you have (these came back from Crook—astonishing me, the British having been so unnaturally hospitable to them—and the BBC after I read some at the Libr. of Congress askt me to broadcast a bunch wh. I haven’t done yet). Yrs,

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

24 Congdon St

Providence RI

9 Dec 1962

Dear Randall—

I’m shaky w. a broken ankle, I hope you can read this.

If you were serious in your to-me-extremely-surprising-&-pleasing req. abt the Dell anthology, here are photos of the dozen in The Noble Savage (please ignore #2); also five that Ramparts are holding while they wait for more; you have the Poetry four; the 2nd one in Sept. Encounter is fair, also the one in New Rep. Fall Bk. No.; I believe I have an extra proof of two good ones of the 5 the Observer are doing. |I’ll look for this when I can look.| That’s 25, & that’s enough or more than, tho’ shd you want to see more, of course you can. I’m giving Ramparts another 20 shortly, and you cd look at them.

I can’t vouch for the texts of any, however (I tinker, trying to remove numbness & stupidity), so may I have all these back—and any you want I’ll send you exact final copies of (if you want any at all), in their proper order among themselves.

It was good seeing you (& your splendid lady) after so long. Our baby was born the day after I got out of hospital the first time & the day before I went in the 2nd time. One nightmare in the 2nd hosp. was abt you—I wrote it out & enclose it—may I have it back? The worst feature was that the judgment was delivered w. all the tender but grave authority of the author of ‘I find no fault in this just man’ (wh. is certainly one of yr masterpieces).891 Yrs always

John

[Chicago, MS]

24 Congdon St, Providence

18 Dec ’62

Dear Saul—

(It gives me pleasure to write those two words: the East is thick w. friends but I haven’t seen Cal yet, tho’ he’s OK he writes me, and I miss Ralph, Boyd, Phil, Maris, Ellen, and it might be shattering to come on Delmore as he was in Washington—lovable but OFF, hating with elaborate phantasies Dwight & you & me—and it was strange to preview Henry in Wash’n & at Harvard & for the BBC last week w. a broken ankle which I hope didn’t scrape—I’ll tell you sometime how R. Wilbur & I got D. out of jail—and I hope you & yr adorable lady Susan are having a ball in California, but come back some time)

I drafted 14 new Songs—all lousy—over Thanksgiving wk & wound up in a Boston nuthouse. They conned me, kid—Monroe, even Brenda,892 an analyst, a psychiatrist, even Kate—in I went. I was a little out of line. Par for the course in 3 months, or 4; I got out in a week, Kate had the baby next day (we were up all night)—it’s Martha, can’t focus, physical perfect [sic], acute hearing, lost all black baby-hair, now brown, w. a widow’s peak that goes nearly to her navel, tranquil, pesky—that night in a taxi accident I broke my ankle in what I will never describe to anybody but the creator of Hattie—will to him.893 Damage; pain, never anything upto [sic]. Marooned on my 2nd fl. here 24 hrs—cd. telephone, but who or why?—cdn’t get down the long stairs to let in. So I tried, hurting, to ‘exercise’ it by answering the extension phone. Surgeon said if I’d gone on a little, cdn’t use it for 6 months. A colleague—alerted fr. Boston!—& ^his^ wife & ‘Rescue Squad’ (cheaper than ambulance, I hope) & a judge next-door pushed me, again unwilling, into clinic

—Let you be tranquil—

John

Some of my new songs are pretty good, pal. How is Herzog?

1963

[Ransom, MS]

23 Jan [1963]

Dear Mr Stiehl

Thank you for yr letter abt the award. I hope you did right. I have been feeling low abt the poem, despite word fr. an old friend in New York that Edmund Wilson has been praising it ‘to the sky’. One never knows and after a certain point one can’t even care. But thanks.

Let’s add some to that fifteen, may I? And do any of them seem to you notably weak? Shall we send a proof to Shahn? I’ll have a photo sent you. Abt biog’l stuff I’ve never been much good—there are sketches in Who’s Who & elsewhere—what do you want to know? If a sketch were drafted there and sent me, I could correct it. I have one idea. If without vanity but to curb my depression I might suggest that it contain certain opinions abt the Bradstreet poem expressed by Aiken, Wilson, Tate, Fitzgerald, Lowell, Alvarez etc, I do so suggest. Those views have never appeared together and they, a little, cushion me, as Housman once put it.

I’m off to read in Buffalo tomorrow. You remember Lardner’s great poem,

The Lackawanna railroad

Where does it go?

It goes fr. Lackawanna

To Buffalo.894

—only I’m flying. I’m flying low.

Yours

John Berryman

[Lilly, MS]

[early February 1963]

Dear Carolyn Kizer

Thanks for proofs & amiable letter. You & Dickey are off yr rockers—I am not the ‘greatest’ anything but fool. That word was aimed at me fr. London lately too; I ducked.—no, I’m wrong. I claim, without reserve or decorum, to be the greatest poet in this part of Providence. I tell you, it’s going to my head! We must be careful.

Yrs,

John B.

I have 3 Songs on Frost in the first number of The N.Y. Review of Bks, out next Wed.895

[UMN, MS]

Fri. aft—[early February 1963]

Dear Ann

I am just back fr. hospital & my mind is full of you & Paul; I don’t suppose 3 hrs ever go by when it isn’t. They are using a ‘whirlpool’ at present on my disgusting leg. This goes on for another month. Not only I but my surgeon (at first) underestimated the injury. Please send me some news. I hear from everyone in the universe but you, and abt Poukie. (I hate telephones, I don’t use them now.)

My crippled work seems to be going okay—3 Songs, against my will, abt Frost, then 2 more & last nt. another, & reviews of Auden’s & Spender’s bks of criticism.896 Weekends, all this. They are throwing the word ‘great’ at me and it hurts. Tell Paul when he is ten that Philip Toynbee’s article on Frost’s death in The Observer winds up, ‘the public is undoubtedly right: Frost was the greatest Amer. poet alive, even in an age which had produced Robt Lowell & John Berryman.’897

Over, & out.

But get that ‘had’—as if Cal & I were—as I often feel—dead. Maybe I cd get a doctorate w. a dissertation on my own stuff. After all, I’ve read it. I don’t understand it but [sic]

Then here’s a letter, come this morning, fr. a W. Coast editor who say: ‘By the way, Dickey & I agreed, happily & at length, that you were [get that ‘were’] the greatest poet in America. The only contender that gave you anything of a run [me broke leg] with us was Roethke’898 etc

Tell Poukie some time.

John

45 of them Songs be done = printed or to be p’t’d here & abroad by May

James Dickey is a hot article—he the guy wr. me, yrs ago, abt Bhain. Brown takes me heavy too.

[Delaware, MS]

24 Congdon St

13 Febr 63

Dear De

Yr good, wonderfully generous & comical letter I’d have answ’d before but the crit. prose of Auden ^(527 pp.)^ & Spender is spilling fr. my ears—I just reviewed both, besides writing five new Songs (3 on Frost—wh. I didn’t want to write but cdn’t help it—will be in the first number of The N.Y. Review of Bks late this week or next).

About Wayne: I couldn’t do it for less than $300 or $350, whichever (if either) the people can come up to.899 I am very grateful to you for the propaganda, and I like to give readings, and I wd love to ^see^ you & yr spouse; BUT a cluttered weekend in Buffalo (80 people talked with, no privacy, 10° below, blizzard, wind 50 mph) has chilled me, and Kate hates being alone (the baby is a ravishing Martha—God help men 18 yrs hence), and I am v. pushed for money. You asked me to be blunt, so I am. Mon. (Apr. 29) wd be best for me.

Yrs affectionate’,

John

Within a day or so of yr letter, I heard fr. Cal’s Eliz that Edmund (Wilson) was praising my poem ‘to the sky’. Can W. & Snodgrass be wrong? My God, for 10 seconds I felt encouraged.

[NYPL, TS]

24 Congdon st, Providence R I

18 Febr 63

Dear Robert,

I have a half-feeling that I’ve called you, or written before, but as I grow increasingly tired (I haven’t taken a vacation from the poem for years—in June I damned well mean to) and keep on overworking (this month I did two ^sections^ the first weekend, three—on Frost—the next, and two more this last, besides running a full teaching schedule, writing reviews of both Spender & Auden, and doing public jobs here & elsewhere) the actual world grows unreal to me and I can’t remember or attend to it.

Let’s make an end of the long estrangement. I have felt bad about it a thousand times. I wrote you a letter I should not have sent; but then you did not reply at all, and perhaps that was going too far, too. Moreover, soon after the letter, I think, while I was still burning with resentment and waiting to hear, I found you’d remaindered the Bradstreet (without telling me, this was the point), and the evil situation solidified. I am sorry. Of course I felt guilty too about the long-unfinished biography, harried about letting you down. That will yet be done.

Meanwhile let’s wipe it out, both personally and professionally. Two more points, though. My gratefulness to you for bringing the poem out at all and so bringing the career of my work to a certainly new point has not ever diminished and it never will; still I feel puzzles and dissatisfactions about all that handling of it back there. And secondly, the lack of success I have had all my life in getting my books of verse published or attended to, in this country, has never and does not make it easy for me to believe in a continuing or serious publishing arrangement, in spite of more & more numerous signs of a likelihood that various influential people on both sides of the Atlantic take my stuff heavy. (Too heavy: the word ‘greatest’ was aimed at me, and near me, both from Seattle and London last week; I ducked.)

So may we now together stand easy?

And how is your life proceeding, oldest (except for Halliday, whom I’m not sure you knew, he left & went to Ann Arbor, bk on Hemingway,900 now with Amer. Heritage) friend? I hear good things from Wm Meredith (whom Kate & I came to love in Vermont last summer), Cal, Catharine, others. I am re-re-married and have a daughter, Martha, who smiles at the air and sometimes us, and turns out to be the twelfth Martha in direct American line; we named her after Mother (who changed her name to Jill) and of course I knew Granny’s name was Martha also, but Mother’s dazzling information afterward was like hitting the jackpot. In all parts of the country, ancient acquaintances, loves, connections, come up after readings or lectures: but Paul Thomson!—no bishop, as Mark (who did good at the Amherst jazz for Frost yesterday) and I predicted, but a mere teacher, like me.901

Mark was reading Frost’s stuff, after a choir and a bishop who tried to prove that F was like-man-a real Christian (scene a chapel) and the conning Pres of Amherst. He can’t do, Mark, the singing some of Frost’s poems need, but my god he read The Telephone wonderful.902 I walk around more than my broken ankle ever so far allow, or do now (in bed all day today). Cal absent, also of course Conrad. In the men’s room at reception I pee next to Marshall Best and we chat gay, neither of us admitting or denying that either knows who the other is.903 I meet the excellent Wilbur’s wife for the first time, love her, and she give me fan-talk, going back as far as the Bradstr poem. Eberhart smiled like the love-baby he is. Thirty people explain how they love me.

A little of this is the 2 songs in Partisan, which 50 people have said or written to me about. (Snodgrass: ‘Baby, you have dood it!’—only of course he had more to go on.) (Other adherents of the new poem: Fitzgerald, Ogden Nash!, Mark, many young people, Wilson.) PR were so imposs. as not to send me copies, so I haven’t seen. I sent them a bitter card today. So I don’t know whether they put on to the PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, with PAUL MUNI, the dedication to you which I send [sic] them many months ago. Anyway it is so dedicated, unless you object. It is a good one. Also I sent them various corrections, with what result I don’t yet know.

About 45 of The Dream Songs have appeared or are scheduled to do. Ramparts, a lay Catholic magazine on the Coast, gave their first prize to 15 of them; $700; private—only to be announced in May. They bombed the National Poetry Festival in Wash. in October, and I recorded a dozen or so for the BBC later. Alvarez writes me that he’s doing comments on two of them for The Observer. There is more to go on, I think, than with the Bradstreet poem.

Now I am within a week or so—with luck, and if I don’t break down, and if I quit writing new ones—of sending you & Monteith of Faber about 75 as a dry-run, which Cal advised, almost a year ago. I would want to hear quick: offer, and date of publication. Offer, from FSC, independent of the Shakespeare account,—which stands now at around $1000, I think,—an entirely inadequate advance for that book, as it goes on, but that’s another matter. There is also Shakespeare’s Friend, and The Freedom of the Poet, a book of essays Meridian are interested in, and many other things. Offers considered. Don’t forget that I have never received one penny from either FSC or Faber for the Bradstreet poem, which took me five years to write. Princeton yes ($200), L.C. (500), Loyola (300), Harvard (250) etc etc; but not from my publishers anything.

Yours,

John

I enclose you a section (of last summer) that some people like; & even I do. I wrote my brains out in Vermont.904

[UMN, TS]

18 Febr 1963

Dear Catharine,

Mountainous thanks for yr letter of yesterday, which took the matter so far forward that I was able to write to Robert, and have done so, at length. As soon as he replies, if he does, I’ll enclose you my carbon (for return, though). I took yr advice: I wrote directly, with almost no reference to you. Giroux is odd, yes. Whether all this works out or not, I am eternally grateful to you.

I must be brief now, though—tired by that letter, as you’ll see, sick all day, and madly overworked. The Amherst business yesterday for Frost was exhausting: it involved more walking than my leg has yet ever done, long drives and ceremonies extensive, then six hours’ talk w 40 friends and 6 enemies, besides a chat in the men’s room, strictly neutral, w Marshall Best!

Of course you were right to cut me short. After a night’s work I sometimes get witless, inconsiderate. Although in general as I go older I grow less demanding, in some ways I have to admit that I grow more so. As Frost grinned at me across the table last summer, after some outrageous piece of little behaviour, ‘I require special treatment’.

You are right abt Keats’s last letters: it’s their imagery, not their outcries, that make them almost unbearable. Every year or so I endure them again, wondering if it will be the last time. For passion & bareness they make most poets’ collected works look like a weekend in Florida. Is the book good? I’m strong on Gittings myself, dislike most others except Bridges.905 I’ll write again. Love,

[WU, MS]

24 Congdon st, Providence

28 Febr 63

My dear Merrill,

Yr amusing & arching expert story in PR, wh. my wife & I have just read w. pleasure, reminds me that I haven’t thankt you for Water Street, and I do.906 I can’t read other people when I’m writing as continuously as I’ve been doing for many months now: either I don’t get their wavelength at all, even old friends’ (this must be protective, & common—Stevens once wrote to me the same thing nearly), or incorrigibly I revise mentally what I read into something nearer what I’m up to myself, either procedure or style (I knockt off the last 2 stanzas of your admirable opening poem). So I never know what to say when people send me books but ‘Thanks’; & the sorry fact is I’m infrequent even w. that. Here’s that, anyway. I liked ‘the Smile’, & the poem for Claude; others. I did get two impressions, prob. worthless. That you’re working better, here, w. short lines than long; and that you might to advantage reduce rhyme. (You see what I mean by ‘incorrigibly’.)

Best, yrs

John Berryman

It was pleasant to meet you again.

[Yale, TS]

24 Congdon st, Providence

Sunday [March 1963]

Dear Edmund,

I wanted to send you a dozen sections of my new poem (‘new’—I’ve been at the bloody thing since the summer of 1955) for Christmas, partly just out of respect & affection, partly with gratitude for your marvellous Elena’s kindness in coming to my Harvard reading; but then I thought ‘What the hell: don’t bother them’ and didn’t. I don’t go in for bothering people whose time is important to everyone. But then Elizabeth Lowell wrote that you had been liking the Songs (my friend, I was astonished & pleased to hear this—I thought: ‘Well, they may be praising the hell out of me in Seattle & London; nevertheless, if some of the poem has convinced Saul, Snodgrass, and Wilson, there must be something in it’) and Monroe said he thought you wd like the gift. So in a day or so I’ll deposit you a bunch.

Meanwhile I feel a little still for the latest one, done Friday, and in fact I wd like to dedicate it to you.907 But there’s a difficulty. It’s addressed to Apollo, and I can’t have the ‘Sire’ taken for you (readers have enough trouble with this poem—The Observer have been holding up two ^sections^ they took last summer, to get Alvarez to do a critical piece to go with them, so he writes me questions I haven’t decided to answer yet). Now if I dedicated it to you and Elena, the problem is solved; but this I wdn’t undertake without authorization. Very few of the Songs are dedicated and in general I am roughshod: I don’t ask permission and them persons is delighted, indeed one very close friend asked for the dedication of one that enchanted him. But this is a special case, and please be candid. Besides, you & Elena may not like the Song at all, I can’t tell yet myself whether it’s any good, I generally give them months or years before grading them. They seldom even get typed for weeks. I am not really a writer; I just brood, divulge, brood. The work is all done beforehand, and then later.

I haven’t seen Patriotic Gore yet—the price is a little rich for my blood—though I remember the seminars close to word for word.908 I hope you have cast since a cold eye on Grant’s account of Cold Harbor. Lately the Iriquois [sic] book charmed me.909 The two stories somewhere in the middle are among the funniest things that have happened in writing since the scholar broke into ‘song’ in the lobby, as I recall it, of an Israeli hotel. Nobody else could have reported either. The truth is that you are, to my sense, the surviving American man of letters. So please take almost perfect care of yourself. (I share Jane Austen’s contempt for the word ‘perfect’; and Monroe & Brenda say you work too hard.) The Devil has come of late and took off our top. Hemingway’s defection bothered me; I cried; I didn’t blame him—it’s his own business—but I felt bad. Faulkner bothered me, then Frost. So who is there? Good guys, but no first-class seniors (no first-first-class seniors) but, sir, you.

My love to Elena,

John

No kidding: if you & Elena do or does not like Song or ded’n, for any reason, please tell so.

[Ransom, TS]

24 Congdon st, Providence R I

10 March 63

Dear Mr Stiehl:

I’m sorry to be so slow, I’ve been over-working and ill, I run three courses for the first time since 1940, besides slaving (unwillingly) on the poem every weekend, besides extra jobs—readings, lectures, addresses—here & elsewhere; I’ve taken no vacation for years and the whole enterprise is running downhill; if I make it to June my doctors and I will all be amazed.

Deep thanks for your kindness of contempt for No. 14; which I share. Let’s kill it. I undertook after yr letter a full revision, which looks good, but let’s kill it. Now: the one I wd like to put in instead |I wanted 18, but it’s too many; I can’t deal w. them now.| is dedicated to Edmund & Elena Wilson, but I won’t do that without their permission, and Edmund hasn’t answered yet. He hasn’t been well. Still I ought to hear tomorrow, and will let you know at once. I enclose it. |I did. He says they’re ‘delighted.’|

I also throw you a Vita my chairman at Minnesota threw together (in despair) from some memoranda of mine. I hate all this stuff. May I have this back though; I might need it while applying for crown prince. (The joke of this is that idiots in Seattle & London—I feel boxed—have taken lately to pretending that I am THE GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN POET, as if it mattered and as if it weren’t obvious that Lowell in fact is, since Mr Frost’s death, if it matters.) The current facts are: I am permanently Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota, visiting professor of English at Brown this year; other sections of my despicable poem have appeared in The Times Lit. Suppl., The Noble Savage, Partisan, Poetry, Encounter, The Observer, The New Republic, Harper’s; I’ve given readings from it this year at the National Poetry Festival in October (Libr of Congr), Harvard, Brown, etc. None of this, please, is to be quoted as from me, or directly. And why any jazz, by the way?—the best introduction given me recently was ‘Mr John Berryman, the American poet’—I was pleased with the curtness: no lies, no errors, no fulsomeism, no exag’n. Now, abt comment on the Bradstreet poem, we undoubtedly enter on exaggeration,—and (blush) I brought it up myself (out of rage at my NY publisher—with whom this week I am now on good terms again). I don’t have those old papers around. Several respectable people voted: yea. On both sides of Atlantica. But at last what I care about is an opinion of Fitzgerald’s—in The American Review, Aut 60, p. 6—‘He bided his time and made the best poem of his generation’.910 Wrong, prob’y, but it sounds good.

Fitzgerald is keen also on the Dream Songs; and two other heavy votes have come in, Snodgrass’s (‘Baby, you have dood it!’—Dee used to be a student of mine at Iowa) and Wilson’s. Maybe there is something in them.

I don’t have no photographs, and all the ones taken here have been apelike. Daniel Lindley (711 W. Green st, Univ of Illinois, Urbana) took a set in Vermont last summer of wh we used one at the Libr of Congress—glossy—maybe you cd try him.911

Yrs,

J Berryman

P.S. I am writing to Shahn. |His address is simple: Roosevelt, New Jersey.| Do you send him the new proofs; & copies of past numbers.

[BL, TS]

24 Congdon st, Providence, Rhode Island

23 March 63

Dear Alvarez:

I’m sorry for delay,—I haven’t been well, have been busy, and hate like fire commenting on my work; I have done it on certain occasions, most recently (for over there) in accordance with a request from Bridson of the BBC in Washington—the tape will be run in the summer, they say—but I hate it. I am much indebted to you, however, for kindness to my work, such as it is, past and present, so here goes. Please do not quote me directly.

It is all one poem, working title (since 1955) The Dream Songs. There are hundreds of sections, some 40 or 50 of which have appeared or are scheduled to do so; 15 will be in the next Ramparts, having won their first prize of $700—this news (or non-news) is not to be released until May 1st; the present plan, at Lowell’s urging, is to issue 75 as a book in NY & London later this year or later, as a sort of dry-run. The poem is grossly unfinished.

That’s context. Now these two (which my wife has just found for me) maybe are difficult—I never know, and couldn’t care less—if the stuff is any good, somebody will eventually catch up, and if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter.912 Kenneth Burke and I many years ^ago^ had an argument on a country stroll about Keats—turned out he hadn’t read Bridges on the subject—so how cd we argue? Bridges explained certain things abt Keats FOREVER. Empson’s masterpiece (I think) I’ve been studying on & off since it appeared (in Life & Letters Today?) in ’37: Aubade.913 Wilbur and one Nims and I have a symposium on Cal’s Skunk Hour in the current New World Writing (21) and we all made mistakes and Lowell’s responsio is magnificent. This is a tough area.

HE YELLED.

The poem is abt a man named Henry, who is sometimes 3rd person, sometimes first, here ‘me’. He is Christ: yelling is the most terrible pronouncement, called the Little Apocalypse, he loosed (Mark 13); Greek—on the consensus of scholarly opinion—he did not know—so we’re dealing w fictions—a good study, by H. (not V.) Taylor, in his posthumous volume.914 Bread-&-rising is Archbishop Carrington’s amazing discovery (The Prim. Xtian Calendar, and his edition of Mark since) that the structure of Mk, on which Mt and Lu wholly rely) is liturgical: Jewish feasts; no historical. Eastern resurrection-rites are also (scornfully) involved. Line 3.3 might be Pascal.

HELL IS EMPTY.

yes, of course, Origen: non-sainted not so much for his self-castration, in my opinion, as for his interpretation of Apocotastasis, intolerable to the Church: everybody’s freed, even Satan repents: all Bad Guys become GOOD GUYS, much too Christian for the Church—no soap—where are the channels??

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

[Carriger, MS]

I like the Egyptian one on p. 19 too.915

10 Apr ’63

Dear Nancy,

I am a little worn w. the memorial service for Mrs. Honig916—it is wearing to live among a dying person’s things, and I feel sorry for Honig—and with income tax stuff; so I write shortly but with gratitude for your letting me see the ms. The things that hit me are where a certain hatred for men surfaces—Esp. the one on p. 46 (Time quote917) &, even better, the one for Yeats.918 In fact I like this second one so well that I’m seconding the book’s publication. Do a favour (to yourself or me): send a copy of p. 50 to Meredith, saying I asked you to. I am writing to him |by this mail| to expect it.—The long poem (forgive my candour) is not really, to my sense, a poem. Live long & write well.

Yrs,

John Berryman

P.S. Kate like the Artificial Flower-factory.919 Me too. Remind me of

1. Ted R—’s ‘3 ladies’ green house operation920

2. a story abt Miss Moore: on the way to her mother’s funeral, they pass the sign of a supplier for zoos, & she want to stop; & remember[.]

[NYPL, MS]

Easter—[14 April 1963]

Dear Ralph,

All my experience w. some damned book called maybe—?—The Arts of Reading, and 25 years of teaching that sort of stuff at respectable places, has not enabled me to fathom this Sabbatical form. I feel sure Miss Park can do so, and beg you to pass it on.921 If I cannot understand it, there is something strictly wrong w. it; and I wish somebody in the administration wd get w. it, to make it intelligible to senior staff.

I’ve had an upsurge of hope—I don’t know why—and congratulate you without envy (or almost without envy) on yr miraculous & over-deserved present freedom. I expect some myself, over-deserved too. A year fr. now I think I will have become (malgré lui) a fairly well known character. Just now I am crawling to June, and spend most of my time in bed. Yesterday I wrote 2 new Songs, both good. Kiss ol’ Penelope for me. 20 min. ago come a lovely letter fr. Fitzgerald in Perugia: he not only agree to be godfather to Martha: he come here & hold her, for the ceremony in early May. Kate delighted. Love,

John

[Haffenden, MS]

24 Congdon St

[spring 1963]

Dear Boyd:

In haste & need: will you send me instanter heavy prescriptions for—tuinal, is it?—& Sparine—Dilantin (as anti-convulsant)—and any general vitamin pill you ever recommen’d to me before? Please, kid. I run my final seminar tom’w, and am afraid then of chaos—I’ve been ill for months (hence no answer to Maris’s good letter)—a partial account will be in R’s hands, strictly confidential, by when you have this, but I’ll write you independently within a few days.

Love to M & all young—

John

My copy of Ramparts, w. 15 Songs, came this morning; others shd (fr. Calif.) this week—and yours will be there pronto.

[Lilly, MS]

24 Congdon St

Providence

Sunday [late April 1963]

Dear Henry—

Thanks for answering my 2 questions and for the Dec. number (HURRAH for the award to Pound922). By luck I had this last week off here, at Brown, so I have a thing v. largely sketched out—12 stanzas, I’ve drafted 1 & 2, one on Isaac, two on The Fire, two on race, others, and 11 & 12. How’s that? Of course I’ve been up all night all week. It’s called “The Other Chicago”, and brother, the end is weird; I discarded other titles when the under-conception finally emerged. Unfortunately the damned poem has filled up before I’ve had a chance to do any research—and I refuse to let it go over 12—when I talked w. you I had in mind 8 (possibly: 9). For instance, I had to write the Negro stanzas without ever having read Black Metropolis.923 Still, I have 6 wks for that & the rest; as, on a more exalted occasion, Freud did all the historical research on dreams—complaining abt it like fire—after he’d drafted Traumdeutung. Also, them race stanzas will prob’y cost me Miss Brooks’s vote.924 I v. fond of Ralph Ellison & James Baldwin,925 and invoke minstrelsy, but I am no ‘nigger-lover’—have you seen Terry Southern’s brilliant story in Esquire?926 Now Engle almost certainly hates me, as I said, and I thoroughly dislike & despise him back.927 So, even if you shd turn out to think the thing better than other entries, I still miss the prize. So it goes. I am now so deeply engaged that (I care, but) I couldn’t care less. I have proved that I can work outside the ‘Dream Song’ framework, even after 8 yrs’ commitment to that. Yes, I’ll throw you a batch for the Fall; & in fact this letter is of course addressed to my friendly colleague, acquaintance, & editor,—not the judge; as you know.

Best,

John

P.S. I forgot I have 2 more questions: 1) The Newberry Library has or had apartments (not in it, nearby) one of which they offered me—I accepted: heavenly privacy—when I was operating at Loyola or the Univ. of Chicago. Now I’m reading at Wayne in Detroit on the 29th: |(Monday eve.)| I wd like some ‘instant’ Chi. for the poem: wd you call the director for me & see if I cd have one for the weekend? 2) Where’s Saul at present? They went to Calif., then Texas. I need his advice.

[Haffenden, MS]

24 Congdon St

Monday [late April 1963]

Dear Pal

Problem: shall I come to Chicago for the weekend before my reading in Detroit next Mon.? I’m working at a poem on that somber city (to try to pry $1000 out of the Chi. D. news) and wd like a look-back, esp. w. you, & to see you. Are you there? are you free? (Address fr. Rago, who had the contest stuff sent me.) Advise quick.

Love & to Susan

fr. old Kate & wing’d —broken leg; Pegasus| me

John

Ramparts are giving 15 Songs $700 prize. I need money.

[Haffenden, MS]

Wed. 1 May 63

Dear Ralph

All thanks for letters and tranquillized forms. Will write on Friday, or maybe tom’w, abt everything. Still sick fr. v. long & rough trip fr. Detroit yesterday (9 hours)—teach tonight & tom’w—after a reading more ‘successful’ than any in my life: the audience wd not stop, afterward, clapping & even stamping—I had sat down, waving them down as usual—Snodgrass said ‘You’re going to have to read more’—so I read at last 2 more—clapping—ditto—I read one more, & said ‘No more’. I read only Dream Songs, after 2 poems by others. We flew blind nearly all the way. Plane fr. Idlewild circled over Providence—in vain—storm—on to Boston; limousine back. Love,

John

The jet was OK but the DC 8 sprang up & down like a deer.

[Emory, TS]

11 May 63

Dear Ralph,

I’m sorry for delay in writing, but I used to be sick one or two days a week, then more often, and now for weeks every day: how I’ve gotten my teaching and jobs done is an enigma. I will say that I never taught better in my life—there have even been articles in one or both of the student ’papers here about it—and some of my best students are taking or vagabonding all three of my courses—sometimes there are more vagabonds than students; and my last big reading in Detroit a few days ago was easily the most sensational success I’ve ever given—Snodgrass who was my chairman and is a damned good poet & reader himself said he had never seen or heard anything like it—I read only Songs, exc for introd’y two poems by others. I haven’t missed a job all year, and I teach far better here than at Minnesota because I teach tiny classes and do anything I like: I make everything up, in the two writing courses I used no texts whatever this Spring (not that I wd do that again though, that’s too much work). But I’m exhausted. One of the psychiatrists in Boston thinks my crucial mistake was the month of devil-work on The Dream Songs in Vermont directly after the prostrating six weeks’ teaching and frenetic social life: I shd have completely quit at that point. Maybe. But I had to know where I was. The realer troubles I think are: I couldn’t stop writing—every weekend, one, two or even three Songs—friend, that’s murder—Kate wants to scream every time I tell her, reluctantly, I’ve finished a new one—I even did one yesterday, a beauty (God damn it)—when I’m sliding to the end, all day in bed, can’t even read, with only three tasks in front: long papers to read, office Mon aft, and a seminar Tues aft; then, this term, the strain of giving three courses, which I don’t believe I have done since 1940 at Harvard—the hours were only the same as at Minnesota—six—each course meeting once a week for two hours—the wrench of mind, in all them directions, is beyond me in my condition, with the poem and the public jobs (readings, lectures, convocations, all over). The leg—enforced total physical inactivity—hasn’t helped either: after more than five months, it’s still contused & swollen, weak, uneasy, and sore. I need rest, and swimming (exercise for it underwater matters—no weight). We have heard of a converted grist mill near here, for rent for the summer, with a waterfall, and have made plans to see it tomorrow. What are you & Alicia doing for the summer?? I am going into hospital as soon as Robt Fitzgerald comes to stand godfather for Martha the Sunday from tomorrow. Wish me luck.

It’s worrying. But Kate and Martha are in perfect health, and M can turn over by herself and wreathes the world—not only K and me, but strangers—in 50 kinds of smiles. We had loverly letters from Maris and Ellen lately. The Ramparts prize came yesterday at last (700,—of which ALAS half has already gone to three medical bills, and 140 more to a fuel bill—this is a big house); my copy—I ain’t seen it yet—ought to be here on Monday, and others in midweek, to be streaked to you and other pals. Allen’s is coming from them, they say. Tell you something amoosing: one I did several weeks ago I decided was for Allen & Isabella, if they want the dedication, and I even wrote it out (though I haven’t found it since yet) in my elegant script, calling it “Dream Song 70015” as a joke: some joke, I noticed later: $700 was the Ramp. prize I was waiting for for 15 Songs. Is anything accidental? Herbie is full-of-it; and I have sometimes wondered whether you don’t have secret doubts yourself,—which abandon, kid. Freud was in business. I picked that number strictly out of the air. A private press called Stone Wall wants to do a run this summer, handprinted, spec paper: I’m thinking of giving them 36. Excitement in places. Farrar Straus and Faber keen to see 75 or 100; doing, when feel better. Weird correspondence, e g some pillar in Squaresville, n y state, write to the publisher of The New Republic ‘animalism … Is it true that The New Rep is still being read in public high schools’—publisher amused, pass down to editor, who delighted throw on to me, ‘Only letter we’ve ever had about a poem’—me furious, with stupidity of pillar, who didn’t even take in was about Henry not me—but laughed too. So have audiences.

What’s happening there in SLA? McDiarmid going, you suggest?928 who come in? or has Wilson really re-structured everything? To our advantage, or not? Has Morgan really that far recovered? What courses will Phil give?—and is the S E Asia Studies a true business? What’s w Geo Amberg and Bob Ames?929 the young people? Are you still entirely in Philosophy??? (I don’t think you ought to be unless you want to be). How are the shits who run the Eng Dept doing?—ol Clark, ol partyboy Montgomery, and the jerk who runs Freshman English? Are Tate Monk Brown Levinson Foster Bowron Weber Wright Youngblood still in there failing to pitch?

Saul he once say to me as we cross the campus, ‘These weaklings like Clark, they are held together with wires’. I agree. They barely get from day to day. They are parasites. Montgomery knows that he is an idiot; the other two are not.

Abt money & business, is up to you. I don’t understand that stuff, as you know.

Love to yr son & Penny, & Alicia,

John

[Ransom, MS]

P.S. Thanks in advance for the ten copies. But may I have, paying for them (didn’t I have a letter fr. you abt reduced rates?), 20 more? Many friends, prof’l & private, here & abroad, are interested in this poem; and I want to send a copy of the number, out of good nature, for yr review of Alvarez, to an editor in New Zealand

24 Congdon St

14 May 63

Dear Mr Stiehl:

My gratitude for the cheque, and to everybody there for the way the Songs look; they never had it so good, or ‘looked’ so bad, until ^read^ aloud,—when some sound possible,—though really this ‘presentation’ business doesn’t mean much to me, it’s for editors (legitimate) & collectors (I used to be one but now for many years the hell w. it). There seem to be only two mistakes (not that it matters): my word ‘prickly’ in 5.1 is not my word: is ‘pricky’; whereby the whole structure was ruined. And ll. 16–17 of #7 are mislined. Landor has a letter fr. Italy to his publisher, ‘on p. 167 you have misplaced a comma. God has prevented me from cutting my throat after this.’930 Or so I recall; and Housman’s insistence (not only in schol’y but in the punctuation of his own stuff) is well known. Your people did a v. g. job. Only I am as bad as W. Savage L. & AEH, or worse.

The cover is brilliant; best so far.931 ^That man is gifted: Nisei, or not?: will you tell me something abt him?^ Harris’s article a beauty, 3 / 4 new to me. Word of advice: Edit yr people. Don’t let W. Coffey ram Lewis down ^our^ throats, as esp. at the end of his interesting & ridiculous article. |Some of Lewis’s drawings are brilliant; not as good as his T.S.E. & E.P.| Teach him slowly, slowly, the art of persuasion. I myself wd have begun w. the great taxi-driver’s test of fiction (Counterpoint, Ivory Tower?) at the end of Men without Art (’34?), and passed on to the characterization of Mr Eliot in Blasting & Bombardiering (unmentioned by yr writers). 1) V. disapp’t’d in Jesuits: try Fr. Wm. J. Lynch 2) You overrate old Thom Gunn (a good guy) and me; and make no recommendations.

Yrs

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

15 May 63

Dear Mr Wang:

Thank you for writing. Will this do as a possible statement for use in advertising—you do not ask for one—I offer it:

I have loved Mark Van Doren’s poetry all my life, or for thirty years. He was the first modern poet I seriously read; and I have never recovered, or tried to recover. His early work was praised by T. S. Eliot, his middle work by John Crowe Ransom. It is delightful to join these high judges by saying that his very recent “Dunce Songs” are beautiful too. Beautiful and weird. Among his middle splendours are the violent “Winter Tryst” and the pensive “This Amber Sunstream”, but under his hand they are the same. Like that’s writing, man.

I wd not want this used without Mark’s approval; or, if you want to cut it, without mine. It is odd to be recommending one’s old teacher,—to who????? But I congratulate you on doing the book even before it comes out.932 And please send me a copy. I love that man.

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

PS: Probably you have never heard of me. My stuff, and therefore my opinions, are hot, here and abroad. Sir Herbert Read in his lecture at the National Poetry Festival last October declared the four great current influences from here to be: Crane, Stevens, Lowell, me.

[Delaware, MS]

25 May [1963]

Dear De—

Belated thanks, and an other ‘Lay of Ike’—treasure it, Son, treasure it—if the market holds, it will be worth a nickel during Teddy’s administration. Also sending you Ramparts if copies ever come; on the extravagant hypothesis that you may like 3 or 4 of the 15 Songs. The 700 paid some medical bills, heh heh.

What’s w. yr summer? We’ve taken a 200-yr-old grist mill on the Ct. line here—crude, but a private waterfall!!!! and only $200 for the whole summer (which I figure I can just afford if Texas ever comes in & votes).

May the sick old Muse smile on yr works & problems. May I live till next week, may Henry walk up the ass of the Empire State Bldg, may all our wives & friends & doctors & lawyers & publishers flourish—but not too much though, to get out of hand—

Affl’y,

John

[Princeton, TS]

Have they sent you Ramparts?—if not: coming, as soon as I get copies.

24 Congdon st

Providence R I

25 May 63

Dear Allen,

I wrote this weeks ago and dedicated it to you & Yr lady but then I mislaid the damned thing till this evening.933 I daresay it’s hopeless.

Sorry to bother you at night: I was getting desperately worried (as usual, only Ralph called today and everything is at odds there: I can come back & teaching [sic], taking my winter single-qu-leave and losing the sabbatical; or I can scrounge to supplement the sabbat., losing the s-q-l for two more years (having already lost it once. Verily, life is ’ell, and I am so tired & sick that I doubt if it will be physically possible for me to teach next year; besides I have to make a final more-than-weekend try at this poem or it’ll be gone. He stalling with the applications, meanwhile pushing the Graduate School for travel (small money) and the McKnight F’n for a grant—to see what application to put in or not: the s-q-l I have, unless I take the sabbat., wh I can’t do without other help. You don’t know, do you, a tame Foundation that likes crippled keen & mod wellknown poets (I have had Hell praised out of me this year, here & abroad)? Of course if I get a Ford I’m fair to live (tho I’ll have to borrow for the summer) but yest’y a bitter blow: no decision till Aug.

We were tickled by the puckish picture of you in The Modern Poets, but I think the hero of them photographs is Robt F,—who came & stood godfather to my tiny Martha last Sunday.934

I’ve taken a 200-yr-old grist mill, near the Ct line, for the summer: crude, but cheap and a private waterfall!! Come swim. What are yr plans? Can we all meet at some point? Isabella will like Martha, indeed she may swoon, the baby is so improb’y beautiful.

Love,

John

[NYPL, MS]

Providence, Mon [late May 1963]

Dear Robert

Oh this is luxurious: thanks, and I hope yr holiday went good. I am this minute, this evening, starting a desperately urgent one myself. I wound up my duties at Brown last night, or rather today at 10 having been up all night w. papers & 20 letters & reports,—slept like a dead all day—and woke w. nothing to read! Came downstairs, & found these. One of my favourite characters Brenan (vouched for too by the author of The Spanish Temper935), one of my favourite countries India & fav. subjects Hatha-Yoga (I too began in Poona & was later at Benares, tho’ my yogic instr’n was in Calcutta—fr. a banker), and a serious book on the Council. My God, I did really not know where to start, and my waves of gratitude must be reaching you in N.Y. But somehow I decided on & am now in, Dom Denys.936 Your copy of Ramparts wd have arrived days ^ago^ if the 10 they promised me had come when expected; they ain’t come YET. Grrr.

Always,

John

The other Robt (Fitzg.) came last Sunday to be godfather to our delicious Martha.

[NYPL, TS]

Monday [June 1963]

Dear Robt,

I liked the Benedictine’s book better ^after 30 pp^ than after 200, when I gave up. It’s unbelievably repetitious (I realize you didn’t do the editing, and it must be economics that retained ref’s to plates that don’t exist in the Amer ed)—I myself cut the equiv of 40 pp out in a few hours; in particular the iterative complacency of his being unable to find a ‘true yogi’ is both tiresome & contemptible; and his sightseeing is primitive: of the 3 great temples in Benares, he does not even know that you go across the ‘street’ and upstairs to a balcony to see into the Golden Temple, and that you ascend a balustrade & join the monkeys to see the inner court of the Durga Temple, and the Nepalese temple he obviously never heard of. A very poor, chatty, & yet interesting job, which shd be reviewed by a pro. Suggestion: send a personal copy, using my name, to Fr Colman Barry, editor of The Benedictine Qu’y, St John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minn.937 And if you’re ever near there, go to vespers (the abbatial church is a massive Breuer) and introduce yourself to that competent historian, editor, and celebrant.—The Council book is fine. Kate & I cried over that marvellous Pope the other night.938—Stiehl at Ramparts felt so guilty for tardiness he’s sent me 30 copies air-post (cost, $16). One’s coming. 2, 4, 5, 8, 15 aren’t bad.—What a Catholic letter.

Best always,

John

[NYPL, MS]

Providence, 27 May [1963]

Dear Randall—

What gives?

I’m trying to put together in my mind(s) a picture of the so far printing. Ramparts just gave a prize of $700 to 15 of the Songs, which unnerved me.

Cheers to your lady, with her wonderful hat—and blessings on your thoughts & work. The baby is named Martha, or ‘Crisco: the All-Purpose Fat’—and she can turn over.

But do please send me the things back, or inform me.

Yrs,

John Berryman

[Chicago, MS]

P.S. Kate is reading Henderson over on the right—baby’s howling. Tell me if you or Susan like the Bessie.939 That word down at the end is waterfall.940 Dialogue: me: where are we in relation to Ct? Owner: You see that big elm?—Yes.—That’s in R.I. The next one is in Ct.

31 May 63

Dear Saul,

I finish old lousy poem and I send a copy to Rago—for record—to pass on to you.941 Now I got another copy, so you & Susan have him, to put in the nearest incinerator, only: tell me where is wrong or absent or stupid—swiftly, without urging yr brain. Hell, that’s your city. In fact, one stanza was abt you; which I chopped. I have a new technique: I just cut. I figured one literary man was enough. Of course another reason I’m bothering you with it is Isaac. I hope I did yr old friend fair.

Pope John is dead. I cried & prayed, & found Kate w. tears in her eyes. He was like a good man. The jerks put him ^in^ as a compromise, decrepit—ha ha! he bombed them.

Ramparts coming, w. 3 of the 15 okay: no. 2, & abt Bessie, & 15. See if you think.

I took a old grist mill on the Ct border for the summer: P.O.: Old Grist Mill Rd, Chepatchet [sic], R.I. Come stay, kids: private waterfall. Let know when come,

John

[UMN, TS]

2 June 63

Gentlemen:

Just a note of enquiry, at the suggestion of The Graduate School at Minnesota, where I’m a professor of Humanities (visiting associate professor of English here this year past). I have a sabbatical due which I can’t afford, as things stand, to take: would you be interested in receiving an application, or a request for aid, to cover the coming academic year? Both Dean Boddy’s assistant, Mrs Hostettler, and my chairman Ralph Ross (who had a grant from you on his sabbatical several years ago), urge me to make it clear that I can “apply through the University—thus making any subsequent grant one made to the University rather than to Professor Berryman as an individual”.942

The project is: completion of an attempt at a critical biography of Shakespeare, interesting itself chiefly in his intellectual and emotional development (heavy reliance on his manipulation of his multiple sources), based on the four Hodder lectures I gave at Princeton, which were expanded then into seven Ellison Lectures on Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, and a longish essay “Shakespeare at Thirty” which The Hudson Review printed. My other literary work, including some ten volumes, is fairly well known at present, here and abroad.

Yours faithfully,

John Berryman

P.S. Perhaps I should add that the book is under contract to Farrar, Straus. Robert Giroux’s my editor.

[NYPL, TS]

24 Congdon st

5 June 63

Dear Robert,

Could I bug yr sec’y with the following situation: I don’t know OUP’s address in NY or who to write to, but Halliday (I don’t know if you remember him, he was in our class before he went to Ann Arbor to finish, is now w Amer Heritage) wrote to me the other day that at last we were in a book together,—edited by one Litz for Oxford, NY.943 Now I never heard of, and do not like being pirated, in this country, and have no idea what of mine they’ve printed—apparently it’s essays on Amer fiction—and received no request that I can remember, and was offered or paid nothing. In short, screw them. Stiehl at Ramparts asked me months ago in some letter why I hadn’t collected my critical essays; but this is worse than otherwise, out of some periodical or anthology. Cd you ask yr sec’y to let me know who to bomb with a little enquiry, or cd she call and ask them to write me instantly with a little attempt at an explanation? This is impudent nonsense. I am accustomed to it from European and Asiatic magazines ^(& publishers, esp. Italian, German & French)^ but not from Oxford NYC.—Thanks.

All best,

John

[UMN, TS]

24 Congdon st, Providence

5 June 63

Dearest Paul,

Perhaps this is the hardest letter I have ever had to write. Besides, I don’t know what a little fellow understands; your mother will read it to you and explain what she can. I can and have made hundreds or thousands of people laugh this year, but not you. Is weird. She used the expression, powerful, ‘mysterious and rough’, about my not coming to see you. I have been wanting to write to you for months, only there was a little problem: I cdn’t write without explaining why I didn’t come to Peekskill, and I couldn’t enter on an explanation without referring to my health. Now, two things a parent does not do to a child is: complain or seek sympathy. Namely you don’t disturb the child nor do you want anything. But I have finally decided that the overruling law here is to be less ‘mysterious’.

I have for a long time been too ill to travel. My hospitalizations in Nov & Dec were incidental, though it’s true my leg after six months is still contused & swollen, uneasy, weak and sore. I began long ago to be physically sick, first once or twice a week, then 3 days out of 4, then for a long time now daily, sometimes several times a day. I am a tough character but it wore me down, and the last few days I’ve been flat on my back. I believe anyone else wd have resigned long ago. Moreover, I was working madly, doing one, two or even three Songs each weekend, though I was running three courses for the first time I think since 1940 at Harvard; so that to nervous exhaustion, and anxiety, was added overwork. However, I did every public job I contracted for (including two long terrible trips, to Buffalo and Detroit) and made up every class or seminar I had to postpone here. (It’s true I felt unable to take up an invitation from B.U., ‘easy’ to get to, bec I didn’t know whether I cd get to it or not; and I was unable to let anyone do any solicitation for me,—after my apparent triumphs in Washington and at Harvard.) Nearly all the jobs were hereabout: a reading here & a Sr Convocation (to 700, in robe & hood haha) & a PBK reading,—URI, Ct Coll, etc: car to door, as in Buffalo & Wayne people looked after me every second, though it wasn’t enough.

I can’t write more now. I am too tired. But I want you to come and see me: I have took an old, very old, mill at Chepatchet, or rather in the country: your mother will say how much you can, betw sch & camp. Afterward is poss too. I will teach you to swim. Finally, I don’t think you have reason to feel ashamed of me. I stand near the very head of one profession, and high in another, in a large & powerful country: and am known to do so abroad; though sick & penniless.

Send me some news, Poukie. Your sister looks just like you, is weird,

love,

John Berryman

There is a waterfall!—a private waterfall!!

[WU, MS]

24 Congdon St, Providence

8 June ’63

Dearest Allen & Isabella—

I am so sorry I cd cry, abt that good Rosie.944 But Kate suddenly said: ‘maybe the marriage won’t last’—and my black cloud for you, & us all, lifted a little. I later—yr letter came half an hour ago, we’re off to see the Camerons in Duxbury, only yr letter kills me—thought: is he a scoundrel, Allen? I never knew no coloured people good—Ellison somewhat. They is people, though. I not of course accusing you of prejudice: we all have it, and they have it. I remember, Allen, a letter in Commentary, explaining how he cd not stand the odor of Gentiles.

Isabella, I sorry.

Allen, I am more saddened, if poss., by yr paying any attention to that photo-anthology. I too get requests to reprint & re-record poems (so called) by somebody once named me, a hopeless fool. So what? Give it no thought. The only thing that matters is what we now write.

Blessings & love,

John

Kate specially asks me to send her love to both of you. We like you. Come to see us!!!

Old friend: I am more sick of being (as you put it) the Dream Song man than even you can imagine. All I want is freedom. I have a Chinese poem to finish. But I’m ^self-^ trapped, & ill.

[NYPL, MS]

c / o Milward

RFD 1,

Chepachet, R.I.

[early summer 1963]

Dear Robert—

Second half of Brenan’s book much better than 1st. Can’t wait to see 2nd vol.—tell him hurry.

Had a bad effect on me: shot me off on my own—an autobiog’y, wh. I never expected to do. I’m at p. 6 of Ch. 1 (schema: 13 ch’s), from over the weekend. Title: Toward 48. 2 ch’s already publ’d: “The Imag. Jew” & “Th. Out”.

Problem: a guy w. a pvt press in Iowa City want to do some Dream Songs—36, I mention in reply. He offer prac’y no money, $150, but I need that. Now we can’t have these reviewed, can we? Interfere w. 75? Best,

John

[Emory, MS]

c / o Milward

RFD 1

Chepachet, R.I.

Mon—[late June 1963]

Dear Ralph,

I’m delighted abt Sidney Hook’s coming—good talk!!945—I’ve just started a new book this weekend (w. 15 unfinished, ugh)—am 5 pp. into Ch. 1, and can’t wait to see what you think of. Is a [don’t tell nobody this]946 autobiography. God knows what my mother will think, if I show her—she comes this weekend. It starts w. my father’s suicide.

The only one of them ^4^ damn Found’ns I heard back fr. was Pforzheimer, whose sec’y so goofed she enclosed w. his letter a copy of it and a note to some ‘Mrs. Smith’ to send me a ‘Library Form’. Human ineptness must never be underestimated.

Mary tells us they let Jim go.947 Those shits in Folwell. Still, he had already got a job at Macalester (weird, huh?) and telling Mary he goof-off: not meet classes etc. Hm. I wrote him hope. He’s a hopeless jackass but a pretty good verse-writer, kid. He was one of 5 people singled out by a reviewer in the TLS rev. (31 May) of one D’Hall’s Cont’y Amer Poetry—3 of the 5 was students of mine—who also cut Hall down by objecting to his prefatory remark that the Bradstr. poem was ‘a failure’ as “grossly unjust to a path-breaking masterpiece”.948 Ha ha. When TLS never even reviewed it.

I cannot get no wd fr. Zimmerman. The gov’t owes me $471, which I desperately need. Would you be willing to call him on the telephone and ask him to reply to my letter?? It wdn’t take 2 min. Besides not telling me when I may expect the tax rebate (I have less than $100 in the bank)—I’m also owed some £30 by The Observer, $30 advance by Ostroff, $25 ditto fr. Oscar Wms, whatever fr. the BBC, ^and The New Rep. (long rev. of Spender)^ and the NY Times Bk Rev for whom I just reviewed a mad Swede (sci-fiction poem) & a madder Welsh Catholic ^(D. Jones, The Anathemata)—etc—he won’t tell me whe’r I really have to pay Calif. a State tax.949

I’ve done 3 new Songs here in the 2 wks, besides the Times review and my new bk (drafting, notes, schema—3 chapters, 2 already published). My brains is recovering.

General love,

John

[UMN, TS]

c / o Milward

RFD 1,

Chepachet, R.I.

19 June 63

Dear Mr Brown,

With immense difficulty I have cut this to 732 words (not counting the two very short verse-quotations) while trying to retain ease and flexibility; I hope to God it can be printed exactly as it stands.950 You said 700—scant allowance for two vast, ambitious and well-known poems. Auden had thousands, in The NY Review, for Jones alone; which he didn’t criticize either.

It’s a day short of your deadline.

I forget whether you regularly or ever send proof. May I please see one if possible?

Yrs sincerely,

I enjoyed this heavy & swift job.

[NYPL, MS]

25 June 63

Dear Randall

Thanks for good letter & stuff back & is no reason for apology & our greeting to your splendid lady in the immortal hat. I’m touched & heartened (did I say? those months ago) by yr interest in my present poem—and above all by yr seeing it as one—wh. even some of my closest friends, like Allen & Meredith, cannot keep in their excellent heads it is—or I say is; they think ^, or sometimes write as if,^ I’m writing poems.

God knows. I worry. But there’s one thematic norm, one personality, one diction, one set of dramatic arrangements. God knows.

Have a good time abroad. I’m pleased you’ve been putting down poems; yes, ‘magic’ is exactly what it is.

Now, d’you have Ramparts? I cd send you—I have 2 or 3 left. But I don’t wish to throng you. If the 2 sections you speak of—the 1st & 2nd in Poetry—are no good, then none of it is. If you want to use them, fine. And—everybody these days tells me they feel ‘honoured by’, etc—I’d feel honoured. I wonder what yr Table of Contents looks like. Maybe you wd send me? All my life I meant to make an anthology; but I never will. I wd expect yours to be the best one there is. Perhaps let me, without acknowledgement, help. I hate anthol’s but I also love them—Auden’s Light Verse, the Ch. Wms MacMillan one, De la Mare’s, the Opies’.951

You ask where is more. The Summer Yale Rev. have 2 pretty good ones, was 3 on Frost in The N.Y. Review of Bks, New Rep. Nov. 17th (p. 16) is a fair one.952 Others is all over, fr. Milan to Seattle, the hell w. it.

Have a ball—

Yrs,

John Berryman

[WU, MS]

c / o Milward

RFD 1,

Chepachet, R.I.

26 June ’63

Dear Allen & Isabella—

Bless you both for yr good letters. Feltrinelli are doing an anthology, so the first appearance of that song for you may be in Italian; I haven’t decided. Yr ¶, Allen, abt. the Songs delighted me, it was so characteristic. Of course I am wild ^to^ be done & move on. I don’t write these damned things willingly, you know. Each one takes me by the throat. I’ve vowed 100 times: never again. So I stall one, for hours, days, weeks; then I’ve had it. I figure a few more months or years will see the poem through.

Isabella I’m glad you don’t despise Rosy’s boy and were kind to him, I’m not surprised that she’s given him a hard time. I wish everybody luck & hope.

The baby is up on all fours, seeking what she may devour. It is so hot during the day we go under our falls three times, sometimes taking her. Do come try it. We also plan at least one Cape trip—K’s never been—& will pay our respects if we may on you & the lovely Wilsons.

Allen, my thanks abt John Thompson.953 I’d written to Farfield—no reply—will again as soon as I come on the address. I’ve been working here—on the poem, a review for the lousy Times, correspondence, a new book—and my papers (with no study) are in a tangle.

Love,

John

So Mr. Bloody [?Trenbry?] thinks there are no poets in Minn, eh? Ha ha—as another to one.

[Haffenden, MS]

28 Jun 63

Mon cher Pasteur,

Il s’agit de ‘housemaid’s knee’: how cure, hey hey? She put in my groin, while dusting. ‘Groin’ is used in the pejorative sense; so is ‘dusting’. So am ‘I’. So is she. So are you.—The medical fact being: she do a little jig & kick me in the BALLS. Ow. Lousy muse! Do not tell the adorable Peachy.

It is not snowing here. Therefore we race under our private waterfall at all times. But a cool breeze is at present blowing, Hell knows why. A wholly unexpected cheque fr. Brown turn up for $973. Hey hey: starve not. We do our Super-Extra-Dough dance. Few get hurt-up. Also the New Repub. hurl me $125 yesterday for a review of the old Spender; expecting 30, I mused. She mused. We all mused & mused. Cornflakes, that’s what.

It was detestable of you to write—and so goodnaturedly! Honey, you are losing your grip. Them Songs is wif & for nothing. Therefore I writ some more—two today, based on yr letter. The which I will horridly send.

As for Maris!: that ghastly Boyd he say to me the abominable wd ‘privilege’ [to see parts of Awful Poem]954—losing my friendship thereby forever. Restore, love, him to himself: a pail of water overhead: douse him w. parakeets & boa constrictors: ease him w. leeches. I tell you, darling: I am not used to this treatment fr. friends. Get him nasty & cool. Then we can converse.—Pass Steven (I always tho’t it was ‘Stephen’) my affection & respect. ^Peace to his muscles.^ Love to the lesser, too. Ain’t it good Art & Frannie was returned: lucky Mpls. Your poem has caused me to put you in for (Anglo-Saxon: ‘nominate’) 17 top prizes. Some people cannot be kept down. Blow us Boyd’s prose too. COME SEE US, Greeks. We don’t know abt next year yet; maybe Dublin. Janie only bomb Herb & ^Mitz’^ muvver wif a coon: Rosy assassinate Isabella (who is recovering though) & Allen. Funny, Kate’s black blood never bother me.—See current Esquire: a good Saul, & delightful on Wilson who we gon’ go see soon.955 He like ‘Henry’.

Wif hatred,

John

That g-d lovely Baby crawls; alas.

[NYPL, TS]

c / o Milward, RFD 1, Chepachet R.I.

15 July 63

Dear Robert,

Many thanks for letter & offer. Forgive delay, Mother was here for ten days and it wasn’t possible to get much thinking or work done or even letters—I am getting amazingly (for me) up with my correspondence: I sent off 20 letters the day before she arrived, and ten the day after she left, none between. Favour: I’ve no way of getting addresses here in the wood: wd you ask yr secretary to send on to Aiken and to Atheneum the letters enclosed? |ditto: a Ramparts [?c / o] you > Aiken| Thanks. Oxford by the way did use the whole critical chapter (penultimate) of my Crane, maybe with Wm Sloane Assoc permission but not with mine and Sloane (so-called) kept as usual very quiet.

I cannot decide what to do about the Dream Songs. Whether to sign with you, and give you 75 or whatever, or as many as 130, or 100 or so, or not to publish any now, I cannot decide. Of course I have not offered any to anyone else. It will just take more work and thought. But I’m anxious to get to work on an elaborate essay called “The Care and Feeding of Long Poems”, and I’m also anxious to get back to scholarship; I don’t know. Money is a problem too. And I want to go on with the autobiography, while remote from everyone (only Meredith dropped in the other evening, with a pitcher or bottle rather of Martinis and Jarrell’s ex-wife, to our delight:956 if you ever want a day or so in a remote & ancient gristmill with a private waterfall let me know—we cd come get you in Providence if you don’t drive).

Well, the problems with regard to the Songs are enormous. I wonder how I ever sleep, and often I don’t. There is a good deal of pressure from friends and strangers to publish a large number; and yet … Mark and Randall have lately voted for them—tastes as different, both being excellent, as I can easily conceive; Wilson is said to like, Snodgrass does, heavy, Allen says he does; but … Spender, and Alvarez, and many other editors do, evidently; still … I am pretty clear that I won’t take up the Stone Wall Press offer. Let me think. Maybe the thing to do is stop exacerbating, pretend to satisfy myself on some sort of Ms. (not the Poem of course), send it you, and come to NY for a chat. I want to talk with you abt Shakespeare anyway. |both books957—I have to select some Songs to be put into Italian, and I’ve promised groups to Poetry & Kenyon (special numbers of both magazines); that’s trouble enough for one week. Some 60 or 70 will then be in print, here or abroad, and there seem to be perhaps some 230–250 of them?? Easy life, eh.

Of the 5 younger poets singled out in that TLS review of D. Hall’s Penguin you quote, 3 were students of mine and one of the other two a sort of disciple. I didn’t teach them anything but I don’t feel useless.

We have beds and are asking you to stay over.

How wd you like a book of poems for children by me?

How wd you like a book of essays called The Freedom of the Poet which I discussed w Meridian (Asher) as of a regular book first by somebody else, then a pb by them. Abt 5/8 done, it is.

As ever (& you never said how yr vacation was).

John

[Emory, TS]

Enclose a mislaid sheet of 3 wks ago.

RFD 1, Chepachet R.I.

[July 1963]

Dear Ralph,

A possibility, at last, besides the Ford!—Thompson of the Farfield, having written me 3 times, is putting me in for a travelling fellowship: 5000. He says there’s just an outside chance; at least I don’t have to apply, and word shd come very soon, he thinks. It may be weeks yet before I hear about the impossible and delirious Ford. All this suspense is hardly bearable, and how undignified the scrounging is.

The consciousness of age you spoke of some weeks ago is with me always now. I feel as if were [sic] rushing to death, with nothing done. It is an unworthy and debilitating feeling—but how to get rid of it? We must have a talk about this. Maybe one can take steps, maybe it’s just another thing to be put up with. Dante seems to have been marvellously free from it, but in Shakespeare and Villon say it’s like a poison. There appear to be no rules. Who among the philosophers have dealt with it?—here in the summer woods I am feeling very ignorant. In fact I know less altogether every year. Perhaps at last we return to the point where we don’t know anything, and can start all over again—THOUGH rather tired.

I am tinkering hard with four overlord schemata for the poem. I haven’t decided yet about a Farrar Straus collection for next spring: Giroux finally proposed one and offered 500; nor about the private press. Meanwhile there a [sic] good many new ones, which I liked at any rate when I wrote them; later I have a tendency to crumple them up. Maybe I’ll enclose one or two.

I have a letter fr the Sec’y of the Regents granting the sabbat. leave but not saying a word about what my salary is. Damn it, it’s nearly August: shdn’t I know?

I hate bugging you with all this business. One day I’ll write you a proper letter without a single fact in it.

How is yr work going? Avon wrote last week wanting me to do a quality pb for them of Crane—just a short preface, the RB, Maggie, 4 or 5 stories, and five essays on Crane; a good idea, though I also want some poems in. They do not, of course, in the exploratory letter, mention money. It is weird how people fail to mention money. Somehow, having ignored money all my life while at the same time agonizing over it, I now occasionally feel that there is no point in mentioning anything BUT money.

I’m glad Jim’s situation is less depressing than Mary made it—nobody ever gets anything right. Even you and I sometimes don’t understand each other over simple matters; how then—to give rein for an instant—but this sentence is boring me. An hysteric in Berkeley has written me gangs of encyclopedic letters for months over the primitive matter of reprinting my essay on Lowell.

Many thanks for speaking to Zimmerman. You know, I wonder if that man is right in the head. His return (federal) as well as his letter with it—his unrecent latest—told me the Govt owes me $471. But now I have a letter from the Govt demanding $5. Did you hear ever anything like it?? I wrote to him of course at once, enclosing the demand and begging for some truth. Naturally I have not heard back yet.

love & kisses,

John

[BL, MS]

c / o Milward

RFD 1,

Chepachet, R.I.

17 July ’63

Dear Mr Kilmartin or Mr Alvarez:

God forbid, gentlemen, that I shd hurry you. But it is nine months since you accepted (9 Mar.^—date of my answer^) the Songs, and I believe Alexander was gestated in that time. The few days over will allow for the 2nd Song. It is all but four months indeed since I—tardily—but not this tardily—replied to Mr. Alvarez’s enquiries.

As I say, there is no hurry. Still, I can imagine a desire to see the proofs promised me on 5 Mar Oct. ’62, and even to be paid.

May I ask a favour: will you throw me here in the woods Sylvia Plath’s last poems?958

Yrs w. great friendliness

but some doubt,

J. Berryman

[Lilly, MS]

22 July ’63

[Dear Henry—

Henry seems to be inter’d in heroes lately—wh. makes it hard on me. I’ll send you with this a Seven. I can’t go into the archives, exc. to find the ‘anthrax-ray’ one, wh. I actually like; or—seem to remember to like.959

Good luck w. yr number, & vacation. Cheers to yr lady & offspring.]960

—old letter just found, 31 July:

Have you seen, can you get rights to, Sylvia Plath’s final poems (Observer, 17 Febr.) and for a biog’l piece on her? They are rare.

Of course you can have more of my songs to tuck in if you want. I just get mortally tired. Best—

John

[Buffalo, TS]

RFD 1, Chepachet R.I.

22 July [1963]

Dear Tony,

This matter is so simple. You are tying yrself in knots for nothing. “..license others to sell said ^essay^ in book form..”: this is what I cannot have. Your crossing out of the end of the sentence doesn’t help at all.961

Look, for an advance of $25 I am not willing to yeild [sic] Little Brown ANY right except to reprint the essay in this book, in whatever editions ^of it^ seem desirable to you and them. The agreement has got to be drawn thus. As I have already said repeatedly, I am not afraid of your abusing these comprehensive and ridiculous ^rights.^ But here are just two problems, say: suppose next year I want the piece in a book of essays of my own, and some jerk at LB gets cute and either won’t let me have it or charges me say $25 for it. At this point, LB has had it for NOTHING. Or suppose an anthologist wants it. Then I split the fee with LB? Not on your life.

There is the whole unbelievably simple problem.

Best

John

P.S. Clearer still: I want all other rights reserved. (IF they stick at this, of course, it means they plan to cheat.)

[Huntington, TS]

23 July [1963]

Dear Conrad Aiken,

I’m bitterly sorry to hear of coronary and hope for a peace of swift & full recov. Throw the pomes out, I’m afraid they went off days ago. I only did what seemed like a rude over Lord Zero 1) as a sort of joke to get you on at least one copy the sort of royalty we ought to get on every one, and 2) I didn’t know who pub’d it and had mislaid the address of my bookseller in Minneapolis.962 In the same mail today w yr card came a letter fr Oxford, I’ll order w the reply. We do plan a Cape-run later, and will call, hoping to pay our respects for five minutes. Rest, despite grandchildren, and flourish.

Affectionately,

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

26 July ’63

No Ford—I heard yest’y, w. a thud. All thanks all same. There are 2 other remote chances.

Alcools done?

Come by again.

I am warring w. Henry. We are both losing.

our love,

John

[Chicago, MS]

1 Aug ’63

Saul pal—

Our love to Susan. Wait till you see old Baby, who cd stand up. God bless Bummidge—hiss on Henry (but that bastard is doing pretty well—instance one just found, inscribed to you a year ago—hear only rhythms).963 I expect yr first sentence is a clown; but I pretend it isn’t, and after the adrenalin heaved me by yr raving masterworks Augie & Henderson—without which I wd be dreaming out an agrarian existence—guess how I feel abt any counter-thrust.

You is more mobile than us, and we got a private waterfall—bring suits, & come. Be cool! Live it up! (Susan: make him come—and for days: we’ll work—& trade advices)

love,

John

[NYPL, MS]

1 Aug 63

Dear Mark—

Yr delightful brogue-letter made me so nervous I cdn’t read it: it seemed to have praise in it: but now I have read it.

G’wan, as Kate says to the Baby.

I don’t like Conrad’s selection of yr stuff.964 (He just have a coronary, he tell me; but recovering.)

I hear you & Dorothy were the stars of the time at Harvard. Hurrah.

That stupid Song for you I just gave Rago for a spec. no. he plan.965 Will send. I truly hope you don’t dislike.

My Songs is no good. It’s just a little ‘jazz.’ I am no good.

Yrs w. love & admiration

John

[NYPL, TS]

c / o Milward, RFD 1,

Chepachet, R.I.

2 3 [sic] Aug 63

Dear Bob,

Well here it is. Or something is. Not the poem, of course. But a heavy proportion of what so far is best in it. I don’t count on collecting any fame from these sixty pages but I shn’t be surprised if some of them proved more or less immortal.

I decided 100 was too many, as giving an illusion of a finished work—and adopted a different principle of selection & arrangement.

Two are missing, 28 & 52. They’re in a batch of nine I gave Poetry for their special no. in October; I’ll have them copied when proofs come in a fortnight or so.966 You may have 52 yourself, it’s the one (All virtue..) dedicated to Mark and I sent copies to some friends, I forget now who—he wrote me an extravagant letter abt it. I’m sorry by the way for the prominence given yr name in my Note by the accident of that one’s coming first of the dozen or so dedicated, I hope you don’t mind.

Cheers.

Yours ever,

John

No notes, I say, this time.

[Emory, MS]

4 Aug ’63

Dear Ralph—

I am closing in on this damned poem. I swear to God & you it contains—repeat: contains—more bad writing than either of us has ever done before. 9 more will be in Poetry spec. no. Oct, 4 in a Feltrinelli (Milan) anth’y, 3 or so in spec. Kenyon for Mr. Ransom, a guy at the U. of Chicago wants help (bibliog.) to study it in a pb on mod. Amer. Poetry to come out next spring, and Kate says if I write just one more she will vanish in orbit, flourishing the baby.

$300 fr. Chicago Daily News—weird, eh?—undeserved—for “ ‘ “pome”’ ” scheduled to be published today.967 Avon offers 500 for a quality pb of & on Crane, the Voice of America 250 for a 27-min. lecture on The Red Badge.968 Don’t hear fr. A or Z (Archer or Zimmerman) or you. I can scrape thro’ summer, but then?

Let us all anyway be happy, heh-heh. Not all the Dream Songs are contemptible—tho’ if you saw Alvarez’s ^elucidatory printed^ comments on two of them (proofs just came fr. The Observer) you’d say so. I have decided that it is my fate to be the worst writer of our time. Copy of Aiken’s new mod. libr. anth’y came this week—longest poem? the Bradstreet—w. Stevens’s “Comedian” a v. close second, pts of “The Bridge” 3rd.

Contempt & clamour

will hiss me to my grave969

What are you I hope contentedly working at? Spare me, old pal, a word. I pray for yr good health—& all yours—

love,

John

Happies fr. Saul (Tivoli) & Ellen (Agra). Naftalin is a rat, he sent me just news-items!!970

The baby can stand up, & does. How are Penelope & brother?

[NYPL, MS]

RFD 1, Chepachet R.I.

12 / 13 Aug ’63

Dear Ralph—

Hi, pal, thank you for your missive! Bless all the good news in it, & hell on the bad. I cleaned the privy—I call it The Booth—today, & feel virtuous.

The bad. Roethke. I was slugged. I heard it first fr. a jerk at Berkeley, at the end of a business letter—last Monday—a man I wdn’t trust w. a fact 2 feet—so, among my misery, I thot NO, is hot rumour, not so. Next day Time come: Yes, heart attack. Next day (Wed.) my mother send me Wash. Post obit, and for the final time I revise the 2nd of the Songs for him I’d been reluctantly & despairingly working at.

That is the last ‘free’ Dream Song.

I send it you. I don’t know what its fate will be. But I imagine it will be around a while. I sent it Beatrice, his widow, w. a letter ^pseudo-consoling:^ (1) he went thro’ 3 phases, & was in at least the 2nd a daring & true & beautiful poet, (2) he cannot suffer any more. I haven’t decided who to give it to yet; I’m tempted by Kenyon—who are doing a Ransom number—who (JCR) did a lovely job on one of Ted’s poems a year or so ago971—but I’ve already handed Robie Macauley, for the purpose, several (3?).972 I haven’t decided.

Yr word of Penny in the Shallows made my hair erect. Martha scares us every day [but is so heavenly & so various that it makes us feel like jets taking off, children have far more facial expressions than we have: she do:—Napoleonic triumph, the weepy-betrayed statesman, cozy-cozy, cunning, who-the-hell-are-you, shy-shy, drop dead, I’m-thinking-it-over, that-food-was-terrific].973 We drool & adore.

Now I take, quickly, the letter. Yr prob. is mine: at a certain point one stops making new notes. OK: I’ll send you Alvarez’s notes, which Kate feels are even more empty than I do; my only copy—please back. Cheers to yr work.

Love to you & all yours fr. all of us—

John

We still have no plans for next year; but, even missing you & the Sieg’s & the Tates & the Thomes, who can afford on sabbat. to live in America? I say: Dublin.

[Lilly, TS]

c / o Milward, RFD 1,

Chepachet, R.I.

17 Aug 63

Dear Henry,

I’m glad you can use the Songs. We’ll be here, I’d say, at least another month—I have two deadlines to make before we go to Dublin—so send proofs here.

Kogan has just at last, prodded, sent me the Panorama, though not the prize yet.974 Stryk I think did better than Carruth or me, but the judges’ handling of the prizes was beautifully just, it seems to me. Stryk’s thing lacks unity, as his title concedes, and Carruth’s is no world-beater. It wd have been wrong to give either so much money. As for my item, I despise it, and if it had been given $1000 (as the special fr the paper at first suggested to me) I wd have gone into hermitage on Athos with embarrassment;—though in fact the prizes seem to have caused (D.G.) so little stir that I have not had one letter about them. My item was perfectly sincere but apparently I cannot write to order—even my own; I think the stanza, invented for the purpose, is first-class, but the poem never managed either the immediacy & élan or the ghostly remoteness I aimed at. Well, I drafted it too fast, let it sit too little (only a few weeks), and was not fresh enough for the revision. Also, it was the first substantial time I’ve been outside ‘Henry’ for years; the style shows marked uncertainty—yr printed note is too generous. I’ll forge it into something real some time. Frankly, I am ashamed of it, and feel too that I let you as a friend down. Scusi.

Best, Yrs,

John

[NYPL, TS]

26 Aug 63

Chepachet, R. I.

Dear Bob,

I am sorry for yr mother’s illness—hope come out. It seems to be a little monsterism we face at this time, old friend. My mother was regarded as dying of cancer for some recent years, in Fla. & NY & a clinic outside Wash DC; now she’s better. Was given up repeatedly. Not simple.

Our letters crossed.

SOCIAL: Come, in mid-Sept or later. I cannot form an idea of distinctiveness abt abroad or here till I hear from the Farfield people. Half-salary will hardly do us: I am on sabbatical fr Minnesota, on half-salary.

PROFESSIONAL: It’s very possible that my songs are no good; but damned unlikely. I am thinking of pushing the 60 I sent you up to 72. If I do, I’ll do quick. Besides you are off in Jersey. I NEED TO KNOW—: WHAT YOU THINK OF.

The old blurb I would like to say as little as poss. abt This Poem, exc perh of its reception (in parts) by some of the most disting’d editors here & in England. On the Bradstr poem, TLS might be quoted—the remark you saw—and Fitzgerald’s in The Roman Review (‘He bided his time and made the poem of his generation’).975 Of me personally, nothing, unless a photograph. My vague feeling is that photographs help sell books. Oh: some prizes are possible, as strictly public—the Harriet Monroe award 1957, a Brandeis award 1960 (I think), Ramparts’s first prize 1963—the first two were presumably, though to me, for the Bradstr poem, the last for 15 of these Songs, most of which are in the 60.

Finally, I need a legal opinion and a personal one. I suppose the firm has counsel better than my lawyer in Minneapolis: will you ask him whether the Robb business in “The Lay of Ike” is actionable?976 I read it, to a demonstration that may fairly be called riotous, at the Libr of Congress last Oct, |also for BBC| but I censored out that line or so; next month, at Harvard I get carried away and read it all, with similar effect. But I have not printed it, because I figure Eisenhower has more powerful lawyers than I do, and I don’t want to get screwed. The personal opinion is about “Baby Teddy”: this too is very effective in reading—and it was in Ramparts—but tell me, is it any good? I enclose both these.

I hope you have an unmiserable week. I never met your family but my helpless good wishes go to your mother.

Ever,

John

—Could we use this face? I like it. What is it anyway?977

[NYPL, MS]

Enclose also, re-typed, the 2 fr. Poetry next.

9 Sept 63

Dear Bob—

I didn’t like the set-up of beg’g—so put in “Big Buttons”, wr. last Thanksg., as (2)—or end, so threw ^(or allowed—I’ve been entirely reserving it—never send or read)^ in “Henry’s Confession”, wr. 6–7 yrs ago?978 Now 75. New numbering, new ‘Note’, old epigr’s.

I am surprised at not having heard from you. You are the only person who has seen any version of the poem.

You don’t want: just say so.

Poetry’s 9 proofs came, & TLS ^my song for^ Ted.979

Louis died—Bridson tell me fr. BBC today.980 L O V E L Y. Is the best guys die—

John

Kate wonders, as i do, if i sent “The lay of ike”. Here.

[Lilly, TS]

9 Sept 63

Dear Henry,

I expect I am getting soft in the head—ruined by the deaths of Roethke & MacNeice—but I like some of these songs.

I am out of money or nearly, since people owe me money, for a week or so: would it damage your budget if you paid me immediately, or as soon as possible, for these? minus $6 for the ten-to-be-sent, a list of which I enclose.

Ted’s death hit me, and over several days I made up two songs, one of which I killed, the other of which was taken so fast by Crook of TLS that he apologized for not sending me a proof. If you want to extend your over-ruling of yourself (as of the Observer songs), live it up or down and use it as IX here (IX wd then be X, and ‘NINE DREAM SONGS’ ‘TEN DREAM SONGS’). I enclose the TLS clip which came by air yesterday, with your proofs. But may I please in any case have it back. Some of yr readers see TLS, some don’t; up to you. I printed it abroad because I can never think of where the hell to send anything here that won’t take months to see, and I generally hold my stuff for years, much less months, but sometimes one gets bored with this procedure. I just had a interestin letter fr V Watkins abt it.981

Notes on Contributors: Farrar Straus prob’y do 75 Dream Songs next spring, Faber perhaps later. Ramparts gave 15 their first prize, $700, in May. Visiting at Brown last year; sabbatical this, again on leave fr the Univ of Minnesota, Humanities Programme (not Engl Dept). Readings from the Songs at Harvard, L.C., Utah, L.A., Minneapolis, BBC, etc.

Yrs,

John

[Houghton, MS]

Robt ^F.^ was a riot at the Christening—“Wait till you hear”

13 Sept ’63

Dear Cal—

Hell of a year, isn’t it—Mr. Frost, Ted, & now Louis whom I loved. Keep well, be good. The devil roams.

Here’s a personal copy of the “Strut”; I can’t submit it for the Review bec. I sent it yest’y to Rago as possibly to be tuckt into the proofs of 9 Songs returned ^him^ for Oct. It was in TLS, 25 Oct ^Aug^.982 If he doesn’t want it, & you want to consider it, it’s yours. I’ll say as soon as I hear. I wish it were better.

After a year & a half I took yr advice & sent Giroux—not 100 but—75 Dream Songs 10 days ago. There are 150 others finished, all stupid. He made me an offer sight unseen & I capitulated. But why publish verse anyway? It’s all right for you to do, but why the rest of us?

I hope you had a ball in London. It is awful not to see you. We will. ^Our^ love to the dear Elizabeth, & to Harriet—

John

[Amherst, MS]

14 Sept ’63

Dear Richard

It is a pleasure to behold yr Apollonian progress (Eliz’n sense)—as a Good Guy, and in view of our dread losses—Ted & Louis. I’m pleased abt the Gugg. & thanks for Tartuffe. I lookt first to see how you did the moment I like best

(E: Que fait là votre main?

T: Je tâtais l’étouffe.983)

—very creditable, pal. I never believed that lovely man cd be Englished & you’ve proved me wrong. T. is not my favourite play, I like best L’école des femmes, perh. bec. I saw Jouvet in it, at the Athenée (in ’37?)—a perf. at once so heartbreaking & so madly funny that our wanting to laugh hurt bec. we cdn’t.984 Many things here are wonderfully done.

All I can return is a Song or so, if I find. I sent 75 to Giroux lately—after only 8 yrs. I hate them almost all. There are 150 more ‘finished’. I’ll try to send you ones I don’t despise.

My lady’s affection & mine to yr good lady. Martha, a little carnival, can almost walk alone.

John

MacNeice was one of my best-loved friends. We think of going to Ireland (I have another leave fr. Minn.), but part of the heart is out of it now he’s not across. Be good when back at Wesleyan to an unusual boy named Michael Wolfe.985

[Bodleian, MS]

c / o Milward

RFD 1,

Chepachet, R.I.

18 Sept [1963]

Dear Stephen

I have a friend named Wm Meredith who suffers from pathological modesty, tho’ he’s published 3 books and is admired by Auden, Cal, etc. He won’t send stuff out; so may I send you these to consider?—I’ll enclose a Song or so of mine too.

I am not over Ted’s & Louis’ deaths at all. I loved Louis.

I hope you & yours are well, very well. We have a daughter Martha and may spend the year in Dublin.

Best always,

John

Did 3, which I even like.

[NYPL, TS]

26 Sept 63

Dear Bob,

These confusions are all my fault. I keep tinkering, and just yesterday I put the Japanese one (‘The taxi’) through major repairs, installing it quietly between 71 Spellbound and 73 Henry hates—which must not come together.986 There are now 76. I enclose all the new front matter: dedication, note, epigraphs, table of contents.

But YES I must have the whole Ms. back as soon as possible. My Ms is not quite complete and in some cases your copies are superior to mine, |I lack 61| as in others my copies are superior. You say you don’t have H’s Meditation—here it is. ‘H sats’ is now 5. ‘H edged’ is now 25.

Thanks for good words—‘complimenti’ much appreciated, as have been excessively depressed.

Baby Teddy is out; just local colour. I hope we can use The Lay of Ike though—would ‘Glob’ for Robb save us?

Ed Honig is the man whose house I had last year in Prov. I don’t remember his ever mentioning Columbia, but I’ve only seen him on one or two occasions.

I’m reading in Boston on the ninth and have a tentative date with the Academy of Amer Poets for a NY reading on Oct. 17, when I wd hope to see you & Cal, and my brother and my son.

I am thinking of surfacing soon, after only eight years underwater, but first I must get every single damned stupidity out of the manuscript. I will be extremely grateful for any suggestions you are willing to make. I enclose, for instance, the new ‘taxi’, now titled. I have just had to rip up the Kenyon proofs of their first one (57 here) so extensively that they are going to have to set it up afresh or kill it.

My next book is Shakespeare’s Friend and I am desperately anxious to get it done and out as fast as possible. Can we switch the Sh. contract to it, and put some more money in, and rush out the book for the 400th anniversary year? I have an idea it may sell. I also think of giving a version of it, when done, to Russell Lynes for Harpers.987 I have this year off, sabbatical (the first I ever had), but half-pay and am poor, poor. I can’t wait to see how the unhappy bastards who are going to have to review 76 Dream Songs approach their task.

Yrs affectionately,

John

[NYPL, TS]

still 19th Sept [1963]

Dear Ralph,

Kate just took off w yr letter, to call my niece (Misspelt?),—no phone here—and I forgot two business items:

1) If Macdiarmid [sic] was good enough to promote me, it seems to me I owe the Administration (fuck them) an account of my doings. Brother, I can do it. There are maybe 50 items. So if you will get the current Sec’y to send me the form, I will do. Let’s let them know they’re dealing with gung-ho (esp., Ralph, since we have nothing to lose or gain).

2) What is this travel jazz? How could I possibly even have an idea what sum to ask for? I certainly need libraries, as my letter just now to you said; but what estimate wd be possible? And for family or just me? My Boston reading will let me examine the BL copy of Engl. 1616.988 I will tell you my whole weird current plan later.

A cheerful kiss to Alicia, touch friendly Penny, touch friendlier the little fellow after your magnificent father—study closely this image of the Heavenly baby—twinke, twinke—

we both miss all ov you heavy

Wuv,

John

Love to Sieg’s & Boyd’s

[Chicago, MS]

25 Sept 63

Dear Saul—

After only 8 years I pulled together (some of) Henry, & sent 75 to New York—in excruciating stages—wh. Farrar Straus are doing in the Spring.

It is dedicated:

To Kate, and also to Saul

‘Thou drewest near in the day’

I hope you don’t object to this, pal. I wdn’t do it without yr permission.

The ms. is not altogether bad. The one ded’d to you—‘Turning it over’—is now 73.989 Epigraphs go:

‘Go in, brack man, de day’s yo own.’

… I am their musick.’ Lam. 3 63

But there is another method. Olive Schreiner

Love to Susan,

John

[UMN, TS]

c / o Milward, RFD 1

Chepachet, R.I.

30 Sept 63

Dear Ann,

I have just sent to New York, in four prodigious hallucinated stages, the first extensive version of the poem—not the poem, but a version, called 76 Dream Songs, for spring publication—and I feel dead, if the exhausted & ill & depressed can also be dead. I’ve done nothing else all summer exc 2 little bk reviews for cash. Without this effort I’m convinced the poem wd never have come to anything; and even so, there are 150 others finished, and several hundred more in various mal-advance. You won’t recognize the work—most of the early ones I’ve discarded because though sometimes interesting in themselves they do not yet show the style (even 4 years ago when I let The jolly old man into the Savage I did it only for sentimental reasons—I knew it cdn’t stay990)—though you’ll recognize the one that for years has stood first, ‘Huffy H’, the one you were so angry abt the writing of, when I turned up with it at midnight or so from that hole-in-wall tavern across Lake st.991 I enclose half a dozen fairly recent ones, to read to Paul: he might like the sound, though he won’t understand much. I have a New York reading tentatively scheduled for the 17th; if it comes off (they’re not sure they can do it, I’m not sure I can do it), would you like to bring Paul—he has never heard me read, and another chance may never occur. Perhaps he’s too little. I was very very glad to have news of him recently—the first in perhaps a year?—in a letter from my mother—but I’m sorry he missed the badge in riflery. Of course I know almost nothing about him now. I’ll come back to this.

I’m on sabbatical leave this year. That’s half-pay. It only came through very recently (we have a new administration there, new president, new dean, new structuring)—also I was in immense doubt whether to apply: who can live on half-pay? and I have no resources. But then it became clear that in fact I wasn’t going to be able physically to teach this year; also Ralph urged me very strongly both as chairman & friend—and indeed it’s obvious that the usefulness, not to speak of the existence, of the rest of my life depends on this year.

And this year must not be tormented, either. In addition to the gross wear-&-tear of the last eleven years, the enormous strain of the poem to this point has opened up my grave and I am looking into it. As soon as possible I must do nothing for a while, unless some scholarship—and where to do that I don’t know, there’s no money to plan with. Only we can’t stay here much longer, it’s getting cold. My library is in Princeton is one gigantic point; I have got to get it out of storage and somewhere where I can use it. Unfortunately, too, I’ve had to pass directly from the poem into critical work, for two deadlines. The only thing clear is that the support-figure can’t be maintained this year: everybody not only theoretically but practically dependent on me is going to have to live very very cheaply—that means myself, Paul, Kate, and Martha.

I’ll try to do $100 a month, and enclose the first, for October. I hope you are going to be rational and far-seeing about this. There are no golden eggs, but there is a goose. Notice one fact in particular: that every cent I send you all year for Paul is borrowed. I may be able to increase this, if I get help (various people have been trying to get me help). Repeat: this first hundred dollars, and all the rest, are borrowed. That already eats hard into next year and is not reasonable. I have no house, practically no furniture, and no savings; I got my debts way down last year, but now they are up to some $800 again; and my family and I have got to be in a position to start living in a sensible way—the way, for instance, you and Paul do.

Some details. If you agree to this, I’ll send you predated cheques at once, on my Mpls account (which stands today at $5.26), and have my University cheques—such as they are—deposited there as usual. As I say, I have no idea where we are going to be. Now about Paul as a dependent: I’ve told you many times that according to Zimmerman the Government has no interest whatever in any agreement between you and me on this score, all they care is where the money goes, the matter is out of my hands. Finally, I do wish to God you would repay me, as you promised more than a year ago, the $190-odd that I paid before that to the Mpls psychiatric clinic for you. The lawyers’ horrid fees are paid, your good old bonds are back, and all the other debts arising out of the luckless are paid, except that I think I still owe Paul $120 for his savings account—not sure about this, except that I sure don’t have it. I’ll put it back in 1965, if I owe it and if I get there.

I tell you frankly I was suicidal ten days ago, and I urge you not to push me. Suicide with so much work unfinished and with some parts of the work going so well is truly an uncomfortable conception.

A heavy daily problem of course is Paul, why I don’t go to see him or have him come see me. I figure six months of analysis (out of the question) would help. Last winter I went into this considerably in the short cheap therapy I had in Boston. The psychiatrist seemed to feel—that resentment toward you, guilt-sense toward him, and revenge for my father’s desertion of me—might be the main components. I don’t think so, though no doubt these enter into what is certainly one of the chief difficulties of my life during the past 13 months. I see the center of it as simpler: He scares me half to death—that’s a fact—at the same time I spend many of my hours being angry about the helpless facts that he can have no idea how much I think about him, how much I pay for him (money is deeply involved in all my feelings about him and you), and how much I hope for him and wish his happiness and excellence. Another thing is: his crying so hopelessly as the car left on the only occasion you brought him to see me in hospital at Glenwood Hills—I have never been able to approach him since without misgivings about the parting—I wince & hurt, I can hardly bear it.

Well, what’s to do? I also want to see him, besides being intensely curious about him. Can he come spend a weekend with us? It’s a long drive with the baby. Could you met us halfway, Hartford say, a Friday afternoon, and transfer him? ditto then Sunday? I don’t know what’s here to interest him—it’s very primitive, and purely country, warn him—but he might like it. We certainly would. Tell him I love him, and congratulate him on the swimming & the badges. I hope you are both well. Kate and the baby and the puppy are, and the waterfall is plunging & beautiful, and the wood-fires smell good.

John

[UMN, TS]

6 Oct 63

My dear Mrs Eberl:

Your letter has travelled about a bit but let me instantly decline, with thanks, its invitation. The mere thought of topics like ‘The State of Poetry Today’ makes me feel blue, like a blue movie—not that I ever had a chance to see one. Anyway I may be abroad and am for the moment accepting no offers exc a Boston one and a Guggenheim Museum one in NY with Mr Lowell, both this month.

Yrs sincerely,

J. Berryman

[UMN, TS]

6 Oct 63

Dear Ted,

Your letter went all over but finally got here and naturally I will do my utter to con the Gugg people into a fellowship for you.992 I will explain that are [sic] not only Sonny Liston but the NY World’s Fair—will that do?

Maybe can [sic] get together last of this month or early next: I’m giving a reading with Lowell at the Guggenheim museum on the 31st, and if I have all my deadlines met by then may hang around a little—though I’ve my son & brother & other relatives and some other people to see, esp my publisher to whom I just delivered in four excruciating stages a version of the poem I’ve been working on for the last eight years. I will certainly call you.

I have a new wife and a daughter and a half-beagle puppy. I’m glad you like teaching but I am damned glad to be rid of it for a little: after a visiting professorship at Brown I didn’t teach this summer (we’re in a 200-yr old gristmill complete with private waterfall by my porch) and am on sabbatical this year, half-pay, meaning you starve.

UP the third book, and even more UP the one that will beat Bellow. I heard from him yesterday delighted with the dedication (jointly w my wife) of the poem in this version.

Flourish!

affectionately,

John

[Chicago, TS]

6 Oct 63

Dear Saul,

We are praying hard for your girl(s). Of course it will be a girl. It is bound, obliged & necessary to be a girl, and I want it named after either me or Ralph Ellison. Let’s have some continuity here. Congratulations to you both.

I’m glad you don’t object to the dedication. I have almost decided to call this version of 76: THE LAY OF HENRY. But it is a terrible wrench to change the title after eight years, I can hardly bear it and even Kate takes it hard. If you have any thought on this subject and can take a moment to put it down (it’s obvious fr yr brevity that you’re as busy as I am, or ought to be—in fact I feel utterly knocked out from the great summer push, and am missing little deadlines left & right) I’ll be right grateful. I am having contract difficulties too. Of course, if Giroux’ lawyer decides “The Lay of Ike” is actionable, then THE LAY OF HENRY won’t do because the sexual implications need stern control—have to be kept, say, tertiary.

I’m reading in Boston this week, and in NY with Cal on the 31st. We still have no plans, because no money—my first cheque fr Minnesota was for 193.80 (is that money?) and the gov’t haven’t repaid me yet: hence the readings, for groceries. Still we haven’t begun to freeze here at the gristmill and may stay all month (no further rent). Are you teaching or advising or what? Blessings to Herzog and the super-self-analyst, and fruitful Susan.

Both our loves

John

[NYPL, TS]

7 Oct 63

Dear Bob:

Saul has accepted the joint-dedication as ‘a great honour’. I’m glad you like the revision of “Karesansui”.993 An interesting letter fr Wilbur thinks the Strut for Roethke ‘awfully good’—‘I begin to be confident with your abruptly strange grammar and your shifts of diction, which allow the poem to turn on a dime from one tone or stance to another.’ From a writer as conservative & elegant as Wilbur this is a little tribute, and I like it because I pretend to be conservative & elegant myself. Of course none of this is for quotation to anybody.

I am thinking, with all my shattered intensity, of changing the title of this version to

T H E L A Y O F HENRY
76 Dream Songs

I have had many titles, but essentially just the one, for all these years, and it hurts to think of changing. I don’t know. Thoughts appreciated. This would not, by the way, be possible if “The Lay of Ike” is out—I wd require it to subordinate the sexual implications, wh must be sternly put down.

Thanks for Ms back. Are you coming perhaps to hear Cal & me at the Guggenheim Museum on the 31st (new date)? Hope to see. May be able to stay over, if I meet various little deadlines. I haven’t been in the city, except a few hours at a time,—it seems to me incredible,—for years. I don’t know even the physical layout any more, much less “who’s in, who’s out”, though I long since took on myself “the mystery of things”. Isn’t Mary being the No. 1 fiction bestseller strange beyond ejaculation?994 I hate to think of Jean gnashing her well-kept teeth—being long fond, as you know, of both.

I have to read in Boston day after tomorrow, and don’t feel like it. Besides they are paying me $50, grocery-money. Which brings me at last to the contract.

Bugs me. I realize these things are more or less standard, that’s what I don’t like about them. Page 4 in general bugs me. Page 4 in particular, tho’ looking again at this satanic prose I see 1. (b) about the title of the work, whose change requires ‘mutual consent’; now we can’t have that. I can have anyone involved decisively in the title of my poem?? Please. I wd never hang you up at the last minute, and I am seeking advice—Saul’s and yours—but this contract is dated Sept 25th—we can’t have that. P. 4 (f) is so vague that I wdn’t dream of signing it; (e) seems to interfere with 4 Songs I agreed to let Feltrinelli translate over a year ago; in terms of (g) it wd appear that I wd instantly owe you, for a mere $500, mysterious parts of my performing / copyright fees for the Boston & NY readings, $200 in all,—now we can’t have that; (H) is out, unless it can be explained to me. British rights must be explained. 20 must be explained—esp since you have replied to me nothing about Shakespeare’s Friend. Nothing is contingent here for me.

Enlighten me, old friend

love—

John

[NYPL, TS]

17 Oct 63

Dear William,

Forgive apparent negligence, I’ve been ill practically every day for weeks. I gave a reading in Boston and that was all right but my thought drags, is uncertain, and inventionless (though I’ve written some new Songs), and I can’t make prose, so I’m badly behind with the Avon people and the Voice of Amer. Also: waiting, waiting; still no plans, because no money. But my contract-difficulties w Giroux were solved day before yesterday, and that’s going. I read w Cal at the Guggenheim on the 31st. The next to last Song is called “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt”, which even you will admit is a good title.995 I gave up writing new Songs long ago but yr head fills once twice thrice and you’ve had it: you reach for a pencil. I’d go into hospital at Mass General but I keep hoping to get these damned Crane jobs done first. We’ve called you repeatedly: can’t get: say when you’d like to or can come, as soon as possible: it’s summery now, but has been cold—yr heater helps.

We have a puppy, half-beagle, toward whom the baby is very brave.996 There was an earthquake yesterday. I have an immense favour to ask, as of only one other person: I am going to ask you to spend several hours there at yr house with 76 Dream Songs and tell me every damned thing you don’t like. If you can’t make this, say so, and it will make no difference whatever to the friendship & love I value. The tremor, at 11:30 a.m., sounded like a horse running around the corner of the mill & shaking it: I decided, up in the Snug, I was hallucinating, but then Kate came fr the kitchen and I said ‘Earth-tremor’ and the radio confirmed. A new Crane project turned up in the mail today, I am wanted to read his poems and The Red Badge for a recording company. Christ. Come see us.

Yrs always,

John

I agreed to the New Rep. Eliot job but thro’ a goof they’d given it to Kermode.997 I wd have enjoyed it. How is Marie Birnbaum?998

[UMN, TS]

23 Oct 63

Dear Stegner:

Ill since I sent Farrar Straus a version of my poem, going since 1955. Sorry. Couldn’t work. I expect you will agree with me that this lecture is not very good.999 Question is, will it do? It’s a bit long—will trim some more in reading. Please let me have back (we’re moving) care of Robert Giroux, Farrar Straus & co, 19 Union Sq West, New York 3, NYC—will have copied & taped quickly. Love to Aphrodite, without any nighty, my favourite Athens expert Louis MacNeice is dead, whom I loved, messages came yesterday fr Saul Bellow & Allen Tate about unbearable deaths, we must hang on,

1964

[UMN, TS]

103–2nd St NE

Washington DC

21 January 64

Dear Mr Myers:

For this relief, much thanks—and so on with Hamlet’s poor sentry.1000 Forgive my delay in saying so: I have been away in the final version of part of my long poem, from which I can’t write letters. I am deeply grateful to the Committee for their decision and to you for their notification. Of course the terms are acceptable, and I will advise you in due course of how it has all gone. In the present crucial work I have already been immensely cheered & reassured by the news of assistance. No, no questions.

Yours faithfully,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS and MS]

103–2nd St., NE

Washington, D.C.

Saturday afternoon [early spring 1964]

Dearest Paul,

Four or five doctors of different sort have been pulling & hauling & drugging me & prodding me, for a long time now, so if this letter does not seem very bright, please forgive me. My dermatologist (that’s a skin-doctor: not a doctor with skin, all doctors have skin, but one who deals with other people’s skin) alone has been treating me for three separate conditions, for months,—two of which are improving. Besides I’m out of practice, this is the first letter I’ve written to anyone for 3 or 4 months. (I see I am full of statistics; a sign of a heavy heart. Never learn to trust statistics, the American vice.) Every day I compose some part of a letter to you in my head, and wonder & hope about what you are doing & feeling, but without writing it down. I will try to improve. I was made very happy to hear from my mother (your grandmother, or Mir) of your achievements in camp. Did you receive, and did your mother read to you, my wire at Christmas (I tried to telephone but could not get through)? I ask because of certain doubts about a photograph of your sister I sent you and a small cheque from the London Times endorsed to you, both of which were returned to me, without comment; of course she will read you this sentence or not, as she sees FIT: But I am quite unable to know whether we can be in touch or not, while you are still small. I would expect you to keep my letters, so that you can read them when you are older. It is a source of pain to me, still, that I have no letters from my father, who died when I was twelve. One thing you must try to understand even now is that your feelings about situations & persons may probably change as you grow up. This is natural. My father was involved once in a hopeless tragedy, and for many years my feelings about him altered & altered, until they settled again, long ago, on sympathy respect & love. Something of the sort—your mother will decide whether to read you this sentence or not—was true of your mother with her father and mother. But most of this will mean very little to you for a happy while.

I’ll endeavour to be more sprightly (that’s: gay) next time I write,—though whether I write again to send it will have to depend on whatever assurance I receive that you have heard and have this letter (I can’t write into a void, though I can write and file letters, for you to see later), and that it will not be used in legal proceedings (I can’t write with a lawyer looking over my shoulder). I doubt you’ll take in that sentence, and that’s as well; I have never been interested in criticizing your mother to you, and am not. A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the last year or so, but not you—and your father is thought to be a wit.

The four Christmas gifts were: Most important, a good chemistry set. After much search (I don’t get around well), I found it, but it was too good—A college major in Chemistry told me he was given the same set at eight and used it until he was 17—but you are not eight, and I didn’t want it just put away till you were—it wouldn’t interest you really until you can read better, he said—so would you like a giant Erector set instead?—do you have one?—with which, or not, another could go? Or would you like something else instead. The chemistry set will come later, if you’ve any interest in science at all—do you? but everybody does; Coleridge did—he was fascinated by the microscope & other such.

Second: a McGuffey’s Reader, for your age. I’ll put this in the mail next time I’m out. Months after my bookseller ordered it, it came. You will trust your mother’s judgment about its use.

Third, a copy of my Elegy for the late President—you will have heard of his assassination—as soon as I am sure it is right.1001 It’s not printed yet.

Last, I made you a member of the National Geographic Society (if your mother is one, tell me, and I’ll make some exchange) on Wednesday, directly after a surgeon told me I have gynecomastia (don’t ask anybody that word, they won’t know), and copies of their flashing magazine, which I loved as a boy, will come every month. Be a cheerful & good fellow,

Your loving father,

John Berryman

Herewith $400: $100 each for Nov Dec Jan Febr. I am very sorry they are late. It is all borrowed, of course.

There are several sentences in the letter to Paul that you will have to use yr own judgment abt reading to him. However, I wd expect a reply.

JB

[NYPL, TS]

103–2nd st NE, Wash’n

27 Febr 64

Dear Robert:

Your queries (53, 54): stet to both. I admit the pointing prob in 53 is hell, but I wd say let it go. Housman on emendation: ‘You can have hard & fast rules, but then they will lead you wrong.’1002 I have faced many similar problems, none perhaps trickier. I realize it looks wilful but it is all done in the service of the voices & the reader.

I give in, totally, abt the Contents arrangement.

Many thanks for the proof-set back. I felt lonely. Besides I am doing a reading-swing in California shortly and needed them.

Spender took long ago for Encounter: 47, 25, 32. But has not printed them yet. 47 and 32 are heavily revised; could you send him, at the Hotel Algonquin in New York, photo-copies of the final versions, and advise him in a note that he ought to print them at once if he wants to be before the book? He & I are very friendly, I saw him just a day or so ago, but not in circumstances that allowed business, and I’ve no facilities here for copying. I hope this is not an imposition, Bob.

Yes, ‘Feltr’ is Feltrinelli. Doesn’t matter. They solicited, through a London woman, Songs long ago to be done page-facing translation: I gave four, and haven’t heard again from the man in Rome. Immaterial, except that if it comes up again I’ll pass it to your people, as now your pigeon & fee. I believe they hang out in Milan; if it were handled from there, no doubt by now it wd be done. London and Rome are the laziest cities.

Mayer at Avon has sent me an essay by a someone named Cott at Columbia which suggests that I am the greatest poet of all time.1003 I survived; but it was strange seeing all them passages quoted, and quoted wrong. I am now (meeting a deadline at the Times, the Voice of America, etc etc) writing an essay proposing Cott as the greatest poet of all time, if (I add, cautiously) he writes poetry. You wouldn’t believe how people bug me. I can’t sleep. Eighty times a day I withdraw from you the book, repaying the advance; eighty times I re-allow. They are going to kill us, you know. Jerks are waiting in the wings to destroy me. I don’t know why we’re doing it. I do feel no confidence that the stuff is any good. Cal seems to like some of it, Cal & Snodgrass & Wilson, and above all Saul; but it’s so easy to be wrong.

Let the binding be utterly plain. Blue-black if poss. I’ll be happy to send skin (see 16) if desired.1004

Amazed gratitude for copies of the 2nd ptg of the Bradstreet. What is this in aid of (as the British say)?—esp after yr remaindering of it, years past, which stood my hair on end and occasioned our rift.

The jacket is yours. Only I wd say (front flap) one sentence abt me, then AB, views of: Aiken, Alvarez, Fitzgerald, TLS, Wilson.

Yrs

John

P.S. PEN News tell me is prizes for transl of English book into Polish & vice versa, letters proposing to go to Roy Publishers, 30 East 74th, NYC 21. Nothing in it for you or me, but a Polish (now Canadian) poet knockt himself out doing the whole Bradstreet poem, publ’d in the refugee Tematy (Themes, it means) 2 or 3 years ago, within, apparently, the time limit for the initial awards. Forget his name, easy to find, I can’t propose, maybe you’d like to. ‘Brak mi, brak mi, Anno’ one passage went.

Can a corrected proof go as swiftly as poss to Ch Monteith at Faber? I don’t want any review copies sent anywhere over there. With my compliments.

I am winding up a Voice of America broadcast on my ART which they are waiting for in Manila and 80 other countries.1005

Did you ever hear of such nonsense?

But they offered me 250 and conned.

I am goint to Virginia & loaf.

Give a boost, Marcel Proust! Last night I again gave up on the book so-called, and give up on the gave-up.

Tematy is in NY, I think; perh phonebk.

Whatever sentence you think up for me is up to you, but for God’s sake put the firm’s address on the jacket. Nobody knows where to reach me, exc thro the Intern’l Who’s Who (which we all read night & day), and that’s troublesome as well as agreeable.

Fragment:

The house-guest

opened one eye and exposed one breast

then.

Kate likes this—it comes from the conversation of a friend of ours here. I have abandoned the writing of verse forever. Revise it, yes.

Maybe if you pushed you cd get that Pole the 250 bucks he so deserves. A Polish asst of mine at Minnesota read it over & said was good. Try embassy maybe, but communist that.

Earlier & better version:

The house-guest

with one eye open and one breast

out.1006

See why I’m giving up Poetry?

Aiken is on AB jacket, Wilson you prob have, TLS also, I forget Alvarez but presumably there was something to quote. Fitzgerald is from THE ROMAN REVIEW; ‘He bided his time and made the poem of his generation.’ Bang.

[UMN, MS]

The Abbott Hospital, Mpls

Sun 12 Apr [1964]

Dear Paul

Thank you for the dramatic keyring—when I have keys again I will put them on it and think of you with love every time I use one. My old friends the Tates have just sent me a pot of tulips (good of them since Allen is also ill—such that he is cancelling a reading tour exactly like the one that proved disastrous to me in Calif.) and three have opened today—it’s gay to see them change, rose against the green spikes. I’ve been in here a week and am certainly improving, but how much it’s hard to tell because I have six drugs in me at all times and am often so limp I couldn’t lift a toothpick. The first copy of my new book came yesterday—a big day, after nine years’ work—and of course you & yr mother will have one as soon as I get some. I’m tired now. Good night & a hug & love—

John Berryman

The National Institute are honouring me next month and I am having you invited.

This is the hospital you were born in. I remember Allen coming to drive us all home when you & yr mother were strong enough to move.

[Henri Coulette]

[Logan, MS]

The Abbott Hospital

Minneapolis 3

13 April 1964

Dear Henri

Two weeks’ bed in Washington did no good, so—still on the verge of prostration—I flew here where my favorite doctor is. The ear is healing (after 5 weeks!), chest troublesome, but exhaustion is it. I eat like a wolf and spend hours so limp I couldn’t lift a toothpick. I can’t read. I can’t write letters; would you do ^me^ the very great favour maybe of calling Vivian Cienfuegos and Robert Deutsch to say I would write to thank them if I could for their supernatural kindness?1007 If you can’t, of course I will understand. My doctor knows as little as I when I can go out. First copies of my book came day before yesterday and I signed the British contract early this evening. I heard an hour ago by ’phone fr. N.Y. that my old friend Jean Stafford has had a heart attack. May blessings—which seem so absent elsewhere—rain on you & yr lady,—

John

[NYPL, TS]

Abbott, 17 Apr ’64

Dear Bob,

With 150 mg of Thorazine in me and after five hours’ sleep, I feel somewhat better. This is a long drag. I have just been reading Monday’s paper (it’s Friday) which I have been trying to read ever since Monday. Next there’s Tuesday’s & Wed’s, then today’s—yest’s I missed—never will I learn all them important items reported yesterday—then Tuesday’s Time, and Holiday, and back to The Tin Drum which I am loving and have read 10 pages of during the twelve days I’ve been here in this here hospital.1008 I can’t read, much as I want to. But I’ve finished a new Song (for Book V) which I hold to be a beauty—it begins with a courtmartial at which is conferred on Henry ‘the rare Order of Weak’ and winds up with a lady hunched over her table-telephone, ‘her white rear bare in the air’1009—and finally got off to Francis Brown last night a trivial review that I’ve been trying to finish for weeks and they have telephoning me here about, Miss Drysdale that is.1010

That list contained no ringers, though I know personally know everyone on it except Miss Moore. Shall we add, or not,

A. Alvarez, The Observer

Anthony Ostroff, also Berkeley

W H Auden

J F Powers (St Cloud, Minn)

Robert Bly

Ben Shahn

J V Cunningham, Brandeis U1011

Stephen Spender, The Algonquin

Wm Empson (Leeds, I think)

and Ch Monteith?

Josephine Miles, Engl, U of Cal, Berkeley

If so, the copies to Alvarez & Spender shd have written on the enclosed card “Personal copy—not for review, please. RG for JB”. Tired now. I worked up several weeks ago a truly beautiful ^title^ for the next volume of the poem if we do one. I hear the Times announced the book, but not what they said.

Blessings,

John

I signed the Faber contract.1012

[UMN, TS]

The Abbott Hospital

Minneapolis 3, Minnesota

20 April 64

Dear Dudley Fitts,

Your letter has almost broken my heart with pleasure, a hard thing to do at this address. Usually I try not to care what anyone, outside about six people, cares about my stuff, but just now I have been so ill for so long—unable really to do anything but write—that until I opened this letter an hour ago I was almost panic stricken lest it seem to everyone that all my hard work—nine years of it—was worthless or ridiculous. I won’t even try to thank you. I value it the more, of course, in that we have hardly met (shaken hands? in Washington) and it is only the second letter I have had about the book and the remark about the ear comes from a translator of the Anthology and admirer of Pound and you even encourage more Songs.1013 A second volume, tentatively called “His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 84 Dream Songs”, is mostly drafted (in fact there are several hundred beyond the 77), though terrifying labour lies ahead if I can ever do it. If I ever can, any merit involved in the result will be due in part to your opinion, your generosity. It is the most important letter from a stranger since Aiken about the Bradstreet poem in October 1953—a long time ago. I hope we come together somewhere, some time, for talk.

Yours,

John Berryman

P.S. My publisher, Robert Giroux, also an old friend of Fitzgerald’s, may very likely be wild to quote part of your letter; if he asks I hope you will refuse permission if you feel the slightest objection.

[UMN, MS]

[20 April 1964]

Publication date is the 27th,—I am on 400 mg. of Thorazine daily, & others, but will be out Boyd doesn’t say or know when

To Ann

It is a melancholy pleasure to inscribe this book wh. a thousand times I despaired of coming to existence. You will find very few of the early ones you knew here (3 is one): it took long to discover the style: even five years ago I put ‘Henry & Mabel’ in the Savage only out of nostalgia, I knew it wd not belong in the poem.—This is the first volume of the poem; a second, slightly longer still, comprising Bks IV, V & VI, is 9 / 10 drafted (& overdrafted) but wants a murderous sum of work if I can ever do it.—I have a lovely title for it.—Let’s war less. I thank you for the relief, this terrible year.

With old love, to the first inspirer,

John

Abbott,

20 Apr ’64

Many say the book will make a sensation. I signed w. Faber ($[illegible]) last week.

[NYPL, TS]

Abbott, Thurs 23rd [April 1964]

Dear Bob,

I am improving with the speed of the galaxy 4C-something but I have a similar distance to traverse and probably won’t make Monday. Too bad, I was looking forward to lunch with you and maybe Catharine & the Lowells if he is out & about & willing to break bread with a reviewee. An evening party is planned by six of my closest friends here if I’m still around (I have going-out privileges). Go, little book.

Three new Songs here in hospital—‘General Fatigue’, ‘Henry’s Pencils’ & ‘Henry of Donnybrook’: if this damned borrowed machine would make carbons (it won’t do even one) I’d send you copies.1014 Some people think they are beauties. Somebody observed recently that the book is not at all like just a book of poems or a poem, much less part of a poem, but is like the lifework of a poet. Something in this.

I am eager to be apprised beforehand of what you come to plan, if anything, in the way of blurbing, whether in ads or on a revised jacket (front flap? are all the jackets printed, by the way? and what size is the printing?) and rush you herewith copy for an ad in the Blue Earth (Minn.) Monday Klaxon:

Quite simply, I am dazzled by these poems, and don’t know what to say.… The wit, the resonance, the pity, the exuberance, the faultless, absolutely faultless ear.

DUDLEY FITTS

Extraordinary … important … new … An authentic voice speaks; it is urgent and upsetting. It will be around for a while.

VIRGINIA KIRKUS BULLETIN1015

I consider Dream Songs about the most moving and sensational poems since The Waste Land.

DAVID POSNER

Baby, you have dood it!

W. D. SNODGRASS

Of course I am joking though the quotations are genuine (Posner is curator of the famous Mss collection in Buffalo, a teacher of poetry and has published some).1016 Tate when he looked in the other day threatened to write me a long letter about the book: if he does and there is anything favourable in it, or in Cal’s review, we might use them somewhere. The Fitts quote might look even stronger if the first sentence were cut to just ‘I am dazzled’; in any case, you’d have to ask his permission, it was a private letter. The quotes on the back of the jacket look splendid. If only they were true.

Miss Geffen says you have sent her Mss as well as proof-sheets: what on earth are they?1017

After all, I have a ‘General Fatigue’ I can send briefly. May I have it back straightaway please, and can you photocopy this letter for me so I’ll know what I said?

James Dickey—Jim Wright reminds me—shd have a professional copy: Reed College, Portland, Ore. I don’t know him exc by correspondence but he is an able reviewer and serious poet. Can we add Ralph Ellison (NY phone book perhaps, or his publisher)?

Friends are puzzled that there is no copy about me on the jacket, but when I tell them I askt that it be so, they track, and like it.

Ever,

John

Thanks for the wire; but write!

I do need James Merrill’s address—I forget his publisher

[UMN, TS]

Abbott, 3rd Thursday [23 April 1964]

Dearest friend Kit,

Have I malingered past the Virginia Quarterly poetry contest deadline? Alas! ow! ugh! This is important and might be instantaneous. Also important: did we ever pay the second half (less than half) of my ’62 Minn. state tax? We should at once, if not. I talkt w. Zimmerman, as I think I told you—he needs the relevant vouchers for the Federal ’62 taxes, in order to see; and is sure that with letters from Tourtelotte (whom I’m paying from here—don’t you pay too) & Boyd the penalty for late filing this year will be waived.

‘General Fatigue’ is now practically perfect and I’d send you a copy but this damned machine of Helen Louden’s will not take even one carbon. I plan to send it, with ‘Henry’s Pencils’ and ‘Posth No. 1’ to The Nation as soon as, maybe today, I’ve revised the last two.1018

I went to the Bank & the University, got quietly loaded alone at the Brass Rail, slept brilliantly four hours till 10 p.m., then again from four till eight, and feel splendid, better than I have done any morning for months. Maybe a toot every fortnight or so is a sound conception, so long as I keep out of trouble. Boyd is halving most of my medication: just to see how it goes, for that’s what he plans to let me out with. Remind me to tell you abt Lynn’s ‘prestige’ and ‘friend’ conversations. My office looked good, desirable.

I’m having Miss Geffen send you a copy of program.

Shakespear’s anniversary, supposedly (likelier is yesterday). I am going to read A Shrew if I can. I am very busy and must go buy a shirt too & handkerchiefs & shorts. Pajamas I don’t need, though thanks. Harriet and either Ellen or Phil is to look in this afternoon, perhaps Allen. I am still working at the Time before last!!! but have caught up with the newspapers. A Shrew will be the first serious reading I’ve tried—I brought my own copy from my office. If I keep on feeling like this, I’ll be in New York on Monday—think of going to the Fair with Giroux if I can lure him out or my brother (haha) or Shelby or Cal (if around) or Ted Hoagland; I can’t think of anyone else but don’t wish to go alone. I need to see it twice, with an interval between, so I’ll case the joint for when we go.—Since I did not invent or train Mother, why in God’s name should you apologize for complaining? Yes she is IMPOSSIBLE, and you are a saint, a lovely saint

Kiss the Twiss for me, & then yourself,

Henry redivivus

Terri just called, may come by.

[UMN, TS]

Abbott, Sat Sun. 26th [April 1964]

Darling,

I’m dead tired and will just put down things as they occur to me. After the 48 hours of the two new Songs, one hard & terrible (‘Donnybrook’), one witty & pathetic, both revised to a scruple, and all the crises bad & good and the gross effort of decision, I only slept two hours, despite a second tuinal and an extra 50 of Thorazine, at 3:30 a.m. I can’t get along thus. We’ll see what Boyd says today but I’m afraid the halving of the medication is not working: it leaves me with so much nervous energy I feel IMPATIENT and URGENT ALL THE TIME, so I work like mad, which is not only very bad for me but which I clearly recognize to be unnecessary and even worthless. So I don’t feel ready to go anywhere, I’m afraid—except that the materials for new urgent & pointless jobs (the VOA on myself, the Crane, the Dreiser, taxes, etc) are all in Washington. I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t feel fit for travel, say to Chicago, in this condition. By the way I will let you know instantly what Saul says when he writes—this letter was from Susan, they were at dinner, the book had just come, and had read 14 which she liked so that she broke off to write—oddly the one across the page hijacks his conversation (done elsewhere I think only in the Gottfried Benn one).1019 Or if anything is said or written or printed, of interest, by anyone; at least for a few days. Adrienne Cecile Rich, I heard yesterday some hours after I’d sent the 3 hosp. ones (the 4th wasn’t begun yet, much less finished—it begins ‘Under the table, no.’ and is entirely about drinking1020) to Denise L., is prob’ly reviewing the book for The Nation.1021 Good, if so; a poet I’ve admired for ten years or seven at least and never met or written about and with nothing against me that I know of; she is the best of the women younger than Miss Bishop, and I’d be curious to hear her, esp since I never heard of her reviewing anything before,—no more than Cal does: my poem seems to be pulling able people out of their orbits. I can’t imagine why Cal is reviewing the book.1022

The coffee alone that I drink (20 cups) wd cost me in a decent hotel more than my whole bill here. I wolf breakfast, bolt lunch, pig dinner—luckily the meals are not large. But I can’t halt this busywork. Out nervous now for my second walk. More later.

I enclose clippings a la Mother and if somebody doesn’t write to me soon abt my book I am going to waltz out of my skin. In 3 wks here I have not had one letter fr Giroux,—though I sent him a personal copy. Oya gave me a stupid Giacometti-type poodle named (shudder) Pinkie, which the Twiss can have. I am bringing you a halo. Mother I haven’t decided about, the field is so broad. I liked very much, by the way, yr remarks abt ‘Gen. Fatigue’.

[UMN, TS]

Abbott, Sunday [April 1964]

Dearest Kate,

My brother has flown to Spain, God knows why. He rang up yesterday from Idlewild while I was over at the university library. I am amazed, he has never been abroad except to Mexico. If you hear anything let me hear: I wrote at once to Shelby but hardly expect a reply, neither of them has acknowledge [sic] the book.

I have a hat! dark grey and very goodlooking, as it ought to be, for it cost $16 at Justers. The cheaper ones I had looked at near our bank I didn’t like. I am going to buy a bag too when I find one on sale, it’s absurd to go about so shabby.

This won’t be much of a letter. I feel languid after a big & fine party at the Ambergs’ where I enjoyed most Martin & Mickey Friedman.1023 It’s a fair, languid day too, the first in a week—not one star has been visible since I bought my fieldglasses on Monday (pawnshop near here, $22.50—I did research by telephone—comparable American glasses start at $40 and $65 and for $200 you can get a really decent pair—you’ll like these).

I finally got Donnybrook copied at the university and enclose it, along with a velvety later one.

You just made me intensely nervous by ringing up. DO NOT CALL ME, damn it. I am sick, I am to be left alone. All the nurses have strict orders. So should you have. Five minutes’ anger, do you understand, can set me back days and DOES.

The hell with the rest of this letter, only if you have not sent my letter to Fitzgerald on, don’t: he is here—Dept of English, Mt Holyoke, South Hadley, Mass—send it there. If you can find the first page of that Voice piece on myself, maybe I could talk the rest of it into my tape-recorder. Meredith has ordered 20 copies for his girls, Lowell’s review will be in the next N Y Review, no Times review set yet nor (of course) Time. Just finished a new one in wh Henry is a parachute that does not open.

love,

John

[NYPL, TS]

Abbott, D-Day plus one [late April 1964]

Dear Bob,

I’m delighted to hear from you, AT LAST, and to learn that Aiken does not feel that I have let him down and that you like General Fatigue. As in March I secured a death-grip on Book IV, so here I am hard into Bk V—seven done in hospital, five in the last six days, therefore I am on the heaviest drugging I have ever heard of: 400–800 mg of Thorazine a day plus phenobarb round the clock and other stuff. Of course I have more than a hundred finished Songs to compete for place also in V, and ditto in VI, for which I wrote a beauty yesterday. I enclose you the third, which please let me have directly back. Some people here think it a very high point in the whole work. I have conquered this machine to the extent of (usually now) one carbon. Next volume, then (have I told you this?—the drugs are destructive of memory):

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 84 Dream Songs

I can’t wait. Or rather, I can wait. Though maybe in a year.. Would you care to publish him? My thanks to Mrs Guinther for the firm’s wire of best wishes.1024 Did you not receive the personal copy inscribed and sent to you, you don’t mention it. Hurrah for Merrill’s address—his wrapt copy has been burning my pockets; it’s his foundation’s money I’m ‘living’ on. For personal reasons I didn’t suggest his or Tate’s as professional copies, though I find you sent one of yours to Allen too. (He is coming in this afternoon, and I’ll bet you nine firstclass lines that he has not indited no letter or will do.) I keep exact count of all these copies, as I hope Mrs Guinther does.

Yes, send me Cal’s review by teletype: I can’t even imagine what he may have said, or why he reviewed the book at all.

That joke blurb-list I sent you does not seem so funny now that I see it again. Yes, it might be used as it stands for an ad in, say, Poetry. Permission wd have to be got, though, not only from Fitts but from Posner (Buffalo) and Snodgrass (Detroit). I like the shorter extract from Fitts better. I suppose the Kirkus are printing that little puff?? My chief physician tells me Jim Wright has asked Hudson for the book (he won’t get it, in my opinion—15 years ago they hired Yvor Winters to beat me up1025) in order to explain that it is ‘unique’ and I am ‘unique’.

Always,

John

Where have review-copies gone? The only mattering places I think of are these: NYTimes

but never mind, except that a copy shd be directed personally to John K Sherman, Mpls Star and Tribune, THE arbiter here, where of course I have a following.1026

Repeat: how big is the printing? & all jackets done?

[Yale, MS]

The Abbott Hospital, Mpls 3

[1 May 1964]

Dear Robert

This is weird—I wrote you a substantial letter, presumably Kate is forwarding it to Italy today—but how dare you 1) be in this country without letting me know—we live in Wash DC at the moment—and 2) write with no indication of how yr poem is. The only things that matter are long poems and children. I hope—yr note has just come—you will eventually get both letter & book: if not the latter, let me know & I’ll have another sent, but I’ve no copy of the former,—wh. will Sally send on? (if you’re here alone again)______Love,

John

1 May ’64

[UMN, MS]

Tuesday 6 a.m. [late April 1964]

Dearest Kit

Too early to type, a pity because I’ve revised 11, called ‘Research & Development’, and need to see it. I have parts of several others going but hope to compose no more.—It’s a good thing I am better: heavy blows fell yesterday. I expected only the perfunctory from Allen and so am not disapp’t’d, but I could not foresee that both Cal & Mark—in many words & in few—would wholly fail Henry. I have just studied Songs 1–7 in Book I and Cal is wrong with ‘There is little sequence’. For many reasons he never should have reviewed the book—for one, he does not understand it AT ALL—he thinks Henry is only ‘one’ of the characters and thinks Mr. Bones is distinct fr. H.—about this I telephoned Giroux: it has got to be changed if possible (this is a—wretched—proof I have, so bad that the whole of 29 is quoted in prose). Giroux calls the review ‘stupid’.

It was quite a day. I bought a cheap suit & bag at a Powers sale, and saw 25 stars & Venus.

The new drugs keep me comatose all day, so I don’t sleep much at night. ^Can’t read, can’t swim: boring.^ But I don’t climb walls.

Typing Middlemarch is a good idea.

Love,

John

[Yale, TS and MS]

The Abbott Hospital, Minneapolis 3, Minn.

30 Apr 64

Dear Robert,

I am a dog a pig a camelopard (specifically, SV Camelopardalis, an Algol-type eclipsing variable) who deserves no mercy for not writing to you, specially about the medaille exquise you sent to the little Twiss (that’s Martha, short for Twissy-Pits, also known as Botsy-doo and by me also as Botsy Strew)—she is a vain thing and swaggers about in it like Tallulah of yore. We thank you with love, Kate and I, and so will my favourite poupie as soon as she has words to her wits. Send even brief word if you will of the important doings of them glories of humanity, Benny (still at PP?), Hugh and Maria and Michael. I plead for my silence (in vain, with myself, but I dare hope not with you) incredible exertions and the consequent exhaustion which along with acute bronchitis and an undiagnosed ear infection (I had jetted with both these from Washington to L.A., and that doctor who let me do so has a particular hole reserved for him in Hell) led me to collapse during a reading tour in southern California: the

[the nurse says typing may wake other patients—it’s just five in the morning]1027 anyway the stretcher-&-ambulance bit, a v. g. hospital in Riverside, thence back to read in L.A. itself, and so eventually back here to study health under the best doctor on the Continent. I’ve been here a month nearly & may be out soon. It comes & goes, stupor from the barely credible medication & rage when its force diminishes. Enough—I pray you & Sally & all are well & very well. K. & M. are.—How is your poem??! I put out at last this week the first volume, called 77 DS, comprising Bks I, II, III. Of course a copy has gone to you and will eventually, I trust, arrive; I couldn’t write in it because here. ^The jacket quotes you—I hope you won’t mind.^ The first letter that came fr. a stranger was from Dudley Fitts, who explained 15 years ago in the N.Y. Times that my work was no good—‘I am dazzled’ he writes,—‘The wit, the resonance, the pity, the exuberance, the faultless, the absolutely faultless ear.’ I was moved to the quick. Too tired for more.

Always,

John

Address: 103-2nd St, NE, Washington D.C.; or here.

Conrad, the first stranger to praise Bradstreet, does not feel I’ve let him down: he calls the 77 ‘fascinating’ & says ‘Berryman is a true “original”, one of the v. few we have.’

[UMN, MS]

Abbott, Weds [early May 1964]

Dearest Paul,

Thank you for your good letter. It is not indeed very long but I have enjoyed it very much and I am glad you got the book and I’m delighted with the picture of you and Adam. Give him my affection.

If all goes well I will be leaving here in a few days and returning to Washington by one of those ’planes that go very high and fast. Are you & your mother coming to New York on the 20th?

Here is a Japanese stamp I like. It is a New Year’s CAT, symbol of good luck. Since my hero Henry often sees himself as a cat, and there are elements of me in Henry (though he is not me, as Lowell is about to assert in The New York Review of Books) you may regard this as an imaginary picture of

your loving

Father

[Haffenden, TS]

Abbott, 4 May [1964]

Dear Van,

A feast I have to thank you for, however briefly: I’ll write when I can read—even the newspaper and Time are on the whole too much for me, I get weeks behind even when I clip as I do things I know I will want to read when recovered. My trouble now is largely neurological—no longer much physical, and not mental or emotional. Three new songs will be in the Nation shortly; I’ve done eleven here in hospital, and a bit over that number in Washington during March. Your study of the blackface business is deeply interesting, better than anything in Lowell’s long review for the New York Review, a proof of which has just come. I hope you and I can talk this over some time. Of course I saw vaudeville, in Oklahoma & Tampa & at Loew’s State (the capital!1028), though I admit I never saw genuine minstrels. Did you?? I don’t promise to read ^in proper order^ your book—it looks like IT in its field straight off, necessary, and only to be done by you—I am too curious to see what you do w. Whitman & James & Dewey.1029 Love to Betty, forgive briefness—no spec applic’n of the two mentioned for her, I just liked them at that point. Which daughter was with you in Japan, the grave & learned C or the frisky M?

Yours ever,

John

[NYPL, MS]

Abbott, 6 May [1964]

Dear Bob—

Leaving perh. Friday—address all again to 103-2nd St NE, Washington. Be up on 19th or so.

Thanks for help w. Cal’s incredible blunder. He called to say he’d changed that ‘detail’, as he calls it—not knowing, that is, who the poem is about. The review is still a disaster but will mislead less. Remains to see if it will kill the book. I think not.

In view of this, I may expand the “note” for a second printing if possible. If one gets imminent, do let me know. Note from James Wright: ‘Almost blood-curdling, truly magnificent.’ If we use ^part of^ Tate’s, that’s five: Fitts, Kirkus Bull., Posner, Tate, Wright. No doubt others may turn up. I think—third—that having made the point abt privacy, we might vouchsafe the fanatical reader a little information (under the photo) and I have constructed 2 sentences bristling with facts which on demand I will afford you.

Too tired to write more—

Always,

John

I thought of the next volume for next year, too. Certainly won’t be ready till late Fall if then. I am so discouraged by Mark’s & Cal’s responses that I hardly can think of it just now.

[Yale, TS]

Washington, Tuesday [spring 1964]

Dear Robert,

Your bad news first: Knowing how intolerable the writing of long poems is just on its own, I was so insensitive as not to foresee your utterly special problem coming out of the (inventionless) Odyssey, or I’d have done us both the honour of warning you, years ago. Two points even now: 1) there is a Kick Big in invention too—one of the high moments was in your off-room there in Ct when I discovered that I was going to let (going to make) the old man her father blasphemous in his last moments; and 2) Patience is all—took me (a quick study I am too) 4 1 / 2 years to get the Bradstr poem off the ground, and five years before the Dream Songs really got out of the stage of isolated splendours—four years more since then. What is your stanza? and will you trust me to the extent of indicating the direction & distance of your theme????

I feel terrible also about yr word of Richard and will write to him at once.

I enclose, AT LAST, two hundred bucks or the legal equivalent thereof, with 400 blushes and worse heart-shames for my negligence therein. And all my fresh thanks, as of 1953, when that loan saved my life; as for all your merciful forbearance, and Sally’s, since.

Your letter makes the book worth having published. That generosity especially to the lustful & religious ones moves me—especially in the light of the way the reviews are ganging up on & trampling me—like nothing since either the Gettysburg Address or Galatians.

Ever,

John

Kate & Martha love you too.

[NYPL, TS]

Washington, Tuesday [May 1964]

Dear sweet william,

A beautiful day here and I feel less erethistic & lethargic (tho drugged as usual five ways) than commonly now. I still after a month in hospital at Mpls am too nervous to read—but two thanks for this noble & honest version of one of the most piercing books since Fleurs du Mal and Les Amours Jaunes.1030 Probably at one stride you have joined the marvellous translators of our generation, Fitzgerald, Lowell, Jarrell, Wilbur, others. Glancing at some of the big items, Merlin, The Hermit, nearly everything seems up to scratch. Perhaps the fine end of La Porte cd go:

As a kid I gave you what I had Get to work

Of course I’m glad to have the book too. One disappointment that went hard was seeing the Pléiade Apoll. in a bookshop in Tangier at some mad price I couldn’t make.

We were happy too to see your own book handled so reverently by the same bastard who then danced up & down on mine, breaking its Bones.1031 When do we see this notable book??

Kate sends particular love, as always,

John

[Chicago, TS]

Delighted Bummidge is cast!1032

103–2nd st

Washington D C

Friday [spring 1964]

Dear Saul,

O your book looks like a beauty, boy. Catharine angelically gave me proofs at the World’s Fair last night and I’m already on galley 44—‘It’s been years since I was really able to concentrate’ except when composing.1033 So far it looks much more normal than Augie and Henderson, more continuing the line of Seize the Day, though of course more mature & complex, and I won’t be surprised if it proves yr masterpiece to date. I love Herzog dearly, the poor bastard, and my rage at Grenzbach knows no bounds as they say in the melodramas. So much is so close to yr experience in the degree that I know that, that it’s hard to externalize. I hold up judgment, then, except for what I’ve said, and am only writing now at once to send you some errors, all of which probably C. or you will trap, except maybe:

35—there’s no Guckenheimer 95, my dealer tells me—I drink 86 proof, and % has nothing to do with proof and shd be deleted. So I think and am told. This 86, for instance, my favourite whiskey and I am drinking it this minute, is 30% straight & 70% neutral spirits.

Some ^other^ trivia: 15—something scrambled in ‘Moses’ passage; ditto in last line of 16. 20 middle: ‘)’ after Priestess???? 22 bot. ‘candor-’ 26 ‘foggy winter days’ is confusing at first—maybe colon in? and comma needed after ‘heels’. 28 bot ‘thi’, 33 ‘carbohydrates’, 35 ‘serto’ for store, 38 ‘june’ and ‘dustry’, 39 ‘Ihar’ & ‘thye’, 42 bot, lousy ‘I’.

But I read very imperfectly and nervously, and may have missed a lot. Read ’em careful, pal. Will send on more as they arrive. Also enclose Nation tearsheets—can I have back? All best, quickly,

John

[Emory, TS]

Washington. WED [spring 1964]

Dearest Ralph,

Hopkins & Bridges used to ‘dearest’ each other, why not me with you?

Not well. Still on all the tracking drugs, and too much work to do, nearly finished my Voice of Amer on my work as a poet (absolute deadline tomw morning), but worst of all, eight or nine new Songs, I enclose the next-to-last, done yesterday,—with a copy too for Phil, and tearsheets for both of you from the Nation, my 3 and Miss Rich’s ‘noble tribute’ as Catharine calls it in a card that came this morning.

WHAT ARE THE DATES OF SS II, and what course am I supposed to be giving??1034 I hope not 61, I always feel uneasy with that except for Homer, the dramatists, and Plato. MAY I GIVE 54 (I contemplate a heavily revised set up for that course) and 131 this fall????? Please advise fast, AND

would Barney & Charley Foster contemplate for some quarter or other, at graduate level, the brilliant DEEP FORM IN American poetry course I have given at The School of Letters, Bread Loaf, and Brown, all graduates?1035 AND

what was the tax-break, as of sabbatical, you wrote to me about, but I can’t put my hands on the letter, and Zimmerman may not know???

I can read a little now and am Half through Herzog galleys wh Saul told Catharine to give me and she did at the World’s Fair (where we dined in the Minnesota pavillion, the three of us)—it is just his best book and Sondra-ludwig-J Schwartz are going to lie down & die too,

Best to all

John

[Schlesinger, TS]

103-2nd St., NE

Washington, Friday 14th [spring 1964]

Dear Adrienne Rich, and I mean dear,

I am convalescent, still heavily drugged & on hosp. routine, so I write shortly, just first to thank you for such insight, sensitivity & generosity that you make me wonder why nobody has ever taken my miserable productions seriously before—and at this thought I become so depressed that I think ‘But they never deserved it before!’ lest You and I be wrong together—and second to congratulate you on the most remarkable American verse-review (I may be wrong about this) since Jarrell’s study of Lord Weary’s Castle 17 yrs ago.1036 Randall, Fitzgerald & I used to be hot at that stuff, but we all quit. How did you come to be a super-pro so fast, I mean in criticism, though I’ve had the pleasure of admiring your verse for eight or nine years, minimum. After all, leaving the laudation to one side, it is your accuracy that most moves me and girds me up for the awful stuff ahead—hundreds of them, in all stages, to be composed together, in a second volume, most of which was finished months ago, called His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 84 Dream Songs, to come out next Spring. How I hate Spring, let it abhor to come, pretending.

Yours admiringly & gratefully,

John Berryman

I never wrote to a reviewer before; I hope you won’t mind.

[UMN, MS]

Sorry, ‘yohm’ came too late, tho’ it wd horrify Hebraists.1037

103-2nd St NE

Wash’n D.C.

22 May [1964]

Dear Denise L—

I feel so indebted to you for editorial hospitality that you may do as you will with ‘the surly cop’; only I wd rather it not be printed alone.1038 Now: you can send it back, or, if you want to, do it alone titled ‘From Book V’, or I can send you others to select from (if you like) to go with it—in which last case let it be untitled—but then in this "  "   , surely some time, months, shd elapse. Tell me. I’m glad you like the Cop; I do. “Spooning,” we cd call it.

What I am most grateful to you for is the prescience that inspired Miss Rich’s ^incredible^ review—which I have actually written to her about, in terms that I hope may please you when you see them.

Yrs,

John Berryman

My wife reminds me of your remarks to me abt her last Fall!

Will you see if she’s had my letter (c / o The Nation)? Thanks.

[Chicago, MS]

Monday [c. May 1964]

Dear Saul—

Hell-sick, old boy, or I’d have written you before abt yr marvellous book. I finisht it some days ago—mostly in bed—I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know how you did it either—I suspect the ‘vacation’ of Henderson made it possible. Now you need another vacation, unless Bummidge has done it. Nobody has ever sat down & wallowed to this extent in his own life, with full art—I mean: novelists. I don’t know of anything to compare it to, except you. It’s far yr richest & strongest book so far (next year in Jerusalem) and though I still Seize the Day it [sic], it’s crazier than Henderson. Triumphs: the transposition, professional, of Herzog; the ending (mild, convincing, far above the rhetoric of Wilhelm & Henderson); Mady—yr finest feminine portrait so far; the proverbs (thanx for balm abt Cal’s review—I remembered that one abt ‘True insincerity’—prob’y I marked it), and the letters & theories extending the ‘great names’ business in Augie (only the letter to Shapiro is very hard to take, pal—perhaps the only one). Both lawyers done to a T, the pistol & arrest fine, Grenzbach magnificent, the Japanese fine, all good, all v.g. Go to Heaven.

John

Absence of Hemingway’s self-pity, also remarkable.

[UMN, TS]

Abbott, Sat / Sun [August 1964]

Dear Ann,

Darken us further, and our sound,

cried the canny old character aground.

There is a hairy portrait of me in this Sunday’s Times (advance copy came)—Beard II, two years ago in Vermont, at present I have Beard III and may keep it—the review by Brinnin is favourable, to my surprise (most thoughtful review so far is in the Nation (25 May) together with three of the dozen Songs I wrote when I was here before—if you haven’t it (did I send it?) I can have it sent.1039 Paul may be amused by the photograph; tell him he not only looked very well at the Institute but behaved brilliantly, neither forward nor shy. It was a great mistake for me though, that ceremony—as I knew—it set me back weeks—but this was the third time in 13 years they’d helped me out and I felt obliged to go. I went to Washington and lay down for some two months in the terrible heat, unable to eat, scarcely to stand, until I could half-pack and fly out here (Kate & the baby drove). I’m very sorry about the June cheque—I enclose it—at that time I could do nothing—this must in fact be the first letter I’ve written to anyone since . . well, 3 or 4 in 3 or 4 months. First I had to get Ralph to give Louden my first-summer-session course—that was easy—then I had to cancel a reading in Syracuse (it was the travel that was impossible—then I had to get Ralph to give somebody my second-summer-session course. So I’ve no summer money.

Physically I’ve improved some again: four of my most disagreeable symptoms have yielded to treatment, at least for now, and after much practice I can now go up and down the five flights of stairs here (1700 steps) not only without assistance but without using the bannisters and without resting except at the top—I admit it doesn’t sound like much but it is far beyond anything I have been capable of since December 2, 1962. Carrying things is another matter; and I’ve only just over a month before the Fall Quarter. The month here in the Spring was wholly inadequate. On the other hand there’s a limit to the time one can bear in hospital if one’s mind is alert, as mine fairly is, in spite of the continual heavy 5 drugs. One trouble is that the specialists don’t agree, except on the acute bronchitis with ear infection that I flew to California, and general physical and nervous exhaustion from prolonged overwork & strain. I try to comfort myself with the thought that I was worth nothing for better than a year and a half after the Bradstreet poem, and it’s only a few months since I finished the first volume of my far more massive and demanding present poem. Boyd says you called concerned about my liver—that’s odd, because two of the experts in Washington were sure the liver was in dysfunction but I told nobody, how did you learn?—anyway, all the tests run here during the last ten days show that it’s not so (except one test which was alarming at first but when repeated was okay). It’s simply my mind tearing my body to pieces with anxiety. I am sorry you have put your lawyer on me (and in passing may I say that I wish he would abandon the effrontery of addressing me by my first name).

Whether I can begin teaching again next month depends heavily on the strains I am or am not under. Can we not arrange some compromise until my salary begins again—I am under very heavy obligations besides this one. As of October 1st I can send you predated cheques again. I have much more to say but this has worn me out. Do congratulate Paul for me on his presence and say I was very happy to see him—and it was pleasant to see you without warring, too.

I don’t know just when I’m going out of here, write either here or to 3207 Lyndale Ave So., though in fact we hope to move from there as soon as we can.

Yours,

John

1965

[Stoneburner, TS transcript]

The Abbott Hospital

3 Apr 65

Dear Tony Stoneburner,

Thanks for yr flattering but v interesting letter (well written too; I hope yr verse is good, with that wonderful name). Yes I was a fool not to go see Hodgson.1040 Well, my loss. I must brace Jim Wright on the subject when next he comes to my house fr St Paul for an evening. How did you stop being a minister? Toss me some biography, as Santayana once ordered (in vain: I am the worst correspondent who ever lived). Perhaps you wd do me a great favor and ring up the pleasant little George Abbott White and say I wd like to know where the hell my fee is: I need it, and moreover never before have I failed to be handed it either directly before or directly after a reading.1041 The expenses are no problem, just airfare: $70.35; but I need that too. Best,

Yrs,

John Berryman

[NYPL, TS]

Abbott Hospital

16 July 65

Dear Bob,

Temporary address; home tomw after 3 wks: 33 Arthur Ave SE. Will you have yr people toss me a dozen copies there, and also the Manhattan addresses of Kay Keast (E Sixties?) and Gertrude Buckman (further uptown?)?1042 Thanks.

You were right abt the Pulitzer, and I was wrong: it doesn’t matter a straw—I’ve had much larger & more important awards—but believe me people think it does. We had reporters & photographers in & out of the house like flies—there was a vast picture of Kate & me on the front page of the main paper—Time commissioned a story and I gave an interview & was photographed, then they rescheduled the story and have now obviously killed it, as too late (to the morgue for my next book—even Time must be getting uneasy that they have never reviewed any of my five American bks of verse, though they’ve twice lately had to refer to me in their columns). Publicity is a bore. The correspondence! the articles! the wires! the phone calls! all meaning nothing. Real fame must be intolerable. But one of the best shots of me ever taken is in a local magazine wh I’ll send you when we get copies—the article is good too—I think we ought to use the photo as the whole back of the jacket of His Toy . . I drafted & revised the preface the other day; it’s good; I have also written 7 beautiful new Songs in hospital—I sent 3 to the Atlantic, whom I hate, this is their last chance. I hear of reviews of the 77 in Poetry and The Reporter but have not seen them: did they not send you copies?1043

Problem: what do you hear that people are doing about this Blue Book of Peace to be published in Moscow?1044 The letter is signed by Shostakovich & other serious people, and sent to all Nat’l Inst members but its Amer sponsor is only Rockwell Kent and I don’t want to be conned.1045 I wrote out a Song in fact but it is completely unpolitical and I can print it anywhere. If it is not a Stalinist con, I might send it them. Let me hear, put yr ear to the ground. I hope you are flourishing, Robert.

Blessings,

John

[Yale, TS]

33 Arthur Ave., S.E.

Minneapolis, Minn.

19 July 65

Dear Sir,

Thank you for yr request, to wh I respond, herewith, but the copy of Agenda you speak of having sent has not come. (My closest friend, the young poet long dead named Bhain Campbell, who was deeply involved in the American labour movement in Detroit in the late Thirties, has a line

And our agenda and again with blood.)

I was in hospital until day before yesterday and I begin lecturing tomorrow, so I can’t type or revise any of the hundreds of unprinted Songs for you; but I send, in accordance with yr 3rd paragraph, two Songs that have only appeared here. Call them “Two Dream Songs” and they are submitted as a unit:

I ((The jolly old man))

II Idyl II1046

The first was in the original Noble Savage, edited by Saul Bellow & others & me, 7 or so years ago—not in the first three Books done by Faber as 77 Dr. Songs, because it belongs later in the poem. Three Americans have perhaps seen it. The history of the second is opposite, besides happening last month, but it all comes to the same things: nobody there, & almost nobody here, knows these Songs. If you change yr editorial schedule and want more, let me know.

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

18 Oct [1965]

Dear loquacious Meredith

All thanks for yr Wisconsin effort—I have written approving both dates but saying you prefer the 21st.1047 Things are marching at the Walker and I’ll hear back in a day or so, then I’ll try Temple Israel too (what are yr favourite topics apart from Liz Browning & Chris Rossetti?—I talked for an hour to the Temple ladies lately on the Jewish Contrib’n to Amer. Culture, so that’s out). You’ll stay with us, of course. Randall’s death hurt me—shock and sorrow to Mackey, please. Everybody is dying—I personally am dying of diarrhoea & nerve-ends. What the hell are you doing in Princeton? The dog got a bird yesterday. Nothing goes well except my ladies & a royalty cheque for 956 & the fact that my Columbia date (Dec 6th) matches my Bennington (3rd, 4th). I did 3 lousy new Songs last week, will be 51 on the 25th, & go to San Francisco soon.

Love,

John

[NYPL, TS]

30 Oct [1965]

Dear Mrs Jarrell,

I hope you had my wire, sent to Greensboro since I didn’t know Ranalll [sic] had moved. I was stunned by his death, but felt far worse later when a friend passed me the NY Times story saying the troopers called it suicide.1048 He was just not the man to kill himself. He had iron selfconfidence, and he was childlike—neither of them qualities leading to suicide. Did he leave you a note or anything? What in the name of God was wrong, do you know? I have tried to write away my feeling, twice, in Songs that I’ll send you when I print them; but it hasn’t helped much. Please accept Kate’s deep sympathy too, she says. We started together, in 1940, and though never close mostly traded books but almost never letters—I didn’t hear from him abt my last book and didn’t expect to—but now I feel bitterly sorry I didn’t throw him a postcard to say The Lost World was his very best.1049 What went wrong??

Two material things. His most brilliant criticism was about Auden: I have never understood why he didn’t assemble it: now that should be done, and published. Also, I don’t know how far he had gone with the verse-anthology, but at least the table of contents should be printed, say in the Kenyon; his taste was impeccable if anyone’s can be said to be. I miss the thought of him very badly. After Roethke’s death and MacNeice’s I swore never to care any more, but I cried over Randall’s. I hope you are being able to console yourself.

John Berryman

[Yale, MS]

[winter 1965]

Dearest Robert,

Your Nativity poem is a beauty only I don’t understand the word deadly.1050 Broken arm, broken foot—so Kate writes for me.

In the second Song here the poet resumes his identity, wakes up, as my brother put it.1051 And the Song is about your god daughter. Picture enclosed.

Pray send me Eileen’s address in Paris.

Love to all of you, especially Maria, from the few of us.

John

1966

[Lilly, TS]

33 Arthur Ave SE

Minneapolis

21 March [1966]

Dear Henry,

Thanks for the Eliot thing, I thought it was well done.1052 I write to ask a favour: do you know anybody in Dublin? Names, addresses, thumbnail sketches. I am thinking of spending next year there but don’t know a soul—all dead like Devlin or departed like Brian Boydell.1053 And are there any good Irish magazines at present? Thanks for any help. I enclose a poem by an almost unpublished former student, an actress turned poet, Deneen Brown, 105 Winfield, San Francisco; which can you find room for? Best always,

John

[UMN, TS]

23 March 66

My dear Mrs Berndt:

Please accept my belated thanks for the privilege of seeing your admirable paper on the first volume of my poem.1054 It came at a time when I couldn’t read about myself any more and I laid it aside, to come on only just now. You acquitted yourself more honorably, I thought, than most of the professional reviewers and were especially good on the epigraphs (brack, in the first, is just minstrel dialect for black), which both American and foreign reviews neglected. It was a hard book to review. The only serious American efforts were Miss Rich’s, which you quote, for an ‘outside’ view (we were strangers then—now friends: she introduced me at Harvard earlier this month), and Wm Meredith’s, in the Wisconsin Studies in Contemp. Lit., for an inside view.1055 I congratulate you on a gallant study.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Princeton, TS]

33 Arthur Av SE

Friday [spring 1966]

Dear Allen,

I hope you have forgiven that phone call. Infernal alcohol: I have been off it, more or less, for some months, and very gradually, under a heavy drug regime, am feeling better. Your angry letter was a bitter pill to swallow but I swallowed it and I daresay am the better therefor, it was so angry as to be unjust, which made it a little easier to take. I wonder how your poem is going. Another year ought to see the second, final volume of mine revised and done. I have a Guggenheim and mean to spend it in Dublin though I don’t know a soul there, all my friends of 1937 are dead or departed, a big city with nobody looks a little forbidding, I made friends easily then but I was young. Ralph says you’ve been there lately: have you any particular friends whom I might bother for help in finding a furnished house or apartment Sept-June?

I miss never seeing you. Can you come to dinner, accompanied or unaccompanied, at six on Thursday or Friday of next week? Or I mean will you?

Affectionately,

John

[Haffenden, MS]

9 Apr [1966]

Dear Saul

I read in Chicago the 29th, flying in late afternoon the day before: is lunch or evening possible?—Thanks for gentle poem.—I quit drinking abt a year ^month^ |<good slip| ago and my nervous system is giving me every known & unknown form of hell. I live hour to hour. Did I ever write poetry? I feel like Herzog only worse. My lectures & seminar take every inch of my will. The more experienced of the doctors who have reduced me to this say it will take 3 or 4 months.—I have a Guggenheim, wh. we think of spending in Dublin, only I don’t know a soul there (do you??)—all I knew in ’37 dead or departed or forgotten. I am worried abt finding a furnished place and who to talk to. What are you going to do next year? What are you writing, anyway? I started re-reading Herzog yesterday, in the moments my nerves allow—it’s even better than the first time, but I remember practically everything. Herzog & Henry nicely split the NBA & the Pulitzer, didn’t they?—The university situation here is the devil. The faculty are still beating up on Humanities, my relation with the Eng. dept is non-existent, the Siegelmans are going to San Francisco, Ralph too may go to California, leaving me without one close colleague! (Tate is too weird & pompous to be close to any more) and for friends only the Thomeses! I despair. You once askt me if I might like to come to Chicago and I said no, but really at present I feel so dissatisfied I’d consider a first-rate offer from anybody. Poet & scholar for hire!—Excuse this gloomy letter, pal. In the snatches of sleep I get, even my dreams are worse than usual. Throw me a cheery word.

John

[BL, TS]

33 Arthur Ave SE

Minneapolis, Minn

29 May 66

My dear Alvarez,

I wish we had had more talk. All those trips are alike, you have a few words with the interesting people and long conversations of a stunning imbecility with all the bores. Maybe we can meet during the coming year: I plan to spend it in Dublin though I don’t know a soul there, all my friends of 1937 are dead (Yeats, Denis Devlin, Arthur Shields) or departed.1056 Where do you expect to be? Have you any particular friends in Dublin, by the way? I need help in finding a furnished house or apartment Sept-June. Are there any poets these days, any magazines? I seem to know only of a lyric poet named Tho Kinsella.1057 MacNeice’s death was sore to me, he was my best friend in London, one of my best anywhere. Jarrell’s suicide did not cheer me up either, we had been colleagues since 1939. The world is beginning to look rather empty. Then there were the happy exits of Sylvia Plath over there and Ted Roethke over here. I could write you a gloomy letter indeed on this beautiful Spring day before going out for more tennis, but I hope all is perversely well with you, send me some news. My poem has advanced itself and maybe another year will see it revised and done, so that I can die off to a flat EEG line in peace.

Best,

John Berryman

[Schlesinger, MS]

[spring 1966]

Dear Adrienne

My thanks for yr letter, wh. I immediately lost & have only just recovered. But I ask you—how can I send you Songs, when there are 259 lately registered, 15 brand new & only ten of the corpus printed—I have been readying the MS. to take abroad, I have a Guggenheim & mean to spend it in Dublin, on the second (final) volume of the poem.1058 But in a day or so I’ll be typing four in response to a special request fr. the London Times and I’ll take carbons of two of these for you, one about Miss Plath—and don’t in your over-offer [sic] send me her poems, I can’t enter that blackness just yet. But do tell me news of you & will you pass on the enclosure to Gelpi whose address I’ve mislaid. Yr poem in his Emily D. is a beauty.1059 Affection,

John

[NYPL, MS]

7 July 66

Dear Mark

How is your fine work going? After weeks of dazzling work I have the ms. of the second (final) volume of my poem ready to take abroad, for a year in Dublin—it’s 259 Songs, to be cut to 84—I know I can’t do it but I plan to try. Fifteen of these, half for Book IV which is finished, were done last month. Meanwhile poor old Henry is appearing in German & Italian editions, where I hope he will make out better than he did in English—except for a new free-verse anthology which wants 20 of them, the joke of this being that, as you know, I don’t write free verse.1060 You wd have blusht to hear the tribute I made you to an overflow audience at Columbia last year. Dean Truman, at his reception afterward, apologized for not having thought of inviting you.1061 Or have I told you this before? I often talk to you without writing and Kate has just reminded me of a long dream recently where one Henry Frisch sold me the fish out of the window of The Captain’s Table at the corner of Bleecker: you were in the nature of a sky-god, in Mircea Eliade’s term, overseeing the transaction.1062 I hope it went well! Most of my dreams are better not recalled, only written about. This is one of those blessed letters that do not seek to be answered. I hope you & Dorothy are brilliantly well.

Affectionately,

John

[NYPL, TS]

7 July 66

Dear Bob,

Hello. Various topics. I have just got the ms ready to take abroad (I have a Guggenheim wh I’m spending in Dublin) after weeks of dazzling work: it’s 259 finished songs (15 brandnew) of which only ten have been printed, and 35 unfinished and scores of fragments: the second (final) volume of 84 to be made up out of this corpus. I hope to have it for you by March. I need money for travel: can you advance me 500 or more against the book?

The German Bradstreet, by a woman finally, is good, in sample, I also answered her four sheets of enquiries.1063 Will be glad to see the Italian version, my Italian being much better than my 1937 Heidelberg German.1064

This man Stephen Berg of the free-verse anthology says you want to charge $1500 for 20 Songs. Somebody is insane. Let him have them as cheaply as possible, Bob: this is a critical anthology as against a general or textbook anthology, and comes to free publicity. As of a general or text anthology I believe in charging whatever the traffic will bear, but this is more like quotations in criticism for which nothing is charged, rightly; 20 Songs there—I admit it’s a hell Of a lot, good for them—can only sell more copies of the book. His selection by the way is interesting and I am going to do him a prose piece (explaining that I do NOT write free verse) once the obstacle with you is cleared.

I also return the Jarrell agreements ^(for Michal [sic] di Capua)^, only they will have to take my text from the Alumni magazine in N.C. taken off the Yale tape—I have no copy.1065

In haste,

Affection,

John

[Trueblood, MS]

33 Arthur Av SE

Minneapolis

7 July 1966

My dear Valerie

Write me a letter! I have no address for you and feel the need of communication. News! Good bad or indifferent. Would you like a copy of my 77 Dream Songs? I can send you one if you would. Become one of my readers. The poem is appearing in German & Italian but I’ll send you the British edition, which is in English or my version of English.—I am overdrawn at my emotional bank, after weeks of readying the MS. of the 2nd volume to take to Dublin for the year: it’s no less than 259 Songs, of which only ten have been published and 15 are brandnew, besides 35 unfinisht & scores of fragments—I feel dazed: since the 2nd (final) volume will only contain 84 Songs, you can see that I have my work cut out.

I play tennis every day, very badly, have grown tired of farewell parties (all my closest friends are moving to California), and am looking forward with pure horror to lecturing twice daily in the infernal second summer session here. Write me a letter at once!

Affectionately

John Berryman

I had a turbulent & incomprehensible postcard from Ellen K. lately—no address, as usual.1066 My regards to the fortunate Dovydenas who inhabits the same city with you.1067

[UMN, TS]

Thurs 7 July 66

Dearest Paul

When your good letter came I was too deep in a large, urgent & difficult task to answer it at once: I was getting the manuscript of my poem ready to take abroad—259 Songs, of which only ten have been published & out of which the second (final) volume of 84 is to be constructed. I wrote about fifteen new ones while engaged in the registration and finished Book IV, so that you may say I have been busy. It has been infernally hot here too and did I tell you I had an abscessed tooth pulled? It didn’t hurt much afterward. What have you been doing since school closed? I begin lecturing again in 10 days and go swelteringly forward, twice a day every day, for five weeks, till I sail from Montreal Aug. 26th. With your saying that your friend is smart & kind, your personality swung into focus for me for the first time—these are two of the very best reasons for having friends, and keeping them.

Your loving father

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

7 July 66

Dear William

Guess who I heard from today: crazy Joy Roulston, of Bread Loaf: she says ‘I am Henry Pussy-cat’ & encloses a snapshot of a cat.1068 Eeeeeee.

Why don’t we write more often? Did you finish all yr horrendous jobs? Henry is appearing in German & Italian where let’s hope he did better, or will do, than he did in English. My chief news is that a few weeks of Dartmoor labour have got my MS. in condition to travel to Dublin for a year: it’s 259 Songs, & 35 unfinished, & scores of fragments,—the whole to be cut down to 84 for the 2nd (final) volume. 15 of these finished are brand new and Book IV is done & I’m deep into V. Wish me luck. All my efforts to get you a reading here failed: this is a hole. I went to Madison where yr friend Enck had suddenly died and I was very sorry I went.1069 We sail fr. Montreal Aug 26th after I do five weeks of filthy lecturing here.

Send news!!

Love,

John

Kate sends love

[NYPL, MS]

Monday [summer 1966]

Dear Bob—

Herewith contract.

Problem: I suddenly yesterday unsealed a sonnet-sequence (114 of them) I wrote in 1947.1070 I am going to check this out w. Wm Meredith but my friends here (abruptly mobilized) advise me to publish them at once—to ‘soften up the audience’, as one friend puts it, for the 2nd vol. of The Dream Songs. Can you handle this vol. Sonnets for next spring and His Toy etc for next Fall, or is that overexposure as the TV comedians say? Of course I have to know what Meredith & then you think of the MS.—this enquiry is purely provisional.

Yrs ever,

John

[NYPL, MS]

Th. evening [summer 1966]

Dear Mark

I suppose you have heard of Delmore’s miserable death—I’ve scarcely been able to think of anything else since and he has completely ruined Book VI with 10 new Songs.1071 But in addition to half-paralyzing grief I’ve kept on lecturing twice daily (today ended, on Anne Frank—whom nobody but me ever seems to have understood—& the Purgatorio) and doing Songs & Sonnets—I unsealed last week 114 Sonnets I wrote 19 years ago and think of publishing them next Spring: it depends on what Wm Meredith & Bob Giroux think. My friends here are strongly in favour, I don’t care one way or the other. I wish I cd see one of yr new poems: how abt a carbon? Will you accept a dedication of the 2nd (final) vol. of the Dream Songs—I just signed the contract—it’s called His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 84 Dream Songs—deadline Mar. 1st OW!!—& to be dedicated

To Mark Van Doren and to the sacred memory of Delmore Schwartz

Affect’y

John

We leave for Dublin tom’w: the Majestic, Fitzwilliam St, Upper.

[Haffenden, MS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

19 Sept 66

Dearest Maris,

Love to Boyd, congratulations on your birthday, & blessings to the children. I’ve written some thirty Songs since I saw you, and Kate & the baby are well (she started nursery school today)—I am not, but never mind. I am sick with fury at my bank there, especially. Will you do me a very great favour? Will you tell my banker, Mr. Stotesberry (or anyone else in charge) at the University National and say to him that I am amazed & displeased by the silence that has followed my cable to him of ten days ago, telling him ^please^ to transfer immediately $1500 to my account at the Bank of Ireland, Ballsbridge, Dublin (the Foundation put $2400 in my account in Mpls ^on Sept 1st^ and the P.O. tells me that if my cable had not been delivered they wd have been notified.). I now want this done at once, and I want an explanation, at my permanent address above, of this insufferable negligence. If the embassy, & the Guggenheim people in NY, had not sprung into action I wd be penniless. So much for that nasty chore which if you will sweetly do for me, accept my heartfelt thanks; I am too angry & mystified to address them again directly until I have some action & an apology; it won’t take you 10 min. on the telephone—I wd have called on Ralph or Ellen but they are not there. I have finisht Book IV, very different. Some of my travel & Irish songs are beauties (‘It’s beautiful’ said to ^me^ Kate about one, as if I had never written anything ‘beautiful’ before) and some take it out on the Irish—I’ll teach these bloody islanders. But we’ve met excellent people too. Send us news, dear lady.

[NYPL, MS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

Tuesday (21st?) [September 1966]

Dear William

All my best thanks for yr trouble in reading my damned Sonnets (I’m sorry they came at a rushed time, and why on earth did you have them copied, you madman bibliophile?) & for yr noble letter to Giroux & for letting me see it. Now all I have to do is hear fr. him: he & my American bank are mysteriously silent. Send me some poems, I have nothing to read—not that I could read much, I just write: I’ve done 30 or 40 Songs since Minneapolis.

What I now enclose you (if I can ever get my hands on an envelope) is the whole of Book IV, which you will find v. different from the first three. Please, if yr goodness will let you read it, pay special attention to weaknesses. It was mostly done 3 years ago, just too late for 77, but extensively reconsidered ever since. When finished, will you pass it on to Adrienne Rich, my other critic? With Randall & Delmore gone, I don’t know whose judgment I trust more than yours. Now I go straight into VII, the end, which is all written but needs much work; then into V & VI, to be constructed out of the 300 unpublished. I am going to send the whole of IV to London (TLS) fr. whom I had a special invitation some months back, & see what happens.1072 I gave up printing these things years ago. Kate sends love, she & Martha are fine. I am NOT, tho’ working well. Some of my new Irish Songs are extremely beautiful: I am relaxing in that direction from the final volume, where narrative & beauty were largely excluded. Send me some of yr work, beloved Wm.

John

[Schlesinger, MS]

Song enclosed. Write me quick!

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

21 Sept ’66

4 Oct (too busy to finish)

Dearest Adrienne

Congratulations on yr excellent book & thanks for yr shrewd letter, only tell me what Song I sent you beside the one on Miss Plath.1073 I was extremely sorry to hear of yr infection, these shd attack the elder. Yr move is Cambridge loss, thank you for sending on my note to Gelpi.

His book on Emily Dickinson seems first-class.

That boy Stuart Davis did an endless interview & printed fr. it 2 articles in the Crimson.1074 He has also twice written to me abt an Advocate devoted to me. I kept a scrupulous silence.

With your book I feel deeply pleased. We now have 3 women at the ages—Miss Moore, up.; Miss Bishop, middle; you young; who is v. young if anybody, tell me. You need to enlarge yr pronouncements, be increasedly secure.

My Book IV goes fr ^Wm^ Meredith (Conn. Coll, New London) to you & will you send it then to Mrs Boyd Thomes, 40 Barton Ave ^S.E.^, Minneapolis. Cable fr. Cal calls it ‘a tremendous & living triumph’. London TLS has taken 8.

Love,

John

[Trueblood, MS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin, Ireland

8 Oct ’66

My dear Valerie

If you get this, let me hear at once: one of my best new Irish songs is dedicated to you (if you accept: I only dedicate w. permission) and you are mentioned in two others: but how to reach you w. copies?1075 I wrote you urgently some while back but you may not have the letter, wh. I had to address to you at Pembroke Alumnae, your Chicago address mislaid—wh. Kate recently recovered.

Repeat: answer this by air, so I can send on this stuff. Tell me too how yr life is, who are the leading suitors, what are yr plans, who do you talk to, etc.

Weirdness: my ex-fiancee of 1936 telephoned day before yesterday & came for a drink w. her new husband. Good news: I finished Book IV & sent it instantly to America & London: the London Times took eight (a whole page, they say, wh. they’ve never done for anyone before) and Robert Lowell cabled ‘a tremendous & living triumph’ fr. New York. I wd like you to see these 13 Songs if you’d like: tell me, but I need a secure address.

Affectionately

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

Wed [fall 1966]

Dear Bob

Old friend, he swore, I have sent you one

of my 14 unpublished books & you have not replied.

Now that was not well done.

If it comes to a decision, spring to my side:

damn the trustees: down w. business meetings:

up the adventure of art.

Which we were born for, now so long ago:

your poem abt Proust still sticks in my head

& yr good-humoured editing.

Between us, we ran the place, a small place,

Columbia, but worth the running: our first scene.

Now that was long ago

but I remember later scenes, two grand,

our weddings, when you wd have had my hand

but you were in the Pacific, on the Essex,

so Mark did, in the Lady Chapel at St Patrick’s,

in Naval Air Intelligence you were,

concerned w. winning a different war.1076

Ever

John

P.S. Accept a dedication: Berryman’s Sonnets to Robert Giroux.

[NYPL, TS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge, Dublin

Monday, Monday Nov..? [1966]

Dear Bob,

Good: let’s do the sonnets first. The contracts came all right but I was disturbed about the difference betw our feelings on timing, also incredibly busy with Bk VII—which to my horror Kate counted the other day at 74 (that is, revised, accepted by me, and located), with 12 or 15 more to go that have always been intended to serve as its end & the end of the whole work. I have a phantastic amount of work to do, and only 3-odd months to do it in. Well, it’s what I was made for, and noone else could do it. I reckon a month each for V and VI, then a month for the whole Ms.

Anyway, let’s do the sonnets in the Spring and argue abt His Toy later, supposing I do get it done by March. I like BERRYMAN’S SONNETS rather than Sonnets as a title; there is the dedication to you; there is the prefatory note I wrote out in my last letter; we ought to use the photograph by Ronh [sic] Engh that appeared in the Twin Citian which I think I had sent to you, and it ought to take up the whole of the back of the jacket—I am convinced that poets’ pictures sell their books, since books are sold and there’s no question of the text doing it.1077

Can you send me the address, pronto, of the Academy of American Poets in Manhattan? I need contact with Betty Krey [sic] abt readings, since I have been offered $1000 for two in May & need others.1078

I enclose an anthology thing.

Best ever,

John

There are 3 more Sonnets, by the way; wh. I’ll find & send—

Tell Monteith I’d like much to see him but our phone has been out of order for two months, he’ll have to write, say where he’s staying, etc.

Please tell M. di Capua that I have no further changes to make in the Jarrell stuff

[Haffenden, MS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

15 Nov 66

My dear Maris

Didn’t you get ‘You dear you’ & Book IV which was to have come on to you from the poet Miss Rich??1079 I’m puzzled: where is IV now—it was to go, as I told her, to Ellen, and then by way of Chicago to New York & my publisher’s safe. I think I told you its immediate fate in London & N.Y. Joke: apparently, along w. Johnson’s other economies, putting out lights: there are no airmail stamps in the White House! We rec’d an invitation to a reception there, wh. came by ordinary mail & took weeks into Oct. (p.m. Sept 2, reception 8th) I wrote without irony, regretting & explaining that I had not boycotted the affair, hating his conduct of the war but thinking like Bellow that he was doing his best. Mrs. Johnson wrote me, concluding ‘It was a lovely evening’. After 75 new Songs in 2½ weeks here, I am invincibly tired & trying to rest. Lowell now writes I’ll get a $5000 prize: am front-runner anyway: what heaven

love fr. all of you to all of us

John

Would Boyd write a medical note to

Dr. Gordon N. Ray

President, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation1080

[Schlesinger, MS]

Ballsbridge

8 Nov 66

My dearest Adrienne

What a lovely reader you are and how little I deserve you. I wonder abt ‘lobster swine’ myself tho’ I can’t change it; I suppose the connexion was in: preying on garbage.1081 A by-blow is a bastard: don’t yr dictionaries have it? ‘Adoptive-up’ is a Henry nonce-expression meaning: up for adoption.1082 A friend of his had a daughter who had a bastard is the subject. I’ll have to take ‘filthy tide’ out: I haven’t come on that Song yet.1083 I have been killing myself over Book VII which Kate to my horror counted out recently at 74 (revised, accepted by me, & located) w. abt 15, long destined for the end, to come. I can’t read properly yr interesting & ambitious poem till I finish Bk VII, but I wd immediately revise out the literary allusions (Yeats, Arnold, Keats) as inappropriate to the bodily subject.1084 I wrote a Song on the back of yr last page, so I can always find it. The orphaned children were necessary, I think; non-rhetorical, practical. Plutarch is one of the supreme masters.—The London TLS are doing nine of my 13 Songs, at once: I’ll have them send you. I was once in love w. a girl in NY named Rosamund and my suit failed—she was a virgin & she was in love w. a sailor—but meanwhile I wrote her a poem, the refrain line ‘John Berryman is dreaming, Rosamund’—3 stanzas—I cheer myself up w. this refrain in low times—current version: ‘John Berryman is dreaming, Adrienne’

Love

John

[NYPL, TS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge, Dublin

Monday, Nov ? [1966]

Dear Mr Silvers,

At last, a mystery cleared. I never received a letter abt ‘additions & revisions’ to the Elizabeth Bishop piece.1085 In fact I never received any letter at all, and gradually concluded with some rage that you had not only killed the piece but killed it without telling me: annoying partly because I had never had a review rejected in my life (31 years of professional reviewing) but also if you didn’t want it I cd easily have printed it in any of a dozen other places. It was not the best review I ever wrote, but quite printable and had the coup of printing the whole Pound poem—a thing Time later did with Miss Plath’s Daddy, making a stunning effect.1086 Thank you for the cheque but I wd rather earn it more fully: if you took a carbon of your letter, and can send me the review with it, I can even now probably put it in better condition and you might use it. My piece was not at all topical.

With this matter cleared up, of course you are welcome to the Songs of Book IV, only there is a difficulty, which you may feel as insuperable: nine of them are appearing very shortly in the London TLS, taking a whole page, a thing I believe they have never done for anyone before—I have read two proofs already. How far yr readership overlaps with TLS I don’t know, but I shdn’t think intolerably. I constantly see things printed on both sides of the Atlantic, esp in Encounter & The Observer. Also you have the whole Book whereas they only have nine. The four they do not have, by the way, are Op posth 3, 4, 5, 6; in any case you can print them if you like, as “Four Dream Songs”.1087 Their selection, though very generous, was eccentric, in fact I remonstrated with them in one case, and won. I’m sorry about this difficulty, which is certainly not my fault—Cal perhaps shd not have assumed they were free. I am glad you liked them enough to want them.

Yrs faithfully,

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

15 Nov 66

Dear William

We enjoyed yr v. nice, tireless historical novelist Miss Holland, for 5 or 6 yrs a few nights ago, during wh. she displaced us to nothingness but she did say that you were in high spirits, painting garden chairs etc—we were glad to hear abt this because we had been worried at not hearing fr. you abt Bk. IV.1088 Cal cabled, the London TLS took nine, making a whole page, which I think they’ve never done for anyone before, the NY Rev of Bks set up all 13 in type, Adrienne wrote 2 admirable letters, but not a word fr. you. We took it that you: (1) were ill: (2) were too depressed to write[;] or 3) didn’t like IV. Send us at any rate a postcard.

I have been working like bloody hell on Bk VII & to my horror Kate counted it out recently at 74 Songs—revised, accepted by me, & located—besides 12 or 15 always destined ^in order^ for the absolute end of the work. This version, that is, is already longer than the whole volume was to be;—without V or VI, both elaborate. Do you know of a warm cave where I can go & hide? Come join me & we will write short poems in happy emulation. Ah, short poems!

Kate spends |Freudian| sends special love

John

[Trueblood, MS]

Monday [November 1966]

Dublin

My very dear little Miss Valerie,

What a lovely cable & how they botcht it in transition & what a packet of money it must have cost you—it was extravagant, but sweet, because I was beginning to feel rather damaged by my inability to get in touch w. you: I have 7 American readers, I want you to be the 8th. You ask ‘Why do me honour’, I reply: first place, no honor, I just think abt you a good deal—and, second place, why not? You are a beautiful & gifted American girl: if I perceive this & want to write abt you, why not?—News: cable fr. NY day before yest’y, the Chancellors of the Academy of Amer. Poets have voted me their $5000 prize. Very helpful, & a little surprising since one of the board, Miss Bogan of The New Yorker, is a bitter enemy of my work.1089 But it has friends too.

I have a full Irish beard, part brown, part grey, which makes me look much older—I got tired of being taken for a graduate student.

I like yr plans in the splendid letter that came this morning. NOW is the time to find out, slowly, what yr talent seems, at present, to be up to. I don’t believe in people as obviously endowed as you & Ellen K working when you shd be forming a style: sponge on yr families, as Shaw did, & Corbière. (Can Ellen be married? I am amazed, & God bless her spouse. Wish her happiness for me if you ever write.)

An endless article on me in a British magazine that came today, one earlier from Madrid, and German & Italian volumes are in process. I have been badly overtired recently but keep on. A man in London wants to interview me, so I will fly there soon. My Sonnets will be out in NY in the Spring, London later; then the 2nd Dream Songs in the Fall (the National Book Award is going to have a hard time next year).

I was extremely sorry to hear of yr Fall—have the headaches gone? Did you have a first-rate doctor? Take care.—Sylvia Plath was a true heroine of modern art. We don’t want anything to happen to you. Be v. cagey whom you marry. Her husband Ted Hughes is an interesting poet—he sent me his first volume—but apparently a full-scale bastard; I don’t know him.1090 There were children, you know, when she put her frantic head in the oven—it was on this ghastly fact that I based my Song—unpublished anywhere, but Adrienne Rich the poet (3 books, 3 ch., 333 Central Park W., NY) has it & might send you a copy if you say I want her to. She is an excellent lady—37, I think—who introduced me at Harvard at my last reading there—and then we went on to do a programme at Yale. She is one of my 3 women readers (her review in The Nation of 77 DS was one of the two shrewdist [sic] in the U.S.), my doctor’s wife is 2nd & a psychologist in Berkeley is 3rd: you be four, dear Miss Trueblood. I have done without readers all my life, but now that I am both famous & isolated, I need them. Just locate my errors & weaknesses, that’s all, exc. also obscurities.

My Bk IV will be coming to you fr. northern California shortly. I want Saul Bellow to see it, my old pal—5490 South Shore Drive, tel. 324-6868—I am writing to tell him all this: he can read them in an hour. Then send them, either you or him (or his wall-eyed secretary, delightful), to Robt Giroux, of Farrar Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Sq. West, NYC. I am counting on the interstices of your fresh opinion. Saul just had 3 plays open in NY & is teaching Swift & working on 2 more novels & has a PROBLEM, so he may not be free. Don’t be seduced by him, he’s a terror, one of the loveliest men I’ve ever known; best novelist in the country. Don’t seduce him, he has enough to handle.—I enclose the Songs abt you, & am having London send you the nine

love

John Berryman

Show Saul these Songs abt you too: he’ll be delighted.

[NYPL, TS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

14 Dec 66

Dear William,

A lovely letter and worth waiting for—but I can’t imagine why you worry about yr handwriting: like everything else about you it is splendid.

I never meant to saddle you with a critical job, only to say Okay or No Good or Kill x & y & z.

I finished the poem the other day with a terror called Henry’s Guilt.1091 Too near the bone. I can’t write any more of them, and feel rather remote and lost without my work, I must have started fifty new ones in my head since I stopped. Of course there is still the very heavy editorial & administrative labour, of Bks V & VI—which I am looking forward to so little that I wd much rather have my throat cut. Bk VII is practically done; it is very long, 80 or 90, mostly from recent months—I have killed some but most I need, for the narrative, such as it is. The end of it, 12 or 15 Songs built backward, is good; about the rest I can’t tell yet, though I have in effect judged, by admitting them.

You certainly get around, Meredith—the Udalls and the Yevtushenkos, yet.1092 No I’ve never met him and don’t much like his stuff either, rhetorical like Mayakovsky.1093 Maybe it’s better in Russian but on the evidence so far I like Voznezensky better.1094

BBC television wants to do a film of me and are sending Alvarez from London to talk about it. Shall I?

About the bee in Betty Krey’s bonnet: I know: she has been after me for years, I think she’s afraid you or Cal or I will drop dead like Ted & Randall & Delmore. Why does she bother you with asking me, why cdn’t she write herself?? But all right I will do it, only not for ‘a tiny fee’, I wd have to be paid decently besides the expences, it is a long and boring trip and will interrupt my important (to me) work. Let her give me a date and terms.

As you probably have heard, you Chancellors voted me a heavenly $5000. I’ll bet you and Cal had a lot to do with this amazing result, and am duly grateful, as for so much else. Let me see some of yr new work, hey?

Love fr Kate & the babay and

[UMN, MS]

55 Lansdowne Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin

15 Dec ’66

P.S. You have some Irish blood, from my father’s side.

PPS: I finisht my poem the other day, w. a terror called “Henry’s guilt.” Now for Bks V & VI

My dearest Paul—

The pictures are splendid: thank you very much. Also for the Xmas list, which coincided precisely w. my own thoughts. They make marvellous sweaters here and one has gone to you with its buttons carefully reversed and the signature of the actual knitter on the card. Likewise a vast number of Irish stamps, among which you will be interested especially by the political martyrs: Wolfe Tone, Pearse, Connolly, and Sir Roger Casement (in the lower right hand corner)—when you grow up I’ll tell you about that complicated character Casement—and the great poet W B Yeats (over on the right), my master in my art, with whom I had tea at the Athen^a^eum in 1937.1095

I am anxious to see you, and an invitation fr. the US has come, to read in New York next month or Febr. If yr Mother will bring you down I’ll come: I’ll take you both to dinner first, then to the reading uptown: we can chat. Let her let me know. I’ll come in May too, for readings & to see you.

I had the London people send you TLS by air.

BBC television cable they want to film me & are sending a man fr. London to talk abt it: shall I do it? love to you both & Merry Xmas

John Berryman

1967

[NYPL, MS]

Dublin, 1 Jan 67

Dear Bob Silvers,

Happy New Year, and thanks about the Songs (tho’ there were several atrocious misprints because you didn’t send me a proof) & payment & the letter abt Miss Bishop. I believe I understand & appreciate all your objections to my review. But I’m damned if I can agree w. them. I think we ought to print the idiosyncratic review exactly as it stands: it will help her reputation. For one thing, without the book I can’t revise the catalogue, and as for quoting fr. ‘Roosters’ I did (‘hens’ lives’ etc). But it’s totally up to you of course, and I feel very sorry if you feel I have let you down. You run an excellent journal and if I can’t praise Miss Bishop in it something is wrong, probably with me. I admit I was in a foul humour when I wrote that review, but surely her reputation is more important to us than either yours or mine and is indeed the whole point. By the way I do think your reviews often run too long—a good fault, but a fault. Let me know what you decide.

Every good wish,

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

Dublin, 2 Jan 67

Dear Ted,

A happy new year & my blessings on yr work & you. I hurt my back in a bad fall last night, so this letter will be short, owing to pain. One of the drugs I take—Thorazine—has a side effect of dis-equilibrium: hence a broken arm, a broken foot, & last night. Now you take care of yrself, you hear?

The constant pain. How did Kennedy stand it?

Yr letter delighted me. I like the verb ‘goose’ wh. so help me God I haven’t heard since I left South Kent. I wd put it into The Dream Songs if I were still writing them. I am through, except for the terrible job of engineering, NY deadline Mar. 1st. Most of Bk IV was in the London Times, Dec 1st, the rest in the NY Rev. of Bks, and Bk VII is 80 or 90 Songs written since I left the U.S. Bks V & VI are to be constructed from the ms of some 250-[300] unprinted Songs. My Sonnets, written 20 years ago, are being printed now. I’ll have them send you one. The Amer. Academy of Poets just voted me their $5000 and BBC television are sending a team over from London to make a film of me. God bless us all, including Amy. Get a heavy daughter—I was touched by yr remarks abt that one, wh. is the end.1096 It is not the worst.

Hurrah for prose

& down w. shit-ass verse

Love,

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

33 ^55^Lansdown Park

Ballsbridge

Dublin 4

[February 1967]

[…] favour: will you [call] a Wesley First at Columbia (Public Relations) and ask him why the hell he hasn’t sent me a proof of my essay on Columbia?1097 (I want you to see that in proof.) (Did you see?)

Dear Bob,

Kate just found two more sonnets from last summer & typed them & I like them. Let’s put them at the end if it’s possible. How many d’you have?—115? Then let these be 115 & 116 and the old 115 be 117, the end (‘..I wrote’). PLEASE DO THIS.

Life mag rang up fr. London the other day and seem to want to do a ‘Close-up’ either here now or in NY in April; I found them hopelessly stupid & uncertain. If they ever come up w. anything I may cooperate ad gloriamaiorem Farrar Straus & Giroux.

We called Catharine in London & she’s coming over to do a tour w. us. She sounds splendid. I love that excellent woman, and feel depressed whenever I consider that she’s never married. What is wrong w. men? I still take yr own marriage hard too.

I finisht Bk V this week, stopping it w. 26, I am half dead but still hope to make your deadline.

Can the binding & spine of the Sonnets be just like 77 D. Songs? I like that exactly.

Ever,

John

PPS Christ, what an omission. We have absolutely got to have a table of Contents for the Sonnets! Will you have one of your girls type one out—numbers & first lines. I can’t imagine why neither of us old hands failed to think of this before.

Love,

John

Don’t forget the dedicatory page!!

[NYPL, MS]

Dublin, 7 Mar. [1967]

Dear Bob

I was sorry, sorry, to hear fr. Betty Kray of Cal’s hospital’n—is he back in McLean’s or Payne Whitney or where? & what’s wrong, do you know? Tell him I love him and he must do exactly what the bloody doctors say & get out as quick as possible and his new book is splendid—until I finish Bk VI I can’t read it properly, but so far I like best of the ones new to me the title-section and no 1 of ‘The Ruins of Time’; of the ones I knew already the ‘Waking Early Sun am’.1098 Have yr secretary copy that sentence for him.

Life have been in touch again but nothing is settled. BBC-TV sent a team over to make a film of me: hard work but great fun: but interrupting. 7 or 8 charming ^young^ Englishmen.

I like all yr proposals. Agree do The Dispos’d & His Tho’t Made Pockets in toto, no revision, w. my ‘Formal Elegy’ for Pres. Kennedy (publ’d in Of Poetry & Power—reviews in NY & London singled it out for comment) at the end.1099 His Thought was published by Claude Fredericks, Pawlet, Vermont (or Bennington).

I have been very ill myself. Keep well

love,

John

[LOC, TS]

27 Dec 67

Dear Mr Kessler,

Thanks for yr book wh I read w interest & enjoyed: yr work is original & good.1100 If I can help you with a recommendation, call on me.

My reading at the Guggenheim seems to be set for March 10, a Sunday. If you can arrange a reading at Binghamton for the 8th or 9th, that wd be fine. I have just got out of a month in hospital and am feeling competent.

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[Amherst, TS]

29 Dec 67

Dear Dick,

Thanks for yr poem, which I like good. We didn’t send cards this year because I was in hospital for a month—now out, very nervous. I am tired from twelve years’ work, I finished the god-damned Dream Songs (for the 15th time) the day before we flew from Athens to London on the way home, it was that close.

Never listen to rumours, kid. I like solid facts myself. I was very sorry to miss seeing you & Charlee because of yr illness but it never for an instant occurred to me that you might be putting me down, and no one ever suggested anything of the sort to me or he wd have had the back of my hand. I regard uz [sic] as colleagues and friends, and I hope & think you do. Blessings on yr family and work all the new year,

Affly,

John

[NYPL, TS]

30 Dec 67

Dear Roger,

Thanks for the list. I was surprised to see the Sonnets recommended, and amazed & pleased to find Robert Penn Warren naming the Short Poems. He was the first major editor to print my work in bulk, in 1938—my god it’s 30 years ago—and we’ve been friendly on the two occasions we’ve met, but it never occurred to me that he really liked my stuff.

I don’t think I wrote specifically to thank you for yr rapidity with the money when Bob was away in Canada. Now I do and I wish you a splendid year. I wish me one too, I am just out of a month in hospital and so nervous I cd scream.

Best always,

John

1968

[UMN, TS]

2 Jan 68

Dear Ted,

Your book is delicious, solemn, funny, original, pathetic, vivid, tragic, exuberant, and as well written as yr others. I wd have said so long ago in Greece where it came to me but I was tired—I wrote two letters in eight months—I finished my twelve-year poem the day before we flew from Athens to London on our way home, it was that close—the second volume in over 300 Songs—borrow a xerox from Giroux and tell me what ones to kill—in Ireland I wrote 100, in Greece I killed some 50—others have died since, Giroux was doubtful abt 6 I killed four, Mark Van Doren crucified one, help me out. We are holding up the book till Sept.

I can’t wait to see how you wind up the journal or whatever it is. I specially like some of yr revisions, my penis big as a surfboard underneath us makes almost me feel that base emotion envy, and so on.1101 By what cause hold you it up though, kid? It is DONE, exc for the 30 or 40 pp you said were to conclude it. Love to yr prose style, power of observation, sympathy and insight—good girls, galore, or one, and pray for

John

Out of a month in hospital, last week

[NYPL, TS]

10 March 68

Dear Bob,

I’m going crazy waiting over Meredith, let’s get the show on the road, let’s put the book into galleys.1102 Whatever he may suggest can be corrected there. This is my fault, I never should have saddled him with the job, over-conscientious & self-overworked as he is. I am in very bad shape myself, in & out of hospital like a yoyo all winter. But a month ago exactly I began to write again, very reluctantly, having resisted the daily or hourly impulse for months, and I have about a dozen new Songs, some bad, some good, which I’m using to plug the gaps left by you & Mark & me. I am superstitious about the numeration, which cost me such hell for years to effect. Let’s protect that.

Now this is in response to your admirable letter of October, which I now fully answer.

I have killed and substituted for, 193 (which Mark didn’t like, nor do I), 247, 255, 285 and 286 as well as 284 (I took yr suggestion of amalgamation, which to my great surprise worked), 288. On my own I have killed 320 and substituted for it, and transposed 302 and 304. 327, first line, shd read ‘some wrong’ for ‘all wrong’, and this change made also in the Table of Contents, some pages of which I enclose, and please return them directly you have made the relevant changes in the master.

So much for substantial changes. Now to details. I forget what a thurn is—maybe dialectal, poss. Gaelic—the Ms may show when I finally put that in order—meanwhile I keep it, some time somebody will amuse himself by finding out.1103 154: (Dwight) is changed to D. as Saul to S.1104 I can’t locate the 155–6 rep of the Cambridge taxi story: the trouble is with 154 & 155, which we had better transpose.1105 As for 199, stet: both ‘All’ and ‘maidan’ (Indian term).

One of the new ones, a beauty, which I enclose, we might put between 301 and 302, making 305 in all. What do you feel about this? I can’t make up my mind.

I have a devilish week coming up week after next, in & around New York. Cd we have lunch on the Monday, a week from tomorrow, or meet some evening when I will have been performing at Queens during the day? |‘At Henry’s bier’ this is.1106|

I hope all is better with you than with me[.] Yours ever,

John

[Buffalo, TS]

12 March 68

Dear Mr Gay:

Your entries are certainly wrong. Either Mr Posner or someone else was at fault. I have only twice let Mss out of my hands for a specific exhibition—at Harvard and Buffalo—and Harvard returned the Ms as soon as the exhibition ended. Will you please emulate Harvard and return the Songs by registered airmail to the address on my envelope? It is impossible for me to convey the degree of my annoyance about this; I personally do not think it was Posner but someone else who mistook the (limited) loan for a gift. However, I dislike Buffalo intensely and this error is of a piece with the shabbiness of my treatment during my two visits there. Of course I do not hold you responsible for any of this, nor Leslie Fiedler.1107

Yours faithfully,

John Berryman

[UMN, TS]

12 March 68

Dear Ted,

Your Canadian book is delicious, didn’t I write you—but no no, I haven’t written nobody, I doubt if I wrote three letters all year in Dublin, and from Greece all summer none. I was working. I finished my poem, for the 15th time, the day before we flew from Athens to London on our way home, it was that close—then I was prostrated for months, tho’ lecturing and doing odd jobs out of town, a week as poet in residence at Trinity Coll. Hartford—I know three other Trinitys but never heard of this one until they wrote to ask if I wd come & Be Theirs for five days. Ow.

Three days ago I finished the poem again, this time for galleys in NY immediately. I’ll be in NY all next week, five jobs in five days, will you?? Call me at the Chelsea.

I am very curious to know how your Journal ends, I think you said there were 30 or 40 more pages. Why on earth are you holding up publication, it doesn’t need any further work, what I saw, indeed the interpolations were charming. What are you doing on the Vineyard besides writing? I have been in & out of hospital like a yo-yo all winter but lecturing as usual Tu & Th aft’s—the university loves me, so I only give one course, heavy enough in my bad shape though.

Enough bad news! Nobody close has died recently, the German edition of my Bradstreet poem is very goodlooking, the government lost its head & gave me $10,000 ‘for distinguished service to American letters’ whereas what I wanted was six Purple Hearts and the Medal of Honor. Time out now while I go downstairs and read yr paperback story, with no drink mind you, the acid test.

Next day. Your grisly tale is a beauty—it has a weird plausibility, as if it had really taken place. Colonel specially well done.1108

Best,

John

[NYPL, MS]

17 Apr ’68

Dear Bob,

Here’s the note back—it’s fine, & thanks. Thanks also for the handsome royalty cheque; all four books seem to be moving along quietly. But isn’t there some impediment to distribution—people here complain they can’t get copies at Powers or Dayton’s or McCosh, our 3 main outlets—I hear the same thing elsewhere, as I move around the country, and in fact the other day Prof. Kieth [sic] Fort of Georgetown told me he had assigned the book until copies never came.1109 Also, these royalty sheets say nothing of the magazine sales you write about—Harper’s I think being the only one I have seen.

Am stumbling forward: a reading in So. Calif. next week, plus one 3 days later (w. my double lecture here in between) in Chicago. I’m never again going to be victimized this way. Here’s to one job only! Love,

John

[NYPL, TS]

Sunday [fall 1968]

Dear Mr Stewart,

I was in hospital when your letter arrived and it got mislaid; my apologies for my delay in replying.

A previous motion for a special number of the Advocate I simply laid aside because my work was not adequately before the public. But on October 25th this situation will be corrected with the publication of the second volume of the Dream Songs and so I am glad to help in any way I can: you can have various new Songs to print and we can do an interview in New York in late October, the 25th or so (I have not been East all summer and won’t be before then, I think).1110

The experts in the United States on my later work are Adrienne Rich and Wm Meredith, but both have written about it and may not want to repeat themselves; in England, A Alvarez at the Observer and Ian Hamilton at TLS & the Review.1111

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

[Trueblood, MS]

Friday [15 November 1968]

Dearest Valerie

What an absolute joy to hear from you & to know where you are. I tried telephoning Chicago but no number. Only laziness, fatigue & preoccupation prevented me from getting yr house address in Virginia fr. the Pembroke Alumnae office & sending my book to be forwarded. Have you noticed that two Songs are dedicated to you (I hope you don’t mind this—I only dedicate w. permission, but I couldn’t reach you) and you appear in at least four others. I am glad you like the book, which you praise in yr characteristic high style. It nearly killed me. I finished it fifty times, writing a hundred new Songs in Dublin and killing 50 in Athens. I was in hospital in Dublin when yr last letters came: I came out only to fly to New York where I gave two readings the same day and wound up in the French Hospital, coming out only to fly back to Ireland with Jane Howard who was doing a story on me for Life.1112 Then I lost yr address.

I am sorry to the quick abt yr ‘year of hospitals & tests etc’. What does ‘much better’ mean? Well or only moderately so? What are yr symptoms? I’m glad anyway that you can ride again; be careful. I’ve been in hospital four times myself this year, but am fairly well at present—tho madly busy w. two seminars, one on The American Character, seen at first mostly fr. abroad (De Tocqueville, Santayana, D. H. Lawrence, D W Brogan, Tony Tanner) and one on The Meaning of Life (the Buddha, St Mark, Tolstoy, Freud, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death,1113 etc, winding up w. Shakespeare’s Tempest if I ever reach it).

Your job sounds good; tell me more. The only defect in yr superlative letter, apart fr. ‘Mr Berryman’ (my name is John), is your failure to say anything about your writing. What gives? May I see the 3 stories you told me you’d worked at? I have written a lot of new Dream Songs (not to be added to the second volume but tucked in by the reader into Books V & VI—called The Annex), four in the last few days: shall I type one out & send you a carbon—I ponder.

The book made a good start. On publication day, Oct 25th, my ^54th^ birthday, my American publ. Robert Giroux gave me a big luncheon at Luchow’s & showed me Helen Vendler’s front-page review in The New York Times—an advance copy—(I never heard of her but she is a smart cookie) & gave me a marvellous special-delivery letter from Conrad Aiken on the Cape.1114 Other first reviews (& letters, tho’ none so vivid as yours) have been good, except for one character who greatly preferred the 77 D.S. to His Toy.… Who knows? Maybe he’s right. Three boys from The Harvard Advocate, with their girls & a tape recorder, recently interviewed me for 3 hours for a special issue of the Advocate devoted to my work.—Now write back immediately.

Love,

John

[Columbia, TS]

Boxing Day 68 [26 December]

Dear William,

I have the Hong Kong flue and cannot think good, therefore I will not be of much use to you. Kat4 has had it foru days and caws like a crow, our car got stuck in heavy snow and I nearly died unsticking it. Besides I have spent exactly 21 years successfully forgetting these said Sonnets, in order to get on w other work.1115 However:

14. Forget all abt billiard ball, maybe news item az you suggest. Damned good sonnet, wholly forgotten by me /

15 I haven’t read Petr & Wyatt for 30 years, but I think the acknowledgement was general rather than particular. Every man has his own style, we encroach we pay due.

20 can’t tell you about the cast girl, cine detail.

21 Really, William; what will you pretend nextM? The whom is thd husband, Uriah the Hittite, who, King David ordered into the vaward of the attack to cleae the way to Bathsheba’s permanent bed. One of the best stonnoets.

22 all New York Nineties: the Lily is Liky Langry whom Crane detested. ‘Bill’ is an actual charactee in the Princeton sene, now a well known man, certainly not to be identified unlezs by himself.

24 was Cal, picnic, moviecamera;

30 Dec, still under the weather. And Time mag held me up by calling & wanting an Apollo poem, deadline 24 hours.

38 I forget the picture, William.

52 The lied is Schubert but I forget how it begins, it’s from one of the two great cycles, Mullerin & Winterreise.

57 Dathan strove w Moses & Aaron and the Lord swallowed himup

63 Julian & Wid are lost to me.

68 ‘I lie a fairy well’—I tell myself there’s a fairy well when there ain’t.

96 Procyon is a distant star

113 an added sonnet: Anne Frank’s vision of her left friend, about halfway through the book, which I read roughly around the time of the Sonnets but made no reference to until 1966. You’re right about the name ‘Lise’, it comes from the book, only I spell it differeently.1116

The six extra-line sonnets emerged from the feeling (shared by Meredith, Geo.,1117 & Hopkins) that we don’t have enought room in an English sonnet, as against the Italian 11-syllable lines.

I don’t find any difficulty with the charming Suzy poem but esplain away if you want to, old boy. Let this be the season of clarification. How I am ever going to lecture next week with this muddy head is a mystery to me, also I hurt all over and have Hell’s cough. I hope you keep well and it is delightful to think of you not teaching

Happy New Year!

Love,

John

1969

[Houghton, TS]

Fri 5 Sept 69

Dear Cal,

With those two words I plan to disappoint the summer of my pain and re-enter the normal world where I hope you are living and feeling well and working. But it is not so. One doctor says 150 days, another says that the nerve regenerates itself 1 mm. a day and it is a very long nerve, 6–8 inches. This is the greater occipital nerve beginning in the back of the neck and going up over the skull which got crushed between two vertebrae, apparently in a muscle spasm 3 months ago. I was in and out of hospital for weeks and still go daily for treatment, hot packs, deep massage and traction. It is not a favorable situation but there seems to be no brain damage, just pain like a jumble of rocks in the upper left back of the skull.

Thanks for your formidable and gorgeous book. The poem took full possession on page 9 (both pieces).1118 Then on p 10 occurs the passage

“We asked to linger on past fall in Eden;

there must be good in man.”

I choked up when I read this to Kate. I read the whole book in page galleys but was too busy and ill to write to you. Just as well because I was very disappointed on 3 scores. I suppose I always expect you to come on like King Kong and in this poem you often don’t. You are only the best poet around and you often insinuate. Second, the pieces did seem to me often disjointed, chatty. Third, I was worried about your form. The expectation of rhyme seemed so great and its fulfillment so slight. But now a few days ago in 24 hours I read the book again from beginning to end and my objections dropt to the ground. Everybody will have to read the book twice. About the rhyme I have myself repeatedly given up rhyme altogether in the Dream Songs while preserving an effect of rhyme. I think you are right in this. Moreover the disjointedness disappears and it comes out as one poem. I especially like 17(3), 29(2), 37(both), 51(2), 83(10), 103(2), 121(4), 131(6), 134(both), 137(3).

I hear from Meredith that you have been to Jerusalem and Spain. I was once 3 months in Spain and loved it but I have never been to Jerusalem where a young poet wrote me there is a Berryman enclave. Envy, Cal, is a base emotion but I do envy you Jerusalem and I hope your poem wins every remaining honor going.

love,

John

Dictated to Kate—my first letter in months.

[Schlesinger, TS]

Sept. 11, 69

My Dearest Adrienne,

I have been ill for months with a nerve injury and this is my second letter, the first was to Lowell. I read your admirable Leaflets when it arrived and was very disappointed, specially in the form.1119 It was my fault. I expect you to be Sappho and you are not Sappho but only a struggling and beautiful and gifted lady. Recently I read your book from beginning to end again and it seems to me your best. Particularly “nerves, friable as lightning” on p. 30, and “The Demon Lover”, and “The Observer”, and the title poem and many passages in the final section, specially the line “I hope you are rotting in hell, Montaigne you bastard.” and “Neither alone, nor in anyone’s arms, will we end up sleeping.”

How is your health? I have daily hospital treatments. Give my best to your friend Jean Valentine whom Giroux tells me has joined Cal and me at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.1120

Your new book, slight as in some ways it is, makes you the queen of ladies in my opinion, under Elizabeth. Branch out! Ransack! Do far better yet and write to me a letter about your health. My best to your delightful husband.1121

love

John

Dictated to Kate.

[Chicago, MS]

Monday [15 September 1969]

Dear Saul,

How are you & Maggie & Von Humboldt Fleischer?1122 I hope flourishing: send me a note. I have been ill all summer w. a nerve injury (the greater occipital nerve crushed betw. 2 vertebrae) in a hell of pain, in the left side of the skull at the back, and after 4 months still have daily hospital treatments (hot-packs, massage, traction of the neck & ‘exercises’). I have done nothing except a few Songs & much experienced suffering. But the pain is lessening (it cdn’t do anything else, old friend) & Edward Kennedy feels even worse—

love

John

[NYPL, MS]

Sat 11 Oct [1969]

Dearest William,

I am v. nervous today, so I write briefly. After 4 or 5 months I still have daily hospital treatments (hot packs, deep massage, and traction of the neck, 35 lb.) and am not improving, except that the terrible pain has lessened. I am lecturing but w. great difficulty. The University here has just given me its highest faculty honor, a Regents’ Professorship—wh. carries, besides the title, a $5000 annual salary augmentation—I got through the v. elaborate ceremony. All my 5 bks of verse with Farrar Straus & Giroux are selling; on the day of the Regents’ ceremonial, I had a royalty cheque for—expecting maybe $600—nearly $8000. Olé!

I have just written for Shreela Ray, a spiffy short letter.1123

Your new poem is admirable—very frisky in style, for somber you—almost like a Dream Song, towards the end—I like it even better than yr moving poem about Frost.1124 The moral hesitations, in the latter poem, are a characteristic mode you ought to develop.

love,

John

The Rembrandt Song isn’t typed yet.1125

V. good review of Cal in the NY Times1126

[NYPL, MS]

21 Dec 1969

Dear William

Thanks for your good letter. I came home day before yesterday feeling better physically, mentally & spiritually than I’ve felt for many years, perhaps ever in my adult life. It is a hard but marvellous programme, one of the most famous & effective in the country. If you ever get really worried abt yr drinking, William, go to Hazelden for 3 weeks.

I’m sorry I didn’t respond long ago to your kind suggestion about Bread Loaf. Truth is, I vowed several years ago never again to teach in the summer. Don’t need the money, can’t stand the strain.

The University raised me $5000 a year this fall and made me a Regent’s Professor, their highest rank.

Always,

John

[Vassar, MS]

22 Dec 1969

Dear Elizabeth

Thank you for your lovely letter, wh. I immediately mislaid and have only now found over a year later. There is no one living whose approval I would rather have. I’ve admired & loved your work since I read “The Imaginary Iceberg” in Trial Balances when I was an undergraduate at Columbia.1127 “Roosters” I’ve taught in various universities and read to audiences all over the northern United States; when I was in India in 1957 I sent to you in Brazil one of the famous little painted wooden animals they make in Benares, a cock—did you ever get it? That poem still seems to me your absolute masterpiece, in spite of the astonishing & marvellous “Visits to St Elizabeth’s.” [sic] I hope you are well & happy & writing. May we meet some time and talk. Merry Christmas.

Affectionately,

John Berryman

[Schlesinger, MS]

27 Dec’r 69

Dearest Adrienne

Splendid! Can you stay with us—we have an extra bedroom. Come to dinner anyway, bringing yr Pakistani friend, and shall we have some people in after the reading to meet you or is a party scheduled? It will be delightful to see you, kid.

As one who took a bottle away from me in New Haven, you deserve to hear that I have just spent a whole month in intensive treatment at a famous alcoholic rehabilitation center and am a new man in fifty ways.

I like Alfred’s toast for 1970—a very happy new year to both of you.

Love,

John

[Haffenden, MS]

28 Dec 69

Dear Van

I’m very glad to see your piece on Vachel Lindsay: Thanks, as for your other offprints.1128 He is much neglected—I thought Saul Bellow & I were the only people in the country interested in him. His little prose books in particular ought to be assembled & reprinted. I read the two biographies long ago and have always meant to do a biographical & critical study of maybe 30 pages, but have just never got down to it.

I am extremely happy working very hard on Hamlet, for a course on it I’m giving this winter for the English Dept. But I’m nearly done and am branching out back into comprehensive biographical & critical Shakespearian studies. A few months ought to see my biography at 500–600 pages, when I’ll cut it back to some 450 and give it to my amazed & delighted publisher.

My love to Betty, happy New Year to you both—

John

1970

[Amherst, MS]

I’ll see you in Sept., there, if not before. My good regards to your good wife. How d’you like this line?: ‘Intolerable Sally, loved in vain.’1129

Sunday night [early 1970]

Dear Dick

A fan letter! I just came, sorting odd books & magazines, on your piece “Poetry and Happiness” and it is superb.1130 I have just shelved it with Criticism, in a case behind this chair—you come between Valéry & Edmund Wilson, and you dignify the company. I wish you wrote prose more often, my friend; you make most critics, including me, look like drudges.

I don’t know if I wrote you about Walking with Sleep.1131 I read it straight through with delight and thought the title-poem in particular the most ambitious & most beautiful poem by you I have ever come on. Similar luck hereafter.

I am in Chapter III of a critical biography of Shakespeare I drafted out in 1951–2, 225 pp.—haven’t looked at the draft—started out fresh last month. Also a poem called “Washington in Love”—70 ll. sketched so far.

All best,

John

[Trueblood, MS]

30 Jan 70

Dearest Valerie

I’m very glad to hear from you even though your letter is painful & even more desolate than painful. Alas! I wish I cd do something to procure you some happiness. The break-up with Jonas must have been hell for both of you. Please work hard, and please do let me see anything you can—it’s no ‘imposition’ at all—I’m eager to see what you’ve been doing. I have great confidence in your gift.

I am half-ashamed to have to report that I am happy as a bird myself, and have been for two months, a long period for me. I am nearly through drafting chapter III of my critical biography of Shakespeare, a poem called “Washington in Love” is advancing spasmodically (the sketches for it come to some 70 ll.), I’m enjoying my slight teaching job (of a seminar in Hamlet & one on the American Character), and I’m halfway thro’ Trollope’s magnificent Last Chronicle of Barset. The University here gave me their highest honour last Fall—a Regents’ Professorship—adding $5000 to my salary; so I’ve no money worries, for almost the first time in my life, and am ordering & buying books like a madman. I’ve started reading abt Mexico—Vaillant’s The Aztecs, D H Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, a revision of Terry’s standard Guide;1132 we’re going for 3 wks or a month next summer;—which is as much time as I can take off from Shakespearian work if I want to finish the draft of my book by Christmas. I also gave in at last to the urging of my publishers American and British, and assembled last month a long overdue collection of my stories (only 3) and essays (25 or 30), which we’ll bring out probably this Fall or next winter.1133 My poems are appearing in Paris and Tokyo, and my last royalty cheque from New York—I expected maybe $600 and wd have been delighted to have it—was for almost $8000. I nearly fainted.

My friend the poetess Adrienne Rich, who was here from New York last week to give a reading, tells me she hates you for your role in my long poem! Take that! Love,

John

Write back.

P.S. (later: midnight.) I keep on thinking about you. Maybe you haven’t been reading the right things. What parts of ‘the Bible’ for instance? The great poem, for instance, that forms chapter iii of Lamentations? Or the Gospel of St Luke, with a good commentary? Do you know a little volume called The Book of the It by Groddeck?1134 He wrote little, devoting himself to individual therapy, but he was a very wise man—greatly respected by Freud himself, who borrowed from him the crucial term Id for the unconscious. If I had a copy I’d send it to you, but something seems to have happened to mine. Robert Graves’s White Goddess (paperback now) is fascinating & shrewd as well as crazy.1135 There is a good biography of St Paul called The First Christian by A. Powell Davies (Mentor), which I’ll be teaching to my little students next quarter.1136 And have you read much Shakespeare, with much care? Try his late play Cymbeline. Listening to music is good of course but it can also mean giving in to a temptation. As a young man teaching at Harvard I interrupted my whole work as a poet & scholar for more than a year just to listen to Haydn, Mozart, late Beethoven & Schubert’s chamber music. Goodnight. Let me hear how things go.

[UMN, TS]

33 Arthur Avenue S.E.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

31 January 1970

Gentlemen:

Please send me as soon as possible copies, secondhand if you have them, otherwise new, of:1137

Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia

Dorothy Moorman’s biography of Wordsworth

Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3 (N.Y., 1961)

Shakespeare, Sonnets, new Arden ed

Cadoux, The Life of Jesus (Penguin)

Santayana, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels

Groddeck, The Book of the It

D H Lawrence, The White Peacock

What biographies can you quote of? Burghley? Walsingham? Robt Cecil?1138

Any volumes of the New Shak. Society Transactions?

Any Simone Weil? Teilhard de Chardin?

Any Trollope novels in the ‘Zodiac’ ed’n (Chatto & Windus)

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

John Berryman

Goethe, Faust, transl. MacNeice1139

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

The Way of a Pilgrim, tr. R. M. French (SPCK)

G. B. Harrison, Sh. at Work

T. W. Baldwin, The Organ’n & Pers’l of the Sh’n Co.

Constantine Fitzgibbon, Dylan Thomas

Plato, Timaeus, what tr?

Ralph Hodgson—a coll. poems yet?

Geo. Thomson, Aeschylus & Athens

vol. I of Larry Thompson’s biogr. of Frost—or get fr. library

[NYPL, MS]

Sunday [1 Feb 1970]

Dear William

Blessings on yr endeavours. Let me hear what they are. I am having the best winter within memory—mostly very hard every day at Shakespearian scholarship & criticism, but also a new poem called “Washington in Love” which advances spasmodically (some 70 ll. sketched so far), my two slight interesting seminars at the University, one in Hamlet, the other on the American character, and reading Trollope’s magnificent Last Chronicle, and Genesis daily, and Vaillant’s The Aztecs in preparation for 3 weeks or a month in Mexico next summer. I hope you are as happily occupied, old friend. There is nothing like work in good causes, for man’s soul.

How do you like the line

Intolerable Sally, loved in vain,

and I have made I think an impressive 30 lines of his accepting, at the instance of John Adams, the ^continental^ command.

I also last month, urged by Giroux, Faber, & others, finally put together a collection of my stories (3) and essays (some 25 or 30), to be called The Freedom of the Poet.

Have you the time & inclination to look at the draft of the first three chapters of my biography? They cover the eight plays of his early period, and the Sonnets. I’d be very glad indeed of your opinion and suggestions. But I am anxious, after my Sonnets & His Toy etc, not to impose on your good nature; so be candid with me. I’m going to send them also to Mark Van Doren & perhaps others. Off here in the Middle West I suffer a little from the feeling that I am working in a void. The death of Sir Walter Greg, who was kindly & expertly privy to my editing of Lear 25 years ago, has rather isolated me. Help me, with your advice, to bear my great burden!

Love,

John

Are you in love, may be, with anybody? I hope: both so, & not. Far be all that from me, in this my age.

[NYPL, MS]

Friday [?6 Feb 1970]

Dear William,

A revolution. I swear, no less. Day before yesterday I suddenly wrote a lyric, my first short poem in manymany years. Intoxicated with it, I wrote another, and in the evening two more. Yesterday, two more. I may go on with this, I never wrote better. I can’t wait to hear what you think of them.1140 Be candid though, and if you find any blunders or numb spots for Christ’s sake point them out. These poems aim at nothing short of perfection of tone.

Love,

John

I think reading Emily Dickinson set me on fire: unrimed quatrains of song & violent speech

[Vassar, MS]

Friday [?6 February 1970]

Dear Elizabeth

You w. yr matchless gift for the administration of long lyrics, I wonder for God’s sake what you’ll think of this new one of mine. Please let me hear.

Best, & thanks for your message & postcard

John

May I have this back if it’s not too great trouble posting?

Can you send me a sheet or so of whatever you’re working at?

[TS photocopy]

Abbott Hospital 3040,

as from 33 Arthur Avenue S.E.,

Minneapolis, Minn.

[?22 March 1970]

Dear ladies & gentlemen:

I am asking Mr Robert Giroux to xerox copies of this book of lyrics, Love & Fame, for a dozen of my friends, in the hope that some of them will find time to read it and CRITICIZE it.1141 Weaknesses, stupidities, numbnesses, excrescences:—for God’s sake if you notice these, please let me hear. I also of course hope that some of you will like some of the poems; which are in a style new for me and new I believe for anybody. My thanks in advance for any help that you may be willing to give. With all respect & admiration for all twelve of you, and the good luck & dedication we all need in this strange endeavour.

Yours faithfully,

John Berryman

Next day, March 23rd: I leave hospital in ten minutes. Write to me if you kindlily [sic] will, at my home address above.

[NYPL, TS]

33 Arthur Avenue S / E

Minneapolis, Minn.

25 March 1970

Dear Bob,

Here it is. I hope to God you like it; please let me hear as soon as possible. Only: read it slowly, and several times. In my present opinion it is one of the beautiful, original & powerful works of the age.

Please xerox it instantly for twelve friends, making sure that the opening covering letter is xeroxed also & goes with them:

Mark Van Doren, Falls Village, Conn.

William Meredith, Connecticut College, New London, Conn.

John Crowe Ransom, c / o Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio

Conrad Aiken, Forty-one Doors, Stony Brook Road, Brewster, Mass.

Adrienne Rich, 333 Central Park West, NYC

Richard Wilbur, Dept of English, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Ct

Edmund Wilson, Wellfleet, Mass.

Franklin Reeve, Higganum, Conn.1142

Allen Tate, Running Knob Hollow Road, Sewanee, Tenn.

Edward Hoagland, 31 Jane St, NYC

Albert Gelpi, Dept of English, Stanford Univ, Palo Alto, Calif.

Deneen Peckinpah, 4010 Northcliffe Ave, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Xerox fifteen altogether, sending one of the extra three to my ex-wife & son, Mrs Ann Berryman, 2266 Ridge Road, Yorktown Heights, N.Y. I’ll tell you later who the final two are to go to, there are so goddamn many interesting candidates.

Tell me anything you find wrong in the Ms, even if it’s only a wrong comma, or say a whole passage that ought to be deleted.

I hope all is well in your private life. Since I got out of hospital day before yesterday, I listen to music all the time, mostly Mozart, Mostly quartets & piano concerti. But I have a new Beethoven poem going, called Beethoven Triumphant, which is promising.1143 I have also written two excellent new Lyrics since I came home, but they do not go in the book. The book is FINISHED.

Affectionately,

John

P.S. The proof of No. 1 came from TLS. I have changed the first two lines & killed the 4th stanza. The version here in this master xerox is right. Don’t you think so?

No. 2—a v. important one—has been heavily revised also, after a marvellous, v. detailed letter fr. Dick Wilbur

P.P.S. If Roger ^& his wife^ & Mr Farrar wd read it too, I wd be grateful.1144 I swear: it contains wonders.

[UMN, TS]

26 March 70

Dear Arthur Crook:

I permit myself the use of your first name because we both work hard: You at editing the most valuable literary journal in the English-speaking world, and perhaps out of personal gratefulness:—I was encouraged by yr liking & taking my lyric a month ago—the opinions of the first friends I consulted on my new poems, Mark Van Doren & Wm Meredith, were hostile & ambiguous—it took all my courage to go on, and you helped me. NOW it is 42 lyrics, some very long; unrhymed quatrains except for one ballad, done in one month, 18 days in hospital. I am a wreck, but Sir a gorgeous wreck.

Now: I return the proof but kill it / [sic] I have changed fundamentally the first two lines and wiped out the Sh’n stanza. What I want to do with you is this: Consider the enclosed manuscript, to be called and printed all at once:

LOVE & FAME: Six Lyrics1145

1

I fell in love with a girl.

13

For all his vehemence & hydraulic opinions

19

The Other Cambridge

25

One luncheon party in Andy’s rooms in Magdalene

26

O! I had my gyp prepare that tea.

42

Heaven

That’s it, and Oxford men all over the world will be jealous about The Other Cambridge: no comparable poem has been written in my opinion since Father Bridges’s ^Hopkins’s^ Oxford.1146 Cable me your word. I would also be very grateful if you would take time—an hour?—from your important work, to indicate to me by letter all weaknesses, stupidities, numbnesses, excrescences in the Ms.

Yrs faithfully & colleague-like,

[UMN, MS]

6 June 1970

Dear Mr. Linebarger:

Of course you have my permission to quote from my work in your book. Good luck with it. I wrote 10 or 12 more Songs, just out of habit, after the poem was finished,1147 and gave the Harvard Advocate 3 of them for their special number on me; but none of them will ever be attached to ^the poem by^ me, and in fact I may just leave them to be published after my death—they are not in my new book, Love & Fame, coming out in October.1148

My 1st middle name, never used, is ‘Allyn’. Why on earth do you want to know when my brother was born (1919)? I’ll send you his address when I get home (I write from hospital). My second wife was named Ann (again, who cares?). To ‘dinch’ a cigarette is to stub it out.1149 We part company on Auden; I was when they came out, & am still, a passionate admirer of his early books. I rowed on the Freshman 150 lb. crew at Columbia, and ran the quarter & half, not very rapidly but fast enough to win my numerals. No varsity sports.

Please feel free to ask me any questions you want. I’ll be glad to help if I can—Louis Martz’s booklet on me last year was so bad that I’d be glad to see a better one appear.1150 Patricia Brenner, at Kent University in Ohio, has sent me part of her dissertation, and it looks to be going to be excellent.1151 About the several other studies in progress around the country I don’t have much information.

I am surprised that you rank my Sonnets w. the Dream Songs. I wouldn’t. But who knows? Some of the Sonnets certainly are pretty good.

Yrs. sincerely,

John Berryman

[NYPL, TS]

Sunday, 16? june 70

Dear Bob,

Just out of a long hospital stay, prostrate with the volcanic 5 or 6 weeks’ effort of the book; my doctors say it will be a year before I’m back to normal.

Herewith the new Table of Contents, the 5 poems not in the xerox’d Ms, the 11-lyric new religious sequence that ends the book (written in hospital after a sort of conversion-experience I’ll describe to you sometime). Can someone, maybe you, very carefully record on a xerox copy the new titlez [sic] & revisions?

The proposed contract sounds fine. Let’s bring out the book on October 25th, and hope it amazes everybody. I was very pleased with your good words about it.

I enclose a Shak. sonnet of which I’d like the typography & style exactly reproduced in Love & Fame. Let the binding be dark blue.

If you have any xerox’s left, please fire one to Saul Bellow, Committee on Social Thought, Univ of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. Mark the envelope prominently as from me, so he won’t miss it. He’s excited about 3 or 4 I read him.

I hope you’re flourishing. let me see the jacket-copy before you sent [sic] it to the printer, eh?

Always,

John

God damn it, I can’t locate the carbons of ‘Death Ballad’: we’ll just have to wait till The New Yorker uses it (I corrected proof some time ago).1152 Leave a page free.

[Haffenden, MS]

18 or 19 June 70

Dear Jane

Congratulations on yr sparkling book—I hope it sells vastly, honey—the subject is important, & you’ve done a very good job of it.1153 I am an ‘in’ reader, after 7 weeks of group therapy at St Mary’s Hospital here, on a ward for alcoholics. ‘Levelling’ & ‘confronting’ are the desiderata, there’s a deal of non-verbal stuff & some psycho-drama like Perls’s.1154 I have a low tuneless unconscious hum: one awful morning Jim made me put it on a chair in front of me & talk to it, then move to the chair, be the hum & talk back—it was hallucinatory. Finally he made me talk to what was under the hum. It’s been very good for me—though I had a ‘slip’ yesterday afternoon: I went to a bar in St Paul & drank for 3 / 4 of an hour. Christ!

How are you doing on the romantic and marital fronts? Write me & tell me. I often wonder, & in fact sometimes pray for you—my relation with Him is quite strong at present.

My new book, made in one volcanic outburst of 5 or 6 weeks just before (near prostration) I went into treatment, will be out Oct. 25th & amaze everybody. I’ll enclose a few items to busy your imagination.

Let’s write back & forth now & then. I’d head for your bed & hand myself, old as I am, if it weren’t for Kate.

Love,

John

[NYPL, MS]

Sat 18? June [1970]

Dear William

Yr poem on Frost is far the best thing in Shenandoah; maybe I think it the sharpest, truest item you’ve ever written.1155

What’s with you this summer? I’m just out of 6 wks in hospital (alcoholism as usual) & my doctors say it will be a year before I’m all right. I’ve added 17 poems, some of them very important, to Love & Fame. TLS are doing all 6 I sent, a vast & pretty page. Mark writes that the book ^(out on Oct 25th)^ will have a great effect and be ‘Hated. Feared.’ The New Yorker is printing a terror called ‘Death Ballad’, The Atlantic another (‘The Hell Poem’) & a long lyric on Richard (Blackmur).1156

Kate sends love.

John

[NYPL, TS]

1 July 1970

Dear Bob, No, damn it, I did not know The New Yorker wouldn’t have room for Death Ballad: I had even returned proof: I’m disappointed.1157 Life is a good idea for it, which wouldn’t have occurred to me: yes, try them,—though aren’t they more likely to take several poems on roughly the same themes than just one? Unfortunately the others such are at Locations, Saul’s new review in Texas, I’ll let you know when I hear from them.1158 Kate reminded me the other day that you & I had agreed that you’d send my stuff out to periodicals, I had forgotten this and have been sending things myself, not that it matters does it?

Thanks for noticing the iteration of ‘scientific & philosophical’: let’s just delete the phrase from Message.1159 And change ‘Toltec’, in Of Suicide, to ‘Olmec’.

I have been very busy in a relaxed sort of way, about a quarter of my next book of verse is written. What progress have your people made with the prose-collection? We ought to be able to bring that out next year, no?

On the back of the jacket of Love & Fame I’d like the arms-outspread photograph Life blew up for their article four years ago. It’s theatrical but very good.

Hot as hell here, we just bought a vast new air-conditioner that arrives day after tomorrow. I am reading 20 books simultaneously, all excellent, the best being Exodus, next-best Eve Curie’s biography of her astounding mother which I’m teaching to a proseminar this Fall.1160

Cheers ever,

John

[NYPL, TS]

2 July 70

Dear Bob,

A new project,—as if I hadn’t enough already. This morning I suddenly got fed up with all existing anthologies, for the hundredth time, and decided to make one of my own. It is going to be a beauty. In a few hours I have ripped out fifty poems from half a dozen anthologies in my vast collection, and am well under way. Maybe a few weeks or months will see it done. It’s called A Verse Anthology with comments (Mark on Emerson’s Brahma, me on Wordsworth’s Resolution & Independence, etc etc), running from the Iliad to Wilbur’s ‘Waking [sic] to Sleep’, maybe six hundred pages.1161 Are you interested, I hope? Can you suggest a better title?1162

Affly,

John

[NYPL, MS]

10 July 70

Dear William

No, Knopf haven’t sent yr bk, but never mind, the Pulitzer people say today it’s coming w. others next week (I’m a judge, along w. the unworthies Cunningham & Simpson). I’m damned if I’ll copy the Blackmur Song, even for you—tear it out, for God’s sake.1163 What for, anyway? No Eastern plans. We hope: Mexico next month. Kate finishes her ^last^ teaching credits in a week or so, and I need a change.

I’ve started again a play abt Mirabeau I failed with some 25 years ago, & finding it hell to manage a tone for him & his mistress.

My anthology is roaring along fr. masterpiece to masterpiece. A fan letter came fr. Togo yesterday. I got drunk Tues. aft. but am otherwise dry; it’s hard. Blessings on yr pentameters.

John

Sir Tho Wyatt is an even deeper fellow than I always thought.

[Leeds, TS]

27 July 1970

Dear Jon Silkin,

I’ve never seen Stand but I find your address with it in a TLS, so I judge it to be a serious magazine and send two poems which I wonder whether they can use.1164 The Observer, who are doing one poem, can’t use these because of space & time—they’ll be in my Love & Fame, out Oct 25th in New York—and I can’t push TLS again who did six of my new poems week before last. Please pass them on, if you’re not an editor yourself, and let me hear.

I can’t write without expressing my deep admiration for your astonishing poem ‘Death of a Son’.1165 I spoke abt it to Spender some 10 or 12 years ago when we were doing a job together in Salt Lake City, he agreed with me and said he ought to print you more often in Encounter.

With best wishes,

Yrs sincerely,

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

3 Aug 70

Dear William—

You are a fine poet, old man,—so gifted, expert, thoughtful, & surprising, that maybe you are wonderful. It was high time that you brought out exactly this splendid book, and I hope it takes the prizes away from me.1166 (I’ve withdrawn fr. the Pulitzer judging, having just realized I’ll have a book contending myself.) It certainly will make a very great difference in yr standing. You & Dickey are now I think the ablest men after Cal & Elizabeth. I heard Dickey read a beauty on TV the other night: himself at 8 swimming out in the country, a reddish palmetto-river, and the lawyer’s daughter diving from a bridge bare-assed into the water near him—the excitement & wonder.1167 Alvarez writes Cal is ‘not well’. Have you heard directly? Believe me, I’m worried.

Letter last week fr. Chris Haynes in Wash DC, first since 1947. That bold remembered hand! 1st ¶ abt The Dream Songs, then the Sonnets (no obj. to publication), then ^her^ son married (Robin, I think in a sonnet or so), then: ‘Pat flung out of home last Sept. in a fog of invective, evid’ly looking for the adolescence he denied himself 30-odd-years ago.’ What a world, a disgusting world.

Galleys late this week, Mexico City Mon. Saul called yest’y fr Chicago to say the last poems had changed his life. You haven’t seen them, exc. maybe ‘Death Ballad’ in The New Yorker. I am ready now for what anyone else can say. I really write mostly for him, sometimes for Bhain Campbell. The poem abt Richard is called ‘Olympus’ & will be in the Atlantic next month; he would like it. It conveys pretty well the transfiguring excitement of a disciple’s admiration. I used to breathe Blackmur in those days.—I’m closing my anthology with you & Wilbur & Voznesensky & Sylvia Plath.

With thanks & love

John

[Yale, MS]

I’ll be in Montreal all this Fall, maybe we can meet?

I often think of those generous & happy days in Connecticut.

16 Aug 70

Dear Robert—

I’ve been reading delightedly on in yr magical Odyssey for weeks now and just write briefly to thank you for it. No other translation from Greek can touch it, for transparency & variety & energy & command. Godspeed w. the Iliad you told me in Lowell House you were getting on with.1168 I am v. anxious indeed to see that. You once praised Lattimore’s version, wh. I like too, but it’s not a patch on yr Odyssey.1169

Your god-daughter Martha is a beautiful & spiritual creature. She’s begun at 7 to make remarks: one morning she closed a theological conversation w. Kate by saying decisively, ‘God is famous; but he doesn’t win prizes like Daddy.’

Love to Sally, and Hugh! Benny! Maria! Send me word of these angels.

John

My new Love & Fame will come to you next month. I hope you like some of it.

[NYPL, MS]

Mon [?17 Aug 70]

Dear Wm

Well, Christ, I finisht revising the galleys of L & F, did the Selected Poems 1938–68 Faber have been after me at,1170 & leave next week for Mexico—but not for long bec. I have to be in Montreal by mid-Sept: Loyola Coll. there has offered me $19,500 to teach writing this Fall. I expect to travel a good deal, from there, & among other people certainly to see you.

Your ‘little poem’ lacks I think what Wilbur calls ‘voltage’. I’ve been writing political poems myself—I enclose one that prob’y nobody will like—1171

Love,

John

[Haffenden, MS]

Sat.—[29 August 1970]

We’re only here for two weeks but are covering the City itself pretty well, went to Teotihuacan, Cuernavaca, Taxco. Since you were here, a magnificent Great Nat’l Mus. of Anthrop’y has been built—the finest museum anywhere I ever saw. I find Aztec art far beyond the photos in all my books: ecstatic, subliminal, terrifying, great. I’m coming back some time for longer. I hope you keep better—slack off work some, Bob. Love & Happy Birthday,

John

[Ransom, MS]

Sun. 6 Sept [1970]

Dearest Elizabeth—

Bob ^Giroux^ tells me Cal is behaving eccentrically again & hurting you. I am very very sorry, dear. I wish I had some influence w. that lovely but weird man, but I haven’t a trace—exc. literary, & the hell w. that. I hope you & yr girl are flourishing otherwise and bearing up. I think I’ll fly east around the 20th for a few days and try you, if you’re back, for lunch somewhere. We spent last week in Mexico City & round about—a fine country. Page proofs of my new book will be ready shortly; I wrote 1 / 3 of it (40-odd poems) in two fierce months last winter / spring, was in hospital a long while, am still depleted,—tho’ some third of my next collection is done ^now^ too. What are you working on at present?

Love,

John

[UMN, TS]

19 Sept 70

Dear Mr Collieson:

It’s too soon to have heard from my order of some days ago, but will you pass another one on, please, to whoever you were kind enough to speak to about me in your Export Division?

I’d like copies of these:

R. Huyghe, Watteau (drawings)1172

Penguin:   Spanish Verse

   French Verse (vol’s 1, 3)

   Russian Verse

Wm Empson, The Structure of Complex Words

S. Plath, Ariel

Ted Hughes, Wodwo

F A C Wilson, W B Yeats & Tradition (pb)

Yeats’s Last Poems, a casebk, ed j Stallworthy (pb)

Dickens, Great Expectations (new Oxf illus)

Ferd. Anton, Ancient Mexican Art

Shak.  The Tempest, a casebk, ed D Palmer (pb)

"      King Lear, a casebk, ed F Kermode (pb)

Plotinus, The Enneads, tr McKenna

Huizinga, Homo Ludens (pb)

E C Pettet, Shak & the Romance Tradition (pb)

Homer’s Odyssey, a crit handbk, ed C Nelson (pb)

Thanks very much, and let me wish you good fortune at the new location.

Faithfully yours,

[Ryan, MS]

Mon. [fall 1970]

Ledges is a good beginning, I think after several readings.1173 The 3rd part of ‘Behind the Wall’ is certainly the best thing in it, but I also like the end of ‘Dugort’ v. much. McKeon tells me yr ‘Minneapolis’ is fine. Inspired, I wrote one myself; we’ll vie, age vs. beauty.1174

Hearing yr girl was in town, we called yesterday to get you over here. Next time. I’ll be in the East this week, back Fri. night: you must come next weekend—

Best,

John Berryman

[NYPL, MS]

Sun. nt [5 October 1970]

An elegant production, Wm.1175 Thanks for letting me (us) see it. Wd you like this fair copy back for printing? I thought the versification ^too^ uneven at first, now it seems okay. The list on p. 2—the ghost business—is in yr best style.

How d’you like this threnody?

I’ll be in Pittsburgh mid-week: reading Wed nt at Brockport, TV next morning, what abt lunching together Thurs? I fly on to NYC that aft. I’ll call you at Hugo’s.

Affect’y

John

Kate finally got a job—a good one: 6th grade ^under an excellent sup’t^—& has started, her heart in her mouth. I’m happy you liked the Xtian ^religious^ poems ^(Sat. Rev., Harper’s)^; there are some 15 now1176

[Schlesinger, MS]

St. Mary’s Hospital

Monday night [late October 1970]

O my dear. It is easier for me to imagine the torment that wd drive such a lovely man to it than yr sorrow surviving.1177 I hope you are not feeling responsible, but I suppose (knowing nothing of what happened except yr few alarming words on the ’phone ten days ago & the fact fr. Robert F. today) you probably are: you must fight the feeling: that act is purely personal, & aggressive, and in our culture w. its taboo the actor is always deranged, out of control. My mother has blamed herself for my fa.’s suicide off & on for 40 years, when in fact she did everything in her power to prevent it. Don’t.

I blamed him myself for ruining my life until an amazing four hours early this morning: when I discovered that it was not true at all: I took it in my stride, with just normal grief—the hiatus in my life from 14 to 18 was due to another cause altogether—and only later invented the nightmare of self-pity rage & resentment I have ^ever since^ been suffering from. I waked up, with tears of gratitude for the grace of illumination.

I won’t pray for Alfred—I don’t believe we survive—but I will pray for you and the children. When you feel up to it, send me a note however short to say how you are. Whatever it was, Adrienne, it is over: have courage now.

Love,

John

Kate feels awful too, she wants me to say:

I had told her how much I liked & admired him.

Try to write verse. In various ways that may certainly help.

[UMN, TS]

[24 October 1970]

FOR MY SON: On the eve of my 56th birthday, after struggles, I think I have learned this:1178

To give an honest (sincere) account of anything is the second hardest task man can set himself; for any account must be selective, and the selection has to be done with energy, learning (‘full’ data—that is, one has agreed to stop looking for more and operate), intelligence (sheer brain-power, whatever that may be), and passion (one’s own deepest, truest, stark-naked feelings about the thing)—and then not only rendered as shortly & memorably as possible but delivered within the Divine perspective. No wonder we value the chief writers of the world. When the ‘thing’ is the illimitable human mind, as in Plato, or the unfathomable human soul, as in Shakespeare, one is obliged to stand amazed at both the gifts of the Lord and the uses which certain miserable, ecstatic persons have been able to make of them. The only harder task, in my opinion at the moment, is to try to love and know the Lord, in impenetrable silence.

John Berryman

[Schlesinger, MS]

St Mary’s, Sun. eve [November 1970]

Thanks for yr good letter.

I’m glad the children are all right—I hope you gradually will be.

I am making myself into a new man here and sister, it hurts. The process—wh. will never of course be finisht—is so far advanced that I’ll prob’y be going home in ten days or so;—and then I’ll send you some of my new poems. But how does Merwin know they’re ‘the age’s finest?’ Where did he see any?

Love

John

My bk is still not ready. But it was hated—at psychotic length—in The Nation last week; app’y fr. galleys.1179

[Chicago, MS]

Sun. night [November 1970]

Overwhelmed, exalted, by Herzog these last days—clearly I was just not up to yr spiritual state when I read it 6 yrs ago. Hit specially by, identify with, pp. 94, 134, 169, 202, 265!! 285! 316!! 326—all the whole rich enlightened end of it.1180 You were a wise man back even then in yr torment, emergent, pal. 133 & 288t are fine too. I was happy (& relieved) when you ^or H.^ predicted Luke’s recovery (315); I too tho’t he was okay—bats but okay. Poor guy, w. his loss (was he real?). Poor us, w. ours—& the hell w. it. God can handle all that v. v. well. I passed on to Him the chief double mystery of my life—10 days ago—& feel GREAT. I also feel unspeakably relieved to have as much confidence as in fact I have (not too much, just enough, to fend) that I’ll never drink again, taking it day by day or if I get crowded, hour by hour. But I’m not worrying. My current motto is ‘No Sweat’. Only: to Kate I say ‘Quack’, 340 ‘that’s just it’.

Tell me suddenly how yr new message is thriving, Maître.

John

Hey! How wd you like to fly down here (bringing [?MS?]) for Thanksgiving & stay in [?libr?]?? Ha! Call me 10–12 p.m. Tues, OK? Or anytime.

[UMN, MS]

St Mary’s Hospital, Sun 8 Nov [1970]

Dear Ann

I had been drinking since Tuesday—after nearly two months’ sobriety (incl. Mexico—so that Paul wd have been okay, but I see now there was no way for you to be sure)—and was too confused already Wed. aft. that I cdn’t remember whether I had to go to Buffalo or Pittsburgh—frantic telephoning—largely by luck got to Buffalo—ran an hr-long TV interview (had to,—the men interviewing me knew fr. nothing abt their job) Th. a.m., gave that nt. the best reading I’ve ever given (bec. I had finally listened to some of my recordings, & identified the main faults)—arrived in NY far fr. sure of anything exc. ^(1)^ wanting to see an old friend now on pot & pills and suicidal, and (2) lunch w. Giroux. Went out of contact halfway thro’ that afternoon: one of the strangest experiences of my life: was in complete emotional anesthesia for 4 days, till for no reason I finally came out, here in hospital.

Let me tell you something abt this mysterious disease—progressive, incurable, fatal unless arrested, and indescribably difficult to arrest bec. the patient’s whole personality is as sick as his body and struggles to protect his illness as violently as his body chemistry craves alcohol, whatever his ‘desire’ may be. It attacks the brain (destroying cells > Korsakov’s syndrome, amentia), the mind (destroying memory and ruthlessly distorting it, so that truth-telling is impossible to the alcoholic where his illness is involved), the feelings (transposing some, driving others so far down into the Ucs1181 that they are almost inaccessible to treatment), the organs (esp. liver—swelling it then shrinking & hardening it >—death—& pancreas > death ^& heart > death^), the body’s resistance in many kinds, etc etc. The strength of the patient’s will (> recovery) is as irrelevant to treatment as it is in cancer; and in fact the absolute acceptance of this powerlessness is basic to any initiation of treatment (AA’s 1st step). The programme here includes: 3 lectures daily—chemical, psychological, spiritual; 2 hrs daily confrontation group therapy (10 patients, 2 counsellors), |(‘What are you feeling right now?’ may be asked 50 times during a confrontation)| 1st step prep two aft’s a week, besides (for some, incl. me) transactional analysis 3 times a week, & heavy reading for everybody. The counsellors are nearly all recovering alcoholics, and they are merciless. Every morning six or ten people weep, beginning (or continuing) to recover. The aim is to torture & shock the patient into recognition of his defenses (silence, denial, shifting, minimizing, complying, defiance, etc) and gradual discarding them, until he stands open to the universe’s million suggestions towards his recovery: to convert him, indeed, fr. John-who-drinks (and this is the grand force of his life: his addiction) to the frightening-because-unfamiliar Johnwhodoesnotdrink and is comfortable in that new role. They estimate that in a successful treatment of 3–10 wks abt 15% recovery can be expected; the rest is up to the outpatient treatment (AA & Encounter group weekly), two years. At that point the disease is considered to be arrested, and of course the alcoholic’s whole life has been transfigured, as his chemical dependency is altered into dependency on other people & ^on^ God. (There are agnostics in AA but they pray too.)

Well. ‘Questions, anyone?’ I want Paul to read this letter and I want you to discuss it w. him, and write me abt anything that isn’t clear. My experience of treatment this time has been almost utterly different fr. last time or Hazelden, and it went well, v. well indeed, until a regression last Tues-Wed (which the staff expected, but I didn’t & was thrown into shock for many hours) fr. which I swiftly recovered, regained the ground lost, & have been advancing since into what looks to be the ultimate wilderness: a series of enigmas all associated either with my father (living, & dead, & dead of suicide) or with my most inexplicable life-failure, 4 years of hopeless inanition beginning a year later, in Connecticut. Problems of crucial importance involving my mother, my fame, etc have been painfully exploded. Some wanted to discharge me last Mon.; I wdn’t have gone, I want to be more secure—one can never be safe (even drink after 20 years’ sobriety)—but one can minimize the threats. Wish me luck,

Love,

John

[NYPL, MS]

St Mary’s Hospital, Sun aft. [?8 November 1970]

Dear Wm

Yr marvellous letter comes like a passport (from ^some^ high moral as well as aesthetic authority) to high final transfigured working years—as many as God wills. Is the horizon of all my living to be realized? Frankly, I tremble. I also feel v. unworthy, but that does not bother me at all. He knows damn well the equipment he gave me, I am only responsible for the day-to-day administration of it. How can I fail? If I ‘fail’ (whatever that may be ^mean^), well it is what, for some reason, He wanted: then I want it too: okay w. me! I find I write at present for a peculiar reason, wh. I hardly know how to put—I seem to write to make Him happy (make you too, Wm)—this is of course absurd, since He is happy—still, that seems to be the story.

My 4 wks of treatment so far this time have been different all the way thro’, fr. last time. Humbler but grander (exc. in one case: the conversion-experience) advances > set-back last Tu-Wed (expected by staff)—digested, ground regained, now working on two vast enigmas maybe connected & if so, the second to be solved penetrated by the first. Sorry not to be clearer, it’s a long story, I keep full notes we’ll talk over some time and you will die laughing when you hear of the morning (in transactional analysis) I was an amphitheatre—^I raise my arms encircling to show where I stand^ Sherm ‘Are you the amphitheatre?’ Me: ‘Yes.’ ‘How do you feel, Amphitheatre?’ Me (great emphasis) ‘Fine!’ This place is a nuthouse. And half of us go out & never drink again. I hope to be one this time. I have a security system founded on the AA 1st step & 3rd step.

I’ll write abt yr poem later. Love,

John

[UMN, MS]

St Mary’s Hospital

Tues. noon [?10 November 1970]

Dearest Paul

I still feel bitterly sorry abt disappointing you & Ann that Thurs. afternoon a month ago at the Chelsea. I was still in Brockport, fried from an hour-long TV interview earlier, not looking forward to the reading that evening (postponed fr. the night before, bec. fogged with drinking—I had trouble w. planes to Buffalo on Wed.), & having utterly forgotten our dinner engagement—or I cd have telephoned, anyway. Well. I hope it won’t happen again; and I don’t think it’s likely to—I came back into hospital that Sunday and during four weeks’ treatment have made real progress. I began to realize only last Fall what a very poor father I’ve been to you, Paul—at least since you were little (I remember one wonderful walk we took fr. Lake of the Isles to Calhoun—under the water we saw an old tire & you cried out, pointing, “Boke!”—meaning Broke(n), one of your two words at that time,—the other being “’S nice”). On my birthday especially I had you much on my mind here—it was the end of my 2nd week—and wrote you out a message, to keep & think over. I’ll type it out now (Kate bro’t my typewriter yest’y.) I also enclose a moving letter that turned up in the mail the other day; I am so unhappy constituted that I am not able to take any pride in it (I am only grateful) but I think you may properly be proud of it; and since I have done so little to make you proud of me, maybe this a beginning anyway. Let me have it back—I want to send him a note.

Tell me what excellent thing has happened to or for you in the last week, and what worst thing. Do you ever pray? If so, pray for me now & then. I’ll pray for you tonight.

Love,

John Berryman

[LOC, MS]

St Mary’s Hospital

Sat aft [14 November 1970]

P. S. I slept 7 hrs last nt, waking only once; best in months. Guilt lessening? as exploded out on Tues.

Dear Eileen

I was amazed & relieved to have yr letter yest’y—I’ve worried greatly over not knowing where you were & what was up—when last in Paris I found only one ‘R. Simpson’ with a tel listed, turned out to be a woman. Welcome back, dear. Next time I’m in the city, have lunch or dinner w. me, with or without yr husband as you like (I’d like to meet him but wd also rather talk w you first alone).1182

About your stories: of course. Send as many as you like |Chekhov to a woman aspirant ‘I like some of yr stories v. much. But how is it that you’ve only sent me 15?’| as soon as you want. Maybe I can really help you—I am a damned good judge of stories at all levels of execution. Better judge than story-teller.

All my thanks—& congratulations—for yr fascinating, learned, shrewd, even wise article.1183 It taught me a good deal & I think will help Kate not only w. Martha (our da., 7) but her 6th grade monsters (her first teaching job & it’s throwing her—I help all I can, but what’s to be done w. a boy who broke a girl’s arm in class recently, another who writes ‘Fuck you, teacher’ on his papers, smashes tomes down on girl’s [sic] craniums, etc etc.) Also she’s pregnant & under the weather physically.

This is an alcoholic treatment center, end of my 4th week. Very very much progress till this last Tu-Th regression; pulled out of, regained ground; prob. be discharged soon; hopeful (in spite of 5 wks at Hazelden last Fall, 6 wks here last Spring). |(Programme: 3 lectures daily, 2-hr Confrontation therapy, for me transactional analysis—w. a genius.)| They estimate optimum in-patient recovery at 15%; the rest is for the 2-year out-patient programme—Encounter Group & AA. If we had known ^during 1950–3 that^ I was an alcoholic—or maybe you did, but you can’t have known anything abt the disease or you wdn’t have hoped analysis could help—maybe AA cd have saved me. However, I don’t repine. What I do suffer again & again—less, recently—is comprehensive & detailed remorse for my unspeakable treatment of you. Forgive me.

Love,

John

[Haffenden, MS]

Sat eve—St Mary’s Hospital [November 1970]

Dear Bob

Yr words abt the poems delight me. For a different view, see ^(don’t buy)^ last week’s Nation where there’s a long long diatribe; good—it will sell copies—if there ever are copies. That son-of-a-bitch must ^have^ had just galleys. I tore up the galleys so, that the printers refused to go straight into page-proofs; hence long delay, & publ’n date prob. late this month. No copy myself yet.

Yes, I’m very glad abt Shelby.1184 Kiss her for me.

Mostly hell’s own summer—finished another bk of lyrics (called Trips to the Interior, I’ll hold it prob’y till 1972)—sober 2 months, then 6 days’ drinking & back here, where everything has been radically different fr. the first time. I have got a good way forward in 4 weeks & expect to get further before I venture out.

I will see you absolutely the next time I am anywhere East near enough. It’s too long. Best to Rose—love,1185

John

If you run short of money, for Christ’s sake let me know—I wd love to send you any amount you need, tomorrow morning.

[Trueblood, MS]

Tues aft. [?1 December 1970]

Dear Valerie delinquent,

It’s a relief to hear, tho’ certainly yr news is not too good. You don’t say one damned word abt yr doctor friend—are you still w. him? What’s been happening? I pictured you idyllic in yr rustic honeymoon-hideout, forgetting me (wh. hurt me) & probably not working at stories nor in fact at anything. Now I love the Folger but in yr comical account of it yr job there is nothing, Valerie. I’m ashamed of you, with yr imagination & talent; a fine return you are making to yr Maker for His Gifts. Moreover you do not sound at all happy. For Christ’s sake come to life. Pitch in. Care. Sweat. Do something for somebody (i.e. yourself).

I love yr sensibility but who else does it benefit? I’d kick you, dear.

Yes I have been unbelievably ill. After four months of practically no drinking, I started on Tuesday seven-odd weeks ago & drank for six days, out of contact w. the universe the last two—formed a conclusive suicide-plan (not out of despair: feeling nothing), for no reason decided instead to go home & went into hospital. Treatment I took utterly differently this time—I feel new—so far, 10 days, okay w. no trouble, I’ll be in out-patient treatment two years now, then just on maintenance of the severe daily discipline I established in hospital 5 wks ago & have not since once relaxed. The next drink I take will probably be on my death-bed if then.

I finish my seminars Monday next, then ten readings in ten days at ten colleges scattered around southern Wisconsin (an importunate character named Bank Roll conned me into this), then New York for some plays & a recording session etc (why don’t you come up fr. work, & have dinner w. me? long time no see, as my bro. says), then Haiti for a few days before my lectures begin here. Don’t be so damned long writing this time—love,

John

I wrote a splendid lyric to Miss Dickinson last night, and I seem to be in love with a Vassar sophomore whom I’ve never met—how inappropriate can you get?1186 My book is still delayed, though an interminable & unremittingly hostile review of it appeared in The Nation a month ago: his hatred blinded him & he made errors, which I nailed (I never replied to a critic before)—I’m told they ran the letter week before last.1187 Never a dull moment.

Thurs. You are featured in a ‘Tour’-poem of yesterday. I don’t think The New Yorker will take it.

1971

[UMN, TS]

Mpls, 12 Jan 71

Dear Jim Dickey

if you are nicknamed Jim:

I’ve an odd feeling I answered your very welcome letter of last October, but I think it’s just fantasying answers (a favourite pastime) and also I was in alcoholic treatment then (my third tour in twelve months) and unreliably memoried.

Deliverance is terrific, in my opinion—neither Kate nor I cd put the goddamned thing down—it’s the best novel of recent years, along with Sammler’s Planet, and it is more dramatic than that is.1188 It ought to make a fine film too, don’t let them butcher it. (Weirdness: one of the big studios, I forget which, approached my publisher last winter about my doing a script of The Dream Songs; we said ‘Screw you’.)

You were amiable enough to ask for stuff: here’s a lot of it: I hope you like some. Any critical remarks will be appreciated. I got help three times last year, the first (I think) in a decade: Mark Van Doren objected to an irrelevant stanza in the opening poem of Love & Fame (I told Giroux last week to throw you a copy of this), Wilbur tore up the third poem (wh is still too long but a hell of a lot better), and The New Yorker people rescued fr mediocrity or worse a really good poem called Ecce Homo (they’ll print it shortly) by begging me to wipe out the 4th stanza—I did and found myself with a honey.1189

Yes I would dearly love to get together. I remember that old correspondence as vividly as you do (nobody else has ever written to me about Bhain); also I caught you on the Cavett show one night and friend you are a charmer as well as a marvellous poet (the poem you read, boy seeing bare-assed lawyer’s daughter diving from bridge into palmetto-stained river, I was delighted with). Come see us if you get anywhere near here. I’ll be in Chicago, visiting Saul and giving the Wm Vaughn Moody lecture-reading, Jan 26–7, Kansas City a Sat mid-Febr, UCLA two lectures in April; otherwise nothing till a reading at the Rotterdam festival June 1–6. It would be gay to give a reading together, I agree. Only I hear you charge $3000 since you got Transmuted, whereas I only charge $1000-plus-expences. Ah, celebrity.

Blessings on yr cadences, as ever,

I hit on my title The Form thinking of yr title The Being.1190

[NYPL, TS]

Read carefully, dear friend.

25 January 71

Dear Bob,

I hope to Christ the first edition sells out quickly and you can reprint: here is the preface (tell me what you think of it) and I want deleted six poems—pp. 48, 51–2, 60–1–2–3— |too much [… ?] italics, [..?] will you [stu … ?] this for me? I can’t decide| and I’ll send you—phone you if necessary—the very few corrections in the text. There’s one bad misprint, ‘ball’ for ‘bull’ in the football passage |(p. 23 top)|, and a little rewriting of “Heaven”, that’s about it. The setting-copy I airmailed to Monteith he has acknowledged but is not certain they can do this spring, transatlantic proofing being the problem, with the current mail embargo no help either.

Please airmail me a copy of either His Toy.. or the combined Dream Songs volume, whichever you have there in the office. I am unaccountably out of both, while re-studying the whole poem with two aims: revision of the representation in the Selected Poems ’38–68 I sent Monteith last year, and revision for possible reprinting by you of either of these two volumes ^and the 77 D.S.^. I am killing some Songs and substituting. I may also do some stylistic & even thematic revision.

The Times reviewer is a cold fish, I agree.1191 He did not hear at all either the suffering or the exaltation in the best poems. On the other hand he didn’t really let his distaste loose either (only nailing me as overbearing and cruel—both charges true—WHY did I name Creeley & Neff???1192 initials are not only just as good but better—you might have caught this, Bob, yourself—or maybe you did and I was resistant, in my delusion—anyway, change to initials now, as with P W etc); and he did give us one sentence to quote:

^Love & Fame ^ “combines strength and ease with great expertness, is never less than immensely readable, and feels highly reassuring to anyone worried about the difficulty of modernist writing”.

Modernist, eh. Where did this professor surface from, anyway—I haven’t seen that word for decades. It was Joseph Conrad, by the way, who measured his reviews.

Frank Reeve has sent me a carbon of the stunning review he’s done for Book World, and it is certainly the most remarkable account of my work written so far.1193 Two new books on me are projected in New England, one in Ohio, one in Calcutta, two in California.

What stage is the prose-selection in (The Freedom of the Poet)?? |Let’s get this book out.| I am about to start revising that, piece by piece, and I could do with a schedule, because I am unbelievably busy with other things—I wrote five poems this week (the book is now called Delusions, |abt 50 poems in it at present| and it may be ready by Easter or it may not be ready till Christmas) and the anthology (let’s call it A BLUE BOOK OF POETRY) pushes on daily, as I think I told you. Draw up contracts, will you, for some of these books. I am going to need provision for a secretary as of the Blue Book—heavy copying. Of course there is no estimating yet of permission fees: I think I’ll send you in a month or so a partial Table of Contents which might make an estimate feasible. Unfortunately a great bulk of the translations is copyright (Mark 40 years ago could rely largely on very old translations, but that is absolutely no longer possible, the last two decades have revolutionized the availability in English of world poetry ancient medieval & modern).

Two deeply engaging new scale-poems under way. Always,

John

One 9-poem sequence (3 done) called Opus Dei & a longer one on Che Guevara1194

I owe you for theatre tickets; you’ll owe me for the ‘Two Poems’ (1 / 3).1195

[LOC, MS]

Friday noon [early spring 1971]

Dearest E—

Of course Carruth saw no yōd of irony in my title, nothing in either term.

Your letter is funny as hell—so it was 12th St, eh? Twenty-three yrs of alcohol hard on memory, tho’ I escaped Korsakov’s syndrome. Sorry I gave us away, love.

Kate read me the same way you read yrself abt Luchow’s: scared. Meet me in New London some time at 2 a.m. and we’ll start all over. I am rather old now, but my spiritual condition is truly extraordinary. I have found out, fr. introspection & ^triangulation^ a dozen pungent things lately abt the Lord’s Prayer, and am no longer really baffled by any of it. May write abt this.

I’m glad the halva importer had the wit to rise: what he saw he liked. I wd like to see it too; but when I’ll be in NY next I don’t know. Chicago the 26th to see Saul & give the Wm Vaughn Moody lecture (reading, in fact, as they urged), Kansas City ^reading^ next month, 2 lectures at UCLA in April, poetry festival at Rotterdam 1st wk in June (Allen Ginsberg & Nabokov are the other Americans—curious to see Voznesensky & Neruda1196) then race back for our baby due 2nd week in June. No other plans. I am still writing lyrics like a maniac, 2 or 3 a week; but very calm, oddly—lectures going well (Tu. & Th. 1:15-3)—and I’ve begun an exercise programme that I hope will land me in the Geriatric Olympics: 8 isometric, 10 each, 4 barbell, 10 each, hopping (worst of all) and running in place until I drop. Recommend it, dear. Twice a day, all this. I plan to die healthy.

Who are good story-writers? Hm. Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is maybe the best story ever told. 2 Samuel 11–12 (my next collection is called Thou Art the Man). S. Crane —now in paperback all over|, Isaak [sic] Babel.

I don’t know why Alvarez is on this death-kick; we correspond spasmodically but he hasn’t told me, and I haven’t seen the PR suicide piece, only had it described to me—app’y he cited me as well as Henry, damn him.1197 Have you seen Jack Douglas’s Social Meanings of Suicide (1967, pb ’70), an anti-Durkheim powerhouse?1198

Love,

John

P.S. The cunning New Yorker people rescued lately a masterpiece, buried in a 4-stanza mess, by simply urging me to kill the last stanza. I looked, and did. They’ll run it sometime—called ‘Ecce Homo’.

[UMN, TS]

33 Arthur Avenue S E

Minneapolis, Minnesota

6 February 1971

Gentlemen:

My last bill seems to come to $64.32. I enclose a cheque for $100, will you credit my account please.

The books I ordered (from Mr Collieson) last September have come, or been explained, except: R.C. Bald, John Donne, a biog (Oxford)—pray send.1199

Geo Marek, Beethoven—which please cancel

May I now order copies of these:

The Oxford Companion to Art, ed Harold Osborne

Kingsley Amis, The Green Man

Hesse, The Master Bead-game, now transl by Richard & Clara Winston (recent)

David Horowitz, Shakespeare, an existential view (Tavistock Publ, 11 New Fetter Lane, E C 4)

The Poet’s Tongue, ed Auden & Garrett

Pascal, Oeuvres (Pleiade edition)

H W Parke, Greek Oracles (Hutchinson pb, 10 / 6)

Simone Weil—any volumes in Eng transl in paperback editions

Novum Testamentum, ed J Leal, 1960 (cl 5 / 5)                            can’t understand

J Steinemann, St Jerome, 1959 (pb 12 / 6)                o.p.

A R C Leaney, A commentary on .. St Luke, A&C Black, 2nd ed, 1966

Edmund Leach, Levi Strauss (Fontana pb)

Geo Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (paperback if there is one)

C M Bowra, Primitive Song (pb? anyway 21 / -)

Eric G Jay, Origen’s Treatise on Prayer (SPCK 1954)

Peter Brown, St Augustine, 1967? (Faber I think)

Romano Guardini, Prayer in Practice

Modern German Poetry, ed M Hamburger & C

Middleton     (MacGibbon & Kee)

A L Basham, The Wonder that was India

Penguins** Shiela Kitzinger, The Experience of Childbirth

The Penguin Dictionary of Astronomy (051028 1)

Welsh Verse

Russian Verse, Chinese Verse, Japanese Verse

Peter Blake, Frank Lloyd Wright

H Marcuse, A Philos Inquiry into Freud: Eros & Civil’n (50s)

That probably is enough for now, and thank you.

Yrs sincerely,

No: add the Penguin crit anthology Walt Whitman ed Francis Murphy

John Berryman

Homage to Trumbull Stickney (poems), ed.

In three months: only 7 heard of, 4 June 711200

[Columbia, MS]

Sat. [late February or early March 1971]

Thanks for yr letter. I’d be delighted to see yr English Inst. talk (xerox’d) on La Bradstreet (& you say me).1201

I’ve heard of nothing planned for the S. Crane centennial—hadn’t tho’t of it myself—perh. a ceremonial bonfire of the insincere works of R. L. Stevenson (they come cheap these days) might be arranged at the grave in Elizabeth1202

Yrs

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

Sat morning [early spring 1971]

Dearest Paul—

Thanks for report, good for you. I hope Andover comes thro’.

Tell Ann sorry she waited for cheque—Kate, absentminded w. pregnancy & teaching. Enclose three here ^two^ post-dated. How is her work going?

Glad you liked the science book. I have a gorgeous artbook for you—soon.

I’m reading in Holland ^(Rotterdam)^ early in June—taking Martha—just a few days, bec. of the baby due 2nd wk in June, and I can’t leave till June 3rd or 4th (my last seminar is late Thurs. aft the 3rd)—would you like to go with us, if your school-dates permit?

Enclose new pictures—

Martha sends love, anxious to see you, often asks me when—

Yr loving father

J.B.

My reading in Kansas City is tonight—taking K & [illegible] in an hour.

[UMN, TS]

Monday morning, 29 Mar 71

Dear Peter,

Surprising discoveries just now, thinking about nothing in particular, after breakfast, the AA 24-hour bk, the paper with its usual crap abt Vietnam, and 2 Chron., and before proceeding with prep for my new seminar beginning tomorrow. I’ve always supposed Dream Song 1 to be about his father’s suicide, exposing him to the insolence of the world (‘they tho’t they cd do it’ images the long interdepartmental war against Humanities here, etc etc)—without however discounting the possibility, or likelihood even, of other embodiments too. But I don’t sit around studying my works and have been content to leave it at that. But the first line drifted into my head and I saw that it’s about The Fall (as indeed much of the poem openly is) as well: the ‘hid’ is from God, for nakedness, ‘Huffy’ is spiritual pride (that led to the^i^r rebellion), |the slip [… ?] the Mo. w. the child’s (Adam’s) guilt + ‘fem.’y complex’ (M. Klein)1203| the ‘departure’ is from the Garden, and so on. Okay. But as I followed the Song thro’, mentally, it seemed also to dramatize the birth-trauma (about which I was reading Otto Rank, with suspicion & contempt, just last night, in an anthology I’m assigning to this seminar):1204 the terrible ‘departure’ is from the womb (‘nothing fell out as it … ought’ cancels the process) and so on—then it became clear that the dreadful scene at the father’s grave (384) destroys the Intruder, penis, on the peace (mother-son) of the womb, re-establishing the primal condition, as Christ (Exc ye become as a little child, ye shall not inherit the Kingdom) and Groddeck (entering at last the bosom of mother earth, after having become childish again) and other observers ([a g … ?]) take the whole purpose of human life to envisage or re-encapsulate. Surprising. If, by the way, a man forty—my age when I wrote that Song—is still unconsciously so exercised about the birth-expulsion (expulsion makes the connexion with the Garden, another womb-image I suppose), there must be something after all in Freud’s guess, or let’s call it insight; though I should still insist that we know very little about it and object to Rank’s extrapolating a dogmatic system about it, supported by dubious physiological & folklorist analogies. Leave it a mystery, if a real & quasi-omnipotent one. I wonder how much of all this my current guide, Professor Erikson, says.1205 Tell you in a few months. Or weeks, for I am moving very rapidly at present.

Finished at last yesterday the poem that has made the last 2½ months intolerable, a nine-part affair on the Divine Office, called Opus Dei. No doubt there may be birth & Fall stuff in it too, but I am damned if I think so. The finale, Compline, is a rare beauty, inspired.

The Intruder, back there, is certainly the Devil, too.

I don’t think much of this interview, but go ahead.1206 I have left it alone, merely footnoted some amusements, corrected a mis-speaking abt my Augustinian procedure, cut some Shakespearian drivel. You say they will get in touch with me about a picture (I have a good one at last) and holograph.

Kate is the size of a house (baby due 2nd wk June) and very pretty. Our best to your lady, blessings on all of you, kick Howard for not writing, tell Jim his phantasy abt Edna Millay (which I read somewhere new yesterday) is flood-level,1207

[UMN, TS]

31 March 71

Dearest Paul,

Your mother was wondering, in her last letter, whether I ought to afford both your coming out in April and the transatlantic trip in June, and I have concluded with regret that I probably ought not to. Martha and I, and Kate, will be disappointed, but there are other considerations involved besides money. They are health and business. I just finished a nine-part poem called Opus Dei which took most of two and a half months and wore me very low: I had vomiting and diarrhea in the final stages, and insomnia. I don’t know that I wd be excellent company, especially since I am also incredibly busy. One of my Spring seminars, on The Post-Novel, is entirely new, and the other, on The Meaning of Human Life (I enclose the syllabus—you might slowly do some of this reading yourself as time goes on), substantially so. I began yesterday a series of recordings of my poems for an archive too; the first half-dozen were a strain on my sympathy but when I reached The Song of the Tortured Girl ^(1943 or so)^ I got comfortable and read hard; this will be no great strain from now on, but an effort every Tuesday. The main business is Shakespeare. I changed, some weeks ago, the title of the critical biography I first drafted out (as the 4 Hodder lectures at Princeton) in 1951, and began an entirely new version which will absorb my whole attention—now the poem is over—at least until Christmas. The break in June, of a few days merely, is all I can afford. Besides all this, I have fresh incidental matters to attend to every week, in fact every mail, and in addition I am revising my Selected Poems 1938–1968 for Faber in London and have promised a revision of the volume of my collected prose (stories & essays) to Giroux for September. Not an idle year. Have you read The Limitations of Science by J W N Sullivan? It’s out of date, 1933, but I fill in and revise as I go; I’ve never come on an exposition so clear for somebody with no non-Euclidean mathematics like me; book I’ve used for years but never went straight thro’ before. It’s too bad abt Easter, I’m anxious to have time with you and M made horrid faces at dinner when I told her. Love,

John Berryman

I enclose a [Mir’s / man’s] letter came this morning[. S]weet.1208

[Haffenden, TS]

Easter evening [11 April 1971]

Dearest Mother,

Five weeks ago I suddenly swarmed with thought, changed the title of my Shak biog and wrote in a fierce week some half the first chapter, 10 pages. But the damned poem nagged me & broke back in and I spent the fortnight Spring break from the University struggling with the last 3 sections, vomiting diarrhoea insomnia the final days, finished—and began teaching: two new seminars, one very demanding—I’ll never do two new ones again together—they’re well under weigh now (two weeks), but so many other pressures on my time have accumulated that I’m doubtful abt getting back to Shakespeare before June. This is distressing. I don’t repine however. There’s plenty of time. Next year I have no academic preparations at all—familiar stuff throughout—and if I can keep from actual ^verse^ composition (I sketch every day but that’s all right) I can probably knock out a draft of the book (Shakespeare’s Reality it’s called, and it begins with an analysis of one line in Rich III, two passages in All’s Well, before entering on the historical materials). One problem this summer: I’ve promised Giroux a revision of my collected essays by September; that’s some 450 pp, very uneven, no casual matter. Delmore never did it—I’m reviewing his posthumous critical volume, which suffers terribly from his neglect, over the awful final years.1209 Well! Did you ever notice that Christ was always ‘in medio’—central person of Trinity, among the doctors in the Temple, among his followers, etc, and finally ‘venit, et stetit in medio, et dixit, Pax vobis’—Bishop Andrewes points this out in the great 1609 sermon on the Resurrection that I was reading at Mass this morning after trying in vain to get anything out of the drivel from the goodhearted celebrant1210—anyway it proves that He was human |See my poem in The New Yorker this week.1211—we are ever in the middle of something or everything. I am drafting out an article “The SST and Renunciation” and busy supporting Gardner’s Common Cause and advising young militants here and helping people in various States who are writing books about me and encouraging when possible poetic aspirants, and so on.1212 In medio! I like yr title The Time of Her Life—Edmund (Wilson) called one of his recent bks A Piece of my Mind, and the next The Bit Between My Teeth. Love!

John

Mislaid yr bk-lists. Next time.

I’m reading in Rotterdam June 5th or so—taking both Martha & Paul. Kate’s voluminous, well.

[NYPL, MS]

Sun, the 18th [April 1971]

Dear William

3rd sacred poem wr. this wk.1213 My vein is recovering fr. the long poem, wh I tho’t had finisht me—the final fortnight’s spurt ^last month^ was gleefully accompanied by vomit / diarrhoea (insomnia) and I decided that my days of verse-composition were over. Maybe not.

That man at the U. of Mass. ought to be ridden down. He was only rude to me (in the Times) but to you he was absolutely insolent.1214 I am very sorry, by the way, you did not get the Pulitzer—or was it the NAB [sic]? You shd have had both.

Listen, a college in Vermont has conned me into coming the 3rd weekend in May? Could you free yrself & join me? Long time no see.—I’m taking Martha, & my son Paul, to Holland for a reading at Rotterdam 1st wk in June. Staying only days, the baby being due 2nd wk of June. K’s as vast as at Texas Falls.

Love,

John

[Haffenden, TS]

19 April 71

Dear Charles,

The spring photographs of English villages in the Guardian Weekly are disturbing me and a girl in Yellowknife (above the Arctic circle) tells me the Northern Lights are getting pale pale green—what am I doing in this sphincter of the Universe at this season? No star has been visible for weeks, the news from SE Asia is base as ever, and Kate is irritable in her 7th month, only the Holy Spirit seems to be on the job. And Martha is braining away.

Let’s add, of the Dream Songs for Selected Poems: 47 in II, 53, 69, and 77 in III, and in IV: 84, 86–7, 91. I’m sorry I didn’t list these for you long since. I only got down to it while doing a series of readings for an Archive here, an hour or so every Tues afternoon for perh 7 wks, tapes to go to Caedmon Records in NY and a new Irish recording company run by Garech Browne fr Dublin.1215

Title of new book changed to DELUSIONS, etc. Maybe this finished, though I wrote three sacred poems last week and one secular one this morning, so Heaven knows. I am teaching my head off (enclose you the syllabus ^of^ one seminar—both alas new) but it doesn’t seem to exhaust me. Since I quit drinking, before Christmas, both my health & energy have bounded upward. I hope you and yours are well. Can you locate for me, by telephone or however, either Catharine Carver (formerly of Oxford ^Press^ there, then Chatto) or Beryl Eeman (degree 1938 Newnham Coll Cambr, once 218 Haverstock Hill, later 24 Holly Mount, both near Hampstead Heath)?? Thanks for whatever offhand effort you may be willing to undertake.

Yrs ever,

John

What’s with Love & Fame? Amer. reviews mixed, but first p’t’g (6000) sold out quickly enough.

[UMN, TS]

33 Arthur Avenue, S.E.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

18 June 1971

Gentlemen:

Can you supply copies of, or will you search for please and quote:

F M Steele, The Life & Times of St Hildegarde (1914)1216

Stenneman, St Jerome (either hardcover or pb)

E K Chambers, Shakespearian Gleanings

Alfred Hart, Shakespeare & the Homilies (1934)

W W Lawrence, Shak’s Problem Comedies

any volumes of: the Malone Society reprints of Eliz plays

Hastings’s Ency. of Relig. & Ethics

Needham’s Science & Civ’n in China

Lancelot Andrewes’s Sermons

H & H Anders, Shakespeare’s Books (1904)

Theobald’s play Double Falsehood

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill

Will you send copies, please, of these Penguins:

J S Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo

Bede, History of the Engl Church

The Cloud of Unknowing

Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Mysticism (F.C. Happold)

Paul’s Letters from Prison (J H Houlden)

Pelican: The Early Church (Henry Chadwick)

Western Society & the Ch in the Mid Ages (R.W.Southern)

I enclose my cheque for $100 to bring my account up to date and ahead. Thank you for whatever rapid industry you can summon for these requests & orders.

Yours very truly,

J.A.M. Berryman

P. Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber pb)

[Haffenden, MS]

Thursday [spring 1971]

Dearest Bob,

Hurrah for yr getting yr stuff up fr. 74th St. I nearly went crazy during the ten years the bulk of my library & my gramophone & records were stored in Princeton (also I nearly died paying the storage every few years, under threat of sale, always after whatever deadline—Christ, what a way to live).

Don’t send the Times, two copies came this morning. Poem not bad. Two more poems yesterday & the day before, but mostly I’m relaxing; reading v. widely for my lectures, transforming old notes. Under pressure (fr. my Encounter group in out-patient therapy over at the hospital) to change my life-style, slacking off drive to avoid exhaustion (as > drinking), I’ve abandoned the treatment book for some weeks or months.1217 I’ll enclose the opening.

Your book sounds damned interesting, frankly. I hope the present writing is going better. Eileen has taken to writing stories, of all things, and po[s]ts them to me for criticism: one will I think be good when it’s revised. She & her husband have moved back here, live near where we were on 84th at Lexington. She published two brilliant articles of French psychoanalytic theory / practice, & seems happy.1218

We’ve decided to call the intruder Jefferson, not Robt.—‘Sabrina’ was one of some 130 female names M. made up a list, God knows where she got them all.—Another poem just now (9 p.m.), which I’ll enclose. The quotation is from a letter of Lowell’s I found at my office this afternoon & most of it abt Part IV of Love & Fame, wh. he takes (wrongly) to be one poem (it’s eleven) & calls ‘one of the great poems of the age.… Along w. yr posthumous poems [Bk IV of The Dream Songs], the crown of your work.’ This is interesting to hear, because he has always taken a very high view of the Bradstreet poem (once said in The N.Y. Review it was ‘the most resourceful historical poem in the English language’).1219

No new notes fr. the Twiss. But one night last Fall when she & Kate were sitting here in the livingroom quietly reading she suddenly sat up & exploded: ‘Oh! this is the most boring evening I’ve ever spent!’

Love

John

[NYPL, MS]

[illegible] 21st [?spring 1971]

Busy as sin but thanks for the sugg’n, instead of relaxing w. Boudaille’s Courbet I might as well try the new ‘work of scholarship, grace & wisdom’ (Hotcha) by Wayne Anderson, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost, if you want to pass it on from Viking.1220 I bought the Intim. Journals in 1936 and tho’ he’s not one of my favourite painters since Uccello I’d be glad to have to write abt him.1221

In fact my lifelong interest in art history & crit. became a mania some 8 mo’s ago and I spend a fortune monthly or weekly sometimes, on art-bks of all sorts. You might forward stuff if you like, and I cd select for indiv. reviews or do round-ups say at Xmas & Easter. Some of the really good ones never get reviewed ^at^ all.

Best regards

John Berryman

I am even keener on architecture & sculpture than on painting.

I’ll be glad to look at the Cole Porter book. I used to sing—croon—my own ^French^ transl’n of ‘Night & Day’ at Columbia proms, and owe him something for plus-strokes.

[NYPL, MS]

Sat. [spring 1971]

Wonderful postcard—I’m putting it at my elbow here w. those of a Pontius Pilate stone at Caesarea (from Saul Bellow), a Cretan vase-painting incredibly beautiful (fr. a close friend of ours fr. Sparta, librarian at the Amer. Sch. in Athens), a marvellous (& famous—Life had her once) old beggarwoman in Rio, Dona Olympia (fr. Eliz. Bishop whom I love), a ‘Saraswati’ painting in the Deccan (fr. Mother), & a mad old bare-bellied Japanese tramp w. a frog on his head, dancing & leering (Edo painting, 18th c) |(fr. the German translator of my Bradstreet poem)|. I have others, but these are favourites. For months now I’ve been squandering Congress’s $10,000 of year before last on art-books, wh. I peruse w. passion. Giving up alcohol & corner-sex, I had to think up a new vice.

It’s a relief you like two of the new poems. My next collection is more or less finished—v. different fr. Love & Fame and I hope more even in quality, & less deluded (tho’ of course still deluded). |(its present title is Thou Art the Man—2 Sam 12:7)|

Yes, Kate is bearing in June, to be called Jefferson (after my brother) or Sarah (after nobody).

Love,

John

[NYPL, MS]

Wed [?3 June 1971]

Dear Wm

Business is blooming. Three of any 5 doors are wide-open (Giroux will support me to any extent for as long as I like, the Univ’y here ditto almost without teaching—one course this Fall, not two, and none then for several years, ^never over one again^—and the red hot agent Roger Straus recommended to me, Colston Leigh, just called fr. NY for a long & meshing talk abt readings & lectures, scale $1000-$1500 a shot anywhere in the US except $600-$750 just around here, ^he’s^ working on Colorado for next month already1222), the 4th is swinging (bloody Federal application under weigh—I’m using you as a referee), and if you want to explore the 5th with your Rockefeller president-pal I have absol’y NO objection.

Xeroxing ^the Vermont^ poem for you (& others). Met in Washington Sunday a girl 22 who has 37 poems about ‘Sad eyes’, Henry’s twin sister—1st poet to get anywhere w. this style.

Love,

John

Linda Lombardi [sic] she’s called—going ^next year^ to Iowa workshop, I’m getting her money fr. Marvin Bell.1223 My respects to yr Gayl Jones, whose style I’m imitating in my booming-daily novel.1224

[Haffenden, TS]

33 Arthur SE, Mpls, 4 June 71

Dear Marvin,

Project: my host in Washington last weekend brought in to see me a girl who has been able to make something of the Dream-song style, in 37 lyrics abt one Sadeyes who is Henry’s twin sister. Here’s one.

Sadeyes’ Proposition

Let’s halloween. Get treats

of trick and all in all disguise us.

Bags we’ll have, goody-full—enough for all

winter, with candy and pennies and—

Listen. I know a game: two play.

One says to the other one, “Yes”

and then they do.

Or the opening of SADEYES BEDTIME PRAYER:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray Thee God (Thou awful Creep)

protect me from the ocean deep

and also from bad dreams.

Name Linda Lombardi, 22, no money, has applied to your Iowa jazz; I want you not only to let her in, but find her some dough, there’s always some around if you push.

It was amusing running into you all over, Kate recalls you with pleasure too. Love to Don & Jean, blessings on yr anacolutha, up the hemistich!1225

Affly,

John Berryman

I enclose 3 items—2 you heard, one writ ^there^ in Vt & NY—xerox’d this afternoon. Give Miss Lombardi plus-strokes. I persuaded her without trouble to move on fr. the Henry-stuff. Good outlook.

[Haffenden, MS]

Fri. noon [early June 1971]

Dear Bob

Good God. But the operation doesn’t sound dangerous. Or is it? Keep me in touch. I’ll call you either when our baby arrives or after yr resection—whichever is first. Enclose 250, let me hear if you need more, no sweat, $200 from Des Moines was in this mail w. yr letter.

I went to Washington and found Mother better than I feared but in a frightful flap, almost completely desocialized, and with Herculean difficulty persuaded her to move out here later this month into a gorgeous large brandnew apartment we’ve taken for her almost across the street from us, a 1-min. walk. I expect her to improve very greatly very rapidly. She told me she’d given up a career as a philologist (Ph.D., the bit) to have me (‘and never for one moment regretted it, John’—Ha Ha): well, my house-warming gifts—we’ll have a big party after the christening, maybe July 1st, & for that occasion—are Empson’s Structures of Complex Words and my New Engl. Dict’y (the 18 vol’s—2 missing), besides the charming little Pearsall Smith Words & Idioms, & Skeat’s Etym. Dict’y wh. I’ve just ordered fr. England.1226 She’ll have a ball, when she can read again.

My work’s rushing—last seminar yest’y. All my financial projections are in flourishing train. University dropped me fr. two courses to one this Fall, then NO teaching for at least two years, and thereafter never more than a single course at a time. Giroux & his associates are prepared to support me to any extent (seven bks are in question, over the next 5 or 6 years—besides the half-dozen selling briskly at present). I’ve signed w. a redhot agent, Colston Leigh (NY-Chi-SF), at $1000-$1500 a stint or 70% of that; and we have long-distance love-ins over the Bell equipment. I may do some jobs in Colorado even this summer, tho’ nothing serious before January, by when I expect Recovery to be drafted or even finished altogether, ready for printer. I’m applying for a federal Senior Fellowship in the Humanities also—how I hate applying, I type, curse, type, do everything but drink—and might get it. Other things too.—I am ashamed of all this good news when your news is so awful. If there is anything fair in the universe, I haven’t at 56 yet located it—outside mysterious working.

Enclose 3 lyrics now maybe right, & 2 current syllabi might charm you.1227

Love to Rose,

John

[UMN, TS]

Mpls, Friday [early June 1971]

Dear old thing,

All’s well, better than well, everything plunging ahead, especially the Novel. Last seminar yesterday, so now I’m four hours a day on Recovery (besides most of the rest of the time too—it’s hard to think of anything else in fact). That’s probably 2 pp a day, a section (50 pages) a month, seven sections finished by Christmas. If not, no matter; but I think so. The material, already a month ago very elaborate, has now greatly expanded, many key passages drafted, the 16 High Points distributed (time is six weeks in-patient hospital treatment, six months out-patient treatment & gradually undeluding experience of the same, but so different as to be barely recognizable, real world, people, events, history in short), and last night I drew up a Dramatis Personae of the 25 main characters—about six of whom are full-length crucial portraits. WORK, man, WORK, and it ravishes me with joy. I told you I’d written the opening pages, these are pouring forward, and the other day I wrote the final paragraph. After 350 pages of almost intolerable crisis, the last sentence—built to with cunning I didn’t know, in prose, I had in me—runs thus:

He felt—fine.

How’s that? Now I want you to draw up a contract for the book and fire it out here; also one for Delusions, which is proceeding with slow confidence. Christening perhaps not till around July 1st. I’ll have the Ms of the poems in your hands about halfway between now & then, so you’ll have plenty of time to study them before we talk over that book here. The advances against royalties for both books is of course up to you, but I want you to strain FSG’s resources for Recovery. If it does not make us a mint of money, I will retire into Textual Criticism, which I love too. But it will, friend, it will.

We must also talk about The Life of Jesus Christ. It is hard to guess how soon this will be ready. I think a splendid physical production is desirable: a large 8vo or even quarto, coated paper, very careful printing of many gorgeous color photographs, several type-styles, perhaps a larger one (possibly even in coloured ink) for Christ’s actual words—those I admit—and altogether a snazzy operation, geared to immense & long sale. I’ll show you some of the paintings, sculpture, and photographs I want. Perhaps $12–15, with a paperback later at $3.95? Published either before Christmas or before Easter. We’ll see. Time enough to think about a contract when you’ve seen some copy & illustrations and approved the general plan, as I hope you will. A good deal of scholarship is going to be built in, without showing (except to experts); book by no means for children only.

Any more business? Yes. My new framework for the book of essays, Brooders (1st series), is far beyond what I read you on the phone. I am going to leave that alone until the novel is done. Maybe next winter, with a view to publ’n in Fall 1972. I am rather keen on that book too, now, and so will you be when you see my table of Contents.

I enclose three lyrics I seem finally to have got right, and two syllabi to show you how I teach, or DID

[Haffenden, MS]

Monday [early June 1971]

No, damn it: this is the first I have heard of a Lit & the Arts by you1228—which I wd be happy to fit into the 30–50 vols, fr. Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez to Games People Play to Boudaille’s new Courbet, wh. I’m amusing myself with in the hectic evenings after the even more hectic days at the Olivetti wh. I love / hate / cajole / fear / vanquish occas’y.1229

Many thanks for the loyal if exag’d account of me you were kind enough to dream up for the Feds. Cross fingers, kid. I support 8 people, etc.

We are taking great pains with Martha—a gorgeous dress this morning for the Christening, which is whenever Giroux can get out fr NY to be godfather.

Cheers (in V-8) to yr spiffy lady & offspring—

Love,

John

My novel is blazing—& so are my publishers.

[NYPL, MS]

Tues noon [15 June 1971]

Dear William,

Sorry to impose on yr time & energy but, using my old chairman here (Ralph Ross) to speak for my teaching, and Mark for my Shak’n & biog’r sides, I need you to speak for my general character (if any) and critical reputation ^ability^—establ’t of Crane, Thomas, Lowell, etc etc

I enclose also 2 syllabi to scare you & the 3 lyrics (2nd begun in Vt., you read, workt on in NY, fin’d here

SARAH

was born night before last—‘I just gave one mighty Push’ Kate says—she’s 20” long, 7 lbs, rather a pretty little broad after 15 min. in the cruel world, and turns out—yesterday—to have lynx ears. God knows all she’ll hear w. them. Come out for her christening and to hear the Beckett record and read Pt. I of my novel.

Love,

John

[Chicago, TS]

Mpls, Thursday morning [late June 1971]

Dear Saul,

She’s 20″ long, ^Sarah Rebecca^, hears like a lynx (I hate to think of what she’s going to have to hear during the next half-century or less or even more), and is (according to observers—we had a lot of people in after her christening yesterday) an unusually beautiful human infant, notwithstanding her evil parentage on one side. Come & see her when you get a day or so free, if you can bear that much Minneapolis with its spectres. Paul is coming this afternoon to spend a fortnight making friends with Martha and getting some education before he enters Andover this Fall—I am going to have regular afternoon classes for the two of them (and possibly Katie Thomes, now 19, who enters Macalester this Fall), with Kate sitting in. I’m taking him (& Martha) to Denver on the 16th to meet Ann. Will you be around out there that long? I am anxious for yr opinion of, and possibly help with, the novel I’m writing. The only professional who has seen its opening (25 pages) is Bob Giroux, who flew out to be godfather; he thinks it ‘marvellous’ and proposed a $10,000 advance, which is encouraging. But he is not you. I myself think it is going to be hot as a pistol, but bitter six-times-over experience has taught me that I cannot write plays, and maybe I can’t write a novel either. Only the one ^other^ reader so far, except Kate who likes some passages but can’t judge it because some of it is too close to what has actually happened) said ‘It’s not a bit like a poet’s novel’—I took this as high praise. Naturally I insist on writing the best novel (except Herzog & Moby-Dick & An American Tragedy & The Bear, to mention only native items) since Don Quixote, but also I am simply, with inconceivable effort and cunning, trying to write a readable story abt a guy in real trouble: an immunologist & University Professor & Pulitzer-winning biographer, named Dr Alan Severance, in alcoholic treatment for the third time in just over a year. Four sections (with a one-page ‘Higgaion’ preceding and a one-page ‘Selah’ concluding): I—FIRST DAY, 11 pp; II—THREE WEEKS, about 150 pp; III—WEEKS FOUR FIVE SIX, same length; IV—OUT-PATIENT, maybe a little longer. |Title: Recovery| Encyclopedic data, almost as heavy as Melville’s abt whaling, sifted into Parts II & III, though I hope better dramatized, and a bloody philosophy of both History & Existenz, almost as heavy as Tolstoy’s in W & P, crashing around in Part IV, though I hope better dramatized! though no doubt equally deluded and—alas—similarly tyrannical. 20 to 30 main characters, half a dozen very important indeed, but the book is really about him: only his fate, as he finds with deep reluctance and after many evasions & revolts & attempted take-overs, is inextricably inmixed with theirs. Two heroines, one strong proving frail but enduring, one inert proving Charlotte Corday, and the wife a major topic in Part IV.1230 Sixteen high points, some mental, some physical, some spiritual, surprisingly (but also gratifyingly) distributed. Surprizes all over, expectations long lovingly accumulated defeated, BUT (in the end) a sort of very provisional actual triumph—with some but minimal projection. The best sentence so far is, ending a long paragraph, ‘She sure could.’ Be on my side, Great Veteran! Give me two hours & plus-strokes—some thought, & reprove me—some attention, & make me viable (if possible)! I am also excited about where your novel must be by now if all is well. Let’s join forces, large & small, as in the winter beginning of 1953 in Princeton, with the Bradstreet blazing and Augie fleecing away. We’re promising! Will you second my nomination of Erik Erikson for the Gold Medal in History (Nat’l Inst); do. Love love,

John

Kate delighted (like me & Martha—& my mother, whom I just moved out fr. Wash. DC into a gorgeous brandnew apartment across the street here) with your note—

I finished the long 9-part poem ^(took all winter & all but ended me)^ on the Divine Office, Opus Dei, and Giroux has taken back to NY the complete ms. of Delusions etc—wh. we’re bringing out next spring. I’ll enclose you the 3 latest lyrics, one you heard in Chicago.

[UMN, TS]

Martz is wrong abt practically everything (I only let him publish at a friend’s begging). The Sonnets was abt the first affair in that then 5-year-old marriage; whatever they indicate as to my wife’s suspicion is more reliable, of course, than any opinion of Prof. M’s.

27 June 71

Dear Mr Linebarger:

I’m afraid I’ve neglected your January letter but as you say the queries really are ‘petty’ and frankly so are these new ones: what possible relevance to any critical enterprise have the birthdates of two of my children (Paul is 14, Martha 8½) and whether or not I edited Pound’s Sel. Poems (I did, as he requested, but then the old gentleman objected that my selection—and introduction, which had appeared in PR—were not suitable for ‘young readers’, so he and Laughlin ignored it; or maybe they simply revised it, I never looked at the published volume).

Well: P C S Barton was the younger son of an Irish title, brought up on the rough in Sydney, divorced, student of Wittgenstein, Conrad- & Kafka-buff, suicidal; later made his way back fr school-teaching in Prague, hero in RAF; what of it? Tracy Dall [sic] was a labor leader imprisoned in Detroit 1939.1231 Teng Fa has vanished from indexes, I suppose Mao & Chu Teh got rid of him at some point, I only knew him in Edgar Snow’s first book.1232 Ingreet was a 17-year-old Maryland farmer’s daughter with a voice; never heard of her again.1233 As for Simonetta, yr education has been neglected if you don’t know—without looking—who she was.1234 Ted Miles was killed in the Pacific war, never made it to Harvard, lucky fellow. Most of my old friends are dead now. ‘They have things easy.’1235 My brother’s address is 42 Pondfield West, Bronxville N Y; however, he just underwent major surgery, so pray do not bother him for at least a month. Yes, I was at school in Jackson Heights just the one year (slip in Cambridge, room full of eager boys and their girlfriends, a photographer or so, and whiskey). Slip in Life, I told Jane ‘1937’ Heidelberg. Finished Bradstr poem 22 March 53, read it at Princeton, doctors sent me first to Atlantic City! then France-Italy-England; separated fr wife; taught Iowa the following Spring, then Harvard summer, then here Oct 54.

Yrs sincerely

JB

Thank you for Xeroxes—I’ll look at ^them^ if I get a chance.

[NYPL, TS]

Mpls, Tues morning [?early July 1971]

Dear Mark,

Gayest letter I’ve had from you in many years—surely some excellent thing has happened to or for you, what was it? And many thanks for your kindness in NOT—for Christs sake—telling the Feds yr conviction that I’ll never finish the Shakespeare.

I suppose it’s possible. (1) I used to ascribe my lifelong failure to finish anything to my 24-year-old alcoholism. But I can’t buy that. I never, for all my industry over it, simplified and prosed my paper on Proust for you; I don’t believe I ever did the papers on Bradley and Stoll for your Shakespeare, even;1236 I never did Edman’s paper on Santayana’s Literary Psychology (whatever that may be)—he said ‘Just send me a copy of your first book’ and Goddamn it I forgot to (I was fond of Edman & indebted to him for some understanding of Plato, but I never forgave him for reading out to an enormous summer audience in Macmillan Theatre, with me sitting there taking the course, two lousy ‘philosophical’ poems of mine and commenting on them). Then there’s everything since. And it’s worse than you know. Recently, instead of letting Giroux (and Faber) go ahead with the collected prose-volume they’ve been badgering me about and which I actually put together some 18 months ago, I set up a new book called “Sacrifice: seven profitable studies, with two appendices”, using some published stuff (recast), some unpublished stuff (also recast), but some merely planned stuff. And more recently still, this month in fact, ten lines of a Proemio to a third long poem, no subject no title, drifted into my head and I took them on to thirty and later to sixty (finishing it anyway) and located my subject after all, as well as over-method (though not detailed-form yet), so I’ll be off and on at that for years as well as the rest. The rest I identified in Vermont last month as seven books. Since then, the fog has cleared a little further, and what I am dealing with is thirteen books, all but three having been in hand for at least fifteen years, some 25 years. What a position. Having published thirteen books, that is, not counting British & foreign, I am exactly in mid-career. So your fear is fully justified, and no doubt I too should despair, at 56, with maybe ten years to live, unless I go back to drinking which isn’t likely.

But I don’t. Tell you why. There are three reasons, I believe, for my never having finished anything important except the Sonnets, the Crane, the Bradstreet poem, and The Dream Songs. First is: some bone-laziness but mostly DOLDRUMS, proto-despair, great-poets-die-young-or at least unfulfilled like Coleridge & Co., all that crap. Two: the opposite, fantastic hysterical labour, accumulation, proliferation. I have seldom known you wrong about anything, but you couldn’t be more wrong about me as a scholar. Mark, I am it, Dr Dryasdust in person. The man I identify with is Housman, pedantic & remorseless (though with a lyric style far superior to mine), a really bifurcated personality—and I mean to deal with him some time, Edmund & the rest are in no position to understand him.1237 Maybe I’ll xerox some diction-sheets of 23 yrs ago to illustrate this spider-aspect of my general enterprise. Third is over-ambitiousness. Part of this is temperamental grandiosity (just what I hit in R P Warren for instance, who has ruined a fine talent in my opinion by not understanding his limitations and working within them) but more of it—unless of course I am wrong—is legitimate self-demand on the largest conceivable scale. Presenting myself with any topic whatever, I require to present, or explain, as the case may be, everything. This sometimes holds matters up for years—always to advantage (provided they ever get done). Now what are my chances against these capital vices. Well, the first has ceased to exist. The second is coming under control; my pedantry is much less self-indulgent, I drop things once I have their direction & velocity taped or sufficiently indicated for my immediate purpose. It’s the third that’s the problem. I don’t know. I admit I am putting myself through a crash-course this summer of 20 works I should have mastered as they came out, besides the very elaborate ongoing novel-related reading, medical lectures and so on. BUT I am insisting on 10 pp a week drafted-typed-revised-retyped; so I don’t see how I can go far astray. I am also studying theology before breakfast and after 1 a.m. and keep up a fancy exercise-programme and spend two evenings a week at hospital and am catching up on 60–70 unanswered letters (many with Mss., alas, including some from Eileen who has taken to writing stories—not bad either—and poems from former mistresses and proteges scattered around the Western world) and supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes. I can drop any or all of this at any time, but I find I am getting on with it, I don’t sweat—only I find myself highly intolerant and make other people sweat: I shot to pieces in the middle of Mass day before yesterday a newly ordained pipsqueak who read us a letter from an ex-priest, explaining that he could (i.e. was so broad-minded as to be able to) imagine leaving the priesthood himself, and the congregation’s comments showed that they too were really comfortable with this idea, and he & they together objected to the Shepherd sheep business, all boys together you know, well I filled the church with my unusual voice & some elementary education and departed[.] ‘Identifying’ with a professional who stood & withstood the hierarchy 20 or 30 years before resigning; nice work. And ‘The Apostolate descended’ I boomed at these pitiful do-your-thing products of the permissive society, ridiculing Authority in the house of God. ‘Only Christ’s words’ I mentioned, one of His prime roles in the Fourth Gospel, adopted from Davidic wisdom already 1000 years old. The occasion electrified everybody, I have been hearing since, and naturally I have felt some compunction until I read Psalm 20 this morning. One friend comments that not only did the congregation come to life for the first time in the year I have been putting up with (and supporting) this parish, but that young man-with-no-more-call-than-a-firefly, when in say 18 months he does consider getting out of his responsibilities, when his ‘thing’ no longer seems to him to happen to coincide with the ministry, may remember that morning, and pause. There was much more to it all, I don’t know how I launched myself on this tiresome recital.

Sarah, against all likelihood, just woke and I fed her—K’s out shopping for the christening party tomorrow (Bob Giroux’s coming fr NY tonight to stand godfather)—and: Anyway, I feel confident of carrying the novel through and then pursuing Shakespeare’s Reality from its hair-raising opening chapters through its hair-raising middle phases to its hair-raising-but-far-from unforeseen conclusion. In fact, his retirement is the second main subject of the first chapter.

I wonder if you will second my proposing Saul Bellow for the Gold Medal for Novel, of the Nat’l Inst, and Erik Erikson (author of Young Man Luther & Gandhi’s Truth, etc1238) for the Gold Medal for History. No living American historian, in my view, has been half as instructive or influential. Erikson knows what society does to men and vice versa: most writers haven’t a clue. Blessings on your enterprises and Dorothy and your tall boys and grandchildren and dogs & cats if any,

Gratefully,

w. love,

John

[Haffenden, TS]

33 Arthur Ave SE, 2 July 71

Dear Mac:

I hate to bother you with business, aestivating (maybe you are; I am working my head off). But my Programme Director—Professor Ames—says it is not his affair, nor Dean Weiss’s or even E.Z.’s, but directly your business.1239 I have a problem. Last month, running a short country-wide symposium of poets in Vermont (I’ve decided, on the basis of my unique experience there, to push Roy Basler & other officials at the Library of Congress into a second National Poetry Festival like the one that was so successful in 1962), I suddenly realized that I am dealing with seven unfinished books and have to have time free. Actually, I have seen since that it is even worse than that: there are thirteen books in question (not counting half a dozen abandoned forever), of which nine were begun at least fifteen to twenty to twenty-five years ago and many are very far advanced. Now ‘time’ is two things: 1) Money, and 2) My relation with the University. Money is no problem (thanks, tentatively, for the ‘raise’ Dean Ziebarth writes is probably in prospect for me as of the next biennium); I can get any amount of money I need—I need a good deal, I support many people—outside the University even. The trouble is teaching. I enjoy it; that’s the trouble—as the enclosed single syllabus will show you; my colleagues, frankly, do not teach this way. This Spring I gave two such courses, both new (they figure, over in the Law School, that a man is underprepared until he has given a course four times). When I observed to Bob Ames last month that I simply can’t do this any more, given my priorities, he said ‘Of course. I’ve been worried about it. At your rank, maybe you ought not to teach at all, I believe most Regents’ professors don’t’. Well, I am giving this course this Fall,—while sweating daily at an ambitious & encyclopedic novel called Recovery (about an immunologist-&-University-Professor-&-Pulitzer-winning-biographer who is in deep real trouble for his life, being in alcoholic treatment for the third time in 15 months) which my American publisher Bob Giroux (a man who does not exaggerate his opinions) called ‘marvellous’ day before yesterday, proposing a large advance. But how about next Winter & Spring quarters, and the future 3 or 4 years?

I am tempted to ask for a leave of absence without pay; but I wonder whether this is just, since teaching is only one-third of what I am paid for, the other thirds being of course Research and Public service. Now the University gets plus-strokes out of me every minute, no matter what I am doing, and in fact both my Research and Public-service functions are going on all the time whether I teach or not; these books-in-progress are part of my University contribution just as my 13 published books are, only more so since they are far more important and more general books and produced under the direct auspices of the University and the State of Minnesota. So I think I ought to remain on active status and pay.

There are many forms of teaching. What about this: instead of the one Regents’ Lecture, suppose I gave four or five, spread over next winter & Spring, drawn from my next book (after the new book of poems, called Delusions etc, the complete Ms of which Giroux took back to New York with him to ready for publication next Spring, and after the novel is finished next winter), which is called Sacrifice, a series of seven thematic studies beginning with “The Historical Personality of Christ” and “The Freedom of the Don” (Cervantes’) and concluding with “The Development of Anne Frank” and “The SST and Renunciation”.1240 These would continue at a higher level the effort begun this last Winter quarter when single-handed I revived the old (ten-year-lapsed) Humanities Forums by giving four public talks in Coffman on “The Major American Poets”. These were announced & covered in the newspapers, and all kinds of people from high-school students to priests came (and came up & asked questions afterward) besides students & faculty here: they were useful. I did them while giving a heavy large lecture-course in Christian origins and the Middle Ages, and working on Shakespeare and a long poem now finished (the nine-section Opus Dei which opens Delusions etc). There is something unreasonable about all this, I sincerely think. I took it all on myself, very gladly,—I wish to be of use, besides being grateful to the University for both my rank and salary; but now I am obliged to protect & sustain the not ordinary literary labours with which I hope to do the University further credit.

What do you think about all this, President Moos? Do you have any suggestions? I do not want to make any demands. I believe anything you may propose will be perfectly acceptable to me. Let me be clearer still: I am not dissatisfied with anything. Only my future is your official concern, as well as mine, and I wanted to put the position for you. I have omitted as much as possible—as some indication of how much, I’ll enclose a xerox of my application for a Senior Fellowship in the Humanities, from the National Endowment, for a final (fifth) version of the large psychosocial critical biography called Shakespeare’s Reality I have spent a good part of the last twenty years on, besides doing a good many other things besides giving many versions of fifteen or sixteen courses in Humanities, the Honors Seminars, and the English Department here, and doing Visiting Professorships at Berkeley and Brown, seminars at the University of Chicago, The School of Letters at Indiana, and The Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.

I’m sorry to have taken up, after all, so much of your valuable time. But maybe some of this JUNK will interest you either intellectually or psychologically (I am very weird, I know it). My best to your good lady—Kate & I were sorry that only she and not you could come to my party for Herbert Feigl, and hope that both of you will look in, some time, at our 7-lb 20″-long wonder Sarah Rebecca now three weeks old.1241 Aestivate gaily.

Yours sincerely,

PS. George Rauenhorst suddenly askt me at lunch the other day with Mr Shepherd what I wd think about the notion of beginning talks, and with whom, about separating off the top of Political Science a foundation for a new department or program in (maybe actually called) Statesmanship.1242 I said ‘Gorgeous’ and suggested you & Naftalin & Sibley and two or three others, he proposed also several media people, Shepherd warned ‘Not too many’ & we agreed. What do you think abt this? I wd feel privileged to listen.

[NYPL, MS]

6 July [1971]

A Jan. date at the Corcoran is fine w. me if acceptable to my agent, W. Colston Leigh (NYC); I’m afraid his minimum, though, is $1000—maybe we cd few him down some.

Of the stuff in this Abrams hist, Fred Hartt’s 3 vol. Michelangelo shd be important (I knew him at Columbia, undergraduates, & 10 yrs later he did good work recovering stolen artworks in post-war Europe, did a fine book ‘Lost Treasures’ upstairs here somewhere).1243 I’d like to see the folio Sistine Chapel also—(the Mondadori photos in their new Vatican Museums are v. bright)| I was working on M’s theory of art this spring—and The Law & the Prophets (I just ordered—a $50 facs. of a medieval O.T. illus’d bk in the Morgan Library—never saw it when I was working there long ago).1244 Perhaps the Braque w. Malraux’s foreword. ^Most of^ the rest sounds like JUNK.

Regards

John Berryman

The Kane came, haven’t read it yet.1245 Very sincere guy. Ever read Malraux’ Goya?1246 Delphic, & empty.

[UMN, TS]

33 Arthur Ave SE, Mpls

20 July 71

Dear Roy,

Looking up H Read’s 1962 address at the Library this morning (in order to hit a TLS reviewer who was insolent to Tate & Aiken1247) I thought: Why don’t you have another National Poetry Festival? Surely the money wd be easy to find, and one every ten years is hardly too many. I was at a symposium last month in Vermont, 8 or 9 poets from all over, and when things were drab I took it over—made everybody read what they really thought was the least despicable thing they’d ever written—nobody liked the idea but everyone did it and the place jumped—I called on poets in the audience to do the same—deep friendships developed, emulation vanished, people came up afterward with tears in their eyes. The thing in Washington was rather stuffy but there’s no need for a second one to be so. The international festivals I read at several years ago in London and Spoleto were lively—partly because of Allen Ginsberg, who may not even have been invited in 1962? ridiculous.

What about Meredith and you organizing it? He knows everybody and is a sensible man, good at administration. The three speakers then are all dead (Jarrell Frost Read): What about hauling Pound over, and Auden, and Lowell—none of whom was there nine years ago. Other poss speakers are Tate, Van Doren, Ransom—of the British, Alvarez or Spender, both of whom are often in this country.

Dead also are Delmore, Miss Bogan, Blackmur, Ogden Nash, Oscar Wms & Louis Untermeyer, others. Newly desirable: Bill Merwin, Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, James Merrill, James Tate, Leroi Jones.1248 I myself despise Creeley, Bly & Miss Levertov, and they shd be invited too. You and William will think of others, I don’t want to run anything, this is just an idea that might give a lot of good guys plus-strokes and be excellent for American culture such as it is as well as the Library. Think about it.

I hope the years are light with you, I am as busy as well myself revising one book, finishing two others, new daughter 5 wks old,

Best wishes

[UMN, TS]

Tues 28 July 71

Dearest Eileen, Working on a novel I feel out of touch with stories (the only story that’s hit me for a long time is Unamuno’s hairraising ‘St Emmanuel the Good, Martyr’ which I believe made me cry with pity) and so my judgments may not be worth anything. The reworked Sabbatical seems to me the most efficient & substantial of the four, though I don’t like your transition on page nine and I don’t ever really feel the guy as I do, once or twice, the cook in the Anniversary, P 7 e.g. That story needs a new ending and perhaps her life ought to be filled out—Flaubert’s Simple Heart (well imitated by Gertrude Stein in one of the Three Lives and beautifully imitated by Jim Power [sic] in Lions Harts Leaping Does1249—which read if you haven’t) I suppose is yr model or ought to be; it needs to be more ambitious. The off-scene husband, by the way, is almost as interesting as the on-scene lost lover; you might bring in him, though I can’t say what for. Wife dim, except in her irritability. Fr obsession w food well conveyed, can’t understand it myself. The Florida story I don’t get at all, and the shift to the husband at the end certainly won’t do. Salinger-tone of the mother-friend drinking undesirable. Girl herself not bad, but why work up toward the friend then no friend? Saw a London comedy once called Geo & Margaret, who never appear, family-chaos just has to come to an end as they are announced (at the end of each act) for dinner; more point than here.1250 The second half of the story about death-realization is far the best thing I’ve seen of yours, perhaps the only subject you’ve handled (though the waif in the dance-story sticks in my head)—opening pp need sharpening. ‘The only remaining skeleton’: you can say that again. I said it in a lecture on Poetry and Death I gave here this Spring, and yesterday a British psychiatrist Stacy Day rang up to borrow my name for a series of symposia at the University this Fall on death, by people here and brought in from elsewhere. I taught Feifel’s anthology in a seminar on The Meanings of Life two months ago—most doctors of course have never even heard of it, just as hardly any medical schools even touch on gerontology, where most of their damned students’ patients will be located.1251 Screw the medical scene and its good-for-30-days transplants. That realization happened to me at Richard’s & Helen’s once in Maine, after the rest of you had gone to bed, there’s a Dream Song about it maybe in vol II. Premonition of Death—soon among the Douglas firs—serried, noble beyond Beauty, attentive—above ten thousand feet on Pike’s Peak (where I took Paul and Martha) two weeks ago. Not unhappy about it, though ceteris paribus I wd rather finish some of the fourteen books I recently found I have in hand—most of them for many years, and not counting various others definitively abandoned. Keenest on this novel at the moment, and Shakespeare’s Reality (fifth version of the psychosocial critical biography I outlined in the Hodder & Elliston lectures), and a third long poem called The Children begun just this year. My next book of verse, Delusions etc, will be out next Spring, and then a series of thematic studies called Sacrifice.

A good deal has happened but I’m flying to Berkeley after my AA meeting tonight, to work on the novel faster alone ^and won’t detail.^ Scene here crowded. I moved my mother out from Washington into a gorgeous brandnew apartment across the street six weeks ago day before yesterday, and later that evening our new daughter was born, Sarah Rebecca, a very great beauty though Kate imagines she resembles me—does pout her lower lip before crying, as I hear I did—has learned to smile, mostly at random, some at her sister, chiefly Kate, once me; hate to leave her. Then my son was here for a while, and Kate’s sister, and the phone rings all the time and mail comes and people come and the hell with it. I want 250 pp by Labor Day. Giroux read the first 25 when he came out to be godfather to Sarah and offered a $10,000 advance, as perhaps it will be readable. Of course I am determined to produce the most powerful and shapely work of narrative art since Don Quixote—what else?—but even more, I am anxious to get a readable novel. My typist for the opening ten pages said she’d read lots of poet’s novels and ‘this doesn’t sound like one at all’, I was delighted. ‘Simple declarative sentences, John,’ Delmore once said to me when I hadn’t written to him for a long time. Only literary advice I ever got, of a general sort, worth having. Of course it’s as well to be a Jamesian too. But my prose model is Pascal—the Pléiade edition finally came and I read a section a day, con furore. The book is about an immunologist (& University Professor & Pulitzer-biographer & thrice-invited wit on the Dick Cavett show) in alcoholic treatment for the third time, Dr Alan Severance, and God help him. About 25 characters, six major, hope to hold it to four hundred pages. Target: Christmas, then six months’ revision, though I am not exactly sketching at present.

My health is better, but subject to convulsive rage (and ungovernable tenderness—I don’t know which is worse); also the mind-body bond is so tense that when Kate talked violently to me one morning several months ago I had to spend a week in hospital. That won’t happen again. I’m sleeping better, stronger with those ‘killing’ exercises as you call them, very relaxed except when moved—when a seatmate identified himself as A.P. on a plane lately I made him for five minutes wish he had never been born (he apologized then for AP’s sin against me two years ago ^wh. allowed some jerk to quote me on the floor of the House and his fellow-jerks voted out of existence an important Fed. cult. programme^)1252 and I shot to pieces one Sunday last month during Mass a pipsqueak priest just ordained who read out a letter from an ex-priest and told the congregation Yes I can identify with that (How’s that for vocation, fancying he can understand the situation of a man who has stood the hiararchy [sic] for 20 or 30 years before opting out) and then he said Of course we don’t take the Shepherd and sheep business very seriously—‘Only Christ’s words’ I said in a voice I’m surprised you didn’t hear in Manhattan, and ‘The apostolate descended’ and so on and so on and departed and I heard the discussion was heated indeed and at later Masses he was still inviting prayers for me)—me, walking madly up and down outside praying for him to come to his senses and develop from nowhere enough dedication & submission to withstand the moment when, perhaps 18 months fr now?, he catches on that maybe his life-style doesn’t really any more coincide with the Ministry of God and cop out. Well, I was grateful for the poor young man’s prayers—everyone is Heard, after all—and naturally (though I had been speaking less to him than to the congregation, who also felt very very comfortable with priests leaving the priesthood, the sweating veterans like the bishop in Rhode Island the other day) I felt guilty about the business until next morning I read in Psalm 26 ‘I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with dissemblers. I have hated the congregation..’

Dry six months today, and I will value the pin my pals will give me tonight rather more ^than^ my great heavy Regents’ Professorship medal or the National Bk Award or the honorary degree I picked up in Iowa last month. I’ve had no trouble but the once in January when, twenty minutes before I left for the airport to give the Wm Vaughn Moody thing at the University of Chicago, I opened and read an unbelievable letter from Tate—I drank for 40 hours, quit on the plane back, ran a seminar that afternoon, went into hospital for a foot operation (successful) next morning. Poor Allen retired, neglected, grandiose in Tennessee, with half a dozen lyrics to his credit (not I’m afraid the famous Ode, which suffers from characteristic inflation, also what Randall hit in Washington as ‘lack of charm, human feeling . . tone of forbidding authority’1253)—sweating with unacknowledged jealousy. Mark and Conrad (Aiken) confess to me that they too are hurting with lack of appreciation—I am bitter about this—but they are honest & unenvying. Tate used his hatred of Love & Fame as a springboard for reading me out of not only the pantheon of art but the Book of Life, accused me of every known immaturity (he didn’t read the irony in the two terms of my title at all—foreseeing, though not in him, this blindness, I drafted out while still in hospital last Fall half a dozen readings of ‘Her & It’ which I’m using as Afterword in the British edition, from which also I’ve deleted some of the worst poems) and took it upon himself to explain my life-failure as an artist. It was wonderful. Saul, to whom I showed the letter that night (I’ve shown it to noone else and will no doubt destroy it sooner or later), cursed and said ‘Predictable.’ Problem complicated by hypocrisy. The Bradstreet poem was hard enough on Tate, and his technical debt to ‘Canto Amor’ (which he imitated for 15 years during the few moments he could spare from his grandeur for verse-composition), but what really did him in morally was his public utterances about the first volume of The Dream Songs while he was despising them to our (mutual) doctor (who only told me lately) and no doubt other good friends. Allen is a very generous and corrupt man, open-hearted, wily, spiteful. I did not write down any of the replies I composed to his letter, only sent after some months an engraved card ‘You hurt me’ unsigned. Last week I explained (letter to TLS |Arthur Crook writes today he’s printing it at once|) to an insolent British reviewer who had compared him to ‘a very good pencil-sharpener’, insulting Conrad ^Aiken^ in passing, Tate’s high claims as culture-hero (Hart Crane’s indebtedness, Cal’s, mine ‘greater still’) and lyric poet. I bet he won’t like that.

Cal by the way wrote in January that Part IV of L&F was, along with Bk IV of The Dream Songs, the ‘crown of your work’ so far. I don’t agree, though the judgment effected some additions to the Selected Poems 1938–1968 I’ve done for Faber paperback, out this winter I expect after their L & F, also eight recording sessions I did this Spring for an archive here—they’re being broadcast once a week all summer, tapes will be used by an Irish recording company and I suppose Caedmon (who have been insisting I record for them in New York and do you know what they can do with it?). But the nine-part poem I spent the winter on, Opus Dei, puts the ‘Eleven Addresses’ in the shade; so Giroux agrees, only reader so far.1254

I am more or less giving up teaching—not resigning—but will do one seminar this fall: enclose the syllabus, which be dazzled by, and random lyrics. |I finally signed w. an agent too—his circular will ‘touch’ you: $1000 minimum| The David will be in The New Yorker when they get around to it.1255 Opus Dei I’m giving Silvers first look at, though I doubt if those lucky Jews (I worked hard to become a Jew myself last Fall in Hospital, the write-up in my novel will kill you laughing) can bear the open Xtianity; next to Crook & ^Ian^ Hamilton at The Times. The REAL Who’s Who just invited me in and you won’t believe this but I replied, listing my Recreations as ‘Chess, dream-analysis, ^art-history,^ |(I’ve started doing art-criticism for The New Republic)—hobby| fatherhood, star-gazing, prayer & self-flagellation’. The proof came back unaltered too. I shd have added Benevolent Tyranny: in April or so, when a poets’ symposium in Vermont (8 or 9 people from around the country) was getting nowhere I took over and made everybody read the poem of his own he thought least despicable, noone liked this idea but they all did it, ^me too,^ emulation vanished, candour flourished, deep friendships developed, and women came up to me after with tears in their eyes ‘Isn’t there any envy among poets as there is in other professions?’ Ha ha.

Well, you don’t get a letter like this every day, dear Lady Broom. What wd you like for yr birthday from the Bay Area. I’m at the Faculty Club, U of Cal, Berkeley. Blessings on yr aestivation, |where, doing what?| & love,

Dr Ex-Broom, Litt.D.

How was the Puerta del Sol? Kate 32 today—gave her a ‘high gold’ signed Steubenbowl 50 yrs old, cost less than your fur coat (Kenyon prize)

[UMN, MS]

31 Aug 71

Dear [G.]

I’m very sorry abt all your trouble, and so will Mary-Lou be when I tell her at AA tomorrow night (she is the nurse you talked to at Detox). She told me, and I felt sad that you’d slipped back. You didn’t look too good but you sounded fine on the ’bus, so I was shocked.

It’s a tough life all over. I hope the judge can help. Write again when you get a chance, pal.

You take it easy too—best,

John Berryman

The poem I’ll show to Mary-Lou; she’s been reading The Grapevine a hell of a lot longer than I have.1257 Thanks for sending it anyway. Pray for me as I will for you (Step II).

[UMN, TS]

Monday 20 Sept AD 1971

Dearest Paul,

How are you making out? As I told your mother on the phone to tell you, your best plan is to lie low and make-like-the-usual for your first term. I hope you are doing that. When you have established a reputation for ordinariness, then it will be quite soon enough to reveal that you’re not—to friends. What friends have you made already? Tell me something about your masters. Some of them are probably dopes; never mind that, your job is to learn 1) from them, and 2) on your own; use them, that is. If you are lucky you will have one or two or three outstanding ones: imitate them in everything. You are not yet in a position to be selective, your task is to accumulate, judgment will come later. Also enjoy yourself on the side.

If you need anything, let me know. I am pushed for money at the moment, but if I get East this Fall I’ll visit you. About your coming out here at Christmas, as I hope you can, we’ll have to see. Your younger sister is beautiful and amusing, she is not exactly competent yet but relevance appears here and there in her behaviour; as she peered at me from my lap before dinner night before last, I said ‘How wd you like to have a ninth-rate novelist for a father?’ and the little bitch grinned. Not at the air either. Martha is in a so-called Free School where by the latest methods she seems to be learning absolutely nothing. You might write her a note.

I finished the first third of the book last week and am exhausted & fighting depression. Wednesday afternoon I talk about Poetry to 1500 Freshmen in Northrop, competing with talks elsewhere here on Transcendental Meditation and Homosexual Marriage. Probably be the first all-straight audience of my career. I enclose you the syllabus of my Honors seminar, starts week after next.

Work like hell, son.

Your loving father,

John Berryman

Kate & Mir send love.

[Ransom, MS]

Friday Oct 8th [1971]

Dear Bob Silvers

At last. I can’t do any more to it. Maybe worthless.

Will you tell Elizabeth for me that her Plath piece is the most brilliant I have ever seen on that tough subject & maybe her finest so far.1258 I forgive her the poetry-readings crack at Cal & me, wish her love. A hard hard life all over.

Good luck

John B.

[Haffenden, TS]

21 Oct 1971

Dear Sally,

Rereading just now, after many months, your tree-poem, I like it better, and I’m delighted anyway that Doubleday have seen their way to doing it.1259 I know of no work quite like it, for the unfolding organic feminine attentive realization of a natural object, both direct & associative. Rilke entered on things in a similar way but not at this length. |You might tell Doubleday they can use this, or part of it.|

Yes I finished Opus Dei, it took all winter and almost finished me. Some people like some parts. It opens a volume DELUSIONS etc due next June. I couldn’t care less. 172 pages of a novel since April, and other things, have laid me low, dear friend.

We have a new baby, Sarah Rebecca, five months old. She turned over, recently, taking ten minutes to do it, and the terrain (my bed) was favourable, and I don’t believe she intended to; but she did it. Martha will be nine in a month and I will be 57 next week—as she reminds me daily—and I wonder merely whether 57 can be as convulsive as 56. They are very beautiful children. My son Paul entered Andover this fall where he is learning Russian. In a moment of phantasy last summer I bought an 8-inch reflecting telescope to scrutinize the glories of God and I am trying to sell it back, partly because the glories of God include my anguish yesterday when my mother (whom perh you remember) told me that 3 doctors have given her ‘6 months to a year’ to live and then discovering that my wife simply didn’t believe her at all but thinks she is anesthetizing me for ^even now more^ extravagant over-spending (I moved her & all her possessions out fr. Washington last June into an apartment across the street that costs far more than our house—etc)

—love,

John

[Yale, MS]

Thurs. 21st [October 1971]

Dear Robert—

Many thanks for yr trouble & help—also for Spring Shade, which I began (crushed however by ^medical^ news fr. my mother, which however Kate doesn’t believe—what a world) at both ends.1260 It’s much longer than the Selected Poems I made up for Faber last year; but then you’ve been at this frantic trade longer. At some point last Spring I began, willynilly, a 3rd Poem—called The Children, in 5 Books, maybe 200 pp.—which might possibly answer the wish I remember you expressed in the Advocate.1261 Time, money, pressures, |(weight, I am down to 140, less than I weighed at 16)| all make it doubtful. Your god-daughter Twissie has constructed a HUT of blankets in Kate’s great chair across the room, and it heaves—no school today—her violin produces horrid sounds, ^beautiful as she is^—‘sleeping over’ w. girlfriends is existential, and she has been reminding me for weeks of my birthday (ah, but who cares?) Monday. Can 57 be worse than 56?

‘Let me wiggle it out.

You’ll get a bigger one there, & bite’1262—the lines Sally prodded me into in Ct. so long ago. ‘For of it we are no way curious’1263

love,

John

The Odys. lines are ackn’d (if I keep the poem) in a pref. note. Excellent lines.

[Yale, MS]

23 Oct 71

Dear Mrs Hodgson1264

You must be a wonderful woman, to have cherished for so long such a marvellous man. I never knew he drank, till Jim Wright’s poem ten minutes ago:1265 most of us do, I only quit last winter (to plunge into other savage troubles) and my last news of Jim, some weeks ago, was of his being—again—in terrible drunken shape in Vermont last Spring—this from a young poet who is doing a book on me and lauded Wright’s new collection in The N.Y. Times Bk Rev. & mirabile dictu does not drink.1266 I’m honoured you noticed my Song. It stands last in the 385-section The Dream Songs and has had enough attention to send many readers to your fine husband anew or even afirst. I wish I had gone to see him when I spent some months in Cincinnati twenty years ago; ^I tho’t of it but we had no car.^ I’ve been quoting his poems on 2 or 3 continents for longer than that. Thank you for the leaflets, I’ll send the extras to Mark Van Doren in Ct., Robt Lowell (who just had a new baby—a son!) in London, |(my new baby is a girl)| and William Meredith—all able poets and of course admirers of his.

Yours v. gratefully & admiringly,

John Berryman

The break in line 5 is after ‘knew’—‘such things’ being l. 6. I suppose you took it fr. Life mag., where Miss Howard had it merely fr. dictation, the 2nd vol. of the poem not then having appeared.1267

[UMN, MS]

25 Oct 1971

Dear Pável Gevánovich,

You already know more than I do,—I’m glad you like the Russian & English masters and are making friends. Thanks for your excellent letter. You sound as if you are in a room alone? Nobody at South Kent was.

Oscar Williams (the editor of your ‘Immortal Poems’) was a friend of mine from 1939! till he died recently in hospital in New York.1268 For years he put me in his anthologies, then he left me out, then he put me back in—I never paid much attention to his whims, I liked him & was sorry for him. Luckily somebody wrote me he was very ill, & where, and I telephoned from here several days before his death. He cried. He was a weird little man with bushy hair & big eyes, very excitable, hopelessly romantic, so fond of the mistress (Gene Derwood), whom he finally married, that once he included more poems by her than by Thomas Hardy—whom you ought to read.—My doctor (one of them) & his wife, old friends, are coming to eat cake tonight for my birthday—I am 57 on this grey day.

Kate says she hopes everybody is very good to you (whatever that’s for). Sarah can almost sit up. Martha makes unfortunate sounds with her violin. I’ll write more cheerfully next time.

Dearest love

John Berryman

[NYPL, TS]

30 Oct [1971]

Dear William,

It is awful of me not to have written—yes we smiled at your poem, both delighted by your unusually comingout handling of the relation betw the friends—but I hated to share such panic as has been going on. Both of us, from different directions, have been menaced by developments here. ^Also:^ A year ago I turned down without ceremony a Distinguished Professorship at the City U of NY (Bklyn) at a permanent $35,000 a year—or maybe w increases, I forget—anyway, later the City didn’t grant the creations—but now I might consider it. 1) The Minn legislature cut the U’s budget to hell, and staff-shortage is such that the relieved-teaching-load I was promist, as Regents’ Professor, isn’t possible—so my literary work is stalled. 2) After 16 yrs of teaching mostly interdisciplinary courses—Great Bks & History of Ideas—I’d be glad to go back to dealing with literature alone or just poetry even & poss. fiction & drama. 3) I feel isolated. If I cd see even just you & Giroux occas’y I’d feel more human. If you hear of anything on the East Coast for somebody ‘top-drawer’ (Dick Wilbur’s word last week for my long Opus Dei), or can quietly nose out anything, please do let me hear. I confess I don’t know where, w Robt F & Eliz B at Harvard, Warren & Hollander (x) at Yale, poets elsewhere, etc.

Extreme depression, 57 last Monday, a new will Thurs, 18 lb underweight, money-ghastliness (Mother has cost me & is costing a fortune, Paul’s at Andover, relatives & friends aren’t repaying me, etc), you name it. Proofs came yest’y of the Sel’d Poems 1938–68 I finally did for Faber, and I can hardly bear to look at them. Novel halted at p 173. I’ve not heard yet fr the National Endowment (or whatever—the Shakespeare fellowship) and don’t expect it. Of course I’ll be pleased to wave yr flag at them for yr v modest request, and all luck.

Love

John

Herewith, & thanks—

I’m very sorry I forgot. No good at money.

[UMN, MS]

Monday [late November 1971]

Dearest Paul—

Herewith. I hope you enjoyed Vosnesensky. Did he read the poem ‘Anti-worlds’? Dick Wilbur has a brilliant translation of it in his last volume Walking to Sleep.

I march off into the snow to listen to 18 Honors students, all pre-professional (6 law, 1 med., 6 teaching, 2 writers, a composer, a painter) misunderstand H. James’s novel The American.

Flourish!

In haste,

love,

John Berryman

[UMN, MS]

Xmas 71

Delighted abt the coming reprints—I hope you are working on a new novel, tho’ I spent a rare happy envying evening last month with your essays.1269 It is high time, my boy, for the one ‘that will beat Bellow.’ He’s half through one on our tragic & beloved Delmore Schwartz. I wasted eight months this year on a novel myself, 220 pp of it, and have nothing good to say for myself at all except affection to you. We had a baby, Sarah Rebecca, in June—a beauty.

John

Kate says Hi! Be merry w. Marion.1270