“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”
—ANNE SEXTON
By the time the poet John Berryman (1914–1972) checked into New York City’s Chelsea Hotel in 1953, he had already checked out of life. He was separated from his wife and was quickly drinking his way through his savings. He first started drinking heavily six years earlier, in the midst of an extramarital affair. Overcome by guilt, he became, by his recollection, “murderous and suicidal.” He heard voices. He made “passes at women drunk, often successful.”
After eleven years of marriage, his wife finally left him in 1953. Berryman, drunk and alone in New York City, wrote to her that he was thinking of jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. He worried that he might hit someone or splatter on the pavement, though if that didn’t happen and his body went quietly into the river, no one would be burdened with the cost of burial. He ended the letter by asking her to talk to him when she was next in New York—if he was still alive, of course.
When Berryman returned to the hotel from a visit to Princeton on November 5, 1953, a note was waiting for him at the Chelsea’s front desk: his friend Dylan Thomas was in the hospital. Berryman rushed to St. Vincent’s and stood vigil until one in the morning. Berryman would have stayed longer, but he had a lecture to give at Bard College the next day. At a post-lecture party near the campus, he waited near the telephone for word from the hospital of Thomas’s condition. If Thomas died, poetry would die with him! Berryman drunkenly wailed.
At the end of the weekend, Berryman again checked in on his friend after visiting hours on November 8. Thomas was still unconscious. When Berryman visited St. Vincent’s the next day close to one o’clock in the afternoon, Thomas was dead. Berryman ran from the room, hysterical at the sight of his friend’s lifeless body.
“Dylan murdered himself w. liquor, though it took years,” Berryman wrote to their mutual friend Robert Lowell, a visiting professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Although he clearly saw how alcohol had killed Thomas, Berryman lacked the insight to recognize that he was headed down the same path. “Something can (and has) been said for sobriety, but very little,” he wrote.
Lowell recommended that Berryman take his place at the university after the fall semester, and, amidst Berryman’s grieving over his friend’s death, the director, Paul Engle, called Berryman to offer him the job. He accepted. He would once again have some direction in his life. It would also take his mind off his estranged wife, Lowell hinted, as the “best students there were really hot.”
In 1954, a middle-aged housewife and mother of two was hospitalized following her first manic episode. The next year—after a string of nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts—the woman landed in the care by Dr. Martin Orne, who would change the course of her life with a simple suggestion. The doctor asked his patient if there was anything she thought she was good at.
“Prostitution,” she said.
Dr. Orne disregarded her flippant remark and suggested instead that she write as part of her therapy.
Her analyst’s couch was a fitting place for Anne Sexton (1928–1974) to begin her career. She used her poetry to grapple with her demons—mental illness, her incestuous family relationships, the pressures of keeping a middle-class household running in the 1950s and 1960s. Her poetry was not only confessional but also confrontational: “Menstruation at Forty” combated middle-aged female sexuality head-on, while other poems covered topics such as adultery, abortion, and female masturbation. Her work was accepted at The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, making an instant star of the formerly unknown housewife.
While she enjoyed the success, Sexton worried that she was a failure as both a mother and a wife. Her eldest daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, recalled that “I wanted to cuddle in her lap, but she wanted to concentrate. In desperation she would put on a record or set me down in front of the television and go back to her desk.” Anne Sexton told her psychiatrist, “Any demand is too much when I’m like this. I want her to go away, and she knows it.”
Part of Sexton’s problem was that she was addicted to sleeping pills, which she dubbed her “kill-me” pills. “There’s a difference between taking something that will kill you and something that will kill you momentarily,” she told Dr. Orne. She risked overdose with the massive amounts of Nembutal that she took nightly, but she figured she had no choice. “I ought to stop taking these pills, but I’d be in a state of panic,” she told a friend in 1963.
She was probably right.
The next year, Sexton was prescribed Thorazine for her mania. Unfortunately, the mind-numbing sedative left her unable to concentrate. She went off the drug in order to write, which increased her risk of bipolar episodes. Although she once wrote, “Poetry led me by the hand out of madness,” it was clear that her continued pursuit of her art form led her back into madness.
She upped her intake of alcohol and sleeping pills to control her mood swings. In her poem “The Addict,” she wrote that she was an athlete training her body, “staying in shape” for her eventual suicide. Still, even as she struggled to keep her mind and household together, her work became increasingly popular. It was excerpted in Cosmopolitan and Playboy and won a Pulitzer Prize. She was readily acknowledged as the next Dylan Thomas or John Berryman. Critics had no way of knowing just how right their comparisons were.
“Whisky and ink, whisky and ink. These are the fluids John Berryman needs,” began the July 1967 Life magazine story that solidified the Berryman legend in the popular imagination. “He needs them to survive and describe the thing that sets him apart from other men and even from other poets: his uncommonly, almost maddeningly penetrating awareness of the fact of human mortality. . . . His consumption of alcohol is prodigious and so is his writing.”
The reporter, Jane Howard, spent a rainy afternoon with Berryman at a Dublin pub. “When he first walked in, he didn’t know a single soul there, but in short order he was the spellbinding—and exhilarated—friend of all,” she wrote, captivated by the bearded poet of the people. Berryman not only drank like a real man, but he made writing sound, well, cool. “Writing is just a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to make it come out right,” he said.
At the time of the interview, Berryman was on his third wife, a woman twenty-five years his junior. He’d made her legally change her name from Kathleen to Kate. Why? Why not! “I should know women—I’ve been married to three of them, and had dozens of affairs,” he bragged to the interviewer. He worried about going to teach at an all-girls school because he would fall in love with his students too easily. “That would be bothersome for Kate,” he said. He also worried that his daughter might also become a poet, because, in his words, “Lady poets are mostly spinsters or lesbians.”
“He sweats a lot and swears a lot. Sometimes he plunges into silent, private gloom,” the reporter wrote. “Sometimes he won’t eat. Even the most succulent of steaks grow cold before him.” It was an unflattering portrait, but what was left on the cutting-room floor was even more unflattering.
The reporter failed to mention, for instance, that on the evening Berryman first arrived in Iowa City on February 4, 1954, to start his new job, he got drunk and fell down the stairs of his apartment and through a half-glass door. He broke his left wrist in the fall. Likewise, there was no mention of Berryman’s firing, which happened the next September after he argued with a colleague, got stinking drunk, yelled obscenities at his landlord, and spent the night in jail after shitting on the landlord’s porch.
The University of Minnesota, another Big Ten school, quickly scooped him up after his embarrassing exit from Iowa, and it was in Minneapolis where he wrote the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning The Dream Songs.
Still, his struggles continued in Minnesota and on sabbatical in Ireland. Berryman went in and out of hospitals for treatment of his alcoholism. He complained of memory loss and struggled to write even an eight-line stanza most days. It’s not difficult to see why he had trouble doing any sustained writing: he was drinking a quart of whiskey a day on binges that often lasted for several months at a time.
He never seemed to fully grasp the nature of his addiction until he was in his fifties, when he was well on his way to drinking himself to the grave. Alcoholism was a game: his wife hid bottles from him, and he in turn hid bottles from her. When he was told by a doctor he had no choice but to quit drinking, Berryman told the doctor not to worry: he had things under control. He planned to write prose for a few months, which he deemed less exhaustive to his nervous system than poetry.
In a letter to his father, he blamed his alcoholism on “the way Americans mistreated their poets.” America could drive anyone out of their skull, he told a reporter—and this was especially true for poets, who had “every right to be disturbed.” In another letter, he called his hospitalizations “payment” for his poetry.
Like Hemingway, the truth of Berryman’s life was that it wasn’t easy being such a man’s man. At his heart, Berryman was little more than a frightened child. “We have reason to be afraid,” he said. “This is a terrible place, but we have to exert our wills. I wake up every morning terrified.”
When Berryman learned of Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, he remarked that the “poor son of a bitch” had finally blown “his fucking head off.” Berryman was further dismayed when Lowell’s former student, Sylvia Plath, killed herself two years later.
Plath, who had never struggled with substance abuse but once wrote that she could see herself becoming an alcoholic if “given the chance,” nevertheless succumbed to the same darkness that Berryman was fighting. In September 1962, Plath separated from her husband after she discovered he was having an affair. Less than five months later, Plath asphyxiated herself while her children slept, leaving behind a small body of work, including the novel The Bell Jar.
Anne Sexton was less sympathetic than Berryman upon hearing the news of Plath’s suicide. “That death was mine!” she complained to her psychiatrist.
Almost nine years after Plath’s suicide, Berryman would take his own life. On January 6, 1972, after eleven months of sobriety—the longest since he had begun drinking some thirty years earlier—he bought a bottle of whiskey and drank half of it. He called in sick to his AA meeting. The next morning, Berryman walked to the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis and climbed a five-foot barrier. Students on their way to their morning classes began to form a crowd. He waved to them without turning around and dove off the bridge onto the rocks below on the banks of the frozen Mississippi River. He was fifty-seven. His widow found a suicide note scribbled on the back of an envelope in the trash:
O my love Kate, you did all you could.
I’m unemployable & a nuisance.
Forget me, remarry, be happy.
Two years later, Anne Sexton donned her mother’s fur coat, poured herself a glass of vodka, and locked herself in her garage inside her running car. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
While both Plath and Sexton are Pulitzer Prize winners, Plath is fixed in the popular imagination as the pretty, thirty-year-old poet on the verge of mainstream success. As Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, Plath is an “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic.” Sexton, by contrast, grew into middle-age and experienced a longer career of ups and downs. She has led a far less exciting posthumous life, relegated to the pages of poetry anthologies and subjected to allegations that she molested her own daughter.
Poetry is still read and studied, but its cultural relevance peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. “What ended that was Bob Dylan,” former music journalist Elizabeth Wurtzel tells me. “What is a better way to reach a person besides music? Up until Bob Dylan, songwriting wasn’t confessional.” This wasn’t a cultural shift that went undiscussed by the confessional poets, who felt the need to defend their territory. Anne Sexton formed a jazz-rock group, Her Kind, which backed her as she read her poetry. A Boston Globe review of a 1969 concert by Sexton and Her Kind praised the group for its “deep and moving work about insanity, lost love, death and life. The Jordan Hall audience loved them, and so will you for what they can tell you about yourself and your happy, hurting life.” The reviewer noted, however, that Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) had largely stolen the audience for poetry—“and ever since the poets have been trying to get it back.”
For a while, poets and songwriters coexisted on the national stage. In the 1970s, Allen Ginsberg toured with Bob Dylan. Some poets could see the writing on the wall and refused to give ground. Berryman, who never forgave Zimmerman for “stealing” his friend Dylan Thomas’s name, called Bob Dylan a young upstart. Berryman said the singer’s poetry was decent; now “all he had to do was learn how to sing.”