John Berryman

I just read an astonishing interview with the poet John Berryman in the 1972 Paris Review #53, available here. It includes some analysis of his method, particularly in relation to the writing of the definitive Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and 77 Dream Songs, and this spills over again and again into colorful, passionate accounts of his life, his loves, his breakdowns and hospitalizations, his religious conversion (to "the idea of a God of rescue"), his love of Yeats, his friendships with Delmore Schwarz and Dylan Thomas, his teaching crisis in the critical period after the Kent State riots, his opinions vis-a-vis fame or an indifferent public, poetic gifts vs. achievements, confessional poetry, suicide, ambition, group therapy, scholarship, female characters in literature etc, and a whole slew of references and anecdotes, all fascinating in their way, to or about fellow writers, his influences, mentors, colleagues and friends, from Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Eliot, Whitman, Housman, Freud, Shakespeare, Augustine and Pascal. But its not just the wealth of detail that makes the interview so remarkable, packed as it is. It's Berryman's wonderful voice. He comes across as cultivated, balanced, authentic, and passionate, a man you wish you could meet and can hardly believe is the same person as the intimidating, fire-breathing workshop demon described by Stephen Spender, nor the legendary alcoholic or even the tragic suicide he shortly proved to be. Then again, he descibes his process in somewhat terrifying terms, terms which seek to make a virtue of what must have been in fact an excruciating experience. "The artist is extremely lucky", he maintains, "who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business", adding, in case we weren't sure of his commitment, "I hope to be nearly crucified." That his ordeal ultimately dragged him over these imagined limits has been, I think, our great loss.