John Berryman - Life and Career

Life and Career

John Berryman was born and raised in Oklahoma until the age of 10, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha, who was a schoolteacher, moved to Tampa, Florida. In 1926, in Florida, when the poet was twelve, his father shot and killed himself. Berryman was haunted by his father's suicide for the rest of his life and would later write about his struggle to come to terms with it in his book The Dream Songs. In "Dream Song #143," he wrote, "That mad drive wiped out my childhood. I put him down/while all the same on forty years I love him/stashed in Oklahoma/besides his brother Will." In "Dream Song #145," he also wrote the following lines about his father:

he only, very early in the morning,
rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window
and did what was needed.

I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong
& so undone. I've always tried. I–I'm
trying to forgive
whose frantic passage, when he could not live
an instant longer,in the summer dawn
left Henry to live on.

After his father's death, the poet's mother remarried another banker who was also named John, and they moved to New York City. Her new husband's last name was Berryman, and the poet took this last name, giving him the same exact name as his stepfather. Around this time, Berryman's mother also changed her first name from Martha to Jill (at the request of her new husband). Although his stepfather would later divorce his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms. With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him away to a private boarding school in Connecticut (South Kent School). Then Berryman went on to college at Columbia College where he studied with the literary scholar Mark Van Doren. Berryman would later credit Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously. For two years, Berryman also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, awarded by Columbia. He graduated in 1936.

Regarding Berryman's earliest success in the field of poetry, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry editors note that "Berryman's early work formed part of a volume entitled Five Young American Poets, published by New Directions in 1940." One of the other young poets included in the book was Randall Jarrell.

Berryman would soon publish some of this early verse in his first book, also with New Directions Publishing, simply titled Poems, in 1942. However, his first mature book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates. The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Randall Jarrell who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent " whose poetry in The Dispossessed was too derivative of W.B. Yeats. Berryman would later concur with this assessment of his early work, stating, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats."

In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris while he was still married to his first wife, Eileen. He documented the affair with a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing, in part, because publication of the sonnets would have revealed the affair to his wife. However, he did eventually decide to publish the work, titled Berryman's Sonnets, in 1967, having long since divorced his first wife. The work included over a hundred sonnets.

In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer Stephen Crane whom he greatly admired. This book was followed by his next significant book of poems, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), which featured illustrations by the artist Ben Shahn and was Berryman's first book to receive "national attention" and a positive response from critics. In blurbs for the book, Edmund Wilson called the title poem "the most distinguished long poem by an American since T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and the poet Conrad Aiken praised the shorter poems in the book which he thought were actually better than "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet."

Despite the relative success of his third book of verse, Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred after he published 77 Dream Songs in 1964. The book won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and solidified Berryman's standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz. Soon afterwards, Berryman started receiving a great deal of national attention from the press, from arts organizations, and even from the White House which sent him an invitation to dine with President Lyndon Johnson (though Berryman had to decline because he was in Ireland at the time). Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, and that same year Life magazine ran a feature story on him. Also, that year the newly created National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a ten thousand dollar grant (though he admitted, when asked about the award by a Minneapolis reporter, that he had never heard of the organization before).

Berryman also continued to work on the "dream song" poems at a feverish pace and published a second, significantly longer, volume entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, in 1968. This book won the National Book Award for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize. The following year Berryman republished 77 Dreams Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest as one book titled The Dream Songs. In the dream song poems, Berryman used the character of "Henry" to serve as his alter ego, but in his next book of poems, Love & Fame (1970), he dropped the mask of Henry to write more plainly about his life. Responses to the book from critics and most of Berryman's peers ranged from tepid, at best, to hostile; now the book is generally "considered a minor work." The character of Henry reappeared in a couple of poems published in Delusions Etc., (1972), Berryman's last book, which focused on his religious concerns and his own spiritual rebirth. The book was published posthumously and, like its predecessor, Love & Fame, it is considered a minor work.

Berryman taught or lectured at a number of universities including University of Iowa (in their Writer's Workshop), Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Minnesota, where he spent the majority of his career, except for his sabbatical year in 1962-3, when he taught at Brown University. Some of his illustrious students included W. D. Snodgrass, William Dickey, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Robert Dana, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, and Henri Coulette. Philip Levine stated, in a recorded interview from 2009, that Berryman took his class extremely seriously and that "he was entrancing. . .magnetic and inspiring and very hard on work. . . he was the best teacher that I ever had." Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord led to him being arrested, jailed overnight, and fined for disorderly conduct and public intoxication. He turned to his friend, the poet Allen Tate, who helped him get his teaching job at the University of Minnesota.

Berryman was married three times. And according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, he lived turbulently. During one of the many times he was hospitalized in order to detox from alcohol abuse, in 1970, he experienced what he termed "a sort of religious conversion." According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Berryman experienced "a sudden and radical shift from a belief in a transcendent God. . .to a belief in a God who cared for the individual fates of human beings and who even interceded for them." Nevertheless, Berryman continued to abuse alcohol and to struggle with depression, as he had throughout much of his adult life, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he killed himself by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota onto the west bank of the Mississippi River.