Youth
Time was we liked our poets young. From the classical age to the Romantics the ideas of poetry and youth were hopelessly intertwined. Whether it is because we associate youth with our headiest feelings or because there have been times — and the first half of the twentieth century was one of those times — when bad boy poets reigned like rock stars over a popular culture that actually thought about, and cared about, poetry. Now it’s hard to even summon the name of a living poet who has much cultural clout, and the ones who come to mind after a little prodding are well ripened: John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, maybe, or Louise Glück? That there was an age when poets roamed the earth making sexual conquests, wreaking havoc, and making headlines seems as remote as the Stone Age.
Eileen Simpson’s 1982 memoir of her early marriage to poet John Berryman, Poets in Their Youth, takes its epigraph from another poet who was both famous when young and obsessed with youth: William Wordsworth. His lines: “We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” This is certainly and sadly true of the main poets Simpson chronicles in her book; Berryman, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, and more peripherally Randall Jarrell, all started their careers young, fresh, full of promise, and enamored with poetry and each other. To read her book is not to make the complete trip to despondency and madness, however. She married Berryman in 1942; by 1953 they were separated (he had had many affairs, among them a highly public one which led to a renowned sonnet sequence) and divorced in 1956. His suicide, by jumping from a bridge into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in 1972, occurred two wives, several hospitalizations, many poems, many projects (finished and unfinished), and many, many drinks after they had parted.
Simpson’s book, along with several of Berryman’s — 77 Dream Songs, Berryman’s Sonnets, The Complete Dream Songs, and a new selection of his poems, The Heart Is Strange — are being reissued this fall in honor of Berryman’s hundredth birthday. The value of his poems is obvious, but the value in Simpson’s book is in chronicling the best and closest years of this circle and deserves some explanation. She has been accused of being naive, of telling only a partial truth, but what other kind of truth is a memoirist capable of telling? On the whole, Simpson’s book is absorbing and transporting, one of the best windows we have back to a significant and somewhat magical time.
The origin story of Poets is worth telling, as Simpson was not a writer until years after she and Berryman parted. When they were married, she did secretarial work to support his poetry habit, though he did some teaching as well and worked obsessively with the help of a Rockefeller Grant on an annotated version of King Lear, which he never finished. Simpson started the memoir as a project many years after her split from Berryman. She wrote:
The book had its genesis when I was a graduate student in psychology. I had been struggling to find an interesting project for a thesis. One day, in the middle of a class on the Rorschach inkblot test, our professor was bemoaning the fact that there were no studies of creative people, especially poets, because they’re so hard to approach and so reluctant to be tested.
The idea of giving Rorschach tests to poets is amusing enough, but Simpson sounds earnest here, as she generally does in the memoir. Her excitement at getting her subjects to agree is palpable too:
It was a bit tricky, because I wasn’t sure they would cooperate — they were tremendously suspicious of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, though some of them went through it themselves at one time or another. To my surprise and delight, all of them — Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, W. S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and of course John Berryman — agreed to talk to me.
As she proceeds with the project, however, she realizes psychology might not be the right approach to writing about the poets. It was too clinical, and lacked the language to tell her story. Simpson needed a bigger toolbox to build her book. Psychology informs Poets in crucial ways, though. Simpson can’t help putting her subjects on the couch: one of her chapters is called “Analysands All.” And she uses Freud’s method on herself, quite productively: “I found that the best way to stimulate a memory of the past was to assume the position of a person being psychoanalyzed — to lie on a couch and associate freely, just as a patient does during an analytical hour.” Thus Simpson reconstructs her past, their shared past, like one would do for an analyst. The results are, like psychotherapy, a mixed bag of revelations, pathology, and banality. Yet even the banal can be fascinating, as psychoanalysts and poets know, for what it reveals about a person’s inner life.
Pathology
Robert Giroux, editor and friend of Berryman and Lowell, told the Paris Review that the two poets had something crucial in common: bad mothers. The answer, interestingly, was not to a question about their backgrounds but to one about their reputations as “‘difficult’ authors.” Giroux said, “Both poets had problem mothers, who caused greater difficulties than their sons’ illnesses.” He elaborated by telling anecdotes about each woman. After he contracted Lowell for Lord Weary’s Castle, Mrs. Lowell called Giroux and asked, “Is Bobby any good?” Giroux assured her that he was, and she proceeded to ask, “Will his books make money?” When Giroux said few poets make much money at the start of their careers, Mrs. Lowell answered with a smug, “I thought so.” The dramatic irony here is that Lord Weary was a raging success, earning Lowell a spread in Life magazine and a Pulitzer. In fact, the picture of the very handsome Lowell “was so attractive that a Hollywood agent asked if he would agree to a screen test. Lowell was amused,” Giroux reports, “but I advised him not to tell his mother about movie-star possibilities.” (Giroux does not add but implies it might have given her fantasies of her son making movie-star money.) Simpson agreed with Hollywood’s assessment:
I felt about those writers the way other young women of that age felt about movie stars. I was dazzled by their learning, their wit and their charm. Oh, those people were so seductive! Remember, too, that I was writing about them in the ‘gladness’ of their youth. The problems came later — the breakdowns and the chaos in their lives. If I had met them for the first time when they were older I’m sure I wouldn’t have found them so attractive.
The tall, awkward Berryman would never be courted by Hollywood. Equal parts poet and scholar (he once said, “I masquerade as a poet. Actually I am a scholar”), he was shy and awkward in the company of people other than his fellow poets, especially as a young man. As for his mother, Jill (everyone called her Jill), she was part drama queen and part career woman. Berryman’s childhood was tumultuous: his mother, who had a terrible fear of heights, told Simpson that John used to “terrorize her” as a boy by climbing the derricks near their home in Oklahoma. But really, she inflicted the terrors that would make Berryman a depressed and anxious man. Foremost among them was her capriciousness: she fell “madly and irrevocably” in love with another man, Bob Kerr, while still married to Allyn Smith, John’s biological father. Allyn, whose business was also failing, moved the family to Florida. A year later he was dead: the circumstances of his suicide when Berryman was 12 remain muddy. There is a confusing story about him threatening to drown himself in the Gulf and taking one of his sons with him — whether it was John or his younger brother, Bob, or both depended on how Jill told the story that day. What is irrefutable is that “early one morning, he got out his gun and put a bullet through his head,” as Berryman told Simpson. Simpson’s reaction is predictably psychological: “Throughout the narration he had behaved, as I told him, as if he were confessing a crime he had committed, as if he had been responsible for his father’s death. Shame and culpability were what he clearly felt. Why?”
This is one of the great mysteries, if not the great one, of Berryman’s life. It comes up in his poems, in his unfinished novel, Recovery, and even in his name. Berryman was his stepfather’s surname; Jill quickly remarried the older and successful John Berryman after Allyn Smith’s death. “A good name for a poet, isn’t it?” Berryman told Simpson. “Well, it’s a damn lie. My real name is ludicrously unpoetic. It is Smith. John Smith.” By changing his name, did Berryman aid in killing his father, or at least in cutting off whatever legacy he might have had by having a well-known poet as a son? He certainly felt guilty about it. He told Simpson: “This act of disloyalty I will never, ever be able to repair. To ‘make a name’ for myself . . . Can you see how ambivalent my feelings are about this ambition?” Jill disputed John’s straightforward account of her first husband’s suicide. As she told Simpson: “You see, Allyn was a weak man. He wouldn’t have had the courage to kill himself.” Simpson writes, trying to make sense of it all, “In the years to come I realized the circumstances of her first marriage were part of an ever-changing myth she periodically reworked, usually in response to her older son’s longing to be convinced that she was not responsible for driving his father to suicide.” Berryman did blame Jill for his father’s actions, and as he got older and angrier she played more and more skilled games with him. Upon the elder Berryman’s business failing, Jill took a job in advertising, where she was quite successful, but because she didn’t want her colleagues to know how old she was when John or Bob visited she insisted they be called her younger brothers. This reinforced Berryman’s notion of his mother as a liar, an unreliable narrator of the past.
Marriage
All of these poets have devastating poems about marriage — most were quite practiced, if not expert, at it. Lowell and Berryman each married three times; Schwartz twice. The marriages in Poets range from mildly dysfunctional to downright torturous. As pronounced as the problems in the marriages is the constant gossip about them. Simpson found the poets’ habit of gossiping to be quite helpful, though, in writing her memoir. “They loved it. When one of them began an affair or won a prize or had a breakdown, the news traveled fast among the others. If you listened, as I did, you heard the stories more than once, and repetition deepens the memory grooves.” In fact, it is Simpson’s position as a listener which helps make her book as rich as it is: their habit of constant talk “made me a very attentive listener. I was the shy one in that group; although the poets weren’t much older than I was, they seemed much older—they were so articulate. They also had big egos and were big talkers; they weren’t unhappy to have someone listening to everything they said.” This is apparent in Simpson’s opening scene, in which Berryman introduces her to his friend and fellow poet, Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz is garrulous, brilliant, and odd; he makes Simpson switch seats with him at the dinner table so he can have his back to the wall. Privately to Simpson, Berryman is slightly disparaging of Schwartz’s early success. Better, he tells her, to do it in Yeats’ way, a “long slow development, the work getting better.” “One didn’t want success to come too early, or too generously. Precocity was an enemy of promise,” he said, urging her to read Cyril Connolly’s book of that name.
Berryman gave Simpson many reading assignments to prepare her for her role as poet’s wife. The Faber editions of both Eliot and Pound were critical, for starters. More important, though, was Berryman’s instinct that Simpson would understand and support him.
Crucial to our relationship was his discovery early on that while reading Keats and Byron and Shelley (though not Spenser, Milton, or Wordsworth) in college, I had, in some wooly way, come to believe that poetry was the most powerful and mysterious form of writing. To be the ‘helpmate’ (wasn’t that the word we undergraduates used in the student cafeteria, talking of such things?) to a poet would be the most interesting and useful way for a woman to spend her life.
How to read Simpson here? Is this one of her more naive moments, or is there a twinge of sarcasm and self-loathing lurking beneath her words? Yes, it’s 1941, but this was written by a much older woman looking back on her younger self. It’s hard not to see this as self-flagellating (and possibly alluding to Berryman’s famous poem about one particular “helpmate,” Anne Bradstreet), given the marriage that resulted.
Berryman and Simpson were happy, for a time. Their early years were characterized by money problems (Berryman, extremely profligate, was already in debt when they met) and moving to where he could get work in the lean teaching years of the war — first in Boston, then in New York, and finally in Princeton. Princeton, though, is where Berryman started to drink in earnest. This was the period when he had stopped teaching and begun work on a biography of Stephen Crane (not Hart!) that would severely test his mettle. Berryman was always obsessive and ambivalent about work, as Simpson shrewdly observed and as he also admitted to himself. No sooner would he start a project than he would plunge into it head-on; then, out of fear or cowardice or self-doubt, he would just as quickly back away. It was during the years working on Crane that he started therapy, which Simpson hoped would help him get over his affair that inspired the sonnets and get on with his work, and their lives:
Our marriage had survived a ‘nightmare.’ Now his drinking, emotional turmoil, stalling about work, irresponsibility about earning a living — he felt sure we would be able to recapture the happiness of our first years together. We had been happier than any couple we knew, and would be again.
To be the happiest couple they knew, though, was still to be a fairly unhappy couple indeed: Delmore Schwartz and his wife, Gertrude Buckman, split soon after the Berrymans married. Gertrude then became the other woman in a love triangle with Robert Lowell and his wife, Jean Stafford — all beautifully and lightly fictionalized in Stafford’s late story, “An Influx of Poets,” about a summer when they hosted most of the characters in Poets in their house in Maine. Stafford was drinking so much she barely noticed her old friend (here called Minnie) making a play for her husband, and in the book when they make plans to meet after the husband confesses to the wife that their marriage is effectively over. In an unforgettable ending scene, the now separated couple takes the train south to Boston together, sitting apart. In the wife’s words:
Liar, I thought. Swindler. Ten minutes before the North Station you’ll come into the club car, where you’ll find me drunk; the sight of you will drive me wild, for I will know what you have been doing, with your eyes so piously attentive to the Latin of your little book. You will have been dreaming, mooning, delighting yourself with thoughts of your reunion with Minnie, your playmate, this very night. (He had dismissed me with that word. ‘I don’t want a wife,’ he had said. ‘I want a playmate.’)
Playmate, helpmate — who could keep up with what these poets wanted?
Poetry
To get an idea about how important poetry was to these men — not their wives, who significantly seemed to tolerate the poetry talk rather than participate in it — it’s best to think about if the World Series, the Superbowl, the Stanley Cup, and the NBA Playoffs all happened at the same time with teams like Milton, Yeats, Eliot, and Shakespeare competing. Randall Jarrell was fond of a game called The Best Three, which he made his fellow poets play obsessively — the best three lines of Milton, of the “The Waste Land,” of Lear, etc. Reading about it in Simpson reminded me of how my friends and I were about music in the 1980s: What’s the best live band you’ve ever seen? Best Stones record? Best UK Punk band before the Clash? Current band from Minneapolis? Band to ever play CBGBs? But while we were obsessed with the new, the poets were wildly concerned with lineages, through lines from the Elizabethans to the Romantics to the Moderns to themselves. The theory is that the generation before — Yeats, Eliot, Pound — would be sure to overshadow this one, no matter how hard Berryman, Schwartz, Jarrell, and Lowell wrote. But that was wrong. If they wrote hard, though, they lived harder, and were extremely hard to live with. It’s not shocking that they took mistresses and to the bottle: poetry was the only thing they could be faithful to.
This was a pivotal time in poetry, and they were the first generation of “professional poets,” a class made possible by MFA programs, generous fellowships, and an actual reading public (as well as popular public readings). Yet despite all of this machinery, the idea of the poet maudit, roaming the streets composing verse about lost loves and sad lives, possessed them. Does it follow that they were then cursed with lost loves and sad lives? One of their constant arguments was about poetry as a vocation versus poetry as work, which seems a false dichotomy. Doesn’t it have to be both?
Robert Lowell’s poem about Berryman, published seven years after his suicide, takes up all of their themes, their ongoing arguments, their problems, and their triumphs. Lowell’s career started with his confessional poems (a word Berryman hated, “with rage and contempt!”) and continued through to the end of his life in 1977, the same year he wrote this elegy, “For John Berryman”:
(After reading his last Dream Song)
The last years we only met
when you were on the road,
and lit up for reading
your battering Dream—
audible, deaf . . .
in another world then as now.
I used to want to live
to avoid your elegy.
Yet really we had the same life,
the generic one
our generation offered
(Les Maudits—the compliment
each American generation
pays itself in passing);
first students, then with our own,
our galaxy of grands maîtres,
our Fifties’ fellowships
to Paris, Rome and Florence,
veterans of the Cold War not the War–
all the best of life . . .
then daydreaming to drink at six,
waiting for the iced fire,
even the feel of the frosted glass,
like waiting for a girl . . .
if you had waited.
We asked to be obsessed with writing,
and we were.
Do you wake dazed like me,
and find your lost glasses in a shoe?Something so heavy lies on my heart—
there, still here, the good days
when we sat by a cold lake in Maine,
talking about the Winter’s Tale,
Leontes’ jealousy
in Shakespeare’s broken syntax.
You got there first.
Just the other day,
I discovered how we differ—humor . . .
even in this last Dream Song,
to mock your catlike flight
from home and classes—
to leap from the bridge.Girls will not frighten the frost from the grave.
To my surprise, John,
I pray to not for you,
think of you not myself,
smile and fall asleep.
It is all in Lowell’s poem: their “generic life” of fellowships, of talking about poetry, of writing obsessively, of girls and what can only be construed as mornings after, glasses in shoes and heavy hearts. Conspicuously absent, though, are the wives. Simpson could not bear it, nor could Stafford. Lowell’s next wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, did better, but at what cost? Her own writing suffered while Lowell leapt from manic to depressive episodes, and from bed to bed, each mania bringing with it some affair he swore was going to save his life. He died, famously, in the back of a taxicab in New York City, trying to make up with Hardwick after leaving her for yet another writer-wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood.
When asked why so many poets of his generation committed suicide, Berryman simply answered, “I don’t know.” He was as open about his impulses toward self-destruction as about everything else — as were Lowell, Schwartz, and even Jarrell. One could speculate about the fervid competition, the prodigious drinking, the religious turns (for both Lowell and Berryman), and the difficulties in making their generic life. But really, Lowell has the right idea: best to just think, not pray, smile and fall asleep, knowing the poetry is alive and well.
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