Lost Classic – John Berryman’s Dream of Henry’s Song
John Berryman typified the wild, drunk but inspired role of the modern romantic poet. Romantic not in the classical sense of pining and whining and lyrically lavishing praise on the focus of his affections, but Romantic in the visionary sense of the word – committedly unorthodox, personally difficult, spiritually distracted, anxious, unruly and relentlessly creative.
Born in 1914 in Oklahoma, Berryman attended Columbia College where he was taught by that illustrious and erudite psychopomp of American literature, Mark Van Doren. He won a Fellowship at Cambridge where he kept the riotous company of the young Dylan Thomas and advanced his brilliant career as a teacher and scholar. His father committed suicide when he was eleven years old and like the lachrymose heir to an ancient king in some Greek tragedy, he followed his father’s fateful footsteps to their lethal conclusion and threw himself off the Washington Bridge in Minneapolis on 7th January 1972. A life of extreme and original eloquence prematurely ended on the frozen banks of the Mississippi, but his legacy intrigues as seductively as it did the day he died.
Berryman understood the value of his poetic gift and knew he needed to produce poetry that could only belong to him. Living under the shadow of Modernism, with its expectations of impersonality, obscurity and intellectual might, Berryman churned out dramatisations of his egregious experiences and constructed a new form to accommodate his confessional expressions. He called these The Dream Songs, a set of three stanzas comprised of six lines in free verse with irregular rhymes. The mysterious singer of these dreams he christened Henry.
The identity of Henry is unclear. He suddenly shifts from using the first person, to the third and, at times, the second. It is ultimately impossible to say who is really speaking and to whom. The reader’s doubt is enflamed by Henry’s steady randomness and so the appearance of the poems evolves from simple admissions, assertions and observations into vivid exhibitions of delusions and drunkenness.
The question of who Henry actually is has irritated critics for almost fifty years. Is Henry Berryman? Is Henry a poetic portrait of the modern American mind? Is he a new literary device designed to elude rational comprehension, to defy that instinct in us all to make sense of things? The answer is still unknown. Henry does resemble his creator in many ways; both seem to drink too much for starters. Both have broken hearts, hear ghosts, see apparitions and talk in strange atonal tantrums, as if the dissonant notes of Thelonious Monk were replaced with words from a minstrel song or Shakespearean soliloquy. But Berryman repeatedly and vehemently denied that Henry was him, saying: “Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand, I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair—and f*** them, I’m not Henry; Henry doesn’t have any bats.”
Berryman was not the only poet in the twentieth century to experiment with dramatic personae. TS Eliot’s earlier poems are primarily monologues declaimed by indefinite identities and like Berryman, Eliot never provided a conclusive explanation for the ownership of those voices. He preferred to tantalise and bewilder his readers rather than to expound the function and nature of his creation.
Fernando Pessoa’s famous heteronyms further developed the ploy of persona in poetry. He bred a group of antithetical characters and gave them all the independence and depth of spirit a truly autonomous and authentic artist would possess. But Henry prevails unlike any other poetic invention.
Berryman’s composition profoundly and unforgivingly baffles and bamboozles, he makes Henry shapeshift, mutate, vanish, reanimate, and to add to the confusion Henry is occasionally accompanied by a more mysterious figure than him whom Berryman gave no name to. This person refers to Henry as “Mr Bones”, which does nothing except gratuitously deepen the opacity of Henry’s presence. What is clear is that Henry embodies bits of American history and culture, encompasses attributes of his maker and is consistently inconsistent. The poet Kevin Young wrote “Henry gives utterance to a thousand shades of thought and feeling…and the result reads like an improvised vaudeville act. His [Henry’s] entanglement with language becomes the central drama of the sequence.”
In an introduction to Berryman’s selected poems, Michael Hoffmann speculated whether it is important to determine the incontrovertible identification of a purposefully evasive personality. Even if more is done to unmask the voice Berryman so brilliantly dreamt of and sang for, any new discovery or theory could hardly improve the critical perception of this masterwork. The Dream Songs are currently listed by the American Academy of Poets as one of its “groundbreaking books of the 20th century” and the poet laureate WS Merwin compared Berryman’s feat of intimate abstraction in these peculiar poems to James Joyce’s inimitable text – Finnegan’s Wake. Judging by the use of personae and vagueness in modern verse and fiction, it appears it pays to be unclear.