Walking through the Diag at the University of Michigan, I’m often asked if I have “a moment for the environment.” And invariably, I don’t: I’m rushing to meet my students, or I’m wiped out and hobbling home. But really, what kind of jerk doesn’t have a moment for the environment? And what a brilliant, insidious pitch.
Do you have a moment, then, for John Berryman?
He came up today in my poetry class (OK, I brought him up), and the discussion turned, as it often does with Berryman, to the question of poet and speaker.
Do you have a moment for Dream Song 4, conveniently linked here?
The poem allows us to talk about its speaker, Henry, and Henry’s relationship to Berryman. In an Author’s Note to The Dream Songs, Berryman writes,
The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.
Many critics have worked themselves up over how seriously to take this “not the poet, not me” claim; Berryman always pressed for the distinction. In an interview with the Harvard Advocate, he said, “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 fuck them, I’m not Henry; Henry doesn’t have any bats.”
As much as I’d like to let the bats comment stand on its own (while adding that I find it odd that “bats in hair” yields only four Google hits), it must be said that the Dream Songs are most successful when the distinction between Berryman and Henry is most clear. That distinction is often lost in the later songs, some of which read like great diary entries, but not great poems. The Dream Songs that rise to greatness (and I put Dream Song 4 in that category) are, more often than not, performances, with characters and settings and surprising final acts. In Dream Song 4, Henry gives one of his better comic turns. Playing the ambitious but self-aware clown, he deflates his own ambitions at every turn. “She glanced at me / twice,” Henry says, and he knows, as we do, that “twice” isn’t a lot. Still, he “hunger[s] back.” Further deflations follow, until, in a laugh-out-loud moment of misdirection, Henry advances upon his dessert.
When Henry’s friend breaks in, we catch the phallic joke of “Sir Bones” (a name from the minstrel stage that conveniently suggests sex or death, depending on the circumstances). Hungry Henry ignores his friend and instead delivers what must be the dirtiest clean line in the world: “What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?” A line like this only works if spoken by a character (imagine it appearing in a poem by Merwin, and you see the problem). Many of the Dream Songs are just a half-turn away from being repulsive, which is part of their brilliance. Why, we wonder, aren’t these poems, spoken by a lecherous braggart (“his loins were & were the scene of stupendous achievement”) who dares to put on blackface (“get back on the take, / free, black & forty-one”), among the most hated in the language? Why don’t they offend on every level? Hear them as confessional cries, and they might. (Asked by Peter Stitt how he reacted to being called a confessional poet, Berryman answered, “With rage and contempt! Next question.”) But that half-turn saves them. Berryman has created a persona who bears some mimetic relationship to the poet’s life but who is not the poet, and who can thus get away with saying things that tenured professors at the University of Minnesota can’t.
Dream Song 4 ends with a suggestion of paranoia, but it’s figured in comic terms (unlike the paranoia in Dream Song 29, which is much harder to laugh off). Henry falls into his woe-is-me mode and utters what seems to be comic hyperbole: “There ought to be a law against Henry.” In a fabulous reversal, his friend simply states that there is such a law. And there the poem ends, leaving us in curious, difficult space.
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But for his fierce need to join his father, Berryman might have turned 95 on Sunday. All happiness to his shade.