Imagine 100 different John Berrymans, in 100 different replays of the past century. They’re all born on October 25, 1914—in McAlester, in Modesto, in Madison, in Montgomery. Some are privileged, some are poor—but they all have that Berryman soul or wiring, that what-is-it that made Berryman (né Smith) himself and not someone else. Do any of these Berrymans live to 100?
It doesn’t seem possible. Centenarians make up only .02% of the U.S. population: 55,000 people. So that’s the first problem. And poets are famous for knocking off early. (See Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, each celebrating—or not celebrating, because they’re long dead—birthdays on Monday.) Sure, Stanley Kunitz made it to 100, and Richard Eberhart to 101—but Berryman’s courtship with death began in his teenage years, when he threw himself onto train tracks after being bullied in school. And maybe that specific incident isn’t repeated in our thought experiment, but so many other dangers await: pills, gin, the night sweats & the day sweats, Spanish blades, the little cough somewhere, bats, a bullet on a concrete stoop, bridges.
Part of me wants to imagine that a Berryman slips through. He survives the humiliations and lashings of 100 years; his beard grows down to his knees. What does this Berryman have to tell us? Does he just wave? And do we even notice him—staring, as we are, at our phones?
More likely: Berryman said, in the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s, what he was put on this earth to say. From “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”:
Make too me acceptable at the end of time
in my degree, which then Thou wilt award.
Cancer, senility, mania,
I pray I may be ready with my witness.
