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Overview
One of the most astonishing things about this astonishing book is that it follows so closely in time the enormous achievement of the author's Dream Songs, the first part of which 77 Dream Songs, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965 and the second part, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969.
Love&Fame is written in a style new for Berryman, new for anybody. The poet talks of his beginnings as an artist' of his loves; of the strange experience of fame ("Dawdling into glory"); of violent politics' of a sanatorium in the Midwest ("Hospital racket, nurses' iron smiles")' of the whole peculiar business of being and staying alive. The poems are cast in language that is fresh, frank blunt, exuberantly gay, shocking, funny, deeply tragic, and never less than memorable:
Thought much I then on perforated daddy,
daddy boxed in&let down with strong straps
when I my friends' homes visited, with fathers
universal&intact.
Love&Fame culminates in a grave series of "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."
"...Love&Fame (1970), the last book that Berryman saw to publication …[was] the most nakedly confessional of all his books…" - The Atlantic
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466879591 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 181 KB |
About the Author
John Berryman is the author of Love and Fame, his last major work published prior to his death.
John Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation of the Dream Songs, in 1969.
Read an Excerpt
Love & Fame
By John Berryman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1970 John BerrymanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7959-1
CHAPTER 1
Part One
Her & It
I FELL in love with a girl.
O and a gash.
I'll bet she now has seven lousy children.
(I've three myself, one being off the record.)
I wish she'd read my book & write to me
from O wherever ah how far she is.
After all, I get letters from anybody.
From hers, I'd tear to the 'phone.
It's not now near at all the end of winter.
I have to fly off East to sing a poem.
Admirers, some, will surge up afterward,
I'll keep an eye out for her.
My tough Songs well in Tokyo & Paris
fall under scrutiny. My publishers
very friendly in New York & London
forward me elephant cheques.
Time magazine yesterday slavered Saul's ass,
they pecked at mine last year. We're going strong!
Photographs all over!
She muttered something in my ear I've forgotten as we danced.
Cadenza on Garnette
'If I had said out passions as they were,'
plain-saying Wordsworth confided down deep age,
'the poems could never have been published.'
Ha! a confrère.
She set up a dazing clamour across this blood
in one of Brooks Hall's little visiting rooms.
In blunt view of whoever might pass by
we fondled each other's wonders.
One night she couldn't come down, she had a cold,
so I took away a talkative friend of hers,
to squirrel together inklings as to Garnette,
any, no matter what, she did, said, was.
O it flowed fuller than the girl herself,
I feasted on Louise.
I all but fell in love with her instead,
so rich with news.
Allen long after, being taxed obscenely
in a news-sheet of Spoleto, international town,
complained to me next day: His aim was tell it all.
Poets! .. Lovers & secrets!
How did we break off, now I come to it,
I puzzle. Did she date somebody else
& I warred with that & she snapped 'You don't own me'
or did the flare just little by little fall?
so that I cut in & was cut in on,
the travelling spotlights coloured, the orchestra gay,
without emphasis finally,
pressing each other's hand as he took over.
Shirley & Auden
O LITHEST Shirley! & the other worlds
She did not say anything definite; but I twigged
(a word I picked up later in Cambridge, England):
I would not make this one.
No indeed. Alas!
The most flamboyant fag on campus, P W,
frightened me one Socratic evening
by telling me that anybody
targeting all attention to the matter
can MAKE anybody — no bar sex or age
or modesty or toilet-training or marriage status.
He'd been thrown out of seven schools, & knew.
He once gave the homosexual howl
on 52nd Street to Noel Coward
himself, who rose up in the rear
of his open-top chauffeured limousine
& flinging their down-flaunt of the hand howled back.
I sometimes still (rarely) think of P W
& I wonder how his beauteous long blond hair
& heavy bright knit ties & camel's-hair topcoat
are making out in this man's world.
Also of G S, a crony of his,
also queer, who had written half a novel
called 'Fish Out of Water' & was a prominent fellow
among our gang on the Fourth Floor of John Jay
that ran the College.
An old-time novelist myself. At twelve
I wrote a half a science-fiction book
about a trip to Neptune & Ee-loro-a'ala
'published' by Helen Justice in two brown-wrappered volumes,
readership limited ah to the eighth grade
at P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights,
Long Island. She was pretty keen on me
but too tall for my then romantic image.
Besides I was being faithful to Charlotte Coquet
skating up & down in front of her blue house
passionate in the late afternoon barely to be noticed.
O Charlotte Coquet ..
I was political in my first year; very.
With Tom McGovern & Paul MacCutcheon
we founded an Independent Party
to break the syndicate of the fraternities.
I lost the trivial Vice-Presidency
to a combed void from Kent School, Alpha Delt,
by five bare bitter votes.
In two years we had a majority on Student Council.
I recognized Auden at once as a new master,
I was by then a bit completely with it.
My love for that odd man has never altered
thro' some of his facile bodiless later books.
This place is done for, England & so on.
The poet mourns but clamps it to a symptom
fascinating, obscurely foreseeing
the hectic dancer of your delicious end.
O and Shakespeare seized his daring in both hands
to warn the star of the age, acclaiming but adding
something in a Chorus of Henry V
on 'favourites,
made proud by Princes, that advance their pride
against that power that bred it.'
Nobody told the Earl, or if one did
it went unheeded, — from a poet? words
to menace action? O I don't think so.
I wonder if Shakespeare trotted to the jostle of his death.
When I flew through The Orators first
I felt outstretched, like an archaeologist
Carl Blegen himself with his withered arm
I shook in Cincinnati at Nestor's palace:
'Woeisme' (the Channing wail
of ladies young at that ladies' school wailing poetry)
that anyone would put great Auden down.
I'd rather prove inadequate myself.
I vow I poured more thought that Fall into Auden
than into Shirley C
the preternatural dancer from Johnson Hall.
O lithest Shirley, — I wouldn't be up to you now.
But darling, sister, do you yourself ever dance any more?
My heart quails as I put this unbearable question, —
into what faraway air?
Freshman Blues
My intense friend was tall & strongly made,
almost too handsome — & he was afraid
his penis was too small.
We mooted it, we did everything but examine it
whether in se or by comparison
to the great red joy a pecker ought to be
to pump a woman ragged. Only kid sisters,
he muttered, want to somersault with me.
Thought much I then on perforated daddy,
daddy boxed in & let down with strong straps,
when I my friends' homes visited, with fathers
universal & intact.
McGovern was critical: I treated my girl slight
who was so kind to me I climbed in bed
with her, with our pajamas, an icy morning
when I'd stayed overnight
by her mother's kindness, flustered by my status,
listening then downstairs.
Tom took her over and I ceased to fear
her nervous & carbuncled brother Thornton.
Images of Elspeth
O WHEN I grunted, over lines and her,
my Muse a nymphet & my girl with men
older, of money, continually
lawyers & so, myself a flat-broke Junior.
But the one who made me wild
was who she let take naked photographs
never she showed me but she was proud of.
Unnerving; dire.
My love confused confused with after loves
not ever over time did I outgrow.
Solemn, alone my Muse grew taller.
Rejection slips developed signatures,
many thought Berryman was under weigh,
he wasn't sure himself.
Elspeth became two snapshots in his keeping,
with all her damned clothes on.
She married a Law School dean & flourisheth.
I almost married, with four languages
a ballerina in London, and I should have done.
— Drawing the curtain over fragrant scenes
& interviews malodorous, find me
domestic with my Muse
who had manifested, well, a sense of humour
fatal to bardic pretension.
Dance! from Savannah Garnette with your slur
hypnotic, you'll stay many.
I walked forth to a cold snow to post letters
to a foreign editor & a West Coast critic
wishing I could lay my old hands somewhere on those snapshots.
My Special Fate
I TORE it open, by one end, & found
French prose translations, a French estimate.
I dreamt at times in those days of my name
blown by adoring winds all over
and once a postcard came from 'Harold Spitz'
a gentleman in Brooklyn, running 'Huh!
You like that stuff? It stinks.'
One of my first fan-letters.
She was eminent at Barnard.
We sat at the Dean's table
during a prom, and I smiled on the Dean
thinking of her protégée's naked photographs,
and shagging with a rangy gay thin girl
(Miss Vaughan) I tore a section of the draperies down.
I wore white buckskin shoes with tails sometimes
& was widely known on Morningside Heights,
a tireless & inventive dancing man.
I left a dance one night with one Clare Reese,
short & pretty, poor teeth, sensual;
we took the subway north to a waste ground
over the Hudson where we tumbled down
under a trembling moon.
Coarse kids collected to jeer down on us
struggling back up into bra, panties, trousers.
At all times loomed for me my special fate,
Elspeth's haggard unsuccessful lover.
Drunks
One night in Albany
on a geology field-trip, in a corridor
upstairs of our hotel
I found McGovern on his hands & knees
heading for his lost room after a bet
which upright I had won.
I read everybody, borrowing their books from Mark,
it took me quite a while to get to Yeats.
I wondered every day about suicide.
Once at South Kent — maybe in the Third Form? —
I lay down on the tracks before a train
& had to be hauled off, the Headmaster was furious.
Once at a New Year's party at Mark Van Doren's
to which I took my Jane & H
cautioning them to behave themselves
the place was crawling with celebrities
poor H got stuck in an upstairs bedroom
with the blonde young new wife of a famous critic
a wheel at one of the book clubs
who turned out to have nothing on under her gown
sprawled out half-drunk across her hostess's bed
moaning 'Put it in! Put it in!'
H was terrified.
I passed out & was put in that same bed.
Down & Back
It is supernal what a youth can take
& barely notice or be bothered by
which to him older would work ruin.
Over Atherton I almost lost not only my mind
but my physical well-being!
night on night till 4 till 5 a.m.
intertangled breathless, sweating, on a verge
six or seven nerve-destroying hours
sometimes a foul dawn saw me totter home.
Mental my torment too all that fierce time
she 'loved' me; but she wouldn't quite sleep with me
although each instant brought a burning chance
she suddenly might! O yes: it hung in the air
her living-room was thick with it like smoke
both of us smelt it
blood sludge from a martini
This was during vacation, then my God
she went back to Northampton
& only wrote once or twice a day
in that prize-winning penmanship
I went back to the world sore & chagrined
with a hanging head & no interest
in anything.
It was then I think I flunked my 18th Century
I wrote a strong exam, but since it was Mark
a personal friend, I had to add a note
saying of the 42 books in the bloody course
I'd only read 17.
He liked my candour
(he wrote) & had enjoyed the exam
but had no option except to give me F in the course —
costing my scholarship. The Dean was nice
but thought the College & I should part company
at least for a term, to give me 'time to think'
& regroup my forces (if I'd any left).
A jolt. And almost worse, I had let Mark down.
I set about to fix the second thing.
I paged the whole century through for five monk's months
keeping an encyclopedic notebook.
I made among other things an abridgement of Locke's Essay
down to some hundred pages
preserving all his points & skeleton
but chopping away superfluous exposition.
Mark thought it ought to be published
but we found out there was one in print already.
Anyway he changed my grade retroactively & talked to the Dean.
My scholarship was restored, the Prodigal Son
welcomed with crimson joy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Love & Fame by John Berryman. Copyright © 1970 John Berryman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
PART ONE,
Her & It,
Cadenza on Garnette,
Shirley & Auden,
Freshman Blues,
Images of Elspeth,
My Special Fate,
Drunks,
Down & Back,
Two Organs,
Olympus,
Nowhere,
In & Out,
The Heroes,
Crisis,
Recovery,
PART TWO,
Away,
First Night at Sea,
London,
The Other Cambridge,
Friendless,
Monkhood,
Views of Myself,
Transit,
Thank You, Christine,
Meeting,
Tea,
A Letter,
To B — — — E — — —,
PART THREE,
The Search,
Message,
Relations,
Antitheses,
The Soviet Union,
The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers,
Regents' Professor Berryman's Crack on Race,
Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks,
To a Woman,
A Huddle of Need,
Damned,
Of Suicide,
Dante's Tomb,
Despair,
The Hell Poem,
Death Ballad,
'I Know',
Purgatory,
Heaven,
The Home Ballad,
PART FOUR,
Eleven Addresses to the Lord,
1 MASTER OF BEAUTY,
2 HOLY, AS I SUPPOSE,
3 SOLE WATCHMAN,
4 IF I SAY THY NAME,
5 HOLY, & HOLY,
6 UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT,
7 AFTER A STOIC,
8 A Prayer for the Self,
9 SURPRISE ME,
10 FEARFUL I PEER,
11 GERMANICUS LEAPT,
Other Books by John Berryman,
Copyright,