All Each Damned Day

John Berryman was powerless over alcohol, but he was also powerless over poetry, and that’s the pits.

I do, despite my self-doubts, day by day
grow more & more but a little confident
that I will never down a whiskey again
or gin or rum or vodka, brandy or ale.

A mere alcoholic might work to have his fatal disease arrested one day at a time, and feel an incremental, fragile confidence (or despair) grow in sobriety. For the poet it’s all despite … doubts … and more and more but a little confident … of never drinking whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, and every other drink he can sensibly fit into a poem. You can almost taste the stuff.

Nor can the poet resist the temptation to remind himself that simple is hardly a synonym for easy:

It all is, after all, very simple.
You just never drink again all each damned day.

In a field not particularly characterized by normalcy, Berryman still stands out as a special case. In addition to the poetry and alcohol, there were lifelong psychiatric issues to add to the mix: his father’s suicide when Berryman was twelve (one among many issues) is as good a starting point for the latter as any, especially since the event may have followed the threat of a different order of insanity – suicide-murder “He was going to swim out, with me, forevers/and a swimmer strong he was in the phosphorescent Gulf/but he decided on lead.” Berryman may have been spoiled for choice, then, when it came to drowning. His was a tide governed by three moons.

In Tom Shone’s version, “John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a ‘dishevelled Moses’, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.”

(Shone accurately captures the general picture, although he conflates several hospitalizations, and misses Berryman, in disheveled Moses form, singing Bessie Smith’s blues. Berryman wouldn’t complain about the depiction. He was hospitalized so many times, he might have been confused himself. Less forgivable, of course, is Shone’s misquoting the poetry: the Berryman persona was under new “management.”)

As the alcoholic might try the switch from liquor to beer, during a later period of abstinence Berryman tried to calm the waters by turning from poetry to prose. The result was an appropriately unfinished novel called Recovery, “an object lesson in how not to recover.” Donald Newlove: “First you hang on to all your old romances about your illness, then you suck your old grandiosity for every drop that’s still in it, you vigorously emphasize your uniqueness among the clods who might be recovering with you, and then you defend to the death your right to self-destruction … Starting afresh meant that a massive part of his work so far was self-pity and breast-beating. That was the last mask he couldn’t rip off. It was like tearing the beard from his cheeks.”

This might be unfair on Berryman, and one wouldn’t want to make too much of hearsay, especially when the source is another alcoholic writer. But Berryman himself is hardly a reliable witness. A manuscript entitled Third Alcoholic Treatment, “a summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery,” notes: “Alcoholism produces inevitably what are known as ‘sincere delusions.’ A sincere delusion is a lie – an affective deformation of reality – which the liar does not know to be a lie … His delusion is shared in some degree by that part of the society which is concerned with his welfare.”

Berryman was late in trying recovery, but sincere enough or sincerely deluded enough to keep on keeping on. What seem to be prayers to a power greater than John Berryman populate his last volumes. He attended meetings, many of which did not always go according to plan: on one occasion, scheduled to lead a meeting and entirely unprepared, he decided to recite (like a poem?) his Fourth Step Inventory from a paper in his coat pocket. The poetry and its prose addenda kept pace. At the tail end of 1969, he worked on a biography of Shakespeare, which he cited as “a replacement for drinking.” A few weeks later, he was back in hospital, devastatingly drunk, deathly anxious, it seems, over the quality of new poems. The tides of 1970 followed this pattern. A few days after another hospitalization in December of that year he wrote: “I feel new - so far, 10 days, okay with no trouble. I’ll be in out-patient treatment two years now, then just on maintenance of the severe daily discipline I established in hospital 5 weeks ago & have not since once relaxed. The next drink I take will probably be on my death-bed, if then.” It wasn’t.

Saul Bellow (on Recovery the novel) notes that Berryman’s inspiration “contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabilizer. It reduced the fatal intensity.” The fatal intensity is not to be doubted - the Minneapolis Star reported a witness who observed that Berryman apparently “waved goodbye” just before he plunged from the Minneapolis Washington Avenue Bridge - but drink as a stabilizer is highly suspect.

In a Paris Review interview, eighteen months or so before his suicide, Berryman said:

“I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the word has never heard before … I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it. Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal that will not actually kill him. At that point he’s in business … I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, “Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,” but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know. I hope to be nearly crucified.”

Berryman might have been playing to the gallery here; but he might also have been living the part he was playing. In Discovery, Alan Severance, a barely disguised John Berryman, is described as “a conscientious man. He head really thought, off and on for twenty years, that it was his duty to drink, namely, to sacrifice himself. He saw the products as worth it.”

The poet sacrificing himself to the ordeal of alcoholism for the product of poetry fits well with the public narrative. An opposite one, the drinker sacrificing himself to poetry in order that he might drink, is just as plausible. So which came first – the headless chicken or the poisoned egg?

A.A. Alvarez (The Writer’s Voice) opts for the egg:

“As a rationale for alcoholism,” he notes of Severance’s justification, “this strikes me as being as fanciful and self-aggrandizing as Severance himself. It becomes convincing only when you turn it inside out: given Berryman’s belief in the connection between art and agony, given also the public’s appetite for bad behavior in its artists (which deflect it from taking their work seriously), it may be that, for Berryman, writing poetry was an excuse for his drinking.”

Or was that the chicken?