Backlisted - The Dream Songs by John Berryman

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Joining us on Backlisted this week is novelist and memoirist Susie Boyt (My Judy Garland Life, Loved and Missed). The book Susie has chosen for us to discuss is The Dream Songs (1969) by John Berryman, the publication of which briefly made its author the most famous poet in America but also, unfortunately, hastened his decline and ruin. But the work shines on. Also in this episode Andy is struck by the contemporary resonance of Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism while John drinks in Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub edited by David Knight and Cristina Monteiro. Please note, this episode contains references to suicide.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)08:06 - The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick. 15:27 - Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub edited by David Knight and Cristina Monteiro. 20:24 - The Dream Songs by John Berryman* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Susie, where are you calling us from? I'm in London, sort of near Camden Town.

And have you been out and about or are you still mostly indoors? I used to pride myself on not leaving the house for many, many days in a row. But since lockdown, I go out for quite a long walk every day. Do you have a particular route that you now stick to for your daily walk? Or do you try and vary it? Well, I noticed I was walking along thinking, thinking oh god there's my bloody favorite tree again so then I started um being a bit more adventurous but I I liked I I started walking into the west end to check on all the theaters when they were closed to sort of see if there was anything any any signs of life and then

um sometimes I'd go into churches and light candles for people who weren't doing well. So I was sort of trying to keep my eye on London itself, feeling that it was really vulnerable and needed me and needed me to sort of do a little stop take and spread a bit of comfort. So I tried to do that. Are you trustee to Hampstead Theatre? I'm one of them, yeah. Today is our first day non-socially distant, so that's quite a big deal. Brilliant.

John, have you booked any theatre tickets yet? Rachel has bought us tickets to go and see Jerusalem, which we missed the first time round, Mark Rylance, Mackenzie Crook. I'm quite excited. That's good. I haven't done much for the last week except read books about and look at pictures of John Berryman. Mackenzie Crook. I'm quite excited. That's good. I haven't done much for the last week except

read books about and look at pictures of John Berryman. And now I'm looking at Mitch and I'm thinking you look too like John Berryman. It's really disturbing. Sorry. It is genuinely quite anyway. Why don't we start? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the snug at Ryan's Pub in Dublin in 1967. In the corner, there's a man reading out loud from an untidy notebook. He's an American, probably a poet, a large grizzled beard and a rasping voice that goes from an anguished whisper to a mad shout in the space of a single line. Is he talking to himself? A guy called Henry? And who is Mr. Bones? Hard to say,

but he's filling the place with laughter and tears. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. and we're joined today by the novelist Susie Boyt. Hello Susie. Hello. Hi Susie. Susie is the author of seven novels which have been praised for their psychological insight and their mordant wit. She also wrote the much-loved memoir My Judy Garland Life

which took episodes from her own life and episodes from Judy Garland's and used them to look at love, fame, grief, consolation and hero worship. The book was shortlisted for the Penn Ackley Prize, serialised on Radio 4 and staged as a musical at the Nottingham Playhouse. Susie writes columns and reviews for a variety of newspapers and recently edited and introduced The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories for Penguin Classics. Susie, is that a collection by Henry James, or is it The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and Ghost Stories by other people? No, it's a collection by me of The Turn of the Screw and some of Henry James' other ghost stories.

But as there were lots of other collections, like his stories about art and his stories about children, there was quite a lot of crossover. So there was a certain amount of snatching and giving back had to take place. But they're all by Henry James. With Halloween approaching, all our listeners will have read The Turn of the Screw,

every single one of them. But what's another Henry James ghost story they should read around Halloween? Well, of course, my mind's gone completely blank now, but there was a wonderful one about two quite elderly cousins who live together, to whom a ghost sometimes appears, and they get phenomenally rivalrous with each other and why would he appear to an idiot like you when he could appear to me? They have a sort of mystery emerges that they have to solve to do with the ghost and that was really, really good.

I discovered when writing about ghosts something I really knew, which is I have no interest in ghosts whatsoever, but I'm very interested in the things that haunt people. So I had to sort of come at it on the slant in that way. Ah, that's interesting. You know, we've talked about, we've got a Halloween episode coming up soon, of course, when we're keeping quiet about who that will feature. But we've talked about doing Elizabeth Bowen and her ghost stories for similar reasons, because they're very much taking the form of the ghost story and using it for exactly that. What haunts you? What haunts me? What can't I get rid of? One of the things that really delighted me when I was doing this Berriman research was I reread that book called Poets in Their Youth written by Berriman's first

wife, Eileen. And one of the best things about it is all the sort of poet's shop talk you're exposed to. But one night they're sitting down, a few poets around a table, and I think it's very soon after Edmund Wilson's famous review of The Turn of the Screw comes out, suggesting that the governess is suffering from a sort of sex neurosis, which causes her to invent the ghosts. And the idea that people were discussing that essay as it came out, it just sat so beautifully on the page as a kind of... And Berriman disagreed and didn't want the ghosts to be sort of psychoanalysed off the page. He wanted them to stay there. And I think Delmore Schwartz was inclined to agree with Edmund Wilson. What a moment this is to think that they did that

and we are now talking about it on this thing called the internet that didn't exist. It's incredible. Susie's new book, Love and Mist, is a short, sharp novel about a grandmother who makes off with her reckless daughter's baby and how the three lives unfold over the next 15 years. As we've said, she's director of 385 poems first published in its complete form in 1969 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in the America and Faber in the UK. It's one of the seminal works in what has come to be called the confessional school of American poetry, which included among others Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. In it, Berriman creates the character

of Henry, who he described as not the poet, not me, but 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. Each poem is a triple six-line stanza written in language of great intensity and originality. The whole sequence is marked out by a bruised humour which is always on the verge of despair. The poems are full of references to contemporary events and Berriman's fellow poets and artists, and combine rough demotic slang with the philosophical high style of his great literary

heroes, Whitman, Yeats and Shakespeare. As his friend Robert Lowell put it, all risk and variety is here. But before we strap in for one of the darkest and most exhilarating rides in modern literature, let me pose the old question. Andy, what have you been reading this week? So I've been reading, if you listened to our summer reading episode last month when we came back from our holidays, you will have heard me talking about Vivian Gornick, the veteran US critic who is now in her 80s,

who last year published a book called Unfinished Business, which I read and loved, about rereading books over the course of life. And who also wrote in 1997, a book called The End of the Novel of Love, which posited that love as the theme of novels was perhaps in decline. And self-realization was one of the the themes of the modern novel and I read a paragraph that I really loved from Unfinished Business which was to do with the idea of nuance what happens in life when we lose nuance from discussion which is obviously a very relevant topic in the age of social media and culture war. And one of the themes of Vivian Gornick's work is the idea that her parents were communists. She was a pioneering feminist.

feminist, one of the ideas in her work is a discussion of how political, social movements, religious movements, start from a position of emancipation of a group, emancipation of the group, and end up oppressing the individual. That what starts as the thing that liberates you, an ideology that can liberate you, becomes dogma. And once it becomes dogma, it becomes a tool of repression for the individual. And The Romance of American Communism is a look at the history of the Communist Party in the US in the 20th century, first published in the mid-1970s. And Vivian Gornick went and interviewed about 50 or 60 communists or former communists, many of whom were in their 50s, 60s or 70s, many of whom had actually fought in certain revolutions or been through the McCarthy witch hunts

or never recanted or entirely recanted and said to them and tried to map the process of their emotional lives through the period of their either being members of the Communist Party or ex-members of the Communist Party. What she finds they have in common is that, regardless of whether they are still communists, whether they've left the Communist Party 30 years earlier, whether they're angry at ever having been associated with communism, they all seem

to say that they never felt so alive as when they felt they were making a difference, when they felt they were part of a group striving for a common goal, and when they had a way of looking at the world which helped them make sense of it and whether they still saw the world like that or whether they disagreed with it they seemed to have this thing in common that they they were alive and they were fully alive when they were communists. And for that, we could substitute the word Christian or feminist or fascist. The book is about communism and it's not about communism. So I really, really enjoyed it. I found it really stimulating. And I just want to read you from the end of the book

by a communist called Eric Lanzetti, you from the end of the book by a communist called Eric Lanzetti, who is in his 70s, in the mid-1970s, when he's interviewed by Vivian Gornick. And she describes him as having a remarkable wholeness of being, quote, he is the most perfectly integrated communist I know, which means that at the point she interviewed him, he is the communist most persuasive to her of that communism can be integrated with the progress of the life of the individual. And she leaves you and the book with him. She gives him the last word. And it's up to you, reader, listener, whether you agree with this on what you make of it. So I'm just going to read what Eric Lanzetti says. And John, you're going to

find this particularly interesting, I think. Lanzetti's view is that the revolution is still happening, that the move to communism will take hundreds of years and it's an incremental revolution. There'll never be a moment where it takes place. It's happening now, here in 2021. This is what he says. Lanzetti pours another drink, lights another cigarette, settles back in his chair and says, George Orwell left a legacy of despair. He came back from Spain

and said communism and fascism are the same. Orwell said all revolution ends in totalitarianism and if you want to see a picture of the future, imagine a boot forever stamping on a human face. Well, as far as I'm concerned, that was the worst thing that could have happened in the post-war world because it helped disintegrate the left more than any government policy of the Cold War. And what happens when the left disintegrates? The right instantly moves up to fill the vacuum. And this is 50 years ago. Eric Lanzetti was saying this, everybody. Despair leads to anarchy and anarchy leads to repression and fascism. And in this country, the despair of the left led directly to Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate. Look, let me explain it to you this way. You're a feminist, right? You hate what Freud said about women. You see the old

man was wrong, wrong, wrong about women. But does that mean you get rid of Freud? Of course not. That's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Freud was wrong on this, wrong on that, maybe wrong in every particular, but he was right. Well, it's the same in spades with Marx. He was wrong on this, wrong on that, wrong on a lot of things, but my God, he was right. He was wrong on this, wrong on that, wrong on a lot of things. But my God, he was right. And to throw out Marx, along with totalitarianism, is to spit on the future, dig our own graves, and fall right in.

And the revolution will come. It will come. After all, Lanzetti finishes with a mocking grin, it is no accident, comrade, that you and I are sitting here today talking about these things. That's wonderful. As we say on social media, I'll just leave that there for people to think about.

It's a really great book. So that's three out of three for Vivian Gornick for me. Absolutely love that. Fascinating and relevant book. John, what have you been reading? Well, I've been reading a book called Public House, A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub. And I've been reading it and looking at it as much as reading it.

It's a really beautifully produced book that came out of an academic course at the Department of Architecture at Kingston School, where the editors of the book had been teaching basically the function of pub within community and the architecture of pubs, David Knight and Christina Montero. So it's two things. It's a gazetteer of 120 brilliant London pubs, from the old sort of Victorian gin palaces through to the latest kind of micro pubs. But it's also a collection of essays by some wonderful writers. It's got an intro from Sadiq Khan, the mayor, but it's got essays on, I might read a little bit in a moment,

from Jennifer Lucy Allen's little essay on the bell, the last order's bell. Luke Turner, Bob Stanley. Do you remember The Local, the Maurice Gorham book? Yeah, I talked about The Local. That's a wonderful book. It's a kind of modern version of that. It has a history of pubs in it. That's lovely.

It's a sort of celebration of what pubs historically have functioned as from their development, you know, from their medieval beginnings right through to the 19th century where they were, funnily enough, they were meeting places for revolutionaries through to today where they, you know, we've been through the gastropub revolution. But they're also essential to the development of popular music, live music, lots and lots of bands started in pubs as well. That's a handsome-looking book.

It is a really beautiful-looking book. Maybe I'll just read this little paragraph. And it's i believe and i've got you know as you know i have a village pub and i'm continually kind of berating uh the the very poor brewery who own it for not doing more but you know pub in the end it will always be about community it will always be a space i mean you know you're talking about the the communist You cannot behave in a pub like you behave on social media. You have to learn to modify yourself, your opinions, your ideas, in order for community to happen. That doesn't mean you can't have disagreements.

You can have very strong disagreements. But there is a sort of a civilising influence, I think, that the pub has had. And almost all the stories you hear about pubs nowadays are negative. So I'm going to read you a little bit from the introduction, very good introduction to the whole thing by David Knight, who is an architect and sociologist. So he talks about the micro pub. The micro pub is another response to the challenges of the present.

And it is the final pub type covered in this guide. After all the twists and turns of this story, it brings us back not only to the simple beer house of the 1830s, but also to the medieval ale house where the story began. Micro pubs are small, rigorously independent, and tend to be run in a very personal manner by an individual couple or family with an aesthetic that is simple and unselfconscious.

They have frequently appeared in former high street buildings rather than homes and architecturally are hard to distinguish from the rest of a run of shops. Generally lacking a cellar, they often use cool-back rooms from which to dispense the beer and another call-back to more ancient models. Similar to the community pub, the micro pub is now chiefly a suburban or out of London condition, as can be seen in some excellent examples, the Upminster Taproom, Dodo Micro Pub, Little Green Dragon, the last of which is a particularly vivid example as it replaced a large improved pub lost to a supermarket. As the character of London changes in the wake of the pandemic, high streets and town centres are hollowing out,

shifting to residential uses where once there were shops and restaurants. Might micro pubs and ale houses be able to carve out space in future metropolitan centres? In Haringey the council have recently supported the transformation of a former public toilet on Tottenham High Street into a new pub. Yes! A pub albeit an unusual one is once again the most prominent and public part of this stretch of the city. This is the key bit. Transformation and reimagination are fundamental to the history of the pub. Changing constantly whilst remaining true to a certain collectively established sense of itself,

the pub often manages to feel timeless while in a permanent state of shifting evolution. This balance of change and continuity is fundamental to the pub's appeal, continuing today as pubs rework their offer, buildings and landscapes in response to the pandemic. Pubs will continue to reflect and support social change, sometimes in ordinary ways, sometimes in extraordinary ways. Every pub in this book is part of that story. It's a great book.

It's a lovely, lovely bit of publishing and well done to Open City. Beautiful. And very appropriate choice of text for this particular episode of Batlist. I was trying not to say convenient. Yeah, yeah, quite. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message.

I still don't get very much fan mail. But I had a lot of mail after I published this song in the United States. I may say that the mail was entirely hostile. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover, my mother told me as a boy, repeatingly, ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner resources.

I conclude now I have no inner resources. Because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me. Literature bores me, especially great literature. Henry bores me with his plights and gripes, as bad as Achilles. Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills and gin look like a drag. And somehow a dog has taken itself and its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky or leaving behind me wag me wag

amazing well I don't know how we're going to follow that for the rest of this podcast to be honest with you but we'll give it a go I like the way he made it sound as though he was composing it there and then for us it had that kind of impromptu feeling like

in a musical where you feel someone's suddenly having those thoughts for the first time. I got to do a bit of the audio for this episode, and we'll talk about his abilities as a performer. But one of the pleasures of it was listening to that several times over. And every time I listen to it, it gets better and it grows on you, in fact, like a tune would because of the musicality of it and the rhythm of it. And again, we'll use this comparison again, I suspect, but the Dylan-like exaggeration of the phrasing is not an accident. I think that's magical. accent is so interesting as well it's sort of grander than one might think and um reading his first wife's memoir she talks about um rp blackmore pronouncing saturday sarady and that when orden came and gave a lecture he said for actually actually and people thought he was speaking

icelandic that is extraordinary though that that sense with Berryman, though, that sense, as you say, that he's actually just, he's composing this on the fly. But I guess it's show business, isn't it? That's what you do. Yeah, and that kind of performative aspect of the Dream Songs is really important, I think. Well, I think that idea of show business is really important in understanding Berryman,

not because he was show business, but because he is almost a symptom of his era. Yeah. The 60s, he becomes famous relatively late in his career and in his life, in the 60s. And that's not an accident. I think we might talk about that later on as well. You know, that idea of here's the poet being brilliant and drunk on tour. You know, it's a fascinatingly electronic version of the Bard at a particular historical moment, I think.

And he spent so, so long becoming, didn't he? Just decades and decades sort of knowing he wasn't quite there yet, but certain he would get there. And the intensity of the hope he had that he would be a great poet, even though a lot of the time his life was falling apart and everything was going wrong. He always had that belief. And there are so many early poems where he calls himself a young poet, not yet good or not quite good or nearly there or sounding too much like Ordinal Yeats or just the sense that I suppose that we all sometimes have

that if only we can throw off the things that hold us back, there'll be no stopping us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's very, yeah, there's all that kind of, again, in that sort of performative way. There's one of those speeches he gives where he says that Saul Bellow is one of only two people who can write a decent sentence in America.

You know, it's basically him, Saul Bellow, and someone else who he doesn't name. All the time with Berryman, you feel the self leaking into the poetry and backwards and forwards. He's better at instability than almost any writer that I think I've ever read. Susie, let me ask you, you know, Berryman, who was so famous in the late 1960s and after his death into the mid to late 70s, has perhaps faded in reputation. When did you first encounter either the Dream Songs or him or his work? or his work? I remember it so precisely. It was in 1992, and I had a job in a bookshop on Saturdays and Sundays. On Sundays, we were completely unsupervised. There were four of us and someone brought in cakes and someone else brought in the newspapers. I set myself up with

cakes and newspapers in the poetry section. This was the Penguin Bookshop in Covent Garden. And I just sat in the poetry section and read all the books one by one. And Berriman being B was quite near the top of the shelf. And I read the Dream Songs, the blue Faber paperback. The Faber one. I was so enchanted. The Faber one. I was so enchanted and I felt a sort of smash of recognition that I saw something quite feminine in his more delicate side and also his courtly side. I'd started my first novel already and

his sense of what it might take to try and get somewhere and how it would be awful, but it was worth trying. And then I liked as well the way he sort of ran together things to do with romance and success as a writer, or that the two things almost go hand in hand. I was a bit lonely at the time, but I somehow felt that bookshop was quite a good setting for me, that it framed me nicely. And so somehow it fed into that as well. for me that it framed me nicely. And so somehow it fed into that as well. And the book next to it had Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in it. And very early on in that poem, which was published such a long time before the Dream Songs, there's a line that's something like, we are on each other's

hands who care. And this idea of one poet reaching back into the past 300 years to this other poet and sort of making some connection and just the whole world of writers inspiring each other. And then I wanted to know more and more about that time and that circle of poets and Princeton with a density of fine minds and people going on holiday with suitcases that only had books in and no clothes. I just sort of couldn't get enough of it. I realised that there was a lot of difficulty and misery, but there was also sort of tons of tweed and lots of parties and a strong dedication to work that if you kept on going out, you might get somewhere in the end. So all that was very powerful stuff to a bookish and rather ardent 23-year-old. John, what Suzu says there about, it seems to me that Berium was a being

made up of books, drink, and work. Yeah. All those things he took very seriously, you know, and that's what you see being worked out in the dream songs, more than in the earlier poetry, I think. I think you see him, like you say, Susie, there is a sense of fulfilling the destiny that he's predicted for himself. You'd have to add love and sex into those books, drink and work,

wouldn't you, with the Dream Songs? Yeah, libidinous kind of energy, which is extraordinary. You know, you're talking about the 60s, and he really isn't like the beat poets. I mean, you know, you're not going to mistake the Dream Songs. I mean, there are probably points of connection, and certainly with, I think the Dylan idea is a really interesting one, Andy, but it's an overused word, but he's such an original writer. And it's because he's a scholar as well, isn't there? You can feel a kind

of 5,000 books on his back at all points. Yes, that's exactly right. And he, you know, if you can't keep up with the illusions, he doesn't cut you any slack. I love that about him. if you can't keep up with the illusions, he doesn't cut you any slack. I love that about him. Apparently one of the students at Princeton, when one of his first jobs saw him, said that she'd never, ever seen someone who looked so like a poet in her life. Is that right?

Yeah. Well, we want to spend quite a lot of today's episode sharing examples of his poetry. So we're either going to hear from Berryman himself, or you're going to hear from one of the three of us. And I wonder whether, Susie, we could ask you to give us a dream song, please, and tell us a bit about why you like this particular one. We should say the Dream Songs is a book of 300 and... 385.

385 poems, originally published in two volumes. 18 lines to each poem. You know, we'll talk a bit later about whether it's 300 and something poems or whether it's all one poem. But Susie, tell us which one you're going to share with us. Yes, I'm reading Dream Song 4. And yes, it's hard to talk about them as a whole without turning into sort of Berriman bingo where you say,

I like 1, 4, 8, 19, 20, 21. And someone says, oh, I've got 6, 12, 13 and 42. It just doesn't really get you anywhere. But anyway, I'll read this one. It's a pretty upbeat one, which I thought would be good to start with. Filling her compact and delicious body with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back, and only the fact of her husband and four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying. You are the hottest one for years of night Henry's dazed eyes have enjoyed. Brilliance. I advanced upon, despairing my spumoni. Sir Bones is stuffed the world with feeding girls. Black hair, complexion

Latin, jewelled eyes, downcast. The slob beside her feasts. What wonders is she sitting on over there? The restaurant ruzzies. She might as well be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong? I'll be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry. Mr. Bones, there is. That's the line, right? And quite a lot of the dream songs are like little playlets with two characters who seem to have a bit of an altercation

or work something out, and I like it for that reason. Susie, you've played into my hands quite brilliantly because you mentioned Dream Song Bingo. We've got a Dream Songs jukebox on Backlisted today where you've dialed up number four. Yeah, we're going to listen to, bear him and read the one you've just read, right? Because I think it's really fascinating to hear the rendition of the poem by us as opposed to where Berryman chooses to land it. And also, when we were in the warm-up to this, everybody,

Susie said to me, in what state of intoxication is John Berryman? I can't remember. You'll hear quite quickly if he's loaded. Filling her compact and delicious body with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back, and only the fact of her husband and four other people

kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying, You are the hottest one for days of night. Henry's dazed eyes have enjoyed brilliance. I advanced upon despairing my spermone. Sir Bones is stuffed de-world with feeding girls. Jet hair, complexion Latin, Jet hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes downcast The slob beside her feasts What wonders is she sitting on over there? The restaurant buzzes, she might as well be on Mars Where did it all go wrong?

There ought to be a law against Henry. Mr. Barnes, there is. Interesting that he changed two of the words there. He said jet hair rather than black hair, and he said days of night rather than years of night. Yeah. That was recorded at the Guggenheim in 1963. Okay, so early.

So it's earlier than he will have revised the poem subsequent to that reading. But this brings us on to another point. He'd been writing these for years before they were published, right, Susie? Yeah, yeah. I mean, he started keeping a dream diary, I think, in 1954 and had 650 pages of it before the year was out or something.

And all these dream diaries at the University of Minnesota, and apparently only one person has looked at it in the last 20 years and one can just go there and and um do that which is wow a bit tempting john do you want to punch up a number on the jukebox what have you got shall i shall i shall i do um snow line what number is it it's 28 you're lucky john is not available to share his rendition with us. It's just you, Mitch. It's cool. This is Dream Song 28, Snowline. It was wet and white and swift, and where I am we don't know. It was dark and then it isn't.

I wish the barker would come. There seems to be to eat nothing. I am unusually tired. I'm alone too. If only the strange one with so few legs would come, I'd say my prayers out of my mouth as usual. Where are his notes I loved? They may be horribles.

It's hard to tell. The barker nips me, but somehow I feel he too is on my side i'm too alone i see no end if we could all run even that would be better i am hungry the sun is not hot it's not a good position i am in if i had to do the whole thing over again i wouldn't If I had to do the whole thing over again, I wouldn't. It's funny though, right? Oh, he's so funny. Susie, is that something that appealed to you or was that not relevant to your initial discovery of him?

No, I definitely think, I don't find that one funny, but I definitely think a lot of them are very funny. And I love that in the Chicken Pakspiko before, as he read it, the idea that he would have run away with her there. And then if it wasn't for her husband and the four people she was with, I mean, I find that very funny. Just a small obstacle. And as I understand it, they were composed almost,

I don't want to say automatically, but he wrote quickly. They were composed almost, I don't want to say automatically, but he wrote quickly. He would accumulate hundreds of dream songs, including many unpublished ones, and then, as we've heard, go back and rework, almost like talking into a dictaphone and then working up what you get from the spontaneity of the moment into a more considered form. I found some of them very difficult to get my head around, and I didn't understand all of them, which is fine. I think that's all part of the warp and weft of poetry itself, let alone John Berryman. But what is it that spoke to you, even if you couldn't quite get into them straight away? You know, people call it confessional poetry, but there are a lot of hidden things and a lot of secret things. But I feel because the central nervous system of the poems is so

well expressed, when you don't completely get exactly what everything means, you still get a big sort of smash of meaning, even where the meaning's not clear just because you know where you are. And it may be that the place you know you are is somewhere where you don't know where you are, but his way of thinking becomes familiar as you read and you sort of enter his world quite fully, or I do anyway. I will share a dream song in a minute, but I'd like to read from a contemporary review of the dream songs by the poet Adrienne Rich'll ask you what you think about this. I think this was published in 1970.

Michael Hoffman really rates this interpretation of the Dream Songs, and I think Berryman himself was very pleased with this. She says, English is not a language anymore. There is no standard American language. There is no standard American language. Over and against the purities of a Brecht, a Louis Aragon, a Pasternak, the security of a native tongue, of a dictionary, we have Berryman's mad amalgam of ballad idiom, ours via Appalachia, Shakespearean rag, Gerard Manley Hopkins in a delirium of syntactical reversals, minstrel talk, blues talk, hip talk engendered from both, Miltonic diction, calypso, bureaucratiania, pure blurted Anglo-Saxon. Blurted Anglo-Saxon, isn't that good? The English-American language. Who knows entirely what that is? Maybe two men in this decade, Bob Dylan and John Berryman. Before the invention of literature, poetry was film and theatre, rock beat and the six o'clock news, as well as religion and tribal memory.

At the other end of time, I stand in Doubleday's bookstore in Fifth Avenue and read the golden letters on the wall. In the highest civilisation, the book is still the highest delight. That was Emerson. Disgusting Emerson, according to Berryman. Wisdom in every line, while his wife cried upstairs. The book, a symbolic object, totem, religious fetish. The book, as automatic trigger of a string of cultural reflexes.

The book, as weapon of oppression as much as liberation. Hello, Vivian Gornick. The book as a dualism of soul and body, physical object and psychic catalyst. Whatever it has become for us, highest delight, I should guess it is not. The shadow of the Boston Athenaeum, of Emerson and Margaret Fuller under one roof, pushing literary documents under each other's bedroom doors. The cerebral self-congratulation of the transcendental abolitionist spirit still hang palely around the American Academy, but the book as evasion of life has its days

numbered. These poems are meant to terrify and comfort, says Berryman in the Dream Songs, and they can, they will, to the extent that we are accessible to them, can meet their demands as the demands of experience, often in perplexity and frustration, but also with some existential gaiety. I mean, I know this is an episode about John Berriman, but if it was an episode about Adrienne Rich, that would be good too, right? I absolutely love that review and the way she sort of gorges on language and really makes you think about what she can make language do when describing what he can make language do. It also reminded me of the fact that he very often used to read the dictionary.

And there's a lovely story in Poets and Their Youth where they're playing charades with many other self-destructive poets, either in Princeton or at Harvard. And he's acting out a word with someone else's wife in a very racy way that's beginning to seem a bit scandalous. And it turns out the word is parnell, which is the word for a priest's mistress, which was his word of the moment, which you could see is a very Berryman-style word. And people talked about it for weeks afterwards, apparently, this racy charade scene. Adrian Rich made the comparison to Bob Dylan there. And I said earlier in the episode, I think there is, you know, the post-Dream Songs volume that he publishes called Love and Fame. Berriam became very famous in a very 60s way.

He arrives in the mid-60s through the late 60s, student uprisings, rock and roll, hedonism, the derangement of the senses all those things and uh one of the things that john berriman was able to do was play gigs to young people which lots of poets in any era would dream of doing and berriman was a brilliant performer and he like like i don't know just to pluck an example out of the air bob dylan he would often arrive on stage somewhat uh in an altered state of consciousness this is a reel-to-reel recording to a cassette of john berryman arriving on stage at the university of iowa in 1968 he's built to read from the Dream Songs, which has been published and has won the Pulitzer. So he's got a hit, right, in the rock and roll term. So here he is,

this is John Berriman taking the stage at the University of Iowa on a bootleg cassette from 1968. Well, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I can't imagine what you're applauding. Mr. Starbuck's introduction, or the physical presentation of me before you. If I were you, I would reserve my applause until the end and then withhold it. Now, the program for this evening is extremely simple. Can you all hear me?

Not? Then I'll speak louder. I can speak as loudly as possible. But some of the poems that I am going to read you are not meant to be spoken that loudly. I don't care whether I'm heard or not, but on the whole, I would prefer to be heard. You see that.

Even the least ingenuous among you must see that. I will not read, but bellow to you. I'm referring to my close friend Saul Bellow, the only other man, with one exception, in the United States who can write a decent sentence, in my opinion. There are only three of us. And one is having difficulty with the marriage, and the other has other difficulties.

And I have many difficulties. I'm assuming that you can hear me. I find it almost unbearable. It seems to me sort of a bit fake in a way that, in a way I don't like to think of him. I find it off-putting. It's funny, in the Michael Hoffman introduction, he talks about the interview Berriman gave to the Paris Review where he says that a poet is lucky

who suffers so much he almost dies and that he wants to be almost crucified. And Hoffman says that it's a sort of, that's a repellent kind of misunderstanding of the philosophy of creation. And I sort of feel notes of that when I hear that speech. What's interesting is there is the debate about Berryman's drinking was a very live one, even while he was alive. And certainly after he died, Lewis Hyde wrote a piece saying,

have you read Lewis Hyde's essay? I'm not sure I have actually. About Berryman and alcohol, which led to a big debate about how much of what Berryman did was directly inspired by alcohol and how much was facilitated by alcohol. You know, would he have written in that way had he not been carrying around that particular monkey on his back for the whole of the 1950s and 60s. It's weird that people say that he learnt drinking from Dylan Thomas, that he wasn't a big drinker. I think of his relationship to suicide as a sort of a foe and sometimes a friendly foe

as something more completely intrinsic to who he was was how he thought how he lived how he loved but his father committed suicide um when he was how old 12 12 i think yeah um kind of it shot himself outside um outside his outside the young vermin's's room, I think. And it was obviously, it reappears at various moments in all his poetry, but it obviously haunted him for his whole life in a way that is, I mean, I think you can't think about Berriman's life or the way that his life ended or indeed his art without coming up against that fact. I wonder, Susie, whether in the light of that

and in the light of what you were saying just now, is there an extent to which becoming very famous late in the day was probably the worst thing that could have happened to him? Or do you think he felt his number was marked, his card was marked before then anyway? I've thought and read a lot about different attitudes towards suicide and some people do view it as a sort of ill, you know, an illness, perhaps one of the worst illnesses there is that comes and goes throughout a life. And I think people who have had it in their family, particularly in their parents, it just sort of puts it more clearly and on the radar as an option at all times. And I felt that very much. There's a sonnet he wrote where people have an argument about suicide that I'd love to read if now would be feasible.

It's sonnet number seven. And so, of course, the sonnets were written 20 years before they were published. They were published, I think, shortly after the Dream Songs, but he wrote them 20 years earlier. I found out why that day, that suicide from the Empire State, falling on someone's car, troubled you so, and why we quarrelled. War, illness and accident, I can see you cried, but not this, what a bastard, not spring wide. I said, a man life in his teeth could care not much just whom he spat it on. And far beyond my laugh, we argued either side. One has a right not to be fallen on, our second meeting, yellow you were wearing,

Our second meeting, yellow you were wearing, voices of our resistance and desire. Did I divine then, I must shortly run, crazy with need to fall on you, despairing. Did you bolt so before it caught our fire? Amazing. I'd like to follow that, if I may, with this very late poem, He Resigns, which is in this collection of Berriman poems selected by Michael Hoffman,

is the one that Michael Hoffman chooses to end the collection with. He resigns. Age and the deaths and the ghosts. Her having gone away in spirit from me. Hosts of regrets come and find me empty. I don't feel this will change. I don't want anything or person, familiar or strange. I don't think I will sing anymore just now, ever. I must start to sit with a blind brow above an empty heart. with a blind brow above an empty heart. I mean, I find that tremendously moving and powerful.

That sense of, what next? I'm at the end of the road. What next? This is Saul Be end of the road. What next? This is Saul Bellow, who was a great friend of Berryman's. They shared an office. Bellow famously says, when he got what he wanted, the poems were killing him. This is Bellow talking about how he felt about the end of his friend John Berryman's life and the ways in which he felt Berryman had come to the end of the road. that he had this unremitting sense of approaching death, that he felt it through the ruin of his body,

that when you heard John cough, when you saw John pass out, when you saw his color, you knew that he was a dying man. Furthermore, you knew that he was a dying man furthermore you knew that he John knew it killed himself because his despair was too great to be contained the chief illusion I suppose that nourished him was that he could at any time start over but I don't think that he believed in it and perhaps in the end he saw it as a kind of a grim joke that one could begin once more anew with a new house, a new place, a new child, a new resolve, a new breakfast. And after all, the indignity of it must have gotten him.

The thing that he could never quite find for himself was a stable life, a way of having creative production within a stable life. And in their poets in their youth, his first wife says that while he claimed that what had attracted him to me were my ankles, what he looked for in a wife were deep wells of sympathy for his work and a conviction that the work was sufficiently important to make sacrifices for. That's what he looked for, obviously, in his wife and in himself kind of thing.

There was a slightly self-fulfilling element to the suffering there. He said in one interview that the greatest pieces of luck for higher achievement is ordeal you know that he he said you know i hope to yeah i hope to be nearly crucified but i think he didn't really believe that that seems to me like your your terrible drunk uncle at the end of the wedding kind of yeah i mean i think that true. He's playing a role there. Here we are in 2021. If somebody were to pick up the Dream Song, never having read it before,

one of the things that would strike them is the Mr. Bone's blackface element of it. And I wanted to read you a thing by our former guest Sam Leith about this. This is what he wrote in The Guardian in 2014 about that blackface. I think it's fair to acknowledge that the racial politics of the Dream Songs are what academics like to call problematic.

I mean, imagine in 2014, everything's problematic now. In 2014, Sam could say only academics said that. Anyway, what academics like to call problematic. But it's fair too to make clear that problematic in this case means complexly troubling rather than being a crude euphemism for racist. I remember having a long argument years ago with a friend brought up in Washington who regarded any tinge of minstrelsy as anathema. And the position I took was that this was a work of self-laceration

and self-reproach, that here was a poet determined to put this character halfway a portrait of himself, messily in the wrong, and that blackface was a way of doing so. That her offence directed at Henry and threw him at Berryman was in other words an intended effect, and I'm not sure I quite buy that now. It's to under-read the poem and to ignore that at the time of its writing, blackface was not as taboo as it is now, and not to acknowledge the prankish energy that the minstrel material gives it. How do we deal with that now? Is this you talking or Sam talking?

No, I am now talking. I am saying that's how Sam tried to deal. No, look, if you hear this, Sam, sorry, but that's Sam trying to deal with the issue in 2014, and it seems even more, as academics and everyone says, problematic now than it did then. I feel uneasy reading some of it. Yeah.

I wonder how you both felt about going back to it now. Yeah, there's certainly certain words that make me feel uneasy that would have made people feel uneasy then as well, I suspect. There's a really interesting perspective on it from Ralph Ellison ellison who was a friend of baron's and he you know he is a it's a really interesting uh little exchange where he but he he would ring ellison late at night he'd say during the period he was writing dream songs, I grew to expect his drunken, sometimes telephone calls, in the course of which he'd read from work in

progress. I can't recall how many calls there were, but he usually wanted my reaction to his use of dialect. My preference is for idiomatic rendering, but I wasn't about to let the poetry of what he was saying be interrupted by the dictates of my ear for Afro-American speech. Besides, watching him transform elements of the minstrel shown to poetry was too fascinating fascinating too and amusing was my suspicion that merriman was casting me as a long distance mr interlocutor or was it mr tambo whose temporary role was that of responding critically to his mr bones and huffy henry and i think what you get when Ellison goes on, I mean, ultimately, he feels uncomfortable. And it's interesting that Adrian Rich kind of gives him pretty much a free pass on the black

face as well. But you do, when you read Toni Morrison and you read Claudia Rankin, You know, you do when you read Toni Morrison and you read Claudia Rankin. It's, you know, as Sam says, it is problematic. And I think he kind of was doing it because he knew that it was problematic. Adrian Rich says that blackface is the supreme dialect and posture of this country going straight to the roots of our madness. As I said, he's not pretending to be black. He's pretending to be a white man, pretending to be a black man. And some part of that is a kind of deep insecurity about whiteness and about his position in the world.

I think it's very important that you say to people that that is an element in these poetry that you find uncomfortable. I suspect, like Susie said, I think he kind of intended it to be uncomfortable. people that that is an element in these poetry that you find uncomfortable i suspect like suzy said i think he kind of intended it to be uncomfortable i think the minstrelsy element is fascinating because as i've been talking about i'm fascinated by by berriman's attitude to performance yeah performance is a big part of what berman is about. The fact that he comes to preeminence in the first Warholian age of electronic celebrity

is not a coincidence. I keep returning to this, but the level of his fame is a fame that, and the type of his fame, and the effect on his posthumous reputation are things that would not have happened in the 1930s. Say, you know, he has the great luck and misfortune to become very famous at the point he becomes very famous.

And I think people, I think we talking about him today, we're still dealing with the fallout of how do we deal with somebody, a poet that successful and famous and destructively so in their own lifetime all these years later? Is it inevitable that somebody who is so praised and garlanded in 1969 is so little read 50 years later. You know, is he backlisted? Here he is on backlisted. Is he backlisted?

Do you feel, Susie, that he is obscure now? I think he was always obscure. I mean, Lowell said he was hard even for a hard poet kind of thing. And that was Lowell who was proud and clever. I was just thinking there was a very good essay by Lee Siegel in the New York Times, maybe four or five years ago, talking about, again, coming back to poets in their youth and what all those poets put the women in their lives through. And he sort of says at one point that a lot of ugly, false behavior went on in the search for beauty and truth. And what about that kind of thing?

Not that this is anything new, but I suppose it needs to be said at some point. It's a subject we keep returning to on here, actually. Well, look, we're running out of time. I wonder if we could all read one final favourite poem of Berryman's. John, have you got one there? I think it's too dark now. I sort of feel like… Do you?

Do you feel we've got… Why are so many of my favourite ones about death? I'm going to… Well, you know. I hadn't realised, but… Yeah. But I'm going to read this one. Cyril Fletcher, he ain't.

I hadn't realised, but I'm going to read this one. Cyril Fletcher, he ain't. Henry edged, decidedly, made up stories, lighting the past of Henry, of his glorious present and his whoreys. All the bite heels he tamped, euphoria, Mr. Bones, euphoria. Fate, clobber all, hand me back my crawl. Condign heaven, tighten into a ball. Elongate and valve Henry. Tuck him peace. Render him sightless or ruin at high rate his cramp and focus. Wipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us. But Bones, he was that. of us. But Bones,

he was that. Cannot remember. I am going away. There was something in my dream about a cat which fought and sang. Something about a liar, an island, unstrung, linked to the land at low tide.

Cable's fray. Thank you for everything. Cable's fray. Thank you for everything. Cable's fray. That's so great. Okay, look, I'm going to read from... So the final, the collection that Berryman published after the Dream Songs was called Love and Fame. And it was a great change of style.

And it was not much loved when it was published. There was clearly some backlash against Berryman's success and it's very, very autobiographical. There's a poem here that I read that I thought I wanted to share with everybody who listens to this because I think it is downbeat, upbeat. So here we go. Message from John Berriman. Amplitude. Voltage. The one friend calls for the one, the other for the other in my work. In verse and prose. Well, hell. I am not writing an autobiography in verse, my friends.

Impressions, structures, tales, from Columbia in the 30s and the Michaelmas term at Cambridge in 36, followed by some later. It's not my life. That's occluded and lost. That consisted of lectures on St Paul, scrimmages with women, singular moments of getting certain things absolutely right. Laziness, liquor, bad dreams. That consisted of three wives and many friends, whims and emergencies, discoveries, losses. It's been a long trip.

Would I make it again? But once a Polish bell bared me out and was kind to it. I don't remember why I sent this message. Children! Children form the point of all. Children and high art. Money in the bank is also something. We will all die, and the evidence is nothing after that. Honey, we don't rejoin. The thing meanwhile, I suppose, is to be courageous and kind. Susie. I thought I'd end with the first dream song.

Huffy Henry hid the day. Unappeasable Henry sulked. I see his point to trying to put things over. It was the thought that they thought they could do it made Henry wicked in a way, but he should have come out and talked. All the world, like a woollen lover, once did seem on Henry's side.

Then came a departure. Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don't see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived. What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear and be. Once in a sycamore I was glad all at the top and I sang, hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed. Beautiful.

Well, amazing. Could I just make the point, if anyone from the publisher Faber and Faber is listening, that the Dream Songs is not currently in print in the UK. 77 Dream Songs is available, but the whole thing is not available. So we'd love to see that back. and Mr Bones. Huge thanks to Susie Boyk for giving us the chance to explore the wild and unforgettable world of Berriman. To Nicky Birch and Tess Davidson for making our sound even sounder. And to

Unbound for the chicken paprika. You can download all 143 previous episodes plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website batlisted.fm. There will be links there to several interviews and documentaries about Berryman on YouTube,

which I urge you to take a look at. I heartily commend, yeah. Incredible that in the electronic era, we can actually get to see these things, which until about 10 years ago would have been so hard to get to see. They're really extraordinary. There's some footage of Al Alvarez talking to Berryman in Ryan's pub in Ireland in 1966, which is incredible.

So you can find those links on the website. And we're always pleased if you get in touch with us on Twitter and Facebook, and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can show your love directly by supporting our patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted um we aim to survive without paid for advertising your generosity helps us do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for rather less than the price of a second hand hardback of dream songs lot listeners get two extra lot listed a month our own intense conversation with our not so imaginary friends about the books films and music that have crossed our path in the previous week

lot listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation and this week's roll call are margie wetherill gary illsley paul woodruff greg s bowman And we're also delighted to welcome Maid and Karin Moses to our Guild of Master Storytellers, the highest tier in the backlisted Firmament. Thank you both for your generosity and to all our patrons, huge thanks for enabling the three of us to continue to do what we love and enjoy.

And also thank you Susie Boyd for joining us today. That was just terrific. Thank you so much. Is there anything you would like to add about John Berryman that we didn't touch upon that you feel is important to let people know? No, not really. Just I suppose talking in this way makes me feel as I feel when I read that I just want to give him an enormous present. Yes, that's a lovely way to end.

We really hope people will go out and find the poems and read the poems and work work your way into them everybody they're incredibly rich and rewarding they are we normally listen on the way out to some music we're not going to do that this time we felt that it was important to give john berriman himself the last. And so here he is, reading or performing or reciting or singing, Dream Song 55. And we'll see you all next time, everybody. Thanks ever so much. Thanks, Susie.

Yeah, thank you. This will be the last one here. No, I'll read you one more. Would you like to hear about his conversation with St. Peter? This takes place just after his death. Just after. He says, Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks. The architecture is far from reassuring.

I feel uneasy. Pity. The interview began so well I mentioned fiendish things he waved them away and poured me a martini strangely needed we spoke of indifferent matters

God's health the vague hell of the Congo, John's energy. This was written several years ago. Anti-matter matter. I felt fine. Then a change came backward. a chill fell clock slackened died

and he began to give me sideways looks Christ I thought what now and would have asked for another but didn't dare I feel my application failing. It's growing dark.

Some other sound is overcoming. His last words are, "'Muy betrayed me. the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me, and Nicky talking about the books, music, and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.