The Heart Is Strange Read Free

so too were his habits. In March 1937 Dylan Thomas visited Cambridge, and Berryman took up heavy drinking in imitation of the great Welsh alcoholic. In the summer of 1941 he was courting his wife-to-be in New York City, and one night they tried to find a restaurant for dinner. “How much easier it would be if we were abroad,” he told her: “Now, if we were in Paris, we could go to La Coupole.” He was imagining them as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or himself as Hemingway, figures of another generation.
    Reading Berryman’s early poetry is like playing a guessing game: who does he sound like now? He is Thomas here, and then he is Yeats; here he is Auden and here he is Eliot. It is by walking through this funhouse of mirrors and influence that he became himself. The very early “Winter Landscape” rewrites Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” as it imagines a “morning occasion”—not “mourning,” but the sound is the same, and he is sensitive to sound, this man of accents—and as it pictures
    The long companions they can never reach,
    The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
    The sledge and shadow in the twilit street.
    This follows Thomas:
    Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
    Robed in the long friends,
    The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
    Secret by the unmourning water.
    “Winter Landscape” was written in January 1939; in February 1940 he began “A Point of Age,” which turns oddly in the fourth stanza into Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter:
    Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,
    Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.
    This becomes less unexpected when placed alongside the opening of Ezra Pound’s Canto I, which rewrites a scene from the Odyssey in that meter:
    And then went down to the ship,
    Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
    We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
    Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
    Heavy with weeping.
    His titles echo others; he is borrowing his syntax and vocabulary; he is a young man, taking what is good, trying out what works. It is worth playing this footnote game now, for later, and culminating in The Dream Songs , Berryman will turn mimicry to his advantage and invent a poetics that is also an echo chamber. He will find a voice that is recognizably his own—perhaps the most distinctive voice of twentieth-century American poetry—but he will find it in the voices of others. To echo him: The heartbreak is familiar but the heart is strange.
    In his first full collection, The Dispossessed (1948), he is often looking forward and anticipating what is ahead. “At twenty-five a man is on his way,” begins “A Point of Age,” and here he is fixated by the time of day and the time of life. “There was a kind of fever on the clock / That morning,” he writes in “Parting as Descent.” As poems about other poets and as poems about coming of age these are also, of course, poems about finding a place in the tradition. In “The Possessed” he pictures the dead before him:
    This afternoon, discomfortable dead
    Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,
    Whittling memory at the water’s edge,
    And watch. This is what you inherited.
    The poem follows the poetic vocabulary of T. S. Eliot and also the terms of his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
    No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
    This is the work of these early poems. Berryman is setting himself among the dead, counting up his inheritance.
    There are also innovations, things particularly his, and since we know what Berryman became it is impossible now to read these early poems but with our own sense of anticipation; we know where he is going to get to and we wait for its