The Heart Is Strange Read Free Page B

poem was something invented.”
    The tenacity of the term “confessional” lies partly in a way of reading: we feel that the real biographical experience gives the poem weight, and yet this is also, of course, a deliberate literary effect. Particularly in Berryman, there is a careful balance of new freedom and old form. That which is hidden is set against that which is displayed, as if each poem were half a secret.
    Berryman was highly sensitive to form. In 1932, William Carlos Williams instructed his generation:
    Don’t write sonnets. The line is dead, unsuited to the language. Everything that can ever be said from now until doomsday in the sonnet form has been better said in twelfth-century Italian.
    Berryman’s whole career might be understood as a rebuke to this. In 1934, he wrote his first surviving poems: they are four Shakespearean sonnets, and they celebrate his mother’s fortieth birthday. The following year he tried to seduce a Barnard student by writing sonnets for her, and when in February 1947 he began an affair with a married woman he met in Princeton, he turned again to this form. “I wanted a familiar form in which to put the new ,” he wrote in his journal: “Clearly a sonnet sequence. And this gave me also a wonderful to me sense of continuity with lovers dead.”
    Her name was Chris. The poems insist upon this: they are little boasts. He describes her blond hair and her clothes, her naked body as she sleeps. “You, Chris, contrite I never thought to see,” begins one: “Whom nothing fazes, no crise can disconcert, / Who calm criss crosses all year.” He repeats the name in puns: he favors words such as “crisis” and “syncrisis.” He lists the days upon which they met—July 3, July 4—and he wishes to invent a new poetic language to express their specific love.
    I prod our English: cough me up a word,
    Slip me an epithet will justify
    My darling fondle
    he writes, as if the language itself were complicit in their affair. In sonnet 23 he turns upon the traditional vocabulary and image-set of love poetry:
    Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast
    Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo;
    I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,
    As little false.
    He is trying to remake the familiar form so that it may hold the new.
    Yet perhaps the problem is precisely that these sonnets have what Berryman called “a sense of continuity.” Like the emotions, these poems are deeply referential: Berryman mentions or alludes to Marlowe, Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Hölderlin, Donne, the canon of love poets. They suffer the sadness of comparison. “Could our incredible marriage … like all others’…?” trails off one of the sonnets, as if understanding that this is only one more love affair in a historical sequence of lovers and their sonnets, of passions bound by time. The poems are aware of the world around them. Both lovers were married to other people, and while Berryman considered submitting a few of them to magazines under the pseudonym Alan Fury, he withheld them from publication. Twenty years later, after he had found success— 77 Dream Songs was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry—he returned to these sonnets and edited them for publication. He replaced the repeated name “Chris” with the almost rhyming “Lise,” presumably to disguise his lover’s identity, but what is most odd about this—and what reveals most about Berryman’s deep ambivalence toward the question of confession—is that having begun to erase the traces of her identity, he only went halfway. He changed her name but not the elaborate system of puns and echoes built upon that name. The eighteenth sonnet, for example, now addresses “You, Lise, contrite I never thought to see, / Whom nothing fazes, no crise can disconcert.” He retains sonnet 87, which is an acrostic: the first letter of each line spells out “I CHRIS AND I JOHN.” This is a halfhearted discretion, as if he wanted to be