Happy Birthday, Dan

For me, Daniel Berrigan will always remain a minor poet, in the school of fellow Jesuit (and much greater poet) Gerard Manley Hopkins, who along the way took a detour into politics. I almost wrote “misguided detour,” but that’s neither fair nor accurate. One cannot imagine Dan other than he is, gifted with enormous energy, physical, artistic and moral. He has spoken softly on every occasion I have shared his company, but softly in the way a grieving man at a funeral speaks who does not wish to bother his fellow mourners. Not that Dan worries about bothering the right people. His voice is soft but never from weakness.

I heard a radio interview with Dan on Thursday, which prompted me to reread some of his poems. This one comes from his first collection, Time Without Number, published in 1957 and nominated for a National Book Award. The title is “Credentials”:

“I would it were possible to state in so
few words my errand in the world: quite simply
forestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves
largehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent order
decrees, says solemnly who he is
in the great thrusting limbs that are finally
one: a return, a permanent riverandsea.

“So the rose is its own credential, a certain
unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
visibly, it gives us heart too: bud, fulness and fall.”

Etymology helps. “Errand” is from the Old English for “messenger”—clearly a word Dan would use to describe his role. And “credential” shares a root with “credo” – “belief.” Almost 50 years ago, in his first book, Dan is defining his stance in the world. That final phrase is pure Hopkins. But in the end, this poem and most that Dan has published are dim shadows of Hopkins. His best work appears in his first four volumes, published between 1957 and 1966, the period immediately preceding his fulltime immersion in the antiwar movement. After that, the poems turn increasingly strident, didactic and journal-like – in effect, less poetic, a distinction Dan would not recognize.

Last month Dan celebrated his 85th birthday, and this year he celebrates 67 years as a Jesuit. I met him in the spring of 1991, in the wake of Desert Storm, when he spoke in Troy, N.Y. He autographed the books I handed him and we talked about Dostoevsky and Dorothy Day’s love of the Russian’s novels. I felt uneasy in his presence. I’m not a Catholic or any sort of believer, and perhaps I feared his reproach, which has never come.

The following summer and for the subsequent three summers I attended the weekend retreats Dan would lead at Pyramid Lake in the Adirondacks. Inevitably I was the only non-Catholic and surely the only atheist in attendance. As a group we would study a book of the Bible, always an Old Testament prophet, and meet to hear Dan’s idiosyncratic understanding of it. The schedule was loose, and I would spend a lot of time alone, reading, hiking, canoeing. Some of the others on the retreat (I thought of them as Berrigan groupies) monopolized Dan’s time, I felt, though he never complained. But by late Saturday afternoon we always seemed to meet informally, usually in the dining hall, and talked about books – Dickens, I remember, as well as the Russians, Frost, Eliot, Yeats, Hopkins. We also talked about a mutual acquaintance, the poet Carolyn Forche, whose talent he rated higher than I did. Besides the lake, the loons and the immense clarity of the night sky in the mountains, these talks were the reason I returned each summer

In 1971, Berrigan and the Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles published an edited transcription of their conversations, The Geography of Faith. Coles’ estimation of Dan resembles my own in that I see him as a complex, contradictory man:

“A man of culture and refinement, he has lashed out at the academic and artistic world. A man versed in logic, and in many ways an obvious rationalist, indeed a skeptic, he can become all of a sudden mystical. I never wanted to `analyze’ his personality, but its complexities kept appearing and never quite resolved themselves; I suspect they will grow and grow, and become the full-blown paradoxes that significant lives so often present to us.”

I don’t claim to have privileged understanding of Dan, either through our meetings or his books. To me, he remains an intriguing conundrum. He expressed contempt for the middle class and its values – not an unusual stance on the Left – and romanticized workers and natives of the Third World. This seems like self-loathing on the part of a highly educated, articulate, well read man. Most of all, I regret that Dan never devoted more time and psychic energy to poetry as poetry, not propaganda. I remember him dismissing the counterculture as hedonistic and self-indulgent, yet one of the poets he most resembles is Allen Ginsberg, who often blurred life and work in endless, apocalyptic, “Dear Diary” maunderings.

By the time of his 1969 collection False Gods, Real Men, Berrigan’s poetic manner has turned, often balefully, to Williams Carlos Williams. The lines are fragmented, the images isolated. In the midst of this sad poetic regression, in a poem titled “Farm,” Dan crafts an unlikely, inconspicuous self-portrait:

“four rotted berry crates
two screen doors
a broken barrow
a compost heap,
weeds springing, bold, ripe
unkillable, voracious for life.”