`The Epistemology of Loss'

Thanks to Ron Slate for reminding me of John Berryman’s “The Imaginary Jew,” one of the five stories posthumously published in The Freedom of the Poet. Set in the steamy summer of 1940 in New York City, after the fall of France and more than a year before Pearl Harbor, the story is plain in style, without the pyrotechnics of Berryman’s later poetry, and redolent of the nineteen-thirties, famously condemned by Auden as “a low dishonest decade,” not unlike our own. The narrator is young, educated, neurotic and, like the world in 1940, living in suspension, awaiting apocalypse, a state distilled by Berryman’s friend Saul Bellow in his first novel, Dangling Man (1944).

I say the story’s style is “plain,” but that’s misleading. The prose is clear, precise and resonant, with a hint of middle-period Henry James and none of Hemingway (the dominant prose influence of the day – the story first appeared in The Hudson Review in 1945). Here’s the complete passage excerpted by Slate:

“The story I have to tell is no further a part of that special summer than a nightmare takes its character, for memory, from the phase of the moon one noticed on going to bed. It could have happened in another year and in another place. No doubt it did, has done, will do. Still, so weak is the talent of the mind for pure relation – immaculate apprehension of K alone – that everything helps us, as when we come to an unknown city: architecture, history, trade practices, folklore. Even more anxious our approach to a city – like my small story – which we have known and forgotten. Yet how little we can learn! Some of the history is the lonely summer. Part of the folklore, I suppose, is what I now unwillingly rehearse, the character which experience has given to my sense of the Jewish people.”

The narrator’s shifts in understanding – from “everything helps us” to “Yet how little we can learn!” – read like precursors of the slippery multiple voices and identities Berryman perfected in The Dream Songs. Berryman once boasted he was master of the pronoun, and few writers have packed so much density of meaning into the first-person singular. The shifts mirror the narrator’s evolving understanding of “the Jewish people.” He begins as an innocent, puzzled by the casual anti-Semitism of his university classmates. After a late-night political argument in Union Square, during which he is accused of being a Jew (“Are you cut?”), this non-Jew, in an act of imaginative solidarity, accepts his “Jewish” identity. Here is the final paragraph:

“In the days following, as my resentment died, I saw that I had not been a victim altogether unjustly. My persecutors were right: I was a Jew. The imaginary Jew I was was as real as the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, in a real Jew. Every murderer strikes the mirror, the lash of the torturer falls on the mirror and cuts the real image, and the real and the imaginary blood flow down together.”

I’m reminded of the scene late in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, when Garrett, after killing his old friend, shoots his own image in a mirror. Like many of us, Berryman was afflicted with Judeophilia – a love of things Jewish. Among his dearest friends were Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. Alan Severance, the protagonist of the poet’s posthumously published novel, Recovery, is a Catholic who contemplates converting to Judaism – like Berryman himself. In an essay included in The Freedom of the Poet, “The Mind of Isaac Babel,” he writes of Jews: “They suffer because they are human beings.”

For Berryman, empathetic projection into the lives of others is a moral obligation. The narrator of “The Imaginary Jew,” rather than reacting violently to his thuggish tormentors or turning bitter and cynical, deepens his moral understanding and grows in humanity. As Berryman wrote in an early work, “The Ball Poem”:

“He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up …”