'I Bite My Lip & Am Quiet'

For a decade beginning roughly two years before his suicide in 1972, I was obsessed with the poetry of John Berryman. What started as literary infatuation turned, as I now see clearly, into pathological projection. I imagined myself into the poet, alcohol, madness and all. I admired and envied his learning, and read everything he had written and most of the writers he mentions in his poems, particularly the Jewish and Catholic figures who show up regularly in Love & Fame (1970) and Delusions, Etc. (1972), and in his posthumously published novel Recovery (1973). Of course, I was drinking.

 

Collected in the Keatsian-titled Love & Fame is “Views of Myself,” perhaps a play on the title of Whitman’s comparably self-centered poem. By this point, Berryman’s gift had been ravaged by oceans of alcohol. He looks inside, imagines nothing, crafts even less and gives the already discredited school of “confessional verse” a bad name, though he can sometimes coin a pithy phrase: “I stick up like Coriolanus with my scars / for mob inspection.” “Views of Myself,” like much of his late work, is a desperately unpoetic poem. Part of me wants to dismiss it; another reads it as a case study and pities its author. Alcoholics thrive on pity, self- and otherwise. Read the poem closely and watch Berryman vacillate and bounce between boastfulness and revilement. The poem’s final line has stuck with me and was one of several goads to my longtime interest in Abraham Lincoln:  

 

“Lincoln once wrote to a friend ‘I bite my lip & am quiet.’”

 

Berryman slightly misquotes the line, which is drawn from the letter Lincoln wrote on August 24, 1855 to Joshua F. Speed. Here is the passage, in which the future president speaks of slavery: “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” Out of context, as Berryman quotes it, the line suggests a disciplined tact or humility – not qualities we customarily associate with the public performances of the most eloquent speaker in our history, or with Berryman.

 

Lincoln had known Speed since 1837, when both lived in Springfield, Ill. Speed inherited his father’s planation near Louisville, Ky., and remained a proponent of slavery. He believed Northerners had no say in the matter, though once the Civil War started he was a Union loyalist in a border state. Joshua’s brother James Speed served as Lincoln's Attorney General beginning in November 1864. Near the conclusion to his letter to Speed, Lincoln writes:

 

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that  ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence [sic] of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].”

 

In the fourth section of “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” in Love & Fame, Berryman writes:

 

“Across the ages certain blessings swarm,

horrors accumulate, the best men fail:

Socrates, Lincoln, Christ mysterious.

Who can search Thee out?”