'Honest Before Anything Else'

A reader doesn’t understand how tastes in books and writers might evolve across a lifetime, how indifference might replace enthusiasm and love, indifference. He mentions Hart Crane, a poet I’m unlikely ever to reread. I swooned over The Bridge in high school, spurred on by our shared ties to Cleveland and alcohol. A friend and I mapped a route among the downtown bars that Crane may have visited, some of which still existed half a century ago, then undertook a pub crawl, toasting him along the way. Crane is not a bad poet. That’s not the point. His Library of America collection is on the shelf beside me. He just no longer writes for me. 

My poetic main man around that time was John Berryman. It’s not a stretch to say I was obsessed with him and his work, far more than Crane. I read and collected every biographical and critical scrap about him I could find, including the July 21, 1967 issue of Life magazine, which features a story about him and photos of the poet in Ireland. After his suicide in 1972 I bought his posthumous novel, Recovery (1973); his essay collection, The Freedom of the Poet (1976); Henry's Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972 (1977) and first editions of the poetry. Of the latter I’ve kept only The Dream Songs (1969), which brings together 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream His Rest (1968).

 

What changed? Alcohol had something to do with it, the romantic appeal of the tormented poète manqué. I genuinely admired Berryman’s gifts while overlooking how he abused them. Today I understand that much of the incoherence in the Dreams Songs is drunken self-indulgence. Like every alcoholic, Berryman was a walking or stumbling disaster, hurting and disappointing everyone he encountered, including himself. I stopped drinking in 1979 and slowly over those early years of sobriety, Berryman’s appeal faded.

 

The opposite of the Crane/Berryman syndrome is Louis MacNeice. I was indifferent to the Irishman when young, though devoted to his friend W.H. Auden and his countryman Yeats. What a mistake I made. Clive James, writing of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), calls it “an intoxicating cocktail of classical metres, conversational rhythms and reportorial detail.” In his introduction to it, MacNeice writes: “Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” MacNeice writes about us, common working people, in ways Berryman never approached:

 

“Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers,

              The workman gathers his tools

For the eight-hour day but after that the solace

              Of films or football pools

Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory

              Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,

The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking

              In the empty glass of stout.”

 

Whereas Berryman in the elegy for MacNeice, “Dream Song” 267, can’t forget himself long enough to rather feebly mourn the poet who died in 1963. “Can Louis die? Why, then it’s time to join him /again, for another round, the lovely man.”