tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post5879943987732972542..comments2024-03-28T19:56:32.848-05:00Comments on Anecdotal Evidence: `Love Is Multiform'Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08436175583386298032noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-7300996233122355212010-10-25T10:58:09.089-05:002010-10-25T10:58:09.089-05:00One of the things I really like about your blog, P...One of the things I really like about your blog, Patrick, is the way you can personalize the relationship between reader and writer. This post reads less as a critical assessment of Berryman than an account of a divorce – with all the attendant poignancy and grief and hard-earned wisdom. <br /><br />It forces me to assess my own feelings about Berryman, for whom I’ve never felt a particular affinity, but who I have found myself (partly out of your earlier enthusiasm) reading a lot lately. All that you say seems dead-on true (and his womanizing is especially horrific from a contemporary point of view), but what appeals to me in Berryman is how efficiently he tears down all the clever masks of ego to reveal the wounded child beneath it. For all his willful obscurity he’s very easy to read in a way, because he’s already broken down, and his perverse glee in detailing his shame and failure is painfully cogent. <br /><br />This ruthless self-honesty is in marked contrast to the other writer you mention, Saul Bellow. Consider the differing treatment of Delmore Schwartz in Berryman’s <i>Dream Songs</i> vs. in Bellow’s <i>Humboldt’s Gift</i>. Berryman is all heart, recognizing Delmore’s death as his own, seeing his complicity in Delmore’s decline, trying almost as desperately not to be Delmore as he tries to be him. It’s all so tragic and real. Bellow, arms length as always, details the facts of Schwartz’ fall like a surgeon, and gently tsks the model of the tragic genius by pointing out how he personally let him down. No hands are dirtied, no truisms challenged, no self-image subjected to the possibility of critique. The whole thing is written from within the safe confines of the Great Writer Ego Projection, where compassion is a gesture he deigns to give, not something he must earn. <br /><br />My tolerance for that kind of stuff grows weak as I get older – but give me honest heartbreak, like Berryman’s, and I am like a child again.WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com