Word: berryman
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...publishing frequently will. Take Ernest Hemingway's Islands in The Stream. The novel, published well after his death, has no merit whatsoever. It did, however, prove two damning points: Hemingway, suffering an unconquerable stasis, was over the hill; his widow, suffering financially, needed the money. Like Hemingway's, John Berryman's Recovery is an unfinished first draft, a rigor mortis novel. But unlike Islands, Recovery maintains respectability...
Saul Bellow's introductory sketch of Berryman adds a great deal to the novel. It's a rare piece, full of quaint anecdotes of their shared careers at Princeton and the University of Minnesota. Bellow knew the writer as a man first--as the man whose gruff arrogance was only a cover up for the frail alcoholic who was unable to manage his life and finally had to take refuge in hospitals. Bellow's sensitivity reaches even deeper. For he knew John Berryman the poet as well: the "Huffy Henry...wicked and away" of the Dream Songs, the narcissistic writer...
ALAN SEVERANCE, whose name, through some pedantic trickery of language means "Harmony Interbreaker," is the protagonist/antagonist. He embodies Berryman's own tremendous ego and frightful delusions. Outwardly self-contained, he helps the hopeless alcoholics in his ward by dominating group therapy and confronting their inadequacies. But he rarely reaches into himself; he is blind to his own shortcomings. He is something of a Cain-figure, lost in a psychological maze of anger and nurtured rejection. Severance, a Pulitzer Prize winning scientist, art critic, and pop intellectual, feels that his status as a celebrity is the source of his troubles. Here...
DREAMS AND delusions have haunted Berryman from his very earliest writing. The Dream Songs are still his most laudable accomplishment. They are not, however, a celebration of any wondrous fairyland of the unconscious mind. Henry, its hero, has "suffered an irreversible loss," and experiences its intensity through his dreams. An earlier "The Ball Poem" reflects the same "epistemology of loss" in a young boy's missing ball. More than anything else, Berryman's dreams are real laments, laced with shattered hopes and withered ideals. Alan Severance too, has very little left to hang onto. His fight for some kind...
Although such perceptions can dazzle, the poles of this novel are fuzzily drawn. Yet whatever Recovery is not, it remains a compelling, scarcely disguised self-portrait of a resplendent mind. It is worthwhile alone for its insights into the alcoholic and suicidal character. As Berryman's friend Saul Bellow observes in an astutely touching foreword to the book, what the poet "needed for his art ... he drew out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive." *Jane Howard