Word: berrymans
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...remained. He was not alone. Robert Lowell's closest friends and fellow poets, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Theodore Roethke, were also emotionally retarded. The poets, observes Jeffrey Meyers, "felt they should seek suffering rather than happiness . . . All four poets obsessively pursued their private myths, and persuaded each other and the public to believe them." Eventually, an inability to grow damaged the quartet beyond repair...
...severely disturbed, opening his psychic wounds and bleeding into confessional verse. But they all went a step beyond, steeping in self- pity, some sabotaging their marriages with meaningless affairs, others sniping at colleagues and then placing blame elsewhere. "American society would drive anybody out of his skull," fumed Berryman...
Eileen Simpson, who wrote Poets in Their Youth (1982), an admirable memoir of her marriage to the poet John Berryman, was an orphan too, but what she calls a "lucky one." Some luck. When she was eleven months old, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis; her father later put her and her older sister in a Catholic convent school, and she learned at the age of six that he had suddenly died of ptomaine poisoning. Convent life was benign but austere. Three winters in a row she suffered pneumonia so severe that a priest administered Extreme Unction...
From this point on, things get complicated. Giselle meets the ghost of Poet John Berryman, still doing penance for his suicide jump into the Minnesota River. She also bears a demon child who invades the bodies of animals and people in order to kill all suspected enemies of ... Bob Glandier. In his tenth novel, Author Thomas M. Disch, 44, serves up such improbabilities with relish; the result is an entertaining nightmare out of Thomas Berger and Stephen King...
Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson. The first wife of the late John Berryman looks back at the years she spent among a brilliant and damaged generation of poets. The Last Kings of Thule by Jean Malaurie. An Arctic adventurer in the tradition of Peary, Cook and Rasmussen poignantly describes the lives of Greenland's Eskimo nomads as the 20th century encroaches on their Sahara of ice and snow...