Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to Eileen Simpson, poet John Berryman's widow, the seeds of the poets' destruction were sown early in their childhood. For example, Berryman's crippling emotional problems were caused in part by his difficult relationship with his mother, she writes in her book Poets in Their Youth...
Simpson says that the late poet never stopped blaming his mother for having an affair with a wealthy man, which he believed helped cause his father's apparent suicide...
Perhaps because he thought his father killed himself, suicide always hung like a shadow over Berryman's life, Simpson writes. She recalls an incident after a drunken prenuptial party in New York when Berryman fought with his mother and then leapt onto the narrow railing of her apartment terrace many stories above the city streets...
Berryman was not unique among the earlier poets in having a troubled childhood. Delmore Schwartz's relationship with his mother was also occasionally explosive, Simpson writes. And Robert Lowell hinted at the sadness of his childhood in his later confessional poems, one of which describes his fictional stay in a mental asylum where all the patients were from Harvard and all the monitors came from Boston University...
...wall, or a note slipped under my door, or a rally in my dining hall, I would have no argument. But when my privacy is involved, my position on the El Salvador issue becomes irrelevant. What if they had sent me a letter telling me that my mother had been killed by Salvadoran terrorists? Should I have boarded the next plane home...