I suppose this thing happens once
a literary reputation gets established where you write to an audience instead
of to yourself, or to teachers and mentors, or some phantasmagorical crowd of future
fans, abstract posterity, or at best to a patient and select group of friends.
I wouldn’t know. And let’s face it, when it comes to establishing a reputation,
who you know is important as how talented you are. You need both. B.’s circle
of friends and acquaintances included nearly all of the subsequently anthologized
mid-century poets. He met them at readings and conferences, through his
visiting professorships, and all these social engagements opened further opportunities
for sharing ideas, networking, and more than a little serious hard-core
drinking. Talent is only one half of the ticket in. Once you’re in, you don’t
even have to behave yourself. I read that one famous writer punched B. in the
mouth because B. ran his hand up the guy’s wife’s skirt. She was just so hot, I
guess, he couldn’t stop himself. But the point is, the groping, getting socked
in the mouth, it’s all in good fun once you’re in. What did she think? Jerk, I
expect, or, boys will be boys, maybe. She might have just thought it was funny.
An interesting circumstance
arises in this poem, because the Pulitzer winner, the poet who has been granted
entrance to the select circle of literary renown, observes a talented poet not
yet of the elect, and even more baffling, doesn’t seem to care. She works in a
bakery, minds her own business, writes poems that flash, gets rejected
constantly, and if or when she does see some success, she’ll probably remain
indifferent. “Her indifference / to the fate of her manuscripts / (which flash)
to a old hand is truly somefing.”
“Somefing,” huh? There’s somefing to unpack here. On one hand, there’s
a pretty strong implication that publicity, fame, reputation, public career,
these are the drivers at this point for the poet. He’s actually being pretty
frank about that in this poem. Supposedly, the root inspiration for Berryman’s
art was to somehow compensate for the emotional wounding he received as a boy,
but the compensation didn’t come from expression or art-making per se, like
with Emily Dickinson. She may have had posterity in mind when she bundled her
poems and tucked them in a dresser drawer before she died, but it’s also clear
she benefitted from the making of her poems for their own sake. There’s no
reason to think B. was never at all
motivated by the satisfaction of making something, like a boy building model
airplanes, but he’s also suggesting that on its own would not have been enough.
The psychological compensation of poetry making for him came through achieving fame
and publicity. Publicity, leading to a satisfying egoistic puffery, starts to
become the point. B. had people lining up to tell him Dream Songs were the best
poetry being written at the time, brilliant, genius, etc. etc., and sure, maintaining
that stream of accolades would have to become a motivation. It probably even takes
over as far as creative motivation. (Again—conjecture. How the hell would I know?)
But he also admits all through The Dream
Songs that he’s aware of the hollowness of this kind of business. Maybe he
really is aware of the hollowness, or maybe it’s a pose. It could be both. So,
about the baby talk. The baby-talk BS of “somefing”, probably dropped in the poem
out of little more than habit, functions as a way of the narrative voice cutting
itself down to size. The baby talk, and the weird and buffoonish blackface
stuff, which I figure is calculated to
cross the line of racial propriety, the sexual exhibitionism, it all is embarrassing
on purpose. Perhaps as nothing more than a way to undercut the swollen,
egoistic persona, but I also do tend to think it’s just as well about feeding
that persona, inflating it further. It’s all received as so honest, so
artistically confessional, right? How brave. Maybe. And maybe it’s all a great ambitious
psychological Ponzi scheme. When it inevitably collapsed, then the game was up:
Suicide, the great double-down. And who can argue
with that? It’s a payment in pure solid gold, the interest from which supports
a reputation into posterity. Or at least that’s the gamble.
There is genuine value and satisfaction
in the earnest act of making—model airplanes, quilts, tree houses, literature,
all of it. It has to be what matters first. A real poet will—astonishingly
enough—sell bread in a bakery. Or teach English. B. says he figuratively “knelt”
before that. Perhaps such a gesture was the real measure and illustration of
how far fame had pushed him from the unsullied example she was living?
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