p.344:
One could discern most of what’s needed of this poem without
the kind of lightning-quick, fingertip research provided for by the Internet,
but a quick bit of sleuthing helps illuminate some of the obscurities of this
Dream Song and make it more comprehensible. (That’s true for many of the Dream
Songs.) So: “Apu-Apu” is from a trilogy of movies made in India from 1955-1959,
known as The Apu Trilogy, adapted
from a coming-of-age Indian novel, a Bildungsroman
about a poor Bengali boy who does well in school and becomes a writer. The
films were well-known in the US in the late 50s and early 60s, so B. would have
been familiar with them. Apu has mother issues, which resonates pretty well
with young John Berryman, who also had mother issues and went on to become a
writer. The other dream features the Unam Sanctam, the title of a papal bull
issued in the early 1300s. Its main idea was to assert the spiritual authority
of the Catholic pope and declare that only within the Church was salvation
possible. There was some conflict with a king somewhere behind it all, no doubt
very important in its day but little more than a footnote now. It does mean
something to B., though, who gets down and wrestles with faith now and then—where
to situate his faith, what kind of God is it anyway who lets him, us, suffer so,
or is there even really a Supreme Being out there? Goguel and Guignebert were French
professors of history who studied the bible, both discounting the divine salvation
of Jesus and looking into the life of the historical person. In the end, these
obscure references resonate and trump up some gravitas within the poem’s proceedings,
but they’re not really central to it. This is a poem about his relationship
with his wife, but the other references, to religion and to his mother,
complicate it.
We’ve seen the “cookie” before in an earlier Dream Song, an
image playing with the idea of the Catholic host, a crisp round wafer of
unleavened bread. To call it a cookie
is a bit of a flip or even blasphemous take on the whole concept, something the
Medieval pope who bulled out that Unam Sanctam might just have had the poet
burned at the stake for. There’s more tolerance for blasphemous jokes these
days in most places, so he gets away with it. But the intent is not really a
joke in the end. The host is a symbol of transference: Yes, symbolic of
physical nourishment, actual food, but that is a metaphor for spiritual
transference: This is my body. My spirit lives within my body, so here it comes
as well. Take the faith and spirit component of communion away and it starts
looking incredibly creepy, but we won’t go there. This business is all holiness
through and through. Make it into a cookie, though, in the poem, and the
overtones of frivolousness, childlike innocence, and absurdity enter the imagery.
The poem begins with that image of the offering of a cookie. The dreams add
what amount to heavy red herrings, though their seriousness complicates the
poem through a kind of linguistic osmosis. They add to the poem through the
allusions that leak off of them in spite of their irrelevance to the central
arc of the poem.
The offering of a cookie-host to his wife is the focal point
of the poem. On one hand, there is the seriousness about it of offering oneself
in marriage, and there is generally a sanctity in promising that level of
relationship. This is all underscored by the seriousness of the reference to
the papal bull, as if to say only in a sanctified marriage is relationship salvation
even possible, and The Apu Trilogy hearkens
back to the poet’s origins, something also deep and serious. The mother stuff—again,
back to origins, and an acknowledgement of the critical role that a woman—wife or
mother—often plays in a man’s life. It’s all highly serious. But, it’s also a cookie, coming from one Henry Pussycat, and
with that comes flooding in all the schmuckery, buffoonery, and absurdity of
the poet’s existence. High seriousness is mixed with pure ridicule: It’s all
gonna be quite complicated. Good luck with all that, Sweetheart. You’re gonna
need it.
To me, by now, to discern the organizing focus of DS 322 wasn’t
all that hard. I get it. Been here before several times, in fact. But the
obscurities were utterly baffling until I looked them up, and I had to look them up even though I
suspected that in the end they wouldn’t matter. I was lucky to Google up a hit
on a .pdf of someone’s 2004 Ph.D. thesis, from a university in Sheffield,
England, and this now Dr. Rogers did the kind of detailed careful exegesis of
the obscurities of this poem that one expects from a scholar who means business.
It was a fine job of scholarship, and it proved useful, and I thank him for it.
I would never have gotten all this on
my own, because I’m not at all a serious scholar here. I’m just a playful reader,
out to learn something, yes, but much, much more about me and my sensibilities.
I’m an artist myself, in other words, one who only dabbles in scholarship, like
a mallard. The thesis moved on to other poems, unpublished Dream Songs and
more, to make a coherent statement about Berryman’s complicated representations
of Christianity. But for DS 322, I’m still left with the suspicion that the
obscurities of the poem, which this scholar did such a find job sniffing out,
were still mainly smokescreen. I’m not going so far as to call them bullshit,
only because the smell of that smokescreen adheres to the poem, like that faint,
delicious odor of fuming hickory one detects in the fine ham next to your eggs
at breakfast. To reduce this poem to its essence, then: He looks at his wife,
looks at himself, shakes his head, says, O you poor girl. He puffs it all up a
bit with, well, with high-scholarly-seeming puffery of some idiosyncratically linked
odds and ends he picked up somewhere and redreamed. But in the end, it’s about
bafflement and regret that such a beautiful woman would hitch her wagon to such
a swaybacked nag.
It's funny how we can summarize a poem, which is one of the most concise written forms.
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