#351

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There’s a coolly honest line in this poem: “Having made a dent / in the world, he insisted on special treatment, / massage at all hours.” I’m feeling a temptation after this to criticize him on this kind of business. In the poem, he sets a scene of having been reading The Times Literary Supplement, with a hangover and “a large Jamieson.” He puts it down and wonders, “Who will his demon lover / today become?” The movement is away from the literary journal toward thoughts of sex, with this magnificent line of poetry: “Love in the shadows where the animals come / tickled his nerves’ end.” Note: the italics here are not mine. He’s talking about orgasm here. Sheesh. Well, I’ve written before about the experience I had of wandering the Louvre, just sort of aimlessly taking it all in, when it suddenly, probably belatedly, hit me: It’s all about sex! Art is about sex! Well, I’ve since grown a bit further even, and I know it’s more than that, but that’s a lot of it. And that’s precisely because it’s so much a part of our humanity. Well, Henry here doesn’t need a revelation. He knew it all along. And he always took advantage. Was it his right? Has he earned this with all that work and recognition? Is he just being some kind of jerkoff cretin? I’m not sure it even matters.

                                    He put down The Times

            & began a salvage operation,

            killing that is the partly incoherent,

            saving the mostly fine, polishing the surfaces.

            Brain- & instinct-work.

Back to work, in other words, though only to salvage something. There is no creativity in the picture anymore, just the necessary work that comes from being a professional writer with a major project to bring to a conclusion. And he’s going to have to work through a hangover and a large Jamieson anyway.

But work doesn’t last. The last stanza is something:

            On all fours he danced about his cage, poor Henry

            for whom, my love, too much was never enough.

            Massage me in Kyoto’s air.

            The Japanese women are better than the Swedes,

            more rhythmical, more piercing.

                                                                  Somewhere, everywhere

            a girl is taking her clothes off.

That image of him on all fours dancing in a cage is a metaphor for his work as an artist. Caged by poetry and what honestly are the narrow limitations of this art form. Wordsworth imagined the poet writing sonnets as a nun praying in her cell. B. imagines himself writing Dream Songs as something like a maltreated chimp dancing for the peanut-crunching crown in a cage at the zoo. Same concept though with vastly different connotations, those two metaphors. The thing is though, there is something of an ironical posing in this. Poetry is actually vast, and it has bought him a high-profile career, invitations to the White House, world travel, and a Pulitzer Prize. And it got him laid constantly. What more does a guy actually want? Some cage. Anyway, the brief foray into thoughts of poetry lead him right back to where his imagination keeps pushing him all along. Massage, and who knows, maybe he knows what he’s talking about when he compares Swedish and Japanese masseuses, but then we end up with women undressing. It feels to me much like the alcoholic on his way to the bar for the first time after drying out in a hospital for six weeks. I’m a clown, I’m awful, but I can’t not go. At this moment: I have work to do, but thoughts of women and massages make their way into my head, and I can’t stop them. He doesn’t want to stop them either.

Here’s another honest line: “Too much was never enough.” Nope. And in the face of that, all of my Puritanical, naïve criticism of his behavior and his thinking rings a touch for me with the Pollyanna quality that he, or any other world-savvy addict, would find worthy of a contemptuous sneer. But there’s a power in innocence, something my mother said to me once in talking about her own lack of worldly experience. I think she’s right. But I don’t know if innocence or experience even apply to the Berryman/Henry of The Dream Songs. Those are ways of living through a genuine life. For him, it’s all a performance, which he has made clear. So the nastier he gets in walking street behavior, the more noteworthy the poetic performance that inevitably follows. Even when he’s engaged in the very human moment of having thoughts of sex and desire capsize his morning’s work, it gets performed as it’s happening, because it never exists in and of itself. Every thought is observed and given form and projected to an audience. But while he knows it’s performance, I wonder if it isn’t coupled with a yearning for recognition. Maybe the image of him dancing on all fours in a cage isn’t a gesture saying, “Look at what crazy thing I’m capable of doing!”; it’s a gesture that is saying, “Look at who I am.” There’s a need for recognition that never is fulfilled because a self that could be recognized is never offered—anywhere. Not even to his wife. There’s something almost infinitely sad about it. These Dream Songs are bottomless when it comes to that kind of thing.