Resolution and Independence: John Berryman’s Ghost and the Meaning of Life

Madeline DeFrees

Writing to his mother in the summer of 1961, John Berryman spoke of his seminar at the Indiana University School of Letters: “working hard (w. the best students I ever had: 15 of them—2 beards, a nun, & a Lebanese professor).” I was that forty-one-year-old nun, swathed in five yards of black wool serge. Six years later—still a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, but in civilian clothes—I would move to the University of Montana to replace Richard Hugo as writer in residence while he was in Italy on a Rockefeller grant. It would be another six years until I left the order altogether, having received a dispensation from my religious vows after nearly thirty-eight years in the convent. Looking back at my participation in Berryman’s seminar, I recognize it as the first step in a long journey to discover the buried self.
    Although I did not know it then, the search for what Berryman called “deep limiting form” in poems would initiate a corollary quest for my own deep form. In this process, Berryman’s abrasive teaching style would clash with my need for approval and eventually generate the sense of independence I needed to resolve the conflict between my poetic and my religious commitments. After that summer, I would move gradually toward my true place in the world, supported by the friendship of Bruce Jackson, a fellow seminar student.
    At the time I enrolled in Berryman’s class, I was heading into early menopause—a condition euphemistically known in the convent as “the change.” Month after month, I would have three or four good days after my period; then the tension would build inexorably until I felt like an overinflated balloon. But at a level I now recognize as far below that of the conscious mind, I was advancing toward a more radical change from the life I had been living for twenty-five years. One of my brighter students from that time described me as “a mass of ganglia with no epidermis.” I could barely hold my body in place during the half-hour of morning meditation in the chapel, and I imagined myself rising to shatter the silence with a piercing scream.
    My gynecologist realized my problem was more than physical. Two or three times, he administered injections to relax me, but he also spoke of “breaking the cycle.” The best remedy, he advised, would be a complete change of scene—the earlier, the better.
    That was how I found myself in Indiana in Berryman’s class. Shortly after the term began, Berryman remarked that in Minnesota he taught a seminar called “The Meaning of Life.” How ironic, I thought, that a forty-six-year-old poet, bedeviled by alcohol; disenchanted with marriage, family, and romantic relationships; haunted by suicide; pursued by demons both real and imaginary—a repeated loser in the war of nerves—should presume to expound on the meaning of life. It is time to revise that facile judgment.
    Berryman explained in the first class of Major and Minor Forms in Poetry that the course title should have included Intermediate. We would study “deep limiting form” in poems of increasing length, Berryman said, adding that he and Delmore Schwartz had coined the term when they were drinking together. Today, critics and biographers, perhaps finding the name redundant, have shortened it to “deep form.” Our first assignment was to read all the entries under Form in The Oxford English Dictionary. The exercise convinced me that we would be concerned with form in the Scholastic sense: that which makes a thing what it is. Here, I was on home territory. But we were not to have the satisfaction of hearing our instructor’s thoughts on the matter.
    In that letter to his mother, Berryman described his lodgings in the Memorial Union as “corner room, 7th floor, in a tower, gorgeous views, sweltering but better than usual.” Coming from rainy western Oregon, where greenery was only one element in a dramatic natural setting, I was more critical of the landscape. The land was too flat. The vegetation, just short of tropical, reminded me of a jungle. The stark white architecture of Indiana limestone rose against level blue or slate skies that could suddenly darken with thunder or flash with lightning. I had thought myself immune to my mother’s terror of electrical storms, but these disturbances were unlike anything I had encountered earlier.
    Berryman spent much of the first two weeks resisting student pressure for definitions. How could we track down deep limiting form if we did not know what we were looking for? One day, Bruce Jackson, easily the brightest student in the seminar, looked up from his book to ask, “Are we going to find out that every poem has a different deep limiting form?” To all such inquiries, Berryman would answer something like, “Oh, you people! You want everything arranged in neat little boxes. Just relax.”
    For me, that was impossible. I came from a context in which definitions grew wild. I wanted a critical catechism, a dictionary of absolutes. Unlike Emily Dickinson’s, my head was kept firmly in place by a coif, a bandeau, and a veil. I had even evolved my own definition of a poem, with Bruce’s help in refining it: “a verbal framework in which contradictories or opposites are brought into temporary equilibrium.” I tested the definition by applying it to individual poems. It worked for all except Oriental models. In them, the polar term existed behind the page, giving the central image its force.
    During the first class, Berryman wrote, in Japanese, a haiku by Issa on the blackboard. I reacted with panic: was I up to this? Later, I learned that this was a trick of Berryman’s—to memorize a short poem in its original language and use it to dazzle the class. I was dazzled, dazzled and scared, by Berryman’s presence and even by the mysterious beauty of the poem in Japanese—though in English it seemed smaller:

A world of dew
It is a world of dew, indeed.
And yet.

I remembered something George Santayana says in The Last Puritan: “In the East, you know, Art is like that—overwhelmed but calligraphic.” Over. whelmed myself—and almost mute—I explored the margins of the campus, wound through groves and thickets, sometimes crossing, in what seemed a symbolic reversal, a small creek called the Jordan River. I was still twelve years distant from what I now see as my deliverance: a long wandering through wilderness into a secular Promised Land.
    One of the few constants during those eight weeks was poetry, that signal from the deepest source in the unconscious. I had been writing verse from my eleventh year, but like others before me, I felt a conflict between my writing life and the religious life. No one had told me explicitly that I must give up poetry, but there was the example of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “elected silence” and Thomas Merton’s more recent struggle. The Trappist had published an essay in Commonweal arguing that the contemplative would reach a point at which he must give up poetry for the sake of prayer. Although he had reappraised the situation eleven years later, asserting that poetry belongs to the mysterious realm of who one is, his reassurance was of little practical assistance to me. I knew that my time belonged to the order. I believed that the commitment to poetry and the commitment to the religious life were total. How could there be two total commitments? And I knew, if it came to a draw, which one would win.
    During the Indiana summer, lines and stanzas kept me company as I covered the distances from dorm to classroom, from classroom to library, from library to the Newman Center for afternoon Mass. The difference was that they were not my lines, not even those of Hopkins, meshing so easily with prayer, but the odd choices of a poet who had left the Church long since but still claimed to be its official interpreter.
    It seemed that Berryman wanted to saddle me with the easy absolutes he associated with an institutional Church he had outgrown. And he wanted to reserve for himself the arcane theological expertise and the historical impartiality of the scholar. My emotional development at forty-one lagged far behind my intellectual, and I was devastated by his—or anyone’s—failure to acknowledge the complexities of my awareness. It was one thing for me to hide behind the nun stereotype and another to have strangers impose it on me. The strongest continuity in my life was writing poems and the sense of self it engendered. That made for a fragile identity, given the awkwardness of the amateur poet and the lethal aim of the teacher-critic.
    It is easy for outsiders to think of nuns from that period as anonymous—an undifferentiated mass with prefabricated opinions as indistinguishable from one another as their habits. People routinely called us “Sister,” as if there were no need to attach a specific name. For me, the life was an extension of the false self I had slipped into at home, where I adopted my mother’s fiction of “the perfect child” and kept my rebellious thoughts under wraps. Demurely dusting the legs of the dining room table, I hid from my mother’s continuous monologue and thought my underground thoughts. Years later, reading R. D. Laing, I understood that the split between my emerging identity and this false self had become a dangerous crevasse, and that I must either fall over its edge or escape into the real world.
    In the artificial world of the classroom, day after day, the labels we proposed for a given poem’s version of deep limiting form were pronounced wrong and Berryman’s proved the only right one. No wonder that my anxiety deepened. I kept a running list of correct terms in the back of my notebook, looking in vain for some common attribute or principle of unity. One day the form would be geometric, as in circular form. The next, it might be rhetorical: inquisitorial form. Maybe it was time to give up on definitions.
    One of our early assignments was to spend fifty hours reading “Resolution and Independence.” I may have been the only one to take Wordsworth (and Berryman) that seriously. Methodically, I clocked the fifty hours—a feat that required reading during meals and into the night—feeling in the end not much better prepared for having observed the letter of the law. Yet recent reflection convinces me that a store of resolution and no small stirrings of independence seeped in by osmosis that session, in spite of my protective coating.
    Wordsworth’s poem, Geoffrey Grigson reminds us, was the first of Thomas Hardy’s “three cures for despair.” I was not exactly despairing, but I was chronically, if not clinically, depressed and could not understand why. Every year, in our small college in Spokane, I had watched one or two Sisters return from their studies and take up teaching. Then, just as I had done, they seemed to be so deeply reabsorbed by their duties that their vitality and dedication began to burn out. My doctor had been right: I needed time away from the college. But adapting to my new environment was hard. Here in this landlocked jungle, I felt utterly isolated except for the rhythms that sustained me. I had already found Berryman’s “A Sympathy, A Welcome,” which he had recited in the first meeting, and had committed it to memory, complete with his inflections and intonations:

Feel for your bad fall how could I fail,
Paul, who had it so good.
I can offer you only: this world like a knife.

He was offering it to me as well.
    From the beginning, Berryman had set himself up as the ultimate authority on all things Catholic. That made of me his uneasy subject. Speaking always ex cathedra, he interpreted my every comment and pronounced on its orthodoxy. He seemed never to hear what I said, but only what he expected me to say. If I spoke of contradictories, he would leap to the reconciliation of opposites and remark, “Oh, Sister, you always think everything will turn out all right.” I wanted to be treated as a person, not a naive, feather-brained refugee from a Bill O’Malley nun cartoon. In spite of the way he wrote me off, I felt a strong affinity for Berryman’s sensibility:

and humorless as you do look you will laugh
and all the others
will NOT be fierce to you, and loverhood
will swing your soul like a broken bell
deep in a forsaken wood, poor Paul,
whose wild bad father loves you well.

    There was not much for me to laugh about, but I identified with the broken bell and the forsaken wood. I had always done well in school, easily excelling. When the order sent me to the University of Oregon in 1949, I discovered for the first time that one cannot always expect to be the best. Now, at Indiana University, I again felt the anxiety that comes from being the official representative of a particular religious community and even of the Church. I was on scholarship for the summer and eager to justify the University’s choice of me. I was terrified, not of failure so much as of mediocrity. Even so, I would stick it out. Unable to write poems, I still found my powers of observation and retention sharpened by strangeness. As I walked the leaf-arched aisles of the campus, cardinals—the ornithological kind—whistled at the swish of my passing skirts. Flattery deserves a good dose of fact, I thought, and checked out a bird book along with an LP record. Soon, the sound of a whistle alerted me to search the topmost branch in the area, where I could usually locate the scarlet flash of the male bird’s plumage.
    Not everything was that flamboyant. Library afternoons, all sodden serge and limp linens, were a struggle to stay awake. Determined to complete reserve reading, I suffered on in chairs tooled for my personal discomfort. Sleepless nights worsened the problem. Returning students came with electric fans and spare bedsheets to drape across open bedroom doors, inducing shy crosscurrents of air from the room across the hail, equipped in like fashion. In this, as in so much else, I found myself unprepared.

If Berryman was impressed by some of his seminar students, he could not possibly be impressed by me. I had earned a BA from Marylhurst College, with courses sandwiched between stints of teaching fifth and sixth grades. My studies extended over twelve years, with many courses out of sequence or by correspondence. It seemed to me that a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, where I had taken “service courses” in English literature, did not prepare me for the School of Letters. In fact, everyone else seemed to have stronger academic credentials.
    When one “beard” among us—a young man from the New School of Social Research, called down Berryman’s ridicule by missing a Scriptural allusion, I took little comfort in my familiarity with the Bible. It merely made me anxious that Berryman would find my weak spots and zero in for the kill.
    “After all, Mr. Wiener,” our mentor said with exaggerated politeness, “there is such a book as the Bible.” From then on, each time we encountered a Scriptural reference, Berryman would turn toward Stuart and say, “We’ll ask our Biblical expert. Mr. Wiener?”
    Yet when I tried to trace what I thought was a series of Biblical allusions in Whitman, Berryman would not give me the satisfaction of agreeing. It was sometimes impossible to decide whether he was baiting us, misstating a case to see whether anyone would challenge him, or merely pursuing the most esoteric explanation at hand. For example, a passage from “Song of Myself” mentions “baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,” followed soon after by “And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,” then (in Section 4) by the phrase, “Trippers and askers surround me.” Berryman had explained the “trippers” in the dictionary sense of tourists with some added British reference to weekend picnics. It seemed clear to me that the trippers were descended from the Pharisees trying to entrap Jesus by their mock-innocent question about giving tribute to Caesar. Berryman encouraged me to trace the whole sequence of connections from the feeding of the multitudes with the loaves and fishes through the Pharisees’ questions. Throughout my recital, he kept muttering, “Very interesting . . . go on.” But at the conclusion, he looked up and said, “Of course, you’re absolutely wrong!” So much for Biblical allusions.
    The rationale behind Berryman’s abrasive teaching style was the belief that it would foster independent thinking in his students. Consistent opposition might persuade them to substitute autonomous inquiry for blind allegiance to authority. Berryman’s classroom strategies are clearly set forth in “Wash Far Away,” which was billed on its original publication in American Review 22 (1975) as a “posthumous short story with autobiographical overtones.” The piece portrays a university professor engaged in teaching Milton’s “Lycidas” (one of the poems we studied that summer) and thus provides insight into Berryman’s conscientious class preparation, his classroom procedure, his manner and motivations:

The Professor was a systematic man. He opened his Milton and read the poem thoughtfully, twice, before he laid out side by side two other Miltons got from the library early in the week and began to work his way through the editors’ notes.

A personal response to the poem figures in his observations: “Both times he was gently moved by the exquisite melancholy of a semi-couplet at the end of the flower passage: ‘For so to interpose a little ease, / Let our frail thoughts daily with false surmise.’” But with the close attention of the searcher for deep form and with the tools of the textual critic, the protagonist of the story does more than react subjectively:

The editors he read closely, he read long, and he was astonished when he learned that “flashy” meant insipid. What were the “songs”? Preaching . . . teaching. Insipid teaching, like his. Was all this preparation a mistake? . . . He wanted still to learn, he didn’t feel superior to the students . . . more now than then. But his experience was what it was. Who would know “flashy” unless he told them?

What follows in the story could be said to be Berryman’s alter ego in the process of discovering the deep limiting form of “Lycidas,” which he defined as inquisitorial, starting with “Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep / Clos’d o’er the head of your lov’d Lycidas?” and proceeding to the “testimony of Triton and Aeolus, and the speeches of Camus and Peter,” which “actually made up a sort of trial.” The verbal support for Berryman’s view of the poem is developed in more detail in the story.
    Another feature of Berryman’s ambitions for his students is highlighted in the narrative. When one of the undergraduates questions the critics’ view of the poem, asking, “Could they be wrong?” the Professor replies:

    They certainly could. I’ve told you all year not to take anybody’s word for anything if you feel competent to judge it yourself and can bring evidence forward.

This, I believe, is the reason for much of Berryman’s stubborn quarrelsomeness in seminars: he wanted his students to judge independently and bring evidence forward. And his ruthlessness in exposing ignorance can be attributed not just to sadistic impulses, but also to a passion for the poem. As the Professor remarks in the story, “No quantity of attention or insight will assist your ignorance, if you happen to be ignorant.”
    Although I was not altogether ignorant, I lacked the assertiveness to argue with the bizarre opinions Berryman sometimes expressed to test us. As a cradle Catholic, I was conditioned to accept the principle of authority. In the convent, holding to one’s own opinion was matter for public self-accusation at the monthly Chapter of Faults. With so little practice at this kind of resolution and independence, I needed support.
    That support came from Bruce Jackson, an Indiana Fellow in Comparative Literature—student by day, bartender by night. At twenty-five, Bruce had been chosen for the fellowship by Harry Levin. Early on, Berryman recognized Bruce’s intellectual and creative gifts and came to depend on him as a sparring partner. Bruce’s degree of interest in class proceedings became Berryman’s gauge for the effectiveness of his teaching. And because Berryman knew that Bruce and I spent hours together, discussing everything, I may have been, in some respects, a rival for the attention Berryman needed to function in alien territory.
    The second Saturday of the term, when the class assembled for the morning seminar, Berryman failed to appear. We waited about twenty minutes, punctuated by smart remarks from some students, one of whom had seen the poet weaving across campus on Friday night. Finally, we adjourned to the student union for coffee and discussion. I wondered how Berryman would explain his absence.
    At the next meeting, he apologized for oversleeping. “At first, I was vexed with myself,” he said, “but then I was vexed with you because I showed up for the second hour, and you weren’t here.”
    He explained that we’d have to make up the class. Indiana could be sticky about things like that. They were almost as bad as the convent: library books could not be renewed ahead of time, even if you were going out of town. Meal hours were strictly enforced. Faculty attendance at Wednesday night forums on research-in-progress was de rigueur. Scheduling the makeup class was not easy. When we finally found a time that promised to work and Berryman was polling the students, a young woman from Brandeis was the only holdout.
    “I’m sorry,” she announced in a petulant voice, “but I have a cocktail party at that time.” We compromised by booking a split shift—an hour before lunch, an hour after. That necessitated having lunch elsewhere than in the distant dorm, so Bruce invited everyone to his apartment. When I was reluctant to presume permission from the order for that, Bruce suggested that I lunch with Berryman in the student union. I’m sure that he made the suggestion in hopes that a one-on-one meeting would eliminate some of the tension between us.
    The day arrived, and after the first hour there I was having lunch with Professor Berryman, hoping that I would not do anything to start an argument. Berryman was being extremely polite, almost formal, and I was awkward, nervous, merely trying to make a choice from the menu. When it was his turn, Berryman chose a toasted corned-beef-on-rye sandwich, but asked not to have it toasted. “I’m not sure we can do that,” the waitress said. That maddening Indiana literalism manifesting itself again.
    “The . . . way . . . you . . . do . . . it,” Berryman said, articulating in exaggerated fashion, “is not to toast the bread.” His order arrived as requested. We talked about George Eliot, one of my favorites, although I had to admit I had not read Daniel Deronda. Berryman said that I must. He also recommended Jacob Boehme’s The Signature of All Things.
    Though the lunch was successful, it did not put an end to the petty persecution I was suffering in class; when I checked with other students, whose view might be more objective, they confirmed my feeling that I was being singled out for punishment. Maybe I reminded Berryman of his Catholic past, they speculated. Even Mr. Stallnecht, Director of the Summer Institute, had an opinion: he felt that he himself might have contributed to the difficulty by praising my poems too highly. Whatever the reason, I was having a hard time. At night, battling fatigue and insomnia, I tried to figure it out. At last I resolved to consult Robert Fitzgerald, whom I had met earlier in Seattle and whose course in Poetry and Narrative I was taking. Fitzgerald suggested that we meet for lunch where we could talk at leisure.
    On the appointed day, I sat across from him and began my story. Lunch was served. Tears ran down my cheeks and into the bowl of soup before me. I was embarrassed but helpless to control them. Fitzgerald suggested dropping the course.
    “It’s past the deadline to drop,” I said.
    “Mr. Stallnecht would make an exception for you.”
    “But I don’t want to drop. I don’t want to give him that satisfaction. And besides, I like the class.”
    Fitzgerald was silent for a few minutes. “Does John know that he bothers you?” I said that he could not help knowing: I had the same problem in class that I was having at that very moment.
    “That’s your first mistake,” Fitzgerald said. “John is something of a sadist, and if he knows he’s getting to you, it will only make matters worse. If you’re resolved to stay in the class, you can’t let him bother you.” He paused again before continuing. “Another thing. Just remember that a man with a hangover feels terrible.” He and John had been meeting for lunch once a week and bringing poems. Fitzgerald said that Berryman often showed up for these sessions already half-drunk, so early in the day. 
    I remembered the morning Berryman had begun class by extending his hands, arms flexed at the elbows, palms downward, moving his hands up and down in a quieting motion as if soothing a roomful of recalcitrant children. “Don’t anyone . . . upset me today. My head . . . is killing me. So tread softly.” The words were accompanied by repeated motions of the hands. All eyes fastened on Berryman. Even our breathing suspended as we waited for what might follow. With the increased tolerance that sometimes enables heavy drinkers to function like a car on automatic pilot, Berryman began his lecture, brilliant as ever but without the customary pauses for interchange with students. Most of us diligently took notes. No one dared argue or object.
    After my talk with Fitzgerald, I felt much better and worked out a strategy for dealing with future seminar meetings: I would never make a flat statement, but put every comment in the form of a question; when Berryman embarrassed me, I would react with amusement instead of hurt; and I would try to anticipate his often outrageous readings of poems and go one step beyond his erotic interpretation, hoping to make myself heard. It was a difficult regimen, and I still found myself yielding to intermittent anxiety. I might have been even more anxious had I known that, all the while, I was searching for my own deep form. Away from my religious community and the convent horarium, I had more control over my time. The concentration this allowed turned poems into a focus for projection: viewing painful emotions in the literary expression of others would eventually allow me to bring my own obsession with death and other repressed feelings into consciousness. The poet was gradually edging out the nun.
    Even so, the nun registered mild shock at Bruce’s account of guiding Berryman through the Kinsey collection in the campus’s Eli Lilly library. Bruce had brought along his then wife, Susie. Anticipating problems, he had asked Berryman to watch his tongue in the presence of a woman. But Berryman had been unwilling or unable to rein in his remarks, and the day had ended badly with Bruce and Berryman at odds. To reinforce his displeasure, Bruce cut the next class, knowing that his absence would distress Berryman. Sure enough, Berryman confronted Bruce after the next seminar and demanded: “Where were you? You left me all alone with all those eyes staring atme!”
    With Bruce back in class, I demonstrated my new tactics, suggesting a heavily sexual interpretation of an assigned poem. Berryman turned his full gaze on me and remarked, “You said that, Sister, I didn’t.” We were off to a new start, although there would still be moments of panic on my side and cantankerousness on his. But little by little, as the summer wore on, Berry- man’s occasional barbed comments began to seem less like hostile attacks than like odd marks of affection.
    Ballantine Hall was not air conditioned, so at intermission everyone in the class, including Berryman, converged on the Coke machine downstairs. On one such occasion, we found the dispenser out of order. Someone suggested a vending machine in a nearby building. “May I bring you a Coke, Sister?” Berryman asked. I nodded happily, thanking him, pleased that the age of chivalry was not yet dead. A few minutes later, the group came back, single file. In the lead walked Berryman, sipping an ice-cold Coke. He nodded curtly in my direction: “It’s coming by levitation.”
    Fitzgerald’s words came back to me: “John is something of a sadist.” But in a matter so trivial? Disappointed, I turned to head back upstairs. Then I heard a slight scuffling behind me and turned to see the student at the end of the line, a Coke in each hand, trying to catch up. He extended the can on the right. “Mr. Berryman said to give you this.”

In another class, Berryman was giving us his version of Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” But first, he had to give the details of Thomas’s death amid the horrors of alcoholic withdrawal. Berryman had kept vigil in the hospital at the time: “You could hear him breathe all the way down the corridor,” he said. “It was horrible!” The reenactment struck us as premonitory of a fate Berryman himself hoped to avoid. For the present, he went on to quarrel with us over the opening lines of Thomas’s poem:

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking.

What was the subject of the verb Tells, Berryman asked, and student after student said that it was darkness. Not so, Berryman said. He argued for a compound subject with the second line parenthetical, and when pressed about the singular verb, said that the clause was asyntactic. We talked about missing hyphens in the compound adjectives. Berryman dismissed this as irrelevant— a point for our side—because Thomas often did not use hyphens. I asked about the alliterative ties in the first two modifiers. All of us were saved by the bell.
    Beginning the next class, Berryman said: “Today we take up the contest between Mr. Jackson”—a long look at Bruce, then another in my direction—“and his followers, and the view that I hold.” It mattered little whether he was right. What we had to learn was the resolution to stand by our considered judgment and the independence not to abandon it just to please the professor.
    At the next Wednesday-night forum, Berryman was to speak on Shakespeare. High-school teachers, on campus for a conference, had been told of the lecture, and many of them filed eagerly into the auditorium as Berryman was about to begin. He announced in a distant manner that he planned to read his paper and that it would take a full ninety minutes.
    “Anyone who is unable to stay that long may wish to leave now.” Berryman paused for the exodus. No one stirred. Then, adjusting his glasses, he placed a thick sheaf of papers on the lectern and began a ponderous marathon of polysyllables. Soon there was a rustling in the auditorium as a few hardy souls rose to climb over the legs of their neighbors and find the nearest exit. The movement gathered weight and mass as Berryman droned on, apparently oblivious. After a few minutes, only the regular summer session students and the faculty remained. At that point, Berryman put the paper aside and lectured with his usual quirky brilliance.
    It was a style calculated to keep everyone in the seminar wide awake in spite of the heat and sleepless nights. The emotional barometer was always rising and falling. I can see him still: lean, wiry, clean-shaven, and courtly—impeccably dressed. His hands, often in motion, showed nicotine-stained fingers that trembled as he reinforced a point.
    More often than not, the poems we studied were about death. We began with Issa’s haiku for his daughter, passed on to a limerick about the “handsome young airman” who “lay dying,” then to the death of Randall Jarrell’s ball-turret gunner. We pondered death by drowning, death by one’s own hand, death from alcohol abuse. The image of a father’s suicide that haunted the impressionable Berryman found an equally urgent, if less violent, counterpart in the images I internalized from the convent, where we wore black to symbolize that we were dead to the world. The final meditation each month on our day of recollection was a rehearsal for our own death. In the novitiate, I was aware for the first time of sharing a roof with a dying person. And when the Sister lay in her plain casket outside the open chapel doors, I took my turn at the all-night vigil. The nun’s final vows, written in her own hand, rested on her breast. As I checked the candles beside the casket, they threw eerie shadows on the pale face framed in starched white gauze.
    A good friend, noting the preoccupation with death in my poems, explained the phenomenon as a corollary of “the strongest drive towards life of anyone I know.” News of a suicide invariably moved me to write a poem, but I was not yet ready to consider what this implied and to confront the demon. When I finally did, my psychiatrist explained that a person unable to express anger may direct that emotion toward herself, converting it to guilt. The endlessness of guilt, he said, triggers a “pseudo-suicidal impulse.”

There was another dead body on the dissecting table in the seminar room. This time it was Robert Lowell’s “Mary Winslow,” and Berryman was presiding over the autopsy. He had called on Elizabeth Sewell, author of The Structure of Poetry, as a consultant. “She uses Boolean algebra in her approach,” Berryman announced gleefully. I was more impressed with Sewell’s notion of the poem as mediation between extreme states of order and disorder, all the way from logic and number to dream and nightmare. But for our present purposes, it was Sewell’s idea of the poem as a closed-relation system, similar to an electrical circuit, that mattered: anywhere one entered the circuit led to every other part of the system. Berryman was instructing us on several ways to approach an obscure poem: through the title, through the first line or another line that seemed to contain the poem in little, and through the most striking phrase. In Lowell’s poem, for example, most of us fastened on “the gelded picador.”
    To our astonishment, Berryman reversed his customary response and agreed with us. Either he believed that we were becoming better thinkers or he just wanted to keep us guessing. The phrase we had chosen reflects the reduced nobility of this “Cleopatra in her housewife’s dress.” (Berryman pronounced it huzzv’if.) Grandeur has become grandiloquence; power has become helpless dependency:

Her Irish maids could never spoon out mush
Or orange-juice enough; the body cools
And smiles as a sick child.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Charon, the Lubber, clambers from his wherry,
And stops her hideous baby-squawks and yells,
Wit’s clownish afterthought. Nothing will go
Again. Even the gelded picador
Baiting the twinned runt bulls
With walrus horns before the Spanish Belles
Is veiled with all the childish bibelots.

Mary Winslow is dead.

It was not a pretty death, and Berryman managed to wring the maximum discomfort from this pitiful situation.

The bell-rope in King’s Chapel Tower unsnarls
And bells the bestial cow
From Boston Common; she is dead.

After a few more lines, the poem concludes on a note only slightly more positive:

Nothing will go again. The bells cry: “Come,
Come home,” the babbling Chapel belfry cries:
Come, Mary Winslow, come; I bell thee home.”

    The nightmare of Dylan Thomas’s death and the literary nightmare of Mary Winslow’s appeared in a slightly muted form in Robert Frost, a poet even darker in Berryman’s view than the one portrayed in Randall Jarrell’s famous essay. The poem was “Acquainted with the Night”:

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye.

It was the sound of the speaker’s own feet that had been stopped in a kind of emblematic suicide. And the interrupted cry was a brand of offstage violence that fairly crackled with the current of Berryman’s recreation, something plaintive and heart-stopping in the music.
    More disturbing still were Berryman’s words to Bruce outside of class: “Ten years from now, you’ll be the hottest young poet in the country, and I’ll be dead. I promise you.” It was obvious to me that Bruce believed the second part of his promise, if not the first. He probably knew, even then, that the range of his own interests was too broad to be restricted to poetry, and his subsequent work in film and novels, in folklore and sociology, bears this out.
    I was feeling less and less despondent as I settled into the summer rhythms of a life lived wholly in the presence of poetry. I had adjusted more or less to the heat and the class, and I felt more confident about the outcome of the course. I was now able to find time for discretionary reading, much of it suggested by Bruce. It was a relief to have almost everything in my life converge on poetry. And for that, Berryman was a singular model.
    Recognizing the resources we had on campus, a group of students pressed for a poetry reading. A three-star program was scheduled with Robert Fitzgerald, J. V. Cunningham, and Berryman participating. About a dozen Students showed up.
    “That’s four for each of us,” Berryman quipped. And the next day he told us that J. V. Cunningham did not think much of his own poems. “He leaned on the piano when he read them.”
    All that summer, Berryman was working on the Dream Songs. He read a few on that evening and another on the occasion of a memorial reading for Hemingway. If there had been nothing else those weeks than listening to Berryman read poems—his own or anyone else’s he cared about—it would have been worth the heat, physical and emotional. The timbre of his voice, the intelligent phrasing, and the absolute attention he brought to the poems made his readings unforgettable.
    Oddly enough, I do not remember much about Berryman’s presentation of “Ash Wednesday” except his insistence that Eliot was not a religious poet. But Berryman’s reading of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” moved me so deeply that I ducked into an empty classroom during the break. Bruce followed me through the escape hatch and peered curiously into my face.
    “You crying?” And he wanted to know why.
    “The way he reads Whitman,” I said. “And I don’t even like Whitman especially. At least I haven’t until now.”
    “Do you know that some people would give their right arm to respond to poems that way?” Bruce said. Much earlier he had asked, “Have you ever noticed how many literature teachers hate literature?”
    Not content with comforting words, Bruce made me a Whitman anthology, personally tailored to what he understood as my taste. That and Berryman’s readings in class forced me to reconsider. Up to this point Whitman had been on my short list of poets with massive egos and no sense of humor. I had already had to drop Milton from the list after reading “Samson Agonistes.”
    By that time, I had let down my guard with Bruce and could tell him with great hilarity what a radical shift the title of Whitman’s poem signalled for me. Our Mistress of Novices had believed that to say myself with accents on both syllables indicated large reserves of egotism. Unfortunately, the word occurred in the vocal portion of the evening prayer, routinely read aloud in chapel by a succession of novices. All of us were trained to say m’self, trying our best to minimize the reflexive pronoun. Religious modesty demanded this kind of attention: and for Thy sake I love my neighbor as m’self.
    I told Bruce about the intense inner conflict this created for me. Should I obey without question, or should I be loyal to the language? When it was my turn to lead prayer I put the language first, hurrying past the offensive term, but avoiding the contraction. I was not sure whether I could get away with it, but nothing was ever said.
    By this time, Bruce and I were showing each other poems. One day he looked up from the page to ask, “What do the other Sisters think when they see these poems?”
    “They think they’re not reading what they’re reading.” And I felt a rush of relief, in spite of all my efforts at concealment, to know that I was now being read truly. The usual response of my companions was bafflement—that of outsiders, stereotypical. With too many outsiders, I could write about murder and it would be read as martyrdom.
    On July 2, word of Hemingway’s death came over the wires, and Berryman instantly guessed that it was a suicide. The following Friday, a Hemingway memorial reading was arranged. Certain faculty members read passages from the novels and short stories. When it was Berryman’s turn, he read a new Dream Song:

My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide
in the mind, and tendoned like a grizzly, pried
to his trigger-digit, pal.

It was easy to see why the novelist’s death had impressed Berryman. Recalling Berryman’s pledge to Bruce, “Ten years from now . . . I’ll be dead,” we were afraid to move:

He should not have done that, but, I guess,
he didn’t feel the best. . . .

At this point, Berryman turned abruptly in my direction, and I felt the eyes of the audience focussed on me:

                                but I guess,
he didn’t feel the best, Sister,—felt less
and more about less than us . . . ?

I thought that the direct address must be an interpolation on his own text for dramatic effect, but when 77 Dream Songs came out, the Sister was still there. Of course, it was only a poem, but it did make us, in some way, secret sharers.
    Berryman laid the groundwork for our final papers carefully. For those content merely with passing the course, the task would be to write about deep limiting form in a single poem. He made it seem a paltry choice. Others might choose poems from two authors and compare or contrast deep form in the two samples. For the truly dedicated, the problem would be to examine a particular poem at length and from that proceed to an examination of characteristic deep limiting form in the poet.
    I asked about doing my paper on James Wright, whose poems I had discovered in Seattle two summers earlier, shortly after W. H. Auden chose The Green Wall for the Yale series prize in 1957.
    Berryman was faintly condescending. “If you can walk down the hall and talk to a man,” he said, “you don’t read his poems. But yes, if that’s what you want to do, it’s probably all right.” I would be starting with a handicap, and I’d need to do something outrageous again just to get Berryman’s attention.
    It did not take long. We had been engaging in abstruse arguments, wandering down hidden paths, lighting on esoterica, all in the name of identifying deep limiting form. I would dare to discover it in the poem’s title—bold as a billboard and contrary to everything we’d been taught. The poem from which the title of The Green Wall comes, “A Fit Against the Country,” would be the focus. I would consider fit, not in the primary sense of a strain of music, but in the most common literal import, that of a seizure. I called my paper “James Wright’s Early Poems: A Study in ‘Convulsive’ Form.”
    The papers were due early enough to insure getting them back before leaving campus. Once we had handed them in, Bruce and I were treated to a kind of Chinese water torture. Whenever we met Berryman on campus, he would pause and tell us about some student’s work. After a few comments on that particular effort, he would smile and say, “I haven’t read your papers yet. I’m saving the best for last.” We had to resign ourselves to hearing nothing until the final meeting.
    We would not have an exam, Berryman had said, but we would meet during the hours scheduled for one. On the appointed day, those of us who arrived early found the door to our meeting room locked. Someone went to look for the custodian and returned without him. By the time Mr. Stallnecht arrived with a key, most of the class was waiting, along with Berryman. The key would not open the door, so Mr. Stallnecht suggested a room nearby, unlocked the door to that, and let us in. In spite of the delay, there was a slightly festive air abroad in the class, as of comrades who had survived a long spell in the trenches and had escaped with no visible wounds.
    “I’ve changed my mind about the final,” Berryman said after we were seated. “Take out your paper and pens.” There was a sullen shuffling of books and papers.
    “First write down the names of your two favorite critics,” Berryman said. A slight scratching of pens followed. “Now write down the names of two critics you can’t stand.” Response came more slowly—not because we could not think of critics we disliked, but because it might be deadly to name the wrong ones.
    “Sir,” the British beard asked in a tone with just the right measure of ironic deference, “what if you don’t know the names of any critics?”
    Berryman looked in his direction, delighted with this response. “Excellent, excellent, write it down.” That was as far as the “exam” went, but some of us were nervous, for we had observed that our substitute classroom had no blackboard, and Berryman rarely made it through a class without at least one entry on the slate. He made a few comments on various student papers. Then he turned and looked at the blank walls of the room.
    “I can’t help it. Sister, find me some chalk.” I knew that he was heedless enough of property to risk writing on the walls, and it was just like him to make the most law-abiding person in the class accessory to the crime. I started to leave, but at that very moment, Mr. Stallnecht arrived like a deus ex machina with the proper key, and we moved to our regular room.
    The notes on my paper were gratifying. Summarizing the search for deep limiting form, I had written that it was a device to compel a more attentive study. The reader tried various names, all of them provisional, looking for a close fit. The best candidate for the form’s name then became a lens through which to reexamine the entire poem. After that the label could be discarded. Next to this passage, Berryman had written, “This is the way I work.”
    Berryman said that the paper was publishable, but declined to suggest where to send t. I mailed it off to Harry Weber at the Minnesota Review, where Wright was on the university faculty. Instead of making it appropriate for the magazine, however, that fact disqualified it for publication there. Nevertheless, when the paper came back, there were marginal comments in several hands, one of them Wright’s, and my rejection letter included an invitation to read my poems in Minneapolis in the spring. I spent the next year in South Bend, where I learned that the sky did not fall in if I made the hem of my habit sleeves three-eighths of an inch instead of five-.
    In December, Bruce called from Chicago, where he was attending the annual conference of the Modern Language Association. Although it was snowing heavily, he promised to drive to South Bend for a visit.
    One of the qualities that attracted me to Bruce was his uninhibited behavior. In the company of such persons, I experienced a surrogate freedom that relieved me of embarrassment about my dress, my too-formal speech, my ignorance of the outside world. Students of diverse ages, skin color, and dress thronged the Bloomington campus. Among the Indian saris and the Arab turbans, the Holy Names habit was just one more campus costume, as the bartender and the nun engaged in animated conversation.
    Now, in the stuffy St. Mary’s parlor, under a picture of the Sacred Heart and a mantelpiece sign thanking us for not smoking, both of us felt some constraint. The Holy Cross Sister Portress patrolled the hall, looking in from time to time, as we tried to recapture the old excitement. Unlike the guitarstrumming companion of the open air, this visitor was wary. I recognized that Bruce had picked up the prevailing atmosphere and modified his conduct to spare me from censure. Denied the permission I had asked to serve him coffee and doughnuts in the students’ cafeteria, I had to bring my Christmas cache to the parlor. We had an intense, if subdued, visit before I sent him out into the storm.
    When I went to Minneapolis in May, I met Father Garrelts, chaplain at the Newman Center, where the reading was to be held. He was a tall, big- boned, British-educated man who had been the prototype for the protagonist in J. F. Powers’s Morte d’Urban. I had read the novel and enjoyed the character of Father Urban, a worldly priest who achieves his ambition—being made Provincial Superior of his order—after being struck in the head by the bishop’s golf ball. Father Garrelts introduced me to the congregation after Mass—the first time I had heard one of my poetry readings promoted from the pulpit.
    I told Father Garrelts that I expected John Berryman to attend. He had promised to come. To my surprise, Father Garrelts objected. He explained that Kate Donahue’s father, an alcoholic like Berryman, had enlisted the priest’s aid in trying to prevent the marriage. They were unsuccessful. Father Garrelts now thought of John as persona non grata at the Newman Center.
    “I understand your concern,” I said, “but it seems to me that the most important thing is not to cut off communication.” Reluctantly, Father Garrelts came round. He would not create a scene, but he would not appear to welcome them either. After I was introduced, I looked Out over the audience with a feeling of disappointment that Berryman was not there. A few minutes into the reading, he and Kate slipped into the back of the hall. At the end, they came forward to the foot of the stage. I leaned down while John introduced Kate, a tall, dark-haired, fair-skinned Irish beauty, more than twenty years his junior. I thought that I could detect a gradual coarsening in the contours of John’s once lean and handsome face. It would have pleased me to have heard some word of praise for the poems, but I had to be content with his attendance. They left almost immediately. That was the last time I saw him, although I continued to follow his career in picture and story.
    Shortly before leaving Indiana University, I had thought again of be- ginning study for the doctorate during my sabbatical year. At the time I had completed the master’s in 1951, we simply waited to be chosen for further study. I knew that I was capable of the academic work, but did I really want to start on the Ph.D. at this late date? I inquired into the Indiana program and consulted both Fitzgerald and Berryman. They advised against it, saying that it would keep me from giving full attention to my poems.

As early as 1945, Berryman had won the Kenyon Review prize for his story, “The Imaginary Jew.” And in his posthumously published novel, Recovery, he had projected a section called “The Jewish Kick,” for which no manuscript has been found. The notes at the end of that novel quote a July 18, 1971, letter in which Berryman writes:

I worked hard to become a Jew myself last Fall in hospital—the write-up
in my novel will kill you laughing.

    The recurrent motif and Berryman’s close friendships with Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, and others might suggest a deep admiration for Jews. Perhaps it was the love of learning so central to Judaism that attracted him.
    Because I knew of Berryman’s Jewish propensities, it did not come as a complete surprise when Bruce wrote in 1967: “Have you seen Jane Howard’s story and the photos of Berryman in Life? He’s back from Ireland, looking for all the world like a rabbi.” I went to the library to check. Sure enough, it was Berryman with an unkempt full beard. Except for the thick glasses, I could hardly recognize him, although the hands were a giveaway. I saw again the long slim fingers, the familiar gesture—right or left hand held to the head, cigarette between first and second or second and third fingers. I saw the partial fist of the right hand, index finger poking back the bridge of his thick eyeglasses. Howard’s article appeared on July 21, titled “Whiskey and Ink, Whiskey and Ink.” I considered it an ominous sign.
    In August of 1967, I went to Montana to replace Richard Hugo for a year—a life even further from the one I took leave of than Dublin was from Minneapolis. The conflict between the forces advocating the status quo and those in favor of change was rapidly depleting my energies. I wanted to devote them to more constructive pursuits, and it seemed to me that it would be easier to go on believing in the convent ideal if I were a little removed from the scene. Year by year, I renewed my permission to stay on.
    In 1969, Bruce sent me his first book, A Thief’s Primer. I suggested him for a university lecture series, and he came to Missoula to show his film on prison work songs and give a lecture. Whenever we got together, Berryman was a shadowy third in some elaborate conspiracy of the imagination. His figure would come back full force: the pitch of intensity at which he lived. The nervous gestures. Most of all, the poems he read aloud with the absolute concentration of a symphony conductor.
    I saw again the fluid shift of his facial expressions and heard the tremolo of a voice stretched over great distances like an electric wire. I felt the risk, the danger, and was drawn to it. There was even a hint of the diabolic, looking down from the height of vertigo, feeling impelled to jump. All these things will I give thee. . . .
    From opposite sides of the country, Bruce and I continued to monitor the decade of remaining life Berryman had predicted. We ticked off the years: 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971. A relieved sigh. Then, barely five months past the deadline Berryman had mentioned to Bruce, on January 7, 1972, the poet ended his life just as I was beginning to make sense of mine. I had gone in pursuit of poems and had stumbled, almost by accident, upon the deep form of my own life. Today I am no longer living out my mother’s dream. And I owe to John Berryman, however troubled and self-destructive he may at times have been, an enormous debt for introducing me to the song of myself.
    Even now, I sometimes see him suspended between heaven and earth in that vicarious leap from the Washington Avenue Bridge. And in the freezeframe that follows, I can almost believe he is still above us, delivering from his midair platform a timeless lecture on the resolution that keeps poets writing and the independence that makes their work outlive them.

Madeline DeFrees was born in Ontario, Oregon, in 1919 and moved to Hillsboro in 1923. After graduation from St. Mary’s Academy in Portland, she entered the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, where she was known for many years as Sister Mary Gilbert. After receiving a BA from Maryhurst College and an MA from the University of Oregon, she taught at Holy Names College in Spokane from 1950 to 1967. While still a nun, she taught at the University of Montana, in Missoula, from 1967 to 1979. In late 1973 she was dispensed from her religious vows. She taught at the University of Massachusetts from 1979 to 1985, after which she retired to Seattle. DeFrees is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, including Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Washington Book Award, and two chapbooks, as well as two nonfiction books about convent life. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Resolution and Independence: John Berryman’s Ghost and the Meaning of Life” appears in our Winter 1996 issue.