Declan Ryan

Suicide was always a spectre for John Berryman

Edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, the poet’s letters reveal how often he contemplated taking his own life, and how understanding he was of the death-wish of others

John Berryman. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 28 November 2020

‘A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the last year or so, but not you — and your father is thought to be a wit.’ This was the poet John Berryman to his nearly-estranged son Paul in 1964. The hurt, off-kilter tone and the humble-brag speak to the Berryman one encounters in this capacious Selected Letters.

One of the great extremists of a brilliant generation, which included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop, Berryman’s entanglement of art and risk, his view of poetry as a ‘terminal activity’ and the artist’s life as one of self-annihilating labour, is present early, and enduringly. In 1936, just graduated from Columbia, Berryman writes to R.P. Blackmur while composing a poem: ‘I am beginning to understand how it drives you mad after a time.’ Here, that’s said more with a willed sense of fellow feeling than despair, but despair would come.

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