Content warning: Suicide
The poet John Berryman’s chance to have a quiet, uneventful life ended early one morning in 1926 when he was 11. It ended when his father walked into the backyard with a gun and committed suicide. John was in his bedroom when it happened. The bedroom’s windows faced the backyard.
It wasn’t the only upheaval in his childhood, and it was far from the only traumatic event that would happen to him, but that morning probably goes a long way in explaining the addiction to alcohol he struggled with his entire adult life.
Berryman worked through the chaos he and his addiction created, and the pain he caused himself and others and the pain others caused him, to create some of the most significant American poetry of the 20th century. He felt compelled to do so.
“I don’t write these damn things willingly, you know,” Berryman said in a 1963 letter to his friend Allen Tate, a once prominent, but now largely forgotten, poet.
At the time, Berryman was finishing his first volume of poems known collectively as the Dream Songs. Those poems occupied much of his later years and are widely considered his best work. In his introduction to the complete collection of Dream Songs published in 2014 to mark the centenary of Berryman’s birth, the poet and critic Michael Hofmann said, “no one writes like that, no one dares, no one would have the wild imagination or the obsession.”
Berryman’s path to those poems detoured through Iowa City in 1954, when he taught briefly — very briefly — at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Berryman was in a particularly dark place when he came to the Writers’ Workshop 70 years ago. His marriage had collapsed; he was having legal problems leaving one publishing house for another; his friend Dylan Thomas, a poet he admired, had just died after lapsing into a coma during a drinking bout, and Berryman was worried the same could happen to him, but he kept drinking; he was plagued by suicidal thoughts. Berryman was so broke he had to wait until his agent advanced him some money before he could buy his train ticket to Iowa City.
He arrived at the University of Iowa having published one book of poetry he felt disappointed by, and best known as a Shakespeare scholar. For his first semester, he was assigned a seminar teaching poetry. “It was the first time in his life and for the last” Berryman taught such a course, one of his students, Philip Levine, noted in his memoir.
The seminar had 30 students at the beginning, but only 13 by the end. “Nearly all [of the 13] would go on to publish serious books, and at least three would become part of the American pantheon in the next generation of poetry,” Paul Mariani wrote in his biography of Berryman. Philip Levine was one of those three. Levine and others from the seminar credited it as a transformative experience.
The next semester Berryman was assigned to co-teach a course on the novel instead of continuing his poetry work. He wasn’t happy about the change, and he developed a corrosive dislike for his co-teacher. His co-teacher felt the same way.
Berryman was still drinking heavily and still acting out while drinking, which wasn’t uncommon for academics of the era. But on Sept. 29, things went beyond what folks in the ’50s were willing to tolerate, because it ended with Berryman in the newspaper.
He started drinking heavily after a particularly annoying day, and when he finally got back to his apartment after midnight, he couldn’t find his key. Berryman pounded on the door, but the landlord refused to let him in. He shouted and pleaded that he desperately needed to get to the toilet. The landlord still refused. Unable to hold back, Berryman dropped his pants and defecated on the porch. The landlord called the cops.
Berryman was arrested and spent the night in jail. According to Mariani, Iowa City police officers taunted Berryman throughout the night, as he was having a breakdown in his cell. The next morning, a judge fined him $7.50 for public intoxication and charged him $5 in court costs. On Oct. 1, the Daily Iowan column on police and court activities listed Berryman as being fined, but didn’t include further details.
He was summoned to meetings with the dean and the provost the next day, and at the end of those meetings, Berryman was fired. He had no idea what he’d do next, but Allen Tate quickly secured him a position at the University of Minnesota. It remained his academic home until one morning in January 1972, when he stopped while walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, waved to passersby and then jumped. Berryman was 57 years old when he killed himself.
“No matter what you hear or read about his drinking, his madness, his unreliability as a person, I am here to tell you that in the winter and spring of 1954, living in isolation and loneliness in one of the bleakest towns of our difficult Midwest, John Berryman never failed his obligations as a teacher,” Philip Levine wrote in his memoir, published 21 years after Berryman’s death. “… At a time when he was struggling with his own self-doubts and failings, he awakened us to our singular gifts as people and writers. He gave all he had to us and asked no special thanks. He did it for the love of poetry.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
