The writer softens the egotistical character of the day-dream by changes and disguises, and he bribes us by the offer of a purely formal, that is, aesthetic, pleasure in the presentation of his phantasies. The increment of pleasure which is offered us in order to release yet greater pleasure arising from deeper sources in the mind is called an ‘incitement premium’ or technically, ‘forepleasure’. I am of opinion that all the aesthetic pleasure we gain from the work of imaginative writers is of the same type as this ‘fore-pleasure’, and that the true enjoyment of literature proceeds from the release of tensions in our minds.
— Freud, ‘The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming’, tr. Joan Rivière

FREUD TELLS US that unsatisfied ambitions and erotic wishes are the prime roots of phantasy, and, as its title indicates, Love and Fame is devoted like all Berryman’s last work to the phantasies or delusions which dominated the poet’s life. ‘Her & It’, ‘Shirley & Auden’, a passion for literary renown and an insatiable sexual urge inform this obsessive, regretful recollection of Berryman’s youth, when these tremendous forces were only beginning to make themselves felt, and everything was still possible:

I dreamt at times in those days of my name
blown by adoring winds all over

And:

‘I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’
My phantasy precisely at twenty:
to satisfy at once all Barnard & Smith
& have enough left over for Miss Gibbs’s girls.

     The woman of Berryman’s dreams is always changing; she appears as someone new in every poem. But the ambition remains unshaken and unrelieved. The girls are sounding-boards, faces out of an imagined audience, necessary but interchangeable. Fame is the driving compulsion, and Love & Fame is an attempt, spurred on by middle-aged anxiety for the wasted past, to re-evaluate, explain, justify a life for which the poet feels agonising guilt.

     Published in 1970 immediately following the enormous success of the collected Dream Songs, Love & Fame was considered minor — and premature, even by its author. In any case, it was a post-partem look backward, an attempt at re-grouping forces. Berryman’s fundamental problem, after the publication of what was acknowledged as his major work, was to find a new mode beyond the highly structured, interlocking stanzaic fragments of the Henry saga. Indeed, the continuous search for a viable style is a characteristic peculiar to Berryman’s entire poetic development. Of his early efforts to create a voice of his own he writes in Love & Fame:

My longing yes was a woman’s
She can’t know can she what kind of a baby
she’s going with all the will in the world to produce?
I suffered trouble over this,

I didn’t want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats
or exactly like Auden
since in that case where the hell was I?
but what instead did I want it to sound like?

     Reading ‘The Imaginary Jew’, a story of 1945 reprinted at the back of Recovery, one begins to appreciate this search for a style. Straightforward, totally unmannered, almost without style, it fails even to hint at the fractured language, the parody of natural ease that was to come, what the author of the TLS article of February 23, 1972 called ‘an expressive style [developed] out of the inarticulateness that fascinated him and that belongs to our time’. That inarticulateness was for Berryman a permanent condition. His style seemed to be transformed by successive acts of will; there was nothing organic about its growth. In Love & Fame again he bemoans his inability to arrive at the mot juste:

Will I ever write properly, with passion and exactness,
of the damned strange demeanours of my flagrant heart?
& be by anyone anywhere undertaken?
One more unanswerable question.

Love & Fame is an attempt at writing properly about the poet’s own personality without the mediating device of an alter-ego. The complicated figure of Henry and his audience/conscience Mr. Bones give way to raw, unilateral self-scrutiny. There are attempts to characterise the self-obsession as a mask; Berryman dedicates the book to the memory of Tristan Corbière, saying:

Your Mockery of the Pretentious Great
Your Self-Revelations
Constitute Still in Any Sunset Sky
A Cursing Glory.

And later, in answer to imagined criticism, he claims: ‘I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends. . . . It’s not my life./ That’s occluded & lost.’ To a certain extent, this is true: the ‘I’ of these guilt-motivated recollections is often hysterically one-dimensional, hollow, and unreal. Basically, however, Berryman has removed the ‘changes and disguises’ that are the sources of Freud’s fore-pleasure, with disquieting results for the reader who presupposes that comfortable veil of artifice which separates ‘literature’ from ‘life’. In Love & Fame, the poet has blurred the distinctions we normally expect form, persona, and tone to make between what the writer feels and what he chooses to express. Here it is the release of tension in the writer’s mind that matters. Contrary to custom, His Majesty the Ego cries out: ‘Something is happening to me’ and the reader is more or less forgotten.

     Berryman’s work after The Dream Songs essentially records his efforts to identify, accommodate, conquer and expiate the devastating powers which haunted him. Love & Fame can be seen as a skirting manoeuvre, an attempt to neutralise his obsessions by glorifying them, as if the mere naming of these forces were the same as controlling them. In Delusions, Etc., he tries to outflank his demons by appealing to a greater power for forgiveness and salvation. Recovery, finally, is a desperate confession. The psyche aims at liberation through purgation, in a last-ditch defence through which the writer convinces himself of his persona’s progress and renewal, closing with a delirious assertion of freedom, again as if saying made it so:

He was perfectly ready. No regrets. Re was happier than he had ever been in his life before. Lucky, and he didn’t deserve it. He was very, very lucky. Bless everybody. He felt — fine.

     Dialectic is a basis modus operandi in Berryman’s work. The poet establishes a tension in the poem between the narrator and a contrasting but related persona which allows him to set up a kind of conversation within himself, in which an unbridled, maniacal self is moderated and usually controlled by a projected, idealised ‘other’, who acts, like the girls of the Love & Fame poems, as a sounding-board, but also as an objectifying standard on which the reader can depend as representing the reality principle to some degree. Mr. Bones, for example, acts as Henry’s super-ego in The Dream Songs:

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
Mr. Bones: there is.

     We see another version of this relationship in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, and yet another in the Sonnets. One of the reasons Love & Fame seems unachieved is that this source of energy and conflict is missing from the reminiscences which make up the first part of the book. Each poem is a new, uncorrected edition of the self, incomplete and failed because unchallenged and unamplified by another point of view.

     Berryman’s horizons widen as the book progresses. In Part III we are thrown into the present, and the poet seems to be edging toward a more generalised outlook:

Man is vicious. We forgive you.

And later:

Man is a huddle of need.

Some of the poems are political, and the poet seems conscious of a need to relate his feeling to some outer authority:

I wondered ever too what my fate would be,
woman & after-fame become quite unavailable,
or at best unimportant.

The fear of judgment leads to the dominant theme of Part IV, the search for a relationship with God. In the ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord’, Berryman regains a measure of distance and control by the introduction of a master-image, an ‘objective’ source of wisdom and strength. This new alter-ego dominates Delusions as well. ‘The prayers are a Catholic unbeliever’s,’ according to Robert Lowell, ‘seesawing from sin to piety, from blasphemous affirmation to devoted anguish.’ Berryman himself called the Hours which begin the book ‘a layman’s winter mock-up’, and prefaced the collection with a number of quotations about pilgrimage and derangement, among them, ‘L’art est réligieux’; meaning, I suppose, just what Lowell implies: that the exploration of the self is religion here, that the figure of God serves as a tool for getting at what needs to be said. Confession is the mode of all Berryman’s last work, and this unknowable, omniscient Confessor provides the self-styled sinner with the ultimate forum, far beyond the histrionic self-advertisement of Love & Fame. Berryman’s God is a creature of need and blind hope, a desperate figment asserting the possibility of salvation and safety: ‘I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight & beauty.’

     In addressing his Lord, Berryman adopts the role of the misfit, the unworthy sinner. ‘Thank you for such as it is my gift’ he says begrudgingly at one point, and later: ‘Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you’. In such equivocal apostrophes, the poet is searching for a working version of God that will clarify and thus dissolve his inability to accept himself and his world (the world), and the notion of God’s beneficent action in it. Berryman’s God is not only ‘potent’ and ‘permissive’, but ‘hard’ and ‘tyrannous’, and in his capacity as the forger of ‘our silliness’, Himself an emblem of the unfathomable paradox of the dualistic human constitution.

     Related to this perception of man is Berryman’s fundamental suspicion that a pact with God is somehow impossible, at least for Berryman, though on the surface he appears to accept the conditions for redemption:

Yet if you and I make a majority
(as old Claudel encouraged) what sharp law
can pass this morning?

Plagued by what ‘we do not know’ (‘I wish you would clear this up’), Berryman’s faith has the aggressive aura of necessity, of trance-like compensatory self-reassurance:

If He for vie as I feel for my daughter,
being His son, I’ll sweat no more tonight
but happy hymn and sleep. I have got it made,
and so have all we of contrition . . .

Somehow the sweating is more convincingly evoked than the praiseful peace. The recurrent ifs among the formulae of contrition and rejoicing, and the encomia of God’s ‘even/more incomprehensible but forgiving glory’, indicate a deep distrust of the fiction of forgiveness, a deep unwillingness to be forgiven, an inability to accept the gifts of Christianity:

Let me be clear about this. It is plain to me
Christ underwent man & treachery & socks
& lashes, thirst, exhaustion, the bit, for my pathetic &
                                                         disgusting vices,
to make this filthy fact of particular, long-after,
faraway, five-foot-ten & moribund
human being happy. Well, he has!
I am so happy I could scream!
it’s enough! I can’t BEAR ANY MORE.
Let this be it. I’ve had it. I can’t wait.

     Most of Delusions is written with this kind of intensity, and with the same sense of the tenuous nature of intercourse between the human and the divine. But once in a while Berryman silences his self-doubts long enough to produce a work of high objectivity, and such is ‘Ecce Homo’, a poem in which the double nature of Christ becomes both accessible and acceptable:

Long long with wonder I thought you human,
almost beyond humanity but not.
Once, years ago, only in a high bare hall
of the great Catalan museum over Barcelona,
     I thought you might be more —

a Pantocrator glares down, from San Clemente de Tahull,
making me feel you probably were divine,
but not human, through that majestic image.
Now I’ve come on something where you seem both —
      a photograph of it only —

Burgundian, of painted & gilt wood,
life-size almost (not that we know your Semitic stature),
attenuated, your dead head bent forward sideways,
your long feet hanging, your long thin arms out
     in unconquerable beseeching —

     The main thrust of these poems, however, is in another direction. The portraits in ‘King David Dances’ or the great ‘Beethoven Triumphant’, or the poems on Washington, Dylan Thomas, Trakl, and Emily Dickinson, come closer to typifying the approaches toward character which inform this volume. They are all, in one way or another, versions of Berryman, fictive ways of nearing personal danger zones, of sharing private delusions.

     A character in literature is a repository in which the writer invests something of himself, at the same time drawing on the strength and the protective cover of identification provided by a professedly autonomous personality. And the reader uses the character for similar purposes, so that in the Beethoven of Berryman’s poem, for instance, or the Henry of The Dream Songs, writer and reader mingle in some small way. Without this neutral ground, the mutual release of tensions which Freud describes cannot take place, and the reader is left feeling somehow cheated. Such is the case with most of Love & Fame, and with Recovery. For despite the adoption of the scientist ‘Alan Severance’ as his protagonist, Berryman makes it very clear that this is little more than autobiographical confession. His opening note parodies the traditional disclaimer:

The materials of the book . . . especially where hallucinatory, are historical; all facts are real; ladies and gentlemen, it’s true.

     It’s unfair to judge Recovery as a work of art, since it was left unfinished. There are passages of great power, but most of it is raw and unedited. Nevertheless, as a commentary on Berryman’s late work, and as a way into his mind, this rough draft is rewarding, for it explains the conditions under which much of the poetry of the last two books was composed. We recognise in the account situations, personalities, and attitudes which are to be found in Love & Fame and Delusions. All that is missing from the narrative is the description of their composition, impossible because of Severance’s identity as a scientist. But at this stage, the anguish matters more than the poetry. The poems and the novel, like the notebook in the novel (which is perhaps a surrogate for the poems) serve primarily as therapeutic tools. Nowhere can we see more clearly the psychic value of creativity:

any writer’s, or even scientist’s permanent message perhaps is really just this: come and share my delusion, and we will be happy or miserable together

     The principal delusion in which we are invited to share here is that rehabilitation is possible for Severance, that by admitting liquor’s power over his life the alcoholic can eventually gain control of himself. The programme of recovery involves conferring upon God the authority ‘to remove our shortcomings’, and making amends to ‘all persons we had harmed’. Once in gear, the book seems like little more than the vehicle for making these amends in an indirect way, by peeling back successive layers of rationalisation and posing to reveal the base roots of the hero’s fear and guilt in an absent father and a neglected son:

Tall handsome Daddy, adored and lost so soon!

     Once this is out, the frenetic role-playing and the unstinting search for authority figures — ’How many models can a grown man survive?’ — along with the prideful glorification of the artist’s privileged status, the apotheosis of fame, and the self-debasing embracement of God appear, like the wild experimentation of Berryman’s style, as expressions of a perennially unsatisfied need. ‘I am a dependent man, I need something besides God’, Severance says, asking not for forgiveness or alcohol. The character who refers to himself as ‘an amphitheatre’ with ‘a certain power of criticism over the shows that are put on in me’, and who identifies with the Jews because they alone of the ancient peoples saw themselves ‘as chosen . . . for service. . . . A bearing attraction’, seems to be trying to tell us of an inability to love and to be loved (‘I’m ashamed of [my great accomplishments]’).

     Miraculously, Severance is cured, partly through learning to empathise with his fellow patients. As we have it, Recovery ends on a note of manic — and uncertain — resolution:

‘The passion of a free and truthful life.’ . . . Five minutes on waking, twenty seconds gratitude at bedtime — the rest is silence.’ He might, certainly, at any time drink again. But it didn’t seem likely.
He felt — calm.

     There’s not much we can do to respond to such a pre-emptive conclusion except to say, with the inevitable smugness of hindsight, that the tensions it relieves seem superficial and the solutions it offers manufactured and pat, and that it sounds like yet another convoluted attempt of an agile, chameleon mind to avert the ultimately overpowering spectres of loss and annihilation.

     Berryman’s last work demands that his readers involve themselves in the life of the writer to an unparalleled degree. It is a human characteristic to assume that what concerns us passionately must necessarily be of moment to others. Perhaps on the deepest level our interests really do coincide; but the adumbration of our most intimate secrets is a complicated process of innuendo and pretence, and without the appearance of objectivity that such mediating postures provide, the writer is almost entirely at the mercy of his feelings. Style and the order it implies cede to the vagaries of emotion, and authorial control seems significantly diminished. At such times the reader can rightly wonder who is really speaking the poem. So it is with much of Berryman’s last work, a great deal of whose impact and effectiveness lies beyond the normal bounds of the poetic art.