{"id":10278,"date":"2025-03-19T15:12:37","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T19:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/john-berryman-on-the-three-demons-of-creative-work-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-03-19T15:12:37","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T19:12:37","slug":"john-berryman-on-the-three-demons-of-creative-work-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/john-berryman-on-the-three-demons-of-creative-work-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"John Berryman on the Three Demons of Creative Work \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman<\/strong> (October 25, 1914\u2013January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a poet. \u201cI cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone,\u201d he would write about his father in a poem, not realizing he was writing about himself. <\/p>\n

Berryman tried to medicate his deepening depression with alcohol and religion, but writing remained his most effective salve. He wrote like the rest of us draw breath \u2014 lungfuls of language and feeling to keep himself alive: ten poetry collections, numerous essays, thousands of letters, and a long biography of his favorite writer.<\/p>\n

\"\"
John Berryman<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter \u2014 having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking \u2014 John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds \u201cso undone.\u201d <\/p>\n

Several months earlier, Berryman had written a long letter to his former teacher Mark Van Doren, who had emboldened him to make a life in poetry and who would lovingly remember him<\/a> as \u201can overflowing man, a man who was never self-contained, a man who would have been multitudes had there been time and world enough for such a miracle.\u201d Despite reporting a routine of astonishing vitality \u2014 studying theology before breakfast, keeping up \u201ca fancy exercise-programme\u201d in the afternoon, reading a canon of medical lectures as research for a novel he was writing, responding to a dozen letters a day, and \u201cand supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes\u201d \u2014 Berryman placed at the center of the letter a self-flagellating lament about his \u201clifelong failure to finish anything,\u201d which he attributed to his twenty four years of alcoholism. (This may be the grimmest symptom of depression \u2014 a punitive hyperfocus on one\u2019s perceived deficiencies, to the total erasure of one\u2019s talents and triumphs.) <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Staffan Gnosspelius from Bear<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a wordless picture-book for grownups about life with and liberation from depression.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A generation after neuroscience founding father enumerated the six \u201cdiseases of the will\u201d that keep the gifted from living up to their gifts<\/a> and Kafka considered the four psychological hindrances of the talented<\/a>, Berryman reflects on what he believed kept him from achieving all he wanted to achieve, distilling the three \u201ccapital vices\u201d of creative work:<\/p>\n

\n

1. some bone-laziness but mostly DOLDRUMS, proto-despair, great-poets-die-young or at least unfulfilled like Coleridge & Co., all that crap. <\/p>\n

2. the opposite, fantastic hysterical labor, accumulation, proliferation\u2026<\/p>\n

3. over-ambitiousness. Part of this is temperamental grandiosity but more of it \u2014 unless of course I am wrong \u2014 is legitimate self-demand on the largest conceivable scale.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who went on to become one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the nineteenth century not because of but despite the uncommon share of suffering she was dealt, had an antidote to the first<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Seamus Heaney, whose poetry won him the Nobel Prize, had an antidote to the second<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As we often give others the advice we most need ourselves, Berryman himself offered an antidote to the third \u2014 which he considered his \u201cgreatest problem\u201d \u2014 in his answer to a student\u2019s question. That student would go on to become a great poet himself, immortalizing his mentor\u2019s advice in a poem that remains the finest blueprint I know to staying sane as an artist:<\/p>\n

\n

BERRYMAN<\/strong>
by W.S. Merwin<\/em><\/p>\n

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war<\/p>\n

don\u2019t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you\u2019re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity<\/p>\n

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice<\/p>\n

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally<\/p>\n

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop<\/p>\n

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England<\/p>\n

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry<\/p>\n

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention<\/p>\n

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can\u2019t<\/p>\n

you can\u2019t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don\u2019t write<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}