It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

  (1973)

  Foreword to Berryman’s novel Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). Published in The New York Times Book Review, 27 May 1973.

  He wrote in one of his last letters to me, “Let’s join forces, large and small, as in the winter beginning of 1953 in Princeton, with the Bradstreet blazing and Augie fleecing away. We’re promising!”

  The Bradstreet was indeed blazing then; Augie was not nearly so good. Augie was naive, undisciplined, unpruned. What John liked was the exuberance of its language and its devotion to the Chicago streets. I had, earlier, published two small and correct books. He did not care for them. In Augie there was a Whitmanesque “coming from under,” which he found liberating. I admired the Bradstreet. What he said was true: we joined forces in 1953 and sustained each other for many years.

  The Princeton John was tallish, slender, nervous. He gave many signs that he was inhibiting erratic impulses. Dressed in a blue blazer, a button-down shirt, flannel trousers, cordovan shoes, he spoke in a Princeton mutter often incomprehensible to me. His longish face with its high color and blues eyes I took to be of Irish origin. I have known blue-eyed poets apparently fresh from heaven who gazed at you like Little Lord Fauntleroy while thinking how you would look in your coffin. John was not one of those blue-eyed serpents. Had you, in a word-association test, said “Devil” to him, he would have answered “John Webster.” He thought of nothing wicked. What he mainly had on his mind was literature. When he saw me coming, he often said, “Ah?” meaning that a literary discussion was about to begin. It might be The Tempest that he was considering that day, or Don Quixote; it might be Graham Greene or John O’Hara; or Goguel on Jesus, or Freud on dreams. There was little personal conversation. We never discussed money, or wives, and we seldom talked politics. Once as we were speaking of Rilke I interrupted to ask him whether he had, the other night, somewhere in the Village, pushed a lady down a flight of stairs.

  “Whom?”

  “Beautiful Catherine, the big girl I introduced you to.”

  “Did I do that? I wonder why.”

  “Because she wouldn’t let you into the apartment.”

  He took a polite interest in this information. He said, “That I was in the city at all is news to me.”

  We went back to Rilke. There was only one important topic. We had no small talk.

  In Minneapolis one afternoon, Ralph Ross and I had to force the window of a house near Seven Corners to find out what had happened to John. No one had seen him in several days. We arrived in Ross’s Jaguar, rang the bell, kicked at the door, tried to peer through the panes, and then crawled in over a windowsill. We found ourselves standing on a bare gritty floor between steel book stacks. The green steel shelves from Montgomery Ward, meant for garages or workshops, for canned peaches in farmers’ cellars, were filled with the elegant editions of Nashe and Marlowe and Beaumont and Fletcher that John was forever importing from Blackwell’s. These were read, annotated, for John worked hard. We found him in the bedroom. Facedown, rigid, he lay diagonally across the double bed. From this position he did not stir. But he spoke distinctly.

  “These efforts are wasted. We are unregenerate.”

  At the University of Minnesota, John and I shared an office in a temporary wooden structure to the north of the School of Mines. From the window we saw a gully, a parking lot, and many disheartening cars. Scorched theology books from a fire sale lined one of the walls. These volumes of Barth and Brunner looked as if they had gone through hell. We had no particular interest in them, but they helped to furnish forth a mental life in the city of Minneapolis. Minneapolis was the home of Honeywell, of heart surgery, of Pillsbury, of the Multiphasic test, but it was not celebrated as the home of poems and novels. John and I strolled sometimes, about a pond, through a park, and then up Lake Street, “where the used cars live!” What on earth were we doing here? An interesting question. We talked about Yeats. The forces were still joined. We wrote things:

  Drop here, with honor due, my trunk and brain

  among the passioning of my countrymen

  unable to read, rich, proud of their tags,

  and proud of me. Assemble all my bags!

  Bury me in a hole, and give a cheer,

  near Cedar on Lake Street, where the used cars live.

  He was proud of the living of these cars. That, he said, was “Delicious!”—a favorite expression. My offering to him at that time was a story called “Leaving the Yellow House.” This, too, he declared delicious, though he found it faulty, inconclusive. (We told each other exactly what we thought.)

  Tense, he stood at his desk as I entered the office. He was greatly excited. He said, “Pal, I have written some new verses. They are delicious!”

  When he broke a leg and Dr. Thomas was called in the middle of the night, John said, as the splint was being applied, “You must hear this new Dream Song!” He recited it as they carried him to the ambulance.

  I would visit John at an institution (not the one in his novel) called, I believe, The Golden Valley. He was not there because he had broken his leg. The setting of The Golden Valley was indeed golden. It was early autumn, and the blond stubble fields shone. John’s room was furnished simply. On the floor was the straw tatami mat on which he performed his yoga exercises. At a collapsible bridge table he wrote Dream Songs. He said, “As you can see, they keep me in a baby crib. They raise the sides at night to keep me from falling out. It is humiliating! Listen, pal, I have written something new. It is,” he assured me, raising hands that shook, “absolutely a knockout! ”

  He put a finger to the bridge of his glasses, for nothing was steady here. Things shook and dropped. Inside and outside, they wavered and flew. The straw of Golden Valley swirled on the hills.

  John had waited a long time for this poet’s happiness. He had suffered agonies of delay. Now came the poems. They were killing him.

  Nitid. They are shooting me full of sings.

  I give no rules. Write as short as you can, in order of what matters.

  Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabilizer. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity. Perhaps it replaced the public sanction that poets in the Twin Cities (or in Chicago, in Washington or New York) had to do without. This sanction was not wickedly withheld. It simply did not exist. No one minded if you bred poodles. No one objected if you wrote Dream Songs. Some men of genius were fortunate. They could somehow come to terms with their respective countries. Others had women, the bottle, the hospital. Even in France, far from the Twin Cities, a Verlaine had counted heavily on hospitals and prisons.

  John drank heavily, and he took refuge in hospitals, but he also studied and taught. The teaching was important. His lectures were conscientiously, even pedantically, prepared. He gave them everything he had. He came in from The Golden Valley by cab to address his humanities class.

  He walked up the stone stairs of the university building, looking very bad. He wore a huge Western sort of hat. Under the flare of the brim, his pale face was long and thin. With tremulous composure, shoulders high, he stalked into the classroom. While the taxi waited, he gave his lecture. His first words were shaky, inaudible, but very soon other instructors had to shut their doors against his penetrating voice. He sweated heavily, his trembling fingers turned the numbered cards of his full and careful lecture outline, but he was extremely proud of his dependability and of his power to perform. “Henry” was indeed one of the “steadiest” men on the block, as faithful to his schedule as Kant, as precise and reliable as a Honéywell product. His talk ended. Then, peanut-faced under the enormous hat and soaked in sweat, he entered the cab and was returned to The Golden Valley, to the tatami mat and the bridge table, to the penitential barrenness of the cure. No wonder that after these solitary horrors he was later grateful for group therapy, submitting democratically and eagerly to the criticisms of wacky truckers, grateful under the correction of drinking plum
bers and mentally disturbed housewives. In hospitals he found his society. University colleagues were often more philistine, less tolerant of poets than were alcoholics or suicidal girls. About these passioning countrymen he did not need to be ironical. Here in the institution his heart was open.

  It all went into his poems. His poems said everything. He himself said remarkably little. His songs were his love offerings. These offerings were not always accepted. Laid on the altar of, say, an Edmund Wilson, they sometimes were refused. Wilson, greatly respected by John, had written him a harsh letter about his later poems. The last time I saw him, John was wounded, suffering. He handed me Wilson’s letter. While I read it, he sat at my table, meteor-bearded like John Brown, coughing softly and muttering that he couldn’t understand—these were some of his best things. Then he snatched up the copy of Love and Fame that he had brought me and struck out certain poems (Berryman deleted six poems from the second, 1972 edition), scribbling in the margins, “Crap!” “Disgusting!” But of one poem, “Surprise Me,” he wrote shakily, “This is certainly one of the truest things I’ve been gifted with.”

  I read it again now and see what he meant. I am moved by the life of a man I loved. He prays to be surprised by the “blessing gratuitous … on some ordinary day.” It would have to be an ordinary day, of course, an ordinary American day. The ordinariness of the days was what it was all about.

  On the visit that was to be his last—he came to give a reading—he arrived in Chicago in freezing weather. High-shouldered in his thin coat and big homburg, bearded, he coughed up phlegm. He looked decayed. He had been drinking, and the reading was a disaster. His Princeton mutter, once an affectation, had become a vice. People strained to hear a word. Except when, following some arbitrary system of dynamics, he shouted loudly, we could hear nothing. We left, a disappointed, bewildered, angry audience. Dignified, he entered a waiting car, sat down, and vomited. He passed out in his room at the Quadrangle Club and slept through the faculty party given in his honor. But in the morning he was full of innocent cheer. He was chirping. It had been a great evening. He recalled an immense success. His cab came, we hugged each other, and he was off for the airport under a frozen sun.

  He was a full professor now, and a celebrity. Life interviewed him. The Life photographer took ten thousand shots of him in Dublin, John told me. But his human setting was oddly thin. He had, instead of a society, the ruined drunken poet’s God to whom he prayed over his shoulder. Out of affection and goodwill he made gestures of normalcy. He was a husband, a citizen, a father, a householder, he went on the wagon, he fell off, he joined A.A. He knocked himself out to be like everybody else—he liked, he loved, he cared, but he was aware that there was something peculiarly comical in all this. And at last it must have seemed that he had used up all his resources. Faith against despair, love versus nihilism, had been the themes of his struggles and his poems. What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit. He drew it out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive. Forces were not joined. The cycle of resolution, reform, and relapse had become a bad joke that could not continue.

  Toward the last, he wrote:

  It seems to be dark all the time.

  I have difficulty walking.

  I can remember what to say to my seminar

  but I don’t know that I want to.

  I said in a Song once: I am unusually tired.

  I repeat that & increase it.

  I’m vomiting.

  I broke down today in the slow movement of K. 365.

  I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.

  John Cheever

  (1982)

  Eulogy read at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, December 1982. Reprinted in The New York Review of Books, 17 February 1983.

  John and I met at irregular intervals all over the U.S. I gave him lunch in Cambridge, he bought me a drink in Palo Alto; he came to Chicago, I went to New York. Our friendship, a sort of hydroponic plant, flourished in the air. It was, however, healthy, fed by good elements, and it was a true friendship. Because we met in transit, as it were, we lost no time in getting down to basics. On both sides there was instant candor. The speed at which necessary information was exchanged was wonderfully amusing. Each of us knew what the other was up to. We worked at the same trade, which, in America, is a singularly odd and difficult one, practiced by difficult people who are not always pleased by the talents of their contemporaries. (Think of that wicked wizard the late Nabokov, who coined terms like “ethnopsychic novelists,” dismissing us by the platoon.) John was not in the least grudging or rivalrous. Like John Berryman, he was fabulously generous with other writers. Yes, an odd lot, poets and writers of fiction. And to those who write novels about it, the country, too, is singularly paradoxical, very different from the “normal” America that businessmen, politicians, journalists, trade unionists, advertising men and scientists, engineers and farmers, live in.

  I think that the differences between John and me endeared us to each other more than the affinities. He was a Yankee; I, from Chicago, was the son of Jewish immigrants. His voice, his style, his humor, were different from mine. His manner was reticent, mine was … something else. It fell to John to resolve these differences. He did this without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place: first the persons—himself, myself—and after that the other stuff—class origins, social history. A fairly experienced observer, I have never seen the thing done as he did it—done, I mean, as if it were not done at all. It flowed directly from his nature. And although his manner was reticent, there was nothing that John would not say about himself. When he seemed to hesitate he was actually condensing his judgments, his opinions, his estimates of his own accomplishments, in order to give them greater force. He spoke of himself as he would speak of anybody else, disinterestedly and concisely. He preferred short views and practiced the same economy in speech as in writing. He might have said, as Pushkin did, “I live as I write; I write as I live.”

  Miss Kakutani of the New York Times used excellent judgment in choosing the quotation with which she began John’s obituary. “The constants that I look for,” he once wrote, “are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.” I’m sure that John didn’t relish making statements about morals and being; that wasn’t his style. I see it as a reluctant assertion, something he had at last to say to correct distortion by careless readers, book reviewers, and academic category makers. I suppose that he felt it necessary at last to try to say what he had been doing with himself for some fifty years.

  There are writers whose last novels are very like the first. Having learned their trade, mastered it once and for all, they practice it with little variation to the very end. They can be very good novelists. Think of Somerset Maugham or Arnold Bennett (you can supply American names of your own), exceedingly proficient and dependable servants of the reading public. What they lack is the impulse to expand. They do not develop; they seldom surprise. John Cheever was a writer of another sort altogether. He was one of the self-transformers. The reader of his collected stories witnesses a dramatic metamorphosis. The second half of the collection is quite different from the first. Rereading him, as I have recently done, it became apparent to me, and will certainly be evident to anyone who reads him attentively, how much of his energy went into self-enlargement and transformation and how passionate the investment was. It is extraordinarily moving to find the inmost track of a man’s life and to decipher the signs he has left us. Although the subjects and themes of his stories did not change much, he wrote with deepening power and feeling.

  With characteristic brevity and diffidence, he only tells us, toward the end, that he loved the light and that he was determined to trace some moral chain of being—no simple matter in a world that, in his own words, lies “spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
His intention was, however, not only to find evidence of a moral life in a disorderly society but also to give us the poetry of the bewildering and stupendously dreamlike world in which we find ourselves. There are few people around who set themselves such a task, who put their souls to work in such a way. “Normal America” might ask, if it were inclined to formulate such a question, “What sense does that actually make?” Perhaps not much, as “sense” is commonly defined. But there are other definitions. For me no one makes more sense, no one is so interesting, as a man who engages his soul in an enterprise of this kind. I find myself, as I grow older, increasingly drawn to those who live as John did. Those who choose such an enterprise, who engage in such a struggle, make all the interest of life for us. The life John led leaves us in his debt. We are his debtors, and we are indebted to him even for the quality of the pain we feel at his death.

  Allan Bloom

  (1992)

  Delivered at Bloom’s funeral service, 9 October 1992.

  The chapel is as full as I expected it to be. It would take a much larger hall than this—something like Grand Central Station—to hold all of Allan’s students, friends, and admirers, for he attracted gifted people. The reasons for this attraction would make a fascinating study, if a man able enough to undertake it were to turn up. Allan loved company. I lured him several times to Vermont, where the trees were impressive, but when he came he never failed to quote the Phaedrus at me: Socrates seldom left Athens, he would say, because trees, even the most distinguished of them, couldn’t talk to you. He had a great many compelling needs that could be met only in the city—in his beautiful apartment full of books and CDs, in a seminar room, or in a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain, among keen, worldly, talkative friends. At home, as if at a command post, he had intelligence coming in continually. Friends phoned from London, from Paris, from Washington, with advance information about important decisions in the making and political news soon to hit the papers. It was hard to be the first to give Allan any piece of information.