'Literature bores me'

In which we are paradoxically excited by Henry's ennui

Photo by David Bole on Unsplash

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Preamble: If you have only ever encountered two John Berryman poems, this will be one of them. It is massively anthologised, and widely delighted in. It is funny, and fun, and (given its topic) perversely vivacious. In the line ‘literature bores me’ it offers a delicious transgressive frisson to its audience who, by definition, are somewhat invested in literature, just as Marianne Moore’s line about poetry – ‘I too dislike it’ – finds an answering chord with its own target audience. Anyway, as with an earlier crowd-pleasing number, DS4, I’m not going to over-analyse it. I’m just going to touch lightly on some of the word choices, techniques, ideas, particularly as they relate to the rest of the book.

Music: This is another of the pieces which is effective more through its dramatic and rhetorical structure rather than through any particular rhythm. It works primarily through repetition: boring (and its variants) seven times; sky, sea, flash, yearn, inner resources, literature, twice each. There are, as always, some pretty passages of assonance and alliteration, and, for example, the ‘li’ of ‘literature’ flickers through ‘plights’, ‘achilles’, ‘valiant’, ‘tranquil’, ‘hills’, ‘tail’. The m’s that hum through ‘moreover my mother’. That little catch in the final lines, where ‘me’ rhymes with ‘sea’ from halfway through the previous line, and then ‘wag’ comes, rhyming with with ‘drag’, so it feels almost like you’ve had two last words. (Or is that just me?)

But it’s really the voice, the delivery, that make this poem great.

The poem

1) ‘Friends’

This is the first time that we have enjoyed this warm, embracing epithet. It won’t happen again, sincerely, until DS53 (‘and that was not, friends, his worst idea’), although ‘let us suppose’, in DS16, strikes a similar note: the address to the reader becomes explicit, as when an actor turns briefly to the audience. (Just as it arguably did with ‘see’ and ‘say’ in DS9.) And I think it happens here because DS14 is a stadium-audience comic turn, and Berryman is pretty confident about the show he is putting on.

It's worth registering, though, that the communal or even conspiratorial gesture of ‘friends’ is at odds with the ennui and alienation that are expressed thereafter, and with the final lonely image of a man deserted by his Best Friend and reduced to a shake of a tail (or a finger), a solitary clown.

2) ‘We must not say so … Even to confess’

I don’t want to labour this. The poem is knowingly subversive, for comic effect; it says what we all sometimes feel, but have been raised not to say, etc etc. It really is that simple. But the book as a whole is packed with moments when things cannot be said, and I do not think it wholly accidental that the word ‘confess’ is used here, one of only three occasions in 77DS, the third being in the title of a crucial poem (DS76, ‘Henry’s Confession’). I would argue that the word ‘confess’ bears real weight in a sequence drenched in the theological and demonic; and I would further argue that even in the book’s most comic moments, there is often a residual presence, however faint, of darkness and difficulty – ‘an odour, a chime’, as Berryman himself will put it.

Outer Resources: Berryman hated the ‘confessional’ tag for his generation of oversharing poets. Here he is in a Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER

You, along with Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and several others, have been called a confessional poet. How do you react to that label?

BERRYMAN

With rage and contempt! Next question.

This Substack isn’t interested in the whole Berryman-is-Henry business anyway, of course. That said, DS14 is one of those unusual poems where both ‘I’ and ‘Henry’ are subjects (outside lines of dialogue), as in DS1. To an innocent reader, especially one finding this poem alone in the wild, perhaps in an anthology or suchlike, the line ‘Henry bores me’ will be hard to make out. For those of us in the know, a question hovers: has Berryman broken cover to declare himself bored even of his own comic creation, or is Henry just bored with himself?

3) ‘The sky … the great sea … Mountains, or sea, or sky’

Berryman is not a nature poet. (He is a human nature poet, ho ho.) For the most part, the skies and seas and mountains of 77DS are not specific but typical, and largely arrive as symbolic tokens. There are exceptions: the Pacific, for example, in DS65, a poem which also gives us a specific Lake District sky; a ‘smothering southern sea’ in DS76 where something significant happens. But in DS14 they are pieces of Parnassian furniture, a knowingly idle and self-mocking shorthand for sublimity and grandeur: exciting and tempestuous in stanza 1, dwarfing and alienating in stanza 3.

4 ‘moreover my mother told me / repeatingly’

As discussed in an earlier somewhat erratic post, this is the second of only three specific mentions of Henry’s mother in 77DS. (I originally wrote ‘two’, but have now furtively edited the post, to cover up my error before anyone catches me. No one will ever know.) Outer Resources: Haffenden: ‘Berryman's mother told me that she had felt outraged at being mocked in that Song , and bitterly pained to have heard it once at a public reading’.

‘Repeatingly’ is another example of the subtle rightness of Berryman’s wrongnesses. If he had said ‘repeatedly’, which would be the expected word, the emphasis would have been on the successive occasions: whereas ‘repeatingly’ puts the emphasis on the mother herself, and the monotony of her injunction.

5 ‘Inner Resources’

One of the great achievements of 77DS is that something as simple as the use of upper case can have an effect. You can hear it, can't you? He is mocking the sententious adult pronouncement.

He immediately then lowercases ‘inner resources’ for his own reflections, just as he, more provocatively, lowercases ‘achilles’ further on. It is part of a nicely achieved diminuendo, the phrase ‘plights and gripes’ cutting huffy Henry down to size once more, and then smaller still, in the shake of a tail.

6) 'heavy bored’

And again; ‘heavy’ is so much funnier than ‘very’. ‘Heavy’ occurs in two other poems: ‘some hang heavy on the sauce’ (DS15) and ‘There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart / só heavy, if he had a hundred years … Henry could not make good’ (in DS29, which is the other poem everyone knows). ‘Heavy’ also half-rhymes with ‘Henry’, for what that’s worth.

7) ‘Peoples’

Wayward though Berryman is with number and agreement in the playful grammar of 77DS, this must genuinely mean ‘peoples’ rather than ‘people’ because we specifically get ‘people’ later. There is throughout 77DS a parochial lack of interest in other nations and cultures – we have already noted the cursory but anxious references to ‘China’. I'll come back to this at greater length in a later post, because it isn’t clear cut – DS31, for example, seems to me a satirical dig at precisely this insularity, and Henry's ‘sense of others’ is, as we saw last time, the redemptive flipside of his dismal self-centredness.

8) ‘Literature … especially great literature … Valiant art’

Everyone gets the algorithm they deserve. My Substack feed is full of competing lists of all the books we're meant to have read before we die. Dusty old Harold Bloom is disinterred by some; others fashion alternative recommendations, to counterbalance Harold's staleness, paleness and maleness. Canon to the right of them, canon to the left of them. Sometimes these lists radiate happy aspiration, sometimes they oppress us with the work not done. And that’s why we enjoy the naughtiness of the Berryman lines.

The books we should have read… The protagonist of Joanna Kavenna's remarkable first novel Inglorious (2007), on an excruciating downward spiral after the death of her mother, has a recurring Bridget-Jonesy to-do list which includes, alongside domestic chores and the urgent injunction to Get a job, an ambitious curriculum:

Buy some tuna and spaghetti

Go to the bank and tell them you need more time – more time to pay back the rest of your debt.

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Hoover the living room

Clean the toilet

Distinguish the various philosophies of the way – read History of Western Philosophy

Sort through your papers and see if there is anything you can send to anyone who might plausibly pay you some money for it

Clean the bath

By the end of the novel, the reading list – frequently repeated and never started – has become, simply and exhaustedly, ‘Read variously’.

Inglorious is a quite brilliant novel because the mixture of comedy and sadness is so unstable, and you don’t know where to put yourself. Beneath its surface entertainments, it delivers one of the best portrayals of grief and depression I have ever read: and it has giddied me to be reminded of it and returned to it now.

9 ‘tranquil hills, and gin’

Those ‘tranquil hills’ for some reason make me think of Housman, who gets a mention in DS53, so must be on the radar. ‘Tranquil’ carries a frisson of sedation, which leads us to ‘gin’. And if Henry is tired of gin, he is surely tired of life. The book makes – repeatedly! – clear that Henry loves ‘the sauce’ not wisely but too well. In DS57, when he is reluctantly on the wagon, he reflects that ‘something can (has) been said for sobriety / but very little’; and in general, as we have seen, the absence of bar or booze usually makes Henry pretty uncomfortable.

9) ‘A dog’

Dogs make several appearances in 77DS. Twice, urinating, they represent critics and journalists, in a faintly disobliging fashion. Twice they appear in a more bluesy way – ‘hound dog’ in DS40, Yellow Dog in DS68. In one poem the synonym ‘barker’ is used, quite possibly a sheepdog. But (and this is not an original observation) the closest echo to this poem comes in DS54, which finds Henry at a low point, mentally and creatively:

I have been operating from nothing,
like a dog after its tail
more slowly, losing altitude.

10 ‘leaving / behind: me, wag’

The punchline offers three resonances in the word ‘wag’. There is the wag of the departing tail, the unsettling diminishment of Henry to a residue, after happiness has scarpered. There is ‘wag’ as comedian, ‘a merry droll’, a habitual joker; an acknowledgment that this has been an entertaining performance, despite its topic. And lastly, perhaps, there is a call-back to his mother’s admonitions; a wagging finger for shamefully bored Henry.

The song: I toyed with using the early Buzzcocks track ‘Boredom’, which certainly has brio. Then I thought instead about Stars of the Lid, whose slow, droning ambient music felt like the right mood; maybe ‘Don’t Bother They’re Here’, for example, or the second part of ‘Requiem for Dead Mothers’, which ends with the sad sound of a whining dog. But in the end I decided on Magazine’s Dostoevsky-inspired ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’. I hope you’ll see why, but in any case, it is an extraordinary song. Thank you for reading, and listening. Dream Song 15, when next we meet, will find us in a bar in Chicago.