'There may be horribles'

In which poor Henry has a difficult time, and so, to a lesser extent, does the reader

The weather was fine. They took away his teeth,
white & helpful; bothered his backhand;
halved his green hair.
They blew out his loves, his interests. ‘Underneath,’
(they called in iron voices) ‘understand,
is nothing. So there.’

The weather was very fine. They lifted off
his covers till he showed, and cringed & pled
to see himself less.
They installed mirrors till he flowed. ‘Enough’
(murmured they) ‘if you will watch Us instead,
yet you may saved be. Yes.’

The weather fleured. They weakened all his eyes,
and burning thumbs into his ears, and shook
his hand like a notch.
They flung long silent speeches. (Off the hook!)
They sandpapered his plumpest hope. (So capsize.)
They took away his crotch.

Preamble: Nasty. Ominous. (Brilliant.) This is the first of a number of paranoid Dream Songs in which Henry is variously persecuted. As I said in an earlier post

In the course of the book, he will be pursued, encircled, cornered, trapped, reduced, diminished. He will be encroached upon, and he will be institutionalised. He will become a hunted stag, a shot racoon, Humphrey Bogart gunned down in High Sierra. This sense of ‘a cornering’ (DS13) […] is easily one of the most significant features of the book.

The trajectory and general mood of DS8 are horribly clear on a first reading; the details remain obscure. These details, these decisions, constitute a significant element of Berryman’s originality and success. One of the techniques, for instance, is a faintly oxymoronic quality, as when sandpaper is juxtaposed with ‘plump’, an adjective that can only be applied to something soft, and usually fleshy. ‘Silent speeches’ is another, though arguably it follows from Henry having been deafened by burning thumbs. ‘Hair’ cannot be halved, as such: it can be parted, or cut. ‘All his eyes’. You do not ‘shake’ a ‘notch’.

Wrongness in 77DS is absolutely deliberate; it is one of the most significant technical devices in the collection. It is not easily done. My legal pal reminded me only recently that the late British comedian Les Dawson had a routine in which he expertly played the piano just slightly wrong, with hilarious effect. This takes, oddly, real skill.

And while we are here – we can permit ourselves an ‘uncharacteristic digression’, can’t we, friends? – here’s the late Mark E. Smith, of The Fall:

I was trying to get the group to play out of time … taking musicians out of their comfort zone, getting them to think about timing in a distorted way.

It’s weird because I never sing in time. Last thing you want is a regular time…

Mark E. Smith, Renegade, pp115-6

Music: Tripartite structure very clear, as in DS5, and again deploying anaphora, each stanza beginning ‘The weather’. A tight rhyme scheme throughout, identical in stanzas 1 and 2, minor variation in 3. Internal rhyme (‘showed’ and ‘flowed’); repetition (‘underneath’, ‘understand’; ‘took away’, twice). Highly alliterative, with ‘f’ and ‘th’ notably running throughout. It reads beautifully, with a few lines of perfect iambic pentameter around which Berryman plays his elegant variations; nothing jarring here. The smoothness and formal neatness, offering perhaps a sense of the inexorable, are deliberately in tension with the cruelty and violence of the content.

The poem: Initially, we read this as a sequence of horribles visited upon Henry, culminating in his castration (a motif we have now encountered often enough for its significance to be unignorable). There is a surrealism to it which at first jars us, and then, perhaps, relaxes us too much – because deprived of an obvious or single explanation for these peculiarities and particularities, we might not pay them sufficient individual attention.

There is a dramatic structure, and even a measure of – not dialogue, no, but the rendition of different voices. Maybe almost a bad cop-good cop effect between the ‘iron voices’ calling, and the murmur of ‘enough’? – before the further crazed violence of stanza 3, and the little moments of – false hope? (‘Off the hook!), or surrender? (‘So capsize’), before the ghastly finality of the last line.

Let’s take a closer look at some of those details, then.

Details

1) ‘The weather was fine … very fine … fleured’

There’s no pathetic fallacy here. Instead, as Henry’s situation worsens, the weather keeps on improving, as indifferent and pitiless as Henry’s persecutors. In a later poem (DS52) we will encounter the phrase ‘under the sun’, with its Biblical resonances. Am I wrong to find an echo of that here too – the sense of totality and enclosure? After all, in the next poem, DS9, we do find the lines ‘He’d flee / but only Heaven hangs over him foul’.

There is an exchange in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead which I have had lodged in my head for as long as I can remember:

ROS: We’ll be free.
GUIL: I don’t know. It’s the same sky.

2) ‘They’

We do not know who they are; we are returned to the questions raised in DS1, the last time the word ‘they’ was used. Here it is used ten times in eighteen lines. Henry’s relations with a wider world are largely unhappy, as we know, with the exception of friends, many of whom are (though this lies ahead of us) dead. Hereafter in 77DS ‘they’ refers only to already identified people or things, with the exception of the sci-fi scenario of DS50 (‘In a motion of night they massed nearer my post’) and its evocation of anonymous hostile forces. ‘Other people’ in 77DS are rarely well defined or developed, and what comes across largely instead is a mutual hostility between Henry and ‘the world’, broken up by love and grief for specific persons, and occasionally an anguished and conflicted patriotism.

3) ‘They took away his teeth’

The castration theme which we have already seen in the earlier poems, with Henry worried about sexual failure, and references to blindness, etc, is very clear here; teeth, hair, eyes, crotch. (‘The dream-work represents castration by baldness, hair-cutting, the loss of teeth, and beheading.’ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams)

4) ‘White and helpful’

Does this refer to ‘his teeth’, or to ‘they’? Both work. ‘Helpful’ for the teeth would be bitterly humorous (‘hey, I was using those’), and for the sadistic dentists (is there any other kind of dentist?) it is bitterly sarcastic, given that the attention being paid to Henry is neither helpful or kind. ‘White’ – either those enviably well-maintained American teeth, or the white coats of the teeth extractors.

77DS deploys a limited colour scheme; the poetry is not especially descriptive, more allusive and associational. If Berryman uses colour symbolically, it is rarely clear to me what correspondences he has in mind. By far the most commonly encountered colour is ‘green’, followed by ‘white’ and ‘black’ (often because of racial topics); in the case of ‘white’ there is also snow, sand, and, ahem, the anterior sclera (‘the whites of our eyes’). It is ‘green’ which will reward attention (see below).

5) ‘Bothered his backhand’

Of all the elements that give this poem its Pinteresque air of menace (I am thinking particularly of The Birthday Party, when McCann and Goldberg torment Stanley Webber), this is one of the most wickedly effective: it is the bathetic incongruence, the juxtaposition of incommensurable items.

McCann What about the Albigensenist heresy?
Goldberg Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?
[…]
McCann: Wake him up. Stick a needle in his eye.
Goldberg: You’re a plague, Webber. You’re an overthrow.
McCann: You’re what’s left!
Goldberg: But we’ve got the answer to you. We can sterilise you.

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party

6) ‘Halved his green hair … So there’

‘Green hair’. Pointlessly strange? Mythical? ‘Green’ in 77DS (‘all a green living’ ‘the green lives’ ‘kindly green ... wood’, ‘greennesses of ours’, ‘green world’, etc) is nearly always related to nature, and often a mythic nature. So what is it doing in ‘green hair’? It surely represents life, vigour, youth. (As it does for so many writers. ‘In my salad days, when I was green in judgement...’) Which is one of the things that made me wonder – what if we are dealing here, at the very least in stanza 1, with a school-age Henry?

The reason I think this is that the iron voices who have announced to Henry his worthlessness and insignificance conclude with the phrase 'So there.’ It is a phrase of complete playground childishness. And reading back from it: the first time you have your teeth taken away is in childhood. ‘Green’ is youth. Tennis lessons are school. And we know that as a schoolboy, Henry is both bullied and beset by thwarted pubescent lusts because in DS11 it is explicitly laid out:

while he was so beastly with love for Charlotte Coquet
he skated up & down in front of her house
wishing he could, sir, die,
while being bullied & he dreamt he could fly -
during irregular verbs

Bullying induces in its victims a profound sense of worthlessness and humiliation that can persist for a lifetime. In this reading, ‘blew out his loves, his interests’ becomes broader in scope than, say, the cruel removal, by sinister figures, of adult Henry’s erotic appetites (‘wipe out his need’, as DS25 has it). School, especially boarding school, interferes substantially with a child’s natural interests and affections by replacing them with the institution’s own priorities, and by removing the child from their primary caregivers. ‘Blew out’: what’s the metaphor here? The extinguishing of a flame? Or (cf ‘blew out his brains’) elimination by a bullet, foreshadowing the later gun deaths in the book?

7) Stanza 2

I don’t have much to say about this stanza, except how well the dramatization works. He pleads to see himself less: they install mirrors. And then they suggest that he turns his gaze outward, with the Yoda-ish murmur ‘yet you may saved be, yes’. The matter of whether Henry is pried open or self-reflecting, raised in DS1, is still in suspense here.

8) ‘The weather fleured’

‘Fleured’ is a deliberately peculiar word; it’s not wholly clear why Berryman uses it. It isn’t a real verb, but used here it gives a sense of blooming and flowering, the weather at its very finest. Berryman (as we saw him do with ‘pried’ in DS34) is making the language itself warp & distort, just as the content itself melts into full-on surrealism. Yet somehow we know what he means.

I have seen it suggested (though I don’t buy it myself) that the francophone frisson is a smack at Wallace Stevens:

Through its formulaic repetition of syntax and its matrix-like structure, consciously or not, the poem echoes the experimental structure of Wallace Stevens's "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," which likewise employs variations on aesthetic images reimagined in increasingly complex language. Berryman's transformations occur more quickly—they must, given the limited form of the Dream Songs—but the progression of the opening sentence of each of the three stanzas, from "The weather was fine" to "The weather was very fine" to "The weather fleured," seems all at once to be mocking Stevens the aesthete, Stevens the experimenter, and Stevens the Francophile.

9) ‘They … crotch’

I think we have effectively covered much of this in the intro. There is a wrongness throughout the poem, and a general obscurity as to what is being done and by whom, but here it reaches a chaotic intensity, with great agitation, and little cries and wriggles of resistance or response: which then makes all the more effective the short, unhappy finality of the punchline.

The song: I struggled for a while to find a song for DS8, but then remembered the late, great Cathal Coughlan, and ended up spoiled for choice: ‘Ambulance for One’, ‘Bullwhip Road’, ‘And He Descended Into Hell’, and ‘High and Dry’, all with Microdisney; and ‘Wilderness On Time’ and ‘Valhalla Avenue’ with The Fatima Mansions. They all would have worked here to a greater or lesser extent. In the end, I have gone for ‘Wilderness On Time’; you’ll see why. I can’t imagine this will be the last time Coughlan appears on this Substack.