The Dream Songs by John Berryman; Collected Poems 1937-1971 by John Berryman; CharlesThornburyReview by: Sean RyderIrish University Review, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 398-400Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484381 .

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

John Berryman, The Dream Songs. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. xxv

+ 427 pages. ST?17.50.

John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937-1971. Edited and introduced by Charles Thornbury. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. lxvii + 348 pages. ST?17.50.

John Berryman made two visits to Ireland during his life. The first was a fleeting (and unsuccessful) visit to Dublin in search of Yeats in

1938; the second, more significant visit, was his residence in Dublin

during the winter and spring of 1966-67. During that time he

produced scores of Dream Songs, many of which were incorporated into the 1968 volume His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Faber's welcome

publication (for the first time on this side of the Atlantic) of

Berryman's collected Dream Songs, will, among other things,

provide occasion for another look at these 'Irish' Songs of

Berryman's.

What is striking about Berryman's (or more accurately, his

protagonist Henry's) Ireland is that it is an Ireland very much

mediated through the work of W.B. Yeats. Berryman confessed to

being a "burning, trivial disciple of Yeats" in the nineteen-thirties;

thirty years later, Dublin in the Dream Songs becomes the site of a

(Harold) Bloomian Oedipal struggle:

I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you,

majestic Shade, [.. .] For years then I forgot you, I put you down,

ingratitude is the necessary curse

of making things new

(DS #312)

As it happens, Henry less "has it out" with Yeats than displays his

dependence; Yeats's "shade" dictates that Dublin is viewed as a city of eighteenth-century grandeur, the home of Swift and other "great

men & weird" (DS #307), but also a "foul ground" populated by "enemies" of Joyce, Synge, Yeats and O'Casey (DS #321). Ireland is, in another Yeatsian configuration, alternately "full of con-men"

(Yeats's paudeens), or the site of "ancient practices" in dolmens and

ruined castles:

The whole place is ghostly: no wonder Yeats believed in fairies

(DS #313)

In his several meditations on the Easter Rising, Henry rehearses

Yeats's martyrology, and utilised a number of obvious verbal echoes, either directly:

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BOOK REVIEWS

'I helped to wind the clock" cried The O'Rahilly, I come to hear it strike' ?

(DS #328)

or ironically, as in this comment on the legacy of Easter 1916:

... nothing is changed

for all these disasters O

(DS #321)

But this Yeatsian Ireland, like other political and historical scenes of conflict referred to in the Songs, serves chiefly as an emblem

of the personal war between Henry and his own "enemies" (DS #291), rather than as a vehicle for genuine historical understanding.

Ultimately, for Berryman, an historical conflict like the Easter

Rising becomes a symbol of the

phantastic hope [which] rules Henry's war as well, all these enterprises are doomed ...

(DS #309)

Similarly, the struggle between a secular modernity and a

"monastic" past when "saints thronged these shores" (DS #341 and

#313) is invoked largely as a metaphor for Henry's own sense of

religious crisis. In effect, Berryman's representation of Ireland

dispenses with serious historical meditation in order to depict a

world of generalised suffering and conflict, which in turn allows him

to mythologise and justify Henry's paranoia and anxieties. The

notion of a human condition which is always historically-specific, and therefore subject to human intervention and change, is

supplanted by an historical fatalism.

In Collected Poems 1937-71, Charles Thornbury has very usefully

gathered together those volumes which Berryman published before

and after the Songs. The early work is ornate, academic and sometimes embarrassing in its posturing, while the work of the late

forties and fifties (the Sonnets and "Homage to Mistress Brad

street") sees Berryman making the startling experiments with syntax and tone which were to become so characteristic of the Dream Songs. The verse of the early 1970s, often seen as a failure of vision and

discipline when compared to the Songs, seems more accurately to be a

deliberate attempt to move towards a looser, more directly 'con

fessional' style. This is bound to be a somewhat controversial edition. Thornbury

has made some two hundred alterations to the well-known 1967 text

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

of Berryman's Sonnets, many of them substantive changes, including the substitution of the name "Chris" for the more lyrical pseudonym "Lise" which Berryman had used to protect the woman involved

(Thornbury has also re-titled the sequence Sonnets to Chris). Also

significant is Thornbury's treatment of Delusions, etc. (1972), the text

of which was always problematic, and to which Thornbury has

added new stanzas, and made numerous emendations to both

punctuation and wording. Whether these new versions of the poems

replace the versions with which Berryman's readers have become

familiar remains to be seen; in any case Thornbury's work must be

commended for showing up the problematic nature of establishing a

'definitive' Berryman.

SEAN RYDER

Brian Inglis, Downstart. London: Chatto and Windus. 298 pages. ST?15.95.

Downstart, Brian Inglis's autobiography, covers his life down to the

present, although there is very little material after 1973, the year of the demise of "All Our Yesterdays", the Granada television

programme he presented. Both the Irish and English dimensions of

his life are described in the twenty-six chapters: his first few years,

spent in India and Ireland; education in England; a short period with

The Irish Times while waiting to be called up for the RAF; seven

years with The Irish Times after the war, combined latterly with

writing a PhD at TCD; then permanent settlement in England to

engage in journalism, broadcasting and writing books at frequent intervals. It has been a full and often insecure life, clouded in recent

years by premature bereavements, but throughout he has shown

much resilience in adapting to changing circumstances.

Brian Inglis was a member of two "endangered species", being both

Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Irish. Having been conceived in India, where his father, later to be knighted, was an official in Poona, he

unconsciously braved the German U-boats to be born in Dublin in 1916.

Thereafter the Anglo-Irish, and in particular the "Anglo" side

prevailed until he left Oxford in 1939 with a degree in History, for he only returned to Ireland during school holidays and vacations.

His education, about which he is most revealing, was marked by a

pleasant time at the Dragon School, Oxford, and a rather mixed

time at Shrewsbury. There he had the misfortune to be in Oldham's, whose housemaster J.B. Oldham placed power in the hands of an

elite few, leaving the way open for "licensed bullying". Even so

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