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     “So Ireland and Yeats were no accidental choice”, John Montague wrote in 1974 in what is finally an appallingly self-applauding account of his relationship with John Berryman. Montague’s essay, ‘Henry in Dublin’, which focuses on Berryman’s time in Dublin from September 1966 until June 1967, engages in the most disturbing kind of myth-making, suggesting that the Northern Irish poet was significantly more than a passing acquaintance of Berryman’s on the one hand, while dangerously reaffirming the remarkably naïve claim that the visiting “Moïse Américain” was a “positively happy” chronic alcoholic on the other. Montague’s account and others like it tell the kind of tale one might expect to hear from any of the numerous “unmajestic characters” Denis Donoghue has suggested Berryman met all too frequently during his sojourn in Dublin. These accounts of ‘Henry in Dublin’ elide the disillusionment that underpinned Berryman’s final experience of the Hibernian metropolis.

     “After thirty Falls I rush back to the haunts of Yeats/ & others”, Berryman wrote in Dream Song 281 (‘The Following Gulls’), remembering his first trip to Dublin in 1937. A little after seven in the morning on the third of April 1937, “fifteen minutes after a most uncomfortable and entirely sleepless night on the Liverpool boat”, in a letter not included in Richard J. Kelly’s invaluable We Dream of Honour (1988), Berryman wrote to his mother from the Phoenix Park Hotel in Kingsbridge, “I’m determined that Dublin shall be fascinating and I shall set out about time to prove it”. By the time he left Dublin after his return visit in 1966 Berryman certainly had put the Irish capital at the centre of his protagonist Henry’s (precarious) free state, where the “majestic Shade” of Yeats presided as a ghostly chief magistrate. But did he really rush back to Dublin and “the haunts of Yeats”? Three years prior to his 1966 transatlantic trip Berryman was altogether uncertain about the suitability of Dublin for a year’s sabbatical leave from his teaching duties as Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota. Among the “BAD” things about Dublin as a possible location for the trip he had been planning as early as 1963, according to entries in one of his diaries for that year, was the fact that there was “no Sh.[akespeare collection]” of any significance there. Money was an important consideration too. Given the (previously unpublished) evidence from his 1963 diary, one realises that Berryman finally decided to spend the year in Dublin not because he wanted to “have it out” with Yeats, as he would write in Dream Song 312 (“I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you,/ majestic Shade”); rather, Dublin was “CHEAP; English spoken, [and it was] n[ea]r London & [the] continent”.

     Proximity to London was important for a number of reasons but primarily because it was still, as far as Berryman was concerned, the centre of contemporary poetry it had been when he lived in Cambridge as a visiting Kellett Scholar thirty years earlier. Regarding the contemporary Irish scene, of which John Montague was a rising star, Berryman wondered on the same page of his diary, “[a]re there any Irish poets of interest?” Three years later, having arrived in Ireland in the same year that Montague published the first section of The Rough Field as a Dolmen chapbook, Berryman remained largely indifferent to and unimpressed by the local talent. As he put it in one unfinished and until now unpublished Dream Song fragment written while he was living in Dublin (which is prefaced in the MS by the remark, “In 10 min. you present yr. life’s work. OK. Ugh”):

All these poets!  Holy God!
Many are drunk & some are odd.  
What am I myself here doing
when I could be off & doing?

Fragments of poems such as this, selected from the thirty-six linear feet of papers that constitute Berryman’s vast manuscript collection in the University of Minnesota, offer an extremely valuable insight into Berryman’s life and work and, moreover, new perspectives on some particularly important periods of his tragically shortened career, such as his trip to Dublin in 1966-7. 

     “What am I myself here doing/ when I could be off & doing?” It is perhaps surprising that John Haffenden, in his otherwise scrupulously well-researched biography of Berryman first published in 1982, did not delve a little deeper into the manuscript material, especially where his account of Berryman’s time in Dublin in 1966-7 is concerned. Relying rather too much on John Montague’s problematic account (he quotes several large chunks), Haffenden’s biography devotes far too little space to what was arguably the most important period of Berryman’s career, when he was trying to finish his long poem of a decade’s labour, The Dream Songs. Haffenden, however, has shown just how difficult the process of working with Berryman’s manuscripts can be, having spent over twenty years editing and preparing the recently published, and widely praised, Berryman’s Shakespeare. He also edited the first collection of Berryman’s posthumous verse, Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, which was published in 1977. Berryman’s Shakespeare, as Hugh Kenner points out in his review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement (17 September 1999), is finally a collection, a highly valuable and engaging collection, of drafts and fragments. “Yes, Drafts and Fragments,” Kenner writes, “[that] pertain, moreover, to a scholarly context that must now be re-created from up to six decades ago”. Berryman’s Shakespeare, however, is but one completed editorial project of the many that have not even been started in the Berryman manuscripts collection, a collection that contains hundreds, perhaps thousands of previously unpublished letters and notes, poems and fragments of poems, essays and drafts of essays, Dream Songs that Berryman “killed” before he culled the “final” 308 included in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest in 1968, innumerable clues which can but further elucidate the life and work of this brilliant but difficult poet who once wondered whether “assistant professors” would “become associates/ by working on his works?” after he had been “lowered underground” (Dream Song 373).

     One cannot help but feel that a great deal of the material in the Berryman manuscript collection may yet merit publication and, indeed, Berryman’s later “drafts and fragments” may one day be viewed with the same kind of critical attention now commanded by the late unfinished works of Pound in particular. On the matter to hand, however, there can be no doubt that Berryman’s papers offer further clarification of his 1966-7 trip to Dublin and his impressions of the people he met there. Contrary to the account given by John Montague and the myth it has helped to propagate, John Berryman did not have a “positively happy” time in Dublin. “Berryman is the only writer I have ever seen for whom drink seemed to be a positive stimulus”, he writes in ‘Henry in Dublin’, taking the kind of approach to literary production one might expect from a member of an undergraduate literary society. Montague, it would seem, was more taken in by the boozy and pretentious literary Dublin of the 1960s than the American visitor. Of course, Montague is not the only writer who has sought to provide a romantically refracted version of Berryman’s experiences in, and of, Dublin. Berryman himself played up the role of the bard with an insatiable appetite for liquor when Jane Howard and Terence Spencer came to Dublin to do a Life magazine presentation of the blustering “whiskey and ink” poet in 1967. Berryman’s dissatisfaction with the scene he encountered in Dublin, however, was not presented there, though it has been illustrated elsewhere – in Dream Song 321, for example, where he criticises the “brainless senators” and various unnamed “enemies of Joyce & Swift,/ enemies of Synge,// enemies of Yeats & O’Casey”, and in letters such as that dated 2 January 1967, included in Richard Kelly’s selection, where he wrote “I’m tired of Dublin; [there’s] no genius here”. 

     The previously unpublished poems that have recently appeared in the TLS (30 April 1999) and Metre 6 offer further evidence of Berryman’s unhappiness in Dublin. In the second of the three pieces published in the TLS, ‘A fire, a drink, a cigarette, a fire’, Berryman conjures an image of desperate solitude, far from the madding crowd of a Dublin pub, “while nightly affright him the horrible cliffs in the end/ & the meaningless penis-harden”. Similarly, in the pieces printed in Metre, we can see that Berryman was far from impressed with either the Dublin literary set or the Irish social set-up: as he wrote in one previously unpublished Dream Song, a verse-letter to his friend William Meredith now available in Metre: “Brace yourself, William: you have a country before you,/ uncivilised”. Berryman severely doubted the kinds of assumptions about his work and his way of working indicated by Montague’s remarks. As he wrote in one of the manuscript pieces recently published in Metre, “every time most people praise me/ I figure there must be something wrong with my style/ trudging away at perfection”. So much for Berryman’s estimation of the local talent and certain of his new-found companions’ powers of critical appraisal. 

     That Berryman did not finish his long poem in Dublin, that Dublin did not provide him with either the space or the inspiration necessary to lay Henry to rest, is a point critics seldom remember. Of course, Berryman did bring many of his problems with him to Dublin, but there is a strong sense in which the social environment he encountered there in the mid-sixties accelerated his alcoholic decline. Critics usually link Berryman’s final decision to travel to Dublin in 1966 with what is frequently (and, one feels, far too simplistically) described as his life-long wrestling with W.B. Yeats, his Anglo-Irish precursor. Dublin and Yeats figure very prominently in The Dream Songs and especially in Book VII, where the American poet’s quarrel with Yeats is generally viewed as the central, closing drama of Berryman’s long poem. Berryman’s reasons for moving to Dublin, however, were more complicated than has often been granted, and The Dream Songs cannot be explained simply or finally in terms of his engagement with Yeats. In the following two stanzas of an unfinished Dream Song written in Dublin, Berryman shows that his engagement with culture and the history of literature was counterpoised at all times by an earnest desire to observe and understand the mysteries of the quotidian:

Here in my villa, with gardens front & back
what can I hope to learn?  The Irish have had their say – 
You might say that with Whitman & Eliot we had:
O yes, we had, & so did they, with Synge
& Yeats: perhaps after all it has all been said?
I wither that idea daily.  My daughter gives me a smack

nightly, but that is not the real good-night:
that comes when for the sixth time she unwinds
with troubled questions & dreams down the stairs – 
she must know the Goya ceiling,
that never has come less, than beatitude
blue & red-rose hang the listening angels 

     “Without notes”, Dennis O’Driscoll has written, “too many of them [Dream Songs] leave the reader knocking in vain for entry – taunted, snubbed, frustrated”. The business of annotating The Dream Songs, a project that has already been impressively if somewhat tentatively started by Sean Ryder in an unpublished doctoral dissertation submitted to University College Dublin in 1989, needs to be considered seriously as a further addition to Berryman scholarship. The best notes to Berryman’s published work, however, are those which he made himself and which remain largely unpublished in the Manuscripts Division of the University of Minnesota, soon to be moved from their home of over twenty years in Berry Street to an impressive structure on the West Bank of the Mississippi, less than a stone’s throw away from the place where Berryman leapt to his untimely end in 1972. With the passing of time and with the publication of more of his letters and notes, drafts and fragments, how we read Berryman and his long poem may undergo substantial revisions or, at the very least, important clarifications.