The American Century: Literature since 1945 559followed by submission, or reconciliation, is caught in each individual stanza, with
its halting ebb-and-flow released in a long, last line; and it is the pattern of the poem
as a whole – almost certainly because Berryman himself saw it as the basic rhythm
of life. “We dream of honor, and we get along,” he was to say later; existence is a series
of small, proud assertions made within the shadow of death, little victories in the
face of ultimate defeat. Undoubtedly, Homage is a work of the historical imagination,
in that Berryman recreates the past, makes it alive in and for the present. But it is also
a personal poem to the extent that it enables him to realize his own voice by making
the dead speak and tell their story.
“Man is entirely alone / may be,” Berryman remarks just over midway through
Homage, then adds, “I am a man of griefs & fits / trying to be my friend.” This
anticipates the tone and vision of Berryman’s major work, the Dream Songs, the first
of which were published in 1964 and the last few of which he was still writing just
before his death by suicide in 1972. “I am obliged to perform in great darkness /
operations of great delicacy / on my self,” Berryman admits in one of these songs,
and this suggests their essential thrust. Like Notebook, they document, in the manner
of a journal or diary, the chaotic growth of a poet’s mind: the processes of his life, in
all their absurdity, fear, pain, and wonder. Unlike Notebook, however, the story is told
with the help of a character, a person called Henry who is “at odds wif de world and
its god.” Along with his creator, Henry is many things: transient, criminal, troubled
and gone, willful, lustful, tired, ridiculous, stricken. In the course of the poem he dies
(“I am breaking up”; “Henry’s parts were fleeing”) and then comes back to life
(“others collected and dug Henry up”); and he is aided and abetted, particularly in
the earlier songs, by another character called Tambo who speaks in a thick, stage-
Negro dialect. If Henry, and by extension Berryman, is “a divided soul,” then Tambo
helps to dramatize that division. Tambo talks to Henry like the end man in a minstrel
show, calling him “Mister Bones” or “Brother Bones” (“Am I a bad man? Am I a good
man? / – Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both, / like most of we”). And, as he
does so, the reader is irresistibly reminded of earlier dialogues of self and soul, or
mind and body, but with the suspicion that these dialogues have been transposed
here into a more contemporary, fragmented and disjunctive key. The shifts of mood
are kaleidoscopic: boredom (“Life, friends, is boring”) slides into happiness
(“moments of supreme joy jerk / him on”), then into guilt (“There sat down, once a
thing on Henry’s heart”), then into stoic endurance (“We suffer on, a day, a day, a
day”). Within this loose, baggy monster, Berryman can incorporate pain at the death
of friends (“The high ones die, die. They die”), references to his casual lecheries or
heavy drinking (“a little more whiskey please”), irritation with whatever power rules
the world (“I’m cross with god”), and horror at the lunacies of the twentieth century
(“This world is gradually becoming a place / where I do not care to be any more”).
Certain themes or obsessions recur, such as the suicide of his father, then later the
pleasures of his new marriage and the birth and growth of his child, but no particular
theme is allowed to dominate. “These songs are not meant to be understood, you
understand,” warns Berryman, “ / They are only meant to terrify and comfort.” They
are “crazy sounds,” intended to give tongue to life as it passes: hell-bent on resistingGGray_c05.indd 559ray_c 05 .indd 559 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM