4.2.hudgins (1)

"I Am Fleeing Double": Duality And Dialectic in The Dream Songs

Andrew Hudgins

The Missouri Review, Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 1980-81, pp. 91-110(Article)

Published by University of MissouriDOI: 10.1353/mis.1980.0023

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CRITICISM

"I AM FLEEING DOUBLE": DUALITY ANDDIALECTIC IN THE DREAM SONGS I Andrew Hudgins

JOHN BERRYMAN' S magnum opus, The Dream Songs, hasremained one of the enigmas of modern poetry, a work more

shifting and illusive than other booklength poems of its era:Paterson, The Maximus Poems, and perhaps Lowell's History. Criticshave been confused as to whether to take The Dream Songs as acohesive work of art or as an artistic autobiography writtensimultaneously with the living of the events described and conse-quently having no more, but no less, intrinsic form than that lifebeing lived. In point of fact, The Dream Songs is not the "open-ended" poem some critics have understood it to be. Berryman didnot add dream songs to the end of the sequence as William CarlosWilliams added Book Five and proposed to add Book Six to Patersonafter he had initially proclaimed the work complete in four books. Ifanything, The Dream Songs is "open-middled," since Berrymanpublished what is presently the final dream song, Song 385, as "TheLast Dream Song: 161" in 1965, considerably before many of thepoems in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest would have been written.Berryman knew, then, some five years before it was completed, howthe volume was going to end, if indeed he hadn't known all along.Obviously, if the ending of the poem was determined before thesequence was half completed, the author was free to organize withina predetermined framework his material into an artistic whole. Oncethat point is established, one is free to examine The Dream Songs forformal principles of structure and development.1

One of the major structural devices of The Dream Songs, and theone at which I plan to look, is the dialectic of opposites which do notsynthesize or resolve, but rather exist in conflict, in ebb and flow, incyclical movement. One quality will be predominant at one mo-ment, the other the next. When the opposites, be they body andmind or the drive-to-life and the drive-to-death, are present inHenry's psyche, they do not cancel out one another; they clashferociously, and Henry can barely contain them. If, as F. ScottFitzgerald said, the quality that distinguishes a first-rate intellect isthe ability to hold simultaneously opposing ideas and still be able tofunction, Henry is modern man courageously oscillating from oneside to the other of that proverbially thin line that separates geniusfrom insanity. Though he realizes his divided nature, admitting "Iam fleeing double" (Song 114), Henry cannot escape the dualitiesthat pervade his life. In this last instance he is fleeing the past and

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future and attempting, not very successfully, to live in the present.Past and future, then, represent yet another duality that Henry istrying to resolve by finding a viable third alternative.

From the title and the dedications to the components ofHenry'spersonality and the cyclical movements of the "plot," dualitypermeates the poem, which recounts the story of Henry's life. Notthe least of the conundrums of the book is its title. The meaning ofthe title has been, and will no doubt continue to be, the subject ofconsiderable speculation. I want merely to observe that the phrase"dream song" unites in a felicitiously uneasy marriage two termsnormally antithetical. A dream is the seemingly unorganizedwelling up of the unconscious and perhaps of unconscious truth.Song, on the other hand, is the organized, rational product of ahuman mind, the art of a "maker" who produces, if you will,conscious truth. Berryman recognizes both impulses in himself. Thedesire to create the elegantly controlled art of Baudelaire ("if one hadthe skill") is matched by an admiration of the spasmodic brilliance ofThoreau and Poe:

O formal & elaborate I choose you

but I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,the mad. I sometimes can't always tell them apart(Song 265)

The internal poet of The Dream Songs, Henry, is both bard and maker.In extremis he goes to pieces, and the pieces keep on writing,oblivious to, and peaceful in, their "piecedom" (Song 311). In otherinstances Henry refers to himself as a maker, though occasionallywith hesitation or even self-mockery.

There are many more dualities extending through The DreamSongs, some encompassing such seeming incidentals as the dedica-tions ofH;s Toy, His Dream, His Rest: "To Mark Van Doren, and to thesacred memory of Delmore Schwartz." Van Doren, who was ofcourse still living when the book was dedicated to him, was one ofBerryman's teachers at Columbia and a poet and scholar renownedfor his dependable and imperturbable wisdom. Sanctified by death,Delmore Schwartz was the very opposite of Van Doren. The literaryWunderkind of the late thirties and early forties, he was known for hisdazzling but erratic brilliance. Unfortunately, his insights grewfewer and his spells of virtual incoherence became more and moredeeply entrenched in his personality, until he became a burden tohis friends. Some of Berryman's experiences with the troubling and

94 · The Missouri Review Andrew Hudgins

troublesome Schwartz of the last years of his life are recounted in theelegies for Schwartz. Songs 146-159 constitute "one solid block ofagony" for the poet's dead friend, and there are other references tohim scattered through The Dream Songs. The duality represented bythe steady, unblinking intellect of Van Doren and the fitfullycoruscating mind of Schwartz, whom one of the dream songs likensto Thomas Chatterton, epitomizes Berryman's admired antinomiesof the formal and elaborate and the hit-or-miss.

A similar, but much cruder, version of essentially the sameantipodes is present in Henry's personality. Henry is part HenryHouse "the steadiest man on the block" and part Henry Pussycat,whose affiliation with Henry's instinctual nature is manifest in bothcomponents of his last name. Keeping ever in mind Henry's proteannature, I am reluctant to divide up Henry neatly into body andmind, though those do seem to be two discrete and unintegratedaspects of Henry's psyche. The figure I tentatively identify as mind,Henry House, is shunted aside early in the poem, and he doesnot appear again, except by implication in the last songs ofBook VII. By then he is more fully incorporated into Henry'spersonality. He is no longer the somewhat stolid Henry House,but a metaphorical house representative of an earned stability.

Henry House may fade out of The Dream Songs early on, butthere remains throughout the poem a dialectic between the physicallife and the sublimated life of the imagination. This dialectic ispresided over by a voice in black dialect which addresses Henry asMr. Bones.2 By and large, Mr. Bones functions as a voice of reasonand balance, acting as a restraining influence on Henry's lust and hisdetermined melancholy. From his limited perspective Henry quitenaturally sees Mr. Bones as someone opposed to him, somethingthat exists to frustrate his desires. He cannot grasp the fact that bothsides of the dialectic that exists between the components of hisdivided soul work together to constitute one whole.3 Mr. Bonesdoes, however, know that all parts exist as one and that his job is tomoderate Henry's extremes, not to reconcile opposites:

The high ones die, die. You look up and who's there?—Easy, easy, Mr. Bones. I is on your side.I smell your grief.—I sent by grief away. I cannot careforever. With them all again & again I diedand cried, and I have to live .—Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.That is our 'pointed task Love & die.—Yes; that makes sense.

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But what makes sense between, then? What if Iroiling & babbling & braining, brood on why andjust sat on the fence?

—I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost.—It's fool's gold. But I go in for that.(Song 36)

Between life and death, Henry, "rolling & babbling & braining,"wants to straddle, like a mugwump, the fence between the physicaland mental life. When Mr. Bones tells him that he cannot, that "Dechoice is lost," Henry admits the futility of the quest and theimpossibility of his own desire for the fusion of the life of the bodyand the life of the imagination. While unprepared to offer aniron-clad interpretation of one of the more famous dream songs, Song55, I sense the same fundamental division of self when St. Peter,rejecting Henry's application to Heaven, tells him, "We betrayedme," indicating that the component parts of the self have betrayedthe whole.

Henry's divided nature seems to be the result of a personal andsocietal Fall from an earlier paradise or golden world which heidentifies with his younger life—when he could sing.4 In the veryfirst dream song Henry remembers a time when:

AU the world like a woolen loveronce did seem on Henry's side.Then came a departure.Thereafter nothing fell out as itmight or ought.I don't see how Henry, priedopen for all the world to see, survived.(Song 1)

As the appellation "Mr. Bones" suggests, Henry has fallen into aworld of death and carnality. 5 Plunging immediately into personallasciviousness ("appetite" is what Milton called it), Henry, in one ofthe most hilarious of the songs, lusts after a woman whom he spieseating chicken paprika in a restaurant. Only his societally-inducedinhibitions restrain him:

96 ¦ The Missouri Review Andrew Hudgins

Fainting with interest, I hungered backand only the fact of her husband & four other peoplekept me from springing on her(Song 4)

The post-lapsarian world, replete with death, fear, frustratedappetites, and especially guilt is still the world in which an awareman must live. The sense of nameless guilt Henry feels in Song 29and for which he cannot account by his own actions, as well as the"irreversible loss" which Berryman attributes to him, may stemfrom his Fall from grace. Henry's attitude toward his father runscuriously parallel to his feeling of alienation from, and ambivalencetoward, his metaphorical Father, God. In this unsettled world,Henry House has no real place. His narrow and impossible worldview is, to say the least, inappropriate:

The strangler tree, the dancing mouseconfound his vision; then they loosen it.Henry widens. How did Henry Househimself ever come here?

(Song 12)

The echoes of the original Fall, particularly Milton's version ofit, pervade The Dream Songs. Condemned to the world of toil andtravail, Henry is tempted to escape suffering in death. Like Adamand Eve in Milton's garden, Henry considers suicide and rejects it infavor of work; unlike them, he continually reassesses his decision,sometimes wanting desperately to die, sometimes reluctantlychoosing to keep on living. Actually, Henry does die several times,only to be resurrected. In the last song of Book I, Henry's Fall isspecifically related to the Fall of mankind. Both Falls are caused byoriginal sin, but Henry's Fall is further identified with the pridefulsin of originality, art:

The glories of the world struck me, madame aria, once.—What happen then, Mr. Bones?if be you cares to say.—Henry. Henry became interested in women's bodies,his loins were & are the scene of stupendous

achievement.


Stupor. Knees, dear. Pray.AU the knobs & softnesses of, my God,The ducking & trouble it swarm on Henry,at one time.

—What happen then, Mr. Bones?you- seems excited-like.—Fell Henry back into the original crime: art, rime(Song 26)

Eden is gone: "My green world pipes/a finish—for us all, my love,not some" (Song 56). As a result man's soul is divided between bodyand spirit and only God can restore men to pre-lapsarian unity:

What roar solved once the düemma of the Ancient of Days,what sigh borrowed His mercy?—Who may, ifwe are all the same, make one.

(Song 56)

God may be able to restore man to his erstwhile edenic state,but to derive much comfort from such a view one must believeimplicitly in both God's existence and his mercy. Henry cannot. Heswings radically from belief to disbelief. He is incapable of achievingthe synthesis of belief and doubt that charges some of EmilyDickinson's poems with ambiguity, a palpable doubt that is part andparcel of an honest, entire faith. Synthesis based on faith is beyondHenry. God either exists or he does not. At the same time, Henry'seschatology is similarly antipodal. Heaven must be a pleasant placewhere one is reconciled with one's friends or an utter void, andeither is a desirable destination when Henry is at the bottom of oneof his manic-depressive cycles. Henry is a true manic-depressive.His soul is split in half, and he is unable to find any emotional orspiritual ground on which to stand. Therefore he vacillates betweenextreme emotional states, often with breath-taking rapidity.

At the end of 77 Dream Songs (which comprises the first threebooks of dream songs) Henry declares his ability to accept, if not tobe reconciled to, the Fall and the resultant nature of man assymbolized by the metonymical head and heart:


Henry likes Fall.Hé would be prepared to live in a world of FaUfor ever, impenitent Henry.But the snows and summers grieve & dream;

these fierce & airy occupations, and love,raved away so many of Henry's yearsit is a wonder that, with in each handone of his own mad books and all,ancient fires for eyes, his head full& his heart full, he's making ready to move on.(Song 77)

Though he remains at the mercy of his divided soul, Henry is,through Books IV and V, more or less true to his promise to accepthis limitations. In Song 133 he notes that "things seemed to matterless .... He enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that . . . ."Song 141 shows Henry once more confronted by his own duality:"One was down on the Mass. One the masses. /Both grew Henry."But he is able to avoid the utter and hopeless despair he felt earlier:

He'd've run off to sea(bu t for his careful studies of the Fall)twenty-odd years ago.6(Song 141)

I am inclined to believe that The Dream Songs is at this pointworking through to an acceptance of the Fall and its consequences,an acceptance of the sort depicted in the final dream song in thevolume, the one originally published as "The Last Dream Song:161." Extending my speculation a bit further, I will conjecture thatthe death of Delmore Schwartz in 1966 plunged Berryman oncemore into reflection on the Fall of Man and rendered the proposedending of the sequence at least temporarily unacceptable to him.The verb "fall" occurs frequently in the songs dealing withSchwartz, and there is a preponderance of imagery of descent ordecline accompanying Berryman's elegiac response to the death ofhis friend. His death-wish is most intense when he considers the"summer" of their lives, when Delmore and Gertrude were ashappy as Adam and Eve in Paradise:


High in the summer branches the poet sang.His throat ached, and he could sing no more.All ears closedacross the heights where Delmore & Gertrude sprangso long ago, in the goodness of which it was composed.Delmore, Delmore!

(Song 147)

But "even that marriage fell on days were lonely/and ended . . ."(Song 154). Though the poet wants to die and be with Delmore, hefinds solace in knowing that his friend no longer has to live in aworld of labor and suffering. He hopes for Delmore that "he's sittingwith his peers: sit, sit,/& recover & be whole." Only in death can onebe whole. Ultimately work and the quest for the "fool's gold" of aunified self save Henry from this grief:

Maybe it's timeto throw in my own hand.But there are secrets, secrets, I may yet—hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme—come on to understand

(Song 159)

The Fall continues to plague Henry, particularly when he looksback on his edenic life, before he was a fallen person, a "fellow":

Eastward he longs, before, well, any badthe silly fellow did. Then he remembers,oh, the worst thing of all.But he only remembers it as having been bad,not as itself—like a list of summerssurging into Fall.(Song 183)

Gradually Henry is once more coming to terms with the Fallen state.Song 241 ends with a supplication that has as its implicit premise acall for a savior: "Christen the fallen." By Song 317 Henry is almostready to accept the coexistence of those opposing forces in himselfas maker and in the world as constructed by God, the Maker:


Henry with joy lay down for his next bout of rest,in happy expectation of the nextassault on his divided soul.Does the validity of the dream-life suppose a Maker?If so what a careless monster he must be, whole,taking the claws with the purr.(Song 317)

The "validity of the dream-life" is further examined and connectedexplicitly to the Fall in a subsequent dream song:

Freud was some wrong about dreams, or almost all;besides his insights grand, he thought the'dreams were a

transcriptof childhood & the day before,censored of course: a transcript:even his lesser insightweremisunderstood&became aboreexcept for the knowing & troubled by the Fall.(Song 327)

While I am not prepared to offer a definitive explication of the lasttwo lines of that quotation or even to untangle their syntax, I do hearan echo of Paradise Lost. Before the Fall in Milton's version, Adamand Eve's dreams are sweet and peaceful; after it they are dyspeptic.Theirs are not the only literary dreams troubled by the Fall. Since theFall of Man is a major concern of Henry's, The Dream Songs also isdisturbed by the Fall. By the final dream song Henry has transcendedmere acceptance of the Fall. Now he can embrace it as thefelix culpa:"Fall comes to us as a prize/to rouse us toward our fate" (Song 385).

Henry realizes early on that the Fall that has divided his soul isalso responsible for his progress. The conflict of antithetical forcesdrives him onward: "Deprived of his enemy, shrugged to astandstill/horrible Henry, foaming" (Song 9). Whether "the enemy"is just a reference to the movie High Sierra (which provides theinforming metaphor of the song) or whether it also refers backwardsto Song 8 which ends, "They took away his crotch," one cannot sayfor certain. If the latter, the id is once more identified with theconflict in Henry's life. Whatever the case, the point is made thatHenry requires the tumult of conflict to move—and movement, anymovement, is preferable to stagnation. Even movement backwards,Henry discovers, is an advance (Songs 325 and 367). When the


speaker of Song 114 says, "I am fleeing double," he indicates notonly the duality ofhis nature but also the fact that that very duality iswhat keeps him running. Examining some "ancient sculpture" inAutun, Henry realizes that the lost soul is and must be a soul inmotion:

The figures figure what the lost soul means,so long ago, in an acre of sepultureinsisting on the verb, not the noun.(Song 161)

Because of Henry's insistence on the verb, The Dream Songs isfrenetic, full of "hellish vaudeville turns" (Song 168), and deliber-ately spasmodic: "we are pitched toward the last love,/the lastdream, the last song" (Song 137) and "moments of supreme joyjerk/him on . . ." (Song 337). The Dream Songs is, in fact, jerky by itsvery nature, since the songs concentrate on matters of moment toHenry and exclude transitional material which would smooth outthe narrative. I have looked over, but I hope not overlooked, the"hellish vaudeville turns" in an attempt to trace out an overallmovement. The sudden changes of mind or attitude both occurwithin a larger cyclical framework and represent in themselvesHenry's vacillations. Both cycles and epicycles are manifestations ofthe dialectic that keeps Henry running.

In The Dream Songs there is a cycle of life and death whichcoincides roughly, very roughly, with the books of the volume . Song1 depicts Henry huffily and sulkily waking into the fallen world,"pried/open for all the world to see . . . ." At the end of the firstbook Henry has "a most marvellous piece of luck" (Song 26)—hedies. In sharp contrast, the next song begins with images ofregeneration ("The greens of the Ganges delta foliate") and endswith "good Spring" which "returns with a dance and a sigh" (Song27). Though Henry himself resists the movement back to life, thegreen exuberance of the world, and his reluctant acknowledgmentof it, signal Henry's acquiescence to the life impulse. The ending ofBook II is by no means so clear-cut. Though not dead, Henry isnonetheless in bad shape and perhaps dying, in a figurative sense.He is radioactive, afflicted with "the night sweats & the day sweats"(Song 51), and apparently his girl friend has left him after havingmade a cuckold of him. Couched in terms of the loss of spring andverdancy, the previous song, Song 50, offers some support for thislast supposition. Mr. Bones is chiding Henry for his constantbelly-aching:


—Mr. Bones, your troubles give me vertigo,& backache. Somehow, when Imade your scene,I came to feel as if

de roses of dawns & pearls of dusks, made upby some ol' writer-man, got right forgot& the greennesses of ours.Springwater grow so thick it gonna clotand the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup,you is bad powers .(Song 50)

As before, the next book, Book III, opens with a waking and thereturn of spring. The song begins 'Bright-eyed & bushy-tailed wokenot Henry up," which I take to mean that Henry did wake up, ifwithout any special alacrity. Going through his deaths and rebirths,Henry is involved in a learning process; he is "growing wise."Though Henry may resist the life impulse which propels him fromcycle to cycle, it is strong within him and he finally capitulates:

He felt like shrieking but he shuddered as(spring mist, warm, rain) an handful with quietnessvanisht & the thing took hold.(Song 52)

Book III ends with two of the most important of the dream songs."If life is a handkerchief sandwich," Henry, according to song 76,would prefer to join his father "in a modesty of death." If life ispointless, frustrating, unnourishing, Henry would rather not partici-pate. Mr. Bones entices Henry into a minstrel dance "by thebeautiful sea," death. Looking out to sea, Henry comes to a suddenresolve:"—I saw nobody coming, sol went instead." He does not seehis father or a savior walking on the water, so he goes looking. Thelast of the first seventy-seven dream songs is cautiously optimistic.Still torn between the irresolvable dualities of his nature—"snowsand summers" which "grieve & dream"; "these fierce & airyoccupations, and love"; and his full head and full heart—Henry isnonetheless "making ready to move on."

Book III is the first book to end on an optimistic note, so Book IVmust, if the cycle is to be maintained, end with a death instead of arebirth. Song 78, the first song in Book IV and the first song of the


"Opus posthumous," is just such a reversal of the cycle as it has sofar developed. Henry is dead and a bit uneasy with the experience.7By the time of the next posthumous song he is rather enjoyinghimself. Imagining nature and poets mourning his death, hehumorously demands under threat of return that he be honored:

. . . let this day be his, throughout the town,region & cosmos, lest he freeze our bloodwith terrible returns.

(Song 79)

Soon be begins to miss his body and regret the condition of his soul,especially when he reconsiders a sexual escapade with the daughterof a friend. Serving as the mediator between body and soul, Mr.Bones comforts Henry, though in an amusingly coarse fashion:"—Mr. Bones, what's all about?/Girl have a little: what be wrongwith that?" (Song 80). Henry, by the next song, has ceased mindingthe separation from his body: "It wasn't so much after all to lose,was, Boyd?/A body." Again Mr. Bones objects, "—But, Mr. Bones,you needed that" (Song 82). Not so easily convinced, Henrypronounces his new dwelling place "a cozy grave" and "a nice pit"(Song 82). In Song 87, however, word gets out that "Henry may bereturning to our life/adult & difficult." Certainly Henry is alwaysdifficult. What is interesting is that Henry's return to life is oncemore perceived as a part of an extended learning or maturationprocess.

As one might expect, the impulses of the body finally begin toreassert themselves. Henry, a male Sleeping Beauty, lies in hiscasket imagining women viewing his mortal remains:

In a blue series towards his sleepy eyesthey slid like wonder, women tall & smallof every shape & size,in many languages to lisp 'We do'to Henry almost waking.(Song 89)

"Which one," he wonders, "will waken him?" Human, physicalwarmth reminds him of the coldness and blindness of the life whichdenies the body, and he begins to open himself, once again, to hisbody:


O she must startle like a fallen gown,content with speech like an old sacramentin deaf ears lying down,blazing through darkness till he feels the cold& blindness of his hopeless tenementwhile his black arms unfold.

(Song 89)

Enjoying his passivity, torpid Henry still does not rouse himself.Finally "others" dig Henry up. Back among the living, he is harriedby the quotidian evils of everyday life: back taxes, bills, and wiveswho are afraid they will have to return the life insurance money.Henry can stand it for only two weeks:

A fortnight later, sense a single manupon the trampled scene at 2 a.m.insomnia-plagued, with a shoveldigging like mad, Lazarus with a planto get his own back.(Song 91)

One can only assume that Henry was successful in his plan toget back to death because Book V begins with his once more wakingup in a hospital. He regains consciousness amid roses and tulips,while "flesh-coloured men & women come & punt" beneath hiswindow. Surrounded by these symbols and acts of generation andregeneration, Henry resists the impulse to life: "I rave/or gruntagainst it, from a flowerless land" (Song 92). At the end of the poemHenry again shoulders, wearily, the responsibility of living:

As still as his cadaver, Henry marsthis surface of an earth or other, feet southeyes bleared west, waking to march.(Song 92)

The end of Book V does not contain another of Henry's deaths,though it does leave him, in Song 145, considering once more hisfather's suicide. Henry is trying to forgive his father not only forkilling himself but also for not taking Henry with him. In song 146,Henry's attitude when he considers his dead friend Delmore

Andrew Hudgins The MISSOURI Review ¦ 205

Schwartz is quite different from the one expressed in the previoussong. But all his dead, especially the newly dead Delmore Schwartz,call for him to join them. Henry refuses:

'Down with them all!' Henry suddenly cried.Their deaths were theirs. I wait on for my own,I dare say it won't be long.I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried,but they are past it all, I have not done.(Song 146)

Henry's resolve does not last. The dialectic of life and death is thevery essence of his divided soul. Unable to balance off the twoforces, he must flit from one extreme to the other. Despite hisrepudiation of death in Song 146, he is, by Song 156, courting itagain, desiring to follow Delmore below. He goes on living, but thebook ends with three songs entitled "Henry's Farewell" whichpertain to his leaving America for Ireland. The ending of the last ofthese three songs is reminiscent of song 145, which ends Book V. Inthat song, one will remember, Henry is unable to forgive his fatherfor leaving him behind when he committed suicide:

I fear the queen is swarming, toward the westtaking her chosen workers, for a stuntleaving behind her Henry.No harm in that, the old survival test.Pardon my sore toast, nominal & blunt& let's get on toward the sea.(Song 278)

Henry is piqued at the queen, whom I assume to be death, for takingher workers to the west, land of the sunset, and not taking him. Theimage is an especially rich one: Henry is a drone in the service ofdeath and he is being left behind in a "survival test" to prove he isworthy of his reward—death.

By way of contrast, Book VII begins with Henry's flying into theeast and into the rising sun, the source and traditional symbol ofrenewal. He is "leaving behind the country of the dead," and foronce Henry is hopeful. Even the books he takes with him lookforward to a happier life. Besides that tool of his trade, a dictionary,he carries with him the work of the optimisticWhitman; a Purgatorio,


the section of The Divine Comedy which traces man's circular ascent,however, laborious, to God; and a copy of the Oxford English Biblewith its message of man's salvation. Much of Henry's anticipationcenters on the other book he is taking with him—his own:

I'll work on slow, O slow & fast,if a letter comes I will answer that letter& my whole year will be tense with love .(Song 279)

Though still plagued by his divided soul, Henry finds somepeace in his work: "We work now for ourself alone, away/even frompal & wife, in ways not to be denied" (Song 280). In his work Henrycan sometimes actually merge the two opposing forces of brain andbody:

He put down The Times& began a salvage operation,killing that is the partly incoherent,waving the mostly fine, polishing the surfaces.Brain—& instinct—work.

On all fours he danced about his cage, poorHenryfor whom, my love, too much was never enough.Massage me in Kyoto's air.The Japanese women are better than the Swedes,more rhythmical, more piercing.

Somewhere, everywherea girl is taking her clothes off.(Song 351)

That is: he can merge body and mind in his art until body asserts itshegemony over his life. In the last stanza of the poem the mergerfalls apart under assault of the sensual life and perhaps indicatesthat the id is the source of artistic sublimation.

The peace that Henry finds is intermittent at best, subject tosudden reversals, yet the overall tone of the last book, while it couldnever be called tranquil, is calmer than anything that has gonebefore. The less frequent appearances of Mr. Bones as the poemprogresses may indicate a calming in Henry's soul. Yet Mr. Bonesnever disappears entirely. Henry may achieve moments of peace,


but he remains a person for whom "all nouns become verbs" (Song368).

Though the dialectic is never resolved for Henry, in the last twodream songs he accepts it with a deeper understanding than he hasever before attained, even in song 77. In Song 384 Henry no longerwants to join his father. He even conjures up a fantasy of exorcism inwhich he repeats the oedipal crime and finally kills, once and for all,the dead father. That is not to say that he actually does purge himselfof his preoccupation with his father's death. He does, however,want to turn away from the dead father to the living daughter. Hehas a certain sense of stability—"My house is made of wood and ifsmade well" (Song 385)—free of the simple stolidity of HenryHouse.Finally convinced there is no "middle ground between things andthe soul," he can abandon his quest for "fool's gold" and embracethe opposites from whose conflicting claims he is released in themerging power of his art. Like Keats, Yeats, and evenWilliam CarlosWilliams at the end of Paterson, Berryman finds in art a temporaryrelease from the dialectic because art requires a unique fusion ofmind and emotion. Thus the dialectic and the pain it causes movehim to "scold" in song his "heavy daughter." What he has created isa burden but it is also living, and scolding it—correcting it—is alife-affirming activity. Because his soul is still divided he willcontinue to scold his "heavy daughter," but he has at last acceptedthe responsibility and pain of the living over the easy indifference ofthe dead, which, to the sufferer, has its attractions.

The duality, the dialectic remains the inescapable essence of hisexistence, but in the course of The Dream Songs, Henry's attitudechanges from frustration with the admittedly futile task of attemptingto resolve the dialectic to an acceptance of it: he has seen there is nomiddle ground and so must accept the dialectic as an integral part ofhis existence. The dialectic also involves Henry in a cyclical processlike that described in Song 109:

. . . Henry has (perhaps) manymonths to gountil another Springwakens another Henry, with far to go;far to go, pal.(Song 109)

At the end of each cycle Henry is dying or in a very deep depressionwhich makes him flirt with the thought of dying. This state issucceeded by an awakening, sometimes in a hospital and usually in


conjunction with the imagery of rebirth and renewal associated withspring. Though he may feel otherwise, it is not a different Henrywho wakes up at the beginning of each cycle. It is the same Henry,and he is maturing into a deeper understanding of the world and ofhimself. The young, rough-edged, petulant, self-centered Henry ofthe first dream songs has mellowed, has become a better person in away perceptible to those around him:

Mlle Chômais noted a definite though smallimprovement in Henry:

as they passed forth across the northern sea,a degree of gentleness.(Song 350)

In a late dream song Berryman says, "These Songs are notmeant to be understood, you understand. /They are only meant toterrify and comfort" (Song 366). A number of such yokings ofopposed concepts which evoke Aristotle's tragic components—pityand fear—are salted throughout the length of The Dream Songs.Their presence points out another, perhaps the essential, duality ofThe Dream Songs: it is both a tragedy and a comedy. Because of hisfallen nature, which has divided his soul and trapped him in anirresolvable dialectic, Henry is caught in an endless cycle of rise andfall. He moves from comedy and rebirth to tragedy and death andback again, until the two become indistinguishable to him. It is also aprocess that becomes less extreme as life progresses because livingand suffering have changed the poet, gentled him—the zaninessand wild despair of the early songs have given way to a more settledperspective as the poet matures. Though he never totally integratesthe opposing forces of his psyche, life matures him almost againsthis will, and while he is still subject to the ups and downs of themind-body dialectic they are not as violent. And finally, Henry, afterwishing to dig up his dead father, confronts his death-wish and isable to turn his attention to his daughter—a life-affirming change ofdirection. By the last dream song Henry has forsaken the personaljeremiads of the early songs for affectionate scolding. Though hehas not reconciled the dualities, he has, because he has no choice,become reconciled to them as part of a whole, a dialectic which is theessence of his life. It seems he has come to see the wisdom offered tohim by Mr. Bones, who, his message finally understood, has fadedaway:


Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?—Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both,like most of we.

(Song 239)

NOTES

1AIl references to, and quotations from, The Dream Songs are to John Berryman, TheDream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), the last edition withauctorial authority.2Though the unnamed voice is addressing Henry as "Mr. Bones," I have, for ease ofreference, conformed to the common critical practice of calling the speaker Mr. Bones.3Though the addition of Mr. Bones as a voice of moderation may seem, at first, to takeus outside the realm of dualism, he is actually just an extension of the poet's intellectas it attempts to control the natural instincts without cutting them off entirely.4Larry P. Vonalt, "Berryman's The Dream Songs," Seivanee Revieio, 79 (1971), 464-465.Mr. Vonalt points out many of the religious implications of The Dream Songs, includingthe fact that the Fall is a prominent concern of the poems.5William J. Martz, John Berryman (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969).6Perhaps because of its associations with the suicide, in Florida, of Berryman's fatherand with the father's threat to his wife to swim out to sea with the young boy shouldshe leave him (Henry has undergone a similar if not identical experience), the sea isan evocative presence in The Dream Songs. It has many associations, death being oneof the more obvious.7Jo R. Porterfield, "The Melding of a Man: Berryman, Henry, and the Ornery Mr.Bones," Southwest Review, 57 (Winter, 1973), 40.


4.2.hudgins (1)

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