Suicide was always a spectre for John Berryman

‘A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the last year or so, but not you — and your father is thought to be a wit.’ This was the poet John Berryman to his nearly-estranged son Paul in 1964. The hurt, off-kilter tone and the humble-brag speak to the Berryman one encounters in this capacious Selected Letters.

One of the great extremists of a brilliant generation, which included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop, Berryman’s entanglement of art and risk, his view of poetry as a ‘terminal activity’ and the artist’s life as one of self-annihilating labour, is present early, and enduringly. In 1936, just graduated from Columbia, Berryman writes to R.P. Blackmur while composing a poem: ‘I am beginning to understand how it drives you mad after a time.’ Here, that’s said more with a willed sense of fellow feeling than despair, but despair would come.

Not for nothing did Berryman include the Book of Job among the reading lists for courses he taught as he bumped around some of the great institutions of America. Only in the final years was he secure, or in funds. First came decades taking a high, persistent toll on his health and self-esteem. Employment was fraught, as was his reputation — to Dwight Macdonald in 1951: ‘Life seems to be an endurance contest without prizes or plan’ — and Berryman was more than ordinarily attuned to prizes.

He displays from the start an inborn sense of thwartedness, at times in pitiful listings of credentials, at others forlorn repining: ‘If you don’t like “Winter Landscape” or “The Disciple”, I think I had better retire and try archery.’ In truth, the early poems were if anything over-praised and anthologised, despite resembling ‘statues talking like a book’, in Randall Jarrell’s cuttingly apposite phrase.