![]() ![]() It seemed absurd,” Simpson writes, “to panic so close to home, but waves of panic were what passed between us, we admitted, when we were safely inside our icy but windless apartment, and could speak again.” In the morning, Delmore calls up to tell them that the temperature had dropped, during their walk, to fourteen below. The ten minute walk up the hill from the subway station takes fifty, the couple feeling the whole time “as though we were wrapped in wet sheets. Poets in Their Youth shows Berryman young and married, trudging back from a dinner party at Delmore and Gertrude Schwartz’s apartment with his wife on a frigid night. Simpson gives us Berryman the young man, and though you can see, by book’s end, the one converge with the other, that doesn’t make her generous portrait any less true. I’ve loved John Berryman-his poetry and his beard-since I was introduced to his work at eighteen, but before reading Poets in Their Youth, I knew only Berryman the mad man. But staring at the figure in black and white induced a kind of vertigo: the yawning gap between Simpson’s Berryman and my Berryman seemed impossibly deep unbridgeable. The caption-“John, Jean, and Cal”-was reassuring. The first time, I did so unthinkingly the second, I flipped through the book itself, to the page where the image originally appears and the figures are identified. Twice, when proofs of our new cover were routing, I was asked to confirm that the cheerful, smiling man to the left of Jean Stafford was indeed John Berryman. Without the trademark beard, the heavy glasses, it’s hard to recognize the depressive poet who would, twenty-six years later, take his own life. The photo on the front of FSG’s reissue of Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson’s memoir of her early marriage to Berryman, shows a younger, lighter man. Each word seems to come from a great distance, to emerge only after a violent struggle. More than drunk, though, he looks pained. ![]() Berryman “was drunk during filming, as the attentive viewer may notice,” runs the quippy description under the video, and sure, he was probably that too. Berryman’s delivery is stilted, almost unnervingly so: his speech is alternately halting and rushed he gestures extravagantly his head bobs and weaves. In so far as there is an image of Berryman that exists in the public imagination, these clips are its embodiment: the poet’s beard is fulsome and his spectacles are large, black, and thickly-framed he is wearing what might be a shoulder-padded overcoat. ![]()
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