566
III
IV
V
VI
The Apostolate
Christ's Ecstasy
&
Transfiguration
The Fourth Gospel
The Resurrection Appearances
Appendix: the Church (Pentecost
&
Paul)
PARTISAN REVIEW
For this
Life,
Berryman made no claims to original scholarship.
It
was
to be a digest, with readability its chief virtue, aimed at children
(Martha and Paul the foremost) for their congenial instruction , as well
as at adults for their pleasure and perhaps even profit. He worded the
Preface shortly and carefull y:
The materials for a biography of Christ are the Synoptic Gospels
(Mark, Mauhew, Luke), the Fourth Gospel, and Paul's Epistle to the
Corinthians. The Apocryphal literature adds nothing reliable to
these sources.
It
has been repeatedly denied that a 'life' can be
constructed from them; but many men have tried, with varying
results of interest, and the present volume is simply another allempt,
made upon reflection and with candor. This is the most important
human personality, and the most important career, of which we have
knowledge; and it befits us
to
try
to
understand them. Our knowl–
edge is not indeed what we would wish it, the Evangelists' interests
being for the most part on ly in certain respects coincidental with
ours. But our knowledge is extensive and real.
I hope I have acknowledged enough of my multitudinous
indebtedness
to
show that practically nothing here makes any claim
to
originality.
There was a modesty and understatement here that he had not
been used to expressing about his work. The following weeks contain a
telling sequence of events which it is important to set out, because the
result was that he ended up devastatingly drunk and in a hospital.
It
would seem that after being discharged from Hazelden on a gust of
euphoria, Berryman swelled his work solidly for some weeks until he
collapsed, not so much from outside causes as from his own failure of
nerve. He was admitted to the Abbott Hospital on February 26, and
discharged about ten days later. His psychiatrist wrote, "for no appar–
ent reason, he began drinking once again and had remained intoxi–
cated for
2-3
weeks." There was assuredly no apparent reason: as
another doctor put it to me, "it is incredibly difficult to unravel the
whole bag of John's psycho-dynamics." Berryman was in an over–
stimulated condition. Elated by the strides the work was taking-in
Shakespeare, in a long poem, in ordering o ld work-there occurred
what he call ed a "revolution" on February 4th: "Day before yesterday I
