BOOKS
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Modern travel and publicity put the great men on public show
to an extent formerly undreamed of, and many readers of these
books will, like me, have known them slightly, and will want to com–
pare their memory sketches with these finished portraits. I met Ber–
ryman only once, in the early spring of 1964, when I was staying
with Allen Tate in Minneapolis . We visited the poet in the Abbott
hospital, the doctor saying we should not stay in his room longer
than it took to smoke one cigarette - not the measurement of time
most doctors would now use . We stayed for half a pack; the patient
was charming and frantically active, signing a great stack of 77
Dream Songs,
talking fast about them, about the seven hundred others
that , he said, existed, and the ones he was writing at that very time ;
discoursing on
The Tempest
(a courtesy to me, he had used my edi–
tion) and gossiping with Allen.
It
was a memorable performance by
a generous man, conscious of his role and his duty. On that same
day or the next he wrote the Song which said
his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued ,
&
suffocation called . . .
Blackmur I met on his unhappy visit to England in 1961 and
1962, but in the summer of 1964 I happened to be a near neighbor of
his in McCosh Circle at Princeton, spending some emblematic even–
ings in his house. They have boiled down to one image of unhap–
piness or disappointment'. His vanity (if a failing so innocuous
deserves so harsh a name) seemed to have deserted him as death ap–
proached. Berryman and Lowell, though often absurdly anxious
about their reputations, never seriously doubted their inherent
worth and strength. Blackmur's is the saddest of these stories
because he almost always did, and especially at the end . He was
never mad and never very secure . He is the odd man out in this
batch; though he believed the same things, he could not live them.
Lowell and Berryman were of course very aware of their
similarities . Lowell wrote of his dead friend,
. .. really we had the same life,
the generic one
our generation offered
And some years earlier, "What queer lives we've had even for poets!
