BOOKS
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power, especially Lowell's, to write lines that spring at one like tigers
and for the moment make all questions of discriminating value or
rank seem trivial. How do the "hideously young" biographers handle
these huge subjects?
Eileen Simpson, of course, is not one of them; hers is a chari–
table, intimate, civilized memoir of one who loved but finally could
no longer bear a man whose dependence on her was mitigated only
by his dependence on his mother, on drink, on the numerous, and
sometimes vaunted, infidelities .
It
is a good and intelligent book.
Mr. Haffenden tells us more, and from him we get documentation of
many horrors. Berryman was a religious man, and would very likely
have preferred almost any other kind of life to the kind he had to
have, felt he had to have; he rarely spares himself when speaking of
his disgrace, and Mr. Raffenden doesn't spare him, either. Ber–
ryman would probably have approved, though he could not have ad–
mired Haffenden's prose . He had a pedantic side, and cared about
purity of prose . Haffenden has a positive gift for the infelicitous.
Among the words he misuses are
traduce, oppugned, prevaricate, im–
ponderable, fortuitous, saliently
(sapiently?) and, perhaps the oddest of
all,
necessitous
("his readings were necessitous to his income"). Of Ber–
ryman's work with students he says that the poet "exercised a
tremendous involvement with all of them," and this awkwardness is
characteristic of Haffenden but not of Berryman's students, for the
samples of their writing given here are all more accomplished than
his own. There is a tradition of careful purity in the prose of
poetes
maudits,
and there ought to be one in the prose of their biographers.
Still, the book is the product of great industry, of much archival
research and many interviews , and it probably won't harm
Berryman.
Lowell's life was even more extravagant and altogether more
grand.
It
is not difficult to believe that he found it hard to imagine
the right person to chronicle its anguish and achievement , its
tragedy and farce. But the right person turned up; Hamilton's is a
book of rare quality . This is an efficient record, but it is also very
well written , with admirable tact and control of tone. Moreover he is
a poet, and understands poetry; not at all inclined to give un–
discriminating praise (he can be severe, for example, on some of the
Imitations), he has and conveys a sense of the presence of Lowell.
The far too frequent manic episodes are set forth with candor- with
an understanding of how frightening and exhausting they must have
