He was a great poet and a great teacher. I was lucky enough in the spring semester of 1969 to get into his “Renaissance and Reformation” course in the Humanities Department at the University of Minnesota. John Berryman, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs and acknowledged to be one of America’s outstanding poets, was one of two national celebrities teaching on the campus at that time. The other famous man was Walter Heller, economic advisor to President John F. Kennedy. I took his economics course, but those memories have faded. My memories of John Berryman will never fade.

When I entered his class that spring, his renown had just been enhanced by his winning the National Book Award for poetry for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. That year he would also be awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize and be named Regents Professor at the University. I had never seen a celebrity before, much less been taught by one, so my expectations ran high. The sad figure of a man who entered the classroom and stood at the podium before the class crushed those expectations in an instant. There were rumors of Berryman’s heavy drinking, but few of us knew he was at the time on the brink of collapse and within the year would enter Hazenden, an alcoholic rehabilitation center. Despite his big beard and booming voice, the man seemed frail, shaking with what I now know to be delirium tremens.

He only made it to class occasionally, maybe once every week or two, and when he did, perspiration would pour from his brow as if he had been running a marathon race, not teaching a class on Don Quixote. At the end of the two-hour lecture, he would be surrounded by a small pool of water that had run from his forehead and been shaken in his excitement to the ground. His excitement was genuine; the classes when he could teach them, were thrilling.

Many of my fellow students found him too eccentric to take seriously. The shaking; the perspiration; the odd voice, often sticking in his throat, “diminuendoing” to near silence with slurred words, then suddenly booming out in thunder with cataclysmic clarity; the unexpected silences when he would fix his eye on an unsuspecting student and stand absorbed in the mystery of an unknown human being while class stopped, often for minutes at a time, and the poor student squirmed and the rest of us breathed a sigh of relief we had not been chosen for such attention; all these oddities closed him off from many of those sixties youth who were concerned only with saving the world or celebrating themselves, not with the spectacle of a curious and aging poet wandering brilliantly from thought to thought or shouting peculiar profundities.

I, on the other hand, was fascinated. When he read the class list on the first day we met, a Mr. Tirpak was absent. Berryman announced that “Tirpak” sounded like a polar bear and from time to time for the remainder of the semester he would wonder aloud what had become of “Tirpak, the Missing Polar Bear.” I found this very amusing, as I did his lectures on Don Quixote, where he would have to stop his talk because he was laughing so hard he could not continue. There were also those occasions when he had to stop because a moment of the knight errant’s shining idealism had reduced him to tears. Could a work of fiction have such a profound effect on a human being? Yes, he taught me, it should, for in this way the heart is made more human. He also taught me to read Descartes and Montaigne and, especially, Pascal. Could intelligent men really take religious questions seriously? (I was, after three years of liberal academic training, a programed atheist.) Yes, he made me admit, intelligent men could; for Berryman himself, these seemed to be the questions which mattered most.

I could not have known at the time, nor had I known would I have cared, that John Berryman had been raised as a devout Catholic. As a child, he had served the six a.m. Mass for a Belgian priest, Father Boniface, who left a deep impression on the boy. He admitted, “I believed in God and my Guardian Angel to the hilt!”

A series of circumstances destroyed that strong faith. First, the suicide of his father when the boy was twelve years old, an act which he later said “blew out (his) bright candle of faith.” His mother remarried, an Anglican man, and the family switched to a new faith. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt of his own, five years after his father’s death, he entered Columbia College in New York and began a brilliant academic career and embarked on his life as a poet. Along with the great achievements and the great honors, however, came a high price — immersion in the poisonous liberal academic/artistic world, a world of arrogance, selfishness, indulgence, sensuality and false freedom. The great victories of poetic and academic success were overmatched by nervous breakdowns, three marriages, numerous affairs and addiction to alcohol. The only real stability was the creative work in poetry and the teaching, and that became more difficult over time as the ravages of too much “life experience” crippled his spirit and weakened his body. I remember one afternoon in his office when he slammed about the room, weeping, and I said, naively, “Why are you so upset? You have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. You’re one of the most honored poets of the day!” and he turned on me with a face red with anger and heavy with despair and barked, “Damn it! I know what kind of poet I am. I don’t know what kind of man I am!”

The end of the year found the man in collapse in the alcoholic treatment center. Lost, helpless and in despair, he turned to his child’s faith, and in prayer found help. He insisted from that moment on that God had “rescued” him, and he felt an obligation to give something back. The God he had abandoned early in his life had never abandoned him. He returned to the Catholic Church, driven by a spiritual need and a desire to worship this God of rescue.

What did he find? Not the Church he had left. This great artist who never lost his sense of beauty or his unwavering thirst for truth even as his body weakened and his mind wandered, found himself stunned by the ugliness and false fellowship of the Novus Ordo service, with its vernacular commonness, its handshaking, its chirpiness, its guitars. Even worse, he heard nonsense. A young priest spoke in defense of those many priests who were abandoning their vocations. The demands on them were too great, the responsibilities too heavy, the priest asserted, and when Christ spoke of priests as shepherds of the flock, He spoke metaphorically. The faithful could not expect such constant attention and guidance from their priests. This was too much for Berryman. He shook now in anger. He had been assisted by God’s grace and God’s mercy; he had been rescued like the lost sheep. He knew he still needed much help. The cavernous voice reverberated in full eruption. “Only Christ’s words!” he shouted, and stomped out of the church. He remained outside for the remainder of the Mass, walking back and forth in front of the church, praying the rosary for the priest. He never returned to this parody of the faith he had known when young.

The later books attempt to explore his new-found religious vision. His next book, Love and Fame, is autobiographical and confessional, examining the chaos and pride and misdirected energies of his early years that led him to despair. It is often shocking in its candor. He spares himself nothing. The book’s spiritual vision moves upward as the proud poet suffers and falls. It ends with some of the only great religious verse of our time, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”. They are beautiful prayers from a humbled soul. Where else in modern American poetry would you encounter such lines as “and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection- appearances to Peter and to Paul/as I believe I sit in this blue chair” or the simple elegance of statement, “I do not understand but I believe. /Jonquils respond with wit to the teasing breeze.”

Sadly, belief cannot continue for long without understanding and the poems do also contain the confusion of thought inevitable in a single mind on a solo flight of discovery. Without the clear direction of the Church and without the grace of the sacraments, the poet’s thoughts tended toward new confusion and the old individualism, even as he himself fell back into old habits. His heart yearned for God’s truth, but he was still too often a lost sheep without a shepherd. Another book, Delusions, Etc., continues his search, but the pain of the old despair resurfaces and finally, despite moments of stability or bravado, swamps the poet. This last book of poems had to be published posthumously. John Berryman had followed the ghost of his father and on a cold January morning in 1972 had jumped from a bridge on the Mississippi to his death.

He remains in my thoughts always. He made an attempt to return to a faith he had known in his youth, but he was betrayed. As if the prodigal son had attempted, after admitting his mistakes, to return to his father’s home and seek forgiveness, only to find the house empty, or, worse, inhabited by a new family he did not know and who offered him only more husks. John Berryman gave me a hearty push on my road to Rome, the Eternal Rome, but when he needed help, the New Rome could not assist him. So on this morning some twenty years after his sad end, I remember his suffering and read his poems and ask you to join with me and pray for the repose of his soul. John Berryman must be counted among the victims in this terrifying religious civil war that shakes our Church and defines our age. May God have mercy on his soul.

Vigilate et orate.

Ambrose