Dream Song by Paul Mariani

Author:Paul Mariani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595347671
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2015-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The Unmaking of a Marriage

1953

A new year and a new beginning. On Sunday afternoon, January 4, Berryman took a long walk around Lake Carnegie with Monroe Engel and Saul Bellow. Up till then he had seen Bellow only in the presence of other people. Now, he told Eileen, he’d finally had a chance to get to know Bellow better, and what he saw he liked. What a lovely, funny man he was. Walking around the lake, Bellow had picked up a log and thrown it into the water, bidding it with a flamboyant gesture to go and be a hazard. It was exactly the odd sort of thing Berryman delighted in imagining.

A few days later he came home with a typescript of Bellow’s new novel, The Adventures of Augie March, having decided to take the weekend off to read it. Eileen would remember him sitting in his red leather chair, smoking as he went through chapter after chapter, laughing that “high-pitched eeeeeeeee” of his “so hard he couldn’t get his breath,” and exclaiming, “It’s damn good,” “Bellow is it,” a “bloody genius.” He read it straight through, finishing the manuscript at 4 A.M. the following Sunday morning, then went over to Princeton Street and banged on Bellow’s window to wake him up and tell him how good the novel was.

What he was particularly impressed with was how Bellow had let himself go in this novel, paying homage to Flaubert and Joyce and Yeats even as he jazzed up the writing. Most of all, however, Bellow had given him hope. Here was someone his own age who had produced something of value, something new. He saw now that the Bradstreet would have to be completely rethought. It would have to be braver and more ambitious and longer than anything he’d ever tried, longer than “Lycidas,” longer than “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”

Ten months after reading Augie March, unhappy that the novel had not received the notice it deserved, Berryman would write a short, dense essay for The New York Times Book Review in which he stressed, as Eliot had thirty years before in speaking of Ulysses, the book’s wide-ranging and refreshing use of myth. It was Bellow’s “recurrent allusiveness to masters of Greek, Jewish, European and American history, literature and philosophy” that had particularly impressed him, Berryman wrote, for Bellow had evoked these Overlords masterfully, letting their names resonate through the book. Together, these presences in effect constituted Bellow’s version of the Sublime, providing him with a way of measuring the present moment against the weight of history.

As if that were not enough, Bellow had managed to employ these Overlords with a sense of humor, making it clear that it was he and not they who was in charge here. What a refreshing use of tradition this was, for Bellow’s Overlords were like those “marvellous vast heads of statues in some of Watteau’s pictures, overlooking his lovers,” presences in a friendly landscape, larger than life but not forbidding: a tradition to be used for one’s own purposes rather than the other way around.

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