Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

PAUL GROUCHO: The exhibit displays chronologically representative pages from the Berryman's manuscripts along with photographs and mementos from his life. The massive collection was placed on deposit at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1972 and includes almost all of the poet's manuscripts from his earliest to his last.

The exhibit was opened this afternoon with remarks by Robert Giroux, a personal friend of Berryman since his student days and the publisher of all of Berryman's mature works, including Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which established his reputation, and the Dream Songs for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen prize. Among other things, Giroux recalled his friend's prodigious energy.

ROBERT GIROUX: And I remember I had about-- I'd spent a couple months tracking down old issues of the magazine. And I showed them to John. I had about 12 issues, let's say. And John grabbed them, took them away, devoured them. Two weeks later, he said, I want to show you something.

He call me into his room. He had the entire 152 issues about the one, which he had managed to track down in the Gotham Book Mart down on 4th Avenue all around town. But he had that kind of energy and that kind of drive and that kind of creative juice, which now after many, many years in publishing, I think, it's absolutely essential to a successful writer.

The key to a successful writer is not just talent. Although that certainly is basic. It has to be there. But if you have only talent it, it doesn't always work. It's talent plus energy. It's this energy this ability to keep going, to keep writing, to keep producing, to keep creating and building. It's not easy to do. John had that from the very start.

PAUL GROUCHO: Giroux also had some remarks about the vagaries of literary reputations.

ROBERT GIROUX: I remember when I was in [? Hoco, ?] I handled Virginia Woolf's books. I can't say I was editor, because I came to you and perfect-- imperfection. And you put them through the press. But when Virginia Woolf died, I never forgot that the front page of The New York Times Book Review had a piece by Diana Trilling, which just wrote Virginia Woolf off, poor Virginia Woolf, precious writer. Too bad, she wasn't really made for this world.

And if you read that paper that Sunday, you would have been convinced that Virginia Woolf was through, that was the end of her reputation. Well, of course, it was only the beginning of it. Diana Trilling couldn't have foreseen. I mean, she was not perceptive, first of all, but she couldn't have-- she was wrong. It happens. But she did have the cover of The New York Times. She couldn't have foreseen women's lib. She couldn't have seen a lot of things, which made Virginia Woolf extremely relevant to the future as well as to the present.

Another interesting case is Herman Melville to go way back. Herman Melville, he's obviously one of the greatest geniuses in American literature. In 1855, he finished Moby Dick. He knew it was-- of course, he knew it was a masterpiece. It was a masterpiece. He almost died writing it. He almost went blind. It was one of the biggest flops in American publishing. Very few people know that.

When Harper issued it, it sold 600 copies. Melville was practically wiped out. He had to take his job in the customs house down in the battery. He fiddled around. And the rest of his life was completely tragic. He died in 1896 unknown. He'd had an earlier success with Omoo, and Typee, and the Early Romances of the South Seas. But Moby Dick, which everyone reads now in every course there is anywhere, was a commercial publishing flop.

I say all this because I think I've been particularly nettled. And I'll be very frank with you about the TLS, the Times Literary Supplement, had a big cover story about John Berryman, which was putting John down as saying, well, very good prose writer. It was absolutely an incredible piece. I don't know who wrote it. Those things are unsigned. I suspect an American from many, many, much evidence within.

It's just wrong. It's as wrong as-- Diana Trilling was wrong about Virginia Woolf or the American public was wrong about Herman Melville in 1855. And it happens-- it happened to TS Eliot. As soon as Eliot-- and it happens to many writers when they die. It happens to most writers. Immediately after their death, their reputation goes down the curve. The graph goes down for some peculiar, psychological, historical, existential reason, which I cannot comprehend. It's just-- you just learn this from experience.

And perhaps, this has happened to John. I don't know. But I do know whether it happened or not that John Berryman is one of the great American writers, one of the great American poets. We're honored to have his papers here in this University and to be opening this collection.

PAUL GROUCHO: And he could not leave without recalling Berryman's sense of humor, which sparkled in his classroom lectures. He taught at the University of Minnesota from 1955 until his death in 1972, and which runs through his poetry. This story was first told by the poet William Meredith.

ROBERT GIROUX: He was with John in Vermont for a reading some years ago. And they were talking late at night. And Berryman said, you know what I'd like to see on my tombstone? Meredith said, my God, what? He said, what I'd like to see would be John Berryman and the dates, and then fantastic, fantastic.

PAUL GROUCHO: Publisher Robert Giroux speaking of John Berryman today at Wilson Library, where an exhibit of the poet's manuscripts is currently on display. I'm Paul Groucho.