Helpmate

By Paul Gray

POETS IN THEIR YOUTH: A MEMOIR

by Eileen Simpson

Random House; 272 pages; $15.50

"What the hell is happiness?" John Berryman once asked his first wife, the author of this memoir. He added another question: "Should a poet seek it?" For Berryman and many other poets of his generation, the answer seems to have been no. They did not flame out young, like Keats and Shelley. But few of them enjoyed their later years, and they are all gone now: Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. They left behind some splendid poems and some terribly sad histories of alcoholism, mental illness, despair and suicide.

Although she is a practicing psychotherapist, Author Eileen Simpson does not try to explain why so many talented writers became so self-destructive. Instead, she looks back affectionately to happier times, when careers were just beginning and prospects bright. Her marriage to Berryman in 1942 brought her abruptly into a small intense world where the subject of poetry superseded all others. She took on both a husband and a calling: "To be the 'helpmate' . . . to a poet would be the most interesting and useful way for a woman to spend her life." Berryman, then 28 and an English instructor at Harvard, needed plenty of assistance. Despite coaching from Schwartz, his colleague and best friend, he made few efforts to ingratiate himself with his superiors at Harvard. Within months of his marriage, he was out of a job.

After a dismal period in New York, when he could neither find work nor write poems, Princeton came to the rescue. Critic R.P. Blackmur offered a temporary post teaching creative writing. He advised the couple: "Make yourselves invaluable, and they won't be able to let you go." They tried, and were let go anyhow. But a combination of grants, fellowships, publishers' advances and occasional teaching kept the Berrymans in Princeton for nearly ten years. She left him in 1953.

Her reasons for doing so are painfully clear: he had become a drunk and a philanderer with a "need to live in turbulence." But the author's account of this period is totally without rancor. There was plenty of pain for husband and wife, but also a parade of fascinating people. Randall Jarrell visited, slim, elegantly dressed, talking like a hillbilly; he twanged out such expressions as "Gol-ly!" and "Ba-by Doll!" Blackmur's wife Helen kept Princeton abuzz with gossip because she so openly scorned the role of faculty wife. When her husband told her that he had invited T.S. Eliot to dinner, she said, "Tell him to bring his own chop." During an erratic ride to a local restaurant, Edmund Wilson criticized the driving of Allen Tate: "Thank you uh uh, thank you Allen for uh for uh for an interesting and hazardous experiment in uh what it's like to drive on the wrong side of the road, an experiment hohoho which I uh I want never to repeat."

Poets in Their Youth is filled with such anecdotes, comic pauses in lives that were becoming increasingly tragic. Behavior that had once seemed madcap began to look dangerous. During a Princeton garden party, Simpson watched Robert Lowell drunkenly toss his shoes up to her husband, who was lodged in a sycamore tree: "The sight of poets disporting themselves in this way may have entertained the other guests, but I was feeling that excess of alcohol made even these brilliant and at tractive men tiresome."

They never seem that way in her narrative, and neither does she. What little Simpson tells of her own life amounts to quite a story. Orphaned and dyslexic as a child, she earned a Ph.D. in psychology during the last tumultuous years of her marriage to Berryman and went into practice. She spent the eleven years that are recalled in this book with a remarkable spouse, and so, it is now evident, did he .

--By Paul Gray

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