ABSTRACT
In the spring quarter of 1971 Berryman ran two highly successful courses – ‘The Meaning of Life’ and ‘The Post-Novel: Fiction as Wisdom-work’ (which included Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and Hesse’s Magister Ludi), and exerted himself even further with four Humanities Forum talks on ‘The Major American Poets’. When one student complained that the ‘Post-Novel’ course was pessimistic, Berryman pronounced that all Humanities courses were pessimistic. His own literary standing was credited when Drake University, Iowa, conferred an honorary doctorate on him in mid-May. Among his working drafts for the novel Recovery (written that summer), some reflections attributed to Severance, the hero, perhaps express Berryman’s own ambivalence towards his distinction. ‘He felt like a jackass and he also felt like a shit…. His honorary degrees burned his shoulder-blades. He felt guilty somewhere behind his eyes, several times a month. On the other hand, he regarded the world and in particular his lazy & blind colleagues with wholesale contempt.’
