ABSTRACT
While his hope of marrying his English fiancée endured, Berryman could entertain exile; as that hope diminished, he sank into a slough of alienation, bouts of work and crazy habits of living including literal starvation and social withdrawal, which brought about physical and mental breakdown. It was a self-punishing year of increasing psychological dislocation. From the start, his loneliness was sublimated in strenuous work; exhaustion took over, then a number of uncanny ‘attacks’ which doctors found hard to diagnose. Even throughout 1940, when he at last gained the chance to have some poems printed in a volume, a relentless drive towards self-punishment led him to criticise the policy of the publisher, James Laughlin, and to stall until he was almost dropped from the project. In April 1940, Berryman was to write, ‘All my sins have their ugly roots in my decision last fall to leave Columbia and accept an instructorship here; that is to say, OUT HERE. This was, from any viewpoint, an insane mistake, and I am paying – in health, in temper, in time.’ The time factor seemed so crucial because he felt that his real gifts, as a poet, were being wasted, languishing in the sterile hours of teaching and assessing themes.
