ABSTRACT
Lying within short range of Manhattan Island in New York, Princeton provided a peaceful, genteel, small-town life (still with whiffs of a curiously southern decadence), centred on the dignified and scholarly ambience of the university itself. In spite of the precariously brief start to his career there, Princeton was to become Berryman’s home for the next decade. His circle of friends expanded markedly during that time. After his initial period of teaching, he undertook a stretch of independent research in Shakespearean textual criticism which lasted for two-and-a-half years, before he was again appointed to the teaching faculty. During that intervening stint of full-time study, he succumbed to phases of guilt, insecurity, and self-exaction. For three years already – at Harvard University from 1940 until 1943 – he had suffered a more oppressive and bitching intellectual climate, from much of which (unlike his colleague Delmore Schwartz) he had shielded himself – only to indulge in increasingly morbid and paralysing habits of self-appraisal. Subsequently, at Princeton, long hours of isolated study drew him more and more into patterns of brooding. His tolerance for setbacks both personal and professional became lower than ever before. By the time he returned to teaching in 1946, he had assumed something of a second nature, a guise in which to outface what he felt to be the frightful demands of his work and society. His public role became one which many of his acquaintances took to be eccentric, a combination of the braggart, the womaniser, the unpredictable drinker, and the formidable – often savagely assertive or dismissive – intellectual. His endearing or intimidating behaviour was often just the superficial aspect of a temperament given over almost entirely to feelings of acute insecurity and self-recrimination. As years passed, Berryman began 149to hide his fears in drink, but it is surprising that his gross experience of frustration and shame did not give rise to even more frequent nervous crises. Berryman’s diaries from the 1940s give all too little evidence of happy times with his wife, more of a man stricken by neurosis and self-analysis, but paradoxically sustaining himself by a programme of greater self-demand. In time, his outrageous, drunken antics became legion; but whatever the show, beneath it Berryman found himself hateful, unworthy, pitiable.
