ABSTRACT
SATURDAY NIGHTS were Richard’s “at home” nights, and the friends were still there when Helen got home in her overalls and carrying her lunch pail. Looking over the scene, she let them feel how she despised it. Wasn’t there a war on? and they sat around talking. Like Yeats’s hysterical women, she was sick of poets who were always gay. John Berryman was one of the poets. He was only twenty-nine in 1943 and already had failed miserably in fifty different ways. Art sustained him, however, and he preferred it to life. “What day of mere living,” he asked himself rhetorically, “presents so rich and complicated an experience?” Since his undergraduate time at Columbia, he had counted himself among Richard’s “most devoted admirers,” and when Harvard let him go his friend Delmore wondered hopefully if Richard might do something about this. Marriage to Eileen had much improved John, he said, “and he is really a good teacher.” Employers by the bucketful discounted Delmore’s opinion and Berryman himself had ceased hoping for anything, “only not to disgrace myself or to be disgraced,” when Richard came through with an instructorship at Princeton. This event proved decisive for both.
