My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself. One signpost of great art, it seems to me, is that the meaning of its greatness shifts in relation to the reader over time, and my appreciation of The Dream Songs has deepened and evolved—as I expect it will continue to for the rest of my life—in the two decades since it first came to my attention.

In my twenties I knew that Berryman was, like me, an alcoholic, and that he committed suicide in Minneapolis in 1972, and being at an age susceptible to the romantic myth of the doomed, hard-drinking mystic, the messy glamour of the dissolute—before I came to know (that is, in real terms, hard terms, blood terms) the cost of that myth—I was intrigued. I knew too that he was considered a brilliant and impenetrable poet, an impression that was confirmed by my first casual glance into an edition of 77 Dream Songs on the shelf of my boss’s office in Cambridge.

These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses. The whole thing was messy, hallucinatory, and impossible to resist; it was the Exile on Main Street of poetry, and I was hooked.

As the shadows over my own life lengthened, scattered phrases accrued talismanic power. “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back,” begins number 45; then, “I’m too alone. I see no end” and “Lightning fell silent where the Devil knelt.” “Hell talkt my brain awake,” says Henry, the mysterious semi-protagonist, at one point, and it seemed as fit a phrase for my existence—insomniac, deeply unhappy—as any. Safely on the other side of life again at age 32, I was given for my birthday, by my parents, a very nearly mint-condition first edition of the complete cycle, the celebrated Farrar Straus hardcover from 1968, featuring Charles Skaggs’s bold white-pink-and-green typography. The interior design, which follows the template set by the brilliant Guy Fleming for the original 1964 edition of 77 Dream Songs, is austere and beautiful, with that slightly antique feel of openness and clarity that seems particular to book design of that era. (Someday I would like an expert in the history of typography to explain to me how this is so). I have it in front of me now, paging through it as I try to capture, clumsily, the strange beauty of this half-understood work, to anatomize its appeal. 

The Dream Songs collectively is many things: a record of a consciousness, a song cycle, an ongoing formalist experiment, a journal of an imaginary insanity, a high-modernist word collage, and an elegy for a generation of poets. The work as a whole is death-haunted, with each successive passing of another poet or peer—Jarrell, Roethke, Schwartz, Williams—bringing a yearning elegy, grave and often touching, as the poet bends his soul towards the haven that they have found and that he will gain only through force of self-violence. As the songs pile up and the years pass the prosody becomes starker, cleaner, marginally more transparent, yet somehow purer in its despair: the world’s longest and most eloquent suicide note. There is also an engagingly quotidian quality to the work, as in a journal: occasional mentions of the outside world, of presidents, the Cold War, the Congo, Vietnam, peek through the whirling kaleidoscope of the poet / narrator’s brain, like a slideshow of the darkening sixties playing in an adjacent room. Other songs seem to hint acidly at the growing professional and academic demands of Berryman’s career. All of this is filtered through a blurry, argumentative stream of voices that is extremely difficult to decode, Berryman’s own note—Henry is “not the poet, not me”—being of limited assistance in the matter.

Better minds than mine have tried to identify a consistent schema of speakerly identification for the Songs, which seem to be narrated from a kind of shifting first-and-a-half-person, the half-person being the poet’s unseen companion, who addresses him as “Mr. Bones” in the rhythms of a not entirely convincing African-American patois, and who may be a schizophrenic counterpart of the narrator and/or Henry. What is to my mind undeniable about the poems is the sense of mystery, of the uncanny, of a shifting, fully inhabited interior consciousness, however opaque or inaccessible, that they convey. Not everyone agrees: the great postwar critic M. L. Rosenthal, for one, thought that The Dream Songs was a step backwards for Berryman, calling it “work we must forage (in) too much on our own.”

It’s an interesting word, “forage,” and apt, for to my mind, a mental “foraging” is in fact the primary experience of reading, especially work so dense and demanding as Berryman’s. And the fruits of my expeditions into the verbal thickets left behind by this brilliant, sad, unlucky, intense man, are a paradoxically heightened sense of freedom and gratitude, an attentiveness to the air and light around me, the twinkling of the city at night, a hunger for “tasting all the secret bits of life.”

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next eight weeks.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
• Last Book I Loved + Tumblr Storyboard
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Even those who wouldn’t count themselves among Welsh’s enthusiasts have come to know his signature mix of gritty realism with charming and yet wholly terrible characters through film adaptations of his work that have been made over the years. Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Mark “Rent Boy” Renton won over those who couldn’t be bothered to decipher Welsh’s lavish use of Scottish slang, and a worldwide brand based on Renton’s “Choose Life” speech was born. Porno, the sequel, was very good (in my opinion arguably better than its predecessor) but failed to enter the public consciousness quite so effortlessly. And although I had high hopes, I could never have predicted how much I would enjoy the prequel to the Heroin Chic trilogy: Skagboys.

It is a testament to Welsh’s ability that the first and last books he has ever written should somehow still link together so fluidly. It helps, of course, that he has a personal connection to the subject matter, being born and bred in Leith and Edinburgh. Still, prequels can end up being romanticized versions of the first novel, with the author using the newer book more as a platform to correct the mistakes they made in the former rather than to formulate any real backstory. More than one critic suggested that since Skagboys is primarily put together from material that didn’t make it into Trainspotting, it’d be nothing more than an “a lashed-together series of outtakes and bloopers.” But Skagboys is nothing of the sort; Rents, Sick Boy, and sweet addled Spud are the same as ever—only here they are pre-skag and still naïve about a world that will leave them jaded and vicious in a few books’ time.

Described as “basically about how Renton and Sick Boy went from being daft young guys just out for the buzz on drugs to total junkies” by its author, Skagboys is a warning to those who find parallels with the characters within it against the all-consuming power of drugs. Renton is once again the primary narrator, and he is so convincing in his constant self-assurance that what he’s doing is normal that you almost don’t register how completely unreasonable it is for a boy who liked a drink to become a junkie trying to break into a factory. Learning more about his history helps us understand why Rents is how he is: angry, bitter, and yet not completely without tenderness, albeit a clumsy kind that seems to do nothing but land him in more trouble. We hear about his disabled younger brother, whose death more-or-less tears his family apart, putting strain on any hopes of finding salvation there in his later, heroin-addled years. Most intriguingly, we find out about his time at university, and how he did once seem to be a promising student with a girlfriend, aspirations, and a future away from Leith all mapped out. Somehow Skagboys manages to surprise me when this all goes to pot, even though having read Trainspotting I knew there was no other way for it to go—which I like to think is a show of Welsh’s skill rather than my own forgetfulness.

Sick Boy, in all his sleazy, charming glory, is as horrible and endearing as he ever is, but in this novel we begin to understand how he displays so much charisma while also mentally undressing and tossing you aside. The Scots-Italian background vaguely mentioned in Trainspotting is explained further, and it becomes a spot-on metaphor for his half-aggressive bully and half-purring Lothario persona. He is the antithesis of the boy that your mum thinks you should be with, but he’s the boy that you really want to be with, and he’s probably the boy that your mum really wants to be with as well. Sick Boy makes your skin crawl, and towards the end of the book he shows himself to be so ruthlessly cruel it almost beggars belief that he could possibly be seen as attractive, and yet he somehow is. In a nutshell, that’s what he’s all about. You hate him and hate him and hate him but deep down, you know you love him—everybody does.

As for Spud: Spud is the personification of why I love Skagboys so dearly. He is such a useless sweetheart, a cat-loving criminal with a conscience and no common sense. Although the tale for the others is one of a downward spiral, Spud’s is more of a plateau. He turns to drugs because there is nothing else for him. He isn’t particularly well-educated or knowledgeable about the world. He’s got a really big heart, but that will hardly help you in Thatcher’s Britain. His particular idiosyncrasy for calling everybody “catboy” is one I have always found unexpectedly touching, and in general his odd sense of morality and duty towards vulnerable creatures, whether they are old ladies, animals, or suicidal girls, has always stood him apart as the most lovable character of Welsh’s books.

In essence, I love Skagboys because however deplorable its protagonists are, I really do want them to succeed. I want them to turn their lives around, get clean, end up fulfilled and well out of Scotland. I’m rooting for it from page one, which, due to the nature of it being a prequel, is as useless as watching Titanic and hoping it will all turn out okay. And yet Welsh forces me into doing it anyway. The fact that Trainspotting exists means that all hope that Skagboys inspires is necessarily false hope, and that’s what makes it such a good read. Any book that can fool you into thinking that there is a chance of redemption when you know there is none—that can make you hope for a “happily ever after” even though you’ve read the “after” and it certainly isn’t happy—is one that is worth reading.

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next nine weeks.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
• Last Book I Loved + Tumblr Storyboard
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Building on our Last Book I Loved series, we’re teaming up to highlight Tumblr writers and the books they love.

Got a book you can’t stop thinking about? Send us a writeup – a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it – along with a short bio. Beginning next month, we’ll publish our favorites every Friday, both on Storyboard and right here on The Rumpus.

Visit our SUBMIT PAGE for more information — and get reading!

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
• The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Have you always wanted to write for The Rumpus?
• Improvising a Bone Graft