Two Books I Read This Spring

In the first chapter of Walter de la Mare's 1922 novel Memoirs of a Midget, the female narrator says, "It is true that my body is among the smaller works of God." (A journalist, we are told, once wrote this about her.) She adds, "But I think [the journalist] paid rather too much attention to this fact."

Indeed, Memoirs of a Midget runs from front to back with that sentiment. It imagines the life of a little person and her closest associations. The title today sounds outdated; at worst, even offensive. Such is the fate of a lot of literature that's fortunate enough to survive into subsequent centuries. Moving past the wording of the book's title, though, I found a lovely, bittersweet, compassionate story that treats its narrator's minuscule stature as secondary to the point that she's a complicated person with a deep inner life. Yes, Memoirs of a Midget encroaches at times on the borderlands of twee, owing mostly to its sentimentality – characteristic of a lot of books of its time – but it never quite goes over the edge. I'm glad I took the recommendation of the New York Review of Books on this one.

Toiling over the works of John Berryman for months gave me an appreciation for the poet, as well as for the origin of the Nick Cave lyric, "Bukowski was a jerk; Berryman was best / He wrote like wet papier mâché / but he went the Hemingway / weirdly on wings and with maximum pain" (from the excellent song "We Call upon the Author"). This is not to say that I enjoyed what I read, but I respected it.

The volume that I combed, Collected Poems, 1937-1971, edited and annotated by Charles Thornbury, brings together what I can only call the lesser work of this tortured, enraptured soul. It includes Berryman's collections The Dispossessed, Sonnets to Chris, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Love & Fame, Delusions etc of John Berryman, as well as excerpts from Short Poems, His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Bukt, Twenty Poems, and Poems – a veritable Berryman trove. Conspicuously absent is The Dream Songs, which won him the Pulitzer Prize. Thornbury writes that he omitted that work because Berryman didn't personally select and arrange that collection. I'm skeptical. Thornbury's introduction employs a quote from the poet Elizabeth Bishop, in which she writes of Berryman, "I have been struggling with these sonnets – many beautiful lines but I do find him difficult." If Thornbury intended to (as I suspect he did) emphasize how challenging this work can be, avoiding Berryman's most read, highest-awarded, and, arguably, most respected work makes good, strategic sense. Accordingly, this collection feels at times like a test. Berryman owes a debt to Shakespeare, and his reliance on form and frequent use of bardic language give his poems a trying air of fustiness. I get the most out of him when he seems to try the least hard. In spite of how stuffy the fourteen-line structure can feel in other poets' hands, Sonnets to Chris, the 117 sonnets written for his mistress over the course of just six months, seem to mark Berryman at his most relatable, probably because the sonnets expose his humanity amid a torrid extramarital affair he was having at that time. I won't likely be reading the fantasies or children's books of Walter de la Mare. If I read anything more by John Berryman it'll be his much-lauded Dream Songs (and that probably not for several years). These high-flying books have put me in the mood for some very grounded nonfiction.