Maria Popova at Marginalia:
Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter — having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking — John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds “so undone.”
Several months earlier, Berryman had written a long letter to his former teacher Mark Van Doren, who had emboldened him to make a life in poetry and who would lovingly remember him as “an overflowing man, a man who was never self-contained, a man who would have been multitudes had there been time and world enough for such a miracle.” Despite reporting a routine of astonishing vitality — studying theology before breakfast, keeping up “a fancy exercise-programme” in the afternoon, reading a canon of medical lectures as research for a novel he was writing, responding to a dozen letters a day, and “and supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes” — Berryman placed at the center of the letter a self-flagellating lament about his “lifelong failure to finish anything,” which he attributed to his twenty four years of alcoholism.
more here.
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