From: "joe green" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 1:33 PM
Subject: Re: Berryman on Housman
> "In 1971, ... still haunted by his own father's suicide
> and with his youngest daughter just six months old, Berryman ended his
> life by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis,
> Minnesota."
>
> That's the bridge that connects the East Banl campus and West Bank campus
> at the U of Minnesota. Missed the water.
>
> Peter Cudmore <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I've been puzzling about this 'he missed the water' thing. Was he an
> inaccurate swimmer?
>
> P
Like Peter, I'd been wondering about this too. The truth is even less
romantic -- Berryman not only missed the water but hit the car-park. I
found this out when I encountered online, some time ago, a Situationist
called "barrett" (sic) who'd been there at the time. The day after
Berryman's suicide, barrett went out with a tape measure and worked out that
Berryman had hit the tarmac at least six feet away from where the papers
said he had. He sent me cuttings from the newspapers published the
following
day to prove this.
Hm, what is it about Situationists and suicide? Guy Debord -- did he
really? -- seems to have carried on the tradition.
:-(
The less-extreme version perhaps goes back to Berryman's ex-wife Eileen
Simpson, and her memoir of all those dead poets, _Poets in Their Youth_:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/15/AR2006101501018.html
Simpson knew that leaving him would cause "anguish" for both of them, though
she was surprised after it happened that "the emotions I had expected to
feel on separation, the predictable anger and bitterness at the failure of a
marriage, were smothered under a blanket of grief." She recovered, though,
moving along to a successful career as psychotherapist and a happy second
marriage to Robert Simpson, a diplomat and authority on the Middle East; she
published a couple more books before her death in 2002. Berryman recovered,
too, in his fashion, publishing poetry to ever greater acclaim, winning a
Pulitzer Prize in 1965, marrying twice more -- but then, perhaps inevitably,
killing himself in Minneapolis in 1972 by doing "what he had been rehearsing
at least as far back as the night of our engagement party: He jumped from a
railing, this time of a bridge, with no net and the frozen Mississippi River
below." He was 57 years old.
... and for a drawing of where it happened ...
http://citypages.com/databank/23/1122/article10453.asp
John Berryman Leapt Here
"At the University of Minnesota, John [Berryman] and I shared an office in a
temporary wooden structure to the north of the School of Mines. From the
window we saw a gully, a parking lot, and many disheartening cars. Scorched
theology books from a fire sale lined one of the walls. These volumes of
Barth and Brunner looked as if they had gone through hell. We had no
particular interest in them, but they helped to furnish forth a mental life
in the city of Minneapolis. Minneapolis was the home of Honeywell, of heart
surgery, of Pillsbury, of the Multiphasic test, but it was not celebrated as
the home of poems and novels. John and I strolled sometimes, about a pond,
through a park, and then up Lake Street, 'where the used cars live!' What on
earth were we doing here?"
--Saul Bellow, from the introduction to John Berryman's Recovery
Robin Hamilton
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