If John Berryman had not committed suicide, I wonder, how many readers might there be for a four-hundred-page story of his life?

In his definitions of classical and romantic artists, W. H. Auden assumed dementia as their common condition; the classical artist was “one whose dementia was simply the occasion for his talent”; the romantic, “one whose dementia became his subject matter.” Berryman, in that showing, was a Romantic in extremis but not unique in the American scene. Convinced that to write great poetry required great suffering and being unsupplied by America, mid-century, with a tragedy of European dimension, he proceeded to stock himself with traumas and compulsions which, if not wholly invented, were at least enlarged as he had need for them, in order to fuel the desperation inseparable from the role of genius. Endowment, he claimed in a Paris Review essay quoted by John Haffenden, was the lesser part of artistic achievement—about fifteen or twenty percent! “I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. . . . The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him.”

Eighty percent unspecified agony and only twenty percent gift; it’s a grotesque have-it-yourself formula, but he labored at it and he seems to have convinced a considerable number of critics that his proportions were justified. During the inceptive years of his career as a poet (that is, in the Forties), Berryman