FRIENDSHIP AND CONFESSION: SAUL BELLOW AND JOHN BERRYMAN

esya bella berliana;

Taking Bellow’s Herzog and Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs as case studies, this article attempts to reconcile two historically opposed approaches to literature: those privileging the author’s intention and those privileging the reader’s response. Contemporary critics described these two books as ‘confessionalist’, but the authors disputed this vigorously. The contradictory situation presented here – it is possible to use detail from the authors’ biographies in order to argue that one should not read these books as being about the authors’ biographies – presents an analytical perch from which it is possible to reinvestigate not only the ‘confessionalist’ claim that Bellow and Berryman’s books are ‘about’the authors, but also the converse and contemporary claim that the author had ‘died’. Tracing the uses Bellow and Berryman made (and avoided making) of their lives through successive drafts preserved in the archives, the article makes the claim that it is only by paying attention, as readers, to what the author thought they were doing with the work, that we can properly appreciate the nature of the activity which we, and we alone, are carrying out with the finished text. It is involved at once in opening up discussion of an important but neglected literary friendship, and in laying the ground-work for new approaches to the possibility of criticism based in detailed examination of authorial biography.