BERRYMAN JOHN Small archive of correspondence to Ralph G Ros

Sale 2244 - Lot 241

Price Realized: $ 9,600

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000

BERRYMAN, JOHN. Small archive of correspondence to Ralph G. Ross, including 15 Autograph Letters Signed and 10 Typed Letters Signed, on various topics, mostly personal, including writing the Dream Songs, his father's suicide, his alcoholism, Delmore Schwartz's mental illness, academic politics, Saul Bellow, writing an autobiography, and financial troubles. With a copy of his Last Will and Testament signed three times. Format and condition vary. Vp, 1957-71

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Chepachet, RI, nd: ". . . The consciousness of age you spoke of some weeks ago is with me always now. I feel as if I were rushing to death, with nothing done. It is an unworthy and debilitating feeling--but how to get rid of it? . . . Dante seems to have been marvellously free from it, but . . . Shakespeare and Villon say it's like a poison. . . . Who among the philosophers have dealt with it?--here in the summer woods I am feeling very ignorant. . . ."
[Berkeley], 2 May [1960]: ". . . [S]o the first thing I have heard about our book was Lawrence Kegan's explaining to me at once last night . . . that he did not feel that my Prufrock piece was plagiarized from an article written 15 yrs ago by two other people, for which he supplied all the ideas, but that he did think my piece superficial and wrong . . . ."
Np, 1 May [19]63: ". . . [A] reading more 'successful' than any in my life: the audience wd not stop, afterward, clapping & even stamping-- . . . I read one more, & said 'no more.' . . ."
Np, 19 Sept[ember] 19]63: ". . . Some of the Songs, in truth, as now revised, may interest somebody. Or this whole version will probably be seen as an imposture. To deceive who is not clear. . . ."