Teaching at Harvard in early 1942 and about to have a pamphlet of poems published by New Directions for its Poet of the Month series, John Berryman rebuked the press’s founder James Laughlin for making public what was meant to be private:
Whether his rage erupted from the letter’s contents, Laughlin’s careless impropriety, or both, Berryman understood that “in letters, as in no other form of writing, the man appears” (1). That thought, written in an undergraduate essay at Columbia, would resurface decades later in a letter to his seven-year-old son, Paul: “I would expect you to keep my letters, so that you can read them when you are older. It is a source of pain to me, still, that I have no letters from my father, who died when I was twelve” (500). When Berryman took his own life on January 7, 1972, Paul would be just shy of...
