Who can keep up? It wasn’t so long ago that we were concerned because the print press couldn’t keep up with the 24/7 news channels, which had scandals and disasters on the air while they were still in progress. Now, the 24/7 news channels can’t keep up with themselves: by the time they’ve assembled a panel of Wise Ones to analyze the most recent infamy, another one has unfolded. Or two. Or three. There is no pause, no day without too many tales to tell, let alone to tell well.
Which is why John Berryman’s 1939 poem “World-Telegram” has new currency. It is about the weight of headlines, of leads, of information that can barely be understood, let alone borne.
I first heard Berryman read it during a ten-hour monologue that went from falling-down drunk to perfect lucidity (without stopping for the hangover) the first day I met him in Bloomington, Indiana, in the summer of 1961.
He told me that, a few years earlier, he and Saul Bellow were visiting faculty or fellows at Princeton, both of them just out of or in the midst of divorce, so they wound up living in different flats in the same Princeton University house. One Sunday morning, John said, he went to Bellow’s room and rushed in, saying, “Saul, Saul, have you seen this in the Times….”
Bellow lifted his hand and cut him off. “I never read the papers. I identify with everyone in them and it takes me all day to get through the fucking things.”
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World-Telegram
Man with a tail heads eastward for the Fair.
Can open a pack of cigarettes with it.
Was weaving baskets happily, it seems,
When found, the almost Missing Link, and brought
From Ceylon in the interests of science.
The correspondent doesn’t know how old.
Two columns left, a mother saw her child
Crushed with its father by a ten-ton truck
Against a loading platform, while her son,
Small, frightened, in a Sea Scout uniform,
Watched from the Langley. All needed treatment.
Berlin and Rome are having difficulty
With a new military pact. Some think
Russia is not too friendly towards London.
The British note is called inadequate.
An Indian girl in Lima, not yet six,
Has been delivered by Caesarian.
A boy. They let the correspondent in:
Shy, uncommunicative, still quite pale,
A holy picture by her, a blue ribbon.
Right of the centre, and three columns wide,
A rather blurred but rather ominous
Machine-gun being set up by militia
This morning in Harlan County, Kentucky.
Apparently some miners died last night.
‘Personal brawls’ is the employers’ phrase.
All this on the front page. Inside, penguins.
The approaching television of baseball.
The King approaching Quebec. Cotton down.
Skirts up. Four persons shot. Advertisements.
Twenty-six policemen are decorated.
Mother’s Day repercussions. A film star
Hopes marriage will preserve him from his fans.
News of one day, one afternoon, one time.
If it were possible to take these things
Quite seriously, I believe they might
Curry disorders in the strongest brain,
Immobilize the most resilient will,
Stop trains, break up the city’s food supply,
And perfectly demoralize the nation.