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REFACE Eight months before his death, John Berryman signeda contract with F arrar, Straus and Giroux for a collection of essays andstories. It was dated May 13, 1971, but we had discussed the project atleast as early as 1968, shortly after publication of Hts Toy, His Dream,His Rest, the concluding volume of The Dream Sofigs. First John sentme a tentative list of the items he was thinlang of putting in the book.Later he drew up a formal table of contents, grouped in five sections,and on January 7, 1970, drafted a statement about his own practice ofcriticism that he intended to expand into a preface. In his letter headded, characteristically, ^^Hurrah for me. my prose collection isgoing to be a beauty'’ His list of contents totaled thirty-seven pieces, eight of whichwere new, or at any rate unpublished. Those that had already ap-peared in print over three decades (see my bibliographical notes at theback) were readily obtainable, but none of the new ones reached mebefore John’s death. With Kate Berryman’s help, we found the essayson Marlowe, Cervantes, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, and AnneFrank, and a two-parter entitled “Shakespeare’s Last Word,” the con-clusion of which provided John with this book’s title. But still missingwere “Africa” (about which I had only John’s penciled notation, “cf.‘Olive pchreiner Foaming at the Mouth’ ”) and an essay on Job en-titled “Man and the Lord.” They were never discovered, and eitherwere not written or were destroyed. The contract for The Freedom of the Poet was drawn up and twocopies were sent to John while his new book, Love & Fame, was goingthrough the press in the early months of 1971. When the contractsdid not come back, I began to wonder whether he had changed hismind about doing the book. Not at all. In early May, when I phonedMinneapolis, I found him in excellent spirits; he had mislaid “thedamned contracts” but was keen to get the book out, because he hadlots of ideas for other books. He told me Kate was expecting and Preface wanted me to be the godfather, probably in the summer (I stood upfor Sarah Rebecca in June), and he said he would mail the contractsas soon as he found them. They arrived on May 13, with a short letterthat said a great deal-more than I realized at first. Written in hisfamiliar mandarin hand, witli his customary abbreviations, on a smallUniversity of Minnesota letterhead, it compressed much news aboutmany matters into little space-
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