Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz

FOREWORD

Though Delmore Schwartz’s reputation is sadly diminished from what it was at his beginnings in the late 1930s, it has been kept alive thanks to James Atlas’s excellent if depressing biography, which appeared in 1977, eleven years after the poet’s early death. Alas, the biography was a success not so much because people were at the time interested in Schwartz’s poetry, but because of the cautionary nature of his life story. Readers indifferent to modern poetry could still take grim relish in the classic saga of a brilliant poet, first heralded as a genius, the greatest young poet of his day, who quickly burnt himself out due to mental illness and addictions to alcohol and narcotics, and died almost forgotten at the age of fifty-two in a seedy hotel room in New York’s Times Square district. In a way, Atlas’s biography is the contemporary counterpart of Samuel Johnson’s great essay on the little-known eighteenth-century poet Richard Savage, which has become a classic study of the self-destructive, paranoid artist. Unfortunately, the story of Delmore Schwartz’s life hasn’t really sparked an ensuing revival of interest in his poetry. It has, however, kept his Selected Poems and several other collections of his writings in print at New Directions, which first published him in the thirties, and also resulted in the publication of a volume of his letters and a copious selection from his unpublished notebooks. The patient, that is to say his reputation, is still alive, if not exactly well. But the extent of Schwartz’s fall from grace can be measured by the fact that, although his early work was admired by Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, and such influential critics as R. P. Blackmur and F. W. Dupee (who wrote, “Since Auden’s early poems appeared, there has been no verse so alive with contemporary meaning”), he is not included in Helen Vendler’s comprehensive Harvard Book of American Poetry and is represented by only two poems in Richard Ellman’s canonical New Oxford Book of American Verse. Nor can one really fault the editors: Delmore Schwartz is but one, albeit perhaps the most distinguished, of a group of poets of his time whom a revolution in taste (in Schwartz’s case speeded by a decline in the quality of his later poems) has swept from view; perhaps he will be swept back in by some future revolution when his time has come.

Now, however, with this spendid Once and for All, the reader can see Delmore Schwartz whole again and take in his entire career.

Delmore, as everyone called him, including those who didn’t know him, was born in Brooklyn on December 8, 1913, to the unhappily married Harry Schwartz and Rose Nathanson, both immigrants from eastern Europe (“Atlantic Jews,” as Delmore would characterize their class in his poetry). He both loved and hated the artificially English-sounding name Delmore, and offered various explanations of its origin. James Atlas tells us: “Sometimes he would insist he had been named after a delicatessen across the street from the house where he was born, sometimes that his mother had been fond of an actor who was named Frank Delmore. In still other versions, the name was taken from a Tammany Hall club, a Pullman railroad car, or a Riverside Drive apartment house.” (His one sibling got off lightly with the given name Kenneth.) In his verse play Shenandoah, the protagonist’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fish, set about choosing a “distinguished and new and American” name for their firstborn, who becomes Shenandoah Fish, an alter ego appearing in a number of Schwartz’s works. Other ponderously named Jewish characters in his writings include Hershey Green (the Anglo-Saxon name Harold transformed to the Jewish Herschel and then to the name of a brand of chocolate), Rudyard Bell, Faber Gottschalk, and Richmond Rose; and Delmore himself would become the character Von Humboldt Fletcher in his friend Saul Bellow’s roman à clef Humboldt’s Gift, published after Schwartz’s death.

The circumstances of Delmore’s childhood and later life would be continually recalled in his writing, which is in a sense one vast mythification of himself and his family. Harry Schwartz was handsome, a successful businessman and a philanderer. Rose’s natural bitterness intensified as the marriage failed; in desperation, she secretly cashed a French war bond, the gift of a European uncle, to pay for an operation which would enable her to have children, thinking in this way to attach her husband. The operation was a success, but the marriage wasn’t. One particularly traumatic event occurred when Delmore was seven, and his mother discovered his father’s car parked outside a restaurant; going inside, they discovered Harry entertaining a “whore,” in his mother’s term; the ghastly scene that followed would later be enshrined in his poem “Prothalamion”:

… the speech my mother made

In a restaurant, trapping my father there

At dinner with his whore. Her spoken rage

Struck down the child of seven years

With shame for all three, with pity for

The helpless harried waiter, with anger for

The diners gazing, avid, and contempt,

And great disgust for every human being.

But all the small tragedies of childhood, situated and magnified against the backdrop of Europe (especially Russia, his father’s homeland) and the war that raged there, would become grist for Schwartz’s writing. In one of his best-known poems, “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” he compares himself, eating a baked potato in Brooklyn in 1916, with the Czar’s children playing ball “six thousand miles away”; he knocks the potato off his tray and loses it, just as the children’s ball escapes through a gate, and the ramifications extend even further back into history and myth: “In history’s pity and terror / The child is Aeneas again; / Troy is in the nursery, / The rocking horse is on fire. / Child labor! The child must carry / His fathers on his back.” History, he observes, has no “ruth,” no pity, for “the individual, / Who drinks tea, who catches cold,” that is to say, everybody. And in his most famous short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the poet himself moves backward in time, dreaming he is in a movie theater watching a silent film of his parents’ courtship at Coney Island years before. At a crucial moment “I stood up in the theatre and shouted: ‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.’”

Schwartz was an astoundingly prolific writer. He seems to have written almost continuously, not only in the various literary genres of poetry, fiction, and criticism at which he excelled — he was amazingly erudite — but also journals, letters, unfinished projects, and scraps and jottings of every kind. The bulk of his work is unpublished and probably unpublishable. The fragments from notebooks which his widow, Elizabeth Pollet, collected in a volume called Portrait of Delmore, run to 650 pages, and though there are treasures to be found in it, they are few and far between. For me and for most readers, his most rewarding phase is that of the early lyric poetry and the book of short stories, The World Is a Wedding, some of which are so good that one deplores the fact that there aren’t more of them (other uncollected short stories do exist), or that he never wrote any of the novels for which numerous sketches abound.

Schwartz’s most ambitious published work is the unfinished epic poem Genesis, published in 1943. The temptation to write the great American epic poem was particularly keen in the 1930s. Besides the obvious examples of Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land—which (unlike the longer Four Quartets) I think must be considered an epic despite its relative brevity — together with Stevens’s “The Comedian as the Letter C”), there were other examples of would-be epic verse: Robinson Jeffers’s “Tamar” and “Roan Stallion”; the volume of a thousand sonnets called M by Merrill Moore, a member of the southern Fugitive group; Taal by the female poet Jeremy Ingalls; while still to come were Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror” and, much later, James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (both of these arguably influenced by Schwartz’s epic), Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” Williams’s Paterson, and Olson’s Maximus Poems—all products of an inherent American urge to make it big as well as new.

Genesis is a disappointment, but it fails on a lavish scale. It was intended to be Delmore’s twentieth-century Brooklyn version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, though a more immediate stylistic precedent was Hardy’s The Dynasts, which Delmore studied. In Genesis, the forebears of the hero, Hershey Green, live out horrible adventures in Europe and manage to emigrate to America, where the real substance and sorrow of their lives begin. As in The Dynasts, a chorus of disembodied spirits comments ironically on the saga as it unrolls; lyric passages, many of them of great beauty, alternate with rather stiff expository stretches of “biblical” prose, printed as long run-on lines of poetry but nonetheless prosaic, though the ear gradually gets used to the contrast. Wrapped in this prose padding like precious objects stored away, the intermittent brilliant passages stand out all the more strikingly:

“The act of darkness which begins the world

Fosters what gross mistakes!” another said,

“Because the lovers lie like scissors close,

And face hides face, love’s plaza absolute,

Their eyes are shut, they cannot see, alas!

And from the cache and spurt what lies are born!”

We see here how subtly Delmore could manipulate undertones of language. The “lovers lie like scissors close”—closed as well as close, one assumes, and yet the idea of the lovers as sharp blades capable of inflicting harm even on each other, as well as being two parts of a single entity, galvanizes the image. Similarly the phrases “love’s plaza” and “the cache and spurt” are both bizarre yet somehow right. The “plaza” suggests the bullring where the antagonist lovers will meet, and also the Plaza Hotel where the upwardly-aspiring couple might, with luck, celebrate their marriage one day. And the dimly heard sexual innuendo of “cache and spurt” (an odd pairing of nouns, to say the least) alludes not only to the female and male sexual organs but also the “cash” which will play an important role in the union.

A little further on occur the lines, “Asking what every sore throat may have meant / And what the burnt match, what the cane, / The necktie and the boredom of the will—.” Delmore was always adept at conjuring a specific world out of a sparse sprinkling of abstract and concrete words. The sore throat evokes “the individual / Who drinks tea, who catches cold” (cold symptoms abound in Delmore’s work), who is situated in a precise environment by the words match, cane, necktie, boredom of the will. This singular but singularly appropriate list of particulars echoes Auden, whom Schwartz admired (and vice versa). James Laughlin, Delmore’s publisher and a poet himself, called Schwartz “The American Auden”—no small compliment, though today one tends to forget that Auden was then considered the major poet of his generation. And Delmore’s list suggests similar lists in Auden: “The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss, / There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.”

“Boredom of the will.” Indeed. Here, as so often in Genesis, as throughout his work (and his work is really all of a piece, the same retelling of birth, migration, new disappointment, damaged hopes, ordinary lives being turned into the stone of history), one is again at the core of the poem; the phrase, like so many of his others, is a rabbit hole down which one plummets to an exasperatingly real and unsatisfactory Wonderland. It always comes back to the recounting of sorrow in new and breathtakingly beautiful ways which lighten the sorrow. For a while. “It seems that few actions remain unobserved, and fewer yet remain unsuspected by human beings, of each other,” observes the nameless narrator of Genesis. At the end of the short story “A Bitter Farce,” a college professor named Mr. Fish “returns to his home to await the arrival of innumerable anxiety feelings which had their source in events which had occurred for the past five thousand years.” In a 1959 prefatory note to his Selected Poems, Delmore surprisingly interjected: “Every point of view, every kind of knowledge and every kind of experience is limited and ignorant; nevertheless, so far as I know, this volume seems to be as representative as it could be.” And at the end of “America! America!” the brilliant short story, Shenandoah Fish says: “‘I do not see myself. I do not know myself. I cannot look at myself truly.’ He turned from the looking-glass and said to himself… ‘No one truly exists in the real world because no one knows all that he is to other human beings, all that they say behind his back, and all the foolishness which the future will bring him.’” These works are later than the early lyrics collected in his first book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, but for me they are the most valuable part of Delmore’s oeuvre.

A brief sketch of his biography may cast some light on a few passages from his greatest poetry.

During the first decade of his life, the family was shunted back and forth between cramped apartments in Brooklyn and the upper-Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Harry Schwartz finally left his wife for good in 1923 and moved to Chicago, where his insurance business prospered, leaving Delmore with the illusion that he would someday inherit wealth. This was not to happen, though he did inherit a few thousand dollars long after his father died in the spring of 1930. Delmore studied for a year at the University of Wisconsin, then at New York University, and finally Harvard, which he left without taking a degree. Despite his unwillingness to be considered a Marxist, he joined the staff of the leftist intellectual journal Partisan Review, which had switched its allegiance from Stalin to Trotsky. During the latter half of the thirties, he taught at Harvard, but often in menial positions: His continual attempts to get a tenured position there, at Cornell, at the University of California and elsewhere, were always foiled by circumstance, or, more often, by his erratic behavior. As a Jew at Harvard, he keenly resented the snobbery of the largely WASP faculty, but even more the success of the suave and cosmopolitan scholar and critic, Harry Levin, who, though Jewish, was somehow “accepted,” or so it seemed to Delmore. I took Levin’s celebrated course in Proust, Joyce, and Mann, though I never studied with Delmore, nor met him at Harvard, for reasons I can no longer remember, since I admired his poetry even before coming to the university; he was, in fact, one of the reasons I wished to study there. My friend Kenneth Koch did, however, take a course with him, from which he reported great things. (I did get to know Delmore slightly several years later in New York, and was delighted when he accepted my poem, “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” for Partisan Review.) Our lack of contact at Harvard may have been a problem of scheduling; Schwartz on at least one occasion canceled his course abruptly and returned to New York to breathe the freer air of Greenwich Village. Still, the cultured ambience of Harvard attracted him, too, and he became friends with such rising, slightly younger poets as Robert Lowell and John Berryman, whose genius and chaotic temperament he shared. Berryman for his part memorialized Delmore in some dozen of his Dream Songs, one of which contains the passage: “He looked onto the world like the act of an aged whore. / Delmore, Delmore. / He flung to pieces and they hit the floor.”

Meanwhile, Delmore’s literary career had begun auspiciously, dazzlingly, with the publication of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. James Atlas has attempted to explain the powerful effect of the book when it appeared in 1938. When I first discovered it some five years later, it still retained this aura, palpable even in the dog-eared copy I found in a public library: “It devolved upon Eliot to become Delmore’s model; he was, after all, the quintessential modernist, and, what was perhaps more significant, he provided an example of the recognition conferred on those who managed to establish a new poetic idiom. Yet… authoritarian, dignified, remote, Eliot had achieved a stature that infuriated Delmore even as it filled him with envy; restrained by the limitations of his own background from emulating Eliot’s cultivated manner, Delmore could only follow an opposite course, and eventually found more congenial models in those exemplary figures of revolt Rimbaud and Baudelaire.” Atlas sees “Baudelaire’s emphatic style of declamation… tempered by a note of ineffable sadness” in the poem “Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses,” though a more immediate antecedent may have been Thomas Mann’s story “Tonio Kröger”; and the peripatetic domestic life of Rose Schwartz and her two boys, ever shuttling between meaner and cheaper lodgings after their relatively comfortable earlier life, no doubt also plays a role.

In “Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses,” as throughout his poetry, the transition is dangerous, unexpected; the peaceful, somnolent bourgeois interior is abruptly supplanted by the world underground, perhaps a further allusion to Gluck and Orpheus. “The weight of the lean buildings is seen,” that is the pilings sunk deep into the earth; the rush is on; “well-dressed or mean, so many surround you.” One thinks of Dante’s (and Eliot’s) “I had not thought death had undone so many”; and the final line with its exclamation point (a favorite device of Delmore’s, often used with great skill, as here) echoes both the slamming of iron gates and the imperious ringing of a cash register totaling up the bill.

Atlas points out the power of Delmore’s titles, which inveigle and buttonhole the reader in the manner of the Ancient Mariner. Others one could cite for their suasive force are “Out of the Watercolored Window, When You Look,” “Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before,” “All of Us Always Turning Away for Solace,” and “A Dog Named Ego, the Snowflakes as Kisses.” Often in one of those seemingly tiny variants which Delmore is always inserting into his poetry and which can produce a seamless unexpectedness, he will use the title as the first line with a minor variation, as in the first lines of two of the poems just mentioned. “Out of the Watercolored Window, When You Look” becomes “When from the watercolored window idly you look” and “Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before” becomes “Someone is harshly coughing on the next floor.”

“The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” perhaps his most famous poem, is one of a group he calls “The Repetitive Heart: Poems in Imitation of the Fugue.” I haven’t seen an explanation of what he meant by “in imitation of the fugue,” but these poems use the device of variants ringing changes on a theme in the manner of Bach, or, even more, of Mozart, where a subtle modulation can slip past the ear’s attentiveness and suddenly alter the music’s landscape and mood.

The clandestine linking of images has the football of the first stanza returning in the word “scrimmage” in the last line (Delmore was an avid sports fan and reader of sports journals). The perhaps likable if clumsy bear, who “climbs the building, kicks the football,” turns terrifying at the end, participating in “the scrimmage of appetite everywhere,” one of Delmore’s most riveting phrases.

Another of Delmore’s “fugal” poems, “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day,” encapsulates a number of his constant themes: the life of the city, names of friends he knew (“Many great dears are taken away”), and above all an apprehension of the whirling universe (in the mundane décor of a municipal park).

Note how matter-of-factly he begins setting the stage: “In the park sit pauper and rentier” (another of his favorite words; how desperately he wished to be a rentier!). But then: “The screaming children, the motor-car / Fugitive about us, running away, / Between the worker and the millionaire.” It’s impossible to know who is running with whom: the screaming children, the car, the worker, the millionaire, all swarming, “fugitive about us”—though why the motorcar and the millionaire should be fugitive is unclear. The spelled-out dates: “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” “Nineteen Fourteen,” as well as the names of people we don’t know (Bert Spira and Rhoda, it turns out, were actual friends of Delmore from his college days) read as desperate attempts to pin down the fleeing scene, give it permanence, but all is swept away in flames. This time the fugal repetitions end in a painful thud of closure.

A somewhat lighter but still disturbing poem is “Far Rockaway.” The name of this lower-middle-class sea-resort near Brooklyn is almost a joke for New Yorkers; there is nothing “far” or “away” about the place, and the joke is compounded by Delmore’s use of an unidentified epigraph from Henry James: “the cure of souls” (could it be from The Wings of the Dove with its larger-than-life doctor character, Sir Luke Strett?). James would certainly have felt ill-at-ease in Far Rockaway, worlds away from Newport.

“The radiant soda,” or a multicolored assortment of soft drinks in their bottles, fun fashions, foam, and freedom (not only on the beach but in the breaking waves as they catch the light). “The sea laves / The shaven sand”; “laves” and “shaven” offer a marvelous echoing of sounds, as well as a precise image of what the sea does to the sand, brutally sandpapering it. “And the light sways forward / On the self-destroying waves.” Finally, an image of destruction undermines the airy gait of the scene; the light collapses inward; the waves self-destruct in coming to be. And at the end the “tangential” author seeking the cure of souls in what greets his gaze is doomed to failure. His nervous conscience amid the “concessions”—a brilliant play on words, concessions can mean commercial stalls such as would flourish along a boardwalk, selling soda, etc., and also the demeaning compromises the writer must accept in lieu of a cure — is the haunting (romantic) and haunted (macabre) moon.

One last example of these early poems is “I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf.” Here again are arrayed many of the motifs that occur throughout Schwartz’s poetry: the sea, tall buildings, automobiles (Delmore loved to drive and even during his most penurious periods usually managed to hang on to some old wreck of a car), sleep, dreams and their responsibilities, his own past, and history. There are some fabulous configurations here: he “climbs the sides of buildings just to get / Merely a gob of gum, all that is left / Of its [that is, his heart’s] infatuation of last year.” The phrase, as awkward but hallucinatory as the act it describes, suggests a forgotten episode of a love affair: the speaker, it seems, was infatuated with a girl last summer and left a wad of chewing gum stuck to the side of a building by the sea, intending to retrieve it later. Now, that disgusting object is all that is left to the lover, menial as a serf to the commands of his heart. Now he is as sick of his heart’s “cruel rule” “as one is sick of chewing gum all day,” a wonderfully comic, cruel image. In sleep anger can spend itself, but when sleep too is crowded and full of chores, the tyranny of the past takes over. The poet must find the right door in a row of maddeningly identical ones, carry his father on his back, or rather, the poem implies, carry a carriage with his father in it on his back. Then the language starts to become increasingly garbled, as speech heard in a dream: “Last summer, 1910, and my own people, / The government of love’s great polity, / The choice of taxes, the production / Of clocks, of lights and horses, the location / Of monuments, of hotels and of rhyme…” Why, among other questions that spring to mind, the date 1910, three years before his birth? The lines become more nonsensical until finally anger causes the dreamer to start awake, with an exclamation mark. But the finality dies into “merely wake up once more,” leaving the humiliated dreamer to contemplate yet again his condition of being a “servant of incredible assumption.”

The pain of Delmore’s poetry is only a pale reflection of the painful life from which it grew. I’ll abridge the downward drift of his later years: two failed marriages, erratic employment as a teacher and a book and film reviewer, increasing poverty, alcohol and various other addictions. When his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Pollet, left him in the summer of 1957, his life was really over, though it dragged on for another nine years, during which he became steadily more deranged, imagining that his wife was the mistress of Nelson Rockefeller and that President Kennedy and the Pope were plotting against him. Friends, including Bellow, took up a subscription to pay for psychiatric treatment, but he never stayed in the mental wards long, returning to his favorite Greenwich Village haunts and increasingly squalid living quarters. Lowell, who had published a poem about their drinking days in Cambridge back in the forties in Life Studies, wrote another about his last years which is probably chillingly accurate:

Your dream had humor, then its genius thickened,

you grew thick and helpless, your lines were variants

alike and unlike, Delmore — your name, Schwartz,

one vowel bedeviled by seven consonants…

one gabardine suit the color of sulphur,

scanning wide-eyed the windowless room of wisdom,

your notes on Joyce and porno magazines—

the stoplights blinking code for you alone

casing the bars with the eyes of a Mongol horseman.

Yet he continued to write poetry. In 1959, he published Summer Knowledge, a collection of poems from previous volumes along with many new ones. Critics have tended to dismiss these, and perhaps rightly, though some have lately come to their defense, notably David Lehman. The late poetry does seem to lack the electric compressions and simplifications that animate his early writing, tending toward bald assertiveness. James Atlas calls it “haphazard, euphonious, virtually incomprehensible effusions… imitative of Hopkins, Yeats, Shelley.” And he may be right. Yet there is something there, perhaps indeed the ruin of a great poet, but perhaps something more. It turns out that critics were premature in condemning the late work of Picasso and Stravinsky; perhaps Delmore will one day get a similar reprieve. Read the title poem from that last collection; I leave it to you to decide, adding only that I think that the repetitions in his defining what he means by “summer knowledge,” though they seem labored at first, end by achieving a new kind of telling, with an urgent bluntness of its own.

JOHN ASHBERY