Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz

LETTERS

To Ezra Pound

73 Washington Place

New York City

April 9, 1938

Dear Mr. Pound,

It was a very great pleasure to receive your letter. I am idolatrous or perhaps the word is “superstitious,” and one of my superstitions is the great poet, especially the three or four who are not yet dead. Your corrections of my piece in Poetry are thus very welcome, and I hope that you will be moved to correct me in the future.¹ But you will not mind, I am sure, if I try to explain more exactly the notions to which you are objecting.

First, however, to answer your question about George Dillon and Poetry. Dillon is a very weak poet and not in the least intelligent. He was Harriet Monroe’s pet child, he won the Pulitzer Prize once, and he translated with Edna St. Vincent Millay all of Baudelaire very poorly (using an alexandrine in English because Baudelaire used it in French). It is no exaggeration to say that he knows nothing. This obviously puts him in the same class as Harriet Monroe, and he seems to have like her one saving virtue, only one, the willingness to give all parties a chance to speak their pieces, and I should guess that he will be more or less as amenable to your desires as Harriet Monroe was. I for one have never been able to understand how you could tolerate so foolish a woman for so many years even with an ocean between the two of you. As for whether I was writing against the editor or with his consent, this question perplexes me. At any rate, I asked him to let me review your new book, expecting only two or three pages and he told me to write a long article, probably because he had read my long piece in the Southern Review in which I put Yvor Winters in his place. When the piece was finished, he said it was very good, and this probably means that I was writing with his consent. As for what I as contributor intend to do about the sabotage of your labors, let me know what you would like me to do and I will probably do it. But I actually cannot see why you should be concerned at all about Poetry. It has had its day and that day is long past, was over in 1920, so far as exercising a genuine influence goes, and the future for that sort of thing belongs or is going to belong to J. Laughlin IV. He has the interests, the energy, the ability and the intelligence which are needed where Harriet Monroe seems to me to have had nothing but a vague desire to be helpful, and it is obvious to me that you can go on with your useful labors with much more ease and satisfaction now than ever before.

Now for your objections. “suppose you Read some of these writers before telling grandpa he ain’t been fotografted in his dress suit.” This is only a shot in the dark and a pretty poor one at that. I have read with much care and attention Dante, Homer and Shakespeare, and also, though not as fully, Ovid. One reason, in fact, that I studied Greek was your own translation from the Odyssey—if Homer was like that, I wanted to read all of him. I found out that he was not really like that and as a matter of fact even better. All literary judgement seems to me to be comparative and on this basis it still seems clear to me that the best “frame” for a long poem is narrative. I may be very naive and literal about it, but when you say that “The Divina Commedia has practically no narration and no plot/it presents a scheme of values/merely a walk upstairs to a balloon landing,” I can only keep in mind the literal fact that the poem in question is about a man who was lost in a dark wood where he met various animals and then a great poet’s ghost and learned that in order to escape from the wood and the animals, he would have to travel thru Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And thus the enormous exaltation of the cantos toward the end of Purgatorio derives from the character of the story, the narrative that Dante is going to meet the lady with whom he was very much in love for a long time and who has been dead for ten years. I do not expect you to take over broken-down values from fat Aquinas nor in fact do I suppose that the absence of narrative in your poem as a whole is a simple thing, a pure matter of choice. It seems to me that narrative began to go out of poetry when Coleridge had to write marginal summaries for The Ancient Mariner and by the time we get to Sordello it has become even harder to tell a story and again there are marginal summaries (at least in some editions) and all this is, I think, a part of a whole complex of both history and literature, partly the increasing quest of certain poetic effects which must of necessity eliminate or at least halt the story narrative — could Mallarmé, for example, conceivably have told a story using his style; and partly the development of the novel as a way of getting everything about a character into a medium; and partly the very breakdown of those values which focus interest upon the life and death of the individual soul — thus even the novel now tells almost no story and the leading beliefs on all sides are, as in Marxism, beliefs about classes, not individuals, about history as a whole.

I do not know how clear this is, and perhaps it is superfluous, but what I mean to say is that the very virtues of your writing necessitate the absence of narrative — at least some of those virtues, such as the wonderful excitement one gets as The Cantos move about the centuries. But given these virtues and with full awareness of your situation, I mean situation in a definite time, the contrast still exists as an objective fact, the contrast between what one gets in Dante and Shakespeare and Homer, and what one gets in The Cantos. It works both ways, of course, and there are, I need hardly tell you, effects in The Cantos which have never before been heard of. I said this in my piece. It also seemed worth saying that there is the correlative lack.

“NEXT/as to the seereeyus and solemp and perlite/‘A tailor might scratch her where ere she did itch,’ ‘cul far tombetta.’” It is right after this that you tell me to read some of these writers, so that it is only in fairness to the quotations that I point out that you seem to have misquoted both, if you are referring to “ed egli avea cul fatto trombetta” (Inf. XXI, 139) and that song from The Tempest. But really, you are mistaking me. By serious I do not mean solemn and polite. T. E. Hulme — there was a serious man, and that is what I mean by being serious, and I was trying to say that no matter what you, Ezra Pound, believe, the fact is that very estimable persons have all kinds of beliefs about life and death and uncontrollable mysteries which you as a poet sometimes (sometimes, I say, not always and who knows what the next 49 cantos will bring except yourself) sometimes neglect or pass over because you are more interested for the time being in some uproarious story (they are really uproarious). The marvellous comedy which takes place at the end of Iliad I, and the comedy in Shakespeare are proportionately less important in the structure of their writing than in yours. But notice this — perhaps I am repeating myself again — this kind of judgement and comparison is made only with the assumption that your poem is good enough to bear such a contrast.

At any rate, you can see that I have not been speaking without also thinking about what I was saying — not that that ever saves a stupid one from his own stupidity. There is a good deal more which I would like to say to you, but this letter is already too long.

Sincerely yours,

Delmore Schwartz

To Ezra Pound

8 West 105 St.

New York City

March 5, 1939

Dear Mr. Pound:

I have been reading your last book, Culture.² Here I find numerous remarks about the Semite or Jewish race, all of them damning, although in the course of the book, you say:

Race prejudice is red herring. The tool of man defeated intellectually, and of the cheap politician.

which is a simple logical contradiction of your remarks about the Jewish people, and also a curious omen of a state of mind — one which can support both views, race prejudice and such a judgment of race prejudice, at the same time, or in the same book.

A race cannot commit a moral act. Only an individual can be moral or immoral. No generalization from a sum of particulars is possible, which will render a moral judgment. In a court of law, the criminal is always one individual, and when he is condemned, his whole family is not, qua family, condemned. This is not to deny, however, that there are such entities as races. Furthermore, this view of individual responsibility is implicit in the poetry for which you are justly famous.

But I do not doubt that this is a question which you have no desire to discuss with anyone who does not agree with you, and even less with one who will be suspected of an interested view. Without ceasing to distinguish between past activity and present irrationality, I should like you to consider this letter as a resignation: I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.

Sincerely yours,

Delmore Schwartz

To James Laughlin

Friday, December 16, 1941

Dear Jay:

I am sending you the first two hundred pages of Genesis today in a copy which is a mixture of carbons, revisions, and older versions, but as close as I could get to the final version without parting with what I need here. These 200 pages are substantially the basis on which I was given a Guggenheim renewal.

I want you to publish it separately. It can be called Genesis or Genesis Part I or Made in America or Made in New York or An Atlantic Boy or A New York Childhood. Many other titles might be considered to take care of the fact that it is just the first part—The Beginning, or Book One.

This publication of the first two-fifths of the poem seems by far the wisest policy to me for a number of reasons, intrinsic and extrinsic. The intrinsic reasons are bound up with the difficulty of getting a proper conclusion right now. If I try to force one, I may wake up in six months and be sorry. But these 200 pages I am certain of, I have tried them out on myself in the worst despondency and lack of energy and I am sure they mean what I want them to mean and what they ought to mean. And if they don’t, there will still be time to make changes whenever the whole poem is published. Long poems have been published in parts from The Divine Comedy to The Cantos, and no comparison in quality is needed here: The form is the same, the long narrative poem can be published in its natural divisions. But more than that, it is too much of a risk right now, with everyone thinking of war, to print 500 pages and expect it to get attention between one crisis in the Far East and another in Iceland and a third in Libya and a fourth in Southern Russia.

The fact that the Philistines of the Guggenheim committee were pleased with this two-fifths should serve as a good external gauge. Some of the internal gauges worth mentioning are as follows: It may seem for a while that the alternation of Biblical prose and blank verse is too predictable, but it will, I think, be felt as an acceptable formal device, like the refrain in a ballad or like rhyme or like a tragic chorus. If the dead as a chorus seem bizarre, remember that Dante wrote the best poem ever written by using the dead as voices. If the fusion of narrative and commentary seems strange, remember that, as I intend to point out in a short preface, this story-succeeded-by-commentary is one of the profoundest most deeply-rooted and most accepted experiences in modern life: The newspaper story-editorial, the play-and-review-of-the-play, the travel film with voice as commentator and newsreel with commentator are all primordial examples of what is going to be an inevitable literary form (inevitable because the life we live forces it upon us). In any case, as I just said, the chorus is one of the best and most popular devices invented in any time. Louise Bogan made a fool of herself again by denying this in reviewing Shenandoah (she says that the poet always disappears from the scene when Dante walks half the way through Hell and Purgatory with a poet next to him and stops to discuss versification with other poets on the way).

If you don’t want to get in back of this separate publication in the way that you would back up the whole poem, that suits me perfectly. I feel that this is more than good enough to make its way to the point where, when the reviews are in, you will feel no further need for caution about my staying powers as a poet. You can regard it as a trial balloon, which will cost you no more than the new Miller book.³

The Christmas vacation comes in two weeks and by the end of the month, at the latest, I will be able to type final copy of the two hundred pages I want you to print, with a bridge passage at the end intended to make the reader look forward to more. Then I can wait (as all good poets should and as fruit-trees wait for the proper season) until the right conclusion comes; I can wait through the summer when I do not have to mark eighty abuses of the English language a week. Perhaps I can write a first version of a first novel, or at least enough of one to make you think I am worth my leisure time.

I have a good deal more to say about this 200-page section in itself (especially about the roadhouse scene as the proper end to this separate publication), but it is pointless to do so until you have the mss. [sic] at hand and have read some of it.

I also want to answer your letter in detail as soon as I have time. One point worth mentioning in advance is that the question of matching another publisher’s advance is beside the point. Whether I am worth what I am told by some publishers I am worth I may never know; they say they would spend from five to ten thousand dollars advertising a novel of mine. Not only would you not do this, but the organization of ND gets worse all the time and you have just put it all in the hands of one who, though a fine person in many ways, has just been running it into the ground because of ignorance, hysteria, and neuroses unequalled on the Eastern Seaboard. The only reason you put it in her hands is that you are busy with the ski hotel: What reason has anyone to believe that you will not always be busy with something else besides ND?⁴ It strikes me that the whole thing would be much better moved completely to Hollywood, since you obviously intend to be in Utah most of the time. In fact, that seems to me the only possibly reasonable arrangement, moving everything including E. S. (who would do well enough with a superior nearby) near you. ND needs you as a bow needs an arrow. However, be this as it may, it is nothing I intend to do anything about until I give you a novel.

Another thing I ought to answer right now, since it may shine on the mss. I am sending is that, lucky or not (and I was not very lucky with Rimbaud, for if I had not been at Yaddo because of poverty I would have shown it to someone at Columbia), and intrinsic merit apart, it should be clear to you by now that what I write attracts a great deal of attention (did you, for example, see the spread for Shenandoah in Sunday’s Times?). Perhaps it is a streak of vulgarity or something else, but almost everything I have published has rung the gong for four years; the instance of the translation shows that it is not my beautiful eyes or winning personality or Aryan background which is responsible; it is the work itself, whether for the wrong reasons or not I do not know.

Please read the mss. as soon as possible and with the best attention. Printing this first part will solve many problems at one stroke. I will try to get a final version to you quickly; don’t let rough spots here and there throw you off.

Yours,

Delmore

To James Laughlin

Thursday, 11 a.m.

Jan. 7, 1942

Dear Mr. Laughlin:

Henceforth I will communicate with you in the cold objective style. This may or may not prevent you from remarking from Norfolk to romantic Alta that I am a drunkard. Your new method of getting at me and insulting me appears to be imputation. First, I play the part of Judas and write the Advocate review; then I write when drunk. I drink only to get to sleep when I have been writing all day; to drink at any other time would be a waste because I would then have to drink so much more to sleep.

Send me back my two Monday letters, so that I can make out what it is, except an epistolary style modelled or rather inspired by yours, that made you think I was drinking. Also send me back my poem. I want both these things and I want them very much, so let us not argue about it.

Answer me about Kazin: Did you tell him I was going to review his book? I take it you are not interested in the story; this suits me, since I can get paid for it now. Also I demand a retraction again; what makes you think you can call me a traitor and schemer in that way without offense?

Why won’t you be persuaded that jacket quotes are dangerous in this case? First, you may not even be able to get them because even those who much admire me think I have already been praised too much for a young man. Second, the reviewers will spend their time fighting the jacket quotes. Third, I can’t postpone reviews and poems beyond March, and if I don’t do them, the editors will be displeased with me. Fourth, the reviews I’ve already persuaded some of my friends to write on the ground of your putative campaign against me won’t be written because of the delay and also because the jacket quotes will make it clear that there never was a campaign, only resentment, expressed loudly to you because it is thought that I have influence with you.

Never was there anyone so influenced by momentary fashions as you. Just because quotes work with Villa, you think it will do good in quite a different case, a long poem in which such a one as Louise Bogan will think this is her last chance of stopping me this side of immortality. If you visit the right editors, then we will get honest and sympathetic reviews, and this book can get along on its own speed.

The decision, perforce, is yours, but you’ll be sorry if this book is not an immediate success because you won’t want to meet the offers I’ve gotten and can get from other more well-to-do publishers when my novel is finished, as it probably will be by fall. I can get three thousand dollars instead of three hundred for a novel and in addition not be insulted as a drunkard, nor terrified by imaginary campaigns against me; nor would I have to fight to get the proper amount of advertising for a novel, namely, an amount which exceeds what you spend on all your books.

I have all the fame I want for the time being; now I want power to protect it or money and probably both. If this seems a drunken statement to you, come to Cambridge and I will make it in person after walking a straight line.

As for Arthur, I like him, but never admired him because he has nothing but his capacity to flatter. In that Kenyon review, he praised all who might do him good and damned those who could not harm him, such as poor Berryman.

For example, in sneering at those who praised Villa, he carefully omits to mention Van Doren, whose boots he has already licked earlier in the review. He kicks Berryman in the face, but is careful to put in a soothing word to me. Next time you see him, ask him how the shoe polish tastes which the Tates use. You can get a certain distance by bootlicking, if you have talent. Arthur has nothing but glibness; I suppose I ought to be sorry for him, because they scared him at Yale and it must be hard to be a Mizener and Moore in a time of raging anti-semitism. But I am sorrier for Berryman who does have talent. Another instance of your fickleness: Last year, on reading his poems, you told me you thought he was really first-rate. Now Arthur says no, dishonestly, and you change your mind. Why are you so unsure of your own taste? Who scared you?

We must get another picture, or the old one may be used and I am sick of being kidded about that and also disappointing the Radcliffe girls. I am nervous and sensitive, and don’t want to be kidded.

Furthermore, I am going to get a five-year contract from Harvard in May. One possibility which may interest you is that the Army may put all instructors into uniform and make them officers (since most of the students will be in uniform and it has been difficult to maintain discipline at training schools with civilian instructors). The classes will march into school in platoons and the first time this happens I will doubtless turn and run into the blackboard, thinking, Jay was right after all, there was an organized campaign against me, there are Patchen, Prokosch, and Barker coming to shoot me down.

As for Williams and his light o’love, this is an example of how your wish to have everything is impossible of realization. You say you want only good poems and an anthology with staying power. In the same paragraph, you say you want Patchen, Brown, and God knows what other bad poets included, all in 128 pages. How can this be? Will you explain? A good anthology full of bad poets? It might be done if we had four hundred pages. But 128 pages? It is you that must be drinking, James.

Which preface do you want me to write, the ghost book or the artist book? I would prefer the ghost one, since I already have thought about it a good deal, and have a lot to say.

Gertrude does not know which store ordered 50 copies. You have an exaggerated view of her interest in how many copies my books sell. She thinks, probably, San Francisco.

Now I have wasted all this energy on you, which would otherwise have gone into a new chapter. Enough of these insults and imputations. Please send me back poem and letters and please answer all the questions I’ve asked.

Yours truly,

Mr. Delmore Schwartz

P.S. If you must have quotes, why won’t old quotes do? Maybe it is the extreme excitement of writing better than ever before that seems like drunkenness to you, when I relax into letter-writing?

To James Laughlin

[Date missing]

[First two pages missing]

… It is clear, is it not, that fame and fortune are mine, especially since, if I may improve upon a revolutionary hero of the past, I have just begun to write.

My chief weakness or Achilles’ heel is an irrational devotion to you. However, I am even more devoted to my self, and to good behavior, and your conduct during the last year — Matthiessen, duress before publication, spite or insensitivity about publication matters, quarrels with one and all, and your complete lack of responsibility — has done much to teach me how costly it is to be devoted to you.

It is possible for us to continue on a new basis by means of several plans, all of which will have to be confirmed in front of witnesses: (The following need not be in conflict with my new publishing venture):

Plan A: You give me a half-interest in New Directions. This is the best plan of all, but I know that, smart as you are, you are not smart enough to see how profitable this would be for you. Since it does not seem likely that this plan will delight you or impress you with its infinite practicality, I pass on to Plan B;

Plan B: You mail me a check for two thousand dollars as a retainer for my services as editor and author during the coming year. This is not as an advance, just as payment for services to be rendered the publishing house. This plan must be put into effect within eight days or the check will have to be augmented by five hundred dollars. After two weeks have elapsed, there will be no more price rises because it will be too late. I will have gone to New York and transferred my services elsewhere.

This plan, too, does not strike me as being likely to win your approval. If it does not, I do not really care very much, I will prosper with more responsible characters who care less for skiing and insulting sensitive human beings.

Supposing then that you are not shrewd enough to seize upon either of these plans, there remains the question of previous agreements. Since I am an honest person, I am prepared to give you the two books promised you, the work of fiction and the sequel to Genesis, once you have kept some of your broken promises and made some new ones of an unfinancial nature.

Thus, Plan C: You must send me a complete accounting of my royalties, give me a contract for an introduction to Flaubert’s Three Tales to requite me for the Matthiessen business, write me a letter apologizing for your reference in various quarters to Gertrude and Emily as “those lice in Cambridge,” sign a statement saying that any such unfavorable remarks will void any contractual agreements entered into in the future, and pay me the fifty-seven cents a copy for each copy of my first book above the cost of publication, an item stated in our initial contract which, I am told, you have broken in a dozen ways, many of them stated in your succinct prose which Robert Fitzgerald once compared to Mozart.

I trust that whatever your emotions at the moment are, you will be reasonable enough to consider the fact that your criminal behavior is a matter which can be proven by other human beings and by your own letters. Meanwhile, I really don’t demand an adherence to any of these plans. You can just disregard them. Each of them is a request for what is my just due, but I am perfectly content to forget about them. But since you have broken our contract in various ways, I will then have to consider it broken. There is no publisher in the country who would not be delighted to publish what I write, and there are several who are prepared to prove in court that you have broken your contract, if you are foolish enough to start a costly legal struggle in which your method of behavior comes out into the open.

I have not yet signed a contract for America, America! and I do not intend to, unless equity is restored and I have a real guarantee that you will not in the future behave in such a fashion as to make life difficult for me: Such as abusing literary editors, applying duress on the eve of publication by threatening not to publish an already-printed book, losing mss. for months at a time, endangering my relationships with friends such as Matthiessen, insulting my wife (whose inefficiency was less than her predecessor’s and who in any case did nothing to warrant your touching tribute), disturbing me with reports of conspiracies, and not promoting a book properly (as in the instance of Genesis) because of spite or timorousness or penuriousness or skiing.

All of this is merely a postcript, you will recognize, to the period last March when you taught me a lesson once and for all by writing me of Plans A and B. And all I want by way of restitution is either peace to go my own way, or two, the guarantee that so far as I am concerned, you will recognize and act upon the profound truth that Honesty is the best policy. That is the reason that Plan A strikes me as the most brilliant of the lot.

Our six years’ association, so fruitful to you, so fruitful and difficult for me, opened with a letter in which you called me a crook. It continued by your opening a letter to me from Harcourt, Brace, a violation of the laws about the mail. It reached great humiliation when Gertrude and I were unloaded at Baton Rouge so that you might have more room for baggage and a whore. It achieved a height of torment when my translation of Rimbaud appeared, and although you behaved with much kindness then, nevertheless this would not have occurred if I had been with a responsible publisher and if I had not been forced by poverty to live at Yaddo, far from anyone to consult about my translation. Told of this poverty in the early fall, you sent me a check for $150., a handsome reward to an author who had just helped very much to give the publishing house and publisher an immense success. There is no need to continue with these memoirs; my purpose is to see that such episodes do not occur again.

I don’t think you have any idea of the amount of ill-will you have accumulated in important places. Thus, the fact that you did little or nothing with Trilling’s book is going to keep other critics who might do as well from writing in that series. You can always get the third-rate, but that will do no good, especially since the first-rate authors will write for others. What chance, for example do you think I have for the kind of success my book on Eliot ought to have, if you are too intent on skiing to make provision for new editions? I say nothing of the difficulty of merely buying a book from New Directions, such is the character of your office.

Once again, I refer to the fact that if you had been willing to listen to me, you would have published Karl Shapiro and Eudora Welty. As a perhaps last piece of advice, I suggest that you act quickly in order not to lose a poet, critic, playwright, editor and teacher who has added much to the prestige, prosperity, and character of New Directions. If you look with care through the new list or catalogue, you will see that so far as success goes, half of the credit is just sheer luck, half is divided in equal parts: One, your money and energy and ambition; two, my ideas, or the direction you went in because of my interests as a critic, or my initial success. You ought also to regard the list from the point of view of the possibility of another author, old or young, being capable of my many activities, no matter how much you promoted him. Williams, Patchen, Fitts, even Miller’s lucid pornography, or Harry Brown, Paul Goodman, Robert Hivnor, Tennessee Williams, and whatever candidate attracts you at the moment.

As a reward, I’ve received some fifteen hundred dollars, many psychological attacks, and the news that you speak of my former wife, to whom I remain devoted, as “one of those lice in Cambridge,” a remark not made in a moment’s emotion, but typed and mailed.

Now if you are really sensible, you will not resort to charm, or anger, or threats, or anything but the decent behavior I have outlined above; which will not cost you anything, if you wish to save money in that pathological manner which leads to many of your worst errors. Don’t take the trouble to break away from the pleasures of Utah in order to converse and dicker with me, because within two weeks it will be too late and you will learn as never before that Honesty is the best policy, it pays to be good, and you have cast a pearl away.

I remain devoted to you, although I don’t know why. If you want to take the alternative of just calling off all bets, then our friendship can continue and be renewed on an uncommercial and disinterested level, though Utah is quite distant. But the best beginning would be a check and an apology.

Yours affectionately,

Delmore

To Gertrude Buckman⁵

[Cambridge

Spring 1943?]

Dear Gertrude,

You have not heard from me because I went to New York on Monday night and to Princeton on Tuesday, trying to get away from the boredom and emptiness here. I should have thought of your letters to your mother, but I did not, and after much thought I did not try to get you in New York because it seemed unlikely that you would want to see me so soon, as I see by your letter where you tell me not to call you. I came back last night, although I was going to stay longer, because I had to run away from New York and Princeton, everyone was too unhappy or dead to bear, and be with.

I suppose you must tell your father, but if you do, be sure that he promises to tell no one else. Philip lives on 10th St. and William on 9th, Fred is nearby, the Zolotows go back and forth, and on 8th Street you will certainly meet some of the boys all of the time. The only thing to say when you meet them is that you have just come to New York in order to visit your mother in New Jersey several times a week. I told them you were at Morristown when they asked for you, and Nancy took the address because she wanted to write to you. It might be best for you to pay a state or official visit to the Macdonalds and Phillipses, to maintain the deception. Besides, you will be lonely and it is better to see them than to be at the mercy of the abysses of loneliness, as you know.

//Dwight liked your review very much, and Richard liked it very much, but felt that there was not enough of the lenience in you and you were a woman with a woman with Kay Boyle. But it reads very well, it reads as if you had written literary criticism for ten years. I will send the copies today.

I was told by Dwight no sooner had I crossed the doorstep that Paul Goodman was going to attack Genesis, and from William I heard that Frank Jones, which might as well be Clement Greenberg, would review it for The Nation, and that there had been a row at Time about reviewing it at all.⁶ Matthiessen had not written his review, although Philip asked for it several times, and Richard had not written his, and spoke of putting it off, and when I looked dismayed, consoled me by a description of how Allen Tate had praised the book. Meanwhile Jay has written all over to say that he does not like the book, but thinks it deserves a serious review.

My last classes ended with surprising delightful prolonged applause, especially from the girls, and made me think I had perhaps not been as poor a teacher this year as I supposed. I boarded the train with Gogol’s Dead Souls, determined hereafter to read a masterpiece on each trip, and when an RAF officer sat next to me after Providence, and seemed to want to hold a conversation, I was divided in half by Gogol delightful [sic] and the feeling that I ought as a matter of conscience to hear what this instance of a great historical reality had to say. But Gogol was too profoundly farcical and I let the great historical reality go.

Dwight was speechless with a sore throat and nothing if not annoying, which made me go to Princeton where Richard and Nela were in their own ways annoying, Richard with his class which I went to and with his detailed activities, Nela with her stories of Richard, Helen, and Nela. But I stayed for two days and came back with Nela who had to come to see Christine, and then went to the Wilsons, asked there because I had been answering Dwight’s phone during his speechlessness, to find Lionel Abel, Dawn Powell, and Rolfe Humphries there, but also [Roberto] Matta [Echaurren] the painter, an effervescent soul who had brought Lionel, and Lionel’s girl friend, and his own wife pregnant and from Ohio. Matta wanted all to take off their clothes. This would be truth and consequences, he declared. No one spoke to Lionel, because he had not been asked to come, and finally I spoke with him and heard him prove that Sidney Hook believed in God. Consequently the next day Lionel went about to tell everyone what a fine fellow I was. Wilson was very attentive to me for several hours and called me Mr. Schwartz when I came in, Schwartz after the second highball, Delmore after the fifth, and Mr. Schwartz once more when we arrived at the eighth refreshing. Now I will never know what would have happened at the tenth and twelfth, although I was tempted to stay just to find out. //

The next night there was a foolish party at William’s, and Diana Trilling asked me if I thought I looked like her? to which I said after a stunned silence, it is very kind of you to ask me. Later William and I tried to decide what it could possibly have meant, and we went to see Meyer Schapiro and asked him, and he had several interpretations, but he was not sure. He looked worn out and old, and he said foolish things, and he told Philip Rahv that he did not know what he was harping about as they discussed the war. He had just written a piece for the magazine entitled “The Nerve of Sidney Hook,” making Hook look like a fool and maintaining that if Hitler won the war, there would nevertheless be the possibility of a revolution in Europe.

But I see that this must sound as if it were a happy trip, but it was not. I felt immense depression to see everyone paralyzed, unable to go forward with their work, not different or better than in 1938, and having nothing to say or foolish things to say, most of all Schapiro who lost his temper with Philip as if he were Dwight, and reported himself unable to read The Ambassadors from beginning to end, and remarked that Joyce hated the English language, part of a typical theory that only an Irishman could have written Finnegans Wake.

Your little pictures make me remember how you were beautiful then as you are now.

Except for your letters, there was no mail that was interesting when I came back last night. //

I dreamed about your room last night, and I did not like the way it looked. But in your letter it sounds like a fine room, and the fireplace must please you.

I will write you more and more, but I went to get this off right now to end this silence and waiting, which I should have thought of, except that I did not think of your difficulty with your father. If my mother hears anything, she will come here again and refuse to go, and maintain that she wants to take care of me, and then there will really be a scene.

Very much,

Delmore

To William Carlos Williams

20 Ellery St.

Cambridge, Mass.

August 20, 1943

Dear Williams:

I like your little poem, “These Purists,” very much, and we will use it soon, with Miller’s “It’s Not What You See, But How You See It.” I’d like to take several more of Miller’s pieces, but we’re full of too many unused accepted verse right now. At some later date, I hope you will send us not just one poem, but a group, for I’ve noticed that readers tune in on what you write when they look at several poems, one after another.

I don’t have your last letter here because I sent it to N.Y. to show the boys that there ought to be no more delays, about answering anyone (but they’ve been preoccupied with the business end of the review for the last two months). So, without your letter, I risk being told again that I did not read what you said. I risk it, anyway, letter or not.

However, the gist of the reply to your essay will be as follows, so far as I am in on it: Dr. Williams is an important poet and author of fiction. This essay is significant for that reason. In it, he maintains that the best kind of statesmen have been boobs, or at least none too bright. Intellectuals are too smart. They are smart to such an extent that they ought to be used very carefully, like any dangerous thing. They are by nature only “superficially colored by democracy.” Jump. Maybe then they are fascists. They don’t like to see a whitewashing of the totalitarianism of Soviet Russia (where two million peasants were deliberately starved in 1932) because such a whitewash has no military value whatever. Jump. Hence intellectuals, or at least [John] Dewey and Eastman, are aligning themselves with those who bombed Guernica. Mission to Moscow not only distorts the truth about Russia, but it also distorts the book on which it is based. Jump. This shows that intellectuals are too smart, and Russia may have its faults, but the fifth columnists (and, as you may know, the best living Russian poet, Pasternak) are behind barbed wire, unable to do any harm.

You can certainly reply to this in print if you like, after the other editors have added their remarks.

As I remember, you ended your letter by remarking that you and I were not intent on the same thing. So far as intent and intention go, this is not true; so far as performance goes, if I am half as good as you at fifty, I will be a lot more pleased with myself than I am now. But the intent is a common one: the exact description of what is loved and what is hated. If I may be even more personal about this, I might say that I guess my teaching at Harvard puts me under the general stigma of being academic. You have as much notion of what the academy is like now as I have of the care of infants. I teach the freshman how to use English, and when one boy writes that a neighborhood is slightly ugly or a person has an outstanding nose, I try to explain that they have misunderstood some words and might do better with other words. Or when a girl writes that “a liberal arts education makes a girl broader,” I try to explain that words have idiomatic and metaphorical qualities which require careful handling. When the high school gets done with them and when the newspapers, films and radio get through with their minds, they arrive here to be repaired. Thus, obviously, I am a kind of dentist, as you are a doctor, and it is an honorable calling. The textbook the freshmen use, as you may know, contains not one, but two pieces by you, “The Use of Force” and “The Destruction of Tenochtitlan.” The only other author with two pieces is your old chum, T. S. Eliot. It is in this way that you are treated by the academy. Meanwhile there are also the Navy boys to be taught, and it grows on me that the war will be over long before some of them learn how to spell, which I mention to explain the perhaps harassed tone of this letter.

The boys and the girls, by the way, seem to see no serious difficulty and inconsistency in reading both you and Eliot, nor do I, and your notion that Eliot keeps any good poetry from print is just as much fantasy as your idea that Macdonald likes Eliot. He resigned, saying among other things that he never wanted to run a review which printed such authors as Eliot. Another fantasy is that Lincoln was not an intellectual; how do you think he learned to practise law and to make the best speeches any politician is ever likely to make?

Well I’ve never won any argument with anyone and being in the middle of my twenty-ninth eternity, I don’t have the energy of old to nourish often-defeated hopes, but I cannot resist adding that your view of the role of Eastman and Dewey is identical with the view expressed by Alfred Noyes that Proust was responsible for the Fall of France. By your jumping logic, this makes you the same kind of poet as Noyes, if Dewey is aligned with the Fascists who bombed Guernica.

Perhaps I ought not to argue with one of the few of my elders I admire very much, but it occurs to me that the difference in age between us is not likely to diminish, so that this is as good a time as any.

Yours sincerely,

Delmore Schwartz

To James Laughlin

20 Ellery

Cambridge 38, Mass.

Oct. 16, 1946

Dear Jay:

I’ve finally got a manuscript to the point where it seems satisfactory. It’s a volume of two short novels and five stories entitled The World Is a Wedding. Will you let me know when you get this letter how soon it can be published? I can come down to New York with the manuscript as soon as you get back to America, and I think this would be the best procedure because there are extra-literary reasons for rushing as much as possible.⁷ If you can get it out by early spring, both of us will profit by the speed.

How do you feel about my appearing with two books in one year? The book on Eliot is close enough to being ready, though there is no question of rushing about this.

Yours,

Delmore

To James Laughlin

20 Ellery St.

Cambridge

Jan. 7, 1947

Dear Jay:

I am delighted more than I would have believed possible that you like the script.⁸ Perhaps all the sad years since 1943 can be traced back to your contempt for my last work.⁹ Can it be that your approval means so much to me? Be this as it may, I hope you will sustain your liking at least until the date of publication, and refrain from letters to editors telling them that you don’t like the book. My uneasiness is occasioned by the fact that you liked Shenandoah very much until you started to lend an ear to rival authors: “Your effort is VERY GOOD,” you wrote to me, “My congratulations on this evidence of the increasing tumescence of your esteemed literary powers.”

“Tumescence,” that’s what the girls like.

I think it would be a good idea to include the story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” not as an appendix, but just like the other stories. I’ve been getting letters asking for the entire book. Is it out of print? And is Shenandoah out of print too?

Can you get the book out by June? The Dial Press, which is no great shakes, takes only three months with an anthology of 600 pages. If it appears in June, I will bet you Elinor Blanchard’s address against two of my roundest, warmest and wettest students at Radcliffe that Orville Prescott will review the book in the Times and declare that I am almost as good as John Steinbeck.¹⁰ Is it a bet? But only if the book appears by June, because it gets hot and Prescott goes away because he does not like the heat and dear Alfred Kazin, who might review it on Sunday, will have departed to France.

How about giving me the introduction to Cocteau’s Selected Writings? I will do as good a job as John L. Sweeney, but faster.¹¹ I also admire Svevo, Pasternak, and Valéry very much, but more than anything else I lust for The Almighty Dollar, just like you.

You can have the page of ads in PR for $40, if you will sign up for six times a year. $40 is $8 less than anyone else. Please advise.

I don’t understand what “the Jewish problem” is, so far as my book goes.¹² No reader has ever accused me of providing anti-Semitic ammunition. In fact, I should think that this might well be the link with the gross public of New York, where most of the readers are, anyway.

The enclosures, which please return, are to show you that I always get good reviews. The gross public will love me, if it is given a chance. And now that I am an assistant professor, I am almost as authoritative as Harry Levin, n’est-ce pas?

Yours,

Delmore

To James Laughlin

405 East 7th St.

Bloomington, Indiana

June 26, 1951

Dear Jay:

My brother was finally located in Seattle. The pursuit had narrowed down to some place between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Canadian border when at last Kenneth — a man of few words — wrote me that he had returned to the aircraft industry as a tool engineer, giving up household appliances because of credit restrictions. This illustrates once more a truth I have tried to force on the American reading public — the international character of our lives; I wonder why I seem to be the only one who finds it fascinating. However, many thanks for offering to put Marie Rexroth on the trail.¹³

Elizabeth and I want to buy a house which we saw last week in Flemington, New Jersey. It has six acres, three bedrooms, two sheds, a barn, a Bartlett’s pear tree, two peach trees, a vegetable garden, a wonderful rooster, and among other valuable assets, a bathtub, for which I have yearned these last four years since leaving Cambridge. We have raised all but one thousand of the four thousand and five hundred dollars necessary to the purchase of it (the total cost is nine thousand, but half is a mortgage), and I wonder if you can lend us the one thousand we need, for a period of two years? You might lend the money to us either as a personal loan, or as an advance of five hundred to Elizabeth and five hundred to me, on books which ND published within the next two years. I will probably have a new book of short stories ready to show you by fall, and that with the addition of Elizabeth’s second novel, ought to cover the advance. If it does not, then we will be able to repay you the loan at the end of two years, because both of us will have to take full-time jobs by the fall of 1952 unless we manage to make more money than we are making now. We figure that by getting the house and living in the country as much as possible, we will be able to get more work done during the coming year. I have the promise of a good teaching job for 1952–1953, and unless I succeed in writing for the slicks during the coming year (as I have been trying to do for the past month), I will have to teach anyway, the fall after this, since there will be no P.R. salaries after next December.

The house appears to be a good investment and the kind of a place we need very much, as you seemed to have noticed last winter when you suggested that we use your place in Norfolk during your absence and thus get rid of cabin fever. It is just an hour and a half from New York, neither too near nor too far, it is entirely rural, and it is just right for the young novelist and the ageing poet’s declining years. I am sure that we can pay you back at the end of two years. However, if you are hard-up for cash or hard-pressed in one or another way, we will naturally understand, since we know how many other needs you have to handle. But do let us know as soon as you can.

We arrived here last Sunday and today I began to teach Yeats and Eliot at the School of Letters, which is the new name of the Kenyon School of English. It is very pleasant, but very hot. Arthur is here but he cannot play tennis with me because his doctor says that he is against it, so I am playing with Francis Fergusson who, as he confesses, is so eccentric a player that his eccentricity becomes a form of power. I never can tell — anymore than he can — what he will do next, while Arthur, while powerful, was entirely predictable. If Francis were but ten years younger, what matches we might have! Tate is here too; he has just become a Catholic and attacks Cardinal Spellman with a vigor he formerly reserved for Robert Hillyer.¹⁴ All in all, it looks like a pretty hot six weeks, and I wish you could come out and inspect the little boom in culture. Next week I lecture to the entire congregation on television and literature, and what chance there is that any sensible and sane portion of the reading public will ever open a book again once they get used to the television scream. As Shakesbeer said, “Some rise by vice, and some by virtue fall,” and the main thing is just to keep swatting the ball.

We passed through Greenfield, Indiana, on our way out, and it turned out to be the former home of James Whitcomb Riley, which made me think of Marguerite Young, since the dear girl is writing a book about the great bard.¹⁵ The heat and the strain of driving for three days was such that I was moved to compose the following masterpiece on the spur of the moment:

Who’s your Hoosier poet?

Pure corn entirely?

Marguerite would know it!

James Whitcomb Riley!

As Tears Eliot remarked, and he ought to know, poetry is a mug’s game — but if one is born a mug, one might as well accept the fact.

As ever,

Delmore

To Roy P. Basler A

725 Greenwich St.

New York City 14, N.Y.

September 9, 1958

Dear Roy:

Enclosed is the corrected copy of my lecture. You have edited it very well indeed and it must have been a trying task. I also enclose a list of the names of people I would like copies to be sent to; if it is possible to send more than twenty-five copies I wish you would let me know: and if it is a question of the Library’s budget I would be glad to pay for the additional copies. As you doubtless know, this is the practise of a good many literary reviews.

I am sorry to have to say that I will almost certainly have to make use of the letter you wrote me last September, about my being able to lecture in January. I would prefer of course to forget about everything that happened, including your letter, but it is impossible at present to do so. I am sure that you acted not only in all innocence and in natural concern about your program; nevertheless, the incident is important for a variety of reasons on which I will not dwell except to say what is relevant to your letter of inquiry concerning my health. It had not occurred to me when I last wrote you that it would have been possible to find out if I had lost my mental health in a good many ways other than that of writing a letter, the envelope of which was addressed to me — so that I would be certain to get it — but the body of which was addressed to my former wife. You will understand my feelings about the matter if I tell you, as I may [have], in part, before now, that I was the object of illegal arrest and detention in Bellevue for seven days, during which, as a result of improper treatment and false information, I had a heart attack on the fourth day and was put in a straitjacket and came close to dying. I did not know of this until last spring when I had a chance to examine the medical records. Your own letter was but one incident — there were a good many others — in which persons of great wealth, having involved themselves in a criminal conspiracy of the most serious kind — attempted to make it impossible for me to protect myself by preventing me from getting any financial help. Use was made of others as innocent of what was going on as you were and also of persons as unscrupulous as Conrad Aiken. During the past year I have repeatedly found that the defamation and the stigma consequent upon it have had serious consequences which I cannot do very much about personally, either through my work or by an explanation which sounds lurid and implausible to anyone who does not know the personas involved. I make this explanation to you with the same feeling that, although I owe it to you as someone who honored me by inviting me to lecture, it will nevertheless fail to be entirely convincing. This is one instance in which there is only one side of the story.

Sincerely,

[Unsigned carbon.]

To Dwight Macdonald¹⁶

House of Mirth

The Crack of Dawn

December 14, 1958

Dear Dwight,

Events are in the saddle, as Emerson rather pallidly remarked 100 years ago. But before burdening you with what has occurred since Saturday at 3, I must tell you that I can’t use your check until I hear from Art News and immediately add that this letter is not a new attempt of Laughing Boy to ask you for more financial aid. You’ve been more generous in all ways than anyone else, by far, and this sentence is, to be plethorically emphatic, sincere, candid, unequivocal, literal, etc.

However.

On Saturday night two hoodlums called on me at 2:30 A.M. and stayed until 5, trying to get me into a fight. When they left — partly because I had begun to ask them to stay — I went to the police station where the desk cop wrote my complaint into his intimate journals. He was rather impressed that one of my friends had taken a few dollars out of my pants pocket, and had been so dedicated to the task of throwing all my belongings on the floor (he was, he said, trying to find out whether I had what he called spunk) that he dropped his draft-board card amid the chaos of books and paper. The desk cop seemed to be delighted by this evidence that I had not been dreaming, but his delight was pure disinterested joy, for he has not sent a detective around, as he said that he would.

Last night my well-wishers and would-be friends, whoever they are, were tired or compassionate, for they restricted their courtesies to ringing the downstairs doorbell every hour from one to five.

The only reason I report this to you is the desire to do so. When I started the letter, I intended to describe a joint project called “Eggshells,” but now that the dawn’s mauve light has become a cotton pallor, I don’t feel like writing about it. It is a serious project, however. But there is no hurry whatever.

Best,

Delmore

To Mrs. Odell¹⁷

907 Harrison Street

Syracuse 10, N.Y.

August 20, 1964

Dear Mrs. Odell:

I intend to continue to pay one hundred and ten dollars a month rent and to stay in this apartment as long as it suits my convenience, or more precisely my immediate needs. If you believe that you are justified in raising the rent by ninety dollars a month — and thus one thousand and eighty dollars a year — I am sure that it would be wise to consult an attorney and go through the customary legal procedures of New York State when a landlord wishes to raise the rent or persuade a tenant to depart. As you may know, you will be wasting time and money; but if you do not know that this is true, it might be worth finding out for the sake of other such occasions.

The only reason you give for your incredible demands, “excessive damages,” has no basis in fact whatever. There are no excessive damages whatever: there are no damages. One mattress, which was very old and torn when I moved here in August 1963, became entirely useless as mattresses invariably do. As I told you in June, I meant to buy a new one myself as soon as my teaching and writing permitted me the leisure. Even if the mattress’s obsolescence had been hastened by me, to suppose that it justifies an increase of over one thousand dollars a year, or [is] a threat to the other facilities in any way at all, is so completely fantastic that it is difficult to believe that it is more than a pretext: only a severe lack of relation to reality could make anyone entertain the supposition seriously. The literal truth is that, since I never cook or entertain, I make almost no use of the facilities and furnishings outside of the bedroom and bathroom.

I must say again — though you may know this very well and imagine that I do not — there is an established legal procedure through which a landlord can seek to raise the rent or secure a tenant’s departure, and this is not only a perfectly effective recourse based upon many landlord-tenant relationships, it is also the only way in which my plans at present can be altered. I would probably prefer to get another apartment and avoid this very unpleasant letter and to conclude by asking you not to write any more letters to me, but use a lawyer or friend for whatever communications may be necessary. I have already had twelve months of letters characterized by gratuitous and insulting advice, lengthy analyses of character and habits of an intimate nature which a close friend would hesitate to make, and in general an insensitivity, insolence, tactlessness and wholly unprovoked hostility.

In any case, I will not open any further communications from you, but if you do consult a lawyer, I will be glad to provide him, at his request, with copies of letters you have written me.

Yours sincerely,

Delmore Schwartz

P.S. There is a limit beyond which forbearance becomes encouragement — your obvious compulsion to bully, patronize and insult anyone you [becomes illegible and crossed-over].

1. “Ezra Pound’s Very Useful Labors,” Poetry, March 1938, a favorable review of Pound’s Fifth Decade of Cantos.

2. Guide to Kulchur (1938).

3. the new Miller book: The Wisdom of the Heart, a collection of essays and stories, was published by ND in 1941.

4. JL was running the ski lodge in Alta, Utah, in Big Cottonwood Canyon above Salt Lake City.

5. Gertrude Buckman was Schwartz’s first wife, a writer. They divorced after six years.

6. It was an enthusiastic review; Jones echoed Eliot’s description of Pound’s Mauberley by praising Genesis as “a positive document of sensibility.”

7. The Laughlins were in France.

8. the script: Typescript of The World Is a Wedding.

9. my last work: Genesis (1943).

10. Orville Prescott: Principal book reviewer for the daily New York Times.

11. John L. Sweeney: Sweeney edited the ND edition of Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas (1946).

12. “the Jewish problem”: JL was having difficulty writing flap copy for The World Is a Wedding.

13. Marie Rexroth: Kenneth Rexroth’s first wife.

14. Robert Hillyer: (1895–1961): Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, led the campaign against the award of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1948.

15. James Whitcomb Riley: (1849–1916), known as “The Hoosier Poet.” writing a book about the great bard: Schwartz is mistaken or making another of his jokes. Young’s Angel in the Forest dealt with Utopian aspiration in New Harmony, Indiana.

16. Dwight Macdonald was an editor of Partisan Review from 1937 to 1943 and was a longtime friend and colleague of Schwartz.

17. Mrs. Odell was Schwartz’s landlady when he was teaching and living in Syracuse, New York.