Delmore Schwartz - Once and for All - The Best of Delmore Schwartz

Love anyway to all of them!

And may they live to see the peace

When no one has to drink to live

And work without hysteria,

Self-pity and insomnia,

Poor Schwartz! Poor Schwartz!

Self-doubt and sun deliria!

Poor Blackmur and poor Schwartz!

Poor Schwartz, he meant well anyway?

But all for parents loves must pay!

Poor Berryman! Poor Schwartz,

All poet’s wives have rotten lives,

Their husbands look at them like knives,

Exactitude their livelihood

The audience would have them miss

Poor Gertrude, poor Eileen

(No longer seventeen)

But back to children, not yet done,

(The infamy has just begun!)

When Sage bathed in the Swishe’s house,

with joy came in and looked,

— And all looked on

Sage stared right back, cold, bored, polite

(This was an act Keith would have booked!),

While Susie glittered in the light!

And now with sudden happiness,

I think of last year’s New Year’s Eve,

(When Nela falls on Hortin’s stairs,

Strange God is kind or he is luck),

And if God is, or is good luck

Some of us may enjoy a duck!

PERSONS OF THE PLAY

Anthony Norman: Mrs. Bergen

Dr. Newman: Martha Bergen

Dr. Bergen: Dr. Bergen’s Disciples

INTRODUCTION

[ A room bare of all but an oval mirror and a table before which DR. BERGEN stands, regarding himself as he rehearses his speech, as if assuming an audience in an auditorium. ]

DR. BERGEN:

There seems to be no Santa Claus. The air

Is free, the park’s nature open until

Ten o’clock comes once more, the starlight admirable,

The unemployed unobtrusive, the traffic’s hum

Subdued as one’s attention shifts,

but otherwise

A final emptiness confronts your eyes.

For otherwise, there is no Santa Claus,

Though the scene shifts to the seashore at dusk

— The summer over, the carousel rusts,

The twilight is cold, it is October—

Where he who walks in solitude, who pauses

At last upon the verge of rocks, dim, dim,

Gazing upon the curled and curling waters,

Does not look up unto the curving sky

Sure that his fate must be coherent there.

The sky is merely dim and vacancy

Through which the airman may ascend for years

And not hear any word, not one, nor see

A face intelligent amid the clouds

Unless the bulged face of the clouds’ heaped-up

And foaming coma.

If he lifted his arms

And bent his knee and bowed his head, what would

He to his own self seem? Grotesque, grotesque,

The sad comedian of cane and derby

Collapsed upon the pavement.

Prayer is now

Ridiculous. Appeal, apostrophe,

And invocation are but mutterings,

Turning from side to side in ignorant sleep.

No one regards you, no one cares for you, none

Shall find cake on the pavement, none

Shall have the past forgiven, and no one

Hears the benevolent white-bearded one

Descend the chimney, rise in the elevator,

Arrive to dispense gratis and for no toil

All justice, loving-kindness, and good will.

But every side is wrong, but every man

Is guilty, every child is used, and now

Effort is useful as spitting in the sea,

Good and evil are merely expressions of pain

In the perpetual return of the blind night

And the bit by bit disorder of the rain.

When music makes the whole room radiant,

Spreading the dream of sweet societies

Where all dance out their gifts, their needs, their choices,

One knows that heaven is epiphenomenal,

Rising from peaked musicians with bad complexions.

Breakfast is good. An income is good.

It is good to be sunburnt, warm, and clean.

Besides this, what can you say with certainty?

In fact, what can you mean but this,

The sunlight where you are in turning time?

Who will rise up, speak out, convinced, convinced,

Affirm once more that nothing can be done

Without the help of that great Santa Claus

Promised to children in the middle ages

— Not now! But with cigar-store Indians

Remembered only in old vaudeville.

— I will speak out! I will show you a wonder,

The secret satisfaction of every wish!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I know you all,

I know you all, I know all that you want.

Which is, though vaguely, all. O you require

A big black piano

And skates for poise

A safe for memory, a giant glass

To drink each dear,

Wit, learning, and a deck of cards

Stacked by the will,

The genuine she to whom your shameless he

Is me and me,

Double-delighting in a box which is

A tender sea—

None of these things are given. But you get

What you do not want, what you do not need,

Do not expect, or do not recognize—

Strength to be patient, naiveté to hope,

Perplexed affection, inexhaustible will,

Brief visits from the dead, and love unwanted,

Too much, too little, overwhelming all.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the emptiness

Which you know well, which is unbearable,

A boredom which no man escapes unless

An animal need preempts and but defers

The question all must face, which I have faced:

What is this life? What can man ask to have?

I know the answer, I have known enough

To leap, jump, jig, and somersault until

Absurdity itself is searched

For Who Knows Him, the dream behind the dream.

I come, I say, having understood in part

The formless vacancy between the stars,

The marvelous light in which all things move and seem,

And the Santa Claus of the obsessed, obscene heart.

[ The living room of the Bergen apartment in the year 1920. French windows at the back are half-open, showing the terrace, which has a wide parapet. It is an afternoon in October. Enter ANTHONY NORMAN, fiancé of Eleanor Bergen, who killed herself three months before. He walks to the mantelpiece, gazes at the photograph of Eleanor which stands there. ]

ANTHONY:

This is the house of the dead, this is the house

Perplexed by a girl who killed herself.

In the morning when they came to wake her

The time to dress herself, prepare her face,

Eat breakfast, and seek the day’s interests,

Had been evaded utterly by her;

Also my will, which I had given her.

— Here they construct a system to make their lives

Self-regarding, self-gratifying, self-conscious,

Indulging their minds in the old foolishness,

The vain vanity: to correct the heart of man,

A mission, a justification, a declaration.

— The true motive is private unhappiness.

But they cannot forget the girl who killed herself,

Though they seek to see in her death a deliberate witness,

As I seek to see in her death my own grave fault,

My weakness, my failure, having offered explicitly

My face, my heart, my will. The I beneath

My quivering eyes cannot support

Her utter rejection of my life, my face, my heart;

I cannot endure myself until I know

Why she turned from me, seeking nothingness.

I must come here again and again to stare

At her parents, her bedroom, her photograph,

While they make of her death their myth and mystery.

The love whose answer was the wish to die

Gasps in a vacuum, seeks the fading face,

Fading and flickering in memory’s cinema.

One million times a single question drags

Its incompleteness, its unfinishedness

Through the unending corridors of unconsciousness.