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

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

For readers of at least the last two decades, it has been extremely difficult to construct an accurate picture of the shape of Delmore Schwartz’s career. Between Schwartz’s death in 1966 and the early 1980s, a number of posthumous books were published. These included volumes that are now already out of print: James Atlas’s excellent biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet; Portrait of Delmore , containing excerpts from Schwartz’s journals, edited by his second wife Elizabeth Pollet; The Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz , edited by Donald Dike and David Zucker; two collections of letters; and Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays , edited by Robert Phillips. Schwartz’s own original collections of poetry and prose — his 1938 debut In Dreams Begin Responsibilities; Genesis: Book One , the only published volume of his uncompleted epic; The World Is a Wedding , his first book of stories; Vaudeville for a Princess , his second book of poetry and prose; and Successful Love , his last story collection — have all been unavailable for decades. Some prose and poetry from these books is contained in various editions published by New Directions. But none of these selections give a truly accurate sense of the development of Schwartz’s art and the unfolding of his literary career.

It is my goal to offer in this single volume the best and most representative of Schwartz’s writing, much of it available for the first time in years, some of it published for the first time. I hope readers will be able to gain a broad, if not complete, understanding of Delmore Schwartz the literary artist. Selections from Genesis are reprinted here for the first time since the book’s original publication in the 1940s; as a whole, the poem is unsuccessful, but, as John Ashbery says in his introduction, there are many stunning passages. I have tried to select a few that represent the whole work. I have also added two unpublished poems found in Schwartz’s archives, held at Yale. The book includes, for the first time, selections from Schwartz’s unpublished book on T. S. Eliot, commissioned by James Laughlin for his Masters of Modern Literature series. This series, containing critical books about single authors, was published early in New Directions’ history.

As it is my goal to portray the unfolding of Schwartz’s career, I have grouped the pieces according to the order of their original publication in Delmore’s own books, though where pieces were reprinted in later books, I have used the later book as my textual source. In Summer Knowledge , Schwartz seemed to have found a more appealing order for the poems in his first book, so I have used that ordering. I am not a textual scholar; I have done my best with the material from the archives to interpret Schwartz’s handwritten drafts and corrections. I only hope any mistakes I have made will be corrected by a future researcher.

I owe thanks to many people, foremost among them my wife Brenda Shaughnessy, who has had to suffer Schwartz’s long residence in our household. I am also grateful to Robert Phillips, Schwartz’s literary executor, for his support of this project. Barbara Epler, Jeffrey Yang, Declan Spring, and Laurie Callahan of New Directions carried forward James Laughlin’s devotion to Delmore, an early author and advisor to the press, and I am eternally thankful to them for giving life to this project. Thank you to John Ashbery for the use of his lecture as the foreword to this book. I am also grateful to my research assistant Monica Sok, and to Don Share and Stephen Burt for much help and advice.

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER

I

I think it is the year 1909. I feel as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen. This is a silent picture as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps. The actors too seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots themselves are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. His clothes are newly pressed and his tie is too tight in his high collar. He jingles the coins in his pockets, thinking of the witty things he will say. I feel as if I had by now relaxed entirely in the soft darkness of the theatre; the organist peals out the obvious and approximate emotions on which the audience rocks unknowingly. I am anonymous, and I have forgotten myself. It is always so when one goes to the movies, it is, as they say, a drug.

My father walks from street to street of trees, lawns and houses, once in a while coming to an avenue on which a streetcar skates and gnaws, slowly progressing. The conductor, who has a handlebar mustache, helps a young lady wearing a hat like a bowl with feathers on to the car. She lifts her long skirts slightly as she mounts the steps. He leisurely makes change and rings his bell. It is obviously Sunday, for everyone is wearing Sunday clothes, and the street-car’s noises emphasize the quiet of the holiday. Is not Brooklyn the City of Churches? The shops are closed and their shades drawn, but for an occasional stationery store or drugstore with great green balls in the window.

My father has chosen to take this long walk because he likes to walk and think. He thinks about himself in the future and so arrives at the place he is to visit in a state of mild exaltation. He pays no attention to the houses he is passing, in which the Sunday dinner is being eaten, nor to the many trees which patrol each street, now coming to their full leafage and the time when they will room the whole street in cool shadow. An occasional carriage passes, the horse’s hooves falling like stones in the quiet afternoon, and once in a while an automobile, looking like an enormous upholstered sofa, puffs and passes.

My father thinks of my mother, of how nice it will be to introduce her to his family. But he is not yet sure that he wants to marry her, and once in a while he becomes panicky about the bond already established. He reassures himself by thinking of the big men he admires who are married: William Randolph Hearst, and William Howard Taft, who has just become President of the United States.