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

I came home one Saturday night in mid-winter and was surprised to find my brother there with his best friend. 2I was surprised because Saturday night was their big night, the one on which they were determined to have a good time, or at any rate to stay out late. If they stayed out late they would not feel they weren’t making the best use of the one night of the week when they did not need to go to sleep and get up the next morning and to go to work. 3

Neither of the boys had been paying any attention to the other. My brother Stanley was reading the evening edition of the next day’s Sunday paper and his friend Howard was studying the colored comics with profound attention, grunting now and then with amusement. 4

Howard said to me: “We have just been talking about you and trying to decide why you spend your time the way you do, writing poems, stories, and reviews. What is it going to get you? No one or hardly anyone is interested in these things and you don’t make much money, do you?”

“No, I don’t, and you’re right, only about ten thousand people in the whole United States are truly interested; perhaps not even that many.” 5

“Then why do you do it? How do you know that anything you write is any good? Here you are writing articles of criticism in which you say whether a book is good or not. Now what I want to know is, How do you know what is good?”

“Would you really like to know how I try to decide? Because I’ll tell you if you’re willing to listen to me.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he answered, “we were just getting ready to go out.”

Both boys arose, knowing they had left me in a lurch, in the middle of a sentence, so to speak. My brother, a person of infinite tact, said that he would like to hear about it tomorrow. 6But Howard could not suppress one parting shot—

“Just remember”, he said aggressively, “that a hundred and forty million human beings feel differently than you do and like the books you dislike and dislike the books you like, that is, if they waste any time paying attention to them. I don’t like the books you read, and I can’t even understand your poems or stories. 7

The same kind of question arose in different forms upon other occasions and among other people. Once a relative of mine returned from a performance of “Mourning Becomes Electra” to ask why human beings, unhappy themselves, should be expected to enjoy and pay for a view of unhappiness for hours on end. On another occasion, another person looked at a story of mine and then at a poem; and then inquired why I never attempted to beautify anything.

DRAFT OF THE INTRODUCTION

T. S. Eliot is a great poet and the best literary critic in the English language.

I begin with this extreme statement so that the purpose of this book will be clear. Sainte-Beuve, a great critic, said that the purpose of the literary critic was to show the reader how to read more and more. This plain statement assumes that there are many ways in which to read the same book. By examining his own experience, the reader will remember how interesting and how illuminating the reading of other readers has often been. It is the best means of checking and extending and correcting our own experiences of the book. Do we not look at the introduction, converse about the book, and look for book reviews, always or chiefly with the purpose of seeing how our reading is the same or different from the experience of other readers? how we missed what other readers saw? how we projected into the book what was in our own existence, not in the book itself?

Implicit in this is the social nature of experience and of literature. Each one must read for himself, but he must be taught how to read by the society in which he exists and has come to belong. And each one’s understanding of the words which he reads is determined by the way in which words are used by society.

We must remember our own society as well as the poet and the reader when we come to the first metaphor in T. S. Eliot’s first book. This metaphor may very well be the beginning of modern American and English poetry, for it is likely that the reader will begin with this poem and this metaphor, when he begins to read the poetry of this age.

…. When the evening is stretched out against the sky,

Like a patient etherized upon a table

With this metaphor, J. Alfred Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, begins to express — which means to press out what is within — his inner anguish of being.

To compare an evening sky to a patient upon an operating table is perhaps a forced comparison, considered in itself. For the visual image of the patient must be inverted; we must look down at the patient, but we must look up at the evening sky. What is important about the metaphor, considered as poetry, is the way in which two very different things have been joined. Considered in the most general way, within the context of how poetry is written in English, the important thing about this metaphor is the width of its sensibility or sensitivity. Although Keats studied to be a doctor, he could not have written such a metaphor; and neither Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti, nor the poets of Yeats’ generation were capable of a consistent apprehension of experience in such a way. A conception of poetry and of the nature of the poetic prevailed, which prevented these poets from thinking in terms of such a metaphor. This very conception of the nature of poetry was itself installed by Wordsworth and Coleridge, who in turn introduced a sensibility or sensitivity different from the eighteenth-century conception of poetic style and diction.

Wordsworth, by means of a new poetic style, a new use of words, rhythms, and images, made possible a new consciousness of nature. Eliot and other modern poets have made possible a new consciousness of modern life.

Yet to speak in this way of a new consciousness of modern life is to risk a misunderstanding which has deceived many poets, critics, and readers. A poet does not achieve a new apprehension of experience merely because he writes about new experience, and many poets have made the error of supposing that they were holding a mirror up to nature because they wrote poems about the automobile or the railroad train. In the same way, some poets have been misunderstood and condemned because they did not write about automobiles, trains, and the industrial character of modern life. But to expect this of the poet is to expect him to be a camera, an automatic register of experience.

The new experience of modern life made possible by Eliot’s poetry is a new sense of the actual, new in that it joins for us things which in ordinary experience exist far apart from each other. Our sensitivity to experience has been widened not because two objects have been newly joined, but because the relevance of any two such objects to each other and to human thought and emotion has been shown.

It is thus essential to consider the actual, and the sense of the actual in Eliot’s poetry. The sense of the actual and the supreme power to grasp it has been one of the great virtues of Eliot’s poetry from the very start.

The actual is that which exists. It is not that which we would like to exist, nor what we hope will exist, nor what we are taught should exist. The failure to distinguish between what is actual and what is not is the cause of much weakness and blindness. The power to grasp the actual is also very important in any effort at understanding what is possible and what is ideal.

The actual is like a moist handshake, damp with nervousness or the body’s heat. This should suggest degrees of actuality and the difference between such a handshake and the gloved hand of an ambassador. The latter is also actual, but one has encountered less of the reality of the person.