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

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 . 2Here 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.