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

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. 7If 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. 8Perhaps all the sad years since 1943 can be traced back to your contempt for my last work. 9Can 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. 10Is 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. 11I 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. 12No 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?