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

However.

On Saturday night two hoodlums called on me at 2:30 A.M. and stayed until 5, trying to get me into a fight. When they left — partly because I had begun to ask them to stay — I went to the police station where the desk cop wrote my complaint into his intimate journals. He was rather impressed that one of my friends had taken a few dollars out of my pants pocket, and had been so dedicated to the task of throwing all my belongings on the floor (he was, he said, trying to find out whether I had what he called spunk) that he dropped his draft-board card amid the chaos of books and paper. The desk cop seemed to be delighted by this evidence that I had not been dreaming, but his delight was pure disinterested joy, for he has not sent a detective around, as he said that he would.

Last night my well-wishers and would-be friends, whoever they are, were tired or compassionate, for they restricted their courtesies to ringing the downstairs doorbell every hour from one to five.

The only reason I report this to you is the desire to do so. When I started the letter, I intended to describe a joint project called “Eggshells,” but now that the dawn’s mauve light has become a cotton pallor, I don’t feel like writing about it. It is a serious project, however. But there is no hurry whatever.

Best,

Delmore

To Mrs. Odell 17

907 Harrison Street

Syracuse 10, N.Y.

August 20, 1964

Dear Mrs. Odell:

I intend to continue to pay one hundred and ten dollars a month rent and to stay in this apartment as long as it suits my convenience, or more precisely my immediate needs. If you believe that you are justified in raising the rent by ninety dollars a month — and thus one thousand and eighty dollars a year — I am sure that it would be wise to consult an attorney and go through the customary legal procedures of New York State when a landlord wishes to raise the rent or persuade a tenant to depart. As you may know, you will be wasting time and money; but if you do not know that this is true, it might be worth finding out for the sake of other such occasions.

The only reason you give for your incredible demands, “excessive damages,” has no basis in fact whatever. There are no excessive damages whatever: there are no damages. One mattress, which was very old and torn when I moved here in August 1963, became entirely useless as mattresses invariably do. As I told you in June, I meant to buy a new one myself as soon as my teaching and writing permitted me the leisure. Even if the mattress’s obsolescence had been hastened by me, to suppose that it justifies an increase of over one thousand dollars a year, or [is] a threat to the other facilities in any way at all, is so completely fantastic that it is difficult to believe that it is more than a pretext: only a severe lack of relation to reality could make anyone entertain the supposition seriously. The literal truth is that, since I never cook or entertain, I make almost no use of the facilities and furnishings outside of the bedroom and bathroom.

I must say again — though you may know this very well and imagine that I do not — there is an established legal procedure through which a landlord can seek to raise the rent or secure a tenant’s departure, and this is not only a perfectly effective recourse based upon many landlord-tenant relationships, it is also the only way in which my plans at present can be altered. I would probably prefer to get another apartment and avoid this very unpleasant letter and to conclude by asking you not to write any more letters to me, but use a lawyer or friend for whatever communications may be necessary. I have already had twelve months of letters characterized by gratuitous and insulting advice, lengthy analyses of character and habits of an intimate nature which a close friend would hesitate to make, and in general an insensitivity, insolence, tactlessness and wholly unprovoked hostility.

In any case, I will not open any further communications from you, but if you do consult a lawyer, I will be glad to provide him, at his request, with copies of letters you have written me.

Yours sincerely,

Delmore Schwartz

P.S. There is a limit beyond which forbearance becomes encouragement — your obvious compulsion to bully, patronize and insult anyone you [becomes illegible and crossed-over].

1. “Ezra Pound’s Very Useful Labors,” Poetry, March 1938, a favorable review of Pound’s Fifth Decade of Cantos.

2. Guide to Kulchur (1938).

3. the new Miller book: The Wisdom of the Heart , a collection of essays and stories, was published by ND in 1941.

4. JL was running the ski lodge in Alta, Utah, in Big Cottonwood Canyon above Salt Lake City.

5. Gertrude Buckman was Schwartz’s first wife, a writer. They divorced after six years.

6. It was an enthusiastic review; Jones echoed Eliot’s description of Pound’s Mauberley by praising Genesis as “a positive document of sensibility.”

7. The Laughlins were in France.

8 . the script: Typescript of The World Is a Wedding .

9 . my last work: Genesis (1943).

10 . Orville Prescott: Principal book reviewer for the daily New York Times.

11 . John L. Sweeney: Sweeney edited the ND edition of Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas (1946).

12. “the Jewish problem”: JL was having difficulty writing flap copy for The World Is a Wedding .

13. Marie Rexroth: Kenneth Rexroth’s first wife.

14. Robert Hillyer: (1895–1961): Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, led the campaign against the award of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1948.

15. James Whitcomb Riley: (1849–1916), known as “The Hoosier Poet.” writing a book about the great bard: Schwartz is mistaken or making another of his jokes. Young’s Angel in the Forest dealt with Utopian aspiration in New Harmony, Indiana.

16. Dwight Macdonald was an editor of Partisan Review from 1937 to 1943 and was a longtime friend and colleague of Schwartz.

17. Mrs. Odell was Schwartz’s landlady when he was teaching and living in Syracuse, New York.