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

Though Delmore Schwartz’s reputation is sadly diminished from what it was at his beginnings in the late 1930s, it has been kept alive thanks to James Atlas’s excellent if depressing biography, which appeared in 1977, eleven years after the poet’s early death. Alas, the biography was a success not so much because people were at the time interested in Schwartz’s poetry, but because of the cautionary nature of his life story. Readers indifferent to modern poetry could still take grim relish in the classic saga of a brilliant poet, first heralded as a genius, the greatest young poet of his day, who quickly burnt himself out due to mental illness and addictions to alcohol and narcotics, and died almost forgotten at the age of fifty-two in a seedy hotel room in New York’s Times Square district. In a way, Atlas’s biography is the contemporary counterpart of Samuel Johnson’s great essay on the little-known eighteenth-century poet Richard Savage, which has become a classic study of the self-destructive, paranoid artist. Unfortunately, the story of Delmore Schwartz’s life hasn’t really sparked an ensuing revival of interest in his poetry. It has, however, kept his Selected Poems and several other collections of his writings in print at New Directions, which first published him in the thirties, and also resulted in the publication of a volume of his letters and a copious selection from his unpublished notebooks. The patient, that is to say his reputation, is still alive, if not exactly well. But the extent of Schwartz’s fall from grace can be measured by the fact that, although his early work was admired by Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, and such influential critics as R. P. Blackmur and F. W. Dupee (who wrote, “Since Auden’s early poems appeared, there has been no verse so alive with contemporary meaning”), he is not included in Helen Vendler’s comprehensive Harvard Book of American Poetry and is represented by only two poems in Richard Ellman’s canonical New Oxford Book of American Verse . Nor can one really fault the editors: Delmore Schwartz is but one, albeit perhaps the most distinguished, of a group of poets of his time whom a revolution in taste (in Schwartz’s case speeded by a decline in the quality of his later poems) has swept from view; perhaps he will be swept back in by some future revolution when his time has come.

Now, however, with this spendid Once and for All , the reader can see Delmore Schwartz whole again and take in his entire career.

Delmore, as everyone called him, including those who didn’t know him, was born in Brooklyn on December 8, 1913, to the unhappily married Harry Schwartz and Rose Nathanson, both immigrants from eastern Europe (“Atlantic Jews,” as Delmore would characterize their class in his poetry). He both loved and hated the artificially English-sounding name Delmore, and offered various explanations of its origin. James Atlas tells us: “Sometimes he would insist he had been named after a delicatessen across the street from the house where he was born, sometimes that his mother had been fond of an actor who was named Frank Delmore. In still other versions, the name was taken from a Tammany Hall club, a Pullman railroad car, or a Riverside Drive apartment house.” (His one sibling got off lightly with the given name Kenneth.) In his verse play Shenandoah , the protagonist’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fish, set about choosing a “distinguished and new and American” name for their firstborn, who becomes Shenandoah Fish, an alter ego appearing in a number of Schwartz’s works. Other ponderously named Jewish characters in his writings include Hershey Green (the Anglo-Saxon name Harold transformed to the Jewish Herschel and then to the name of a brand of chocolate), Rudyard Bell, Faber Gottschalk, and Richmond Rose; and Delmore himself would become the character Von Humboldt Fletcher in his friend Saul Bellow’s roman à clef Humboldt’s Gift , published after Schwartz’s death.

The circumstances of Delmore’s childhood and later life would be continually recalled in his writing, which is in a sense one vast mythification of himself and his family. Harry Schwartz was handsome, a successful businessman and a philanderer. Rose’s natural bitterness intensified as the marriage failed; in desperation, she secretly cashed a French war bond, the gift of a European uncle, to pay for an operation which would enable her to have children, thinking in this way to attach her husband. The operation was a success, but the marriage wasn’t. One particularly traumatic event occurred when Delmore was seven, and his mother discovered his father’s car parked outside a restaurant; going inside, they discovered Harry entertaining a “whore,” in his mother’s term; the ghastly scene that followed would later be enshrined in his poem “Prothalamion”:

… the speech my mother made

In a restaurant, trapping my father there

At dinner with his whore. Her spoken rage

Struck down the child of seven years

With shame for all three, with pity for

The helpless harried waiter, with anger for

The diners gazing, avid, and contempt,

And great disgust for every human being.

But all the small tragedies of childhood, situated and magnified against the backdrop of Europe (especially Russia, his father’s homeland) and the war that raged there, would become grist for Schwartz’s writing. In one of his best-known poems, “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” he compares himself, eating a baked potato in Brooklyn in 1916, with the Czar’s children playing ball “six thousand miles away”; he knocks the potato off his tray and loses it, just as the children’s ball escapes through a gate, and the ramifications extend even further back into history and myth: “In history’s pity and terror / The child is Aeneas again; / Troy is in the nursery, / The rocking horse is on fire. / Child labor! The child must carry / His fathers on his back.” History, he observes, has no “ruth,” no pity, for “the individual, / Who drinks tea, who catches cold,” that is to say, everybody. And in his most famous short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the poet himself moves backward in time, dreaming he is in a movie theater watching a silent film of his parents’ courtship at Coney Island years before. At a crucial moment “I stood up in the theatre and shouted: ‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.’”

Schwartz was an astoundingly prolific writer. He seems to have written almost continuously, not only in the various literary genres of poetry, fiction, and criticism at which he excelled — he was amazingly erudite — but also journals, letters, unfinished projects, and scraps and jottings of every kind. The bulk of his work is unpublished and probably unpublishable. The fragments from notebooks which his widow, Elizabeth Pollet, collected in a volume called Portrait of Delmore , run to 650 pages, and though there are treasures to be found in it, they are few and far between. For me and for most readers, his most rewarding phase is that of the early lyric poetry and the book of short stories, The World Is a Wedding , some of which are so good that one deplores the fact that there aren’t more of them (other uncollected short stories do exist), or that he never wrote any of the novels for which numerous sketches abound.

Schwartz’s most ambitious published work is the unfinished epic poem Genesis , published in 1943. The temptation to write the great American epic poem was particularly keen in the 1930s. Besides the obvious examples of Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land —which (unlike the longer Four Quartets ) I think must be considered an epic despite its relative brevity — together with Stevens’s “The Comedian as the Letter C”), there were other examples of would-be epic verse: Robinson Jeffers’s “Tamar” and “Roan Stallion”; the volume of a thousand sonnets called M by Merrill Moore, a member of the southern Fugitive group; Taal by the female poet Jeremy Ingalls; while still to come were Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror” and, much later, James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (both of these arguably influenced by Schwartz’s epic), Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” Williams’s Paterson , and Olson’s Maximus Poems —all products of an inherent American urge to make it big as well as new.