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PAGE 18 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE August 30, 1985
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Delmore Schwartz: Living down to genius
by Joseph Cohen
The case of Delmore Schwartz is as
intriguing as it is unique in the
annals of 20th century American
Jewish literature. In his 24th year
he published his first book “In
Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
(1938), a collection of short stories
and poems. Like Byron following
the publication of the first two can
tos of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrim
age” in 1811, Schwartz awoke the
next morning to find himself fam
ous. For the rest of his life he could
neither live down his celebrity sta
tus as the chief intellectual among
the American literary cognoscenti
nor could he live up to it. In the
end, he was certifiably insane, and
on two lamentable occasions, he
was packed off to Bellevue Hospi
tal in handcuffs.
Coming of age in the 1930s,
Schwartz anticipated the public
role Jewish writers would take for
granted from the 1950s forward.
He was the epitome of the New
York bred, Ivy League-educated
Jewish intellectual emerging from
the dark moon of the immigrant
community into the high noon of
sophisticated literary prominence.
For a time he played the part with
elan and dazzling brilliance.
But behind his glittering person
ality, his winning charm and his
handsome features there lurked a
bedevilled, arrogant monster, tor
menting himself and others in a
desperate effort to find out who he
really was. Having become at a
tender age the Court Jew to Amer
ica’s most prestigious men of let
ters, Carl Van Doran, Allen Tate,
Wallace Stevens, R.P. Blackmur
and John Crowe Ransom among
others, Schwartz never knew quite
what pose to strike. He was too
young, too insecure. It was not the
cognoscenti’s problem. Whatever
the private feelings several of them
may have had about Jews en masse,
Schwartz had been admitted to
their inner circle. It was his prob
lem and he messed up.
The result was that all his adult
life he was in an acute identity cri-
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sis of his own making. Ambival
ently, he retreated from Judaism in
his social encounters with the
world while simultaneously he em
braced it ardently (never religiously,
only historically and sociologically)
in his poems and stories.
Schwartz’s most important
books, “In Dreams Begin Respon
sibilities” (1938), “Shenandoah”
(1941), “Genesis Book I” (1943) and
“The World Is A Wedding” (1948:
the title comes from the Talmud)
are substantially about Jewish mi
gration to America and the Jewish
immigrant experience in the New
World. It is the Schwartz family
story, along with the stories of
some of their neighbors, replete
with separation, alienation and
rootlessness.
The emphasis upon separation is
migrational, generational and fam
ilial. In the latter instance,
Schwartz’s parents, Harry and Rose
(Nathanson) Schwartz, the immi
grant children of Romanian Jew
ish parents, introduced him at birth
in 1913 into a stormy, seething
domestic theater of war—Daddy
was a well-to-do, not always scrupu
lous real estate promoter and ac
complished philanderer; Mama was
an embittered, tenacious, voluble
martyr—where the infighting finally
culminated in their awakening him
in the middle of the night when he
was 6 years old to announce that
they were splitting, insisting then
and there that he decide which par
ent he would live with. He stayed
with his mother, whom he subse
quently came to hate. His father
later offered to buy him for $75,000.
It was an offer his mother could
refuse.
It is easy to understand why
Schwartz, living in the midst of this
acrimony—hostile takeover bids
are nothing new—became obsessed
with his own story, both in its per
sonal microcosmic intensities and
its sociological macrocosmic impli
cations: the Jews were separated
from their homes in the Old World,
they were alienated in America,
they separated from each other,
and their offspring could relate
neither to them nor to the gentile
society in which they found them
selves.
The sum of this experience was
rootless chaos for both the indi
vidual and the community. This
was the story Schwartz was deter
mined to tell, and he did, trembling
with the invented but no less real
fear of exposure and humiliation.
That is to say he hated his Jewish
ness and gloried in it at the same
time, and in that conflict lay the
madness he courted.
He got his accolades first, rush
ing to put his indelible stamp on,
ahem! American Literature. Hailed
as a prophet of the New Modern
ism, he became its pied piper, lead
ing the emerging generation of his
followers, the poets Robert Lowell
and John Berryman, among
them, down the primrose path to
the confessionalism and radicali-
zation of poetry which has tem
porarily robbed it of all felicity and
reduced it to its presently deplora
ble nihilism. This Schwartz did,
not by the example of his own
verses which rose above sentimen
tality and self-pity, or by his criti
cal dicta, but by the absence of
order and discipline in his lifestyle.
In his disorder and early (and late)
sorrow, he resembled Dylan Tho
mas, having in common with the
Welsh bard a flair for extravagant
notoriety, and an abiding need in
marriage and apart from it for con
solation, adulatory, sexual and
maternal. Both had a passion for
the comforts of the bottle, and
hung out when they could at New
York’s White Horse Tavern.
Much of the story of Schwartz’s
progress from prodigy to recog
nized genius and on to decline,
drugs, drink, despair, rage and
paranoia is well known from James
Atlas’ biography “Delmore
Schwartz: The Life of an Ameri
can Poet” (1977) and from Saul
Bellow’s novel about Schwartz,
“Humboldt’s Gift” (1975). Not un
expectedly, a lot of Schwartz’s short
stories, poetry and criticism have
found their way back into print in
the past decade and a half. To this
is now added “Letters of Delmore
Schwartz,” selected and edited by
Robert Phillips, with a foreward
by Karl Shapiro (Ontario Review
Press; $24.95).
These letters make for painful
reading, given Schwartz’s early pre
cocity, his awkward posturing
before the literary moguls, his recrim
inations against his wives when his
two marriages failed, his absurd,
pathetic charges of diabolical con
spiracies against him by friends
and strangers alike—he accused
Nelson Rockefeller and John F.
Kennedy of having affairs with his
estranged second wife—and his des
perate borrowing as he sank into
penury.
The only thing beyond his men
tion was his ignominious death in
July 1966 when he suffered a heart
attack while carrying out his gar
bage from his cheap Manhattan
hotel. For two days his body lay
unclaimed in the morgue. That his
papers have survived—they are now
all at Yale—is a minor miracle.
The real value of these letters is
that they will perhaps stimulate the
discerning reader to look into either
the Atlas biography, or the Saul
Bellow novel, or better yet,
Schwartz’s short stories, poetry and
criticism. He was an original and is
entitled to his legend, for he made a
genuine contribution to our cul
ture though he paid a heavy price
to do it.
We don’t have many Jewish liter
ary cavaliers; he would have been
one of the best of them if he hadn’t
been compelled to live down his
genius.
‘In his disorder and early (and late) sorrow, he
resembled Dylan Thomas, having in common with the
Welsh bard a flair for extravagant notoriety, and an abid
ing need in marriage and apart from it for consolation,
adulatory, sexual and maternal. Both had a passion for
the comforts of the bottle, and hung out when they could
at New York’s White Horse Tavern.’
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