Delmore’s Gift

“Ah, poor Humboldt! He might have been—no, he was so fine!”

—Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s
Gift by Saul Bellow

The legend of Delmore Schwartz may seem more durable than the reputation of his work. Immortalized as Von Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Delmore was the golden boy of his literary generation, “handsome, fair, large, serious, witty,” and “learned”: “the brilliant golden master of conversation,” as Bellow’s narrator says of Humboldt. At the age of twenty-three, he had written a perfect short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which appeared with pride of place in the first issue of the new Partisan Review, alongside works by Wallace Stevens and Picasso. When his first book appeared in 1938, under the same title, Schwartz had just turned twenty-five and was immediately hailed as the most important writer of his generation.Allen Tate, the leading figure of the “Fugitive Poets,” wrote to him: “Your poetic style is . . . the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound.” As Irving Howe later remarked, Schwartz had become “the poet of the historical moment quite as Auden was in England.”

Great expectations no doubt played into Schwartz’s manic-depressive personality, encouraging him to embark on his massive project, Genesis, a modern epic to rival Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos, while far surpassing them in length. Only Genesis: Book One (1943) was completed and published in Schwartz’s lifetime, although at more than 180 pages, it is nothing if not long. It landed, like most of Schwartz’s subsequent work, with a polite thud, despite his frenetic campaign to engineer flattering reviews from eminent poets and critics.

A decade later, Schwartz mused in a journal entry on the steep decline of his literary reputation: “Either it is true that I am not good—not first rate or I am unread because of having turned to the theme of the Jew after my first book.” Other conspiratorial speculations followed. Attended by pills and alcohol, he had begun his long slide into paranoid psychosis, ultimately accusing his second wife of abandoning him for Nelson Rockefeller and suing Bellow (among others) for making off with money intended for Schwartz’s care. At fifty-two years of age, his body was found in the hallway of a Times Square hotel; he had suffered a heart attack and remained unidentified for days. As Bellow wrote in Humboldt’s Gift, “At the morgue, there were no readers of modern poetry.”

Had recognition been doled out in more moderate increments, perhaps Schwartz would have spent a larger share of his genius on pitch-perfect lyrics, like his early poem, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” a brilliantly executed complaint against the dumb hungers and aggression of his animal life:

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Always graceful and refined, Schwartz’s language is wonderfully free of its lumbering subject, who “howls in his sleep for a world of sugar.” The poem’s most poignant passage touches on the poet’s conflicted sexuality:

The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear.

As literary historians have observed, Schwartz was the first of his generation to relax the impersonal mask of modernist verse, setting the stage for the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and John Berryman. But here, at his most intimate, Schwartz’s almost Elizabethan sense of decorum transforms the personal into the universal. His cunning pun on “bare,” for instance, displays more mastery and wit than emotional nakedness. In the end, the poem’s speaker is both confessional and everyman, “Amid the hundred million of his kind, / The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.”

In what sense, and to what degree, was Genesis a disappointment? Schwartz’s own judgment oscillated wildly. Well into its composition, he predicted it would be “the longest and worst poem in American literature.” But he was also given to grandiose claims. “In days to come,” he told New Directions publisher James Laughlin, Genesis would seem the beginning of “post-Symbolism,” doing for poetry what Cezanne had done for painting. It would last “as long as the pyramids.” It’s tempting to say that Genesis contains passages to justify both judgments.

At the heart of Genesis: Book One is the sparse, compelling saga of Schwartz’s family, from the generation of his paternal grandfather, a soldier in the tsar’s army, to the slow-motion train wreck of his parents’ marriage (the subject of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” as well). Only the names have been changed—his own to “Hershey Green.” By chronicling his Jewish family in a narrative style adapted from the Hebrew Bible, Schwartz had indeed “turned to the theme of the Jew” after his first book, often with tremendous success. Hershey’s story climaxes with a primal scene from Schwartz’s childhood. Passing a “large white roadhouse, once a Colonial Mansion, from whose roof / The Stars and Stripes were blowing in the daylight summer evening, like an accordion,” his mother, Eva, spots the parked car of her philandering husband, Jack. She enters the restaurant, son in tow, like a fury of retribution:

The headwaiter came up and asked Eva Green,

Was she waiting for anyone? Because she looked intensely through the dining-room, and because she was an incongruous figure, holding a small boy by the hand.

Yes, she was waiting for someone, she replied, standing there in the lobby, holding Hershey with a grasp which hurt his hand,

Casting her glances about, almost ready to give up because she did not see Jack Green anywhere,

Until, just before she was going to turn to go, she saw Jack Green at a table in a corner next to the window,

Seated with a woman, drinking and chatting, amid soft music from the musicians. Quickly she moved to this table,

Turned to the rest of the long dining-room, the headwaiter beside her, helplessly polite,

Begging her to sit down, and cried out and spoke aloud

Her passionate righteous anger, inspired and shouting phrases she had read in the Hearst papers about divorce cases,

Pointing to Hershey, his hand still clutched in hers, his joy at seeing his father destroyed in that moment,

Shouted to the diners on the mezzanine floor that her husband had left her and her children to dine with a whore!

The controlled reaction of Hershey’s father is no less memorable, in lines that evoke, as perhaps all of Genesis does, American cinema and a biblical chronicling of generations:

But Jack Green arose and took Hershey by the hand and walked outside with him,

And lighted a cigarette, and stood with Hershey silent upon the cinder path, his face hard and cold as he looked down at the boy in the daylight saving evening.

The controlled reaction of Hershey’s father is no less memorable, in lines that evoke, as perhaps all of Genesis does, American cinema and a biblical chronicling of generations:

But Jack Green arose and took Hershey by the hand and walked outside with him,
        And lighted a cigarette, and stood with Hershey silent upon the cinder path, his face hard and cold as he looked down at the boy in the daylight saving evening.

Had Schwartz always written thus, Genesis: Book One would deserve to be regarded as a masterpiece of American literature and a significant development of his art—seamlessly fusing his gifts as a lyric poet and a short story writer—rather than as evidence of his decline. But Genesis: Book One is both. High above the all-too-human drama, the disembodied dead appear to hover, or one might imagine them sitting in a dark auditorium of the mind, interrupting Schwartz’s family stories with verse commentaries. Their windy invocations of Plato, Freud, and Marx (and “of the divinities, America, Europe, Capitalismus”) are meant to supply the poem with a tragic chorus. But Schwartz’s ghosts are too ironic, too supercilious (or, by turns, sentimental), to be tragic or even very interesting. Having died, they regard life as cartoonish: “strips of comedy, / Speaking balloons.” But they themselves are cartoonish. Schwartz was apparently evolving and declining at the same time—or on parallel tracks.

A similar pattern plays out in his subsequent work. As James Atlas had suggested in his classic biography of Schwartz, the long manuscript of improvisations titled Genesis: Book Two, which appears in its entirety for the first time with the publication of this new collection, contains a handful of Schwartz’s most remarkable and original poems. But his next book, Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems (1950), is thoroughly disappointing, and Schwartz understandably chose not to reprint any of its poems in Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems (1959), which contained the new poem, “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine,” a luminous philosophical masterpiece with a high gloss finish.

In Humboldt’s Gift, Von Humboldt Fleisher had published only one book of ballads, which made him famous for a time. Renata, Citrine’s girlfriend, spitefully remarks that Humboldt “only wrote ten or fifteen poems.” In response, Citrine points out that they were “beautiful,” and that “even one is a lot, for certain things.” Indeed, even one beautiful, fully accomplished poem is no mean thing, and “ten to fifteen” is a rare and considerable gift. But Delmore’s literary gift was different than Humboldt’s. For Schwartz kept writing, even as mental illness closed in on him, sometimes producing poetry as good as the best of his early work, as the belated publication of The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz makes clear.

Even as late as 1962, Schwartz was capable of writing one of his most memorable poems, “First Night of Fall and Falling Rain,” the last poem he chose to publish. At the time, when he wasn’t teaching at Syracuse or committed to the sanatorium near the university, Schwartz was living in New York City and giving alcohol-fueled readings at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Lumbering and overweight, lashing out against his closest friends and supporters, he had come to resemble the heavy bear he once decried.

Although “First Night of Fall and Falling Rain” is as elegant as the best of Schwartz’s early work, it also, in every way, marks the end of his ambitions, literary or otherwise. As he nurses whiskey and ice by the first fire he has made since a cold night in May (“too long ago to be more than / Merely a cold and vivid memory”), the poet feels his ego dissolve (“at dusk, the very sense of selfhood waned / A weakening nothing halted”). Indeed, nowhere in the poem does Schwartz use a first-person singular pronoun, as if the very grammar of a singular self had become merely a sensation, regarded, if at all, with supreme detachment. Into this mental state of diffusion, the “common rain had come again / Slanting and colorless, pale and anonymous,” pattering on the darkened windows of the poet’s apartment and over the surfaces of the cityscape. It does not so much suspend Schwartz’s ebbing sense of identity as redeem its dissolution, with a revelation that ultimately derives from Ecclesiastes (via Pilgrim’s Progress and Vanity Fair). Undistinguished and making no distinctions, falling everywhere, with its unbroken natural music, “in slow sustained consistent vibration,” the rain momentarily washes Schwartz’s sorrow away—“down runnel and drain”—along with the vanity of every human effort, including the fantastic quest for literary recognition that he had, so stunningly, won and lost:

Staring, empty and without thought
Beyond the rising mists of the emotion of
   causeless sadness,
How suddenly all consciousness leaped in
   spontaneous gladness;
Knowing without thinking how the falling rain
   (outside, all over)
In slow sustained consistent vibration all over
   outside,
Tapping window, streaking roof, running
   down runnel and drain
Waking a sense, once more, of all that lived
   outside of us,
Beyond emotion, for beyond the swollen
   distorted shadows and lights
Of the toy town and the vanity fair of waking
   consciousness!