Electrical insight

“He was out of his own mind for years, / in police stations & Bellevue”, wrote John Berryman of his friend, the American poet Delmore Schwartz, in “Dream Song #155”. Schwartz was born in 1913 in New York and died there of a heart attack, at the seedy Columbia Hotel in Midtown, only fifty-three years later. By the end of his life Schwartz was a far cry from the poet Berryman adored: “I remember his electrical insight as the young man, / his wit & passion, gift, the whole young man / alive with surplus love”.

Berryman’s observations about Schwartz’s personal and literary character are devastatingly accurate, as Ben Mazer’s Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz demonstrates. Schwartz was unequivocally brilliant and brilliantly ambitious, if sometimes maddeningly abstruse. He made expert use of framing devices, but he was not always in control of his skills and is uneven on the page. Mazer gives readers the poet at his best and his worst, published and unpublished. Individual poems do not always cohere, but they are all worth examining.

Mazer arranges the poet’s output chronologically over five books, from 1938 to 1959. He includes both the long-out-of-print first part (1943) and surviving excerpts from the never-published second part of Schwartz’s 299-page epic poem Genesis, about a Jewish boy who is the product of two immigrant Jewish families, rich and poor, and the many ways that families can fail. He has also included seventeen wonderful previously unpublished poems; these are among the more skilful and accessible in the book, and they reflect Schwartz’s most authentic and confident voice. The thirty-six “posthumously published” poems appeared in Last and Lost Poems (1979; second edition New Directions, 1989), with more handwritten drafts appearing in Once and for All: The best of Delmore (New Directions, 2016), but here they are collected in one volume, with the seventeen new poems and another twenty-eight published only in magazines (though two were also published by New Directions in 2016). Mazer has opted not to include the handwritten drafts, and wisely leaves out Schwartz’s stories, presumably to ensure that readers judge his poetic works on their own merit.

The editor’s short preface and one-page coda are efficient, but they are unfortunately not enough to guide readers through the oeuvre of a poet whose output was prodigious and whose work was at times impenetrably referential. The introduction offers a greatest-hits story of Schwartz’s achievements, beginning with his ascension to celebrity status after the newly revived Partisan Review published his story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” in 1937; his collection with the same title made a powerful impression the following year. Written over a weekend when Schwartz was twenty-three years old, the story is about a man who becomes increasingly agitated while sitting in a cinema watching his parents’ courtship on the big screen. He weeps, watches them argue and shouts: “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.” An usher hurries over and tells him to be quiet, but he stands up, shouting again, and the usher returns and drags him out. He wakes up on the morning of his twenty-first birthday.

Mazer offers biographical details – Schwartz’s years studying philosophy at New York University, his ample publication history, his wives, and his lifelong worries about being a failure and subsequent descent into mania, fuelled by barbiturates and alcohol – and refers readers to James Atlas’s excellent and informative biography, Delmore Schwartz: The life of an American poet (1977). A more comprehensive introduction would have been useful to readers. Also missing is some sort of guide to the hefty 700 pages ahead: what was Schwartz’s approach to poetry, how did his style evolve and change, what were his themes and what were the ways in which he succeeded or failed? Based on my reading there are seven things to know about Schwartz. One: he had a blazing intelligence and an intuitive feel for language and drama. Two: he carries narrative in poetry as effectively as in fiction. Three: his decision, in Genesis, to foreground Jewish-American immigrant life as if it were high drama and meant to be watched in a matinee is a coup. Four: his poems combine tradition and experiment by using idiomatic phrasing and dialogue in blank verse, mixing verse and narrative together, and concocting metrical lines (some sloppy, some shrewd) that demonstrate real emotional depth and variation. Five: he is important for his role in the literary milieu of the 1930s, after modernism and before the advent of confessionalism. (He was a precursor of the latter, and a friend to Berryman, Robert Lowell and others.) Six: his subjects were himself, the pursuit of knowledge, the ugly dissolution of his parents’ marriage and his bitterness when he did not come into the inheritance he expected from his father. Seven: his life is a parable of the enduring ill effects of early fame on an artist.

Schwartz had the ambition, and recklessness, of a young writer all too aware of his sweeping talent. He was eager to make a mark, desperate to find the audience he thought he deserved. It is easy, retrospectively, to get revved about his considerable promise, then to feel disappointed by the lack of restraint in his work. But he is good in the early lyric poems and his early verse play Coriolanus and His Mother (1938); he is at the height of his energies in “In the Naked Bed, In Plato’s Cave” (1938):

Hearing the milkman’s chop,
His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink,
I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
And walked to the window.

Schwartz uses a number of frames (epic poems, verse plays with prose commentary, and references to comic strips or matinees) as organizing devices and as imagery. These allow his dramas some latitude and persuade readers to sit tight even as he digresses. In Coriolanus and His Mother (1938), Schwartz steps out of the scene: “Here I am once more, dressed in a toga to suit the occasion. I am sure you will agree that this performance is nothing, if not engrossing.” He wants to make sure his readers aren’t “deceived” in what they are seeing. All the world is a stage. Several lines later he admits: “It is difficult to be sure of anything”.

With the middle books come the grandiose effusions and metaphysical abstractions of Genesis. Vaudeville for a Princess (1950) contains simpler, more formal poems and was poorly received. Where there is filler, however, there is also charm. See, for instance, “Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve”, his poem about Jesus’s disciples, or “To Figaro in the Barbershop”:

There is a gulf which I detest
Between the self that clips my hair
And the warm beasts lounging in my head
Where past and present soil the air!

Before long, however, his career tanked and his life unravelled. He was a genius, but the psychic traumas of his childhood (especially his parents’ ugly fights and his father’s death when he was sixteen) warped him. He was a lifelong insomniac and always broke. Literary work didn’t pay. He lived in boarding houses, juggling short-term teaching gigs while trying unsuccessfully to get a tenured position. In 1940, the year he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, he acquired consistent work at Harvard teaching English, and stayed there for seven years. But by 1953 he was, in the words of his second wife, Elizabeth Pollet, “on a treadmill of alcohol to reduce anxiety and increase the pleasures of ego expansion, of barbiturates and alcohol to reduce insomnia, of amphetamines and the new tranquilizers to enable him to function during the day. He was a sick man, and more and more a frightened one”. (“Two sherry or two bourbon before dinner (three after) – tired-tired – depressed after dinner”, Schwartz wrote in his journal in 1953.)

After Pollet left him in 1957 (as repulsed by his unpredictability and his rages as his first wife, Gertrude Buckman, had been), he moved into the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. He became increasingly paranoid and was committed. He didn’t stay long at Bellevue Hospital or, next, the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, for which friends had raised money; instead he sued them, took the money and checked himself out.

But he began to find his mature voice. Summer Knowledge: New and selected poems 1938–1958 came out in 1959. Here Schwartz figures out a style and a lyrical shape that works for him (and that comes to the fore in the unpublished, uncollected and posthumously published later poems). There are lovely short poems where his diction is sharp, tense and orderly (“Vivaldi”: “O clear soprano like the morning peal of the bluebells”; “Music is not water, but it moves like water”). He has mastered the lyric. Still, he is more likely to be remembered for the late poems, which relax into long, loose lines and use slower, softer, idiomatic speech. Here is an excerpt from “America! America!”:

For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)
and the cemetery (in the city)
And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the heart and mind
This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.

Whichever poems I would call exciting zingers, Mazer also finds worthwhile, including “The Error” (“I saw my father lying in his coffin and I / felt nothing”), “The Sad Druggist” (“But, suddenly abstracted, I tiptoed on the curbstone!”) and “Immortality” (“Oh no! not at all! Don’t you know that you’re dead?”). Another stand-out poem is “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine”, a concrete and tender vision of observed leisure: “a little girl holds to her mother’s arm / As if it were a permanent genuine certainty”. Cohesion comes through imaginative transformation as umbrellas turn Ovidian, in love with the tree they become while the tree becomes the umbrella:

Rooted and rising with a perfect tenacity
Beyond the distracted erratic case of mankind there.
Every umbrella curves and becomes a tree,
And the trees curving, arise to become and be
Like the umbrella …

When Seurat enters, as Schwartz’s artistic analogue, the effect is transcendent:

Each micro pattern is the dreamed of or imagined macrocosmos
In which all things, big and small, in willingness and lover surrender
To the peace and elation of Sunday light and sunlight’s pleasure, to the
Profound measure and order of proportion and relation.

“Narcissus” is Schwartz’s most vulnerable poem. Its self-consciousness at times can only adequately be described as searing:

How then could I have expected them to see me
As I saw myself, within my gaze, or see
That being thus seemed as a toad, a frog, a wen, a mole.
Knowing their certainty that I was only
A monument, a monster who had fallen in love
With himself alone, how could I have
Told them what was in me …

But the main event – and problem – among the later works is naturally Genesis. Schwartz himself worried that it would be “the longest and worst poem in American literature”; that instead of expressing the “spirit of America” the poem would show “what it is like to be A-Poet-Who-Would-Like-To-Write-A-Poem-About-The-Spirit-Of-America”. (He also thought it was so good that no one would believe he wrote it alone, and that “it will last as long as the pyramids”.) Mazer calls it “one of the greatest imaginative works of the century” and observes that no other American poet could have done it. No doubt the second half of that statement is true, but there is much to grumble at in Genesis. It is a verse and prose epic drama told through alternating voices: a blank-verse “Greek” chorus of old Jewish men alternating with long narrative lines (Schwartz described these sections as “biblical prose”) that document the childhood of Hershey Green, the grandchild of two European-Jewish immigrant families whose children married each other. They are Schwartz’s real-life miserable parents.

The way to read Genesis without aggravation is to skip the verbose and melodramatic chorus of ghosts and the embarrassing Freudian parts (“No loss is like the loss of mama’s womb, / Never again to be so snugly warm”), and read the long narrative lines like a potboiler. The story of Jack Green and Eva Newman, an unhappy couple in a doomed marriage, is a fast-paced and delightful page-turner. It is a funny, if horrible, reminder of how much two people in a romantic relationship can dislike and mistreat one another. That said, the ghosts too occasionally have their satisfying moments, as in this passage, when a ghost recounts his arrival in heaven:

When I looked down at Life for the first time,
It was as if I turned to the comic strips,
And lit a cigarette for the first time,
And in deep relaxation, started slowly
To smile, then roared! at the mere black-and-white
Unlikely slots and strips of comedy,
Speaking balloons! as if they did not live,
Had no true being (somewhat Platonic then
My frame of mind).

Many moments in Genesis are similarly resonant, and there are many memorable one-liners (“Find the private movements of the heart / And move with them”) and beautiful, psychologically astute human observations (“Noah brings to the commonwealth his own / Nervous intensity, as some bring drunkenness, and some bring competition, and some againstness”).

To read Genesis in its entirety is to be rewarded at intervals with excellent writing, especially in this sentence from the second part, when Hershey Green contemplates whether God exists or if the universe was created by chance. The sentence shimmers with wit, intelligence and lyrical technique:

– Now first, after some thoughts of method,
I sought to fund the probability
That this wide world would from a trash
of spinning chemicals or lesser bits
Evolve, as we said then, that painful glory
A conscious being!

Half a page later, though, the difficulty increases:

“Candide!” they cried at me, “Pangloss! Leibniz!
Was the nose made to bear a pince-nez’s clasp?
Ingersoll! Darwin! Voltaire! Democritus!”
And they refused to believe my argument …

To understand these four lines, you must know that Voltaire (in Candide, where the character Pangloss appears) was satirizing the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, who believed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, created by God. Doubt creeps in with Robert Ingersoll, a famous agnostic; with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection; and with Democritus, who believed that the universe is composed of atoms. Science makes its argument and God loses traction for Hershey – and probably for Schwartz too. He was a trained philosopher, and the God of his epic poem is less an object of devotion than another convenient framing device. Through it he attempts to create a Jewish vision whose ambition matches that of Dante’s Christian epic. His subject was not, like Dante’s, the journey of faith itself, but the American family: by giving this poem about his heroic, sad family story such a grand overarching structure, he connected it, and himself, to the beginnings of humankind.

So here is Delmore Schwartz under one cover. After reading this book I was glad to have spent more time with his work, sympathetic to his project and convinced of the reality of his talent. Did he fulfil the ambition of his poetic vision? “Everything happens in the mind of God”, he says at the end of Genesis, referencing what Dante learnt in Paradiso. He was no Dante, though his work is by turns explicit, surprising, awkward, boring, jarring, delightful, uncomfortable and often beautiful or astonishing. He was a poet from a lousy family who wrote verse stories about a kid in a lousy family. From that very human reference point he mythologized his past in ways that were vivifying and imaginative, if not divine.

Diane Mehta’s most recent collection of poems is Tiny Extravaganzas, 2023. Her collection of essays, Happier Far, will be published in 2025

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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