National Post (National Edition)
Portrait of a ‘genius’ who lost his way
THE FICTIONAL LIFE AND REAL LEGEND OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ
One of the young princes of American literature in the middle of the 20th century, Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), turned his career and his life into a tragic legend. He was much loved and much respected. His poems, stories and critical articles were discussed with admiration — until admiration gradually turned to regret and his work lost its meaning. “Your dream had humor,” his friend and contemporary Robert Lowell wrote after his death. “Then its genius thickened, you grew thick and helpless.”
He inspired many writers by his originality and his astonishing range of reference. He appeared as a character in the poems of Lowell and John Berryman but his most famous appearance in someone else’s work was as Von Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow’s novel, Humboldt’s Gift. His own excellent writing is demonstrated in Once and Forever: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions), edited by Craig Morgan Teicher.
Schwartz, Brooklyn-born, started out to be a writer and a scholar, like many in his generation. He studied at the University of Wisconsin, at New York University and at Harvard. He hoped to become a tenured professor but never rose above temporary teaching jobs. He manoeuvred for years to get an appointment at Princeton, a story Bellow adapts in Humboldt’s Gift, all to no avail.
He taught for three years at Syracuse University, where one of his students was a future rock star, Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground. Reed adopted Schwartz as his mentor and later wrote a tribute to him in Poetry magazine — “O Delmore how I miss you. You were the greatest man I ever met. You were a genius. We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake (by James Joyce). So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better in life than to devote oneself to Joyce.
“After your final delusion led you to a heart attack in the Hotel Dixie, unclaimed for three days. You — one of the greatest writers of our era.” A Reed song for the Velvet Underground, European Son, is dedicated to Schwartz.
His poems carried remarkably evocative titles, like Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day or I Am To My Own Heart Merely A Serf. His poetry was painful, though maybe not as painful as the life it echoed. He endured two failed marriages and years of erratic and ill-paid work, the result of his inability to convince any employer that he was reliable. Alcohol and drugs afflicted him, along with mental illness that was apparently with him early in adulthood. He was dead at 53.
When his second marriage collapsed, he became paranoid, believing his exwife was Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s lover and that John F. Kennedy and the Pope were in a plot against him. It was Schwartz, apparently, who first said “Even paranoids have real enemies,” a line I’ve seen credited to Leon Trotsky.
Friends, among them Bellow, paid for psychiatric treatment but he soon left the hospital, fleeing to the comfort of Greenwich Village and continuing to publish poems, most of them inferior to his earlier work.
As Schwartz testified, his intense anxiety and chronic insomnia were the result of the unhappiness of his parents. Harry Schwartz and Rose Nathanson, Jewish immigrants from Romania, were ill matched. Harry, a handsome and successful insurance man, was an obsessive philanderer. Rose’s bitterness grew steadily worse as their marriage failed.
Delmore recalled in a poem a hideous occasion when he was seven, walking on the street with his mother, when she saw her husband’s car parked outside a restaurant. Mother and son went inside and found Harry with a “whore,” as Rose called her. The scene — enraged mother, trapped father, harried waiter, diners gazing in contempt at the family — struck the sevenyear-old with “great disgust for every human being.”
His most famous short story, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, puts Schwartz into a movie theatre watching a 1909 silent film of Coney Island where his parents are courting. As they grow affectionate and their marriage becomes a possibility, the film turns into a nightmare about Schwartz’s future. He jumps to his feet, calling out, “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.”
The work makes its point with a slowly dawning sense of domestic horror. Others, tortured by life, contemplate suicide. Schwartz, in this autobiographical dream, yearns for an even more dreadful fate — never to have existed at all.
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities appeared in 1938, in the Partisan Review, the most admired journal of the era. It made his name and became one of the most anthologized pieces of the century, studied by thousands of students. It never loses its effect. I re-read it once more the other day and found it as chilling as it was when I first laid eyes on it decades ago.