by Matt Hanson

originally published in Flak Magazine

            Out of the colorful and provocative milieu of pre- and post-war New York, particularly City College and Columbia University, came a cauldron of radical literary and political thought. The New York Jewish Intellectuals (as well as their Gentile cousins and compatriots) brought a rambunctious, rich, and permeating influence on the culture in which they awoke to find themselves. All day all night talk of socialism, literature and religion fueled so much of their work that it is almost impossible to trace their entire effect and consequence. If you scan the lists of their ranks, you get a panoply of writing worth reading and taking seriously. A little bit of the future just starting to happen. Interestingly, what you don't get (at least until the post-war era) is very much actual fiction or poetry. Delmore Schwartz (in contrast to Malamud, Bellow and Mailer) is one of the strongest and most sadly neglected creative writers. 

            Schwartz, like many of his generation, was a first-generation Jewish American (his feisty and unsparing parents hailed from Romania). He grew up in Brooklyn, learned to read at three, and was a brilliant and ambitious student. His first published work bore the Yeatsian title "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and depicts a young man witnessing his parent's momentous courtship on an early trip to Coney Island as grainy flashbacks in a movie theatre. He watches, with rising horror and agitation, their artless interaction and the utterly universal awkwardly human process of courtship: "My father tells my mother how much money he has made in the past week, exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated." His father is gauche, over-bearing, nervous. He shows up too early. He brags when he doesn't have to. His mother is expectant, shy, underwhelmed. They are enacting a scene from a movie in which they did not how how to be cast. 

            At the moment his father proposes marriage the narrator jumps from his seat, startling other theater goers, shouting: "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." Irving Howe wrote about how those who read it (some of the leading lights of the literary establishment) reeled with "the shock of recognition." Read it — immediately — and reflect on your own kinfolk. In a time where we are always solemnly warned that half our marriages end in divorce, who knows but that you will be reeling too. It was published to great acclaim as the lead piece in the "Partisan Review" in 1937. He was 24 years old. 

            Schwartz's poetry is his largest achievement, prose having reached its peak for him too soon, as with so much of his life. What I have always loved about his work is the odd formal familiarity of it. It achieves the same effect of his modernist contemporaries without as much affect. It addresses you neatly attired but with a slightly obscured line of sight. Even as it tells you plainly, it doesn't quite look you in the eye. His phrasing and subject matter are familiar, pedestrian, street level while suffused with social and metaphysical alchemy. 

In the naked bed, in Plato's cave,

Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,

Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,

Wind troubled the curtains all night long,

A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, 

Their freights covered, as usual.

The ceiling lightened again,

the slanting diagram

Slid slowly forth.

            I recommend reciting this to yourself in bed at night, as you murmur the words with city sounds coming in through the window. Schwartz investigating his consciousness is a wonderful way of entering your own consciousness. This can comfortably be said to be the hallmark of great writing. Supreme though it is, "The Waste Land" (as well as much of Eliot) is far too overdressed and forbiddingly ornate to do it as immediately, as recognizably. Schwartz, like many poets of his generation, did not evade the influence of Old Gray Tory Tom — no one could hardly be as strong as that — as much as transform it. Own its means, as it were, reclaim them and reproduce what was made. All that talk of Marx wasn't wasted on one young poet. 

            See it again in "Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before": 

The past, a giant shadow like the twilight,

The moving street on which the autos slide,

The buildings' heights, like broken teeth, 

Repeat necessity on every side, 

The age requires death and is not denied,

He has come as a young man to be hanged once more! 

            Remember he wrote this in 1937, in Greenwich Village, as "the last good war" began to break out halfway across the world. He was soon to become a democratic Socialist and in a few years edit the "Partisan Review," a tenure lasting around a decade. The world he breathed (as he himself once put it) was breathing into him. He narrated this process in line after line of his prosy, imagistic discourse. His art was about managing and fashioning art from out of this distance. You can't get much better for this than "The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me," which bears the epigraph "the withness of the body" and is about nothing less than the stumbling gulf between being and becoming, potential and act. It's worth noting that this very gulf seemed to throw up its monsters at him as his life wore on. It's one of the best poems ever about being physically awkward ever written. Schwartz keeps up his translation of this universal problem with clarity and insistent verisimilitude: 

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, disheveling all, 

Climbs the building, kicks the football, 

Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city... 

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, 

Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed 

Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, 

Amid the hundred million of his kind, 

The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

            Schwartz was (pardon the cliche) ahead of his time. Ironically, he got there by being so much a part of his own time that he and his contemporaries found themselves at the cutting edge of culture even as they were just getting started. Listening closely, we can make out some of the early glintings of what would become known as post-modernism in "I Am A Book I Neither Write Nor Read." If it's simply part and parcel to being alive after the second millennium A.D. that we look at our lives as texts disseminating amid a bunch of other texts, a story amid other stories, we can at least take comfort in the fact that we were never alone: 

I am a book I neither wrote nor read,

A comic, tragic play in which new masquerades

Astonishing like guns crackle like raids

Newly each time, whatever one is prepared

To come upon, suddenly dismayed and afraid, 

As in the dreams which make the fear of sleep

The terror of love, the depth one cannot leap... 

I no more wrote than read that book which is

The self I am, half-hidden as it is

From one and all who see within a kiss

The lounging formless blackness of an abyss. 

How could I think the brief years were enough

To prove the reality of endless love? 

            Finding this love, this transcendent sticking point amid all the confusion of our lives, this love that is not "love" was Delmore Schwartz's poetical goal. He rarely allowed himself to come face to face with that which he believed would save him. Perhaps it was about capacity. Gazing down into the abyss of the self is enough of a task for a lifetime. No wonder he drank like a fish, took barbiturates, squandered his goodwill among his many early fans and friends. He could think just hard enough to surpass his immediate reality in poetics, but not to grasp what was barely perceptible as actual, human salvation. If this sounds opaque and vaguely ridiculous, that's because it just might be. Who knows, after all, if there's anything to hope for? If Hegel is right, and the ultimate of form is formlessness, then Schwartz would have been quite justified to have written as abstractly and ethereally as he eventually did. In his later years what had been locked down becomes unmoored. You can feel the desperation sink in as his poor little brain cells started to thin out from overwork and self abuse. Self-consciousness killed Delmore Schwartz. Even so, it seemed like he might have been onto something, as in the Van Gogh vitality in the opening of "May's Truth and May's Falsehood": 

            All through the brilliant blue and gold afternoon All space was blossoming: immense and stately against the blue heights The sailing, summer-swollen milky and mounting clouds: colossal blossoms,  And the dark statues of the trees on the blue and green ground, flowing. And every solid thing Moved as in bloom, leafing, opening wing upon wing to the sun's overwhelming lightning! 

            This is not God being described, so much as it is the life force itself. It was not to last. Schwartz drank, like all poets, but unlike most he got vicious and paranoid. His marriages crumbled at the hands of his own psychosis. He insulted people, had various enraged scenes (no doubt reinventing psychodrama inherited from his childhood) and became brutally paranoid, convinced everyone he knew was sleeping with his wife and that the entire staff of Harvard University was against him as a cadre of genteel anti-Semites (on this, he was probably not too far off the mark). He was quoted as saying "even paranoids have enemies." He bounced from college to college, moved to a run-down old shack with his wife. He worked five jobs, took amphetamines, drove himself crazy. Eventually he was arrested and put in the bughouse. He continued to go to seed, drinking at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, manically reading out loud from his copies of Joyce, Valery and Rimbaud — in his own translations, of course. He was known to have sat on a bench in Washington Square Park, scribbling in his notebook for hours, staring ruefully with suspicion at everything around him. He had burned himself out. 

            Along the way he'd inspired Saul Bellow — one of the many buzzing amid the circle of his early years. Bellow developed mightily over time and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "Humboldt's Gift", written about knowing him in his early glory and witnessing his downfall. While teaching at Syracuse he met the young Lou Reed, became his mentor, and relied on his protege to drive him home after exhausting rounds of beer and ranting. He managed to cut through to the young songwriter (no mean feat) with the demand that Reed promise him that he would write well and never sell out, and furthermore that if he did and indeed there was a heaven he could haunt Reed from, he would. Reed took him at his word. He dedicated the first Velvet Underground record to him, and even penned the dadaist ode "European Son" in his honor. It goes without saying that this first Velvets record influenced just about every great record to follow it. It follows, then, that in an odd way one forlorn, forgotten poet who'd squandered his gifts infused in some small way most of the major records of your lifetime. Schwartz died of a sudden heart attack face down in the lobby of a Broadway flophouse. This was after a long period of being so despondent that even kindly Bellow himself couldn't bear to cross the street and shake hands with him. He was scarcely mourned. By some accounts, the body was left for three days before anyone identified it. 

Dearest, is all love dark? Must all love be

Hidden in night from the one who is nearest?

Or is the mystery of divinity an abyss of black?

How then can you come to me? Why do you come back?

Why do you desire my love? Is it love, in truth, if I lack

The sight and vision which begins all intimacy?