Holy Delmore
The originary 20th-century American Jewish writer and poet is famous for his descent into drug-addled madness. A new collection shows quantities of self-obsessed dreck shot through with redeeming literary and critical genius.
The New York intellectuals, Irving Howe once said, were obsessed “by the idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz).” Delmore, as everyone called him, was a boy wonder, opening the revamped Partisan Review’s first issue in 1937 at the age of 23, with his perfect short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” (The issue included work by Picasso, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Wallace Stevens, and James Agee, but Delmore’s story headed the table of contents.) Then his first book of poetry arrived, hailed by Allen Tate as “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot.” But he came to a dismal end, an alcoholic and pill addict burdened by paranoid fantasies. Since Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and James Atlas’ classic biography, Delmore has been more celebrated for the legend of his wasted talent than for his actual literary production. Schwartz the writer has gotten short shrift.
Ben Mazer’s new edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems aims to resurrect Schwartz the working poet, rather than the once-brilliant wreck of a human being who descended into madness. The results are mixed. Delmore’s Collected Poems encompasses much disappointing verse, along with a handful of lyrics that will live forever. All too often, Schwartz runs into the high weeds of hysterical sentiment, or plunges headlong into bathos. But there are gems amid the dreck, and Mazer has done admirable work. He has compiled hundreds of pages of Schwartz’s poetry, including the unpublished portion of his misbegotten epic Genesis. Few readers will make it through this big volume. But I am glad that FSG has brought out Mazer’s scholarly monument, a rarity from a trade publisher in the year 2024.
Delmore often foregrounded his Jewishness, and he worried that he was “unread because of having turned to the theme of the Jew after my first book.” But really it was not Jewishness, but his self-obsessed approach to his writing, that doomed him. Delmore yearned to rid himself of his family history, yet he was also convinced that this history, in particular his parents’ catastrophic marriage, had fixed his fate absolutely. Perpetually uncomfortable in his own skin, he was trapped by the Oedipal struggle.
A stronger writer might have made sublimity rather than self-indulgence out of Schwartz’s background. But what he has left us is enough: a dozen intensely memorable poems, one undying short story, and some discerning critical essays.
Delmore’s image cannot be separated from his reputation as a virtuosic, free-spirited talker. Dwight Macdonald remembered,
his wide mouth grinning, his speedy raucous New York voice running up and down the scale of sarcasm, invective, desperate rationality, gasping ridicule, his nervous hands clutching his head in despair at the obtuseness of his antagonist or flung wide in triumphant demonstration or stabbing the air with a minatory forefinger. ... He was a conversationalist, not a monologist [...] depending on the other person, or persons, to stimulate him to his greatest reaches.
Macdonald saw Delmore’s generosity and frankness, even though, like all Delmore’s friends, he often bore the brunt of his vindictive moods. Delmore wrote, “I am always direct, open, friendly, simple and candid to the point of naivete until the ways of the fiendish world infuriate me and I am forced to be devious, suspicious, calculating, not that it does me any good anyway.”
The family romance plagued him endlessly. One night in 1919, when he was 5, his parents, Harry and Rose, awakened Delmore and demanded that he choose between them. There was another primal scene. When Delmore was 7, his mother, with her two sons in tow, surprised her husband with another woman in a local restaurant, and loudly denounced him and his “whore.” Once Harry sent a friend from Chicago to New York to try to seduce Rose, in order to establish grounds for the divorce that she for years refused to grant. Such was the Oedipal “vaudeville of humiliation,” as Delmore called it.
Atlas writes that Delmore saw his father, a well-to-do businessman, as “a heroic figure who had mastered life by means of a defiant cynicism that protected him from the storm of emotions battering his son.” His vulnerable mother bequeathed to Delmore a talent for denunciation that made him deeply ashamed. Atlas remarks, “Intimacy seemed to call forth in him a strange malevolence, since it violated his mother’s belief that selfish motives dictated all relations between men and women.”
Delmore’s second wife, Elizabeth Pollet, became a successful novelist, and so Delmore planned “to retire to devote myself to what really interests me, psychiatric literature, major league baseball, and military strategy.” But Elizabeth never saw the promised riches from her bestseller, and so Delmore continued to scrounge for money, teaching first at Princeton and then, toward the bitter paranoid end of his life, at Syracuse, where he was Lou Reed’s teacher. (Atlas writes that, in Syracuse, when a student girlfriend “left a Christmas tree outside his door as a gesture of reconciliation, he doused it in the bathtub, convinced the tree was wired with explosives.”) One day he left Syracuse for New York, and within a year he was dead, victim of a heart attack while taking out his trash in a grubby Times Square hotel.
In 1964, two years before he died, Delmore wrote in his journal,
It is now seven years to the day since my wife, Elizabeth Pollet, left me suddenly at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. The man for whom she left me—after many preparations over a period of two years designed to conceal the real motives of her actions was Nelson Rockefeller. His great wealth, his status as a married man, and his ambitions were all very much involved in her effort to conceal the real reasons for her actions.
There is an immense distance between such flagrant paranoia and Delmore’s jewellike story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a favorite of Nabokov’s. “In Dreams” is Nabokovian in its conceit: A man dreams he witnesses, with alarming lucidity, his parents’ courtship on a movie screen—they spend a day at Coney Island that will seal their and his fate. Here the author’s pathos is judicious rather than unkempt, in contrast to so much of Delmore’s work.
At the end of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” the movie theater’s usher upbraids the narrator for his melodramatic outcry. He has just been shouting at the image of his parents on the screen: “Don’t they know what they are doing?” The usher says, “What are you doing? [...] You can’t act like this even if other people aren’t around! [...] you can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”
Everything you do matters too much: That was Delmore’s curse and, for a while, the blessing of his art. Overestimating his own gifts, he relished the feeling of omnipotence, then was shattered by the knowledge that he was not up to the world-historical writerly task he had set for himself. Often he gravitated to authors who, he seemed to hope, might provide the antidote to his own disabling self-consciousness. He immersed himself in Heinrich Heine, and signed a contract to edit the “Portable Heine,” one of the many book contracts he never fulfilled. But Schwartz utterly lacked the poise and crispness that distinguished the great German Jewish poet. His work was often maudlin, while Heine’s was heartfelt and agile.
Delmore has been more celebrated for the legend of his wasted talent than for his actual literary production. Schwartz the writer has gotten short shrift.
Delmore’s first book, which contained “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” along with much of his best verse, garnered praise from Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Auden. Five years later, in 1943, came Genesis, and suddenly Delmore’s reputation was sunk. Genesis was meant to be a mid-20th-century Jewish version of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Wordsworth’s poem is devoted to the growth of the poet’s mind, but in Genesis the growth is stunted. Book One of the poem, which is several hundred pages long, ends with the seventh year of the child protagonist, Hershey Green, who is modeled after Delmore. Hershey later dreams about writing “the great work which would make him the Lindbergh, Moses, Siegfried, Odysseus, of America.” Delmore had similarly implausible heroic fantasies: He was crippled by ambition.
Genesis was influenced by Joyce as well as Wordsworth. Obsessed by Finnegans Wake, Delmore wore out several copies of Joyce’s cryptic masterpiece, even annotating it while sitting in the bleachers at the Polo Grounds (Delmore was an ardent New York Giants fan). Finnegans Wake recounts the troubled dream of a paterfamilias, letting Joyce shift tawdry Oedipal strife into mythic territory. Delmore hoped to make a similarly ennobling move in Genesis, so that his parents’ drama would have world-historical resonance—but he failed. Anthony Burgess remarks that Joyce’s humor “modulates easily from the farcical to the sublime and from the witty to the pathetic—a humour not much found in our brutal, sentimental and facetious age, hence a humour much needed.” Delmore aimed at something like the Wake’s humor in his Genesis, but his enormous swing was, sadly, a miss.
Burgess refers to “the shadowy majesty of the characters” in Finnegans Wake. In Genesis, the child hero’s philandering father and grasping, anxious mother have nothing majestic about them, only the drab edge of desperation. There is a fumbling quality to many of Delmore’s lines, mixed with a strange intensity. He writes,
—The one who speaks is not remarkable
In the great city, circa 1930,
His state is not uncommon in the world,
O, by no means, sleepless and seeking sleep
As one who wades in water to the thighs,
Dragging it soft and heavy near the shore ...
Delmore begins with three orotund and gassy lines, then pivots to an achingly memorable image, the sleepless man wading into the water, and dragging it like a tide of memory. (Delmore was a lifelong insomniac, an affliction increased by his habit in his last years of taking up to 16 Dexedrine tablets a day.) Even on its first page, the poem Genesis is already a mixed bag. So it goes for hundreds more pages full of brooding awkwardness.
Midway through Genesis one of the poem’s overseeing deities comments on the career of the protagonist’s father, Jack Green, like Delmore’s father a businessman who abandoned his family:
Giant, phenomenal, and purposeless,
How the divinities, America,
Europe, Capitalismus, others too,
Move through the life of this Atlantic Jew!
“Giant, phenomenal, and purposeless” is a sadly apt description of the interminable Genesis, which Delmore wasted too much of his writing life on, before finally realizing it was a failure.
In his review of Genesis, Paul Goodman said the narrator was “a young man ill-equipped and over-equipped struggling with a self-analysis when all his data are nothing but what his repressions and ambitions allow him to remember; nowhere able to tap a spontaneous impulse, and relapsing into gloom.” Goodman was an enemy of Delmore, who satirized him in his acid-tongued short story “The World Is a Wedding.” But Goodman was right. The Delmore of Genesiswas lethally unspontaneous, paralyzed by the past.
It is a salutary shock to turn from Delmore’s bloated, divagating Genesis to his best lyrics. “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” pungent and epigrammatic, clearly informed James Merrill’s “Broken Home,” another poem about the poet’s parents, though Delmore is more angst-laden than Merrill. “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” an ode to insomnia, has a self-teasing poignant grandeur that influenced early John Ashbery (“O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail / Of early morning, the mystery of beginning / Again and again ...”). In the haunting “Father and Son,” where Delmore impressively follows Yeats and Auden, the father lays a guilt trip worthy of Hamlet’s ghost on his helpless offspring.
Best of all is “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” which laments the poet’s cloddish animal nature:
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.
The poet’s bearlike shadow self is a “stupid clown,” thumping around like the dumbly desiring crowds with their gross desires, “the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.” What makes the poem, though, is Delmore’s affection for this mammoth clunker of a combined ego-id. Instead of recoiling from the body’s desires, he expresses, in adroit, refined style, a paradoxical relish for them. Delmore here stands apart from his literary hero, T.S. Eliot, who wished to armor himself against love’s depredations.
Delmore was fanatically gossipy when it came to Eliot, insisting that his private sexual neuroses were visible throughout his poems. He dedicated endless hours to a book on Eliot which he never finished. He was troubled by Eliot’s antisemitism, as he was by Pound’s. After reading Pound’s remarks on the “Semitic race” in his Guide to Kulchur, Delmore told him in a letter, “I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.”
Delmore’s best critical essays are among the most useful of their era. He showed how Faulkner mixed moments of sublime originality with empty bombast even within the same paragraph. He spoke precisely about Hemingway, whose style was antithetical to his own: “Although the abstract words have become obscene, it is nevertheless precisely glory, honor, courage, and sacrifice which are the true ideals and aims of conduct in all of Hemingway’s writing. But most of his characters grasp these values ... by a fiat of will, as if they existed in a vacuum without any support or justification.” Stevens embodied a freedom that Delmore could never reach, “uniting an underlying seriousness with an ultimate gaiety” and “exhibiting the strains of solitude, exoticism, and Puritanism,” like the New Englander he was. Delmore diagnosed Stevens’ flaws as well: “The poem is sometimes extended not by a progress of perception, or of meaning, but one word and one phrase multiplies others ...” Stevens’ marvelous fluency, he saw, could be a poetic disadvantage. Stevens, not at all displeased by this criticism, called Delmore’s “the most invigorating review” of his Man with the Blue Guitar.
Delmore also wrote acutely about Yeats, whose writing, he said, will never “be separated from the human being who was not what he wished to be and not what he saw himself as being.” But the remaking of the self, which Yeats pursued arduously, was never possible for Delmore, who remained the child of his parents, unable to break away.
In one of his late poems Delmore sounds like his tragic friend John Berryman:
O your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
In the same poem Delmore depicted himself “as one who falls ... in a parachute,” “An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown,” who will end in “the famous unfathomable abyss,” death.
“His work is really all of a piece,” Ashbery remarked, “the same retelling of birth, migration, new disappointment, damaged hopes, ordinary lives being turned into the stone of history.”
In Delmore’s short story “America! America!,” the young Shenandoah Fish listens to his mother’s gossipy talk about a neighboring family, the Baumans. As he listens, Fish begins to be troubled: “What is it, he said to himself, that I do not see in myself, because it is of the present, that they did not see in themselves? How can one look at himself? No one sees himself.” Looking in the mirror, he realizes he is as ignorant of who and what he is as his mother and her friends, or his ancestors coffined in their sepia-tinted photographs. We remain obscure to ourselves, hapless passengers through worldly existence.
When I first read Atlas’ biography as an enraptured teenager, I fell for Delmore the ruined genius, and passed over his searing melancholy wisdom. But he was in the end the man Lou Reed loved, the world-weary sage of Syracuse, the faded buffoon whose dreams made him responsible for all. The hapless Atlantic Jew surrounded by family and history, and his own misspent life, this is the Delmore we remember.
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