Genesis is a disappointment, but it fails on a lavish scale. It was intended to be Delmore’s twentieth-century Brooklyn version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, though a more immediate stylistic precedent was Hardy’s The Dynasts, which Delmore studied. In Genesis, the forebears of the hero, Hershey Green, live out horrible adventures in Europe and manage to emigrate to America, where the real substance and sorrow of their lives begin. As in The Dynasts, a chorus of disembodied spirits comments ironically on the saga as it unrolls; lyric passages, many of them of great beauty, alternate with rather stiff expository stretches of “biblical” prose, printed as long run-on lines of poetry but nonetheless prosaic, though the ear gradually gets used to the contrast. Wrapped in this prose padding like precious objects stored away, the intermittent brilliant passages stand out all the more strikingly:
“The act of darkness which begins the world
Fosters what gross mistakes!” another said,
“Because the lovers lie like scissors close,
And face hides face, love’s plaza absolute,
Their eyes are shut, they cannot see, alas!
And from the cache and spurt what lies are born!”
We see here how subtly Delmore could manipulate undertones of language. The “lovers lie like scissors close”—closed as well as close, one assumes, and yet the idea of the lovers as sharp blades capable of inflicting harm even on each other, as well as being two parts of a single entity, galvanizes the image. Similarly the phrases “love’s plaza” and “the cache and spurt” are both bizarre yet somehow right. The “plaza” suggests the bullring where the antagonist lovers will meet, and also the Plaza Hotel where the upwardly-aspiring couple might, with luck, celebrate their marriage one day. And the dimly heard sexual innuendo of “cache and spurt” (an odd pairing of nouns, to say the least) alludes not only to the female and male sexual organs but also the “cash” which will play an important role in the union.
A little further on occur the lines, “Asking what every sore throat may have meant / And what the burnt match, what the cane, / The necktie and the boredom of the will—.” Delmore was always adept at conjuring a specific world out of a sparse sprinkling of abstract and concrete words. The sore throat evokes “the individual / Who drinks tea, who catches cold” (cold symptoms abound in Delmore’s work), who is situated in a precise environment by the words match, cane, necktie, boredom of the will. This singular but singularly appropriate list of particulars echoes Auden, whom Schwartz admired (and vice versa). James Laughlin, Delmore’s publisher and a poet himself, called Schwartz “The American Auden”—no small compliment, though today one tends to forget that Auden was then considered the major poet of his generation. And Delmore’s list suggests similar lists in Auden: “The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss, / There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.”
“Boredom of the will.” Indeed. Here, as so often in Genesis, as throughout his work (and his work is really all of a piece, the same retelling of birth, migration, new disappointment, damaged hopes, ordinary lives being turned into the stone of history), one is again at the core of the poem; the phrase, like so many of his others, is a rabbit hole down which one plummets to an exasperatingly real and unsatisfactory Wonderland. It always comes back to the recounting of sorrow in new and breathtakingly beautiful ways which lighten the sorrow. For a while. “It seems that few actions remain unobserved, and fewer yet remain unsuspected by human beings, of each other,” observes the nameless narrator of Genesis. At the end of the short story “A Bitter Farce,” a college professor named Mr. Fish “returns to his home to await the arrival of innumerable anxiety feelings which had their source in events which had occurred for the past five thousand years.” In a 1959 prefatory note to his Selected Poems, Delmore surprisingly interjected: “Every point of view, every kind of knowledge and every kind of experience is limited and ignorant; nevertheless, so far as I know, this volume seems to be as representative as it could be.” And at the end of “America! America!” the brilliant short story, Shenandoah Fish says: “‘I do not see myself. I do not know myself. I cannot look at myself truly.’ He turned from the looking-glass and said to himself… ‘No one truly exists in the real world because no one knows all that he is to other human beings, all that they say behind his back, and all the foolishness which the future will bring him.’” These works are later than the early lyrics collected in his first book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, but for me they are the most valuable part of Delmore’s oeuvre.
A brief sketch of his biography may cast some light on a few passages from his greatest poetry.
During the first decade of his life, the family was shunted back and forth between cramped apartments in Brooklyn and the upper-Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Harry Schwartz finally left his wife for good in 1923 and moved to Chicago, where his insurance business prospered, leaving Delmore with the illusion that he would someday inherit wealth. This was not to happen, though he did inherit a few thousand dollars long after his father died in the spring of 1930. Delmore studied for a year at the University of Wisconsin, then at New York University, and finally Harvard, which he left without taking a degree. Despite his unwillingness to be considered a Marxist, he joined the staff of the leftist intellectual journal Partisan Review, which had switched its allegiance from Stalin to Trotsky. During the latter half of the thirties, he taught at Harvard, but often in menial positions: His continual attempts to get a tenured position there, at Cornell, at the University of California and elsewhere, were always foiled by circumstance, or, more often, by his erratic behavior. As a Jew at Harvard, he keenly resented the snobbery of the largely WASP faculty, but even more the success of the suave and cosmopolitan scholar and critic, Harry Levin, who, though Jewish, was somehow “accepted,” or so it seemed to Delmore. I took Levin’s celebrated course in Proust, Joyce, and Mann, though I never studied with Delmore, nor met him at Harvard, for reasons I can no longer remember, since I admired his poetry even before coming to the university; he was, in fact, one of the reasons I wished to study there. My friend Kenneth Koch did, however, take a course with him, from which he reported great things. (I did get to know Delmore slightly several years later in New York, and was delighted when he accepted my poem, “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” for Partisan Review.) Our lack of contact at Harvard may have been a problem of scheduling; Schwartz on at least one occasion canceled his course abruptly and returned to New York to breathe the freer air of Greenwich Village. Still, the cultured ambience of Harvard attracted him, too, and he became friends with such rising, slightly younger poets as Robert Lowell and John Berryman, whose genius and chaotic temperament he shared. Berryman for his part memorialized Delmore in some dozen of his Dream Songs, one of which contains the passage: “He looked onto the world like the act of an aged whore. / Delmore, Delmore. / He flung to pieces and they hit the floor.”