Meanwhile, Delmore’s literary career had begun auspiciously, dazzlingly, with the publication of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. James Atlas has attempted to explain the powerful effect of the book when it appeared in 1938. When I first discovered it some five years later, it still retained this aura, palpable even in the dog-eared copy I found in a public library: “It devolved upon Eliot to become Delmore’s model; he was, after all, the quintessential modernist, and, what was perhaps more significant, he provided an example of the recognition conferred on those who managed to establish a new poetic idiom. Yet… authoritarian, dignified, remote, Eliot had achieved a stature that infuriated Delmore even as it filled him with envy; restrained by the limitations of his own background from emulating Eliot’s cultivated manner, Delmore could only follow an opposite course, and eventually found more congenial models in those exemplary figures of revolt Rimbaud and Baudelaire.” Atlas sees “Baudelaire’s emphatic style of declamation… tempered by a note of ineffable sadness” in the poem “Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses,” though a more immediate antecedent may have been Thomas Mann’s story “Tonio Kröger”; and the peripatetic domestic life of Rose Schwartz and her two boys, ever shuttling between meaner and cheaper lodgings after their relatively comfortable earlier life, no doubt also plays a role.
In “Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses,” as throughout his poetry, the transition is dangerous, unexpected; the peaceful, somnolent bourgeois interior is abruptly supplanted by the world underground, perhaps a further allusion to Gluck and Orpheus. “The weight of the lean buildings is seen,” that is the pilings sunk deep into the earth; the rush is on; “well-dressed or mean, so many surround you.” One thinks of Dante’s (and Eliot’s) “I had not thought death had undone so many”; and the final line with its exclamation point (a favorite device of Delmore’s, often used with great skill, as here) echoes both the slamming of iron gates and the imperious ringing of a cash register totaling up the bill.
Atlas points out the power of Delmore’s titles, which inveigle and buttonhole the reader in the manner of the Ancient Mariner. Others one could cite for their suasive force are “Out of the Watercolored Window, When You Look,” “Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before,” “All of Us Always Turning Away for Solace,” and “A Dog Named Ego, the Snowflakes as Kisses.” Often in one of those seemingly tiny variants which Delmore is always inserting into his poetry and which can produce a seamless unexpectedness, he will use the title as the first line with a minor variation, as in the first lines of two of the poems just mentioned. “Out of the Watercolored Window, When You Look” becomes “When from the watercolored window idly you look” and “Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before” becomes “Someone is harshly coughing on the next floor.”
“The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” perhaps his most famous poem, is one of a group he calls “The Repetitive Heart: Poems in Imitation of the Fugue.” I haven’t seen an explanation of what he meant by “in imitation of the fugue,” but these poems use the device of variants ringing changes on a theme in the manner of Bach, or, even more, of Mozart, where a subtle modulation can slip past the ear’s attentiveness and suddenly alter the music’s landscape and mood.
The clandestine linking of images has the football of the first stanza returning in the word “scrimmage” in the last line (Delmore was an avid sports fan and reader of sports journals). The perhaps likable if clumsy bear, who “climbs the building, kicks the football,” turns terrifying at the end, participating in “the scrimmage of appetite everywhere,” one of Delmore’s most riveting phrases.
Another of Delmore’s “fugal” poems, “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day,” encapsulates a number of his constant themes: the life of the city, names of friends he knew (“Many great dears are taken away”), and above all an apprehension of the whirling universe (in the mundane décor of a municipal park).
Note how matter-of-factly he begins setting the stage: “In the park sit pauper and rentier” (another of his favorite words; how desperately he wished to be a rentier!). But then: “The screaming children, the motor-car / Fugitive about us, running away, / Between the worker and the millionaire.” It’s impossible to know who is running with whom: the screaming children, the car, the worker, the millionaire, all swarming, “fugitive about us”—though why the motorcar and the millionaire should be fugitive is unclear. The spelled-out dates: “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” “Nineteen Fourteen,” as well as the names of people we don’t know (Bert Spira and Rhoda, it turns out, were actual friends of Delmore from his college days) read as desperate attempts to pin down the fleeing scene, give it permanence, but all is swept away in flames. This time the fugal repetitions end in a painful thud of closure.
A somewhat lighter but still disturbing poem is “Far Rockaway.” The name of this lower-middle-class sea-resort near Brooklyn is almost a joke for New Yorkers; there is nothing “far” or “away” about the place, and the joke is compounded by Delmore’s use of an unidentified epigraph from Henry James: “the cure of souls” (could it be from The Wings of the Dove with its larger-than-life doctor character, Sir Luke Strett?). James would certainly have felt ill-at-ease in Far Rockaway, worlds away from Newport.
“The radiant soda,” or a multicolored assortment of soft drinks in their bottles, fun fashions, foam, and freedom (not only on the beach but in the breaking waves as they catch the light). “The sea laves / The shaven sand”; “laves” and “shaven” offer a marvelous echoing of sounds, as well as a precise image of what the sea does to the sand, brutally sandpapering it. “And the light sways forward / On the self-destroying waves.” Finally, an image of destruction undermines the airy gait of the scene; the light collapses inward; the waves self-destruct in coming to be. And at the end the “tangential” author seeking the cure of souls in what greets his gaze is doomed to failure. His nervous conscience amid the “concessions”—a brilliant play on words, concessions can mean commercial stalls such as would flourish along a boardwalk, selling soda, etc., and also the demeaning compromises the writer must accept in lieu of a cure — is the haunting (romantic) and haunted (macabre) moon.
One last example of these early poems is “I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf.” Here again are arrayed many of the motifs that occur throughout Schwartz’s poetry: the sea, tall buildings, automobiles (Delmore loved to drive and even during his most penurious periods usually managed to hang on to some old wreck of a car), sleep, dreams and their responsibilities, his own past, and history. There are some fabulous configurations here: he “climbs the sides of buildings just to get / Merely a gob of gum, all that is left / Of its [that is, his heart’s] infatuation of last year.” The phrase, as awkward but hallucinatory as the act it describes, suggests a forgotten episode of a love affair: the speaker, it seems, was infatuated with a girl last summer and left a wad of chewing gum stuck to the side of a building by the sea, intending to retrieve it later. Now, that disgusting object is all that is left to the lover, menial as a serf to the commands of his heart. Now he is as sick of his heart’s “cruel rule” “as one is sick of chewing gum all day,” a wonderfully comic, cruel image. In sleep anger can spend itself, but when sleep too is crowded and full of chores, the tyranny of the past takes over. The poet must find the right door in a row of maddeningly identical ones, carry his father on his back, or rather, the poem implies, carry a carriage with his father in it on his back. Then the language starts to become increasingly garbled, as speech heard in a dream: “Last summer, 1910, and my own people, / The government of love’s great polity, / The choice of taxes, the production / Of clocks, of lights and horses, the location / Of monuments, of hotels and of rhyme…” Why, among other questions that spring to mind, the date 1910, three years before his birth? The lines become more nonsensical until finally anger causes the dreamer to start awake, with an exclamation mark. But the finality dies into “merely wake up once more,” leaving the humiliated dreamer to contemplate yet again his condition of being a “servant of incredible assumption.”