The pain of Delmore’s poetry is only a pale reflection of the painful life from which it grew. I’ll abridge the downward drift of his later years: two failed marriages, erratic employment as a teacher and a book and film reviewer, increasing poverty, alcohol and various other addictions. When his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Pollet, left him in the summer of 1957, his life was really over, though it dragged on for another nine years, during which he became steadily more deranged, imagining that his wife was the mistress of Nelson Rockefeller and that President Kennedy and the Pope were plotting against him. Friends, including Bellow, took up a subscription to pay for psychiatric treatment, but he never stayed in the mental wards long, returning to his favorite Greenwich Village haunts and increasingly squalid living quarters. Lowell, who had published a poem about their drinking days in Cambridge back in the forties in Life Studies, wrote another about his last years which is probably chillingly accurate:
Your dream had humor, then its genius thickened,
you grew thick and helpless, your lines were variants
alike and unlike, Delmore — your name, Schwartz,
one vowel bedeviled by seven consonants…
one gabardine suit the color of sulphur,
scanning wide-eyed the windowless room of wisdom,
your notes on Joyce and porno magazines—
the stoplights blinking code for you alone
casing the bars with the eyes of a Mongol horseman.
Yet he continued to write poetry. In 1959, he published Summer Knowledge, a collection of poems from previous volumes along with many new ones. Critics have tended to dismiss these, and perhaps rightly, though some have lately come to their defense, notably David Lehman. The late poetry does seem to lack the electric compressions and simplifications that animate his early writing, tending toward bald assertiveness. James Atlas calls it “haphazard, euphonious, virtually incomprehensible effusions… imitative of Hopkins, Yeats, Shelley.” And he may be right. Yet there is something there, perhaps indeed the ruin of a great poet, but perhaps something more. It turns out that critics were premature in condemning the late work of Picasso and Stravinsky; perhaps Delmore will one day get a similar reprieve. Read the title poem from that last collection; I leave it to you to decide, adding only that I think that the repetitions in his defining what he means by “summer knowledge,” though they seem labored at first, end by achieving a new kind of telling, with an urgent bluntness of its own.
JOHN ASHBERY
EDITOR’S PREFACE
For readers of at least the last two decades, it has been extremely difficult to construct an accurate picture of the shape of Delmore Schwartz’s career. Between Schwartz’s death in 1966 and the early 1980s, a number of posthumous books were published. These included volumes that are now already out of print: James Atlas’s excellent biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet; Portrait of Delmore, containing excerpts from Schwartz’s journals, edited by his second wife Elizabeth Pollet; The Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Donald Dike and David Zucker; two collections of letters; and Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays, edited by Robert Phillips. Schwartz’s own original collections of poetry and prose — his 1938 debut In Dreams Begin Responsibilities; Genesis: Book One, the only published volume of his uncompleted epic; The World Is a Wedding, his first book of stories; Vaudeville for a Princess, his second book of poetry and prose; and Successful Love, his last story collection — have all been unavailable for decades. Some prose and poetry from these books is contained in various editions published by New Directions. But none of these selections give a truly accurate sense of the development of Schwartz’s art and the unfolding of his literary career.
It is my goal to offer in this single volume the best and most representative of Schwartz’s writing, much of it available for the first time in years, some of it published for the first time. I hope readers will be able to gain a broad, if not complete, understanding of Delmore Schwartz the literary artist. Selections from Genesis are reprinted here for the first time since the book’s original publication in the 1940s; as a whole, the poem is unsuccessful, but, as John Ashbery says in his introduction, there are many stunning passages. I have tried to select a few that represent the whole work. I have also added two unpublished poems found in Schwartz’s archives, held at Yale. The book includes, for the first time, selections from Schwartz’s unpublished book on T. S. Eliot, commissioned by James Laughlin for his Masters of Modern Literature series. This series, containing critical books about single authors, was published early in New Directions’ history.
As it is my goal to portray the unfolding of Schwartz’s career, I have grouped the pieces according to the order of their original publication in Delmore’s own books, though where pieces were reprinted in later books, I have used the later book as my textual source. In Summer Knowledge, Schwartz seemed to have found a more appealing order for the poems in his first book, so I have used that ordering. I am not a textual scholar; I have done my best with the material from the archives to interpret Schwartz’s handwritten drafts and corrections. I only hope any mistakes I have made will be corrected by a future researcher.
I owe thanks to many people, foremost among them my wife Brenda Shaughnessy, who has had to suffer Schwartz’s long residence in our household. I am also grateful to Robert Phillips, Schwartz’s literary executor, for his support of this project. Barbara Epler, Jeffrey Yang, Declan Spring, and Laurie Callahan of New Directions carried forward James Laughlin’s devotion to Delmore, an early author and advisor to the press, and I am eternally thankful to them for giving life to this project. Thank you to John Ashbery for the use of his lecture as the foreword to this book. I am also grateful to my research assistant Monica Sok, and to Don Share and Stephen Burt for much help and advice.
CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER
FICTION
IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES
I
I think it is the year 1909. I feel as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen. This is a silent picture as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps. The actors too seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots themselves are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.