But Schwartz idolized Eliot above almost all other authors, finding in him a model of the poet/critic/dramatist/editor and literature-altering figure he hoped to be. This necessarily resulted in ambivalence surrounding Eliot’s work and person — Schwartz felt mastered by Eliot, and also hoped to master him to become a great man himself.
Schwartz’s ambivalence, his frantic personality, and money difficulties made the Eliot book a near-impossible task. It was never finished, though Schwartz made many attempts, and it now survives in four disorganized folders in the Schwartz archive at Yale.
These folders contain several drafts of an introduction to the book, along with an aborted attempt at an entertaining anecdotal justification for writing the book and for Schwartz’s literary activities in general. This is the first time these pages have appeared in print. Also in the folders are many drafts of chapters on Eliot’s individual works—“Ash Wednesday,” “The Four Quartets”—as well as aspects of his style and innovations, with titles such as “Separation as A Subject” and “Manners and Morals as A Subject,” plus essays on Eliot’s dramatic works, criticism, and influence. There is even a complex attempt at understanding and almost forgiving Eliot’s anti-semitism.
Schwartz wanted to portray Eliot as the exemplary modern poet, the writer who actually brought on a new sense of the industrial world. Alas, he could not make it cohere. Nor could he even decide on a final form for the book, as various drafts indicate more or less formal and personal attempts at an overall scheme. A scholar might piece together a serviceable book from these folders, but it would probably offer little that other critics haven’t since said better.
What is most useful to readers now is the chance this writing offers to better understand Schwartz the thinker and critic and literary fan. In the pages that follow, we see a young poet grappling with the overpowering influence of his chosen master, layering his personal philosophy and sensibility into his reading of Eliot, who offered, Schwartz insisted, a new “sense of the actual.” Schwartz was increasingly tormented by his own shifting sense of actuality; what follows is one of his attempts at describing what seemed most true to him: literature.
THE REASON FOR WRITING THIS BOOK
In 1937, I lived in a rooming house near Washington Square. Because I read late at night and because it was difficult for me to fall asleep, I slept every morning until noon. I wrote all afternoon and then in the evening I went to the pictures, often walking the two miles to Times Square in order to do so, and going through the dark garment district of that part of the city until I came to the crowds moving about under the garish brilliance of Broadway. After the picture was over and I had left the theatre with my customary sense of guilt at the waste of an evening, I returned to the room where I lived with my brother and for the first time during the whole day enjoyed a genuine human relationship. All that I had done in that respect during the earlier part of the day was to tell the waitress behind the counter what I wanted for lunch and communicate in like terms with the waiter in a restaurant when I had my dinner. But when I came back from the movie, my brother was usually there and in bed, reading a tabloid. He had read my mail, which usually concerned literary matters, and we discussed these letters briefly. Then he began each night to tell me what had happened during the day at the office where he worked, a business concern which marketed artificial flowers and made a good deal of money, but not enough, it seemed, to keep the four brothers and their brother-in-law who owned the business on good terms with each other. [I would try with all the will in me to listen to my brother’s stories, but they scarcely ever interested me very much, and so I would soon find myself turning the pages of my brother’s tabloid while he continued to talk, wholly unaware of my lack of interest. Then he went to sleep usually, unless he had found some novel among my new books which interested him, and I sighed to think how far apart we were, although we had been in the same house and slept in the same bedroom almost always from the day he had been born.]1 These thoughts preoccupied me for a few moments, and then I would begin to read, placing four or five books beside my bed because I never could bring myself to believe that any one book would interest me sufficiently.
I came home one Saturday night in mid-winter and was surprised to find my brother there with his best friend.2 I was surprised because Saturday night was their big night, the one on which they were determined to have a good time, or at any rate to stay out late. If they stayed out late they would not feel they weren’t making the best use of the one night of the week when they did not need to go to sleep and get up the next morning and to go to work.3
Neither of the boys had been paying any attention to the other. My brother Stanley was reading the evening edition of the next day’s Sunday paper and his friend Howard was studying the colored comics with profound attention, grunting now and then with amusement.4
Howard said to me: “We have just been talking about you and trying to decide why you spend your time the way you do, writing poems, stories, and reviews. What is it going to get you? No one or hardly anyone is interested in these things and you don’t make much money, do you?”
“No, I don’t, and you’re right, only about ten thousand people in the whole United States are truly interested; perhaps not even that many.”5
“Then why do you do it? How do you know that anything you write is any good? Here you are writing articles of criticism in which you say whether a book is good or not. Now what I want to know is, How do you know what is good?”
“Would you really like to know how I try to decide? Because I’ll tell you if you’re willing to listen to me.”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” he answered, “we were just getting ready to go out.”
Both boys arose, knowing they had left me in a lurch, in the middle of a sentence, so to speak. My brother, a person of infinite tact, said that he would like to hear about it tomorrow.6 But Howard could not suppress one parting shot—
“Just remember”, he said aggressively, “that a hundred and forty million human beings feel differently than you do and like the books you dislike and dislike the books you like, that is, if they waste any time paying attention to them. I don’t like the books you read, and I can’t even understand your poems or stories.7
The same kind of question arose in different forms upon other occasions and among other people. Once a relative of mine returned from a performance of “Mourning Becomes Electra” to ask why human beings, unhappy themselves, should be expected to enjoy and pay for a view of unhappiness for hours on end. On another occasion, another person looked at a story of mine and then at a poem; and then inquired why I never attempted to beautify anything.
DRAFT OF THE INTRODUCTION
T. S. Eliot is a great poet and the best literary critic in the English language.
I begin with this extreme statement so that the purpose of this book will be clear. Sainte-Beuve, a great critic, said that the purpose of the literary critic was to show the reader how to read more and more. This plain statement assumes that there are many ways in which to read the same book. By examining his own experience, the reader will remember how interesting and how illuminating the reading of other readers has often been. It is the best means of checking and extending and correcting our own experiences of the book. Do we not look at the introduction, converse about the book, and look for book reviews, always or chiefly with the purpose of seeing how our reading is the same or different from the experience of other readers? how we missed what other readers saw? how we projected into the book what was in our own existence, not in the book itself?