To Ezra Pound
8 West 105 St.
New York City
March 5, 1939
Dear Mr. Pound:
I have been reading your last book, Culture.2 Here I find numerous remarks about the Semite or Jewish race, all of them damning, although in the course of the book, you say:
Race prejudice is red herring. The tool of man defeated intellectually, and of the cheap politician.
which is a simple logical contradiction of your remarks about the Jewish people, and also a curious omen of a state of mind — one which can support both views, race prejudice and such a judgment of race prejudice, at the same time, or in the same book.
A race cannot commit a moral act. Only an individual can be moral or immoral. No generalization from a sum of particulars is possible, which will render a moral judgment. In a court of law, the criminal is always one individual, and when he is condemned, his whole family is not, qua family, condemned. This is not to deny, however, that there are such entities as races. Furthermore, this view of individual responsibility is implicit in the poetry for which you are justly famous.
But I do not doubt that this is a question which you have no desire to discuss with anyone who does not agree with you, and even less with one who will be suspected of an interested view. Without ceasing to distinguish between past activity and present irrationality, I should like you to consider this letter as a resignation: I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.
Sincerely yours,
Delmore Schwartz
To James Laughlin
Friday, December 16, 1941
Dear Jay:
I am sending you the first two hundred pages of Genesis today in a copy which is a mixture of carbons, revisions, and older versions, but as close as I could get to the final version without parting with what I need here. These 200 pages are substantially the basis on which I was given a Guggenheim renewal.
I want you to publish it separately. It can be called Genesis or Genesis Part I or Made in America or Made in New York or An Atlantic Boy or A New York Childhood. Many other titles might be considered to take care of the fact that it is just the first part—The Beginning, or Book One.
This publication of the first two-fifths of the poem seems by far the wisest policy to me for a number of reasons, intrinsic and extrinsic. The intrinsic reasons are bound up with the difficulty of getting a proper conclusion right now. If I try to force one, I may wake up in six months and be sorry. But these 200 pages I am certain of, I have tried them out on myself in the worst despondency and lack of energy and I am sure they mean what I want them to mean and what they ought to mean. And if they don’t, there will still be time to make changes whenever the whole poem is published. Long poems have been published in parts from The Divine Comedy to The Cantos, and no comparison in quality is needed here: The form is the same, the long narrative poem can be published in its natural divisions. But more than that, it is too much of a risk right now, with everyone thinking of war, to print 500 pages and expect it to get attention between one crisis in the Far East and another in Iceland and a third in Libya and a fourth in Southern Russia.
The fact that the Philistines of the Guggenheim committee were pleased with this two-fifths should serve as a good external gauge. Some of the internal gauges worth mentioning are as follows: It may seem for a while that the alternation of Biblical prose and blank verse is too predictable, but it will, I think, be felt as an acceptable formal device, like the refrain in a ballad or like rhyme or like a tragic chorus. If the dead as a chorus seem bizarre, remember that Dante wrote the best poem ever written by using the dead as voices. If the fusion of narrative and commentary seems strange, remember that, as I intend to point out in a short preface, this story-succeeded-by-commentary is one of the profoundest most deeply-rooted and most accepted experiences in modern life: The newspaper story-editorial, the play-and-review-of-the-play, the travel film with voice as commentator and newsreel with commentator are all primordial examples of what is going to be an inevitable literary form (inevitable because the life we live forces it upon us). In any case, as I just said, the chorus is one of the best and most popular devices invented in any time. Louise Bogan made a fool of herself again by denying this in reviewing Shenandoah (she says that the poet always disappears from the scene when Dante walks half the way through Hell and Purgatory with a poet next to him and stops to discuss versification with other poets on the way).
If you don’t want to get in back of this separate publication in the way that you would back up the whole poem, that suits me perfectly. I feel that this is more than good enough to make its way to the point where, when the reviews are in, you will feel no further need for caution about my staying powers as a poet. You can regard it as a trial balloon, which will cost you no more than the new Miller book.3
The Christmas vacation comes in two weeks and by the end of the month, at the latest, I will be able to type final copy of the two hundred pages I want you to print, with a bridge passage at the end intended to make the reader look forward to more. Then I can wait (as all good poets should and as fruit-trees wait for the proper season) until the right conclusion comes; I can wait through the summer when I do not have to mark eighty abuses of the English language a week. Perhaps I can write a first version of a first novel, or at least enough of one to make you think I am worth my leisure time.
I have a good deal more to say about this 200-page section in itself (especially about the roadhouse scene as the proper end to this separate publication), but it is pointless to do so until you have the mss. [sic] at hand and have read some of it.
I also want to answer your letter in detail as soon as I have time. One point worth mentioning in advance is that the question of matching another publisher’s advance is beside the point. Whether I am worth what I am told by some publishers I am worth I may never know; they say they would spend from five to ten thousand dollars advertising a novel of mine. Not only would you not do this, but the organization of ND gets worse all the time and you have just put it all in the hands of one who, though a fine person in many ways, has just been running it into the ground because of ignorance, hysteria, and neuroses unequalled on the Eastern Seaboard. The only reason you put it in her hands is that you are busy with the ski hoteclass="underline" What reason has anyone to believe that you will not always be busy with something else besides ND?4 It strikes me that the whole thing would be much better moved completely to Hollywood, since you obviously intend to be in Utah most of the time. In fact, that seems to me the only possibly reasonable arrangement, moving everything including E. S. (who would do well enough with a superior nearby) near you. ND needs you as a bow needs an arrow. However, be this as it may, it is nothing I intend to do anything about until I give you a novel.
Another thing I ought to answer right now, since it may shine on the mss. I am sending is that, lucky or not (and I was not very lucky with Rimbaud, for if I had not been at Yaddo because of poverty I would have shown it to someone at Columbia), and intrinsic merit apart, it should be clear to you by now that what I write attracts a great deal of attention (did you, for example, see the spread for Shenandoah in Sunday’s Times?). Perhaps it is a streak of vulgarity or something else, but almost everything I have published has rung the gong for four years; the instance of the translation shows that it is not my beautiful eyes or winning personality or Aryan background which is responsible; it is the work itself, whether for the wrong reasons or not I do not know.