On Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz was an American writer. His Jewish Romanian family made a life in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, where his father's entrepreneurial skills enabled the immigrant family to enjoy a high standard of living and quite rightly to consider that they had achieved “the American Dream.” However, the economic crash of the 1920s resulted in the collapse of Harry Schwartz's speculative property empire, and with it the family's fortunes. This rags-to-riches-to rags cycle was a sore picked-over by Delmore in his journals and later writings.

He set out to establish himself as an important writer in his own right, publishing stories and poems in many of the principal literary journals. In the late 1930s, under James Laughlin's New Directions imprint, he published a collection of poems and stories, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and as a result of its critical success was touted as the most important writer of his generation, a burden of gold in some respects, but otherwise an impossible weight to bear at the age of twenty-five. In perspective, this was a time when his contemporaries, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Saul Bellow, had published nothing.

Although critically acclaimed, the book's sales were poor, and for several years he made an indifferent and meagre living teaching. In the late 1940s, he published a book of short stories, The World is a Wedding, again critically well received, but with the proviso that the initial great promise of his early writing was not to be fulfilled.

His personal life was unhappy, and, a chronic insomniac, he became pharmaceutically dependent on barbiturates, an addiction compounded later by alcohol abuse. His second wife, the writer Elizabeth Pollett, said, "He had about five jobs, was working his head off, and was increasingly out of touch with reality.” "Being with him,” she wrote, was "like living on the side of a volcano."

Separated from Pollett, and at one time sectioned, his later years found him renting West Village cold-water flats. He still functioned well enough to review for The New Republic, though, and in 1960 he became the youngest poet to receive the Bollingen Prize for poetry.

In 1966, he was found lying in the hallway outside his room, dead. His body lay in the morgue two days before it was claimed by friends.

F. Scott Fizgerald's observation that “there are no second acts in American lives,” was probably as true of Schwartz as of any self-promoting personality in American Life. Schwartz, however, seems to have found a way around the doom-laden epithet, albeit posthumously. His poems were regularly anthologised in American publications, and in the early years of this century a compendium of his best poems and stories was published. Robert Lowell's “For Delmore Schwartz”, from Life Studies, gave credence to a literary life and its times, while his former student at Syracuse, Lou Reed, dedicated "European Son" from the Velvet Underground's first album, to Delmore, and Saul Bellow's novel, Humboldt's Gift, offered a fictional portrait of Delmore that still resonates today.

At the beginning of his biography of Schwartz, Delmore Schwartz: the Life of an American Poet, published in the mid 70s, James Atlas lamented that there was no substantial body of letters from which to glean important and interesting biographical material, comparative that is, to the correspondence of Virginia Woolf or Henry James.

Today, the comment seems quaint. The biography in fact includes dozens, if not hundreds, of extracts from Schwartz's manuscripts and letters. The comment in retrospect places it within a cultural milieu attendant to Edwardian and early Modernist literary tradition, before computer technology, e.g. Internet, social media, Skype, email. One can imagine the difficulties of a contemporary biographer dependent solely on electronic mail to validate a Life.

Delmore's abiding passion, which shone through personal and professional enmity, was James Joyce, and in particular Finnegans Wake, a well-used, well-annotated copy of which remained in Delmore's possession to the end of his life.

In Joyce's first publication, Dubliners, a character muses on a “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness.” Perhaps, after all the self-regarding, impetuous, inventive, ill-considered, and outright genius of our creative choices, we are all only standing in each other's shadows.