SOURCE: "More on Delmore," in Partisan Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, 1987, pp. 497-502.

It is possible to feel overwhelmed by Delmore Schwartz in death as it was in life. Twenty years after his death on July 11, 1966, the movement to resurrect Schwartz has taken an aggressive turn. The publication of his journals is just a ripple in the tide of Schwartziana that has been swelling since 1975, when Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift brought Schwartz back into public consciousness as the kibbitzer maudit and insomniac laureate of his age. That wave includes Robert Phillips's edition of Schwartz's Letters, published in 1984; Schwartz's Last and Lost Poems (1979); the collection of "bagatelles," The Ego is Always at the Wheel (1986); James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977); the extended portrait of Schwartz in William Barrett's The Truants (1982); and Bruce Bawer's essay on Schwartz's poetry in The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell (1986). Virtually forgotten after his death, Schwartz has now been brought back to life as a symbol of Jewish intellectual life and a small but vigorous cottage industry.

Much of this industry is the work of Schwartz's literary executor Robert Phillips, who has been toiling in the ruins of Schwartz's career in the hopes, it seems, of making a museum out of all that shattered masonry. The Letters, the Last and Lost Poems and The Ego is Always at the Wheel are his doing, and he cautions us in the last book that other publications are likely to be forthcoming: verse plays, unpublished novels, stories, a book-length critical study of T. S. Eliot, and the autobiographical poem that Schwartz wrestled with for years, Genesis, Book II. "Much of this material," Phillips has been candid to admit in the preface to The Ego is Always at the Wheel, "is not Schwartz at his best," and it is doubtful that any reader of the most recent gleanings will take issue with him.

Phillips has not been alone. Working in tandem to edit, decipher, and publish Schwartz's gargantuan journals has been Schwartz's exwife, Elizabeth Pollett, who had been estranged from Schwartz for nine years at the time of his death. The journals, some 2,400 pages of lava and ash, were among the papers rescued by Dwight Macdonald from a moving company, after their whereabouts came to light during a chance encounter in a bar between Macdonald's son and the proprietor of the company. Those 2,400 pages were eventually transcribed into 1,400 pages of typescript, then edited down to something like 900 pages [entitled Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz: 1939–1959]. Entries after 1959, which Elizabeth Pollett found virtually indecipherable, are omitted.

Schwartz began the journal of his twenty-sixth birthday, December 8, 1939, and kept at it for twenty-seven years until his death. It began as a diary of the most conventional kind: "In the evening I went to the movie…. Yesterday we went to see the Fergussons…. Jay called from Mt. Vernon." Except that literature is Schwartz's constant preoccupation, this is fairly indistinguishable from the diary of an ordinary teenager. It is self-conscious, gossipy, and bristling with resentment. Keeping track of social encounters and the social injuries he invariably provoked was Schwartz's chief preoccupation. But by 1942, the journal had become a catch-all for whatever impressions were bubbling through his mind: poems, limericks, epigrams, puns, sendups, assaults, appeals, diatribes—the effluvia of his restless imagination. When Schwartz was in one of his manic moods, the journal took on the qualities of a Joycean monologue interieur, and Schwartz's lifelong fascination with Joyce, whom he transcribed into his notebooks as a discipline of style, may have inspired his erratic and spontaneous method of notation. But in Schwartz's hands the Joycean manner—fleeting impressions joined by threads of association—often dispensed with the associations. Early on, the journal suggests a basic disorganization. By 1942, when Schwartz was twenty-nine and at the height of his powers, the private writing was already showing signs of decomposition, as though the tide of impressions was no longer under control. Two years later, while keeping up a brave front as a poet and man of letters, he privately admitted defeat:

This lifelong sickness which robs me of my self, which takes away my power, which made me a poor student, the author of unfinished works, or works which deceive me very much: at last I know it is a sickness, and that I am hardly to blame, to blame myself—at least that much is understood.

The sickness was never precisely pinpointed, though insomnia was Schwartz's chief torment, and the remedies he indulged to combat it had a shattering effect on every mental faculty: his concentration, his character, his work habits. The journal is a twenty-year-long pathogram, which shows us Schwartz sliding into a limbo of alcohol, amphetamines, and barbiturates until disorder has become his only order, scatter his only unity, everywhere his sole direction.

July 5 [1945] I took Benzedrine at 3:30. St. Louis 7, Giants 5. I rejected ten mss. I took a haircut. I had breakfast with E.; lunch with [Milton] Klonsky; I dined with The New Yorker at the Sevilla. I wrote one painful page. I glanced through Auden's collected poems and was distressed by the titles. "Don't be Careful." Spoke to Edna [Phillips] on the phone.

Page after hopeless page, the journal proceeds in this fractured and banal fashion, the self-regard punctuated by jokes and epiphanies and, on good days, poems on the theme of his torment:

      I held a seashell to my ear and heard
      My heart roar PANDEMONIUM which was to say
      Every demon from hell yells in your heart
      —Although you thought you heard the senseless sea,
      You only heard yourself.

Schwartz's poetry was all misery and form, and the misery being constant, his perennial quest was for a proper form. "Form is an endless effort," he writes, "and not only that, but perhaps the secret of life." Again, "Every success I knew was from the fecundative power of form." These are standard claims, and yet in the context of these journals they seem like pleas for redemption. Cut loose from any sustaining ideas, Schwartz took form alone for his grail, one that was at times no larger than a shotglass: "All literature," he would declare nonchalantly, "is an effort at the formal character of the epigram," and he hoarded his epigrams the way a comedian hoards punch lines.

Schwartz's performance, as he turned the inner pandemonium into a theater of personality, had a hypnotic effect on others. "Mankind is stunned by the Exuberance and Beauty of certain individuals," observed Bellow in Humboldt's Gift. "When a Manic Depressive escapes from his Furies he's irresistable." In New York Jew, Alfred Kazin would remember "the headlong rush of words that seemed to engage every muscle in his face as he twisted and spat in the rage of his opinions." But Schwartz's improvisations are not so compelling in print as they were face to face. The command was in the delivery, which wedded the manic-depressive's intoxication to the tummler's sense of timing, without which the exuberant lines fade into narcissism and exaggeration; they seem merely gaudy without being particularly potent, and Pollett herself steps outside the glow of her own devotion long enough to express disappointment in "the lopsidedness of the entries and the impossibilities, finally, of language to render life." This book might be thought of as the script for a great tragicomic performance in which puns and one-liners take the place of heroic verse. Schwartz was a dynamo of quips, a machine for generating bon mots and a few mauvais ones as well. "What this country needs is a good five-cent psychiatrist"; "Philip Rahv has his good qualities, but he never lets them stand in his way"; "She was the wife of the party; he was engaged in holy wedlock"; "How do you like Kipling?' 'I never drink it'"; "A horse divided against itself cannot stand"; "All gall is divided into three parts: arrogance, insensitivity, self-dramatization." Schwartz aspired, it seems, to be Milton Berle, but such a Berle as himself might yarn to be T. S. Eliot, taking the measure of modern life in iambs and singing to the mermaids with a cigar in his teeth.

Schwartz was a study in contradictions. On the one side lay a heaviness, immanence, a nervous, exasperated life, and a sluggish physicality, "the heavy bear who goes with me."

       When I go down to sleep
         To sleep
       I am wood I am
         Stone I am a slow
       River, hardly flowing
       & all is warm & all is animal
       —I am stone, I am river
       I am wood—a wood but not
         A leaf …

Then again, in raptures of illumination, he was the bard of air and wind, music and light.

       Music is not water, but it moves like water
       It is not fire but it soars as warm as the sun
       It is not rock, it is not fountain,
       But rock and fountain, clock and mountain
       Abide within it, bound together
       In radiance pulsing, vibrating, and reverberating,
       Dominating the domination of the weather.

This cadenza appears in 1959, when, gloomy and dazed, Schwartz could still snatch a grace beyond the reach of amphetamines. Playing Ariel to his own Caliban, he could outflank his depression long enough to strike the silver note. It is remarkable. The journal, otherwise sodden and world weary, suddenly melts into air. Perhaps these were no more than the normal gyrations of the manic depressive, whose capricious moods can drag him from the suburbs of heaven to the porches of hell in minutes, but one is struck all the same by their extremity: how utterly black were the black moods and how dazzling the light ones.

I wish I could report that [Portrait of Delmore] was a joy to read or that it returned me to Schwartz's writing with renewed appreciation. Unfortunately, it is a trial that no one will pick up casually. The scatter is appalling, and if these journals in any way can be said to capture Schwartz's furious presence, it is only by documenting in brutal detail his confusion and grief and the venom that poisoned all his social relations. The brilliant range of reference that Bellow recorded in Humboldt's Gift—"Yeats, Apollinaire, Lenin, Freud, Morris R. Cohen, Gertrude Stein, baseball statistics, and Hollywood gossip"—was no more than that, a range of reference and evidence of a mind that had mistaken gossip for thought and had gotten lost in the cosmopolitan wilderness somewhere between James Joyce and Walter Winchell. Schwartz's mind was an encyclopedia from which everything had been scratched but the titles, and he had an inkling of his own depthlessness: "As with an onion," he wrote, "illusion after illusion is peeled off—what remains? Nothing at all—".

What did Schwartz believe? These journals show us a man without a gospel, who by that fact alone stood apart from his fellow Partisan Review editors, all of whom were virtuosi of gospel. One looks in vain for a significant politics: Roosevelt appears seven times in the index, Trotsky four times, Stalin only twice, and they are only names among names. One looks for an emotional agenda, a social doctrine, a code of human relations, a burning metaphysic—anything. Even a poetic. The terrible truth was that behind the poetry was a void that Schwartz sought desperately to fill with words, as if to hide from himself the absence of meaning. Instead of meaning we find personality, instead of thought, declamation. Schwartz performed the rare feat of baring his breast while hiding his heart, electing to complain, to joke, to dramatize himself, and above all to itemize with dull perseverance every drink, every pill, every slight, every grievance, every frivolity, every frisson, and every pang, until the tabula rasa was smudged with grief and clotted with verse.

It is not too strong to say that this is an appalling book and that Schwartz is diminished by these raids on his papers. The journals are 663 pages long, the letters 384, the "bagatelles" 143. By comparison, a fine little compendium of Schwartz's best poems published in England in 1976, What Is to Be Given?, is but 75 pages long and is simply overwhelmed by the ephemera. Portrait of Delmore shows us the poet at his most dishevelled, stripped of his defenses and his dignity. Maybe what is lacking is only the ersatz dignity of literary form and verbal composure, but ersatz or real it is vital to the artist who digs deep into himself and mines the seams of his own shame for his art. At such times, one sympathizes with Kafka's plea to Max Brod to destroy all his papers after his death. We're all the richer for Brod's betrayal of his friend, but Schwartz left nothing like The Trial behind him when he died.

Delmore Schwartz in all his vanity and turmoil, his narcissism and pain, is growing uncommonly familiar to us these days, while the poetry is sliding out of focus. A generation of readers that knows nothing of Schwartz's great poem "Seurat's Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine" is now expert in his insomnia, his drinking, his rages, and his crack-up. There have got to be better forms of homage than these 648 pages of undigested journal. Surely there are shorter ones.