The Brooklyn Rail

Finally.

Fifty eight years after Delmore Schwartz’s heart attack in the hallway of a hotel off Broadway in midtown Manhattan, readers have access to almost the full spectrum of his poetry, a gift to anyone who cares about twentieth century verse in English. The poems from his first book, in their original unrevised state, would make it that by themselves: published in 1938, when Schwartz turned twenty-five, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was, in effect, a selected works, comprised of the eponymous short story that had made him famous when it appeared in Partisan Review; a long poem called “Coriolanus and His Mother: The Dream of One Performance”; thirty-five shorter poems, in two sets; and “Dr. Bergen’s Belief,” a play in prose and verse. Readers of the original will miss the short story and play, but Schwartz himself cut off the story from the rest of the book when he included it in his first book of stories, The World Is a Wedding, and the play is available in Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays, edited by Robert Phillips.

The Collected, then, starts off with “Coriolanus and His Mother.” The story comes from Shakespeare and Plutarch, and Schwartz’s account of motherly love, pride, and blight in fifth century BCE Rome follows the sources faithfully. His main contribution to the story, along with acute versification and four prose interludes, is the introduction of a chorus, its members the anonymous narrator and a few ghosts. The arguing shades are Aristotle, Marx, Freud, Beethoven, and an unnamed fifth who at one point trembles into view as Immanuel Kant. The sequences that follow, “The Repetitive Heart” (untitled poems “in imitation of the fugue form”) and “Twenty-Four Poems,” include some of Schwartz’s best work, poems that crackle and glow line to line—“Calmly we walk through this April’s day,” “The heavy bear who goes with me,” “Socrates’ Ghost Must Haunt Me Now,” “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” and “The Ballet of the Fifth Year.” None of Schwartz’s contemporaries in the United States except David Schubert was writing poetry this good at this pressure point, and not even Schubert wrote poems that combine personal, literary, philosophical, and political history with such apparently effortless grace. “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar” superimposes an image of the poet, two years old with baked potato in Brooklyn, on what may have been a photograph of the last Czar’s family the year before the February Revolution. Here’s the third of six sections:

I am my father’s father,
You are your children’s guilt.

In history’s pity and terror
The child is Aeneas again,

Troy is in the nursery,
The rocking horse is on fire.

Child labor! The child must carry
His father on his back.

But seeing that so much is past
And that history has no ruth

For the individual,
Who drinks tea, who catches cold,

Let anger be general:
I hate an abstract thing.

Mazer prints Schwartz’s translation of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer as Schwartz’s second book of poems but doesn’t explain why he uses the 1939 edition of A Season in Hell and not the version that followed a year later. It isn’t a matter of avoiding elaborate revisions for original simplicity: reviewers of the first edition pointed out many errors of translation, and the revised edition corrects these mistakes. Versions aside, no translation into English of this poem is more sensitive to the original, and the impact of Rimbaud’s visionary mixture of poetry and prose is evident throughout Schwartz’s work.

The complaints about Schwartz’s French were nothing compared to the response of critics and reviewers to his next book, the two hundred page Genesis: Book One. Yes, the United States had finally entered the war by 1943 and the Allies weren’t doing well, but that doesn’t explain the misreading and consequent dismissal of this ambitious and powerful poem. Like “Coriolanus,” Genesis is a narrative in prose and verse with choruses, only now the lens through which we see everything has a name, Hershey Green (“schwartz” comes from the German word for black), and the prose of the narrative is also a kind of poetry, laid down in versets influenced by the King James Bible, Whitman, and, possibly, Eliot’s translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase. This time the choristers are anonymous, though one is clearly a Freudian, another a Marxist.

Time is circular and concentric in the poem, which begins in 1930, then goes immediately beyond Hershey’s birthday in 1913, in retrograde progression, as he and the ghosts witness and comment on his grandparents’ lives first and then his parents’ meeting, courtship, and quickly deteriorating marriage, the first seven or eight years of Hershey’s life, and the worlds around them in Russia, Europe, and New York (“Europe’s last capital”). At the end, Eva Green drags her son into a restaurant where her husband, Jack, is entertaining a girlfriend and screams bloody murder at them, upsetting no one more than her cringing unwitting accomplice. The Collected includes 115 pages from the unpublished Book Two, which ends with Hershey’s father’s death in Chicago and the stock market crash of 1929, so that we’re back at the beginning of Book One:

“. . . . Me next to sleep, all that is left of Eden,”
—The one who speaks is not remarkable
In the great city, circa 1930,
His state is not uncommon in the world,
O, by no means, sleepless and seeking sleep
As one who wades in water to the thighs,
Dragging it soft and heavy near the shore;

Never having been orchestrated by Schwartz for publication, the selections don’t really add up to a book, but they’re valuable in their unfinished state because, apart from the occasional brilliance, they suggest how he might have worked on Genesis. Some pages are variations on material in Book One, some are different versions of each other, and reading the fragments, you get a sense that Schwartz wrote up one or more versions of an episode and then, for publication, chose the ones that best suited his needs and ordered and rewrote them into a coherent poem.

Mazer could have spent more time explaining his decisions, especially the one behind this version of 1950’s Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, “suggested by the admiration of Princess Elizabeth for Danny Kaye” and dedicated to Schwartz’s second wife, novelist Elizabeth Pollet. The first section gave the book its title, or vice versa, and was originally comprised of eight poems, several modeled on Tudor and Elizabethan songs, interleaved with seven prose pieces that read like standup comedy routines by Shelley Berman or speeches by Falstaff (“Existentialism: The Inside Story,” “The Ego Is Always at the Wheel,” “Hamlet, or There Is Something Wrong with Everyone”). As Mazer notes, the prose pieces have been published separately, but this doesn’t make them any less vital to the book of poems in which they originally figured, and removing them makes as much sense as would have done taking out the interludes in “Coriolanus” or the sprung prose in Genesis: Book One (there’s none in the pages selected from Book Two). Furthermore, except for the section’s last poem, “Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve,” about the aftershock of Christ on his first disciples, the poems don’t stand on their own. We’re given lots of princess and no vaudeville.

The poems in Vaudeville’s second section, “The True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” are self-consciously public—several begin “Dear Citizens”—and attempt to synthesize, satirically, the poems and prose pieces of the first section, though without that prose the architecture vanishes. In the third section, “The Early Morning Light,” a sequence of forty sonnets and sonnetlike short poems, first lines often rhyme with and vary titles—“The Winter Twilight, Glowing Black and Gold” begins “That time of year you may in me behold.” It’s hard not to think of klang rhyming. The best poem in the sequence, about his wife and her father, a painter, is alarming otherwise. Its title, “The Desperanto of Willynully,” comes from Finnegans Wake:

Her father’s early portrait shows
Her gaze turned inward and her hands
In a delicate diffident pose,
Tiger lilies lightly clasped.
Who shall say he understands
What fingers on flowers signed and masked?

The years are used and cast aside.
This year is evil more than most.
Those lights were false. For she remains,
Rising from all that she denied,
Like great parks on this hurried coast,
And statues through the dirty rains.

Greeted with less hope than Genesis and as little enthusiasm, Vaudeville for a Princess was Schwartz’s last book before Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems 1938–1958, a volume that won the 1960 Bollingen Prize. Half of Summer Knowledge consists of slightly revised poems from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, including the sixty page “Coriolanus,” but by 1959 Schwartz had internalized the failure of his later books: there are three poems from Vaudeville for a Princess and a two page passage about Lincoln from Genesis.

The new poems are another story. While the charm of “‘I Am Cherry Alive,’ the Little Girl Sang” can be related profitably to the earlier “Will you perhaps consent to be,” there’s nothing in Schwartz’s earlier work like “Swift,” which collages passages from Jonathan Swift’s letters to map, chillingly, the satirist’s loves and mental illness. Nor is there anything to compare with the extravagant “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine” (based, according to James Atlas’s biography, on notes Schwartz took at a series of lectures by Meyer Schapiro), which begins—

What are they looking at? Is it the river?
The sunlight on the river, summer, leisure,
Or the luxury and the nothingness of consciousness?

After a detailed exploration of the painting’s foreign landscape, unknowable inhabitants, pinpoint technique, and sudden fate Chicago, the poem ends—

          Far and near, close and far away
Can we not hear, if we but listen to what Flaubert tried to say,
Beholding a husband, wife and child on just such a day:
Ils sont dans le vrai! They are with the truth, they have found the way
The kingdom of heaven on earth on Sunday summer day.
Is it not clear and clearer? Can we not also hear
The voice of Kafka, forever sad, in despair’s sickness trying to say:
“Flaubert was right: Its sont dans le vrai!
Without forbears, without marriage, without heirs,
Yet with a wild longing for forbears, marriage, and heirs:
They all stretch out their hands to me: but they are too far away!”

Schwartz’s life after Summer Knowledge was chaotic—a lifelong insomniac, he was also depressed, paranoid, alcoholic, and addicted to pills—but poems kept coming, among them “The Journey of a Poem Compared to All the Sad Variety of Travel,” “Love and Marilyn Monroe,” and, among the seventeen pieces hidden until now in Schwartz’s papers at Yale, this New York Giants fan’s “Exercise in Preparation for a Pindaric Ode to Carl Hubbell” and “Immortality,” where death is a hospital ward. He couldn’t always depend on it, but he seems never to have lost the exquisite ability to say more than he meant, as in “To a Fugitive,” first published twenty-three years after he fell at the Columbia Hotel:

The night you got away, I dreamed you rose
Out of the earth to lean on a young tree.
Then they were there, hulking the moon away,
The great dogs rooting, snuffing up the grass.
You raise a hand, hungry to hold your lips
Out of the waiting air; but lights begin
Spidering the ground; O they come closing in,
The beam searches your face like fingertips.

Hurry, Maguire, hammer the body down,
Crouch to the wall again, shackle the cold
Machine gun and the sheriff and the cars:
Divide the bright bars of the cornered bone,
Strip, run for it, break the last law, unfold,
Dart down the alley, race between the stars.