Romance out of Tragedy

...Or for Atlas' hospitability to comic relief...

...undertaking several romantic involvements...

...Others resurrect his mercurial temperament—for Norman Jacobs, a former New Leader editor, he had "a radiant disposition," while the wife of Harvard's Harry Levin tells Atlas how her husband and Schwartz used to sit on the porch stairs after dinner, "talking pessimistic...

...His stories (in The World Is a Wedding) conveyed, through an odd blend of crankiness and eulogy, self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement, what it was like to be the children of East European Jewish immigrants...

...Mother...

...But in James Atlas' biography, he looms as a central figure in the literary world, and even his failure to achieve his goals becomes the stuff of romance...

...If there is another word besides wonderful I dont know...

...Yet that was also the period when Schwartz wrote his evocative, bittersweet stories about the strident family relations and combative friendships among the Jewish immigrants in Washington Heights...

...Below, shuffling comedy...

...I've never met anyone," said Robert Lowell, "who has somehow as much seeped into me...

...Occasionally, though, Atlas exhausts us as he relentlessly puts Del-more Schwartz together from scraps of journals, fragments of letters and Niagaras of reminiscence...

...But his dejection did not prevent him from planning a novel...

...He was always ready to board the shuttle from small humiliations to big projects, moving from vanity to intellect...

...Full of relish for the man, this biography is sure to be popular with young academics...

...he was "beautiful, a mischievous, poetic child...

...A surfaced whale might look as he looked with his wide-set eyes...

...His rueful Eliot-and Keats-flavored lyrics ("Time is the school in which we learn,/Time is the fire in which we burn") seasoned a generation of bristling polemicists with an unlikely reverence for poetry and the poetic life...

...One of the great gossips of all time," Schwartz would probably not have been dismayed that a biography faithfully pursuing his intellectual development should include so many personal tidbits...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp For many who read Partisan Review in the 1940s, the very name Delmore Schwartz reverberates a sentimental education...

...There is something worrisome in our fascination with doomed, self-destructive poets like Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath or Delmore Schwartz...

...Again, after the unenthusiastic reception of his ponderous autobiographical poem, Genesis, he lamented to John Berryman, "No reputation is more than snowfall...

...Whatever he did was delicious...

...His interviewees and correspondents number over a hundred, and range expansively (albeit hectically) from Robert Lowell and Allen Tate to the counselor Delmore had at the Pocono Camp Club in 1926, when he was 13...

...Although these imperfections make the poet seem more human, they also serve to make us feel more patronizing...

...Still, James Atlas' persistence does in the end bring to life the charismatic, many-sided Schwartz who fired the imagination of so many more successful poets and critics...

...and lambasting Van Wyck Brooks' The World of Washington Irving for ignoring the darker side of American literature...

...Yet if he has accepted the point of view of this group (too much at odds with one another to be called a community), he has also blithely harnessed their services as the largest unpaid research staff a 28-year-old biographer ever dreamed of...

...Not much dust from library stacks settles on Atlas' peppy work...

...We hear, too, of his epigrams?Even paranoids have real enemies"—and slanders...

...A reader of Ezra Pound's Cantos as they were appearing when he was 17, and a high-handed reviewer of Joyce and Eliot at 21, Schwartz provided the natural link between its anti-Stalinist politics and its passionate embrace of the great European modernists...

...There are moments in my life, thet I believe all my struggles are worth while...

...But no matter how important anxieties and disarray are to an understanding of the man, this book ought to have been (and to some extent can't help being) testimony to Schwartz' phenomenal energy of mind, his suppleness and his enormous receptivity to others' creative achievements, regardless of his own mood...

...Gossip does not thrive on good fortune, however, and friends once enlivened by Delmore's company were more than willing to supply a melancholy dossier of his weaknesses: shyness, inaudible mumbling as a college teacher, insomnia, a talent for making enemies and bolloxing up his prospects—even pallor and bad teeth have been adduced against him...

...At Harvard, where Schwartz felt uneasy and conspicuous about being a Jew—he joked that the office he shared with Harry Levin was the "Golden Ghetto"—he turned his discomfort into a preoccupation with anti-Semitism in literature...

...His parents battled fiercely until they were divorced, and the million-dollar legacy he expected from his father's Chicago real estate business never materialized...

...While his early years as a teacher at Harvard were among his most productive, at 28, when his verse play Shenandoah was published to mixed reviews, he was already easy prey to jealousies and depressions, relying on drink and barbiturates, and convinced that his face as well as his nature was divided between good and evil...

...And years after Schwartz abruptly ended their friendship, William Barrett wrote in his affectionate, yet wonderfully just memoir {Commentary, September 1974): "he was the most magical human being I've known...

...This is not to say that Schwartz' life was devoid of formidable handicaps...

...we can imagine him often interrupted by ringing phones, clattering cups and walks in the city—or perhaps chuckling with the silent creative partner of our time, the tape recorder...

...he would have been fired long ago if he weren't a great poet...

...In a sense, this treatment behooves him, since it was precisely his personality that had such extraordinary impact...

...Nevertheless, they are encouraged in the reader by the book's internal momentum toward disaster, and by its clear if unstated implication that the career was all the more glamorous because it was tragically aborted...

...entertaining James Agee, Clement Greenberg and Auden in Cambridge...

...1 myself am...

...an unsuccessful poet," he wrote in an unfinished autobiographical story...

...Schwartz did not receive much solace either from his marriage to a dour, undemonstrative, "literary" girl...

...He thrilled me continually," wrote Bellow about the fictional Schwartz...

...Even in the 1950s, when he was penniless and distraught and brilliance had faded from his style, there were moments when he exulted, "Verse is pouring from my fingers...

...Alfred Kazin remembers Schwartz' air of "fine distraction," as he declaimed in "gulps of argument," transforming Greenwich Village in his talk from a province into a cultural capital...

...Upon reading Ezra Pound's hostile remarks about the Jews early in 1939, his reverence for Pound as a literary hero did not prevent him from writing an eloquent letter of conscience that ended: "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...

...made it big...

...Like the Ellery Brown of a story begun that summer," writes Atlas, who makes the transitions from psychic temperature to substance with remarkable ease, "Delmore was in a desperate mood...

...above princeliness and dignity, a certain nutty charm...

...His nagging, unbearable mother begrudged him the money to finish college, enjoined him whenever he left the house to "come home in a coffin," then pulled an unnerving switch when she read his story about her own catastrophic marriage...

...Seen in the light of Atlas' biography, Von Humboldt Fleisher, Bellow's vivid personification of quick literary success and prolonged painful failure, turns out to be almost photographically modeled on Delmore Schwartz...

...the union was strained from the beginning and they eventually parted...

...He was the magazine's poetry editor and resident man of sensibility in a period when, as the narrator of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift remarks, "sensibility...

...All in all Schwartz was the essential Partisan Review type, and no doubt his excitement about ideas of every kind—from pop culture to psychoanalysis, from Aristotle to Marx?helped make PR the remarkable magazine it became after breaking from the Communist party in 1937...

...It extends to them the flattering invitation to share in the author's total, comradely appropriation of "Delmore," as he unvaryingly refers to his subject, on the most unabashedly intimate terms...

...I don't mean to imply that a meticulous biographer like James Atlas is himself given to such responses...

...Dear Delmore," she wrote, no doubt contributing to her son's life-long neurotic ambivalence...

...To view him under so golden a light, and to write this live-wire, well-populated, all-too-knowing biography, Atlas must have fallen under the spell of Schwartz' whole circle: the men and women who contributed to Partisan Review in its heyday and are still—despite the deaths of a half dozen major figures—among America's best poets, critics and academics...

...and cannily previewed the rough-edged ideological "New York intellectuals" they were to become...

...Readers might bolt from the vertigo of this "manic-depressive rollercoaster" were it not for the continuous, surprising normality of the biographer, sound in judgment and unrhetorical as a presiding physician...

...From then on his thoughts were laced with gloom, and Atlas traces his descent to madness with the fine lines of a Kokoschka portrait...

...Philip [Rahv, oracular chief editor of Partisan Review\ does have scruples but he never lets them stand in his way...

...It's not too late to change your minds...

...As everybody is beginning to admit, those were mean streets on which New York intellecluals met to swap opinions, but evidently Delmore's remarkable gift for friendship remained intact...

...We have only to read a poem or two by writers Schwartz admired—Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams—to see that he could not match them in concentration or clear purpose...

...We are not so much gloating at their downfall as enjoying the false notion that we experience them more profoundly, perhaps are capturing their creative secret, when we know the worst in them...

...Mary McCarthy muses (with rare tenderness) about her fascination with his "violet eyes...

...One of the original Partisan editors, F. W. Dupee, recalls that with his marvelous invective, his incredible command of literary information, and "a half ironic parading of erudition," Delmore seemed the very type of poetic genius...

...We long for the eccentric poet to rear up more suddenly in the flesh and more buoyantly in the spirit, the way he does in Bellow's flashy description: "He was thick through the shoulders but still narrow at the hips...

...His legs were restless and his feet made nervous movements...

...Reading this biography is a lot like watching (or having) a fever, seesawing from a Schwartz ablaze with ideas and expectations to one wracked with fatigue, tormenting himself, "What have you done with the gift of consciousness...

...That suspect mood increases as we climb aboard the terrible tobag-gan-slide from the exhilaration the 25-year-old Schwartz felt when his first book of poems received a stunning burst of acclaim, to his lonely death in the hallway of a shabby Times Square hotel at 53...

...He recounts, for example, that when Schwartz felt duty-bound to inform Wallace Stevens' insurance colleagues that they had a major poet in their Hartford headquarters, one of them interrupted, "Listen, Stevens is the worst insurance lawyer we have in this office...

...Though Schwartz' writing was strikingly unconventional in texture and poignant in effect, I doubt much more of it will last than the few poems that appear in the anthologies (like "The Heavy Bear") and the perfectly cadenced, mesmeric story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," about a boy envisioning his parents' courtship in silent film images, and shouting "Don't do it...

...In addition, Atlas regales us with colorful examples of a manic careerism: Schwartz' convoluted maneuvers to advertise his books and Machiavellian schemes to acquire university jobs...