Unraveling in Style

...after the correct Latin plural "many opera," we get a censorious sic...

...There, in his last two years, he lived a hermit's life, bedridden by choice, and dying because an hour passed before a neighbor heard his moans when he collapsed carrying out the garbage...

...James Laughlin, Delmore's first important and longest-lasting publisher, is a minor poet in his own right, as well as a publishing prodigy, having started the prestigious and influential New Directions while a Harvard undergraduate...

...But, then, such was Delmore's poignant bad luck in life?which he did a lot to help along—that it extends to being posthumously delivered unto Robert Phillips...

...As late as May 1953, he writes Jay (or J, as his friends called James) about his hopes of earning more money through editorial work for the tony magazines Diogenes and Perspectives, adding: "And then there is the further possibility, in which I am not sure that you are passionately interested, that our hurly-burly friendship might achieve exalted regions of disinterested benignity which death alone will surpass...

...The hapless poet is remembered most of all for his witticism "Even paranoiacs have enemies...

...Yet here as well exaggeration is present, and Laughlin can declare, "Your statement that I was not trying to help you struck me as one of the most extraordinary remarks that I have ever heard...

...The two problems are related because I have a theory that one becomes unhappy because one sleeps with too many girls...

...Yet where the publisher is himself a writer, as in the case of, say, Jacques Riviere, director of France's premier publishing house, correspondences perk up...

...So when a choice embodiment of the concept comes along—Lord Byron or Dylan Thomas, Shelley or Rimbaud, Edna Millay or Robert Lowell—the poet acquires movie-star dimensions...

...This zesty correspondence is at times marred by Robert Phillips' shockingly obtuse editing...

...Accepting a hack job Laughlin offers him, Delmore writes, "I will swallow my pride—what is left of it—in order to have other things to swallow...

...He enthusiastically compares Bertolt Brecht to Jonathan Swift, an advanced view for 1944 America...

...disturbing me with conspiracies, and not promoting a book properly (as in the instance of Genesis) because of spite or timorousness or penuriousness or skiing...

...It may be impossible to be officially dubbed Poet without having written a certified anthology piece...

...Across the page, his friend John Berryman weighs in with 19...

...In it, Delmore laments his "Achilles' heel...

...in 1939, he appreciates "the sticks of dynamite which the later Rimbaud was throwing at the disorder and conflict and disease of Western civilization," despite the fact that his own translation of Rimbaud proved a bust...

...Laughlin led the life of the rich, skiing in Utah where he maintained a residence, traveling all over the world, making love to numerous women...

...In September of that year, he tells of Elizabeth, sick in bed, wondering whether they "could now purchase the pop-up toaster which has been the apple of her eye for the last eight months...

...Ironically, it was as a storyteller that he made his initial splash, with "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," a brief piece he submitted unsolicited to the newly revived Partisan Review...

...The great acclaim it received made Delmore's reputation...

...There is rather more about baseball from these Giant fans...

...this final one is in—what...

...Instead of explaining obscure passages, Phillips wastes pages and pages annotating the obvious...

...a sophist might somehow construe it as a tetrameter...

...Letters to one's publisher, to be sure, are a very special backwater of the epistolary mainstream...

...We believe Schwartz when, in 1955, he writes Jay about an "income which [very often] averages $25 a week," or talks, in February 1952, about "wearing one of my three neckties...

...About the famous writers and artists' colony, he remarks: "We also wanted to go to Yaddo, but they have made a fine rule that the creative husband must come without the non-creative wife (it is obscene, the desire to separate whom God hath joined), and since Gertrude has been planning to leave me since we were married, I think I had better stick around while she is still able to endure me...

...To improve TV would be to lose this new and important experience...

...palled on him too...

...the word paraphrase is misused...

...There are notes on Hemingway (his dates and the comment "American novelist"), Emily Dickinson, Mussolini, Virgil ("greatest poet of ancient Rome"), Dylan Thomas ("leading Welsh poet"), Aristotle ("Greek philosopher"), Tolstoy, and Gandhi, among others...

...no PR man could have planned better...

...But too much of this exchange is taken up with questions of publishing and financial matters...

...My favorite Phillipsisms are calling Rommel" Irwin," which must have been the name under which the German field marshal infiltrated Brooklyn, and annotating the infamous Mailer party and Lowell's comment on it with a reference to Norman's "allegedly'' stabbing Adele...

...On and on goes the list of complaints, concluding with the "wish to save money in that pathological manner which leads to many of your worst errors...

...He continually warns Jay about overestimating Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth, who "was better off when he wrote the most obscure poems ever written...

...As he gave to Impressionism the solidity of the museums, so I will give to the Symbolism that has reigned from Baudelaire to Eliot the solidity and the lucidity of the classics and the narrative ground of the epic...

...How much sprightlier and more various are the letters to Mrs...

...This is what always eluded the handsome Del-more Schwartz, qualified as he was in most respects...

...Phillips will helpfully name for us the three parts of the Divine Comedy, but not explain "Xmuss" beyond calling it an early Laughlin pun...

...Such was Delmore's talent for misery that this success (oh, for the good old days when the ladies still went for poets...

...Laughlin, one year his junior, and represented here by far fewer letters, is no piker either...

...Cioran, he pronounces, "Much of it is sumptuous intellectual-ized paraphrasing of the obvious...

...Just as he scuttled that poem, Del-more (as he was generally referred to) managed to ruin everything he touched: his teaching career (he wouldn't show up for class), his editorial activities (his erratic performance let down the magazines and publishing house with which he was associated), his two marriages that both ended in divorce (one to his high-school sweetheart Gertrude Buck-man, the next to the beautiful and adoring Elizabeth Pollet, herself a gifted novelist...

...Poets will be learning their meters from Pound for the next two hundred years," he writes in 1940, and for more than a quarter of that term he has already been proved right...

...for months at a time, endangering my relationships with friends such as [F.O.] Matthiessen, insulting my wife...

...Of course, she may have slipped and fallen on the knife...

...A book-length manuscript of Delmore's disappeared for months, to be found eventually in a Utah mail truck...

...Concerning the then new medium, TV, he advises: "I see that the Ford Foundation is tinkering with the intellectual level of television...

...I am going through Boston womanhood A to Z." A slight from his first wife could make him "engage in operations which soon demonstrated that anyone who wrote poems was regarded by the entire female sex as an...

...Nowhere in Schwartz' modest yet not skimpy poetic oeuvre (there was also drama, fiction and criticism) is there a poem or even a title that everyone, however dimly, knows, such as The Waste Land, "Sailing to Byzantium" or The Age of Anxiety...

...In 1961, Robert MacGregor writes to Laughlin, "Robert Lowell had a footnote to the party at which Norman Mailer stabbed his wife...

...Yet mention the name of the 1959 Bollingen Prize-winner in any com-pany other than that of the literati and see if it rings as loud as the telephone next door...

...Typical is a long jeremiad that, even with its first two pages missing, takes up five pages of the book...

...Although the image is not half bad, the meter in the last verse goes to pot...

...Impecunious Delmore could keep up only in the last department, marriages permitting...

...A sorry legacy for a talent admired by such shrewd and stern critics as Randall Jarrell and Dwight Macdonald, for a poet whose first volume (in 1938, when he was 24) elicited praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, and whose first collection of stories fared almost as well in 1948...

...Oh, for the good old days before fear of aids, or even herpes!] The question then arises as to who is more unhappy, you or me...

...He threatens to take his writings to "more responsible characters who care less for skiing and insulting sensitive human beings...

...His very death could have been averted...

...As he puts it, his "discovery of the extremely literary character of the female libido destroyed my joie de vivre and since then I have been bored...

...If some of these gripings are at least partly justified, some are paranoia rampant...

...If he does think the book is for the mass market, why notes (similarly skeletal) on Jack Dempsey, the Klondike, the Cardinals, Sherlock Holmes, etc...

...Just how profitable, one wonders, can a volume of poetry be...

...One of the best things about Delmore's epistles is their coruscating wit...

...Even that great poet-epistolarian Rainer Maria Rilke is usually not at his best writing to his dear friend and publisher, Anton Kippen-berg...

...Eliot and Auden were in the air, but he went to Hart Crane for content, the Fugitives for style, and E.E...

...Delmore's first letter is from 1937...

...Delmore became part of a group of bright young instructors that included Berryman, Lowell, Harry Levin, Howard Baker (poet and husband of the novelist Dorothy), and Albert Guerard...

...Jay is no slouch in this department, and Delmore is particularly astute...

...Or to be told the whereabouts of Syracuse University ("upstate New York...

...The impoverished poet—from Cambridge and, later, from New Jersey?could only fulminate...

...Of course it must have been galling to Schwartz to contemplate Laughlin's life-style...

...But Jay, the absentee landlord, skied in Utah, attended conferences in Aspen, traveled for pleasure in Europe, India, Japan...

...Seems Delmore was there, along with 200 others, and for several days he went around expressing his outrage and the firm belief that Mailer had done this especially to harm Delmore's reputation...

...Whatever it is, it is not pleasing...

...incarnation of Phoebus Apollo...

...So it is heartening to get Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, edited by Robert Phillips, to set beside Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz, edited by his second wife, and Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, the telling biography by James Atlas...

...The letters also cover other subjects...

...Most but not all: He never wrote a poem that fully captured the imaginations of both people who knew it and those who merely knew about it—a larger and more significant constituency...

...Since he has become clear, even barbarians can see what commonplace thoughts were concealed in his obscurity...

...There is stuff about politics, with both epistolarians reprehending Franklin D. Roosevelt for getting us, as they saw it, into the War...

...And what sort of reader needs obvious jokes explained in a note...

...Soon he started publishing some of his highly original poetry...

...the last letter from Laughlin that Phillips reprints is from April 1955?but, inept editor that he is, he does not tell us whether it was actually the last...

...Nevertheless, Delmore affirms, "I remain devoted to you, although I don't know why...

...Even paranoiacs have their annotators...

...As a steel-industry scion, he has always had wealth on his side, but more important has been his steely determination...

...I would prefer that you say it in a pleasant tone, but I'd rather have the tone unpleasant than be left in ignorance and self-delusion...

...He lists grievances, "Such as abusing literary editors [i.e., him], applying duress on the eve of publication by threatening not to publish an already-printed book, losing mss...

...Does Phillips, who is Schwartz' literary executor, imagine that people who don't know these worthies will profit from his laconic notes, or, more to the point, will flock to buy and read such a book...

...Instead of escaping from life's pains by means of literature and art, we now can enjoy escaping from TV drama into actual existence...

...The playful poet can be very levelheaded when instructing his publisher in the strategy of garnering good reviews for Genesis...

...Of the eponymous bear—the body—we read in the closing lines: "Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, / Amid the hundred millions of his kind, / The scrimmage of appetite everywhere...

...You can scan it as a pentameter from hunger or a healthy trimeter...

...And though Schwartz has written some good stanzas and better verses, the current edition of Bart-lett's adduces only two quotations from him...

...1 don't know if he persuaded Laughlin, but Tate considered Schwartz' "the only genuine innovation we have had since Eliot and Pound...

...Schwartz was a lively letter-writer, as clearly emerges from the better passages of this correspondence...

...Sure, New Directions functioned in his absence—partly through the efforts of Delmore and Gertrude, who did some of its editorial and secretarial work out of their Cambridge apartment...

...Toward the end Del-more gets truly pitiful...

...The depressive phase yields a very different tone: "I don't like to hear that I have not fulfilled the promise of my youth, but almost everyone is too polite to tell me...

...Cummings for spirit...

...On a work by the precious and overrated E.M...

...Actually, that the two were able to have as long and productive a relationship as they had, commercially and convivially, speaks well for both—especially Laughlin, who put up with a good deal more from Delmore...

...Thus there is much crabbing and whining in Delmore's letters...

...That legions of poets do not conform to this spurious archetype has done little or nothing to change it...

...Things could get fouled up, however...

...Elsewhere he informs the temporarily unhappy Laughlin, "I have reflected upon the problem [of unhap-piness] and upon a related problem, namely, Who has slept with more girls, you or me...

...The alliance of author and publisher proved a rocky ride that spanned almost two decades...

...After that, there are only a half-dozen missives from Robert MacGregor, Laughlin's locum tenens at New Directions, and, finally, a telegram from Del-more (February 1963), now teaching at Syracuse University, inviting Laughlin to come and smoke a peace pipe...

...All is not laughs...

...He lists specific instances of help, not to mention that "over the years at New Directions I have continued to publish your books, although not one of them has ever been really profitable...

...The son and grandson of Romanian immigrants, the good-looking boy was named—despite his fabu-lating various mythic sources—after a neighbor kid whose grandiosely deluded mother wanted him to sound wasp...

...an irrational devotion" to Laughlin...

...Delmore confers on Willie Mays the stature "of a highly intellectual being who realizes the limitations of the intellect & introspection very much as Bergson did...

...The following year Laughlin accepted for publication his collection of verse and prose, under the same title...

...In addition, sloppinesses abound...

...No answer...

...He had adventurous years at the University of Wisconsin and New York University, but it was not until he was a graduate student in philosophy under Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard that his star began to twinkle, if not exactly shine...

...Poor Delmore had looked forward to a lifelong collaboration...

...The two preceding verses are in iambic pentameter...

...This seems to me a profound error...

...A merry, madcap pen pal this, you might say, but beware his frequent black moods—not for nothing was he called Schwartz...

...If you are more unhappy than I am and have slept with more girls, it obviously follows that my theory is correct...

...His friendships were a favorite stomping-ground for his paranoia, into which he sank and drank himself ever more deeply until his death at 52 from a heart attack in a shabby New York hotel...

...It is quite a remarkable poem, but it too fails in one all-important respect: It does not end with a bang, or so much as a haunting whimper...

...Hence, in view of the fact that we have now been friends for some 15 years, it is, I think, your duty as well as your privilege to say what you really think...

...He grew up in Manhattan's Washington Heights and wrote some pretty impressive verse at George Washington High School...

...Delmore is equally good when he praises...

...Lawrance Thompson, two times out of three, becomes "Lawrence...

...True, through books, anthologies and pamphlets, the man did more for the advancement of new literature, including Delmore's, than most publishers...

...There is a fair bit of critical matter: evaluations of various contemporary writers...

...Or "real enemies," as it is sometimes quoted...

...To Pound, the political "jackass," he attributes "maybe the best ear that anyone ever had who used the English language...

...Still, between marriages, he could report that he "can find sex by ringing numbers...

...The closest Schwartz (1913-1966) came to that is "The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me...

...Reviewed by John Simon The public's image of the poet—to the extent that the public has one—is of a young person forever in love or in bed with someone, foolhardy, antisocial, and at least slightly mad...

...An occasional joke falls flat, but much of the humor delights...

...As so often, the truth about who did what to whom lies midway between these recriminations...

...At other times, he becomes manic in self-praise: "In days to come—mark you!—[my] poetic style will be seen as the beginning of Post-Symbolism, as Cezanne was the beginning of Post-Impressionism...