5/8/2023 0 Comments Delmore schwartz![]() ![]() (4) Much the same can be concluded about the relative weight of what is said and not said in conventional U.S. Then again, trumpeter Miles Davis famously observed that the notes you don’t play in jazz are more important than the ones you do. One wonders if there is anything new to be said. Such a finale, retold ad infinitum, has by now turned Delmore into something of a vacuous cliché: the preternaturally gifted boy genius of otherworldly innocence unable to live in a profit-driven, sordidly corrupt society a self-destructive poète maudit in the drug-and-alcohol-addled mold of 19th century French Symbolists Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire or one of the English Romantic William Wordsworth’s “poets in their youth” who began in “gladness” and ended in “madness.” (3)Īfter the sensational behavior depicted in Saul Bellow’s biographically based novel about Delmore, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), and James Atlas’s biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), his saga has the aura of a life subsumed by a tabloid afterlife. A 1937 piece of surrealistic fiction, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” made Delmore’s name, but the circumstances of his demise - with his unclaimed body lying for days at the Manhattan morgue - cemented his legend. Three decades later he died at age 52 deranged, paranoid, and alone in a fleabag hotel off Times Square. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and became a central presence in the pages of the Trotskyist-influenced journal Partisan Review. an author self-consciously departing from traditional ways of writing), he was dubbed “The American Auden,” extolled by T. What most students of literature are taught about the Jewish-American poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-66) is a cautionary tale of creative, reputational and psychological atrophy.ĭelmore, who was almost always called by his first name, initially burst like a supernova on the Marxist literary landscape of the 1930s a striking young eagle with a blazing movie-star charisma. Detroit, Comeback & Austerity: State of the City.Conviction on All Three Counts in Chauvin Trial, Bail Revoked.The commonplace style, though ironically employed, is also, paradoxically, a bare and brilliant poetry (the author recovers his lost shirt) in which the sense of this past is captured and celebrated. This past cannot be summoned up in the manner of a Henry James or a Sir Osbert Sitwell nor on the other hand could one write like Clifford Odets or in a genre of some kind of Jewish regionalism and say what these stories say. When he acknowledges that “the child is the meaning of this life,” he is, in his own way, the Jew returning to himself, seeking himself in his childish past. ![]() As the air was full of the radio and unseen voices, so the life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered.” For what the artist figure in these stories also rejects is a present life unconnected with the past. His separation was actual enough, but there existed also an unbreakable unity. “And now he felt for the first time how closely bound he was to these people. How different it might seem, if he had been able to see these lives from the inside, looking out.”īut with this style the author is able at the same time to affirm the depth of his relation to the world he has rejected. He had listened from such a distance that what he saw was an outline, a caricature, and an abstraction. He was sick of the mood in which he had listened, the irony and the contempt which had taken hold of each new event. This severely commonplace style is employed ironically, of course, contemptuously even, as the protagonist of “America! America!” explicitly informs us: “Shenandoah was exhausted by his mother’s story. ” In the later stories, however, the writing has deliberately been made flat, and figures of speech are of this order: “After five years of the depression, the hopes of most of the boys of the circle had faded slowly like a color or were worn thin like a cloth.” ![]() I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow. The last line of what I take to be one of the stories earliest composed-the charming “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”-has this vivid metaphor in it: “. The literary graces are progressively renounced in this collection. ![]()
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