I eat it up

The​ world was rigged against Delmore Schwartz. His mother, Rose, was to blame. After all, it was she who decided on his first name – the ‘crucial crime’, and an expression, he felt, of her ‘brazen gaucheness’, her botched attempt to assimilate into American society. ‘I never heard anybody call him “Schwartz”,’ Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no corrective to the conclusion that Schwartz was a busted flush. John Ashbery (a great admirer of the early poems) was right: ‘The bulk of his work is … probably unpublishable.’ Any account of mid-century American letters, however, has to reckon with Schwartz’s influence at the time. After the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938, Allen Tate proclaimed his style ‘the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot’. Old Possum himself sent words of admiration: ‘I want to see more poetry from you.’

Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. His father, Harry, made a fortune in real estate. Schwartz remembered him dressed in a Palm Beach suit, a Cuban cigar in his mouth: ‘a tall powerful-looking handsome man who looked at others as if he owned the world’. In his epic poem, Genesis, Harry is ‘the great cut-glass chandelier in whose light all objects shone or were dark’. He was a philanderer, which Rose hoped to cure by the simple expedient of making him a father. But her husband had mixed feelings about children and Rose required an operation before she could conceive. She waited until Harry left on a business trip, sold a French war bond given to her by an uncle and went under the knife. Soon she was pregnant.

When Schwartz learned that his birth was the result of a deception it strengthened the feeling he had struggled with all his life: that perhaps he should not have existed at all. In Genesis, he reflects that his ‘thisness tiptoes on Might-Not-Have-Been!’ and writes: ‘All my life/I felt my self’s lack of necessity.’ His best short story, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, is set in a movie theatre where the narrator watches on, helpless, as his father proposes to his mother on screen. ‘Don’t do it,’ the boy pleads. ‘It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandals and two children whose characters are monstrous.’

By all accounts, Rose was difficult to live with (Schwartz’s childhood friends called her Lady Macbeth). Harry often abandoned the family home for periods and in 1923 packed up for good, moving to Chicago. Afterwards, worried that Delmore was becoming a ‘violin’ of his mother’s ‘sick emotions’, he offered to buy his son from Rose for $75,000. (She said no.) One of the terms of their separation was that Schwartz and his younger brother, Kenneth, would spend every summer in the Midwest. In June, Harry would arrive in his chauffeur-driven Lincoln to collect his sons. ‘May you come home in your coffin,’ Rose called after them. Harry showered the boys with gifts; they dined in the best restaurants and watched baseball at Wrigley Field, where he had a private box. In 1929, Schwartz’s father gave him a Chrysler Imperial. The chauffeur was given the job of teaching him to drive; during their first lesson, Schwartz hit a truck. He liked to boast that his father was a millionaire, but Harry was hit badly by the Wall Street Crash and died not long afterwards (he had a heart condition). Schwartz might yet have inherited a few thousand dollars from the estate had Harry’s executor not swindled the family by continuing to speculate with Harry’s money after his death. In 1946, Schwartz was still writing to the Chicago Title and Trust Company determined to get back what was rightfully his.

Schwartz was a strange and precocious boy – the sort whose best intentions were always comically misplaced. He once offered to bring an unmarried teacher a record he had seen at home: ‘Wedding Bells (Will You Ever Ring for Me?)’. He hated living with Rose. She didn’t approve of his reading at night, claiming it accounted for their high electricity bills. And she couldn’t comprehend his taste for Shakespeare (‘old-fashioned’). When Schwartz appeared one day carrying Hart Crane’s The Bridge, she was appalled that such a small book cost three dollars. Even summer camp offered no respite: Rose came along to help out and humiliated her son by following him around.

In 1931, Schwartz went to the University of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of reality, not as cheap band music’; to listen to Bach and avoid ‘catgut music’; and ‘to be pure of … laziness … pomposity … uncleanliness, bizarre dress, consideration of money, jealousy, hero-worship – and thusward’. He once objected to an exam question on Stephen Vincent Benét (‘I could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.

Schwartz would sequester himself in his room, keen to ‘impress the boys with his habit of solitude and concentration of study’. His letters to Julian Sawyer, his only close friend from New York, are outrageous. It’s not just his habit of correcting Sawyer’s grammar or his vague contempt for his friend’s homosexuality, but his egotistical descriptions of his place in the social pecking order at Wisconsin: ‘I pose the questions, am the authority, and the kind of influence (through speech, I mean) … I am a very important person.’ The purpose of their correspondence, he told Sawyer, ‘should be to keep burning the “home fires” of the relationship … I do not wish you to write any unconscious or conscious attempts at literature.’ Even fruit could not escape his portentousness. He liked apples on account of their ‘snow-white meat and ruddy cover’, but it was ‘a metaphysical appetite, for I do not care for their taste’.

Schwartz sometimes worried that his intellectualism was willed rather than authentic. In his autobiographical notes, he described ‘trying as before to force feeling and seeing’ and pushing himself to appreciate Conrad. Here is Atlas:

Delmore described these acts of self-imposed consciousness as ‘megalo’ (from the Greek word meaning ‘large’ or ‘abnormal’), by which he meant that his primary motive in striving to induce them was to win power and attention through the exercise of intellect. He would purchase a volume of Nietzsche ‘for megalo purposes’, or have a ‘megalo conflict’ with a classmate about the merits of H.L. Mencken.

There is a similar affectation in his work. In the long narrative poem ‘Coriolanus and His Mother’, the speaker watches the play with the ghosts of Aristotle, Beethoven, Marx and Freud. ‘“Nature is no machine,” says Aristotle,/“But like a whore she spreads herself, and man/Can do there what he wishes, all extremes.”’ It’s terrible stuff. ‘The curtain falls. The orchestra begins,/Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Beethoven sobs.’

In 1933, Schwartz transferred to New York University, enrolling as a philosophy major (his mother refused to pay for his second year at Wisconsin). There he came under the spell of Sidney Hook, who was making waves with his lectures on Marxism. The attraction, for Schwartz, wasn’t ideological. (‘Political insight does not coincide with literary genius,’ he pronounced.) As he saw it, Marx stood for the historical factors that shaped human destiny (‘History has no ruth//For the individual,’ he wrote), while Freud symbolised the unconscious drives that configure character. It was the collision of these forces that Schwartz explored in his work. Historical and psychological pressures, he claimed, could be seen as ‘the “divinities” of our day, acting on our free will as fatefully as ever did the gods of the ancient world’.

Schwartz’s intellectual precocity was part of his appeal to those involved with Partisan Review. After its relaunch in 1937, the magazine’s co-editor Philip Rahv (Schwartz referred to him as a ‘manic-impressive’) was keen to promote the ‘Europeanisation of American Literature’. Macdonald, who had been brought on as an editor, recalled that they were sent ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ just as they were putting together the first issue. They had ‘the sense to recognise it as a masterpiece’. The story became the lead, ahead of contributions by Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Picasso. The magazine maintained a connection to its radical origins by advocating high modernist art and literature, whose perceived independence from economic necessity and mass culture appealed to cultural anti-capitalists. In his essay ‘The New York Intellectuals’, Irving Howe wrote that the group also had a common attraction to ‘the idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz)’ who represented ‘urban malaise, second-generation complaint, Talmudic dazzle [and] woeful alienation’.

Schwartz’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’ appeared in Partisan Review in January 1938. It opens with an image of a garden in St Petersburg, where the tsar’s children are tossing a ball back and forth: ‘It fell among the flowerbeds./Or fled to the north gate.//A daylight moon hung up/In the Western sky, bald white.’ The trajectory of the lost toy is symbolic of the march of history, moving ‘eastward among the stars/Toward February and October’. The revolution and the children’s executions loom: ‘The past is inevitable’.

The ground on which the ball bounces
Is another bouncing ball.
The wheeling, whirling world
Makes no will glad.
Spinning in its spotlight darkness,
It is too big for their hands.

The poem dovetails the fate of the children with one of Schwartz’s early memories. ‘Six thousand miles apart,/In Brooklyn, in 1916,// Aged two, irrational’, he suffers his own trifling loss: a baked potato falling from his high-chair, a ‘buttered world’ slipping out of his grasp.

On the strength of his Partisan Review work, Schwartz found himself being introduced as ‘the new Hart Crane’. In February 1938 he wrote to James Laughlin, his editor at New Directions, with a characteristic blend of hubris and diffidence:

All these fine reviews and all the rest of the things that I’ve been getting the last few months are accumulating to the point where I am going to be terrified. It can’t last, I can’t be being praised for the right reasons by so many people, it is much too soon, and it is taking my mind away from working. I hope that it does not make you expect me to progress in a straight line … The latest salutation, by the way, is from Wallace Stevens who sent the Partisan Review a letter … saying that my review of The Man with the Blue Guitar was the ‘most invigorating review’ that he had ever had.

At other times, his arrogance wasn’t tempered by self-consciousness. He wrote to Pound pointing out a number of mistakes in the Cantos, misquotations from the Inferno and The Tempest (‘Suppose you Read some of these writers before telling grandpa he aint been fotografted in his dress suit,’ Pound replied). Meanwhile, an article by Trilling was deemed ‘very good … except that I wish he would not make the most obvious remarks in the tone of one who has just discovered a cure for cancer’. In The Truants, his memoir of working at Partisan Review, William Barrett remembered Schwartz dismissing Hannah Arendt as a ‘Weimar Republic flapper’.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was published in December 1938, shortly after Schwartz’s 25th birthday. As well as the title story and ‘Coriolanus and His Mother’, it contained ‘Poems of Experiment and Imitation’ (an assortment of lyrics divided into ‘The Repetitive Heart’ and ‘Twenty-four Poems’) and a plodding verse play called ‘Dr Bergen’s Belief’. Charlie Chaplin refused to provide a blurb, as did Yeats. Praise flowed in nevertheless. Stevens applauded Schwartz’s philosophical gifts and Rahv declared him ‘by far the ablest of the younger American poets’. ‘Some of them are foaming at the mouth,’ Schwartz remarked of his admirers. ‘And I love it, I eat it up.’

Schwartz​ had long held a torch for Gertrude Buckman, a ‘kind of Dutch beauty’ he met at NYU. In 1938, she finally agreed to marry him. On hearing the news, his mother, furious at being abandoned by her eldest son, threatened to kill herself. (When Kenneth married a few years later, Rose declared: ‘He would have been better off in Buchenwald.’) On 14 June, just as the wedding was about to begin, Rose suffered a mysterious episode of paralysis and insisted on being carried up the stairs of the synagogue. Gertrude’s parents, distraught at their daughter’s choice of husband, wept through the ceremony.

It was not a union one could feel hopeful about. On their honeymoon in Vermont, Schwartz called up Barrett and invited him to join them. ‘My Lord called and I came,’ Gertrude said sardonically. There were problems in the bedroom. Gertrude wasn’t keen on sex and Schwartz himself said that he was ‘squeamish’ about it. A classmate from Wisconsin remembered standing next to him at a urinal after a tennis match and hearing Schwartz exclaim: ‘When you take a piss on a cold day after holding it in, it’s better than the best orgasm.’ But he did visit prostitutes and continued to do so after he was married. ‘Dinner (twice) with Mexican whores’, he wrote in his journal. Perhaps the brothel trips were an attempt to put paid to the squeamishness. I wonder how he got on.

‘Prothalamion’ was written in anticipation of his wedding. It begins on a note of foreboding: ‘Now I must betray myself./The feast of bondage and unity is near.’ There can hardly be a bleaker stanza in the canon of love poems than this one:

For fifty-six or for a thousand years,
I will live with you and be your friend,
And what your body and what your spirit bears
I will like my own body cure and tend.
But you are heavy and my body’s weight
Is great and heavy: when I carry you
I lift upon my back time like a fate
Near as my heart, dark when I marry you.

The embrace of the other person is haunted by the isolation it’s supposed to dispel. Cross rhyme (‘years’/‘bears’, ‘weight’/‘fate’) locks us into a fatalistic echo, as the beloved, brought close, becomes an almost unbearable burden. The clunky repetition of ‘body’ weighs down the lines, just as Schwartz imagined Gertrude would encumber him.

Schwartz once told Rahv that he ‘would rather write than make love’ and characterised his desire for Gertrude as a ‘thirst after righteousness’. He struggled to reconcile physical and emotional intimacy; one tended to preclude the other. His deepest longing was for some unattainable separation of body and mind, and perhaps this is why, as Anthony Hecht pointed out, ‘there are probably more abstract nouns and adjectives’ in Schwartz’s work than in ‘any other modern writer’.

‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me’ is a comic meditation on the burden of physicality and ‘the scrimmage of appetite’ that impedes the life of the mind:

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

The poem’s epigraph, ‘the withness of the body’, is taken from Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, which theorises the role of the body in the process of perception. For Schwartz, ‘withness’ was a curse. Touching a lover ‘grossly’, the bear reduces intimacy to a fumbling grasp, stripping away any courtly illusion, while the speaker searches in vain for ‘a word’ that might ‘bare my heart and make me clear’. The ‘quivering meat’ of the body wins out.

Despite the critical acclaim, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities didn’t sell and Schwartz found himself in need of money. He and Gertrude rowed about children: she was, he claimed, resistant to becoming a mother because she was an only child and would be jealous of any offspring. Schwartz, meanwhile, admitted to wanting a child primarily as ‘an expansion of [his] ego’. They moved from New York to Cambridge in February 1940, in the hope that a job at Harvard might transpire. At first it didn’t, then it did. Even better, Schwartz was only required to teach one class a week, leaving him free to devote most of his time to his ‘giant work’, Genesis.

In a reminiscence of their friendship published in 1974, Barrett claimed that discovering ‘Freud was a disaster for Delmore.’ His ‘self-absorption’, Barrett went on, ‘was such that his mind was already excessively riveted in his own “family romance” of childhood’. Schwartz was convinced that a ‘diagnosis’ of his childhood would provide the basis for an autobiographical verse drama that would ‘obsess the nation’ and ‘last as long as the pyramids’. For twelve years, he laboured over the design of Genesis, eventually settling on ‘two methods which can paint the living world’: Hershey Green, his adolescent avatar, who suffers the humiliation of being named after a chocolate bar, would narrate his family history in what Schwartz called ‘biblical prose’, while a chorus of unnamed ghosts would respond to each episode in blank verse.

Laughlin was apprehensive about the project, but when he voiced his reservations Schwartz became bullish, lobbying to bring forward publication, asking for a bigger advance and complaining that even ‘the Philistines of the Guggenheim committee’ saw the value of the work (they had awarded him a grant). In fact, Schwartz vacillated over his book’s merits. He told Robert Hivnor that he was ‘in the middle of what will probably be the longest and worst poem in American literature’ and wrote to R.P. Blackmur that he was ‘publishing a blunder 261 pages long’. But to Berryman he confessed: ‘Every time I read or see the long poem … my hair stands on end at my own daring.’ He fretted that the book was ‘an ambitious fiasco’, ‘peculiar and full of private obsessions’, then declared: ‘I read some more of Genesis, and fear that it is so good that no one will believe that I, mere I, am author, but rather a team of inspired poets.’

Like Tristram Shandy, Hershey Green takes a while to get to his own birth. First, he gives us the history of his ancestors in Eastern Europe, his grandfather Noah’s desertion from the army during the Russo-Turkish War, his parents’ emigration to America and so on. It’s tedious going, not because the subject matter is boring but because Schwartz wanted Genesis to have a ‘morbid pedestrianism … The diction of this deliberate flatness – and the heavy accent and the slowness – is an effort to declare the miraculous character of daily life and ordinary speech.’

When Hershey finally turns to his own life, the Freudianism leaps into overdrive. Kindergarten is a ‘Congress of thirty Ids, like a convention/Of a small radical party in some respects.’ Here is a typically excruciating recollection:

His aunt came home from her business with a pretty young lady friend who stooped and kissed the cunning child,
So that when she went to the bathroom during the evening, he went to the hallway and saw her shadow on the glazed window door,
And the untaught Id banged and banged on the door, demanded admission, wished to see the woman naked …
Until grandmother drew him away, saying, Shame on you! Shame on you!

A ghost responds: ‘O penetrate this surface deeper now:/See how the Super-Ego grows in him/ … Against the grain, against the animal/Harshly and slowly and with much surprise.’ Nobody needs to hear about Hershey’s circumcision (‘the tiny foreskin was to be cut with the knife which reached across/five thousand years from Palestine’), or that he reclined on a young girl’s belly behind the garage (‘seeking he knew not what, remaining/unsatisfied, the fifth-year libido far in advance of consciousness’). Nabokov’s warning seems apt: ‘Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.’ The poem ends with a childhood memory that plagued Schwartz. His mother, with her eldest son in tow, confronts his father at a restaurant, shouting ‘to the diners on the mezzanine floor that her husband had left her and her children to dine with a whore!’

This in-ness lives as mother holds your hand,
As father looks at you, and looks away,
Anguish and shame, anger and guilt enact
The in-ness of your being-in-the-world –

For Schwartz, ‘childhood was ended here!’

Genesis was a flop. Auden, who read it in manuscript, advised Schwartz against publication. ‘It isn’t that I think psychoanalysis or metaphysical speculation are without value,’ he wrote, ‘but they become destructive when they presuppose nothing but themselves.’ Macdonald was one of the book’s most virulent critics, calling it ‘unreadable, flaccid, monotonous, the whole effect pompous and verbose’. (By the end of Genesis’s two hundred pages, Hershey has only got to the age of seven, and Schwartz envisioned two further volumes.)

The book had at least one admirer, though. In a letter to Laughlin, Berryman called it ‘a work with which, in penetration, range, intelligence, no other American poem of any period can comfortably be compared’. To Schwartz himself, Berryman said: ‘You are the greatest writer on sex in modern times.’ (‘It’s the strength of non-participation,’ Schwartz replied.) Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife, recalled her husband preparing to visit Schwartz at Harvard: ‘I’m off to Cambridge to show my new poem to God.’ One way of thinking about Schwartz’s work is as a gateway to the confessional poets who came after him: he provided the template for a turn inwards at a moment when Eliot’s principles of ‘impersonality’ were still the benchmark for high seriousness. ‘I’ve never met anyone who has somehow as much seeped into me,’ Robert Lowell said. And he helped in practical ways, too. Schwartz was pivotal in getting Berryman published (though he maintained that his friend was an ‘ontological contradiction’ since Berryman was ‘stupid’ but wrote great poems).

Schwartz was distraught at the reception of his magnum opus. ‘So far as being noticed in the wide world goes,’ he complained to Macdonald, ‘it has been like a big boulder dropped in mid-ocean.’ Simpson wrote that Schwartz lived through the post-Genesis years like a ‘clochard’, ‘heavy and grey like his overcoat’. By the beginning of 1943, his relationship with Gertrude was at breaking point. Schwartz described her as a ‘sick old maid’, ‘domineering, inconsiderate’ and an ‘actress of childhood who plays the child with no false note’. His cheating didn’t help. ‘As to this new generation,’ Schwartz wrote to Laughlin, ‘they appear to regard sex as a form of violent exercise a little less serious than tennis.’ Berryman remembered being at their house one evening when Gertrude showed her husband a piece she was writing for Partisan Review: ‘He pointed out the number of words beginning with “ex-” and remarked, “Freud could make something of that.”’ ‘You don’t need Freud. You can make enough out of it yourself,’ Gertrude shot back. They separated in March.

To divorce in New York State at that time required proof of adultery. Despite his many indiscretions, Schwartz was unable to supply it. He and Gertrude rented a hotel room and set about fabricating a liaison between Schwartz and another woman. They invited some married friends to come by, with the idea that they would arrive to find Delmore in bed and an unknown woman slipping into the bathroom. But they couldn’t find anybody to play the other woman, so Gertrude herself took on the role. ‘This was one time when he wasn’t with another woman,’ she told Barrett.

Later, Schwartz admitted that the ‘lava flow of [his] towering vanity’ had made Gertrude’s life unliveable. He was dubious about poets’ marriages in general. Shortly before their break-up, he had tossed off a poem beginning: ‘All poets’ wives have rotten lives,/Their husbands look at them like knives.’ After Gertrude left, however, he hung her photograph in his study and wept when the movers came to take away her piano. ‘I lie on the sofa like a horse with a broken leg, waiting to be shot,’ he wrote. He devoted himself to his cats, first Riverrun, named for the first word in Finnegans Wake, who ran away, much to his disgust (‘Where is that overrated ingrate Riverrun?’). Then came Oranges, whom he fed French sardines and liked to cosy up with. ‘I sleep with my cat, Oranges Schwartz, a girl, very affectionate, so affable indeed that for a time I thought she was a dumbbell,’ he wrote to Blackmur. ‘My relation to her is maternal and this shows that I’ve always wanted to be a mother.’ He was much preoccupied by the question of Oranges’s ‘virginity’ and in a letter to Jean Stafford, then married to Lowell, described the problem at length:

When I returned from lunch and lightened by three martinis, four tomcats had cornered my little girl, but she had chosen the biggest and fattest tomcat of all and I felt as Oedipus’ father might have felt when his son punched him at the crossroads when I saw the look in the stout tomcat’s face. He had been having difficulties of his own because of the other boys who were trying to horn in … I decided to desert and return and then a world war started and Oranges was the innocent bystander just about to lose not only her innocence but also her eyes.

Schwartz was desperate to return to New York. ‘I doubt that I will be groping about this abyss for more than two years,’ he told Berryman in April 1946, ‘since as you know I want to die in Brooklyn which is abysmal too, but a less foreign abyss.’ The following year, without a word to Harvard, he left. He began dating Aileen Ward, an English graduate he thought ‘very beautiful’, though ‘there was in her manner something official, social and of polite emptiness.’ It didn’t last. One evening he took her to see Antony and Cleopatra and, after drinking a pint of gin, made a scene in the theatre, howling with laughter at inopportune moments, shouting loudly that one of the actors looked like FDR and comparing the play to the Yalta Conference.

In 1948, Schwartz published The World Is a Wedding, a collection of short stories. He had discovered the phrase in the Talmud not long after his separation from Gertrude, and it crops up repeatedly in his journals, including in a piece of doggerel from October 1945, rejigged to fit his mood: ‘The world is a divorce/the beginning of betrayal and adultery/anger and separation.’ Eventually he decided that the phrase was a neat description of the complicated relationships of the New York intellectuals, united in their political and aesthetic affinities, but a dysfunctional family given to quarrelling and melodrama. Schwartz’s characters recite long passages from Axel’s Castle – Edmund Wilson’s study of symbolist literature – and try to outdo one another with witty citations (‘It is as Dr Johnson said, the Irish are a fair people; they do not speak well of anyone’). A man called Leon Bergson changes his surname because he is ‘unable to endure the rivalry between his own ambition and [Henri] Bergson’s fame’. Another character describes himself as ‘ninety-nine and one-half per cent Marxist … [he] reserved one-half of one per cent for God, for if one did not reserve anything for God, then the state became the deity.’

R.W. Flint, writing in Commentary, claimed that the stories of The World Is a Wedding offered ‘the definitive portrait of the Jewish middle class in New York during the Depression’. For Howe, the book captured ‘the quality of New York life in the 1930s and 1940s with a fine comic intensity – not, of course, the whole of New York life but that interesting point where intellectual children of immigrant Jews are finding their way into the larger world while casting uneasy, rueful glances over their backs’.

Time’s review declared Schwartz ‘among the dozen or so most accomplished young US writers’, likening him to Chekhov and Stendhal. He refused to pose for a photograph to accompany the piece, so the magazine had to reprint the picture Vogue had taken of him twelve years before, ‘handsome as I have never been’. The Vogue photo was a touchy subject. Schwartz had long felt it established expectations that were dashed when people encountered him in real life; but he couldn’t bring himself to pose for a new picture, ‘which would destroy the delusions created and sustained by the old one’. He convinced himself that, based on the publicity from Time, The World Is a Wedding would sell thirty thousand copies. This was a pipe dream. The writer George Schloss ran into him in a bar on MacDougal Street one day, crying uncontrollably about the book’s commercial failure. He made ends meet by giving poetry lessons to an aspiring filmmaker and millionaire called Hy Sobiloff: ‘It’s like being paid by a fat woman to tell her that she is not fat and getting others to write letters to her affirming that other women are fatter than she is,’ Schwartz complained.

He married Elizabeth Pollet, an aspiring novelist, in 1949. She was shy, which appealed to Schwartz. He said that her blonde hair and blue eyes reminded him of an ‘airline stewardess’. They had first met five years earlier and had had a brief affair that was scuppered by Schwartz’s commitment issues. They should have left it at that. ‘I got married the second time,’ Schwartz later said, ‘in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.’

The poems he wrote during these years – mostly sonnets – were dreadful. ‘I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved,’ Berryman laments in one of the Dream Songs, ‘but it is not so.’ Here is Lowell:

Your dream had humour, then its genius thickened,
you grew thick and helpless, your lines were variants,
unlike and alike, Delmore, – your name, Schwartz,
one vowel bedevilled by seven consonants

In 1950, New Directions published Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, a collection which suffers from pretentiousness, vague abstraction and slapstick. The following year, Hugh Kenner published a lacerating review in Poetry. ‘The unbelievable badness of these poems,’ he began, ‘is irrelevant to any criteria of technique.’ It’s difficult to argue against Kenner’s charge of ‘maudlin self-abnegation’ when you read something like this: ‘Myself I dedicated long ago –/Or prostituted, shall I say? – to poetry.’ These lines are spoken by a poet-cum-emperor who holds that writers have a far more difficult job than politicians:

They can say anything, they have no shame,
Kiss babies and blow promises to all,
Awed or indifferent, bemused or ill at ease
We who are poets play the game which is
A deadly earnest searching of all hearts
As if we struggled with a puzzle’s parts.

During​ the 1950s, Schwartz’s professional commitments left little time for writing: he was the poetry editor for Partisan Review, employed by Laughlin to read manuscripts for New Directions and served as ‘confidential literary consultant’ to Perspectives, a magazine funded by the Ford Foundation. He worried that these publications had got him at a ‘bargain rate’. He and Elizabeth were living in a farmhouse in New Jersey and once a week Schwartz drove into New York and rushed from office to office performing his editorial tasks. He didn’t enjoy spending time in the Partisan Review office because Rose was in the habit of dropping by in search of the son who had deserted her. And he hated going to the Pierre Hotel, where Perspectives was based: ‘The elevator boys seem to think that I am an agent of the Mafia, bringing opium to the real patrons.’

He was dependent by this stage on alcohol and sleeping pills but also amphetamines. His journals record the obscene amounts of Dexedrine he was taking – sometimes up to twenty pills a day – and the ‘manic surge’ he ‘felt mounting’ after each dose. He was convinced that the pills helped him work, opening up ‘blocked patterns of nervous response’ and allowing for ‘intuitive following of the pattern’. But his notebooks are littered with silly lines and he seems to have spent much of the time copying out the work of other writers: ‘Beer hangover & shakiness. Nine pp. all day, copying Ulysses with Dexedrine’; ‘Eight Dexedrine with a lift for an hour, during which I copied pages of Rilke. Then the bleakness and emptiness came back.’ Elizabeth complained about his drug habit; he complained of her ‘motiveless malignancy’. At one party, convinced she was flirting with Ralph Ellison, Schwartz ‘stormed off, literally dragging her along, handbag, shoes, cigarettes, hairpins flying’.

In 1957, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to teach at the Free University of Berlin. On the day they were to set sail for Germany, Schwartz woke to find a note from Elizabeth saying she wouldn’t be accompanying him: Hilton Kramer (an editor at Arts magazine) had asked her to write for him and she was staying in New York. She added that she would not see her husband again unless he admitted himself to hospital. Schwartz flew into a paranoid rage, convinced that she and Kramer were having an affair. He wired the Fulbright to cancel his fellowship and checked into the Chelsea Hotel, while Elizabeth hid out at a friend’s apartment.

Coincidentally, Kramer was also staying at the Chelsea. When Schwartz realised this, he turned up at Kramer’s room and started banging on the door. Kramer opened it a fraction and saw that Schwartz was carrying a gun. The police were called, at which point Schwartz became violent, was placed in handcuffs and packed off to Bellevue, where he was diagnosed with ‘acute brain syndrome’ and ‘psychomotor retardation’ caused by his abuse of amphetamines and alcohol. From Bellevue, he continued his vendetta against Kramer, hiring a dodgy private detective to find proof of his affair with Elizabeth.

This was the first in a series of hospitalisations during the final decade of Schwartz’s life. In between he moved from one hotel to another, leaving manuscript pages scattered all over Manhattan. When he wasn’t reading aloud from his battered copy of Finnegans Wake at the White Horse Tavern, he focused his energies on getting a law firm to help him bring a case against Kramer. Eventually he found one that would do so and the suit dragged on for years. (Schwartz was demanding $150,000 in compensation from Kramer for his ‘illicit relationship’ with Elizabeth.) Alfred Kazin remembered visiting him in a ‘damp, dark and constricted’ hotel room: ‘It was the kind of room that could have been chosen only by someone with an extraordinary knowledge of all the murderously bad rooms put aside and carefully preserved by the heartless state for poets to die in.’

In December 1958, two days before his 45th birthday, Schwartz received a letter from his mother:

Dear Delmore: By chance I came across the Commentary magazine I hope these letter will reach you. I read the poems in June issue, also the story in November issue. The story is very good on the 8th is your birthday I don’t remember how old you are. Tell every-one-here you advised me against entering a home It’s not to believe how I exists here. If I fell into a well and looking up to get out no one comes to take me out … I am in no position to write clearer and therefor not satisfied with my letter … No harm if you write to me. God health and where are you. Love, Mother

Rose was the last person he wanted to see. As his paranoia escalated, he also became suspicious of his old friends. Saul Bellow (whom Schwartz once referred to as his ‘blood brother’ and who had raised money to help fund his hospital stays) wrote to Laughlin complaining that Schwartz had telephoned him in the middle of the night ‘using techniques the GPU might have envied, threatening to sue me for slander’. He suspected William Phillips, Rahv’s co-editor at Partisan Review, of trying to poison him. Schwartz had never enjoyed parties – ‘a traffic jam of the lost waiting for the ferry across the Styx’ – but he was present at the notorious occasion in 1960 when Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. His name appeared on a guest list published in the newspapers, and Schwartz considered the possibility that the whole thing ‘may have been – probably was – a set-up’, part of an attempt by Mailer to humiliate him. Barrett’s final meeting with Schwartz was in a restaurant in the Village. He seemed perfectly ordinary to begin with, but as they shared a brandy there ‘burst forth a Delmore I’d never seen or heard, not even in his most agitated moments … yells, grunts, groans’ and then a ‘wrathful and incoherent bellow’. Barrett recalled that after Schwartz left ‘our waiter came running over: “I guess you’ll want another brandy after that.”’

‘That I am a writer but an unsuccessful one, is something to which I cannot get accustomed or resigned, although I have tried very hard,’ Schwartz wrote. ‘The torment of disappointed hope becomes a brutality to oneself, if one is unable to surrender one’s hope.’ But Atlas’s biography shows the reverence he still commanded in literary circles. Editors at Poetry and the New Yorker continued to solicit his work, rescuing what they could from his chaotic manuscripts (not everything was salvageable; a review he wrote for Commentary included a line about ‘the retarded conscience of Arthur Miller, the ballplayer for whom Marilyn Monroe consented to be circumcised’). In 1959, Doubleday published Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, 1938-58, which won the Bollingen Prize on the strength of the early work (only three poems from Vaudeville were included). Schwartz was invited to JFK’s inauguration in 1961, though he received the letter four months late as a result of his hotel-hopping.

Most remarkable of all is the way he managed to wangle institutional roles. In spring 1961, he was invited to teach a semester at UCLA. He often slept in the park and arrived at lectures in a grass-stained suit. He began an affair with a 17-year-old student called Victoria Bay: at his behest, she followed him back to New York, at which point he dumped her. But she stayed in the city and they had an on-off relationship over the next two years. Schwartz sometimes introduced her as his fiancée and boasted that ‘making love to her was like Grant taking Richmond.’ At other times, he suspected her of being a ‘stooge’ of his various enemies.

Schwartz’s​ final book, the ironically titled Successful Love and Other Stories, appeared in 1961. It contained some whimsical portraits of the Eisenhower era, depictions of suburban life and the sexual education of teenage girls. Rahv lamented that it was written in ‘child’s English’, while Howe remarked on the oddness of Schwartz’s ‘quizzical wonderment at the powers of the American innocent’ at a time when his own life was so dark. One night in October that year, he broke every window in his rented apartment. The police arrived to find him standing naked in the middle of the room holding a lamp. ‘The only violent thing I’ve done was to give beef kidney to my cat,’ he protested. He was packed off to Bellevue again.

After his release, Schwartz went to Syracuse to take up a professorship organised by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. On arrival, he trashed his hotel room and was beaten up by the police while waiting for Donald Dike, a colleague from the English department, to bail him out. Shortly afterwards he travelled to Washington for a poetry festival; again he smashed up his hotel room, again he was arrested. Victoria was too young to sign the papers for his release and contacted Berryman, who was also at the festival, for help. At the station, as Berryman completed the forms, Schwartz bolted out the door and jumped into a taxi. ‘Berryman, you’ve taken every woman I ever had!’ he shouted as it drove away.

In January 1963, Victoria left him. Schwartz made plans to travel to England – he was sure that T.S. Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon had some vital information about a million dollars that was owed to him – and Dike had him sectioned. At Twin Elms Hospital, a sanatorium near the Syracuse campus, he made little progress. ‘Suppose psychosis clarifies things?’ he asked. He liked to hold forth to his doctors about Freud. ‘I won’t have anything to do with them, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts,’ he said. ‘They ruin you. Not Freud but the others, the epigones, they iron you out and there’s nothing left but to fold.’

He was released in June. Aside from teaching, Schwartz spent his time obsessively rereading and annotating his published works. ‘Don’t be like me, Hershey,’ he wrote on the final page of Genesis, ‘forgive & live.’ But there were some things he couldn’t let slide. He now believed that Elizabeth’s affair had not been with Kramer after all. Here’s a journal entry from 1964:

It is now seven years to the day since my wife, Elizabeth Pollet, left me suddenly at the Hotel St George in Brooklyn. The man for whom she left me – after many preparations over a period of two years designed to conceal the real motives of her actions was Nelson Rockefeller. His great wealth, his status as a married man, and his political ambitions were all very much involved in her effort to conceal the real reasons for her actions.

His last relationship was with an undergraduate called Elizabeth Annas, who became so exhausted from the demands of living with him that she ended up on a psychiatric ward herself. Schwartz visited her there and accused her of spying for Rockefeller. When she was well again, she tried to patch things up by leaving a Christmas tree outside his door. No dice. He believed it was rigged with explosives.

Schwartz left Syracuse abruptly in January 1966. Back in New York, he tried to remain anonymous, frequenting Cavanaugh’s Irish pub in Chelsea, where he was less likely to run into old acquaintances. That summer he checked into the Columbia Hotel on West 46th Street. On 11 July, one of the guests rang the front desk at 3 a.m. to complain that ‘Mr Schwartz … is throwing things again.’ After promising to calm down, he decided to take out the rubbish and had a heart attack coming out of the lift. An ambulance was called, but he was dead before it reached the hospital. His body lay unclaimed in the morgue for two days.

In Bellow’s roman à clef Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine (the Bellow character) provides a gloss on the demise of his friend Von Humboldt Fleisher (Schwartz). Humboldt, he says, ‘lived out the theme of Success. Naturally he died a Failure’:

What else can result from the capitalisation of such nouns? Myself, I’ve always held the number of sacred words down. In my opinion Humboldt had too long a list of them – Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, Alienation, Politics, History, the Unconscious. And, of course, Manic and Depressive, always capitalised.

What would Schwartz have thought about Bellow’s account of his descent winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1975? Humboldt answers this in the novel: ‘a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates’, he tells Charlie. ‘The Pulitzer is for the birds.’