PARTISAN REVIEW
375
person, a compulsion. He enveloped you with his feelings and his ideas,
even though you knew he was always satisfying his needs not yours.
Delmore was one of the most intelligent and probably the most
tortured writer I have known. His intelligence was of that instanta–
neous, luminous variety one associates with an unusual mind: there was
nothin" in any field he couldn't grasp immediately and unlike those
writers who pay homage to the cult of the creative by nurturing their
own ignorance and narrowness Delmore was just as much at home
with ideas as with questions of taste and sensibility.
But the truth is Delmore was an anguished man, and as he got
older his torments spread over his whole being. Even when he was
younger his charm, his intelligence and his exuberance were clouded
by his delusions and suspicions. He was always paranoid, but in his
last years his paranoia took almost complete possession of him, though
unlike most paranoid writers he was sensitive about the way people
treated him, and not about what they thought .of his work. Hence his
friends kept falling away. There were never too many of them: earlier
the most loyal were William Barrett, Robert Lowell, Anatole Broyard
and Milton Klonsky; later Dwight Macdonald, Meyer Shapiro and my–
se~f.
But at the end he wore us out, though, as I recall Dwight and
Meyer seemed able to cope with him longer than I could, and I saw lit–
tle of
him
just before he died. One had to have almost a professional,
self-effacing tolerance to take the rages, the demands, the recrimina–
tions, the fantasies, mostly about money, but often about being generally
betrayed by those few people who stuck to
him
and tried to help him.
Now a legend is growing up around Delmore, partly because he
lends himself to the myth of the pure, suffering artist, and people who
hl!.d no use for him are getting in on the act. I think it would be
more fitting and a nicer testimonial to his memory if we recalled Del–
more as he was and as we felt about him. His large, perhaps unrealized
talent, his intelligence, his enthusiasm, were of a piece with what made
him so difficult, with all the things that destroyed him. But when
Delmore was at his best, at his most lovable, I can remember the excite–
ment of his wildly animated conversation, with Delmore laughing,
roar~
ing, jerking, his jacket twisted, his shirt half out of his pants, smelling
of whiskey and cigarettes, telling endless stories and scoring rhetor–
ical points, long into the night. He was so strong I never thought he
would die.
W.P.
EDITOR'S NOTE
With this issue Richard Poirier is leaving the Editorial Board, to be able to
give more time to writing and teaching. While we're sorry he's no long–
er an editor, we're glad to say that he'll be staying on as a consultant.
