BOOKS
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The reviews of
Dreams
came in, the letters, the congratulations, all but
unanimous in their celebration of Delmore Schwartz as the Literary
Establishment's new wearer of bays, its chosen Yank at Oxford, Jew at
Harvard,
wunderkind-at-large.
He shared his success well with a
younger Saul Bellow, a younger Isaac Rosenfeld.
For the next ten years Schwartz feared, and fed, expectations. Here
were Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams, Tate, Richards, Blackmur,
Ransom, Auden, Warren, Rahv, Mark Van Doren, Louis MacNeice,
and an intellectual cast of hundreds lined up on his side-and yet: he
didn 't have tenure at Harvard or Princeton; he didn't have a lifetime
contract from Louis B. Mayer; he didn't have a cool million; he hadn't
yet been swarmed over by those dreamed-of beautiful, adoring, atten–
tive women.
What wasn't signed and sealed was obviously transitory, or worse,
a delusion. Schwartz wanted treaties, blood covenants, mutual aid
pacts to codify the irreversible. He behaved sometimes like a very small
nation, with chosen envoys, pouch-carriers, trial-balloon launchers.
But he could not coerce the calendar or stare down the moon. Acclaim
for
The World is a Wedding
in 1948 didn't fake him out. Delmore
Schwartz was a hare among tortoises abounding: Bellow, his protege,
silently lapped him, and, more important, kept on writing. And then
there was Robert Lowell, and John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell.
Ten years later he was the loneliest of the left-behind runners, with
the devil of bad luck dragging after him. Like a faded movie star, he
had his clippings. Soon he was dependent on academic and publishing
handouts, and too depressed to care. Gone were the days when Delmore
Schwartz inhaled theory and breathed out explanation. His talk alone
should have produced huge books titled
Lumen
or
Lex
or
Gnomon.
What happened to the young poet on Olympus to turn him into just
one of the boys from Syracuse?
This is the question James Atlas, in his biography,
Delmore
Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet,
sets out to answer. But
Delmore Schwartz's bad luck, alas, continues after death. Atlas has dug
through manuscripts and notebooks and little scraps of paper, talked
to almost everyone Schwartz was connected with, seems to admire
Schwartz's poetry and stories, his criticism, his reviews. At times he
shows compassion for Schwartz's unfortunate fall. At times. Ulti–
matel y, however, in spite of Atlas's admiration for the writing,
Schwartz ends up victimized by Atlas's methodology, his frequently
lugubrious moralizing, his Heep-humble biographer's gratitude. Biog–
raphers at their best are dachshunds burrowing to get at the weasel
underground; or fierce guard dogs defending a subject-master from
