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PARTISAN REVIEW
basic as examine the Bellevue log on Schwartz? Obviously because of
that methodological Either/ Or: once Schwartz is tagged " indiscrimi–
nate in his suspicions" he is juridically wiped out, dehumanized into a
raving Bedlamite.
Bellow's version of the Bellevue episode in
Humboldt's Gift
is,
compared to Atlas's, rounded, almost tragic. Bellow's Schwartz charac–
ter, Von Humboldt Fleisher, remains all-too-human. (Humboldt is a
minor character in the novel, lovingly epiphanized in its opening
pages but essentially a pale, rumpled "gray stout sick dusty" Failure–
foil
LO
Citrine, a comfortable aging Jewish Prince prinked out with the
familiar Bellovian eam ests of Success-expensive shoes, expensive
women friends , highroll er relatives, mobster acquaintances, etc. )
Twice he accuses Citrine (the book's main character) of misusing
" life," of being incapable of separating " life" and "literature."
(Schwartz's cry was "This isn 't literature, it's my lifel")- Schwartz
rejected any explanation for his Bellevue "imprisonment": the
means,
Bell evue, cancell ed out nobl e
ends,
the total reclamation of Delmore
Schwartz.
Ultimately Schwartz zeroed in on his old " pal " Bellow, now his
"mighty opposite," as the cause-of-it-all, jealous, treacherous, anxious
that Schwartz be packed away in order for Bellow to plagiarize
Schwartz's God-knows-what. The perspective of Bell evue made every–
thing ominous: Schwartz had loved
Seize the Day
though its loser hero,
Wilhelm, was fitted out with Schwartz eccentriciti es (some would tum
up again as Humboldt's)-his silent, panting laugh, his bear's body,
his peculiar ways of driving a car, wearing his suit collar up, drinking
gin out of a coffee mug, stretching out to watch tel ev ision baseball, etc.
Seize the Day
proved Bellow had been observing him; he was being
kept in Bell evue because Bellow wanted to observe him further.
Bellow 's object? More " litera ture" at the expense of Schwartz's " life."
Atlas doesn 't mention , and obviously didn't have access to, Bel–
low 's memoir of Schwartz and Isaac Rosenfeld that he put as ide to do
Humboldt's Gift.
The memoir might have spelled out for Atlas just
what was at stake in Bell evue.
It
might, too, have tempered Atlas's
literalisti c adherence to his thesis that "Schwartz's work, both pub–
lish ed and unpublish ed, is a lmost wholly autobiographical."
Atlas seems unaware of how Joyce, and Rilke, and Mann i to
name the most obvious members of Schwartz's pantheon, had trans–
formed fi ctional autobiography. Long before Schwartz began to write,
the portrait of the artist in the modem world was an established literary
form: Stephen Dedalus, Malte Laurids Brigge, Tonio Kroger were
