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European archetypes. Schwartz set himself a grand goal, to create a
significant American myth out of his own experience and celebrate the
new American hero- as poet, as young Jewish intell ectual, as
twentieth- century west-of-the-Atlantic everyman. Schwartz's language
itself was full of echoes from his literary p antheon . Atlas sometimes
reads as pure autobiograph y a p araphrase of Joyce's
Portrait
or the
reworking of a line or phrase from Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane,
Melville, Blake, Dostoevsky.
After Bell evue, Schwartz's perky literary stance faltered. Early in
1958 he began summing up. His talk at the Libra ry of Congress turned
o ut
to
be his fin al word on the American dream:
Clearly wh en the future of civilization is no longer assured, a
criticism of American life in terms of a contras t between avowed
ideals and present actuality cannot be a primary occupati on and
source of inspiration . For America, not Europe, is now the sanctuary
of culture; civiliza tion 's very existence depends upon America, upon
th e actuality of American life, and no t the idea ls of the American
dream.
A much mo re personal summing up was published a year later,
"Seura t's Sunday Afternoon along the Seine," Schwartz's " Dover
Beach ." He imagined Kafka crying Flaubert's
" Ils sont dans levrai"
at
the "parade and promen ade o f mild, calm happ iness" in Seurat's
painting. It wasn't Kafka the writer but Kafka the destroyed man who,
like Schwartz, had experienced the ultima te bleakness :
Without forebears, without marriage, without heirs,
Yet with a wild longing for forebears, marriage, and heirs....
Schwartz's h yperborean stances had disappeared. On one level the
bourgeois scales were simpl y the scales of life. He weighed himself and
found only himself wanting. Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld before his
death had something go ing in life; Berryman was working on his
"Dream Songs" but, mu ch more significantly, Berryman had a son;
Lowell had discovered the " rag-and-bone shop of the heart" in
Life
Studies
but, on the hi gh er scale, h ad a famil y, friendships, a wife.
In
1960 Schwartz published "All Night, All Night, " a relentless
summing up of hi s ex istenti al sta te:
. . . I for my part felt in my h eart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endless ly, and feels the vast
Draft of the abyss suck ing him down and down ,
An endl essly helpl essly falling and appalled clown
