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PARTISAN REVIEW
that last line the more pathetic for its echo of Eliot's
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Those last years fall into silence and shadow. Atlas has tried to fill
in the narrative, but once again both his methodology and his respect
for a literary hi erarchy get in his way. Schwartz didn't write much after
1961, so there was less material, less "autobiography," to draw on;
again, those witnesses who had served Atlas's researches for the 1940s
and 1950s knew very little about Schwartz's life in the 1960s. Not that
Atlas ever abandons their point of view: "Ashamed of his condition,
Delmore deliberately chose to avoid his friends, preferring to take up
with women half his age and people who didn 't know him in his
celebrated youth." Then there's a curiously sexist and generally
deprecating attitude toward those young women. Surely an intervi ew
with one of those young people who sat as a comitatus over Schwartz's
body would have revealed a fact or two Atlas could pass along with
taste and consideration of the individual's present privacy?
Similarly, Atlas refers
to
Schwartz's rambling spiels at parties and
in bars as if incoherence, too, were not the stuf( of biography. But what
particular passages from
Finnegans Wake,
for example, did Schwartz
recite, and gloss-the stage Irishman
shtik,
the Shem-Shaun " baltle,"
the lament of "I done me best when I was let," " How small it's all !" or
joyce's final pronouncement on himself, " Loonely in me loneness"?
Even at his most depressed and despairing, Schwartz ev identl y cou ld
wake students to literature as a cry in the streets, or make people see
Syracuse was indeed a plausi bl e setting for an American
Ulysses.
In the end, of course, one must be grateful for even so fl awed a
work as
Delmore Schwartz.
Atlas's labor mu st be lauded, for he did
assemble an enormous amount of material. He has also resisted that
romantic temptation to lump Schwartz's fate with Roethke's, j arrell's,
Berryman 's, Sylvia Plath 's, Anne Sexton's as proof that America
destroys its young, that the pressure to succeed kills of( the gifted, the
beautiful , the promising. What was said when Schwartz was a t hi s best,
and flourishing, still holds true: "You love Delmore, but you can die
from him. " He was difficult, at times, impossibl e. Some of Schwartz's
fri ends who continued to love him preferred not to "die (rom him. " To
these people-including Bellow, john Berryman and Robert Lowell–
he was an image forever fixed in the early
I
940s, thoughtful, hand–
some, owlishly serious, wickedly funn y, hopeless ly highbrow, hope–
less ly lowbrow, a boy king of th e castle done in by invisibl e trolls.
