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PARTISAN REVIEW
Much of this industry is the work of Schwartz's literary
executor Robert Phillips, who has been toiling in the ruins of
Schwartz's career in the hopes, it seems, of making a museum out of
all that shattered masonry . The
Letters ,
the
Last and Lost Poems
and
The Ego is Always at the Wheel
are his doing, and he cautions us in the
last book that other publications are likely to be forthcoming : verse
plays , unpublished novels , stories, a book-length critical study of
T.S. Eliot, and the autobiographical poem that Schwartz wrestled
with for years,
Genesis, Book
II.
"Much of this material ," Phillips has
been candid to admit in the preface to
The Ego is Always at the Wheel,
"is not Schwartz at his best," and it is doubtful that any reader of the
most recent gleanings will take issue with him .
Phillips has not been alone. Working in tandem to edit,
decipher, and publish Schwartz's gargantuan journals has been
Schwartz's exwife, Elizabeth Pollett, who had been estranged from
Schwartz for nine years at the time of his death . The journals, some
2,400 pages of lava and ash, were among the papers rescued by
Dwight Macdonald from a moving company , after their where–
abouts came to light during a chance encounter in a bar between
Macdonald's son and the proprietor of the company . Those 2,400
pages were eventually transcribed into 1,400 pages of typescript,
then edited down to something like 900 pages . Entries after 1959,
which Elizabeth Pollett found virtually indecipherable, are omitted .
Schwartz began the journal of his twenty-sixth birthday,
December 8, 1939, and kept at it for twenty-seven years until his
death . It began as a diary of the most conventional kind : "In the
evening I went to the movie.... Yesterday we went to see the
Fergussons .. . . Jay called from Mt. Vernon ." Except that litera–
ture is Schwartz's constant preoccupation, this is fairly indis–
tinguishable from the diary of an ordinary teenager. It is self–
conscious, gossipy, and bristling with resentment. Keeping track of
social encounters and the social injuries he invariably provoked was
Schwartz's chief preoccupation . But by 1942, the journal had
become a catch-all for whatever impressions were bubbling through
his mind: poems, limericks, epigrams, puns, sendups, assaults, ap–
peals, diatribes - the effluvia of his restless imagination. When
Schwartz was in one of his manic moods, the journal took on the
qualities of a Joycean
monologue interieur,
and Schwartz's lifelong
fascination with Joyce , whom he transcribed into his notebooks as a
discipline of style, may have inspired his erratic and spontaneous
method of notation. But in Schwartz's hands the Joycean man-
