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PARTISAN REVIEW
of life." Again, "Every success I knew was from the fecundative
power of form." These are standard claims, and yet in the context of
these journals they seem like pleas for redemption. Cut loose from
any sustaining ideas, Schwartz took form alone for his grail, one that
was at times no larger than a shotglass: "All literature," he would
declare nonchalantly, "is an effort at the formal character of the
epigram," and he hoarded his epigrams the way a comedian hoards
punch lines.
Schwartz's performance, as he turned the inner pandemonium
into a theater of personality, had a hypnotic effect on others. "Man–
kind is stunned by the Exuberance and Beauty of certain in–
dividuals," observed Bellow in
Humboldt's Gift.
"When a Manic
Depressive escapes from his Furies he's irresistable ." In
New York
Jew,
Alfred Kazin would remember "the headlong rush of words that
seemed to engage every muscle in his face as he twisted and spat in
the rage of his opinions." But Schwartz's improvisations are not so
compelling in print as they were face to face. The command was in
the delivery, which wedded the manic-depressive's intoxication to
the
tummler's
sense of timing, without which the exuberant lines fade
into narcissism and exaggeration; they seem merely gaudy without
being particularly potent, and Pollett herself steps outside the glow
of her own devotion long enough to express disappointment in "the
lopsidedness of the entries and the impossibilities, finally, of lan–
guage to render life." This book might be thought of as the script for
a great tragicomic performance in which puns and one-liners take
the place of heroic verse. Schwartz was a dynamo of quips, a
machine for generating
bon mots
and a few
mauvais
ones as well .
"What this country needs is a good five-cent psychiatrist"; "Philip
Rahv has his good qualities, but he never lets them stand in his
way"; "She was the wife of the party; he was engaged in holy
wedlock"; '''How do you like Kipling?' 'I never drink it'"; "A horse
divided against itself cannot stand"; "All gall is divided into three
parts: arrogance, insensitivity, self-dramatization." Schwartz as–
pired, it seems,
to
be Milton Berle, but such a Berle as himself might
yarn to be T. S. Eliot, taking the measure of modern life in iambs
and singing to the mermaids with a cigar in his teeth.
Schwartz was a study in contradictions. On the one side lay a
heaviness, immanence, a nervous, exasperated life, and a sluggish
physicality, "the heavy bear who goes with me."
When I go down to sleep
To sleep
