BOOKS
I am wood I am
Stone I am a slow
River , hardly flowing
&
all is warm
&
all is animal
- I am stone , I am river
I am wood - a wood but not
A leaf ...
501
Then again, in raptures of illumination, he was the bard of air and
wind , music and light.
Music is not water, but it moves like water
It is not fire but it soars as warm as the sun
It
is not rock, it is not fountain ,
But rock and fountain, clock and mountain
Abide within it, bound together
In radiance pulsing, vibrating, and reverberating,
Dominating the domination of the weather.
This cadenza appears in 1959, when , gloomy and dazed,
Schwartz could still snatch a grace beyond the reach of amphet–
amines . Playing Ariel to his own Caliban, he could outflank his de–
pression long enough to strike the silver note. It is remarkable . The
journal, otherwise sodden and world weary , suddenly melts into air.
Perhaps these were no more than the normal gyrations of the manic
depressive , whose capricious moods can drag him from the suburbs
of heaven to the porches of hell in minutes, but one is struck all the
same by their extremity: how utterly black were the black moods and
how dazzling the light ones .
I wish I could report that this volume was a joy to read or that it
returned me to Schwartz's writing with renewed appreciation. Un–
fortunately, it is a trial that no one will pick up casually . The scatter
is appalling, and if these journals in any way can be said to capture
Schwartz's furious presence, it is only by documenting in brutal de–
tail his confusion and grief and the venom that poisoned all his social
relations. The brilliant range of reference that Bellow recorded in
Humoldt 's Gijt-"Yeats,
Apollinaire , Lenin, Freud, Morris
R .
Co–
hen, Gertrude Stein, baseball statistics, and Hollywood gossip"–
was no more than that, a range of reference and evidence of a mind
that had mistaken gossip for thought and had gotten lost in the
cosmopolitan wilderness somewhere between James Joyce and
Walter Winchell . Schwartz's mind was an encyclopedia from which
everything had been scratched but the titles, and he had an inkling
