Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz by Delmore Schwartz

by Delmore Schwartz

The publication of this book restores a missing chapter in the history of twentieth-century American literature With his New Directions debut in 1938, the twenty-five-year-old Delmore Schwartz was hailed as a genius and among the most promising writers of his generation. Yet he died in relative obscurity in 1966, wracked by mental illness and substance abuse. Sadly, his literary legacy has been overshadowed by the story of his tragic life. Among poets, Schwartz was a prototype for the confessional movement made famous by his slightly younger friends Robert Lowell and John Berryman. While his stories and novellas about Jewish American experience laid the groundwork for novels by Saul Bellow (whose Humboldt’s Gift is based on Schwartz’s life) and Philip Roth. Much of Schwartz’s writing has been out of print for decades. This volume aims to restore Schwartz to his proper place in the canon of American literature and give new readers access to the breadth of his achievement. Included are selections from the in-print stories and poems, as well as excerpts from his long unavailable epic poem Genesis , a never-completed book-length work on T. S. Eliot, and unpublished poems from his archives.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories, American, The United States Of America, Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published April 20, 2016

About the author

Delmore Schwartz was born December 8, 1913, in Brooklyn. The marriage of his parents Harry and Rose, both Roumanian immigrants, was doomed to fail. Sadly, this misfortune with relationships was also a theme in Schwartz's life. His alcoholism, frequent use of barbiturates and amphetamines, and battles with various mental diseases, proved adverse in his relationships with women. His first marriage to Gertrude Buckman lasted six years; his second, to the young novelist Elizabeth Pollett, ended after his ceaseless paranoid accusations of adultery led him to attack an art critic with whom he believed Elizabeth was having an affair.

Despite his turbulent and unsettling home life as a child, Schwartz was a gifted and intellectual young student. He enrolled early at Columbia University, and also studied at the University of Wisconsin, eventually receiving his bachelor's degree in 1935 in philosophy from New York University. In 1936 he won the Bowdoin Prize in the Humanities for his essay "Poetry as Imitation." In 1937 his short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (successfully written in one month during the summer of 1935 after he locked himself in his Greenwich Village apartment) was published in Partisan Review, a left-wing magazine of American politics and culture; the following year this short story would be published by New Directions with other poetry and prose in his first book-length work, also titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. It was praised by many, including T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and Vladimir Nabokov.

He never finished his advanced degree in philosophy at Harvard, but was hired as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, and later given an Assistant Professorship. Frustrated by what he believed was a sense of anti-Semitism within the school, in 1947 Schwartz ended his twelve-year association with Harvard and returned to New York City. His book of short stories The World is a Wedding was published the following year. Time compared Schwartz to Stendhal and Anton Chekhov. By this same time his work was widely anthologized. He was publishing critical essays on other important literary figures and cultural topics, and was the poetry editor at Partisan Review, and later also at New Republic.

His increasingly itinerant nature left him dependent on a series of teaching positions at Bennington College, Kenyon College, Princeton University, the writer's colony Yaddo, and at Syracuse University, in his last years. Among others, he inspired the student Lou Reed, who later dedicated "European Son" on the Velvet Underground's first album to Schwartz. In 1960 Schwartz became the youngest poet ever to win the Bollingen Prize. His friend Saul Bellow wrote a semi-fictional memoir about Schwartz called Humboldt's Gift, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

The last years of his life Schwartz was a solitary, disheveled figure in New York. He drank frequently at the White Horse Tavern, and spent his time sitting in parks and collecting bits of work, quotes, and translations in his journal. Finding himself penniless and virtually friendless, in the summer of 1966 Schwartz checked into the Times Squares hotel, perhaps to focus on his writing. Unfortunately by this time his body had been taxed by years of drug and alcohol abuse. He worked continuously until a heart attack on July 11 seized him in the lobby of the hotel.

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Source: poets.org

Reviews

[Greg Lehman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dated and self-aggrandizing on a level I’m hard-pressed to compare with anyone over their 20s, one can read “Summer Knowledge” and a letter telling off Pound for his anti-Semitism, rest assured that you’ve seen the best, and move on to find someone better, which has to be worlds easier than the slog this collection brings to the reader.

[Adam Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first books that made me seriously want to pursue poetry."

"To live between terms, to live where death
has his loud picture in the subway ride,
Being amid six million souls, their breath
An empty song suppressed on every side,
Where the sliding auto's catastrophe
Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high
The office building rises to its tyranny,
Is our anguished diminution until we die."

[Aharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brief; still padded.

[Glenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I grabbed this collection to dip into the Delmore Schwartz catalog after reading a Lou Reed biography and being reminded of Lou's reverence for his college professor, drinking buddy, and friend. The poems and letters didn't grab me but two short stories stood out: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (his most famous piece for a reason) and The World Is a Wedding. The first is a brief, surreal sketch of one's parents' relationship viewed, quite literally, by their child; the second is a longer story of a young adult friend group growing up and apart, rife with progressive (for their day) artistic, political, and sexual perspectives, and, unfortunately, also with some less than fully developed characters. I would have liked to see if some disciplined writing and editing could have turned The World Is a Wedding into a novella or novel so we learned more about each member of the circle.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping to be more delighted. Though I enjoyed Summer Knowledge and the poem about Seurat.

[The Jewish Book Council]

"Does a new selection of Delmore Schwartz's poetry and prose truly represent the best of his oeuvre?" Review by Merrill Leffler for the Jewish Book Council.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://artsfuse.org/144746/fuse-book-...

[Kristin]

I flipped through this. While there are a couple of standouts, I wouldn't call Schwartz a lost icon of American literature. He seems to predict the emergence of the Beat poets with his ordinary and conversational style. There's promise here, but his work is convoluted and genuinely boring at times.