Delmore Schwartz – Fourteen Lines

I Am Not Able To Forget

All poets’ wives have rotten lives, their husbands look at them like knives.

Delmore Schwartz

Dream Song 181

The Translator——-II

by John Berryman

Because I am not able to forget,
Henry is dreaming of society,
one where the gifted & hard-working
young poet is cherished, kissed as a king
to come, a prized comer. Ah but see
them baleful ignorant

justicer & witnesses, corrupt by purity,
lacking all sense of others, lacking sense,
but liars too, pal.
I snuff the proper vomit of a State
where every tree is adjudged equal tall,
in faith without debate.

I beg to place in evidence, vicious mother:
That in the west of my land tower Douglas firs,
taller than others.
If then a judge grides to one of them ‘You are sick,
lazy: Siberia’ what gross metaphors
shall we invent for this judge?

(The sentence: forced labour for five years in a ‘distant locality.’)

Berryman should have had every reason to improve his disposition in the fall of 1940. Harvard offered much of the advantages he was left wanting after his experience at Wayne State; higher pay, more gifted and dedicated students, incredibly talented counterparts and an opportunity to connect with his younger brother. Unfortunately, Berryman always had a glass half empty mindset and quickly settled into his same bad habits of nervous exhaustion, self pity and grumbling aloofness and ill health. The English department at Harvard in 1940 had what would prove to be some heavy weights of American poetry including, Delmore Schwartz, Wallace Stegner, Harry Levin, Mark Schrorer and of course Berryman. Other than a strong friendship with Schwartz, Berryman carried around his every heavier life long chip on his shoulder and managed to alienate most of his colleagues. However, Berryman was honing his skills as a professor, and by and large his students loved him and with the positive feedback of his pupils came a muted respect of his colleagues.

Berryman was weary of the grind of teaching, the prep, the grading, the reading of students papers and providing feedback. He worked hard it. He felt it robbed him of his creative energy and kept him treading water as a writer. However, during his Harvard years, he was able to muster sufficient time and energy to produce some poems that were not only published but were gaining some attention by important critics and publishers.

Berryman and his younger brother, Robert Jefferson, had taken up residence together when he moved to Boston to teach at Harvard. It was a rattle trap apartment, with holes in the walls, but it was an opportunity for the two of them to reconnect. Unfortunately, Berryman interacted with his brother the same way he interacted with everyone else, which pretty much was what seemed like indifference as he went about in his own self induced haze of annoyance. Despite it not being the reunion that Robert Jefferson had hoped, it worked well enough. The two of them lived peaceably under one roof for better part of two years. His brother would marry his first wife in the fall of 1941 and the three of them lived together, despite modest tensions, for the next year.

Berryman’s own romantic pursuits were more complicated. He was still undertaking an on again/off again letter writing romance with Beatrice, his fiance, living in England, while dating Eileen Mulligan, a friend of Jean Bennett’s, his girl friend from his college days. Eileen was an orphan and a devout Catholic. I mention both because the first was likely an entry into emotional bonding between the two and the latter a cause of exasperation for Berryman, who by this time was a loud and opinionated atheist. Eileen was kind, emotional, grateful and insecure as to where her future lay when they met. Berryman created an emotional obstacle few women would have dared to cross, still professing his love of his fiance, even though it was shear fantasy and farce by this point, neither he nor Beatrice had the will to call it off.

Berryman’s mother took a liking to Eileen and was genuinely kind and generous towards her emotionally, encouraging the relationship. It wasn’t until July of 1941, England in the grips of war, that Beatrice wrote him a letter and renounced her acceptance of his marriage proposal. Within a week he proposed to Eileen and she accepted. It wasn’t until October that Berryman got around to giving her a ring, inscribed ‘J.B. to E.M – NOW AND THEN ONE – 24, October, 1942.’ And in doing so set the date of their marriage one year hence.

Berryman’s and Delmore’s academic and personal friendship flourished during this time, but it was almost like Berryman’s melancholy was contagious, because by winter of the next year, Schwartz had slid into a serious depression, which contributed to the break down of his marriage. Eileen was a gentle source of encouragement and support to both. She competently set out to plan a proper Catholic wedding and had to plan the entirety of the event because of Berryman’s feckless ways.

During the lead up to the wedding, Berryman was desperate to both publish and find a more lucrative position. He was in debt from back rent and owed friends money. He was angry and despondent that he could never seem to get ahead financially. He applied to more than fifty schools and did not land a position to his suiting. He had to take a job selling Encyclopedia Britannica that summer, tramping the streets of New York’s East Side just to make a few bucks. Feeling hopeless and despondent he declared to Eileen that he hated life, to which she replied, “if you feel that way we shouldn’t get married.” But get married they did. He landed a position at the Iona School in New Rochelle for the salary of 2,400 for that fall, but lasted only three weeks as he felt over worked and stressed at the expectations. Fate would intervene, as in October, the month he would be married, he received a letter from Richard Blackmur that he had been advocating on his behalf at Princeton and had convinced the head of the English department to offer Berryman a job. Blackmur had been introduced to Berryman’s work through Alan Tate and had become interested in the young writer. The position at Princeton would pay $225 a month with the opportunity for additional summer income at a stipend of $500, sufficient funds that Berryman could dig himself out of debt and start married life on firmer financial ground.

The Foggy, Foggy Blue

By Delmore Schwartz

When I was a young man, I loved to write poems

And I called a spade a spade

And the only only thing that made me sing

Was to lift the masks at the masquerade.

I took them off my own face,

I took them off others too

And the only only wrong in all my song

Was the view that I knew what was true.

Now I am older and tireder too

And the tasks with the masks are quite trying.

I’d gladly gladly stop if I only only knew

A better way to keep from lying,

And not get nervous and blue

When I said something quite untrue:

I looked all around and all over

To find something else to do:

I tried to be less romantic

I tried to be less starry-eyed too:

But I only got mixed up and frantic

Forgetting what was false and what was true.

But tonight I am going to the masked ball,

Because it has occurred to me

That the masks are more true than the faces:

—Perhaps this too is poetry?

I no longer yearn to be naïve and stern

And masked balls fascinate me:

Now that I know that most falsehoods are true

Perhaps I can join the charade?

This is, at any rate, my new and true view:

Let live and believe, I say.

The only only thing is to believe in everything:

It’s more fun and safer that way!

Child, We’ve Done Our Best

Heart’s Needle 2

by W. D. Snodgrass

Late April and you are three; today
         We dug your garden in the yard.
    To curb the damage of your play,
Strange dogs at night and the moles tunneling,
    Four slender sticks of lath stand guard
         Uplifting their thin string.

    So you were the first to tramp it down.
         And after the earth was sifted close
    You brought your watering can to drown
All earth and us. But these mixed seeds are pressed
    With light loam in their steadfast rows.
         Child, we’ve done our best.

    Someone will have to weed and spread
         The young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour
    When shadow falls across their bed.
You should try to look at them every day
    Because when they come to full flower
         I will be away.

Do you ever feel like you just can’t get ahead of the sequence in which the order of things would make sense? I wanted to plant a few fruit trees this spring, but the cold, wet, late spring has made that complicated. I got 6 trees planted yesterday, blustery, rainy mid-40’s cloudy day, perfect for bare root trees, not so perfect for the gardener. Now I have to figure out how to keep the deer off them until I can build a proper deer fence. All my intentions for positioning the orchard were thrown out the window by unexpected complications in designing a new septic field. We’ll see who wins, but it would have been so much easier if I could have built the fence first, then then plant the trees.

Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day

By Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,

Metropolitan poetry here and there,

In the park sit pauper and rentier,

The screaming children, the motor-car

Fugitive about us, running away,

Between the worker and the millionaire

Number provides all distances,

It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,

Many great dears are taken away,

What will become of you and me

(This is the school in which we learn …)

Besides the photo and the memory?

(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn …)

What is the self amid this blaze?

What am I now that I was then

Which I shall suffer and act again,

The theodicy I wrote in my high school days

Restored all life from infancy,

The children shouting are bright as they run

(This is the school in which they learn …)

Ravished entirely in their passing play!

(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!

Where is my father and Eleanor?

Not where are they now, dead seven years,

But what they were then?

No more? No more?

From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,

Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume

Not where they are now (where are they now?)

But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,

The great globe reels in the solar fire,

Spinning the trivial and unique away.

(How all things flash! How all things flare!)

What am I now that I was then?

May memory restore again and again

The smallest color of the smallest day:

Time is the school in which we learn,

Time is the fire in which we burn

My Clumsiness Each Time I Try To Dance

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

John Milton – Paradise Lost

Rome

By Joachim du Bellay

Translated by Ezra Pound

O thou newcomer who seek’st Rome in Rome
And find’st in Rome no thing thou canst call Roman;
Arches worn old and palaces made common
Rome’s name alone within these walls keeps home.

Behold how pride and ruin can befall
One who hath set the whole world ’neath her laws,
All-conquering, now conquered, because
She is Time’s prey, and Time conquereth all.

Rome that art Rome’s one sole last monument,
Rome that alone hast conquered Rome the town,
Tiber alone, transient and seaward bent,

Remains of Rome. O world, thou unconstant mime!
That which stands firm in thee Time batters down,
And that which fleeteth doth outrun swift Time

Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois,
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois
Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme.

Vois quel orgueil, quelle ruine et comme
Celle qui mit le monde sous ses lois
Pour dompter tout, se dompta quelquefois
Et devint proie au temps, qui tout consomme.

Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
Le Tibre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit,

Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme est par le temps détruit
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.

Despite Lowell’s embrace of the true southern hospitality showed him by Tate, Warren and Ransom, Lowell was a Bostonian through and through. Though even he was a bit taken aback by the privileged life he grew up in and retained as an adult through his family’s Bostonian wealth, status and power, he never hesitated to embrace the safety net it provided. There are the penniless loonies, like Pound, who get by in part through their eccentricity. And then there are the wealthy eccentrics, who are tolerated because they have fuck you walking around money. They can be as crazy as they want, and their community will accept it, because there is an unspoken bond among families, schools and businesses that are so intertwined in their community, that they have mutually decided its better to accept a few nut bars of their own choosing, as long as they can pay their bar tab and afford expensive psychiatrists and luxury mental hospitals in times of recovery when substance abuse gets out of control. The field of psychiatry and the big business of treating mental illness and substance abuse largely evolved to serve the wealthy in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. During the hay day of Lowell’s drinking in the 1940’s, there was an acceptance of heavy drinking that was part of the culture within which he associated that covered up real insanity, with a ready excuse of bad behavior by individuals as “just having had a few too many with the boys.”

Lowell had burned enough bridges in Boston with school mates, his father, and the upper crust of Bostonian society, that as a young adult and then throughout the rest of his life, he made New York more his adopted northern home. He would spend long periods in New York, in between stints at various Universities, including one triumphant return to Harvard, and travel abroad. Schwartz, who also came from money, but saw his inheritance squandered by a corrupt executor of his father’s estate, who died suddenly at age 49, was taken aback by the level of wealth and servants in Lowell’s parent’s household. He was also shocked by the undertones of anti-Semitism that ran through the banter between Lowell and his parents during “pleasant” dining room conversation when he and Lowell would visit.

Schwartz and Lowell were good friends, who palled around together in New York City in the 1940’s and early 1950’s when Lowell was in residence or visiting, during the high point in Schwartz’s career, when his books and poetry were being praised by Tate, Warren and others. But writing careers are like chess games, there is an opening, a mid-game, and for the best, an end-game. Schwartz had a clever opening and the start of a solid mid-game, but alcoholism and mental illness wore away his talents and opportunities, until even his brilliant conversational skills weren’t enough to keep his friends visiting him at his favorite bars in New York City. He died penniless in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City at age 52.

Lowell’s dark side was in full display early in his marriage with Stafford. There was a sense of obligation, from the car crash, that instantly began to erode its underpinnings and by 1945, Lowell was finding other female companionship to his liking better, if not for sex, at least for its pleasant diversion of company. For someone known as a bit of prude, who didn’t counter rough talk and sex jokes among his male companions, Lowell was unabashed in going through a series of lovers and female companions in the end stages of his marriage to Stafford. By 1946 serious negotiations were ongoing between the two of them around dissolution through Lowell’s lawyer on what would be the financial alimony paid to Stafford in a divorce so that it could be finalized. During this time from 1945 to 1948, Lowell and Stafford were married in name only. Lowell used this time to travel, live in New York and then in 1947 and 1948, as the divorce was finalized, take on a position in Washington D. C. as a consultant to the Library of Congress, the post that would eventually be renamed as the position of United States Poet Laureate.

It was during this time that Lowell lived in Washington, D. C. that he began visiting Ezra Pound in prison, who was being held on charges of treason at the Chestnut Ward at St. Elizabeths Hospital in southeast D.C. Lowell, no stranger to mental institutions, though ones far nicer in creature comforts than St. Elizabeths, began visiting Pound for weekly conversations on poetry and literature. Lowell had always been fascinated by Pound. Lowell first contacted Pound via letter his freshmen year at College. Pound, always a generous mentor and critic and fan of younger poets, had written back and so it is not surprising that Lowell seized this opportunity to further their friendship.

I am hopeful both men found solace in the acceptance of each other’s humanity. As someone who is having to come to grips with the depths of his own demons, I can appreciate the generosity and dangers these types of friendships represent. Friendships like Lowell had with both Schwartz and Pound, were the totality of their beings was not hidden, both the power of their artistic expression, the brilliance of their intellects and the brokenness of their souls, are on full display and tolerated, as friends, is a rare thing to find. And I would hope, all three were the better for it, even if not spared from the best and the worst each brought to those relationships and their own lives.

Why Do You Write An Endless History

by Delmore Schwartz

“Why when you write do you most frequently
Look in your heart and stare at it both first
And last, half agonized by what you see
And half bemused, seeking what is accursed
Or blessed in the past? And what demand
Is gratified?” I answered, hesitant
And slow: “Because I wish to understand
The causes of each great and small event

Choosen, or like thrown dice, an accident,
-My clumsiness each time I try to dance,
My mother’s anger when I wore long pants,
Thus, as the light renews each incident,
My friends are free of guilt or I am free
Of self-accused responsibility.

The Dark Accidents Of Strange Identity

delmore-schwartzs-quotes-1

The Rumor and The Whir of Unborn Wings

by Delmore Schwartz

Some girl serene, some girl whose being is
Affection, and in love with natural things,
In whom like summer like a choir sings,
Yet with a statue’s white celebrities
Although the city falls. Golden and sleek,
Spontaneous and strong, quickend and one
To wake for joy, the mother of a son
Who climbs with conscious laughter every peak!

But I know well the party rush, the black
Rapids of feeling falling tot a bride,
Trapped in the present and the body’s lack,
Long reasons’s new hat quickly thrown aside,
And soon a child rising and toiling like me
With the dark accidents of strange identity.

At a Solemn Musick. (Recorded at the National Poetry Festival, 1962)

O City, City

by Delmore Schwartz

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.

Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
Of a voice speaking the mind’s knowing,
The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
When in the white bed all things are made.

God Forbid I Look Behind

The Only Ghost I Ever Saw

by Emily Dickinson

The only ghost I ever saw
Was dressed in mechlin, –so;
He wore no sandal on his foot,
And stepped like flakes of snow.
His gait was soundless, like the bird,
But rapid, like the roe;
His fashions quaint, mosaic,
Or, haply, mistletoe.

Hi conversation seldom,
His laughter like the breeze
That dies away in dimples
Among the pensive trees.
Our interview was transient, —
Of me, himself was shy;
And God forbid I look behind
Since that appalling day!

I attended a performance of Amal and the Night Visitors this weekend with James Sewell Ballet in Minneapolis. A simple tale, an operetta set to motion as a ballet, that reminds us that our lives change for the better when we open the door to the stranger and welcome them inside. I agree with Delmore Schwartz. Let Angels be the judge of dogs and children. Some people believe babies are born with all the knowledge of the world, childhood is unlearning what they already know. Dogs are born with similar knowledge. They are born trusting. And in companionship they learn to magnify that trust or it diminishes, depending on the person in their charge. To howl and dance out our souls sounds like a good plan for dogs, children and adults.

Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children are Strangers

by Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.
Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,
Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,
The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,
Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,
The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,
As if she understood the wind and rain,
The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.
—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!
For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children
Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?
And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly
Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?
The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,
The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,
Know more and less than you: they know full well
Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:
You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,
Welcome strangers, but study daily things,
Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,
But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,
This which we live behind our unseen faces,
Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither
Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,
For we are incomplete and know no future,
And we are howling or dancing out our souls
In beating syllables before the curtain:
We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

This Is The Meaning of Life

The Beautiful American Word, Sure

by Delmore Schwartz (1913 – 1966)

The beautiful American word, Sure
As I have come into a room, and touch
The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such
Certainty where the darkness loomed before,

As I care for what I do not know, and care
Knowing for little she might not have been,
And for how little she would be unseen,
The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.

Where the light is, and each thing clear,
Separate from all others, standing in its place,
I drink the time and touch whatever’s near,

And hope for day when the whole world has that face:
For what assures her present every year?
In dark accidents the mind’s sufficient grace.

Delmore Schwartz lived and died in New York City. In between were stints as student or adjunct professor in Madison, Wisconsin, Harvard and Syracuse University. New York City and his parents divorce loomed as a character in his stories and poetry, his sonnet 0 City, City a far cry from Wordsworth’s love affair with London. Schwartz seemed to bear New York on his shoulders, filling his mind with literature in its public libraries as a young man, surrounding him with artists and intellectuals and then he spit it out after having chewed on it sufficiently for 40 years. It is said that Schwartz paved the way for Saul Bellows to be Saul Bellows. If true, its damnable praise that his legacy was being an originality that allowed the next Jewish writer to prosper for excelling even further in defining the loneliness of trying to assimilate as an outsider into a nation of immigrants.

Schwartz was a man of brilliant intellect whose professional zenith peaked in his 20’s. He was touted by William Carlos Williams. He was an acquaintance if not friend of Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Lowell penned a tribute or a curse in honor of him. Schwartz suffered the burdens of genius, mental illness, creativity, alcoholism and poverty. He died at the age of 53 of a heart attack. His body unclaimed by family and friends he had grown estranged from years before.

Schwartz writes with a clear voice, an impulse driven by a deep understanding of literature and a willingness to work within the confines of tradition to forge something new. The subjects of his poems were often stark. His sonnets a love song to words and and ideas more than people.

What to make of the first line and his association of the American-ness of the word ‘sure’? Schwartz was a first generation Romanian Jew, who grew up in respectable if not the upper middle class in New York City. That all changed in an instant when his father died suddenly at age 49. Apparently dying young was the one true inheritance his father passed on to his son. The ‘sureness’ of being American may have eluded Schwartz. And yet the freedoms that invention allowed were not lost on his awakening as an artist. For what was possible for him in America would have been impossible in the birth place of his parents.

Sonnet

by Delmore Schwartz

I follow thought and what the world announces
I lean to hear, and leaning too far over,
Fall, and babied by confusion, cover
Myself in drowse, too tired by such bounces.
But in sleep are dreams across zigzagging snow
Descending quietly and slow, like minutes,
And on this peace the soul again begins its
Rhetoric of desire, older than Jericho,
And rails once more, like birds of early morning
Urchinous on branches and like newsboys,
“Extra, this is the meaning of life,
Here is the real good, beyond all turning,”
Till night goes home, astonished by such cries,
I wake up, and, to feel superior, I laugh.