Delmore Schwartz has come to be considered possibly the most representative literary man of the Jewish intellectual generation of the 30’s, certainly in its own view. No other poet or novelist is felt to have come nearer to reflecting that generation’s inner struggles with America and itself. His books include: Shenandoah (1942); Genesis (1943); The World Is a Wedding (1948); and Vaudeville for a Princess (1950). Heinz Politzer, who here presents perhaps the first full-scale appraisal of Mr. Schwartz’s work, is a member of the department of German at Bryn Mawr College, and has been a very frequent contributor to these pages; his latest long piece, “The Blue Piano of Else Lasker-Schueler,” appeared in the April 1950 issue. The present article has been translated from the German by Martin Greenberg.

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An almost constant division runs through the works of Delmore Schwartz. There is the world of his own experience, as constituted by his biography, memories, and immediate feelings. This he has fixed in time and called childhood; he has also fixed it in space, in Brooklyn, where he was born in 1913. Beyond this sphere of real life, there lies the world of his education, full of the names of books, famous men, and of images taken from books: an abstract universe of the intelligence where he developed his consciousness.

The conflict at the basis of Schwartz’s writings is entirely secular. Whereas Kafka, for instance, is fundamentally concerned with man’s loss of faith, and in his writings there is only one authority, one father, one God, Schwartz’s books swarm with demigods, heroes, and father figures. Of these, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are the most frequently mentioned. Where Kafka, as we know from his diaries, wrote his stories in a kind of trance, Schwartz’s creative atmosphere is the light of consciousness, which he flashes upon the obscure reality of his memories. Thus it is that his work will sometimes seem to be social satire, sometimes a form of psychic therapy applied by himself to himself, but always an attempt to push beyond his teachers Marx and Freud to new creative perceptions and images.

It is this plus ultra, this going beyond his teachers, that gives new meaning—and new beauty—to Delmore Schwartz’s most recent book, Vaudeville for a Princess (New Directions). Here Schwartz seems to have developed a new sense of responsibility, an ironical and at the same time profound conception of the common weal. He begins each sequence of poems in this new book with “Dear Citizens”; this smacks ironically of Mark Antony, but, under the surface, it is meant in dead earnest. In spite of all Schwartz’s intellectual bravado, a new sense of community emerges in these lines, of an integration that the poet may not like and therefore ridicules, but which he accepts nevertheless. There is a mock-forensic quality in the poems, spoken as they are with tongue in check, yet they also express the pathos of a new feeling for his fellow men.

Schwartz’s new poems show a definite aggressiveness toward psychoanalysis, and even resort to slapstick as a weapon of liberation from a once revered teacher. The liberation from Freud marks an advance: he now possesses Freud. There are more good lines in this latest volume of Schwartz’s than in any of its predecessors; this is especially true of the love poems, which are brave and direct, and present beneath their brilliantly complex surface a deep and natural knowledge of the living being’s soul such as no one but Freud could have taught the poet.

It would seem, the often cheap witticisms of Schwartz’s prose interludes notwithstanding, that a new and almost classical tranquillity may be rising out of the conflicting forces of his nature and his intellect. It is, however, still too early to say. For the conflict is a profound one, not easily arbitrated.

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The incompatibility of experience and consciousness—the contradiction between the banality and ugliness of daily life and the truth and beauty of intellectual existence—has remained ever present to Schwartz. In inquiring after the reasons, social as well as psychological, for this incompatibility, Schwartz tries to understand the cleavage in his own breast; and by understanding, to cure himself of it. Delmore Schwartz’s significance is that he is a writer trying as hard as he can to discover his own identity. You will find flat lines and bad images in his books, but never insincerity.

He is a merciless realist and an often malicious satirist. There is scarcely any music in his verse, and if now and then a strain or so is heard, it is almost as if he had lost control of himself, or his poetic unconscious had played him a trick. He writes: “I have no wish to emulate Swinburne, but rather the ‘morbid pedestrianism’ of such poets as Donne and Hardy, Webster and Wordsworth. The diction of this deliberate flatness—and the heavy accent and the slowness—is an effort to declare the miraculous character of daily life and ordinary speech. . . .” His prose is cold and clipped, the accents of his conversation almost a caricature of living speech, and often consciously and ironically vulgar. And it would not be hard to trace vestiges of Yiddish intonation in this English which outwardly seems impeccably sophisticated.

His heroes are middle-class Jews, the children of East European immigrants. The older generation he portrays with the intimacy of hate. These dubious pioneers whom the convulsions of the old country thrust out of Europe dart giddily about like flies in the light of prosperity that bathes the New World; the shock that America gave them upon arrival remains alive in their nerves to the very end. It is something from which they never recover, and it causes them to shut themselves up in their dwellings, where, with the ambivalence of the ghetto state of mind, they huddle together, beget children, quarrel with one another, run away from one another, suffer together, die together, and call it heart failure.

As in the traditional East European Jewish story, the mother is the central figure in the family. Here the satire is more delicately sketched and acquires a certain plasticity, as in Ruth Hart, the matriarch of the story entitled The Child Is the Meaning of This Life. On her seventy-fifth birthday her family plans a surprise party which she, with her harsh tyranny and equally stern modesty, had never expected. The children try to keep the old lady away from the scene of the surprise, with the result that the guest of honor immediately scents disaster, concludes that her favorite son has died, and almost has a stroke. Figures and scenes like these have the authenticity of life; if now and then one is reminded of Sholom Aleichem or S. J. Agnon (for example, where this same Ruth Hart on her sickbed expresses to her grandson Jasper, in phrases of lapidary simplicity, the melancholy of the passing of the generations), the similarity between these otherwise disparate writers is owing to the realism with which each studies the same type of Jew.

Relations with people are limited almost exclusively to the group, to the family, where they acquire a grotesque and swollen extravagance. When a relationship with someone outside the group is established, it is of the kind represented in this episode from Genesis: “. .. Eva Green was thrilled to have her for her neighbor and soon her intimate friend, because she was Gentile, because she was beautiful, because she had been on the stage. . . .” The order here plainly indicates the quality of this friendship, which at the first test collapses like a house of cards. Or in Shenandoah the dramatic decision of naming the child, around which the action is built, is taken not by the family and the rabbi who is present, but bv the father’s Gentile lawyer—an American deus ex machina whose verdict, issuing from a telephone, proves sufficiently catastrophic for the hero of the play.

This first generation is dominated by uncertainty, a fitful overestimation of the surrounding world that readily changes into an equally fitful suspiciousness and disquietude. Only one way exists by which these men can make contact with the reality of the new country they inhabit: their sexuality. It is as if the North American continent, the terra incognita Americana, wished to reveal itself to them in the hurried adventures of their desire, a desire of which they are only half aware and yet of which they are proud as the sign of their vitality.

The land, however, remains concealed from them; though they use its earth to speculate with, or to erect the structures of their businesses on, it outlasts the ventures of prosperity. These men employ the facilities of America only as an avenue down which to pursue their own feelings of uneasiness. But their goal has no geographical location; their uneasiness has its origin in time, in that first moment when they, the newcomers, were frightened to death by America’s bigness. And so, for all their patriotism, they never come to know their new home; when they are broken and defeated they turn back into the bosom of the group. . . .

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It is toward these familial origins that Delmore Schwartz’s recherche du temps perdu is directed. His work is for the most part turned toward the past, toward his own past. “Only the past is immortal.” In the children of the second generation, the real heroes of his poems and stories, the process of adjustment is completed. America works with all its real and symbolical influences on these young creatures: America is the Stars and Stripes and Macy’s Santa Claus; the “silence and freedom of New York”; the tempo and vitality of the street lying just outside the close and guarded rooms of the parental home. It is the Katzenjammer Kids and the funnies in general (which in his poetry are transformed into a serious symbol¹); the deep respect entertained for every form of fun (that trivialization of the Constitutional pursuit of happiness); fashion,² marbles, and picture cards—“. . . small cards with the faces and names of baseball players and Hollywood stars, successively put down, one after another, until one player or the other matched the top card’s first initial and took the sum which had arisen, waiting for identity to fall like chance, breathlessly waiting, moved by the postponement which made the sum grow larger and larger, drunk with contingency and private property, the deepest motives that surrounded the playing boys and among the deepest motives in the United States of America!” (Genesis.) Thus the new soul spins the reality and mythos of America around itself.

Between the children of this second generation and the land of their future—“America! America!” is the half-ironic, half-enthusiastic, title of one of his short stories—there intervene the parents, in accordance with the laws of nature, society, and psychoanalysis. It is very characteristic of Delmore Schwartz, and very Jewish, that this opposition between the two, this holding back (re-ligio) of the young by the old, should be represented in the naming of the child. The taboo placed on God’s name by the Decalogue gave to names in general an occult significance in the unconscious of Jews. One must add to this the trauma suffered by the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe when anti-Semitic officials, dissembling their aggression, bestowed so-called “civil” Jewish names upon them, names which, especially among the lower classes, functioned almost like the yellow patch. But with Delmore Schwartz it is the parents themselves who, in naming their own children, wound them for life.

Schwartz’s one-act play Shenandoah has to do with the naming—and circumcision—of the infant son of a family named Fish. The parents, grasping after the most outlandish things in their eager pursuit of a false assimilation, are hardly aware that with their ultra-American name they are inflicting a second and deeper wound upon the newborn infant It is in vain that a more cautious relative warns the family against it:

Nathan Harms: Shenandoah! How in a hundred years did you think of such a foolish name?

Walter Fish: I fail to see anything foolish about Shenandoah.

Nathan Harris: It is foolish in every way. It does not sound right with Fish. The association of ideas is appalling. The boy will be handicapped as if he had a clubfoot. When he grows up, he will dislike his name and blame you for giving it to him. . . .

There is little doubt that his name is a sore—and at the same time a creative—point with Delmore Schwartz. He insists so often and with so much emphasis that his heroes are not to be understood in any autobiographical way, that we have every right and excuse to suppose that they are self-portraits in the end, and a species of self-mockery.

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The name, however, fulfills a second function: it prevents Shenandoah from achieving that full assimilation which would make him an imitation of his father and which would exactly reproduce in him the faults of the older generation. The “genteel” name Shenandoah, in stigmatizing the boy, forces him to become what his creator is: a solitary, an outsider, an exile from society, a poet. (The clubfoot spoken of by Nathan Harris calls to mind the creative infirmity of Byron.)

The grown man Shenandoah Fish, present as a shadow of the future at his own circumcision, comments on it and gives explicit voice to the ambivalence, the crippling and at the same time creative power, of his resounding and ridiculous name:

Shenandoah (turning to Nathan Harris): How moved I am! how much he understands! He is both right and wrong. He sees the danger, but does not see the strange effect to come. . . .

Thus Schwartz extends the psychological understanding he has of his characters to embrace himself and his own creative act. While he creates, he analyzes the act of creation, the thing created, and the creator. This excessive consciousness limits his creative power; at the same time, however, it is one of the sources of his irony.

Almost all of his principal characters suffer because of their names. Thus the hero of the story The World Is a Wedding, the unsuccessful playwright Bell, has Rudyard for a first name; and Green, the hero of Genesis, labors under the name Hershey. The grotesque Americanism and corrupted Judaism of the older generation, as it collides in these names with the aspirations and opportunities of the young, gives off an ugly sound that will accompany the latter through their whole lives. And yet they accept their absurd stigma; none of them even thinks of changing his name. It is the last bit of tradition binding them to their parents, and Delmore Schwartz himself is, in an odd and devious way, a traditionalist.

His characters therefore halt midway between their origins and their future. This irresolution is delineated most sharply by his portrayal of Rudyard Bell’s circle in The World Is a Wedding. The young men sit around their table—apparently still in Brooklyn—do-nothings and idlers most of them. They use up their lives in commenting on life. They are not persons but grotesque abbreviations of living people in whom the sparks of vitality are extinguished. Around them is loneliness, in them only an incapacity to communicate. They do not see each other, do not know each other; none hears his fellow, and the incessant chatter is only a threadbare interweaving of insipid monologues. Around this circle is a rarefied atmosphere of egoistical isolation and lifeless abstraction in which it is hard to breathe. Here the individual has as little identity as the community has authenticity; the values of life itself, the American values of success and failure taught them by their parents, are lost. Love for them is a social game as, for their fathers, desire was a form of flight.

Rudyard Bell and his friends are decadents, and took only a generation to become so. (It took the Jewish middle class of Europe far more time to reach their coffeehouse stage.) But though an anti-vital self-irony is the mood of this circle, they keep trying to buttress the meaninglessness of their lives with a meaning, and thus find a justification for it. Jacob says, at the end of the story: “No, I don’t mean to say that this life is just a party, any kind of party. . . . It is a wedding, the most important kind of party, full of joy, fear, hope and ignorance. And at this party there are enough places and parts for everyone, and if no one can play every part, yet everyone can come to the party, everyone can come to the wedding feast, and anyone who does not know that he is at a wedding feast just does not see what is in front of him. He might as well be dead if he does not know that the world is a wedding.”

What Jacob, who is “recognized by all as the conscience or judge of the circle,” expresses here is nothing else than Hasidism’s pious veneration of the joy of life, secularized, rationalized, intellectualized, but still radiant with its old warmth and gaiety. It is Delmore Schwartz’s East European inheritance, though he, the man of consciousness, is apparently unaware of this, and perhaps for this very reason is able to formulate it so cogently and unironically. But this is only the thesis of his dialectic. The antithesis is immediately provided by Laura, Rudyard’s sister and the only woman in the circle: “You can’t fool me, the world is a funeral. We are all going to the grave, no matter what you say. Let me give all of you one good piece of advice: Let your conscience he your bride.”

Conscience, however, is here only another name for consciousness, which, as is made clear to us on every page, is the antithesis and negation of life. This conscience, this consciousness, is the axis round which Schwartz’s second, higher world turns. Thus in the concluding dialogue of The World Is a Wedding, the conflict between life and intellect, between unreflecting living-together and the conscientious recording and interpreting of every simple impulse, is brought together as in a nutshell. And judging from his writings, there is little doubt that Schwartz would like to feel and think as Jacob does, but actually feels and thinks like Laura. For him the natural life has hardened and frozen into a shadow play because consciousness—Laura’s conscience—has stripped its every motion and feeling of all spontaneity and turned it into a caricature. Conscience is his bride, but it is a bad conscience, and to protect himself from it he must invoke his education. Shenandoah, for instance, contains a whole catalogue of great names, from James Joyce to Thomas Mann, which he erects around himself like plaster patron saints.

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Although more than two-thirds of Delmore Schwartz’s work is given over to the portrayal of childhood (Genesis ends when Hershey Green reaches the fourth grade), the years of his higher education are shrouded in complete darkness. College figures only once, in the short story “A Bitter Farce,” with the hero Fish a faculty member and involved in racial questions. Of the world of life and childhood in which he had his origin Schwartz tells us everything, but never a word about the time and place of his education. For the spirit is autonomous and without beginning or end—spiritus flat ubi vult.

Books opened themselves to this young man from Brooklyn like the gates of Hell to Dante: it was the inferno of consciousness, the inferno of modern man into which he entered, and he had no Virgil to guide him. In spite of his schooling, he is an autodidact; this is perhaps to be seen in his excess of anecdote and paradox, in a tendency to be clever and to shine, or in a fondness for punning that he shares with Heine and Börne, those second-generation Jews of Germany; except that Schwartz is aware of these faults and suffers under them:

My mind intends no pun, but falls on one:
Jews are no jewels, as Angles are no angels.

His passion to make the universal treasures of the intelligence his own is just as great as his passion to see to the bottom of his childhood; it is the passion of a young Jew who has shaken off the paralysis of the Orthodox tradition and who now cannot gaze enough upon the new and astonishing vistas disclosed to him. And there is also in it a little bit of the pride of a very young boy who likes to see the marbles he has just won glitter in the sun.

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The great Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal once said: “Plagiarism is a question of good taste.” In this sense Schwartz is more often than not a master of good taste. Quotations are scattered wholesale through his verse. He can spin a confessional poem out of a line lifted bodily from a Shakespearean sonnet, and the result is neither parody nor pastiche; on the contrary, in its new context the line from Shakespeare is suddenly seen in an ironic and ambiguous light. His long poem Coriolanus and His Mother: The Dream of One Performance, which Conrad Aiken calls “altogether the finest and profoundest long poem which has come into the English language for a long rime,” is a unique piece of literary patchwork. Against the background of the Plutarchian life and the Shakespearean tale which Schwartz (a new Charles Lamb, but exclusively for grownups) retells, he sets out the teachings and opinions of his masters. Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Plutarch, Aristotle, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Sigmund Freud are present at the performance, and accompany it with comments embodying the quintessence of their wisdom. It is as if Schwartz mistrusted his own consciousness and were trying in jest to find shelter behind the teachers who had shaped it His own contribution is limited to five prose speeches called “Between the Acts,” a mixture of nonsensical jokes and intellectual masquerades, executed either in the style of a Shakespearean fool or with the urbane melancholy of one of Picasso’s pink harlequins. But even these interludes are weighted down with allusions and anecdotes, quotations, references, and cross references, so that the whole poem seems to be a literary game that the poem is playing with itself.

And yet Schwartz is able to give this virtuoso display of super-rationalism a turn into the personal, the mysterious, and the poetic. Sitting next to the poet in the orchestra, next to Freud, Marx, and the other sages and titans, is a stranger (apparently the “Seventh Wise Man”), nameless, silent, and masked in white; his unspeaking presence greatly disquiets the poet, who begs the sages to tell him who he is. It is only at the end of the performance, when the imaginary spectators are on the point of dissolving into nothingness, that an answer—which is no answer at all—is vouchsafed him:

He is the one who saw what you did not!
He is the one who heard what you did not. . .
He is the one you do not know, my dear.

And thus the poem ends with a question, with a sudden gaping onto the void, its unfinished character resembling a Kafka novel, or the open chord that concludes Gustav Mahler’s Lied von der Erde. These unresolved endings mean that beyond all that is rational and sensible a transcendental and mysterious something exists which is not to be grasped in its irrationality. The one who has the last word on Coriolanus, on the COMMENTARY and the commentators, on the poet and his conflict, indeed, on the poem itself, is the mysterious stranger who says nothing, the one whom Schwartz does not know. In this radical resignation there is concealed a sense of the awe felt by consciousness before life and its mysteries.

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It is now possible to understand the contempt that the poet feels for his own ego. “A dog named Ego,” he says in one place; another time he compares his body with “the heavy bear who goes with me . . . Clumsy and lumbering here and there . . . In love with candy, anger, and sleep, crazy factotum, dishevelling all. . . .” Or he has his father tell the age-old story of the man, the boy, and the horse. It is impossible to satisfy them all; first the man and then the boy rides the beast; then it is the beast who is carried by the man and boy; until finally the man shoots the boy, the beast, and himself. And again, the name of the pony—who in other versions is a mule or donkeyis Ego. Schwartz despises his ego, that seat and vehicle of the consciousness, because his consciousness, in spite of all it has been taught in school, in the end has nothing more to say than this, that the “ineffable is ineffable, which we knew all along” (Kafka). The ego of the poet, once the proud subject of lyrical effusions, and as often as not their object as well, has declined sadly from its former high estate; it no longer comprehends the world, it hardly comprehends itself, and, if it is honest, all that is left for it to affirm is only this incomprehensibility. And so it is doubly affecting when this impoverished, haunted, and self-preoccupied ego now and then essays to reach beyond itself to love. “What an unheard-of thing it is, in fine, To love another and equally be loved.” It is ancient wisdom: a surer salvation is to be found in embracing another than in analyzing the self-conscious ego.

Our poet, however, is not one of those born to proclaim love’s power to loose and bind. His task is the resolution of his own conflict, the reconciliation of experience and consciousness, towards which he employs a variety of means. Past and present are arbitrarily run together, as in Shenandoah, where the grown man is present at and comments on the re-enactment of his own infancy. In the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the best one of his that I have read, a small boy experiences, as if in the movies and with the help of something like H. G. Wells’s time machine, the hours in which his father courted his mother. For a moment it seems as if the witness of this scene would never be born. And he shrieks out in panic: “What are they doing? Don’t they know what they are doing? Why doesn’t my mother go after my father and beg him not to be angry? If she does not do that, what will she do? Doesn’t my father know what he is doing? But the usher has seized my arm, and is dragging me away, and as he does so, he says: ‘What are you doing?’” But this premature—or should we say, tardy?—anxiety of the child for parents who have not yet begotten him is at bottom hypocritical. For when the parents seem to be reconciled, the boy calls out with prophetic irony: “Don’t do it! It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous. . . .”

Behind these kinds of time—the unreal present and the imaginary past—that in mirroring each other become completely illusory, stands the sphere of consciousness, or of conscience (the boy), which collides with the sphere of life (the parents). And from the collision of the two spheres fly the splinters of a tragical joke.

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A knowledge of the fruitlessness of all human relations constitutes the consciousness of Delmore Schwartz. His irony, born out of the meeting of the banal with the spiritual, is carried to its farthest extreme in Genesis, where it is the chorus of the dead who are appointed to be the commentators on events. Genesis is a parody of the Bible, not only in its title and in the arrangement of its prose sections (p’sukim), but in its intention as well; and as such it is blasphemous. The antecedents and childhood of Hershey are treated as Scripture, as if this obscure American were at least one of the minor prophets; and the chorus’s exegesis of the action mediates between the reader and the “authentic” text like a Jewish COMMENTARY. This Genesis has more in common with Rashi than with Euripides.

The time of the action is around 1930. The place, New York. Hershey Green, a young man about the same age as the man Shenandoah, lies sleepless on his bed and tells the spirits hovering round him

The endless story which—many a year!—
Over and over and over again! wakened his
   mind—

It is a voyage to the underworld that he is making, a journey through the Inferno, or a psychoanalysis in which the chorus of the dead assumes the role of the all-explaining and generalizing physician who draws the stuff of life from the unconscious. The opposition between the action itself, in prose, and the free verse of the chorus, produces sparks of intellectual wit, bon mots, and aperçus about the modern life of America. The teaching and the message of the poem, however, is a lengthy chain of variations in a minor key on the general theme elsewhere stated as “Love is not American.” The chasm between thought and experience is not bridged; this only death can do, which reconciles the two worlds in destroying them:

Oh what a metaphysical victory
The first morning and night of death must
   be.

Thus this blasphemous Genesis seeks death as its “unresolved ending.”

How could this be otherwise? The poet’s consciousness brings a gruesomely sharpened sensibility to the delineation of a life that has degenerated and lost its true impulse after having been dragged from Europe into the big cities of America. No wonder that this life, when subjected to such a scrutiny as Schwartz gives it, dissolves, and is replaced by the world of his conscience and consciousness, of artificial symbols and spiritualized images. Yet it remains surrounded by another cosmos, by the stale backstairs world both of the house and of the soul, of bawling tyrannical women, runaway husbands, wornout words, and worn-out feelings. Between these two worlds moves the man and poet Delmore Schwartz, his words hard as the pavement on which he walks; it is his own ego, his own identity, that he is looking for, a moralist and a transcendentalist, a realist and a prisoner of reality, an iconoclast out of love for the pure image, sacrilegious out of a longing for the holy: Lucifer in Brooklyn.

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Schwartz’s work has only the simplest kind of form; his figures are linear and sharply drawn, resembling in their grotesque quality the cartoons of Saul Steinberg; his wit is the psychological wit of the Jewish anecdote that Sigmund Freud loved so much and so frequently quoted. Schwartz is more obscure than most of the poets of the avantgarde because he is entirely given up to the portrayal of his own conflicts. Yet the characteristic of his style is candor.

With this candor he tries to get to the bottom of himself. In mercilessly identifying the sources on which he draws, and in choosing as his central theme the chasm between poetry and life and between man and man, he battles for his identity as a poet. (Occasionally, when his verse gets very good, it is as if his theme had chosen him and not he it, in the very same way that Rilke became the “speaking mouth” of his visions.) In celebrating the American continent, the astonishment of the child is still alive in him; in debunking America, in satirically stripping the mask of reality from its surface, and only then going on to praise its unveiled beauty and grandeur, he struggles for his identity as an American. And in taking his origins as the point of departure for his attempt to make himself part of the world, part of the human environment and of the universe of the intellect, he battles for his identity as a Jew. He acknowledges his own weaknesses but at the same time claims for himself the powers by which he hopes to cure himself of them.

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¹ In Genesis the spirits say: “. . . we come like comic strips, speaking balloons. . . .”

² “. . . lucidity/Dresses me like a brand-new Palm Beach suit . . .” (Genesis).