Humboldt's Model

By Melvin Maddocks

DELMORE SCHWARTZ: THE LIFE OF

AN AMERICAN POET by James Atlas

Farrar, Straus & Giroux;

418 pages; $15

When Saul Bellow wrote his roman a clef, Humboldt's Gift, even knowledgeable readers had trouble recalling the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher. The difficulty would not have occurred if Bellow's chief character had been based on Robert Lowell or John Berry man or Theodore Roethke. Yet, for these celebrated poets, Delmore Schwartz was once the front runner of their generation.

No young poet since has so dazzled his peers. When Schwartz's first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, appeared in 1938, Critic Allen Tate called it "the first real innovation that we've had since Eliot and Pound." T.S. Eliot himself was "much impressed."

Nor was Schwartz's achievement limited to verse. The title work was a brilliant short story whose narrator witnessed the past courtship of his mother and father, interrupting with cries of "Don't do it! It's not too late ..." No less a judge than Vladimir Nabokov placed this tale --written when Schwartz was only 21 --among his "half a dozen favorites in modern literature."

Delmore became a member of the Harvard faculty. He joined the prestigious Partisan Review crowd. He began a long poem, Genesis, which he believed would secure his place as a poet and cultural hero. John Berryman recalled his colleague just "waiting for fame to descend."

That descent never came. What happened to the promise, the flamboyant charm? With care and intelligence, James Atlas chronicles a decline as moving as it is horrifying. By the time Schwartz reached 30 his center could no longer hold. He had started to drink heavily. His marriage broke up. One day in 1947, suddenly and finally, he left Harvard, convinced of his double exile from the American Dream: as a poet and as a Jew.

As his spiral curved down, Schwartz ran through more and more women, more and more colleges. He campus-hopped to Princeton, Kenyon, the universities of Chicago, California, Syracuse. His ambition to be the Great American Poet deteriorated into a panicky need for money. Inspiration was replaced by alcohol and amphetamines. The body went to flab, the handsome face to coarseness. Fellow Poet Hayden Carruth remembered Schwartz slouching toward 40: "He looked and spoke like a defeated shipping-house clerk."

Yet Delmore never stopped trying. Through the chaos of his life, trailing from one rented room to the next, he made desperate resolutions: "To get up at eight o'clock--and to take vitamins, join a gym, buy new clothes, answer mail." Occasionally there was rebirth, as with his poem about the disciples, "Starlight like Intuition Pierced the Twelve"--Schwartz always could write titles. But below the labels the quality was diminishing.

Schwartz lived to be only 52, yet the end was agonizingly slow. There was time for visits to New York City mental wards and pilgrimages to the scene of a second marriage--an abandoned New Jersey farm, where through overgrown fields he wandered, calling the name of a long-lost cat. The badly aged Wunderkind died of a heart attack in a Times Square-area hotel while struggling downstairs with his garbage. The measure of Atlas' biography is that he does not exploit the implications of that curtain scene. With admirable restraint he suggests that Schwartz was a lyric poet who insisted on being an epic poet: given that divergence, tragedy was the only possible outcome.

Genesis has been deservedly forgotten; one volume was more than enough. But Schwartz lives in lines that soar and sting: "I am my father's father,/ You are your children's guilt." The funny and unforgiving stories of The World Is a Wedding (1948) remain some of the best work in a genre that has shown the world what it felt like in the Depression to be young, Jewish, and lost, somewhere between the Old Country and the New Criticism.

As for the man himself, as this compassionate biography shows, Delmore Schwartz is the ruin on which others have built. "I think I've never met anyone who has somehow as much seeped into me," Lowell once said, delivering a tribute haunted enough even for Schwartz. -- Melvin Maddocks

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