marriage

"Marriage is a panic room, a safety lock, a stable for one, a conspiracy of two, a compromise and compulsion, a moonshot, a white flag, red tape, no accident, a desert island, a private language, 'a human Society' (John Milton), 'a stupid endless mistake' (Delmore Schwartz), 'like you say everything everything in stereo stereo' (Anne Waldman), a bird in the hand, a cut corner, a plea, a bargain, a violet hour, a path of least resistance, a tonic, a toxin, 'close to the target, very near' (J. H. Prynne)."

~~ from "When Does a Divorce Begin?" by Anahid Nersessian

several solitaries of the highest genius

"'That's just it. There never was such a literary world,' I said. 'In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius—a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia's situation now resembles ours—poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.'"

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

life, Charlie, not literature

"Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a straight jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from the hot grimy flaking dressing room a the Belasco. And he had yelled, 'This is life, Charlie, not literature!' . . . [W]hen Humboldt cried, 'Life!' . . . [h]e only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

The Partisan Crowd

Poet Ben Mazer posted a curious sales item in his Delmore Schwartz social-media group. It's a complete run of The Partisan Review from December 1937 to December 1959, and many of the issues are in excellent condition. "The Partisan crowd" also received good mention in Joseph Epstein's recent writing in Commentary Magazine. The essay concerns his early days among the New York Intellectuals when, as a subscriber, he'd avidly read Commentary, The Partisan Review, and Encounter.

not customarily issued from high places

"Judaism had always been for Delmore a significant emblem of his identity, and one he had made symbolic use of in his work, conjuring the artist and the Jew, both of whom occupied a unique, anomalous place in society. But by the 1950's the great excitement of the two previous decades, when the Jews of Delmore's generation had first acquired intellectual prominence, was fading before the complacencies of the Eisenhower era. The Trotskyites of the thirties were now professors, and 'notes from underground are not customarily issued from high places,' as one commentator on that period shrewdly put it."

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

many paradoxes

"It was one of the many paradoxes of Delmore's career that the beginning of his worst depression--from which he never entirely recovered--and the subsequent decline of his work coincided with the moment when. . . his importance as an American man of letters became firmly established. By 1947, he was the most widely anthologized poet of his generation, as well as its 'ablest critic of modern poetry,' wrote John Berryman some years later."

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

a five-year appointment as a faculty instructor. . .

"Haunted by the war--which he continued to denounce bitterly in his letters--by teaching, and by what he called an 'inevitable mid-winter staleness,' Delmore found himself amid two crises in the spring of 1943. On March 2, he learned that a committee had been formed to decide on whether to offer him a five-year appointment as a faculty instructor, and they proposed to visit one of his classes. Delmore, 'in a frozen slump' at the time, objected strenuously to what he thought of as an unprecendented procedure, and decided to refuse their request--'on principle,' he told Berryman. At once defiant and unnerved, he worked out an elaborate argument by which he hoped to win Morrison's support before presenting his position to the committee: 'With enough benzedrine and coffee, in half an hour I can win them over.'"

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

slovenly and grand

"Like Von Humboldt Fleisher of Saul Bellow's fictional portrait, Delmore in 1939 was 'slovenly and grand,' his ample hair swept back, 'his face with widely separated eyes white and tense.' Cosmopolitan, radical, at home with Rilke, Trotsky, Pound, he was the very embodiment of the New York intelligentsia. Declaiming in what [Alfred] Kazin described as 'gulps of argument,' Delmore transformed Greenwich Village in his talk from a province into cultural capital, importing ideas from the whole European tradition and adapting them to the sprawl and chaos of contemporary America."

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

better off in Buchenwald

"Delmore's mother reacted to the announcement with even less enthusiasm; she threatened to kill herself. How could her son abandon her in this cruel way? she wailed, working on his guilt. (A few years later, she would greet Kenneth's marriage with the declaration: 'He would have been better off in Buchenwald than married to that woman.')"

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

a good night's rest

"'History is a nightmare during which I am trying to get a good night's rest,' he once noted in his journal, reversing the famous remark of Joyce's Dedalus. Delmore used to say that he was twice as old as everyone else because he never slept[.]"

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

more from the Atlas

I had been twenty-four when I embarked on Delmore; I was forty when I began Bellow. The young biographer had been thrilled to interview the distinguished Partisan Review intellectuals Irving Howe and Clement Greenberg. But on my second tour. . . I felt a little sheepish. Not him again, they must have thought. The slight, eager youth with his oblong reporter's notebook had metamorphosed into a weary middle-aged writer. Not them again.

James Atlas On Biography

I'm a hundred pages into James Atlas's The Shadow in the Garden, his memoir about his life writing biography, and I'm greatly enjoying it. Although his principle subjects, Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, figure prominently, there is so much more on various writers, biographers, and writer-biographers. Some of the footnotes are extremely detailed or hilarious as well. Thomas Carlyle, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Kazin, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Stafford are only a handful of  writers who are included in the narrative. The recurring theme of writers dying isolated in cramped apartments would make Cyrus Duffleman proud.