Delmore Schwartz

A Critical Reassessment

A. Runchman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137394378
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137394385
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Taking as its starting point Delmore Schwartz's self-appointment as both a 'poet of the Hudson River' and 'laureate of the Atlantic,' this book comprehensively reassesses the poetic achievement of a critically neglected writer. Runchman reads Schwartz's poetry in relation to its national and international perspectives.

CHAPTER 1

“The Greatest Thing in North America”: “International Consciousness” or “The Isolation of Modern Poetry?”

New Europe

In the summer of 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, Schwartz wrote to his publisher, James Laughlin, embracing Laughlin’s proposal that they set up a magazine together. It should be titled New Europe, Schwartz suggested, and it should be based upon the hypothesis “that Europe is through, but that something has to be done to carry on the greatness of European culture.” Its articles would carry out a “large-scale attack on popular culture” and would attempt to “overcome the gulf between popular culture and advance guard culture” by taking seriously “Hollywood, Broadway, popular novels, comic strips, NY Times editorials and poems, the prose of Time, and the photos of Life.” The whole project would be founded upon the assumption that “Europe is the greatest thing in America . . . but the next greatest thing in America is Hollywood; and between these two large-scale cultural factors, the future of culture lies” (DS & JL Letters, 214–215). Ultimately, Schwartz implies, establishing the new magazine would constitute a stage in enabling America to become the sanctuary of Western civilization.

New Europe never came to anything. Schwartz’s manifesto is worth taking seriously, however, because it epitomizes his lifelong preoccupation with the ways in which American culture might be able to extend and develop European culture while retaining a distinct character of its own. In proposing such a course, Schwartz was restating views already well- established among the Partisan Review circle.¹ As early as 1937, shortly before their official break from the Communist Party and their founding of the revived Partisan Review, William Phillips and Philip Rahv had called for “the Europeanization of American literature.”² The efforts of the American Communist Party to “create a literature in one country” were futile, they argued, “because inevitably a contradiction arises between the international consciousness of intellectual life and the provincial smugness of the literature itself” (Cooney, 92). As Terry Cooney has explained, “the goal was not to imitate Europe and thus to remain its province” but “to bring a new sophistication to American literature, to broaden the national culture by making it more international and more cosmopolitan without discarding its particular qualities” (Cooney, 93). The model for Rahv and Phillips was Thomas Mann whose work, though “deeply rooted in the German soil” also generalized “the intellectual experience of Europe” (Cooney, 93). The American writer, they hoped, “rising to a high level of consciousness,” would similarly “carry the particulars of American life into the main stream of world culture” (Cooney, 93).

Implicit in Rahv and Phillips’s essay on “Literature in a Political Decade” is a belief that to be intellectual is, by definition, to be internationally minded. Calls for internationalism are common among thinkers on the Left in the 1930s, Sidney Hook, for example, proposing in 1933 that “the time has come to build a new communist party and a new communist international”: again, the implication is that progress cannot be confined to a single nation, although there is equally no call to give up national characteristics.³ Cooney explains that “cosmopolitanism as interpreted in Partisan Review meant that secularism, urbanism, intellectuality, and international-mindedness would generally be taken to represent positive cultural and political values, whereas rural, religious, nationalistic, and anti-theoretical attitudes would commonly be regarded as evidence of backwardness or bad faith” (Cooney, 150). The cause was as cultural as it was political, perhaps even more so; and its most iconic figure was Leon Trotsky who, despite privately criticizing the journal’s overrespectability, contributed an article on “Art and Politics” and an open letter to André Breton to Partisan Review in the late 1930s. As a revolutionary in exile—“Intellectual, International, Jewish, Secular, Literary, Classicist, Modernist”—Trotsky was, in Christopher Hitchens’s account, “the ideal-type, of the cosmopolitan, the modernist, the essayist and the man of action yearned for by the diaspora of Partisan Review.” Even regardless of his Jewishness and his Marxism, Trotsky remains “the [twentieth] century’s most arresting instance of the aesthete and the intellectual in politics.”⁴

Trotsky had himself contended, in Literature and Revolution, that “the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch” (Trotsky, 9). He also argued, in his letter to Breton, that, “In our epoch of convulsive reaction, of cultural decline and return to savagery, truly independent creation cannot but be revolutionary by its very nature, for it cannot but seek an outlet from intolerable social suffocation.”⁵ On these terms, the emergence of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan literature would be the justification of the radical politics championed by Partisan Review’s editors. They knew, however, that literature written to conform to a prescribed ideology, even a radical one, must inevitably lack vitality. They saw the anti-intellectual, anti-international proletarian literature sponsored by the American Communist Party and published in journals such as New Masses as evidence of this, its purposes more political than they were literary. The extent to which a writer’s politics and social attitudes may or may not be extricable from his or her writing is a problem recurrently suggested in the pages of Partisan Review.⁶ It is one, however, that the magazine’s editors, on its relaunch, insisted would have no bearing upon their editorial principles. “Conformity to a given social ideology or to a prescribed attitude or technique, will not be asked of our writers,” they insisted. “On the contrary, our pages will be open to any tendency which is relevant to literature in our time.”⁷ As will be seen, such a policy of openness itself amounts to an ideological stance, entailing complications of its own. But it also made Partisan Review, in Irving Howe’s words, “the first journal in which it was not merely respectable but a matter of pride to print one of Eliot’s Four Quartets side by side with Marxist criticism.”⁸ It established for the journal a crucial role in the “process of internationalizing American culture (also, by the way, Americanizing international culture),” the “international” suggesting not just a willingness to publish writers of all nationalities, but also a catholicity of taste, a preparedness to recognize the artistic or literary merit of writers regardless of their extraliterary views.⁹

For Schwartz, as he wrote to Dwight MacDonald following Trotsky’s assassination, the Soviet revolutionary had “created in his writing alone a kind of international consciousness, an instrument like the electric light”¹⁰—a modern, far-reaching consciousness that became indispensable as soon as it had been created. The same idea finds different expression in a short piece Schwartz quickly abandoned entitled “Funeral Oration.” “The biggest thing in America is Europe,” Schwartz writes, “and the biggest thing in Europe is Russia and the biggest thing in Russia was this small bearded gesticulating angry man in Mexico.”¹¹ If this is ultimately an America-centric way of putting it—a disingenuous means of claiming Trotsky for the United States and suggesting that Russia and Europe only exist for US sustenance—it nonetheless delineates how Schwartz perceived the transmission of that electric light, projected from individual to nation to continent and beyond.

“International consciousness” is a condition toward which Schwartz consistently aspired in his own writing. He picks up the idea again in an October 1940 letter to his friend, Robert Hivnor, this time using it in relation to his writing of Genesis and referring not just to an ideological position but also to a formal consideration. “My main problem right along,” he explains,

has been to get the kind of structure which would make reasonable and articulate and symmetrical the kind of international consciousness which keeps growing bigger all the time in the world—in such strange plants as the radio and the newspaper—and which is the only point of view from which I can see my subject.¹²

What exactly is this “kind of international consciousness?” In its simplest sense, it amounts to an awareness of one’s position in the world, in relation to others, in relation to both temporally and physically distant events, and in relation to surroundings both immediate and remote. Schwartz repeatedly stresses that it is impossible for anyone—not just poets—to overlook the internationality of modern experience, but this is not the same as being internationally “conscious,” which for Schwartz also involves a hard-earned ability to find universal principles in particular events. In his essay, “Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times,” Jim Keller recognizes Schwartz ‘s aspiration toward “international consciousness” but describes it in slightly different terms when he argues that Schwartz, in Genesis in particular, “was guided by an epic sensibility to rewrite history within a bold new Eliotic structure, one that he increasingly despaired of ever finding.” It is a sensibility that makes him strive to transform personal history “into epochal history”—or to transform the local into the international, the particular into the universal.¹³

The language Schwartz uses to describe “international consciousness” suggests, however, that transformation was less his intent than assimilation. Uncomfortable about admitting the tensions and difficulties that result when two or more national cultures intersect, his solution was to try to incorporate European culture—even though it may retain its specifically European qualities—into American culture. “Europe is the greatest thing in North America”: playing upon both the concrete and the abstract senses of “greatest,” the statement conflates a sense of physical or geographical conditions (most appositely, the fact that a majority of North America’s population can claim some kind of European ancestry) with an evaluation of cultural importance that sees Europe as the source of all that is great in America but also as now subsidiary to America. Even the colloquial idiom—“the greatest thing”—usurps notions of European refinement, and often enough “Europe” seems to be simply synonymous for Schwartz with the Jewish cosmopolitan culture of his native New York City. All the same, the will to preserve a European heritage is greater than the will to change it, even if the means of preservation within another culture turns it, of necessity, into something new.

Attempting to “overcome the gulf between popular culture and advance guard culture” (DS & JL Letters, 214) and attempting to recast personal history within an international framework, are different facets of the same project of assimilation. To counter the threat posed by popular culture, the avant-garde can simply absorb it, as Joyce had demonstrated in Ulysses, as Eliot had shown in The Waste Land by incorporating jazz motifs and the song about Mrs. Porter and her daughter, and as Schwartz himself does in his frequent exploitation of cinematic techniques. And yet, paradoxically, in each of these cases, assimilation, even when successful, heightens the distinctions between the two entities to be combined. The contrast between popular song and “pure” poetry is intensified when one is used in the service of the other; self-consciousness is heightened when the individual recognizes his or her relation to a world that diminishes individual agency; and Europe and America come to seem all the more separate when one tries to merge them. It is for this reason that Schwartz’s allusions to European works, and his depictions of “Old World” Jewish customs, often end up accentuating his modern American identity. The very premise of “international consciousness” would seem to unsettle the idea of a purely American poetry, and yet Schwartz’s own engagements with European thought and writing also provided a standard against and alongside which he could establish his national consciousness.

Schwartz’s commitment to internationality and his “infinite interest” in the American Dream, though interdependent, often jostle against each other uneasily. Europe and America, whatever Schwartz’s claims about European culture infiltrating American culture, figure as polarities in his writing. Europe represents, on one hand, the apex of literary and artistic civilization, and on the other the backward and parochial traditions that the first generation of Jewish immigrants failed to leave behind. America, in contrast, represents modernity and cosmopolitanism, but also (with a few crucial exceptions) a cultural morass. This view is only heightened by Schwartz’s refusal to look, except occasionally, much beyond New York City. His “international consciousness” might more accurately be regarded as a transatlantic consciousness, and his national consciousness an East Coast consciousness (each accentuated by his “Atlantic” self-identification). The various contradictions arising between his ideology and his practice, and even within the ideology itself, account for Schwartz’s difficulties in finding “the right structure” within which to express his “international consciousness.” How could an internationally conscious poet, for example, allow a single point of view—albeit one that purports to be all-encompassing—block out other points of view that might have their own validity? Most pressingly, how might being “internationally conscious” be contingent upon the experience of the possibly biased or prejudiced individual whose particular perceptions must inevitably color the nature of his or her consciousness? Such problems—many of them inherited from the modernist mentors he so ambivalently admired—animate Schwartz’s work as much as they hinder it. His oeuvre can be read as an ongoing attempt to work them through.

“International Heroes”: Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and Joyce

The question of how a poet might express universal themes while also addressing actual and localized experiences dominates Schwartz’s critical essays throughout his career. In an early piece, written soon after Yeats’s death, Schwartz maintains that Yeats became a European (as opposed to merely Anglo-Irish) poet despite himself. Yeats’s young poetry, for Schwartz, is all subjectivity and aestheticism. As he became more involved in political and social affairs, Yeats was increasingly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   “The Greatest Thing in North America”: “International Consciousness” or “The Isolation of Modern Poetry?”
• 2   In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: “The Egocentric Predicament”
• 3   “The Land of the Old World Failure and the New World Success”: Genesis and “America! America!”
• 4   “An Innocent Bystander”: The City, Vaudeville for a Princess, and Schwartz’s Postwar Cultural Criticism
• 5   Summer Knowledge: “Infinite Belief in Infinite Hope”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index