by James Atlas
It was around this time*2 that I had lunch at Benihana with Tom Stewart, a college classmate who had just landed a job at the acronymic FSG—as Farrar, Straus & Giroux was known to those who managed to penetrate its dingy sanctum on the fourth floor of a nondescript office building facing Union Square. Tom had read and liked my essay, and as the chef on the other side of the counter flipped shrimp off the sizzling griddle, he suggested I consider writing a biography of Schwartz.
A page from Delmore’s journal Credit 3
Thus began a correspondence that dragged on for months. “There are crates and crates full of papers,”*3 Tom reported: Bob Giroux, the legendary editor of T. S. Eliot, had learned of their existence from Macdonald. The main obstacle, apart from my inexperience, was the unremitting dolor of Schwartz’s story, which “starts at the top and moves inexorably toward the bottom,” Tom noted, quoting Hobbes. “The problem of writing about a life that is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ is how to avoid a nasty and brutish book.” (“Short” probably wasn’t desirable either; biographies were supposed to be long.)
I wrote a proposal, and eventually Tom persuaded Roger Straus, the house’s famously parsimonious founder, to put up a three-thousand-dollar advance—a small but not unreasonable sum for someone two years out of college whose only published prose consisted of the essay on Delmore and a few book reviews.*4
If Roger didn’t exactly shell out the dough (as he might have put it in the tough-guy idiom he affected), he was an enthusiastic supporter of the project in other ways. He was a great prowler, and whenever I came into the office to see Tom, he would stop me in the corridor to offer some tip.
“What about Malamud?*5 Is he a black hole?” Had I thought of applying to Bread Loaf, the summer writers’ workshop in Vermont? He could get me a grant. And so it was.
The most important thing Roger did was send me to Dwight Macdonald. In the spring of 1974 I went to see him at The New Yorker, where he kept an office, though he hadn’t written a word for the magazine in years.
The thought of facing Macdonald intimidated me. Yale-educated, from a family of now-slightly-worn gentility, he had been a vivid figure in the literary life of the 1950s and ’60s, when he wrote the essays that would be collected in Against the American Grain. What stirred people up about Macdonald was his defiant certitude: he was always sure of the rightness of his position. Even if he often changed his mind, he didn’t regard consistency as a virtue. And he was utterly without pretension—a highbrow but not a snob. He made a distinction between “serious” literature and the productions of such “middlebrow” writers as John Steinbeck and Pearl S. Buck, but he did so in a comic spirit, spluttering like Elmer Fudd. One of his most famous essays, “By Cozzens Possessed,” eviscerated James Gould Cozzens, a once-popular novelist, long forgotten now, his descent into oblivion no doubt hastened by Macdonald’s opprobrious attack; in a particularly memorable sally, he likened the novelist’s sex scenes to “a Fortune magazine account of an industrial process” as described by “a tongue-tied Dr. Johnson.”
But Macdonald wasn’t chiefly a literary critic. He was what would now be called a public intellectual. Politics was his main preoccupation—no, his obsession. A Trotskyite in the 1930s (when it was the fashion to be a Stalinist) and an isolationist during World War II, he liked to think of himself as a “conservative anarchist”; he achieved his greatest prominence as a leader of the anti–Vietnam War movement, playing a major if somewhat clownish role in the 1967 March on the Pentagon. In Armies of the Night, that masterpiece of fanciful but dead-on reportage, Norman Mailer expressed admiration for his compatriot’s fanatical probity: “Macdonald was forever referring the act of writing to his sense of personal standards which demanded craft, care, devotion, lack of humbug, and simple a fortiori honesty of sentiment.”
The man who ushered me into his office wasn’t outwardly imposing—he would have laughed at the very idea. His white hair and goatee were streaked with yellow; his skin had a ruddy flush; his Caribbean-blue tropical shirt shimmered in that dusty cubbyhole.
Smoking a long cigarette in a holder, his shirt riding up over his big belly, he gave me a sly smile. “So you want to write about Delmore,” he said, slouching over his desk as if he were protecting an exam from a neighbor’s prying eyes. “But why did you come to me?”
His voice, a high-pitched stutter, was incredulous. He found the whole scene—the young man in his office, the idea of a biography of Delmore, the fact that he was Delmore’s literary executor—comical. Didn’t I see the joke?
“Well, no one else has done it,” I said, provoking another outburst of merriment. The stern critic was nowhere in evidence; he was vague, good-natured, uncomprehending—a shrewd peasant playing dumb.
It was out of the question, he assured me. Delmore’s papers were scattered all over the place, no one knew where; besides, Delmore’s brother had the last word, and he was nowhere to be found. And who was I, anyway? “What makes you think you could write his biography?”
Still, Macdonald conceded, waving his cigarette at me, maybe something could be worked out. He had promised the papers in his possession to Yale and was arranging for them to be transferred there. He’d let me know as soon as they arrived. My effusive thanks cracked him up again, and he gave me a pat as he walked me down the hall.
“By the way,” he said. “No one ever called him ‘Schwartz.’ If you’re going to do this book, you’d better start thinking of him as ‘Delmore.’ ”
—
My sharpened pencil and pad for taking notes were at the ready.*6 Like a detainee under questioning, I had stored all my other belongings in a locker. After an interval that seemed as long as the wait for a job interview (in a sense, I was interviewing myself: Was I the right person? Did I have the experience? Was I up to the task?), the librarian at last arrived bearing the papers I had ordered ten minutes—it felt like ten hours—before.
Since my last visit, they had been cataloged and put in some kind of order. Taut with anticipation, I opened a manila folder, and there, on the table before me, was a stack of typed pages, the brittle yellow sheets riddled with Braille-like holes where the period key had punched through the tissue-thin paper. Now and then a corner would flake off, crumbling like a moth’s wing.
I removed a page and set it down gently on the table, smoothing out the edges. No event in a biographer’s life has such electrifying intensity. It’s the moment of contact, when you travel in a startling instant from the present to the past, your subject suddenly alive before you on the page, redeemed from oblivion—real. Lucasta Miller, on her first glimpse of Charlotte Brontë’s journals in the Morgan Library, felt her eyes filling with tears: “This scrap of paper, covered in tiny writing, recorded the minute-by-minute secret fantasies of a woman who had been dead for nearly a century and a half. I was overwhelmed by an almost necromantic sense of the past coming to life, and could understand for the first time the emotional lure of relics.”
It was thrilling, yes, but there was a nagging question here—the first of many that would trouble me in the years to come. Should I—should anyone—have been looking at these journals in the first place? Did their content “belong” to me? I’d been given permission by the estate—that is, Dwight Macdonald—so there was no criminal malfeasance. Nor was it an ethical matter: I wasn’t here to uncover dark personal secrets (as far as I knew). Not that Delmore was aware of the drama about to unfold. But he was still implicated, even if posthumously. Otherwise why would he have kept his journals? For whom was he writing them? Were they simply for himself, to keep track of his moods? Or were they for posterity—for his biographer? Surely he believed there would be one. How else interpret this ambiguous journal entry of 1942: “Biographies written of you. It is different with everyone; with the great poet. NOT moral.”
After a lifetime of thinking about this declaration, I’m still puzzled by it. Did Delmore mean that biography wasn’t moral, or that it was only moral “with the great poet”? T
hat if you were a mediocre poet, a biography would be intrusive, but if you were a great one, all bets were off? Delmore was only twenty-nine when he wrote this entry—not old enough to be sure if he would be great. (Obviously, he thought he had a shot.) That was the thing about writing a biography: you knew more than your subject could ever know about his fate.
Delmore’s journals (yes, for me, he was now Delmore; I was pouring my own life into the resurrection of his, and taking Macdonald’s advice, I felt free to be on first-name terms with him) were written both for posterity and to keep himself company. They were gossip as internal monologue. Surrounded by scholars laboring away over Dryden variorums in the basement of the windowless, marble-walled library, I investigated John Berryman’s philandering and tensions in the marriage of Lionel and Diana Trilling; I wrote down in my notebook the philosopher Sidney Hook’s opinion of Mary McCarthy: “People do what they want anyway. She at least admits it.” It all belonged to what Bellow’s friend Isaac Rosenfeld called, in a comic euphemism, “social history.”
Despite his garrulous disposition, Delmore had lived mostly alone between his two marriages. Talking to himself, he was talking to me. “January 16: I almost wept into my Hungarian goulash at the Georgian in the cold blank winter evening.” I thought about this passage while refueling at a vending machine in the bowels of the Beinecke. Hunched over a microwaved turkey sandwich, a two-day-old copy of the Yale Daily News open before me on the Formica table, I found his loneliness consoling. He was good company: witty, sympathetic, observant. The simplest note—“July 1st, to Falmouth & Truro; cocktail ecstasy; moonlight summer country evening”—brought back Delmore’s once-living presence. And I was touched by his sorrowful ruminations. “Snubbed by waitress, consoled by sandwiches”—this entry somehow made my own mealy, plastic-wrapped sandwich more palatable. (How I would have loved the presence of a waitress, even at the price of being snubbed.) “I drank in the darkness, arose, looked at my picture, & drank more.” I drank in the darkness. Nice.*7
There was also a lot of tedious circumstantial detail: saw this one, saw that one; went here, went there. Habitually short of cash, Delmore would obsessively review his tottering finances:
REVISED BUDGET SEPT. ’53–’54
Certain or almost certain:
Bank 1,700
ND [New Directions] 600
Saul [Bellow] textbook 750*8
I was fascinated by these calculations of chronic insolvency. Even at his most mundane, Delmore was interesting. He was present—there—in all his confusion and humanness. I could see him at his desk, desperately monitoring cash in/cash out, the folds of his already furrowed brow deepening as he contemplated the precariousness of his situation. (“The teething anxiety, the gnawing nervousness that wastes so many days and years of consciousness”—I wonder if Delmore wrote that memorable line, from “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine,” after one of his futile exercises in drawing up a budget.) But the raw numbers, so bland and innocuous, also signaled his desperation; he never had enough money, never would have enough money.
I also had to slog through terse sketches of ossified, long-forgotten events that, decades later, lay dead on the page: “Jay [Laughlin, Delmore’s publisher], Bellow, Jean [Stafford, the writer], and [David, a critic, alas, forgotten now] Bazelon in Ticino’s”; “Tuesday morning, breakfast at the Dicksons’.” But even these entries could resonate with a poignant lyricism (“Kissed Rose’s cheek. Fatigued, depersonalized. The thick lamb sandwich”) or blossom into strange fragments of poetry (“Passes the path of the downing sunlight and is charred, among burning silver”). Flipping idly through the pages, I stumbled upon profound aphorisms buried beneath the detritus of daily life: “Every dream is an illness, and every fantasy from conflict flows.” I was chilled by Delmore’s psychiatric self-appraisals: “I lie in the coffin of my character.” But he was funny, too: “She was frigid, he was rigid: what a marriage.”
Delmore’s journals were the spillover of his genius:
August, a country house
A dry bright day
Summer already waning
Birds—shears & the trimming of hedgerows
A recurrent splash
Above which
Whistlers warblers trillers
He could rattle on for pages at a time in loose blank verse about the events of his day: whom he’d seen, what he’d read, what he’d done and hadn’t done. One night, deliberating about whether to go to a party, he worked out the alternatives in his journal:
Shall I go there tonight, not Dickens read
Who is so large, says [Edmund] Wilson, almost Avon’s*9
Great height (desiring this man’s gift, and that
Man’s scope and hope) who might teach much,
And give much joy. (He also had bad taste,
Was maudlin and, says Wilson, “pretty bad”
Are the short stories shoved in “Pickwick Papers”)
He wrote about Wordsworth, Tolstoy, Blake; philosophy and politics; his parents’ marriage and their stories of the Old World. He exhorted himself to produce (“A page a day! No day without a page!”); recorded his friends’ dialogue; and registered the vicissitudes of consciousness:
This is the way
My mind works. From peak to peak, I read
The purple passages of prose and verse,
Having only the stumbling stamina
Of one who comes back after each defeat.
These “excurses”—as Delmore called them—were a joy to read. I admired the galloping rhythm, the rapid alternation of colloquial and formal style, a faux-stentorian tone that was at once pompous and self-deflating. He was playful, audacious, funny.
But I found the meticulous record he kept of his daily alcoholic and pharmacological intake unsettling. He alternated between highs (“Xmas Eve: a lively happy active day, causeless happiness”) and lows (“Dead day, dead Sunday”) that he regulated with an increasingly steep intake of alcohol and amphetamines. By the time Delmore hit thirty, he was already in trouble, drinking too much (“rum at 4”; “two glasses of Zinfandel before noon”) to counter the effects of his truly alarming consumption of Dexedrine, gobbled at the rate of up to twenty a day. May 27, 1952: “Calm after two Dexs.” December 21, 1953: “16 pages of U[lysses]—at 5 Flem.*10 & back, no liquor, no cigarettes & bubbling of ideas.”
That Delmore was aware of what was happening to him (“This lifelong sickness which robs me of myself, which takes away my power”) didn’t mean he could do anything about it. As he reached his forties, his condition had worsened to the point where he could no longer function without massive quantities of uppers and downers, with predictably deleterious effects that he recorded in his blank verse journals: “How many years have I shortened my life / By barbiturates and alcohol?” Quite a few, as he must have known—and as I knew for certain, reading these prescient words two decades after he wrote them in his journal.
—
Why did Delmore’s decline feel so inevitable? In part, perhaps, because only limited help was available. Psychiatry in the 1940s, when his condition was in its incipient phase, was still in the pre-pharmacological era: mental turmoil could be resolved or mitigated only by the conventional form of “talk” therapy. But Delmore had little faith in this method, which he saw as a threat to his powers of imagination. In his essay “The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World,” published when he was only twenty-eight, he declared that his job was to remain “indestructible as a poet until he is destroyed as a human being.”
Delmore himself was the apotheosis of this myth. The artist was by definition alienated: it was his job to be alienated. In his verse journals, he celebrated the secret fraternity
who find in art
What exile is: art becomes exile too,
A secret and a code studied in secret,
Declaring the agony of modern life.
When I first read these lines in the mid-1970s, I felt stricken—what an ordeal life had
been for Delmore. Reading his journals over now, it’s hard to miss the diagnosis. When he writes of “running up and down the hills and dirt roads of sensibility,” or refers to “the roller-coaster” of his emotions, he’s describing what has come to be recognized as a biological condition: Delmore was bipolar.*11 I knew none of this then. All I knew was that he had suffered. Now I see his anguish, perhaps too simply, as a symptom of faulty wiring, a physical disability no different from diabetes. But knowing—or believing—that there is a creative component to one’s depression perhaps makes it easier to bear. Besides, to medicalize his genius would have been to steal its magic. For Delmore, poetry was a death sentence. But it was also divine.
One afternoon, ready to pack up my notebook for the day—I was copying out in pencil the passages I might need—I came across the following entry, written when Delmore was forty-five:
December 31 [1958]
Alone—alone but free of all bondage to anyone but myself—on the last night of
the year of 1958—save for weaknesses and temptations—
Who knows—BUT GOD—what the future may hold…
God and the biographer.
*1 The fact that such a humiliating fee could even be countenanced by either editor or contributor should have raised a red flag about the penury in which a freelance writer could expect to live.
*2 How glad I am to be spared at last the biographer’s flustered rummaging among papers for the exact date; the licensed uncertainty of the memoirist feels liberating after a life spent in the fact-constricted prison of biography.
*3 It would be impossible to craft a sentence capable of bringing greater joy to a biographer.
*4 Let’s not forget “The Prose of Samuel Beckett: Notes from the Terminal Ward,” the long-winded piece in The Minnesota Review.
