“We would rather run ourselves down than not speak of ourselves at all.”
—La Rochefoucauld

When the reputable and talented die, it is often their fate to have their privacy examined in detail. This is a mixed blessing at best. How chilling it is to remember that Nijinski’s feet were cut open to see if the bones were somehow special. There must be some clue, we think, to the mystery of fame.

The Fifties, again edited by Leon Edel, is the fourth volume of Edmund Wilson’s notebooks to be published, and the most tedious to date, It contains seemingly endless family data (six pages on the stealing of a Boston Rocker), gossip, comments on his relatives and his wife’s relatives, various and sundry opinions, and (though now less so) the temperature of his sexual relations. I think it time to call a halt. Wilson himself edited, in part, The Twenties, about which he said that he didn’t want to publish inferior material. His wish has not been heeded. At the beginning of this inflated enterprise, expectations were high. In a brief memoir in the Times Literary Supplement, Harry Levin said that he had thought the American counterpart of the Goncourts would be forthcoming but was saddened by what he found, even in The Twenties, the best of the lot. The 41 copybooks (some 2,000 manuscript pages), it appears, will not constitute an invaluable history of American literary and cultural life.

By the 50’s Wilson had quit reading most new writers and concentrated on a number of personal projects of dubitable value. These projects were no longer concerned with literature and will prove to be of antiquarian interest only. What happened? Two things, I think.

First, as time went on, it became increasingly clear that he had no compelling image or idea in his life, not even a strongly held philosophical point of view—except to have none. He was left at the mercy of his ego, one more instance of the bankruptcy of modernism. And while he was an uncompromisingly professional writer, what did he have, then, to be uncompromising about? Honesty to his own taste, which is not a little thing in our era, but not ever much of a big thing. Even his vaunted hard realism is called into question by the IRS affair. Is it possible that a former editor of The New Republic would forget to pay his taxes for nine years and be surprised to discover that taxes were used to pay for national defense?

What is the nature of his legacy? At best, he provided an example of what a determined reader and an excellent writer can do for our understanding of literature by using the historical/ biographical bias. Many of his fine essays still remain (and will for some time) as points of reference. But he never did understand the world’s inviolate sadness, the tragic view of life.

Second, he played Johnson to himself playing Boswell. He wanted it both ways. He had cast himself in the role of Johnson, which gave him what his friends at once recognized as authority, even early on. But Boswell, he held, was the true creative genius, the role he wished to play as time went on. (Delmore Schwartz said that Wilson thought he was Henry James.) What he had not accomplished with his novels and plays, he was determined to pull off with his journals, which give us a portrait of Wilson watching Wilson watch himself in the mirror.

In Portrait of Delmore: 1939-1959 we have a like phenomenon; the dust jacket features a posed photograph of Schwartz looking at himself in the mirror. He was from first to last the hero of his own life. The journals contain notations, single words, and sentences highlighted by their isolation, fragments of poems, stories, and essays, notes to himself, dreams, dates, lists, social calendars, records of his drinking and pills taken, much nonsense, and in boldface a self studying a self Near the beginning he notes that all great men are insane and at the ending he is haunted by fears of madness. One is strongly tempted to see in him what his early commentators saw in Hart Crane—a symbol of what America does to its poets. There are no second acts; romantics do not survive the assault of experience. But both Crane and Schwartz knew better. In their lucid moments both knew how inner the destructive urge was.

Delmore Schwartz was reputable and talented. Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift is a memorial to him. Robert Lowell’s Life Studies has a poem to him. John Berryman devoted 10 elegiac Dream Songs to him, “the young man/Alive with surplus love.” Karl Shapiro named him the “touchstone” of his generation of confessional poets. Publishers have served him well: Everything he wrote has been put into print. Yet, he is not much read now; many find his life, as symbolic, more interesting than his work. Somewhat reluctantly (remembering poor Nijinsky), I will engage in a postmortem and confront the question Schwartz himself asked about Ring Lardner, “why so successful and gifted a human being suffered so much and so helplessly.”

Although he knew that “the absolute will of the ego” must be subjected to the testing of reality, he could/ would not do this seriously or for over a period of time. He was mature enough to know that doing “what you really want to do means that you are willing to take the responsibility for what you have done once it is done,” but he could not act on this thought. Living directly as a pagan and with no sense of community, he could not engage himself in reality, true as he knew it was, when it stretched out its hands to him. “We are all forever/lost and/alone,” History was most of the time, he felt, a nightmare which intruded on his special sense of self giving him an epic case of insomnia. One of his friends remarked (and he copied it in his notebook), “Delmore is selfish—he wants to be loved before he loves anyone.”

He was a tragic paradox. On the one hand, his selfishness was huge and uncompromising. But on the other, more’s the wonder, he never knew who he was. For whom was he making this incredible effort of will? Yet, despite this, he remained convinced for years that his life could be the base for an epic drama. “The self is a story.” In reality, a sustained work about his own life was impossible. His most famous work, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” ends precisely where he, being born, would have to accept responsibility for himself “I wished for the innocence of my stars and my stones and my trees,” but seeing through the glass darkly he was shown instead “my fear at last” and in his own face. “Let the day perish that I was born,”

W.H. Auden guessed that his egocentric mania, as he called it, was an essentially religious problem, caused by his desperate need for a transcendent Other and his inability/refusal to let go of the self. William Barrett, his closest friend, felt that Schwartz had an essentially religious nature, and many entries in the journals (as well as his poetry, essays, and fiction) support this judgment:

God exists if anything exists.

If you don’t believe in God,

there is nothing you won’t do.

Men who start with denying

the existence of God will end

by devouring each other.

Yet the passion for the transcendent and the thirst for community did not finally enable him to put his ego in order. It appears that he had so little sense of anything else that he clung harder and harder to the fragile self even as it dissolved in tears of self-pity. Paraphrasing Henri Montherlant, he wrote in the Journals, “O my God—cut the appalling knot of contradictions that at least for one instant before ceasing to be, I may at last know who I am.” But no knot proves more Gordian than the one tied by oneself In desperation, he concluded:

We will never arrive

At the future in Which we exist . . .

“No roots, no religion,” he lamented. In the final entry he names the world “poisonous.”

Two entries, late and probably shadowed by growing madness, stand isolated in the journals, each in its turn, and between them they are the keys to understanding his yearning, his failure, his suffering, and his helplessness. “Call me” echoes his wild longing to be part of a reality larger than himself with forebears and heirs who reach out to embrace him into the truth, “but they are too far away.” And then the ineffable “I can’t.”

 

[The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, by Edmund Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) $25.00]

[Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz 1939-1959, edited by Elizabeth Pellet (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) $35.00]