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7 DelmoreSchwartz’sStrangeTimes Jim Keller By the time his full-page obituary appeared in the New York Times on July 14, 1966, Delmore Schwartz’s body had lain unclaimed for three days at the Bellevue morgue.1 The poet’s name had only been noticed, in fact, by a Times journalist who regularly perused the morgue roster, and it would still be a matter of some time before Schwartz’s Aunt Clara, contacted by a family member who had read the Times, finally claimed his body. This series of delays is often used to measure the extent of what John Ashbery calls Schwartz’s “fall from grace” during his lifetime.2 And much similar commentary is devoted to noting the sadly “poetic” fact of Schwartz’s deferred physical identification, given that his literary recognition had come so early and profusely in his youth. From the event of his well-attended funeral onward, though, Schwartz would be listed now and again among the century’s most underrated American poets, by turns one whose time had come too early and one whose time has not yet come. Schwartz’s delayed literary recognition almost compels the rhetorical links that have been drawn between the circumstances of his postmortem and his posthumous reception. Robert Phillips notes that “when the body was removed to the city morgue, it was unclaimed for some days,” in the process of lamenting that twelve years after his death, “a man whom many consider one of this century’s most important American poets” still went Time is the fire in which we burn. —Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day” Nor can it be said that posthumous fame is the bitter reward for those who were ahead of their time—as though time were a racetrack on which some contenders run so swiftly that they simply disappear from the spectator’s range of vision. —Hannah Arendt 154 |   unread or, at best, remained underappreciated.3 Saul Bellow, in his thinly veiled fictional account of Schwartz, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), also remarks on this time lag, indicting American Babbitry in passing, when he comments, “at the morgue there were no readers of modern poetry.”4 But in Bellow’s novelistic wish fulfillment, popular culture does finally appreciate Humboldt ’s (Schwartz’s) “gift”: both his talent and the actual movie script that he wills to Bellow’s alter ego, Charlie Citrine. Though James Atlas understandably saves his treatment of Schwartz’s belated identification until the end of his 1977 biography, the event seems profoundly present throughout, as Atlas consistently stresses the prophetic nature of Schwartz’s own claims (made throughout his lifetime) that his literary recognition would be deferred.5 In elegiac form, Schwartz’s friend John Berryman echoes Auden’s epitaph for Yeats in remarking that “[Delmore’s] death stopped clocks,” chagrined that “His good body lay unclaimed / three days.”6 But Berryman also seems assured of Schwartz’s eventual return to the cultural forefront. In a 1972 interview for the Paris Review, Berryman admonishes that Schwartz is “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century,” pronouncing his first book “a masterpiece” and offering with cavalier ease that Schwartz’s reputation “will come back—no problem.”7 Similarly, numerous introductions and biographies evoke a more or less anxious sense of awaited recognition, an impression that Schwartz haunts literary history—or left to it an unappreciated gift, most likely hidden, it is supposed, beneath the “lurid cultural legend”8 made of his life and isolation. In remarking that Schwartz’s insecurities outlived his young talents, Berryman suggests the image of someone advancing through time backward , “like a man death-wounded on the mend” (Song 152), though he takes solace from the sense that Schwartz’s influence will not diminish but draw strength as it continues to be tempered by the fire of time. In later generations, Berryman believes, Schwartz’s reputation will be reanimated and “the young will read [Schwartz’s] young verse” (Song 156). Lou Reed, recalling Delmore in a quite literal sense, offers a tribute set within a séance to his former Syracuse professor, in the song “My House,” from his 1982 album, The Blue Mask: Sylvia and I got out our Ouija Board to dial a spirit, across the room it soared We were happy and amazed at what we saw blazing stood the proud and regal name Delmore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [3.133.121.160] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 21:17...

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