![]() Associating with Hamlet means being misunderstood. and yet no one can stop thinking that someone is to blame.” Like the disappointments of youth in “Memoirs,” Hamlet is used to confront a larger question: Can we, and should we, relate to great literature? Schwartz studies the play in order to understand Hamlet, with whom he has an affinity, but Hamlet cannot be understood. “You can have this gift or that disease, and no one understands why, no one is responsible. and that is why no one understands Hamlet,” he writes, with an urgency belying personal struggles with bipolar disorder. “No one knows the real causes of the manic-depressive disease. In, “Hamlet, or There is Something Wrong with Everyone,” Schwartz begins by summarizing the play with the arrogance of a tenth-grader: “Ophelia was very much in love with Hamlet, and when Hamlet went to Germany to study metaphysics and lager beer, she thought about him all the time.” He dismisses a variety of scholarly readings-Hamlet was a woman, he was homosexual, everyone was blasted drunk-and concludes that Hamlet was manic-depressive. The intersection of literature and personal life found in “Memoirs” reappears throughout the collection, notably in its literary criticism. This provides a veneer of comfort (We really can become anything with enough work!) that Schwartz masterfully undercuts when he concludes “Experience has taught me nothing.” If he has learned nothing from experience, what can we learn from reading this essay? The essay isn’t advice for how a writer should be, but merely what happened. Reading the essay, we know that Schwartz, the son of no poets, became a great a poet. So how can Delmore become one? The irony is thick. Talent is linked to genetics: “Was your father a poet? Was your grandfather a poet?” an uncle asks. Newspaper “reports of boy wonders and child prodigies”depress Schwartz. In the essay, Schwartz confronts the insecurity and fatalism of a young poet-the belief that he will never be good enough-as it clashes with the fantasy that poet need only work hard to succeed. made the new year seem as hopeless and bleak as my own present and future.” He feels as if he were “born too late in a world too old.” If the West is in decline, he reasons, why do anything? Why be a poet? For the fame? Schwartz does, after all, publish poems in his high school literary journal-only to learn that nobody reads them. ![]() As a young man, Schwartz intended to split his adult as a New York Giants short stop and a poet-that is until he reads The Decline of the West. The collection’s longest piece, “Memoirs of a Metropolitan Child, Memoirs of a Giants Fan,” is a sort of bildungsroman squeezed into 22 pages. The man whose company “meant not only breathing with one’s lungs but with one’s mind.” The man whose death stopped clocks. Here is the witty and humorous Delmore who left friends breathless with laughter. Not the pill-popper who lay unclaimed at the morgue for three days. Not the man who stole his wife’s typewriter because his work was more important than hers. Not the medicated melancholic who cataloged his drinks in his journal. It’s an account of Schwartz rendered by Schwartz: a deft construction distinct from the triangulation of journal, biography, and fictional alter egos. He made his name through his writing, but now it’s the torment interests us-posterity loves splitting authors into their work and their torment. That he wrote feels both fundamental and incidental to his biography. A literary Icarus as much reputation as writer. ![]() Here he mythologizes, criticizes, sketches, and yarns to create a lucid and neurotic account of the role of the Artist. But in The Ego is Always at the Wheel-Schwartz’s undeservedly neglected personal essay collection-we find just that. For it’s no longer the stories readers want, but the stories about the creators of stories, the interviews, origin tales, and advice to the novices. Perhaps admirers were misguided in their attempted revivals. ![]() Not even New Directions’ 2012 reissue of his story collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, revived Schwartz. ![]() Hailed by the likes of Nabokov, Eliot, Bellow and Trilling, Schwartz remains relatively absent from the Elysian Fields of the Forgotten Author: The syllabus. A century after his birth, and nearly fifty years since he died, alone, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Delmore Schwartz, briefly considered the great American poet, remains relatively unknown. ![]()
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