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Durham E-Theses Durham E-Theses Self-reections and repetitions: a study of the writings of Delmore Schwartz Nelson, Richard William Eric How to cite: Nelson, Richard William Eric (1994) Self-reections and repetitions: a study of the writings of Delmore Schwartz, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5871/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 ABSTRACT Name: Richard William Eric Nelson Title: Self-Reflections and Repetitions: A Study of the Writings of Delmore Schwartz Degree: Ph.D. Date: 1994 Despite the changes that his work underwent over the course of his career, Schwartz's writings form a cohesive whole. His poems, stories and essays are unified by a series of themes and motifs that recur both within individual works and throughout his oeuvre. One of the most significant of these involves the moment when an individual catches sight of his reflection in a mirror, a moment of sudden self-knowledge, shocking yet liberating. Schwartz provides a reinterpretation of the Narcissus myth that serves as a justification for his self-conscious approach to art. Again and again he returns to an examination of the individual's place in society. The individual is seen as alienated both from his fellow man and from himself, but at the same time unable to escape the bonds that hold him to others. His nature is determined by that relationship. Nevertheless, he can. achieve freedom through becoming truly conscious. Although Schwartz's interest in Freud and Marx is relevant, he does not accept any doctrine uncritically. His use of repetitions helps him to develop contrary positions and is part of an approach to art that favours paradoxes over certainties. He views himself as an isolated artist, yet carries out a sustained critique of the implications of that isolation. One effect of this reading of Schwartz's work is to provide a defence of the hitherto poorly received later stories and poems. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author No quotation from it should be pubhshed without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 2 Q DEC » TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 Narcissus and the Mirror: Facing the Self 6 2 The Artist in Society 38 3 The Early Short Stories 78 4 The Late Short Stories 132 5 Form, Content and Consciousness 167 6 SuiTuner Knowledge: Different Forms for a Different Consciousness 187 Notes 227 Bibliography 255 DECLARATION: I confirm that no part of the material offered has previously been submitted by me for a degree in this or in any other University. STATEMENT OF COPYRIGHT; The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. INTRODUCTION Delmore Schwartz received considerable acclaim in the early years of his literary career. His first achievements, in collections such as In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and The World is a Wedding, marked him out as a distinctive writer of both poetry and short fiction. However, in later years that praise became a burden, and he began to fear that he would not be able to live up to the early reception. He was right to worry: the later work was not favourably received. The years since his death have not done much to restore his critical reputation, in spite of a recent revival of interest in Schwartz in the United States. Previously unpublished or uncollected letters, journals, poems, stories, plays and essays have all been gathered in various posthumously published volumes. However, although Schwartz considered himself to be above all a poet, a Collected Poems is still sorely missed: both his long poem. Genesis; Book One, and the second of his three volumes to include verse. Vaudeville for a Princess, have been long out of print. In Great Britain only a selection of predominantly early poems and a volume of correspondence with his publisher, James Laughlin, are currently available. No volume of his fiction is in print m Britain. Moreover, few verse anthologies include poems by him. It is rarer still to find his work in collections of short stories. Schwartz's standing as a writer has not been helped by the way his personal life has come to overshadow his art. More readily available than his own writings, John Berryman's The Dream Songs and Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift have done much to fix the image of Schwartz as a tragic, doomed poet. The biography by James Atlas has also contributed to this myth-making process. Schwartz has become more important for what he represents than for what he wrote. Unfortunately, this image of him only involves a partial truth that is sometimes deeply misleading. Extreme caution needs to be exercised in relating Schwartz's life to his writings, in spite of their heavily autobiographical leanings. One mistake is to assume that there is a simple correlation between Schwartz's deteriorating mental health and the way that he wrote in his later years. Another more serious error is to assume that Schwartz's artistic concerns were unhealthy and contributed to his personal problems. His work is self-conscious, but that is not necessarily a pejorative description. The only book-length study of Schwartz's writings, Richard McDougall's Delmore Schwartz, is marred by the author's disapproving attitude to his subject's self-consciousness. It is indisputable that Schwartz's work changed considerably over the years. There are significant differences between the poetry in the 1938 volume, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and the new verse printed in 1959 in Summer Knowledge, just as there are between the short stories in The World is a Wedding, which first came out in 1948 , and those in Successful Love and Other Stories thirteen years later. The sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit basis for some critical judgements about Schwartz has been that he produced his most authentic work at the beginning of his career before his personal problems sidetracked him. However, it is dangerous to assume that In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and The World is a Wedding are typically Schwartzian in a way that the later volumes fail to be. It will be part of the argument of this thesis that there is a good case for considering Schwartz's body of work as a cohesive whole. Whatever the differences, whatever the changes, his later writings are still recognizable as the work of the man who produced In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and The World is a Wedding. Furthermore, the apparent narcissism of his art, which McDougall finds so objectionable, is not only one of the factors that makes for that cohesion, but is also more fairly seen as a sustained examination of what it means to be both an individual and an artist m society in the twentieth century. II In "The Poetry of Allen Tate" Schwartz describes the way in which repeated images or motifs provide a key to understanding a writer's work: The whole vision of the poet can best be seen by grasping minute image, recurrent metaphor, symbol and idea, typical use of language, and single view of differing subjects in the unity from which they arise. Beginning with the minute image, we find that every element, from image to subject, tends to suggest itself as an example of some aspect of another part and of the writing as a whole. (1) He can be found applying this critical approach in "Ezra Pound's Very Useful Labors": The Cantos have no plot, although as the poem continues, the repetition of key phrases, characters and situations, makes more and more clear the kind of unity which the Cantos do have, a wholeness based upon certain obsessions or preoccupations, deriving itself from the character of Pound's mind . (2) The relevance of the approach becomes increasingly clear when one considers Schwartz's own work. As he himself admits in "The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot", "there is ... a natural tendency upon the part of a poet who writes criticism to try to justify and praise in his criticism what he attempts to accomplish in his poetry" (3). A reading of Schwartz's work reveals instance after instance of "the repetition of key phrases, characters and situations". So extensive is Schwartz's use of repetition that it clearly amounts to more than a tendency to reuse successful or favourite expressions from old material. Rather, it is a technique that enables Schwartz to establish relationships and contrasts, to develop ideas, to complicate issues and to structure his work. Richard McDougall's book examines some of Schwartz's repeated images, particularly in the section "Blue Sky, White Snow: Images of Transcendence" (4). This study will draw attention to others. It will show how they create for the body of Schwartz's writings "a wholeness based upon certain obsessions or preoccupations".
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