Poet Delmore Schwartz, New York City / Uncredited and Undated Photograph
"O Delmore how I miss you. You inspired me to write. You were the greatest man I ever met. You could capture the deepest emotions in the simplest language. Your titles were more than enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck. You were a genius. Doomed.
The mad stories. O Delmore I was so young. I believed so much. We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better in life than to devote oneself to Joyce. You’d annotated every word in the novels you kept from the library. Every word.
And you said you were writing “The Pig’s Valise.” O Delmore no such thing. They looked, after your final delusion led you to a heart attack in the Hotel Dixie. Unclaimed for three days. You—one of the greatest writers of our era. No valise.
You wore the letter from T.S. Eliot next to your heart. His praise of In Dreams. Would that you could have stopped that wedding. No good will come of this!!! You were right. You begged us—Please don’t let them bury me next to my mother. Have a party to celebrate moving from this world hopefully to a better one. And you Lou—I swear—and you know if anyone could I could—you Lou must never write for money or I will haunt you.
I’d given him a short story. He gave me a B. I was so hurt and ashamed. Why haunt talentless me? I was the walker for “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.” To literary cocktails. He hated them. And I was put in charge. Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail front right hanging—tie skewed, fly unzipped. O Delmore. You were so beautiful. Named for a silent movie star dancer Frank Delmore. O Delmore—the scar from dueling with Nietzsche.
Reading Yeats and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t finished reading—liquid rivulets sprang from your nose but still you would not stop reading. I was transfixed. I cried—the love of the word—the heavy bear.
You told us to break into __’s estate where your wife was being held prisoner. Your wrists broken by those who were your enemies. The pills jumbling your fine mind.
I met you in the bar where you had just ordered five drinks. You said they were so slow that by the time you had the fifth you should have ordered again. Our scotch classes. Vermouth. The jukebox you hated—the lyrics so pathetic.
You called the White House one night to protest their actions against you. A scholarship to your wife to get her away from you and into the arms of whomever in Europe.
I heard the newsboy crying Europe Europe.
Give me enough hope and I’ll hang myself.
Hamlet came from an old upper class family.
Some thought him drunk but—really—he was a manic-depressive—which is like having brown hair.
You have to take your own s
hower—an existential act. You could slip in the shower and die alone.
Hamlet starting saying strange things. A woman is like a cantaloupe Horatio—once she’s open she goes rotten.
O Delmore where was the Vaudeville for a Princess. A gift to the princess from the stage star in the dressing room.
The duchess stuck her finger up the duke’s ass and the kingdom vanished.
No good will come of this. Stop this courtship!
Sir you must be quiet or I must eject you.
Delmore understood it all and could write it down impeccably.
Shenandoah Fish*. You were too good to survive. The insights got you. The fame expectations. So you taught.
And I saw you in the last round.
I loved your wit and massive knowledge.
You were and have always been the one.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him think.
I wanted to write. One line as good as yours. My mountain. My inspiration.
You wrote the greatest short story ever written.
In Dreams
– Lou Reed, “Oh Delmore How I Miss You” 2012
Tired and unhappy, you think of houses
Soft-carpeted and warm in the December evening,
While snow’s white pieces fall past the window,
And the orange firelight leaps.
A young girl sings
That song of Gluck where Orpheus pleads with Death;
Her elders watch, nodding their happiness
To see time fresh again in her self-conscious eyes:
The servants bring in the coffee, the children go to bed,
Elder and younger yawn and go to bed,
The coals fade and glow, rose and ashen,
It is time to shake yourself! and break this
Banal dream, and turn your head
Where the underground is charged, where the weight
Of the lean building is seen,
Where close in the subway rush, anonymous
In the audience, well-dressed or mean,
So many surround you, ringing your fate,
Caught in an anger exact as a machine!
– Delmore Schwartz, “Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses” 1937
Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett’s camera and Florenz Ziegfield’s
Foolish Follies.
They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness
Of their youth and beauty
In the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of
awareness
Heightened, intensified and softened
By the soft and the silk of the waters
Blooded made ready by the energy set afire by the
nakedness of the body,
Electrified: deified: undenied.
A young man of thirty years beholds them from a distance.
He lives in the dungeon of ten million dollars.
He is rich, handsome and empty standing behind the linen curtains
Beholding them.
Which girl does he think most desirable, most beautiful?
They are all equally beautiful and desirable from the gold distance.
For if poverty darkens discrimination and makes
perception too vivid,
The gold of wealth is also a form of blindness.
For has not a Frenchman said, Although this is America…
What he has said is not entirely relevant,
That a naked woman is a proof of the existence of God.
Where is he going?
Is he going to be among them to splash and to laugh with them?
They did not see him although he saw them and was there among them.
He saw them as he would not have seen them had they been conscious
Of him or conscious of men in complete depravation:
This is his enchantment and impoverishment
As he possesses them in gaze only.
…He felt the wood secrecy, he knew the June softness
The warmth surrounding him crackled
Held in by the mansard roof mansion
He glimpsed the shadowy light on last year’s brittle leaves fallen,
Looked over and overlooked, glimpsed by the fall of death,
Winter’s mourning and the May’s renewal.
– Delmore Schwartz, “A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir” 1962
we sometimes are guilty of forgetting what a New York radical intellect Lou actually was despite the street poetry of junk and 'Waiting for My Man' to bring the ‘Heroin’!? he also was quite the poet . . . . Sweet Jane riding that Stutz BearCat Jim! . . . . I’ll Be Your Mirror . . . . reflect what you are!
