The Isolation of Delmore Schwartz

STEPHEN HAHN

The last years of Delmore Schwartz's life are witness to his
isolation. He died of a heart attack in 1966, at fifty-three, in
an ambulance en route to Roosevelt Hospital from the
Columbia Hotel in Times Square, after lying for over an hour in the
hallway, unshaven and with the elbows of his shirt torn. Memoirs of
Schwartz in his last years tell of his deteriorating physical and men¬
tal condition and of his descent from literary eminence to itinerancy
and destitution. He had been poetry editor and film critic for The
New Republic, 1955-57, and the recipient of the BoUingen Prize in
Poetry for 1959 and the Shelley Memorial Award in the same year,
but before his death, he went trundling about with untied shoe laces
and sought companionship in bars. His decline, evident in photo¬
graphs taken of him in Washington Square Park in the early sixties,
seems a sad confirmation of the words in Frost's poem "Home
Burial": 'Trom the time when one is sick to death, / One is alone,
and he dies more alone." While each edition of his work to appear
since his death has been greeted with predictions of a revival of his
reputation, it is unlikely any general revaluation will take place
soon.

The reasons for this unlikeliness have little to do with the quality
of his work in literary criticism, fiction, and poetry. His criticism is
rigorous yet fluent, clear, and free of cant in ways that highlight
inadequacies of tone and conception among even some of the most
honored of his contemporaries. While philosophically informed,
however, it is written in an occasional mode that is deceptively mod¬
est and out of keeping with the current emphasis on "theory."
Some half-dozen of his short stories are minor masterpieces, exam¬
ining the manners and morals of the middle and lower middle
classes from the Depression through the Cold War, and much of his
poetry is intellectually stimulating and highly original in the figural
resources it deploys. Yet the passing of the "modern" moment in
literature has meant a shift of critical attention to issues other than
those most obviously raised by Schwartz's work. It is perhaps just
 

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