DAVID BLAIR
Several Beginnings, a Neglected Essential Collection: Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems
1
If Delmore Schwartz had not produced his hybrid or mixed-genre classics, his 1938 book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and the postwar book we are going to talk about here, Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, with its title sequence inspired by Danny Kaye, would we have “Mixed Emotions” from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery, I do not know. I’m being random here, in a way, as there are a lot of other poems that find language and would do just as well. I had gone looking for one with Daffy Duck painted on the side of a bomber or something when I found and remembered how much I love this one about a dream pinup:
A pleasant smell of frying sausages
Attacks the senses, along with an old, mostly invisible
Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.
How to explain these girls, if indeed that’s what they are,
These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas
About the vast change that’s taken place
In the fabric of our society, altering the texture
Of all things in it? And yet
They somehow look as if they knew, except
That it’s so hard to see them, it’s hard to figure out
Exactly what kind of expression they’re wearing.
What your hobbies, girls? Aw nerts,
One of them might say, this guy’s too much for me.
Please don’t expect me to answer this question I have raised, but we also might not have Ashbery’s Parmigianino without Schwartz’s Seurat in poems that try their best to say different versions of everything. But what’s in this passage of this poem anyway? Eloquence or nerts? In this one of his modes, Ashbery extends what Schwartz does with the language and idiom of American “sub-literary” culture as sure as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth pick up on the idiom of the performative talk that they heard and which forms their language and which enters page after page of rollercoaster surprise, and the influence of Schwartz the writer and the personality on Bellow is so well known, thanks to Humboldt’s Gift, that we might not really have considered Schwartz and poetry enough. At the time that New Directions published the unusual Vaudeville, the publisher was expecting Schwartz to complete a long-awaited study of T.S. Eliot, which he never did. But he did complete Vaudeville for a Princess.
Isn’t there some vaudeville in the abrupt transitions and leaps in diction, not to mention the song and dance aspects, of The Waste Land. I always hear Groucho Marx when I read the “Good night, sweet ladies” routine in the pub at the end of “A Game of Chess.”
2
Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems came out in 1950. Vaudeville was already like Mister Kurtz (dead). That’s why Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and other comedians of the 1950s, Lenny Bruce for instance, and also the choreographer Bob Fosse, and Anita O’Day’s junky drummer, started out in burlesque. You want to know how hokey and sentimental the idea of vaudeville was in 1950, check out Singing in the Rain, those horrible plaid suits and goofy hats that Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor wear in when they do “Fit as a Fiddle” in a montage of railroad tracks. The talkies killed Vaudeville, as sure as they did the acting career of Lina Lamont. Here comes television, already casting a blue shade in Schwartz’s collection.
If you want to read a copy of Vaudeville for a Princess, which I hope you will, tonight it is for sale on Amazon for a mere $70.29, a lot cheaper than the 1938 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which you can have as your very own for $750. Comparable works come a lot cheaper in terms of raw price. Life Studies/For the Union Dead can be had for $12.59. 77 Dream Songs for $15, Citizen, an American Lyric, for $15.69. How many of the people who have given Vaudeville for a Princess a lukewarm shoulder, particularly seventy years ago, had even read the book Spring and All by William Carlos Williams. A book that we can understand and appreciate better than the contemporary critics who gave it mixed reviews and did not appreciate how a translator of Rimbaud could find and repurpose language and borrow forms and idioms from pop culture and other seemingly naive sources, and who what’s more were probably expecting to find the expected, a series of very well-made urns rather than a composite work with moving parts whose genius lies in shifts and juxtapositions, truly, a book, Vaudeville is an antique whose time maybe has come. While a high price tag might look like an unabashed marker of success, it also means that nobody is reading a book. Some boon, Schwartz himself might say.
But it was also meant to look something like an antique. The back cover is solid yellow, and the front cover has a black rectangle on top of a somewhat larger yellow rectangle. The graphic designer chose a vaguely thirties font for the title of the book. It resembles the opening credits for the movie Chinatown, which was a product of the thirties nostalgia craze of the early seventies. There is an epigraph from Plato’s Symposium, in English translation cast in a faux-Greek alphabet font that looks like it could be from a Jazz age translation of Catullus or Pindar or The Nightlife of the Gods by Thorne Smith, author of Topper. Curiously, the front matter and the section divider pages are made of the same black paper that you would find in a photo album of deckle-edged snapshots people had developed of their picnics and one-piece bathing suits for the first few decades of the twentieth century, a fragile black paper that works well with Schwartz’s gloominess, nostalgia and intimacy. Atlas, who is not an especially sharp judge of poetry as he is a storyteller, claims that Schwartz saw the black sheets as the equivalent of blackouts between acts.
This reminds me of what we see in J.V. Cunningham’s epigram about a burlesque show a few years later, and the vulgarity of the Cunningham poem in a way shows something about the dark sheets as well. “I left the silver dollars on the table/ And tried the show. The black-out, baggy pants,/ Of course, and then this answer to romance:/ Her ass twitching as if it had the fits,” and so on. British Music Hall sounds like it was always somewhere between vaudeville and burlesque, a little naughtier, as the British guy in your office will occasionally call you the c-word via Cockney rhyming slang when you made that sound while eating hot ramen in your cubicle. “My life is like a music hall,” Arthur Symonds notes, drily, right before modernism, not entirely comfortable. The actual physical Vaudeville for a Princess resembles a playbill from a light musical comedy, which you might find photographs of in an old issue of Stage, the Magazine of After Dark, perhaps with a young Orson Welles as Brutus in the Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar. It looks like something that has survived in an unlikely way from the other side of World War Two, the unspeakable and unthinkable carnage and numbers.
I think this example of the bookmaker’s art is the best container for Schwartz’s book. There are three sections. The first, the title sequence, contains prose interludes of great humor and pathos and increasing darkness written in an approximation of a chatty and sophisticated humorist and disconsolate lecturer on contemporary issues like divorce and celebrity and the sorts of literature that are generally part of popular culture, Shakespeare, the Mozart operas with librettos by Da Ponte. Here we find the voice and collaged and multi-faceted diction that has been so important to American prose writers but which also informs his poems in general, and punctuated by song-like poems, many of them neo-Elizabethan songs that feel related to the “society verse” lyrics of Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter, but sadder. Then there is a section of poems often addressed to us as “Citizens.” This section is called “The True, the Good and Beautiful,” values that might suggest hierarchies, or ideals, but which for a democratic poet like Schwartz are contenting and non-hierarchical, a quality we find in his later work, when all of the details in “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine,” including its current location, all weigh about the same. He is always like the kid in his poem who rejects either/or for both, and in his later poems which are talky and manically ecstatic, which Ashbery thinks maybe we have yet to catch up with even as he concedes that he does not like them as much as the earlier lyrics, he tries to say everything at once. We tend to think of Schwartz in relation to his friends, Berryman and Lowell, and also Plath, of course, as poets of personal life, of confession, but that is only part of the story. They are political poets who are at odds with hierarchies of privilege, and this section is particularly important for understanding how Vaudeville is a sort of pinecone, less overt in politics, for some of what we see develop in Lowell and Berryman in the late fifties and sixties. These social poems cast what KRS-One might call their “edutainment messages” in a voice that is something like a theatrical, dubious and found cultural item in itself. Then the third section of Vaudeville, “The Early Morning Light” ends the book with its updated-Elizabethan vibe, with a sequence of sonnets, which have cumulative, downbeat force.
I am pretty sure that when they made a movie version of Kiss Me, Kate, when Anne Miller was spazzing out and tap-dancing her face off to “Tom, Dick or Harry,” one of the hepcats dancing around her in Technicolor doublet and tights was in the same color pattern and geometry of the cover of Vaudeville for a Princess. Only the book did not get very good reviews or sell many copies and is not in print because it was ahead of its time as well as at the back of its time.
3
Everybody is crazy about the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which is the kind of rare story that once you read it a few times, you find yourself thinking about at odd moments throughout your life. “Just tonight, I was thinking how the narrator’s father admired William Howard Taft” is something that I could have said many evenings, as I often think, “Is not Somerville a city of churches?” The ending of that story is one that epitomizes Schwartz, in his utterly sad pessimism, and his way of suggesting many hours in failed psychoanalysis and an overwhelming sense that after a disastrous childhood or after disastrous parents, you never get well, and also his articulation of the most teenage-sounding discovery of inalterable fate imaginable: “everything you do matters too much.” When you turn twenty-one, it won’t be fun at all, “the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.” There is, I believe, a little Delmore Schwartz in the poems that David Ferry writes sometimes about people trapped by immovable sadness that they were not able to lift before dying, and his sadness in remembering them and their sometimes inalterable and painful anguish feels like realizing how utterly sincere and real the sadness can be in a Delmore Schwartz poem. There are a lot of people remembered this way in David Ferry poems the way there are a lot of really good Delmore Schwartz poems full of moments that are so unguarded that I think of Christopher Smart saying that he has a “greater compass both of mirth and of melancholy than another.” Ferry steps back from them while they step into the darkness. Ferry has been around Boston and Cambridge so long that of course he remembers Schwartz being around. Like Schwartz, he used to live on Ellery Street. Chestnuts. Not chestnuts really, but brick sidewalks. The poets of Schwartz’s generation died so young, a lot of them. What bad habits.
But I digress. What I really mean to say is that there is another ending of a different, but in some ways similar, short story by Delmore Schwartz, and I think this ending is the one that we should keep in mind when we read Vaudeville for a Princess. Cynthia Ozick uses it as the tile for her brief collections of Schwartz’s stories and poems, a book that I have used when teaching mixed genre creative writing classes. “Screeno” is like “Dreams” with an ending that gives the narrator some stoic peace and pride and joy in not only the goodness of art but the goodness of goodness itself. This is not really what makes it so apropos to our discussion, but some plot summary is necessary.
The plot is simple. A twenty-five-year-old poet named Cornelius Schmidt is hungry for wild renown, so much so that the only things he can bear to read in the newspapers are the obituaries of great men. Schwartz sees our culture as one where the desire for fame is intense, and it also makes people kind of stupid, and he so fits right into this culture himself, with popcorn. He is also somebody who is torn between high culture and pop culture, which he enjoys with a guilty conscious, and before getting fed up and tired of the obits, we see him force-feeding himself classical music records before gorging himself on what he really likes, “certain singing records of a celebrated movie actress.” Who this might be, I am not sure, but the narrator enjoys Schmidt’s discomfort at liking something his mean and judgmental friends, if he has any, would probably laugh about even as he tacitly defends this taste by finding it sweet, and we can hear this ironic pleasure in the way he makes it sound like porn. Cornelius is the kind of guy who folds up his own poems and puts them inside copies of books by great poets in the hopes that the greatness will rub off. The sense is that if Cornelius could unify his sensibilities, and maybe admit what he really likes, he would further along the road. The critics might not have recognized the connection between Groucho and Eliot, but Groucho and Eliot sure did. No doubt you are thinking of how different literary culture is now, as we can find Stephanie Burt, who is representative in this respect, writing as well and passionately about Frozen 2 or Taylor Swift as she does about C.D. Wright or Monica Youn or Donne or Herbert for that matter, and not with a sense of ironic campiness or hierarchical snobbery. Jarrell has an early poem called “Bad Music,” the title evoking the god-awful taste of most undergraduates at the time.
There is hope for Cornelius though. He goes to the movies, a double feature of a Spencer Tracy movie and what sounds like a Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy movie. Must have been a Loews theater. He is excited because “Spencer Tracy was an actor who had often pleased him by an absolute unself-consciousness, and Cornelius wished to permit himself to be moved by the operetta music.” The year seems to be either 1939 or 1940 because during the newsreel, we see Franklin Roosevelt trying to prepare the country for war, and Roosevelt had to sneak around about that until things were already getting hot for England. Roosevelt was a bit like Cornelius, hiding the true nature of his affections and taste, preferring democracy to fascism. So the Depression is ending. By the way, I want to let you know that I am still not quite at the moment that I think is so important, so typifying of the Vaudeville project, but it’s worth pointing out Schwartz is highly aware of the historical moments that surround the smaller moments of his art. Schwartz’s poetry is like a streetcar line or train that runs at oblique angles to popular events and culture, with occasional intersections and persistent commentary upon things both inside and outside of the poems.
For instance, aside from being a hyper-real evocation of a local landscape with scrubby industry around and uneven sidewalks made of local bricks, this poem from Summer Knowledge might seem like a throwaway about how stuffy Cambridge and Boston seem, or how things felt very uncertain at the end of the Depression, and that things ahead were very ominous, and these things would all be true:
Cambridge, 1937
At last the air fragrant, the bird’s bubbling whistle
Succinct in the unknown unsettled trees;
O little Charles, beside the Georgian colleges
And milltown New England; at last the wind soft,
The sky unmoving, and the dead look
Of factory windows separate. at last,
From wind gray and wet:
for now the sunlight
Thrashes its wet shellac on brickwalk and gutter,
White splinters streak midmorning and doorstep,
Winter passes as the lighted streetcar
Moves at midnight, one scene of the past,
Droll and unreal, stiff, stilted, and hooded.
I am not joking when I say that there is something in this landscape that causes a bit of depression. If you think of 1937 as the year of the “Little Depression,” the year conservatives in the government and Roosevelt himself, in a fit of starchiness according to the admiring book about him Freedom from Fear, backed off on economy-sustaining relief, their heads like a lit streetcar at midnight, like winter itself, like scenes of the past, their heads “unreal, stiff, stilted,” not with it, backwards, looking the wrong way, holding things up, backwards ass conservative place, probably how Schwartz, the kid from New York, saw it. When he is at his best, when he is well enough to write at the top of his powers, Schwartz is a poet whose work is always in sharp counterpoint to events and contemporary life. Maybe you thought the crabbed sonnets on politics and history that Lowell wrote in the sixties were from just from reading Eugenio Montale. I’ve got some compressed poetry that stays news for you. One of the things that makes Life Studies and Dream Songs so moving in their poems in friendship for Schwartz—elegies from Berryman, a poem about Ellery Street that Schwartz took as an elegy—is that they pick up where he leaves off, and we can say the same thing about American poetry in general. Even shorn of all this social meaning, the spatial metaphor for the moment of time as a single and lit-up streetcar passing through a nightscape as if it were still the middle of the day is like a whole book of haiku in one bump.
So anyway, Cornelius is at the movies like Wittgenstein after a hard day of scratching his head except Cambridge University asks Wittgenstein to please scratch his head in England, and there is a very lucrative game of bingo before the movies begin. Remember, vaudeville is dead, but the movies are a bit more interactive still at the time, with stronger sense of one-of-a-kind event and happening about them. Movies trying to be theater was a thing. Cornelius is feeling like a big loser, but he wins. Accepting the prize or several hundred bucks, he makes the mistake of admitting that he is a poet, prompting the emcee to make jokes about his big feet (“They’re Longfellows”), and asking him to recite a poem, which he does in ludicrously inappropriate fashion considering the populist nature of the event, with a particularly bleak and famous passage about history from T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion.” This is the moment that matters for Vaudeville, the almost Dadaist frustration of the audience’s expectations by delivering something bleak and real being met by the audience’s valid laughter at the young man’s pretension and move for crowd-pleasing kudos in the attention economy of the movie theater. It almost does not matter, for our purposes, that the story has an additional twist. An old man, a musician with a violin case, calls out that he has the winning ticket, and though he is mistaken, Cornelius tries to strong-arm the theater into giving the old man a prize as well. The audience getting impatient with this sudden leftwing agitation on the poet’s part delaying their pleasure, Cornelius forfeits his winnings to the old man, his elderly unsuccessful doppelgänger. Walking home, pleased with himself and the world and accepting his solitude as heroic in a Spencer Tracy sort of way, Cornelius privately recites William Dunbar’s “Be merry, man, and tak not sair in mind” to himself, a paen towards expressing all of the cultural and spiritual values of being what you might call “a mensch, a good dude.” By the time he writes “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” Auden did not really have to remind poetry readers that “to be free/ Is often to be lonely,” a certain amount of alienation from all other people and culture the ground floor, not just praiseworthy but desirable, a basic ingredient of conscious life. This was an early story, not published in Schwartz’s lifetime, one of his best.
Go back a moment. Think of that audience, and then think about the book. There are jokes, this book looks like prose, it’s inspired by Danny Kaye, but guess what? It’s going to be bleak poetry. It’s dedicated to then Princess Elizabeth, who is about to be married, and we get “The Difficulty of Divorce.” We get Iago, “the lowdown on life.” We get Hamlet, “something is wrong with everyone.” The last poem in the section is “Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve.” In his dramatic monologue for multiple voices based on the Acts of the Apostles, the dove does not descend and bring the gift of eloquence, but more stammering, not tongues, stammering, and none of the twelve really likes being alive anymore. What has gotten into Danny Kaye now? Here is the Jesus or Holy Spirit of this poem:
“Unspeakable unnatural goodness is
Risen and shines, and never will ignore us;
He glows forever in all consciousness;
Forgiveness, love, and hope possess the pit,
And bring our endless guilt, like shadow’s bars:
No matter what we do, he stares at it!
What pity then deny? what debt defer?
We know he looks at us like the stars,
And we shall never be as once we were,
This life will never be what once it was!”
Boom. There is something like a Dadaist thwarting of expectation in Schwartz’s despairs in poems and prose and in the structure itself of Vaudeville for a Princess. Holy smoke, it’s the atom bomb. So much for Tom and also Jerry. This was hardly a Technicolor Biblical picture, too much Victor Mature and not enough Hedy Lamarr. I guess Oppenheimer was thinking along similar lines when he remembered the lines when he saw the first test one go off. That shining eyeball in the sky turns up in the old woman’s delirium—remember Hiroshima—at the end of Kurosawa’s Light in August. We’re reading about it in Stage the Magazine after Dark. The photo album’s black pages are disintegrating as we turn the pages.
4
Canned language is a problem for this post-war American poet Delmore Schwartz writing early in the Cold War and after the example of mass culture bringing us not only extended radio lives for form vaudeville stars like Jack Benny and Fred Allen who are aging out of the movies, but totalitarian mayhem in the news, and yet there is something about genuine language being both noble and funny that operates as a survival principle in Vaudeville for a Princess, something that we could also say about the good medicine section of Ginsberg’s Howl, a poem that is far more famous for the way that it tries to live with the bomb. I’m thinking of the parts where he lets Carl Solomon know that he is with him, sharing a sense of cultural identity, mad humor, delight in language and in idiom. The first short poem in the book is a variation on a sentence by Pascal, “True eloquence mocks eloquence.”
Eloquence laughs at rhetoric,
Is ill at ease in Zion,
Or baa-baas like the lucid lamb,
And snickers at the lion,
And smiles, being meticulous,
Because truth is ridiculous.
You could say that Schwartz does vaudeville language, and Ginsberg is there with Lenny Bruce at the burlesque. There you have it, Schwartz getting Blakean and recommending the posture of the lamb against the lion. If you don’t have the several hundred dollars at this point you will need to purchase a copy of Schwartz’s book because our discussions here, you can find the prose sections of Vaudeville in a posthumous collection of personal essays and humorous writing The Ego Is Always at the Wheel, and you will see that there is a sort of genetic relationship between Schwartz’s impromptu style of writing prose and Lenny Bruce’s jazzy and associative routines, within his “bits” of prepared material like “Thank You, Masked Man” and “The Sound,” as well as in his freeform pieces that he used to preserve his sanity and to practice his art as his legal issues weighed against him, and talk as practiced by Bellow’s characters Henderson, Herzog and Humboldt, and the performance of talk as the engine that moves The Adventures of Augie March and Roth’s novels like The Professor of Desire, the inventive sentence-by-sentence joy of Grace Paley’s The Little Distrubance of Man, and so on. It’s ironic that in his essay that apparently was the first to use the term postmodern in a discussion of poetry, David Antin really is quite snarky about Schwartz, calling him and Jarrell more or less assemblers of bric-a-brac and makers of uninspired collage, while Antin himself would go on to make “talk poetry.” Nobody owns the great free and improving world of bullshitting, close to a kind of poetry, and that is why there is a sort of revelry in the way dialogue overlaps and interrupts in life-force movies by Orson Welles and Robert Altman.
One of the common ways of thinking of the new American poetry movements of the time, is that they move against the sort of formalist poetry and generally stodgy ways of thinking about poetry and language encouraged by New Criticism. I have a theory about some of the preoccupations of that moment that in a roundabout way might explain how Vaudeville splits from an intellectual milieu that nurtures it, and also why younger poets suddenly embraced an earthier sense of life, a wilder and more derelict and seemingly obscene vocabulary. I’m not sure if it’s right, because I am in truth, not much of a scholar who is interested in too much critical apparatus so much as I am a writer who thinks through poetry and primary texts and my experiences when I am not reading, and this was before the O.E.D. was online. My roommate had him, and I remember him saying, “This old fellow is a pain in the ass.” My theory is that professors of the new critical flavor or era were very hung up on individual words and their definitions, philology. I think the assignment involved looking up and commenting upon every noun, verb and modifier in “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” or something like that, and that’s why we you read poems by poets trained by and as close-readers—Heaney, Pinsky, Hass—you find a good deal of riffing on the roots and definitions of words. In Schwartz, who was of the generation that at least partially taught the generation of the poets born in the late thirties and early forties, we feel this in his interest in idiom taking him in surprising and destabilizing and fresh, even postmodern, directions in some of the great openings of the prose interludes. Here is the opening of “Hamlet, or There Is Something Wrong with Everyone”:
Hamlet came from an old-upper class family. He was the only son of a king. He was very intelligent, though somewhat of an intellectual, and he was quite handsome too, except for a tendency to get fat in the face and thicken.
This is wonderful. I think I once heard my father say that some guest on Johnny Carson was “getting a bit fat in the face.” How horrible, the way that language uses everybody, and so we have to push back.
Sometimes in this section, there is another mark of Schwartz’s ear for “true eloquence”, the ironic distance between the claims of syntax on rationality with the slightly asinine statement of common thinking, partially amused and partially appalled by what passes for intelligence in a country with a truly idiotic reverence for fame and success, the cause of much personal suffering in Schwartz’s poetry and also, as mass culture has always a potentially lethal side, for everybody. We are all of a sudden paying attention to the prose as prose because we are in a poetry book. How weird the language around us is, even when it seems to be behaving in a normal way.
Cars are very important, even if one does not care very much about cars. This is because most people admire a handsome car very much. If one is an owner of a fine car, then one is regarded by the populace in general as being very successful and prosperous.
(“The Ego Is Always at the Wheel”)
There is a slightly mocking side to subtly inflated diction. I once heard a waiter at the Katz Delicatessen say, “If you will sit here, I will be your waiter.” I then asked for a cup of a coffee, and he said, “If you want coffee, you will have to go elsewhere, but if you wish to stay, I will bring you a hot tea, in a hot glass without a handle.” He could see that I was the kind of upstate hick who would object, but really defensive people never get out of their own neighborhood, so I said, “Fine.” Writers are usually at the sweet and/or sour spot between solitude and company, and one of Schwartz’s specialties is the toxicity of literary company no matter how well anybody is doing , as we see in “The World Is a Wedding,” a novella about a circle of young snobs who are not very good writers,” and “Fun with the Famous, Stunned by the Stars,” one of the prose interludes in Vaudeville. But writers need friendship, and a lot of performative talk begins at or around a table. He has that early poem about how people always talk about each other “mockingly, maliciously,” a poem that hit me right between the eyes when I was in high school, especially his surprising acceptance of this fact of social life, which would hardly be comforting to a reader with a really awful pimple on the side of his left nostril, because “we need/ Each other’s clumsiness, each other’s wit,/ Each other’s company, and our own pride” and that all boils down to “our common love.”
Humor and poetry have always just learned or discovers a new language or heard the delight in language just changed and always changing. We can hear the sound of dream intellectuals enjoying their own expertise and one-upmanship and self-education in the opening of “Don Giovanni, or Promiscuity Resembles Grapes,” the kind of love of language that you don’t get in school, but with friends who have also put their elbows to newspapers and books. If you want to play with other members of the dream intelligentsia, Grandma Lausch tells Augie March in example as well as in words, you have to be informed:
Don Giovanni, that much-publicized Spanish sportsman, playboy, man about town, loose liver, and singer has been dealt with extensively and comprehensively by such experts as Mozart, Da Ponte, Balzac, George Byron, George Bernard Shaw, and other deep thinkers.
So it would just be gilding the lily, carrying coals to Newcastle, and really redundant to rehearse the whole business of his life and works once more, except that in some respects these profound commentators have missed the point. Perhaps this was because they have the benefit of the Kinsey report’s confusions.
The joke about the Kinsey report is a pop culture standard for 1950 (“According to the Kinsey report, every average man you know/ Prefers his favorite sport when the temperature is low,” according to Cole Porter’s singing barbers in Kiss Me, Kate), but he is also, in a manner of speaking, getting the librettist DePonte and Byron “and other deep thinkers” into diction of the society pages in a tabloid. If you go back to “Mixed Feelings,” you might hear something similar, Ashbery channeling the voice of a corny announcer addressing the characters in a newsreel as if the “characters” can hear them, a sort of move you might have seen in a Looney Tunes cartoon, with an interjection suddenly of Mel Blanc doing a corny paternalistic voice asking Felix the Cat if he really wants to paint glue on the bottom of that mousetrap right before he somehow explodes and steps out of his fur. The whole thing ends like a joke with a punchline with a maybe sexist/homophobic joke after rejecting explanations for Don Giovanni’s unhappy psychology by saying he was just a Lesbian and liked to sleep with girls. This seals it as a performative voice operation for one’s pals, and the only reason it does not sound completely awful is that in poem after poem, Schwartz rejects the possibility for explanation to either diagnose or heal any real problems, a point in makes in different ways at the ends of his studies of Hamlet, Iago, in two essays that end much more sadly, and I have to figure that most poets thought it was “crazy” that there were doctors who actually regarded gayness as illness. Finding a psychiatrist who did not think he was crazy for being gay was a long time coming for Ginsberg.
In his poetry as well as his prose, Schwartz is always capable of perfect sincerity, an effect as well as an affect that he carries off by allowing his idioms to destabilize so that language can never be anything but something that thinly veils. Here is the open, moving, sincere Schwartz really talking about his own struggles with mental health at the end of his Hamlet piece, letting his voice morph into that of a clerk who must apologize for lost luggage or something like that to a customer who is irate for good reason, but it is not like anybody means to lose somebody’s luggage, even his own.
…However, for what it is worth, and to use clinical terms terms, I will say in brief that I think Hamlet suffered from a well-known pathological disorder. He was manic; and he was depressive. No one knows what the real causes of the manic-depressive disorder are, whether physical or mental or both, and that is why no one understands Hamlet… and no one understands why, no one is responsible, and no one can really alter matters, and yet no one can stop thinking that someone is to blame. To be manic-depressive is just like being small or tall or strong, blond, fat—there is no reason for it, it is quite arbitrary, no seems to have had any choice in the matter, and it is very important, certainly it is very important. . . This is the reason that the story of Hamlet is very sad, bad, and immoral . . . In this way we must recognize the fact that there is something wrong with everybody.
The ending of “Iago, or the Lowdown on Life” is even better, and even worse, and again, I can’t tell if Schwartz is channeling an instructor’s voice or the gee-whiz tone of an incredulous student making an important discovery that real issues are very basic, but this freshness is intensely moving and transformative of the dryness that should be the opposite of discussing anything really important. After rejecting various motives for Iago’s treachery and vulgarity before agreeing with Coleridge about “motiveless malignity” and then speculating about Shakespeare himself the way one discusses a masterful dentist or lawyer who has done something self-destructive. “He must have been a very unhappy man, even though very talented.” And then the closer, a one sentence paragraphs that is one of those sentences that I often remember when I find out some awful thing: “He seems to be saying that all he can say is that Desdemona is in her grave.” Try forgetting that.
One of the big finds for me in Craig Morgan Teicher’s selection of Schwartz’s poetry, fiction and critical essays is “The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World” for its discussion of Schwartz’s delight in and respect for the supposed mistakes he finds as a contingent composition instructor in student papers using idiom that seems right to them and also of how “In America itself the fact of many peoples and the fact that so large a part of the population has some immigrant background and cherishes the fragments of another language creates a multilingual situation in which words are misused and the language is also enriched by new words and new meanings.” The essay, written about the same time as he wrote Vaudeville, shows his subtle discomfort with the whole hierarchical and class situation of American universities, particularly at WASPy Harvard. As for Schwartz’s feelings about Harvard, where he had the contingent faculty blues on top of feelings of social insecurity wafted on fumes of anti-Semitic micro-aggressions, no doubt—we get a small sample of this at the start of a twelve-liner wedged like a folded coaster amid the sonnets at the backend of the 1950 theatrical program:
Sick and used Cambridge in the suck-
Ing sound of slow rain at dead dawn
Amid the sizzle sound of car and truck
As if continually thin cloth were torn,
Blue light, plum light, fading violet light,
And then the oyster light of the wool sky:
Is this not, after all, appropriate
Light for a long used poet such as I?
(“The Morning Light for One with Too Much Luck”)
Anybody who has ever heard, appalled or not, a chorus of “Yankees suck” at Fenway Park has to get this one. Schwartz is a great poet of adjunct life. At the same time, the essay shows Schwartz’s engagement with Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, closing the distance between poetry and prose, much as translating Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell must have. So the academic focus on words as words, the example of Joyce and appreciation for his own family’s immigrant experience of language is here in Vaudeville, and also, because Schwartz is an original synthesizer, something like a Dadaist’s collection of found language, which Rimbaud practices when he praises things like “artless rhymes,” old primers, the signs of inns, badly punctuated pornography and stuff like that. This is the important Rimbaud for American poets, according to Marjorie Perloff’s “poetics of indeterminacy,” aside from all those other versions of Rimbaud as an influence that contend for our headspace, including to the one where Jim Morrison gets big as Elvis and splits his leather pants, excuse me. I am thinking of Eddie Murphy doing Elvis doing “My Way.” Bronx cheer.
Not just in terms of verbal registers, Schwartz does things like this with broad cultural idioms, even plots, using the vocabulary of one form of entertainment and then departing from it and lighting on another one to work his gloomy magic in the spirit of Eliot’s complete definition of “objective correlative.” For instance in “The Difficulty of Divorce,” a prose piece explicitly addressed to then Princess Elizabeth on the eve of her marriage, including what sounds like the plot of The Palm Beach Story by Preston Sturges about two people getting a divorce having to pretend to commit adultery by having a one night stand, and Schwartz is also channeling the sort of prose idiom nobody is taking seriously, humor writing from magazines. Irving Howe points out that Schwartz can sound a bit like James Thurber in his prose interludes, and I think that is particularly true of Thurber’s literary parodies that can be found, for instance, in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze or Is Sex Necessary? and other books from the thirties.
But he never sounds like Thurber for long, moving directly from his almost strictly funny spoof “Existentialism: The Inside Story” to a poem that compares his troubled psyche to the Civil War using comic rhymes, invoking the racist minstrelsy of “Camp Town Races” and many other American songs along the way:
Davis protects his friends to the end.
The Negroes chant in the promised land,
The Negroes jig at heaven’s gate,
Lincoln explains why he hesitates,
What right which wrong attack defends,
And who with what will make amends.
This is the famous Civil War.
Assassins stop in Baltimore.
Grant closes in remorsefully,
Longing for home and family,
As Lincoln signals for unity
Until Booth kills him pointlessly.
* * *
The mind resembles all creation,
The mind is all things, in a way:
Deceptive as pure observation,
Heartbreaking as a tragic play.
Idle, denial; false affirmation;
And vain the heart’s imagination—
Unless or if on Judgment Day
When God says what He has to Say.
The ending evokes the voice of God at the end of Hardy’s “Channel Firing,” the God who says, “Ha, ha.” Transitions like this from the funny to the deeply and darkly and defiantly not funny at all are part of Schwartz’s project. Schwartz practices “culture-jamming” within the confines of his own book, making us better readers. The only despised idioms are political lies, hatred, and advertising. I’m sure that Joyce would have found a way to use Thurber and Stephen Foster, too, if he had lived over here.
No doubt a lot of critics were not thinking of Rimbaud and artless rhymes and upsetting expectations when they encountered Schwartz’s charming prose and juxtapositions. They could not have been thinking of Berryman’s Mr. Bones in The Dream Songs even though both Schwartz and Berryman are seeing racism as part of an American death trip because Berryman hadn’t written his Henry poems, which one-up Schwartz and praise him in that antic and disturbing amusement park. They probably just thought that Delmore Schwartz had started writing some bad and didactic poetry with obvious rhymes, and they did not know how to take the prose at all, probably because they thought of humor pieces in The New Yorker primarily as something to read in the john, not really as something to think about as a potential source of idiom-theft for the sake of transformation by an American poet doing something unusual with a French poet whom they mistakenly regarded as a symbolist demanding a particular kind of serious reading.
5
Let’s get back to Kiss Me, Kate. It’s possible that standing here in 2021 that we would misread the various feints and echoes and borrowings and meditations upon Shakespeare’s songs and characters and the sonnet and Marlowe/Raleigh’s passionate shepherd, thinking that all of these are examples of Schwartz not wearing his learning lightly upon his sleeve, but instead seeing this as high-culture warrior stuff with a silver helmet and stars on his breast and pearl-handled revolvers. Not so. We have already seen how Vaudeville followed closely upon the heels of Cole Porter’s double musical about a production of The Taming of the Shrew that is also a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. There are a lot of charming connections between the Schwartz and Porter’s productions. One is that they both insist on economic contingencies, with the Shakespearean comic hero “come to wife it wealthily in Padua,” and a modern-sounding girl trying to choose among suitors in “Tom, Dick or Harry,” with one offering a lot of money, and another offering less money but social standing, and another offering neither money, but really amazing sex. Here is Mr. Money:
I’ve made a haul in all the leading rackets,
From which rip-roarin’ rich
I happen to be.
And if thou woulds’t attain the upper brackets
Marry me, marry me, marry me.
This guy sounds gangster on the old Broadway cast album, practically denasal. The social standing and less money option sounds hilarious, like some fantasy of a Beacon Hill character, so it is a surprise to learn that Cole Porter may have gone to Yale, but really he was from Wyoming or someplace—
I come thee a thoroughbred patrician,
Still spraying
My decaying
Family tree.
To give a social boost to thy position
Marry me, marry me, marry me.
While the song begins with a direct quotation from Shakespeare, once the song heats up, the idiom becomes free American singspiel, with the sorts of live and timely phrases “leading rackets” and “thoroughbred patrician” that pop in Schwartz’s prose music and prefigure the even more dramatic shifts in colliding diction that we find all over the place in the first few great books by Ginsberg, the dirty metaphysician, and Corso, the grungy Romantic, and all of O’Hara, the poet of perfect poise, and lively in Ashbery for decades. The song is a lot dirtier than Schwartz allows himself, as the slangy “Tom, Dick or Harry,” meaning any old person gets transformed and re-arranged, repeatedly, first “Art thou Tom, Harry or Dick?” and then “Art thou Harry, Dick or Tom?” and this gets repeated enough times that we realize that Porter is making a joke about “a hairy dick,” and we know that sex will ultimately trump class and money both, as the song ends, approximately,
A dicka Dick Dick Dick
A dicka Dick Dick Dick
A dicka Dick Dick Dick
A dicka Dick
A dicka Dick
A dicka Dick
A dicka Dick
Everybody must have noticed this. Happier poets to come, less ostensibly committed to the idea of grownup behavior than Delmore Schwartz generally is in his poems would allow more room for such life-affirming vulgarity of one kind or another. Cole Porter’s list songs like “You’re the Top” with a home for “Napoleon Brandy” and “Garbo’s salary” and “cellophane” probably have something to do with the topicality that American poetry comes into in the fifties and sixties, not to mention how Anita O’Day learns how to change the song and break it down because eighth notes work best for her. “You’re the bop.”
One of the best books about poetry and popular music is Philip Furia’s The Poets of Tin Pan Alley. Here you can find some amazing things about lyrics as poetry. For instance, Furia makes a more than compelling case about the relationship between the way his major American lyricists and composers “rag” lyrics over music to emphasize rhymes made by stretching words and fragmenting them over the melodies to allow internal rhymes to function as end-rhymes and the way that, say, William Carlos Williams fragments syntax with line breaks. He also gives us a sense of the social background of the songwriters, with some of them educated like Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, and others arriving at music with public New York City educations, and most of them, like Schwartz, coming from upwardly mobile immigrant Jewish backgrounds. George and Ira Gershwin were from Brooklyn, too. Robert Pinsky notes how people of this generation valued poetry or the idea of poetry enough to make the names of poets common first names, Milton and Sidney, for example. Furia gets us further towards the poetry that actually filled the heads of our song writers. Some of it was pretty schlocky, and thus we get some terrible tearjerkers and histrionics from Cole Porter when he wanted to be serious. But Furia gets to the light verse tradition, and in particular the Carolyn Wells’ Vers de Société Anthology, a compendium of light verse going back to Shakespeare and the silver poets of the seventeenth century “to nineteenth century verse by Lewis Carol and Ernest Dowson,” and also about how major magazines were full of light verse. I went and found that this anthology is available for free online now, and I was surprised to find that Carolyn Wells was also a mystery writer whose books are still in print.
So it is not surprising to find Cole Porter writing Kiss Me, Kate. As a matter of fact, Rogers and Hart had already done Two Gentleman from Verona as The Boys from Syracuse, and recently I read in The New York Times about an unsuccessful musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1939 that featured Louis Armstrong as Bottom, Butterfly McQueen as Puck, the Benny Goodman orchestra, and the enduringly beautiful “Darn That Dream,” a song that you should really hear done by Dinah Washington and a group including Clifford Brown on trumpet and Max Roach on drums. We can hear W.H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror in this light as well, another mixed genre work. When Auden writes songs, it is clear that he could write pop songs, with the “cabaret songs” in his great collection Another Time like “Calypso” and “Funeral Blues” basically saying to Noel Coward, “Hey, move it on over, bub.” The pop, faux-Elizabethan spirit is everywhere in the songs that Lorenz Hart—what a name for a poet that. Consider the introductory verses to “I Could Write a Book” from Pal Joey, a musical with a libretto by John O’Hara based on Lardner-esque short stories in the form of badly spelled letters from an unscrupulous and amoral and not very intelligent singer that Lorenz Hart manages to turn into a sort of essay collection about making art and being an artist written in songs that embody different motives and ways of conducting art and love. This great work is hidden by a lousy movie version that hides its originality. We usually hear the song as a pretty ballad for a soloist, but it is really a comic duet, and when you look at the introduction you see something that is characteristic about American songwriting, its collaging of found diction with more conventional kinds of eloquence, a characteristic of pop even today.
Joey:
If they asked me, I could write a book
About the way you walk and whisper and look.
I could write a preface on how we met
So the world would never forget
And the simple secret of the plot
Is just to tell them that I love you a lot.
Then the world discovers how my book ends
How to make two lovers of friends.
Linda:
Used to hate to go to school.
I never cracked a book,
I played the hook.
To write I used to think was wasting ink.
It was never my endeavor
To be too clever and smart.
Now I suddenly feel
A longing to write in my heart.
Then pretty soon, Linda—a quail, Joey, who is always a rat, calls her, and a mouse—is on a different kind of hook, and Joey is, too. He is hoisted on his own petard. Or is he? She is singing it too. “If they asked me, I could write a book.” The situation, the characters, the enjoyable conceits, the letter writing itself, are vaguely Shakespearean, but the demotic breeze of popular music, the principle of contrast, is all over Vaudeville for a Princess. Schwartz may complain later on that Tin Pan Alley gets together with Hollywood to eat our heads. It really does, and it happened to him, too. He is always influenced by, borrowing from, fighting with popular culture, and in Vaudeville he writes sonnets and rewrites Feste’s song from Twelfth Night—
And this knowledge, like the Jews,
Can make glad that I exit!
with a hey ho, the stupid past,
and a ho ho, and a ha ha at last.
And while William Carlos Williams thought that Raleigh was right about how we cannot go back to the country, Schwartz gives us a very dark version of “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” that shows that he suspects that Raleigh’s nymph is equally compelling and right about love:
Come live with me and be my wife,
We’ll seek the peaks and pits of life
And run the gauntlets of the heart
On mountains or the depths of art.
We’ll do the most that thinking can
Against emotion’s Ghenghis Khan.
And then things get worse from there. Things are rocky in love. But things are rocky in love for Lorenz Hart as well. Listen to “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “I’ve Got Five Dollars.” Whoah! Lots of fighting. People used to drink too much.
Let’s end this little trip down Tin Pan Alley by getting back to Mr. Cole Porter and Kiss Me, Kate, as Frank might say, a melting ice cube sliding down the bar. Schwartz has a poem about a barbershop, “To Figaro in the Barbershop.” The poem is about how service economies create an alienation between the customer and the worker, and it’s also about how weird it is that anybody else would get so near your brain without getting closer to you. It feels creepy and sad, which is just what Schwartz intends. It also comes right after the prose of “Don Giovanni or Promiscuity Resembles Grapes,” and it suggests that part of the problem is privilege is that whole dynamic between served and server is getting in the way of love. A year before this, we have Cole Porter’s standard that has become a jazz standard as well. In “It’s Too Darn Hot,” the barbers make jokes about the Kinsey report—just like Delmore—and sing about the bounteous sex life that they enjoy, apparently fifty out of fifty two weeks of the year—Delmore, not so much, although it is never too hot for that, according to the barbers, no matter what they are ostensibly claiming, as nothing worth happening is supposed to happen by some sort of fiat, except maybe in a car.
In an essay on “Stranger in the Village,” Teju Cole notes that when Baldwin wrote his fifties essays, he had no idea how powerful and great popular music would become because of Black artists and culture. We could say something similar about Delmore Schwartz in Vaudeville and popular music in general. He just doesn’t know that Miles Davis is going to feel around with quintet and “If I Wrote a Book,” and Coltrane will be there, and then A Love Supreme will happen, that Bob Marley did not live long enough to get the Nobel Prize for his lyrics but Bob Dylan did, and so on. Schwartz thinks that the popular music that inspires his book and work will have about the same chances as his marriage or any other romantic happiness will have to move the world in a positive direction: zero, like the Zeppelin business after the Hindenburg disaster, not a bunch of Christmas carols. The verdict is not in for us yet. In “I Am Very Exquisitely Pleased,” what Schwartz feels is ambivalent about what he loves to hear. One one hand, he loves music on his radio as much as Frank O’Hara wants to hear Prokofieff, Honegger or Grieg on his in “Radio,” a poem from Meditations in an Emergency that seems spun out of Schwartz, consciously or not but perfecting it with poise and acceptance that the older poet lacked. For Schwartz, neither bad news nor corporate control and propaganda can be turned off like the radio that frames the music:
Shhhhhhhhhhh!
Suddenly certainly the music begins
Tinkling as for the birthday of a child,
The dogs and fates are reconciled
By motions soft aloft as Zeppelins.
And stops, continues, stops or mounts because
Of powers strange as stars. Or good or bad
Or both, but mostly much misunderstood,
True, false, and fabulous as Santa Claus.
With incoherent braggadocio,
The storm flows overhead, beyond control,
—Yet who would play it like a radio
If but he could? These concerts to the soul
Have helpless strength like summer. One must go
Blindfolded and bewildered, groping and dumb,
Suspicious of the kingdom which has become.
We would love to turn the good news off and happiness on like a radio, but as O’Hara points out, you don’t get to choose what is on the radio. The miracles might have been there for shut-ins while he was at work. As for who controls the airwaves, Schwartz was “suspicious” even before there were Clear Channel, Apple Music, Spotify, or whatever glass tube conveys your favorite blah-blah-blah-wonka-wonka podcasts and feeds. The sequence of sonnets is called “The Early Morning Light,” which he links to Fitzgerald and drinking, or painfully drying out, but it also conveys a sense that this post-war world is a new world, and in these sonnets, you can find the full range of Schwartz’s themes and concerns, both private and social ones included. They all read smoothly and freshly and surprisingly enough to me, and while they have a reputation for triteness and being uninspired, partially because of what James Atlas says about them, I don’t think this judgment holds up as well, and perhaps it has more to do with the things that Schwartz does with diction and rhetoric in the second section of the book, which is eccentric and nowhere near as on the level as it may have appeared at the time.
6
It’s surprising to find Schwartz finding an America that is already starting to resemble Nixonland in “Disorder Overtakes Us All Day Long,” early, 1950, as he seems to be reflecting on how the Red Scare comes on the heels of the New Deal. In this poem, you can feel the old left politics that must have been part of his bond with Berryman and Lowell, even as the poem compares young Elizabeth to something her oldest son Charles is often compared to, a horse:
Lo, from the muff of sleep, though darkened, strong,
I rose to read the fresh news of the age:
“Elizabeth would like to be a horse!”
(Though she’ll be Queen of England, in due course.)
Ha. Following the pattern established with the prose interludes of the comic followed by the serious, the next part of the poem could almost be Lowell in Near the Ocean, name-checking an important New Deal holdover in the Truman administration.
While in the South Pacific Southern boys
Upon a flagship raised the Stars & Bars
As if the South had won the Civil War.
Meanwhile in Washington Ickes declares
That every plant owned by the government
Should go to G.I.s when they come back home.
—What does he think this, Utopia?
He should have stayed in bed and read a poem.
These politicians have an easy time,
They can say nothing, they have no shame,
Kiss babies and blow promises to all
And chant that everything is wonderful.
Of course, I can’t imagine Lowell, who works from lotifer-seeming perch, worrying that Ickes with his awful name that you can’t help but smile about is being too idealistic and risking inadvertently perhaps, I don’t know, an Eisenhower administration, or some sort of eeven bigger bland liar who sounds like some sort of Frankenstein Reagan. The next part of the poem compares the act of writing a poem to something like governance, a vision of order that can never come together, a making that puts a writer in doubts, and which requires hope to try again. Today, the idea of negative capability is ubiquitous to the point that business school texts on marketing include it as useful information, but it is still news in this poem, and news in the letter to Fitzgerald’s daughter paraphrasing the concept at one point in The Crack Up.
It’s impossible to imagine time-bound Schwartz getting swept up by the heroism of contemporary politicians the way Lowell and Berryman would be able to respond to more charismatic figures like Bobby Kennedy or even develop fan-boy palpitations over Adlai Stevenson. He is more like Auden in “The Managers,” who sees a post-war politician and remarks that it is impossible to imagine this stressed out and spectacled fellow riding a dolphin. “He didn’t care about Kennedy,” Stravinsky joked to Craft while discussing the atonal “Elegy for J.F.K.” that Auden wrote “with carpenter’s measurements.” Even so, there is a battered liberalism in Schwartz’s social poems that we find in the poems in section two of Vaudeville, particularly in the poems addressed to us as citizens. “He Heard the Newsboys Shouting ‘Europe! Europe!’” is particularly beautiful. I think it’s about the experience he must have had of teaching veterans, men who were about ten or twelve years younger than him like Kenneth Koch, who was a veteran recently returned from the Pacific war and who has a beautiful poem about walking around with Schwartz and the older poet telling the nice young middle-class veteran of grisly war to wear a coat.
Dear Citizens,
I heard the newsboys shouting “Europe! Europe!”
It was late afternoon, a winter’s day
Long as a prairie, wool and ashen gray,
And then I heard the silence, drop by drop,
And knew I must confront myself:
“What shall I cry from my window?” I asked myself,
“What shall I say to the citizens below?
Since I have been a privileged character
These four years past. Since I have been excused
From the war for the lesser evil, merciless
As the years to girls who once were beautiful.
What have I done which is a little good?
What apples have I grasped, for all my years?
What starlight have I glimpsed for all my guilt?”
I love that he calls himself “a privileged character” for being able to avoid the war, which anybody who avoided the war was and always will be, though the phrase itself is more found idiom of middle-class irritation, on the same musical scale as “fat in the face,” as the italics indicate. I believe I have heard it pop up in the lexicon that Lenny Brue gave to one of his approving judges in his freedom of speech trials as portrayed in his unscripted talk improvisations and later routines. It’s not too far from this poem to Lowell satirizing his own privilege that allowed him to “make his manic statement” and choose prison without hurting his social standing in the last in “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” While the first part of the poem has this italicized moment of pure idiom, the rest of the poem is a lot of heavy breathing diction that marks this entire section of the book. Schwartz has already, at book’s outset, put us on alert to distinguish “true eloquence” from rhetoric, and the unlikeliness, the absurdity and inappropriateness, the staginess of the language is part of its point. Inflated diction in vaudeville is W.C. Fields doing his Dickensian doubletalk. If what Fields is saying is serious or tragic, surprise.
Then to the silence I said, in hope:
“I am a student of the morning light,
And of the evil native to the heart.
I am a pupil of emotion’s wrongs
Performed upon the glory of the world.
Myself I dedicated long ago
—Or prostituted, shall I say?—to poetry,
The true, the good, and the beautiful,
Infinite fountains inexhaustible,
Full as the sea, old as the rocks,
new as the breaking surf——”
As eloquence, it is wonderful what he says and extravagant the way he says it; as rhetoric, this is like a weeping magician doing an obvious trick. I bet if Cornelius Schmidt had read this to the movie theater in “Screeno,” the place would have gone blotto at his extravagant style which is as calculated as Jack Benny’s ham actor dealing with a professional crisis in confidence as his wife sleeps with the Polish air force and the Nazis occupy Poland in the sublimely anti-fascist Ernst Lubitsch waltz To Be or Not to Be. While I am also reminded of how Bruce joke about how so many writers complain that they have prostituted their talent that half the time when people call their hotel bellboys in Las Vegas a hooker, half the time they send up some guy in a sports coat with a typewriter and a beard, the best American poetry is always picking the lock of privilege and the imposition of language of received dullness and caution and fear and disapproval, and a poet should always remain a student even if a poet becomes a teacher. And while poetry is the place for the truth and goodness and beauty, you have deal with the bad stuff as well. Or as Schwartz’s student Lou Reed puts it on one of his wonderful but not particularly critically acclaimed albums, “Now I have known a hero or two/ And they all learn to swim through mud/ And they all got boots caked with dirty soles/ That they get from squashing bugs/ So when push comes to shove get the Harley revved up/ and we’ll eclipse even the…” and you know the rest, c’mon.
Later in the fifties, Schwartz will write his poem about “Manic depressive Lincoln, national hero!” and his humanity and discernment—“a politician—of the heart!” who “understood quite well Grant’s drunkenness!” because of war’s grisly horror not experienced at what Burroughs called the long end of a media fork, but “In fact, the North and South were losers both:/—Capitalismus won the Civil War—” I am very happy to read John Ashbery praising the exclamation points in Schwartz. I have never gotten away with one myself.
One poem from this section of Vaudeville that Cornelius Schmidt might not want to have read to the crowd at the movie theater is “Lunas Are Tempting to the Old Consciousness,” for there the image of America is a boardwalk amusement park rent by fears of sexual violence, and generally speaking, sometimes it can seem as though as many as 49% of all American reminded of awfulness are capable of confirming what you have just mentioned to them about themselves.
Not far, before a door, and with a roar,
A girl’s skirt is blown up! showing her hips,
Her drawers, her giggles, her belly and—surprise!
Panic like rape shudders and shakes her eyes.
At this Coney Island of the mind, the games of skill and chance themselves are encoded with racist imagery that show the racist aggressions and desires of the whole culture of guns and sports.
A negro’s face appears, to grin, if hit,
And hurt by baseballs, sublimation sweet!
Last is the gallery where the guns are neat:
The hearts not satisfied and still denied
Can win a mama doll with a good shot.
Contemporary Black visual artists, many featured in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, an American Lyric, are often teaching us to read cultural artifacts and discourse the way Schwartz does here. The Lunas poem is among the most newly timely in Vaudeville. Both Schwartz and Lowell are earlier progressive artists who read cultural items to reveal their social and psychological meanings. They are pioneers of a political critical spirit who step over a tarn into a zone. Think of how Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” deals with the specificity of history and a real place and more complex and contradictory cultural artifacts rendered with hyper realism to ultimately honor our ideals against the “savage servility” of Bostonians driving around town, and you don’t get the feeling that he includes himself in that crew, if he is thinking of the folks about to protest bussing. Maybe this moment is a climax of ultimate class satire, apiece with “Skunk Island.” To the powerful and connected, all of that driving around and racial tension is just a whole bunch of “savage servility,” savage being a way of putting down Black people and a traditional moniker for the Irish poor. It’s important to understand that Lowell works against various kind of privilege and presents himself as comic and bumbling, still something of a snob as many of the abolitionists were, even in honoring a Civil Rights movement led by Black people rather than heroic and “out of bounds” figures who wanted to end the hierarchy that would put them above other men’s shoulders as Shaw is pictured on statue that his own father was against, so much so that Lowell himself makes it ambiguous who is using the n-word. The Black kids who are protesting are the heroes and leaders to Lowell, not guys like Lowell himself. Not needing a Shaw is part of the “blesséd break.” When Lowell says, Shaw is “out of bounds,” he must be aware that there is another monument on Boston Common, a small stone marking the site of the first soccer game ever played by prep school kids in the United States. Schwartz’s poem maps out a psychic zone that reveals what he fears is inside our country and our minds, regardless of class. “This is the Luna of the heart’s desire,/ This is the play and park we all admire.” That is his democratic way of saying, “I myself am hell.” What does Schwartz mean by “old consciousness” anyway? I guess he means “the unconscious [that] stretches, yawns, rises, wanders, aspires and admires!” But it is also something like “your consciousness before you read books and got out of your childhood home.” Lowell’s image for that is the fishes at the old South Boston Aquarium and his own little nose against the glass.
We should know Schwartz beyond a few poems and one short story, not just because he is that good, which he is, but because he helps us see and read the progress of poetry and understand how we can be part of that progress. He is also a pinecone for poetry and prose that comes after him. We realize this when we go back to these odd poems. On one hand, Vaudeville for a Princess anticipates the radiant celebration of the eternal present tense that looks like nostalgia in “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” and also the way that Berryman, Lowell and Plath will let something like Schwartz’s version of culture and history as an emanation of violent and racist pathology speak through the fractured and contending self of Henry, and we have seen just part of how his example works on Ashbery who says someplace that Schwartz remains one of the less obscure poets whom he reads when he wants to get writing, and yet, there is a stodgy part of him here, too. He anticipates and haunts, contradictory figure, not just the brilliant talk performances of Bellow’s narrators, but old and crusty Saul Bellow himself, pain-in-the ass conservative Bellow, ugh, come back home to be liberal, prose hero, old shit, in park bench hat really as we love you, not in some Indiana Jones fedora, old man who should maybe share that sandwich with pigeons, not go on, cranky, in various places about how awful and dumb we all are, we young punks, to know and read other things and not spend more time on the steps of the public library talking about Stendhal. Actually, I think I saw Bellow once by a Xerox machine at Boston University, and he seemed like a good time, lanky. Was he wearing boots with a heel? We hear a bit of the stuffy kind of guardian of culture in “Some Present Things Are Causes of Fear,” as if nothing good comes from greed or accident:
When Tin Pan Alley formulates the hart,
When Hollywood fulfills the laws of dream,
When the radio is poet laureate
To Heinz, Palmolive, Swift, and Chevrolet—
For poets of consciousness in the fifties like Schwartz and Ginsberg and many others, style as a form of mental control and also, ambiguously, the expression of consciousness itself—“Moloch is whose name is the mind”—is part or at least potentially part of the problem that demands emotional awareness on the part of readers and writers to keep in line. The idiom of this poem is populist and full of types, but the ending is subversive and turns on the audience and demands a psychological sense of collective responsibility, while basically saying, “You people are scaring me, and if I am with you, I must be out of my mind.” Here it is:
Do we not have, in fine, depression and war
Certain each generation? Who would want more?
O what unsated heart would ask for more?
Is Schwartz thinking of himself as Yeats who is scornful of audience in “The Fisherman,” or is he enacting the comedy of Cornelius Schmidt reciting Eliot to a crowd that has come to see Naughty Marietta?
In either case, the crowd at the ballgame is, as Williams says, terrifying. We can see that in “Some Present Things Are Causes of True Fear,” Schwartz is worried that the stupid cheerfulness of American pop culture and the way that loving it buys into the economic system and its hierarchies and masks a dark impulse that would lead to depression and war in each generation. Do you also watch the Super Bowl halftime show with virtuous pleasure and awe at the artistry seeming human, freakishly good and yet representative, in the middle of the brain-damage paid for with commercials for shit as if the entire evening lacked unity and underlying values? A large thing to note is that what strongly marks both O’Hara and Ginsberg is their refusal to be afraid of anything. It’s as if those two were teenagers who heard Roosevelt say we only had to be afraid of being afraid now, so we might as well just go ahead and be more real and courageous, and they nodded their heads if not at that moment, but eventually at least, and said, “Right. Got that, Franklin.” So Schwartz is not just an example; as a source, he is an example to go against, though the connections remain. The poets who form us are like family. In some ways, Schwartz really is very close to Ginsberg’s far more specific poem “America,” a poem that goes back to Schwartz’s earlier specificity with open love for the old left, and rather than treating worn out pop idioms like found objects, gets right in our faces and makes us look actual images and tells the whole scene to go fuck itself with an atom bomb. This involves doing things like reading television shows and street idioms and the covers of mass-produced magazines as texts. When I want to read something again and again, the specific detail is almost always more refreshing and expressive and lasting than poetry made as an encounter with found idioms, and that may be why when all is said and done, most readers will always prefer Schwartz’s early poetry. There is from the start a part of Schwartz who could look at the pop culture he grew up with and find an astonishing line like the one comparing a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt to an Arrow collar ad in “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar” from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and that couplet is so precise and so moving, and he is able to express so much history and even sociology and psychology and a keen grasp of the nature of mass-media and consumerism and politics—a short jump to Warhol here, original banana on cover first Velvet Underground album, and not just a box of soup, but the Campbell’s Soup Kids with tomato soup in their blushing pleasure, if he wanted to do that—with a few strokes, but he is still a poet who feels that he has to ward off a lot of popular culture because not only is the stuff stupid, it can be downright evil. We can all take a moment and regret, if we did, once loving vigilante racist cop movies like Dirty Harry and The French Connection that helped make America less safe and held up freedom over the course of fifty years, and we can wish for some sort of procedure or technique of hypnosis that would allow us to completely forget the names of all human beings ever who appeared on reality television shows, or as I like to call it, Not Really Our Confessional Television. But let’s reopen the old vaudeville house and make sure it comes back into business by reading his book however we can get our hands on it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Blair is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays. His latest book True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021 is available from MadHat Press. He teaches poetry in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.