Alex Kudera's Blog, page 73

not customarily issued from high places

"Judaism had always been for Delmore a significant emblem of his identity, and one he had made symbolic use of in his work, conjuring the artist and the Jew, both of whom occupied a unique, anomalous place in society. But by the 1950's the great excitement of the two previous decades, when the Jews of Delmore's generation had first acquired intellectual prominence, was fading before the complacencies of the Eisenhower era. The Trotskyites of the thirties were now professors, and 'notes from underground are not customarily issued from high places,' as one commentator on that period shrewdly put it."

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

In Knowledge We Trust(ed)

At Louisiana State University, Misty Saribal directs In Knowledge We Trust(ed): Red Tape, White Institutions, Blue Students.

many paradoxes

"It was one of the many paradoxes of Delmore's career that the beginning of his worst depression--from which he never entirely recovered--and the subsequent decline of his work coincided with the moment when. . . his importance as an American man of letters became firmly established. By 1947, he was the most widely anthologized poet of his generation, as well as its 'ablest critic of modern poetry,' wrote John Berryman some years later."

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

Susannah Hunnewell

I missed the news last June that Susannah Hunnewell, my favorite interviewer from The Paris Review, passed on. In fact, I did not know that she was the interviewer I admired or the publisher of the journal, but The Paris Review interviews that she conducted with Michel Houellebecq, Harry Mathews, and the Russian-to-English translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are among my favorite author interviews. Sadly, she died young, only 52. Safe passage.

a five-year appointment as a faculty instructor. . .

"Haunted by the war--which he continued to denounce bitterly in his letters--by teaching, and by what he called an 'inevitable mid-winter staleness,' Delmore found himself amid two crises in the spring of 1943. On March 2, he learned that a committee had been formed to decide on whether to offer him a five-year appointment as a faculty instructor, and they proposed to visit one of his classes. Delmore, 'in a frozen slump' at the time, objected strenuously to what he thought of as an unprecendented procedure, and decided to refuse their request--'on principle,' he told Berryman. At once defiant and unnerved, he worked out an elaborate argument by which he hoped to win Morrison's support before presenting his position to the committee: 'With enough benzedrine and coffee, in half an hour I can win them over.'"

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

A Rebel In Defense of Tradition

"Dwight [Macdonald] was always disappointed that his books didn't sell. I'd had the same regrets. . . Dwight often thought that his life had been a series of disappointments. These self-destructive feelings often led to debilitating bouts of depression and writer's block."

~~ from Michael Wreszin's A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of
      Dwight  Macdonald

Berlin Wall

Is a "New World Order" at risk thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

A variety of sources reported on the anniversary.

slovenly and grand

"Like Von Humboldt Fleisher of Saul Bellow's fictional portrait, Delmore in 1939 was 'slovenly and grand,' his ample hair swept back, 'his face with widely separated eyes white and tense.' Cosmopolitan, radical, at home with Rilke, Trotsky, Pound, he was the very embodiment of the New York intelligentsia. Declaiming in what [Alfred] Kazin described as 'gulps of argument,' Delmore transformed Greenwich Village in his talk from a province into cultural capital, importing ideas from the whole European tradition and adapting them to the sprawl and chaos of contemporary America."

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

better off in Buchenwald

"Delmore's mother reacted to the announcement with even less enthusiasm; she threatened to kill herself. How could her son abandon her in this cruel way? she wailed, working on his guilt. (A few years later, she would greet Kenneth's marriage with the declaration: 'He would have been better off in Buchenwald than married to that woman.')"

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

a good night's rest

"'History is a nightmare during which I am trying to get a good night's rest,' he once noted in his journal, reversing the famous remark of Joyce's Dedalus. Delmore used to say that he was twice as old as everyone else because he never slept[.]"

~~ from James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet