A Case for Judgment: The Literary Criticism of Delmore Schwartz

Abstract

To read the criticism of Delmore Schwartz is to hear it: to hear an identifiable personal voice talking conversationally about literature and culture to-his typewriter, the author used to say. This experience can be disarming; the reader is likely to be bemused by informality of manner and levity of tone; he may be misled by Schwartz's own deliberate want of pretension, the pleasant conversational manners, into overlooking his serious critical intention and intellectual rigor. The likelihood was enhanced during Schwartz's writing lifetime by the fact that so much that he wrote was in response to occasions and also by his calculated failure to announce, through obvious shift in style, a deliberate major effort. Although the several essays which began as public lectures take account of their ceremonial occasion by a slight elevation of manner, there is, on the whole, a marked consistency between brief book review and sustained consideration of a literary subject. And because of this, even good friends and even Philip Rahv, a coeditor of Partisan Review, remained curiously unaware of the bulk and weight of Schwartz's criticism until it had been posthumously collected. Apart from his poetry and fiction, they thought of him as a talker, perhaps confusing in memory the words addressed to his typewriter with the famous conversational improvisations. The voice is not only engaging but also important for several reasons. Its apparent casualness clearly articulates Schwartz's sense of the modesty which criticism ought to exhibit. Its unstressed but discernible personality (the writer implicitly admitting his local, limited, selfconscious existence) acknowledges responsibility. The ease with which it modulates into humor and sharpens into wit serves the purpose of