Moreover, Schwartz was a Jew, and Bellow Is committed to Jewish traditions. He has chosen to make a character out of Delmore Schwartz because Schwartz's life illustrated the difficulty of being an artist in America, a problem that affects Bellow himself. The interest of “Humboldt's Gift” does not lie in the plot, it is in Bellow's ideas. With the help of this, he says, he means to “listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us.” The movie has been made, it is successful, and Charlie as co‐author comes into money. “I always thought it would make a classic,” Humboldt says in the letter he has left for Charlie. Humboldt wrote the scenario for a movie based on an idea he and Charlie amused themselves with years ago. As for the “gift” promised by the title-it turns out to be money. On the other hand, we know what it must feel like to hold on for dear life to a girder high above Michigan Boulevard.Ĭharlie has a girl friend, Renata, a type of sexpot we have met before in Bellow's fiction, notably “Herzog.” She ditches Charlie at the end and goes off with an undertaker. Bellow is able to invent strange situations and make them physically credible, but he has trouble imagining a character who is not like himself. In one episode he forces Charlie to walk out on the girders of a high building under construction. Then, in order to make the novel move, Bellow involves Charlie with a low‐life character named Cantabile, who sets about humiliating him. The other leading character is the dead poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, resurrected in Charlie's memoirs. He has had some commercial success but has fallen short of his youthful ideals, and now he is writing about boredom. “Nothing but grief,” he says, “had ever come of my being honored by the French.”Ĭharlie is a writer. A publicity release tells us that Bellow has received the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French Government, “the highest literary distinction awarded by that nation to noncitizens.” In the novel, Charlie Citrine has the same decoration but a different attitude toward it. Indeed, there are times when Bellow's fiction seems closer to fact than Bellow's publicity. Charlie Citrine, who tells the story in the first person, bears a striking resemblance to Saul Bellow. Humboldt isn't the only character in “Humboldt's Gift” who appears to have been taken from life. For days the body of the poet lay unclaimed. The end came in a seedy hotel in mid‐Manhattan-a heart attack in the middle of the night while taking out the garbage. Schwartz's career started brilliantly at the end he could no longer write he drank heavily and quarreled with his friends. Like Humboldt, Schwartz had paranoid fantasies that involved him in farcical, humiliating situations. And it is the glory of the poems that survives here, awaiting new life.Reviews have pointed out that the character Humboldt in Saul Bellow's new novel is based on the life of the poet Delmore Schwartz. As Mazer writes in his introduction, “It is the poems that count now. Accompanied by Ben Mazer’s illustrative notes and introduction, The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz offers readers the long-awaited opportunity to rediscover one of the most influential and original poets of the twentieth century. This book brings together all of Schwartz’s poetry for the very first time, from his groundbreaking debut collection to his unpublished late work, which he kept writing until his death. Today, more than fifty years after his death in 1966, Schwartz is often remembered for the tragedy of his life rather than for the innovation and sad brilliance of his greatest work. The brilliant start of his career is matched perhaps only by its tragic end, a lonely death after an extended period of alcoholism, depression, and derangement. Eliot himself wrote Schwartz a letter asking him to compose more poetry. The famed poet Allen Tate wrote to him, “Your poetic style is beyond any doubt the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound,” and T. After the appearance of his first book (by the same name), he was inundated with praise. When Delmore Schwartz published his first short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” in Partisan Review in 1937, he became an instant literary celebrity. The first complete collection of the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century" (John Berryman).
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