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Schwartz lived to be only 52, yet the end was agonizingly slow. There was time for visits to New York City mental wards and pilgrimages to the scene of a second marriage—an abandoned New Jersey farm, where through overgrown fields he wandered, calling the name of a long-lost cat. The badly aged Wunderkind died of a heart attack in a Times Square-area hotel while struggling downstairs with his garbage. The measure of Atlas' biography is that he does not exploit the implications of that curtain scene. With admirable restraint he suggests that Schwartz was a lyric poet who insisted on being an epic poet: given that divergence, tragedy was the only possible outcome.
Genesis has been deservedly forgotten; one volume was more than enough. But Schwartz lives in lines that soar and sting: "I am my father's father,/ You are your children's guilt." The funny and unforgiving stories of The World Is a Wedding (1948) remain some of the best work in a genre that has shown the world what it felt like in the Depression to be young, Jewish, and lost, somewhere between the Old Country and the New Criticism.
As for the man himself, as this compassionate biography shows, Delmore Schwartz is the ruin on which others have built. "I think I've never met anyone who has somehow as much seeped into me," Lowell once said, delivering a tribute haunted enough even for Schwartz. — Melvin Maddocks