“O Delmore how I miss you. You inspired me to write. You were the greatest man I ever met. You could capture the deepest emotions in the
simplest language. Your titles were more
than good enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck. You were a genius. Doomed.”
Lou Reed met Delmore
Schwartz in the 60’s at the University of Syracuse, where Schwartz taught
literature.
“I’d given him a
short story. He gave me a B. I was so hurt and ashamed. Why haunt talentless me? I was the walker for THE HONEY BEAR THAT
WALKS WITH ME. To literary
cocktails. He hated them. And I was put in charge. Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail
from right hanging—tie askew—fly unzipped.
Oh Delmore. You were so
beautiful…”
The Heavy
Bear Who Goes With Me
“the withness of the body”
A manifold
honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and
lumbering here and there,
The central
ton of every place,
The hungry
beating brutish one
In love with
candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy
factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the
building, kicks the football,
Boxes his
brother in the hate-ridden city.
Breathing at
my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy
bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his
sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness
intimate as the water’s clasp,
Howls in his
sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and
shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting
show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his
dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to
think that his quivering meat
Must finally
wince to nothing at all.
That
inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed
me since the black womb held,
Moves where I
move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature,
a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown
of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and
affronts with his own darkness,
The secret
life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too
near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to
embrace the very dear
With whom I
would walk without him near,
Touches her
grossly, although a word
Would bare my
heart and make me clear,
Stumbles,
flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me
with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the
hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of
appetite everywhere.
“Reading Yeats
and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t finished
reading—liquid rivulets sprang from your nose but still you would not stop
reading. I was transfixed. I cried—the love of the word—THE HONEY BEAR.”
Schwartz was in mental
institutions. He never had money. He was the poetry editor of the Partisan
Review. He was widely anthologized.
His first book, “In dreams Begin
Responisbilities” was published in 1938, when he was 24 years old.
“I wanted to
write. One line as good as yours. My mountain.
My inspiration/You wrote the greatest short story every written/IN
DREAMS”
T.S. Eliot,
William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and Vladimir Nabokov praised
him. At 52, he died alone, in a hotel room.
His body wasn’t found until two days later.
“A heart attack in the hotel Dixie. You–one of the greatest writers of our era.
No Valise”
The
Ballad of the Children of the Czar
1
The children
of the Czar
Played with a
bouncing ball
In the May
morning, in the Czar's garden,
Tossing it
back and forth.
It fell among
the flowerbeds
Or fled to the
north gate.
A daylight
moon hung up
In the Western
sky, bald white.
Like Papa's
face, said Sister,
Hurling the
white ball forth.
2
While I ate a
baked potato
Six thousand
miles apart,
In Brooklyn,
in 1916,
Aged two,
irrational.
When Franklin
D. Roosevelt
Was an Arrow
Collar ad.
O Nicholas!
Alas! Alas!
My grandfather
coughed in your army,
Hid in a
wine-stinking barrel,
For three days
in Bucharest
Then left for
America
To become a
king himself.
3
I am my
father's father,
You are your
children's guilt.
In history's
pity and terror
The child is
Aeneas again;
Troy is in the
nursery,
The rocking
horse is on fire.
Child labor!
The child must carry
His fathers on
his back.
But seeing
that so much is past
And that
history has no ruth
For the
individual,
Who drinks
tea, who catches cold,
Let anger be
general:
I hate an
abstract thing.
4
Brother and
sister bounced
The bounding,
unbroken ball,
The shattering
sun fell down
Like swords
upon their play,
Moving
eastward among the stars
Toward
February and October.
But the Maywind brushed their cheeks
Like a mother
watching sleep,
And if for a
moment they fight
Over the
bouncing ball
And sister
pinches brother
And brother
kicks her shins,
Well! The
heart of man is known:
It is a cactus
bloom.
5
The ground on
which the ball bounces
Is another
bouncing ball.
The wheeling,
whirling world
Makes no will
glad.
Spinning in
its spotlight darkness,
It is too big
for their hands.
A pitiless,
purposeless Thing,
Arbitrary and
unspent,
Made for no
play, for no children,
But chasing
only itself.
The innocent
are overtaken,
They are not
innocent.
They are their
father's fathers,
The past is
inevitable.
6
Now, in
another October
Of this tragic
star,
I see my second
year,
I eat my baked
potato.
It is my
buttered world,
But, poked by
my unlearned hand,
It falls from
the highchair down
And I begin to
howl.
And I see the
ball roll under
The iron gate
which is locked.
Sister is
screaming, brother is howling,
The ball has
evaded their will.
Even a
bouncing ball
Is
uncontrollable,
And is under
the garden wall.
I am overtaken
by terror
Thinking of my
father's fathers,
And of my own
will.
This post is a
prayer. A prayer for Lou, for Delmore,
and for one other Schwartz.
My grand aunt
lived in Staten Island. I had been to
visit her once or twice as a child. We
had spoken on the phone a number of times after that. I remember her car. It was full of crumbled sheets of paper, broken books, pens,
jelly doughnuts.…you could hardly breath in the backseat.
When she died I
was summoned to court. I had been left
some money. I travelled on the ferry to
Staten Island, and found myself alone in the courtroom with a bunch of lawyers
discussing her estate. The Public
Administrator- a charismatic man who could have jumped right out of the movie
“Glen Garry Glen Ross” leaned over and whispered in my ear:
“Did you read her book?”
“What book?”
“She wrote a book. Under a pseudonym.”
“Where can I find it?”
He slipped me a
card. Weeks later, I called and went to his office. I held her 425 page novel
in my arms: “The Decision,” by M.T. Sands.
The dedication reads: “This book is dedicated to my parents Abe Schwartz
and Sabina Schwartz.” It was shocking to
see my great grandparents’ names there. In that instant, I realized this really
was her book. No one in my family knew
about it.
It starts with a
poem:
WITNESS
A gun shoots fast into the night
Women of shade,
shadows of women
Children who
cry, who live, who die.
A gun shot breaks
into the night–
Fate failed, I
begged deaf ears–
No tears, or eyes.
A gun shot sings into the night–
The hours die to
tell the tale
Of years darker
than all days.
A gun shot
cries, the night, the night…
And ends with an
About the Author:
Michele Sands
was born into the turbulence of the Holocaust years. One of Belgium’s hidden-children, she
survived to eventually migrate to America with her parents and sister.
An active environmentalist, Ms. Sands is an artist and poet and resides
in New York State.
Listen to Lou Reed Read "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (slow to load).
LISTEN TO LOU REED IN HEBREW, BY SHIRA YASUR AND SAAR YACHIN: