In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938), the first collection of poems and stories by Delmore Schwartz (1913-66), brought him acclaim as the most promising poet of his generation; yet Schwartz’s later books failed to satisfy critics, and eventually his ambition and productivity collapsed under the weight of self-disillusionment, anxiety, insomnia, and manic depression. All along, however, Schwartz continued to write letters, many of them hilarious, some of them demented, and not a few of them to his longtime editor James Laughlin, with whose fledgling publishing house, New Directions, he cast his lot when both were in their early twenties and Laughlin a Harvard undergraduate and steel-corporation heir.
This correspondence tells a poignant story not only of a business relationship but of a close friendship in which the Brooklyn-born Schwartz’s emotional dependence upon his editor is as manifest as Laughlin’s devotion to him. If his early missives give us Schwartz the clever, cocky, culture-mad boy genius, teeming with ideas for poems and stories and with tendentious views of the latest highbrow books and essays, his later dispatches are by turns bitter, frantic, and pathetic, packed with literary backbiting, baseball chitchat, money worries, desperate puns, career intrigues, pop-culture references, and the occasional unfounded assertion that Laughlin has defrauded or otherwise betrayed him. Laughlin, for his part, remains a gentleman, taking time out to help Schwartz financially and turning the other cheek to accusations of perfidy.
Yet Schwartz gets the first and last word here.
One is constantly aware of