The Lou Reed songs that pay tribute to Delmore Schwarz: “You spit on those under 21”
Following a bout of critical bewilderment and waning commercial success as he entered the 1980s, New York songsmith Lou Reed stepped back into the raw confessionals and abrasive rock from a decade earlier, even lifting the classic cover of Transformer and slapping an electric-hued colour scheme on top for 1982’s The Black Mask to flex where he was creatively returning to. While not topping the Billboard charts as he used to, his 11th studio album saw him thrust into the new wave climate along with Marianne Faithfull and Captain Beefheart as yesteryear’s rock figures who strolled into punk’s aftermath with career rejuvenation.
Among the drug dealers, transgender socialites and Berliner dysfunctional couples that litter Reed’s urban lyrical underbelly, The Blue Mask‘s opening track touched on his affection for Syracuse University advisor and poet Delmore Schwartz. ‘My Home’ reads like an affectionate reportage to Schwartz, updating the literary influence on the fortunate path his life has taken: “I’ve really got a lucky life/My writing, my motorcycle and my wife”. Later, Reed speaks candidly of his and then-wife Sylvia’s efforts to communicate with the late Schwartz via an Ouija board, wishing to experience the man’s wisdom and wit one last time.
Born to a Jewish family in 1913 in Brooklyn, Schwartz’s parents’ break-up at nine would prove to cast an enduring shadow on his future work. Winning plaudits early on in his career for the cerebral way he explored the darker undercurrents of bourgeois existence and the anxieties that bristled between the old worlds of his Russian immigrant family and the Americanised offspring embracing new values and social aspirations.
These thematic obsessions would fuel 1937’s acclaimed In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, a short story first published in Partisan Review depicting a young man’s dream watching his parents’ courtship in an old-fashioned cinema and his eventual disruptive watch as he yells at the screen and breaks down as the narrative before him unfolds and provokes all his inner familial wounds.
Despite initial high standing in New York’s literary circles and a steady two decades of regularly publishing work, including 1943’s epic Genesis: Book One poem, personal disasters across two divorces, alcoholism and mental health issues saw Schwarz’s final years living reclusively in Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea, dying of a heart attack at 52 in July 1966 and undiscovered for two days.
Recorded three months before his death and released eight months after, Lou Reed penned ‘European Son’ with former band The Velvet Underground, closing their debut album with a more acidic ode to the struggling artist. Anticipating White Light/White Heat‘s distorted garage rock, ‘European Son’ is caked in noisy feedback that obscures Reed’s lyrical seethe, angered at the time by Schwarz’s refusal to meet him or any other of his old Syracuse alumni.
While unlikely to have grasped the full extent of Schwarz’s private turmoil, “You spit on those under 21” makes his twist of anger and disappointment clear. Time’s a healer, and long after Schwarz’s death, Reed let go of such resentments and spent the rest of his life praising his creative effect on him, even writing the short prose O Delmore How I Miss You for 2012’s Poetry in honour of his creative hero.
