Lou Reed’s Rabbi

The rock star’s new tribute to his teacher, the writer Delmore Schwartz, illuminates their common genius

By Jake Marmer for Tablet Magazine

This piece was originally published on October 29, 2012. Lou Reed died Sunday, October 27, 2013.
Lou Reed is the indelibly hip version of Woody Allen’s Zelig: A human chameleon continually and thoroughly transformed by his surroundings. The difference, of course, is that while Allen’s film character grotesquely altered his physical appearance and worldviews so he would be liked, Reed’s radical shifts have been determined by desire to duck expectations, to shake up and subvert established forms of normalcy. As an iconic rock star, Reed has lived out his numerous rebirths and in the process popularized if not outright invented a number of musical genres—art-rock, avant-pop, noise, and punk, among others.

What remained constant throughout his transformations, however, is Reed’s rootedness in literature. His lyrics have always been filled with references that ranged from Shakespeare to the Marquis de Sade, from Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce. And now, after over half a century of bona fide writing and composing, Reed has penned a piece that is among his very finest bits of writing to date—an introduction to the New Directions reissue of Delmore Schwartz’s collection of short stories In Dream Begin Responsibilities.

Schwartz, a star of the New York literary scene in the 1930 and ’40s, was a poet, innovative prose writer, cultural critic, and, at one time, a professor of English literature at the University of Syracuse, where Reed met him in the early 1960s. As is clear from the introduction to In Dream Begin Responsibilities, Schwartz’s impact on Reed’s life has not waned one bit over the years: “You were the greatest man I ever met. … Your titles were more than enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck.” Lovingly Reed recollects: “We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better than to devote one’s life to Joyce.”

Reed’s piece surges from descriptive to lyrical, from poetry to prose. At times reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg “Kaddish”—another epic tribute—Reed’s elegy is a tragicomic stream of consciousness and ecstatic excavation of memory: “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 usage of em-dashes, as in Ginsberg’s work, intensifies the potency of the free-associative leaps. The incisiveness and vividness of the portrayal are tremendous: “Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail front right hanging—tie askew—fly unzipped. Oh Delmore. You were so beautiful. Named for a silent star dancer Frank Delmore.”

Continue reading.