No one else can take a bath for you

Mark Ford

  • The ego is always at the wheel by Delmore Schwartz
    Carcanet, 146 pp, £6.95, May 1987, ISBN 0 85635 702 2
  • A Nest of Ninnies by John Ashbery and James Schuyler
    Carcanet, 191 pp, £10.95, June 1987, ISBN 0 85635 699 9

Like Tristram Shandy, Delmore Schwartz so hated his name that he sometimes used to attribute all of his misfortunes to it. It was an obsession he enjoyed feeding: he would invent ridiculous sources for it – a delicatessen, a Pullman railroad car, a Tammany Hall club – while in his stories and poems he would always inflict on his leading character, who was always himself, a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt. In his best verse play, Shenandoah, he even features himself looking back on his own naming ceremony twenty-five years earlier. When his mother, Elsie Fish, decides on Shenandoah, he breaks out Macbeth-like:

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