Philip Schultz: A Poet In Spite Of Himself

Philip Schultz, recent winner of Poetry magazine's prestigious Levinson Prize, would still be mired in depression today had it not been for the timely intervention of his guardian angel, Stein.

"The novelist in me is always inventing characters," he said during a recent interview at his house in East Hampton Village. "Stein was jolly, portly, balding, and myopic, an Isaac Babel type who'd been demoted to third-string angel by the time he took my case: I was not a high-profile job."

Stein "knew everything about calamity," Mr. Schultz wrote in his 1986 chapbook, "My Guardian Angel Stein." As the dejected poet grimly roams Fifth Avenue at Christmastime, Stein, "overweight and unaccustomed to such devout self-loathing,/hurries to keep pace . . . 'Let's see a movie or have an ice cream,' " he urges, like a Jewish mother.

Farewell, Angel

Stein's mission succeeds, however. In "Stein, Goodbye," the recovered poet bids farewell to his wisecracking angel rather as the rest of us might to a beloved shrink: "Dear Stein, at heart/we're all third-string angels . . . who must keep moving, however slowly,/into the mystery of such wonderful/abundance. . . ."

Mr. Schultz's depression, with its bracing shafts of tough humor, was surprisingly fruitful. From its depths came his first volume of poetry, "Like Wings," which won a National Book Award nomination and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1978.

In 1984 the despondent poet published "Deep Within the Ravine," the recipient of the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Prize that year. The Academy bought 1,200 copies of the book, to boot.

Over the years Mr. Schultz has regularly contributed short stories and poems to such literary journals as The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review.

Numerous grants and fellowships have come his way: a New York State Council for the Arts Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and a Fulbright Grant, to name a few - serendipitous rewards for a poet "stuck in pain's spiderweb," who had, as it happens, become a poet in spite of himself.

In the poor section of Rochester where he grew up, to say one was a poet would have been tantamount, he said, to "wearing a sign saying kick me."

The offer of a poetry prize would have called for a rebuff, too, something on the order of Groucho Marx's snarl to the Friars Club that he didn't care to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

Tough Kids

As a kid, Mr. Schultz felt called upon to be a tough guy, not a bard.

"I had to fight a lot. In my neighborhood black and especially Irish bullies made Jewish kids pay protection money to go to school, and all the Jewish kids except me coughed up."

"I fought every day, and was kicked out of two schools for fighting, but I never paid a dime. My father and uncle were such tough, scary weirdos I wasn't afraid of anyone."

The first part of his life was "just one big fight for survival," Mr. Schultz said. His father, a chronic failure, finally gave up and "just died of immigrant angst."

At Mrs. Applebaum's

Only an occasional moment at "Mrs. Applebaum's Sunday Dance Class" brightened the poet's sense of foreboding with its "first intimation of splendor, or darker knowledge," as Mrs. Applebaum, "never a winner," urged her class on with a shrill "Und vonce again, voys und gurdles!"

The future poet had severe learning disabilities as a child, and barely got through grade school. Held back twice, he was always in "the idiot section" with a group of boys who were in and out of reformatories.

"There were no teachers trained or inclined to help us. We were basically left alone and told to teach each other."

Somehow his parents found the money to get help for their only child, and after learning to read from comic books, he announced to his tutor his intention to become a writer.

Not In Fiction

Not for him the effete strains of T. S. Eliot, however, but the virile, declarative sentences of Ernest Hemingway, a man drawn to blood sports: boxing and bullfighting.

"I loved the music of his writing; he had a great ear," Mr. Schultz said.

But after trying his hand at short stories and a novel, written at the Iowa Writers Workshop, he realized that "it wasn't going to happen for me in fiction."

He moved around the country for a while, holding teaching jobs in San Francisco, Louisville, Kalamazoo, Francisco, Louisville, Kalamazoo, and Boston, and gradually came into his own as a poet. In 1984, when he was appointed director of New York University's creative writing program, he settled in Greenwich Village.

That same year, he founded the Writers Studio, a private school offering fiction and poetry-writing workshops designed for students at all levels. And, ironically, dogged by his absorbing depression, he himself stopped writing altogether.

"A certain amount of narcissism is necessary, but too much is not a path to understanding others. I'd written my mother poem, my father poem, my grandmother poem, and my "For the Wandering Jews" poem - how many failures and failed relationships can you write about? It was too dark and painful; I had to wait until my life changed."

Student Successes

Meanwhile, the Writers Studio flourished. "You can't teach people to be geniuses, but you can teach them to write - I do it all the time. Give them the skills that allow them to overcome their inhibitions, point them in the right direction, and they'll have all kinds of success."

"People who already have something are promoted by the star-system writers teaching at most university programs. But the ones who need to be taught most - the not-yet-talented, the not-glamorous-enough-for-the-stars - are the ones I was always most interested in."

The need to write is often the need of the fearful and inhibited to express something that can't be said in any other way, Mr. Schultz explained. "I guess I identified with the unchampioned, and liked rolling up my sleeves to get them going. Good writers are often shy."

But if the student's desire and intelligence are strong enough, something will happen, he said. The school has worked for a good number of people who have moved on to publish their novels, poems, and short stories, and who are very grateful.

"They even want to give us money! I'm stunned! Teaching is my passion, not just my vocation. I guess I'm going to have to start a foundation."

A New Life

Even as he busied himself with everything except writing, Mr. Schultz's life changed. He got a dog, Benya, a huge black Lab/Great Dane mix who initiated visits to a neighboring dog run.

There he met his wife, the sculptor Monica Banks, and her smooth-haired fox terrier, Gus. Not only did the dogs become soulmates, their owners fell madly in love and were married two years ago. They now have a 9-month-old son, Eli.

"I immediately started writing love poems to Monica," the poet said. "Now I think I'm writing for all the right reasons: for the music, the excitement of working with language, and from the new happiness that has allowed me to deal philosophically with the darker side of life outside myself."

"Souls Over Harlem"

For the past two years he has been working on a 10-page poem called "Souls Over Harlem," about the black man who shot eight mostly nonwhite customers at Freddy's Fashion Mart on 125th Street, and then set fire to the place and killed himself.

"He was an immigrant worker frustrated by his failure to realize the American dream, and they were people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"It was a case of misplaced xenophobia, misguided racism, and mistaken identity, with strong overtones of the Holocaust, a subject so tragic I never could have dealt with it until I'd put my own demons to rest."

Turning To Mozart

Yet the poem is fun to read, and graced by all kinds of music, metaphor, word-play and narrative drive, the poet said.

"I didn't know I could do in poetry what I just did. It satisfies the fiction writer in me."

"But of course there's no bright side to tragedies like this, no possibility of transcendence, and outrage only makes them worse."

"The only thing to do," he concluded with a smile at his wife and child across the room, "is turn your radio dial from the news to Mozart. That's what Monica and Eli have done for me."