When David Yaffe changed offices, he had to leave behind a dysfunctional relic of a desk. But the desk itself was historic: It once belonged to Delmore Schwartz, a Syracuse University English professor who Lou Reed adored.

“No one who worshipped a poet like Delmore Schwartz wrote rock music,” said Yaffe, an assistant professor of English at SU.

Reed dealt with dyslexia. Yaffe said his struggles with reading haunted the singer at school. Yaffe said Reed couldn’t read or write more than a few lines at a time.

“He had novel-sized ideas,” Yaffe said.

James Gorney and Reed were in a class that Schwartz taught about novelist James Joyce. The two got to know each other during the next two years.

Schwartz was a “prolific drinker,” Gorney said. But he was a great storyteller.

Gorney said they two of them often spent a lot of time with Schwartz at The Orange bar near campus. All three used to all sit around, drink and talk about literature. He remembers The Beatles coming on the jukebox in the bar, “and it was so infectious that we all three started singing along immediately.”

They caught up a few years later when Gorney was in graduate school at the University of Chicago. Reed was in town for a Velvet Underground show.

“He was already now transformed into Lou Reed in capital letters,” Gorney said, adding that Reed was dressed in solid, black leather from head to toe and was “thin as a rail.” But when Reed’s 1982 album “The Blue Mask” was released, Gorney said, he was reminded of the more eager, softer person he knew in college.

The album’s opening track, “My House,” is about Reed’s relationship with Schwartz.

 

 

Published on November 4, 2013 at 2:23 am