The Artist and the Family
The World is a Wedding
By Delmore Schwartz.
Norfolk, Connecticut, New Directions. 196 pp. $2.75.

The literary graces are progressively renounced in this collection. The last line of what I take to be one of the stories earliest composed—the charming “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”—has this vivid metaphor in it: “ . . . I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow. . . . ” In the later stories, however, the writing has deliberately been made flat, and figures of speech are of this order: “After five years of the depression, the hopes of most of the boys of the circle had faded slowly like a color or were worn thin like a cloth.”

This severely commonplace style is employed ironically, of course, contemptuously even, as the protagonist of “America! America!” explicitly informs us: “Shenandoah was exhausted by his mother’s story. He was sick of the mood in which he had listened, the irony and the contempt which had taken hold of each new event. He had listened from such a distance that what he saw was an outline, a caricature, and an abstraction. How different it might seem, if he had been able to see these lives from the inside, looking out.”

_____________

In this first story in which this style is used extensively, it is more a matter of single words or phrases ironically set off in italics. Later, however, in the short novel entitled “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life,” the finest story of the book, this deliberately pedestrian quality of language pervades the entire sentence, the very structure of the writing, at the same time that the contempt it previously expressed disappears entirely and the irony is considerably softened. The author, that is, succeeds in seeing “these lives” (the New York Jewish middle class of the first, second, and third generations) more “from the inside, looking out.”

This later style (which is only gradually arrived at in the course of these stories) permits the author both to disavow the life that he describes and to affirm his relation to it; that is its merit, and the merit of the best of these stories. The author ironically surrenders his style to the flat, commonplace language used by the characters of his stories, and by this irony he rejects and flees the desolate world of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie that he evokes. He escapes the captivity of his origins, as it were, by leaving his shirt (his style) behind in their hands. What “Shenandoah Fish, a youthful author of promise,” hero of several of these stories, says of his own work is true of Mr. Schwartz’: its “innermost motion” is “flight, or criticism, or denial, or rejection.”

_____________

But with this style the author is able at the same time to affirm the depth of his relation to the world he has rejected. “And now he [Shenandoah] felt for the first time how closely bound he was to these people. His separation was actual enough, but there existed also an unbreakable unity. As the air was full of the radio and unseen voices, so the life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered.” For what the artist figure in these stories also rejects is a present life unconnected with the past. When he acknowledges that “the child is the meaning of this life,” he is, in his own way, the Jew returning to himself, seeking himself in his childish past.

This past cannot be summoned up in the manner of a Henry James or a Sir Osbert Sitwell; nor on the other hand could one write like Clifford Odets or in a genre of some kind of Jewish regionalism and say what these stories say. The commonplace style, though ironically employed, is also, paradoxically, a bare and brilliant poetry (the author recovers his lost shirt) in which the sense of this past is captured and celebrated.

Judging from the present book, however, the uses to which this style can be put are limited. When it is used, in “The World Is a Wedding,” to describe a circle of friends—a study in the lack of “true community”—the effect is simply one of tedium. In the stories of Jewish family life, the style reduces that life to its elemental events and the story has a saga-like and portentous flow, as the book jacket correctly remarks. In this story, however, the style sentimentally reduces the friends to their individual unhappinesses and lonelinesses, the narrative drags, and it all dissolves into mawkishness.

The other stories in the book are not nearly so interesting. “New Year’s Eve” is a venture into Hecate County; “A Bitter Farce” is one of those college classroom stories which English professors and English students both seem to delight in writing; and “The Statues” is a lame flight of fancy that ought never to have been taken into the book.

It needs to be noted that the proofreading of this book is atrocious. I suspect the publishers of feeling that, so long as the Direction is New, a slovenly product, technically, is a quite insignificant detail.

_____________