There is no doubt that Delmore Schwartz’s first book of stories, The World Is a Wedding, was a considerable, though not popular, success. This may have surprised even the author, who was known in 1948, and may have wanted chiefly to be known, as a brilliant young poet. One can easily imagine Mr. Schwartz swept up by a reading of Turgenev or Chekhov or both and “trying his hand” in what seemed to him at the time a casual way at some social history à la russe, oblivious of the reigning vogue for symbols and mythological epiphanies, fairly careless of the unities, or the rule insisted upon by Frank O’Connor that a short story should encompass only one crisis or mood. But somehow a deeper necessity than merely hitting the average highbrow literary taste took hold of Schwartz, and he was faithful to a higher rule than any he flouted: namely, that an ounce of presentation is worth a pound of care; and drew what to my mind is the definitive portrait of the Jewish middle class in New York during the Depression.
How do I, knowing relatively little of this class at first hand, undertake such a verdict? Because these early stories still seem to me among the very best written anywhere at the time. They are acts of discovery and celebration such as no other group in the country at the time could have produced, and they have the great virtue of having been generated from the real, as against the ideological, preoccupations of their society, of aiming neither, like Salinger’s stories, to fit the new life into the classical patterns of sentimental farce, nor, by gentle and subtle distortion, to revive lost folkish sentiments recovered from writers like Babel or Sholem Aleichem. This is New York Jewry, I venture to say, of an integrity and wholeness unmatched elsewhere in fiction, before the intellectual diaspora of the 40’s began, before Leslie Fiedler began howling from Montana for an end to innocence or Karl Shapiro from Nebraska for an end to T. S. Eliot.
Marx and Freud are still good uncles in this book, not domineering schoolmarms. Alfred Kazin has written of the “sodden brilliance” of Jewish political dialectics in the New York of this era. By forgoing colloquial brilliance of the Salinger variety, Schwartz found a pace that avoided lapses into soddenness, either by omission or commission. The tempo of these stories matches their language; deliberate, careful, formal, gray to gray readers, tired to tired readers: tempo and language seem fourteen years later to have been exactly right, in the chronicle of a society discovering a new life along with a new language, a society moving with great circumspection in spite of its clannishness and intellectual assurance, a society that could not help sentimentalizing somewhat over what it took to be relics of an older and purer America and attempting to adopt them into its successful advance.
If it moved slowly, it also made the frontal attack on American mores that required a historian like Delmore Schwartz; to explain to itself and the world, for instance, that marriage in so fluid a society had become a career in itself at which people like the Baumanns in “America! America!” could excel when they excelled at little else, or that the majority of marriages in the United States cannot help seeming bizarre to friends of either party, so problematic has the institution become. Schwartz recorded the effect of business cycles on careers with impassive pity, or the incommensurability of talents and careers during a depression. That these crises have been “normalized” since the last war in no way lessens the relevance of Schwartz’s history.
The histrionic richness of these stories is like that of Chekhov in his drama rather than his fiction, though where Chekhov is obliged to make his characters declare themselves fully, Schwartz does not scruple to provide the clues himself to his characters’ endless misunderstandings. And this is because his mind moves towards a kind of Weisheitsdichtung that is impatient, under the circumstances, of an overly educated literary subterfuge. In “New Year’s Eve” Shenandoah Fish expresses the vision toward which the stories move: “Some other world, some world of goodness; some other life; some life where the nobility we admire is lived; some life in which those who have dedicated their being to the examination of consciousness live by the laws they face at every turn.” In the last flare of naturalism which the early Schwartz celebrates, there is no retreat to Zen or the California Sierras or even to Durrell’s Alexandria. His vision is measured against the lives of dentists, insurance agents, New York writers, teachers, and publishers; and if the colors tend to be dark, the composition is spacious and centripetal as the later fantasists rarely succeed in being. The humor is casual; the stories can equally well be read as serious or comic, according to the reader’s temperament. Schwartz’s master ironies are large enough to evoke any of a dozen conflicting emotions. The smaller ironies feed the larger; we are not surprised, for example, to learn, halfway through “The World Is a Wedding,” that Rudyard Bell, hero and center of his circle, is a bully to his sister and perhaps a passive homosexual, or that Ruth Hart of “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life,” the “powerful human being who lived through her devotion to her children” has, in fact, as she jokingly says at the end of the story, “the worst children in the world.” These reverses follow the rhythm of the author’s perception and are not intended to illustrate some borrowed thesis about Illusion and Reality, so dear to reviewers of fiction, but rather some very exact thesis about American urban society of the 30’s, when intellectuals, however obliquely they came at it, had an especially vivid sense of the fate of their society. They knew it as tragic, hopeless, radically sick—the “place” of the party in “New Year’s Eve” is the sense of “having-nowhere-better-to-go”—but they accepted it as a fate and not as a weapon in a cold war or as a springboard into exotic states of being.
To summarize the value of The World Is a Wedding is to say that the affection and interest it arouses, in this critic at least, require that it be treated in language no less formal than its own. Even the physical volume is, for me, New York, more than anything except some James, Wharton, and Hart Crane.
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Schwartz’s new collection, Successful Love,1 belongs very clearly to another era, the era for which Fiedler found a suitable epigraph in his title, An End to Innocence. None of these stories is concerned with Jewish life as such and thereby reflects the change that has weakened the emotional and intellectual ties of the community. One of the best, “The Hartford Innocents,” is narrated in part by a Dewitt Howe, solemn officer of an unspecified charitable foundation, investigating the scandal that occurs in a fashionable progressive Eastern school when the forthright daughter of a liberal Protestant Midwestern clergyman decides to adopt a half-Negro child mysteriously left on her family’s doorstep and raise it herself at school. This is about as far within continental limits as Schwartz could get from the atmosphere of The World Is a Wedding. He has, in fact, turned to writing the sort of fable that has become increasingly popular, stimulated perhaps by the example of Camus, Silone, and Moravia, and the desire to keep at least a rational, if not very physical, grip on reality. It is fascinating to see how he carries his fictional equipment almost intact into this new, windier territory.
“Successful Love,” “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “The Gift,” and “A Colossal Fortune” are gayer, snappier, more colloquial and cheerfully mundane than anything he has done before. They are the work of a self-confident author amusing himself with the fruit of much talk, experience, and casual reading. There is a tendency to construct characters out of variations on well-known figures: the hero of “An American Fairy Tale” strongly suggests Leonard Bernstein, and the father who becomes a “primitive abstractionist” on retirement from business suggests the senior Nemeroy (father of the poet Howard). But the peroration of this story leaves me at a loss:
How beautiful this success story is, how good, how true! It is the equal of any fairy tale, it is full of purity, innocence and happiness. It is like a newborn child. It is as if one were to say, believe, and hope that America were going to be discovered again.
I think this may be a bitter irony, but am unwilling to wager that it is, so much more strongly are we asked to feel about these characters than we could possibly feel about their prototypes in life.
In any event, something is missing, and it is neither skill nor acuteness of perception nor humor. As counterpoint to the rational exfoliation of themes about a problem, Schwartz sounds an affecting new note of midnight lyricism:
One for love, one for frustration, and one for desperation, brandy for hope and beer for nervousness, Martinis to eat and whiskey to sleep, one to be calm, two to be gay, one to be warm and a few to have something to say. A pint to make love and a case to get away from the guilt one cannot face after the great wild flower of the sunset has gone down and left one alone in the isolation and condemnation of the night, the darkness of fear amid electric light. One for the strength never to despair, one to be near the hope which is born of desperate fear, one to remember always that the greatest courage is born of the greatest danger, that courage is born of fear, one never to forget how hope is a way of being alive and living with the real people.
This sort of poetic prose, inextricably woven into the fabric of his earlier stories, detaches itself here and, so to speak, drops off at a bar for a drink by itself. Amidst the funny barroom banter or the solemn, formal brilliance of Dr. Manning’s diagnosis of true charity in “The Hartford Innocents,” one has no doubts of Schwartz’s continuing skill. The missing element, I think, is simply a theme to match the theme or themes of The World Is a Wedding. I was uncomfortable when Leslie Fiedler discovered the dangers of innocence and am no less so now that Delmore Schwartz has discovered them. He seems too honest to be much convinced of anything but the theme’s literary usefulness amidst the general vacancy, and this in turn does not seem quite enough.
The infamy of innocence begins by concerting a valid legal postulate—that all human beings are born equal—into an ideal and an absolute which must be realized immediately; if it is not, we are all unconscionable scoundrels and hypocrites. . . . The attitudes and principles meant as theoretical limits of the structure of a democratic society had become not the boundary lines they were meant to be but the center of attention, consciousness and action. The Hartford girls, in their disregard for all but principle, acted as if human beings existed for the sake of having a democratic state, rather than the democratic state for the sake of the human beings inhabiting it.
This is eloquent and just, especially considering that it is a comment on what happens in Schwartz’s own story where the girls act with an extraordinary degree of selfless idealism. But it comes at the end of a long demonstration of exactly what innocence can still achieve when joined to strong natural gifts. The very substance of the story, indeed, is little more than the charm and power of innocence. The Negro baby that Candida Manning adopts might just as well, had the parents and school officials been less innocent, have been adopted by the proper agencies in the beginning.
It would be difficult to maintain that innocence is our chief danger. Schwartz does not attempt it. But the theme has a dismaying attraction today, because it permits the writer genially to patronize popular culture whose charms he both assimilates and ridicules, the dividing line between affection and ridicule becoming increasingly less visible to dull readers like myself. At the same time, he repudiates his doctrinaire past as partaking, at one remove perhaps, of the general climate of innocence. Whereas the innocence which made The World Is a Wedding possible—Schwartz’s own in the 30’s and 40’s—gave its author a strong taste for the most general case within the strictest social limits, this new zeal in the exposure of innocence, however relieved by humor, cannot help bearing down on the special case, since to accuse a whole nation of innocence is to dissipate whatever point one may have had in mind. And this is a loss to fiction because there are many agencies more pressing than fiction for the airing of special cases. Inventive as Schwartz may be in concocting his fables, one cannot read them without suspecting that in about five minutes reality, aided by the press, TV, etc., will provide something better; that problem-posing, or according to the latest cant, Decision Making, has become so much the normal substance of life that fiction can only limp along behind. What we must have from fiction is life itself, and the life of an old language when it enters a new life in the world.
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1 Corinth Books. 242 pp., $4.50: paperback $1.95.