Schwartz, it is true, was aware of himself as a Jewish writer at the same time, he was an experimentalist. Still, if this indicates its own sort of heritage, Schwartz as connected to Bellow and, by extension, to Philip Roth or Tillie Olsen, such a reading is not nuanced enough. A decade after Schwartz’s death, Saul Bellow would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Humboldt’s Gift” the protagonist, Von Humboldt Fleisher, was inspired by Schwartz, with whom Bellow had been friends. Eliot), teaching at Harvard and Cornell, the youngest ever winner of Yale’s Bollingen Prize for life achievement, descent into disorder and disarray. Even the facts - on the surface, anyway - support this perspective: early success (including praise from Ezra Pound and T.S. The temptation, of course, is to consider Schwartz as a self-created (and self-destroyed) genius, the apotheosis of romantic myth. It’s a good book and an important one, both on its own terms and as a way to frame the author as part of a lineage. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” opens “Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz” (New Directions, 293 pages, $17.95), a new collection, edited by the poet Craig Morgan Teicher and with a foreword by John Ashbery, which seeks to reclaim a place, a stature, for Schwartz’s fiction, criticism and poetry. ![]() First published in the Partisan Review when Schwartz was in his early 20s, it is, along with James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Anatole Broyard’s “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn” (which resembles it in some ways), among the finest short stories I know. It’s all there, in a narrative that moves back and forth between the mundane and the fantastic, echoing the ebb and flow of the author’s inner life. Inevitability, loss, the disconnect of generations and the futility of living: “And so I shut my eyes,” he writes, “because I could not bear to see what was happening.” It is one of only two passages in the story written in the past tense the other comes at the end, when the narrator awakens on “the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday,” and realizes that everything about which he’s been railing is already committed to the past. The negation, the self-abnegation - how would Schwartz exist if his parents hadn’t come together? - is part of the point. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous,” the narrator cries out as he watches his father ask for his mother’s hand. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Take the title story of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a nine-page fiction that portrays the past as a silent movie, the courtship of the author’s parents as a tragedy. (Schwartz died in 1966, at 52, after years of alcohol and madness.) But their intent, their brutality, is aligned. Reed’s lines, of course, are blunter than much of what Schwartz wrote during his truncated career. Reed, I should say, struck me much more viscerally I think of his 1974 song “Kill Your Sons,” with that heart-stopping second verse: “And sister, she got married on the island / And her husband takes the train / He’s big and he’s fat and he doesn’t even have a brain.” This was my family he was describing, my aunts and uncles, who appeared to embody precisely the sort of suburban Jewish existence I’d been raised to regard with both disdain and distance, as though it didn’t, couldn’t, possibly have anything to do with me. ![]() The only book of his I knew about had a title so great, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” that I wrote it in a notebook once, as if it were a secret message I needed to decode. ![]() It wasn’t that “European Son” was a song I loved - the album has more resonant tracks, including “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Sunday Morning” and “Heroin” - but there was that name, Delmore, exotic, especially when juxtaposed against the common Schwartz. For most of my formative years as a reader, he was just a name, inspiration to my great culture hero Lou Reed, who dedicated “European Son,” on the first Velvet Underground record, to him.
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