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PARTISAN REVIEW
But there's nothing, he said to himself bitterly, nothing you can make
of it. Wiley Bey, for example, imagines he's proved some point or other.
And suddenly Simon (who couldn't hear pain of any kind) began to
bang his forehead hard against the wooden panelling between the two
windows, saying aloud each time:
"But he hasn't, he hasn't, he hasn't!"
Books
A NEW YORK CHILDHOOD
GENESIS: BOOK ONE. By Delmore Schwartz. New Directions. $3.00
Like Oedipus,
No one can go away from genesis,
From parents, early crime, and clwracter,
Guilty or innocent!
Five years ago Delmore Schwartz's first book,
In Dreams Begin
Responsibilities,
was greeted with more critical acclaim than has come
to any other American poet of his generation, the generation since Auden.
As a result Schwartz was placed in the hardest position for a young
writer to sustain in a spot-lighted age, a beginning poet with a reputation
to live up to. When his short verse play,
Shenandcah,
seemed slight, it
then became the fashion to declare that he had been overpraised and
had not deserved his reputation in the first place. It is fortunate for
both the poet and his readers that
Genesis
is a marked advance over all
his previous work, and that it is impressive in a way that recent poetry
has too seldom been-in the range of its subject-matter.
As he says in his preface, Schwartz aims to be "one more of the
poets who seek to regain for Poetry the width of reference of prose with–
out losing what the Symbolists discovered." He bears out this aim by
presenting a whole phase of our cultural history, the image of American
life that was formed for and by the immigrants of the end of the nine–
teenth century, who came from Central Europe to survive or endure in
New York. Their intentions were not political; their American dream was
that of greater wealth. The most strikingly drawn character in Schwartz's
narrative, Hershey Green's father, becomes a terrifying embodiment of
our naked lusts. Running away from Czarist Russia to join his older
brother here, Jack Green soon gets his feet on the economic ladder. He
climbs to being a successful dealer in real estate, and thus fulfills the
intense feeling that he had brought with him from Europe, that "the
ownership of land was the greatest material thing." His other passionate
drive is for sensuality. His marriage with self-willed tactless Eva
Newman is a succession of brutal scenes over his infidelities. ("Is not
escape a major industry in North America?"). At the time of the out–
break of the first World War, she is trying desperately to hold him by
bearing him a son, and Jack Green feels proud and secure. Although
the other lights may be going out in Europe, for him in America the
radiance of making money surpassed them all in brilliance.
The form that Schwartz has devised for presenting his material is
