BOOKS
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an alternating sequence of prose narrative and choric comment. The
narrative consists of the compulsive reflections of sixteen year·old Hershey
Green as he lies sleepless one night and rages through all that he knows
of his history, from his own memory and from family report. The
chorus, a shadowy group of the dead, give their minds to discuss and
explain, since, in the detachment of death, their sole desire is for clarifi·
cation through full knowledge. The advantages for the author in such
a chorus are obvious: he can gain thereby great density of reference.
But the dangers are equally patent. Such commentators can overin·
terpret, and can then prove merely a distraction from the forward·moving
story. And although the poet cites Hardy among the modern witnesses
for a chorus, the example of
The Dynasts
is different in two crucial
respects. For one thing, Hardy's various groups, such as the Spirits
of the Pities and the Spirits Ironic, are characterized by a dramatic point
Qf view, whereas Schwartz's succession of voices have no clear identity
and often lose themselves in mere fluidity. What is even more important,
the form of the choruses seems frequently too relaxed for full effective–
ness. To be sure, Schwartz has stated that he has "no wish to emulate
Swinburne," but that he seeks rather to approximate the flat accents
of ordinary speech. But one of the most living delights of art is the
surprise of contrast, and, as an offset to the prose narrative, the reader's
ear often longs for more of the resources of verse than Schwartz avails
himself of, for more formal stanzaic patterns, and for at least an occa·
sional tightening up by rhyme.
As it is, we are faced with the anomaly that the most lyrical passages
of the book are expressed in prose. An exquisite moment occurs when
Hershey, coming downstairs for his sixth Christmas and finding the
bicycle for which he had longed, wheels it over to the window and comes
face to face with an even more overpowering joy, the new snow, the
deepest symbol to him always of the mystery of release. Schwartz's
writing is masterly at such a juncture, and the chief reason why he
can convey the warmth of breathless emotion is that he has disciplined
his narrative as he has not disciplined his choruses, by stylizing his
prose up to a tense rhythmical pattern. We have travelled a curious
distance from the lesson that Eliot and Pound learned from Henry James,
that poetry ought to be as well written as prose.
I may exaggerate this point, but the success of
Genesis
assuredly
lies primarily in the accumulating richness of consciousness on the part
of the growing
boy~
The narrative is thus a type of
Bildungsroman,
and
is a further addition to what seems to have become about our most
frequent modern genre since
Buddenbrooks
and
Swann's Way
and
The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
But there is a peculiar freshness
to Schwartz's contribution to the genre, a freshness that is owing to his
most distinctive gift, irrespective of which medium he works in. He has
a fine capacity for combining lyric immediacy with philosophical refiec·
tion, and can thus command both the particular and the general. His
great flair for observing aU the surfaces of Hershey's environment is not
allowed to degenerate into the production of mere decor, for Schwartz
holds tenaciously to the poet's high responsibility to intelligence. Thus
the passage about the bicycle and the snow-and here the chorus serves
