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LESLIE A. FIEDLER
spectable topics for the popular press: an age which, rediscovering
West and Roth, celebrated its own sons who had grown up reading
them, the age of the Jew as winner. But how hard it is to love a
winner-to love Bellow, let's say, after the National Book Award
and bestsellerdom- in this land of ours, where nothing succeeds like
failure, and all the world loves a loser.
How much more comfortable we feel with those exceptional
figures of the forties-fifties who did not quite make it, dying too soon
and still relatively unknown, like Isaac Rosenfeld ; or surviving dimly
inside of their wrecked selves until they could disappear unnoticed,
like Delmore Schwartz. I, at least, find myself thinking often these
days of Rosenfeld, who might well (it once seemed) have become our
own Franz Kafka; and who perhaps
was
(in a handful of stories like
"The Pyramids" and "The Party," dreams of parables or parables of
dreams) all the Kafka we shall ever have. And even more often
my thoughts turn, ever since his pitiful death anyhow- in the same
black year for the Jews which also saw Lenny Bruce go--to Delmore
Schwartz, with whom the forties began two years before the official
opening of the decade.
It was only 1938, even before the start of World War II, when
there appeared a volume of
his
short fiction and verse called, ap–
propriately enough,
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities- "responsibili–
ties" for the age to come, "dreams" for the long tradition on which
he drew. In the title story, at any rate, a young man on the eve of
his twenty-first birthday, is portrayed dreaming a dream that becomes
a movie (not in technicolor, or even in black and white, but in grey
on grey, those authentic Schwartzian colors), the movie of a dream.
Asleep, but already on the verge of waking, he watches his parents,
sundered by rage and mutual incomprehension before his birth or
conception. "... And I keep shouting," he tells us, " 'What are they
doing? Don't they know what they're doing? Why doesn't my mother
go after my father?' ... But the Usher has seized my arm and is
dragging me away. . . ."
It is a nightmare uncannily apt for the Age of the Cold War
and Going-to-the-Movies---an era whose chief discovery was dis-illu–
sion:
this
bad dream of the past as irrevocably given; and of the
impotence of the young in the face of enormities which they inherit
