PARTISAN REVIEW
35
If
the Jewish writers of the thirties, as writers, failed even to
survive the decade, the generation of the forties remained in its
own way
maudit
and unfulfilled -- and hardly acknowledged to–
day except for its star performers. In a sense they were writers too
talented but also too restless and unconfident to pursue a single
line of work. Like many of their non-Jewish contemporaries -–
Randall Jarrell comes to mind - - they were intellectuals and men
of letters rather than novelists and poets. Several -- including
Delmore Schwartz, Paul Goodman, and Isaac Rosenfeld -- made
their mark as critics and essayists, and in fiction they tend to
assume a no-nonsense tone of plain talk which, despite a leaven
of whimsy and fantasy, reveals a distrust of the imaginative pro–
cess when it gets too far from "real life." They gravitate toward
small forms and big ideas, which they sometimes manipulate
so brilliantly that they overwhelm the fictional context. They
distrust eloquence and Art but remain beautifully close to the vital
facts of experience, especially the experience of intellectuals
caught in a wild, unsettling rush of acculturation, a crazy quilt of
America. For all their attraction to ideas they never forget that in–
tellectuals have mothers and fathers, friends and lovers, and that
ideas are hatched by people, who can be elated, changed, or even
destroyed by them.
Bellow is a characteristic member of this generation, its only
survivor, its only "success" as a novelist. His friend Isaac Rosen–
feld is its fallen soldier, but Delmore Schwartz remains its most
fascinating and least-appreciated prophet. A
wunderkt"nd
who
never fulfilled his matchless promise, he descended increasingly
into paranoia and isolation during the latter part of his life. By the
time of his terrible, anonymous death in a shabby hotel in 1966 he
had entirely faded from public view. The ripples of interest that
followed first his death and then the publication of a thick volume
of selected essays in 1970 consisted mainly of testimony from old
friends to his extraordinarily vital personal presence.
As a writer he is hard to characterize or pin down, and few
have tried. Younger readers seem not to have heard of him, though
his work is one long brooding adolescence, and a scholar like Allen
Guttman, whose book
The Jewish Writer in America
aims at a cer–
tain comprehensiveness, gives him no space a,t all. The finale of
