36
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Guttman's work is a long section on "Mr. Bellow's America," with
chapters on everyone of Bellow's novels, but Schwartz's great
stories "America! America!" and "In Dreams Begin Responsi–
bilities" evidently don't belong to the semiofficial canon of ex–
plicity "Jewish" writing. Yet, as much as Bellow's first book,
Dangl£ng Man
(1944), they do introduce themes that would be–
come decisive in the Jewish literary renaissance of the fifties.
Yet even a background has its background: behind the
awkward new sensibility of the 1940s lay not only the disruptions
of the war but the adventures and sorrows of Marxism. "Marxism
is in relative eclipse," wrote Edmund Wilson in 1940, after nearly
a decade of immersion in it. "An era in its history has ended." N
0-
where is that eclipse more visible than in the work of the young
writers. The introspective diarist whose mask Bellow wears in
Danglz"ng Man,
begins by attacking his age as "an era of hardboiled–
dom" dominated by a belief in action rather than self-knowledge.
He writes in 1942 when the obligations of wartime patriotism had
replaced the pressures of social activism but the thrust is broadly
aimed. In keeping a journal and keeping to his room, Joseph -–
whose name recalls Kafka's antihero -- announces a new turn in
the direction of the novel, away from Hemingway and from the
proletarian writers who had appropriated his tight-lipped manner
to their own ideological purpose.
Danglz"ng Man
is the strangest,
most claustral of war novels, a late, mild flower of the Under–
ground Man tradition, morosely ideological in its refusal of all
ideology.
Danglz"ng Man
would probably be forgotten today if Bellow's
later work had not kept it in view.
The World
£s
a Wedd£ng
(1948),
which collects Delmore Schwartz's stories of a decade, £s for–
gotten, perhaps
the
neglected gem of the fiction of the forties.
Schwartz received recognition mainly as a poet but neither his
poetry nor his criticism have worn well -- which is to say, sur–
vived the period of uncritical adulation of the great modernist
writers. Everything he wrote shows a good deal of stiffness and
self-consciousness, but when the hermetic, elliptical intensities of
Rilke, Eliot, and the symbolists merged with the gauche poeticism
of his own language and sensibility the results could be disastrous.
Where his poetry is alternately hermetic and "sincere" his critical
