PARTISAN REVIEW
37
manner is uniformly earnest and labored. Except for a few first–
rate pieces like "The Duchess' Red Shoes" (a critique of Lionel
Trilling) his longer essays offer access to his mind more than they
illuminate the object. Only in his stories does that mind become
conscious of itself, for only there does his strange ruminative voice
work dramatically. Instead of donning the robes of abstract cul–
tural authority he makes his style and personality part of his
subject, part of the problem.
I can't resist quoting an example of this style from "New
Year's Eve," one of three stories that concern "a youthful author
of promise" with a name -- Shenandoah Fish -- even more
improbable than the author's own: "Shenandoah and Nicholas
travelled crosstown in a street-car, standing up in the press and
brushing against human beings they would never see again. They
continued their argument which on the surface concerned the '
question, should Nicholas go to a party where he would for the
most part be a stranger? This was a type of the academic argu–
ment, since the street-car slowly went crosstown, bearing the
young men to the argument's conclusion." The awkward, chiselled
quality of Schwartz's critical prose is on viewhere but the tone is
wry
rather than earnest, a volatile mixture of irony and affection.
A moment later the argument deepens and we see the other pas–
sengers "listening in amazement to their virtually ontological dis–
cussions of character." Schwartz's own boyish mind is just the sort
that bears down on experience in an "ontological" way, risking
absurdity in an effort to both express and overcome its own sense
of isolation, its singular intensity. His stories are populated by
images of himself, named like himself, who become both the meat
of his satire and the vehicles of his aspiration to art, genius, and
fame. Such stories as "New Year's Eve" and "The World is a
Wedding" dwell lovingly on the preciosities of urban intellectuals
and artists
manques
whose quasi-bohemianism is enforced by the
depression rather than founded on talent or creative energy. Con–
temptuous of a middle class which refuses to bow down to them,
cut off from their origins yet without much inward direction, they
devolve into a brittle cynicism and cliquishness that leaves them
cut off from "real life," trapped in their own anxious feelings of
superiority.
