38
MORRIS D ICK ST E IN
Delmore Schwartz's attitude toward these characters is com–
plicated: there must be a great deal of himself and his friends in
them, yet he lays bare their weaknesses with a scalpel. Surely
he
is
the "youthful author of promise" whose name betrays his own
divided soul. Ironically, the stories as a whole are hobbled by the
same sort of claustral self-involvement for which he tellingly
indicts his characters, as if the Hemingway code of action had
been replaced by a cult of sensitivity so stringent that no action
whatever is possible. Taken by themselves these stories would
seem to confirm Irving Howe's suggestion that the sensibility of
the New York intellectuals was too nervous and special for major
creative work.
The major action of the stories is conversation: despite his
irony Schwartz lovingly orchestrates his characters' talk. We are
told of Rudyard Bell, who presides over a circle of would-be gen–
iuses in "The World is a Wedding," that "the volley of the conver–
sation, as at a tennis match, was all he took [away] with him. For
what he wanted and what satisfied him was the activity of his own
mind. This need and satisfaction kept him from becoming truly in–
terested in other human beings, though he sought them out all the
time." Surely Delmore Schwartz is exposing himself as well as
Rudyard, for in his own talk he too "was like a travelling virtuoso
who performs brilliant set-pieces," but in his self-diagnosis the
author becomes a Rudyard who knows and transcends himself.
Like Rudyard, Delmore is an Artist and talker but his bohemian
contempt for the middle class is superseded by a fascination with
his origins and identity. After Schwartz's death Dwight Mac–
donald, with his usual amiable obtuseness, wrote that he could
never understand his friend Delmore's "obsession with his Jewish
childhood." Paradoxically then, his self-involvement forced him to
become truly interested in other human beings. Only they could
help him decode his own secret, and it's precisely this obsession
that propels his fiction from random satire and self-dramatization
to an entirely different order of material.
In "America! America!" (his best story) and "In Dreams Be–
gin Responsibilities" (his most famous one) Schwartz turns from
the narrow circle of his contemporaries to the enigma of the previ–
ous generation. Both stories focus on the formative bonds between
