PARTISAN REVIEW
41
nothing to do with his work; perhaps, on the contrary, it
wa~
the
center; or perhaps it was the starting-point and compelled the in–
nermost motion of the work to be flight, or criticism, or denial, or
rejection. "
Delmore Schwartz's best stories move away from this
starting-point, toward an empathy for other lives, but they never
fully evade these limitations. They are exquisitely wrought but
excruciatingly self-conscious. No one would call them expansive.
Their main theme remains that of the isolated self and the mys–
teries of identity that can never be solved but never evaded . For
the author himself the final paranoia and anonymity, the trail of
broken friendships and brilliant memories, to say nothing of the
deterioration of his work, were the final seal of the same failure.
Ill.
The very title of Saul Bellow's first novel suggests its kinship
with Delmore Schwartz's work, almost more than the book itself.
As William Phillips has aptly remarked, Bellow's Joseph dangles
"with both feet on the ground." (His resemblance to the Under–
ground Man is skin-deep.) Not until
Herzog
(1964), his retrospec–
tive summation of the cultural life of the postwar period, would
Bellow fully convey the glory and anguish of the deracinated
Jewish intellectual of that time. What makes
Dangling Man
pro–
phetic of a new literature and sensibility is its intent focus of the
theme of the isolated self. Where Herzog and Tommy Wilhelm (in
Seize the Day)
will desperately reach out to people to overcome
their almost unbearable sense of dis connection, Joseph attenuates
all human connection in order to experiment on himself, to sound
every inward note.
Dangling Man
is li terally a book about a man
who keeps a journal ("to talk to myself" ): "and if I had as many
mouths as Siva has arms and kept them going all the time, I still
could not do myself justice." Severed from his job, not yet in the
army, out of touch with wife, friends, and family, scarcely able to
read, Joseph is performing an ontological experiment on the self,
acting out a dream of absolute freedom that is the flip-side of the
coin of alienation. In its small and weightless way
Dangling Man
foreshadows the metaphysics of the self, the elusive mysteries of
personality, that would dominate the fiction of the fifties -- the
