RaymondJ. Wilson
DELMORE SCHWARTZ AND
PURGATORY
The words, " In dreams begin responsibilities," which Delmore
Schwartz employed for the title of one of his best-known stories, derive from
William Butler Yeats. Attributing them to an "Old Play," Yeats wrote,
'''In
dreams begins responsibility'"
as the motto for his 1914 book,
Responsibili–
ties.
This connection begins a chain of thought that leads
to
an even more
striking link between the two writers: similarities extend far enough between
Schwartz's story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and Yeats's late play
Pwgalory
that placing the two works side by side illuminates differences and
promotes an understanding of both story and play, qualities that are
independent of historical explanation.
Schwartz's story shows startling similarities to the play that Richard
Ellmann considered Yeats's best:
Purgatory.
Both story and play show a son
viewing the crucial moment leading to his own conception, a moment in the
parents' doomed relationship. In both, the son calls out futilely for the parents
to stop their actions before they lead to scandal and unhappiness. Each son
says that the parents must avoid the conception of someone as vi le as him–
self. Schwartz's story is a dream; Yeats 's play has notable dream-like
characteristics, and it contains a thematically crucial motif of dreams. Both
physical settings consist ofa darkened area containing the son and a rectangle
oflight within which the parents act. Both stories contain a theme oflengthy
or endless repetition which is in some way connected to a horse or horses.
Even such great similarities would not surprise people who noticed
them if one cou ld assume that the youthfu l Schwartz had found inspiration,
either conscious or unconscious, in a work by the world-renowned elder poet.
However, facts rule out an imitative Schwartz as the exp lanation because
Schwartz wrote his story three years before Yeats wrote his play. Schwartz
wrote "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and showed it to fr iends in 1935
and published it in
Partisan Review
in the fall of 1937. Yeats began writing
Purgatory
in the spring of 1938, and the first performance occurred later that
year.
Although the great differences between Yeats and Schwartz provide an
unexpected context for the already odd notion of Yeats following the lead of
a twenty-five-year-old American, the detailed quality of their similarities is
too intriguing to be easily dismissed. In his story, Schwartz's narrator de–
scribes his mother and father on an outing
to
Coney Island sometime before
