The first, which includes the title story along with “New Year’s Eve” and “A Bitter Farce,” offers an acid chronicle of the thwarted lives of young bohemian intellectuals coming of age in New York during the Great Depression. The stories here fall into three categories. “A recklessly penetrating psychology,” wrote an admiring Hannah Arendt about the tales gathered in the volume, claiming that they revealed “the inner and social life of individuals who have been separated by modern society from all authentic community.” Uprooted by immigration, battered by poverty, disrupted by one world war with another on the way, and compelled to work within a ruthlessly competitive economic system during a worldwide Depression, what else could one expect? A critique of the American project lies at the heart of Schwartz’s fictive enterprise.
In the end, he abandoned the novel, distilling it into the title story of his 1948 collection. Dupee, as well as Dupee’s former pupil Mary McCarthy (whom Delmore once tried - and failed - to seduce). The prototypes for its characters include the literary critic and co-founder of The Partisan Review, F. Schwartz revels in the epigram’s teasing implications: “he world is a misalliance, a marriage of convenience, a royal mating, a shotgun affair, and all the other kinds of marriages.” He used the line as a working title for a 400-page novel, a roman à clef about his friend Paul Goodman and his circle. Under the impression apparently then that I knew it well, so that in order not to be caught napping again, I took a volume of selections from the library, and amid much trash, protocol, and mere intellectual ingenuity, found this sentence all by itself without context or commentary “ The world is a wedding.” “Someone quoted the Talmud to me several weeks ago,” Schwartz wrote in a letter to Mark Van Doren in 1943,
Many of the issues haunting Schwartz - sexuality, antisemitism, racism, class-consciousness, the dubious virtues of family life - remain at the forefront of our American conversation. For better or worse, its singular celebrity has eclipsed a body of work whose strangeness and neurotic vitality merit a closer look. More than 80 years after its first publication, that story remains fresh, and disturbing. A decade would pass before New Directions brought out his first volume dedicated solely to stories, The World Is a Wedding (1948), in which “In Dreams” reappears. Schwartz’s first book was the kind of literary miscellany newly in vogue today under the rubric “hybrid”: the collection contained one story, 35 lyric poems, a long narrative poem, and a play in verse. It contained both the title story and Schwartz’s poem “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave.” With this book, Schwartz joined the rarefied company of Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, and a tiny handful of other writers whose work surfaces regularly in both poetry and fiction anthologies. Published in 1938 by New Directions, a two-year-old small press founded by a Harvard undergraduate, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities marked one of the most storied debuts in American letters. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” The story’s 24-year-old author could not have known he had composed a self-fulfilling prophecy.įew writers launch their careers with first books containing two masterpieces in different genres. Unable to restrain his anguish, the narrator leaps up and screams at the screen: “Don’t do it! It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.
#DELMORE SCHWARTZ MOVIE#
ONE OF THE unforgettable moments in American fiction occurs when the narrator of Delmore Schwartz’s 1937 story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” who has been sitting in a movie theater inexplicably watching a film that chronicles his parents’ courtship, sees his father propose to his mother.
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