Delmore Schwartz, "In Dreams Begin Responsiblities"

self-envy & time-sickness

“He is studying in his bedroom upstairs, studying for his final examination at the College of the City of New York, having been dead of rapid pneumonia for the last twenty-one years.”

Sometimes an author writes something so good that it constitutes a personal catastrophe.

It’s one thing — and not a small thing — to encounter an unmatchably great work by someone else. The resultant feelings of pointlessness and worthlessness (try reading “The Dead” and then going back to your novel) can disable a writer for months. But for envy there are at least treatments. Take the envied work as inspiration. Reread Bird by Bird.

But if the unmatchably great work is by you — well, then you are in much deeper trouble. Because of course you should, in fact you must, be able to create work of that quality again. Unless you’ve somehow suffered a devastating brain injury without realizing it? (Reddit can you have a concussion and not know) Or if that dazzling work was a fluke, like that time you once flung a sandwich wrapper into the trash can from across the room, and now your entire career/life is doomed to be a slow unveiling of your actual, inborn mediocrity?      

I don’t know exactly what went wrong in Delmore Schwartz’s life — alcoholism, mental illness, and unhappy marriages all seem to have taken their cuts. But having written “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” in a single weekend — at the age of twenty-one — can’t have helped.

“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is (in case you’re one of the lucky few with a first reading ahead of you) an eight-and-a-half page story, published in 1937, about a young man who dreams that he is in a movie theater, watching his parents go on a date to Coney Island. The narrator, watching his parents’ courtship on the screen — this turns out to be the date on which they become engaged — experiences a kind of apoplectic dread, sometimes sobbing, sometimes shouting at the screen (“‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.’”) The story is, for creative writing students, what the human eye is for aspiring biologists. You stand before it in a state of hushed awe; nature is capable of this.

The story’s uncanny power (I almost typed the dream’s uncanny power, and I’d bet anything that the story did come to Schwartz in a dream — it has that preternatural richness) — but in any event, the story’s power has to do mostly with its relation to time, how the narrator watches the past unfold with a full and helpless knowledge of what is to come. His parents’ relationship, which looks shaky even at its inception, evidently led, in Schwartz’s accounting, to “remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” He is strapped into his own personal Clockwork Orange movie seat, unable to watch, unable to look away.

But the torment is deeper, and more widely applicable, than merely regretting your parents’ marriage. The narrator finds himself weeping at the ceaseless activity of waves in the ocean, and at the shining of the “terrible sun.” There ought to be a word for the broad and paralyzing terror he experiences, something that might be translated from the German as time-sickness. There is something fundamentally nightmarish about being a time-bound creature, isn’t there? Of knowing with absolute certainty that your end will be a merciless dissolution, and yet having to linger over every tick of the roller-coaster cart on the way?

Early in the story the narrator watches his father show up at his mother’s house to pick her up for their date — his mother isn’t quite ready, so his father has to spend an awkward interval making small talk with her family.

Where is the older uncle, my mother’s older brother? He is studying in his bedroom upstairs, studying for his final examination at the College of the City of New York, having been dead of rapid pneumonia for the last twenty-one years.

That second sentence is, for me, the pathogen of time-sickness captured on a slide. The uncle is, at the moment depicted on the screen, a young man upstairs studying, and he has been dead of pneumonia for twenty-one years. The structure of the sentence forces these two incompatible visions into a single element of perception. The first time you read the sentence your brain fills in the words after having been with something like worrying about the exam for months. You expect, naturally enough, to remain, for a sentence at least, in the relative safety of the past. But Schwartz, after softening us up with the homey chattiness of the first two clauses — those repeated studying’s have something of Roth or Malamud in them — pierces us with the casual disaster of the finale.

This is a truer way of seeing than with our ordinary blinkered present-preoccupation — the cup is, as the Buddhists say, already broken. It’s also enough to wreck your life.