Young Adulthood…
I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday…
Delmore Schwartz’s most famous short story (apparently written over a single weekend by the similarly aged Schwartz) is the retelling of a dream the unnamed narrator has on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. In this dream the narrator is seated in a cinema audience, watching an old black and white film of the courtship of his own young, not-yet-married parents. He sees his father arriving at his mother’s family home to take her out on a date, and watches his grandfather (his mother’s father) disapprovingly observe his would-be-son-in-law. The narrator muses that his grandfather is perhaps worried that “my father would not make a good husband for his oldest daughter,” and just at that moment the film breaks down.
It quickly resumes, and the couple depart for their date at Coney Island. And yet the sense lingers that the grandfather, through an unguarded comment or question, could have put a stop to everything right there; but, by holding his peace, has allowed the union to continue, and all that follows. Meanwhile, the twenty-one-year-old result of this union continues to watch his parents on their date, all the time horribly aware of their flaws and insecurities. At one point he even stands up to shout at the screen: “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”
It’s Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’ meets the Back to the Future – shot through with a healthy does of Jewish intelligentsia circa 1930s New York.
First published in the first issue of Partisan Review, 1937. Collected in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, 1938 and in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories 1978
A Personal Anthology 