In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and other stories by Delmore Schwartz

A finger on the pulse of pre-war America

In his story "America! America!", Delmore Schwartz (1914-66) writes: "The lower middle-class of the generation of Shenandoah's parents had engendered ... children full of contempt for everything important to their parents."

The old-timers, Jewish immigrants who have established themselves as small businessmen and insurance salesmen, are still filled with the romance of the new country: "When the toilet-bowl flushed like Niagara, when a suburban homeowner killed his wife and children, and when a Jew was made a member of President Theodore Roosevelt's cabinet, the excited exclamation was: "America! America!".

Their children, by the late 1930s, are feckless, self-regarding (and often unbalanced) literary types.

This collection (published in paperback here for the first time) offers a poignant portrait of these two generations, and the clashes, gulfs and "unbreakable unity" between them. In the celebrated title story, a young man goes to the cinema, watches his parents' courtship at Coney Island in 1909 and, as his mother accepts his father's gauche proposal, jumps up and screams: "Don't do it ... Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous."

This story caused a sensation when published in Partisan Review in 1937. That didn't prevent Schwartz from writing an abrasive account of a literary magazine's New Year's Eve party, said to be based on the PR crowd. Amid the gossip, rivalries and sycophancy, Oliver and Delia Jones's attempt at an "open marriage" is anatomised with a typically amused yet unsparing clarity. Delia stands around in a gown "intended to suggest to many minds the delightful possibility of taking it off". She is "unable to understand why no amorous interludes occurred", for "she heard everywhere of extramarital episodes of other human beings. She did not understand that it was not a question of a defect in her, but of the difficulty of direct communication in modern life, the difficulty of making clear her willingness". So Delia goes "from one man to another, making amorous proposals which were regarded for the most part as efforts at wit".

Schwartz was to succumb to drink, deep depression and an absurdly grandiose attempt to turn his early life into an epic poem. But his best stories view his characters with such sharpness that the wider significances never seems forced.

As the Joneses' marital differences degenerate into slaps and screams, another guest realises that the new year has arrived – 1938, the year of the Munich Pact. "Everyone knew that soon there be a new world war ... Shenandoah was already locked in what was soon to be a post-Munich sensibility: complete hopelessness of perception and feeling." For a brief moment, at least, Delmore Schwartz was the man with his finger on the pulse.

The reviewer is editor of the 'Jewish Quarterly'