No Cavalry in Sight

SUCCESSFUL LOVE (242 pp.)--Delmore Schwartz--Corinth ($4.50).

A rainy, unpromising greyness surrounds the short stories of Delmore Schwartz, as it does the fiction of other writers who find the literary quarterlies their most congenial homes. One reason for the quarterly drear seems to be an extreme distrust of the dramatic, arising partly from squeamishness about melodrama, that greatest of sins against artistic sophistication. Another is the honest awareness of serious men that the cavalry rarely does charge into ordinary lives. One might suspect that Schwartz and his colleagues had all been invited to tea by John Marcher--the hero of Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle, whose distinguishing mark was that nothing ever happened to him--and that halfway through someone had slammed the door closed, leaving the quarterly writers locked inside.

No Arrivals. This reluctance of Schwartz--a poet, critic and onetime Partisan Review editor--and other writers of his sort to let things happen on the page, more or less in view.of the reader, means that their fiction lacks the sense of journey-and-arrival that, even if it is only a movement from one mood to another, distinguishes a story from a prose painting or a personal essay. Most of the stories in this book are plotless. Some are mere parables, the ironies of which do not make up for the anemia of the telling. A somewhat giddy heartiness about sex in a few of the pieces does not help.

The last story begins promisingly--a Negro foundling is placed on the doorstep of a prominent white parson who has six children, nine bathrooms, liberal views and a carnivorous wife. The reader is encouraged, feeling that from such a start Schwartz cannot fail to arrive somewhere. For a while this optimism is justified; idealism, hypocrisy and natural family contentiousness roil before one's very eyes, and the parson's eldest daughter, horrified to see her parents act like racists, dashes off to college with the baby.

Lost Lady. The author is now nicely above the treetops; he could sail for a while and eventually arrive safely back on earth. Instead, he throws away all his sandbags and soon is far out in the grey with nothing below him but open water. For the last 40 pages, 'the story is a meditation on the incident by a bemused academic type who indulges himself in lengthy prose calisthenics on the destructive force of innocence in American society. It is a good meditation, filled with elaborately balanced sentences that deserve to' be read twice, and must be if one is to understand them. But what of the egregious parson and his wife? They were an excellently burlesqued Macbeth and Lady, but they disappear halfway through the second act, leaving the porter to explain the rest of the play. Not very surprisingly, the audience wants its money back.

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