29 pages • 58 minutes read
Delmore SchwartzIn Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1938A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Delmore Schwartz
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a short story by Delmore Schwartz, remains arguably his most influential piece of writing. Schwartz drafted it in the summer of 1935, when he was just 21 years old. The events it describes closely match his real-life family experience. For example, his parents, Harry and Rose, really were Brooklynites who formed a disastrous marriage. They divorced when Schwartz and his younger brother were still children. The story was published in 1937; it found immediate success and made the author’s name.
Due to the strength of “In Dreams,” “The World Is a Wedding,” and other early stories, critics greeted Schwartz as one of the emerging literary spokesmen of his generation. His prodigious talent burned out fairly early, however. His post-1940s fiction received mixed reviews and remains infrequently anthologized. His epic poem Genesis (1943) was a critical flop and has never gained a wide readership.
Twice married and twice divorced, Schwartz seemed to replicate his parents’ troubled relationship—the subject of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”—in his own romantic life. Increasingly, he struggled with alcohol misuse, mental health conditions, and financial woes. In 1959, he received a major poetry award, the Bollingen Prize, for his volume of New and Selected Poems, but this was the last hurrah of a fading career. In 1966, he died at age 52 in New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel.
Today, Schwartz is remembered as much for other writers’ tributes to him as for his own writing. The poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the novelist Saul Bellow, and the songwriter Lou Reed all depicted him or dedicated work to him. Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift (1975), for example, portrays a fictionalized version of Schwartz in his declining years. Bellow’s novel addresses the delicate balance of art and power and compares the successes and failures of a fictionalized Bellow alongside Schwartz.
Cultural Context: The Great Depression
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” appeared in 1937, toward the end of the economic crisis known as the Great Depression (1929-1939). It depicts a dream set in or around 1909, the year the narrator’s parents got engaged. However, it ends with the narrator waking on his 21st birthday (presumably during the Depression, which for the 21-year-old Schwartz would have been the present day). In other words, the story looks back on a bygone, seemingly optimistic period from the perspective of a bleak present.
Notably, the father in the story is brazen about his financial future. Even as a young man, he makes plenty of money (though he exaggerates his income). He dreams of becoming a great success like “the big men he admires,” including President William Taft and the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Paragraph 5). For Schwartz’s first audience, the father’s attitude would have signaled an excessive confidence in the future, or perhaps an unwarranted belief in the American Dream itself. Indeed, Schwartz wrote “In Dreams” just a few years after historian James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase “the American dream.” Adams defined the concept as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” By the middle of the Depression, that dream had come to resemble a cruel joke for many struggling Americans.
Schwartz also sets the story in the cultural environment he came from: the borough of Brooklyn in early 20th-century New York City. Schwartz’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania, and his father did become a financial success in the real estate business. Due to estate complications, however, Schwartz never inherited that wealth. Like America itself, his family legacy promised more than it could deliver.
As a result of this cultural context, some early readers felt that “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” summed up the mood of a generation, including, more specifically, the experience of Jewish Americans born to immigrant families in the early 20th century. It became the title story of Schwartz’s first collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938), which debuted to enthusiastic praise from the American literary establishment.
