"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities": Delmore Schwartz and Lou Reed (Music and Literature: September 22nd, 2022)
How should we look at Schwartz's story, and how does the story appear in the work of Lou Reed?
Hey.
Beginning in the Fall of 2022, I hosted a show at my college radio station called Music and Literature. For each episode, I wrote out a small essay to read from, partly to make talking on-air less nerve-wracking (which it did), and partly to have some written record of my thoughts. I wrote them in a way that wasn’t so academic and dense; more conversational, similar to the style I hope I’m achieving with these newsletters. (Lou Reed, I learned today, also hosted a radio show as a student at Syracuse. It was a jazz show called “Excursions on a Wobbly Rail,” and he was booted off for playing things that were apparently too far out. Who knows if this is true.)
Here’s the essay I wrote as a guide for the very first episode on September 22nd, 2022. I’ve edited it slightly to make it more of an essay and not a follow-along as it was originally intended to be. At some points throughout the show, I would pause to play music from the episode’s Spotify playlist, which you can find here. All tracks are also linked below.
Thanks for reading! Here’s a music rec.
Tyler
Welcome to Music and Literature. My name is Tyler Martinez, senior here at Hunter College. Each week, using a small essay as a reference, I’d like to talk about a piece of literature, like a short story or a novel, with the goal of A) unearthing its meaning, B) discussing where it resonated for me and why and C) uniting that resonance with music, and in no particular order.
Just to avoid having to re-cap an entire novel for the duration of the show, I want to stick to “classic” novels and/or short stories – things that most people have read, or may read afterward, so instead, we can talk about important elements of a novel, and where we might find the piece resonant in our lives. (I’ll continue mentioning the word resonance — where a text resonates for me is the basis for my interest in it and hopefully some people listening will relate.)
This week, with the release of some new music from the Lou Reed archives, I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk about him, play some of his music, and talk simultaneously about a former professor of Reed’s from his time spent as an English student at Syracuse University who was also an underrated American poet and short story writer. His name is Delmore Schwartz.
Delmore Schwartz isn’t a name often mentioned in the canon of American Literature. In an interview with Lou Reed in 2006, he said of Delmore:
“Delmore changed my life. By the time I ran into him, he was on a really … dangerous spiral down from various problems. He was a great writer at a very early age. He wrote a short story called ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ and he always carried this letter from T.S. Eliot in his wallet, saying ‘This is one of the greatest short stories ever written.’ Delmore won all these prizes — very educated guy, very funny. Some of the things he wrote including that story had the simplest language imaginable. And I couldn’t believe that you could do that with words. That simple. There’s no polysyllabic word in there, it’s incredible.”
Reed then continues into a synopsis of Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”:
“And it’s essentially: a guy goes into a movie theater, he sits down, he’s watching the shorts, and what they’re showing is his father courting his mother on the boardwalk at Coney Island. And he’s watching this, and he suddenly jumps up and says, ‘Look, stop, no good will come of this, you’ve got to stop.’”
Reed continues to describe how Schwartz’s story evoked in him a connection between the use of simple language, and early rock ‘n’ roll music – to him, they went hand-in-hand. He’s eventually quoted saying that, ultimately, his mission was to “bring the sensitivities of the novel to rock music,” and “I wanted to write the Great American Novel, but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities.”
If you were a Lou Reed fan before the show, you’ll know these sentiments span Reed’s entire discography. As the frontman to the Velvet Underground and as an eccentric, constantly changing solo act, Reed shied not away from topics that were normally considered taboo for the pop music scene of the late sixties and early seventies, often approaching them with realism and humor and tragedy. A good example is in his song “Wild Child,” originally released in April of 1972, but released on streaming services last week as a part of the “I’m So Free: 1971 RCA Demos.” In the song, Reed illustrates the often-chaotic lives of New York City creatives and the unfortunate procession of self-destruction. According to Rough Trade, these demos — the ones we’ll be listening to throughout the show — are the first sessions Lou ever recorded as a solo artist after leaving the Velvet Underground. [Music break.]
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was first published in 1937 when Schwartz was twenty-one years old, and the title comes from the W.B. Yeats 1914 volume of poetry titled Responsibilities. There’s a six page PDF of the story online. Lou describes the short story perfectly: the story begins with a young man who sits himself in a movie theater and, without precedent, becomes a victim to the footage of his parent’s courtship. He watches his father as a young man embarrassingly approach the steps of his mother’s house, exchange cordialities with his future in-laws, then head to Coney Island, where the couple’s day ends with an argument just before a reading from a fortune-teller. At this climax, the narrator has an outburst in the theater and is escorted out by an usher. He then suddenly wakes up from the dream on the morning of his 21st birthday to realize it was a nightmare.
My process for understanding a story begins with understanding the author’s motivations for writing it: What is the genre of the piece? When was this written, and with what intention? What were the conditions that prompted the author to write it? What exists in the text that indicates the characters and events are smaller metaphors for larger social phenomena? These questions help build an objective framework for understanding the novel’s chronology and its place in history.
For “In Dreams,” there is still a lot of mystery. What we do know are the events occurring in and around Delmore’s society. Tension was building around the world that would escalate into World War II, New York City was still weighing Depression-era casualties with an explosion of culture in Harlem, and in the literary world, modernism continued to roar.
Modernism as a literary movement was a response to industrialization, urbanization, scientific breakthrough after WWI. Its goal was to break intentionally from previous literary practices — or, as put simply by Ezra Pound: “Make It New.” Whether Schwartz accomplishes that in this piece is up for debate, however, his use of the short-story format to describe a world-weary young adult experiencing an uncomfortable vision of his birth (evoking contrasting images of apocalypse and creation), then being forced from the theater in protest against his own existence is a powerful statement given the historical context. (T.S. Eliot – considered one of the most important modernist writers – and Ezra Pound both praised Schwartz’s work.)
Like the work of many writers or artists, we can only make light conclusions about society’s influence on Schwartz’s work. However, we can say that “newness,” and “breaking from pre-establishment” is a trademark of Lou Reed’s early mission in the Velvet Underground, both musically and textually. A good example is “Heroin,” released on the Velvet’s 1967 Velvet Underground and Nico but also unearthed on Spotify a few days ago for “Words and Music,” another Lou Reed compilation, this time from 1965, with some of the earliest known recordings of Lou that would eventually become Velvet Underground songs. Here it is — a super early version of “Heroin.” Then after, we’ll listen to “I Heard Her Call My Name” off of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat (my favorite album of VU.) [Music break.]
So, after understanding the story on an objective level, we are allowed to understand the story on a personal level. Some stories resonate with us immediately after reading them, but “good” stories continue to resonate with us throughout our lives, taking on new and refreshing meanings, and advancing with us through the movements of life. Analyzing a story objectively opens doors for introspective questions like: In what ways does this story resonate with me? In what ways does the character and the events of the book reveal something about my life, or the lives of my friends and family and community? What moral can or should I take away from this work that may improve my life or the lives of others? What passages or themes of the book sat with me, or continue to sit with me after my first reading?
While to some, seeing footage of your parents meeting and awkwardly exchanging their lives as young adults may be a sentimental and positively profound experience, but for the narrator, it is a wrenching and hopeless experience. The young-adult narrator’s dejected and disturbed voice I can still hear, years later. Lou Reed was right: the story’s strong and very steady narration contributes to the unsettling undertone to the narrator’s dream.
To anyone with parent trouble, the existential horror endured by our unnamed protagonist in “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is easily understandable: he witnesses his parents first date, and in the same night, their first argument, which prompts his father leave before being shown the future, ignoring the impending doom he’ll impart on his unfortunate offspring and sealing the family’s fate forever.
Though we never get the narrator’s name, Schwartz mentions the age of the narrator in the very last sentence, signaling to the reader that, as we get older, we realize how many of the puzzles of life we only know the answers to in retrospect. As we age, it’s often not that our feelings change, but that we develop a stronger vocabulary of the self to understand our feelings and attach them to our world.
What is especially resonant in Schwartz’s story, though, is the blame we often impose on our parents for their emotional unintelligence in conceiving us in the first place, and for children of divorced parents (or parents with a less functional relationship), the questions of our existence become cumbersome and annoying.
We are often stereotypically told: “Well, when a man loves a woman, they join in holy matrimony, etc., etc.” – or, simply that because of love, we exist. But what happens when they stop loving each other – do we then exist in spite of love, or despite it? And what happens when the love dissolves before they decide to become parents, then parents to two or three? Should we assume that our existence is incomplete without the tradition of a household? Does our existence “make sense” without the love we expected (apparently) unreasonably?
These are all dramatic questions. On most days, actually, they are easy to answer – but from the few days where all feels lost, sometimes, art emerges. I’m sure many of us would enjoy standing up in the theater of life and protesting from the crowd as the narrator of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” had, and maybe some of us would find some catharsis at being thrown out by the usher. On those days when the answers are harder to discern, though, writers like Delmore Schwartz help illuminate what's invisible by arming us with a vocabulary — and musicians like Lou Reed, with the music.