If literature is the light that imagination shines upon reality, then reading literature inevitably uncovers reality as various, complex, and often strange. Perhaps that is why critics used to refer to the "world" of the writer (some still do), or more grandiloquently to his "universe." Yet in opening a work of literature, of fiction, do we not still look for light that it may shine upon our own world, our own reality, the existence that we daily live? Escapist or sensationalist literature apart, does not fiction bear upon our lives, if not directly, then none the less incisively for being indirect? This is the justification for science fiction that aspires to be taken seriously, but it must also be the justification for any fiction that pretends to serious literature, which mediates between the unsifted experiences of our lives and the recurrent need to find some coherence or at least intelligibility in those experiences. Lacking that sort of literature, Alfred Kazin says ("American Writing Now," The New Republic, October 18, 1980), we suffer from a profound cultural malaise. Best-sellers and the literary hype that goes with them are not symptoms but, along with other examples of the "breakdown of intellectual authority," are the malaise.

Although the situation is bleak, it is not hopeless…. Delmore Schwartz's stories from the 1930s and 1940s, republished along with several others under the title In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, not only show what the form was capable of, but invoke a strong sense of their times and demonstrate in fiction a sensibility as powerful as that which is demonstrated in Schwartz's poetry. The longest piece, The World Is a Wedding, a novella in ten sections, recreates the social and cultural milieu of a group of young intellectuals who gather on Saturday nights during the Depression to talk about their experiences and their ideas. But the story accomplishes a good deal more than the evocation of what is now a lost era; hence, as Irving Howe indicates in his Foreword, the value of this story and others in the volume is hardly to satisfy nostalgia. In the opposing views of Jacob Cohen, the "conscience and noble critic" of the group, and of Laura Bell, Rudyard's sister in whose small apartment the circle meets, the story sustains a tension that remains unresolved to the end. For Laura's bitter disillusionment about herself, about her brother (to whom despite her carping she is profoundly devoted), and about the life they all lead can scarcely be reconciled with Jacob's generally more optimistic realism. He recognizes that indeed the "world is a wedding," uniting not only God and Nature, but also the variety of human types represented, for example, in the very circle of friends who gather to express their hopes and disappointments, their accomplishments and failures. Jacob's positive acceptance contrasts with Laura's bitter condemnation of an existence that is anything but cheerful. The world is a wedding, not a funeral as Laura claims, although she is allowed the last word. But to recognize this requires the thoughtful disposition of a Jacob Cohen, the wanderer of neighborhoods who, like Socrates, refuses to let materialistic attitudes and values overwhelm him, tempted as many of his friends are to do so. It is his point of view, I think, that permeates other stories in this collection, notwithstanding the strident note of despair that Schwartz often sounds, especially when, as in "The Track Meet," he is recounting the experience of a particularly horrifying nightmare.