In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz

Yesterday my boyfriend requested that I read the short story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz because he is in the process of adapting it into a short film. The story opens up with "I think it is the year 1909. I feel as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen."

As the story continues, you realize the narrator is watching a movie of his parents' courtship. One of their dates is playing on the screen in real time. The dual setting of the story is perfection: the narrator in the movie theatre and the young couple on a date at Coney Island. To master setting is one thing, but to master two settings simultaneously is what makes you want to return to a story over and over again. Somehow, in a mere eight pages, Schwartz creates two worlds and an entire family's history. The ending is perhaps bordering on cliche, but also somehow necessary. And the title has multiple meanings, which I appreciate.

The thing I loved most about the story is the universal, yet rarely touched upon theme. Who doesn't want to know what their parents were like as youth in love? Schwartz really shows what that would be like knowing so much of what happens next, which is especially interesting considering how in our culture so many stories stop when the couple falls in love. Writing like this is also intriguing to me in the way it connects people. Schwartz first published this story in the now defunct Partisan Review in 1937, and just through reading the story, 1937 doesn't feel quite so far away from today.

I'm curious to see how the story is translated to film by my boyfriend, and I know that film adaptations of books and stories will come up here on more than one occasion. Thinking about the story as an adaptation makes you read it in a much different way. If it were not for this film project, who knows when I would have even heard of Delmore Schwartz, which is surprising because of how often he and/or his work have been referenced by musicians such as The Velvet Underground, U2, or Lou Reed. Dennis Brennan explains in the first link below why he wrote the song "Delmore Schwartz," and I agree with him wholeheartedly. Schwartz's stories should be more widely read today. So pick up the book.

For more information:
Scroll to Number 7 to see what inspired Dennis Brennan to write the song "Delmore Schwartz"
PBS Article on Delmore Schwartz
Poems by Delmore Schwartz