# AN AMERICAN FAIRY TALE

A Story

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

THIS is a fairy tale. And it is a success story. It is a story which is not only full of goodness and beauty, but it is also a true story. It is full of purity, innocence, and happiness. Since it is the kind of experience which could only occur in America and the kind of a story which has and must have a happy ending, it shows that America has to be discovered again and again by everyone in America, for America is always new and always full of the unknown and undiscovered.

Melvin Smith was a prosperous businessman. He was a manufacturer of scholastic jewelry and thus his prosperity was comparatively stable because whenever a young boy or girl was graduated from high school or college, the parents felt that it was a matter of pride to congratulate their progeny by presenting them with a scholastic ring or some other form of scholastic jewelry as a reward and as a token of their progress in higher education.

His wife, Naomi Smith, was a strong and domineering woman who had helped her husband in business from the very start, when he was very poor; and she had become an equal and far from silent partner, as soon as the business became successful.

Melvin Smith wanted his son to be his junior partner as soon as he was graduated from high school. But Paul asked his father to give him just one year at college. And since so many other boys were also going to

college, it was difficult to deny Paul's desire. The father's feeling for his son was a very strong one, for he thought of him as a part of himself, refreshed, renewed, youthful once more. He felt almost as intensely about his son as he felt about his own body when he had a toothache, or an upset stomach. There were two other children, Mildred—but she was a girl and thus did not satisfy the father's need—and Howard—but he was just a little boy, and the father was only able to think of him as the baby of the family.

Paul went to a Midwestern university, for it was only by going out of town that he was able to believe that he was really going to college as he had fondly imagined it. He was unhappy there, since he was afraid of girls. This was the one remaining dreg or drag of his shyness. In all other things he made his voice heard, but he thought that he was too plain for girls to like him very much. He was plain, but not repellent, as he supposed, and when he asked a dormitory friend if any girl would ever really love him, the friend thought that Paul must be joking. Then his friend perceived that Paul was not joking, that he awaited an answer fearful that his doubts would be confirmed. Hence the friend sought to explain to Paul that most girls were not really interested in good-looking men, they wanted something else, a sense of power, or a sense of importance, for the sake of their unborn children. But Paul would not believe him. He thought that his friend was just trying to reassure him.

"You just like to cheer up your friends," Paul declared, self-convinced and self-dismayed. Some three years before this time, having been told that one grew to look like the objects one looked at a great deal, he

A NEW collection of short stories by DELMORE SCHWARTZ, including this one, is scheduled for future publication by Doubleday; earlier, the same publisher will bring out a volume of new and selected poems covering the years 1938-58, of which COMMENTARY has already printed a group (May 1958), to be followed by several more in one of our forthcoming issues.

420

IS THERE AN “ARAB CIVILIZATION”?

419

in all climes of the Orient except Arabia. With regard to other aspects of culture, not linguistic or purely literary, it is noteworthy that both masters and workmen, teachers and pupils, were in nearly all cases non-Arabs, and that the sources, methods, procedures, and styles were of non-Arabian origin, deriving mostly from Oriental and Mediterranean antiquity. Thus the famous “Mosque of Omar” (which does not date from Omar but from the early 8th century) was built on the site of the Temple of Solomon by architects and craftsmen none of whom were Arabs. And the Arabic version of Aristotle—which contributed so much to the shaping of medieval Moslem, Christian, and Judaic thought—was the work of Christian-Aramean translators and commentators who were often Judeo-Spaniards. For even the celebrated “Arab philosophy” is a complete misnomer. Its great authorities were Iranians* like Avicenna (Ibn-Sinna), Turco-Iranians like Al-Farabi, Moors like Averroes (Ibn-Roshd), or Spanish Jews like Avicebron (Ibn-Gabirol), and, above all, Maimonides.

*Al-Kindi, "Philosopher of the Arabs," provides an exception. This Iraqi scholar was of genuinely Arabian origin, whence his traditional nickname.

The contribution of true Arabs to this falsely styled Arab civilization is therefore meager; in theology, a minimum; in the humanities, still less; in the sciences, almost nothing; in the arts, absolutely nothing. "Arabian" architecture is Byzantine, Persian, Levantine, Moorish. The "Arabic" numerals are Hindu (though the principle of the zero seems to go back to the Sumerians). Even the "Arab" horse is of Syrian or Syro-Mesopotamian breed (but domesticated first on the steppes of Eurasia). Only the dromedary—perhaps†—is Arabian, together with the landscape which befits it. For, truly, the void from which Arabism sprang remains its sole creation. As a well-informed Englishman, a former governor of Sinai, once remarked: the "sons of the desert" deserve more properly to be called "fathers of the desert."**

†Yet this too is doubtful. The first domestication of the dromedary, like that of the two-humped Bactrian camel, may have taken place somewhere on the northeastern confines of Iran. As to systematic camel raising in Arabia, it started toward the end of the Bronze Age (about the 13th century B.C.) among Midianites and other south Semitic tribes. But these were more closely related to the Hebrews than to even the pre-Koranic Arabs.

**C. S. Járvis, *Three Deserts*, p. 161.

AN AMERICAN FAIRY TALE

421

had purchased a bust of Apollo, placed it
in his bedroom, looked at it as much as pos-
sible for the next few months, and obtained
no results.

Paul did not know that his exuberance
and his bouncing, exciting, delightful vital-
ity made him attractive to girls. What hap-
pened on dates was that he rushed to make
amorous overtures, he rushed for fear of
rejection, and when his haste was criticized,
he concluded that was an absolute judgment
and refusal.

DURING the first year at this Midwestern
university, Paul became known to the
other students, and in fact he was loved as a
delightful fantast who did many hilarious
things. He was arrested for drunkenness
and he argued with the policeman and the
judge that they had no right to judge him
because they had studied neither Plato's Re-
public, nor the works of D. H. Lawrence,
where the necessity of spontaneity and
wholeness of being was shown to be an im-
perative of nature, an imperative blocked
and frustrated by our industrial civiliza-
tion, thus forcing all who were intelligent
and sensitive to take up hard liquor and
sprees. No one really knew what he was
saying, but it seemed to some charming
and to some hilarious.

And when he walked up the steps of the
library with his crony Sylvester, who like
him came from New York, and when Syl-
vester asked him to speak in a lower voice,
if he used four-letter words (Sylvester was
more sensitive than Paul to conventional
mores), Paul responded by denouncing the
conventions and the squeamishness of gen-
tility, of academic institutions, of the entire
middle class.

"I face the facts," he shouted to Sylvester, "I use four-letter words because existence is full of four-letter facts and phenomena! I refuse to be an ostrich! And I don't care if all the nervous prudes shudder when they hear FOUR! FOUR! FOUR! As for me, I like it very much, I find it delightful. It is delicious. It is most enjoyable. FORE! FORE! FORE!"

When, during the worst part of the

great depression and during the year before
the New Deal began, Paul Smith began to
become very much interested in Marxism,
he became a member of the student political
group which was called YPCL, or Young
People's Communist League. Voluble and
dogmatic as ever, Paul argued with his
friend Sylvester about Marxism and Com-
munism and the Soviet Union and he had
like arguments, when he went home during
holidays, with his father.

Sylvester infuriated Paul by telling him
that he did not understand his own motives
for being interested in Marxism or joining
the YPCL's. Even when Paul was elected
president of the YPCL's, a post he desired
for its own sake and in the hope that it
would make him more attractive to the girls
who were his comrades, Paul refused to ad-
mit that his reasons for being a political
radical were purely personal and sexual and
artistic.

"How about you?" said Paul, irritated and
triumphant. "What reason is there for your
hatred of Marxism and Communism except
the fact that you are a serf of the lower
middle class and lack the courage to emerge
from your class and place and join the
brotherhood of the human race."

Sylvester told Paul that he would change
his mind again and again, but Sylvester did
not suspect that in twenty years' time Paul
would be an ardent and self-righteous de-
fender of Senators McCarthy and Jenner,
arguing as violently about their political
rightness as he argued in defense of Josef
Stalin, Karl Marx, and the Soviet Union.

"You can't tell me that the one hundred
fifty million people of the Soviet Union are
all wrong!" Paul cried loudly to Sylvester.

"Many millions of human beings have
been wrong again and again and will be
wrong again and again," said Sylvester
hopelessly.

"What egotism!" said Paul, "You think
you're right and yet you're only one among
millions and millions of human beings: a
guy like you ought to want to be something
more than a lackey of the lower middle-
class."

422

COMMENTARY

"I just want to be a human being," said Sylvester, hopelessly and hopefully, "a human being and an American: I was born in Brooklyn and thus I was fortunate enough to be born a native of the United States, an American; but what I want now is to be permitted the right implicit in the Constitution, the right to the pursuit of being a human being and not the hypnotized puppet of an economical interpretation of history and of human nature."

"Chauvinism, pure chauvinism!" said Paul, stalking off in ideological indignation.

During school holidays, Paul had arguments of a like kind with his father. Melvin Smith told his son with pride that since he was the son of a capitalist, he ought to be a capitalist himself, and join the family business as junior partner, instead of joining the traitors and revolutionists who were trying to destroy capitalism and take over the family business.

"If I were not a capitalist," said Melvin Smith, "you would not be going to an out-of-town college. You would be a shipping clerk in the garment center and a parlor socialist on Sundays and holidays. You can't have your cake and eat it too unless you want indigestion and constipation or unless you are a capitalist and can afford to buy more and more cake."

In reply, Paul denounced him as a vicious and shameless sentimentalist as well as a petty bourgeois blinded by capitalist lies.

But Paul did not remain a Communist for very long. He had become interested in music and in making music and he decided to be a great musician like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. For a long time he had been delighted by jazz music and he had played the piano very well with a small jazz band on Saturday nights. But now he decided that he was against jazz, he detested it. Jazz was a debased expression of the anxiety and frustration of the creative, progressive, and revolutionary working-class.

His interest in studying classical music came into conflict with his political activity very soon, and he quickly decided that he was through with Communism, a shift

which was made the more rapid when two factions of his party unit sought to win his favor by denouncing the other faction as in the pay of the police, an accusation entirely untrue of both factions.

"Something quite theatrical," Paul told Sylvester, "theatrical and histrionic about their behavior. It is as if they were acting out the scenario written for them by previous revolutionary movements. The police are called the Cossacks, not the cops."

At the music school where Paul now went to study harmony and counterpoint, he denounced anyone who seemed to be conscious of the trials and crises of society. He said that they really hated art and tried to deform it. And he studied very hard, amid his denunciations, and he fell in love with an extremely pretty and extremely self-conscious girl named Dorothea. Dorothea was also an ambitious musician and she responded first of all to Paul's extravagant vitality and forthrightness, even though she sometimes was shocked by his foul language. Dorothea not only admired Paul very much, but she was sure that he was a genius: she thought that she was a genius too, but said nothing about this certainty to Paul or anyone else.

In a short time, Paul and Dorothea were very much in love with each other, and when Dorothea introduced Paul to her parents, and told them she intended to marry Paul, they were horrified. Paul's preoccupation with the writing of great music was set to one side when Dorothea told him of her parents' refusal to accept Paul as her husband and their son-in-law. He recognized for the first time that Dorothea was not only very intelligent but that she was very much in love with him: hence he became even more in love with her than he had been all along, and he proposed an elopement, immediately. Despite the poverty which troubled Paul so much, since his father refused to do more than pay his tuition fee, Paul insisted that Dorothea elope with him immediately. Paul was in a hurry and Dorothea was thrilled by the idea of an elopement, and even more thrilled because her parents pro-

AN AMERICAN FAIRY TALE

423

hibited her marriage to a genius. She was
also thrilled because Paul was in a hurry, he
was always in a hurry; he kept saying that
either the elopement occurred immediately
or he would live a celibate's life, just as Bee-
thoven had. After six weeks of disputation
and impatience, Paul and Dorothea eloped
and were married. Neither of them had any
money and Paul had to take a poor job with
sheet music publishers, and the newly wed-
ded couple had to live in a seedy rooming
house.

S soon enough Paul was writing arrange-
ments for jazz bands. Soon he was leading
his own jazz band. But he did not in the
least surrender or forget his desire to be a
great composer. He began his second sym-
phony and Dorothea, who had voiced her
suspicion that the dean of the music school
was jealous of Paul, encouraged him passion-
ately.

"I know I am right," said Dorothea. "You
will prove that I am right and that you are
a great composer."

And she supported her hope and admir-
ation for her husband by drawing forth her
inexhaustible fund of examples of unrecog-
nized genius in music and in the other arts
as well.

"How can it possibly be otherwise, dear-
est," she argued. "How can genius as origi-
nal and unique as yours be clear to everyone
from the very start?"

"But dearest," said Paul reasonably, "you know that you are my wife and that you love me, that's why you see me the way you do."

"I would not love you," Dorothea an-
swered, "if you were not what you are. When
you love a person you know him better than
anyone else does. Think of the late quartets
of Beethoven, of Cézanne, of Van Gogh, of
Keats, and Emily Dickinson. No one knew
how wonderful they were. And Shakespeare
did not know that he was Shakespeare! If
he had, he would not have let some of his
best plays remain unpublished during his
lifetime."

Paul was somewhat consoled by these re-

marks. And he found himself resorting to
declarations of despair just to elicit reassur-
ance from Dorothea, a reassurance rich in
examples and praise which compared him
with immortal masters.

Paul became a very successful jazz band
leader and he played once a week on the
radio also. He earned a very handsome sal-
ary, and he lived very well. His parents and
his wife's parents were now very proud of
him, bragged about his early success. Paul
and Dorothea began to move among the
famous and the rich, and they acquired a
taste for expensive living, and they took an
apartment in a fashionable neighborhood.
Paul tried hard to save enough money to
be able to stop conducting for a time, so
that he might finish his second symphony,
but this desire was contradicted and denied
by their ever-increasing desire to live well
and to know interesting and gifted people
who were in the limelight, or the public
eye, as Paul said.

Paul's success as a jazz band leader was
secure. It depended upon effervescence and
vitality more than upon his musicianship,
but Paul strove to ignore this dependence
whenever he became conscious of it. Finally,
Paul secured six months of leisure, finished
his second symphony, and persuaded a ma-
jor orchestra to perform it.

The performance was to occur in the fall;
during the summer Paul saw his friend Syl-
vester who was now a lawyer, none too
successful, but quite content with his lot.
Paul told Sylvester that he had really ac-
complished something new in music.

"I have augmented the world of sound in
a fundamental way," he declared.

Sylvester was used to such declarations
and he was pleased to hear them because he
knew that it meant that his friend, of whom
he was very fond, was feeling very good.

During their meetings of recent years,
the friends had argued long and in vain
about the possibility of being a serious com-
poser and yet a popular one.

"Shakespeare did it," Paul insisted in a
clamorous way. "If he did it, there is no
reason why it can't be done today."

424

COMMENTARY

Sylvester felt that the Elizabethan age was different from the present. The analogy was wrong, and the whole character of modern society seemed to him to make it very difficult for a serious musician to be popular, except by some freak or accident.

"You are a melancholy Lear, howling in the wilderness," answered Paul.

But when his symphony was performed that fall and praised politely and quickly forgotten, Paul was full of dismay. He felt that he was right back where he had started. Dorothea's reassurances were again necessary, and now they were more extreme, more exaggerated than ever.

Paul returned to conducting a jazz band at a fashionable hotel, and he played once a week on the radio. He was determined as ever to be a great composer, and he began to think of his third symphony and his fourth—perhaps if he produced the two at once, he might win the acclaim he desired so much. But he also desired and enjoyed the pleasures and comforts of his standard of living, and this desire was encouraged in him by Dorothea just as much as his ambition as a composer. Husband and wife still denied to each other and to friends that there was any real conflict between the two desires.

THE year before, Paul's sister Mildred had married a likely young man who was nothing if not willing to take Melvin Smith's place in his business. Melvin Smith retired and the business continued to prosper, just as before. Since he had nothing to do with himself, Melvin Smith began to go to all the art shows in New York City, and then he began to paint himself, and in a comparatively short period of time, he was a primitive abstractionist. He showed his canvases to various art dealers, and to Claude Vermont, the brilliant critic of modern art, who told him that his primitive abstractionism was far superior to the primitive paintings of Grandma Moses. This sufficed to secure Melvin Smith a one-man show and one of his paintings was purchased by the Museum of Primitive Modern Art.

Melvin Smith gave two of his paintings to his son and daughter-in-law, and visited them frequently without announcing his coming to be sure that they kept his paintings upon the wall of their handsome Bauhaus living room.

When Paul told his father that he did not care for primitive or abstract art, he infuriated his fond father once again.

"You have sold out," said Melvin Smith to his successful son. "You have sold out to Tin Pan Alley. Why don't you be like Bela Bartok? Money is not everything: I will be your patron, if necessary! I will support you for at least two years if you write the kind of music you really want to write instead of writing tinkle and tom-tom for Tin Pan Alley!" Melvin Smith became aware that he was shouting and he lowered his voice, "Don't you see that you will be much more satisfied with yourself, in the long run, if you stop wasting your time on pleasing the public? If you would just follow Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Prokofiev, you would enjoy the most important feeling in life, self-respect. You are just as good as you want to be! I knew that this was true when I was a boy and I know that it is true now."

Paul was silenced for the first time in fifteen years. He did not know what to say in reply to his father. He felt sure that the world was coming to an end, or at least the world as he had known it. He had tried to remind his father how much parental resistance there had been to his becoming a musician at all, and how much family pride there had been when he was a popular and successful composer listened to on the radio and frequently in the public eye.

But his protestation was quite in vain. And in the depths of his heart in all truth Paul himself was unable to disagree with his father or possess any strong conviction that his father was wrong and he was right.

How beautiful this success story is, how good, how true! It is the equal of any fairy tale, it is full of purity, innocence, and happiness. It is like a newborn child. It is as if one were to say, believe, and hope that America were going to be discovered again.

2

make the most of a stable market, a market stabilized by the fact that students are graduated from school every June and January, and they very much like to buy rings as shining signs of their progress in higher education. Naomi Smith, his wife, was a strong, domineering woman who had helped him in his business at the start when he was poor; and she had remained, like an equal partner, after the business became more and more successful.

Melvin Smith wanted his son to become his junior partner as soon as he was finished with high school, but Paul asked his father to give him just one year at college. And since so many other boys were going to college, it was difficult to deny Paul's desire. The father's feeling was a very strong one, for he thought of himself as a part of himself, refreshed, renewed, youthful once more. He felt almost as intensely about his son as he felt about his own body when he had a toothache, or an upset stomach. There were two other children, Mildred--but she was a girl and thus did not satisfy the father's need; and Howard, but he was just a little boy, and the father was only able to think of him as the baby of the family.

Paul went to a midwestern university, for it was only by going out of town that he was able to believe that he was really going to college as he had fondly imagined it. He was unhappy there, being afraid of girls. This was the one remaining dreg or drag of his shyness. In all other things he made his voice heard, but he thought that he was too plain for girls to like him very much. He was plain, but not repellant, as he supposed, and when he asked a dormitory friend if any girl would ever really love him, the friend thought that Paul must be joking. Then his friend perceived that he was not joking, that he awaited an answer fearful that his doubts were confirmed. Hence the friend sought to explain to Paul that most really interested in good-looking men, they wanted something a sense of importance.

3.

"Sure," said Paul, whistling cheerfully, while his mother helped him get his skipants and goloshes on.

Mrs.Reynolds, from her bedroom window, watched Paul set out. He was a strange dreamy boy, very different from his father. He was squatting down now, trying to entice the pussy to come with him. I'll have to ask Carl to get him a dog, she thought. It would be dawdling along, quite a while before Paul returned. She knew how he walked, drawing pictures in the snow, and often standing still for a moment to rest. She watched until he was a small point on a distant hill, her thoughts travelling sadly with him. She knew so little about him. With Marjorie he chattered constantly, but with her he was awkward and silent. But I did cheer him up! she thought defensively.

She sat down heavily in her wicker rocking chair, a small woman with anxious, friendly eyes. She had expected with Marjorie gone, to have aace in the house. But if anything the atmosphere was more threatening. Some evil geni presided over the household, whom she was incapable of combatting. A long sigh escaped her, as she rocked in the slow rhythms she had used to when she rocked her baby girls to sleep. But now her hands were empty and they twitched nervously. What had gone wrong? Why? When? I f only I was strong, I could face anything, she thought. If only my health hadn't fallen to pieces. Another sigh escaped her as she reached out her hand for her well-worn bible. She turned it immediately to her favorite psalms. I turn my eyes unto the mountains from whence cometh my help; my help cometh from the Lord God: she murmured repetitively. The sentences were grooves which had for many years drained away her terrors.

times was shocked by his foul language. Dorothea not only admired Paul very much, but she was sure that he was a genius: she thought that she was a geniustoo, but said nothing about this certainty to Paul or anyone else.

In a short time, Paul and Dorothea were very much in love with each other, and when Dorothea introduced Paul to her parents, and told them that she intended to marry Paul, they were horrified. Paul 's preoccupation with the writing of great music was set to one side when Dorothea told him of her parents' refusal to accept Paul as her husband and their son-in-law. He recognized for the first time that Dorothea was not only very intelligent but that she was very much in love with him: hence he became even more in love with her than he had been all along, and he proposed an elopement, immediately. Despite the poverty which troubled Paul so much, since his father refused to do more than pay his tuition fees, Paul insisted that Dorothea elope with him immediately. Paul was in a hurry and Dorothea was thrilled by the idea of an elopement, even more thrilled because her parents prohibited her marriage to a genius. She was also thrilled because Paul was in a hurry, he was always in a hurry, he kept saying that either she elopement occurred immediately or he would live a celibate's life, just as Beethoven had. After six weeks of disputation and impatience, Paul and Dorothea eloped and were married.

10.

of whom he was very fond was feeling very good.

During their meetings of recent years, the frineds had
argued long and in vain about the possibility of being a serious
composer and yet a popular one.

"Shakespeare did it", Paul insisted in a clamorous way,
"if he did it, there is no reason why it can't be done today".

Sylvester felt that the Elizabethan age was different from
the present. The analogy was wrong, and the whole character of
modern society seemed to him to make it impossible for a pepious
musician to be popular, except by some freak or accident.

"You are a melancholy Lear, crying in the wilderness",
answered Paul, in typical terms.

But when his symphony was performed that fall and praised
poitely and quickly fogotten, Paul was full of dismay. "He felt
that he was right back where he had started. "Dorothea's reass-
urances were again necessary, and now they were more extreme,
more exaggerated than ever.

Paul returned to conducting a jazz band at a fashionable
hotel, and he played once a week on the radio. He was determined
as ever to be a great composer, and he began to think of his
third symphnony and his fourth, --perhaps if he produced the two
at once, he might win the acclaim he desired. But he also desired
and enjoyed the pleasures and comforts of his standard of living,
and this desire was encouraged in him by Dorothea just as much
as his ambition as a composer. Husband and wife still denied to
each other and to friends that there was any real conflict between
the two desires.

The year before, Paul's sister Adele had married a
likely young man who was nothing if not willing to take Melvin
Smith's place in his business. Melvin Smith retired and the busin-
ess continued to prosper, just as before.

11.

Since he had nothing to do with himself, Melvin Smith began to go to all the art shows in New York City, and then he began to paint himself, and in a comparatively short period of time, he was a primitive abstractionist. He showed his canvases to various art dealers, and to Claude modern Vermont, the brilliant critic of art, who told him that his primitive abstractionism was far superior to the primitive paintings of Grandma Moses. This sufficed to secure Melvin Smith a one-man show and one of his paintings was purchased by the Museum of Primitive Modern Art.

When Paul told his father that he did not care for primitive or abstract art, he infuriated his father once again.

"You have sold out", said Melvin Smith to his successful son, "You have sold out to Tin Pan Alley. "Why don't you be like/Bartok?" Money is not everything: I will be your patron, if necessary! I will support you for at least two years if you write the kind of music you really want to write instead of writing tinkle and tom tom for Tin Pan Alley!", Melvin Smith became aware that he was shouting and he lowered his