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When the Partisan Review was revived as a noncommunist periodical in 1937, the first item in that first issue was Delmore Schwartz's remarkable “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”16 Dwight Macdonald, then one of the editors of the Review, has declared that this tale “deserved its primacy” and dubbed it a masterpiece.18a Repeatedly anthologized, “Dreams” has intrigued several generations of Americans but by and large appears to have escaped detailed commentary, more study having been devoted to Schwartz's poetry than to his prose. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the plot that discourages explication, perhaps the embarrassing self-disclosure that is evident at points. Macdonald feels that the story
combines the freest, most specific self-revelation with a form that controls the expression of these deep, personal fears partly by distancing' them in time and medium (a movie is just what suits) and partly by a classical concision.”18b
He is correct about the distancing and the concision but mistaken, I believe, about the freedom and the specificity of the self-revelation.
Like a real dream, Schwartz's literary dream conceals more than it discloses. In order to be understood, it must be approached as if it, too, had a latent meaning which, subjected to various distortions by the mind, emerged in a radically different manifest form.* Elementary psychoanalytic dream theory maintains that a dream is at