FBR 98: From the heavy to the light . . .

Dots and Dashes again, I'm afraid, since we have had a frantic week, not without some exciting business, however.

First, we received three new books for the bulging library. I'd been toying with bringing Delmore Schwartz to the table for a while, and was pushed over the edge by James Atlas's Bellow biography. Atlas previously published a life of Schwartz, who died in 1966, and Bellow uses the short life of his friend as the impulse for Humboldt's Gift, published in 1975. I have picked up both the Bellow novel and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the 1938 volume of stories Schwartz published to fairly widespread critical acclaim, as Atlas claims in his introduction to the book. Dreams contains some marvelous stories and a style both spare and lyrical:

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. His clothes are newly pressed and his tie is too tight in his high collar.

Still swimming around Salinger and his stories, I've come across a book from 1962, reissued to near silence last year as a Harper Perennial: Salinger, A Critical and Personal Portrait, edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald (and now subtitled The Classic Critical and Personal Portrait, which I suppose is accurate enough). I saw the volume in the biography section of our local Borders, but as the store is closing and mobbed with sudden shoppers panting for the fire-sale discount, I passed on it there, and got it from Amazon (a book-hoarding man in my financial position has a responsibility to purchase books at a discount). The collection contains some twenty-seven appraisals and essays on Salinger's output to that time, not all of them complimentary, from such novelists and critics as John Updike, Leslie Fielder, Joan Didion, Joseph Blotner, and Granville Hicks. I haven't scratched the surface, but am excited about getting into it, a night-table volume, if there ever was one.

Neither a Dot nor a Dash, but a genuine delight, I've been asked to join the faculty at Lesley University's MFA program in creative writing for a second semester, meaning that you'd all better call me Professor Tony when you see me, walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn, or anywhere else.