A line from David Denby’s New Yorker review of “Greenberg” touches on a theme that shows up often in Jewish American literature. Denby says that Greenberg, played by Ben Stiller, “can’t accept mediocrity, but, an aesthete without an art, he doesn’t know how to get himself anywhere.”
I’ve got Seymour Krim on the brain, so naturally I thought of his great essay, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” which zeroes in on this problem of being “an aesthete without an art” as the problem faced by people like himself. And Krim pegs it is a problem not confined to artists. It is a general one. But I’ll get to Krim in a moment because I’m reminded of another literary example in “America! America!” by Delmore Schwartz.
The main character in the Schwartz story, Shenendoah Fish, listens to his mother’s tale about the troubles that befell a family they knew, and she tells him that “the salvation of the family would have been the summer hotel business, which they had once considered seriously as an enterprise. No one would have been better suited for that business than the Baumanns.”
Shenendoah, a troubled writer, sees that his mother “had perceived perfectly a profound necessity which he himself knew very well in literature, the necessity that the artist find the adequate subject and the adequate medium for his own powers.”
Now to “Failure Business.” Krim diagnoses his own problem, and that of the “thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me” as failing to find “the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. I think what I have to say here will speak for some of their secret life and for that other sad American you don’t hear too much about.”
And, of course, this is one of the biggest problems facing all of Saul Bellow’s dangling men, represented by unemployment.
So what is going on here with Schwartz, Krim, Bellow, and in “Greenberg.” Why has it been so hard for some Jews to find “the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls?” Does the question answer itself? Is it because Jews are more likely to host a riot in their souls?
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