Books: No Cavalry in Sight

SUCCESSFUL LOVE (242 pp.)—Delmore Schwartz—Corinth ($4.50).

A rainy, unpromising greyness surrounds the short stories of Delmore Schwartz, as it does the fiction of other writers who find the literary quarterlies their most congenial homes. One reason for the quarterly drear seems to be an extreme distrust of the dramatic, arising partly from squeamishness about melodrama, that greatest of sins against artistic sophistication. Another is the honest awareness of serious men that the cavalry rarely does charge into ordinary lives. One might suspect that Schwartz and his colleagues had all been invited to tea by John Marcher—the hero of Henry James's The Beast...