“An Innocent Bystander”: The City, Vaudeville for a Princess, and Schwartz’s Postwar Cultural Criticism

Abstract

Schwartz was only 12 when, in 1926, he read a review of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which he soon went on to read for himself. The book had recently been translated into English and its influence on the aspiring writer was to be profound. Spengler’s challenges to the idea of straightforward linear progress in history, and his attempts to understand “world-history, the world-as-history,” rather than history told simply from a Western-centric perspective, may have informed Schwartz’s conception of “international consciousness” to as great an extent as did Eliot’s “his­torical sense” (no matter that, in practice, Schwartz’s perspective remained Western-centric).¹ Even more importantly, however, the German historian’s theories of the cyclical growth and decline of cultures and civilizations, and his conviction that “Western civilization had reached autumn,” proved a creative provocation.² Schwartz’s efforts not so much to dispute Spengler as to regard such processes in a more optimistic light are held back by the generally bleak prognoses of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Genesis, and The World Is a Wedding, but ultimately lead, via his transitional volume Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, to his advocacy, in the mid-1950s, of faith in American actuality over and above the American Dream.