American Dreams, Rural Realities: Family Farms in Crisis Book

Camus once quipped that American writers are the only in the world who don't feel the need to be intellectuals. Too many Americans write; not enough write smartly; far fewer write what could be called "intellectual fiction." Consider that on nearly every occasion a story's characters are said to be "thinking," they do nothing more than express their own feelings. Novels have become more and more where characters go to gush and gush about their emotions and wants and desires, but hardly anywhere is there an intellectual engagement with a contentious idea. These characters don't have ideas about life, much less about literature, philosophy, poetry, politics, film, food, wine, porn, whatever. This is incredible if you consider how much time writers (are supposed to) spend in books, gathering together an intellectual self with intellectuals tastes... and apparently, all so they can write books with characters without intellectual selves and without intellectual tastes. It has become so incredibly rare to come across any character anywhere with a brain, and equally rare, to find an author with one.

Delmore Schwartz is that rare example of an intellectual writer who wrote intellectual stories about intellectual characters. From "America! America!", his description of a mind thinking:Her words descended into the marine world of his mind and were transformed there, even as swimmers and deep-sea divers seen in a film, moving underwater through new pressures and compulsions, and raising heavy arms to free themselves from the dim and dusky green weight of underseas.From Schwartz's novella, The World is a Wedding, this clarification of an artist's purpose:[...] now that I cannot compose new works, I see for the first time, as if this were the first morning of my life, that there is only one reason to write poems: the only reason to write poems is for the sake of the activity of the whole being which one enjoys when one writes poems. This is the only justification.This story, about a circle of artistic friends, reads like The Waves on a more miniature scale, with Jacob and Francis as clear respective analogs to Woolf's Bernard and Neville. The story ultimately turns into an argument for the necessity of artistic failures:"The fault is not this desire for things," said Jacob, "but the way in which the motive of competition is made the chief motive of life, encouraged everywhere. Think of how competition is celebrated in games, in schools, in the professions, in every kind of activity. Consequently, the ideas of success and failure are the two most important ideas in America. Yet it's obvious that most human beings are going to be failures, for such is the nature of competition. Perhaps the ideas of success and failure ought to be established as immoral. This strikes me as a revolutionary idea, although I suppose it has occurred to others." Towards the end, the group argues about the meaning of a Pieter Bruegel painting, "The Peasant Wedding," and Jacob here reaches this beautiful conclusion, clarifying his ideas from before:"No," said Jacob, "I don't mean to say that this life is just a party, any kind of party. It is a wedding, the most important kind of party, full of joy, fear, hope, and ignorance. And at this party there are enough places and parts for everyone, and if no one can play every part, yet everyone can come to the party, everyone can come to the wedding feast, and anyone who does not know that he is at a wedding feast just does not see what is in front of him. He might as well be dead if he does not know that the world is a wedding."And, of course, there's the title story that Nabokov named as one of his "half a dozen" favorites. Nearly the entire story is reported action—sure to annoy anyone who abides by that obnoxious rule "Show, Don't Tell."