The Human Touch

JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM did a good and a noble thing when he established the Guggenheim Fellowships enabling students in the sciences and creators in the arts to pursue specialized investigations, write books, paint pictures, compose music, mold and carve sculptures and do any one of those other special things they are most fitted, most willing and most eager to accomplish. The stories, the poems, the histories, the scientific researches, the paintings, the etchings and the wood-blocks and lithographs, the sculptures and the music which the annual fellowships established by his will made possible will constitute a more lasting memorial, and a more precious one, than any edifice of steel, brass or stone.

The readers of yesterday’s Bulletin were acquainted with the identities of the Jewish beneficiaries of this year’s Fellowship. They include an instructor in philosophy, a favorite student of Prof. Morris R. Cohen of City College; an economist, a sculptor, two story writers and a poet who is also a story writer.

I believe, without knowing, that for every lucky person who obtains a fellowship, there must be about one hundred who ask but do not receive. I myself know of one who was refused an annual subsidy to enable him to finish his book, but who, nevertheless, did finish his book, living the meanwhile on a friend’s loan, and not only succeeded in getting his work published, but also in having the Literary Guild select it, which means that even without the subsidy he is now debt-clear, or should be, and has a minimum of several thousand dollars ahead.

ABOUT ISIDOR SCHNEIDER

But of all those who asked, and did not get, there cannot be one who can grudge those novelists and poets who did obtain Fellowships. Among them is a fine fellow called Isidor Schneider, a poet and a story teller, who has been making his living, and will probably continue to do so, as publicity and advertising representative for one of the New York publishing houses and whose leisure has been divided between critical and creative work on one hand and impersonal political activity on the other. He is the author of “The Temptation of Anthony and Other Poems” and of a novel, “Dr. Transit,” not to mention a heap of poetry published in magazines and of a second book of verse. He obtains his fellowship for “creative writing abroad.” He does not propose to leave his job until some future, and more propitious, date.

He is a fairly tall and sturdy fellow and has so luxuriant a shock of hair, and mustache, that he could almost make his living by posing as an advertisement for a hair restorer. He has kindly, understanding eyes, a deep, soft voice and, in addition to his poetic sensitivity, a penetrating mind that can clarify many problems, with the possible exception of his own. He has been struggling–and I hope he won’t mind my telling Bulletin readers this–with a panoramic nove of New York life for some years. Perhaps any other writer who was less exigent with himself would have finished and published this story, but Schneider is as exacting with himself as he is, in his views, with the works of other men.

INTEGRITY AS CRITIC

Incidentally, I do not know of another reviewer in New York who is more clear and more objective in his criticism than he. I feel more certain that a book is good when Isidor Schneider says so than I do when all the other reviewers say so. But sound as he is as a critic and full of integrity as he is as man and critic, he has a dry and penetrating sense of humor which makes talk with him an intellectual treat and a conversational delight.

I have a very definite, although slight, impression of Dr. Ernest Nagel, the instructor in philosophy at Columbia University who won a fellowship to enable him to pursue “studies of the recent contributions to symbolic or mathematical logic, the present state of researches into the relation of abstract mathematics to such logical studies, and the relevance of such logical studies to the formulation of an adequate theory of probability, in consultation with European scholars.” Wow!

I spent several weeks in a country home outside Saratoga Springs one summer, at a time when Dr. Nagel was a fellow-guest. Dr. Morris Cohen was another. (Incidentally Dr. Cohen has a superb knack of telling Jewish stories.) But the chief characteristic about Nagel–I don’t think he was Dr. Nagel then–was that he was of such a retiring disposition that he looked as if he would prefer to be a shadow. He ventured into general conversation rarely and the only person with whom he seemed able to lose his shyness and selfconsciousness was Dr. Cohen. It was Dr. Cohen who assured us that his prize student was a brilliant scholar, and we were willing enough to take his word for it, but, so far as I was concerned, Nagel seemed unwilling, or unable, to take his part in general conversation.

HALPER AND EHRLICH

I have never had the pleasure of meeting either Albert Halper or Leonard Ehrlich, who are known to fame if not to fortune as novelists and story tellers. The book that gave Mr. Ehrlich reputation was a novelized version of the life of John Brown, “God’s Angry Man,” and Mr. Halper was practically nobody until he published “Union Square,” his first printed book, but his fourth to be written.

Mr. Halper’s publisher, The Viking Press, taking a gamble on a young man whose rejected manuscripts had so much promise in them, gave him a weekly stipend for the period necessary to write “Union Square” and he made good, both for publisher and for himself. It is said that the publisher’s stipend was equivalent to the sum Mr. Halper had been earning previously as a dishwasher in a restaurant or cafeteria. Since “Union Square” he has published a book of stories, “On the Shore,” many of which stories have the quality of Sherwood Anderson recollections, although there is a little in them, in story form, of eourse, of the “feel” of Elmer Rice’s “Street Soene.”