The Electrical Workers
Rice, Charles Owen
explored, the major time frame of the book, takes Angela from about age thirty-eight to age forty-three. She has been divorced for eight years, is a ~uc- cessful writer, and lives in Brooklyn with...
...Foreign Bodies enunciates a curious theology of the flesh...
...They were merciless and injected nastiness and bitterness into the struggle...
...Applying the above questions to Made Winn's Children Without Childhood seems vital because the book is so bleak in its assumptions and so foggy in its purpose...
...The decade of the Self has, by conse- quence rather than intent, left two una- voidable questions...
...The Communists in the UE had many enemies but among the most formidable and long standing were the Socialists and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU...
...one of the constants would surely be the unworthi- ness as here, of the object of the obses- sion...
...for him, her words dissect experience only to kill it...
...The book's main assumption, however, is obvious: Children today grow up early, unprotected from the in- fluences of sex, drugs, pornography, and Commonweal: 444...
...however, even if one could seriously entertain the theory, Angela's emotional preoccupa- tions prevent her frown a discursive treat- ment sufficient to encourage a good ar- gument...
...Devi accuses her of talk- ing and writing too much, of over-articulating lived experience...
...Does everything have to mean some- thing...
...WHOLE CHILD/ WHOLE PARENT Polly Berrien Berends Harper & Row, $16.95, 360 pp...
...Looking back I am not all that proud of my part...
...Dump him, we shout...
...An obsessional love dominates this time of her life, the main topic of the novel...
...Angela has philosophical and theolog- ical ambitions...
...Most of us ACTU people had been influenced by Dorothy Day in the direc- tion of enthusiastic support of organized labor, but we lost Dorothy's serenity and positive attitude along the way...
...Schatz is fair, but, even as he tries to be neutral between the UE and its foes, he cannot suppress admiration for a great union and the dedicated, often fanatic, men and women who led it...
...When we began, our anti-Communism was not fashionable, especially in liberal circles, but it became so...
...Devi's beauty is like a character trait," she writes, "Devi's beauty amounts to a kind of goodness...
...For Devi is generally a nasty piece of work: self-indulgent, careless of Angela's feelings, and cruel...
...It was shattered to bits because there was a fatal flaw in its leadership...
...Those Communists, shrewd in so many mat- ters, were naive to fancy that they could continue defiantly spouting the party line with impunity...
...In the end the UE was almost wiped out...
...The employers, of course, took ad- vantage of all this...
...These are questions parents might ask themselves before approaching any of these three new books on family life--books which are, directly or indirectly, either a reflec- tion of, or a response to, the decade of the Self...
...Would that they had lain low and tried to ameliorate relations be- tween Moscow and Washington...
...IN DEFENSE OF THE FAMILY Raising Children in America Today Rita l~mmer il~e Books, $15.~, 263 pp...
...The feminist theme is played in several chords, from the high seriousness and beauty of Lu- cy's coming of age to sympathy for, and at times satire of, Eileen, Angela's friend, who goes through multiple trans- formations in a short period...
...Writing without academic jargon he has organized a mountain of research into a smooth narrative...
...I can't, I can't, she responds...
...Charles Owen Rice T RAGEDY is not too strong a word for what happened to the United Electri- cal, Radio and Machine Workers --CIO, (UE), that big beautiful union of 600,000 members...
...Do children, because they are children, have certain irreduci- ble fights and needs...
...Angela responds by trying to imbue his flesh with theological value...
...What is the se- cret of her past that makes her fall in love with homosexual men who have, moreover, the consonants d and v in their first names...
...Devi accentuates these, since his spiritual and moral attributes are mini- mal...
...In such fiction, the obsession, endlessly talked about, never explained, is all...
...She piles up mots in waves of self-congratulation, even as she tells us she is in pain...
...It is never clear who exactly this book is for, or what exactly its intention is...
...Earlier, however, she has told us of an experience "years later" in which she relives Devi in another, finally learning how she had "hurt" him...
...Do parents, be- cause they have children, carry certain unalterable responsibilities...
...The Auto Workers, the Machinists, and others raided it for years and kept on even after the CIO chartered its non-Communist IUE in 1949...
...Most of what is now being written takes their side, not only I Childhood's return CHILDREN WITHOUT CHILDHOOD Marie Wtnn Pantheon, $13.95, 224 pp...
...I unionists were Communists --the real article --Stalinists...
...It appears to be a book about the problems of children, but it pays more attention to the idea of children as prob- lems...
...The discrepancy between Devi's accusation and Angela's practice in- volves an irony of which one wishes a firmer affirmation by the author...
...Although it does not present the ACTU in a favorable light, it does not denounce it...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison either cannot or will not order Angela's life...
...That purge was inevitable...
...She also speculates that his beauty is a kind of analogy, for her, of the Incarnation of the Word...
...Angela's mother dies, and, at the book's end, her father is near death...
...The Communist cadres in the UE were demanding, and in internecine strife they gave no quarter...
...As he relates the rise and fall of the UE, Schatz gives an enlightening picture of the electrical industry and its giants, GE and Westinghouse...
...His regret at its downfall is genuine and he grieves over the humbler victims of the purge of the 1950's...
...I found this heterodox stuff interesting...
...A critic may someday write a study of novels of obsessional love...
...Angela's confessor encourages her to speculate on her sexual journey rather than to end it, as she once wishes he would...
...As the decade ran its course, it became increasingly obvious that this reassessment was defensive in nature, a reaction...
...Copies of the UE News and the Daily Worker are available and eloquent...
...The IUE even- tually won about half the old member- ship...
...Foreign Bodies puts forward a wealth of interesting material, but it is, I think, a deeply unfinished novel...
...She has great difficulty defining anything, and revels in giving opposite views between which she can't decide...
...Any of us might contemplate the frightening possibility that in a given five-year period of our lives we can't perceive progression...
...Novels usually treat human experience more generously and give us a sense of order, of pattern if not of progress, of wisdom if not of joy...
...Angela also tells us about other sexual affairs she has during this time, in lieu of physical response from Devi...
...But their morale was high, they were good at what they did, and when they realized their ultimate vulnerability, it was too late...
...The UE archives are open and in academic hands, (but so are mine...
...I was a free-wheeling part of the latter...
...Their control was solid...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison lets Angela reveal few moral qualities which make him lovable...
...Although much happens to Angela between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-three, she doesn't change...
...Angela leaves Devi at the very end of the novel, resolving not to repeat her experience...
...With encouragement from the women's movement and various pop psycholo- gists, many parents (especially mothers) responded to this "burden" by redefin- ing their children's needs, rather than reexamining the source and significance of their own desires...
...Readers of the essays in Off Center will recognize Harrisonian motifs and at- titudes here...
...She has been divorced for eight years, is a ~uc- cessful writer, and lives in Brooklyn with her precocious daughter, Lucy, whose description resembles that of the author's own daughter in a 1980 collection of es- says, OffCenter...
...We were pro-labor and not merely anti-Communist, but I for one wish there had been far less emphasis on the negative...
...But children, being tough customers with their own felt priorities, confronted parents, as always, with the bare, inescapable truth: This wasn't working--for anybOdy...
...Their labor (Continued on page 444) Commonweal: 442 policies, some of which were Machiavellian, are examined at justifiable length...
...We are to share Ange- la's pain, but not get annoyed that she does nothing about it...
...The focus of tlte seventies was on a highly valued but unclearly defined idea of self-fulfillment and self-realization...
...A special blend of recollec- tion, sympathy, and irony makes the es- says very readable...
...we as Christians, however, should have risen above that...
...Such opin- ions, which Angela recognizes as idolatrous, together with many other animadversions along this iine~ advance a theory of salvation in a flesh that lacks or is counter to spirit...
...There is no end to the affair: Angela has not been able to forgive Devi or herself for it, and the author has been unwilling to invent a fictional form to give the experience a satisfactory beginning,middle, and end...
...In a time when desires got mistaken for rights and responsibility got confused with repression, it was not surprising that self-fulfillment and self-realization were isolated as goals (or rights) unto them- selves, rather than the natural (earned) consequence of a larger purpose...
...Withal it is important, interesting, rather complete, and nearly always accurate...
...Neither was it surprising that some parents, preoccupied with these false or impossible goals and unable to sort out because times have changed, but because the left-wing survivors have a sense of history...
...he asks her...
...priorities, should begin to view their children's needs as burdensome, one more obstacle to personal fulfillment...
...It is ironic that the Communists who lost on the field of battle bid fair to win the battle of the books...
...Communism hadn't a chance of taking over America or even its labor move- ment, but we did not know that, and we were infected by the demon theory and the notion of Communist invincibility...
...But with the coming of the Cold War and McCar- thyism it mattered very much...
...Foreign Bodies and the genre of obsessional literature do not an- swer such questions...
...The obsession is a given, corresponding in some coded way to an anthorial pres- ence, and chosen to disguise rather than to make clear --for audience and perhaps author herself...
...My deepest regret is that we did not defend their civil fights in the final crunch, and let McCarthyites have their will of them...
...Too many of those fine trade Angela does have some witty remarks about the New York art world, on the fringes of which Devi lives...
...The object of her love is Devi, a handsome painter from India, and, like David Larrimar, a homosexual...
...Of all the many books, Schatz's is the most urbane and scholarly...
...For a while, in the first flush of the New Deal and the wartime honeymoon with Russia, it did not matter...
...Also, Ange- la's peculiar combination of freedom from convention and servitude to Devi may well involve sensitivity to a feminist motif that remains unavailable to the ob- tuse male reviewer...
...May a reader psychoanalyze obsessed charaOets like Angela...
...Janet ~:ott Bcsriow D URING the | 970s and beyond parents have been faced with an ongoing public and personal reassessment of the purpose of parenthood and the meaning of childhood...
...Oddly enough, a desire to define and make clear is the last fault of which the reader wishes to accuse Angela...
...As her name suggests, she has problems integrating flesh with spirit...
...While Foreign Bodies does not glut us with irony, Purges & principles ELECYIIICAL lll~.B Ronaid W. Schatz Univer~ty of Illinois, $22.95, 279 pp...
Vol. 111 • August 1984 • No. 14
