HARVEY SWADOS, 1920-1972

...It meant plunging into occasional politics, as Harvey did in the recent campaign, and then pulling back, a little quizzi cal—though with an awareness that when he was needed again, he would be there...

...Nothing—neither the impatience of critics, nor commercial failure, nor the wiles of the Zeitgeist—could induce Harvey to write in any way but the one that he had to...

...intent upon changing society but finally changing little more than the consciousness of those who had gone through it...

...that he was cut off from the work of his fulfillment and the triumphs of his children— this seems an outrage...

...Harvey Swados is a man with a white beard, full-figured, handsome as the very devil, a writer with novels, stories, essays behind him...

...The books are like Harvey himself, chunks of integrity, the imaginings of a good man, firm with the drama of conscience...

...HARVEY BECAME A NOVELIST, and the writing of fiction was the passion of his life...

...the world will take notice or it won't, and we'll go on...

...He's a fellow, I thought to myself, "with moxie...

...But what do such things matter when one thinks of his openness, his charm, his vibrancy —the way he seemed to rush out to embrace the life that came to him...

...It meant an immediacy of anger at the outrages that packed our years, whether saturation bombing of Vietnam or persecution of writers in Russia...

...Today I remember after that first meeting using in my mind a slang word about Harvey that was already out of fashion...

...It's customary on such occasions to end on a note of reconciliation with fate, to make one's peace—in words if not feeling—with the reality that has been imposed on us...

...It meant a sudden burst of scorn--the scorn of a man who never had any use for trimmers—whenever he heard about an intellectual whose nose had lost the capacity for smelling out dead fish...

...One of them is Harvey: rosy, cheerful, serious, a young man not yet fully formed...

...A young friend, also a novelist, told me to say that Harvey was regarded by all who knew him as a "model of honesty and commitment"— and so let us say it...

...Some quality of directness, a moral freshness and transparency strikes one about him...

...but he remained a socialist to the end...

...It's a place where you encounter a variable number of Swadoses, people laughing, quarreling, shouting, working...

...Part of the fun of visiting the Swadoses was always the sense one had of a rich, intense family life, with its interweaving of politics and music and theater, its incomparable closeness and devotion...

...He wasn't a saint...

...I come to visit, and later we talk about politics, our first but by no means last quarrel, and more shyly, we edge into literature, though I have no idea he may be dreaming COMMENTS AND OPINIONS about becoming a novelist...

...But it's like saying his name was Harvey Swados...

...It meant a wonderful grasp of the experience, the feelings and aspirations, of those workers whom so many of our friends had come to treat with a poisonous condescension—one thinks especially of Harvey's classical essay, "The Myth of the Happy Worker," a piece of writing full of his characteristic hard sense and pungent rebelliousness...

...In the last few years, whenever I read some silly article about "the end of the family," I would immediately think back to the Swadoses and then the whole idea that families such as theirs could be anything but the true norm of our existence seemed absurd...

...He had a sort of ingrained, rather funny suspicion of the literary life in the big city, his view of it always seeming closer to the novels of Balzac than to the reality of New York...

...the voice of a man struggling to understand his time...

...Irving Howe q 150 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...

...The socialist group from which we came was a curious one, still carrying the portentousness of Bolshevik vocabulary but moving toward a more open-spirited and problematic outlook...

...After a few years Harvey left that milieu, losing what little interest he had ever had in the dogmatics of socialism...

...Harvey tells me with a grin, knowing how to incite a city boy's imagination, that in Chesterfield you can go snowshoeing, across the meadows behind the house...

...We talk about our children, making certain that our boasts have an edge of wryness to them, since it would not be proper to seem merely paternal...

...But I don't think Harvey would have liked that at all, he would have snorted and scoffed at such an idea...

...To call himself a socialist meant for Harvey most of all to preserve the power of moral responsiveness...

...Its members in Buffalo are young, mostly students going into factories, excited by this venture into what they regard as the reality of things...

...That he was deprived of the twenty or twenty-five years of additional life which should have been his...

...He could be contentious, and finding in me an equal talent, he would steadily write letters, which I as steadily answered, about our political disagreements...

...He was human, and that meant, at times, impatient, stubborn, disappointed, irascible...

...The evening is nothing special, a brief pleasant visit, we're not really intimate, just old friends whose lives have intertwined for decades .. . It begins some thirty years earlier in Buffalo, where the socialist group to which we both belong is building a new branch...

...determined to sink roots in the life of the American working class but mainly providing a school for young intellectuals in love with modern culture...

...There's not a trace of fashionableness in them, not the least glimmer of concession to whatever is the "going thing...

...It meant, as he wrote a dozen years ago, "my kinship has been with those writers who imply, even as they treat of trouble and terror, that the world could be better, just as my commitment has been to those human beings who believe—despite every awful evidence to the contrary—that the world must be better...

...Like other writers before him, he found it hard to bear what he regarded as neglect of his work...

...His novels are works of substance, memorable less for their happenings than for the secure voice that comes through, with a kind of rough-textured affection...

...Somewhere in his mind a new book is gathering, but it's not yet close, and he doesn't mean to hurry it...

...By now we're both older, says Harvey, and like to think that we've learned there's no longer the need we used to feel for hurrying...

...It meant standing fast—the man with the white beard, full-figured, handsome as the very devil, is the same as the boy in Buffalo, rosy, cheerful, serious: still the comrade of our early hopes...

...we can stop a little and rest in the support of the moment...

...Beaming with a child's delight, he shows us his new house in Chesterfield, a wonderful old house, notched with the weight of generations yet already bearing the marks of his own pleasures...

...Half a lifetime later I find myself regretting that I never told him about that, since I can see his quick amusement, his characteristic ex plosion of vitality softening into reflectiveness, and his teasing reply, "Say, that was one of your better critical judgments...

...I say it because that is what Harvey would say himself—this friend, the rosy boy, the man with the white beard, standing fast...