LIFE IN THE FACTORY
JonathanSchwartz
ON THE LINE, by Harvey Swados. Little, Brown. $3.50. Fiction about factory workers has been a rarity during the past two decades. Most novels at all concerned with work take as their...
...Before he quits, he manages to take his vengeance by wrecking four new car bodies...
...Sci-Art Publishers, Cambridge, Mass...
...Exactly what those ideas are, Walter does not quite discover...
...he is trying realistically to see what they are like in the midfifties...
...Fiction about factory workers has been a rarity during the past two decades...
...it's slaveryl" The older men laugh sympathetically...
...He has to fight certain middle-class notions of his mother in order to take the factory job in the first place...
...in 1957 he is quiet and cool...
...William J. Newman has also spent a year in England...
...Those who appreciate Bert Brecht's theater or Kurt Weil's music will enjoy Tucholsky's work...
...They think you're one of them, and in a good way you are...
...He talks to few of the other workers, but takes a liking to Walter...
...Leopold Labedz is a Polish journalist now living in England . . . Michael Walzer . who spent a year in England doing graduate work, last appeared in the Spring 1957 DISSENT, with the "Failure of the British Left...
...Swados has written with marvelous eloquence ("The Myth of the Happy Worker," an article in The Nation, August 17, 1957) about the lack of sensitiveness and concern that characterizes the attitudes of most liberals and intellectuals toward factory workers today...
...The novel does seem to have one "extra-literary" purpose...
...Bernard Rosenberg, long faroilar to our readers, recently co-edited Mass Culture...
...The men on the line like you, Walter," Joe says...
...AMONG OUR CONTRIBUTORS...
...That factories are still ghastly places in which to work is made very clear by Harvey Swados in his new novel, On the Line...
...He last contributed "Americans in Subtopla" Summer 1957 . . . L . Stern makes his first appearance in our pages with what is probably the first lengthy analysis of Lukacs to appear in English . . . Harvey Swados is well known to our readers for his earlier contributions . His latest novel is discussed above . . . Georg Mann is a "science writer by trade ." This is his first piece in DISSENT, but he has appeared in many other publications, including Politics and New Directions . I94...
...When the foreman warns him to "smarten up," the kid replies, "I was born smarter than some of the characters in this dump...
...Joe is the vanishing radical...
...In contrast to his treatment of other characters, Swados is intentionally vague about Joe...
...by Harry Zohn...
...Conditions being what they are, it is not very easy to formulate ideas "in an adult and comprehensible way...
...But Swados remains sympathetic toward these young people, he is willing to wait and listen to them...
...In Swados' novel the most rebellious workers on the line are the young boys who have either just quit or graduated from high school...
...The novel is intended not to polemicize or persuade toward a political point of view, but to recall to our at tention a major segment of humanity, the people who, despite mortgages and autos, remain, in important ways, the "bottom dogs" of American society...
...This may in part be due to the fact that much of his writing is intensely topical and can be appreciated only by those who are able to place it in the context of the years between wars in Germany...
...Not only was there no one else really to talk to about it, but Joe had forced Walter to try and formulate his emerging ideas in an adult and comprehensible way...
...One boy, who wears "pegged" pants to work instead of coveralls, expresses violent hatred for the assembly line...
...But if I understand him correctly, what Swados is concerned with is to show us something of the newer workers, those who have not been touched by the experiences of the thirties, and to explore the possible resources for creative action and behavior that is to be found among these younger people...
...but he was forced to admit to himself that more and more he was seeing the factory through Joe's cold, discerning eyes, and he began to fear that if Joe were ever to leave, the plant would have no real existence other than as a money-producing nightmare...
...Swados has shaken off any remnants of old notions about the workers...
...he is, I take it, a sort of oldtime radical, an almost allegorical figure...
...Kurt Tucholsky, the foremost satirist of the Weimar Republic and perhaps the most biting political commentator that Germany has produced since Heine and Boerne, has until now not be translated into English...
...Satirist THE WORLD IS A COMEDY...
...Swados writes: Walter fought hard against the influence of the older man, whose crabbed and subversive outlook was so foreign to everything Walter had been taught...
...The assembly lines exposes him to social reality...
...But many of his other pieces transcend the limitations of the period...
...and ed...
...Later on he says, "This isn't work...
...that is all he can do...
...Though endowed with a more acute political consciousness than most contemporary novelists, Swados shares with the best of them one important trait: a belief in the potentialities of the young, those who do not turn to an explicit politics of revolt yet are instinctively hostile to the cant of our time, those who "are not with it...
...1957...
...Maybe I93 that's why I've got hopes for you...
...He has no ideological preconceptions to advance, he starts with no confining archetypes...
...Most novels at all concerned with work take as their setting and inspiration the air-conditioned offices on Madison Avenue, not the grinding assembly lines...
...A TUCHOLSKY ANTHOLOGY, trans...
...In fact, if one's knowledge of American life were confined to certain literary and intellectual oracles, it would be hard to know that people still work in factories, that the work is dull and wearisome, and that men who spend their lives on assembly lines continue to feel any emotions other than those of gratified contentment...
...and Swados is much too honest and serious a writer to try to say...
...I came here to earn a living," he yells, "not to kill myself...
...They don't think you're just nosey when you ask questions...
...There he meets Joe, "the vanishing American...
...WALTER is a high school graduate who is saving money to go to college...
...He encourages Walter to be critical...
...Each worker is distinct: a man who comes to the factory, punches in, serves his time and takes home his check in ways that are different from those of his fellows...
...Some of them have here been gathered and competently translated...
...Joe does his job quietly and one day quits quietly...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
