Art Down on the Farm

...What is the function of art in American life...

...False Coin, which is obviously concerned with what it says as well as how it says it, is delicately balanced on the brink of both camps...

...Why, then, the reservations...

...What is real art and what is counterfeit...

...As a widower whose child has died, Warder is as free emotionally as he is creatively, which again puts him in a good position to tell us about the personalities involved in the project...

...After becoming involved with the members of the governing board more or less intimately, he finally asks the important question about the project—is it morally superior to commercially sponsored art in that it can give the artist absolute freedom...

...These are good questions, and in his novel, Swados has created lively people in an interesting situation to exemplify them...

...False Coin itself turns out to be a good example of the problem Swados is writing about...

...Conversely, for all the reader's conviction that the book's questions are important ones, they are not answered...

...The book wears its thesis—that art is an individual matter — on its sleeve, yet whenever the novel is about to be dominated by the tract, the characters take over and assert a life of their own...

...It mixes too much base metal with its gold to ring true...

...When the answer turns out to be that it cannot give the artist absolute freedom Warder resigns...

...Unfortunately, Warder is not a good narrator...

...What is the role of the personality—as artist, as patron, as critic—for whom art is created...

...And you'll see," he said, "it'll be a new kind of culture that I'll be midwife to in my new Lying-in Hospital...

...A Congressional committee headed by Representative Roap and Counsel Hangman want to look into the matter of tax-exempt foundations that prevail upon artists to alter their work for purposes other than art...

...Unfortunately, it is a good deal easier to believe in what has happened to Ben Warder than in any part of the Pilot Project...

...The goal, as the project director puts it is, "a massive attempt to heal the crazy split between mass culture and art, between lowbrow and highbrow, not by asking the artist to water down his work, or by force-feeding the general public with abstract art, but by undoing the barriers that separate the two...

...If such compromises make it also more profitable, is this bad...

...Fred being the kind of man he is, he set to work at once.' " Warder plays an important role in the Pilot Project...

...Also in residence at Harmoney Farm are social scientists who will measure the response of the public to bits and pieces of the Pilot Project as it is in the process of creation...

...The answer is, I think, that in spite of Swados' careful attempt to construct the situation in False Coin out of contemporary events, the reader is never ready to believe in the book's basic premise...

...The project collapses, and with it Warder's future as a sound engineer...

...Warder goes to Harmoney Farm as a subordinate member of the team, a performer rather than an originator, involved artistically but not so creatively entangled that he is unable to record for us "what was revealed to me there not just of myself but of the strange life of our time...

...But such a novelist is running a risk that the novel will be swallowed up by the dissertation, as has happened for the modern reader with, for example, Uncle Tom's Cabin...

...He is not through, however...

...The Pilot Project, as the experiment is called, brings together at Harmoney Farm musicians, writers, actors, directors, artists, composers and technicians who are expected to synthesize their talents into a single creation...

...What compromises are justified to make art more popular and less difficult, to make it influential and more widely appreciated...

...The question is asked repeatedly, explicitly and implicitly, by the author, by the protagonist, by the subordinate characters in turn and eventually by the reader—out of sympathy if not out of compulsion...

...Warder testifies, reluctantly, that this has happened on the Pilot Project, and in the glare of a Congressional investigation Piolt Project's backers withdraw...

...Ignoring for the moment the sub-plots, of which there are a generous number, False Coin is about a communal experiment in "the production and distribution of art to a mass public in an atmosphere freed of commercial pressure...

...He reports people as telling him things it is hard to imagine anyone ever saying: " 'And Fred said, "We've got plenty of culture cemeteries, let them have their galleries and museums and libraries...

...I want just one place where culture can be born, not die—all culture, all under one roof like this great Market...

...In spite of Warder and a whole gallery of char acters who regularly come alive, the book as a whole does not...

...we come out the same door that we go in...

...his fellow workers include writers as diverse as Dostoyevsky and Harriet Beecher Stowe...

...To tell us about the project, Swados gives us as narrator and protagonist Ben Warder, a recording engineer with the rare talent of being able to transcribe music as the composer wants it to be played rather than as it is easiest to do...

...But there is always the hope that the achievement will transcend the original idea, as in Dostoyevsky...

...Reviewed by Roderick Craib Author, "Our Yesterdays" A NOVELIST WHO tunes his plot to a liberal mixture of ideas and symbols is in good company...