Tales of Disillusion:
FRANKEL, HASKEL
Tales of Disillusion Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn. By Harvey Swados. Atlantic-Little, Brown. 248 pp. $4. Reviewed by Haskel Frankel Senior Editor, G. P. Putnam Book Company; Instructor in...
...When Ralph Everett's moment of triumph approaches he learns that creativity, talent and honesty are not enough to win a large public following...
...He bows to the knowledge that books are a commercial product and publishing houses profit-making businesses...
...There was a time," the narrator begins, "when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter...
...Yet it will remain until the end of days embedded in the very core of my being aflame with romance and infected with disillusion...
...When he sees the last free place in the world—the sky—being corrupted by skywriters he dances over a building ledge...
...Obviously a writer of such truths as Swados offers is not likely to find the wide readership his talent merits...
...Instructor in writing, New York University While many writers these days seek unusual plots and unusual characters, Harvey Swados molds his stories from the little experiences that shape the average man...
...His lowkeyed tales have a way of insinuating themselves into the reader's mind with all the discomfort of a damp fog...
...Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn contains 10 short stories...
...The most optimistic story is "The Peacocks of Avignon" in which the protagonist learns to hear a painful life by finding a little beauty somewhere...
...Between these two extremes are anguished little tales that illustrate Swados' cliches of despair: It is easier to take than to give...
...With both lightness and bitterness, he sketches the wanderings through Manhattan of a modern Candide in the guise of a wouldbe dancer seeking a freedom he is not cunning enough to wrest from others...
...The story ends with" the magic and the mystery of the city gone...
...the most difficult thing for a man to face is himself...
...I was young and I was free...
...viciously biting, it veers from Swados' usual simple, straightforward realism...
...The story is an account of a man, his girl and his friends rattling around in the freedom of youth, unaware that life is forging invisible chains around them, link by link...
...Swados himself is obviously infected with disillusion, and reveals it most graphically in "The Man in the Toolhouse," the story of a man who slaves for years to write a novel that is creatively honest...
...She knows what's going on, but make her face the truth and you lose her...
...What actually transpires seems unimportant—a series of average days and months—yet the essence of years squeezed from those days and months is quite meaningful...
...Youth and freedom inevitably end and only the chains of commitment remain, alien and unbreakable...
...the world honors success more than self-respect...
...The Dancer" is also unusual...
...Each carries its bitter pill of recognition...
...one is satirical...
...Eight can be described as serious, if not unhappy...
...Now it is just a place, no worse, for those who want to look at it that way, than the placid and self-satisfied town where I live...
...The average reader is as skittish as a maiden approaching seduction...
...In the title story, Swados paints his largest and bleakest canvas...
...A critic writing of Ralph Everett's bestseller says it represents "a striking example of the effect of the corruption of American culture on its worst victim, the creative man...
...the last attempts farce...
...Swados has clearly taken a long, hard look at our world and found it wanting...
Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 22
