Chuckling, He Squared His Shoulders

...Typically, the densest moments in Swados' fiction come when one person is trying to get through to another, to communicate some sense of rightness or obligation...

...By contrast, The Will takes place in a kind of allegorized No City somewhere in America, full of cardboard scenery representing decaying downtown slums, newly built-up suburbs, etc...

...He is a man of reason...

...For an example of what I mean, read his novel of a Utopian community, False Coin (and compare it to Hawthorne's Brook Farm...

...nor would Swados himself wish us to use his politics as an excuse for his artistic shortcomings...

...Yet, when one gets right down to it, Swados is far more interesting when he portrays "the naked world" than when he tries to force a "vision...

...Swados takes a courageous chance here, but as it turns out he could hardly have chosen a model less suited to his gifts...

...But in The Will he has deliberately confined himself to the area of the existential drama, where thoughts and feelings are tested and changed by the very actions they inspire...

...But it is Swados' very humanism that marks his limits as a novelist...

...In one respect, Swados' background as a democratic Socialist is compatible with his strongest virtue as a writer...

...Swados' typical hero is a man of goodwill, who stands to the side of whatever is going on and struggles to understand and help...

...he does not understand the irrational...

...But Swados must have his Greek chorus, and so he rounds out the failure of The Will by taking up the concluding chapter not with any "vision," not even with "the naked world," but with the Polonian reflections of Dr...

...The artist who plunges in brings forth to our consciousness some of the richness, ordered and illuminated, of his own experience...

...Trying, perhaps, to break away from the sociological impasse, he has chosen in The Will to follow a more purely psychological conflict based on The Brothers Karamazov: Conspicuously, his plot revolves around three brothers of allegorically different temperaments thrashing out the inheritance of an evil uncle...

...for Swados' painstaking human concern entitles him to more of an audience than he is currently likely to achieve...

...Since Swados himself invokes Dostoyevsky, it is not unfair to observe that Dostoyevsky would surely have done without the explaining interloper, or else he would have pressed his theories to the limit by making him a red-hot, icecold professional...

...Using his hero's helplessness as a wedge, Swados pushes onward to the frantic and ultimately self-immolating business manipulations of the young woman's father, and beyond that to the whole wartime mood of lostness and confusion...

...In the best of the stories, the point is somewhat fictionalized, but usually the schoolmaster must step in to spell it out...

...The characters of Swados' novel are reduced to endless rationalizations of their motives, like patients on the couch unable to break through to what they really feel...

...The fight scene, for instance —in which Ralph Land grapples with his brother Mel in the middle of the night in their uncle's old house, both of them deranged and murderous—is simply not brought off...

...He is aware that men's feelings do not follow logical rules, yet he cannot convincingly show what it means to be angry or crazy or to want to destroy...

...he's got it...

...Thus, Dr...

...Stark, an MD who considers himself an amateur analyst— to explain the Land brothers to the reader...

...Stark, who finishes the book by ironically sticking out his tongue at a reflection of himself...

...Unlike, say, Dostoyevsky, who turned his abstractions into a dialectic of dramatic torment, Swados strips the ideas of Marx and Freud from the complicated, poetic contexts in which they were originally expressed and tosses them into his fiction halfcooked...

...He counts it as part of his profession to know how work is done and how workers live, and he knows these facts perhaps better than any other American writer...

...Sometimes in his shorter fiction Swados works up a specificity of scene and character so dense that he does not need to plug things up with lessons...

...The demands are insistent, fulfillment elusive, and at its best The Will exercises its author's talent for representing the pulls and tugs and worries of earthly love...

...And probably no psychological conception, no matter how complex, could survive its embodiment in the textbook prose that Swados employs for narrative...

...Swados writes as though words themselves were absolute entities instead of inadequate counters for the non-verbal mysteries of human personality...

...In none of his fiction has Swados succeeded in creating a creditable dramatic scene...

...In his fiction, this concern is reflected in an obsessive involvement with guilt and responsibility...

...When Swados describes machines or work habits or family budgeting, he is at once illuminating and precise...

...One cannot help feeling that The Will would have a better chance to come alive if its painted flats were replaced by a setting as definite as Swados' "subterranean" Buffalo...

...I wonder, finally, how he expects to lure them back, when he echoes, in that wise old chuckle, the smugness and sterile loftiness which infect so much of the middle-aged intellectual establishment...

...Furthermore, as if to make sure no one misses his meanings, in The Will Swados deputizes a raisonneur—Dr...

...One can only regret that detailed radical reporting is excluded from publications of any large circulation in America...

...Perhaps this is because he has no vision comparable to the cosmic psychologies of the great romantic writers...

...the occasion is unlikely and the language unexciting...

...Reviewed by JEREMY LARNER Contributor, "Partisan Review," "Dissent," "Nation" One wants to appreciate Harvey Swados' novels...

...Yet there is no body of ideas, as such, which defies an inspired novelist...

...In Swados' first and best novel, Out Went the Candle, there is a young heroine with an enormous flair for self-destruction, which all the implorings of the observer-hero cannot check...

...Alas...

...He who dares to make the perilous descent is usually tortured by the disparity between his separate vision and the naked world...

...He is the best we have to tell us what is happening with our miners, rubber workers, longshoremen and auto workers...

...If they fail, one would like to think it is because their author insists on the values of a dedicated radical intellectual...

...The meaning of such a novel must lie in its moments of passion, and in The Will it is precisely the most passionate scenes which ring false...

...Swados has his job figured out, and in an essay written in 1949 entitled "Certain Jewish Writers" he has stated it well in the abstract: "Art begins at the irrational, that subterranean area where the most important parts of our lives are rooted...

...If only intellectuality were sufficient...

...I am thinking of the gems that fill Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn, and especially "The Man in the Toolhouse," in which the painfully believable conflict between the slowworking writer and his restless wife is somehow intensified by an exact evocation of the physical presence of the city of Buffalo...

...By its author's choice, then, The Will is an existential rather than a social novel, and it fails from a fatal existential weakness: Swados' inability to propel his characters into significant action...

...Then, chuckling, he squared his shoulders to the rising wind and strode on briskly through the frosty twilight streets...

...Like a social scientist, Swados seeks to explain human behavior by the application of hard fact to cerebral theory, and the result is all too often a kind of symbolic sociology rather than fiction...

...Often he has been able to side-step this weakness by relying on other talents...

...Usually Swados takes the novelistic strategy of writing from the point of view of the implorer, recording his baffled frustration as the object of his implorings resists and misunderstands, twisting away from the very insight meant to free him...

...Again, in The Will Swados uses the imploring consciousness as a strategic device, shifting points of view repeatedly as his characters make demands one upon the other...

...Stark Carries On, Faces Life, etc., presumably giving pause to many of our young people of today, whom Swados fears are resigning from the human race...

...Or for Swados at his most singleminded, read the stories in On the Line, which like good little Socialist schoolchildren line up to recite the lesson that assembly-lines are dull and degrading work...