Success at a Dead-End Price
NEUFELD, ALICE
Success at a Dead'End Price Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn: The Collected Stories of Harvey Swados Introduction by Grace Paley Viking. 448 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Alice Neufeld Associate...
...she is content with her obscure lot, and Roy Farrow is left with no one to share his self-disgust...
...Shedding his khaki, an ex-soldier heads for the city to bathe in its "unquenchable variety...
...At last, heis cornered, and jumps from the ledge of a high-rise into the "last free space in all the world...
...He had divorced his ambitious wife, only to realize how he fulfilled her dreams of success after all...
...He has come to the city to study dance: "A great creative force within himself' was released by watching early Fred Astaire in the movie houses of Tokyo, where he served in the occupation forces...
...Afterward he wonders: "...do you think it's a bad thing, having a wife make sacrifices for you—so that even when she doesn't remind you of them because she knows you can't stand it, you can still see them in her eyes...
...With an actor's instincts and a director's sense of theater, he executes a victory against racism before an audience of employees of a Panama City nightclub...
...Have we really earned it, the whole country...
...The title story is a youthful romance with the New York City of 1945 that flourishes until possibility conspires with history to clamp down upon the lives of two friends...
...He is a victim of society's structure: A publisher promises him a "best-seller" if he will rewrite his novel to includearomance...
...No more access to classified material...
...The imprint of these stories is still felt today...
...A series of diseased characters bombard him, each speaking a language he can't comprehend: con art, sleaze, Newspeak, chic, academic, and hype...
...Literally, and figuratively, Ralph feels compelled to sell out for romance...
...All are intense, realized achievements...
...Blight...
...Joe, The Vanishing American," stands no less solidly than the pick-up man on the assembly line as a precursor for Joe, The Engineer (1983), Chuck Wachtel's fine novel about a working-class man who is trapped and stagnating in his job reading gas meters in Queens, New York...
...In English, Peter asks: "But how did you understand me...
...Mac was sorry and all that, but word had come through...
...Felice was four years Harvey' s senior and only 25 when her novel about a girl's reform school, House of Fury, was published...
...The forces that move him to compromise, however, are not confined to his individual character...
...Tell her Shanker sent you...
...Fear and ambition burrow into people, until finally the city deadens life where it once sustained it...
...Swados is often political, but never doctrinaire...
...He "comes on" to a girl in the subway, and marries Pauline soon after: "That a girl with legs like that would be reading Partisan\" The texture of lost friendship rediscovered upon streets, and nourished nightly, in and out of restaurants, is sen-tiently drawn, as is conversation, political and ruminating: "But now that the War is over for most of us, and we want to live it up, I feel uneasy...
...Peter Chifley, the ex-soldier in "The Dancer," is young and unformed...
...Reviewed by Alice Neufeld Associate professor of humanities, Suffolk Community College Harvey Swados was 52 when he died in 1972...
...Everything we work on is classified, for God's sake...
...He forgets himself momentarily, and in Japanese, addresses a man in a "cardboard hat bearing the words 'Sightseeing Tours.'" The guide answers coolly, "Got much money...
...In the 1961 edition, "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn" opened the col-lectionand"The Dancer" was positioned last, pointing back toward the city themes first drawn, and forward, to a slide over the edge into the surreal...
...Roy Farrow betrayed his youthful aspiration to compose music by becoming a TV show bandleader...
...Unease becomes ironic prophecy, then nightmare: "I went in yesterday and found my desk locked...
...His wife has changed...
...The guide directs Peter to a boarding house in Chelsea, its owner is a "Mrs...
...Readers recognized themselves and felt their experience reiterated in such books as On theLine(195T)— a group of eight stories (reprinted in 1978) that grew out of Swados' work in the Ford plant at Mahwah, New Jersey...
...Before he was 18, TheBestShort Stories of1938 included one by him...
...Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn first appeared in 1961, and its nine stories are combined in the present volume with 11 more from 1965 that were published in A Story for Teddy...
...At 15, he had left Buffalo for the University of Michigan with a sense of the writer' s craft already forged at home by his older sister...
...Asocial radical, Swados spoke to the voiceless people who earned a living at a dead-end price...
...Although the consequences are deadly, the juxtapositions are hilarious as Peter pursues "lightness and grace" among thesystembuilders...
...Fresh off the bus, amid the throngs of people on Eighth Avenue, Peter is reminded of Tokyo...
...Her death at 29 devastated him, then intensified his need to write for both of them...
...And he returns to these themes in "The Glance in the Mirror" as well as "The Man in theToolhouse...
...His wife had sacrificed her own creative development upon the altar of his talent...
...During a particularly unproductive period in his life, guilt blackens the gray mood of an artist husband, in "The Balcony...
...Twelve years later, he returns to visit his ex-wife and child, hoping for bitter recriminations, but all he receives is a warm welcome...
...Ralph Everett, "The Man in the Tool-house," is also isolated by his self-contempt...
...There are lighter moments, too, and delight from contradictory characters who surprise us with amazing feats...
...In "The Dancer," Swados realigns the boundaries between friendly and enemy, healthy and diseased, sane and insane territory...
...Peter is pinballed into a post-Hiroshima allegory...
...they share a striking comprehensiveness, a steadfast confidence about what is of value in life that derives from having one's youth leveled against the Depression and World War II...
...Bobby Shafter, seaman, has a wife in Nashville, and a fiancee in Panama City...
...A Glance in the Mirror" is rich in irony...
...The abundance of food, drink and friendship lose their spontaneous, organic powers and become crude oil for the "grinding success mechanism...
...Swados then goes on to explore the different ways women and men compromise themselves in the name of romance, and shows us the heavy personal costs in guilt and rage that we suffer by perpetuating the romantic system...
...I used to coach baseball in Kobe— ran a sex shop on the side...
...His stories are full-blooded fictions that have one eye focused upon justice and the other upon love...
...I thought it was a practical joke...
...Financial success cannot mitigate his despair at having sold out...
...Many are first-person recollections of past selves, time and places...
...Measuring how "successful" artists fare in our culture, the author imagines two men who feel their losses more keenly than their gains...
...his fear of failing her redoubles his own fears, and he lashes out at her in anger...
Vol. 69 • November 1986 • No. 17
