Different Failures
Schickel, Richard
Different Failures by Richard Schickel A BOOK LIKE The Lincoln Lords (Little-Brown. $5) always awes me. I can never imagine how a writer, no matter how blunt his sensibilities, how mundane...
...He is, in short, front-man and salesman...
...The International Ladies1 Garment Workers1 Union conducts its own "West Point,11 to prepare young men and women for careers in labor leader ship...
...Not one of the things that happens in that cannery is initiated by Line...
...We probably don't need novels of protest any more either...
...This, of course, is the old ends-justify-means argument and writing in the wake of all the scandals which have lately rocked the business world, I am, perhaps, over-reacting to it...
...The one-year course combines classroom and field work...
...There is nothing soft or cushy about any of these jobs...
...On that level one is forced, unwillingly, to say that his novel is a failure...
...His ideas rob his novel of vitality...
...Hawley, on the basis of the power of observation shown in this novel, and on the basis of his plot, which is by turns melodramatic and boring, is not the man for the job...
...But we do need insightful books, written by social historians of sensibility, about the business community...
...As it is created, their product is being tested by social science researchers on sample audiences...
...Not content to rest his case on the career of Lincoln Lord, Hawley sprinkles his volume with little moral tales which further support his notion...
...The author has fallen into one of the commonest of fiction's traps...
...He is the opportunist, the booster, in many ways a semi-tragic figure in his lack of values and lack of self-awareness—a sort of Willy Lo-man in a corner office...
...Hawley is beneath consideration as a literary artist, but Swados must be judged with the best of his generation...
...Different Failures by Richard Schickel A BOOK LIKE The Lincoln Lords (Little-Brown...
...The Lincoln Lords are not, as you might suspect, rulers of a shire in medieval England...
...The Training Institute is now in its tenth year...
...and Mrs...
...To these, we open the doors of the Institute...
...The narrator of the novel, a recording engineer, finally feels that he must stand up against these pressures and against the Lincoln Lord types who counsel acceptance of them...
...Line is one of those bags of wind who rule so many destinies in our time...
...He is a professional corporation executive with no talent beyond charm and public speaking ability...
...Hawley wants us to believe that no one but a "go-getter" like Line could have pulled off such a feat, but the truth is that the writer has stacked the cards in Line's favor...
...Your readers, especially those under the age of 35, have been a source of talent, inspiration and raw material for us during the last few years...
...My favorite is the one about the scholar who has his research stolen from him by a colleague, but who comes to regard the thief highly because he had the vision to turn the stolen work into money for the college...
...His one contribution to their effort is his ability to put their ideas over on stockholders, consumers, and employees...
...His notion is that the true men of value in our society are not the creators but the sellers...
...INTERNATIONAL LADIES' GARMENT WORKERS' UNION David Dubinsky, President Memo to: Morris H. Rubin, Editor, The Progressive From: Gus Tyler, Director ILGWU Training Institute Subject: A CAREER WITH A CHALLENGE...
...With the job comes the challenge-to provide the kind of dedicated and ethical leadership that will make the American labor movement the creative so cial force it seeks to be...
...Yet, his obvious talent and intelligence force one to judge him on an entirely different level...
...In addition, I can't understand a publisher adorning such a trash basket with encomiums like "a truly major work .. . a truly revealing novel...
...His characters are too full of "literary" talk, and they are more symbols in a morality play than human beings...
...Lincoln Lord, man and wife in today's United States, people who might be your neighbors if you happened to be in the $50,000 a year bracket...
...Nor do I understand, even taking into account all the perversions of rational thought which have accompanied universal literacy, how so many readers can be such devoted admirers of its author, Cameron Haw-ley...
...Rather, he is the recipient of good breaks and good thinking on the part of his associates...
...Promised perfect freedom to create, along with freedom from monetary concerns, the artists find, as they proceed, governmental, business, and foundation pressure beginning to twist their work out of shape...
...Write before April 15: ILGWU Training Institute, 1710 Broadway, New York 19, N. Y...
...As the book opens he accepts his sixth corporate presidency in ten years—a minor one—and everyone, including his wife, is coming to think that he is little more than an empty-headed blow—the correct view of the man, in my opinion...
...his need to prove his point prevents him from proving that his people are real, I suppose the sincerity of a man like Harvey Swados has to be commended...
...Virtually all started as organizers-to learn the labor movement at the grass roots...
...had hopes that Harvey Swados, the author of False Coin (Atlantic-Little, Brown...
...Those who complete the course are as signed to a full-time job with the union...
...140 of its graduates now hold union office in the ILGWU...
...Each year, we have heard from your readers in response to our appeal for dedicated young men and women to work in the labor movement...
...The truth is that Hawley has a thesis which he is trying to ram down our throats...
...But never underestimate the power of charisma, for by the end of the book, Line has made a going concern out of a moribund food cannery...
...We want those who will enjoy the sting of challenge...
...He is the sort who gathers a "team" around him and then proceeds to live, parasite fashion, off their ideas...
...We have no need of this...
...He is a decent, humane, intelligent writer, deeply engaged in, and concerned about, what is going on in our society these days...
...And next to a writer like Cameron Hawley he is a tower of light and strength...
...His work suffers from a lack of life...
...I refuse to believe there are that many tired businessmen in the world...
...We need people who can probe, surgically, for the cancer that seems to affect the thinking of these people...
...The chief agent of these pressures is the social scientists who claim to know what the public wants...
...I am in agreement with Swados' intellectual position, but I don't particularly admire his method of stating it...
...Hawley has tried to make a virtue of fraudulence...
...But then we are not looking for young people who want the easy plush life...
...His thesis cannot make up for the wooden prose and obvious characterization...
...While some continue at this mission as their first and enduring love, others branch out to take on respon sibilities as business agents, local union man agers, educational and political directors, area supervisors, time study experts, etc...
...He fails, but not before an eloquent plea for the necessity of freedom for the artist...
...I can never imagine how a writer, no matter how blunt his sensibilities, how mundane his prose, how tinny his ear, can manage to type out 556 pages of such drivel without going completely bananas in the process...
...Lord is a hollow fraud of the type we used to satirize or vilify in the novels of the Twenties and Thirties...
...They are Mr...
...And his political orientation, I think, blocks him from using all of his sensibility in the observation of character and of events and from wringing total meaning from them...
...But it is an all-too-common rationalization for the ways of our huckster-oriented society...
...We can see in the "pilot project" a microcosm of all the forces which attempt to blunt and stunt the artist's vision...
...Swados' case for freedom, and against the "team" method of creation, is well stated...
...We are convinced that in every generation there is a segment of young people who would like to play a courageous and active role in changing the shape of things, and we are therefore renewing our invi tation to a career that others-in this decade-have found a rewarding way of life...
...4) was the man for the job...
...In his new novel Swados asks us to believe that a foundation has set up an experimental artists' colony in which writers, musicians, painters are attempting to create variations on a single story for all the media, from opera to comic books...
Vol. 24 • February 1960 • No. 2
