IDEALISTIC SKEPTIC
NYE, RUSSEL B.
Idealistic Skeptic A Radical's America, by Harvey Swados. Atlantic-Little Brown. 347 pp. $5. Reviewed by Russel B. Nye Harvey Swados is a novelist (Out Went the Candle, False Coin) and short...
...The collection is dominated, then, by this "radical" point of view, which is in effect an old-fashioned radicalism reminiscent of the "muckrakers" of fifty years ago and the social-critical radicals of the Thirties...
...He is one of those, he explains, "who persist in saying No to a society built on worship of the buck . . . who persist in dreaming of a society built on mutual aid and mutual respect...
...The Myth of the Powerful Worker" and "The Myth of the Happy Worker" (the latter a Hillman award winner in 1958) are the most perceptive studies of the American worker published in the past ten years...
...These virtues, summarized in the American "pride of performance and the integrity of a job well and honestly done," he believes, are being debased by "a culture that no longer puts any premium on such accomplishments, but glorifies the 'instant,' the 'magic,' the 'reach mix.' all euphemisms . . . tor the quick, the sloppy, the careless buck.'' If there is radicalism in this, it is the radicalism of the middle-class man that Swados is perfectly willing to admit he is...
...The author writes from the point of view of the socialist, not a doctrinaire socialist, but his own kind, neither from a "liberal or a Stalinist bias...
...I heir ate good writers today, and good readers...
...He belongs with Wendell Phillips and Eugene Debs and perhaps ferry Simpson and Abner Kneeland, lor his writing has the same tension between skepticism and idealism that is an old American custom...
...It is not a systematic book about "American civilization," nor is it intended to be...
...Radical or not, the author is more than anything else angry at the despoliation of American life by the merchants of "happy hobbies and highflown leisure" who threaten its traditional values...
...We are, he believes, "at the thresh-hold of an age of intense literary productivity and what happens in it will very likely be determined by "what we cut do to forge new links between those who write and those who are retreshed and stilted by what they read...
...I think Harvey Swados will find a good many readers who will side with him...
...I he balance of the collection is taken tip with comments on various aspects of contemporary culture—the popularity of Herman Wouk, the vogue of Mitch Miller, a study of airline pilots as prototypes of the skilled worker of the future, the dilemma of the educated woman, Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johanssen, the last an example of why one shouldn't go too far out of his field...
...but lie has reason to think some may appeal...
...What is more important, certainly, is that he places himself squarely with those "people who are not satisfied with the world in which we exist so precariously, and who believe that the expression 'a better world' is neither sinister or old hat...
...Be Happy, Go Liberal" is a stinging reply to the breast-beatings of the rnea culpa liberals, and "Why Resign from the Human Race?," perhaps the most powerful essay in the book, may well have been the first suggestion for the Peace Corps...
...He is also an essayist, or more accurately, a journal-ist-critic-commentator-essayist, deeply concerned with trends and issues of contemporary life...
...there ate not many imaginative or dating publishers...
...Of the twenty-five essays in the volume, nine are concerned with problems of labor, six with letters, four with popular tastes and fashions, and six with contemporary political and social issues...
...At a time when a good many complain that "unions are too strong," Swados is concerned that thousands of men work at meaningless jobs and go home from them to an equally meaningless life...
...The author's reflections on modern literature are somewhat more hopeful...
...It ought to be required reading for every young person who wonders what there is left in the world besides TV, T-birds, and the twist...
...As would be expected from such a collection, the volume is a kind of grab-bag of topics, ranging over books, bombs, movies, labor unions, politics, sports, and almost anything that catches the eye from the passing scene, for the author is alert to winds of opinion and trends of culture...
...There are a number of things about our times which Swados views with alarm, and a number of things, too, on which he looks with hope...
...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye Harvey Swados is a novelist (Out Went the Candle, False Coin) and short story writer (On the Line) of some distinction...
...In the end his commitment, as he concludes, is "to those human beings who believe, despite every awful evidence to the contrary—that the world must be better...
...The essays on labor comprise a survey of both specific and general issues—unemployment in the mine fields, the waterfront, the Akron rubber plants, thoughtful pieces on the growing problems ol automation and leisure, and an indictment of "Labor's Cultural degradation" by the salesman's pitch, the shabby commercial, and the cheap manipulator of mass media...
...This book is a collection of his essays and articles published in various magazines over the past decade, each updated by additions and appendices...
...He is worried about the conservation in American life of the virtues of stability, integrity, a day's pay for a dav's labor, the values of home and work and safety...
...It is rather a set of highly personal reactions to the society of his times by a man closely involved with it, who is alternately optimistic and pessimistic about its future...
...Harvey Swados, viewed from right of center, is probably the radical he says he is, but his radicalism is a distinctively native variety...
...The voting writers obsessed by security, he feels, are simply mirrors of the society in which they live, but he has hopes that some of litem are willing to take chances...
...For anyone who cannot understand how a man can be a skeptic and an idealist at the same time, the author points out that he is really a novelist, and that a novelist has a right to be inconsistent...
...There is no bland, easy, on the-other-hand journalism here...
...He is flatly "outraged by the shrill and malevolent vacuity of American capitalism" and its "bottomless hypocrisy," and he believes that the answer to a great deal of the troubles and terrors of the Twentieth Century world may well lie in "fruitful work, applied to the great and greatly challenging tasks that still confront the human race...
...Swados is simply a man of urgent conscience and moral commitment, which he may, if he wishes, label "radical...
Vol. 26 • May 1962 • No. 5
