Ersatz Bertrand Russell

THE PRAISE WITH WHICH some critics have greeted Celebration probably has more to do with their respect for its author, a novelist and essayist who taught at Sarah Lawrence and died in December 1972, than with its merits as a novel. A political writer from a generation that provided no large community of political artists. Swados published his first novel in 1955, when the Cold War was at its iciest, the United States was prosperous, and middle-class and professional people could be told that the working class was a figment of Communist propagandists' imaginations. In the 1930s, when large chunks of the middle class most writers came from and wrote for had joined most workers in protesting Depression hardship, opposing fascism and supporting the New Deal, many writers had moved Left. If they stayed there in the '50s they found themselves a little isolated and more alienated from their surroundings than they had been in the past. Many of them moved away from the political concerns they had grown up with to concentrate on criticizing the increasing complacency of American arts--an area where they could readily claim competence and occasionally claim an audience as well.

Swados shared his colleagues ostensibly litetary concerns. 0ne of his best essays was a scathing analysis of The Came Mutiny's appeal to readers who disliked critical intellectuals who believed that only a patriotic military elite could save them from unfathomable dangers and who liked romances to be Realistic as long as their heroines stayed Nice.

But more than many writers. Swados could also lay credible claim to competence in non-literary matters. He worked as a metal finisher in a Ford plant, for example drawing on his experiences there for a book of short stories. On the Line, On the Line remains a rarity in the United States, where millions of people's lives are radically molded by the places in which they work for others--according to one government study released last month, one out of four workers in small American businesses, those that employ 125 workers or fewer, suffers from an occupation-related disease--but where even the "proletarian literature" of the 1930s dealt more often with people from the lower middle class.

The assembly-line workers in On the Line--a black tenor with operatic ambitions, a shrunken Polish immigrant who dreams of buying his son a car for his high school graduation, foreman unable to cope with the car-smashing tough-punk rage of an Italian boy put on an impossible schedule by a time-study engineer--find little satisfaction in the labor they perform. But out of their relationships to one another at union picnics as well as in the plant, Swados's people make their mechanized factory into a human place. And though each of them is unique, there is no suggestion that they are more unique than anyone else. As in nearly all good political novels, what makes characters interesting and enables them to help shape their lives and the lives of others, is ultimately no special gift or genius but a simpler common humanity stamped by social and personal experiences that people of their class background are likely to share.

CELEBRATION is also intended as a political novel. Its hero, a 90-year-old radical educator named Samuel Lumen can't decide whether to let the president of the United States name a new children's center after him or to join his long-lost grandson in a People's Bicentennial-style group called the Children of Liberty. But it is not a good political novel. Lumen is a sympathetic enough figure but it's hard to take either him or his dilemma too seriously. After 348 pages of diary writing he concludes that "it's far too late for anything I do to make a difference in how I am regarded by posterity." This has been apparent to the reader all along and it's never become clear why posterity will regard him at all. Swados never establishes Lumen as a representative figure like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon: at best, he's a composite of Bertrand Russell and William O. Douglas and maybe some World War I pacifist like Roger Baldwin. All we know is that we're supposed to have read about him in the newspapers and that like another diarist. Leon Trotsky, he finds old age creeping up on him suddenly but would rather talk about more public matters.

If, as Trotsky said diaries are just ersatz journalism then Lumen's diary is ersatz ersatz journalism: and if, as Swados himself once wrote old-time leftists can have "the spooky aspect of a gathering of ghosts," then Lumen has the spooky aspect of the ghost of a ghost. Whereas it's people--real and living ones--that shape politics and fiction alike.