Standing Fast by Harvey Swados; Last Things by C. P. SnowReview by: Charles ShapiroNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 87-89Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345242 .

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REVIEWS POLITICAL FATES

Political Fates

HARVEY SWADOS, Standing Fast (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.,

1970), pp. 656, $8.95.

C. P. SNOW, Last Things (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970), pp. 431, $7.95.

Contemporary politics seems to be more successful in the streets than in fiction, and novels concerned with political questions are too often either dismally agit-prop or

badly misinformed. One of the recent exceptions is Standing Fast wherein Harvey Swados, an informed journalist and a fine creative writer, has avoided the traps in- herent in any polemical fiction. Irving Howe has noted that, at its best, "the political novel generates such intense heat that the ideas it appropriates are melted into its move- ment, are fused with the emotion of its characters," and Swados, in his latest and best work, has approached this ideal.

Standing Fast spans the years in America between the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the assassination of President Kennedy. The focus is on a number of politically oriented men and women, some absurdly dedicated, many opportunistic, most of them confused, who are involved directly or peripherally with a Trotskyite splinter group and who must all eventually face, as they grow older and their country changes, the tor-

menting question of how much of their lives should be dedicated to the proletarian struggle. Even more frightening, they are forced to an honest evaluation as to whether

they have done more harm than good. These political moments, carefully counter-

pointed throughout the novel, have the intensity of those sexual "moments" so beloved

by Sherwood Anderson where his characters make decisions, where a lifetime is re- vealed by a choice.

Early on in Standing Fast one character pontificates that the great value of Marxism is "that things fall into place." But they don't seem to, and Swados chronicles for us just what this means.

The structure of the novel, in some ways reminiscent of early Dos Passos, is decep- tively simple. Short chapters, each highlighting the lives of ten or so major protagonists, enable the point of view to switch, though each section manages to reinforce, dramatic-

ally as well as symbolically, the common themes. Each chapter explores crucial decisions, and though the novel is at heart unashamedly political, Swados is shrewd enough to let us understand just how a political judgment is too often the sum total of a number of

personal needs. When one labor leader boasts "I got to have action or I get no satisfac-

tion," he believes he is joking, but we come to see just why that is so for him. It is this careful individualization that removes Standing Fast from the dreary ranks of the pro- letarian novels that so charmed our ancestors; for by caring for men as individuals and

avoiding special pleading, Swados gives us political life and art, not propaganda or

journalism. Comrade Lewis, a glib party functionary, boasts: "What unites us today is the belief

that our group, although others may regard it as laughable or pathetic, has a tremendous

potential, if only because we are closer to being right than anyone else. Correct?" This

potential never develops and lives are ruined in the process. Men who love power are

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NOVELIFALL 1971

made powerless, men with specific professional abilities become factory workers and party hacks, marriages come apart, children are destroyed. And all this folly while the group has before it the example of the tragic errors of the Stalinists, their reputed arch- enemies, whom too many of them resemble. Asked to recruit a prospect into the party one man puts it simply: "I just don't know whether I want the responsibility of chang- ing a man's life." And another party member replies: "That's the craziest thing I ever heard of. What do you think we've been doing all these years?" The irony is that both men have been revealed to us as essentially decent.

Gradually, in different ways, most of the party members realize that their message is not being heard, that though their sacrifices and life-style might be ennobling, they have failed to alter history in any crucial fashion. America speeds on, the working class, if such a group ever existed, has become fat, content, and bigotted, the action has shifted from the production line to the civil rights movement. Younger activists see the

party philosophy as out of date and harmful. As Norm (pun probably intended), the character whose story opens and closes the novel, puts it: "Could you live for others when they did not know or care whether you lived or died?" He wonders about his friends, isolated, miserable. And like most of us he goes on doing the best he can.

Lord Snow's narrator for the Strangers and Brothers series (eleven plump novels in

all) is also constantly trying to do his political best, self-consciously and empirically; but as the series progresses, as Eliot and his friends enter the 1960s in England, his obser- vations become increasingly tedious. In Last Things Lewis Eliot finally clams up and none too soon. According to the dust-jacket, when the reader finishes "he knows what has happened to every important character in the series." True, but in the same sense that alumni bulletins fill us in on the lives of classmates we have forgotten or never cared for.

Though Lewis Eliot's personal journey, from the lower class to what Snow in his worst novel has called "corridors of power," enables him to meet a startling gallery of fools and saints, grotesques when measured against his own careful sanity, there is in fact no "measure" for his journey. What Snow has given us, through eleven novels, is little more than a collection of mildly humorous eccentrics whose serious problems are made cozy for us by Eliot's everlastingly kind observations. Despite the success of The Masters, a controlled, intricate little drame, most of Snow's fiction comes closer to the romantic achievements of, say, R. F. Delderfield, than to the planned and witty artistry of Anthony Powell. And, in his final novel, where we might hope for some profound summing up (as in the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past), all we get is the

sophomoric attempt at making sense of a lifetime. Near death at one point, Lewis Eliot reflects: "Somehow that progress, journey, history had for me become disconnected or dismissed. As though what fashionable persons were beginning to call the diachronic existence had lost its grip on me." His hospital meditations on epistemology, sex, or for that matter anything else, are equally dull.

This dullness extends to politics. In a previous novel a visiting American scientist is told: "Countries, when their power is slipping away, are always liable to do idiotic things. So are social classes." In a sense Last Things, with a political melodrama at its heart, works out this proposition. When Eliot is not busily filling us in on the fates of characters left over from former books he is engaged with contemporary political prob-

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REVIEWS POLITICAL FATES REVIEWS POLITICAL FATES

lems. Eliot's son, Charles, is involved with a New Left group that plans a student strike

and, during the resultant turmoil, manages to steal papers proving that the college is

doing secret experiments involving biological warfare. Fine enough, except Snow

through Eliot uses this adventure to prove a repeated thesis that is overstated through- out the novel. Over and over we are told about "enclaves." Charles, like his bourgeois enemies, is simply part of a pattern. "All over the advanced world, people seemed to be

making enclaves." The steady formulation of this rather specious idea forces events into a logical mold. "Somehow these institutions, which had their own charm to those inside, set limits to one's expectations. Enclaves which made for a comprehensible life. When one left them behind, as I had done, it was a bit of a surprise to find that enclaves weren't necessary, and that comprehensibility wasn't such a comfort as one had thought." There is almost as much of this moralizing in Last Things as there is awkward prose to bear it.

Frederick R. Karl once observed: "Public roles-the sum and substance of C. P. Snow's world-ultimately become meaningful to us only as they reflect private beings. The novelist must recognize that man has many faces, only one of them which he wears to work, and that the face at work is often the least, not the most, interesting." It is precisely by this measure that Snow's failure reveals just how remarkable Swados' complex novel is, a political work that forces us to realize how being political is only a part of being human.

CHARLES SHAPIRO, Brown University

JEAN CARDUNER, La Creation romanesque chez Malraux (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1968), pp. 223, 20 F.

When the Gestapo found and subsequently destroyed the manuscript of Part II of Malraux' La Lutte avec L'Ange, the novelist, seemingly discouraged, abandoned fiction and concentrated henceforth on art criticism and other essays on aesthetics. Yet his novels still constitute a block of singularly strong and striking books, some of them widely viewed as masterpieces and all of them widely read and studied. Jean Carduner's lucid, carefully researched book sheds new light on these well-travelled grounds. His responsible, original interpretation proves especially insightful in its close textual ac- count of developing techniques.

Carduner contends that Malraux' novels of the period of maturity, far from having been written haphazardly, are painstakingly constructed. Their structure owes much to the technique of the cinema, Carduner asserts, and often proves his point by well- chosen illustrations from the fiction. Malraux' own essays on the cinema tend to bear out the critic's thesis, and his often involuted plots clearly follow cinematic precedents.

Carduner begins his well-organized book by investigating the depth of Malraux' characters. In Les Conquerants he felicitously demonstrates that all the secondary char- acters are conceived as foils to the hero, Garine. He further shows that in this somewhat

lems. Eliot's son, Charles, is involved with a New Left group that plans a student strike

and, during the resultant turmoil, manages to steal papers proving that the college is

doing secret experiments involving biological warfare. Fine enough, except Snow

through Eliot uses this adventure to prove a repeated thesis that is overstated through- out the novel. Over and over we are told about "enclaves." Charles, like his bourgeois enemies, is simply part of a pattern. "All over the advanced world, people seemed to be

making enclaves." The steady formulation of this rather specious idea forces events into a logical mold. "Somehow these institutions, which had their own charm to those inside, set limits to one's expectations. Enclaves which made for a comprehensible life. When one left them behind, as I had done, it was a bit of a surprise to find that enclaves weren't necessary, and that comprehensibility wasn't such a comfort as one had thought." There is almost as much of this moralizing in Last Things as there is awkward prose to bear it.

Frederick R. Karl once observed: "Public roles-the sum and substance of C. P. Snow's world-ultimately become meaningful to us only as they reflect private beings. The novelist must recognize that man has many faces, only one of them which he wears to work, and that the face at work is often the least, not the most, interesting." It is precisely by this measure that Snow's failure reveals just how remarkable Swados' complex novel is, a political work that forces us to realize how being political is only a part of being human.

CHARLES SHAPIRO, Brown University

JEAN CARDUNER, La Creation romanesque chez Malraux (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1968), pp. 223, 20 F.

When the Gestapo found and subsequently destroyed the manuscript of Part II of Malraux' La Lutte avec L'Ange, the novelist, seemingly discouraged, abandoned fiction and concentrated henceforth on art criticism and other essays on aesthetics. Yet his novels still constitute a block of singularly strong and striking books, some of them widely viewed as masterpieces and all of them widely read and studied. Jean Carduner's lucid, carefully researched book sheds new light on these well-travelled grounds. His responsible, original interpretation proves especially insightful in its close textual ac- count of developing techniques.

Carduner contends that Malraux' novels of the period of maturity, far from having been written haphazardly, are painstakingly constructed. Their structure owes much to the technique of the cinema, Carduner asserts, and often proves his point by well- chosen illustrations from the fiction. Malraux' own essays on the cinema tend to bear out the critic's thesis, and his often involuted plots clearly follow cinematic precedents.

Carduner begins his well-organized book by investigating the depth of Malraux' characters. In Les Conquerants he felicitously demonstrates that all the secondary char- acters are conceived as foils to the hero, Garine. He further shows that in this somewhat

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