The Strength of Memory

WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties. Weave together their tangled personal lives and those large public events all “of us” know by heart—the tough, good fight in the CIO to organize the industrial unions; the betrayal of American socialism by the Communist party; the confusion of the pacifists after Pearl Harbor when World War II had to be both right (Nazism meant what it said) and wrong (all wars are); the dreary cold-war politics of the late forties; the Eisenhower blandness, and the McCarthyist misery of the fifties; the brief surge of hope for liberalism in the early sixties (civil rights). Stop there, with President Kennedy shot dead in Dallas. Don’t go on to the disintegration, the hollow nonwar against poverty and the escalating all-too-real war in Vietnam. Throughout, keep the faith in sturdy, honest prose. No return to the old-time newsreel at the Dos Passos theater; no new-style, either, no cosmic looking backward at those muddled, failed radicals as if you were Norman Mailer (whose great gift is sometimes flawed, to quote the poet Warren Lenz, by a passion for sucking the existential egg). Tell it as it was. Be evenhanded: include those in the New Party who messed up and sold out; don’t neglect those who managed to stay whole and stand fast. An assignment like that—after all that has been said in the form of history, memoir, essay, novel—what teacher would give it out or student take it on nowadays? The answer to both questions is Harvey Swados. For years he has been teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence, at San Francisco State, now at the University of Massachusetts. For even longer he has been a worker in and a student of the labor movement, writing about trade union people, men and women on the line, intellectuals enmeshed in a hundred different varieties of the Left. (His tribute to C. Wright Mills remains, in my opinion, one of the finest essays ever printed in DISSENT). Why not, then, rounding into middle age, before too much time makes for too much distance, have a last try at teacher-student in the workshop, an assignment to oneself to put right that time when young radicals started out bravely (and foolishly) to organize a better (they thought socialist) world. I think he succeeds, in an old-fashioned book, working against the grain of now-fiction. Even the defects become virtues in a way; a certain clumsiness and heaviness in the narrative reflects precisely the period narrated, those years of endless meetings in upstairs lofts, the talk heavy with expressions like “class struggle” and “building up cadres.” Standing Fast rings true, holds up.