PARTISAN
REVIEW
483
caught between the claims of Angelina, the Italian mistress he shares
with a policeman, and Laurie, his bloodless but sympathetic wife, the
social worker turns painfully on a spit of his own making. All through
the book, the voices of Laurie and Angelina observe him with sad
detachment, a brilliant device in which they echo the social worker's
own notes. Slowly he sinks into perverse dreams where only the
thought of Angelina's little girl can arouse him. In a last surprise, his
fiery mistress throws the tokens of his impotence at him. For a moment
we touch real dread.
How to read Harvey Swados's
Standing Fast?
As an encyclopedia
of the non-Stalinist left - fascinating. As a novel- boring. All the char–
acters have to bear the weight of Mr. Swados leaning over their
shoulders explaining. Actions speak louder! A noisy third person is
constantly giving us quickly psychoanalytical insights, philosophical di–
gression~,
journalistic roundups of the situation. A mutual friend of
Swados's and mine warned me that I was not the right one to review
Standing Fast.
Probably. In terms of historical appreciation I can not
smile and cry recognizing the roll call of old fights and compromises
out of the thirties and forties. I'm told many of the younger radicals
also enjoy the book. OK, but I'm a reader for whom the excitement
has to be created, not recalled. The heavy furniture of the melodramatic
plot, moved like ponderous set pieces from one chapter to the next,
deadens most of my joy in the chronicle.
As
line by line excitement goes,
Swados is more compelled by sex than revolution. The prose goes taut
wherever there's a hard-on. Only for all too brief patches, the wonder–
filled account of a Retail Clerks' strike paralyzing the city of Oakland, a
wartime sitdown by the UAW at the automobile plants, riots by dis–
gusted servicemen in Panama City, does his pen really scratch for the
cause. And there is a fine portrait buried in these annals, the face of
Baruch Glantzman, an old Stalinist, mind and body paralyzed, ugly,
cruel, holding on to a half-dead cause, half-dead limbs, poisoning his
family, a shadow that darkens the book. Had the author remained with–
in the Glantzman's kitchen perhaps there would have been time to
probe the agonies among enlightened labor families caused by the
splits and shifts of the thirties' left. I've heard these stories from stu–
dents at CCNY: fathers beaten up by brothers; factional arguments
which the protagonists resolved with fists and clubs. Instead
Standing
Fast
tries to be a panorama of the US Left through three decades.
It goes on and on, a liberal soap box opera, a Trotskyite TV serial.
Nice, but-
There
was
a story here, honest and bitter, the disillusion of the
socialist intellectuals who hoped to capture the imagination of Amer-
