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From The New International, Vol. XXIV No. 2–3, Spring–Summer 1958, pp. 142.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
On the Line
by Harvey Swados
Little, Brown and Company. 1957
In the years following World War II the book market has been flooded by a torrent of third and fourth rate novels whose setting is the business world and whose protagonists range from the ambitious Madison Avenue ad man and the grasping, social climbing executive from exurbia to the man on top of the heap – the millionaire tycoon, sometimes brutal, sometimes tender, usually misunderstood and almost always tragic. It has become a rare event for a novel to concern itself with the personal and moral problems of the worker who is, after all, the man behind the man who sits behind the desk. Yet it is difficult to believe that the Madison Avenue sharpie lends himself more naturally than the man on the assembly line to fictional forms and to an artistic presentation of human problems. It is this which makes Harvey Swados’ latest novel, On the Line, a rare event. Here, too, the novel has a “business situation.” However, the main characters are not men in gray flannel suits but in grease stained overalls. On the Line has a deceptive simplicity of style and content. It almost appears to be a series of sociological case studies in which the author uses the fiction form to compress and understand the life of nine workers.
Swados is interested in dispelling the myth that the working class has been a full-fledged participant in the Great American Celebration and at the same time avoiding the crude isolating of the worker so often found in the proletarian novel of the Thirties. He emphasizes the harshness of dull, monotonous work. True, working with files and pencils may not be any more intellectually enriching for white collar workers than for those who work with wrenches and hammers; but by and large it entails less drudgery, less discipline and is regarded more respectfully by the community, and often by the workers themselves. If this were not so, Swados observes, then why the dismay on the part of his intellectual friends who heard that he was returning to work in a factory?
And it is at these liberal intellectuals who foresee the onslaught of the mass man engulfed and stupefied by a mass culture, that Swados seems to wave an indicting finger. Not that they have created the situation, but what are they doing to rectify it.
Rather than writing a “proletarian” novel, and ending with the prescribed radical solution, Swados seems to have a more modest, and yet more important goal in mind – to rekindle the interest of the intellectuals in the working class and its problems. If that can be done, then solutions may be forthcoming; but without it, all the worked out solutions may come to nothing.
THE MOST INTERESTING SECTION of the book deals with the relationship between Joe, the vanishing American, a Wobbly-type who has had long experience working, and Walter a young boy out of high school, working on the line to save money in order to go to engineering school. Walter feels that Joe has given him a perspective of what it means to be working in the body shop of the auto plant, the meaning of the assembly line. But Joe, the radical, is inarticulate on this score.
His words of advice to the engineers, the intellectuals, to Walter is:
“never mind the machinery. Remember the men. The men make the machines, and they make their own tragedies too. Once your own life gets easier, you’ll take it for granted not only that theirs must be easier too, but that they deserve what they get anyway, that some law of natural selection has put you up where you are and them down where they are.”
And that is the theme: never mind the machinery; remember the men. But is this the meaning of the assembly line? Though it may not be the answer, it has to be the starting point, if we are to find a human answer.
Strangely absent in these nine portraits of different types of workers is one of a union militant. Throughout the book roams Lou, the committee-man. But he is the tenth portrait. And so we never get Swados’ insight into the man who stayed in the shop through the great organizing strikes, was a militant, if not a radical, and now has settled down into a minor bureaucratic job. But he is the crucial figure, the symbol of the schism that concerns Swados, the symbol of the crisis that has separated the intellectuals and the working class. It is strange that he wanders through the book undefined.
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