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Source: Saturday Review, 22 January 1955.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Out Went the Candle is a first novel which, despite serious faults, marks its author as one of the most interesting postwar novelists in America. [1] Harvey Swados is serious, gifted and individual, though if one had to relate him to the stock trends – or perhaps drifts – of contemporary fiction one might gingerly place him between two groups of younger writers: those concerned with exploring and testing what is ‘new’ and ‘unique’ in our postwar experience, and those who are trying to discover the inner patterns of American Jewish life as it shifts from the ghetto to the suburb.
The two plot lines of Mr. Swados’ novel reflect these distinct though related themes. The first concerns a group of young people at a mediocre college during the war years as they wait to be drafted, married and variously shocked into a sense of the terribleness of modern life. Betsy Felton, bright but radically undisciplined, hungers for those extremes of experience she feels to be characteristic of the war years yet unavailable to her because she is a female. This leads her to a series of personal catastrophes, a virtual disintegration of the self, and finally to a tentative effort at personal rehabilitation. Alongside her are a larger-than-life creature named Bunty, a terrifying apparition of untroubled amorality, and a smaller-than-life figure named Joe Burley, who is an almost equally terrifying representation of ordinary muddled decency.
In contrast to these drifters stands Herman Felton, Betsy’s father, a small racketeer who quickly rises, by dint of manipulative genius, to be a big figure in the underground of wartime finance. We have met Felton before in novels about American Jewish life, though never with quite the same completeness and authority; he is the shrewd operator for whom the accumulation of wealth and power is partly a means of obliterating his sense of personal insignificance and partly a kind of vendetta against the official, polished, treacherous – because Gentile – world. In him the acquisitive impulse is transmuted into a kind of ferocious idealism, the urge to domination becomes selflessness.
Those sections that deal with Felton’s rise and decline are the best in the book, for Mr. Swados has a remarkable sense of the way in which impersonal claims serve not merely to veil personal desires (that everyone sees), but also how they complicate, disappoint and even destroy them. One wishes that Mr. Swados had filled in with richer detail the actual workings, the daily course of Felton’s business life, for a trouble with the novel is that either Felton looms too large for the plot or the plot is too fragile to contain Felton. Nonetheless, he has the interest and massiveness of reality.
More serious is one’s sense of impatience and at times irritation with the young people in the book. Mr, Swados writes of them with an amazing tenderness and patience but with too much earnestness: he has, I think, given himself up to them excessively, so that his sympathy interferes with his sense of what they really are. The more he insists that they represent a radical departure in human character, being so thoroughly deficient in belief and hope, and the more he convinces us that this is actually what they are, the more difficult it becomes to understand them.
Nonetheless, Out Went the Candle is one of the most intelligent and at times powerful efforts to look into what is distinctive and puzzling in recent American life, to measure the vast distance between generations torn apart by war, and to turn, modestly and without ideology, to the possibilities of human renewal. Mr. Swados writes well, though without the ease and lightness of the ‘natural’ – there are too many sweat marks on his pages. And I think that he is too concerned with meaning and pattern, as against sheer performance, the novel as a ‘show’.
1. Harvey Swados, Out Went the Candle, Viking Press, New York, 1955.
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