I got a phone call one day in the late sixties from Ben Seligman, the first director of the recently established Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts. We knew and were friendly with each because of one of those small-world, certainly in academia, situations. Not always an academic, Ben had come to us from Washington where he had been a New Dealer and important in the world of labor legislation. His wife Libby had been executive secretary of a Jewish NGO in D.C.—where her secretary had been Beatie Raskin, a beloved cousin of mine…
So Ben called me, that 1960s day, to say his friend (from earlier Shachtmanite days, I believe), Harvey Swados, was tired of teaching at Sarah Lawrence—for one thing, they didn’t pay much and he had a family to support. Could I see if we could bring him to the university’s English Department? I leaped at the idea, having known and cherished Swados’s work for years. Many of his books are still on my shelves. I gave some of them recently to Robert Niemi, a former graduate student now professor at St. Michaels College in Vermont, who was producing a Swados monograph for the American Writers Series.
I was and am especially grateful for On the Line, fourteen stories about assembly line factory workers based on Harvey’s own years of work at various time in factories at skilled and unskilled labor. Published in 1957, the year before I came to UMass, it was about real working class jobs in our country at mid-century, and the emotional and physical price they exacted– unsentimentalized, honest, and bottom sympathetic to a world scarcely recognized or written about in the mainstream literature of the period. Harvey was extraordinarily productive in the years before that call from Seligman. The works I treasured were Nights in the Gardens of Broooklyn (given its title and subject, his New York days) in 1960; Years of Conscience: The Muckrackers—an Anthology of Reform Journalism (1961), a collection I used for years in classes on American life and culture between the Civil War and World War I; and Standing Fast (worked on for several years) and in those days before having to be vetted by PC administrative rules, Harvey got the job offer. One of the few times I would justify an Old Boys network! First he was a visiting professor, but in the next year, 1970, he became a tenured professor, teaching fiction writing, and moved his family to the region.
He liked being here and the students loved him: he was a warm and carefully attentive, responsible teacher. And not just to the students: Jay Neugeborn, for one, also in the program, looked upon him as a mentor and model, as well as a friend. The MFA director came to be his close friend and greatest admirer.
We had a good relationship that included a memorable dinner party at our house with him, his lovely wife Bette, and another writer, an incredible successful one, with books on language and on North American Indians, who had taken up residence in our town, along with his gracious wife and family there to attend to his every need. His books were well-written, about difficult matter, in an impressively comprehensible way—to me they were like the best term papers one could ever produce, but they made the writer a small fortune. Which he liked to talk about, at length, for example at a New Year’s Eve dinner party with Lisa and Leonard Baskin, one of the most uncomfortable evenings of its kind in my life. At the conclusion of the meal, the other couple left first, and Harvey then said to us: “This is the second time I have been to dinner with that guy. Don’t ever invite me with him again!” And we never did.
There were occasions when I marveled at his knowledge of French wine, enjoying the way he lovingly handled a bottle, uncorked it, and then savored the flavors as he swirled a mouthful. He was indeed a man who loved life. He and his family had spent much time in the south of France, but alas, only a short time teaching in Amherst. Harvey died, suddenly, of an aneurism, in 1972, at the age of 52. The shock of that still reverberates, for his family—of whom I knew best only his son Robin, an actor who had the lead in a university production of Company—and those of us who knew or studied with him. At his memorial service at the university, I spoke of what his work had meant for me, a liberation of sorts in that earlier buttoned up period. His was a unique and strong voice: Harvey Swados had always stood fast. He is missed, and needed.