Word: lumen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CELEBRATION is also intended as a political novel. Its hero, a 90-year-old radical educator named Samuel Lumen can't decide whether to let the president of the United States name a new children's center after him or to join his long-lost grandson in a People's Bicentennial-style group called the Children of Liberty. But it is not a good political novel. Lumen is a sympathetic enough figure but it's hard to take either him or his dilemma too seriously. After 348 pages of diary writing he concludes that "it's far too late...
...Trotsky said diaries are just ersatz journalism then Lumen's diary is ersatz ersatz journalism: and if, as Swados himself once wrote old-time leftists can have "the spooky aspect of a gathering of ghosts," then Lumen has the spooky aspect of the ghost of a ghost. Whereas it's people--real and living ones--that shape politics and fiction alike...
Privately, Lumen also shared Bertie Russell's enormous sex drive. He buried two wives and outlived all his innumerable pushovers. Third Wife Jennifer, 60 years his junior, combines the odd satisfaction of caring for a living legend with the freedom of being a successful traveling photographer. Others close to the old man are a protégé, who is also a White House aide; a male secretary and talented ghostwriter reminiscent of Robert Craft, Igor Stravinsky's invaluable chronicler; and a young bearded man, who is either Lumen's grandson or his natural son. In friskier...
Celebration combines all the elements that should produce readability and substance in fiction. Sam Lumen's secret diary is told in the form of mixed memories, snatches of dreams and unsentimental musing about old age. But the clash of ideas, between old and new radicals, for instance, never reaches higher than Lumen's easy parries of nihilistic rhetoric. Above all, Sam Lumen's eminence is never convincing...
...diary form of the novel sees to this. Lumen is more intent on confessing his frailties than on contemplating the ideas and works that made him famous or the changes and conditions that are about to immortalize an old radical in federal concrete. The evolution of American radicalism was apparently much on Swados' mind when he wrote Celebration. He was a serious man whose leftist politics and social conscience developed during the Depression '30s. Sympathetic members of his own generation and background are likely to fill in the gaps. Others may wish that Sam Lumen's secret...