Kitchen Matches in the Dark

THE MIDDLE AMERICANS by Robert Coles. Photographs by Jon Erikson. 181 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $12.50 hardcover, $3.95 paperback.

With such a title, Robert Coles could at first be mistaken for one of the people he desperately deplores--that complacent horde of pigeonholers, polltakers, politicians, consumer experts and scholars who seem bent on reducing vast groups of individual Americans to some neatly labeled lowest common denominator of fear, status, greed or need. Coles, after all, is a Harvard psychiatrist. He has been seen in the company of notebook and tape recorder. For more than a decade he has studied and written voluminously about troubled children, blacks, migrant workers--all subjects that are now ritually lamented in near-faceless collectivity as "problems."

Coles' concern, however, is not with finding the convenient label or the exploitable correlation. Like a nonfiction novelist, he seeks, instead, to reveal the buried complexity of individual lives. Customarily he spends years, not months, on his interviews, confining himself to a relatively few people whose trust he slowly gains, and whose small devices for enduring life decently, no matter what, he deeply admires. In this book, for instance, Coles condenses talk and comment, going back as much as five years, with a handful of workingmen and their wives--a steam fitter, a policeman, a filling-station operator, a machinist, a fireman, a welder, a druggist and a bank-loan arranger, the only white-collar man in the group.

Grudgingly he does admit--and the interviews show--that his subjects hold in common some predictable political and cultural attitudes, among them varying hostility to blacks, a need to believe that the Viet Nam War has meaning, dislike of hippies and "experts" with questionnaires, a passionate (and heartening) fear of going into debt, a distrust of the educated, the fancy and the self-important. They also have little patience (like Coles himself) with catch-all locutions: "the Silent Majority," "white backlash," "Middle Americans." Still, the book is very successful in demonstrating that even on the gut issues of prejudice, pocketbook and politics their views have remarkable breadth and subtlety.

Coles records a lingering (and lately reinforced) populist disgruntlement with big business, as well as a sensible cynicism about the "selective sympathy" of liberals and radicals. Over the lunch pail they may sometimes sound (and know they sound) like Spiro Agnew or George Wallace, but they are aware that such politicians are mainly--perhaps only--concerned with getting their votes.

Signals of Pain. The discourse is customarily shadowed and low key, consistently matter of fact. But sharp signals of pain and courage and devotion flare suddenly like kitchen matches struck on the thumbnail. A son remembers his proud father, back in the '30s, crying because he had to go on relief to feed his family. A lately bereaved father admits to a recurring nightmare: he finds himself at the supermarket check-out station without any money, but is let by when he explains that his son Ralph has been killed in Viet Nam. A woman admits that her main aim is to help her children be honest, decent and hardworking. Then, fearing that this will sound simpleminded, she adds with truth and passion: "It may not be the smartest kind of philosophy, but it's what a mother ought to be saying to herself in her heart all the time."

Inevitably, there is much repetition. Unhappily, too, the more than 100 pages of pictures by Jon Erikson, son of Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, whose biography Coles wrote last year, are disappointing. The book, nevertheless, is a strong and compassionate document. It is especially good as an antidote to fears that the Generation Gap has really become part of the inevitable condition of man, that a helpless whine is now the characteristic American sound or that the family has been laid out for good with R.D. Laing's stake in its heart. Many of Coles' people are cousins and sisters. Their families seem to hang together for comfort and mutual support. Fathers and sons still seem to talk. Most heartening, perhaps, the wives, so often caricatured elsewhere as selfish, slothful featherbrains in hair curlers, here display great common sense and kindness.

Perhaps most encouraging of all. Coles' Middle Americans still possess a wisdom (or virtue) that now seems rare. They believe in reticence, especially about their private lives. If you cannot afford to give way to despair, expressed self-pity is not therapy but tragic indulgence. The moment you enshrine a hopeless feeling in words, you are instantly that much worse off for having done so. "I make things sound worse when I talk about them," one woman confided to Coles, "and I make myself seem lonelier."

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