September Song

By R. Z. Sheppard

CELEBRATION by HARVEY SWADOS 348 Pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

Everybody wants a piece of Uncle Sam Lumen, even though he is practically 90. The President of the U.S. is after Sam's famous name for a National Child Center. At the denim end of the political fabric, a band of radical youths known as the Children of Liberty arrogantly demand his support against the Establishment. In between, friends, disciples and devotees strive to keep old Sam buttoned to their own self-interest.

Lumen himself is an old-school radical and internationalist. He muckraked like Lincoln Steffens. During World War I he went to prison as a pacifist like Bertrand Russell, and later founded a progressive school for children. Even in his creaky 80s he flew to Biafra to organize relief for the starving.

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 protege, 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 days, Humanitarian Sam forced himself on his daughter-in-law, and the issue is in doubt.

Harvey Swados finished Celebration shortly before dying of a brain hemorrhage three years ago at the age of 52. The novel has the virtues one cherished in Swados' fiction: decency, compassion and a gentle wit. Yet the book suffers from what was always Swados' noble flaw as a novelist: a talent never quite up to the demands he put upon it.

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.

The 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 diary will one day be discovered by that talented ghostwriter-secretary. sbR. Z. Sheppard

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