Protagonist of Harvey Swados Novels
Rent from DeepDyve- Protagonist of Harvey Swados Novels
I gave him my life, in letters at great length.He used it up, not badly.I was "Joe Link," the archetypical proletarian,novel after novel.Me, in real life: my grandfather owned a pubin Liverpool and my grandmother used to say "shite"in the most genteel way.I was 19 in 1940 at UCLA.The Young Communists, they sangthe "Internationale" like they didn't mean it.I left college for the Merchant Marine.I didn't want to kill.Afterward, I went into industry.Trotsky was our visionary, even dead.Read Harvey Swados and find out: I led the strikes.I fought the racism in the Seamens Union of the Pacificand then was out on my ear.CLR and myself in Manhattan for a weekendConnie's Club, a Caribbean place.James said, these are two dameswho want to be picked up.He had one, I had the other, some weekend!Then the 'Fifities: auto plants, life in blue-collar LA.Surfing on weekends, always, since high school.Then came the sixties and young people.I wanted them to fight the labor bureaucrats, [End Page 5] but I took them to gay nightclubs, too.Myself, I had longshore jobs and foughtmy old enemy, Harry Bridges.And then I ran out of time. [End Page 6]
PAUL BUHLE is a retired labor historian living in Madison, Wisconsin. He most recently coauthored Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography (2019) with Steve Max, Dave Nance, and Noah Van Sciver.
This poem is based on my conversations with Stan Weir. Stan repeatedly declined to have his oral histories turned over to UCLA because he thought they were incomplete. Or, as I think, he had given it all to Harvey Swados, and could not come up with a better narrative.
