Books, Arts & Manners

Sal Si Puedes By Peter Matthiessen Random House, $6.95 Peter Matthiessen is a novelist, and as such he cannot be blamed if he lacks a reporter’s ability to separate fact from fiction. He is a man of emotion, for which he must be commended, but he has let that emotion stand between him and a careful view of his subject. In his “non-fiction” Sal Si Puedes, therefore, he has written one of those agitprop novels, so popular in the Thirties, in which his charismatic hero—one part Joan of Arc, one part Huckleberry Finn, one part St. Francis of Assisi—wins over the starving masses and the little old ladies in Delman shoes by his sheer virtue. In the case of Cesar Chavez, a better word might well be virtuosity.

In creating a portrait of César Chavez—gentle, whimsical, courageous, tolerant of his enemies, scrupulous, dedicated—Peter Matthiessen is, unfortunately, compelled to deal with a man and a situation still visible to a reporter’s naked eye. The facts do not warrant his superlatives. For Chavez is a rank fraud as a humanitarian and a failure as a union leader. His attempts at organizing the grape pickers in California is a trade union disaster. His boycott of table grapes, though somewhat more successful, is the product of AFL-CIO and UAW muscle—and the people most hurt by it have been the pickers themselves.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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Sal Si Puedes By Peter Matthiessen Random House, $6.95 Peter Matthiessen is a novelist, and as such he cannot be blamed if he lacks a reporter’s ability to separate fact from fiction. He is a man of emotion, for which he must be commended, but he has let that emotion stand between him and a careful view of his subject. In his “non-fiction” Sal Si Puedes, therefore, he has written one of those agitprop novels, so popular in the Thirties, in which his charismatic hero—one part Joan of Arc, one part Huckleberry Finn, one part St. Francis of Assisi—wins over the starving masses and the little old ladies in Delman shoes by his sheer virtue. In the case of Cesar Chavez, a better word might well be virtuosity.

In creating a portrait of César Chavez—gentle, whimsical, courageous, tolerant of his enemies, scrupulous, dedicated—Peter Matthiessen is, unfortunately, compelled to deal with a man and a situation still visible to a reporter’s naked eye. The facts do not warrant his superlatives. For Chavez is a rank fraud as a humanitarian and a failure as a union leader. His attempts at organizing the grape pickers in California is a trade union disaster. His boycott of table grapes, though somewhat more successful, is the product of AFL-CIO and UAW muscle—and the people most hurt by it have been the pickers themselves.