Irwin Shaw was a journalist and when he took to writing novels, he went for telling a good human interest story, rather than fine writing. Rich Man Poor Man was televised in the 1970s and was his best known novel. The TV version was immensely popular.
Like many American writers, he lived in Europe much of the
time, and was a liberal who disliked the McCarthyite years in his native
country.
The story begins in 1945 on the last day of World War
Two. It focusses on two brothers, Rudolph
and Tom Jordache, from a German American working class family, in a small town
in upstate New York. Rudy, the elder, is
intelligent and ambitious. Tom is
younger, an angry teenager who loves to fight and is always at odds with the
world. Rudy’s ambition is to go to
college and make a fortune. His brother
has no ambitions. Their sister,
Gretchen, is beautiful, intelligent and artistic minded, but sensual. Their parents are unhappily married and they
only unite in love for their favourite child, Rudy. Both mother and father want him to get
on. They ignore Gretchen and Tom. She rebels by taking a rich lover, the town’s
“wealthy WASP”, Teddy Boylan. Although
she has ambitions to go into the theater, her sexually passionate nature makes
her fall into bed with many men, whereas Rudy maintains a strict control over
himself and works his way through College and into a position of trust in a
large business. While Tom's life goes from bad
to worse. When his first real love
affair ends badly, he becomes a sullen young man who earns his living with his
fists as a boxer. He gets into trouble constantly.
Rudy supports his mother, when his father commits suicide
and his brother and sister leave town, and he manages to achieve his ambition
of making a fortune in business. In the
TV version of the book, Rudy’s character was changed somewhat, making him more
selfish and cold hearted than the Rudy of the book. In the TV series, Rudy is seen as refusing to
help someone he knows, who has fallen foul of the Communist Witch hunts in the
50s. Generally until later in the
series, he comes across as hard and completely self-interested, while Tom is
gradually made more of a hero. However
Shaw’s original Rudy is (while ambitious and hard headed) an essentially decent
man who takes responsibility for his family, makes a good living and does not refuse to help his college tutor who
is being hounded for supposed communist leanings.
The novel covers the post war period, and outlines Rudy’s
progression to a wealthy businessman and then a husband and father. He retires from business and goes into local politics.
Tom gets mixed up with the mafia, during
his boxing career and to escape them, becomes a merchant seaman. Even then his violent past sometimes catches up
with him. Eventually he becomes a calmer happier man, and settles abroad, in
the Mediterranean with his son and his new English girlfriend. Rudy’s marriage hits a bad patch and his wife’s
drinking causes a tragic incident. Tom manages
to avert another disaster caused by Jean, when she has been drinking, but that leads
him to a final fight which ends in tragedy.
Its hard to say why I like this story so much. The characters are well drawn, and there is plenty
of drama and human interest. And the
post war epoch, in America is interesting.
And unlike some writers, Shaw was unpretentious and simple in his
writing.
