Why Ask <i> Why</i> Some People Do Good? : THE CALL OF SERVICE: A Witness to Idealism; <i> By Robert Coles (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95; 287 pp.) </i>

Robert Coles is a man of dazzling, if not overwhelming accomplishment. A pediatrician and child psychiatrist, he has published over a thousand essays and more than 50 books including biographies of Dorothy Day, Anna Freud, Simone Weil; a five-volume series on “Children in Crisis,” plus one book each on the political, moral and spiritual lives of children. His latest work, “The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism,” is a frustrating and fascinating study of how service work fits into a life.

The book opens with a conversation between Coles and his father. Laconic, conservative, himself a hard-working volunteer advocate for the elderly poor, the elder Coles warns his psychiatrist son not to delve too far into the motives of those doing service. “I don’t think it matters why we do something--but it does matter a lot that what we try to do is good and right,” he says. When pressed, he adds, “I frankly doubt if I could continue (volunteer activity) if I looked too hard within.”

Curiously, Coles heeds his father’s plea. “The Call of Service” is, as the subtitle indicates, a witnessing rather than an analysis of volunteer work. Here are dozens of interviews Coles has taped over the past four decades loosely organized and linked by what is often the most vague and discursive of commentary.

Although trained in psychoanalytic and medical thought, Coles fastidiously avoids the nomenclature and interpretations of his professions. Indeed, he actively resists anything resembling formulation lest it prove reductive; and he is hesitant to delineate even such benign categories as kinds of service (community service, charity, service to country, etc.). “I have tried to do some useful, even necessary sorting,” he writes as if to apologize for the merest trace of organization, “but I hope I have left room for overlap, for a blend of motives and deeds that, properly, cautions us all against airtight conclusions and formulations.”

Unfortunately, there is so much overlap and blending of motives and deeds throughout the book, it is difficult to draw any conclusions. Interviewees speak for pages, and while Coles has clearly edited out certain conversational tics, the stories, transcribed from tapes, often have the unwieldiness and dross of someone thinking out loud. Narratives burgeon out of the context Coles has given them and we, as readers, are lost.

One remembers the vivid story of Laura, a civil rights worker in Mississippi in the early ‘60s. Jailed, she befriends her jailor and momentarily, at least, integrates that “ bastion of the segregationist power”--the county jail. One does not remember that this hilarious, telling anecdote is found under the rubric “Weariness and Resignation” in the Chapter entitled “Hazards.”

Coles may justify the diffuseness of his method as an antidote to patness, but it reads exactly like undisciplined writing and poses serious difficulties to those this book might best serve: busy volunteers seeking to reflect on and contextualize their own service experiences.

Coles professes great reverence for fiction and poetry; it’s a shame he has not aspired to the poet’s compaction, the novelist’s deftness and vividness. It is as if he sees no difference between the raw sociological data spewing from his tape recorder and the crafted stories, poems and novels of his beloved writers. A few jokes wouldn’t have hurt this book, either. Even William James, who employed the prototypal patchwork of voices in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” never resisted the impulse to amuse even as he classified and enlightened.

And yet. All this lengthy, significant objection to Coles’ muzziness aside, it must be said that many of the stories in “The Call of Service” are resonant, instructive, moving. And we readers are privileged to “hear” them. And while he cannot pay equal attention to all forms of volunteer service, Coles does present a well-rounded picture of the service experience: the satisfactions and the hazards, the motivations and the consequences.

Over and over again, the stories teach that service is no hierarchy but a back-and-forth, a reciprocity in which the distinctions between teacher and pupil, giver and receiver, server and served constantly dissolves. The lives of all involved shift and change, often irrevocably. A white, well-to-do mother of a leukemic daughter drives a poor black mother and her leukemic daughter to chemotherapy treatments. Says the white woman of her passenger: “She taught me to have patience. . . . I learned to trust in each day, in my husband and my children--and in her. . . . Every time she tells me how good I’ve been to her, I get all teary and I tell her she’s been a tremendous gift to us.”

Dorothy Day, speaking of those she fed at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen states bluntly, “Our guests are the Catholic Worker. Without them, we’d not be here as we are.”

A dying street alcoholic prays daily and at length for the staff and well being at his shelter. “I guess I’d assumed we were the ones who were doing the praying,” exclaims one of the shelter workers. “Talk about arrogance!’

In two “Interludes,” Coles views service from the vantage of those served. In the chapter “Doing and Learning,” his Harvard students make quirky, resourceful use of Tolstoy, Hardy and George Eliot in order to shape and understand their own experiences as volunteers.

Throughout, we catch glimpses of Coles’ own teachers: Poet and Dr. William Carlos Williams cautions him against sentimentality. Prof. Perry Miller reminds him that he can’t feed others if he doesn’t first take good care of himself. Anna Freud provides some of the psychoanalytic insight Coles himself is so loathe to articulate. Dorothy Day nudges him out of the confines of intellect and into the nitty-gritty, hands-on realm of service.

In story after story, we meet people engaged in selfless and not-so-selfless acts of giving--and receiving. Before serving cakes brought to a soup kitchen, volunteers festoon them with candles to celebrate the birthdays among the homeless and hungry. A father whose only son is born with Down’s syndrome channels his rage and disappointment into working with other retarded and disabled children. And there are the intermittent appearances of Dorothy Day, to whom this book is dedicated. Beatific and industrious, Day epitomizes the humility and the pastoral, often spiritual nature of older idealism: “We feel the spirit of Christ at work-- in the wor k. We are not so high on ourselves that we feel Christ is in us; no, we hope we are moving a bit closer to Him, to His spirit through the work we do. . . .”

How then does service fit into a life? Answers found in “The Call of Service” are as numerous and particular as each of the lives involved.*