Coming or Going?

Image from Robert Frank's "The Americans" Louis Adamic's encounter with the girl "on the bum," as relayed in his "Girl on the Road" chapter of My America draws for me two interesting parallels of travel, and specifically of American travel. Within the narrative there are two travel stories: Adamic's own, leaving Cleveland for New York; and a girl struggling at the side of the road, on her way, we later learn, to Baltimore. Both journeys are, in many ways, similar. Both have made a tour of the country, an elliptical route and slinging now back to the East Coast/the Mid-Atlantic. But for me, hearing the girl, Hazel, tell her story and Adamic's passive reaction to it highlights the question of the relationship of artist to subject and of the American travel story itself.

I don't believe there's any exploitation of subject for art, between Adamic and the girl. He does no more and no less than most of the "good eggs," the "square shooter" truck drivers with whom Hazel made it to California and has returned. The fact of her story, that he will use her in a book, becomes secondary to his wish to help her with the gift of a few dollars. The exploitation, if one calls it that, is not in the relationship to an artist seeking a subject but inherent in their reasons for travel--Hazel's active necessity for travel and Adamic's passive desire to travel. A crucial part of the American dream, I think, is the unconscious knowledge that, as Nathan Asch says in the introduction to The Road, "When you're born you're not born to suffer." You can, when things get bad enough, when your land is taken or when your husband abandons you with nothing, leave. Hazel, like so many others, hears of the California promised land, and, unbeaten, sets out for the West. That in itself is as much the American story as the Capitalist ideal, rags-to-riches. The migration west not out of hopelessness but out of hope itself, an individual's manifest destiny, that we the Americans have the right to be there, and there it will be better. The truth of it, whether it's better or not, is ultimately irrelevant in the shadow of the strength of that belief.

America, too, has a long tradition of documentary artists. Not just with the Depression, but long after; photographers and writers looping a meta-path of the dispossessed in the attempt to document the truth of the struggle. Again, there is nothing, I think, inherently exploitative in that documentation. Observation is necessary, documentation is crucial. It is the journey itself that rings false for me. The truck drivers and Hazel are alike; both travel with both the weight and wings of the American dream on their backs. The truck drivers, in their constant motion, move towards a tangible destination, towards the end of their route, indefinitely, repeatedly. Hazel moves towards the promise of something better, towards an end for herself where she might settle. I have no doubt that she will move again if work proves impossible in Baltimore. Adamic, and those writers and photographers commissioned, or with a home (a settled "end") to which to return, make only a superficial, passive journey. They look for other people's journeys, for their destination is already reached.