sloane's blog

Seriously. Who wears shorts in this weather?Being from San Francisco, I was clearly most interested in what the California guidebook had to say. Man, was it dense! I was very impressed with the level of research that had gone into it, and the immense amount of detail. It had an extensive history of the state, the names of places, important figures and moments in time. There were several state maps at the beginning, showing the roads and the geography of the area. But I particularly enjoyed the discussions of the flora and fauna, and of the weather.

More modern guidebooks not only condense their coverage of history and terrain, they often leave out really important facts. Or so I assume. How else to explain why tourists show up every year to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge in shorts and t-shirts, freezing their butts off while those of us who live in San Francisco shake our heads in our wool coats and tights? The WPA guide very clearly states that fall is much warmer than summer, where there is icy cold fog sticking its fingers down your shirt all the time and the sun comes out maybe seven times in three months. In fact, the guide details the weather year-round for each part of the state.

There are lovely descriptions of the nature in each area too, and since I feel like that is a big part of the draw of California it was nice to see. Overall, though it read a bit more like a textbook summary than a guide, I felt it had many interesting details about the state, and was full of useful information for the traveler as well as the historian, the naturalist, and the social psychologist.

I also appreciated that the guidebooks were written in such a way that assumed a certain level of education of the reader—beyond simply being literate. Each section was full of literary and cultural references that gave the text authority and dimension. However, it did not feel inaccessible either; the writing did not condescend to the reader with overly simplistic explanations, but it did not alienate the same audience by making these allusions unnecessarily complex or opaque. Each quote or reference was contextualized and incorporated in such a way that it was not necessary to have read the book to appreciate the way that the guidebook’s writers were using the words of writers before them who had written about California with a different intent.

As Jakle notes in “The Tourist,” camping is not only an inexpensive way to vacation, but also one that gives the traveler a feeling of personal freedom and a return to simplicity. Agee discusses the American Roadside as important a character as the American people or the American Road itself, and gives endless lists of numbers that demonstrate the growth of tourism within the country during the Great Depression. These days, again there are countless articles about the rise in popularity of camping, the increased number of visitors to national parks, and tips on what to purchase for a camping trip. Even Ken Burns jumped on the bandwagon with his latest PBS documentary! But how does camping fit into this generation’s view of tourism? Perhaps the “return to nature” and to a simpler way of living provides more of an escape for people who until now were accustomed to being able to wander off to Europe with relative financial ease. These arguably parallel periods of economic instability in the United States has led to an increased desire to see the country, rather than fleeing for the next available continent. How does this fit in with the idea of travel as an escape from one’s current situation?

It seems to me like camping, this concept of returning to a simpler life, appeals to people in two ways. First, it is affordable, yet it has the advantage of being as foreign as another country for the people who do it. I’m talking about those people who leave their clean, modern lives in favor of the woods for a few days, rather than people who camp very regularly or live in pretty rural areas. For the city dwellers that go to Yosemite or Yellowstone, a camping trip is an entirely unique experience from their day-to-day existence. Which brings me to point number two, which is that camping, for the camper-tourist, provides an opportunity to construct a miniature world of peace, unbreakable and unblemished by the outside world. For those whose lives at home are falling apart, or merely being chipped away at, full of technology and credit cards and banking, the opportunity to live in the wild for a moment provides the fantasy of a rural, self-sustained existence; living off the land, even if you’re really living out of cans, or washing your clothing in a lake (with soap from home.) Travel to Europe or the like can’t provide this illusion of perfection because it’s too similar to what is at home in America, too clearly also modern and blighted by a global economy.

Not quite, Mr. AlgerIn his article “The Fiction of Nathanael West: No Redeemer, No Promised Land,” Randall Reid writes of West’s work: “His vision is too narrow, his subjects are too extreme, there are no normal people in his books, and life isn't all like that.” Reid is talking about why West is seen as a “minor” writer by critics, but at first—and maybe all—glances, even a reader who likes West’s work has to admit that this is true. But West’s dealings in extremism are toward a definite goal: A Cool Million is intended to be unrelentingly satirical. In that sense, the book is interesting to look at in terms of the failed American Dream, and as a counterpoint to all of the “uplifting” Depression-era books whose characters held on to hope above all else, and whose authors seem to be generally, or ultimately, positive about the American/human condition.

And yet, I couldn’t agree with Fred T. Marsh’s comment in “A Cool Million and Other Recent Works of Fiction” that “Mr. West's hilarious parody-satire is a good deal of fun. You will read it at a sitting and enjoy it.” I didn’t really find it fun. I found it disturbing, and slightly manic, and thoughtful. But I was prevented from truly enjoying it by the basic facts of the story; the repeated rapes, the gory violence, and the painful naïveté that West burdens his protagonist with were not “a good deal of fun.” Being one of those rare creatures who doesn’t enjoy Seinfeld because it makes me so anxious I have to leave the room, if I laughed during A Cool Million it was out of profound discomfort, and not true amusement.

I found Lemuel Pitkin’s journey most comparable to the pieces we read last week, particularly Conroy’s The Disinherited. Here was a boy who left home in search of a job, to try and help his only family; the book is a series of vignettes in which Pitkin becomes more and more desperate and tragic as a hero. No job or fortuitous experience lasts long for him. He loses body parts along the way, as though the world that is chipping at his optimism, having failed to make a dent there, went at him with a real shovel to chip at his flesh. West doesn’t greatly develop Pitkin, or indeed anybody, as a character, nor does he go into great detail about each and every event that occurs. Content to use the story as a sort of fable, West drags the “hero” of his story through increasingly dark experiences until, and after, his death. The fictional aspect didn’t help much; I still felt as depressed as at the end of Waiting For Nothing.

A Protest in London, 1939We have read already several excerpts from novels written by Europeans visiting the United States during the Great Depression. This, to me, indicates a certain level of awareness outside of America of the situation during the 1930s. However, there does not seem to be a reciprocal knowledge within America of the situation in Europe at this time. Clearly there is a certain level of recognition of the political climate in Europe, what with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, and the rise of fascism throughout the continent. However, little or nothing is written in the books we have looked at of any knowledge of the global scale of the Depression, or any concern for those outside of the States. The American expatriate community that existed in Europe seems to have been concentrated in the 1920s and in the period following the war, but I know (off the top of my head) of no writing by Americans about Europe in the 1930s. I mentioned George Orwell in my post the other day, but the real reason I got to thinking about this subject was the sort of silly documentary on Tuesday where they interviewed that one guy from France about his “hoboing” experience. What was the situation with moving to or from America like during the Great Depression? If millions of people, potentially, were on the road with the country, how many were leaving it? None of the research (read: Wikipedia-ing) I did turned much up; there was a bit about the antagonistic attitude toward immigrants for stealing jobs, which we got a little bit of in Somebody in Boots, Nelson Algren’s piece. There were an estimated four million people who immigrated to the United States during the Depression, but very little on whether anyone really chose to leave in favor of Europe or elsewhere. Perhaps Americans truly were aware that the situation was equally dire outside of the country; Europe was still suffering badly from the effects of the First World War. But I still find it interesting that as readers of Depression-era writing, we have learned viscerally, minutely, and in from many angles and points of view, the American experience of the Depression; and yet, we know nearly nothing of the daily life or the minor details of the Depression as it occurred in Europe, at least not from an American point of view.

One of the themes that continues to resurface again and again in the reading so far is the utter failure of organized religion during the Great Depression. Steinbeck mentions it in The Grapes of Wrath, Woody Guthrie has an incident of it in Bound For Glory, and now Tom Kromer drives the point home in Waiting For Nothing. In fact, the title of the novel refers to an incident at the very end, in which the mission the narrator is spending the night in has shut many homeless people out in the cold, because they were not early enough to listen to the sermon guaranteeing them a bed for the night. Kromer writes, “I lie here and wonder since when did Jesus Christ start keeping office hours?”

George Orwell relates a similar story in Down and Out in Paris and London, in the London section, about having to attend a sermon before being given a meal and a bed to sleep in. Down and Out was published only two years before Waiting For Nothing, perhaps demonstrating that the attitude of organized religion toward the unfortunate and homeless was relatively uniform worldwide. The idea of Christian charity being handed out “in exchange” for attempting to indoctrinate these people is not only, from both the perspective of the time and now, completely absurd, but it also shows an inherent lack of awareness on the part of the religious organizations. Rather than being fed, cleaned, and given a place to sleep, which might truly lead these men to considering a sort of faith, the missions end up jading the drifters that they preach to. Kromer’s concern is only to play the system in order to get as much out of the missions as possible; he notes repeatedly those who are new to the life and unaware of the necessary playacting that comes with attending one of these sermons.

Not only does Kromer portray these churches as being unaware of the hypocrisy surrounding their charity, but he shows that in many cases the workers at these missions are actively uncaring and antagonistic toward the homeless they are helping. The night man at the end of the book seems simply irritated by having to deal with the dying man, rather than compassionate or concerned to any degree. Not only does he help the dying man only reluctantly, he vows to throw Kromer out for even alerting him to this situation. Earlier, too, the female preacher is quick to throw out any men who question her sermon, although she is certainly aware of what she is sending them out to.

What is truly disturbing about this is that I, personally, simply have no way of knowing how much this system of Christian charity has changed. However, I suspect that it largely has not. There continues in America to be an attitude that those who are trapped in a situation of misfortune have brought it upon themselves, and that they should be able to pull themselves up out of it. But as unemployment continues to stay high, and the country feels the affects of this recession, how can we justify this attitude to ourselves?

The readings for this week illustrate a little more thoroughly the troublesome relationship between fact and fiction when dealing with as controversial and difficult a topic as the Great Depression. While the Boxcar Bertha narrative is a work of fiction, it is presented as a sort of faux-autobiography. This is such a paradoxical idea that it begs the question of what the true intent of the author was. Did he really want his readers to know that the book was fiction, or did he mean for them to confuse it for reality? Why did Ben Reitman, who in the foreword is described as having had many of the experiences that Bertha has in the story, not write an autobiography? Why did he choose to fictionalize the tale, and lose the authority of personal experience in favor of the questionable authority of a fictional female voice? To some extent, it now seems that he is exploiting the stories of the women he met on the road, by borrowing their lives without giving them the agency of speaking for themselves, as well as imagining their voices rather than using their own words. It recalls what Margaret Bourke-White did, adding stereotypical quotes to her already dramatized photographs, rather than taking the Lange approach of allowing these people to give their own statements.

On the other hand, Woody Guthrie’s fictionalized autobiography seems perfectly logical, and in keeping with his construction of his own mystique, his own legend as a musician. Similarly, Anderson’s book is presented as a work of fiction in a novelistic style. Neither of these seems as troubling as the Boxcar Bertha narrative. And yet, Steinbeck clearly presented The Grapes of Wrath as a work of fiction, yet it was still much more controversial than Sister of the Road or the Bourke-White book, perhaps because it implicated more fully the capitalist system. Hungry Men is less accusative, more narrative, while Bound for Glory is taken only as seriously as its writer intended it, which is likely not very seriously at all.

When one is writing about the current state of affairs in a country in the midst of turmoil, as these three writers were, it is interesting to see what comes of each work. Grapes of Wrath inspired Congressional hearings, Dorothea Lange convinced government agencies to send help and money to migrant workers, but the others were not always so prestigious. Sister of the Road and Bound for Glory both were made into Hollywood movies (which, oddly enough, both starred David Carradine), but seem to have been received as relatively lighthearted fare when compared to opuses like Steinbeck’s and James Agee and Walker Evans’ book. Perhaps the reception of, and reaction to, each of these novels depends as much on the author’s intent as it does on the reader’s take.

On the anniversary of his death, this video--which celebrates what might have been--seems appropriate.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was originally commissioned by Fortune magazine in 1936 for a text-and-photo essay on the plight of white sharecroppers in the South. Writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans spent eight weeks living with three white sharecropping families to research their assignment. When they returned, the article was rejected as not meeting the magazine’s expectations. Whatever the magazine expected, it was probably not that the two men would turn around and publish the project in 1941 as the groundbreaking work that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men became.

Walker Evans was, at the time of the researching, working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a part of the New Deal program which sought to alleviate the strains of poverty on the lives of sharecroppers and tenants. Evans was part of the influential photography program of the FSA, and received a temporary leave from the program under the condition that the photographs taken for the Fortune article became government property. In 1938, the year he left the FSA, the Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition of his photographs, the first that the museum had dedicated to a single photographer. He went on to famously photograph New York subway passengers, and was an editor at Fortune and a professor of photography at the Yale Univeristy School of Art.

James Agee had specifically requested Walker Evans for the Fortune project. At the time, he was working regularly for both Fortune and Time. Apparently (according to Wikipedia), Agee eventually conceived of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as part one of a multi-volume work exploring the lives of tenant families. The intended other volumes never materialized, however. Agee went on to become the film critic for Time and later The Nation. He wrote two celebrated screenplays, The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter, and was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel A Death in the Family.

In 1989 a “sequel” to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published, written by Dale Maharidge and photographed by Michael Williamson, entitled And Their Children After Them. Maharidge and Williamson returned to the three families of the Agee-Evans book, and photographed and wrote about their surviving descendants. The book gives great insight into the feelings of these descendants about the original project and how their families were portrayed by Agee and Evans. It also, in some cases, illustrates the tragedy of continued poverty and suffering for many of the family members. The New York Times wrote an article at the time of And Their Children After Them, which gives a hint at some of the stories of the children of these famous men.

Each of these pieces attempts to discover, in one way or another, the “real America” of the Great Depression; the people behind the terms “Okie” and “shovel-leaner,” the ones receiving government aid. These writers are looking for the New Deal in action, and putting human faces on the masses. But at the same time, these writers are not part of the welfare-receiving crowd; it is important to remember that they are being paid, often, whether in advance or profiting after the fact, for “slumming” with the less fortunate. They are essentially tourists in the Great Depression, even the ones in the pay of the government.

In searching for the “genuine” or “real” experience of people suffering hardship during the economic downturn of the country, these writers are carrying on a tradition of tourism: the search for the unique, authentic experience. Stopping at a gas station to ask the serviceman for his “story,” dining with working-class men in the auto industry in Detroit, talking to housewives finally off of relief; these are all ways of sneaking in the back door of experience. But sometimes these tricks backfire, such as when the station attendant has already been asked, and hands you a notecard instead; it’s like finding the hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant only to later discover it’s the most popular dim sum place in town.

The questions are always these: how much is this exploiting the subjects of an author’s interest, and how much is it helping them speak when they themselves cannot? How much is tourism and how much is traveling? How realistic can an outsider make a world in which they have never and will never belong? All these authors are attempting to illuminate the struggles of the real victims of the Depression, by traveling to the places they live and observing their homes and their work lives. But then they return home themselves, to sit in well-appointed studies and record their observances, much like a tourist creates a scrapbook of his or her adventures upon returning from a trip. And how should their audience take these works? After all, they are wealthy enough to afford books, and educated enough to read them. It is another level of alienation from the subject at hand.

But nonetheless, it can be argued that these writers are doing a public service by describing the plight of the downtrodden. Despite the touristic nature of their journeys into the masses of America, they are writing something worth recording, and it is impossible to write—or travel—in a vacuum.

David Cassuto’s article “Turning wine into water: water as privileged signifier in The Grapes of Wrath” explores the conspicuous absence of the Plains’ most valued resource throughout Steinbeck’s novel, and its re-appearance as a threat rather than salvation at the novel’s close: “The flooding that climaxes the novel is thematically situated to provide maximum counterpoint to the drought which originally forced the Joads to migrate west. Disenfranchised and dehumanized, the Joads can only curse the rising floodwaters even as they once prayed for a deluge to feed their parched crops.” Water’s presence as a deity and its numerous Biblical references (Noah, the Flood, etc.) is especially interesting in the face of the other liquids in the novel: coffee, liquor, milk.

Liquids are social lubricants in many situations, from the very beginning. The diner interaction in the second chapter of the novel, between the waitress and the truck driver, takes place over a cup of coffee. The same occurs in Mae and Al’s diner later on in the novel, where coffee acts as a social vehicle and an indicator of social status (the difference between the truck drivers’ attitudes and the “Okies’” attitudes and the tourists’ attitudes.) Tom Joad and Jim Casy bond over the “fact’ry liquor” Tom brings home from the prison; in a slightly ironic twist, their alcohol-fueled bond occurs during Casy’s reflection on the new stance towards God he developed after leaving his position as preacher. Tom seems to use the alcohol (which was either given to him by the prison or purchased on his way out of prison) as a means to promote social interaction with the people he meets along the way home. It loosens both him and his partners in conversation up.

Ultimately, though, liquor gives way to milk—a liquid that sustains life throughout the story. The most important instance of this sustenance is the conclusion of the novel, in which Rose of Sharon gives a dying man her breast milk (meant for her deceased baby) in order to give him the necessary nourishment to survive, as he is unable to stomach bread or water. In another instance, Ma asks Pa to spend some of their hard-earned money on milk for Winfield when he is sick. Milk, like water, is essential for survival; milk, unlike water is accessible. Milk, the nurturing mother, the generous deity; water, the vengeful God.