The Radical Vision of Gerrard Winstanley

 

 

As Winstanley’s writings were published for the most part in separate pamphlet form, I treat their titles (when I mention them) as though they are books, though some are brief.  Page numbers in parentheses all refer to The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (1965) and available at archive.org.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Gerrard Winstanley, the seventeenth century leader of the Diggers of St. George’s Hill in Surrey, was a pioneer of direct action and civil disobedience whose group, like the I.W.W., advocated “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” [1].  Three hundred years later his example remained fresh enough to animate the Diggers of San Fracisco’s Haight-Ashbury who greeted me and several thousand others during the summer of 1967.  Those who gathered there shared with Winstanley not only his brash attitude and uncompromising anarcho-communism; many were pursuing spiritual paths -- Sufi, Daoist, Zen, quasi-Native American – which they saw as parallel to their social vision.  Winstanley’s religion was the foundation of his politics; he was a Christian, but a heterodox one, whose vision was at once more rational and more mystical than that of his fellow Christians who remained in the pews of the Church of England.    

     In terms of politics, he viewed the profit system, whether feudal or capitalist, as inherently and inevitably vicious.   His communism was absolute in terms of the means of production, primarily agriculture in his view.  (He is careful to note his disagreement with the contemporaneous Ranters who were reputed to practice free love [519].)  Well before Proudhon, Winstanley declared unequivocally that “Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thou shalt not steal, nor kill” (258).  He imagines a utopia in which everyone will work to “cheerfully put their hands to make these things that are needfull, one helping another” (184), then what is produced would be available to all in free stores: “every family, when they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops, and fetch without money, even as now they fetch with money” (526) [2].  Though his basic principle is simple, absolute, and, at its heart, entirely voluntaristic, Winstanley provides details for its operation in practice, involving numerous “peace-makers,” overseers, judges, and others [3]

     Winstanley regularly identifies the oppressive feudal system with “the Norman yoak” imposed by William the Conqueror (as though the Anglo-Saxons had not had their own equally oppressive kings).  To him putting commons to agricultural use seemed legal under traditional law.  More significantly, though, and quite apart from his more pragmatic suggestions, he viewed the Diggers as spiritual warriors and the contention as not between classes, but, as he often repeated, between the apocalyptic figures of the  Dragon and the Lamb.  He explicitly declares that his insights are divine openings, occurring in trance or otherwise gifts of God’s grace, “shown by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation” (257).  Winstanley clearly regards himself as a prophetic voice, a herald of divine insights.  He states with utter confidence that “the following declaration of the word of Life was the free gift to me from the Father himself.” [4]  His active interest in the apocalyptic symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelations, a curiosity he shares with many of his century, including Isaac Newton, is reflected in a number of passages [5].

     While a pursuit of esoteric meaning in Scripture is not unusual for his day, Winstanley’s theology was decidedly unorthodox.  His criticisms of the Established Church and its clergy do not advocate for any reforming sect.  (While he did have demonstrable ties to Quaker meetings, his actual membership has not been proven.)  Perhaps Winstanley could not find a doctrinal home in the England of his day, because his theology was, for all the mystical trappings, shockingly rational, a forerunner in significant ways of Deism and “natural religion.” 

     The most striking sign of his dissent even from Dissenters is in his use of Reason as an equivalent for  God.  Though he also refers to God as ”love” (375, 382, etc.), he explicitly says “I use the word reason rather than the word God in my writings” (104) and commonly speaks of “The Great Creator Reason” (251) and “the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason” (253).  While his attachment to Christian language and to the sacredness of the scriptures remains intact, he was with his elevation of reason a prefiguration of the eighteenth-century advocates of a non-supernatural religion. 

     Due to the compassion manifested in his redemptive role, Christ is primarily identified with love; thus Winstanley speaks of “Christ who is the universall power of Love.” (446)  This emphasis made the idea of eternal damnation unacceptable to him as it would imply a limitation of divine love [6].  To him God’s “power of Universall Love” (375) can do no less than cause “a thorough salvation . . . and leave none under bondage.” (384)  He is quite explicit that since the deity is “absolutely a God of Love” in the end every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour” (82) since “Christ gave himself a ransom for all” (81).  For him in fact the trees of knowledge and of life are beneficial, not forbidden, though subject to corruption, with the first identified with imagination and the second with love and knowledge (452).

     These concepts of God and Christ underlie and justify his social campaign.  For him the mandate for the truly pious to open what he repeatedly calls the “treasury” of earth to all people is nothing less than allowing love and reason rather than tyranny, crime, and self-interest to govern human affairs.  This partial rationalization of Christianity is evident, as well, in his identification of entities such as Adam, Satan, Eden, Heaven, and Hell as essentially psychological though he never denies their independent existence.  Thus the significance of Adam is not as a historical figure, but as he is manifested in every individual (203).  He refers to “the garden of Eden (mans heart)” (447) and notes that “a half hours silence” is equivalent to being in Heaven (223).  The devil that matters is the one “within you” (95).

     With some asperity , he insists that, in fact, all history including the events in scripture are most importantly located within the individual soul.  “All that which you call the history, and have doted upon it, and made it your idol, is all to be seen and felt within you, before you cast off true peace.” Adam and Christ, Cain and Abel, the Canaanites, Amalekites,  Philistines, he very land of Canaan, Judas, Heaven and Hell, good and bad angels are “all to be seen within” (215).  Therefore “that which a man seeks for, whereby he might have peace, is within the heart, not without” (213) and any people who wish to look for heaven or for hell had best look into themselves (216).

     Winstanley rejects authority and even scriptural revelation as the basis for religious belief, privileging only personal experience.  Thinking that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (213) the believer must find inspiration not from books, but inside the soul (204).  For his part he is emphatic in his claim that his own inspiration is of this kind (204), a “free gift to me from the Father himself” (445).  “While I builded upon any words or writings of other men, I builded upon sand.  Man has a teacher within him” (93).  “What I hear another man speak is nothing to me until I find the same experience in  myself” (96).  He claims to receive these “openings,” as the Quakers would call them, from his meditative trance experiences (190, 261, etc.).

     In a few passages, Winstanley comes very close to what sounds like pantheism.  Not only does he call the earth the “mother” of humanity (271), he declares that God is to be seen only in the world.  The deity cannot be fully known and to imagine him is simply “to build castles in the air.”  Not only is God a mystery, the afterlife is as well.  “To reach God beyond the Creation, or to know what he will be to a man, after the man is dead, if any otherwise, than to scatter him into his Essences of fire, water, earth, and air, of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line, or capacity of man to attain to, while he lives in his compounded body.”  All one can really know is this world.  “The creation is all its dimentions be the fullness of him, that fills all with himself, and if you yourself be part of this Creation, where can you finde God but in that line or station wherein  you stand?” (565)

     In the twenty-first century we remain far short of Winstanley’s recovered Eden in an egalitarian anarcho-communism, yet he can still indicate the need for change and the characteristics if a more just social and economic order.  Any step toward a more equitable sharing of the good things of life heads in the right direction.  In his use of direct and uncompromising non-violent action he is exemplary for protestors to the current corrupt regimes of this earth.  And in religion, he points the way to a more truly catholic Christianity, in which the specific symbols of the Christian tradition are understood a symbolic and in which any person may pursue salvation or enlightenment or liberation without sectarian boundaries.  An inspiring example to the cultural revolutionaries of the ‘sixties who, though not perhaps deprived of the necessities of life (as the poor were in the seventeenth century) nonetheless felt alienation and spiritual hunger and who, like him, followed the dictates of their inner vision to try to practice what in Jewish practice is called tikkun olam, the mending of the world.  Gerrard Winstanley was a mystic as well as a revolutionary.  Over fifty years ago, when I met some of the San Francisco Diggers, their message seemed to me quite compatible with that of Che Guevara, honored during “The Year of the Heroic Guerilla” in 1968, whose slogan that year seemed to be on everyone’s wall.

 

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.  [7]

 

The same love of all humanity that motivated Gerrard Winstanley in Surrey animated Emmet Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Peter Berg in San Fransisco’s Haight, and countless others before and since.  Perhaps, I flatter myself, even this essay can spread a little love.  

 

  

 

1.  Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World.

2.  The vision was realized by the San Francisco Diggers.  The Haight-Ashbury store had several incarnations including at 1090 Cole.  A Black People’s Free Store later opened at 1099  McAllister, then one in New York City at 264 East 10^th Street, and many other cities followed.. 

3.  For details see in particular The Law of Freedom in  a Platform or True Magistracy Restored.

4.  Fire in the Bush p. 445.

5.  See, for instance, pp. 87-90 in The Breaking of the Day of God and 464-472 of Fire in the Bush.

6.  Universalism, though later condemned, was taught by early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Diodorus of Tarsus.

7. From “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today,” later reprinted as “Socialism and man in Cuba 1965” in The Che Reader (2005).

8.  The Ranters seem to have gone further in  the directions of antinomianism and pantheism.  The most reliable statement of their ideas is likely in Laurence Clarkson’s A Single Eye (1650) which declares “what act soever I do, is acted by that Majesty in me God be in all things” and “if God be in all, why are not all things one in God?”  Though Winstanley takes pains to distinguish himself from this even more radical group, particularly due to the allegations that they (including Clarkson) practiced promiscuous sexual relations, in his own day they were viewed as similar.

Imru’ al-Qais: A Pre-Islamic Arabic Poet

 

A copy of Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych’s translation of Imru’ al-Qais’ poem from The Mu’ allaqat fir Millenials is appended.  Numbers in parentheses refer to line numbers of that poem.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     A curious reader unfamiliar with the Arabic language and, for the most part, with Arabic literature, might well begin with Imru’ al-Qais.  A pre-Islamic poet, and thus, in the view of believers, a dweller in the time of ignorance (the jahiliyyah), he is nonetheless a fountainhead for Arabic literary tradition.  Considered by many to be one of the finest poets in the language, he has an undeniable place in  its literary history as the originator or early reinforcer of conventions that shaped the poetry of a number of Arabic-speaking Muslim nations as well as work by Muslims writing in Persian, Bengali, and other languages. 

     The work of the earliest Arabic poets, unlike the later courtly poetry of Damascus, Baghdad, and Granada, is full of the imagery of the nomadic camp.  Poetry was always performed aloud, composed according to the techniques of oral composition such that outstanding works were subsequently transmitted for generations without writing (leading to textual variations that vex modern scholars).  During evening gatherings in the tents of sheikhs, poetry aficionados recited poems as entertainment.  Verbal sophistication was highly prized and poets competed at annual gathering in ʿUkāẓ near Mecca. 

     In pre-Islamic times the dominant mode seems to have been the qaṣīda, often translated as ode, a form that makes rigorous demands, both in form and content.  The classic early qaṣīda is composed in a single quantitative meter and monorhyme (every line ending with the same sound) [1]. 

     In content the qaṣīda typically begins with a scene of an abandoned campsite in the desert (called the nasib) evoking loss or melancholy, followed by a journey, often with lengthy descriptions of animals (the raḥīl), and concluding with a boast (fakhr) in praise of the poet, his patron, or his tribe.  Since so many aspects of the poem are prescribed by convention, the artist’s task is not to be original but rather to devise ever more craftsmanlike versions of past models.  Less latitude than a modern reader might expect was given to self-expression.  Like Alkman and other early Doric poets, the work was a community expression generally embodying shared values.  In this context the poet is a conformist who defines his culture’s received ideas.  The social centrality of such poems is indicated by the (perhaps legendary) hanging of winning poems on the Kaaba for all visitors to see, leading to the collection called the Muʻallaqāt, the Hanging Odes or Suspnded Poems.

    Imru al-Qais is the author of the qaṣīda conventionally placed first in this collection, and he is often considered the most influential poet in the language. [2]  This ode, as it is sometimes called, deviates from the usual program of the form, lacking in particularly a conclusion  boasting of the poet’s own prowess or the power of the tribe.  As the qaṣīda seems to have been already developed to a sophisticated degree including its conventional subdivisions,  Imru al-Qais is less likely to be suggesting a possible structure than he is expressing his own individuality.

     His self-image includes a more than usually generous share of love-making.  He is sometimes called the wandering king or even the playboy due to his devotion to women.  His father was said to have been so angered by his pleasure-loving lifestyle that he banished him, though, when his father was killed, he devoted himself to revenge. [3]

     The poem opens with a melancholy memory of a past love at an abandoned campsite.  The location is very specific with the precision habitual to those who dwell in what looks like a trackless waste.  Similar to the Romantic Era passion for ruins as picturesque and sublime, for Imru’ al-Qais the sight of a place where people have passed fills him with a sense of the transience of worldly things.  His feeling is strengthened by the association of the location not simply with the past in general but with memorable erotic encounters.  (The antelope scat adds an unforgettable concrete detail, making the heretofore vague image of the place suddenly photographic.)  The poet’s bitter tears, repeated in the bitter taste of the colocynth, define a tone familiar to readers of ancient Greek lyric.  To the extent that one loves life, including sexuality, one will regret mortality.  The more comfortable one is in one’s body, the more difficult must debility and infirmity seem. 

      The sensuality of the poet’s reminiscences is luxurious, clove-scented, as he says. (8)  Romantic boasting is for the poet more boastful than intimacy, and he recounts like a grand signeur the day he slaughtered his riding camel to make a barbecue for the lady bathers.  Another palpable image brings the scene before the mind.

 

All day the playful maidens

 tossed pieces of her meat

     And of her fat, like twisted fringes

     of white Damascus silk.

                                       (12)

      The succeeding vignette of romance must have been shocking to the original audience; it surely is for most  readers today.  Umru’ al-Qais manages to have sex with a pregnant lady in her howdah atop a camel even as she nurses a young child.  The pessimism of the opening abandoned campsite has been entirely banished by the poet’s very earthy joie de vivre.

     Even this adventurous liaison, however, ends on a note of rejection as she rebuffs the poet.  Just as in the lyrics of William IX, his descriptions of his passion veer from the risqué to the courtly.  She is his “slayer.” (21)  The eyes of the beloved “pierce/ With their two arrows/  The pieces of my slaughtered heart.” (22)  Jealous observers, here guards and clansman, seek to frustrate love. (24)  The portrayal of the beauty of the woman is as poetic as the Song of Songs and as systematic as in a blason: “Her collarbone shone like/ a polished mirror” (3), she resembles a “wild doe” (31) or an “antelope” (33), her hair is “full and thick like dates” (35).

 

Her waist is as fine as

 a twisted bowstring, trim;

     Her calf like a papyrus reed,

     well-watered, tender.

 

She takes with fingers smooth, uncalloused,

 as if they were

     The soft dry worms of Zaby Dune or

      the tender twigs of ishil trees.  (37-8)

 

     This highly erotic encounter is succeeded by a passage of the profound desert night hanging over the poet “like a huge camel” (45), the depth of the darkness corresponding to a kind of existential woe as well as a more specific romantic longing.  He obtains a sort of resumption of mastery in the excellence of his noble horse, “now wheeling, now charging, advancing, retreating” (50),  His mount is itself worthy of the detailed praise he has afforded his lover.

 

He has the flanks of a gazelle,

 the ostrich’s two legs,

     The wolf’s lope,

     the fox-cub’s canter. (56)

 

This celebration of nomadic life on horseback turns naturally into a scene of oryx hunting in which the prey is depicted with the same care and, in one case at least, the very same image as the beloved.

 

Then an oryx herd appeared before us

 with does like virgins

     Circling round a sacred stone

     in long-trained gowns.

 

Then they turned like a string of onyx beads,

 alternated black and white,

     On the neck of a child

     of two noble families. (60-61)

 

The people feast then joyfully, and any reader of Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta will know how likely it is that they were hungry indeed.

     The poem then closes with a scene of a titanic storm, implying the people’s hardiness and strength in living in such harsh surroundings. 

 

As if Mount Abān in the first rains

of the storm

     Were a tribal chieftain wrapped

     In a striped cloak.

 

As if the peak of Mount Mujaymir

in the morning

     Ringed with dross left by the torrent

     were wool on a spindle.

 

The storm set down its burden

on the desert of Ghabīt

     Like a Yemeni merchant alighting with

     his fabric-laden bags. 

(74-76)

 

     The erotic passages are of particular interest to the literary historian, including, as they do, motifs that were to become prominent in European medieval love poetry, while, from a synchronic point of view, the poem expresses a major structural tension.  On the one hand, the lover cannot force the woman’s love.  She may remain standoffish in spite of his power, strength, and prestige.  In the same way, the experience of love is always time-limited, so the melancholy opening section, while explicitly recalling a past romance, represents the ephemeral character of all human experience.  Again, the passing of the glories of the world is unstoppable.  One may lament this fact without falling into despair.

     The psychological balance is restored for a time in this poem by the paean to the horse, itself a major signifier of the wealth and prestige of its rider, the enabler of the successful hunt, and, though the topic is not mentioned here, the warrior’s partner in battle.  The magnificent storm with which the poem concludes represents both the might of nature which can overcome even the strongest and, on the other hand, the fortitude of the desert-dwellers who cultivated a mild contempt for townsmen who might be overcome by the elements if they ventured out of settled areas.

     In this poem the persona is, like the poet and like all of our species, caught between a feeling of mastery and of helplessness, between delight and despair.  The central practices of the culture – nomadic encampments, horsemanship, hunting – as well as the universal element of sexual love are highlighted.  It is this cultural definition in a hundred lines or less that allowed the Arabic-speaking nomads of Imru’ al-Qais’ era as well as before and after to compose works on such a highly conventionalized format.  Every man was a rider, a hunter, a fighter, and a lover and so each present comparable experiences.  The most significant common element, though, was certainly the knowledge that death is certain, and even apart from that fact, the future is always uncertain.  Living in a difficult environment among periodically violent neighbiors, the Bedouins of Imru’ al-Qais’ circle might at times console themselves with a love affair, an exciting hunt, now and then a heavily-laden table and, if the occasion is to be gala indeed, a rousing poem as well.

 

 

 

 

 

1. Stop, my friends, and we will weep

 over the memory of a loved one

      And an abode at the dune’s edge of Siqt al-Liwā,

      between al-Dakhūl, then Hawmal,

 

2. Then Tūdih, then al-Miqrāt, whose trace

 was not effaced

      By the two winds weaving over it

      from south and north.

 

3. You see the droppings of

 white antelope

      Scattered on its wide grounds and dried-up puddles

      like peppercorns.

 

4. On the morning when they loaded the camels

 to depart, before the tribe’s acacia trees,

      I wept splitting

     bitter colocynth.

 

5. My friends stopped their mounts there

 over me and said:

      “Don’t die of grief,

      control yourself!”

 

6. “There is no cure for me

 but pouring tears,

      And is there a better place to weep

      than the worn traces of a ruined abode?”

 

7. Console yourself as once before you did

 for Umm Huwayrith

      And her neighbor at Mount Maʾsal,

      Umm Rabāb.

 

8. When they rose there wafted from them

 a fragrance, redolent

      As the East breeze when it bears

      the scent of clove.

 

9. Then out of ardent love my eyes

 sent flowing down my neck

      A flood of tears

     until they soaked my sword-belt.

 

10. And the many days of delight

 with the damsels!

     And, best of all, the day

     at Dārat Juljul!

 

11. The day I slew my she-camel

for the maidens—

     How amazing when they loaded up

     her saddle and its gear!

 

12. All day the playful maidens

 tossed pieces of her meat

     And of her fat, like twisted fringes

     of white Damascus silk.

 

13. And how about the day I entered the howdah,

 ʿUnayzah’s howdah,

     And she said, “Damn you! Look what you’ve done!

     I’ll have to go on foot!”

 

14. She kept on, as the high-sided saddle

 lurched to one side,

     “You’ve crippled my camel, Imruʾ al-Qays!

      Get down!”

 

15. So I said to her, “Just keep going

 and loosen his reins,

     Don’t keep me from a second taste

     of your sweet fruit.”

 

16. Many a woman, like you, pregnant and nursing,

 I have visited at night

      And distracted from her amuleted

      one-year-old.

 

17. When he cried from behind her, she turned

 her upper half toward him,

     But the half that was beneath me

     did not budge.

 

18. Then one day, on the back of a dune,

 she rebuffed me,

     And swore an oath never

     to be broken.

 

19. O Fātimah! Enough

 of this teasing!

     And if you have resolved to cut me off,

     then do it gently.

 

20. If something in my character

 has hurt you,

     Then pull my clothes away from yours—

     they’ll slip right off.

 

21. Were you emboldened to abuse me

 because your love is my slayer

      And whatever you command my heart to do,

      it does?

 

22. Your eyes do not shed tears

 except to pierce

     With their two arrows

     the pieces of my slaughtered heart.

 

23. With many a pale and curtained maiden

 whose tent none dares approach,

      I took my pleasure,

      unhurried.

 

24. I stole past guards

 to get to her, past clansmen,

      Eager, if they could conceal it,

      to slay me.

 

25. When the Pleiades were spread out

 across the sky

      Like the pleats of a sash with alternating

     gold and gems,

 

26. I came when she, before the tent curtain,

 had shed her clothes for sleep

      And was clad in nothing but

     an untied shift.

 

27. She cried, “By God, there’s no way

 to dissuade you!

      And I don’t see the veil of your error

      lifting!”

 

28. I led her forth from her tent

 and as she walked she trailed

      Over our tracks the train of her gown

      of figured silk.

 

29. Then, when we had crossed

 the clan’s enclosure

      And made our way to a sandy hollow

      surrounded by long winding dunes,

 

30. I drew her temples toward me, and she

 leaned over me

      With a slender waist, but full where

      her anklets ring.

 

31. Her skin white, her waist thin,

 not full,

     Her collarbone shone like

     a polished mirror.

 

32. Like the first inviolate bloom,

 white mixed with yellow,

     Nurtured on water limpid,

     unmuddied.

 

33. Now hiding, now baring a cheek

 full and smooth,

      She guards herself with the glance

      Of a wild doe at Wajrah with fawn.

 

34. Her neck, like the neck

 of a white antelope,

      Is not overly long when she raises it,

      nor lacking in ornament.

 

35. A jet-black head of hair

 adorns her back,

      Full and thick like dates upon

      a cluster-laden palm.

 

36. Some locks are secured on top,

 while others

     Stray between the braided

     and the loose.

 

37. Her waist is as fine as

 a twisted bowstring, trim;

     Her calf like a papyrus reed,

     well-watered, tender.

 

38. She takes with fingers smooth, uncalloused,

 as if they were

     The soft dry worms of Zaby Dune or

      the tender twigs of ishil trees.

 

39. At nightfall she lights up

 the dark

      Like the lamp in the night-cell

      of a hermit monk.

 

40. Late into the morning her bed is fragrant

 as though strewn with crumbs of musk,

      And she, still in her loose night clothes,

      sleeps on ‘til noon.

 

41. At one like her the staid man

 gazes with ardor

      When she stands at her full height between

      woman’s gown and maiden’s shift.

 

42. Grown men find consolation for

 the follies of their youth,

     But my heart refuses solace for

     its love for you.

 

43. How often did

I quarrel  over you

     And reject sincere advice that, though reproachful,

     was generously given.

 

44. Many a night like the billowing sea

 let down its veils over me

     With all kinds of cares

     to torment me.

 

45. Then  I said to it when, like a huge camel,

 it stretched out its spine

     Then raised its haunches

     and heaved its ponderous chest

 

46. “O long night, will you not dispel

 to reveal the dawn?

     Though the dawning day will be

     no better for me!

 

47. “O what a night you are!

 as if each of your stars

     Were tied to Mount Yadhbul

     with a tightly twisted rope.

 

48. “And the Pleaides stand in midcourse

 motionless,

     As if suspended by flaxen cords

     from obdurate rocks.”

 

49. At daybreak I ride forth,

 the birds still in their nests,

     On a huge steed, sleek and swift,

     like a lasso for wild game.

 

50. Now wheeling, now charging, advancing, retreating,

all at once,

     Like a mighty boulder the torrent has washed

     down from the heights.

 

51. A dark bay: the saddle pad

 slips from its back                         

     Like raindrops rolling

     off hard rock.

 

52. His gallop, like a downpour,

 still bursts forth 

     When the dragging hoofs of flagging coursers

     kick up dust.

 

53. Lean yet full of vigor,

 as if his pounding gallop

     When he seethes with heat

     were a cauldron’s boil.

 

54. The slender youth

 slips from his back;

     The sturdy riders’ robes

     fly out behind.

 

55. His gallop streams like a boy’s

 pebble-on-a string

     When he tightly twirls the string with his two hands

     then pulls!

 

56. He has the flanks of a gazelle,

 the ostrich’s two legs,

     The wolf’s lope,

     the fox-cub’s canter.

 

57. Full in the flanks; from behind                          

a thick tail fills the gap

     Between his legs, reaching almost to the ground,

     not crooked.

 

58. As if, when he heads off, his rump,

 hard and smooth, were a stone

     On which a bride pounds perfume or

     bitter colocynth is crushed.

 

59. As if the blood on his throat—

 blood of the herd’s frontrunners—

     Were henna on an old man’s

     combed white hair.

 

60. Then an oryx herd appeared before us

 with does like virgins

     Circling round a sacred stone

     in long-trained gowns.

 

61. Then they turned like a string of onyx beads,

 alternated black and white,

     On the neck of a child

     of two noble families.

 

62. He took us straight

 to the leaders of the herd,

     Leaving behind those that lagged

     in an unbroken cluster.

 

63. One after another he overtook

a buck then a doe,

     But still was not awash

     with sweat.

 

64. Some cooks laid out the meat in strips

 to slowly roast on embers;

     Others threw it into pots

     to quickly boil.

 

65. At evening, our glances shied

 before this steed:

     To whatever part we raised our gaze—

     dazzled, it dropped.

 

66. All night he remained, with his saddle and bridle

 upon him.

     All night he stood beneath my eye,

     not loose to graze.

 

67. Friend, can you see lightning? Look,

 there is a faint gleam,

     Like two hands flashing

     in the cumulus’ high crown.

 

68. Its flash lights up the sky—or like

 the sudden flare of a monk’s lamp

     When, tilting it, he soaks

     the twisted wick with oil.

 

69. I sat with my companions                    

 between Dārij and ʿUdhayb.

     How distant was the storm

     at which I gazed!

 

70. Over Mount Qatan, as I read the signs,

 the right flank of its downpour falls,

     Over Mount Sitār, then Mount Yadhbul,

     falls the left.

 

71. By late morning it began pouring down its rain

 around Kutayfah,

     Overturning the lofty kanahbal-trees

     upon their beards.

 

72. As the fringes of its rain passed

 over Mount Qanān

     They drove white-footed goats

     down every path.

 

73. In Tayma ʾOasis it did not leave

 a single palm trunk standing

     Nor a single stronghold but those

     of gypsum-plastered stone.

 

74. As if Mount Abān in the first rains

 of the storm

     Were a tribal chieftain wrapped

     In a striped cloak.

 

75. As if the peak of Mount Mujaymir

 in the morning

     Ringed with dross left by the torrent

     were wool on a spindle.

 

76. The storm set down its burden

 on the desert of Ghabī�t

     Like a Yemeni merchant alighting with

     his fabric-laden bags.

 

77. It was as if the song-birds of the valley

 at daybreak

     Had drunk a morning draught

     of fine spiced wine,

 

78. As if the wild beasts drowned at evening

 in its remotest reaches

     Were wild onions’

     plucked-out bulbs.

Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth

 

drawing by Woody Guthrie

 

 

     Amid the Betty Crocker cookbooks and bestsellers from past decades on the shelves of the local Salvation Army store, I was surprised to come across a novel called House of Earth by Woody Guthrie.  As a teenager during the folk song revival I sought out Pete Seeger in a Skokie synagogue and Skip James in a Cambridge coffee house, and became familiar with Woody Guthrie through Folkways records.  I enjoyed his semi-autobiographical novel Bound for Glory in the Dolphin paperback with its quirky offhand drawings by the author and felt a moment of melancholy when now and then I saw a story about the singer’s physical decline and eventual death.  Yet I was entirely unaware of House of Earth which remained unpublished until 2013 [1].  

     I had known that Guthrie was a prolific writer, author not only of several thousand songs, but of a regular column in the People’s World, the West Coast sister publication of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, but House of Earth was a surprise to me. Unlikely as it seems, the book was published by Johnny Depp, who has convinced Harper Collins to make him editor of a new line named Infinitum Nihil after the actor’s production company [2].

     For more than fifty years Bound for Glory has taken a place on my shelves, not with twentieth century American literature, but in the folk/political area of the music books, near the Little Red Songbook of the I.W.W. and The Oxford Book of Ballads.  Guthrie’s importance in American popular music, his influence spreading though Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg, and others to the present day, seemed to me to outweigh his literary credentials.  His role in American politics, too, while righteous, was irrelevant to his admission to the slopes of Parnassus.  

     He did take some pains with his literary style.  Though he cultivated the image of a dispossessed and penniless Okie naïf, Guthrie had in fact been raised in a solidly middle-class home.  His father, rather like Ella May’s father, cast as a villain in House of Earth, was a successful businessman who bought distressed properties, owning at one time thirty pieces of land.  A power in local politics, he served as district county clerk and was said to have purchased the first automobile in Okemah.  He was, in addition, a racist and Ku Klux Klansman who participated in at least one lynching [3].  Furthermore, by the time he wrote Bound for Glory and, later, House of Earth, Guthrie had the aid of Marjorie Mazia, his wife from 1945-1953 and a principal dancer with Martha Graham’s company, a woman at home in New York City artistic circles.  So Woody, no less than his disciple Bob Dylan, cultivated a stage persona of a penniless and rootless wandering troubadour.

     The most prominent element of the character he played and, doubtless, paradoxically the most cultivated aspect of his writing style, is his use of dialect.  Guthrie himself embraced folk expressions and irregular usages as signs of authenticity indicating his membership in an idealized proletariat.  While the non-standard language of a writer like the Nigerian Amos Tutuola is natural, the reader has reason to suspect Guthrie of being self-consciously folksy to create his persona.  He criticized Steinbeck’s Okie speech in Grapes of Wrath [4], yet the reader from another time and place is hardly in a position to judge.  For both writers dialect builds an environment in which the rhetoric of the “uneducated” comes to seem standard and, instead of ignorance, is associated with experience, knowledge, and truth. 

     The second most prominent aspect of Guthrie’s style is its ebullience, extravagance, and plenitude.  He is given to catalogues and lists and what the Middle Ages would have called amplificatio, creating a sense of teeming life, carnivalesque richness of life celebrating itself.  The pattern was set already in Bound for Glory.

 

The white folks talked of this and that, hogs, horses, shoes, hats, whiskey, dances, women, politics, land, crops, weather and money . . . Kids of all three colors, and an occasional mixture of each, crawled, walked, run, chased loose chickens, took in after cur dogs, clumb poles, fell across wagon tongues, and slipped down on the sidewalk with a brand new pair of shoes on.  Ice cream cones was waving up and down the street.

                                (Bound for Glory Ch. V) 

 

In this passage the discussion topics are multiplied until all sense of a given focus is lost; the children are doing so many things that they are doing nothing in particular.  Rather than a concrete and specific scene, the reader is left with a vague impression of a maelstrom of action.  As here, though, while the world may seem a bit out of control, the predominant mood is clearly joyful affirmation.  The expenditure of energy even in privation, whether in work, struggle, or love-making, is redemptive, the only route to full humanity and an abundant experience of life.

     The extravagant rhetoric of Bound for Glory fills House of Earth as well. 

 

“Let it be rotten, Lady . . . Guess it’s got a right to be rotten is it wants to be rotten, Lady.  Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!  Look how many families of kids that little ole shack has suckled up from pups.  I’d be all rickety an’ bowlegged, an’ bent over, an’ sagged down, an’ petered out, an’ swayed in my middle, too, if I’d stood in one little spot like this little ole shack has, an’ stood there for fifty-one years.  Let it \rot!  Rot!  Fall down!  Sway in!  Keel over!  You little ole rotten piss soaked bastard, you!  Fall!” (13)

 

Here the six descriptive terms beginning with “rickety” puff up the passage without adding new information.  They do, however, convey Tike’s prodigious élan vital, his impatient ambition, his delight in food and sex and life.  The reader will little care whether anybody had ever actually said “Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!”  Such an expression is, perhaps, more effective for those who cannot judge its faithfulness to the actual spoken dialect.

     In several passages Guthrie lists brief phrases or single words to build a scene. 

 

Belly band.  Back band.  Neck yoke and collar.  Buckle it up.  Snap it down.  Carry it off and hang it up.  Smokehouse.  Woodshed.  Cow stall.  Manger.  Henhouse.  Big house.  Backhouse.  Cellar.  Tap.  Bolt.  Nut and screw.  Skinned knuckle.  Cut finger.  Burned arm.  Scalded shinbone.  Wheels.  Hubs.  Spokes.  Seat.  Brogans.  Clodhoppers.  Tit squeezers.  (106-107)

 

This passage ends with an elemental sexual image: “The penis of the stud slipping into the mare, and the sweaty hot open womb of the cow as she waited for the bull” (107), but the book’s erotic incidents are by no means limited to livestock.  An extended and explicit scene of joyful marital sexuality, of the sort that the author surely knew could not be published in 1947, occupies nearly half of the book’s first section “Dry Rosin.”  Love-making is a solace available to the poor without charge as well as a powerful way to give assent to life. 

     Why, then, am I placing House of Earth next to Bound for Glory instead of in the neighborhood of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Black Boy?  Because his subcultural vernacular seems more designed to bear the simple significance of uneducated country speech more than it casts new light though its folk poetry on what is being described and the lists of adjectives he piles upon each other never mean much more than the first one, Guthrie’s writing rarely escapes a sameness of tone.  It is an encouraging, inspiriting, optimistic tone, indeed, redolent of vitality and a joyful embrace of lived experience, but it is always much the same.  Indeed, for all his stress on hard times, Guthrie’s music and his prose are both quickened with a tireless optimism that turns a bit flat due to its unchanging tone, its being so insistently positive.  His friend Pete Seeger similarly could not open his mouth without seeming so cheery he approached dangerously close to sounding corny.  He and Woody both could sound child-like and funny and ever sanguine, they could manage to be a bit sentimental, but neither could approach tragedy, ambivalence, or complexity.  Perhaps this simplicity arose as a reflection of a dualistic political vision pitting virtuous workers against wicked capitalists, but what well serves a socio-political polemic is likely to fall short as art. 

     Woody Guthrie wrote our alternative national anthem in “This Land is Your Land” and national anthems have quite properly no place for ambiguity.  Apart from its reductive vision, which, while striving to capture lived experience in a torrent of words, in fact leaves out the difficult questions, the book has other faults.  While the child’s birth that ends the narrative appropriately marks a climax foregrounding the renewal and continuance of the cycle of life, it leaves unresolved other important issues of Tike and Ella May’s life: will they build an adobe house?  Will they ever manage to save some money?  Will they realize why they are exploited?  Furthermore, the repeated earlier references to a pain in Ella May’s breast are clearly meant to foreshadow a cancer diagnosis which never arrives.  Hod the book been publishable, an editor would never have permitted it to stand as it does.

     Yet we must be glad to have it, now available after decades in  manuscript.  Guthrie’s descriptions of nature, owing surely some debt to Steinbeck’s alternating chapters in Grapes of Wrath, are often lyrical and closely observed.  The book is largely dialogue and makes a very speedy read.  Guthrie manages in include as ornaments fragments of bluesy songs he loved.  I will thank Johnny Depp and Prof. Brinkley for bringing those who love Guthrie’s music and admire his politics another artifact of his fertile imagination.  For over fifty years KXQR in New York City has presented a folk music show called Woody’s Children, and, in a real sense, we are all Woody’s children.  With House of Earth many will come to know a bit more about the roots of contemporary American culture.

 

 

 

1.  Guthrie also wrote Seeds of Man which was published by E. P. Dutton in 1976.

 

2.  House of Earth is the imprint’s second publication, following The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan by Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.  Brinkley worked on House of Earth as well, and the laudatory introduction is credited to both Depp and Brinkley. 

 

3.  The 1911 murder of Laura and L. D. Nelson.

 

4.   Introduction to House of Earth, Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp, p. xxxi.

 

Note on another Dust Bowl novel

     I have only just learned of Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown, another treatment of the Depression era Dust Bowl by a native of the region with more reason even than Guthrie to know hard times there.  Like House of Earth, Babb’s novel was not published for decades.  According to Ed Vulliamy’s essay “The Vindication of Sanora Babb” in The New York Review of Books for August 19, 2021  Babb, like Guthrie, thought her depiction of the Okies was more realistic than Grapes of Wrath.  She also thought herself a “better writer” than Steinbeck, a claim Vulliamy finds dubious, though his comments on her work are generally laudatory.  For those interested in the era’s writing, Babb’s work (including her memoir An Owl on Every Post) seems required reading.