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 Yet I was entirely unaware of House of Earth which remained unpublished until 2013 [1].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.
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