Carolyn's Tumblings

Oil!

Upton Sinclair, 1927

The novels, The Ford (Mary Austin, 1917), Oil! (Upton Sinclair, 1927) and In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck, 1936) make a sort of family (dare we say genealogy? I try to make it my business to know who Mary Austin read and corresponded with; it’s a little harder to know who read her.)

In some sense, Oil! Is one long, terribly drawn-out sacrifice of Paul Watkins, which will resonate with Jim in In Dubious Battle. The earliest parts of Oil! Are what remind me of The Ford, which focuses on the little folk — Ken is the son of the ordinary hard-working man, Anne is his sister. Both are good and brave folk. Anne loves Frank, the oil-baron’s son, and Ken idolizes the older boy from the next ranch. But it’s a tough friendship, particularly when naive Ken manages to tip Frank off to his own father’s business ideas, allowing Frank’s father to circumvent them. Oil somewhat inverts this relationship— young Bunny (James Arnold Ross, Jr.) loves Paul and is attracted to his politics, but nonetheless, it is Paul who tips Bunny (and thereby Bunny’s father) off to the presence of oil on the Watkins family ranch (in the soon-despoiled Paradise, California).

That difference in stance is an interesting one. Austin focuses on those who are run over by power (and we glimpse those who organize, too). Sinclair focuses on Bunny, who was born to wield power, but becomes a parlor Socialist and strives to identify with workers like Paul, whom we glimpse through Bunny’s admiration and concern. (The novel is every bit as much about the differences that arise between Socialism and Communism after the Russian Revolution as it is about oil). Steinbeck brings one closest to the strike by focusing on Jim as he does.

There’s the question of the proletarian novel. Encyclopedia Britannica has an article on the Proletarian Novel (Wikipedia doesn’t! Someone should get on that!) Anyway, Britannica cites Upton Sinclair as being a proletarian novelist. So we give Sinclair himself some working-class cred (despite the rich grandparents). And yes, Bunny (and the readers) are led to moments of what Professor Wald called ‘dereification’ – where the social system becomes legible. But Bunny is an oil prince. He dates a movie star (Vee Tracy) and drives the latest cars. Can the main character of a proletarian novel be a millionaire? The novel’s insistence on being about Bunny instead of Paul seems somehow an ideologically undermining indulgence in wish-fulfillment. I don’t toss that out as a charge of hypocracy or a critique, really – I just find it interesting, the way in which this fails to be proletarian. Or helps find the margins of the genre.

Love Medicine

I’m amazed. What a lovely book. I must read more of Erdrich. Just the first forty pages left me gasping, needing to put the book down and gather myself to read on – it demanded the respect of time to let it settle.

I rhapsodized about the way that Jones in The Known World manages to paint an entire county / community. Perhaps I should withold my amazement, a little – this buisiness of having multiple plots and main characters is a tradition that runs deep in the history of the novel (think Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life … Is that where the roots of it are?) … and, in any event, here we are within that tradition.  You could say that Erdrich has completed a sort of Study of Reservation life, using the people in the family tree below as a sort of microcosm of experience in a North Dakota community.

(I plan to scan said tree as soon as our big computer recovers from its latest hard-drive disaster)

Does blood-relation become an alternate kind of writing in this book? I was so interested in how this family tree was put together. There are other love affiars not represented here in dotted lines, like Albertine’s brief moment with the ill-fated Vietnam vet, Henry Lamartine Jr. No child results, so it doesn’t make the tree. By in large, the story follows the lines of kinship.

This is also a ghost-haunted book. (Put it next to Beloved, put it next to what?) Tempted to choose a main character, we might choose June, who dies, stepping out, over the snow towards home, in the first chapter. Mourning for her animates her husband, her niece, the son who never knew she was his mother. Nector Kashpaw makes a return, and we wonder if Henry Jr.’s drowned spirit can ever rest.

The Watch

Rick Bass, 1989
I’m rarely disappointed by recommendations from Jim Shepard, and this collection is no exception. It splits its time between Mississippi, Texas, Utah and Montana, and there’s often an oil well bubbling somewhere in the background. “Mexico,” “Juggernaut” and “Redfish” (the first, fifth, and tenth/last stories in the collection) revolve around an unnamed narrator and high-school friend Kirby (and Kirby’s wife Tricia).

These stories are everyday touched with just enough of the surreal or bizarre to make them utterly delicious. In “Mexico,” Kirby tries to grow a prize bass (named Shack) in his swimming pool; in “Choteau,” Galena Jim Ontz makes that name for himself by stealing a cement mixer and a great quantity of galena, and pouring his town crystalline blue sidewalks. In “The Watch,” an old man called Buzbee runs away from his son Hollingsworth, moves back into a town in the swamp abandoned by a yellow fever epidemic, and survives by wrestling alligators for food, evading Hollingsworth’s efforts to recapture him. It’s really fine work; I’d happily read more of Rick Bass.

"The Scarlet Plague"

Jack London, 1912  (etext here)

London sets his story in the 2070s, after a fast-acting plague has killed nearly all humans and left the remainder in a primitive, tribal state, but in some sense what he’s really doing is looking ahead 100 years to 2013, the year of that plague.  Through his narrator (Professor Smith / Granser) telling his grandsons of the last days of civilization, we learn that America in 2013 is run overtly by the “Board of Industrial Magnates,” with a similar group ruling the earth.  Smith is always calling men of the laboring classes “brutes” (varied with “grinning hairy apelike human brute) and is particularly horrified when the dainty, Magnate-class woman, Vesta Van Warden, winds up the cowering wife/”squaw” of her former chauffeur. Despite what one would presume to be the obvious advantages of working-class experience in a world returned to savagery, London’s portrayal of the working-class is not much better than Smith’s description — they are indeed acting brutish, rioting, looting and killing wantonly in the days of disorder after the arrival of the plague.

Asked by a grandson to explain how he made his living by merely talking, instead of gathering food, Smith says,

“Our food-getters were called Freemen. This was a joke. We of the ruling classes owned  all the land, all the machines, everything. These food-getters were our slaves. We took  almost all the food they got, and left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and get us more food—”

While London implicitly and explicitly condemns the ‘better sort’ of people for enslaving the workers, he also fails to allow them a glimmer of humanity.

In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a  race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon  us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us. And they destroyed themselves as well.

So London engages in this wild classism even as he critiques the socioeconomic system of his time which he expects to give rise to (or feels has already given rise to) conditions of wage slavery.  (That, I think, is a political reading that’s also a deconstructionist reading, pointing out how the text undoes its own binaries. Hmm.)

This is also a text that should be interesting as an allegory / set of symbols.  The fall of the last airships seems very important to Smith.  Smith’s identity of a university professor, and his colleagues’ failed attempt to lock out the troubles of the city by barricading themselves in the Chemisty building also seems to direct attention to what human knowleges or achievements avail.

London, I think, also expects a lot of mileage from the appearance of Grizzly bears, wolves, a Shetland pony, newly rugged domestic canines, sea lions and wild horses, as if the animals are supposed to carry a freight of meaning onto the scene.  Midway through his narration, Smith tells of thousands of wild horses in the valley of San Joaquin, and at the end of the tale,a small herd of wild horses appears on the beach.

There were at least twenty of them, young colts and yearlings and mares, led by a  beautiful stallion which stood in the foam at the edge of the surf, with arched neck and bright wild eyes, sniffing the salt air from off the sea.

“What is it?” Granser queried.

“Horses,” was the answer. “First time I ever seen ‘em on the beach. It’s the mountain  lions getting thicker and thicker and driving ‘em down.”

The low sun shot red shafts of light, fan-shaped, up from a cloud-tumbled horizon. And close at hand, in the white waste of shore-lashed waters, the sea-lions, bellowing their old primeval chant, hauled up out of the sea on the black rocks and fought and loved.

“Come on, Granser,” Edwin prompted. And old man and boy, skin-clad and barbaric, turned and went along the right of way into the forest in the wake of the goats.

The Violent Bear it Away

Flannery O’Connor, 1960

I’d wanted to get more thoughts together on this book, but this is what I have, so here goes:

Outside of Faulkner (and perhaps) a few fantasy novels, I’m not sure anyone writing in the 20thC can get you to believe in destiny quite the way that O’Connor gets you to in this book. I don’t know enough about what books you bring it into coversation with by using the term “southern gothic” to think through how useful the term might be.

I observed earlier this year in reading McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper how there seemed to be some sort of destiny / “murder will out” plot operational in the friendship of the young boy and his father’s killer, but that close-bending arc never closes: despite the eventual reappearance of the dead man’s body, the killer never knows who he killed, and the son never knows how his father died.

Outside of the southern-gothic box, you could put this o’connor book in contrast to the Heart is a Lonely Hunter, because, though both books are “southern women’s writing,” 20 years apart, they are constructed along quite different lines. McCullers’ ensemble cast is replaced by O’Connor’s family of four, plus a few more remembered and passed by the wayside. I was not surprised to learn that the first chapter was published in 1955 as a short story, “You can’t be any poorer than dead.” (It would be a long short story — It’s 50 pages in my edition!) — that first portion had a self-contained quality, and in general, the cast of characters and structural arc of the entire book is clean in the ways that the plotline of a short story is clean. It’s a testament to how far you can get with minimalism in that regard.

Characters:

Francis Marion Tarwater. The boy raised to be a prophet

Rayber. Tarwater’s town-dwelling, secular, school-teacher uncle.

Bishop. Rayber’s son; Tarwater’s cousin, who Mason fails to baptize.

Mason Tarwater. The great-uncle of Tarwater and Bishop and the uncle of Rayber. The prophet who raises Tarwater in a clearing called Powderhead.