House of Earth (4 page)

There is an almost biblical sense of trials and tribulations in the obstacles Guthrie would confront in California. Like all the other migrants on Highway 66, he always felt starvation banging on his rib cage. From time to time, he pawned his guitar to buy food. Like the photographer Dorothea Lange, he visited farm camps in California's San Joaquin Valley, stunned to see so many children suffering from malnutrition. But then Guthrie's big break came when he landed a job as an entertainer on KFVD radio in Los Angeles, singing “old-time” traditional songs with his partner Maxine Crissman (“Lefty Lou from Mizzou”). His hillbilly demeanor was affecting, and the local airwaves allowed Guthrie to reach fellow workers in migrant camps with his nostalgic songs about life in Oklahoma and Texas. For a while, he broadcast out of the XELO studio from Villa Acuña in the Mexican state of Coahuila; the station's
powerful signal went all over the American Midwest and Canada, unimpeded by topography and unfettered by FCC regulations.

Many radio station owners wanted Guthrie to be a smooth cowboy swing crooner like Bob Wills (“My Adobe Hacienda”) and Gene Autry (“Back in the Saddle Again”). Guthrie, however, had developed a different strategy for folksinging that he clung to uncompromisingly. “I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good,” he explained. “I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that … songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.”

When Guthrie became a “hobo reporter” for
The Light
in 1938, he traveled extensively, reporting on the 1.25 million displaced Americans of the late 1930s. The squalor of the migrant camps angered him. He kept wishing the poor could live in adobe homes. “People living hungrier than rats and dirtier than dogs,” Guthrie wrote, “in the land of sun and a valley of night.” Guthrie came to understand that, contrary to myth, these so-called Dust Bowl refugees hadn't been chased out of Texas by dusters; nor had they been made obsolete by large farm tractors. They were victims of banks and landlords who had evicted them simply
for reasons of greed. These money-grubbers wanted to evict tenant farmers in order to turn a patchwork quilt of little farms into huge cattle conglomerates, and they thereby forced rural folks into poverty. During his travels around California, Guthrie saw migrants living in cardboard boxes, mildewed tents, filthy huts, and orange-crate shanties. Every flimsy structure known to mankind had been built, but adobe homes were nowhere to be found. This rankled Guthrie boundlessly. What would Jesus Christ think of these predatory money changers destroying the family farms of America and forcing good folks to live in wretched lean-tos? “For every farmer who was dusted out or tractored out,” Guthrie said, “another ten were chased out by bankers.”

The Franklin Roosevelt administration tried to help poor farmers through the federal Resettlement Administration (the successor to the Farm Security Administration, famous for collaborating with such artists as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Pare Lorentz) by issuing grants of ten to forty-five dollars a month to the down-and-out; farmers would line up at the Resettlement Administration offices for these grants. President Roosevelt also aimed to help farmers like the Hamlins by ordering the US Forest Service to plant millions of acres of trees and shrubs on farms to serve as shelterbelts (and reduce wind erosion) and by having the Department of Agriculture start digging lakes in Oklahoma and Texas to provide irrigation for the dry iron grass. These
noble New Deal efforts helped but didn't completely solve the crisis.

The legend of Guthrie as a folksinger is etched in the collective consciousness of America. Compositions like “Deportee,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” became national treasures, like Benjamin Franklin's
Poor Richard's Almanack
and Mark Twain's
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. With the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists” emblazoned on his guitar, Guthrie tramped around the country, a self-styled cowboy-hobo and jack-of-all-trades championing the underdog in his proletarian lyrics. When Guthrie heard Irving Berlin's “God Bless America” sung by Kate Smith ad nauseam in 1939, on radio stations from coast to coast, he decided to strike out against the lyrical rot and false comfort of the patriotic song. Holed up in Hanover House—a low-rent hotel on the corner of Forty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue—Guthrie wrote a rebuttal to “God Bless America” on February 23, 1940. He originally titled the song “God Blessed America” but eventually settled on “This Land Is Your Land.” Because Guthrie saved thousands of his song lyrics in first and final drafts, we're lucky to still have the fourth and sixth verses of the ballad, pertaining to class inequality:

Guthrie signed the lyric sheet, “All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.” (During that week in Hanover House, the hyperproductive Guthrie also wrote “The Government Road,” “Dirty Overhalls,” “Will Rogers Highway,” and “Hangknot Slipknot.”)

Over the decades, “This Land Is Your Land” has become more a populist manifesto than a popular song. It's Guthrie's “The Times They Are a-Changin',” a call to arms. There is a hymnlike simplicity to Woody's signature tune. The lyric is clear and focused. Woody's art always reflected his political leanings, but that was all part of his
esprit
. He wasn't, in the end, a persona. What you heard was real as rain. There was no separation between song and singer.

Everything about a Guthrie song accentuated the positive in people struggling against all odds. He would trumpet hope at every turn. He even once referred to himself as a
“hoping machine,” in a letter when he was courting a future wife. Guthrie sought to empower those who had nothing, to uplift those who had lost everything in the Great Depression, and to comfort those who found themselves repeatedly at the mercy of Mother Nature. He could not help raging at the swinish injustice of it all, in the two fierce verses in “This Land Is Your Land” that slammed private property and food shortages—verses that were lost during the period of McCarthy's “red scare.” A relatively unknown, but very important, verse—“Nobody living can ever stop me … Nobody living can ever make me turn back”—challenges the agents of the authoritarian state who prevent free access to the land that was “made for you and me.” Reading all the verses now, one is impressed by Guthrie's ability to elucidate such simple, brutal truths in such resolute words.

In many ways,
House of Earth
—originally handwritten in a steno notebook and then typed by Guthrie himself—is a companion piece to “This Land Is Your Land.” It's another not-so-subtle paean to the plight of Everyman. After all, in a socialist utopia, once a Great Plains family acquired land, it would need to build a sturdy domicile on the property. The novel is therefore pitched somewhere between rural realism and proletarian protest, with a static narrative but a lovely portrait of the Panhandle and the marginalized people who made a life there in the 1930s. It's Guthrie addressing the elemental question of how a sharecropper couple, field hands, could best live in a Dust Bowl–prone West Texas. Trapped in adverse economic conditions,
unable to pay their bills or earn anything more than a subsistence wage, Guthrie's main characters dream of a better way. Tike Hamlin—like Guthrie himself—wants to build an adobe home for his family. Wherever Guthrie went, no matter the day or time, he talked about someday having his own adobe home. “I am stubborn as the devil, want to built it my own self,” Guthrie wrote to a friend in 1947, “with my own hands and my own labors out of pisse de terra sod, soil, and rock and clay.”

Before writing
House of Earth
, he had composed his autobiography,
Bound for Glory
, in the early 1940s. In that work, Guthrie proved to be a genius at capturing the rural Texas-Oklahoma dialect in realistic prose. Somehow he managed to straddle the line between “outsider” folk art and “insider” high art.
Bound for Glory—
which was made into a motion picture in 1976—is an impressive first try from an amateur inspired by native radicalism. Guthrie's great accomplishment was that his sui generis singing voice, his trademark, prospered in his prose.

Another book of Guthrie's,
Seeds of Man
—about a silver mine around Big Bend National Park in Texas—was largely a memoir, though fictionalized in parts. There is an authenticity about this book that was—and still is—ennobling. He saw his next prose project—
House of Earth
—as a heartfelt paean to rural poverty. (Just a month after Guthrie had written “This Land Is Your Land,” he played the guitar and regaled his audience with stories about hard times in the Dust Bowl at a now legendary
benefit for migrant workers hosted by the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization.)

What Guthrie wanted to explore in
House of Earth
was how places like Pampa could be something more than tumbleweed ghost towns, how sharecropping families could put down permanent roots in West Texas. He wanted to tackle such topics as overgrazing and the ecological threats inherent in fragmenting native habitats. He elucidated the need for class warfare in rural Texas, for a pitchfork rebellion of the 99 percent working folks against the 1 percent financiers. His outlook was socialistic. (Bricks to all landlords! Bankruptcy to all timber dealers! Curses on real estate maggots glutting themselves on the poor!) And he unapologetically announces that being a farmer is God's highest calling.

One of the main attractions of Guthrie's writing—and of
House of Earth
in particular—is our awareness that the author has personally experienced the privations he describes. Yet this is different from pure autobiography. Guthrie gets to the essence of poor folks without looking down on them from a higher perch like James Agee or Jacob Riis. His gritty realism is communal, expressing oneness with the subjects. The Hamlins, it seems, have more in common with the pioneers of the Oregon Trail than with a modern-day couple sleeping on rollout beds in Amarillo during the Internet age. Objects such as cowbells, oil stoves, flickering lamps, and orange-crate shelves speak of a bygone era when electricity hadn't yet made it to rural America. But while
the atmosphere of
House of Earth
places the novel firmly in the Great Depression, the themes that Guthrie ponders—misery, worry, tears, fun, and lonesomeness—are as old as human history. Guthrie's aim is to remind readers that they are merely specks of dust in the long march forward from the days of the cavemen.

The Hamlins have a hard life in a flimsy wooden shack, yet exist with extreme (and emotionally fraught) vitality. The reader learns at the outset that their home is not up to the function of keeping out the elements. So Tike starts exasperatedly espousing the idealistic gospel of adobe. On the farm, life persists, and the reader is treated to an extended, earthy lovemaking scene. This intimate description serves a purpose: Guthrie elevates the biological act to a representation of Tike and Ella May's oneness with the land, the farm, and each other. And yet, the land is not the Hamlins' to do with as they please—and so the building of their adobe house remains painfully out of reach. The narrative then concerns itself with domestic interactions between Tike and Ella May. Despite their great energy and playfulness, dissatisfaction wells up in them. In the closing scenes, in which Ella May gives birth, we learn more about their financial woes and how tenant farmers lived on tenterhooks during the Great Depression when they had no property rights.

When the folklorist Alan Lomax read the first chapter of
House of Earth
(“Dry Rosin”), he was bowled over, amazed at how Guthrie expressed the emotions of the downtrodden with such realism and dignity. For months Lomax encouraged Guthrie to finish the book, saying that he'd “considered dropping everything I was doing” just to sell the novel. “It was quite simply,” Lomax wrote, “the best material I'd ever seen written about that section of the country.”
House of Earth
demonstrates that Guthrie's social conscience is comparable to Steinbeck's and that Guthrie, like D. H. Lawrence in
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, was willing to explore raw sexuality.

Guthrie apparently never showed Lomax the other three chapters of the novel: “Termites,” “Auction Block,” and “Hammer Ring.” His hopes for
House of Earth
lay in Hollywood. He mailed the finished manuscript to the filmmaker Irving Lerner, who had worked on such socially conscious documentaries as
One Third of a Nation
(1939),
Valley Town
(1940), and
The Land
(1941). Guthrie hoped that Lerner would make the novel into a low-budget feature film. This never came to pass. The book languished in obscurity. Only quite recently, when the University of Tulsa started assembling a Woody Guthrie collection, did
House of Earth
reemerge into the light. The Lerner estate had found the treasure when organizing its own archives in
Los Angeles. The manuscript and a cache of letters written by Guthrie and Lerner to each other were promptly shipped to Tulsa's McFarlin Library for permanent housing. Coincidentally, while hunting down information about Bob Dylan for a
Rolling Stone
project, we stumbled on the novel. Like Lomax, we grew determined to have
House of Earth
published properly by a New York house, as Guthrie surely would have wanted.