I can’t help feeling a certain amount of mistrust when I see In Search of America in a book title. It’s a phrase that’s pompous in its humility. The author poses as one looking for something without certainty about its nature or whereabouts, but that something is so large in scope that the search seems more an act of hubris than humility. John Steinbeck took as his subtitle for Travels with Charley and in 2002, ABC anchorman Peter Jennings took it as the title for a post-9/11 coffee table book intended to instill a common feeling for truth, justice, and the American way — or at least the comfortable patriotism of posting a flag by your front door.
In Nathan Asch’s case, the humility outweighs the hubris. He spent four months in 1936 traveling around the U.S. by bus because it was cheap and because he found traveling by car too isolating and traveling by train too constrained. The buses and roads of 1930s America were not comfortable. “Everything the huge wheels meet upon the road is transferred, is applied to the sitting body, and you vibrate and shake…you feel the road.”
The son of Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch, Nathan Asch was a left-leaning novelist and journalist who decided to take to the road with fairly vague goals. In part, he admits, he wanted to escape from a novel he’d been struggling to write — he never did publish another novel after The Valley (1935). But he also sensed that after over five years of the Depression, his country was harboring wounds deeper than any individual newspaper or magazine story could touch on.
He begins by heading south from Washington, D.C., knowing he would encounter racism and poverty, but at his first stop, in the tobacco capital, Winston-Salem, N.C., he finds it hard to penetrate the opaque barrier of Southern hospitality. The residents of the lodging house where he stays welcome him warmly. The old man in the room across the hall invites him in for a glass of bourbon. Asch remains, however, an outsider kept away from the people and places he’s most interested in. “Where did I get the impudence to thing that I could learn something about America in four months?” he wonders.
In Memphis, though, his skin color gains him entrance to an all-black burlesque show performed for an all-white audience. As the chorus girls perform their routine, a loud voice behind him yells, “Oh, the pretty baboons!” The force of that undisguised racism stuns him:
So humanity had yearned, and Christ had died, and men had suffered tortures, so that a drunken man could call a negro girl a pretty baboon. It didn’t matter whether I wrote a book or not. Nothing mattered except to take a gun and to kill someone.
He continues on to the small Arkansas town of Marked Tree, the site of a strike by tenant farmers against the local cotton growers. There, racism is reinforced by long-standing economic barriers. The growers, the local businessmen, indeed all the white townspeople resent the presumption of the tenant farmers to demand better conditions. “All the ills that had befallen the South were the fault of the tenants. The price of cotton was too low, the roads were bad, business was slow, girls couldn’t get married because the tenant farmer was lazy, born lazy, improvident, and shiftless” — regardless of race.
Asch spends a night in a black sharecropper’s house — though an oversized fruit crate would be a more accurate description. “There were no beds, no table, no dresser, no chairs, no mirror, no closet, no clothes.” Wind and rain blow in through gaps in all four walls and the ceiling. “I don’t see how you people can live,” he says to the farmer. “We don’t live here,” the man replies. “We’re just here.”
Moving on to Oklahoma, he enters the Dust Bowl, where he remains for the next three weeks, until he reaches the Rockies. “Everything I thought was complicated by the thought of dust; in everything I ate I tasted dust. It was the last thing before I fell asleep, and the first thing with consciousness at waking.”
More than anything, The Road is a powerful catalog of the devastation wrought by the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the opposition to labor organization in 1930s America. Asch meets Mexican farm workers being threatened with deportation if they refuse to accept wages lower than the year before, living in crate camps with no water or sanitation. An acquaintance in San Francisco invites him to a party where everyone turns out to be living on relief.
He joins a lumber crew in the Cascades outside Tacoma and listens to a union organizer who sneaks in and out of the bunkhouse after dark to avoid getting beaten up by the company goons patrolling the camp. He’s warned not to enter the town where the Grand Coulee Dam is being built because “They hate people who wear white collars. They think nothing of smashing you in the jaw or stabbing you.”
He stops in Butte, “a slowly dying city” due to the collapse of the copper mining industry. There, he sees the undisguised hostility of Gilded Age capitalism to the working class as anything but labor:
Human? That word meant nothing in Butte. The company that took copper from underneath the city, that held that city in the palm of its hand, and whenever it wished to tightened the fingers of its hand and squeezed that city, the company that employed Zorn’s father and paid out the wages that bought the milk the child Zorn drank, the company the actions of which had moulded Zorn’s character, as were moulded the characters of everyone else in Butte, that company had a director, and the director said, “We’re not interested in the human element.”
What Asch saw throughout America, he thought, “Was not defeat; it was want that was fought and struggled with daily.” Although he hopes that “some day it would by all of them be fought together and vanquished,” his hopes are utterly vague. He offers no suggestion or hint of how. Alvah Bessie lambasted Asch for this in his New Masses review: “It is not enough to say, merely by implication, ‘This is rotten.’ The time has come for us to say forthright: ‘This is rotten and we will change it!'” Even the New York Times criticized this, if in more moderate terms, calling the book “exceptional as a record and sadly banal in its conclusions.”
The Road is a kaleidoscope of woes rather than a mosaic. Its structure is geographic and chronological. We start with Asch in Washington, D.C. and end with him when he returns to his home in New York City, but it’s more accurate to say the book stops than that it ends. The Times reviewer was exaggerating in saying that the book has conclusions. In the last sentence, Asch spies the New York skyline as his bus slips into the Holland Tunnel.
Though he served as a reporter with the military’s Stars and Strips newspaper during World War Two and later taught writing in Marin County in the 1950s, Nathan Asch never published another book after The Road. He may have inherited enough money from his father to make the work unnecessary, but there are times in The Road where we get the sense that we are reading the words of a writer who’s exhausted, too overwhelmed by all he has seen to shape his material into a design, to attempt anything more than collecting his notes.
But Asch was not alone in that regard. When the English writer Ethel Mannin reached New York after her own bus trip around the United States in 1966, described in An American Journey (now reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press), she looked ahead to the departure of her ship back to England and wrote, “I wanted to be gone.” Perhaps this is how America rewards those who attempt to go in search of her.
thanks
Oh, this sounds too interesting indeed. I wonder how it compares to Henry Miller’s “Air-conditioned Nightmare” from 1939.