Tony Baer wrote to share his enthusiasm about Meridel Le Sueuer’s novel The Girl:
Small town Minnesota farm girl moves to the big city of Minneapolis/St. Paul in the depths of the 1930’s Depression. The girl works in a speakeasy, lives with a prostitute, and falls in love with one of the more handsome petty criminals. He gets her pregnant, she refuses to have an abortion. She then agrees to be the wheelman for a bank robbery. The robbery fails, with enough blood and guts spilled to leave her alone and having to fend for herself and her unborn child in a dark cold world.
The book is not a complete success as momentum slows significantly after the ramp up to the bank robbery.
But the words ring true, full of a poetic oral realism of the era.
At the time she wrote the book, Le Sueur was a member of the Communist Party. But the book didn’t find a publisher until the 1970s, when John Crawford, who had started a new publishing house, the West End Press, got Le Sueur’s consent to rifle thru her basement for musty treasures.
When Le Sueur had tried to get left-wing publishers interested in the book back in the 1930s, they didn’t like it. It showed “lumpen tendencies,” portrayed “degenerates” rather than “virtuous Communist women,” had too much cursing and sex, used the Lord’s name in vain, was “defeatist in attitude” and “lacked revolutionary spirit and direction.” In other words, it was true.
She was then blacklisted in the 40-50’s, unrepentant before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
Not Communist enough for the left, too communist for the right.
The Girl was written by splicing together a number of oral histories from different women who participated in a workers’ alliance writing group in the 30’s, sharing their personal stories with Le Sueur. She took one piece from a bank robbing wheel(wo)man, one piece from a bootleg shootout widow, one piece from a girl birthing a child after escaping an asylum, and so on.
“Some samples of the prose, which, once again, I really dug”:
“Better be hiding, I said, better be running, better be on the lam, better fade away. Yeah, he said, better not be seen, and I saw his terrible eyes looking, shaking like dice–snake-eyes.”
“Ganz suddenly brough his huge mutilated hand back and struck me full in the face. I fell down, I thought, forever, into the dark earth. I thought the light would never be so bright again.”
“But keep your mouth buttoned up, he said to me. You keep yours, I said. And I ran out and down the stairs, past the clerk at the desk, and into the street, and I looked back and saw all the windows behind me brightly lighted and the smooth furniture inside and the nice beds. I always wanted to see what they did in there. Now I knew. I ran into the park and I touched the trees and I leaned down and picked up some dirt and ate it. It tasted bitter…..And I kept walking and looking at men and now I knew something. This is what happened. Now I knew it. I was going to know more. Nobody knew anything that didn’t do it. Down below you know everything and there are some things you can never tell, never speak of, but they move inside you like yeast.”
“You can’t sit in a barroom alone after it’s quiet. I got desires now, wild, like the dark sweet fruit of the night that breaks on your tongue. How can you sit down now in any room, and mend your stockings and polish your nails and maybe think about your mother, with your flesh like the wild breaking of spring, like a tree after a storm, weighted to the ground and rainwater in your throat and your hair springing wild out of your skull and the strong root terrible in the earth with bitter strength?”
West End Press published three editions of The Girl, first in 1978, then in a revised edition in 1990, and a third in 2006 after the University of New Mexico Press had picked up the West End Press catalogue. Sadly, the only books by Meridel Le Sueur that appear to be in print now are the two from the UNM Press: The Girl and I Hear Men Talking, a collection of her short stories.