watched the lucky players at the table, or standing,
faces
shaved, intently listening to the union organizer, or lying on
their own beds trying to forget in an adventure magazine
the yearning to be home with family and kids, they had also
been alike, all workers-like
a crowd of business people
returning at six in the evening on the Jersey ferry, row after
row of straw hats, white collars, brown oxfords and the
evening papers folded to the sporting page, and expression-
less faces. These also seemed alike: you could not tell an
insurance man from a ledger clerk. But when Number 110
arrived and they jumped off the coach and walked toward
the steam engines, fired since 4 :30 by the watchmen,
as,
saws dangling, they stepped on the fallen trees to get down
to the places where the tall trees stilI stood, their resemblance
vanished. At work, each man seemed a specialist, and his
clothes showed his work. The mechanic was filthy with oil;
the loader wore gloves, and the pants of his overalls were
rolled up for ease; the fallers showed always sawdust in
their seams. When twelve o'clock came, they knocked off
for an hour, and each sat in the place he worked and opened
his lunch box, then having eaten lay back where he sat and
dozed off for a minute, or just looked at the sky. Then back
to work until they heard Number 110 coming down the
grade.
From Monday till Friday, each day was the same; they
cursed the time-keeper and the purchasing agent, they ragged
and pestered the bull cook-it
almost seemed as if this inof-
fensive fat man who made their beds and swept their floors,
had been put there to deflect their anger at those they really
wanted to hate. And I wondered why they hated these men
so; why they never spoke of the men in the Tacoma offices
without tightening their jaws and narrowing their eyes.
But I saw them also when they didn't work. They had a
five-day week, and Friday night the camp would be empty;
they would be with their families or dead drunk in a hotel
with a two-dollar whore; or they would be laid off, on the
skid road in Tacoma, in Seattle, in Spokane.
I saw these towns at the height of the season, when mil-
lions of feet of rough lumber were shipped every day to
Japan, to the South Seas, to South America, to Europe; when
other millions of feet were cut into planks and made into
chairs and sent to every town in the Union; when lumber
companies operated at capacities-and stilI the skid road in
Seattle was black with unemployed loggers; on relief, on the
soup line, in shelters. I saw the pitiful dime shows, where
not only ancient pictures were shown, but the piano played,
and a line of unbeautiful
girls, dressed in dirty rompers,
kicked their ungraceful
legs not very high. And the men
didn't watch them. Their eyes were not alive. They slept,
or if they didn't sleep, their minds were fogged with hunger,
no home, nothing to live for, no tomorrow to expect.
It wasn't the purchasing agent the men hated so much. It
was the fact that the pay was small and the week had been
shortened to five working days and the season was short, only
a few months, and the,e were too many loggers for the work
to be done and there was no other work to be done; and
they hated the fact that for the moment they were working,
were eating, were sleeping in beds; but soon, as inexorably as
death, a notice would come from the Tacoma office through
the purchasing agent, through the timekeeper, that the season
was ended, that they were to be laid off, that they had better
prepare for the Seattle skidroad.
NATHAN ASCH
PARTISAN
REVIEW
THEATRE
CHRONICLE
I THINK that Ignazio Silone's
Fontamara-along
with
works like Malraux's
Man's Fate
and Celine's
Journey to
the End of Night-is
one of the most important European
novels to be translated during these last few years. Both in
his novel, and in
Mr. Aristotle,
a volume of short stories,
Silone has written of the more backward sections of the
Italian peasantry. He has conveyed a sense of the lives, the
consciousness, the wit of these people. Additionally he has
unfolded how they become the pawns of a social system, and
this he does without violating the sense of character and of
the human destinies that he is describing. There are few
books that I know of which can rival
Fontamara
for the
picture of Fascism at work that it contains. It is quite con-
vincingly a presentation of a section of Mussolini's Italy.
Also, it includes a description of black shirts that cries aloud
for quotation: "Some of these men in black shirts ...
they
had been obliged to come out at night to keep their courage
up. Most of them were stinking with wine and if you looked
at them from close to, right square in their eyes, they could
not face your gaze. They were poor men too. But they were
a special class of the poor, without land, with no trade or
with many trades-which is the same thing-all
rebels
against hard work ....
Too feeble and cowardly to rebel
against the wealthy and those in authority, they preferred to
serve them, so as to have free license to rob and oppress other
poor people, farmers, squatters and little landholders. When
encountered by day on the street they were humble and ob-
sequious; in a gang at night they were malicious and bad.
They had always been at the beck of the man on top and
they always would be. But their enrollment in a special army
with special insignia and a special brand of weapons was a
novelty of the last few years.
"These are the so-called fascisti."
The Theatre Union presented, as its final offering of the
season, Mr. Victor Wolfson's dramatization of
Fontamara
under the title of
Bitter Stream.
The play follows essentially
the same pattern as the novel and one summary suffices for
both works.
The Fontamarans are peasants who have always been
burdened by taxes, exploited by landlords, forced to live on
a subsistence level. Previously however, they have had one
hope-the possibility of emigration. New restrictions and the
advent of Fascism have robbel them of all hope of
escaoe and betterment.
In addition their taxes have been so
incr~ased that there is almost nothing else of theirs left to
be taxed. A new Promoter has come into the section of the
country.
In the national interest,
he is grabbing up every-
thing, not only from the poor Fontamarans,
but also from
the rich.
The Fontamarans revolt. One of their number is Viola
Berardo, landless and leader of the younger elements of the
community.
He meets the Unknown Hand, a leader and
agitator of the underground revolutionary movement. While
both of them are in jail, the Unknown Hand explains the
purposes and the aims of the movement. Viola confesses that
he is the Unknown Hand. and the real agitator goes free to
continue his work. Inspired by Viola Berardo's example and
martyrdom,
the Fontamarans issue a newspaper for farmers
25
