72
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Everything I'd been told was wrong. That I see with my own eyes. I'd
been told, I'd been assured that it was a strive and succeed world. What
you did: you got yourself an education and a degree and then you went
to work for a family newspaper and then you married a nice girl and
raised children and this was what America was. But this was not what
America was. America was not socialized and I resented very deeply that
I'd been lied to." Certainly, Algren in his tough-guy manner may have
romanticized his life on the road, like Jack London several decades ear–
lier. Because it was based on experience, not formula, it became a truer
kind of discovery than the contrived conversions we find in the strike
novels.
The empathetic writer, burdened by middle-class guilt, was invariably
radicalized by what he saw on the road, by his exposure to so many
marginal and miserable people, the detritus of the American dream.
While few women took to the road like Algren, they often had similar
experiences in bread lines, on picket lines, or among the homeless. They
got involved in the labor wars, witnessing factory lockouts and seeing
goons beating up strikers to prevent unions from organizing. Writers
moved back and forth between journalism and fiction or poetry.
Steinbeck's
Grapes
if
Wrath
emerged directly out of the wrenching arti–
cles he wrote for
The Nation
and the
San Francisco News
about the con–
ditions of migrant labor. Often the writer became a Communist, or
worked with the Communists, not because he or she was strongly politi–
cal but simply because the Communists, especially at the local level,
seemed the most committed to changing society and helping those at the
bottom.
Writing ·in the thirties was in many ways an experiment in down–
ward mobility. Only a few of the 'proletarian' authors, such as Jack
Conroy and Tillie Olsen, actually came from the working class. Other
felt ashamed of their own background and upbringing. Still others (like
Algren) may have been seeking adventure and risk, in the style of
Hemingway - then writing about it, also in Hemingway's style. (A num–
ber of writers followed Hemingway to Spain after 1936.) Though many
middle-class or ethnic authors and filmmakers grew up in circumstances
that were but one step above poverty, their education alone vaulted
them into the ranks of the privileged. Yet many sloughed off the com–
forts of the middle class, for a time at least, to explore a way of life that
seemed more emblematic of Depression America. In his book on the
thirties,
Part of Our Time,
Murray Kempton pays tribute to "plebeian"
writers like Farrell who came from the lower middle class but carried the
freight of early poverty through their whole writing lives. He cites an
