Crane's poems express enthusiasm for bridges, highways, the "Twentieth-Century Limited," the Wright brothers and the dirigible, and the subway. For Tate, the subway seems a place for religious contemplation. In Aiken's poem, taxis intrude on solitude, while Lowell gives a vision of the city from within a taxi cab. Toomer presents trains and cars as pushing hard against African-Americans, while Thurber sees them as sources of humorous confusion, both in New York city and Columbus, Ohio. cummings' wit links a new car with a sexual fantasy. Fitzgerald sets a tragic, fatal automobile accident in the midst of New York's various commuter Systems, and contrasts that waste land with a recuperative train ride back to the middle west. Lewis's Babbitt also depicts long-distance train travel to the East and then back to Minnesota, while the novel explains how courtship in a midwestern city has changed with the automobile. One of Lewis' stories goes to comic lengths about the logistics of driving from Minnesota to North Dakota. Dreiser points to the very end of the horse-drawn era in Kansas City and upstate New York, with young men (and women) driving on joy rides and to dances; the plot turns partly on the logistics of train travel among small, New York towns. Cather portrays of an older midwesterner who is little touched by the automobile age around him. Jeffers shows part of rural California which still depends on horse-drawn vehicles, while Faulkner dramatizes an epic wagon ride across Mississippi. Wolfe describes the intrusion of the auto into North Carolina.
African-American perspectives in the rural South are given by several writers. Brown writes of chain gangs, the lure of riding trains to unknown destinations, and the status of automobile ownership. In one story Hurston shows a town in Florida where the poor can only watch trains with wonder as they go by; in another, the horse and buckboard are being replaced by the automobile. Hughes' poems also give snapshots of rail travel out of the South and the homesickness which ensues, the porter's life, along with several scenes about the excitement of cars and subways in New York's Harlem. A chapter by Morrison presents another example of segregation on the trains, in the North but more viciously in the South.
Hemingway develops symbolic events around Americans in Parisian taxis, and in Spanish trains and busses. Cather depicts an elderly lady in a bumpy limousine ride in France. Hemingway's stories include African safaris by auto, one with a too-late rescue attempt by airplane, as well as several centering around post-War train travel and taxi rides in the Midwest, and some peculiarities of auto travel in Mussolini's Italy, and of train rides on the Continent.
Author: Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Title: "The Bridge" In The Complete Poems of Hart Crane
Date: 1933 Written: 1926-1930
Systems: Roadway (Brooklyn Bridge), airplane, clipper ship, subway
Context: Contemporary, New York city
"Macadam, gun grey as the tunny's [tuna's] belt, / Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate.… / Keep hold of that nickel for car-change, Rip, - / Have you got your 'Times'?" Crane's poem on Brooklyn Bridge involves a series of visions which celebrate the national Systems of communication and transportation that the modern Rip Van Winkle is waking up to: "a Ediford - and whistling down the tracks / a headlight rushing with the sound - can you / imagine - while an EXpress makes time like / SCIENCE - COMMERCE AND THE HOLYGHOST / RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME…" It is a "world of whistles, wires and steam"
The sounds of the harbor, when "winch engines begin throbbing on some deck," show the new world's vitality. From his vantage point under the arches of the Bridge he sees roads "Down Wall [Street], from girder into street leaks, / A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene; / All afternoon the cloud-down derricks turn…. / Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still."
At the Mississippi river, "So the 20th Century - so / whizzed the Limited - roared by and left / three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly / watching the tail lights wizen and converge slip- / ping gimleted and neatly out of sight." The "rail-squatters" and "hobo-trekkers" hang around behind his father's cannery, hopping the freights, while "Pullman breakfasters glide glistening steel / From tunnel into field - iron strides the dew - " ("The River"). These scenes have replaced Indiana's "dim turnpike to the river's edge," as the modern harbor has replaced the clipper-ship days, which an old sailor recalls: "Perennial-Cutty-trophied-Sark!" He also recalls building the Panama Canal where he ran a "donkey engine" ("Cutty Sark").
Crane is also excited by the airplane, "Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!" The "Wright worldwrestlers veered / Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun / What ciphers risen from the prophetic script." Further, "Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-steel hangars. / Taught motors surge, space gnawing, into flight / Through sparkling visibility, outspreading, unsleeping, / Wings clip the last peripheries of light…" He even appreciates the Zeppelin, "While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger / Of pendulous auroral beaches, - satellited wide / By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee." As these "vast engines… on clarion cylinders pass out of sight," Hart sees a new version of Whitman's Open Road ("Cape Hatteras").
"The Tunnel" takes us to the subway, "Performances, assortments, résumés - / Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights / Channel the congresses, nightly sessions, / Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces - " The circle and the square images resonate throughout the poem, as does the concept of time and the figure of Christopher Columbus. "The subway yawns the quickest promise home," but one must "Avoid the glass doors gyring at your right." The underworld has its ugly side: "The phonographs of hades in the brain / Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love / A burnt match skating in a urinal - " After the change at Chambers Street, "The platform hurries along to a dead stop." Overhead while under the river, the tugboat goes with "wheezing wreaths of steam."
Few poets of this century are so clearly enthusiastic and lyrical about urban life.
Edition used: Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1958.
Author: Allen Tate (b. 1899)
Title: "Subway"
Date: 1928
Systems: Subway
Context: Contemporary, New York City
The short poem treats the "geometries" of the subway as it goes "down the successive knell / Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red / Reverberance." The image links the tunnel to a Gothic cathedral, and its religious message becomes a "musical steel shell / Of angry worship." The speaker is "tangential of your steel" as he stands in the car while contemplating how "the worldless heavens bulge and reel." The subway becomes a sanctuary where one can think about the spiritual world.
Edition used: Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis. Introduction to Literature: Poems, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Author: Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)
Title: "Cloister" In Preludes for Memnon
Date: 1930, 1931
Systems: Taxi
Context: Contemporary
In describing an apartment refuge, Aiken says, "The door is closed: The furies of the city howl behind you: The last bell plunges rock-like to the sea: The horns of taxis wail in vain."
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950).
Author: Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Title: "The Taxi"
Date:
Systems: Taxi
Context: Contemporary, New York City
When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face, Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?
The poem gives the perspective of seeing the nighttime city from the back seat and, unlike several other backseat scenes, the couple is driven apart rather than thrown together.
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
Author: Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Title: Cane
Date: 1923
Systems: Railroad, elevated trains, car, buggy
Context: 1920s, South, Washington D.C., and Chicago, African-American perspective
In "Becky" a white woman with negro children is forced to live on the "narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road." Ironically the outcast becomes the center of attention because of her location: "Six trains each day rumbled past... Fords, and horse- and mule-drawn buggies went back and forth along the road."
"7th Street": "zooming Cadillacs,/ Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks" establish the sound and feel of Seventh Street, Washington DC, "bastard of Prohibition and the War": An urban-primitive sketch of Jazz Age "nigger life."
"Bona and Paul": The windows of Paul's South-Side Chicago apartment are "cut in two" by the "hurtling Loop-jammed L trains." Paul, a high yellow college man, is himself "cut in two," torn between white and black, North and South. The L trains and stock-yard stench provide the stark contrast for Paul's nostalgic reminiscence of a "pine-matted hillock in Georgia" and chanting "Negress."
Edition used: New York: Liveright, 1975.
Author: James Thurber (1894-1961)
Title: The Thurber Carnival
Date: 1931-1945
Systems: Automobiles, train, airplane
Context: Contemporary, New York City and Columbus, Ohio
Thurber created many short humorous sketches of contemporary and remembered life, chiefly for The New Yorker. Most involve shifts in focus and topic, digressions in an ordinary context, but with Thurber often the central story line is impossible to ferret out.
"The Lady on 142" begins with the Thurber narrator and his wife waiting at the Cornwell Bridge station for a twenty-minute late train to Gaylordsville, "the third stop down the line, twenty-two minutes away. The stationmaster had told us that our tickets were the first tickets to Gaylordsville he had ever sold." The narrator overhears the station agent refer to the lady on (train number) 142, which triggers off, first a conjecture that the woman is ill. Then, after they get on board, a more elaborate fantasy about spies and kidnapping explicitly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock movies and "The Maltese Falcon." Moral: A major part of the romance and adventure of riding the train in the 1930s and 1940s was affected by films.
"Recollections of the Gas Buggy: Footnotes to An Era for the Future Historian" is told in the late 1930s, but its first episode involves the narrator's great aunt, years ago. "She enjoyed the hallucination, among others, that she was able to drive a car. I was riding with her one December day when I discovered, to my horror, that she thought the red and green lights on the traffic signals had been put up by the municipality as a gay and expansive manifestation of the Yuletide spirit. Although we finally reached home safely, I never completely recovered from the adventure, and could not be induced, after that day, to ride in a car on holidays." Thurber's own problems with cars include his sense while driving in Scotland in 1938 that his gas gauge was moving toward "Full." Later, in Connecticut, when the red fluid in the engine gauge gets to "Danger" he pulls into a service station and gestures toward another dial which registers 1560 - not the temperature, but the setting on the radio dial. "Whenever I tried to put chains on a tire, the car would maliciously wrap them around a rear axle. If I parked it ten feet from a fire plug and went into a store, it would be only five feet from the plug when I came out." The sketch picks up on the tone of the bemused New Yorker's studied scorn for cars and driving. "A Ride with Olympy" has a Russian emigre who is driving "one of those bastard agglomerations of wheels, motor and superstructure that one saw only in France. It looked at first glance like the cockpit of a cracked-up plane. Then you saw that there were two wheels in front and a single wheel in back." Olympy and Thurber try to communicate with little success in French and fail even to get close to technical terms needed to avoid a series of near accidents.
"Sex Ex Machina" quotes a Freudian Dr. Bisch on how "An automobile bearing down upon you may be a sex symbol at that, you know, especially if you dream it." Thurber then absurdly applies this to squirrels who run into a car's path, "except that he is awfully fast on his feet and that I always hurriedly put on the brakes of the 1935 Sex Symbol that I drive." In a later episode, he talks of apparent fiends who materialize in his barn at the middle of the night. He tries to comfort his dogs until the car's horn shrieks. "Everybody has heard a klaxon on a car suddenly begin to sound; I understand it is a short circuit that causes it. But very few people have heard one scream behind them while they were quieting six or eight alarmed poodles in the middle of the night in an old barn." The final anecdote involves an old friend in Ohio who had the steering bar of an electric runabout break off in his hand, "causing the machine to carry him through a fence and into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls. He developed a fear of automobiles, trains, and every other kind of vehicle that was not pulled by a horse."
In My Life and Hard Times, Thurber looks back to his childhood in the first two decades of the century. Cars and other vehicles appear periodically, as do the army trucks which warn people of the dam that didn't break. "The Car We Had to Push" was "an old Reo we had that wouldn't go unless you pushed it for quite a way and suddenly let the clutch out.… Of course, it took more than one person to do this; it took sometimes as many as five or six, depending on the grade of the roadway and conditions underfoot." This domestic dilemma exemplifies the problems faced by people in Columbus in contrast to the more exotic natural catastrophes reported in autobiographies by Lincoln Steffens and Gertrude Atherton.
A scene in "University Days" features Bolenciecwicz, the Ohio State tackle, who is asked by the economics professor to name a means of transportation: "'I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land'" The professor continues his prompting, "'Choo-choo-choo'"; the students "shared Mr. Bassum's desire that Bolenciecwicz should stay abreast of the class in economics, for the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season." "'How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwicz?' asked the professor. 'Chuffa chuffa, chuffa chuffa.' 'M'father sent me,' said the football player."
Finally, in "Draft Board Nights," Thurber reports on his grandfather, "A famous horseman, he approached [driving] as he might have approached a wild colt.… He always leaped into it quickly, as if it might pull out from under him if he didn't get into the seat fast enough." He has trouble persuading the car to stop going around in a circle since he holds on too tight to the guiding-bar. "And a man who (or so he often told us) had driven a four-horse McCormick reaper when he was five years old did not intend to be thrown by an electric runabout."
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, 1957.
Author: e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
Title: 100 Selected Poems
Date: 1959 Written: 1923-1954
Systems: Motor car, elevated train
Context: Contemporary
Written as a first person narrative, "she being Brand" describes a "first ride" in a new car, but in terms that link the experience to having sex with a virgin:
she being Brand -new;and you know consequently a little stiff i was careful of her and(having thoroughly oiled the universal joint tested my gas felt of her radiator made sure her springs were O. K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her up,slipped the clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she kicked what the hell)next minute i was back in neutral tried and again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my lev-er Right- oh and her gears being in A 1 shape passed from low through second-in-to-high like greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity avenue i touched the accelerator and gave her the juice, good (it was the first ride and believe i we was happy to see how nice she acted right up to the last minute coming back down by the Public Gardens i slammed on the internalexpanding & externalcontracting brakes Bothatonce and brought allofher tremB -ling to a:dead. stand- ;Still) [1926]
Though written early in the history of U.S. car culture, this notion of the car as "she," as female, has survived and flourished to the present. (Ocean-going ships, of course, had been feminized for centuries.) This conceit plays on two important aspects of cars and male/female relationships: first, the notion of ownership of the female is transferred to the car, which becomes another prized possession, another marker of male competence and superiority; the next step is for the car to eclipse the woman, the human, and become the man's most valued object, his most important relationship. Cummings' poem exaggerates and parodies just that tendency not only to overvalue the car but actually to sexualize it, both in the sense that it is an extension of the male's sexuality, and the male's - the driver's - sexual partner.
#72 "plato told"
After a series of missed messages (Plato told him, Jesus told him… but he didn't believe it), "it took a nipponized bit of the old sixth avenue el on top of his head to tell him." But why "Nipponized"? Because, allegedly, scrap metal from the salvaged elevated train tracks were used by the Japanese in the Second World War.
Edition used: New York: Grove Press, 1959.
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Title: The Great Gatsby
Date: 1925
Systems: Automobile, train
Context: Contemporary, New York city, Long Island, Middle West
Near the end of the novel Nick Carraway, the narrator says of the Buchanans: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…" (Ch. 9). Carraway opens the novel with a discussion of the importance of being "decent," honest, caring, and compassionate, and these attributes, their presence, or more commonly their absence, inform the action of The Great Gatsby. "Carelessness" is often dramatized by reckless driving. Tom Buchanan had once been in an accident with one of his mistresses - the day before Daisy gave birth to their daughter (Ch. 4). Jordan Baker, Nick's girl friend is aggressive about her poor driving. She rationalizes nearly flicking the button off a road worker's coat with her fender by maintaining that others just have to keep out of her way (Ch. 3).
In the key scene Tom's lover, Myrtle Wilson, tries to flag down the yellow Rolls Royce that she thinks Tom is driving; when she runs out into the road she is run over and "her life violently extinguished, [she] knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust." As it turns out, Daisy, accompanied by Gatsby, was actually behind the wheel of the Rolls. Since the car is identified with its owner, Tom tells Myrtle's distraught husband, George Wilson, that the car will be at Gatsby's. George proceeds to find and murder Gatsby, thinking him responsible for Myrtle's death (Ch. 7).
Gatsby is a careful driver; he tries to grab the wheel before Daisy runs over Myrtle and then tries to get her to stop. But his attempts to insinuate himself into a world of money and privilege make him vulnerable to the sort of carelessness symbolized by the Buchanans' and Jordan's driving. It's his Rolls Royce that becomes the "death car," not only for Myrtle, but also for himself. The Rolls is an important vehicle in Gatsby's quest for Daisy's love and all that he imagines that love includes. On one hand it represents his notion of wealth, luxurious evidence: "It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort green leather conservatory, we started to town." The car is a rolling mansion, protecting and separating the passengers from the outside world; but the car is also "swollen" and "monstrous," capable of destruction (Ch. 4). In the end Gatsby proves inept at maneuvering through the wealthy world that the Buchanan's are able to negotiate unscathed. He's not careless enough; as Nick tells him, "'They're a rotten crowd … You're worth the whole damn bunch of them'" (Ch. 8).
Fitzgerald's novel is clearly focused on the wealthy, yet the characters occasionally descend into "the valley of the ashes," a grey and rundown area between Long Island (where the rich live) and New York City. Here is the confluence of commuter trains, cars, and barge traffic. It is here that Myrtle Wilson and her husband live. Though Wilson owns a garage and ostensibly buys and sells cars, there are no cars in his except for a "dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner" (Ch. 2). Tom Buchanan has promised to sell him a car, but the promise is always deferred, despite Wilson's pleas for action and need for money which reselling it will bring. Cars mostly function as a leisure time conveyance, and then chiefly for the rich. For commuting the train or taxi is the means of transportation. Manhattan is, of course, a place of excitement and beauty: "The city seen from the Queensboro bridge is always the city seen for the first time" (Ch. 4). In Manhattan at 8 PM, "the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district" (Ch. 3).
But when Nick decides to go home at the end of the novel, to leave the East, sell his car, and return to the Midwest, he does so by train (cars, it seems, were not yet a convenient means of long-distance travel). That decision evokes "vivid memories" of his train rides from prep school and college, the repeated "coming back West." He describes the sense of exciting and satisfying familiarity he experienced on snowy winter nights on "the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad," moving through "real snow, our snow, [which] began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by" as he neared home. Nick decides that for a midwesterner like himself, the East has "a quality of distortion" - everything seems just a bit strange, dream-like (Ch. 9). The train will take him back where feels more comfortable, soothe away the uneasiness he felt in the East.
Edition used: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.
Author: Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Title: Babbitt
Date: 1922
Systems: Train, automobile
Context: Contemporary, Midwest
Like others of Lewis' works, this novel gives a broad panorama of United States society which goes well beyond just telling the basic story, so we get a chapter on baseball, another on buying a bottle of bootleg gin, and so on. The basic story line is real-estate executive George Babbitt's drifting away from his oppressively ordinary life and then back again in the final chapters.
Babbitt's first escape is by train for a vacation in Maine. A long chapter describing the smoking compartment of the Pullman shows the fellowship and male bonding which that setting affords. The outside is discussed poetically - "a glaze of darkness stippled with the gold of infrequent mysterious lights." A steel mill on the outside of a city they are passing "flared in scarlet and orange flame that licked at the cadaverous stacks… 'My Lord, look at that - beautiful!' said Paul." The compartment has but four seats; the first people there become the "Old Families," a "council"; a newcomer is the "Outsider" who has to stand and smoke. The men talk about the schedule to guess where they are; they ask the porter, "a negro in white jacket with brass buttons," who thinks they are on time - this exchange leads Babbitt and his pals to exchange racist remarks about how "the old-fashioned coon" should stay in his place, and so on. After talk about prices and models of motor-cars, they start up with "expansive and virile" dirty jokes. When the train stops at "an important station" they get out to walk up and down the platform. At the end of the evening, Babbitt, in "the close hot tomb of his Pullman berth," fondly recalls the punch lines and looks out at the "village lamps like exclamation-points." For Babbitt and his middle-class pals, this smoker is a gentlemen's club, isolated from business and from women (Ch. 10: 3). When he travels to Chicago with his son, they join "the other sages of the Pullman smoking-compartment" (Ch. 19: 3).
The enormous waiting room of the Union Station has frescoes depicting the early French explorers of the region, benches of "ponderous mahogany," a marble newsstand with a brass grill, and other decorations which are almost identical to the hotel lobby (Ch. 13: 3, cf. 24: 2). Along with Babbitt and his friends who are going to a convention, are "The patient poor people waiting for the midnight train [who] stared in unenvious wonder - Italian women with shawls, old weary men with broken shoes, roving road-wise boys in suits which had been flashy when they were new but which were faded now and wrinkled." This is one of the few times we see working-class people in the novel (Ch. 13: 3). Despite all the splendor, the "voluptuous thing" of having his suit pressed on the train, Babbitt is forced to join other men in the smoking-compartment in the morning, no longer splendid as "it was jammed with fat men in woolen undershirts, every hook filled with wrinkled cottony shorts, the leather seat piled with dingy toilet-kits, and the air nauseating with the smell of soap and toothpaste" (Ch. 13: 4).
At home, the automobile allows him to have an affair and to run with a fast crowd, while Mrs. Babbitt is on an extended trip to the east. George hooks up with Tanis Judique, to whom he had rented an apartment. Cars are constantly in the background of this fling. On their first night together, as they draw up to the radiator in her flat and fantasize about being in front of a fireplace in an old-fashioned cottage, "There was no sound from the street save the whir or motor-tires, the rumble of a distant freight-train" - the urban getaway (Ch. 28). Babbitt then joins his "sporting" neighbor, Sam Dopplebrau, and a group of "Bohemian" partying friends, eventually called the "Bunch": "life was dominated by suburban bacchanalia of alcohol, nicotine, gasoline, and kisses." The weekend parties "usually included an extremely rapid motor expedition to nowhere in particular." Babbitt experiments with drunk driving: "With his other faculties blurred he yet had the motorist's gift of being able to drive when he could scarce walk; of slowing down at corners and allowing for approaching cars. He came wambling into the house." One close call on an icy pavement: "Even with skid chains on all four wheels, Babbitt was afraid of sliding, and when he came to the long slide of a hill he crawled down, both brakes on. Slewing round a corner came a less cautious car. It skidded, it almost raked them with its rear fenders" (Ch. 29: 4).
Babbitt is replete with others images of middle-class automobile culture - ritual repairs, sexual freedom, and investment opportunity. "To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore." Starting the engine is a daily crisis, "the long, anxious whirr of the starter." He's always happy not to graze the garage (Ch. 3: 1). When he contemplates buying a new car, the Babbitts "went, with ardor and some thoroughness, into the matters of streamline bodies, hill-climbing power, wire wheels, chrome steel, ignition Systems, and body colors. It was much more than a study of transportation. It was an aspiration for knightly rank" (Ch. 6: 3). As he tries to sleep he imagines his neighbor's car running without a driver, in an image of a real automobile: "The car insultingly cheerful on the driveway.… The motor raced for the climb up into the garage and raced once more, explosively, before it was shut off. A final opening and slamming of the car door.…" (Ch. 7: 3). In moments of disillusion and loneliness, George goes out to the garage to work on his car, to clean the drip-pan at one point, to examine a cracked hose-connection at another (Ch. 22: 1, 31: 1).
Babbitt's son, Theodore Roosevelt B., is "motor-mad." "[H]e was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit. Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle…" (Ch. 18: 1). When grandmother Babbitt comes to visit, she rejoices at how he greases the differential (Ch. 18: 5). The Babbitts debate about who gets the car - Ted complains that his sister wants "to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of some skirt's house all evening while you sit and gas about lite'ature and the highbrows you're going to marry" (Ch. 2: 2).
George is acutely aware of the public role of the automobile. For one thing, as a real estate investor, he uses his involvement in a political campaign to get "advance information about the extension of paved highways" to buy land. In a speech to the Chamber of Commerce he characterizes the kind of person "that's ruling America today," a man who, after work, gets into "the little old 'bus, and maybe cusses his carburetor, and shoots out home" to his bungalow (Ch. 14: 3). Later, he declares that the proposed symphony orchestra is as necessary "as pavements and bank-clearances" (Ch. 21: 1). With the other "Boosters" from his crowd George celebrate in slogans - the city of Monarch is the "Mighty Motor Mart" - and ads - "TRY LIFE'S ZIPPINGEST ZEST - THE ZEECO!" (That line was written by T. Cholmondely Frink, "a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertizing agent.") The Zeeco is "above the Javelin class." (Ch. 13: 5, 8: 3, 9: 2). Unfortunately, America is "hustling, for hustling's sake" - to get trolleys, "with another trolley a minute behind"; even people making $20,000 a year are hustling to catch trains (Ch. 12: 2).
Edition used: New York: Signet Classic, 1980.
Author: Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Title: "Travel is So Broadening" In The Man Who Knew Coolidge
Date: 1928
Systems: Auto
Context: Contemporary, Minnesota
The narrator, Mr. Schultz, talks with Mrs. and George Babbitt about his recent trip to Yellowstone; well, he actually didn't quite get that far; actually, it's the first installment of an endlessly detailed account of the trip Schultz and the little woman took a couple of hundred miles west of Zenith, Minnesota, maybe to the Black Hills. Babbitt is praised as "an old trained, long-distance motorist," having driven 316 miles in one day. One goal of their trip is a visit to his wife's brother-in-law, who started a radiator factory in Tomahawk City, North Dakota - a town with no iron, coal, or railroad connection - but failed because he couldn't "compete with the trust." Schultz gives the beginning of a list of what one needs for a long distance drive, starting with a khaki coat and pants, a "Pull-U-Out" to get out of mud holes and even muddy places in concrete highways. The "editor" intervenes to say that he has suppressed 37 articles that Schultz also rehearsed. The Schultzes left at 12:03 exactly - he knows because he kept a full schedule of time, mileage, oil and gas consumption (better mileage with Dainty Daisy than Samson, despite the latter's claims for "power-plus").
You're better off, Schultz advises, going fewer than 300 miles; otherwise "you don't really see all the scenery as thoroughly and study the agriculture and other features of the country as closely as you might if you just jogged along at a nice steady forty-five or fifty miles an hour instead of speeding." The scenery fascinates: "now every mile or so you'd find a dandy up-to-date hot-dog stand - some like log cabins and some like Chinese pagodas or Indian wigwams or little small imitations of Mount Vernon about ten feet high… and, of course, up-to-date billboards all along the road to diversify it…, and in every town a dandy free auto camp providing free water and wood for the tourists." Schultz stops by a hobo and lectures him on how, if he gets a job and a car, he won't need to hitchhike.
They had stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch, a place where for "Ma," the cook, "the only thing she didn't burn was the drinking water." At the Red Ball Grocery Store in New Paris he rear-ends a parked car, manages to bluff the "great big rube" off from calling the cops, and then enjoys the fact that he had smashed up the valve stem on his spare; it "served him right for the way he'd talked to me." At 5:00 they stop for dinner in a "nice burg, right up to date [familiar phrase], all brick pavement." Instead of going to the hotel, they use the campground, "just the least little bit dirty with forty to sixty people camping there every night." The travelers spontaneously start a camp fire and spend the evening in talk and "old ancient songs," unlike the "modern songs [that] haven't got the melody and sentiment." Even though "hardly more'n 40 per cent were up to the Chevrolet class," Schultz condescends to chat with many of them, among whom was a veterinarian who had met a guy from Zenith - "pretty doggone small world after all, isn't it."
No one (probably) picks up, strings together, or puts down clichés from the automobility craze of the 1920s better than Lewis. This story, like others, uses the booster from Zenith to voice not just midwestern but national provincialism, racism, and sexism.
Edition used: James Moffett and Kenneth E. McElheny, eds. Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories.. New York: Signet Classic, 1966.
Author: Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
Title: An American Tragedy
Date: 1925
Systems: Automobile, train
Context: Contemporary, Kansas City and New York state
An American Tragedy, set around 1920, is explicitly placed at the end of the horse-drawn age, where automobiles are ubiquitous both in a mid-size city, Kansas City (population 400,000) and a smaller town, Lycurgus, New York (population 20,000).
Kansas City, the setting for the first third of the novel, has a "great street" where "The handsome automobiles that sped by, the loitering pedestrians moving off to what interests and comforts he [Clyde Griffiths, then in his teens] could only imagine." (Ch. 1: 1). Later, "Taxis spun and honked and two old-time closed carriages still in use rolled here and there, their curtains drawn" (Ch. 1: 9; italics added). Horses are ridden on bridal paths by the well to do in Lycurgus; also hansom cabs are out front at one fancy dance (Ch. 2: 25). When Clyde arrives in Lycurgus, he sees the two bridges, one with a car line, the "traffic, pedestrians and automobiles," and "various automobile showrooms." The rich part of town has "expensive and handsome automobiles either beneath porte-cochères within or speeding along the broad thoroughfare without" (Ch. 2: 5). The rich uncle has at least two cars. When Clyde is courting Sondra Finchley, one of the upper set, their excursions are always by automobile; at least once, she picks him up in her car for a New Years party in Schenectady (Ch. 2: 32).
In the poor, farm country near Lycurgus, Clyde's girlfriend's father drives a horse and buggy, the "old family conveyance," on the rough roads "at a time when excellent automobile roads were a commonplace elsewhere" (Ch. 2: 29). Clyde's wealthy, Lycurgus aunt comments on the implications of "too much dancing, cabareting, automobiling to one city and another, without due social supervision" (Ch. 2: 1). At the trial in Book Three, "hundreds of farmers, woodsmen, traders, [were] entering in Fords and Buicks" - all autos, no wagons (Ch. 3: 19).
Book One ends with a hit-and-run car accident which drives Clyde from Kansas City. One of his teenage friends 'borrows' a Packard from his employer for a ride to Excelsior Springs. They rehearse the route, worry about snow-packed roads. The girl Clyde has been courting is attracted to Sparser, the driver, which is part of her gold-digging personality and shows the attractiveness of driving. This ride is the first time Clyde gets out of Kansas City (Ch. 1: 17). [A generation earlier escape and adventure would have been by train.] After the expedition, the kids are worried about getting back to work on time, but run into a traffic jam. In their effort to find a better route, Sparser runs down and kills an eleven-year-old girl. He drives away, is followed by the police, and eventually crashes at a construction site where two of the young people are injured. Clyde is not hurt and runs away (Ch. 1: 19). Later, we learn, he took a box car to St. Louis. Sparser was charged for car theft and avoiding arrest, but not for manslaughter (Ch. 2: 3). He drove a Chicago delivery wagon (horse-drawn) for a year or so before coming to Lycurgus.
In Lycurgus, Clyde tries to keep two romances going at the same time with ultimately tragic results. Trysts with Roberta Alden, a woman of his own social class, require much planning and logistics involving the railroads to near-by towns. For various reasons they do not want to be seen together in town, so they set up cover stories at their separate rooming houses, settle on a common destination (e.g., Homer, New York), get on the morning train but sit in separate cars, and worry if their co-workers or roommates see them (Ch. 2: 18). Roberta gets pregnant, and they set up similar arrangements when they go to the abortionist, (Ch. 2: 36) and when they are on the trip to an isolated lake where Clyde plans to drown her, they worry about buying tickets, take separate cars, and so on (Ch. 2: 44, 46). Clyde does drown her, but he is captured; during the trial many functionaries from the trolley and rail lines testify about seeing them - thus proving that his general fears are well grounded (Ch. 3: 21).
Edition used: Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1978.
Author: Willa Cather (1876-1947)
Title: "Neighbour Rosicky"
Date: 1932 Written: 1928
Systems: Wagon, automobile
Context: Contemporary, Middlewest (Nebraska)
This is a gentle tale of Rosicky's aging and death which sets the contrast, among other things, between the wagon and the automobile. When Rosicky is first diagnosed with heart problems, the doctor asks if he's in town with the family car or wagon: "'When you got five boys, you ain't got much chance to ride round in de Ford. I ain't got much for cars, noway.'" At the end of his eight-mile ride home he stops at the graveyard at the edge of his land. "There he stopped his horses and sat still on his wagon seat, looking about at the snowfall… The fine snow, settling into this red grass and upon the few little evergreens and the headstones, looked very pretty" (Ch. 2).
After showing us Rosicky's interactions with his family and memoirs about his migrating from Czechoslovakia through London, we witness his death. His son had taken the car to town; he hitched up the work team, "with guilty caution" because of the doctor's warning, rakes up thistles, but has a heart attack in the barn. The doctor had been out of town; on his return he drives to Rosicky's house, stops his car and looks over the same prospect that the old man had earlier. "For the first time it struck Doctor Ed that this was really a beautiful graveyard" (Ch. 6).
Edition used: Five Stories. New York: Vintage, 1956.
Author: Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Title: "Roan Stallion"
Date: 1925
Systems: Carriage
Context: Contemporary, California
This long, narrative poem is a reminder that much of rural America in the 1920s still depended on horse-drawn vehicles. Johnny brings the stallion to his family behind their carriage: "She [California, Johnny's wife] heard the hooves and wheels come nearer … He sat twisted / On the seat of the old buggy… " Later, California drives to Monterey, but must cross a ford at night: "Noise of wheels on stones, plashing of hooves in water, a world / Of sounds; no sights; the gentle thunder of water; the mare snorting, dipping her head, one knew, / To look for footing, in the blackness, under the stream…. " The mare gets turned sidewise in the stream, which adds to the danger. She eventually has to rescue the toys and groceries from the wagon and ride the mule out of the torrent and then home - the "miracle of the ford." The whole scene points out the dependence among wagon, mule, and driver, and the way the working partnership gets thrown off by darkness, scenes echoed later in the poem as California and the stallion interact.
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Title: As I Lay Dying
Date: 1930
Systems: Wagon
Context: Contemporary, Mississippi
Faulkner's story of the Bundren family and their long and tortuous journey by wagon along the roads of Yoknapatawpha county, carrying the body of Addie Bundren, is in part about people who are not used to being on the move and who are not especially adept at traveling. Anse Bundren, in particular, the father, though he is determined to get Addie to Jefferson, where she wanted to be buried, distrusts roads and travel. He thinks that when God "aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when he aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man." It follows then that God didn't mean for people to be "always a-moving and going somewheres else," but meant them to stay at home.
It takes a major event - Addie's death - to get Anse moving; but once he starts, he won't quit until he gets to where he's going. Anse's motivation actually seems to stem more from his desire for a set of teeth and a new wife then a commitment to fulfill Addie's last wish. But these too are reasons significant enough to get him out on the road. Anse's has been pining for teeth for awhile, and his laziness is legendary - a wife is necessary to take care of the children and house. Though Faulkner's story has an element of absurdity not shared by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, As I Lay Dying does depict the same kind of uprooting of a family that has not been out on the road - an unfriendly road - before. The road proves dangerous, fraught with peril for the inexperienced: Cash breaks his leg, Darl finally goes over the edge into insanity, Dewey Dell tries to get an abortion. The family slowly disintegrates as the days and troubles on the road multiply, disintegrates as Addie's body decomposes, the stench growing ever stronger. In the end the journey, despite the many tribulations, is completed. But the price for leaving home has been high for many in the family (though ironically not for Anse); staying home is no solution in the novel, but going out on the road so ill-prepared is disastrous.
Edition used: New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Author: Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
Title: "The Return of the Prodigal: The Thing Imagined" In The Hills Beyond
Date: 1941
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1920s, North Carolina
The section has Eugene Gant returning to "Altamont," North Carolina, a town in general poverty but with the jarring presence of expesnive automobiles. Accessory shops and a garage are on the main street, along with "the most pretentious of the lot, a salesroom for a motor car agency… [where] the powerful and perfect shapes of the new automobiles glittered splendidly, but in this splendor there was, curiously, a kind of terrible, cold, and desolate bleakness." An older woman comments that "'The better class all have their automobiles an' want to get out in the mountains.'" While some parts of the country had seen automobiles as being widely available, such is not true in this setting.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Sterling Brown (1901-1989)
Title: Southern Road
Date: 1932
Systems: Roadway, train, car
Context: Contemporary, Rural South and unspecified city; African-American perspective
"Strong Men" provides an excellent example of how transportation Systems are marked by social relationships. In this case the "meaning" of a particular form of transportation or a particular system varies depending upon whether one owns, operates or builds that system and under what conditions.
This poem incorporates the work song but more experimentally than does Brown's "Southern Road." The poem is both tribute and angry vision; it intersperses quotations from actual work songs with longer stanzas which enumerate abuse against American blacks. The result is close to call and response - litany, then work song:
They point with pride to the roads you built for them, They ride in comfort over the rails you laid for them. They put hammers in your hands And said - Drive so much before sun down.
Each such verse is answered by a work song. The repetitive use of an already repetitive form (the work song) builds an ominous insistence:
You sang: Ain't no hammah In dis lan', Strikes lak mine, bebby, Strikes lak mine.
The militant meaning of Brown's formal experiment is explained in the refrain (borrowed, by the way, from Carl Sandburg): "The strong men keep a-comin' on / the strong men git stronger..."
In "Convict," yet another variation on the chain-gang/road construction theme, Sterling Brown focuses on a single convict sentenced to three months on the gang. This poem highlights the shantytown conditions Jim lived in before he was imprisoned in "a dingy cell," sentenced to "daytime on the highways, / Nights in hell." Unspecified trucks roll Jim past Shantytown in his daily shuttle between highway and jail. Thus he daily "sees what he's used to," the very conditions, we are told ironically, which "brought him to handcuffs": namely, "Sleeping hounds everywhere, / Flies crawling thick, / Grown ups drunken / and children sick." This picture of "filth and squalor" is the "longed for heaven / He's returning to." In other words, the poem emphasizes that in the routine of work on the chain-gang, Jim can see all the possibilities of his life. Whether in freedom or in jail - and we are lead to believe he will see plenty of both, Jim will live out his life between Shantytown, highway, and dingy cell.
"Long Gone" reworks the "rambling man" theme from blues and folk ballads. One might read the poem to suggest that with the accessibility of rail travel arises a new kind of man. (Accessible, in these songs or ballads, means accessible to those daring enough to jump free rides or to work the kitchen - almost always men.) For Long Gone and other "railroad men," it "jes' ain' nachal / Fo' to stay here long" - "Jes' my name and my habit / To be Long Gone." The poem is addressed to Long Gone's female lover; his natural impulse will always draw him away from the stability of love relationships "though it's homelike and happy." The allure of a "sweet woman" and social stability cannot compete with the "itch" and allure of "travelin'" by train - "I'se jes' dataway."
Significantly, the appeal of the machine itself is equal to that of travel to new places; Long Gone is drawn to the look of the rails and ties, the sound of "an ole freight / Puffin' up de rise" or of "de empties / Bumpin' up de hill." He speaks of the itch "Fo' to hear de whistle blow / Fo' de crossin' or de switch." So too, a chief pleasure is in the lack of concrete destination and the variety of people he'll meet and the newness of the country he's "gotta highball thu."
"Tin Roof Blues" is another poem about riding the trains. Brown provides a speaker whose dissatisfaction with his life and the people around him push him on. This speaker's itch, in contrast to Long Gone's of the earlier poem, is not to travel, but to leave. Here the destination is a vague elsewhere - "where de people stacks up mo' lak friends." This mental geography of escape and therefore of a better world is mapped only by train lines: "I'm goin' where de Southern crosses top de C & O."... or .. "Goin' where de Norfolk Western curves jes' lak de river bends."
"Mister Samuel and Sam" compares Mr. Samuel and Sam by examining the property and community memberships held by each. Despite the gulf in economic status and cultural refinement between the two, each spends according to the same proportions and their lives are qualitatively the same. For instance, it's no matter that one drinks "Canadian Rye" and the other "bootleg gin," "Both gits as high as a Georgia pine / And both calls de doctor in."
Notably, one of the first properties used to mark social station is the car.
Mister Samuel ride in a Cadillac, Sam ride in a Tin Lizzie Fo'd; Both spend their jack fo' gas an' oil, An both git stuck on de road.
As is the case with Canadian Rye and bootleg gin, the car may mark a certain level of status, but it cannot erase the fact that both machines and men have the same basic requirements and are prone to similar malfunctions.
Edition used: Boston: Beacon, 1974.
Author: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Title: "The Way of a Man with a Train"
Date: 1927
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary, rural Florida, African-American perspective
"The Way of a Man with a Train" gives some indication of the role trains played in the rural South of the 1920s. Old Man Anderson lives "seven or eight miles" outside of Eatonville, Florida, a town of "five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jail-house." Old Man Anderson is somewhat extraordinary because, unlike "citybred folks," he's never seen a train. For citizens of Eatonville, trains are common enough that even "the smallest child" had been to see one go by, and yet these machines retain aspects of the marvelous. For this rural community, locomotives remain a spectacle - a phenomenon one watches rather than a vehicle one rides. The viewing of a train is a weekly ritual and social event to Eatonville youth: "On Sunday afternoons all of the young people of the village would go over to Maitland, a mile away to see Number 35 whizz southward on its way to Tampa and wave at the passengers."
The story suggests a social restructuring coincident with the arrival of railroad technology. Trains offer the children of Eatonville an edge over their hardworking and otherwise respectable elder, Anderson. A spectator's knowledge of trains constitutes a form of "worldly knowledge" that can vie with the wisdom of age: "Even we children felt superior in the presence of someone so lacking in worldly knowledge."
The tale's humor presupposes an audience of the "train-wise" willing to laugh at Anderson's ignorance. The town's "patronage and ridicule" eventually have their effect on Anderson, and he drives in one morning to watch Number 78 go north to Jacksonville at 10:20. As he waits in the woods along the tracks, Anderson recalls stories he's heard of train noise. Worrying that his horse will scare and bolt with his wagon, he secures the nervous animal deep in the woods. Then recalling reports that the engine "belched fire and smoke," he begins to draw his wagon to a safer location. As he does so, the 78 thunders past "spouting smoke" and "blowing for Maitland." Anderson himself bolts in terror, wagon and all, tearing up the equipment "worse than the horse ever could have done." The narrator concludes, "He doesn't know yet what a train looks like, and says he doesn't care."
Edition used: Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2, 2nd Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.
Author: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Title: "Sweat"
Date: 1926
Systems: Horse and buckboard, automobile
Context: Contemporary, rural Florida, African-American perspective
The few brief references to transportation in this story structure the narrative and serve as important indices to moral character. The women here own the horses and wagons, while a man's access to his vehicles defines his relationship with each woman and his position in the community.
Washerwoman Delia Jones collects and delivers laundry each Sunday. For the townsfolk, her body-breaking labor and dependability are synonymous with her vehicle, a "rusty buckboard" which comes and goes through the small town "ez reg'lar ez de weeks." Delia's earnings support her two-timing husband, Sykes. She is almost totally indifferent to his movements; her concern for his whereabouts amounts only to "wondering where Sykes...had gone with her horse and buckboard."
That the town gossips approve of Delia and disapprove of Sykes in equal measure is clear as they trace his depravity to two distinctly Northern dangers - white women and cars: "He allus wuz uh ovahbearin' niggah, but since dat white 'oman from up north done teached 'im how to run a automobile, he done got too biggety to live - an' we oughta kill 'im."
Edition used: Hans Ostrom, ed. Lives and Moments: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1991.
Author: Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
Title: Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
Date: 1959
Systems: Railroad, road construction, automobile, subway
Context: 1920s to 1960s, South, northern cities, African-American perspective
Hughes touches on the complex and changing relations blacks have to Southern transportation Systems, and his poems go through civil rights era when equal access to public transportation (buses and trains) played an important symbolic and material part in the end of segregation.
"Bound No'th Blues" (1926), while talking about walking rather than riding, comes to the same conclusion: "These Mississippi towns ain't / Fit fer a hoppin' toad." Once in the North, "Homesick Blues" (1926), "A sad song in de air," articulates a dilemma: "Ever' time de trains pass / I wants to go somewhere. / … / Lookin' for a box car / To roll me to de South."
A more detailed, social analysis comes in "One-Way Ticket" (1949):
I pick up my life I am fed up And take it with me With Jim Crow laws, And I put it down in People who are cruel Chicago, Detroit, And afraid, Buffalo, Scranton, Who lynch and run, Any place that is Who are scared of me North and East - And me of them. And not Dixie. I pick up my life I pick up my life And take it away And take it on the train On a one-way ticket - To Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Gone up North, Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake, Gone out West, Any place that is Gone! North and West - And not South.
"Porter" (1927) ends with "Rich old white man / Owns the world. / Gimme yo' shoes. / To shine. Yes sir!" which points to the subservience which is expected of black men in this role. A young child asks "Where is the Jim Crow section / On this merry-go-round," which is compared to being put in the back of bus ("Merry-go-Round"). "Dream Boogie: Variation" (1951) begins with a description of a blues performance and then associates the emotions from music with the "teasing pain" of being "A few minutes late / For the Freedom Train." In a longer, allegorical poem, entitled "Freedom Train" (1947-48), Hughes describes segregated trains, hiring, facilities going back to his grandmother's experience in 1883, through her grandson's death at Anzio. The Freedom Train of the civil rights movement offers hopes that, in addition to opening up the trains and ballot boxes, might even provide opportunities for "a coal black man [to] drive the Freedom Train," not just be a porter. A brief poem on the same topic, "Lunch in a Jim Crow Car" (1959): "Get out the lunch-box of your dreams, / Bite into the sandwich of your heart, / And ride the Jim Crow car until it screams / Then - like an atom bomb - it bursts apart."
The automobile is also a way out. In "West Texas" (1942), after a description of cotton fields, "we cranked up our old Ford / And we started down the road / Where we was goin' / We didn't know - / Nor which way." West Texas "Ain't no place / For a colored / Man to stay!"
"Florida Road Workers" (1931) suggests the general condition in which blacks cannot imagine participating in the automobile world they physically create. The final effort, to get the white folks' attention, also speaks of the poem's purpose.
I'm makin' a road For the cars To fly by on. Makin' a road Through the palmetto thicket For light and civilization To travel on. Makin' a road For the rich old white men To sweep over in their big cars And leave me standin' here. Sure, A road helps all of us! White folks ride - And I get to see 'em ride. I ain't never seen nobody Ride so fine before. Hey buddy! Look at me. I'm making a road!
Several poems celebrate the excitement of Harlem culture. "Juke Box Love Song" (1950) invites the listener to "Take the neon lights and make a crown, / Take the Lenox Avenue busses, / Taxis, subways, / And for your love song tone their rumble down." "Projection" (1951) begins, "On the day when the Savoy / leaps clean over to Seventh Avenue / and starts jitterbugging / with the Renaissance." Further, "Lenox Avenue / by daylight / runs to dive in the Park / but faster… / faster… / after dark," plays on the contours of the roadway and on "dive" as a cheap restaurant ("Dive" 1951). Another poem quotes a father who "watched Harlem grow / until colored folks spread / from river to river / across the middle of Manhattan / out of Penn Station / dark tenth of a nation" who arrived "in buses marked New York / from Georgia Florida Louisiana / to Harlem Brooklyn the Bronx / but most of all to Harlem." Despite the opportunity, Hughes asks, "What happens / to a dream deferred?" ("Good Morning" 1951).
The texture of the subway is again characterized in "Subway Rush Hour" (1951):
Mingled breath and smell so close mingled black and white so near no room for fear.
The commuter's schedule is pointed to in "Blue Monday" (1959): "No use in my going / Downtown to work today. / It's eight, / I'm late - / And it's marked down that-a-way."
Hughes' songs have African roots which are brought "To sing on the Georgia roads," and thus part of the American experience ("Sun Song" 1927). In a similar reflection toward African-American history, he writes of John Henry, "with his hammer / Makes a little spark. / That little spark is love / Dying in the dark" ("Love" 1942). The work done by slaves is linked to nineteenth-century Systems: "Out of labor came the rowboats / And the sailboats and the steamboats, / Came the wagons, stage coaches" and the railroads ("Freedom's Plow" 1943).
A child is asked to link people passing by, airplanes in the sky, and birds flying home, since "Home's just around / the corner / there - / but not really / anywhere" ("Kid in the Park" 1950).
Edition used:
Author: Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
Title: "1920" In Sula
Date: 1973
Systems: Train
Context: South, African-American perspective
This chapter is a classic, but retrospective account of the effects of Jim Crow rules, on train travel (both in the North and South) just after the end of the First World War. Helene Wright and her daughter travel from "a Northern town called Medallion" to visit her mother and ailing grandmother in New Orleans. (Her husband is a cook on a Great Lakes Line ship.)
At the Medallion depot, the colored porter directs them to the wrong carriage, even though it is marked COLORED ONLY. The conductor challenges them, calling her "gal," a word which triggers "All the old vulnerabilities, all the old fears of being somehow flawed." She thinks he wants to see her tickets, but he really is blaming her for having entered the wrong coach, "'We don't 'low no mistakes on this train. Now git your butt on in there.'" Helene looks to see if any man, including two soldiers in uniform, will help her get the suitcases in the overhead rack. "It was that train, shuffling toward Cincinnati, that she resolved to be on her guard - always" - guard especially against men looking at her with lust, as well as being caught violating the segregation rules.
"For two days they rode; two days of watching sleet turn to rain, turn to purple sunsets, and one night knotted on the wooden seats (their heads on folded coats), trying not to hear the snoring soldiers." They change trains at Birmingham, "and discovered what luxury they had been in through Kentucky and Tennessee, where the rest stops had all had colored toilets. After Birmingham there were none." At Meridian, Mississippi, with the guidance of a black woman, they have to relieve themselves in an open field, a process they repeat at Ellisville, Hattiesburg, and Slidell, until they finally get to New Orleans. Despite the three days on the train and her fears, "she had gone on a real trip, and now she was different."
Edition used: Hans P. Guth and Gabriele L. Rico, eds. Discovering Fiction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Blair, 1993.
Author: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Title: The Sun Also Rises
Date: 1926
Systems: Train, taxi
Context: 1925, travel in France and Spain
The opening chapters in Paris have Jake Barnes traveling by horse cab and motorized taxi from his flat to various bars and restaurants. In a cab ride with a prostitute they kiss, but he moves her hand aside since he isn't interested in (or capable of) sex (Ch. 3). A roughly parallel scene occurs with "Lady" Brett Ashley in a taxi (Ch. 4). Somewhat in the background are the noises of night trains on street-car tracks which keep him awake, men working on urban car-tracks by acetylene flares (Ch. 4), and the "S bus." (Ch. 5). Jake contemplates taking a plane to Strasbourg on short notice (Ch. 1), and he's thinking about buying a car (Ch. 5). One of Brett's male friends has a chauffeur-driven limousine which appears periodically in these chapters.
In this novel about expatriated Americans, their efforts to escape keep them going further away from Paris streets and toward rural roads in the Spanish mountains.
The novel's main events surround the bull fight and fiesta in Pamplona, Spain. To get there, Jake and Bill take the train from Gare d'Orsay to Bayonne in southern France. On the train, there's much talk about booking a lunch seating - they can only get the fifth since the train is filled with seven cars of Americans from Dayton who are on a pilgrimage to Rome, Biarritz [sic], and Lourdes; these "Pilgrim Fathers" have cornered the dining car, so Jake and Bill don't get to eat until 4:15. Along the way they buy sandwiches and chablis from a vendor on the train and stop off to buy wine at Tours (Ch. 9). They had hoped to get a scheduled bus from Bayonne, but the service doesn't start until July 1, so they pay for a motor car at 400 Fr. [The hotel room costs 16 Fr. a night.] The passing Spanish countryside is given in detail as they go up mountains and eventually to the plateau of Pamplona. Once there, they wait for the 9:00 train from San Sebastian where they expect to meet Brett and another friend - no Brett, so they decide to go trout fishing instead (Ch. 10).
The bus ride from Pamplona to the fishing spot at Burgete puts Jake and Bill together with Basque peasants. As with the other events in the novel, everyone drinks fairly constantly, but now it's from wine skins. One Basque man imitates an automobile's klaxon horn while Jake is drinking; he jumps and dribbles, much to the group's amusement. The ride starts with people on top of the bus, sitting on the luggage - by the time they arrive at Burgete there's room for everyone to sit comfortably inside (Ch. 11). The insistent presence of railroad time, down to the minute, and always on schedule (in this book) contrasts with the relaxed atmosphere of fishing and even of the bullfights. But these settings can only be for a vacation.
The travel back to France and to the trains is in big motor-cars, although not as big as the sight-seeing cars which wait after the fiesta, one of which carries twenty-five Englishwomen. Bill takes the train to Paris at 7:10. Jake goes to San Sebastian where he talks with bicycle racers in the hotel (the race is followed by motor-cars). He gets a telegram from Brett and takes the Sud Express (10:00 PM) to Madrid, which is the "end of the line," where all trains stop. A taxi ride to the Hotel Montana, a big meal with Brett. The final scene has Jake and Brett in another taxi which curves around a traffic policeman with a baton and pushes them closer thus emphasizing the inevitability of their separation. Hemingway is playing these frustrated encounters against the general promise that sexual events notoriously take place in the back seat.
Edition used: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954.
Author: Willa Cather (1876-1947)
Title: "The Old Beauty"
Date: 1936
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1922, Travel in France
The central event in the story is the death of an old woman, a great figure from the 1890s, who is bumped around and frightened after a near collision on a mountain road. The narrating consciousness, Henry Seabury, had befriended the woman and her companion, and had proposed the drive with his Savoyard driver to the Grande-Chartreuse. Earlier he had presented driving in chauffeur-driven limousines as being almost as intimate as having tea at the hotel. This time, the drive is "strangely impersonal. He and the two ladies were lost in a companionship much closer than any they could share with one another. The clean-cut mountain boy who drove them seemed lost in thoughts of his own." Coming down the mountain a "dirty little car" with two American women is in the wrong lane, so our group has a narrow escape. The famous old woman is shaken, but forgives the driver and suggests a generous tip; she dies in her sleep that night, though.
Edition used: The Old Beauty and Other Stories. New York: Viking, 1976.
Author: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Title: Short stories
Date: 1923-1936
Systems: Automobile, train
Context: Generally contemporary, Michigan, Texas; travel in Africa, Europe
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936) is an African safari story in which the motor car is incongruously a central part of the setting, the theme, and the irony. Francis and Margot Macomber and Wilson, the white hunter, chase and hunt lions and buffalo from a "doorless, box-bodied" two-seated car. Francis "knew about motor cycles - that was earliest - about motor cars… about sex in books, many books, too many books," but he doesn't know about people, or hunting. Throughout we are reminded about where the Macombers are seated as Wilson manages them. Wilson has the black guides shovel a path over a steep bank the day before so the hunting goes smoothly. In typical, Hemingway style, "The car stopped," a disembodied way of removing agency from the world.
There is a hunter's code: it is somewhat acceptable to chase buffalo in cars, but it is illegal to shoot from them. Chasing is, in Wilson's terms, "sport enough," a phrase which also points to his sexual pursuit of Mrs. Macomber. Margot complains about "chasing those big helpless things in a motor car"; it seems unfair, and telling the officials about it could put Wilson out of business. Francis worries about his fear and his masculinity: "Motor cars made [fear] familiar … Made him into a man." Margot: "Just because you've chased some helpless animals in a motor car you talk like heroes." The final scenes include Wilson and Francis, on foot, popping away at a group of buffalos, killing some and wounding others. Margot, perhaps by accident, perhaps not, blows her husband away as she shoots, from the car, in the general direction of a wounded buffalo. Do you break the code if you murder your husband from a car, rather than getting out first?
The lives of characters in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936) rely heavily on the success or failure of trucks and planes. This is also an African safari setting where technology is as much a feature as is nature. The unnamed central character has gangrene and incipient blood poisoning. He and his mistress cannot be evacuated - it would have been better to have hired a good mechanic instead of the kikuyu driver; he should have checked the oil so the bearing wouldn't burn out. Much later in the story he notices that he should have used iodine for the thorn scratch, so he wouldn't have gotten the gangrene.
The story is interspersed with the man's flashbacks to scenes from World War I and Paris, scenes he might have written about but now can only dream or imagine. There's the railway station at Karagatch where he saw the headlight of the Simplon-Orient express; later he looked out the train window during breakfast in Bulgaria. At the rue Mouffetard he had taken his bicycle up the hill on the only asphalted street in that quarter. That image becomes merged with his sense of death's physical approach: "It was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements." Still later, he says to the woman that death is just as likely to be "two bicycle policemen" as a scythe and skull, or a hyena.
The plane should be the way out. The camp is set up with a reasonable landing strip and smudge pots to identify it. In a final dream the man imagines the plane circling twice and landing with the help of the fires. After a bumpy take off (you need to avoid the wart-hog holes) the pilot and the man fly over the hills and up to a vision of Mt. Kilimanjaro, echoing the opening image of a leopard unaccountably out of its regular range which got frozen in the mountain's snows.
Several stories trace the growth and travails of Nick Adams and other young men who grew up in the 1890s, participated in the First War, and came back or stayed in Europe thereafter. The series begins in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, with barges on Lake Michigan slowly moving on the horizon, and a blacksmith shop prominent in the small town ("Up In Michigan" 1923, set in 1884). The doctor makes house calls by rowboat ("Indian Camp" 1924). Lumber schooners carry both the cut wood and a portable lumber mill from site to site ("The End of Something" 1925).
As a young adult, Nick jumps freight trains and, in "The Battler" (1925) he is kicked off by the brakeman who seems to serve a policing function. In this story we get a technical description of the good quality of the track which "was well ballasted and made easy walking, sand and gravel packed between the ties, solid walking." This particular roadbed is surrounded by swamps on either side, and thus Hemingway sets up a fairly typical, symbolic landscape. In a famous story, set after the War, "The Big Two-Hearted River" (1925) Nick is left off the train at a now-deserted town surrounded by a fire-damaged forest to fish and to try to rebuild his life.
Other veterans come to a society where automobiles play an important role. The wounded major in "A Very Short Story" (1924) "got gonorrhea from a sales girl in a [Chicago] loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park." Mr. Krebs in "Soldier's Home" (1925) was not allowed to use the family motor car before the War since his father needed it in his real estate business to show farm properties. When Krebs returns to Oklahoma we are reminded that "it was still the same car." His mother says that he can use it to go out on dates, in a futile gesture to get him to out of his depression. A retrospective story, "Fathers and Sons" (1933) juxtaposes Nick's riding down a modern highway after getting through a road-repair detour in the center of a small town with his memories of his childhood and his conversations with his father.
"Che ti Dice la Patria" (1927) uses the state of Italian roads and a confrontation with a Fascist on a bicycle to characterize Mussolini's regime. Two Americans in a Ford coupé pick a person up on the way to Spezia; since the car is a two-seater, the hitchhiker has to ride on the outside, on the running board. On the outskirts of Spezia he gets off, since they could get into trouble (undefined) by carrying a passenger - thus, regulating how cars are used is one way that the Fascists show their power. Driving through the muddy streets near Genoa forces them to use their wind-shield cleaners and later a rag to clean off the wind-shield and licence plate. The Fascist on a bicycle with his revolver and the car stop at a railroad crossing - the Fascist claims that "Your number's dirty" and, even when it is cleaned off again, he fines them 25 lire, plus another 25 when the Americans complain about the roads. The Americans force the Fascist to enter the charges and fines in his coupon book and to give a receipt, thus trying to subvert the shakedown racket.
"A Canary for One" (1927) takes us on an express train run from Marsailles to Paris, and, along the way, gives details on how the compartments are configured, the views of cities and towns from the switch-yards, and passing glimpses of the country side, e.g., of a burning farm house. The central character, an American lady who owns the canary, can't sleep once the beds are turned down because she is afraid of speed at night. As the train gets close to the Paris station we see the brown wooden restaurant and sleeping cars ready for the return run to Italy at 5 PM, and the suburban commuting cars with their extra seats on the roof. They also pass three cars that had been in a wreck with their splintered sides and the roofs sagged in.
The main activity in "A Canary for One" is a conversation between the narrator's wife and the American lady who is deaf and must read lips. The narrator occasionally makes comments but they are not heard or responded to, which turns out to reflect the forthcoming break up of their marriage, and, indirectly to comment on the social dynamics of people who travel together in train compartments.
The train's breakfast schedule is well ahead of the city's preparation for morning activities, so Hemingway points out the nice distinction between travellers' time and on-the-ground time.
"Homage to Switzerland" (1933) shows the station room with its carved chairs and comfortable seats, and carved wooden clocks. The narrator tries to hire the waitress for sex while he is waiting for the train. Hemingway uses nearly identical language both the describe the station and the pick-up three times in three different towns, which points out the uniformity of the country. He thus invites us to see transportation Systems as reflecting (or stereotyping) national character, at least in Europe.
Cars, boats, planes, and trucks abound in Hemingway's war stories, but we have chosen not to detail the military use of these vehicles.
"After the Storm" (1932) is the account of a small-scale salvage operator who comes across a sunken ocean liner off the Florida coast. The man has only a wrench and cannot break through the port holes and thus gather the valuables. He depicts a female drowning victim grotesquely floating in the wreck up to a porthole. A large, professional company does get the safe out and gathers whatever valuables are around. The final section is the narrator's imaginative reconstruction of how the crew and passengers faced the disaster.
Edition used: The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938.
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