Porter presents an ocean liner as a microcosm to dramatize American and European political forces which led to World War II. Rey also uses a liner in a children's story. Wright dramatizes the train as a young African-American boy's path from the south, while wandering by freight and passenger train and social dislocations from train travel are subjects for several blues songs, and of Hughes' short story. Wolfe's 'Far and Near" gives a sentimental picture of the engineer as a countryside hero. MacLeish sees the railroad as the prime example of uncaring capitalism; Hurston points to the auto makers' fame. Dove surveys the arrival of various systems to Akron, Ohio, starting with a riverboat accident, going through a Zeppelin factory, to various aspects of the automobile and its infrastructure. Welty's Losing Battles focuses on a potentially serious car accident which brings out the best in people. Taylor, also writing of the South, charts the effect of automobiles and improved roads on a small town, as Welty does in two stories about traveling salesmen. Martz's story shows a highway tunnel under construction in West Virginia. The highway and its construction are central to Warren's fictional treatment of Huey Long's Louisiana, where driving styles become indices of peoples' character. One of McCullers' stories, set in a Georgia town, shows the growing effect of car travel to larger cities; in other stories (set later in the century) she portrays commercial flights to France and a Southerner's commuting by bus in New York city.
In West's Miss Lonelyhearts the taxi is the superior way to get around New York, and it depicts an escape ride to the Connecticut countryside. Doctorow's novel about a criminal gang places their expensive cars in the midst of New York's other systems which still include horse-drawn wagons as well as private single-engine airplanes. Schwartz also shows the continued presence of wagons amid the trucks. In Gardner's detective story criminals' automobiles and garages, as well as a plane crash, become major sources of clues. Ellison's main character is first seen driving in the rural South, then on a train to the North; his New York scenes are heavily involved with the subways. Wolfe's story presents the Brooklyn subway as the gateway to an indefinitely complex urban world. Wright's Native Son, an African-American point of view, is set in Chicago where the envy of limousines is a motivating force, and driving one is the central character's job.
Kennedy and Saroyan pick up on the theme of the car as a place where casual sex occurs. The Greyhound bus is another way for young people to escape small town life as depicted by Brautigan, while Steinbeck's California story, "Chrysanthemums," contrasts a traveling handyman's freedom to roam in his wagon with a farm couple's more restricted, but car-based life. His Grapes of Wrath depicts a broader social movement by car of share croppers from Oklahoma to California in the Dust Bowl era; Guthrie charts the same migration pattern, this time by train, and he also shows the hassle of poor peoples' owning and using cars in California. Robinson shows the impacts on a family of accidents where first a train and then a car plunge off cliffs; Agee focuses on the profound consequences and arbitrary nature of a car crash.
Hollywood's glamor and notoriety is the setting for West's Day of the Locust and Fitzgerald's Last Tycoon; West concentrates on the automobile as a site for sex and seduction, while Fitzgerald shows how the airplane brings hopefuls to the city. Doctorow's book on the New York World's Fair brings together the diversity of modern systems, including the Hindenberg's final flight and the General Motors "Futurama" display. Stewart goes into great detail on the effects of a major storm on trains, highways, and airplane travel, especially in California, but eventually across the country. Finally, The Little Engine that Could allegorically depicts the wonders of the train for young readers.
Author: Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
Title: Ship of Fools
Date: 1962 Written: 1945-1961
Systems: Steamship
Context: 1931, Veracruz to Bremerhaven
The ship Vera is self-consciously a microcosm highlighting attitudes about race and religion leading to the Second World War. As he walks around the deck, the Captain sees his role thus: "That was his true world, of unquestioned authority, clearly defined caste and carefully graded privilege, and it irked him grievously to be forced to concern himself with any other. He knew well what human trash his ship - all ships - carried to and from all the ports of the world: gamblers, thieves, smugglers, spies, political deportees and refugees, stowaways, drug peddlers, all the gutter-stuff of the steerage moving like plague rats from one country to another, swarming and ravening and undermining the hard-won order of the cultures and civilizations of the whole world" (Part 3). The international group of named characters (Europeans and North Americans), listed before the story begins, travel first class. From the upper deck they can look down at steerage "feeding quarters," see the passengers eat in shifts at long tables. After the stopover in Havana, the formerly empty quarters are filled; on the first day out, we see the crew hosing the vomit off the seasick steerage passengers; they are "all starving, in rags, shipped like cattle." While a few have hammocks, most sleep on the floor. The Captain, concerned about a revolt, takes trouble to ensure there are no weapons; he turns out the lights when he finds the passengers are dancing and playing cards (Part 2). At the stop at Tenerife, they are herded off while the first-class passengers watch and gawk (Part 3).
Life in first class includes dining quite well at the Captain's table, lots of drinking, and extended conversation about race, religion, civilization, and so on. Prostitutes walk the decks. The general atmosphere is party - dances, games (ping-pong, shuffleboard, chess), a small canvas swimming pool, band music. This part of shipboard life is capped off in the long fiesta scene towards the end of the novel - Spanish and German dance music, noise-makers and paper hats, a lottery.
The quarters seem genuinely uncomfortable. The cabins have two or three berths with little room to stow luggage or toilet gear. In most cases, cabin mates are strangers who negotiate with more or less success in preserving privacy and getting along. After a few days, the new passengers who get on in Havana are seen as interlopers by those who have become used to each other's company (Part 1). In one scene a young boy watches his parents undress for the first time, and becomes acutely aware of their odors since the consensus is that the portholes must be kept closed to keep out the "dangerous" night air. Even so, the almost total lack of privacy means that sexual relations are nearly impossible to orchestrate, whether between pickups at a dance or an engaged couple. The purser is the ship's officer who should work all this out, but he has trouble finding matches to move one passenger out of his original cabin because he does not wish to share it with a Jew. The Ship of Fools is a modern effort to expand the theme, begun with the nineteenth-century steamboat, that the closed quarters of a boat forces a diversity of peoples to interact.
Edition used: New York: Signet, 1963.
Author: H. A. Rey (b. 1898)
Title: Curious George
Date: 1941
Systems: Boat, traffic
Context: Contemporary
An illustrated book for very young children, part of a series; still in print and widely known. George, a monkey in Africa, is caught by a man who puts him in a bag and rows him to a big ship (an ocean liner); he jumps overboard but is rescued. Once at the man's house in the city, after other adventures, he grabs a bunch of helium balloons but finally lands on a traffic light and the "traffic got all mixed up." He climbs into the man's car and winds up in the zoo.
Edition used: Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1941.
Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Title: "The Man Who was Almost a Man"
Date: 1941
Systems: Train
Context: 1930s, South; African-American perspective
In this story, as in Wright's other works, trains are symbolically linked to masculinity, or rather, they represent the promise of a future masculinity - fully achieved and untroubled; thus the passage to manhood often entails an encounter with a train or with forces metaphorically associated with trains - power, danger or the urge to escape.
Seventeen-year-old Dave considers himself "almost a man." But his not-quite manhood has less to do with age and more to do with the power relationships in which he lives and works. Ignored by the men he works with, his earnings carefully guarded and spent by his mother, Dave comes to believe that only a gun can change his social position - with it he could command the respect he craves.
Ironically the gun only deepens his obligation and humiliation at work and at home: Dave's practice shoot ends up killing his boss's plow mule. Rather than face his father's beating and two years of labor to remunerate Boss Hawkins, Dave quite spontaneously decides to hop the Illinois Central, riding "away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man..."
The sudden appearance of a train at the end of the story offers an easy exit for Dave and the author both. The scene bears a dreamlike quality. Wright emphasizes the power of the train as it "thunder[s] past...rumbling and clinking." But the challenge after all is easily met and Dave seems to glide onto the top of a boxcar without sweat, bump or jolt. The story leaves him riding down moonlit tracks and staring into his future. Whereas the gun only disappointed as a means to manhood, the train in this story bears up under a heavy fantasy investment in a way that resonates better with the blues than with realist fiction.
Edition used: Charles Bohner, ed. Short Fiction, Classic and Contemporary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.
Author: Various
Title: Blues
Date: Early twentieth century
Systems: Car, train
Context: African-American perspective
Big Joe Williams (1903-1982) "Overhauling Blues":
Drop down, baby, let me overhaul you little machine. I say, drop down, baby, let me overhaul you little machine. Well, you know, you got a loose carburettor, [sic] you been burning bad gasoline. Well, I'm gonna race your motor, baby, I'm gonna heist your hood. Spark plugs getting old, generator ain't putting out good. But, oooh, yeah, let me overhaul you little machine.
Obviously these lyrics have nothing to do with car travel, yet have everything to do with technology and sexual pleasure. Often in blues, the handyman, mechanic or engineer possesses special, decidedly sexual, knowledge. But the handyman trope, like the expressions "get to work" or "gettin' busy," are more than just thinly veiled references to sexual activity. Like the lyrics above, the sexual idiom of the blues defines desire and the erotic in broad terms. Technology (and a mastery of technology) is erotic. The "Overhauling Blues" carry a double message: not only is technical skill necessary to erotic pleasure, but there is erotic pleasure latent in technical skill.
Blind Boy Fuller (1908-1941) in "Passenger Train Woman" also takes the machine [train] as a figure to describe sexual practice and sexual desire. "Passenger Train Woman" and the lines from "Seventy Four Blues" below suggest that our technologies redefine relationships between people imaginatively as well as logistically.
Well, the time I need you, mama that's the time you're gone, The time I need you, that's the time you're gone, I believe you got ways like a passenger train, when one's getting off, the other one's getting on.
In Blind Boy Fuller's lines, the woman is train-like; in "Seventy Four Blues" by Willie Love (1906-1953) the train is man-like. In both cases, the train meddles with the order of things and makes its presence felt in the most intimate of relationships.
74 is just a freight train, but it's got ways just like a man. The 74 is just a freight train, but it's got ways just like a man. it'll take your sweet little woman, boys, and let you down cold in hand.
"That Lonesome Train Took My Baby Away" by Charlie McCoy (1909-1950) presents trains as an unpredictable and (mischievously) destructive social force.
It ain't no telling what that train won't do, It'll take your baby and run right over you. Now that engineerman ought to be 'shamed of hisself. Take women from their husbands, babies from their mother's breast.
Travel and the "engineerman" himself come to represent aggressive sexual possibilities, more general and social than the lyrics of Willie Love or Blind Boy Fuller. The "Lonesome Train" title is not so much a personification as its opposite; this is not a train endowed with human characteristics and sentiments, but rather a human sentiment that can only be conveyed with reference to a train. In as much as the properties of trains and the realities of train travel have created new ways of being in the world, new ways of desiring and feeling. One cannot conceive of or describe certain states of mind without reference to that same technology.
Various students of the blues use rubrics like "Travel Blues" or "Songs of the Lonesome Road" to designate the large body of songs seemingly occasioned by travel or nomadic experience. Whether the singer is travel-weary, itching-to-travel, or wanting his/her baby back, the motif is a common one and has contributed to the clichéd image of the blues singer as the "rambling" or wandering drifter - typically male. A significant number of these blues take train travel as their subject. Robert Johnson (1912-1938) in "Love in Vain" suggests that the frequent comings and goings in "travel blues" might refer to psychological as well as physical displacements.
Well, the train has left the station with two lights on behind, The train has left the station with two lights on behind, Well, the blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind.
Those with steady jobs on trains, working set routes, are apparently no less drifters than the ramblers who hop trains from point to point. Even the work on trains seems to defy routine - these blues depict the porter's life as one of continual interruption. Train life makes it impossible to count on fixed family and gender roles, marital expectations or hours for sleep. Sylvester Weaver, "Railroad Porter Blues" captures these themes.
Hear that bell ringing, keeps me 'wake all night long, (2x) Ain't no time for sleeping, something's always going on wrong. Folks keeps yelling, 'Rastus, pull the window down please.' (2x) With that snow a-falling, somebody surely going to freeze.' Shining shoes till morning, got no place to lay my head. (2x) When I get through slaving, Lord, I'm almost dead. Baby starts crying, then they takes me to be a nurse. (2x) I gets almost drownded, and what could be worse? Poor railroad porter, hates to leave his wife at home. (2x) 'Cause she starts to cheating just as soon as he is gone.
Edition used: Cited from Paul Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit. New York: De Capo, 1975.
Author: Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
Title: "On the Road"
Date: 1952
Systems: Railroad
Context: Depression era, Northern U.S.; African-American perspective
"On the road" for Sargeant, the protagonist of this brief story, means riding freights from town to town looking for food and shelter. The story opposes hobo culture to segregated American church culture and proposes that life on the rails better embodies egalitarian and Christian ideals.
Refused shelter and sent back out into the snow storm by the white Reverend Mr. Dorset, Sargeant attempts to break into the church next door. As the door gives beneath his weight, he is stopped by "two white cops" and Sargeant begins to hallucinate. Beset by white townspeople who would drag him from the church, Sargeant clings to the stone pillars supporting the huge edifice. Beaten furiously by the cops, Sargeant pulls down the church Samson-style, burying the white people beneath debris. This de facto reorganization of the white church brings Christ down to earth, literally, by dislodging him from the cross.
The emancipated Christ takes to the road with Sargeant. Together they hike down to a hobo jungle where Sargeant knows he'll be welcome; unlike the church, the jungle "ain't got no doors." Christ pushes on, catching a freight to Kansas City. The hallucination ends in nightmare as Sargeant imagines that even the freights are policed. In trying to hop a coal car he discovers the car holds more cops than coal. Just as he's being knocked from the car, Sargeant comes out of the hallucination to find himself in jail.
Edition used: Hans Ostrom, ed. Lives and Moments: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1991.
Author: Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
Title: "The Far and the Near"
Date: 1935
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary
The "limited express between two cities" passes a spot near a little town just after 2 PM each day. As the train gains speed after leaving the nearby town it goes past a "tidy little cottage" where a woman had waived to the engineer daily for twenty years. Over that time, the woman's daughter and the engineer's children had grown up. He had also had four near collisions - a light spring wagon, an automobile, a battered hobo on the rails, and a vague "form." which flew by the engine. The faithful woman had become a permanent fixture, "no matter what mishaps, grief or error might break the iron schedule of his days." When he retires he follows a promise he made to himself to visit the two women. As he walks from the station, the town is totally strange to him. At the house, "this place he loved turned unfamiliar as the landscape of some ugly dream." The real woman, with a "harsh and pinched and meager" face does not fit "the brave freedom" of her gesture. After an embarrassed, halting conversation with her and her daughter he leaves, realizing his age, and that the "vista of that shining line" was gone forever. By making the location anonymous and general, Wolfe emphasizes the ubiquitous role the railway system came to play in demarcating both daily time and life times in rural America for several generations.
Edition used: George McMichael, ed. Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Author: Archibald MacLeish (b. 1892)
Title: "Empire Builders"
Date: 1933
Systems: Trains
Context: Contemporary
A museum attendant gives the set piece on five panels depicting people who made America, including "Mister-Harriman-is-buying-the-Union-Pacific-at-Seventy: / The Santa Fe is shining in his hair," Commodore Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Mellon, and the maker of Barton's "Deliciouest-Dentifrice." Most of the poem is a letter from M. Lewis (of Lewis and Clark fame) to Thomas Jefferson on the 1803 expedition. The economic irony of capitalism is picked up in the final lines: "You have just beheld the Makers making America: / They screwed her scrawny and gaunt with their seven-year panics: / They bought her back on their mortgages old-whore-cheap: / They fattened their bonds at her breasts till the thin blood ran from them…"
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Title: "The Gilded Six-Bits"
Date: 1933
Systems: Car manufacture
Context: 1930s, Small settlement in rural Florida, African-American perspective
This story turns on the sham display of wealth. One unfortunate evening, Joe comes home early from his night shift, only to find his wife Missie May in the sack with Mr. Otis D. Slemmons. Slemmons is from "up Chicago way" and wealthy - "a heavy-set man wid his mouth full of gold teethes." In Slemmons's scramble to escape the bedroom, he leaves behind some of the showy "gold pieces" he uses to attract the ladies - and these, of course, turn out to be nothing but "gilded six-bits."
Typically for the times, when the as-yet-happily married couple first discuss Slemmons's arrival in town, they refer to Henry Ford (and later "Mr. Packard and Mr. Cadillac") as the epitome of wealth and power. They quarrel over whether Ford is "puzzle-gutted" or "spare-built." These auto makers as identifiable personalities were the topic of popular speculation, fueled by Henry Ford's frequent presence in the news. Joe maintains that even Slemmons's distended gut makes him look like "a rich white man. All rich mens is got some belly on 'em."
Edition used: Martha Foley, editor. 200 Years of Great American Short Stories. New York: Galahad Books, 1975.
Author: Rita Dove (b. 1952)
Title: Thomas and Beulah
Date: 1986
Systems: Riverboat, car, zeppelin, airplane, railroad
Context: 1919 to 1969, Akron, Ohio, African-American perspective
These poems "tell two sides of a story and are meant to be read in sequence."
The title characters meet and marry in Akron, a town dependent on all types of vehicle manufacture. Thomas's relationship to local industry is particularly interesting because he deeply fears the very machines by which he earns his living. His life is marked by freak transportation-related accidents; the series of poems suggests that, while boats, cars, planes and the like offer a heightened sense of power over the environment, these same technologies make life vulnerable in new ways.
"The Event": Significantly, the book of poems opens with a riverboat accident. Thomas and his best friend Lem leave the Tennessee ridge in 1919 for the "riverboat life." The poem connects the power and ease of steamboat travel to the cocky self-assurance of young manhood. They drink, play a mandolin and sing while the "wheel / churned mud and moonlight." The steamboat and the river are essential ingredients in the fantasy lifestyle these two have tried to capture: free, irresponsible travel for men who own only the "stinking rags" on their backs, men "with nothing to boast of but good looks and a mandolin." The poem exposes the narcissism of the fantasy; in contrast to the power of the river, their own puny power - and that of the boat for that matter - means nothing. Each playing the part of rogue-adventurer to the hilt, Thomas dares Lem to swim to an island in the river. Lem never reappears, and Thomas is marked by the guilt of his dare for the rest of his life.
"Nothing Down" weaves together the purchase of Thomas and Beulah's first car with a memory of Thomas's childhood. They buy a car on "nothing down" for a trip back to Thomas's home in Tennessee. The car is important because it signals to Thomas's family, and to the white folks of Tennessee, that these Negroes have done well for themselves in the Northern economy. Again an accident deflates the narcissistic fantasy. En route to Tennessee, the car skids into a ditch - significantly derailing their triumphant return. Beulah calls after a carload of "hallooing" white men, "You and your South... Don't tell me this ain't what / you were hoping for."
The choice of a car is clearly an aesthetic one in this poem. Beulah "saunters along the gleaming fenders" and admires her reflection "in the headlamp casing of a Peerless." The car's color appears to have both a personal and social significance. Beulah doesn't even consider the red car; she passes it, mocking the voices of Southern whites and emphasizing the racial stereotypes the color would confirm: "'Nigger red,' she drawls, moving on." Beulah wants to choose the color she thinks her husband wants; she senses his eyes on a "sky blue Chandler!" For Thomas, blue is associated with a narrow escape from white pursuers in his boyhood. In effect, whether opting for one color or against another, the choice is intimately related to the couple's past or present standing in white society.
In 1928, the Goodyear Zeppelin Airdock was built in Akron; at that time it was the largest building in the world without interior supports. Thomas and many others found work in the factory. "The Zeppelin Factory" emphasizes Thomas's emotional reaction to working on airships so large: "standing in the cage of the whale's belly, sparks / flying off the joints / and noise thundering / Thomas wanted to sit right down and cry." These lines play on the guilt that has plagued Thomas since the accidental death of his friend Lem - Thomas is the sinner, the Jonah in the whale's belly, preserved again and again by sheer luck while those around him die.
In 1931, the "third largest airship was dubbed / the biggest joke / in town, though they all / turned out for the launch. / Wind caught, / 'The Akron' floated / out of control, / three men in tow - " Two men jump to safety, the third falls "clawing / six hundred feet." Thomas, "intact and faint-hearted," associates this accident with the early drowning of Lem; he will forever after whisper to the Goodyear blimp whenever he sees it - "Big boy I know you're in there."
The year 1922 marked the completion of a viaduct spanning the Little Cuyahoga River. One decade later, in "Under the Viaduct, 1932," Thomas has lost his sky-blue Chandler to the Depression, and he finds himself under the viaduct instead of driving across it. Here the viaduct makes literal the division between "upper" and "lower" classes; Thomas apparently likes the leveling effect of the times. The traffic above is ominous, "hissing" and "slithering" - but like the rest of the economy, "slithering to a halt."
Yet again, Thomas is spared disaster in "Lightnin' Blues." Thomas and Beulah's second car stalls, inexplicably, in a lightning storm, and "leaps backwards every time he turn[s] the key." The poem captures the annoyance of car trouble in bad weather (complete with kids bickering in the back seat). The sheriff eventually comes along to tell them that bad luck is good luck - they would have been struck down in the road by a falling tree if the engine hadn't stopped.
"Aircraft" explores a complicated gender insult to Black men who were hired as wartime workers in an aircraft factory. Declared "too frail for combat," Thomas is employed as a riveter by an aircraft manufacturer. Standing among "the robust women around him," he wonders, "Why frail? Why not simply / family man?" He also wonders at the racist division of labor - he blasts bolts into airplane wings thinking, "Why wings, when / women with fingers no smaller than his / dabble in the gnarled intelligence of an engine?" These thoughts mingle with his persistent mistrust of all vehicles. Hired to give each wing bolt a five second blast he panics - "And if he gave just a four second blast, or three?"
In "Thomas at the Wheel" Thomas of course dies in a car, but not in the manner he's dreaded. Arriving at a drugstore to fill a prescription for heart pills, he parks and suffers a heart attack while sitting behind the wheel. Unable to move, he dies "watch[ing] / the slit eye of the glove compartment, / the prescription inside."
"A Hill of Beans" is the only poem that shows Beulah's perspective. One spring during the Depression, she feeds the hobos that follow the circus in and out of town: "Any two points/ make a line, they'd say, / and we're gonna ride them all." When the circus tents fold, her guests take off, leaving the field grass with "a path / torn waist-high to the railroad / where the hoboes jumped the slow curve / just outside Union Station."
Edition used: Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie-Mellon Univ. Press.
Author: Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
Title: Losing Battles
Date: 1970
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1930s, Mississippi
In Welty's novel, set in the hill country of northeast Mississippi, three generations of Granny Vaughn's family gather at her home to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. Over the two days of the reunion the various family members tell stories about one another, about their descendents, and about the different people in the community who have had an impact on the family. More than simply nostalgia, the narratives are connected to the present, impinging directly on the lives of the characters.
One of the main characters in the novel is Jack Renfro, a great-grandchild of Granny's who is nineteen and has just finished serving a year and a half in prison. While Granny is revered as the oldest member of the family, Jack is considered the leader and the hope of the Vaughn-Renfro-Beecham clan. The reunion is as much a celebration of his return as of Granny's birthday. But it turns out that the good-hearted Jack has, on his way home, helped a man driving a Buick get his car out of a ditch; unbeknownst to Jack the man was Judge Oscar Moody, who was responsible for sending Jack to prison. Jack's family discovers the identity of the distressed motorist and subsequently insists that Jack correct his error. Knowing the judge will have to take the road by the family house, Jack awaits him, planning to "`shoo him back in a ditch just as good as he was in.'" But when the Buick comes along Jack's baby daughter, Lady Mae, runs out into the road, and his wife, Gloria, goes after her. The Buick swerves to avoid them and ends up hanging halfway over a cliff, barely balancing on a roadside sign that reads "Destruction Is At Hand!" After checking on his wife and baby, Jack rushes to the Judge's assistance, expressing his gratitude to Moody for not running over his loved ones. He immediately undertakes to rescue the Judge's car. Jack works throughout the Sunday reunion, attempting various methods of retrieval that are recounted throughout the novel, in-between the other stories and action. In the end he does manage to save the car, which is not in very good condition, but does still run.
The car accident - an accident which could have been much worse - is like the many tribulations that have confronted and continue to confront the family: debilitating but not fatal. The car does not go over the edge. Jack is a Good Samaritan who works to save the car, and though the Buick is a bit battered, finally there is salvation. Destruction might be at hand, but the car does swerve, missing Lady Mae and Gloria, and it is towed back from the edge. Human action - Judge Moody's and Jack's - can avert destruction, keep it at bay. The car is a machine well capable of violence, but the right kind of guidance and effort can control that threat.
Edition used: New York: Vintage, 1978.
Author: Peter Taylor (b. 1917)
Title: "What Do You Hear from 'em?"
Date: 1951
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary and 1930s. South
The central character is a black woman known to the small Southern town as Aunt Munsie. She is occasionally visited by the adult children of a medical doctor whom she had helped to raise. They come in a "big car"; one son has a Ford-and-Lincoln agency in Memphis, a symbol both of their modernity and the fracturing of the small town. The old doctor had been frightened of mules and horses, so "the happiest day of his life was the day he first learned that the horseless carriage was a reality."
The central plot involves Munsie's business, which is pulling a slop wagon (to gather pig food) down the middle of the Thornton's streets, which was accepted thirty years ago. Now "the streets yet been broadened," and their macadam surface is barely wide enough to let two cars pass; teenagers and strangers honk at her, for, "in those days everyone had equal rights on the streets of Thornton." Aside from the slight inconvenience, white women claim to care about Munsie's safety, so the town government cooks up an ordinance that puts her out of business and destroys the way of life of a person who is about a century old.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
Title: "Death of a Traveling Salesman."
Date: 1941
Systems: Car
Context: 1930s, Mississippi
The salesman of the story, R.J. Bowman, is a middle-aged man who has been on the road selling for fourteen years, and who has just spent a month in a hotel bed, sick with influenza. Not completely recovered, he becomes lost as he drives his Ford through Mississippi, ending up on a rutted dirt path. From the protection of his car he sees people working far across the fields, too distant to ask for directions. Suddenly and unexpectedly he comes to the end of the path, and before he can stop it, the car slides slowly into a ravine. He goes to a nearby house for help, and finds a women who tells him he must wait for "Sonny" to return. Later, while Sonny retrieves the car, Bowman imagines being "somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening." But when night comes he suddenly wants to stay with the couple, to share their companionship; he thinks about his life and the isolation of the road and momentarily yearns for something different. But in the middle of the night he awakes and decides he must leave immediately. The car awaits him above the ravine, sitting "in the moonlight like a boat." But as he climbs the small hill to his car, he has a heart attack, and sinks "in fright onto the road," where he dies, alone.
Edition used: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
Author: Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
Title: "The Hitch-Hikers" In Curtain of Green
Date: 1941
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Memphis area
In this short story a traveling salesman, Tom Harris, picks up two hitchhikers as he drives north towards Memphis. This trade is the modern version of the peddler in his wagon. The two men are "tramps," with no particular destination. Harris stops at a drive-in and buys them burgers, and then stops in the town of Dulcie, at a hotel. While he goes in to the hotel to talk to the proprietor, whom he knows from previous trips, one of the hitchhikers attempts to steal the car, but the other hitchhiker hits him over the head with a bottle, nearly killing him. Harris drives the injured man to the hospital and the other hitchhiker is arrested. When he returns to the hotel Harris receives a phone call from a woman he knows in the town and is invited over to a party. Harris is much different from the salesman in Welty's "Death of a Traveling Salesman"; he is younger, known and admired in towns all over the south, even considered a hero of sorts, if an enigmatic one. At the party, Ruth, the host, tells complimentary stories about him, and another woman calls him an "angel." It seems that he commonly goes in for "good deeds," such as picking up the hitchhikers: he also recently gave an eloping couple farther south a ride to the next town. And throughout the second half of the story his concern for the injured man is displayed again and again, as he repeatedly calls the hospital, hoping the man can survive, for the sake of both of the "tramps."
And yet Harris remains somewhat detached from the adulation of the people who know him, somewhat uncomfortable with their desire to know him better. He is gentle and caring with the two women in the story, Ruth and Carol, who obviously want to get closer to him, but he keeps them at a distance (though there is a suggestion that he has had fleeting relationships with both in the past). It seems the incident with the hitchhikers has made him even more solitary than usual, made him doubt the portrait others paint of him. In the final passage of the story, after he has learned the injured man has died, Harris prepares to leave town by getting a haircut and having his car "polished." The car is largely the means by which he has created his far flung reputation for sophistication and benevolence, and yet in the story that self-image has been tarnished: one of the hitchhikers he picked up is dead and the other faces a murder charge; we also learn that he had completely forgotten his relationship with Carol, which occurred five years before (and he has been lauded for "never forgetting"). Harris's self-confidence has been shaken, but the polished car indicates that he's going on with the life he has been leading for years, along the roads of the south. Whether his driving is an escape or a mission is left in doubt both for him and for the reader.
Edition used: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
Author: Albert Maltz (b. 1908)
Title: "Man in a Road"
Date: 1936
Systems: Road construction, automobile
Context: Contemporary, West Virginia
The unnamed narrator nearly runs down a man at the entrance to a tunnel and then picks him up to drive him a hundred miles to Weston. The near miss is rather surrealistic - he slowed down to ten miles an hour on a "patched, macadam road [which] had been soaked through by an all-day rain, and now it was as slick as ice." A "big cream colored" truck in the tunnel crosses over into his lane, hits its brakes, and scrapes his car. The old man seems oblivious to the noises including a blast from the car's horn, or he may be a ghost. On the four hour drive to Weston, "The road twists like a snake on the run and for a good deal of it there is a jagged cliff on one side and a drop of a thousand feet or more on the other. The rain and the small rocks crumbling from the mountain sides and littering up the road made it very slow going."
It turns out that the passenger had been on the crew which built the tunnel; he and his co-workers got silicosis - many of them died. His disability means that coal mine operators won't hire him, so he has left his wife so he won't be a burden to her. This is one of the few stories where the dangers and disabilities of building modern highways is mentioned.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
Title: All the King's Men
Date: 1946
Systems: Automobile, highways
Context: 1930s, Louisiana and California
This novel opens with a lyrical passage to highways and accidents:
MASON CITY.To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you'll hypnotize yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you'll try to jerk her back on but you can't because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you'll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. Then a nigger chopping cotton a mile away, he'll look up and see the little column of black smoke standing up above the vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows, and up against the violent, metallic, throbbing blue of the sky, and he'll say, "Lawd God, hit's a-nudder one done done hit!"… Then a few days later the boys from the Highway Department will mark the spot with a little metal square on a metal rod stuck in the black dirt off the shoulder, the metal square painted white and on it in black a skull and crossbones. Later on love vine will climb up it, out of the woods.
… For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own. Where every boy is Barney Oldfield… Where the smell of gasoline and burning brake bands and red-eye is sweeter than myrrh.
The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, press aide to Governor Willie Stark, who is based on Huey Long, the master of machine politics in Louisiana. We first see them in the Boss's Cadillac, "reminiscent of a cross between a hearse and an ocean liner." Sugar-Boy, the chauffeur and body guard, is a pleasure to watch as a driver, "if you could detach your imagination from the picture of what near a couple of tons of expensive mechanism looks like after it's turned turtle three times at eighty"; he loves close calls, as the one when he passed a hay wagon in the face of a gasoline truck and came "close enough to give the truck driver heart failure with one rear fender and wipe the snot off a mule's nose with the other."
In 1937, Willie's son, Tom, wrapped his "expensive yellow sports car around a culvert on one of the new speedways that bore his father's name." The governor's public works are immediately associated with his power to deal with scandal. Tom's drinking is not reported by the Highway Patrol. His companion's injuries are compensated by a state contract to her father who puts him in the trucking business, noting that "truckers had a lot of contracts with certain state departments" (Ch. 6).
Burden's own driving becomes an index to his alienated character. He remarks about a 1933 trip away from his home, "There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain"; it makes him anonymous, "It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place" (Ch. 3). After finding that the woman he has loved since childhood is having an affair with Stark, he takes an eight-day trip to Long Beach, "which is the essence of California." "I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve.… I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor." On the way, in New Mexico, "a land of total and magnificent emptiness with a little white filling station flung down on the sand like a sun-bleached cow skull by the trail" (Ch. 7).
Burden has other memories associated with driving. In 1922, on his first trip to Mason City in a Model T, he was "hanging on to the steering post to stay in the saddle while I sideslipped in the gray dust… or when I hit a section of gravel, holding my jaws clamped right to keep the vibration from the washboard from chipping the enamel off my teeth. You'll have to say this for the Boss: when he got through you could drive out for a breath of air and still keep your bridgework in place" (Ch. 2). Or, in the summer of 1919 when he borrows his mother's roadster to court Anne Stanton - "she knew you didn't sit in parked cars with boys to play checkers," but the regular whistle of the 11:45 train is the signal that he needs to take her home. He drives off angrily, scattering the shells in her driveway; a roadster is "as much hell-for-leather as was possible on the roads and with the mechanism of those days" (Ch. 7).
The image of the black smoke carries over to trains. As a young kid, at the train station, he looked up the rails but couldn't see the "little patch of black smoke yet" so he kneels down in his Sunday clothes to listen to the rails (Ch. 2). At the very end of the novel Burden's mother leaves for Reno to divorce her latest husband. At the station he "arranged all her nice, slick matched bags and valises and cases and hatboxes in a nice row on the cement of the platform." After she is aboard, "I saw the conductor who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety-second stop at a hick town." He watches, first, the "dwindling train" and then the "last smudge of smoke fade to the west" (Ch. 10).
Warren's narration abounds with clever similes and metaphors. The springs on the Caddy are "soft as mamma's breast" (Ch. 1); it has an "expensive whisper" (Ch. 6). The car he drives to California has a sixty horsepower "mystery" which wines "like a wolfhound straining on leash." In confronting a judge with a scandalous past, "I lurched and ground on like a run-away streetcar charging downhill and the brakes busted" (Ch. 8). The tortured ride of Anne Stanton on the way to her brother's funeral in a rented limousine was "lifting the miles slowly off the concrete slab, slowly and fastidiously as though you were peeling an endless strip of skin off the live flesh" (Ch. 10).
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, 1953.
Author: Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
Title: Short stories In Seven
Date: © 1936-1951
Systems: Automobile, international airplane, commuter bus
Context: 1930s, Rural Georgia and 1940s, New York City
"The Ballad of the Sad Café" (1951) is set in Georgia in the late 1930s. As part of her description of the "dreary" town with its "miserable main street only a hundred yards long," McCullers locates it by its distance from public transportation: "The nearest train stop is Society City, and the Greyhound and White Bus Lines use the Forks Falls Road which is three miles away." Even though the main character, Miss Amelia, had a crank-started Ford, she used it rarely, especially when the café was founded. Her husband, perhaps ironically, was put in jail for robbing three filling stations. Over the half dozen years when the café is operating, the main street is used more: "[I]t is not so rare to have a truck or an automobile pass along the road and through the town on the way from Cheehaw to somewhere else." The tax collector comes through; people from town "connive to get a car on credit," and cars hauling the chain gang which works on the Forks Falls Highway drives by. One day Amelia's husband shows up to change her life again. Aside from taking over and eventually destroying the café, her isolation is broken somewhat - "To begin with she had no patience with any traveling; those who had made the trip to Atlanta or traveled fifty miles from home to see the ocean - those restless people she despised." Now she goes with Cousin Lymon, a hunchback, "making exhausting trips to various spectacles being held in distant places, driving the automobile thirty miles to a Chautauqua, taking him to Forks Falls to watch a parade. All in all it was a distracting time for Miss Amelia." At the end, actually after the end, of the story McCullers gives an extended picture of the chain gang, its work and its songs - "Just twelve mortal men who are together."
"The Sojourner" is the story of a man, in New York city for his father's funeral, who is waiting for the Air France flight back to his home in Paris. He meets his ex-wife's children for the first time, and they exchange talk about whether the son wants to become a pilot. The idea of being in New York in the morning and midnight in Paris is part of the story's theme of the man's former and current families, as well as the title. We get one passage about the inspiring view from the plane: "The next day he looked down on the city from the air, burnished in sunlight, toylike, precise… The ocean was milky pale and placid beneath the clouds."
"A Domestic Dilemma" is the story of a man whose wife has become an alcoholic, apparently because he was relocated to New York city from Alabama. It starts with his leaving the office to catch the first express bus home. The ride home charts some of his emotions. He leaves "when the evening lilac glow was fading in the slushy streets" but the bright lights are on when he leaves the terminal. He hopes that no commuter will talk with him so he concentrates on his paper until they cross the George Washington Bridge. At the half-way point, before his wife's illness, he began to relax, but now he "kept his face close to the window and watched the barren fields and lonely lights of passing townships."
Edition used: Seven by Carson McCullers, New York: Bantam, 1954.
Author: Nathaniel West (1903-1940)
Title: Miss Lonelyhearts
Date: 1933
Systems: Taxi
Context: Contemporary, New York City
The title character, a male personals-column writer, who uses the pseudonym "Miss Lonelyhearts," rides in taxicabs as his main way of traveling in New York city: "The bus takes too long, while the subway is always crowded." At one point Miss Lonelyhearts has an "insane sensitiveness to order" and finds chaos in the streets - "lamp-posts were badly placed" and he fears the "harsh clanging sound of street cars."
Miss Lonelyhearts and Betty borrow an old Ford touring car to get away to the country. "As soon as they reached the outskirts of the city, Betty began to act like an excited child, greeting the trees and grass with delight. After they had passed through New Haven, they came to Bramford and turned off the State highway on a dirt road that led to Monkstown. The road went through a wild-looking stretch of woods and they saw some red squirrels and a partridge." [The stove at the cabin "looked like a locomotive."] The drive back to the city goes through the Bronx slums, and so the depressing isolation of the city is confirmed.
Finally, one of the letters into the newspaper shows up economic class differences. The writer reads gas meters for $22.50 a day, "while the bosses ride around in swell cars living off the fat of the land."
Edition used: New York: Avon Library, 1959.
Author: E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931)
Title: Billy Bathgate
Date: 1989
Systems: Automobile, private airplane
Context: mid-1930s, New York city
Dutch Schultz and his gang in New York go around in big Packards, LaSalle coupés, and Buick Roadmasters. In several scenes, the mention of the car indicates the mob's presence. In contrast are everyone else's tin lizzies, Model A's and T's. Drew Preston, Schultz' mistress (and sometimes Billy's), owns a "beautiful dark green four-door convertible" of unspecified brand (Ch. 16).
Billy is a street kid from the Bronx who is a numbers runner and lookout. As part of his work he travels extensively around the city, giving Doctorow the chance to rehearse his routes: "I took the Third Avenue El to Manhattan, and the streetcar all the way crosstown to the West Twenty-third Street ferry slip, and then I stood on the deck of the beamiest bargiest boat in the world…" - this time to Jersey City where the gang contact waits in a yellow cab (Ch. 18). The Bronx scene at 149th Street is sound filled: "I ran faster than the cars were moving, and the horns of the buses and trucks, and the grinding gears, and the clop and rattle of horse-drawn wagons, the sound of all the traffic driving its way fiercely into the high hours of the business day, sounded like choir music in my breast" (Ch. 5). The middle chapters break to upstate, where Schultz is being tried on various charges. To this city lad, "The worst part was that country nights were the real ones, once you rolled across the Onondaga Bridge and your headlights picked up the white line of the country road, you knew what a thin glimmering trail we made in that unmappable blackness" (Ch. 15). In this remote place, Schultz has food delivered daily from the city by truck and airplane (private, presumably); at the end of the country section, Drew and her husband escape in a single-engine plane, and the gang takes the green car in compensation (Ch. 16).
Edition used: New York: Random House.
Author: Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
Title: "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
Date: 1938
Systems: Car, truck, milk wagon
Context: Contemporary
In this brief poem, a modern version of Plato's cave is illuminated by reflected headlights, and all night long one hears "A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, / Their freights covered as usual." Other sounds include the milk horse's "chop" and "the bottle's chink," as well as other "Shaking wagons, hooves' waterfalls," and in the morning, "A car coughed, starting." The images remind us that horse-drawn commercial vehicles continued to be used well after the introduction of their motorized counterparts.
Edition used: Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis. Introduction to Literature: Poems, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Author: Erle Stanely Gardner (1889-1970)
Title: The Case of the Curious Bride
Date: 1934
Systems: Automobiles
Context: Contemporary, unnamed city in California
Cars are everywhere in this typical detective novel. They give a modern touch to a genre that started with Poe and continued famously with Doyle into the twentieth century, and they give some mobility to the detective, the baddies, and all manner of suspects which is lacking in the originating books. This one starts with police clues - keys to a Chevrolet and a Plymouth which can be checked against registrations, and "Because of the fact that the woman evidently had access to two cars, police are inclined to think she is a married woman whose husband maintains two cars for the use of his family" (Ch. 6). The clues include lots of eventually crucial facts and implications about a garage door - when it was opened and closed, where the car went, and so on. At least in the early chapters, and typically for the detective genre, the inferences are quickly confirmed by the cops, the newspapers, and the reader. Later on, especially in the final chapters, clues lead in directions which only Perry Mason can figure out.
Like the "money trail," what we might call a "travel trail" with registrations, receipts, hotel registries, and the like tells both the detective and the reader much about who people are, where they have been, and their motives.
Mason gets involved in several tracking expeditions, the most elaborate of which is following the lead suspect to the airport in a cab. Now-typical stuff - "'There's a good tip if you get me there in a rush, buddy.'" After a near collision and spinout, the cabbie, rather than Mason, notices they are being followed; the cabbie says, "'[T]hat's nothing. I have to see what's going on in this racker, or the wife and kids would starve to death. You've got to have eyes in the back of your head.'" This novel has about four different groups of detectives, including our hero, so when a person such as this woman tries to escape, "they're covering all exits out of town - airports, railway stations, bus depots and all of that" (Ch. 7). [Why people in this story don't drive out of town is curious.]
Criminals, suspicious family members, and detectives all take unusual trouble to park their cars away from where they are going. Implied in these moves is a society of rather curious neighbors: "There's just a chance some of her friends might be watching out of a window. If they saw the three of us get out of the same car, it might not be so hot.'" One wonders if watchful neighbors in these years were more attuned to strangers' cars than is now the case.
Aside from a passing reference to the "trimotor plane glistening in the sunlight," the "airship" plays a role in that the prime suspect's former husband was apparently killed in a crash, at least he was on a list of people who had booked passage but never got on board. One potential witness to some of the events is advised by Mason to take a "long ocean voyage."
Edition used: New York: Pocket Books, 1973 [33rd printing].
Author: Ralph Ellision (b. 1914)
Title: Invisible Man
Date: 1952 Written: © 1947, 1948, 1952
Systems: Automobile, train, subway
Context: 20 years ago; South and New York city; African-American perspective
A couple of scenes illustrate and symbolize how African Americans were treated in their ability to get around. As a junior at a southern college, the unnamed ("invisible") narrator drives Mr. Norton, a white college benefactor, around campus and to the quarters where slaves had lived in the outskirts. He is very much aware of his youth, his race, and the enormous ability to get into social blunders. Norton's car "smells of mints and cigar smoke." He watches Norton closely through the rear-view mirror; more important, he keeps his eyes on the white line in the highway. Driving this car, which "leaped leisurely beneath the pressure of my foot," and which is a sign of his standing in the modern world, is contrasted to photographs at the college of black men and women in mule-driven wagons. As Norton asks him about the poverty they pass through, "It was hard not to turn my eyes from the highway and face him." When Norton asks the narrator to tell his fate, symbolically an insect "crushed itself into the windshield, leaving a yellow, mucous smear" (Ch. 2).
Later, a minister, Reverend Barbee, delivers a sermon at the college. He compares blacks' opportunities to a train starting up a steep grade in the winter. "The whistle of the train was long-drawn and lonely, a sign issuing from the depths of the mountain." The Leader of the college is sick "in the Pullman assigned him," but Barbee remembers how he looked "out of the frosted pane and saw the looming great Northern Star [an echo of the Underground Railroad's means of navigation] and lost it, as though the sky had shut its eye." The accommodating nature of this extended metaphor, echoing Booker T. Washington's speech from Chapter 1, is brought home when Barbee is compared with a railroad porter, in contrast with the (white) conductor. With unconscious irony, this becomes a funeral train (Ch. 5).
In New York, evidence of discrimination is generally unstated and subtle. The narrator has consistent trouble hailing taxi cabs. Whites shun him on subway platforms; as a recent migrant from the South in a crowded car, where people are pushed "like chickens frozen at the sound of danger," he is pushed against a white woman and is amazed at the absence of reaction, just as he is amazed at seeing a black policeman (Ch. 11). A seminal event is the shooting of Tod Clifton, a "Brother" in a black liberation organization, by a cop at 42nd Street. The narrator witnesses it obscured through the "flashing cars," and hears the shot over "the dull roar of traffic and the subway vibrating underground." He escapes into the subway, which "was cool and I leaned against a pillar, hearing the roar of trains passing across on the other side, feeling the rushing roar of air." He likens Clifton's death to his being thrown in front of a subway. The platform includes three black boys whose proud, dance-like movement suggests that the politics he is involved in may not be relevant to younger people; the subway car itself has two nuns, one black and one white, who are absorbed in their prayers, and do not look at each other (Ch. 20).
The layers of New York are illustrated in a nice image: "Along the walk the buildings rose, uniform and close together… Out of the grounds and up the street I found the bridge by which I'd come, but the stairs leading back to the car that crossed the top were too dizzily steep to climb, swim or fly, and I found a subway instead.… I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into late afternoon Harlem" (Ch. 11).
Edition used: New York: Signet, 1960.
Author: Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
Title: "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn"
Date: 1935
Systems: Subway
Context: Contemporary, New York City
The premise, articulated in the opening sentence, is that "Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo, because it'd take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun' duh f - - town." The story begins with two men debating alternate subway routes: "'Sure,' I says, 'It's out in Bensonhoist. Yuh take duh Fourt' Avenoo express, get off at Fifty-nint' Street, change to a Sea Beach local deh, get off at Eighteent' Avenoo an' Sixty-toid, an' den walk down foeh blocks.'" A stranger pipes up, "'Duh guy is crazy!… Yuh change to duh West End line at Toity-sixt'" et cetera. After they board the train the stranger admits that he doesn't know anyone in Bensonhurst, he just wants to get a look at since he likes the name. He is proud because he has a map of Brooklyn, something the narrator never saw before, and which gives a new view of "the whole f - - place." The companion had, remarkably, been to Red Hook, New Jersey, last night - big fields with no houses, but with a comforting view of ships, elevators, and cranes in the harbor. The narrator then relates how his older brother threw him off a dock one day, so he would swim or drown. "'Duh only t'ing yuh need is confidence.'" This way of learning, he believes, is better than using a map, an approach he finally tells the reader is crazy. The outsider's sense that Brooklyn is somehow a limited universe is in contrast with both the multiplicity of specific parts of that borough, as well as the options available through the public transit system.
Edition used: George McMichael, ed. Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Title: Native Son
Date: 1940
Systems: Airplane, car, street car
Context: Late 1930s, Chicago; African-American perspective
Wright's novel has become a touchstone for contemporary African American writers; it is widely cited, taught in courses on American literature, and has contributed to twentieth-century perceptions of urban black life. The relationship between the protagonist Bigger Thomas and his wealthy white employers, the Daltons, carries the symbolic weight of race relations in the U.S. That being the case, Wright makes a purposeful choice in selecting Bigger's form of employment. Bigger works for one disastrous day as the Dalton family chauffeur.
The Thomas family lives in the Chicago's Black Belt. Bigger, his mother, sister and brother all rent one rat-infested room at exorbitant rates; late in the novel, the reader learns the property is indirectly owned by the Daltons. Bigger, at age twenty, goes from job to job, and we learn at the beginning of the novel that he must take the Dalton job or the family will be thrown off "the Relief."
Anticipating his interview with the Daltons, Bigger walks the streets of his neighborhood, where every car represents the luxury of being white and the limitations of being black. "Long sleek black cars" become particularly symbolic in this regard:
A long sleek black car, its fenders glinting like glass in the sun, shot past them at high speed and turned a corner a few blocks away. Bigger pursed his lips and sang: "Zooooom!"
"They got everything," Gus said."They own the world," Bigger said.
"Aw, what the hell," Gus said. "Let's go to the poolroom." (25).
From the street, Bigger and Gus watch an airplane skywriting, ironically it spells out an ad for SPEED GASOLINE, fuel for vehicles they agree they'll never own. To boys caught in the poverty and boredom of the Black Belt, the plane, the plumes of vapor, the sky, the pilot in control, all represent a freedom and power well beyond their reach.
"Them white boys sure can fly," Gus said."Yeah," Bigger said, wistfully. "They get a chance to do everything."
Much later in the book, Bigger is in prison, accused of the rape and murder of Mary Dalton; he eventually receives the death penalty. In this setting, Bigger reveals that flying had been one of his first and only dreams: "I wanted to be an aviator once. But they wouldn't let me go to the school where I was suppose' to learn it. They built a big school and then drew a line around it... That kept all the colored boys out" (327).
Richard Wright uses the transportation color line as an example of the broader exclusion of blacks from U.S. economic and cultural institutions, especially the justice system. Whether depicting street cars, automobiles, or planes, the novel suggests that the relationship of black men and women to transportation is limited; they may ride, drive, or watch, but even this access is tightly regulated by the white capitalists who own those vehicles, as well as by Jim Crow statutes.
Bigger's brief tour of duty as a chauffeur illustrates this expertly. At first Bigger is excited at the prospect of driving a wealthy man's car: "He hoped it would be a Packard, or a Lincoln, or a Rolls Royce. Boy! Would he drive!" (61). Though Dalton's dark blue Buick is "not so expensive as he had hoped," Bigger finds driving an unprecedented rush: "He had a keen sense of power when driving; the feel of a car added something to him" (63). But what the car adds is immediately taken away. His first trip chauffeuring Mary Dalton turns into an anxious torment, and the evening spins out of control. Although trying his best to please his employers, he finds Mary's wishes in conflict with her father's. The white people act strangely; they shame him and have bizarre notions of what "his people" feel and think. Bigger ends up having to carry the drunken daughter up to her room. Attempting to keep her unconscious groans from calling attention to his presence in a white girl's room, he inadvertently smothers her with a pillow. His frantic attempts to dispose of the body and the eventual detection and distortion of his crime comprise the rest of the book.
Edition used: Perennial Classic, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Author: William Kennedy (b. 1928)
Title: Ironweed
Date: 1983
Systems: Car
Context: 1938, New York state
Set in 1938, Ironweed tells the story of Francis Phelan, ex-baseball player and family man, now in his late fifties and long homeless and alcoholic. The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is part of Kennedy's Albany cycle, which also includes Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Francis has wandered around the country with his companion Helen for many years, repeatedly drawn back to Albany and his former life, but always compelled to move on again. In an important scene near the end of chapter three, Francis, on a bitterly cold winter night back in Albany, coaxes Helen into a 1930 black Oldsmobile, "dead and wheelless in an alley off John Street." The car is claimed by another "bum," Finney, who exacts sexual favors in return for letting Helen escape the cold. Francis leaves her in the car with Finney, abandoning her as he searches for a way to reconnect to his old life. That attempt fails when the local Legionnaires attack the hobo camp and Francis kills one of the raiders. In the last scene of the novel Francis imagines himself on a train, "the Delaware & Hudson freight," heading south out of town.
Edition used: New York: Penguin, 1984.
Author: William Saroyan (1908-1981).
Title: "Harry" In The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories
Date: 1934, 1941
Systems: Automobile
Context: Late 1930s
"Harry" is about a man who makes lots of money in various schemes and scams. A couple have moral consequences on the small town where he lives; in one, he buys used cars, "Fords, Maxwells, Saxons, Chevrolets and other small cars." He gets them for $15 to $20, makes slight repairs and puts on bright paint, and sells them to high school boys for three or four times what he paid. The town is filled with boys "taking their girls to the country at night and on Sunday afternoons, and anybody knows what that means." This situation is acceptable for boys except that many of them had to get married before they got jobs; two or three girls had babies but didn't know who the other parent was. "In a haphazard way, though, a lot of girls got husbands for themselves."
The mystique of the car as a moving bedroom for teenagers is nicely illustrated by this story.
Edition used: New York: Bantam Classic, 1961.
Author: Richard Brautigan (1937-1986)
Title: "Greyhound Tragedy"
Date: 1971
Systems: Bus
Context: 1930s, Oregon and California
This short story is about a young woman, three years out of high school, living in a small Oregon town in the 1930s. "Movies were the religion of her life" and for years she has dreamed of going to Hollywood. After many years of wishing, and because she is being pressured by her parents to marry a Ford salesman who has proposed, she decides to at least find out how much a bus ticket to Hollywood costs. But for several more months she can't bring herself to go down to the bus station. Finally she forces herself to drive to the terminal, but she is too nervous to ask about the fare, and after a short inner struggle returns home in tears. She subsequently marries the Ford salesman and has two children, Jean and Rudolph. The story ends with the remark that after thirty-one years "she still blushes when she passes the bus station." The bus in the story, rather than providing an escape for the young woman from small town life, offers only a mirage of freedom. The possibility that the bus holds out to her is actually worse than no opportunity at all. She blushes after so many years because she cannot forget or get over what she considers her own lack of nerve, her failure. The bus station is a constant reminder of the dreams she once had and her inability to realize those dreams or to even give them a try. In the young woman's case, the access to different places that the bus potentially offers only serves to call attention to her dissatisfaction and to her lack of courage.
Edition used: Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970. New York: Pocket Books, 1972.
Author: John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Title: "The Chrysanthemums"
Date: 1938
Systems: Wagon, automobile
Context: Contemporary, California
Elisa Allen, a thirty-five year old woman, lives with her husband on a ranch near Salinas, California. Elisa is a competent woman, a good worker, but because of her gender her work is limited to the cultivation of chrysanthemums. These flowers are amazingly large and strong, a great source of pride for her. When a traveling handyman shows up at the ranch, driving a wagon and looking for something to fix, Elisa initially tells him she has nothing for him to do; but noticing the flowers, the man tells her he has a customer "down the road" who's been asking for some chrysanthemum plants. Elisa flies into action, replanting some cuttings in a pot and giving the man instructions on what to do with the flowers. Then she finds a little work for him to do. Elisa's husband returns and finds her "stronger" looking, her confidence almost palpable. They drive into town for dinner, Elisa exuding strength and satisfaction. But on the way, along the road, she spots the chrysanthemum cuttings, where they have been discarded by the handyman. She breaks down and, surreptitiously, so her husband can't see, cries "like an old woman."
The story is very much about what a woman, Elisa, is capable of doing versus what she has an opportunity to do. At one point she says to the handyman that traveling as he does must be "nice," and adds, "I wish women could do such things.'" But the man quickly says it's not a life for women, a comment Elisa resents. The road in the story fulfills an important role in emphasizing Elisa's lack of opportunity. She's stuck on the ranch, limited to the flower beds that surround the house; the road is reserved for men. And though she thinks she has transcended the limitations placed on her, in the end the car trip to town with her husband and the sight of the flowers along the road remind her of her place. Rather than an avenue of freedom, the road in Steinbeck's story signifies access denied, the social constraints placed on women.
Edition used: The Long Valley. New York: Viking, 1938.
Author: John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Title: The Grapes of Wrath
Date: 1939
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Oklahoma, the Southwest, California
Steinbeck's famous novel of the Depression era tells the story of the Joad family, "Okie" sharecroppers forced from their Oklahoma land who head for California, hoping to find work. After selling all their possessions they, counseled by sixteen-year-old Al, the family car expert, buy an old Hudson Super-six sedan, which they turn into a "truck" by tearing off the back half of the roof and putting in a wooden bed and sides. The $75 spent on the Hudson leaves them about $150 for the trip to California. The oldest of the Joad children, Tom, who has been in prison for four years, shows up just days before the family plans to set off for the west. With Tom, his friend and ex-preacher Jim Casy, Ma and Pa Joad, the rest of the children, and Pa's parents and his brother, John, thirteen people are loaded in the truck when they pull out of Sallisaw, Oklahoma. The novel chronicles their laborious journey west, and the disappointment that awaits them in California; barely surviving as exploited migrant farm workers, the family slowly disintegrates as conditions become more and more intolerable. As Pa becomes discouraged, Ma takes over as head of the family and struggles unceasingly to keep them all going and together, despite their difficult existence.
The role of the Hudson, and of other cars, is of central symbolic and dramatic importance in the novel, crucial to many of the work's thematic concerns. The Hudson is the vehicle that takes the Joads west to a supposedly better life, to a place where there will be an chance for the family to regroup and reclaim a stable place in society. And though that opportunity proves illusory, the car continues to be an important buffer between them and absolute poverty and hopelessness. As long as they can keep looking, keep moving on in search of that elusive opportunity, there is still some hope.
Cars are also important as markers of class difference in the novel. In Oklahoma "owner men" show up at the farms in "closed cars," cars they remain in, only rolling down their windows to speak to the farmers, to tell them they must leave the land. New cars are reserved for the powerful - owners and cops mostly - and their appearance is usually ominous. On the other hand, most of the displaced farmers (the Joads included) have never owned cars, only mule teams, and must buy cheap "jalopies" to make the trip west. Chapter 7 is an account of a used car business on a lot somewhere in the Dust Bowl that sells ancient and decrepit cars to those who have lost their farms. Told from the point of view of the owner of the lot, the chapter details how the farmers are cheated and taken advantage of, and how the owner is making a fortune off their misfortunes. Cars, like the farms, provide an occasion for the rich - the banks and owners - to exploit the poor. Further, the junkers they drive identify the migrants as destitute, and mark them on the road west and in California, leaving them open to continual distrust and mistreatment.
In contrast to the idea that the car provides transportation toward opportunity is the suggestion in the novel that the car has cut off the Joads and people like them from the land. On the eve of their departure the Joads gather for a meeting: "The family met at the most important place, near the truck. The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson … was the new hearth, the living center of the family." But this trade has not been an advantageous one, the swapping of the land for a machine: "That man who had been bound with acres [now] lived with narrow concrete miles. And his thought and worry were not anymore with rainfall, with wind and dust, with the thrust of the crops. Eyes watched the tires, ears listened to the clattering motors, and minds struggled with oil, with gasoline, with the thinning rubber between air and road." The lives of these people have been narrowed; they "were not farm men anymore, but migrant men" and that transformation has diminished their lives, forced them to exist mile by mile, "crawling" westward with the hope of something better, reliant on undependable machines, cars that many of them don't understand at all. And the migration west along Highway 66, is more a desperate than a heroic journey, though the courage necessary to keep moving in spite of that desperation is amazing. Chapter 12 describes 66, "the main migrant road," and tellingly it's a slow moving and difficult flight west: "Cars pulled up beside the road, engine heads off, tires mended. Cars limping along 66 like wounded things, panting and struggling. Too hot, loose connections, loose bearings, rattling bodies." Connections are unraveling and things are falling apart, not coming together, as these desperate people drive westward.
But again, though their lives are coming apart, these people know that the car is their last hope, that if the car goes they will be stranded, lost. They have traded in their farms for the cars, and though it's a trade they didn't want to make, there is no going back - the tractors have plowed over the Joads' old home and the land has been taken. Throughout the book the Joads and others struggle to keep their cars, in poor condition to begin with, on the road. Only in the direst straits is the car sacrificed: Tom meets some people who had to sell their car to keep from starving - and then typically they were swindled, the used car buyer taking advantage of their destitution and need. When the car is gone a family has hit bottom. But in the last chapter of the book, when the Joads are out of money, out of work, and have (at least temporarily) lost their truck to a flood, the family, led by Ma, does not give up. Miraculously they struggle on. The loss of the truck does mark a low point, but it also proves that even this long-dreaded catastrophe, coupled with the specter of starvation, is not enough to defeat them. It turns out that the car is not the final buffer, its loss the final blow; instead the Joads keep fighting and working, determined to stay together, to support one another, and to survive.
Edition used: New York: Penguin, 1976.
Author: Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)
Title: Bound for Glory
Date: 1943
Systems: Train, automobile
Context: 1910s-early 1940s, Oklahoma, the West, California
While Guthrie's book is usually described as an autobiography, it is more a chronicle of the people he meets in his travels all over the U.S. in the late 1930s, particularly hobos and migrant workers. The book does recount his childhood in Okemah, Oklahoma, but for most of the narrative Guthrie is on the road. One section of the book is devoted to his trip from the oil boom town of Pampa, Texas to Sonora, California, where he has relatives and the prospect of work. He first hitchhikes through Texas and into New Mexico, and then catches a freight train that takes him the rest of the way to California. Guthrie describes the lives of the men he meets on the train, especially how they must be careful to evade the cops who hound them from one place to another: "Morning. Men are scattered and gone. A hundred men and more, rolled in on that train last night, and it was cold. Now it's come morning, and men seem to be gone. They've learned how to keep out of the way. They've learned how to meet and talk about their hard traveling, and smoke each other's snipes in the moonlight, or boil a pot of coffee among the weeds like rabbits - hundreds of them, and when the sun comes out bright, they seem to be gone." Guthrie's book is a companion piece to The Grapes of Wrath, telling the same sort of story about the same sort of people. The strongest link between the two works is their shared emphasis on the sense of community among impoverished people during the Depression. Though there are certainly exceptions, Guthrie writes again and again of people helping each other out, sharing what little food they have. And, as in Steinbeck's novel, it is the poor who can be counted on for help; as Guthrie finds out in Tucson, asking for food in exchange for work in the wealthy part of town only brings the law down on him, but going down by the railroad tracks, and asking the same question at the wooden shacks clustered there will certainly get him a meal.
In another incident reminiscent of the Joads' experience, Guthrie and a bunch of other men just off a train are nabbed by the local police in Tracy, California. The cops' car is big and new and black and its headlights in the night are an ominous sign of trouble. After warning the men not to come back, the cops use the car to literally herd them out of town. "All of the cops were laughing and joking as their car drove along behind me. I heard a lot of lousy jokes. I walked with my head ducked into the rain, and heard cars of other people pass. They yelled smart cracks at me in the rain." The car reveals the gap between the men who are out of work and out on the road, and the people who live in towns and who can afford to own cars; it also seems to act in some cases as a buffer between the two groups, a sort of protective shell that separates the townspeople - and the cops - from the poor, and allows them to deride and despise those who must walk.
Though Bound for Glory contains other road stories, including a chapter on Guthrie's travels with a family of migrant farm workers, a train ride that begins and ends the book is the most telling account of life on the road during the Depression. The book opens in the packed boxcar of a freight train heading east through Minnesota, occupied by 69 men: "I set down with my back against the wall looking all through the troubled, tangled, messed-up men. Traveling the hard way. Dressed the hard way. Hitting the long old lonesome go. . . . A crazy boxcar on a wild track. Headed sixty miles an hour in a big cloud of poison dust due straight to nowhere." Talking and arguing and fighting, the men tell of the jobs they've lost, and of the work they hope to get. The last chapter returns to the train; Guthrie has struggled out to the top of the boxcar, where he is joined by two young boys and a black man. They have fled the roiling violence that has overtaken the men in the boxcar, but Guthrie sympathizes with the men's anger and frustration: "'These is good guys,'" he tells his companions. "'Just outta work. You know how a feller is.'" Soon after, the train stops in Freeport, Illinois and the cops show up and force the men off the train. While the head cop is lecturing them a man runs by, heading for a train going west, and yelling out that there's work in Seattle. The men from the boxcar, who had been going east, begin to slowly peel off and join the man running for the westbound train, drawn by the prospect of work. Guthrie joins them. On the new train, the men are singing: "This train don't carry no smoker, / Lyin' tongues or two-bit jokers; / This train is bound for glory / This train!" In the final passage of the book, Guthrie describes the ride: "Wet wind curled in the drift of the train and cinders stung against my eyelids, and I held them closed and sung out at the top of my voice. Then I opened my eyes just a little slit, and a great big cloud of black engine smoke pushed down over the whole string of cars, like a blanket for the men through the storm." Though these men have been reduced to an illegal form of transportation, the freight train offers them protection and hope, a sort of salvation. The only way to weather the storm is to find work - or at least keep looking - and the train provides the means of searching. In the end they are all friendly once again, reinvigorated by the thought of work and the new train that is taking them towards that work, a train that is not going "nowhere," like the last one they rode, but one going someplace better.
Edition used: New York: Signet, 1970.
Author: Marilynne Robinson (b. 1944)
Title: Housekeeping
Date: 1980
Systems: Train, automobile
Context: 1930s, Idaho
Set in the small town of Fingerbone, in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho (seemingly in the 1930s, but the time is unclear), Robinson's first novel tells the story of two sisters, Ruth (the narrator) and Lucille, and their aunt, Sylvie. After the sisters' mother's suicide and later the death of their grandmother, Sylvie becomes the girls' guardian; but she proves an unorthodox housekeeper and parent, and her habits alienate Lucille and the community until finally she and Ruth (a teen-ager) must flee the town.
In the opening chapter of the book we learn some of the Ruth's family background, particularly how her grandfather, after growing up on the plains, determined to move to the mountains. He travels west by train, settles in Fingerbone and secures a job with the railroad, marries and has two children, Helen (Ruth and Lucille's mother) and Sylvie. But coming home from a business trip the grandfather falls victim to a train accident, when the "Fireball," while crossing the bridge that straddles the lake next to which Fingerbone is built, plunges into the lake, disappearing with barely a trace. Many years later - but shortly thereafter in the narrative - Helen returns to the town with her two children, Ruth and Lucille, whom she drops off at her mother's house before proceeding "north almost to Tyler, where she sailed in [the] Ford from the top of a cliff named Whiskey Rock into the blackest depth of the lake." While in these two key events trains and cars are clearly linked with death and loss, trains are also indicative of transience and wandering. Sylvie, before she returns to Fingerbone, lives in no one place, but wanders across the west, usually traveling by freight train. As her housekeeping slowly deteriorates, driving Lucille away yet attracting Ruth, Sylvie begins to wander once again, though only short distances. Finally, she takes Ruth with her on a trip onto the lake, by boat; but when they return home by freight train, they are seen by some of the townspeople, who feel this incident is the last straw. Subsequently the sheriff comes to take Ruth away (Lucille has already moved in with a teacher); at this point the two decide to leave town, to become transients. They escape across the bridge at night, a dangerous route considering the long length of the bridge and the early morning incoming train. But though they are presumed dead, they do make it and take up a life of wandering, usually traveling by freight train. In this instance the train represents the only sort of transportation available to them, since they have refused to conform to their community's rules of conduct, particularly as they apply to women.
Edition used: New York: Bantam, 1989.
Author: James Agee (1909-1955)
Title: A Death in the Family
Date: 1957
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1930s, Tennessee
The death in Agee's title is that of Jay Follet, who has left in the middle of the night to drive to his parents' farm, where his father is supposedly dying. But his father's condition turns out to be less serious than he was led to believe, and so Jay sets out on the drive home the next evening. But he doesn't make it, dying in an accident near the end of the drive. The novel focuses on this accident, taking place over a three day period, but utilizing flashbacks to tell the story of Jay and his family.
The accident is caused by a cotter pin's falling out and the subsequent failure of the steering mechanism. The wheel was jerked out of Jay's hands, throwing him forward against the steering wheel; the only blow was to his chin, but it killed him instantly, an injury which the doctor described as "'a chance in a million.'" After he was knocked unconscious, he was thrown from the car (a "Tin Lizzie"), which then ran up an embankment and turned over. Other than a cut on his chin, Jay is unmarked, and the car is only slightly damaged.
In Agee's novel the idea of the car as something that provides mastery and control is turned on its head, and the car takes on an uncontrollable force of its own. A cotter pin inexplicably and unpredictably falls out and suddenly, while traveling at a high speed, control is lost. The machine is not entirely dependable, but on the contrary can fail the driver at any moment, with catastrophic consequences. As Jay's father-in-law says, "'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.'" The accident is a seemingly arbitrary event, beyond human control, both in the sense of the mechanical failure and the chance in a million injury that kills Jay. As in The Great Gatsby the car can in a moment precipitate a death that has monumental effects on the drivers and on those around them (in this case particularly affected are Mary, Jay's wife, and Rufus, their six-year-old son). The automobile, though it provides an extension of human capabilities, is not infallible. Like humans, cars are not perfectly controllable or dependable. Significantly, one of the family members, as the accident is being described to him, "thought of Thomas Hardy. There's a man, he thought, who knows what it's about." In other words, accidents are always hovering around all human endeavor, and the car, rather than protection from that sort of fate, actually offers more opportunities for tragedy.
Edition used: New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957.
Author: Nathaniel West (1903-1940)
Title: The Day of the Locust
Date: 1939
Systems: Auto, truck
Context: Contemporary, Hollywood
The novel takes place in Hollywood during the 1930s, and we get passing glimpses of movie sets which depict, variously, Mississippi steamboats, trucks delivering sand for a desert scene and snow for another. In a ride back from one of the sets, the main character, Tod, has to ride on the running board of the studio car because the seats are filled with injured extras from the film "Waterloo," one of whom has a broken leg (Ch. 19).
While it is by no means central to the plot, West uses driving style (along with clothing, make-up, alcohol consumption patterns) as an element of characterization. The angry Faye, "She pulled into the curb and slammed on the brakes…. She slammed off the emergency brake and started the car again" (Ch. 11). This touch is plausible with privately-driven (and owned) vehicles; it's hard to create a world of trains or ocean liners where operating style is a significant variable (although some war stories use the device with fighter pilots).
Cars play a now-familiar role in the sexual lives of the characters. Faye starts out with a battered Ford touring car. When Homer takes her on as a mistress and protégé, he buys her an ermine coat and a "light blue Buick runabout" (Ch. 20). The story includes a call-girl (prostitute) operation where the manager, Mrs. Jennings delivers the women with a chauffeur (Ch. 5). Late in the novel Tod has a drunken fantasy of raping Faye. He would drive into a vacant lot and wait for her. "She would drive up, turn the motor off, look up at the stars, so that her breasts reared, then toss her head and sigh. She would throw the ignition keys into her purse and snap it shut, then get out of the car.… She would look like a deer on the edge of the road when a truck comes unexpectedly around the bend" (Ch. 26). Nature, cars, and sex are all merged in these images. The final image echoes the scene where headlights from Faye's coupé are used to illuminate an illegal cock fight in a barn (Ch. 21).
As one example of how people from the Midwest ultimately become bored in the fantasy life of Hollywood, "… after you've seen one [ocean] wave, you've seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a 'holocaust of flame,' as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash" (Ch. 27).
Edition used: New York: Bantam, 1957.
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Title: The Last Tycoon
Date: 1941
Systems: Airplane, automobile
Context: Contemporary; cross-country flight, Hollywood
Celia Brady, the intermittent, first-person narrator takes a commercial flight back home to Hollywood from college at Bennington. Her father, a movie executive, had flown often with the kids, so she knows this world. The plane is "vaguely like a swanky restaurant at that twilight time between meals. It's a rough trip; the plane might be grounded in Nashville owing to the weather. Several people on board are involved in the movie industry, and they recognize Brady's name and talk like old friends. The plane does have to put down in Nashville, "the plane was unmistakably going down, down, down, like Alice in the rabbit hole. Cupping my hand against the window I saw the blur of the city far away on the left."
I suppose there has been nothing like the airport since the days of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as somber-silent. The old red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - -people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back into history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos in midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity. In the big transcontinental planes we were the coastal rich, who casually alighted from our cloud in mid-America.
They get into a bind while waiting for the flight to resume, so some of the passengers take a bus to the hotel, while others a taxi to see Jackson's home, Hermitage, at dawn. Back at the airport, Brady tries to sleep on "one of those Iron Maidens they use for couches." The pilot is clearly in control of the plane - he refuses to let a drunk get on board, and he knows each of the passengers; he speculates with one of them on the topography of the railroad routes they are flying over. In California, they land at the Glendale airport. (Ch. 1)
Most of this unfinished novel takes place at the movie studio, or in the vicinity of Hollywood. Brady has a car which affords her social mobility. Fitzgerald gives several nice images of driving around - "the open car pulled the summer evening up close." "Ahead of him the stop-signal of a car winked violet" (Ch. 4). On a ride to Santa Monica, "The windshield wiper ticked domestically as a grandfather's clock" (Ch. 5).
Edition used: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Author: E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931)
Title: World's Fair
Date: 1985
Systems: Airplane, car, zeppelin
Context: 1930s, Bronx New York
Using a format like Ragtime on the 1910s, Doctorow reconstructs the details of daily life from a previous era. Aside from incidental use of trolleys and taxis, and descriptions of service vehicles, like the Sanitation Department's water truck which washes down the streets in summer, there are a few set pieces. Among these are a 1936 trip from the Bronx to Coney Island by train via Penn Station ("High above was the vaulted roof of steel and translucent glass") (Ch. 7), a ride on the "W" streetcar and then the "A" trolley out to the suburbs ("It appealed to me that fast or slow, barreling along or creaking around corners, the trolley could go only as directed by the tracks; it was all planned") (Ch. 12), and a run to Manhattan on the Sixth Avenue subway which starts above ground at 174th Street (Ch. 14).
The narrator's older brother is an expert model airplane maker, although actual planes are not part of their lives. This leads to interest in airships or zeppelins, "the most amazing things in the sky. You saw them occasionally from a distance… They floated gently, like clouds. They moved so slowly they were visible for a long time, as airplanes were not." The Hindenberg passes over, quite close to the ground, prior to the disaster at Lakehurst. New Jersey (Ch. 17).
Automobiles are pretty much in the background; horse-drawn carts are still evident. An exception is when a Chevrolet coupe knocks a woman pedestrian into the school yard where Edgar, the narrator, attends primary school. The image of the dead woman's arm hanging over the edge of the stretcher, and the lingering blood stain on the playground produce nightmares for several days (Ch. 17).
The World's Fair scenes include an extended description of the General Motors Futurama exhibit: "That was everyone's first step." It uses models (a motif from the brother's hobby) to depict a streamlined city with fourteen-lane highways, services which mean that people rarely have to go out of doors, and airplanes flying directly downtown. The Railroads Building is a "scenic diorama of O-gage trains and locomotives rolling through hills and valleys" (Ch. 28).
Edition used: New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986.
Author: George R. Stewart (b. 1895)
Title: Storm: A Novel
Date: 1941 Written: 1937-41
Systems: Plane, train, automobile, ships
Context: Contemporary, California, Nevada, New York, Chicago, and others
This novel gives a comprehensive view of how transportation systems respond to a major storm. Stewart is consciously educational about cars, boats, trains, and planes, as he is about flood control, meteorology, and the physics of weather. The basic topic, and the main "character," is a storm which starts in the Pacific Ocean and moves across California (the main locale) and finally, twelve days later, to New York.
The amount of detail is overwhelming; one striking note that sounds through is the recognition that our responses to the impact of weather-related events - snow, rain, and wind - on transportation are basically unchanged since 1940. Also, Stewart points out the complex set of circumstances which lead to an "accident," ranging from just being at the wrong place in the road to incidental carelessness; by having other cars or trains pass safely by the accident site under roughly the same conditions, he suggests a genuinely random element in the event.
The storm is first noticed by the U. S. Weather Bureau from the routine weather observations of a ship south of Japan (First Day). As the storm crosses the Pacific other ships are affected - a freighter nearly sinks (Fourth Day), but is repaired (Fifth Day) - and others channel their weather data in periodically. When the storm hits New York a freighter breaks its moorings and a liner from South America is 4 hours late (Twelfth Day). Keeping schedules is an ongoing theme.
Planes come in two forms. "Great clipper airplanes" which go between Honolulu and San Francisco report on the forthcoming storm and are able to use tail winds to go 200 mph (Second Day). During the intensity of the storm they are grounded (Twelfth Day).
The second type of air service is scheduled transcontinental and Pacific coast airplanes. These have to work around all sorts of local variations in the weather, and use radio "beams [e.g., one from Oakland, followed by the next one at Reno], beacons, and constant radio communication" to negotiate their passage. "[M]ost men in the flying business … are young." (Third Day). When weather is bad, flights are canceled, scheduled stops are bypassed - one flight has to go directly to Salt Lake City and miss Reno (Sixth Day). These planes cruise at 13,000 to 12,000 feet, fly 180 mph. The schedulers are shown to be taking a cautious position, so the only plane that comes near to being in trouble gets there partly by losing radio contact with the Bay airport on its flight from Salt Lake. The pilot flies by sheer instinct and manages to get through only a bit north and an hour late (Eleventh Day).
A focus of much attention is the Donner pass and the Humbolt river valley, which is the route of U. S. 40 and the transcontinental railroad, and which, we are reminded, was the site of an unfortunate event in wagon traffic in 1846. "The new wagon-road preceded the railroad; the telegraph came with it," and the valley is also where the Reno beam is channeled (Second Day). The General Manager of the railroad had heard his father's stories about coolie gangs building the original tracks, making the cuts, and so on; now the cuts are weathered back and grown up so washouts are less frequent (Third Day).
Keeping the railroad tracks clear of enormous heaps of snow is a complex system involving push plows on the front of trains, rotary plows pulled and pushed by two engines, and a "flanger" which clears between the tracks (Eighth Day). The goal is to keep the tracks open for all rail traffic, but especially for the Transcontinental Streamliner from Chicago, which gets priority clearance. "Its departure, like the sailing of an ocean-liner, mingled festivity and solemnity." It takes 24 hours to get to Wyoming, 40 to travel the 2,200 miles to the coast (Ninth Day). The travelers are basically bored or asleep for most of the trip; they read the company's publicity flyer on how modern and nice the train is. At one point they worry about making the schedule, but the black porter (identified by dialect, but not by description) says "Dis train ah-ways on time, suh!" Not quite true - after getting through the pass the brakes slam on and they are a few yards short of a washout, spotted by a "trackwalker," which will take two to three hours to repair (Eleventh Day).
And they have to keep U. S. 40 clear. The main character is the Road Superintendent, a man who gets a child-like joy from noticing out-of-state license plates and the diversity of trucks and buses which use the highway (Second Day). Again, they use push and rotary plows and we get details on the difficulty of maintaining speed so the snow arcs nicely off the road, the extreme vibrations in the cab of the rotary, the fatigue of the men and equipment on 48-hours' work, the role of tall "road stakes" which delineate the side of the road. (Sixth and Seventh Days). On the eighth day, after noticing that no cars are coming from the east, the Superintendent investigates to find a long chain of cars backed up behind a truck which is sideways. The road is closed, with gates and the Highway Patrol, until the trucks and cars are cleared, and the need to enforce a requirement to use chains becomes clear. The next day the wind picks up and the snow drifts at 6 inches right behind the plows, so the men can only keep one lane open and have to convoy cars through, at one stage in lines three miles long, headed by an orange highway truck (Ninth Day). The Superintendent finally "loses the road" when a small avalanche buries his car and forces them to spend the night clearing out the drifts. The closing of Donner Pass makes the national newspapers (Tenth Day).
Accidents happen like this: On the fourth day a 2 x 4 falls off a truck; two days later a manure truck clips the board and drops a bit of its load on the highway; later that day a man going 50 mph hits the rain-soaked manure and goes off the road and rolls over twice. "With the shudder as of a dying animal, the car - its four wheels in the air - vibrated for a moment, and then was still." More elaborately: A sixteen-year-old boy takes a pot shot at an electric switch box on day four; it turns out, we are told on the eighth day, that the box controls an automatic pumping system for the highway underpass that goes beneath the railroad - when the water gets high a float trips the switch. "Accident, of course, was possible, as with all works of man." A long scene on the next day traces the effect of rising water at the site. Stewart lists the eight vehicles which are approaching the flooded underpass when the water blows the fuse. College students in a coupé make it through, a truck jackknifes, a jalopy glides into the sedan, but the police car stops in time, sorts out everyone safely, replaces the fuse and the water is cleared away. In both cases, human agency and nature conspire; in one, the result is fatal, in the other, it is nearly comic.
Incidentally, Stewart reminds us of the interdependence of the transportation and communication infrastructure. Everyone uses cars or trucks to do their jobs - the phone company, the people responsible for the electric system's long lines, the flood control officers. Officials, including the Highway Patrol, communicate by telephone, telegram, and radio in dozens of settings. Also, when we focus on one system we hear from another - train whistles and the drone of airplane engines are heard while the crews are plowing the highways.
A couple of final comments. The world which Stewart describes is all male; one woman, a passenger in an ill-fated car, is the only major exception. Second, this is a world dominated by technologies: "[Modern man] expects much more of his civilization [than traditional religions]; he has spread it far and wide until it sprawls; he has given hostages. Therefore, he must sally forth about his flocks and herds; he must look to his roads and ditches, his levees and culverts, his wires and rails. To protect his machines he must invent other machines and with them labor against the storm. The honor of the battle is now not so much to skill and courage as to flawless steel and cool bearings" (Tenth Day).
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, 1947.
Author: Watty Piper (Pseudonym)
Title: The Little Engine That Could
Date: 1938
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary
The title of this children's book and "I Think I Can" are, remarkably, trademarks. The story starts with a (female) engine rumbling over the tracks pulling a train filled with toys, including toy engines and airplanes. She stops - wheels won't go. A clown conductor flags down other engines, without trains, on their way to the roundhouse where they "live when they are not busy." The (male) Shiny New Engine is a Passenger Engine whose train "had sleeping cars, with comfortable berths; a dining-car where people bring whatever hungry people want to eat; and parlor cars in which people sit in soft arm-chairs and look out of big plate-glass windows." Too much class for the toy train. Next, the Big Strong Engine, a Freight Engine had just hauled machines to print "books and newspapers for grown-ups to read." Too important for the toy train. A (male) Kind, but Rusty Old Engine begs off; he is just too tired, and "I can not. I can not. I can not."
Finally, a (female) very little, blue engine shows - she had only been used to switch trains in the yard. She agrees and by repeating "I Think I Can" manages to get the toys over the mountain and into the valley.
Aside from the inspirational message, and the curious refusal by males to help kids out, this story shows the basic contrast between passenger and freight trains.
Edition used: New York: Platt and Munk, 1990.
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