Two retrospective novels trace the introduction of the automobile through the transitional first decade of the twentieth century. Marquand chronicles a Boston aristocratic family's replacement of their private carriages with motor cars in the 1910s. Steinbeck highlights the impact of the auto on the Salinas Valley in California, where it complemented the fairly new railroads and replaced much of the wagon trade. Sinclair outlines the control exercised by the Railroad Trust over the beef industry and even over trolley lines in Chicago. Intra-urban networks are treated from riders' points of view by Doctorow for the East coast, in London's Martin Eden for San Francisco, and by Wharton for Manhattan and Schwartz for Brooklyn. A short story by London describes how the cable-car line divides rich and poor parts of the city. Train travel between East coast cities is dramatized by Cather in "Paul's Case," and in the midwest in other of her short stories; Carver gives a brief picture of long-distance travel in Europe. Morrison describes segregated trains under Jim Crow laws in the South. Wharton shows the interactions between buggy and sleigh traffic and the railroad in rural Massachusetts. Faulkner's The Reivers describes an early introduction of the automobile into the rural South, while The Hamlet focuses on the variety of horse-drawn vehicles in a similar setting.
Author: John P. Marquand (1893-1960)
Title: The Late George Apley: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir
Date: 1936
Systems: Carriage, automobile
Context: 1870s-1920s, esp. 1900-1920, Boston and New York City
Marquand traces the history of Apley, an upper-end Boston aristocrat, through one of his peers who assembles Apley's letters and those of his relatives and friends. While most of the book concerns Apley's relations with his family, Marquand places them in a general, albeit rarified, social context.
The Boston aristocracy is always out of date. In the early 1870s they keep mudscrapers in front of Beacon Hill houses, and even some of the hitching posts as reminders of the "day of the horse" (Ch. 4). One of Apley's school mates becomes famous for imitating the Irish conductor on the Brookline car (Ch. 5); at Harvard in the 80s, he kept his horse and trap at a livery stable near campus (Ch. 7). After scolding George for campus pranks and getting an apology, his father offers the use of "either of my two trotting horses, any of my carriages or sleighs" (Ch. 10). This plurality of vehicles is exceptional; the Apleys have lots of money.
During his trip to Europe in the mid 80s he enjoyed seeing England out of the train windows - much better than direct contact with non-Bostonians (Ch. 9). The 1890s in Boston were the "days of the horse-drawn vehicle, the trolley car and the bicycle" (Ch. 12). We learn about the Belmont hotel in New York which is where proper Bostonians stay in 1910 - they can get from the train station to the hotel and then to the theater with short cab rides and have minimal contact with "the nervous excitement of New York City." "There are very few horses left on the streets; their place is taken by taxicabs and private automobiles with shining brasswork that pant beside the curbs. There is a pandemonium of motor horns and policemen.… I wonder if the time will ever come when we shall hear only motor horns instead of the rattle of wheels and the slip-slap of horses' hoofs on Beacon Street" (Ch. 18). Among the changes which deeply disturb George is the subway between Boston and Cambridge, which will reduce travel time from one hour to 12 minutes (Ch. 19).
The car does come to Boston. The Apleys get a Packard in 1916. George's daughter in a moderately scandalous episode is slated to take the motor to the North Station 5:00 train; instead she shows up in a young man's motor, and had gone "without chaperonage to a certain roadhouse.… frequented by stenographers and worse" (Ch. 22). Just after the War, "The craze for purchasing automobiles which they cannot afford to run is driving many [factory workers] into debt, and several families in Apley Falls [where the family-owned mill is] are doing without wholesome nourishment in order to own a car" (Ch. 24). By the 1920s the "increasing motor traffic" on Beacon Street is agitating the vintage Madeira in Apley's cellar. (Ch. 25), and Apley hears vague tales about "necking" and "petting" and people drinking out of pocket flasks in automobiles (no longer "motors") and he asks his son to explain what's going on (Ch. 26).
The Apleys had been fighting causes and changes in Boston for over half a century - why put up local parks when the poor children have the Common? As final acts in these crusades, George protests having a motor speedway along the Esplanade, and he tries to stop "a large electric sign, advertising a certain inexpensive variety of motor car" over the Common. The narrator tells us, sympathetically, "He justly called this sign, to the end of his days, 'Our Badge of Shame.'" (Ch. 28).
Edition used: New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Grosset's Universal Library 1937.
Author: John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Title: East of Eden
Date: 1952
Systems: Buggy, train, automobile, railroad building and road gangs
Context: Before 1900 to 1917, Salinas Valley, California
This multi-family saga traces changes in the Salinas Valley in northern California from the time when the 'Americans' bought out the Spanish, and "wheel tracks of buckboards replaced the trails"; and yet, "within fifteen years the valley was two-deep in Fords and Will [Hamilton] was a rich man driving a Marmon" (Ch. 1).
Adam Trask (born in Connecticut in 1862) becomes an "expert tramp" during the 1890s, "tacking it" all over the country until he is arrested near Tallahassee and serves on a road gang: "that's how the roads were built." He escapes and eventually gets out through the Valdosta, Georgia train station back home (Ch. 7). His future wife, Cathy, drops out of school, buys a train ticket to Boston, only to be retrieved by her father the same day (Ch. 8).
They leave in 1900, with "monstrous changes taking place in the world," and they wind up in Salinas, because, "In that day the railroads - growing, fighting among themselves, striving to increase and to dominate - used every means to increase their traffic. The companies not only advertised in the newspapers, they issued booklets and broadsides describing and picturing the beauty and richness of the West.… The Southern Pacific Railroad, headed by the wild energy of Leland Stanford, had begun to dominate the Pacific Coast not only in transportation but in politics. Its rails extended down the valleys. New towns sprung up, new sections were opened and populated, for the company had to create customers to get custom. The long Salinas Valley was part of the exploitation." Adam buys a rig to find their home (Ch. 13). The sense that the whole West is preoccupied by the future in conveyed by an image of a family, down from its hill ranch, in a "drag - a big box nailed on oaken runners" bouncing into town, waiting for "When the roads come in" and they will sit "high and happy in a surrey," and, later, "when the railroad puts a branch out here" and they can ship oak logs by the Southern Pacific (Ch. 15).
Before the first Ford is delivered to the Trasks, we get an extended reminder from Lee, the Chinese man who raises Adam's children and provides the intellectual and philosophical base for the novel, of the horrors of Chinese building of the railroad. Lee recounts his father and pregnant mother's passage in the black hold of a ship from Canton - she must dress as a man to avoid the Federal ban on importing women. They are taken by cattle car to the construction site in the California mountains. Their effort to escape to the mountains for Lee's birth is foiled by the father's broken leg, and the birth becomes a grotesque Caesarean section after his mother is raped to death by other workers (Ch. 28).
The more elaborate, modern infrastructure of the East is contrasted with the rural West by descriptions of two whorehouse operations. In the East Mr. Edwards rotates the women among brothels by train (so they won't be identified by local authorities) - at one time a train wreck killed two "units of four girls each" (Ch. 8). In the "Row" in Salinas, the road is mud in winter and "hard as rutted iron in summer." Customers are driven up in a horse-drawn hack; the driver waits for them. This is a fixed institution, in the town, accepted and ignored by the officials (Ch. 19). By 1911, train travel is fairly routine from King City to Salinas, and even to San Francisco by the "Lark" from Los Angeles. But progress comes to the service of womanizing: Uncle Tom Hamilton goes to San Francisco to "roll and wallow in women." His father and mother go by train to the Chautauqua season in Salinas (Ch. 23).
In the middle of the 1910s, Adam and his family move to Salinas, and they invest in a new railroad venture. Lee buys an icebox and Adam gets the idea of using ice to keep lettuce fresh for winter shipment to New York. He buys an ice house which becomes the base for his venture. Six freight cars are filled with iced lettuce and shipped out, but a snow slide in the Sierras causes a two-day delay; warm weather in the midwest and a confusion of orders in Chicago leads to tons of rotten vegetables in New York, a $15,000 loss, and considerable embarrassment. He does not repeat the experiment, even though he winds up with enough cash to try (Ch. 37).
The automobile will radically change the Valley - possibly even more than had the railroad. In the early 1910s, surreys and buggies drive to the father's funeral. In this setting, and at this time, Adam buys an automobile from Will Hamilton's garage - although there are lots of orders, he gets to the top of the list, and he refuses to use the installment plan but pays cash (Ch. 26).
In a charming chapter, Lee, and Adam and his sons learn about the Ford. Steinbeck, writing from the 1950s, says, "It is hard now to imagine the difficulty of learning to start, drive, and maintain an automobile. Not only was the whole process complicated, but one had to start from scratch. Today's children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncrasies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right." The old starter involves much more than turning the key. "It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic.…" The mechanic comes out after the car is delivered and Will gives up on a one-shot training session; he explains the four-cycle internal combustion engine, planetary transmission, external crank shaft and wire choke; and he unsuccessfully refers the family to the user's manual. The eleven-year-old kids do pick up on the drill, and they recite the succession of commands, "retard the spark and advance the gas," et cetera each time Adam gets the Ford going (Ch. 29). That he learns to drive is accepted by the town as being a "miracle" (Ch. 30).
In the final chapters, centering around the First World War, the train is a routine part of peoples' lives, as it is when one of Adam's sons comes back from Stanford University for Thanksgiving break, and when the same son ships out to be in the army (Ch. 49).
Edition used: New York: Viking, 1983.
Author: Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)
Title: The Jungle
Date: 1905 (Serial), 1906
Systems: Carriage, automobile
Context: Contemporary, Chicago
The novel shows the extent of isolation which poor, immigrant workers experienced in the middle of Chicago. While the book is famed for having made the Congress worry and individuals ill through its descriptions of how livestock is killed and butchered, the general drift is toward Jurgis Rudkus's conversion to socialism. Thus, in the concluding chapters, various socialist stump speakers analyze what's wrong with America. Rich people, says one, "spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts" (Ch. 28). In contrast, the poor are trapped by the Coal, Steel, Oil, and Beef Trusts (this latter of special concern for the book), and "the power which really governs the United States today is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state government, wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate. And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts - save only the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads - it is plundering them day by day through the Private Car" (Ch. 30). That is, it owns all refrigerator cars, and "it was reaching out for the control of other interests, railroads and trolley lines, gas and electric light franchises - it already owned the leather and the grain business of the country" (Ch. 29).
The Trust controls peoples' lives in subtle and complex ways. One episode, repeated twice for emphasis, involves various deals the trolley car companies use to make it hard for immigrants and other poor people to get transfers from one line to the next. The first requires that the passenger announce her need for a transfer when she gets on, no exceptions, as a response to a city ordinance (Ch. 7). In the latter, the companies arrange "a pretense of separate ownership" to avoid giving transfers (Ch. 20).
Jurgis spends most of his time trapped in the slums, where a trolley ride goes past thirty four blocks of side streets all looking the same, and "here and there would be a railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and rattling freight cars filing by" (Ch. 2). The stockyards have 250 miles of track within them, and, later on, we are told that the butchers' hourly schedules are totally dependent on the rate at which animals are delivered to the lines (Ch. 8). While track-bound Systems are growing rapidly, the streets themselves remain so narrow that snow piles up to the first floor windows in the winter (Ch. 7). Later, Jurgis's infant son drowns by falling off the sidewalk, "a platform made of half-rotten boards, about five feet above the level of the sunken street" (Ch. 22).
In despair, Jurgis escapes from the city for one summer, first by holding onto the bottom of a freight car to escape the security guards (Ch. 22). This is his first time outside the city in three years, since his arrival from Lithuania. At the end of the summer he returns to the city and gets hired on an odd scheme which uses a contract to construct tunnels for the telephones to build a secret, underground freight railway network to break the teamster's union (Ch. 23).
The alternative of the automobile may be beyond the reach of the trusts, although it will be of little help to Jurgis and the workers. In one other brief escape, he meets a drunk rich man in a bar who gives him a $100 bill and takes him home, by cab, to Lake Shore Drive. This gives Sinclair an opportunity to dazzle Jurgis with the incredible wealth of the capitalists, in this case, ironically, of a packing house owner. The man's brother had gone away in his automobile in a dispute about whether he should marry an actress - one of the few autos in the novel, set in 1904 (Ch. 24).
Edition used: Toronto: Bantam, 1981.
Author: E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931)
Title: Ragtime
Date: 1975
Systems: Interurban railroad, train, subway, auto
Context: 1902-1914, New Rochelle, NY
Looking back over half a century, Doctorow articulates some of the enthusiasm which many people must have felt about the railway networks. "Tracks! Tracks! It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular magazines that the future lay at the end of parallel rails. There were long-distance locomotive railroads and interurban electric railroads and street railways and elevated railroads, all laying their steel stripes on the land, crisscrossing like the texture of an indefatigable civilization. And in Boston and New York there were even railroads under the streets, new rapid-transit subway Systems transporting thousands of people every day." Doctorow follows this lyric with a description of how the subway tunnel was being dug from Manhattan to Brooklyn, ending with a freak accident which puts a sandhog in the hospital to be visited by Houdini, the escape artist (Ch. 13). A nice scene at the end of a chapter shows the main family's departure from the New Rochelle station to Atlantic City, giving details on their wicker trunks, the architecture of Penn Station, and "the encouched locomotives waiting in an impatience of steam and shouts and tolling bells to be released on their journeys" (Ch. 31).
Doctorow also dramatizes the fact (or myth) that it was possible (in 1909) for a person to take a series of intraurban trolley and street car lines to their termini, walk a short distance and catch the next line, and thereby move from New York to Boston. Aside from giving the details of how this was possible, the total cost in fares was $2.40 for an adult and $1.00 for a child (Ch. 12).
Chapter 18 gives a capsule history of the Ford Model-T assembly line as part of general background. We then see one of these cars driven by a black musician, Coalhouse Walker, near a firehouse manned by white bigots who taunt Walker, box in his car, and (eventually) send him on a path of revenge and revolution which is his triumph and his tragedy (Ch. 23).
As part of Doctorow's effort to create a turn-of-century atmosphere, he uses brand names, model numbers, and the like. For example, the young boy sees a 45 horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout, and the family sees Father off for a Polar expedition with Peary on a five-car train pulled by a Baldwin 4-4-0 with spoked engine truck wheels (Ch. 1, 2). These details are lightly sprinkled throughout the book. Ordinary people, "Father," "Mother," "Mother's Younger Brother," come into professional and personal contact with famous, historical figures with curious regularity. For example, we witness Sigmund Freud's brief trip to the United States during which he is oppressed by the "clatter of horses and wagons, the clanking and screeching of streetcars, the horns of automobiles" (Ch. 6).
Edition used: New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
Author: Jack London (1876-1916)
Title: Martin Eden
Date: 1909
Systems: Urban rail, steamship, bicycle
Context: Contemporary, San Francisco area
Martin Eden comes to the Berkeley/Oakland area after a career on commercial, Pacific-coast cargo ships to get an education and write poetry and fiction. Until his literary career takes off, he struggles with poverty and disappointment. This leads to rides on his "wheels" (bicycle) until he has to pawn them, and the urban "electric car" (trolley) from which "he watched the houses and cross-streets slipping by." The 5¢ fare is often a problem - when payment of $300 for one of his manuscripts finally comes in he can retire all of his debts and help his landlady buy her house.
Throughout the story Eden has fantasies of escaping to Tahiti; at one point in the midst of extreme poverty and hunger he has an elaborate, dream-like fantasy of exotic life there (Ch. 40). At the end of the novel he books passage on the steamer Mariposa, not on a deck stateroom but below, on the "weather-side, the port-side," a bit of technical knowledge which reminds us of his former career and brings the setting full circle (Ch. 45). Since he is now a famous and rich author, he gets to eat at the captain's table and sit on a deck chair. His walk to the forecastle with the sailors recalls his former days: "On ships at sea he had always been in the forecastle, the steerage, or in the black depths of the coal-hold, passing coal. In those days, climbing up the iron ladders from out the pit of stifling heat, he had often caught glimpses of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing but enjoying themselves, under awnings spread to keep the sun and wind away from them, with subservient stewards taking care of their every want and whim, and it had seemed to him that the realm in which they moved and had their being was nothing else than Paradise" (Ch. 45).
Edition used: Baltimore: Penguin, 1968.
Author: Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Title: "The Other Two" In The Descent of Man and Other Stories
Date: 1904
Systems: Elevated train
Context: Contemporary, New York city
Waythorn, the husband, catches the elevated at the "employees' hour" and finds himself "crushed between two layers of pendulous humanity." He sees his wife's ex-husband at 8th Street and they talk about "the perennial grievance of the congested trains," and a business colleague's gout. Public transportation and restaurants often put people awkwardly together in ways that private carriages and private clubs do not.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
Title: "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"
Date: 1948
Systems: Streetcar
Context: 1909, Brooklyn
The story is of the narrator's parents' courtship in Brooklyn. It begins with an image of the narrator's father walking through tree-lined streets and "once in a while coming to an avenue on which a street-car skates and gnaws, slowly progressing. The conductor, who has a handle-bar mustache, helps a young lady wearing a hat like a bowl with feathers onto the car.… He leisurely makes change and rings his bell. It is obviously Sunday…" We also hear an occasional horse-drawn carriage, and once in a while, "an automobile, looking like an enormous upholstered sofa." The young couple takes the street-car to the end of the line at Coney Island where they spend the day.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Jack London (1876-1916)
Title: "South of the Slot"
Date: 1909
Systems: Cable car
Context: Contemporary, San Francisco
The central character develops two personalities. He is both Freddie Drummond, a conservative professor of sociology and Bill Totts, a "workman" who takes a major role in various strikes, including one against the streetcar industry. Whole editions of his book, "The Unskilled Laborer," are bought up by "Presidents of great railway Systems" to the workers in an effort to quell their discontent. The two personæ, and the whole city of San Francisco are symbolically divided by a transportation corridor:
The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the center of Market street, and from the Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless cable that was hitched at will to the cars it dragged up and down.… North of the Slot were the theaters, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business houses. South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class. The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of Society…
Crane calls this a metaphor, and he does not speculate whether the division has created or resulted from the car line.
In a final scene, modern and old vehicles crash together. Professor Drummond is with his fiancée, Catherine Van Vorst, in her brother's chauffeur-driven limousine to visit one of her charities. They run into the Beef Strike where Kearny, Market, and Geary streets come together. A coal wagon, drawn by four huge horses, blocks an intersection. The auto tries to avoid a crash, but its wheels get tangled with those of a "rickety express wagon" which "Bill" had previously driven. "On the other side a brewery wagon was locking with the coal wagon, and an east-bound Kearny-Street car, wildly clanging its gong, the motorman shouting defiance at the crossing policeman, was dashing forward to complete the blockade." In the confusion of labor agitators, frightened horses, and embattled policemen, "Bill" leaves Catherine's car to join the dispute; he eventually becomes a professional labor leader.
Edition used: Paul Lauter, et al., ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1994.
Author: Willa Cather (1876-1947)
Title: "Paul's Case" In The Troll Garden
Date: 1905
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary, Pittsburgh and New York City
The title character of this short story is a teen-age boy who is miserably unhappy with his lower middle-class life, with his gray and unimaginative teachers at school, and with his (to him) squalid neighborhood in Pittsburgh. His unhappiness translates to a general "bad attitude" that is excoriated by his teachers and his father, and ridiculed by his peers. The only solace Paul finds is in his job as an usher for the symphony and, more importantly, in the time he spends hanging out at a theater, with a group of actors led by Charley Edwards. In both situations he feels more "at home," among people whom he considers to be like himself, people who don't scorn him. But when "matters [go] steadily worse with Paul at school," his father forces him to quit his job as an usher and bans him from the theater; Paul is taken out of school and put to work.
His response is to embezzle a thousand dollars from his firm and head for New York and the Waldorf Hotel, where for eight days he lives as a wealthy and fashionable young man, an existence that provides satisfaction and comfort. The train is his escape to a better life, but a transitional stage; that is, he makes the journey in the lower-cost "day coach" rather than the Pullman, because he is afraid of being seen by some businessman who will recognize him from his office. The trip is made in the midst of a grey snowstorm, and the only description of the scenery is of dead grass and weeds that protrude from the drifting snow. After his sojourn in New York, his money almost gone, his father on his trail, Paul makes another train trip, this time getting off in New Jersey. As he walks down a lonely stretch of track, preparing to throw himself before an oncoming train, he again sees "dead grass [and] dried weed stalks." Paul's two train trips bracket his time in New York, certainly the best eight days of his life. But from the beginning the trip is a sort of funeral voyage, a movement toward Paul's inevitable death, suggested by the desiccated landscape that he moves through. Near the end of his stay in New York Paul recognizes the undeniable necessity of money, and the utter impossibility of getting more money to continue on with what for him is the only appropriate and satisfying way to live. Among his many purchases he has even bought a gun, supposedly with the unconscious intention of shooting himself; but in the end he opts for the train. Like the train out of Pittsburgh, the train that kills him takes him away also, from the intolerable life that would await him on a ignominious return to his home. The train, as a means of attaining freedom in the story, provides a double escape for Paul, the first fleeting, the second permanent.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Willia Cather (1876-1947)
Title: Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912
Date: 1892-1912
Systems: Train, wagon, motor car
Context: Contemporary; chiefly in Nebraska and Wyoming
Several of Cather's early stories use a train ride into a town to set up interactions among characters. In "The Treasure of Far Island" (1902) an image of the Silvery Beaches "were glistening in the sun like pounded glass" is echoed by the sun's beating upon the windows the the passenger train that "swung into the Republican Valley from the uplands." Doug recognizes landscape features that he knew as a boy - a cliff over which Indians drove buffalo, the Far Island, and so on - he is returning home to Empire City after twelve years. His father meets him at the station and they take the "shabby little street car which ever since he could remember had been drawn by mules that wore jingling bells on their collars." "'A Death in the Desert'" (1903) has Everett Hilgarde becoming conscious of the man across the aisle on the "High Line Flyer" "jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous country between Holdrege and Cheyenne." "The four uncomfortable passengers [in the car] were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust… [which] blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed." The other three get off at a Colorado way station and Everett goes on alone to arrive four hours late in Cheyenne; only the station agent seems to notice. A woman in a phaeton is waiting, gets startled, apparently at the sight of Everett who settles the horse down and then walks on to the hotel. (She used to be one of Everett's brother's music pupils; he knew her as a girl; she sang with the brother in Europe.) Two days later, he's back on the west-bound train where an opera company descends and one person mistakes him for his brother. In "Flavia and Her Artists" (1905) the train nears Tarrytown from the New York to let Imogen Willard attend Flavia's house party; Flavia drives her home in a "high tilbury" carriage. After the party, it's back on the train.
In "The Sculptor's Funeral" (1905), a "group of townspeople stood on the station siding of a little Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already twenty minutes overdue." They fuss with their overcoats to keep out the cold and speculate about when the train will arrive. "The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh lands…" The G.A.R. man's coffin is put on the the horse-drawn hearse and taken to the family's home. "The Affair at Grover Station" (1900) also uses delays in train schedules to motivate the story. The narrator heard the story "sitting on the rear platform of an accommodation freight" crawling between Grover Station and Cheyenne. As the train leaves, "The telegraph poles scored the sky like a musical staff as they flashed by, and the stars, seen between the wires, looked like the notes of some erratic symphony." The story which Rodgers tells is about a murdered station agent and the details involve trying to get the last train for Cheyenne at 5:45 for the governor's inaugural ball, the agent's duties for the 7:30 AM eastbound, and the failure of the agent to turn up as planned. The next, snowy day, Rodgers and his horse go to Grover on the 151 passenger to see what happened. An apparent ghost leaves an apparent clue, the number of a box car - it is tracked down in Omaha and the agent's body is found on board.
The short story in the form of a comic play, "The Westbound Train" (1899), is set in the Cheyenne Union Pacific depot. Mrs. Sybil Johnston arrives from the east and has a two-hour layover before the 28-hour ride to San Francisco to meet her husband, Reggie. It is her first travel alone and she has extended written instructions from Reggie. When she asks the station agent, her passes have been taken already by another person who claimed to be her. This apparent imposter, Mrs. Sally Johnson (no "t") writes an explanatory letter from a hotel near the station at the agent's suggestion. Sybil fears that her husband has two wives and decides to take the eastbound to Chicago. In steps Reggie who had decided to meet her at Cheyenne, but whose telegram didn't get through. All is forgiven.
"The Bohemian Girl" (1912) has the transcontinental express running along the Sand River, with Nile Ericson sitting in the rear seat of the observation car. Nils is returning home after several years; since he's not sure of his reception he checks his trunk at the station. His mother has an automobile which she drives to town daily for the mail as well as going "over the whole country" - it is, the old farmer says, one of fourteen motors in all. At one point in the story, Old Lady Ericson's car runs off the road and has to be pulled out by horses. For the barn raising, a major event in the story, the helpers arrive in buggies and wagons (not motors).
"A Resurrection" (1897) includes a brief history of Brownville, Nebraska on the Missouri river. It had been the head of river navigation for the old steamboat trade soon after statehood (1867), but the old Hannibal brought up the rails for the Union Pacific, and the channel became uncertain and narrower; it no longer remembered when it led to "the great aorta of the continent, or the throb of the wheels of commerce that used to beat up the white foam on its dark waters." The village became "a little Pompeii buried in bonded indebtedness." The focal character, Martin Dempster, now runs one of the old ferry boats. Years earlier, at 16, he ran away as a cabin boy, settled in St. Louis - he came back after his job and his marriage failed.
Edition used: Virginia Faulkner, ed. Revised ed. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970.
Author: Raymond Carver (1939-1988)
Title: "Errand"
Date: 1988
Systems: Railroad
Context: 1904, travel in Europe
This fictional account of Anton Chekhov's dying from tuberculosis includes a carriage ride to a clinic, Chekhov's train ride from Moscow to Berlin; he is seen off by friends at the Potsdam station. At one point, Chekhov's (false) optimism about being cured symbolically leads him to study railroad time tables, a playful gesture toward the conflict between those schedules and the reality of train travel.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
Title: Jazz
Date: 1992
Systems: Train
Context: 1906, Virginia to New York City, African-American perspective
Morrison's recent novel recreates New York at the turn of the century: a city pumping with violent, erotic energy, a city that draws people to it and transforms human desire. She uses a train to anticipate the motion of New York itself and to demonstrate the way a city works upon the body.
Joe and Violet Trace leave Vesper County, Virginia on the "colored section of the Southern Sky." This "young, country couple" enter the City "dancing," that is, standing close together in the aisle and clinging to the baggage rack above their heads: "When the train trembles approaching the water surrounding the City, they thought it was like them: nervous at having gotten there at last, but terrified of what was on the other side... The train shivered with them at the thought but went on and sure enough there was ground up ahead and the trembling became the dancing under their feet." They enter "laughing, tapping back at the tracks," "her hip bones rubbed his thigh,... and like a million others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they stared out the windows for the first sight of the City that danced with them, proving already how much it loved them" (Ch. 2).
With Joe and Violet, Morrison makes literal the sexual energy of a high speed train. But their entrance into New York also represents a desire so big it can bring "a million others." Morrison's characters carry the weight of the historical moment, these two represent the vast urban migration of the late nineteenth century: "The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s; the '90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it" (Ch. 2).
The author offers some details on segregated rail travel in this period. Late in the book, Joe Trace recalls, "they moved us five times in four different cars to abide by the Jim Crow law" (Ch. 5). Entering New York, the train attendants are shown inviting the colored coach to take breakfast in the dining car "now that they could." Once the train has gotten well away from Maryland and out of Delaware, there was no longer a "green-as-poison curtain separating the colored people eating from the rest of the diners." The cooks and attendants enjoy the change, because they are no longer required to show extra courtesy or bestow extra helpings on the white passengers. To this particular attendant's continuing dismay however, the colored travelers always refuse the dining car; they persist in bringing boxes, baskets, and paper bags of "bacon-stuffed biscuits" and other home-cooked fare.
The train initiates a transformation that will be completed by the brash excess of the City with its "wide streets and wasteful lamps lighting them." Yet Morrison carefully notes that the change a body undergoes is almost a recovery; one recaptures another self in order to indulge it. Once dancing in on the train or moving through the city, these people "are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves" (Ch. 2). Joe and Violet Trace are both trackers, ones who hunt and roust out their hidden pasts or secret longings. First it is the train and then the City that emboldens them to do so.
Edition used: New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992.
Author: Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Title: Ethan Frome
Date: 1911
Systems: Buggy, train, sleigh
Context: Contemporary and 20 years ago, rural Massachusetts
The frame tale has the narrator being driven by buggy for a daily commute by train from the town of Starkfield, Massachusetts to his job at the power-house. This is a new world, "Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycles and rural delivery, when communication was easy among the scattered mountain villages." Another daily routine was Ethan Frome's coming to town by buggy to get the mail. One winter day all the horses in town get ill, so the narrator gets a ride in Ethan's sleigh, but the snows are too heavy, and Ethan has heard that the passenger train is behind a freight which got stalled in the drifts. The narrator stays over at Ethan's house and pieces together Ethan's life story, especially the events from two decades before (Prefatory chapter). Ethan's story is of his love for Mattie, a house servant, a cousin of his wife's. On one occasion, his wife takes the train to Bettsbridge for a doctor's visit, although in winter the trains are "slow and infrequent" (Ch. 3). Ethan and his townspeople use sleighs for grocery shopping, sledges to haul lumber. The near seduction is apparently sensed by Mrs. Frome who sets things up so Mattie will have to leave town. Ethan has an extended fantasy that he and Mattie will go West (Ch. 8), but the final day is an extended series of maneuvers which involve getting Mattie's trunk in the sleigh, a ride to the station by way of one of their trysting spots, and her missing the 5:00 train in favor of a sled ride down the big hill in town (Ch. 9). Transportation in this town is basically unchanged; actually it's not much different from what we saw from before the middle of the nineteenth century.
Edition used: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939.
Author: William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Title: The Hamlet
Date: 1931, 1936, 1940
Systems: Carriage, train
Context: Circa 1902 to 1920, rural Mississippi
The major characters are consistently identified with their vehicles, and that identification helps fix their social standing and class in the town of Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi. Ratliff, the itinerant sewing-machine salesman, has a beat-up buckboard. The Varners, the original founding family of the town, have a surrey. The upstart Snopeses arrive in a wagon. When Flem Snopes takes over most of the Varners' town operations he gets a new buggy ("Flem," 3: 2). Owning or at least driving a vehicle is a token of maturity: As the farm boys grow up "the trace-galled mules had given way to the trotting horses and buggies" ("Eula" 2: 1). When Flem agrees to marry Eula Varner after she has another man's baby, part of the settlement, in addition to a sort-of honeymoon by train to Texas, is a "new buggy with somebody to do the driving," well beyond anything else in the story ("The Long Summer" 1: 1). When Flem and the Texas hustler return from Texas it is in "a covered wagon drawn by mules and followed by a considerable string of obviously alive objects which in the leveling sun resembled vari-sized and -colored tatters torn at random from large billboards…." the wild horses later to be sold in the town. At the auction, the Armstids, the chief victims of the scam, have a wagon, "It was battered and paintless. One wheel had been repaired by crossing planks bound to the spokes with bailing wire and two underfed mules wore a battered harness patched with bits of cotton rope; the reins were ordinary cotton plow-lines, not new" ("The Peasants" 1: 1).
The book is punctuated by scenes where many horse-drawn vehicles assemble in one place. During the courtship of Eula Varner, four buggies swarm outside her house. A buggy ride lets a suitor or seducer be alone with her. In the final section, "The Peasants," wagons pull into town for the horse auction and the trial. The town's cotton gin is shown through Ratliff's eyes: "He could see the wagons too, the long motionless line of them behind the patient, droop-headed mules, waiting to advance a wagon-length at a time, onto the scales and then beneath the suction-pipe where Jody Varner would now be again…" ("The Long Summer" 1: 1).
Escape from Frenchman's Bend, usually in disgrace, but sometimes in triumph, is "to Jefferson and the railroad" ("The Long Summer" 2: 2). Near the end of the book Faulkner traces changes in the rural roads: "That road was no longer a fading and almost healed scar. It was rutted now, because there had been rain a week ago, and now the untroubled grass and weeds of almost thirty years bore four distinct paths: the two outer ones where the harnessed teams had walked daily since that first afternoon when the first ones had turned into it - the weathered and creaking wagons, the plow-galled horses and mules, the men and women and children entering another world, traversing another land, moving into another time, another afternoon without time or name" ("The Peasants" 2: 2).
Edition used: New York: Modern Library Paperback, 1940.
Author: William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Title: The Reivers
Date: 1962
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1904, Mississippi, Memphis
Faulkner's last novel is narrated by Lucius Priest, an old man telling his grandson about an incident that happened in 1904, when he was eleven. The impetus for the coming of age episode he retells is the purchase of an automobile, a Winton Flyer, by his grandfather. Boon Hogganbeck, an employee at Lucius's father's livery stable and a sort of family retainer, had two years before been mesmerized by the first automobile to visit Jefferson, and he immediately takes over the care and driving of the Winton Flyer. (Boon had appeared in Go Down, Moses as a representative of the older generation in the bear hunt.) In the car Boon finds "his soul's lily maid, the virgin's love of his rough and innocent heart." But unfortunately Boss Priest (the grandfather) is satisfied with simply owning the car, and has no interest in using it (he bought in defiance of a city ordinance, sponsored by the town's other and junior banker, outlawing cars within city limits). Boon begins a somewhat successful campaign to keep the car in circulation, recruiting through their curiosity other family members, particularly Lucius. When Lucius's grandparents and parents are called out of town by a funeral, Boon sees his chance and convinces Lucius (who doesn't need convincing) to accompany him and the car to Memphis. They are joined by a stowaway, Ned McCaslin, Boss's black carriage driver. In Memphis Ned swaps the car for a horse and most of the book is taken up with their convoluted attempt, through the agency of a horse race, to reacquire the car.
The landscape of turn of the century Mississippi is decidedly unmarked by automobiles. The story is told at a time when the car has taken over the country, profoundly effected geography and culture, but the elderly Lucius harkens back to an age that predates the changes that have occurred. His own youth and the youth of the automobile are closely linked, and in part romanticized as a better and less corrupt time. More specifically, the story is about the movement from childhood into the relatively seamy world of adults. Lucius, in retrospect sees the whole episode as a significant turning point in his life, a moment of revelation that largely shut him off from the innocence of his childhood. Similarly, Boss Priest foresees the future the car will bring, predicts that the livery stable will become a garage, and that soon cars will overrun the town, roads will be paved, and the bank will buy bonds to finance the roads; "'people will pay any price for motion,'" he says, "'They will even work for it.… We don't know why.'" Boss Priest is against the automobile and the changes it will bring, but he is also a banker and willing to go where the money goes. But he doesn't understand the phenomenon. He doesn't understand Boon's obsession with cars. Lucius is caught in-between, fascinated by the automobile (Boon teaches him to drive it) but also interested in the values his grandfather advocates, a gentlemanly honor code that seems at odds with the noisy, smelly and too fast moving automobile. The Reivers is in part a very nostalgic book, inscribing a yearning for not only a youth but a culture that has been lost; the car is not the only culprit in terms of the vast changes, but it certainly shares a large part of the responsibility. The incident Lucius recalls, precipitated by the purchase of the Winton Flyer, marks the beginning of those changes both in his own life and in the culture of small town Mississippi.
Edition used: New York: Random House, 1962.
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