Thurber's Walter Mitty faces imaginary enemies and performs medical miracles in the midst of running errands by car. The young Malcolm X finds various railroad jobs during the War, while Bissell fills in as a Mississippi River towboat crew member which earns him a draft deferment. Faulkner shows stateside travel in Mississippi and Memphis by bus, train, and car. Griffith describes how a Los Angeles riot involving Mexican-Americans and troops spilled onto the streetcars. Shapiro juxtaposes the gruesome details of an auto wreck to the War. Barth describes a family's special holiday drives to the Ocean City amusement park. Silko's tale shows the train and car as paths for destructive escapes for the Laguna Pueblo servicemen and for others after the War, while Phillips charts changes in the ways automobiles are used and perceived in a small West Virginia town from the end of World War II to Vietnam.
The names of New Orleans streetcar lines have symbolic dimensions in Tennessee Williams' play, while Moore describes old people with their packages going home by streetcar. Capote takes his characters, starting on the train and eventually winding up on a wagon ride beyond the last road in rural areas of Louisiana. In another story, he shows the reliance of a small town on the bus, which is a tenuous and symbolic link to, for example, Hollywood. McCullers ties a girl's isolation to her unsuccessful effort to take a car ride out of town and her ignorance of how to hop a freight. Ferré gives a view of the travel options in Puerto Rico, including DC3s and private airplanes. Erdrich also depicts possibilities for rural Native Americans, and includes a woman who takes off with a barnstorming pilot and children who take a freight to North Dakota. Wilbur celebrates a dining car waiter's grace, which he compares with Shakespeare and Nijinsky. Gregory captures the dilemma and the promise of an empty train station, while Rukeyser talks of the frustration and fear of tragedy as relatives wait for the plane to arrive while hearing weather reports on the radio.
New York City is the focus of several works throughout the 1940s. Two stories by Baldwin and one by Ellison give African-Americans' images of the subway system, and they reflect driving and train rides outside the City. Bishop also points to the limited perspective that the subway affords, even within the narrow confines of the City's streets, while William Carlos Williams' poem brings out more chaotic and violent images from those streets. Payne sees the simple fact of automobiles and trains as sufficient to represent a city, while White's story of a mouse who drives a miniature automobile conveys safe riding rules to young children.
Later in the decade, Jackson's stories turn missed train and bus connections between a New England city and more remote towns into nearly supernatural events, while Nabokov depicts a Russian immigrant couple's confusion about New York's apparently sentient subway and bus systems. Agee describes how the subway affects the mind of the urban commuter. In addition to several scenes involving taxis in New York and the night train from prep school to the City, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye explores many dimensions of how the automobile is a place for teenage sexual encounters. His short stories focus on commuting to and from the suburbs by train and car, as well as other events such as a bus trip for a boys' club and an ocean liner voyage. Miller shows how automobiles come to symbolize youth, middle age, and death for a traveling salesman.
Author: James Thurber (1894-1961)
Title: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." In My World - And Welcome to It
Date: 1942
Systems: Car
Context: 1940s, New York City
In this famous story about Walter Mitty's fantasy life, several of the imagined adventures occur while Mitty is behind the wheel of his car. In the opening paragraph of the story Mitty imagines he is in the cockpit of a Navy hydroplane, on a particularly difficult mission - when he is stirred from his reverie by the complaints of his wife that he is driving too fast. Throughout the first half of the story Mitty's dreams of elaborate feats of competence are contrasted to his ineffectual driving. We learn that he can't take chains off the tires (the one time he tried he created a hopeless mess, wrapping the chains around the axle); he moves too slowly when a stoplight turns green; he drives the streets "aimlessly"; and he can't even correctly park the car in a parking lot - the attendant must do it for him. And yet the car ironically remains a vehicle for his power fantasies, as we see when he races the engine in response to his wife's admonition that he's "'not a young man any longer.'"
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: El-Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik [Malcolm X] and Alex Haley (1925-1965)
Title: The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
Date: 1965
Systems: Railroad
Context: 1940s, Boston, Harlem, African-American perspective
By age seventeen, Malcolm Little had acquired the street skills that would serve him well the rest of his life. Hustling shoe shines, drugs, and women in Boston, he'd learned to estimate character at a glance, to take enormous risks, and to work most any situation for personal gain. He soon learns to work the railroads with equal success. He earns a name for himself hawking sandwiches on the "Yankee Clipper" line which connects Boston and New York (in fact, he's called 'Sandwich Red'). The fast pace of New York gives hustle a new meaning for Malcolm; he eventually uses his "in" with the rail workers to gain free travel around the country - a privilege that greatly expands his business "hustling reefer" and gets him out of town when the vice squad makes Harlem too hot.
In 1942, Malcolm's middle class relative and patron, Ella, gets him a job with the railroad through a friend, the "elderly Pullman porter," Old Man Rountree. With a world war "snatching away railroad men," and this kind of insider connection, Malcolm finds the job easy to get and easy to keep - despite the fact he's well below the age requirement of twenty-one. Promised the first available "fourth-cook" job (a post as an unglorified dishwasher), he is temporarily assigned a job on "The Colonial" to Washington D.C. On this line, the kitchen crew "worked with almost unbelievable efficiency in the cramped quarters. Against the sound of the train clacking along, the waiters were jabbering the customers' orders, the cooks operated like machines, and five hundred miles of dirty pots and dishes and silverware rattled back to me." On the overnight layovers, the workers go "sight-seeing" in D.C., though of course, after years on the railroad, they are regulars in this town and every other on the line.
Snatching the opportunity to fill in for an absent sandwich man on the line to New York City, Malcolm soon makes himself indispensable. Lugging his "shoulder-strap sandwich box and that heavy five-gallon aluminum coffee pot up and down the aisles of the 'Yankee Clipper,'" he sells "sandwiches, coffee, candy, cake, and ice cream as fast as the railroad's commissary department could supply them." He explains the secret of his unprecedented sandwich sales:
It didn't take me but one week to learn that all you had to do was give white people a show and they'd buy anything you offered them. It was like popping your shoeshine rag. The dining car waiters and Pullman porters knew it too, and they faked their Uncle Tomming to get bigger tips. We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.
"Sandwich Red" increases his notoriety by swearing profusely and exhibiting a surly attitude that provokes complaints and at least one memorable "fight." Challenged to a fist fight by some "big, beefy, red-faced cracker soldier," Malcolm laughingly agrees, but tells the soldier, "you've got too many clothes on." The drunk-to-weaving bully begins a striptease that ends in humiliation as the "whole car" breaks with laughter. Says the wise servant-and-psychologist: "I couldn't have whipped that white man as badly with a club as I had with my mind."
Malcolm's smart mouth eventually gets him fired, but he still uses his railroad identification to win free travel from fellow rail workers and to gain entry to their "big blackjack and poker games." These went on around the clock in the locker room for Negro railroad men, beneath Grand Central Station. (In an aside on segregation, Malcolm tells us that though black men had been working in dining car service for thirty or forty years, in the early 1940s, there were no Negro stewards - at least not on the New York, New Haven, Hartford line).
Edition used: Ballantine Books. New York: Random House, 1965.
Author: Richard Bissell (1913-1977)
Title: A Stretch on the River: A Novel of Adventure in a Mississippi River Towboat
Date: 1950
Systems: Mississippi River towboat
Context: 1943, Mississippi River
The Minnesota Historical Society republished this book as an "enduring historical source," which seems appropriate, given the fairly ponderous realism of Bissell's narrative. The book begins with an allusion to Twain's Life on the Mississippi to establish continuity with that account of the river in the last century.
The narrator, Bill Joyce, and his brother sit by the railroad tracks and watch the passing river steamers; they "smell the damp smell of steam and steam cylinder oil"; young Bill really is interested more in the calliope than the being on the boat crew. Their high school friends want roadsters; one got a phaeton, another a Marmon; at school in the mid 30s, he learned how to check his trunk on a through ticket; he later went to Europe on an "antique Cunard" - all signs of his sophistication as a traveler. It then boils down to his arrival at the Union Station in St. Louis in 1942 and his work on a diesel towboat to haul coal on the River, and, significantly, to get a deferment from the draft (Ch. 1).
After a year learning the trade, working on a tow boat becomes comfortable, "Then I began to forget I had ever lived any other way. Then I began to feel sorry for the people on the bank. When I got that far I was a river man." The upper River was "six hundred and forty miles of twisting bends, sand bars and crossings, channel lights, day marks, swing bridges, lift bridges, floating bridges, wing dams, landings, locks, rock riprap, willows silent in the summer heat … and the river towns where the little girls stand in their pinafores on the limestone slab sidewalks watching the towboats go by." (Ch. 3). The main trip involves taking eight barges of central Illinois coal to Minnesota in the summer of 1943. We get all sort of details - on pumping the barges, on keeping the barges together with various ropes and chains, on cleaning the tug's pilot house, trimming the navigation lights, and on buying groceries and getting mail on shore. Passing through the lock at Keokuk, Iowa, comprises three chapters (10-12). In the one adventure, a crew member trips on a rope, falls under the barges and drowns; his body is found a week later and sent home by train (Ch. 17).
In a portrait of Jim Sargent, a pilot, we find that "In his head he had filed away a complete history of every bar, snag, and 'set' in the current from Cairo to the Falls of St. Anthony." Sargent had left home twenty years earlier to go by Wabash box car to St. Louis where he began his career. He advanced from mate to pilot after a decade, and we hear of his accumulating skills like learning to read a sounding stick, handling barges, fixing frozen pumps. He also exemplifies the loneliness of River life - he has a rather tenuous relation with his wife and young child (Ch. 7).
On a couple of occasions Bissell comments on the train tracks and highways which run parallel to the River. People on shore watch the towboat; automobiles slow down (Ch. 9). They see semi-trailers near Winona (Ch. 20); there also the Burlington tracks are on the east bank, the Milwaukee tracks on the west (Ch. 21). At Dayton Bluff, near St. Paul is the Chicago streamliner (Ch. 22).
Edition used: St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1987.
Author: William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Title: "Two Soldiers"
Date: 1942
Systems: Bus, train, car
Context: 1942, Mississippi, Tennessee
This story, set in 1942, is told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy who lives in Frenchman's Bend in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county, and whose older brother, Pete, after hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor, decides to join the army. Pete leaves for Memphis, a hundred miles away, on a bus which stops along the road out in front of his parents' house. That night the younger brother decides he has to go after Pete, and walks the twenty-two miles to Jefferson, where he goes to the bus station. After talking a policeman into sending him to Memphis, the boy gets on the bus; though tired, the boy stays awake, marveling at how the bus takes him through town after town. The size of Memphis is overwhelming, described as frightening partly because of the large number of cars. The boy finds the recruiting office and learns Pete is leaving on a train in an hour; Pete returns to the office and talks his brother into going back home. An officer calls a woman, who is wealthy and obviously aids children occasionally, and she sends the boy home in her car, driven by her chauffeur. The different modes of transportation in the story are all alien to the boy, not a part of his previous experience; they are the means of taking him and his brother out of their familiar world and placing them in a strange and unknown world. Buses, trains, and cars, expand their geography - initially the boy imagines Pearl Harbor as "'across that Government reservoy up at Oxford'" - and creates a world in which the two brothers can be separated, a situation which the young boy had previously been unable to fathom.
Edition used: Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Curtis, 1942.
Author: Beatrice Griffith
Title: "In the Flow of Time"
Date: 1948
Systems: Streetcar
Context: 1943, Los Angeles; Mexican-American perspective
An account of "the sailor-zootsuit war" between rampaging servicemen and Mexicans in Los Angeles. Early in the morning of the riot, "Mingo and me had took the streetcar out to San Fernando Valley, hopped the bus, and soon we were on the little dusty road going up to my grandfather's farm." This pastoral escape lets them wear "drapes" on the day before they will join the army. On the way back they are stared at, especially their clothes: "it was like the people in the streetcar had never seen Mexicans before." Sailors and marines are attacking Mexicans all over the city. "We caught the car just as the conductor clanged the bell and banged the door shut. Everybody was scared. Mexicans, Negroes, gabachos .… everybody was excited and talking." The rioters take over streetcars where the passengers are trapped and beat them freely. After they rampage the narrator's house (another trap), they flee in a taxi and roadster.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
Title: "Auto Wreck"
Date: 1942
Systems: Automobile, ambulance
Context: Contemporary
Shapiro's poem contrasts death in war, "done by hands," with death in a wreck, where we question "Who is innocent?" Even suicide has "cause and stillbirth, logic." The poem opens with an ambulance, with its "one ruby flare," "entering the crowd" at the crash scene. Then "the mangled [are] lifted / And stowed into the little hospital" which moves away even before the doors are closed. The cops still at the scene sweep up glass, make notes, and run "ponds of blood / Into the street and gutter." It is the onlookers who speculate about "The grim joke and the banal resolution" while the authorities go about their work. Even in war, then, perhaps this is "our richest horror."
Edition used: Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis. Introduction to Literature: Poems, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Author: John Barth (b. 1930)
Title: "Lost in the Funhouse" In Lost in the Funhouse
Date: 1967
Systems: Automobile
Context: World War II, Ocean City, MD
Ambrose and his family take their ritualized drive to Ocean City (Maryland), which the family visits each year on Memorial, Independence, and Labor Days. Ambrose is in the back seat with a teen-aged girl, Magda, and there is an ongoing chance that she will put her hand on his leg or he will reach behind her. The story plays with indeterminacy among current reality, memory, and fictional construction of a world where the carnival funhouse is the high point of the trip.
When Ambrose and Peter's father was their age, the excursion was made by train, as mentioned in the novel The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos. Many families from the same neighborhood used to travel together, with dependent relatives and often with Negro servants; schoolfuls of children swarmed through the railway cars; everyone shared everyone else's Maryland fried chicken, Virginia ham, deviled eggs, potato salad, beaten biscuits, iced tea. Nowadays (that is, in 19__, the year of our story) the journey is made by automobile - more comfortably and quickly though without the extra fun though without the camaraderie of a general excursion. It's all part of the deterioration of American life, their father declares; Uncle Karl supposes that when the boys take their families to Ocean City for the holidays they'll fly in Autogiros. Their mother, sitting in the middle of the front seat like Magda in the second, only with her arms on the seat-back behind the men's shoulders, wouldn't want the good old days back again, the steaming trains and stuffy long dresses; on the other hand she can do without Autogiros, too, if she has to become a grandmother to fly in them.
The drive is punctuated with the ritual sighting of the power plant at "V___," halfway there; "looking for the Towers" is much anticipated, and the person, usually a kid, who spots them gets a candy bar or a piece of fruit. Ambrose, but not his brother, figures out that you spot the landmark from the right side, but you also get more sun, so he lets Magda take the seat and win the banana. In case you wondered, Barth tells you, the person in the front right-hand seat can use the sun visor to cut down on the sun. Poetically, "Plush upholstery prickles uncomfortably through gabardine slacks in the July sun."
Edition used: New York: Bantam, 1969.
Author: Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)
Title: Ceremony
Date: 1977
Systems: Automobile, train
Context: 1940s, Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, Native-American perspective
In this story of Tayo, a young Native American trying to recover from his horrific experience in the Philippines during World War II, the automobile and train function quite differently than they do in much fiction by white writers. Rather than escape, the highways - Highway 66 in particular - provide a means of invasion; the highway provides access for white tourists and white culture in general, an access that has destructive consequences for the Lagunas in the novel. The train also functions less as a means of escape and more as a conduit for destructive forces; it is on trains that the young Indian men leave their home in New Mexico to fight in the war and on which they eventually return, profoundly injured by their experience in the white world and unable to fit back into their communities.
Though several of the Native characters have cars or pick-ups, there is a sense in the novel that automobiles are infected with the "witchery" which Tayo must defeat, those destructive forces that are abroad in the world and which are making him sick. Among the Native veterans, Emo, the one most enamored of the white world they all experienced as soldiers, turns out to be a minion of the witchery, and the car he drives, a beat-up Ford coupe, becomes a vehicle for the evil he serves. In one of the final scenes of the novel Tayo witnesses the torture of Harley - another Laguna - who is being kept captive in Emo's trunk (in the end Harley and another Laguna, Leroy, are found dead in the wreckage of a GMC pick-up). Significantly, in most of the scenes in which Tayo rides in cars he is in some way threatened, particularly in terms of his mental health (specifically with the prospect of being committed once again); but when he travels by horse, or by foot, away from the roads, he is clearly involved in an effective healing process. Cars are identified with a culture, a way of life that is psychically debilitating; Tayo starts improving when he gets away from the roads and from those people that are too involved with cars and roads.
Edition used: New York: Penguin, 1986.
Author: Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952)
Title: Machine Dreams
Date: 1984
Systems: Automobiles
Context: World War II to Vietnam, West Virginia
Set mostly in a small town in West Virginia, this novel depicts the lives of Mitch and Jean Hampson and their two children, Danner and Billy, from World War II through the Vietnam War. As the title suggests, machines play an important role in the narrative, from the bulldozer Mitch operates as a soldier in 41st Engineers in the South Pacific during World War II, to the helicopter that is such a big part of Billy's experience in Vietnam. Also included are cement mixers and dump trucks, as part of Mitch's civilian occupation as a road builder. But the key machines in the story are the various automobiles the Hampsons own. Though Mitch has unending employment and financial troubles, his cars, though not quite new, were always "big and luxurious … impeccably clean and cared for." Because he loses his status as breadwinner at home, more and more Mitch seeks a sense of empowerment elsewhere - mainly through his cars. But when Danner asks him if he dreams, the car is revealed as an inadequate substitute for the control he has lost over his life. In the brief and simple dream he recounts, Mitch is driving in a snowstorm that is so intense that he can't see the road, "'can't see where [he] was going.'"
For Jean the car is a means of escape from her relationship with Mitch, which she finds at times oppressive. Early in their marriage, before the children are born, there is a scene in which she takes the car, a Nash, to run an errand, but instead parks in a cemetery, where her mother is buried, and falls asleep and dreams of her mother. Mitch is overly protective of Jean - and overly worried about the car - and in response Jean uses the car to escape.
Finally, a car, a red Camaro, plays an important role in the account of the loss of Billy, who goes missing in action in Vietnam. Mitch keeps the Camaro in a shed behind his house, waiting for Billy's hoped-for return. When Danner visits her father, they go out to look at the car, which appears "bright and cherished." The car functions as a sort of stand-in for Billy, all that is left for the grieving family, because it was so important to Billy when he was still with them. As with Mitch, the car functions as an extension of Billy's personality.
Edition used: New York: Pocket Books, 1985.
Author: Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
Title: A Streetcar Named Desire
Date: 1947
Systems: Streetcar, train, Greyhound bus
Context: Contemporary, New Orleans
The title points to Blanche DuBois' first line: "They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!" Williams plays off these evocative names to suggest ironically the significance of the play's events (Sc. 1). An exchange between Blanche and her sister carries this further:
BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire - just - Desire! - the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another…STELLA: Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car?
BLANCHE: It brought me here. - Where I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be… (Sc. 4)
Stanley and Stella Kowalski's apartment is between the L&N tracks and the river, and the trains occasionally drown out or punctuate peoples' conversation (Sc. 4). Stanley has a car and travels for his company, and gets dirty fixing it (Sc. 4). The boy friend from Miami whom Blanche says she met last Christmas had a "Cadillac convertible; must have been a block long" (Sc 4). Blanche and her temporary New Orleans friend, Mitch, had parked and kissed by the lake (Sc. 6). After being frustrated by Blanche's posturing and pretentious, Stanley buys her a one-way Greyhound ticket back to Laurel for a birthday present (Sc. 8). In the final scene, as yet another face-saving gesture, Blanche claims that she has an admirer's invitation for "A cruise of the Caribbean on a yacht!" (Sc. 10).
Edition used: New York: New American Library, 1974.
Author: Merrill Moore (1903-1957)
Title: "Old Men and Old Women Going Home on the Street Car"
Date:
Systems: Street car
Context: Contemporary, urban
Carrying their packages of groceries in particular With books under their arms that maybe they will read And possibly understand, old women lead Their weaker selves up to the front of the car.
Men who had worked as clerks for thirty years had a different view of women, but now they are surveyed "harmlessly." Presumably this is a comment on aging people, rather than on the changed use of urban trolleys.
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
Author: Truman Capote (1924-1984)
Title: Other Voices, Other Rooms
Date: 1948
Systems: Train, bus, automobile, wagon
Context: Contemporary, Louisiana
This is an interesting regression through transportation systems from the modern city to the end of the road. Once there, the young protagonist is locked into a surrealistic world of his dying father, his artistic cousin's bisexual excesses, and general moral and epistemological decay.
Twelve-year-old Joel Knox is summoned by his estranged father to Skully's Landing after his mother's death. His father's letter had said, "We have at present no mechanized vehicle." The novel starts with noting that there are no busses or trains to Noon City, so he will have to ride in a turpentine company truck which carries supplies and mail to Paradise Chapel. The rough, washboard road takes them past signs for Red Dot 5¢ Cigars, Dr. Pepper, and so on. He had gone from New Orleans to Biloxi by train, and then by bus to Paradise Chapel. It was three hours late. The truck is a Ford "of the pick-up type"; it smells of leather and gasoline; the speedometer is broken at "a petrified twenty." As they go down the highway, they wave back and forth at farmers. At Noon City they drive down an unpaved, nameless street with houses on each side and a red-barn livery stable with "horses, wagons, buggies, mules, men." Noon City on Saturdays was "a procession of mule-drawn wagons, broken-down flivvers, and buggies" which wheel in from the country and which leave at sundown. The final stretch is on a black man's wagon which will take Joel to the Landing. A cousin, Florabel, talks about a green 1934 Chevrolet that six people can ride in without anyone in anyone else's lap, which her father won in a cock fight. We hear nothing more of this car once Joel is situated at his father's home (Ch 1: 1).
Joel's only possession is his tin suitcase with stickers from Paris, Cairo, Bombay, and so on, a relic of his grandfather's wedding trip around the world just after the Civil War (Ch. 1: 1). This is the only hint of something even larger than New Orleans except for an encounter with a midget at a Moon City circus who "seemed to him Outside, to be, that is, geography, earth and sea and all the cities in [cousin] Randolph's almanac" (Ch, 2: 11).
Somewhat incidentally, a young black woman, Missouri Fever, known as "Zoo" escapes briefly to Washington D.C. - "I feels like ninety-six locomotives gonna light outa here goin licketysplit." Upon her return, three whites and a black in a red truck throw her in the back, rape her, and burn her with a cigar, a grotesque contrast with Joel's rather more protective ride into town.
Edition used: New York: Signet, 1949.
Author: Truman Capote (1924-1984)
Title: "Children on Their Birthdays" In A Tree of Night and Other Stories
Date: 1948
Systems: Bus
Context: Contemporary, South
Capote's short story begins and ends with the death of the main character, ten-year-old Miss Bobbit, who is run over by the six o'clock bus in a small southern town. In between we learn of Miss Bobbit's arrival in town, on a bus, her precociousness, and her showbusiness ambitions. On the day of her death she was packed and ready to go, with her mother, to Hollywood, a trip financed with the money of several local boys. A traveling con-artist had come through town and sponsored a talent contest, promising that the winner would get a screen test; he had also collected $150 each from several boys, promising he could get them jobs on boats out of New Orleans. When the con-man skips town without fulfilling any of his promises, the indomitable Miss Bobbit begins a letter writing campaign that results in his capture and the refund of the boys' money. Subsequently she talks them into using that money to jumpstart her career, promising in return 10% of her life's earnings.
Throughout her stay in town Miss Bobbit remains somewhat aloof, seemingly immune to two boys, Billy Bob and Preacher Star, who are infatuated with her. She is focused on becoming a dancer. But at the end of the story, the two boys bring her roses as a parting gift; seeing them coming, Miss Bobbit uncharacteristically runs across the street towards them, "her arms outstretched," and is struck by the bus. She had never considered herself a citizen of the town, but merely a visitor on her way somewhere else; but in a moment of weakness she attempts to embrace the two boys and their offering - and so becomes a permanent resident of the town. As long as she remains detached, her dream of a better place is intact, the bus that brought her to the town available to take her away again. But the abortive embrace precludes travel, and the vehicle of departure immediately switches her destiny from stardom to smalltown anonymity.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
Title: The Member of the Wedding
Date: 1946
Systems: Car
Context: early 1940s, South
The "member" of the title is Frankie, a twelve-year-old girl in a small town in the south, during the early 40s, who is poised on the precipice of puberty. And she is not happy about the prospect of womanhood. Frankie resists the feminine role that inexorably awaits her, and yet she worries incessantly about becoming a "freak." In an attempt to solve this dilemma, she determines to join her brother and his fiancée on their wedding trip, and somehow form a sort of triumvirate with the two young adults, in which she, Frankie, can be something other than masculine or feminine. On the day of the wedding Frankie packs her suitcase and after the ceremony attempts to accompany the bride and groom in their wedding car. When pleading and begging fail to coax her from the car, she, clinging to the steering wheel, is dragged from the automobile and placed "in the dust of the empty road." Back home she plans to run away, and hop a freight train to Chicago, or New York, or Hollywood. But once out of the house, suitcase in hand, she realizes that she doesn't know how to get on a freight train. She wanders around town, unsure what to do. Before long the alerted police pick her up at a cafe and take her home. Frankie soon after decides she wants to be called Frances and in the end reconciles herself to a relatively circumscribed existence, as a young woman in a small town.
Edition used: Collected Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Author: Rosario Ferré (b. 1942)
Title: The Youngest Doll
Date: 1976 in Spanish, 1991 in English.
Systems: Car, airplane, canal
Context: 1940 to 1980, Puerto Rico
"The Glass Box" follows four generations of eccentric "bridge builders" in Cuba and Puerto Rico. The great-grandfather comes to Cuba from France and is involved in a failed scheme to "dig a channel in the virgin continent [Central America] which would be the geographic feat of the century." He eventually dies inside an ice box he invented. His son, Jacobito, moves to Puerto Rico and in the 1940s grows rich building metal bridges commissioned by the Marines. The parts for the bridges are cast in factories that used to make catharine wheels for sugar mills; thus, Jacobito represents a transition from a sugar economy to an industrial economy run by U.S. interests. Consequently Jacobito owns the town's first Model T, and his house is the first to see General Electric lightbulbs, a Frigidaire icebox, a Hot Point electric stove, a black American Standard toilet and shower tub, an Electrolux vacuum cleaner and a "Sun Beam electric fan that was so noisy it made you feel you were sitting under the nose of a Pan Am DC 3." Jacobito's feverish "admiration for the foreigners" eventually leads him to imitate an American parachute fiend; he leaps from his roof, open umbrella in hand.
"Mercedes Benz 220 SL": Out for a drive in their new Mercedes, an elderly, elitist couple remorselessly run down a pedestrian, never realizing (of course) that the victim is their estranged son. Much attention is given to the car and its accessories - steering that responds to the touch, flashing chrome, the "crossed lances on the hood," automatic windows, "sexy" leather interior, a horn "like the first trumpet in Das Reingold," and the driver's pigskin gloves. The car is characterized by its speed, protection, security and compared to a "rolling rhinoceros" three times. Also described as a fortress and a German tank that "shows them who runs this country" or "always puts us in the right."
In "The Fox Fur Coat" Bernardo takes his twin sister for her first flight in the "small plane his father bought for pleasure trips." She buys gas for the trip with $10. Bernardo pilots wearing "suede gloves and goggles; as he steered the plane he moved the pedals distractedly, as though sitting at a sewing machine." As Bernardo tells of a tragic sleigh accident, Marina takes in the "silent miniature world spread before her feet for the first time." Bernardo later takes off in a storm on a suicide flight.
Edition used: Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska P, 1991.
Author: Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)
Title: The Beet Queen
Date: 1986
Systems: Airplane, freight train
Context: 1932 to 1972, Native American perspective
The action of Erdrich's novel (a work loosely linked to two of her other novels, Love Medicine and Tracks) is precipitated by an airplane ride. Adeliade Adare, the single mother of three children (the youngest an infant), goes to a local fair and there climbs aboard the airplane of the Great Omar, a barnstorming pilot. While ostensibly going for a short ride, she and Omar instead fly off and are never seen again. Someone takes the baby home, but the other two children, Mary and Karl, are left to fend for themselves. Eventually they hop a freight train to Argus, North Dakota, where they have an aunt and uncle. Mary stays, while Karl gets back on the train, leaving Mary completely alone (he grows up to be a traveling salesman). The airplane and train scenes occur in the first fifteen pages of the book, and after that the rest of the story takes place in Argus. Mary's subsequent life is significantly affected and determined by these two early instances of abandonment, as she herself never strays far from the town and also has difficulty developing close relationships with other people.
Edition used: New York: Bantam, 1989.
Author: Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
Title: "Grace"
Date: 1947
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary
Amid a series which illustrates artistic grace, from Nijinsky's "out-the-window leap" to Hamlet and Flaubert, we get an image of "the dining-car waiter's absurd / Acrobacy - tipfingering tray like a wind-besting bird." The waiter and his tray represents both art and stability "the sole things sure / In the shaken train" while the train symbolizes the wider world in war time, as the poem ends with a plea for safety of "the praiseful, graceful soldier." Having the waiter, as a working class person, likely African American, contrasts with the "higher" arts of ballet and Shakespeare.
Edition used: The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Author: Horace Gregory (b. 1898)
Title: "This is the Place to Wait" In The Passion of M'Phail
Date:
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary
The section of the poem begins with an vignette on missing a train, with a nice observation on the traveller's guilty feelings:
When you are caught breathless in an empty station and silence tells you that the train is gone, as though it were something for which you alone were not prepared and yet was here and could not be denied; when you whisper, Why was I late, what have I done?, you know the waiting hour is at your side.
This ordinary scene leads the narrator to discuss parallels - with waiting for his doctors to diagnose his insanity, with the promise of sex, and with the sun on Easter morning.
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
Author: Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)
Title: "Ceiling Unlimited"
Date:
Systems: Airplane
Context: Contemporary
The poem captures the apprehension which family members have come to feel when a person is in an airplane. Against a backdrop refrain of weather reports ("Light gales from the northwest tomorrow, rain … The Weather Bureau's forecast, effective until noon… To Cleveland: Broken clouds to overcast") a pregnant wife and her pilot husband discuss their anticipated baby. We are reminded of the early morning hour as "The cattle-trains edge along the river, bringing morning on a white vibration." Flying removes him from her world, makes him "strange to me, dark as Asia." He demystifies his task: "If I fly, why, / I know that countries are not map-colored, that seas / belong to no one, that war's a pock-marking on Europe." She only knows land; "She does not imagine how the propeller turns / in a blinding speed, swinging the plane through space; / she never sees the cowling rattle and slip / forward and forward against the grim blades. grinding." The final stanza, where the pilot is not home in time, could be ominous: "She knows night. She knows he will not come," or merely inconvenient; "Ceiling unlimited. Visibility unlimited."
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Title: "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"
Date: 1968
Systems: Subway
Context: 1940, Harlem and Brooklyn, New York
Leo Proudhammer looks back on his lonely expeditions through the New York subway system as a ten-year-old. Leo spends many of his childhood Saturdays providing an alibi for his streetwise brother. While the parents think their boys are "at the movies" for an evening, Caleb is off indulging in adult fun, while young Leo is left alone to explore the city. Subways are a grand adventure. Leo figures out how to slip beneath the turnstile and ride for free; by sitting very quietly at the side of a "respectable-looking" gentleman or lady, he can appear as if he is under the supervision of an adult. Leo travels in this "precarious anonymity," absorbing the sound, light and speed of the trains: "It seemed to me nothing was faster than a subway train, and I loved the speed, because the speed was dangerous."
For a ten-year-old on the subway, there are other dangers, however, and those less thrilling. The subway is a lesson in demographics and neighborhood zoning: "Underground, I received my first apprehension of New York neighborhoods and, underground, first felt what may be called a civic terror." Leo is comfortable in the company the elegant Saturday evening crowd; men and women in their capes, coats, lipstick and pompadours. But after a certain point going uptown or downtown, "all the colored people disappeared." Leo tells of his first such "civic terror." He rushes off the train for fear of what the white people might do to him, and promptly gets lost, riding line after line in a panic. He feels a mite safer when he leaps into a train containing a single black man - his "savior." Shy but urged on by an impossibly full bladder, Leo asks his assistance in finding a bathroom. The man scolds the boy for riding alone and guides him from Brooklyn back home to Harlem (stopping first at the restroom, of course).
Edition used: Martha Foley, ed. 200 Years of Great American Short Stories. New York: Galahad Books, 1975.
Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Title: "Sonny's Blues"
Date: 1941
Systems: Subway, car
Context: 1940s, Harlem, African-American perspective
The story opens with a rather nondescript ride on a subway through Harlem. On the ride, the protagonist reads the newspaper account of his brother's arrest for "peddling and using heroine." To elucidate the guilty connection the protagonist bears to the brother-addict Sonny, Baldwin offers a story within the story. The narrator flashes back to his father's funeral and the story his mother chose to tell him on that occasion.
The protagonist learns for the first time that he had an uncle, his father's brother, who like Sonny was a gifted musician. One evening, as the father and uncle are returning from a night of drinking, the uncle is hit by a car of white joyriders. Though the driver is only trying to scare the black man, the mischief goes awry (the story is clear about who typically pays for white men's mischief). Baldwin here chooses a car and a car accident to illustrate the fluky but sure means by which life (or death) will surprise and devastate, unexpectedly separating brother from brother. The mother extracts a moral - you can't always prevent trouble, but you can anticipate it - "let him know you are there."
Edition used: Charles Bohner, ed. Short Fiction, Classic and Contemporary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.
Author: Ralph Ellison (b. 1914)
Title: "King of the Bingo Game"
Date: 1944
Systems: Train, subway
Context: 1940s, Harlem; African-American perspective
Ellison uses trains at two important moments in this story; each time the train represents powerful social forces. Whether running amok or running on schedule, the trains bear down relentlessly on the protagonist who can choose to die, or to run, but can't opt out of the game.
The story follows the delusions of a penniless and desperate man who attempts to win enough at bingo to pay for an operation that will save his girlfriend's life. That life is a gamble, and for a black man a losing gamble, is made clear enough from the game show episode at the story's center. Earning a shot at the $36.94 jackpot, the protagonist spins an enormous bingo wheel (resembling but predating Bob Barker's contraption on The Price is Right). The protagonist realizes that the only measure of control over his destiny which he can attain is to keep the wheel in motion, neither quitting or winning, merely keeping on.
The train images prepare for this realization. Before the bingo game begins, he dozes off and imagines himself back in the South as a boy. While playing on a railroad trestle, he sees the train coming in time to run to safety. He rests by the highway only for a moment before he discovers the train has left the track in order to pursue him down the middle of the road.
Later, during the rush of the game, the protagonist spins the wheel and experiences a vertiginous power that eventually sickens. As his power over the wheel becomes indistinguishable from the wheel's power over him, he wants to vomit; just then "his mind form[s] an image of himself running with Laura in his arms down the tracks of the subway just ahead of an A train...knowing no way to leave the tracks because to stop would bring the train crushing down upon him and to attempt to leave across the other tracks would mean to run into a hot third rail as high as his waist."
Edition used: Charles Bohner, ed. Short Fiction, Classic and Contemporary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.
Author: Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911)
Title: "The Man-Moth"
Date: 1948
Systems: Subway
Context: Contemporary, urban
The "man-moth," an urban commuter, "emerges / from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks." After climbing the façades in the hope of seeing the heavens, he retreats to the "pale subways of cement he calls his home," where he "cannot get aboard the silent trains / fast enough to suit him." Symbolically he "always seats himself facing the wrong way," since thus he can't know how fast he is going. The architecture of the train spawns a series of reflections about the world. The ties under the tracks are like recurrent dreams. He fears looking out the window "for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, / runs there beside him." If you hold a flashlight up to his eye, you will see "one tear, his only possession." Even the streets are so dark that "The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat," so the subway world becomes an extension of the whole urban landscape, not a special refuge.
Edition used: Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis. Introduction to Literature: Poems, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Author: William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Title: "The Last Turn" In The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams
Date: 1944
Systems: Urban street
Context: Contemporary, New York City
An image of a New York street scene which links the sights and the music along lines made familiar by George Gershwin from the music side and Piet Mondrian from the art side:
Then see it! in distressing detail - from behind a red light at 53rd and 8th of a November evening, the jazz of the cross lights echoing the crazy weave of the breaking mind: splash of a half purple, half naked woman's body whose jeweled guts the cars drag up and down - …
Like many surrealistic paintings, Williams' visual images are transformed into scenes of nightmare and violence.
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: Emmy Payne (b. 1919)
Title: Katy No-Pocket
Date: 1944
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary
An illustrated book for young kids. Katy, a pocketless mother kangaroo, goes to the city to solve her problem. It is a place of "stores and houses and automobiles." After she gets a carpenter's apron, the picture shows her hopping along a railroad track back to her forest home. These are presumably the bare minimum symbols to convince a young person that the setting is urban.
Edition used: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944.
Author: E. B. White (1899-1985)
Title: Stuart Little
Date: 1945
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, New York City
This is a famous children's story of an anthromorphized mouse who lives with a New York City family. He catches a city bus to 72nd Street and Central Park, and has to invent a mouse-sized dime to get on board; it is accepted. He goes to a dentist's office where the man has made a functioning, small automobile with an on/off invisibility switch - Stuart drives it, in invisible mode, around the office until it smashes into furniture and its fenders are bent and its radiator leaks. The dentist gives a general message for all young kids: "Stuart, I hope this will be a lesson to you: never push a button on an automobile unless you are sure what you are doing" (Ch. 11). Stuart drives a similar car through Central Park to 110th Street and then to the Saw Mill River Parkway, but he goes in the early morning before traffic. Later he gets a job as a school teacher and changes from motoring clothing to a salt-and-pepper suit for the new job, gets an oil change, and the needed 5 drops of gasoline (Ch. 15).
This playful story gives its young readers a safety lesson and information about some of the logistics of using an automobile.
Edition used: New York: Harper and Row.
Author: Shirley Jackson (1919-1965)
Title: Come Along with Me
Date: 1968 Written: 1942-1965
Systems: Car, bus
Context: Contemporary, New England
Many of Jackson's stories work a tight line between characters' often bizarre psychology and the supernatural, something along the lines of "The Twilight Zone." These stories play out several themes of the disorientation and anonymity of public transportation and suburban life.
"The Beautiful Stranger" (1946) starts at a train station where the focus character's husband has returned from a business trip in Boston. The "first intimation of strangeness occurred at the station" - the wife and the two children arrive half an hour early, throwing off the rhythm of her perfect welcome so much that she's "unsure at last whether this was an arrival or a departure." On the drive home she wonders if she can go along on his next trip. All seems fine until the next day when she thinks, "That is not my husband," an intuition which is reinforced after he drives home from work that evening. The husband adds to the tension: "'Someone told me today,' he said once, 'that he had heard I was back from Boston, and I distinctly thought he said that he heard I was dead in Boston.'" To relieve the tension she takes a taxi to do some shopping (they have only one car), but when she returns she can't recognize which is the house with the beautiful stranger inside. The story picks up on the similarity of suburban houses, the isolation of wives and kids compared with the routine mobility of commuting husbands.
"Louisa, Please Come Home" (1960) explores a parallel theme. Louisa had taken a bus downtown, then bought a round-trip train ticket to Chandler so her parents would think she was coming back. Along the way she stops at another town to throw off any trace. She sleeps on the train since she has no other place, and notices "how no one pays any attention to you at all. There were hundreds of people who saw me that day, and even a sailor who tried to pick me up in the movie, and yet no one really saw me." Three years later Paul, a friend from her old town, recognizes her in Chandler and takes her home on a plane - her family claims that she's not their daughter and her father gives her money to go back. Paul, it turns out, had shown up with two other candidates in the past.
"The Summer People" (1949) follows through on the problems a couple in their late sixties have when they decide to stay at their summer place after Labor Day. They take their regular "big trip" to town for shopping; Mrs. Allison splurges on glass baking dishes. The plan collapses when they learn that the kerosene truck doesn't make deliveries after the season, the car won't start, and the phone is disconnected. Even in a remote holiday resort people depend on cars and trucks; the story ends on an uncertain note as a thunderstorm zaps their battery-operated radio.
"The Bus" (1965) tells the story of Old Miss Harper, who is getting her regular bus home. In the opening scene she is unhappy with the "dirty small" bus and mentally composes a letter to the company, "Your ticket salesmen are ugly, your drivers are surly, your vehicles indescribably filthy…." The bus serves several small towns in order "to get somewhere, even home." In a recursive story which borders on reality and dream, she sleeps on the bus to be awakened by the driver, who says to the other passengers, "She thinks I'm an alarm clock." The driver puts her off, but it's not her home town, only a deserted crossroads with a RICKETT'S LANDING sign and "no stores, no lights, no taxis, no people." Two young men drive her in a pickup to "the old lady's," a house that is (or is like) her childhood home, now a Bar & Grill; she pays the truck drivers and takes a room. The closet is filled with her childhood toys, which talk to her, but she's awakened by the bus driver who says, "She thinks I'm an alarm clock," and drops her off, not at her home town but at RICKETT'S LANDING…
Edition used: Stanley Edgar Hyman, ed. Come Along with Me. New York: Popular Library 1968.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Title: "Signs and Symbols"
Date: 1948
Systems: Subway, bus
Context: late 1940s, New York City
This short story tells of the visit of an elderly Russian couple, long displaced by the Russian Revolution, to New York City in the late 1940s to their son, confined to a "sanitarium" because of his insanity, a rare type of "referential mania" in which the patient imagines that the entire inanimate world is a "veiled reference to his personality and existence." The unrelentingly bleak lives of the couple are partially depicted by the description of their weekly journey to the sanitarium, which involves first a subway and then a bus ride. The "underground train," which is described as if it were a sentient being, breaks down; the bus keeps them waiting for a long time and is crowded when it shows up. The passages devoted to their subway and bus experiences, both there and back, provide a very unappealing portrait of urban mass transit.
Edition used: Nabokov's Dozen. New York: Bard, 1973.
Author: James Agee (1909-1955)
Title: "Rapid Transit"
Date:
Systems: Subway
Context: Contemporary
The alienation of commuting by subway is symbolic of a general change and adaptation to urban life, and introduces a new kind of disorder into an apparently regular society.
Squealing under city stone The millions on the millions run, Every one a life alone, Every one a soul undone: … The wrecked demeanors of the mind That now is tamed, and once was wild.
Edition used: Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern American Poetry: Mid-Century Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
Author: J. D. Salinger (b. 1919)
Title: The Catcher in the Rye
Date: 1951
Systems: Automobile, train, taxi, subway
Context: late 1940s, Pennsylvania and New York
Salinger's famous story of Holden Caulfield's reluctant coming of age takes place initially at Pencey, a prep school outside of New York, and then moves to the city itself. Holden, who has been kicked out of school, leaves for Christmas vacation early, on the spur of the moment, taking a late night train to the city. "Usually I like riding on trains, especially at night, with the lights on and the windows so black, and one of those guys coming up the aisle selling coffee and sandwiches and magazines" (Ch. 8). The only other passenger in his coach turns out to be the mother of one of his classmates, and Holden takes the opportunity to tell her what a great guy her son is, concocting a series of lies that mask his real opinion, which was that her son "was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey." This encounter on the train is similar to the several taxi rides Holden later takes in which he asks cabbies where the Central Park ducks go in the winter. In both instances the lonely Holden is trying to make some sort of connection with people (he asks both the woman on the train and the two cab drivers to join him for a "cocktail" - all three decline). He is constantly reaching out to the different people he meets, seeking assurance that not everyone is a "phony," that he can find someone with whom he can communicate honestly. But after several cab rides he gives up on finding that in cabs, and at one point makes a decision to walk back to his hotel, even though it's a long walk. In a sense the book is a process of narrowing Holden's opportunities for connection; he contacts one person after another and again and again these people fail him.
The book's title refers to a variant of a Robert Burns poem, set in a context of dangerous streets: a young boy whom Holden encounters was singing "The cars zoomed by, brakes screeched all over the place, his parents paid no attention to him, and he kept on walking next to the curb and singing 'If a body catch a body coming through the rye.' It made me feel better" (Ch. 16). Holden says, "'I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door…" His fantasy is to escape by driving to Massachusetts and Vermont and living in a cabin (Ch 19). At the end, he imagines hitchhiking out West: "I figured, I'd go down to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I'd bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I'd be somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody'd know me and I'd get a job. I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people's cars." After a bit of that, again, he'd build "a little cabin somewhere" (Ch. 25).
As manager of the school's fencing team, he had gone to a meet in New York and had "left all the foils and equipment and stuff on the goddam subway. It wasn't my fault. I had to keep getting up to look at this map, so we'd know where to get off… The whole team ostracized me the whole way back on the train. It was pretty funny, in a way" (Ch. 1). This episode is mentioned a couple of times later in the novel.
In addition to the train and taxi as meeting places, the automobile functions importantly as the place for teenage sexual encounters, encounters which Holden feels very ambivalent about. Throughout the novel he worries about the date his roommate, Stradlater, has gone on with Jane Gallagher, a friend of Holden's. Holden is worried that the "very sexy" Stradlater has tried to or succeeded in giving Jane "the time" (having sex with her). Though he repeatedly contemplates calling Jane, Holden never does, fearing that somehow she will be different, now that she has gone out with Stradlater. In thinking about the two of them together, Holden recalls double dates with Stradlater that ended up with them parking in some lonely spot. Holden has witnessed or at least heard Stradlater compelling resistant girls to let him have his way, and that memory plays on his fears. Holden himself talks about his own dates, and making out in cars, admitting that he's a virgin and explaining that when a girl says "no," he stops - in contrast to Stradlater whose response is to ply the girl in "this Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice" until she complies. The cars used on these dates are never Holden's, and, although he is sixteen, he never drives in the novel. That age, sixteen, usually marks the beginning of access to cars, a privilege in the United States that brings with it a certain amount of freedom, freedom that can translate into access to sex. But just as Holden doesn't drive, he's not ready to have sex. Though he explains his virginity by putting it off on the reluctance of the girls he's been with, it's clear that he is reluctant himself. The cars in the novel offer sexual opportunities to a genuinely interested Holden, functioning as a sort of transitional location, a precursor to more adult sexual milieus. But for Holden the transition from child to adult, particularly in terms of sexuality, is confusing and often painful. His dates in cars mirror that confusion, as they are both exciting and the source of some of his most overwhelming fears.
Expensive cars are both admired and scorned by Holden. On the first page, we hear about his brother's new Jaguar, "One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks." His roommate's father, an entrepreneurial undertaker, has a "big goddam Cadillac"; the father talks about Jesus all the time, even when he is driving, "I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs." (Ch. 3).
Holden says (to Sally Hayes), "'Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.'" (Ch. 19).
Edition used: New York, Signet, 1953.
Author: J. D. Salinger (b. 1919)
Title: Nine Stories
Date: 1953 Written: © 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953
Systems: Commuting train, car, cab
Context: Ca. 1950; some stories are set earlier, New York suburbs
These stories presuppose familiarity with some of the customs and practices of New York area, suburban commuting life which may have been quite obscure to other readers. For example, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" begins with a word play on the Merritt Parkway, mis-named "Merrick" by Mary Jane, the visitor from New York. As the two former college classmates get drunk in the afternoon that an ice storm begins. Mary Jane worries, "I hardly have any anti-freeze in the car," showing, probably, her ignorance about the automotive dangers from this kind of storm. Eloise, the host, later lies to her husband who calls from the train station to get a ride home, saying falsely that her car is parked in by Mary Jane's and the keys are lost. She suggests he get a lift from friends, but he can't; then "Why don't you boys form a platoon and march home?" a satirical jibe at his military experience. The whole issue of "bedroom communities," the possibility of the husband staying late at the office, the need for the wife for the drop off and pick up at the suburban station are all involved but not stated in the conversation. In contrast to the nastiness in Eloise's marriage, the black maid, first "whosis" and later Grace, asks if her husband can stay over because of the storm and is refused, "[H]e can't spend the night here. I'm not running a hotel."
Running errands in the suburbs is a sign of restored order and family at the end of "Down at the Dinghy." Boo Boo tells her son, "'We'll drive to town and get some pickles, and some bread, and we'll eat the pickles in the car, and then we'll go to the station and get Daddy, and then we'll bring Daddy home and make him take us for a ride in the boat." This after the son had reported on the servants' anti-semitic remark about the husband, but had thought that "kike" meant kite.
"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" involves a husband trying to figure out why his wife is late. He calls a friend who speculates that she and her companions hopped in a cab to the Village, since they "missed their last train" (from New York back home to the suburbs) - no, they drove in. The need to plan around train schedules, and the difficulty of keeping family members informed about changes in plans is exacerbated by limits on what kinds of transportation is available, but all of this is understated in Salinger's elusive style of telling his stories.
"The Laughing Man" involves a boy's club which uses a reconverted commercial bus (with straw seats) in the 1930s for trips from far uptown New York to Central Park to play sports, go to museums, and take holiday trips to Palisades Park. The all-male world is first broken into when the Chief, the adult who organizes the club, puts a woman's photograph in the front of the bus; the girl friend finally appears, talking about the trains she missed and caught in order to link up with the group; she finally insinuates herself into the baseball game. The fragile rituals and the fellowship of the bus world are thus destroyed.
"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," set in 1939, shows a barely-qualified art teacher who escapes from New York, where he was "holding on to the enamel pole near the driver's seat, buttocks to buttocks with the chap behind me" on the Lexington Avenue bus amid the driver's continued request to "'step to the rear of the vehicle.'" Then "Things got much worse. One afternoon, a week or so later, as I was coming out of the Ritz Hotel, where Bobby and I were indefinitely stopping, it seemed to me that all the seats from all the buses in New York had been unscrewed and taken out and set up in the street, where a monstrous game of Musical Chairs was in full swing." Enough - on to Montreal!
The final story in the collection, "Teddy," is set in the early 1950s on an ocean liner, and it includes incidental details about on-board recreation (deck tennis, swimming, shuffleboard), reserving deck chairs, taking meals, and the ship's daily newspaper.
Edition used: New York: Signet, 1954.
Author: Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
Title: Death of a Salesman
Date: 1949
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, New York city
Linda's first question of her husband, Willy, is "You didn't smash the car, did you?" which highlights two issues - the central role the car plays in his salesman's job and (as it turns out later) a pattern of accidents which the insurance inspector thinks shows Willy's suicidal tendency. One of their sons, Happy, recalls his father's stopping at a green light and going on the red, thus explaining the accident as simple careless driving. As part of his general pattern of avoiding what's really going on, he tells a neighbor that "A little trouble with the car" is why he is home, not that he's lost his job. His failure is symbolically described as "driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent." His frustrated hopes include a dream that he could work in New York, and "I'll never get behind a wheel the rest of my life!" so the car becomes part of his prison.
Willy's current car is a Studebaker, but he is so disoriented by his failure as a salesman that he had to drive home at ten miles an hour (four hours from Yonkers to Brooklyn). Earlier in the day he had struggled, because the "car kept going off onto the shoulder"; he was "even observing the scenery" this time, tried to open the windshield, "I absolutely forgot I was driving." Soon he recalls that "windshields don't open on new cars" - he was thinking of their old, red 1928 Chevy. Insurance and repair costs for the Studebaker are part of Willy's ongoing financial bind - the need for carburetor repairs leads him to say "They ought to prohibit manufacture of that car."
The Chevy symbolizes the Lomans' better days. In one of several flashbacks, Willy and his sons are simonizing it: "Don't leave the hubcaps, boys." They did such a good job that the car dealer didn't believe it had gone eighty thousand miles. This Simonizing becomes a telling moment when Willy and his sons, especially Biff, were genuinely close together - Willy wants to "get back to all the great times" he tells his brother's ghost. Summing up near the end of the play, "After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up more dead than alive."
At the end of the play, Willy's car is heard leaving the house "at full speed," on to his death.
Edition used: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
| Previous chapter | Title page | Next chapter |
| Subject index | Author index | Place index |