In different contexts, Kerouac and Nabokov describe long-distance, continental driving around America, Kerouac "on the road" in the western states, Nabokov's Humbert Humbert from motel to motel in an elaborate pattern to avoid his pursuers. Selby, by contrast, presents the complex culture of socially isolated young men in Brooklyn where sex, violence, and the local economy depend on cars. Hawkes shows various symbolic and material roles that the car plays in one family's life, while O'Connor's preacher in Wise Blood turns an old Essex into his pulpit. Roethke presents a drive on washed out roads as a symbol for the speaker's unconscious mind. Stafford's "Traveling Through the Dark" juxtaposes a dead deer on the road with his car's animation. Warren shows the decline of the Appalachian region partly in terms of its collapsing infrastructure. Bellow charts an elderly woman's struggle to keep her aging car in working condition so she can get to her remote home in rural California. A scheme to steal an antique Ford from a woman through fraudulent marriage to her daughter is the subject of O'Connor's "The Life You Save…." In another of her stories, a grandmother's misremembered and confusing road directions lead a family to its death. Chase highlights car models as a way to identify gangsters and their police pursuers on Kansas highways. McMurtry shows the importance of the car culture in Texas with special emphasis on the car's role in teenagers' sexual encounters. Stafford in "The Trip" gives images of the drive-in restaurant, while Booth characterizes the rural Maine economy partly by the way people repair and recycle old cars. In Albee's play, segregated Southern hospitals are shown to cause blues singer Bessie Smith's death following an auto accident, while Wilson dramatizes the effects of segregation in the Pittsburgh local trucking industry. Cushman creates a plot around a man's gradually selling off parts of his prized Buick as an allegory about the general decline of Native Americans in the face of whites' technology. Nabokov's Professor Pnin, after struggling with unreliable railway and bus schedules finally joins the automobile age in his eccentric and bumbling way.
Cheever's "Country Husband" depicts the survivor of an airplane crash whose near-tragedy cannot be communicated to his family or neighbors, as he deals with routine problems commuting by train to the suburbs. Nemerov's poem gives images of the airplane as a symbol of the Eisenhower administration. Lensky shows the Mississippi River valley, with its tugboats and lock system, while Bissell deals with technical problems of towing barges during a flood on the River, as well as competition from the railroads. Baldwin describes an African-American expatriate's voyage from France to the United States on an ocean liner, and then his wonder at the new highway system. Ferlinghetti links the multi-lane highway to images from Goya's drawings of war, while Lowell associates the building of a parking garage and cars with tail fins with a general indifference to the pain of wars in this century.
O'Connor uses a train trip to Atlanta to describe a young white Georgia boy's first contact with blacks, where the train station becomes the symbol of his ability to escape back to his home. Stafford's "West of Your City" has word plays which echo the sound of a moving train, while Wright builds on the sexual symbolism of the train's masculine imagery. The commuter train in Cheever's story is the site for a sexually exploited secretary to stalk her former boss for revenge, while Carver's companion piece focuses on how other passengers react to the woman. Bellow describes how subway travellers try to guess each others' thoughts and character.
Author: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Title: On the Road
Date: 1957
Systems: Car
Context: 1950s, Western states, Mexico
In Kerouac's novel the location of the drama of American life is transferred to the automobile, specifically to the car hurtling at high speed across the continent on a journey more focused on movement than destination. In the first paragraph of the book we learn that Dean Moriarty, the central character, was born on the road, in a "jalopy" in Salt Lake City while his parents were on their way to Los Angeles. From that point on most of the significant events and interactions in the novel occur in cars. The respites in New York, Denver, San Francisco, and other places, make up a relatively small part of the narrative; the focus is on what happens during the drives between these cities. What happens is a mixture of unpredictable "adventures," sandwiched around marathon talk sessions in which stories are traded and the significance of the various experiences discussed and analyzed in an almost frenzied way.
While the focus on the car and on the road makes On the Road a key text in broadly understanding the burgeoning of the car culture in post-World War II America, it should be remembered that the book is also an account of the "beat" subculture, that the people in the novel and the lives that they lead are decidedly outside the mainstream. For the most part these people are not car owners (of the various vehicles used for the many trips only two are owned by the travelers - one is soon repossessed, the other breaks down and must be abandoned). Instead it is always a challenge to gain access to cars. Hitchhiking, travel bureau cars (getting a ride in exchange for gas money), borrowing cars, stealing cars - these are some of the ways the characters get around. Money is always an issue; Dean and Sal Paradise (the narrator) are relegated to hitchhiking when broke, but Dean buys a car when he's flush. But even when they have a car, money is low, leading them to steal and pick up hitchhikers for gas money.
Though Dean and Sal are men on their own, they operate in the tradition of the Joads in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath; they're barely scraping by as they travel from one place to another. Though their situation is never as desperate as the Joads', at the same time they're clearly not on vacation. There is nothing leisurely about the driving. The trips take on the quality of frenzied quests, not for any one place, but for a way of living that can somehow capture the immediacy of the road, the excitement of self-determined movement. What they're after is a full experience of the present moment, each succeeding moment, and the suggestion is that that moment can best be appreciated behind the wheel of a large American automobile, moving at ninety miles per hour across the American landscape.
Edition used: New York: New American Library, 1957
Author: Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Title: Lolita
Date: 1955
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, All of U. S.
Nabokov's infamous novel tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a pederast who sexually exploits his stepdaughter, Lolita, over a several year period as they travel all over the United States by car. The "relationship" is initially made possible by the death of Lolita's mother, who is killed when she is run over by a car. To evade the prying eyes of friends and neighbors, Humbert takes Lolita on the road, moving from one motel to another. The series of motels and "Kumfy Kabins" that they frequent offer a anonymity essential for the continued satisfaction of Humbert's desires. Humbert, the narrator of the novel, provides a detailed account of the various categories of accommodations, the motor courts, tourist homes, "'Colonial' Inns," self-described "'high-class'" resorts, and so on. The motels and restaurants and roadside attractions that are depicted, as well as the roads themselves, offer a contrast to contemporary car travel, pre-dating the advent of interstate highways and the subsequent takeover of the overnight accommodations business by corporate chains. But the road as a place to escape to is still a familiar notion, and certainly the long trip is an attempt to separate Lolita from the protection of community. Humbert jealously guards all her movements wherever they are staying, making sure she makes no connections, shares no confidences. Lolita is effectively removed from her childhood, not only placed in an adult position sexually, but socially isolated from all other children. Their perpetual "guilty locomotion" ensures that isolation.
Humbert's actions are certainly reprehensible, an admission he frequently (in hindsight) makes; he is aware of what Lolita lost because of him and that he can never make amends for the crime of ending her childhood prematurely. But he insists that he truly loved her. When he finds her again - she escaped from him at fourteen - she is seventeen, married and pregnant, and clearly no longer a "nymphet"; and yet he asks her to leave with him: "'From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty- five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.'" The car is still all he has to offer, an illicit, shabby, and lonely life on the road, moving from one motel to the next. She of course refuses, having no desire to return to that life with Humbert.
In an afterword to the book, Nabokov insists that Lolita "has no moral in tow," that it is a fiction, like all his fiction, that affords him "aesthetic bliss,… a state of being where art … is the norm." Seen in this light, the action of the novel gives Nabokov the opportunity to depict the poetry of place names, of car types, of all that borders the roads Lolita and Humbert travel. In spots the novel is a litany of those places and names, revealing Nabokov's fascination with the emotions and impressions that such terms evoke.
Further, Nabokov turns the road map of the U.S. into a sort of game board (and we learn Humbert is enamored of various games, such as chess); tracing the route of the initial trip as they travel through "corn belts and cotton belts" a pattern begins to emerge. Their progression is certainly not linear, but nor is it completely random. Instead they move in a series of back and forth motions, or zigzags, going west then back east, north then south then north again. It's been suggested that the trip forms a butterfly on the map (an allusion to Nabokov's frequent butterfly collecting trips), but the constant backtracking, rather than forming some concrete image, reflects Humbert's desire to recapture the fleeting moments, to somehow make time stop and indefinitely perpetuate his enjoyment of Lolita's "nymphethood." Driving in the novel, rather than a means of getting someplace, functions as a sort of anti-movement, an attempt to occupy a space apart from a disapproving society in a way that defeats the inevitability of time passing
Edition used: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1955.
Author: Hubert Selby, Jr. (b. 1928)
Title: Last Exit to Brooklyn
Date: © 1957, 1960, 1961, 1964
Systems: Car, subway
Context: Contemporary, New York City
A series of five stories (or dramatic acts) followed by a "Coda" which give portraits of working and poor people from Brooklyn. While the title refers to the New York subway, the most prominent use of that system is as a temporary escape route after crimes and acts of violence to make pursuit hard for the cops ("Tralala"). While most New York stories emphasize or celebrate the interconnections created by public transport, this novel points to isolated communities at the end of the line. It also parodies the car culture of the 1950s.
The stories begin with a group of men hanging out at the "Greeks" diner near the army base, "Watching cars roll by. Identifying them. Make. Model. Year. Horse power. Overhead valve. V-8. 6,8, a hundred cylinders… Cant beat a Plymouth fora pickup… Outrun any cop in the city with a Roadmaster…" The technical specs drift into fantasy, and then into the power to use a car to get sex (and violence): "Cruise around in a load like that [a 47 Continental] with the top down and a pair of shades and some sharp clothes and ya haveta beat the snatch off witha club." The men try to "identify them by the sound of the motor then looked to see if they were right" ("Another Day Another Dollar"). A similar crowd is into motorcycles. Tommy, "the guy who got married" and had a kid and threw a party. He has a 76 Indian, "Not a onelunger," even though it's small. "Yawant somethin that can be fixed up. Yaknow, made real sharp - streamers and things and a bigass buddyseat with chrome. Man, the snatch really comes runnin… Tommyd sit on this pecka with wheels gunnin the motor and retadin the spark soundin like a gun battle." His friend Spook "had the hots for a bike for months. 6 months before he even got one he was wearing a motorcycle hat. Of course all the boys with bikes woreem." Spook prices bikes then tells the group "about the great Harley-Davidson machine he saw" ("And Baby Makes Three").
The links among cars, sex, and violence are insistent and often grotesque. The patterns of car-talk and bike-talk, with an emphasis on fantasy and boasting are echoed in the ways talk about their sexual conquests. "He talked with some of the men, listening to their jokes, their stories of dames fucked, followed each story with one of his own about how he bagged some dame and threw a fuck intoer and how she thought he was so great and wanted to seeim again" ("Strike"). In one shocking parody of the motif of sex in the back seat, a teenage whore, after getting very drunk and undressing in a bar, is gang raped until she dies in a "wrecked car in the lot on the corner of 57th street" ("Tralala").
The longest story, "Strike," focuses on Harry Black, a union leader who is in charge of the picket lines for several months. In one episode, management contracts a local trucking company to take finished goods out of the plant which precipitates fights between strikers and the police. Harry's major triumph is in getting two men to blow up all the trucks, an event which gets into the newspapers, even though he cannot take credit. Throughout, Harry uses the strike fund for doubtful purposes - ranging from buying enormous quantities of beer for the picketers to paying his cab fare so he can visit his lovers in gay bars nearly every evening. When the strike ends, Harry's life collapses - among other things, he has to ride the cheaper subway to continue his sex life, "It had been a long time since Harry had ridden the subway and it seemed to be exceptionally cold and stuffy and every turn and bump seemed to be directed against his comfort."
"Landsend" is a series of portraits of people who live in the Projects. Race plays a major role, as in the extended story of a black man, Abraham, who "opened the door of his bigass Cadillac and looked smugly at the people sitting, the people passing and the people washing their cars.… It was his. Ghuddamn right. All his. He looked at the dashboard with all its knobs and patted it. Every ghuddamn hunk of chrome belonged to him, Abe.… [He] rubbed his hand along the fine upholstery, patted the dashboard again (ghuddamn if it didnt shine like a babys ass), turned up the radio and once more dug the cats washin their cars with buckers of water, soap and sponges.… Ah, it was great, real great man, to just sit and dig the radio and smell the car, that special CADILLAC smell…" Predictably, in this novel, this advertisement-like pride in ownership leads to sex: "this was the kindda day you lake to take a ride and just cruise around and dig the music on the radio and maybe pick somethin up." Later he does pick up Lucy at a bar: "Abe let her look his Cadillac over before he opened the door. He wanted to be sure she saw those bigass fins and the whitewalls." Lucy gives him more sex than he has strength for, and he can barely struggle home to his wife - the badass Caddy is not mentioned in this humiliating return.
We get a grim hint of nature in the last scene: "The sun rose behind the Gowanus Parkway lighting the oil filmed water of the Gowanus Canal and the red bricks of the Project."
Edition used: New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Author: John Hawkes (b. 1925)
Title: Second Skin
Date: 1964
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1920s, but chiefly 1950s
The protagonist in Hawkes' novel is Skipper, a man in his late fifties looking back on the tragedies of his life from the vantage point of a better and contented present. Though the events recalled are complex, mixed up with Skipper's longings and fears, the story concentrates on deaths, those of Skipper's father, his wife, his son-in-law, Fernandez, and his daughter, Cassandra. In each case automobiles play a large part in the lives and deaths of these characters, functioning sometimes as reflections of their conditions and sometimes as malevolent machines of destruction, wielded by the characters who menace the lives of Skipper's loved ones.
Describing his childhood, Skipper identifies a memory of his mortician father washing their hearse (which doubled as the family car), his mother watching, as "the vision lying closest to the peaceful center of my childhood." But we also learn that the father commits suicide, with young Skipper as witness, and subsequently the hearse becomes a symbol for Skipper of his ruined childhood, dating from his father's death.
Fernandez is most clearly linked with a car, his car, as Skipper realizes "that the enormous outdated Packard with all its terrible capacity for noise and metallic disintegration was somehow a desperate equivalent of my little old world Catholic son-in-law." The car functions as both a source of power for Fernandez and a reflection of his limitations: when Cassandra gets in the car for the wedding trip he "changes," slamming the door and ordering his bride to drive; but the decrepit condition of the car and his inability to drive it suggest an impotence that we later learn extends to his role as husband.
Two characters instrumental in Cassandra's eventual suicide are Miranda and Jomo, and both are closely linked to their "hot rods." Miranda's automobile (which Skipper dubs "Cleopatra's Car") appears initially as a wreck, on blocks in her backyard; Miranda cynically tries to seduce Skipper in the car, to keep him occupied while Jomo and friends sexually use Cassandra. Later, after Miranda's car is fixed, Skipper uses it to chase Jomo, whose "hot rod" is described as black and predatory, and to try to save Cassandra from his clutches. But it turns out Skipper has been decoyed away from the scene of Jomo's crime, and before he can arrive Cassandra has killed herself.
Skipper's past is presented as one long nightmare, moving from one humiliation, one death, one loss to another - and doing so by car. But he is writing from the perspective of his new life, which is on an unidentified Caribbean island where there are no vehicles. The closest object to the machines of destruction that have haunted his life is a great water wheel, now frozen in place and overgrown. Here the wheel, unlike the steering wheels of his past, is powerless, a reminder of the threat of machines/cars, but of no danger. Instead of death and loss, Skipper now leads a fecund life: he is (supposedly) the father-to-be of a pregnant young woman's child and he works as an "Artificial Inseminator" for the island's cattle. The cars that menaced his life were all damaged, junkers and rustbuckets, suggesting and wielding decay and death. But the island is green and alive, free from the fumes of cars and, more importantly, their destructive drivers. For Skipper cars represent a death- dealing technology that he has to escape from, if is to elude the fate of so many others close to him.
Edition used: New York: New Directions, 1964.
Author: Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Title: Wise Blood
Date: 1952
Systems: Automobile
Context: late 1940s-early 1950s, South
In her introduction to the 1962 edition of this short novel O'Connor describes it as a "comic novel about a Christian malgre lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death." The main character, Hazel Motes, sets out for the city of Taulkinham "'to do some things I never have done before'" (Ch. 1). The central "thing" he does is to develop and preach his philosophy of "The Church Without Christ," a personal gospel that attempts to deny Christ but which actually reveals Motes' obsession with the Redeemer. Key to this task is the purchase of a beat up, "rat-colored" Essex, which becomes both Motes's home and his pulpit. His grandfather's Ford had previously been used as a preaching platform. Although his preaching fails to win converts, the car remains a source of solace, particularly in the face of all the ugliness that Motes sees around him (a highway is "ragged with filling stations and trailer camps and roadhouses" [Ch. 3]), and which so angers him.
Near the end of the novel Motes decides that going to another city will offer a fresh start, and he contemplates the advantage of having a car, "of having something that moved fast, in privacy, to the place you wanted to be" (Ch. 11). But before he leaves town he has a confrontation with "the Prophet," another preacher who has taken to imitating Motes and preaching the Church Without Christ. Convinced that the Prophet is a non-believer, a follower of Christ, Motes first runs his car off the road and then runs him over. "The Essex stood half over the other Prophet as if it were pleased to guard what it had finally brought down." Afterwards Motes leaves town, though his car is barely working. The filling-station attendant sizes up the mechanical dilemma: "there was a leak in the gas tank and two in the radiator and that the rear tire would probably last twenty miles if he went slow" (Ch. 13). Near the outskirts of Taulkinham he is pulled over by a policeman who asks Motes to get out of the car and then pushes the Essex over an embankment. Defeated, Motes returns to town and blinds himself, a final act he thinks provides access to an inner light. Without the car his mobility is restricted, and so he injures himself, as the car has been wrecked. The car, as the vehicle for his beliefs, had sustained him in his quest: "'Nobody with a good car needs to be justified'" (Ch. 6). Having lost the car, his quest is over, and he turns inward, literally shutting out the light of the world.
Edition used: Three by Flannery O'Connor. New York: Signet, 1962.
Author: Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Title: "Journey to the Interior"
Date: 1961
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, East Coast
"In the long journey out of the self, / There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places / Where the shale slides dangerously / And the back wheels hang almost over the edge." Thus begins an elaborate comparison where various road and driving conditions are tied to the narrator's troubled psychological state, his "interior." Later: "I remember how it was to drive in gravel, / Watching for dangerous down-hill places, where the wheels whined beyond eighty - / When you hit the deep pit at the bottom of the swale, The trick was to throw the car sideways and charge over the hill, full to the throttle." You have to know quite a bit about how a car works under specialized conditions to figure out what the narrator is saying about his distress. The passing landscape, and the implied psychological environment in which the narrator lives, are also given in precise terms: "The towns with their high pitted road-crowns and deep gutters, / … / An old bridge below with a buckled iron railing, broken by some idiot plunger, / Underneath, the sluggish water running between weeds, broken wheels, tires, stones. / And all flows past - " The auto age gives us thrills, danger, garbage.
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: William Stafford (b. 1914)
Title: "Traveling Through the Dark"
Date: 1960
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary
This is a brief poem describes the narrator's finding a dead, pregnant deer "on the edge of Wilson River road," and physically feeling that the fawn is still alive, but "never to be born." This is set in symbolic contrast with the car, which is presented as also being alive: "The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights; / under the hood purred the steady engine. / I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red." The deer are pushed off into the canyon, which is "usually best" so that the narrow road can be clear, for "to swerve might make more [deer or people] dead." The living cars control the road.
Edition used: Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis. Introduction to Literature: Poems, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Author: Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
Title: "Dragon Country: To Jacob Boehme"
Date: 1957
Systems: Railroad, wagon, car
Context: Contemporary, Kentucky
In this poem, Warren uses the idea of a mythic dragon to account for falling land values, religious revivals, Appalachian poverty, and a systematic eagerness to avoid the truth. "The slime on the railroad rails is where he has crossed the track" - it is part of a "track of disrepair" which includes what "they found, in the woods, the wagon on its side, / Mules torn from trace chains, and you saw how the harness had burst." Troops were promised to stop the dragon; "No one talks" about it. A salesman has a blowout, steps from his car - and the sheriff has the car burned up to hide the evidence. "If a man disappears - well, the fact is something to hide. The family says, gone to Akron, or up to Ford, in Detroit" - Jebb Johnson's boot, "with the leg, what was left" is found, and it is destroyed, too.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
Title: "Leaving the Yellow House"
Date: 1957
Systems: Automobile, accident
Context: Contemporary, rural California
Old Hattie, age 72, continues to live at Sego Desert Lake along with "six white neighbors," but she is having trouble making it alone. Once a week, "At the wheel of her old turret-shaped car, she drove, seemingly methodical but speeding dangerously, across forty miles of mountainous desert to buy frozen meat pies and whisky.… And at five o'clock she drove back at the same speed, calmly, partly blinded by the smoke of her cigarette." The central episode is her accident: "The explanation she gave was that she had sneezed, and the sneeze had blinded her and made her twist the wheel. The motor was killed and all four wheels of the car sat smack on the rails. Hattie crept down from the door, high off the roadbed. A great fear took hold of her - for the car, for the future, and not only for the future but spreading back into the past." As usual, when she drives home she is quite drunk, which is the real cause of the accident. She convinces a bartender to help her pull the car off the tracks; she first takes the wheel of his pickup and prays to herself: "'Please, God, I didn't bend the axle or crack the oil pan.'" As part of the effort to pull the car a chain slips and breaks her arm; following a difficult recovery in the hospital where she nearly dies, she gets back to the yellow house. She is acutely aware of her car's significance - it is essential for her independence. She finds that the car still runs, and "Proudly, happily, she listened to the noise of tappets." She keeps hoping that her arm will heal so she can drive again. Late in the story she tries to drive it, but fails: "Then she started the motor and tried to drive out of the yard. But she could not release the emergency brake with its rasplike rod. She reached with her good hand, the right, under the steering wheel and pressed her bosom on it and strained. No, she could not shift the gears and steer." Even though she is dotty and an alcoholic, her approach to the car itself is precise and technical.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Title: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"
Date: 1955
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1950s, South
The main character in this short story is Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed itinerant carpenter who appears at the farm of an old woman and her retarded daughter. Secretly coveting an old car he spots in a shed on the farm, a "a 1928 or '29 Ford" that hasn't run in fifteen years, Shiftlet offers to stay and do some work. He sleeps in the car. Soon the old woman is scheming to have him marry the daughter and stay permanently. After getting the car running and painting it, Shiftlet agrees to the marriage, but insists on a honeymoon weekend. But once on the road he abandons the daughter and takes the car, heading onto Mobile alone.
The Ford functions for Shiftlet in a contradictory manner, offering redemption, but doing so through the temptation to betray the two women. The title of the story, which refers to roadside signs that admonish people to drive carefully, suggests the redemption the car offers. Shiftlet tells the old woman that "'the body, lady, is like a house. It don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always"; later he adds "'a man's spirit means more to him than anything else.'" For the first time in his life Shiftlet is moving, mobile, freed from the usual constraints. But as he drives away from the daughter he begins to feel depressed. He picks up a hitchhiker, a boy, to try to assuage his depression, but the boy proves mean-spirited, and soon willingly abandons Shiftlet, who in response implores the Lord to "'Break forth and wash the slime from his earth.'" In answer a thunderstorm appears, but rather than being washed clean, in the last scene of the story Shiftlet races the "galloping shower into Mobile." The car, then, also functions as a means of outdistancing the Christian redemption that it initially seems to offer.
Edition used: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
Author: Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Title: "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Date: 1955
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Georgia
This short story tells of a family's drive to Florida (from Atlanta), their accident on a lonely dirt road, and subsequent discovery by three escaped convicts. Told from the point-of-view of the grandmother - who is accompanying her son and his wife and their two children - the story traces their trip from home, through a stop at a roadside restaurant, to the detour down the dirt road. The grandmother convinces her son, Bailey, to make the turn off to see an old mansion, the site of a party she attended when a young woman. But after a few minutes she realizes that her memory has deceived her and the house she remembers is actually in Tennessee; she flinches at this realization and the cat she's holding on her lap leaps onto Bailey's neck, causing him to drive off the road. Within moments they are discovered by the convicts, the Misfit and his two cronies, whom the grandmother makes the mistake of verbally recognizing. Subsequently the whole family is shot and killed, the grandmother last. The reason for the detour is a visit to the past, symbolized by the move from a paved highway to a deserted dirt road; but events on the old road suggest that the grandmother's belief that times used to be "better," is questionable at best. Further, the turn off suggests a veering from the path of righteousness, a path the grandmother tries to convince the Misfit that he can find. But when she herself discovers salvation, reaching out to the Misfit with the last minute realization that he is "'one of my own children,'" recognizing her Christian responsibility for and connection to even the most benighted individual, he shoots her three times.
Edition used: A Good Man is Hard to Find. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
Author: James Hadley Chase (1906-1985)
Title: No Orchids for Miss Blandish
Date: 1961
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Kansas
The cover says it's a "notorious novel of violence and brutality which has left more than 2 1/2 million readers gasping!" The wealthy victim drives a Jaguar; the first group of kidnappers a Lincoln; the sadistic Grissom gang (who steal the victim from the first group) a Buick; the federal investigators a Ford. The players are often identified by their cars rather than who's in them - "the Buick pulled up." The kidnapping is on Highway 54, the trunk road from Pittsburg (Kansas) to Kansas City; the ransom money is dropped on a straight stretch of Highway 71 near the Maxwell filling station. And so on. These locations and brand names (but not models or years) add realism - even though we don't get brands for food and clothing, people on both sides of the law [and violence] have "Thompsons."
Edition used: New York: Avon, 1966.
Author: Larry McMurtry (b. 1936)
Title: The Last Picture Show
Date: 1966
Systems: Automobiles
Context: 1949-1950, Texas
Cars are everywhere since even the distances within Thalia are great. In addition to getting around, they help identify characters and places - by color and brand name almost always. Sonny the young hero's '41 Chevrolet pickup, Abilene, the big shot's Mercury ("best car in the country"), a farmer's red GMC pickup, Jacy, the lovely and wealthy girl's white Ford convertible and her mother's big blue Cadillac, the night watchman's old white Nash, and so on.
Many of the families and individuals are touched by automobile accidents. Sam the Lion, owner of the first Ford agency in town, had his youngest son run over by a deputy sheriff (Ch. 1). Frank Crawford's father, the former high school principal became a drug addict after being injured and his wife was killed in a wreck (Ch. 3).
The highschoolers are on the road for their sexual adventures - the bus for the basketball team where Jacy and Duane pet in the back seat (Ch. 8). Lester in his Oldsmobile drives Jacy to a naked-swimming party in Wichita, where even richer kids are in sports cars and the host owns the "first Ford Thunderbird in that part of the country" (Ch. 9). Sonny drives coach Popper's wife to a doctor's appointment, which begins their sexual liaison (Ch. 6). And the trips which Sonny and Duane take to Mexico (Ch. 16), and to Fort Worth on Duane's last night before he ships out for Korea on the Continental Trailways bus (Ch. 25) emphasize the ways cars are used. Cars are, of course, involved in the silly eloping which Sonny and Jacy attempt, and in her parents' pursuit of them until they get the marriage annuled (Ch. 23).
Young Billy, who is feeble minded, is first shown sweeping the highway clean, an odd comment on the town's poverty and economic depression (Ch. 1). Later he taken by the boys to a grotesque encounter with a prostitute in the pickup's cab (Ch. 10). After the death of Sam the Lion, his mentor, and the last picture show, he waits, confused in the theater. When he flees to the street, he is run over by a passing cattle truck (Ch. 26).
Edition used: New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Author: William Stafford (b. 1914)
Title: "The Trip"
Date: 1961
Systems: Auto
Context: Contemporary
The automobile confronts the drive-in: "Our car was fierce enough: / no one could tell we were only ourselves; / so we drove, equals of the car." At the restaurant they watch the waitress and manager doing their jobs which leads to the final, cynical comment that "Some people you meet are so dull / that you always remember their names," even though the restaurant workers are anonymous.
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: Philip Booth (b. 1925)
Title: "Maine"
Date: 1960
Systems: Auto
Context: Contemporary, Maine
The poem celebrates Maine's commitment to recycling and re-using automobiles, almost as if the state were a national resource. Automobiles become farm vehicles, engines are removed first to power boats, and eventually to provide anchors. The bodies are re-used as curio stands where they attract tourists in their cars, and so the cycle is closed.
When old cars get retired, they go to Maine. Thick as cows in backlots off the blacktop, East of Bucksport, down the washboard from Penobscot to Castine, they graze behind frame barns: a Ford turned tractor, Hudsons chopped to half-ton trucks, and Chevy panels, jacked up, tireless, geared to saw a cord of wood. Old engines never die. Not in Maine, where men grind valves the way their wives grind axes. Ring-jobs burned-out down the Turnpike still make revolutions, turned marine. If Hardscrabble Hill makes her knock, Maine rigs the water-jacket salt: a man can fish forever on converted sixes, and for his mooring, sink a V-8 block. When fishing's poor, a man traps what he can, Even when a one-horse hearse from Bangor fades away, the body still survives: painted lobster, baited - off Route 1 - with home preserves and Indian knives, she'll net a parlor-full of Fords and haul in transient Cadillacs like crabs. Maine trades in staying power, not shiftless drives.
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: Edward Albee (b. 1928)
Title: The Death of Bessie Smith
Date: 1960
Systems: Automobiles
Context: 1950s, South
In Albee's play, Bessie Smith, the great blues singer, never actually makes an appearance on stage, although she is an important character. Instead Albee recreates the place, in a small southern town, mostly at a small "semiprivate" hospital, and the circumstances of Smith's death.
In the opening scene of the play we learn that Jack, a black man and new friend of Smith's is going to drive her "north," to New York City, where she can do some recording and try to revive her flagging career. Jack doesn't reappear until the end of the play, when he shows up at the hospital to tell of the car accident he and Smith have been in while on their way north. They have already been refused admission at the other local hospital, also a "white" hospital, and so Jack has brought Smith to the one where the play mostly takes place. Smith's arm was "almost torn off from her shoulder" in the accident, and as we learn at the very end of the play, after she has again been refused admission, she has bled to death in route to the second hospital. Though the car initially offers the means of escape from the South, the means of getting north, Jack and Bessie Smith are unable to make it; but not so much because of the accident, but because of the failure of white southern society to acknowledge the humanity of blacks, their crucial need for admittance. At the first hospital Jack is told to wait, even though he insists "This is an emergency!" The "accident" is an old one, tied up with the experience of blacks in North America over the last several hundred years, and bleeding has been going on for a long time. The play suggests that any more waiting will be fatal, as the "wait" was fatal for Bessie Smith.
Edition used: New York: Coward-McCann, 1960.
Author: August Wilson (b. 1945)
Title: Fences
Date: 1986
Systems: Truck-driving
Context: 1957, Pittsburgh; African-American perspective
The play's main character is garbage collector Troy Maxson. A gifted baseball player in his youth, Troy was shut out of the all-white major leagues. The play opens with Troy's discrimination complaint against his Union: "You think only white fellows got sense enough to drive a truck. That ain't no paper job! Hell, anybody can drive a truck. How come you got all whites driving and the colored lifting?" (Act 1: 1). Later, Troy has won the fight with the union and will be the first colored driver in Pittsburgh. Taking some ribbing because he doesn't know how to drive, Troy maintains, "Driving ain't nothing. All you do is point the truck where you want it to go" (Act 1: 4). Driving proves a lonely victory, however. As the token colored driver, Troy is separated from his friends and decides to retire early (Act 2:4).
It is asserted in passing that a women's "hips cushion the ride ... like you riding on Goodyears!" (Act 1: 1).
Edition used: New York: New American Library, 1986.
Author: Dan Cushman
Title: Stay Away, Joe
Date: 1953
Systems: Automobile, wagon, motorcycle
Context: Contemporary, Montana, Indian reservation
Located on a gravel road from the Agency to Montana State Highway 29, eighteen miles from Big Springs, Louis Champlain and his family await the return of Big Joe, a Korean War veteran, who has been a rodeo performer at Fort Worth and Madison Square Garden. While bronc busting and wagons, one "rickety and wheelsprung" are part of the scene, most of the men are identified by their cars. These range from a Cadillac sedan, "one of the big ones, somber and hearselike" to a "beaten-up Model A Ford" which has no brakes and must be stopped by ramming a heap of firewood. The Cadillac crosses a small creek, one wheel at a time. Later, a "massive old Hudson sedan, its rear very low on broken springs" gets stuck in the same creek, and it sits there for the rest of the novel as a symbol of the failure of technology to help the Native Americans deal with the present (Ch. 2).
Two self-consuming activities dominate the novel. Louis gets a contract from the Federal government to maintain and increase a cattle herd, but he gradually sells the livestock, including the bull, to pay for alcohol and family expenses. Big Joe gets a Buick which he sells, piece-by-piece, until he is left living in the shell.
When Big Joe arrives he tells how the Cadillac he bought "Burned out the main bearings. Couple of connecting rods too" after making 108 MPH on the highway between Helena and Great Falls. He goes with two of the heifers to Great Falls and returns with a "huge new emerald green Buick sedan," called by Grandpere the "greatest of all skunkwagons" (Ch. 7). After a drinking bout where the store owner, Callahan, had let the air out of the tires by removing the valve cores, Joe drives home and shreds the tires (Ch. 9). He cannot borrow money from Louis, so he sits in the car all day, smoking and listening to the radio until the battery dies. At this point, he begins to sell the parts - the spare and tube for $18, the wheel for $7 more, a spotlight (traded for canned food), and so on. After he starts living in the Buick, he trades the transmission for a Harley Davidson which gives him mobility and allows him to court Mamie Callahan, who moves into the car with him (Ch, 10). At one point, experienced car thiefs with a set of keys jump into the Buick but find no seats, just a bed roll, chair, stove, and some food. At the tribal fair, Joe borrows $150 on the motorcycle and $20 on the Buick to bet on a horse race (Ch. 13). Louis is down to his final cow; a tow truck from "some place in Great Falls" picks up the Buick, and the family finally realizes how fully Joe had equipped it as his residence. Joe and Mamie, just married, appear on the motorcycle to find the car gone. Joe explains to his father-in-law where they had planned to live, "'I had a good place … but it was stolen away from me.…'"
Grandpere describes the changes that have occurred: "'Long time see things go to hell. When I was young, shoot buffalo. With musket, Sharps rifle, shoot buffalo. All buffalo long time gone. See steamboat come, railroad firewagon come, skunkwagon [automobiles], devilbox [radio] come. All over now barbwire fence, grass plowed under, country go to hell. Republicans Democrats ruin country'" (Ch. 11). Living in wrecked cars, selling off the government's cattle become small-scale versions of this general history.
Edition used: Great Falls, MT: Stay Away, Joe Publishers.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Title: Pnin
Date: 1964 Written: © 1953, 1955, 1957
Systems: Train, bus, automobile
Context: Contemporary, New England
Professor Timofey Pnin is introduced in "that inexorably moving railway coach," but he is on the wrong train. Like many Russian émigrées, he is quite fond of time tables, and he is proud of figuring out his own schedule, in this case, to deliver a guest lecture at Cremona. The schedule is five years old, which explains how he has been misrouted. A conductor helps him find an alternative way to get to Cremona, by taking the bus at Whitchurch (Ch. 1: 1). In the Whitchurch waiting room, he checks his bag, but the baggage clerk on the next shift cannot find it, so he must take the bus without it. He decides to leave the bus at a strange town, since his speech is with his luggage; once off the bus, a helpful person gets him a ride on a truck which lets him arrive in time for his speech (Ch. 1: 2). Another elaborate account of trying to articulate train and bus schedules, with by-the-minute details (Ch. 4: 8) emphasizes the difficulty of getting from one small town to the other with these systems. The choices are to take faster trains and endure a 3 1/2 hour wait or to take a slower train and change to a bus.
The alternative to this series of inconveniences, outdated schedules, and reliance on the good will of functionaries (it seems obvious in retrospect) is the automobile. For the eccentric professor, it becomes a personified car, "moving and poking this way and that in a maze of doubtful roads" on the way to a resort at Onkwedo Spring run by and for émigrées. The car seems a "pale blue, egg-shaped two-door sedan, of uncertain age and in mediocre condition, [which] was manned by an idiot." Professor Pnin learns to drive with a 40 page Manual and an encyclopedia article, rather than lessons at the Waindell Driving School; he can"t "combine perceptually the car he was driving in his mind and the car he was driving on the road." He can't understand why to stop at a red light, "when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled." He got the car for $100 from a former student who was marrying the owner of a "far grander machine" (Ch. 5: 1).
The final scene, showing Pnin's acceptance of the auto age is of the professor, just fired from his college, driving his car out of Waindell.
Mr. Lake, the art teacher at a private school, tries to immortalize the motor car. He does this by "making the scenery penetrate the automobile. A polished black sedan was a good subject, especially if parked at the intersection o a tree-bordered street and one of those heavyish spring skies whose bloated gray clouds and amoeba-shaped blotches of blue seem more physical than the reticent elms and evasive pavement." If the body is broken into "separate curves and panels," the cubist effect brings colors and patterns together, "mirrored in the outside surface of the rear window." The chrome and the distorting effect of reflecting surfaces echo those found in Van Eyck, Petrus Christus and Memling (Ch. 2: 6).
Incidentally, Pnin's landlady, Joan Clements takes a plane to a Western state to visit her married daughter; Professor Clements follows her a day or so later (Ch. 2: 6).
Edition used: New York: Athaneum, 1964.
Author: John Cheever (1912-1982)
Title: "The Country Husband"
Date: 1954
Systems: Airplane, commuter train
Context: Contemporary, suburban New York
The story begins with a survivor's perspective on an airplane crash. That traumatic event is then set next to more ordinary difficulties with commuter schedules and finding lovers' lanes, and, metaphorically, with a dog which "crashed" into a rose garden, how Francis Weed could "wreck everyone's happiness." Throughout, Weed is unable to get any of his family to listen to his account of the plane wreck, just as he cannot speak about an event he witnessed in World War II.
Weed is on an airplane from Minneapolis running into heavy weather. "The color of the cloud darkened to gray, and the plane began to rock." Francis "had never been shaken up so much." His neighbor takes a drink from a flask. "The plane had begun to drop and flounder wildly." After the stewardess announces an emergency landing, "All but the child saw in their minds the spreading wings of the Angel of Death." Hydraulic valves groan and swallow up the pilot's singing of "I've got a sixpence…" over the audio system. A "shrieking high in the air, like automobile brakes" [sic] precedes the plane's hitting its belly in a corn field. The passengers file out the door into the field, then to a barn; a string of taxis take them to Philadelphia. Through it all "there was surprisingly little relaxation of that suspiciousness with which many Americans regard fellow-travellers."
Weed gets a train to New York and then transfers to his regular commuter train to Shady Hill. On the train he talks with Trace Bearden about the crash, but the story of his "brush with death" cannot be re-created; Trace picks up his newspaper for the rest of the ride. At Shady Hill he drives home in his secondhand Volkswagen, where, again, his efforts to discuss the event get lost amidst the family's regular antagonisms and problems (one child has a splinter, for example).
Throughout the middle of the story Weed becomes infatuated with the "frowning and beautiful" baby sitter, Anne Murchison. He drives her home, "out of his own neighborhood, across the tracks, and toward the river, to a street where the near-poor lived." His fantasies about the girl include going with her to Europe on the Mauretania, and, more elaborately and more locally, finding a place to drive her and park the car - the driveway of the Old Parker mansion, a dead end street, "The old land that used to connect Elm Street to the riverbanks."
"He had been bitten gravely" by the girl's looks, so he misses the "seven-thirty-one" and has to wait for the "eight-two." While he waits, the Buffalo night express, covered with ice from the early autumn weather, goes by. He watches people eating breakfast in the dining car, imagines the soiled bed linen in the sleeping-car compartments, and sees "an unclothed woman of exceptional beauty, combing her golden hair." A couple of mornings later on his regular train, he thinks he sees Anne on the train, but it's an older woman wearing glasses. Like much else in the story, he has "the much deeper feeling of having his good sense challenged."
Edition used: Beverly Lynn, ed. The Short Story: 30 Masterpieces. New York: St. Martin's, 1987.
Author: Howard Nemerov (b. 1920)
Title: "Boom!"
Date: 1960
Systems: Airplane, automobile
Context: 1957
An AP bulletin is quoted on how President Eisenhower's pastor had discussed how "modern conveniences" and prosperity had led to growing religious activity. Nemerov's response is a poem in the form of a mocking prayer to a God of progress: "the sky / is constantly being crossed by cruciform / airplanes, in which nobody disbelieves / for a second…. But now the gears mesh and the tires burn / and the ice chatters in the shaker and the priest / in the pulpit…" He asks the Lord that never may "Thy sun for one instant refrain from shining / on the rainbow Buick by the breezeway / or the Chris Craft with the uplift life raft." The satire on the consumerism of this decade is sharpened by the references to brand and model names.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Lois Lensky
Title: We Live by the River
Date: 1956
Systems: River locks, tow boat
Context: Contemporary, Mississippi and Ohio valleys
One of a series, "Roundabout America," for young readers. "Janey Lives Over the Locks" gives episodes in the life of a young girl, her friends, and family. They live next to a lock on the Pearl River, between Louisiana and Mississippi. These people have to cross the lock to get to the store, church, etc.; from it they can see the river traffic carrying logs, sand, gravel, and rolls of paper, as well as the tugboats. The family takes its truck to visit grandma; Janey's father shows up a day late because of a traffic jam near the circus. "Lola Mae Lives on an Island" in the Mississippi. This rehearses similar issues - the logistics of getting provisions from the shore and delivering the island's product, cotton, back to market by a barge which holds their truck. "Sammy Joe Lives on the Bank" has a scene where a towboat pushing a string of barges filled with new automobiles heads down the Ohio toward the lower Mississippi valley.
This sort of book is typical of what is available for American children, either through the school library or to be bought. The "formula" is to give a minimal, episodic plot with a hint of information about how other families deal with logistical problems in their daily lives. As far as we know they stay in print for many decades, sometimes with changes in the illustrations, but rarely the text, to show more contemporary clothing styles, automobile models, and the like.
Edition used: Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1956.
Author: Richard Bissell (1913-1977)
Title: High Water
Date: 1954
Systems: River towboat, train
Context: Contemporary, Upper Mississippi river
Covers the trip from St. Louis toward St. Paul of a diesel-powered towboat, the Far West, and eight barges during a major April flood. Much of the time is spent showing the interactions among the small crew. We also get a fair amount of technical information, e.g., on the consequences of having one of the barges sink - the insurance company will expect a full report, and a salvage company will try at least to get the coal out, after the flood. Barges such as this one, built in 1925, have histories of minor and major mishaps, so they have a "suicide complex" (Ch. 12). By the 1950s, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce is licensing diesel-boat captains, which suits the insurance companies, even though old-timers are allowed to work without a license (Ch. 14). We hear a brief debate at a bar on whether maintaining a nine-foot channel and the system of locks and dams has caused the flood - the Democrats are blamed (Ch. 13). The boat uses a "double-trip" system, whereby three barges are tied up with a guard; the other four are taken part-way up the river and tied up, while the tug goes back for the stragglers. This is necessitated by the strong flood current (Ch. 17). Throughout we hear about how the river-boat veterans have prostitutes and other women friends all along the river routes.
The major event in the novel is when the tug loses its rudder, crashes into a bridge, killing three of the crew. The narrator, three other crew members, and a girl passenger who had been rescued from the flood are saved. After recuperating in a hospital, the narrator takes a freight to Chicago's Union Station. He then takes a regular train to Quincy, and that ride coupled with the scary experience of the accident convinces him to quit steamboating. "Nothing like riding on a train, though. Once I get on a train, I don't really care when I get where I'm going, providing I get a comfortable plush seat. You cut right through towns and people's back yards, but you don't have to worry about them … as long as you are inside you can do as you please and watch the sorry world slide past the windows."
Edition used: St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1987.
Author: James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Title: "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" In Going to Meet the Man
Date: 1961
Systems: Transatlantic steamship
Context: 1950s, Paris, on the boat, Hollywood; African-American perspective
The narrator, a famous black film actor and singer recounts his only return visit to America eight years in the past. He went for three months following his mother's death. On the steamboat his thoughts are filled with images of the U. S., rich, cold milk and chocolate cake. Americans, but not Europeans, "used first names almost at once," but he senses "an eerie and unnerving irreality about everything they said and did." Next to the last night, he sings at the gala in the big ballroom, and easily establishes an identity on board. The morning they land, "All of the deck chairs had been taken away and people milled about in the space where the deck chairs had been, moved from one side of the ship to the other, clambered up and down the steps, crowded the rails, and they were busy taking photographs - of the harbor, of each other, of the sea, of the gulls. I walked slowly along the deck, and an impulse stronger than myself drove me to the rail. There it was, the great, unfinished city, with all its towers blazing in the sun." The gangplank is "the long stretch which led to the gate, to the city." Baldwin uses the images of the immigrant in the context of the returned exile.
The changed city is disorienting: "We were in the shadow of the elevated highway but the thing which most struck me was neither light nor shade, but noise. It came from a million things at once, from trucks and tires and clutches and brakes and doors; from machines shuttling and stamping and rolling and cutting and pressing; from the building of tunnels, the checking of gas mains, the laying of wires, the digging of foundations; from the chattering of rivets, the scream of the pile driver, the clanging of great shovels; from the battering down and the raising up of walls; from millions of radios and television sets and jukeboxes. The human voices distinguished themselves from the roar only by their note of strain and hostility."
In the face of American racism in its various forms he is reminded by his producer, "one day you will remember that airlines and steamship companies are still in business and that France still exists." Back to France at the end of the story.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)
Title: "In Goya's Greatest Scenes"
Date: 1958
Systems: Freeway
Context: Contemporary
The modern landscape for Francisco José de Goya's Disasters of War, often called "suffering humanity" is "on freeways fifty lanes wide / on a concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness." Even though we have "fewer tumbrils" the painted cars with "strange license plates / and engines / that devour America" cause "more maimed citizens." Ferlinghetti points to the dramatic increase in auto fatalities and injuries in the years after the Second World War.
Edition used: Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis. Introduction to Literature: Poems, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Author: Robert Lowell (b. 1917)
Title: "For the Union Dead"
Date: 1960
Systems: Parking garage
Context: Contemporary Boston
"[D]inosaur steamshovels" are digging an underground garage on the site of the old Aquarium; "Parking-spaces luxuriate like civic / sandpiles in the heart of Boston." Ironically overlooking the construction site is the statue of Colonel Shaw, head of the "bell-cheeked Negro regiment," the first black regiment in the Civil War. Lowell notices the absence of memorials to World War II, although there is a poster which advertises how a Mosler safe survived Hiroshima. The indifference to all wars is shown as an image of the tail-fin excesses of the 1950s: "Everywhere / giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility / slides by on grease."
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Title: "The Artificial Nigger"
Date: 1955
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary, Atlanta and rural Georgia
Mr. Head and his grandson, Nelson, travel to Atlanta from their small town home in a county from which all blacks have excluded. Head had requested the railroad to make a special stop, and they wait in the early morning, "Trains passing appeared to emerge from a tunnel of trees and, hit for a second by the cold sky, vanish terrified into the woods again." He fears it won't stop, but "The engine charged by, filling their noses with the smell of hot metal and then the second coach came to a stop exactly where they were standing." On the car, most passengers are asleep. Head tells the boy to keep close track of his ticket stub - it's his way home - and trying to keep open their escape route is a theme in the story. Not only is this Nelson's first train ride, but he also sees his first Negro walking through the cars. Head showed him the men's room, "demonstrated the ice-water cooler as if he had invented it," and took him to the diner, "the most elegant car in the train." We see, but Nelson doesn't quite understand, that the dining car is segregated - two tables "set off from the rest by a saffron-colored curtain." As they near the city, he sees that "the country side was becoming speckled with small houses and shacks and that a highway ran alongside the train."
In Atlanta, they notice the "putty-colored terminal with a concrete dome on top" as the landmark for getting back in the afternoon. They walk, get lost in a black neighborhood where they are directed to a "long yellow rattling trolley" which they fear to take. They follow the trolley tracks in what they think is the right direction, but, instead they wander to the suburbs where "There were no sidewalks, only drives," but manage to catch the train home from the suburban stop. [The image from the title is a statue they see just before boarding the train, a final comment on Nelson's introduction to the city and to racism.] Once home safe, the train "disappeared like a frightened serpent into the woods," and Nelson resolves never to leave.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: William Stafford (b. 1914)
Title: "West of Your City"
Date: 1960
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary
The opening lines of a poem which invites us to see nature (and the west) afresh uses a familiar train-ride image with a play on how it sounds against the rails:
West of your city into the fern sympathy, sympathy rolls the train all through the night on a lateral line…
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Title: The Long Dream
Date: 1958
Systems: Train
Context: 1950s, "Clintonville," USA; African-American perspective
Fishbelly is a boy learning his place in the world. With great seriousness, Wright reworks a clichéd Freudian connection and elaborates the train image in such a way as to make it stand for the power and fear that surround black male sexuality in the mid-twentieth century.
Fishbelly's dad, Tyree, is the black undertaker in town. Running into the funeral parlor's "guest room" on an errand, Fish is drawn near the bed by the strange "bumpbump" sound of sex, and there confronts the spectacle of his naked father, "two staring red eyes, a strained, humped back; and he heard harsh breath whistling in an open throat" (18). Terrified, Fish at first thinks his father is "working on a dead body." Fish understands that his father is embarrassed and that this woman is somehow in his mother's place. His father's funeral business, the fear of punishment, the conviction that his father had been "acting like a train" (22), and the smell of sex all combine, taking Fish back to an earlier scene of pregnant fish bladders. This reconfiguration of pleasure, secrecy, train-like power establishes Fish's future understanding of male sexuality.
"From that day on," the narrator tells us, Fish's dreams are embroidered with the apparition of speeding trains:
thundering trains loomed in his dreams - hurtling, sleek, black monsters whose stack pipes belched gobs of serpentine smoke ... whose pushing pistons sprayed jets of hissing steam - panting trains that roared yammeringly over far-flung gleaming rails only to come to limp and convulsive halts. (23).
One dream in particular shows the connection between sexual power and powerlessness that trains represent in Wright's work. Fishbelly sees himself approaching a beautiful, brand new train despite his mother's prohibitions. He drives the enormous, throbbing machine - pushing it to unimaginable speeds. The dream is one of perfect power for which Fish must sacrifice all control. The pleasures of manhood can't be had without the dangers, and power necessarily entails punishment.
Edition used: Perennial Classics. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Author: John Cheever (1912-1982)
Title: "The Five-Forty-Eight"
Date: 1954
Systems: Commuter train
Context: Contemporary, New York suburb
Cheever's short story is about Mr. Blake, who sleeps with his secretary (after she has been on the job three weeks) and then has her fired. The story actually begins six months later, when the woman, Miss Dent, follows Blake from work to his commuter train, which he's taking home to the suburbs. On board he recognizes two people from his home town but does not acknowledge them, nor they he. Mistake. The unhappy woman sits next to him, pulls her revolver on him, and explains her distress in evangelical terms. His acquaintances don't notice his predicament.
When they get off at his stop, she forces him up the tracks away from the station, where she makes him grovel in the dirt before letting him go.
Blake had seen Miss Dent immediately upon leaving work and tried to lose her on the way to the train station; when he boards he thinks he has eluded her. The coach he enters is described as uncomfortable and shabby, and it "smelled oddly like a bomb shelter in which whole families had spent the night." But though the milieu is worn, "it was a scene that meant to Blake that he was on a safe path" - as the bomb shelter comparison suggests. But just at this moment Miss Dent appears and sits down beside him, her concealed gun trained on his midsection. Confronted with this danger, Blake frantically tries to figure some way of signaling his fellow passengers, two of whom are neighbors. But he doesn't have a friendly relationship with either; he has previously alienated them both, which is why he sat alone in the first place, leaving himself open to Miss Dent's machinations. When the Shady Hill station is announced Blake sees "the abandoned mansion outside of town, a NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to a tree, and then the oil tanks." This routine, whereby landmarks herald the approach to a familiar place, is given a literary turn as we consider the alienation suggested by those objects. At his stop are "a dozen or so cars waiting by the station," mostly wives there to pick up their husbands. But Blake's wife is not among them - as we have learned, Blake is an emotionally abusive husband, and their estrangement from each other is many years old. During their walk a train passes from the north where "the windows where people ate, drank, slept, and read flew past." Both the train and the cars offer the possibility of community and refuge, but Blake, through his selfishness and lack of compassion, has isolated himself from others, and so neither train nor automobile can provide safety. On the contrary, the train provides the opportunity for Miss Dent to have her revenge, as the coach functions as a cage from which Blake can not escape. Miss Dent corners him on the train, and then on the lonely and anonymous tracks has her way with him.
Edition used: The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1958.
Author: Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
Title: "The Train"
Date: 1983
Systems: Train
Context: 1950s, New York suburbs
This short story is dedicated to John Cheever and appears to pick up where Cheever's story, "The Five-Forty-Eight," leaves off. After threatening a man with a gun, and making him plead for his life (we're not told why), a young woman, Miss Dent, walks to a nearby railway station to wait for the next train. It is late at night, but after a few minutes two people come in, a woman and an old man. Their conversation is intriguing but inexplicable out of context. Miss Dent remains silent while they speak, but just as she is about to say something, to reveal her actions of earlier in the evening, a train pulls in. As they move out onto the platform, the few people on the train assume that the three people boarding are together, "and they felt sure that whatever these people's business had been that night, it had not come to a happy conclusion. But the passengers had seen things more various than this in their lifetime…. For this reason, they scarcely gave another thought to these three who moved down the aisle and took up their places." Like Miss Dent, they don't ask questions, ponder what's beneath the surface of these people's apparent unhappiness. The passengers are contrasted to the cozy families moving toward bed in the suburbs the train is passing through; the passengers are outsiders of a sort, their presence on the train at such a late hour indicating that they aren't a part of the suburban community. At the same time the passengers separate themselves from each other, from each other's "business," and remain silent and detached even while riding together in the night. The train, rather than a gathering place for travelers, functions to emphasize the passengers' willing isolation from one another.
Edition used: Cathedral. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1984.
Author: Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
Title: "A Father-to-Be" In Seize the Day
Date: 1955
Systems: Subway
Context: Contemporary, New York City
A subway scene in the middle of the story shows us Rogin, a chemist, on his way to his fiancée's apartment. He enters the "stony, odorous, metallic, captive air of the subway," and overhears a conversation where one man is telling the other that he is an alcoholic. This triggers a series of observations and interpretations of the lives of people he sees as "the human tides of the subway swayed back and forth, and cars linked and transparent like fish bladders [he just stopped at a delicatessen] raced under the streets. How come he thought nobody would know what everybody couldn't help knowing," since, after all, he recognized the man's "alcohol-wasted" face. "Thoughts very often grow fertile in the subway, because of the motion, the great company, the subtlety of the rider's state as he rattles under streets and rivers, under the foundations of great buildings, and Rogin's mind had already been strangely stimulated." Rogin interprets what he sees in terms of his own life and concerns, even though the narrative tone gives the impression that his views are rather general. This latter is, presumably, Bellow's comment on how we see and understand the world around or above us.
Edition used: James Moffett and Kenneth E. McElheny, eds. Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories. Signet Classic, 1966.
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