Now in November (19 page)
Authors: Josephine W. Johnson
SHE died that night. It was early in October a month ago, and the autumn storms began. The first rains since February. . . . Once I thought there were words for all things except love and intolerable beauty. Now I know that there is a third thing beyond expressionâthe sense of loss. There are no words for death.
The night after her funeral I went out and walked miles in the dark. It was cold and damp. Fog-chillness and the air like a winter marsh. Leaves wet in the wagon-ruts. I don't know how far I wentâhours along the dim roads; but this time the dark could not cover or fill the broken emptiness. I could not pretend or hope any longer, or believe blindly in any goodness. It was all gone. Faith swept away like a small mound of grass, and nothing to live or wait for any longer. God was only a name, and it was her life that had been the meaning of that name. Now there was nothing left. . . . There was a night eight or nine years ago when there had come for the first time a shadow of this great loss and doubt, and I remembered it now, stumbling back through the useless dark. I had overheard them talking one night, Dad tired and exasperated, his corn gone at less than the price of a plough. “God! don't they
want
a man to farm?” he said. “Where they think corn's going to come from after they pry us off the land? They've got to eat, God knows!” . . . And then Mother's voice, fierce and half-crying in the dark: “Let'm have pig-weed and cockle! That'll grow wild.” I was afraid of the sound in her voice. It was as if all her trust and belief were snatched away, and left us
grappling with wind and emptiness, and she, like the rest of us, was come down to hate and doubt. I waited to hear her say something else, say that it didn't matter, tell him next year would come out better . . . but she was quiet and didn't say anything more at all. I saw partly then what was plain to me now in this night after her burialâthat I had believed because she had, and if she lost it and came to the darkness where we were, groping along with no more light than I,âthen all of my blind belief in goodness was gone. . . . But all this was nothing beside the unbearable feeling of loss.
. . . IT IS almost two months now since her death, and we have gone on living. It is November, and the year dying fast in the storms. The sycamores wrenched of leaves and the ground gold. The ploughed fields scarred around us on the hills. We have had our mortgage extended, but it does not mean that we are free or that much is really changed. Only a longer time to live, a little longer to fight, fear shoved off into an indefinite future.
I do not see in our lives any great ebb and flow or rhythm of earth. There is nothing majestic in our living. The earth turns in great movements, but we jerk about on its surface like gnats, our days absorbed and overwhelmed by a mass of little thingsâthat confusion which is our living and which prevents us from being really alive. We grow tired, and our days are broken up into a thousand pieces, our years chopped into days and nights, and interrupted. Our hours of life snatched from our years of living. Intervals and things stolen betweenâbetween what?âthose things which are necessary to make life endurable?âfed, washed, and clothed, to enjoy the time which is not washing and cooking and clothing. . . . Thoreau was right. He was right even as Christ was right in saying
Be ye also perfect
.âAnd as beyond us.
We have no reason to hope or believe, but do because we must, receiving peace in its sparse moments of surrender, and
beauty in all its twisted forms, not pure, unadulterated, but mixed always with sour potato-peelings or an August sun.
There is no question of what we will do. It is as plain before us as the dead fields. We are not trapped any more than all other men. Any more than life itself
is a trap. How much of what came to us came of ourselves? Was there anything that we could have done that we did not do? Godâif you choose to say that the drouth is Godâagainst us. The world against us, not deliberately perhaps, more in a selfish than malicious way, coming slowly to recognize that we are not enemies or plough-shares. And we against ourselves. It is not possible to go on utterly alone. Father may see this now, in a furious and tardy recognition. We can go forward; the way is plain enough. But it is only that this road has too high banks and too much dust. . . .
I WENT over to the Rathmans' this morning. It is eight months since that time when I went in May, envying them mildly and full of a foolish hope. But now there is neither hope nor envy left.
Lena behaved herself better, the old lady told me. But she did not seem happy. “Come in and see Papa,” she said. Old Rathman lay there on his red blanket, shriveled up like a pod. His eyes were dim and cauled over, but he knew me for a while. “Pop sees you go by
for the mail,” Mrs. Rathman told me. “He knows you sometimes when he ain't out of his head.”
“I came over to get some eggs,” I told him. “Our hens aren't laying much just now. Nobody's are.”
“Nobody's are,” he repeated after me. “Nobody's got anything. You're young, thoughâyou ain't like me. You can do things still. You ain't just lying here, old like me . . . fit for nothin' . . . I can't do nothin'. . . .” He said it over and over like an old lesson,âforgot I was there and turned his head away. I could hear him muttering and tossing when we left the room.
“He's real clear sometimes,” Mrs. Rathman said. “It's his shouting makes Lena mad.” She got me the eggs, but wouldn't take any money. “Just bring some over when you can.” She came to the door with me and smiled kind of greyly, her round face patient and resigned. “Maybe there'll be a better year next. Things don't come twice this way. . . .”
Then I came out of the hot kitchen and walked back up the road. The hounds howling and strangling on their chains might have been the same as the ones we were afraid of as children. Everything might have been the same as in that time,âthe white geese and
the beagle hounds . . . the cabbage-heads sunk in the furrows . . . Max's car there, long, grey and wastefully big . . . the pumpkins set out in the arbor on a stool, for sale, but with no sign. A cat ran out of the dead lilac bushes and hid under the porch. I remembered and saw us again as we used to come up the road on the way to the mail, Kerrin ahead like a long red crane, her black stockings hanging wrinkled and dirty, and her long neck stretched out, singing some wild, sentimental song; and Merle and I stumbling along after, not hurrying, kicking stones and stopping to sow dried thistle-seeds, scattering them thoughtfully and without malice over the fall-ploughed earth. And then walking fast and uneasily by the house for fear the old man would see us and make us stop to talk, saying things that we could not understand or were slow to answer, afraid of his mocking look and cackle. . . .
I came back to where Father was still sitting as I had left him, the walnuts piled around him on the chopping-block. He turned and peered up when I came, with the old suspicious look, as though denying something not yet said, but smiled in a bleak and frozen way.
“Button your coat up, Marget,” he said. “It's colder than you think. Damp-cold.” He looked older in the light, so aged that he seemed almost to be Old Rathman there, pounding the black shells with his rheumy hands.
I pulled my coat up around me, although the air seemed mild with a kind of dull softness in it. “Merle'll make you a cake of those,” I said. “She's going to be glad to see them shelled.”
“She ought,” Dad said. “It's hard work enough. . . . Hard work enough. . . .” He kept muttering this to himself in the same way that Old Rathman had done,âlike a living parody of the other old man lying useless in his bed. And I saw Father with awful clearness as he would be soon. Old and querulous and able only to shell beans in the sun. And I saw how the debt would be Merle's and mine to carry by ourselvesâhow many years I do not know, but for a long and uncounted time. All life perhaps. . . . But I went on past him and up to the hill-edge where we used to peer down on the orchard when it looked like a gulf of clouds in spring. Now there were only the
dry grey-orange branches blown back and forth like bushes in the wind, but still beautiful in the clean
sharp way of winter things. And there was the cold fire of the oak trees, not fallen yet, and a kind of icy red along the woods.
Love and the old faith are gone. Faith gone with Mother. Grant gone. But there is the need and the desire left, and out of these hills they may come again. I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.
Â
May 6, 1935 appears to have been a propitious day for women writers. The dramatic moment came when a messenger boy handed Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, the list of Pulitzer prizes for the year to announce to a ballroom of waiting journalists and writers. Judged by an all-male panel of reviewers, the prizes for best novel, best play, and best verse went to women, two of them just twenty-four years old. “Pulitzer Awards Go to âThe Old Maid' and a First Novel” proclaimed the front page
New York Times
headline. “The Old Maid” was Zoe Atkins's adaptation of an Edith Wharton short story, and the first novel was Josephine Winslow Johnson's
Now in November
. (Audrey Wurdemann, “wife of Joseph Auslander,” won the award for verse.)
Now in November
had been published the previous fall to considerable critical acclaim. Indeed, at the time of the announcement 11,500 copies had been sold and the novel had been published in England. By the middle of the summer of 1935 over thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed. Clifton Fadiman, Simon and Schuster's editor and a first reader of Johnson's manuscript, compared her with Dickinson: “If Emily Dickinson had turned to prose she would have written a book like this. It has that indefinable authority, that aura of hidden reserve, strength, and beauty that strike right to the core of things. It is the most beautiful and moving book I have been fortunate enough to read in years.”
1
Other reviewers compared Johnson with Willa Cather, Ole Edvart Rolvaag, and Emily Brontë, and most agreed on the qualities that made this first novel of a farm family's struggle during the Depression so memorable: the novel was wise; it demonstrated a penetrating and respectful comprehension of the cosmic forces of natureâdrought, storm, coldâthat dominate human life, yet it was not nihilistic. Although Johnson sees human beings as gnats jerked about on the surface of the earth (p. 226), she sees them also as sustained in nature and healed by it. Further, the reviewers noted Johnson's astute attention to the inner life of the five members of the Haldemarne family, her understanding of the causes of anxiety and insecurity. And finally, reviewers caught Johnson's paradoxical combination of lyric and realist voices: the descriptive language, the similes and metaphors made of nature's beauty, and the awareness of social and economic injustice.
2
This is a book about “the terrific sense of the insecurity and anxiety of the forgotten men and women and children,” wrote the reviewer from
Commonweal
, “those who were being dispossessed from any claim to a right to exist on the face of the earth . . . because of the . . . blight of a fiscal system in which figure and symbols of fictitious
values multiplied while men and women and children starved.”
3
Johnson achieved what she herself called in a
New York Times
interview just after the Pulitzer was announced “poetry with its feet on the ground.”
4
Fifty-five years later the assessment of these reviewers seems remarkably accurate.
Now in November
is a memorable and unusual novel: it has a complex and subtle psychological sensitivity; a unique lyric voice; a rootedness in the powerful, enduring natural world; and, simultaneously, a grasp of a particular historical and political moment. These are qualities worth pondering anew. But more than half a century after these reviewers made their judgments, we can ask fresh questions of the novel, too, ones critics of the thirties did not. We can better assess Johnson's originality and effectiveness in experimenting with traditional narrative uses of time. We can look at the novel as the work of a woman writer particularly sensitive to girls' coming-of-age, and to women's role in the family. We can place Johnson's writing in the tradition of the pastoralâa genre that has been the focus of heightened interest in recent yearsâand we can view the pastoral in the gendered terms set forth in the feminist scholarship of the last twenty
years on the intertwining of women/nature/culture. Finally, we can ask how and to what degree Johnson's novel reflects an accurate economic analysis of a particularly conflict-ridden moment in American historyâthe Depression.
“I like to pretend that the years alter and
revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing
but enlarge without mutation.”
Since there is no omniscient narrator, and initially the story is more of feelings than of facts, time sequences and events are not always easy to follow. Marget, the middle child of the three Haldemarne daughters, narrates looking back from the vantage of a twenty-four year old at the past ten years. The story begins when Marget is fourteen and moves with her father Arnold, mother Willa, ten-year-old sister Merle, and fifteen-year-old sister Kerrin to a mortgaged farm from the city of Boone where her father has been displaced from his job in a lumber factory. Marget's experience of the world is limited, and there is no evidence that she ever goes further than a neighbor's farm in the ten-year span of the story. Events of a Depression world “all wrong, confused, and shouting at itself” (
pp. 6â7
) impinge only
at the margins of the novel's world and in deliberately vague and general ways beyond comprehension or control. These are juxtaposed to the real events of Marget's life and to her own inner life that mirror the confusion, though not the despair, of the Depression world.
Of remembered events, several are crucial and presage the tragedy that will overtake the family: the violent incident in the first April when on the father's birthday Kerrin kills the family's dog; the appearance of a hardly human beggar from town seeking food from farmers; the expulsion of the mother and daughters from church. There are also the meanings of these events that Marget cannot fathom, and her questioning is a counterpoint to the daily life “without any more mystery than the noon sun” (
p. 33
). Over and over she asks herself about the burden of debt the family bears, the family's unending toil, its cruel interpersonal blindness, and its frail love. “There must be some reason, I thought, why we should go on year after year, with this lump of debt, scrailing earth down to stone, giving so much and with no return. There must be some reason why I was made quiet and homely and slow, and then given this stone of love to mumble” (
pp. 127â28
).
These memories are interwoven in a skillful and sophisticated way with the present world of the novel. As in her much later work,
The Inland Island
, Johnson uses the cycle of seasons and the period of each month to structure her work, and it is the circular repetition of months within linear time that permits her to move from a past November, for example, to a present one so easily. Marget remembers “now” (in November of the tenth year of the family's life on the farm) the eight months from March on in which the tensions within the family peak and explode. These months coincide with a period of intense anxiety about the fields, livestock, garden, and house in a year of drought, and with a labor struggle in surrounding farms and towns.
In April, the month of fragile new life, the hired man Max departs, and Grant Koven arrives, a man who is kind, has been to school, and whom Marget and Kerrin both love. The unnatural dryness of May is coupled with Marget's recognition that her love will be unfulfilled: Grant is taken with Merle. In July the corn is dead and other crops have shriveled, and Kerrin grows increasingly strange and frightening, increasingly in pursuit of Grant. On the last day of July, Ramsey, the black tenant
farmer and the father of six children, is thrown off the land; and Rathman, the only farmer whose land is paid off, breaks his hip, thus destroying even the hopefulness of a comfortable survival nearby. August brings Kerrin's strangeness into the open; she is dismissed from her teaching position. As heat and sun dry the land, fires break out, paralleling the emotional turmoil among the Haldemarnes and inflicting grave losses on both family and farm. September is the month of separation, anticipated loss, and death. In October come the recuperative rains, and sustenance in the beauty of the “dry grey-orange branches blown back and forth like bushes in the wind” (
p. 230
).
It is also a seasonal repetition that forms the basis for Johnson's perspective on time's passing and the impossibility of change. Seasonal patterns continue on into infinity, their course unalterable; change beyond that already patterned, she dismisses as a naive hope. But Johnson distinguishes carefully between change and growth. As usual, her metaphor is from nature: “the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth” (
p. 70
). This sentiment is also expressed as an aphorism: “time does nothing but enlarge without mutation” (
p. 69
). This
perspective serves as a useful guide to our reading of Johnson's characters. Early on Johnson establishes each character's way of being in the worldâMother who has faith in the human spirit; Merle who is honest, lucid, sane; Kerrin fierce with love and hatred; the father worn with physical labor and care; the narrator energized by longing, doubt, and earthly beauty. These qualities never change, but surface events, circumstances, and the chronological and linear time of the plot serve to amplify and deepen our knowledge of each character, help us to know more deeply what we knew in the very beginning. Looking back, the narrator works with the fragmented memories not to interpret them, but to gather them up like the pieces of a puzzle, the whole of which had been already formed, though not yet seen by the human eye. Indeed, the last sentence of the novel circles up to the time of the first sentence, the structure of the novel forming the pieces into a totality that begins and ends “Now in November” when “I can see our years as a whole.”
“this feeling of waiting, of life suspended
and held in a narrow circle”
One helpful way to situate
Now in November
is to categorize it as a novel of female late adolescenceâof waiting, thinking, observing, anticipating, but not of action. Indeed, despite the harsh, rural setting and backdrop of political violence and economic deprivation, the sisters of
Now in November
are not unlike Jane Austen's sister of
Pride and Prejudice
or George Eliot's Dorothea in
Middlemarch
or Doris Lessing's Martha Quest in the novel of the same name. Unspoken rules and social mores shape these young female lives: these young women long for freedom to leave home, but they are forbidden to venture into the world alone; they long for sexual experience, for intimacy, but they can do nothing but
be
attractive, useful, and available; they are on the verge of intellectual maturity, but have only books and abstractions, not the dilemmas of the public world with which to grapple. Furthermore, they know that decisions about religion and personal philosophy belong to the men of the family, and no matter what independent ideas they develop, these will be tempered in marriage.
Looking back over her family history and early married life in the memoir
Seven Houses
, Johnson speaks about herself in the period between girlhood and marriage (she married at age thirty-two) in just these terms: “I seemed to be waiting to begin to live and not all the beauty, all the intensity of the words on paper, all the desperate search for reform and change, the bitterness of the Depression years, not the love for my sisters nor the tortuous refining of personal philosophy, seemed to be the reality of living that I wanted to find. And then I met Grant Cannon and the waiting-to-live was over and the real life began” (p. 87). (It is, of course, a coincidence that the single attractive, compassionate, engaged man in the novel is named Grant: Johnson did not meet her husband until some seven years after the novel was published.) The three sisters Johnson creates are similarly suspended between girlhood and womanhood; each is waiting to assume her role as marriage partner with a man, as keeper of the domestic sphere, and as mother of children. The event that can precipitate this next phase of life, can move a late adolescent into womanhood, is a heterosexual love relation that will focus latent sexual feeling and make manifest the structure of the life to follow.
In the novel this theme of waiting, of “not acting,” with its accompanying theme of the mystery of men, is treated with delicacy and sensitivity. Each sister experiences the waiting of adolescence differently. Kerrin, the eldest, is restless, “sick and drawn inside with hate” (
p. 16
). “I knew,” says Marget's narrative voice, “that she wanted love,ânot anything we could give her, frugal and spinsterly, nor Father's . . . , but some man's love in which she could see this image she had of herself reflected and thus becoming half-true” (
p. 46
). Kerrin is enraged by her father's unwillingness to let her plough because he believes that “a girl could never learn how” (
p. 15
).
5
Kerrin taunts and challenges her father who responds to her from a remote emotional distance, “as though to a little dog that insisted on yapping, a little dog that he might kick soon” (
p. 64
). She is furious with her mother for her quiet yielding to her husband's views. It is interesting to note that in her perception that one cause of tension between young girls, their mothers, and female teachers is the anger of the young about the powerlessness and acquiescence of the older, Johnson anticipates recent work in the psychology of women and girls, particularly that of Carol Gilligan and her collaborators.
6
Identified with the active world of men yet forbidden entry, Kerrin also hates the girls she teaches in her one-room school. “[They] were already vacant wives, she said,ânot stolid, their tongues slapping around like wheels, but already bounded tight with convention, a thick wall between them and the unknown things” (
p. 42
). In her discontent, she separates herself from the family, stirs trouble everywhere, sleeps in the barn, eats ravenously after the family meals are finished. With Grant, she is as aggressive as a young woman can be
without
overtly transgressing the rules of gender roles. She devises strategies to call attention to herself and, in her sisters' view, shows an excitement on the verge of madness. In Kerrin, Johnson portrays a young woman angry at the circumstances of her female life, unable to build a reliable self, and snatching at the figure of a man hoping in him to find her own salvation. “She made me think of the carrion vines that move with a hungry aimlessness,” Marget says, “groping blindly in all directions till they find a stalk to wrap on” (
p. 107
).