Now in November (22 page)
Authors: Josephine W. Johnson
In 1930, Johnson, an art student, dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis to return to write at her family home. Her parents had moved from Kirkwood when she was an early adolescent to
a two-hundred-acre farm; here her widowed mother lived with Josephine's three sisters. Despite her elite education and privileged upbringing, Johnson seems to have developed a deep commitment to social justice for the poor and oppressed. Perhaps she followed after her mother, Ethel, who was a strong pacifist during World War I, an active member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and a Quaker. Perhaps her politics grew from her experience as a college student at Washington University just as the Crash came. In the years after the publication of
Now in November
, Johnson's sympathies with farm struggles remained sufficiently strong to have led her to write for
The New Masses
and to engage in pro-union activism on behalf of rural laborers.
The New York Times
of September 6, 1936 tells of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's arrest in Arkansas “under suspicion of encouraging cotton field workers to strike.”
Throughout the thirties Johnson continued to write and to participate in activist union groups on behalf of dispossessed and poverty-stricken victims of the Depression. Indeed, she met her husband, Grant Cannon, then a field examiner for the National Labor Relations Board, in a St. Louis courtroom, as she says, “in those days when unions were
young and revolutionary and a force for change” (
Seven Houses
, p. 88). A Mormon by birth and the grandson of a pioneer, Cannon made his way to St. Louis “by way of San Francisco, where he had arrived by freight cars and hobo camps in search of work” (p. 87). In 1942, at the age of thirty-two, Johnson married Cannon and not long after he went to war leaving her with a young child and pregnant with a second.
10
In 1947, now a family of three young children, the Cannons moved to Newtown, just outside of Cincinnati, to the first home of their own, which they called the Old House. Here Johnson mothered her family, deepened her interest in nature, and watched approvingly as Cannon was absorbed by and acted on the world around him. According to Johnson, besides editing the
Farm Quarterly
, he was also a photographer, a pilot, a potter, an active Quaker, and an amateur playwright. He published
Great Men of Modern Agriculture
, and won honors, prizes, and awards for his achievements and community service.
In 1956, with suburbs encroaching on the Old House, the family moved ten miles further out of Cincinnati to a thirty-seven-acre plotâthe land that became Johnson's
Inland Island
, the subject of her
1968 meditation on nature. This land the Cannons deliberately let go wild waiting out the years while Nature restored wildlife, plants, and forest. After ten years of observing, Johnson began
The Inland Island;
she finished it in a year, and she and Grant drove it to New York where Simon and Schuster declared it a book for the times.
Her return to Cincinnati, however, was fraught with tragedy. As she tells it, as the two got off the train, a porter told them that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot. Very soon after, they learned that Grant had cancer. Grant died in 1969, and Johnson lived on alone on the Island, observing nature, writing occasional pieces for
Country Journal, McCalls
, and
Ohio Magazine
, and guiding visitors through the Island. In March, 1990, just as I began this introduction and was making plans to visit Josephine Johnson at her home, she died of pneumonia at age seventy-nine. In June, Johnson was remembered in a memorial service and guided walk through the Cincinnati Nature Center.
Nancy Hoffman
1
. From a Simon and Schuster advertisement for the book in
Saturday Review of Literature
, July, 1935.
2
. These comments summarize reviews by Edith Walton,
New York Times Book Review
, 16 Sept. 1934; Fanny Butcher,
Chicago Daily Tribune
, 15 Sept. 1934; Lewis Gannett,
New York Herald Tribune
, 13 Sept. 1934; and several anonymous reviewers writing immediately after the publication of the novel.
3
. Frederic Thompson,
Commonweal
, 12 Oct. 1934.
4
.
New York Times
, 6 Aug. 1935.
5
. The issue of ploughing brings to mind Willa Cather's Antonia who, despite the dismissive remarks of farm-hands, ploughs proudlyâsweaty, shouting, sunburnedâjust like a man, and enjoys the hard muscles in her brown arms. (Willa Cather,
My Antonia
[New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918], pp. 122, 125, 138.)
6
. See particularly, Carol Gilligan, Janie Ward, and Jill Taylor, eds.,
Mapping the Moral Domain
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7
.
The Inland Island
draws heavily on the older woman's experience; she has lived and observed and worked on the land. The later work is informed by science as
Now in November
is not; she has read deeply and shared her husband's work as editor of
Farm Quarterly
. There is now a strong ecological theme, and human voices become the
backdrop for observation and rumination on nature.
8
. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds.,
Women, Culture, and Society
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 67 ff.
9
. This account is drawn largely from Carl N. Degler,
Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America
, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1984), chapts. 11â13.
10
. For confirmation of the dates here, for help with photographs and reviews, and for a generousness of spirit, I am grateful to Carol, Annie, and Terry Cannon.
OTHER WORKS BY JOSEPHINE JOHNSON
Winter Orchard
(collected stories). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935.
The Unwilling Gypsy
(collected poetry). Dallas: The Kaleidograph Press, 1936.
Jordanstown
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937.
Year's End
(collected poetry). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937.
Paulina Pot
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939.
Wildwood
(collected stories). New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946.
The Dark Traveller
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
The Sorcerer's Son
(collected stories). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.
The Inland Island
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
Seven Houses
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
Circle of Seasons
(photographs by Dennis Stock and text by Josephine Johnson). New York: Viking, 1974.
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JOSEPHINE W. JOHNSON (1910 - 1990) was the author of eleven books of fiction, poetry, and essays. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel,
Now in November
.