Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday July 25, 2010
|
WORK SONG
Ivan Doig
Riverhead
ISBN 978-1594487620
275 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Ivan Doig, who turned 71 three weeks ago, has had an interesting, productive life. A native of Montana, he has worked as a reporter, editorialist, rancher and magazine editor. He has lived in Seattle for many years, but Montana remains the central preoccupation of his writing. He has published a dozen books, nine of them novels, most of them dealing in one way or another with his home state: its lusty past, its natural beauty, its endangered environment. Though he has a tin ear for speech and really should stop writing dialogue, his descriptive powers can be acute, as in this portrait of Butte in 1919, as painted by Morrie Morgan, the narrator of "Work Song":
"Everything about Butte made a person look twice. My train journey had brought me across the Montana everyone thinks of, mile upon hypnotic mile of rolling prairie with snowcapped peaks in the distance, and here, as sudden and surprising as a lost city of legendary times, was a metropolis of nowhere: nearly a hundred thousand people atop the earth's mineral crown, with nothing else around but the Rocky Mountains and the witnessing sky. The immediate neighborhood on the skirt of land out from the depot, as my gaze sorted it out, seemed to hold every manner of building from shanty to mansion, church to chicken coop, chop suey joint to mattress factory, all mixed together from one topsy-turvy block to the next. Butte stood more erect as the ground rose. In the city center, several blocks on up the slope, lofty buildings hovered here and there waiting for others to catch up, and the streets also took on elevation, climbing the blemished hill until workers' cottages mingled with mines and dump heaps along the top of the namesake butte. Up there, the long-legged black steel frameworks over the mineshafts populated the skyline like a legion of half-done miniatures of Eiffel's tower."
That's not poetry, but mercifully it doesn't try to be. Instead, it's good, solid descriptive prose that conveys a strong sense of place. Doig is also a trained historian -- he has a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Washington -- and he has deliberately set "Work Song" in a troubled, dangerous hour:
"The immeasurable shadow of the 1914-1918 war still lay over the affairs of nations; Europe's old jealously held boundaries were being torn up and rewritten, for better or worse, at the Paris peace conference. Russia already had shaken the political firmament by doing away with the Czar and yielding to the new fist of the Bolsheviks. America's habit of throwing a fit to ward off contagion was at high pitch; activists with a leftist tinge were being hounded by government agents, even jailed or deported. Alongside that, the laboring class started at a deep disadvantage whenever it challenged the masters of capital. Strikes were its only effective tool, the way things were, but the powers that be resisted those with force if necessary. It added up to a jittery period of history, did it not?"
That's History Lite, to be sure, but it does put in context the story Doig tells about labor troubles at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned Butte in those days the way DuPont owns Wilmington. Unfortunately, though, having quoted these two paragraphs as evidence of the good to be found in "Work Song," I can no longer put off getting around to the bad. Not to put too fine a point on it, "Work Song" is the worst work of fiction to cross my desk in years. I don't keep a chronological record so cannot cite chapter and verse as to which was the last novel I found as bad as this one -- it may have been Joan Didion's "Democracy," published a quarter-century ago, or Erica Jong's "How to Save Your Own Life," published in 1977 -- but it is my unhappy duty to report that "Work Song" is a world-class dud, a sequel to Doig's popular "The Whistling Season" (2006) but hardly its equal.
"Work Song" is not set in corn country, though Lord knows there's plenty of corn in it, and it's full of what an old-time North Carolina newspaper editor delighted in calling "shucks and nubbins," roughly defined as folksiness so posed and artificial that the reader is left not charmed but nauseated. It's jes' chock full o' characters so quaint 'n' cute you want to execute them on the spot. Chief among these is the aforementioned Morrie Morgan, whose "rightful name" is Morgan Llewellyn but who had to shed it after a run-in with Chicago gangsters. Now, he has made his way to Butte, running from a failed romance in a town where he had worked as a schoolteacher.
First, he finds a room in a boarding house run by a fetching widder lady, Grace Faraday, the other boarders being two miners, Wynford Griffith and Maynard Hooper, aka Griff and Hoop: "Although they looked enough alike to be brothers, I figured out that they had simply worked together so long in the mineshafts that the stoop of their bodies and other inclinations had made them grow together in resemblance as some old married couples do." They are meant to be a mixture of comic relief and miners'-union solidarity, but they aren't in the least amusing, and their rhetoric is stale. For his part Morrie has no desire to go down into the mines, so first he takes a job as a "representative of the Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home," which is to say designated "cryer" at local wakes, but then he gets lucky and lands a job as master of all trades at the incongruously grand public library.
He is taken on by the imperious major domo of the library, Samuel Sandison, a former rancher whose splendid book collection is the jewel in the library's crown. Sandison likes Morrie because he loves books, and takes him on ostensibly to manage the schedule of meetings held in the library, but soon enough Morrie has his hands full: "Day by day, besides my juggling act with the meetings schedule, it had been gruffly suggested to me that I organize the disorganized subscription list of magazines and newspapers, find someone to fix the drinking fountain, deal with (the librarian's) complaints about squeaky wheels on book carts passing through her sanctum, respond to a stack of letters from people with the kinds of questions only a library can answer -- in short, I was tasked with anything Sandison did not want to do, which was very nearly everything."
On and on the novel drones. A couple of Chicago goons show up, again ostensibly for comic relief, but if you want funny goons, I recommend "Kiss Me Kate" and "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," because every attempt to make these guys funny falls flat. The radical International Workers of the World -- the "Wobblies" -- loom ominously in the background, but all their looming doesn't amount to a thing. Instead, Doig places Morrie -- whom he clearly finds charming, clever and pixyish -- at the head of a truly ludicrous competition to compose a battle hymn for the miners of the Hill, in the spirit of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," behind which they can march into battle against the feared and hated Anaconda.
All in all, take away a couple of modestly quotable paragraphs and "Work Song" is mawkish, corny, clumsy and uninviting. It is an utter mystery that Doig, who should know better, wrote it and that his new publisher, who should know better, agreed to issue it. But you, dear reader, who most certainly know better, are under no obligation to read it.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Send Story to a Friend | Top |
THE EYES OF WILLIE MCGEE: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets In the Jim Crow South
Alex Heard
Harper
ISBN 978-0061284151
404 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Michael Kazin
The bare facts about the case of Willie McGee seem to fit the dreadful image of a legal lynching in the Deep South back when white supremacy ruled. In 1945, McGee, a handsome black truck-driver, was jailed for allegedly raping a white housewife named Willette Hawkins in Laurel, Miss. -- while her husband slept in a nearby room and a small child slept beside her. Despite the improbable circumstances, McGee was convicted by an all-white jury and, after two appeals, was electrocuted in 1951.
On the night of the execution, a cheerful, all-white crowd gathered by the courthouse, and two local radio stations broadcast the event live. When she heard of her client's fate, one of McGee's defense counsels "cried at the notion of the human degradation that could kill a man because of his color, because that's what it was." The tale may remind one, as a blurb on the dust-jacket says, of "a real-life To Kill a Mockingbird."
But Alex Heard, a veteran journalist who grew up in Mississippi, uncovers a story that is a good deal more intriguing, if less dramatic, than Harper Lee's iconic Southern novel. The McGee case was fought out on a global terrain. That tearful young lawyer's name was Bella Abzug. Years before she became a politician famous for big hats and robust feminism, Abzug worked for the Civil Rights Congress, a small but aggressive group with close ties to the Communist Party. The CRC, with aid from the Soviet bloc, whipped up an international outcry against McGee's execution. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Dmitri Shostakovich dispatched cables of outrage, and a band of protesters chained themselves to one of the columns at the Lincoln Memorial.
At the same time, the CRC connection enabled the authorities to charge that McGee's defense was a prime example of subversive meddling by "the Reds." Mississippi's governor at the time was Fielding Wright, a severe former judge who, in 1948, ran for vice-president on the States' Rights ticket with Strom Thurmond. There was as much chance that Wright would commute the death sentence of a convicted black rapist as there was that Abzug would express a fondness for the quaint racial mores of the Old South.
At ideological loggerheads, few of the key actors cared to acknowledge that the facts of the case were actually quite murky. Heard sifts carefully through dozens of contradictory accounts -- including long interviews with the children of both the defendant and his accuser -- and emerges with a sad recognition that, under the Jim Crow order, blind justice was, in essence, impossible. Every black Mississippian believed McGee and Hawkins had a consensual affair that somehow went bad; hardly anyone on the other side of the color line believed a respectable white mother could stoop so low. "That's just what the Russians were using to stir up trouble in our country," one white housewife told a local paper.
With no physical proof that a rape had occurred or any eyewitnesses other than Hawkins herself, McGee would likely have been acquitted by a fair-minded jury. But he had initially confessed to the crime -- after several police beatings. Hawkins stood firm by her story, even suing the Communist Daily Worker for libel. In the end, a divided U.S. Supreme Court refused to take the case.
While Heard is unable to decide who was the honest party, he surrounds the legal narrative with a rich and knowing context of historical truths. He describes other, clearly unjust capital trials of black men in the period and several horrific lynchings. He details the friction between the Civil Rights Congress and the much larger National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose leaders were suspicious of any defense campaign in which communists had a dominant role. And he sketches the biographies of the local white attorneys who tried to save McGee, including a former boxer who had big political ambitions before deciding "to give the black man in Mississippi the full advantage of his rights under the law."
On occasion, the lengthy backstories obscure the travails of McGee himself, a frightened man who appeared to go mad for a spell when he thought his cause was hopeless. Still, Heard has produced a book that, in arresting prose, captures a significant slice of the past and a case whose verdict was all but preordained.
There were signs in the late 1940s and early '50s that the long night of official racism was beginning to end. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby integrated the major leagues, Harry Truman integrated the armed forces, and black men and women with stable jobs joined civil rights groups in unprecedented numbers. None of this was enough to help Willie McGee. But, in his final letter, he asked his wife to "tell the people to Keep on fighting." Four years later and two hundred miles to the east, by refusing to ride buses in Montgomery, Ala., thousands of black people did just that.
Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Dissent and the author, most recently, of "A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Send Story to a Friend | Top |
|
|
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 THE SHALLOWS: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
3 BOOKS ABOUT THE BRONTES
INTELLIGENCE
MORNING MIRACLE: Inside the Washington Post -- A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life
DEAR MONEY |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
