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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780985035549 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2013 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 339 KB |
About the Author
Jess Walter is the author of Beautiful Ruins, We Live in Water, the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, the Edgar Award–winning Citizen Vince, Land of the Blind, and the New York Times Notable Book, Over Tumbled Graves. He lives in Spokane, Washington with his family.
Read an Excerpt
The Land of Plenty
Introduction by Jess Walter
In the summer of 1950, in the midst of a critical beating over his novel, Over the River and Into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway received a letter of support from a writer he hadn’t heard from in years, Robert Cantwell.
Hemingway (who had used the name Cantwell for his protagonist in Over the River) wrote back from Cuba:
“Dear Bob,
It was strange to hear from you after so long. I have worried about you and waited for books … You were the best bet I had in American fiction and I wish the Christ you would write it.”
Over time, literature shrinks its field with a coldness that can seem cruel. Accomplished, important, even brilliant writers fall out of print and fade into obscurity; only a fraction ever make the turn of any given decade, kept alive in the smoldering stoves of literary criticism and college reading lists. A fraction of those find their way into the canon.
So while Hemingway burns on, nearly as significant as he was during his own lifetime, Robert Cantwell, a writer he once saw as “the best bet . . . in American fiction” is out of print and mostly unread. Left behind are some scholars’ assessments of his work, a handful of Cantwell’s books and articles, and Hemingway’s enduring question: how does one of the most promising fiction writers of his time, arguably the pioneer of the modern Pacific Northwest novel, simply stop writing fiction?
###
“Suddenly the lights went out.”
With that powerful, allegorical first line, Robert Cantwell launched The Land of Plenty, one of the great novels of the Depression.
In many ways, The Land of Plenty is a classic workplace novel, unfolding during the graveyard shift at a veneer plywood factory in Western Washington the night before the Fourth-of-July. The novel is decidedly of its time—haunted by the Depression, filled with the concerns of proletarian writers of the 1930s. But it is also surprisingly contemporary, in part because our own early twenty-first century economics have sparked new debates about employment, unions and income equality. Some of the novel’s dialogue could have been uttered yesterday:
What the hell has happened to everything? You read in the paper things have never been so good; there’s never been so much prosperity; the God-damned stock market is booming; and then you find out you can’t get work, everybody’s losing his job, or their wages are being cut.
The novel also feels contemporary because of Cantwell’s lithe style. The Land of Plenty is written in powerful, plain-spoken prose, but elements like time and point-of-view are handled with expert elasticity. Cantwell shows a keen understanding of modernist technique without ever sacrificing clarity or stretching for political points; one sees the influence of John Dos Passos without that writer’s showy dogma.
Part One, “Power and Light”, begins with the blackout, shifting from character to character as confusion reigns in the veneer plant, and underlying tensions bubble up between disoriented workers and the night foreman, Carl. A worker has also been pinned by a log and Cantwell holds this steady tension over the first section. Thematically, his concerns jump from the sociological to the psychological, from the intimacy of characters’ deepest thoughts to vivid environmental description:
Outside, the tideflat on which the factory stood was almost as dark. There was no moon and the summer sky was clouded with the film of smoke drifting toward the sea from the forest fires in the mountains. . . . Two weeks before, the fire had started. It could be seen from town, looking at first like a new mountain pushing its way up beyond the nearer hills. The great glaciers of smoke piled up and rolled in silent avalanches down its sides. . . . During the hot days the smoke seemed like a great tan canvas stretched tight from one horizon to the other, and underneath it the world looked dull and strange, the sharp colors and outlines disappearing or running into one another like objects under water.”
In Part Two, “The Education of a Worker”, we see the effects of the blackout and the deep conflicts between workers, managers and owners of the plant: a picket line forms, replacement workers are hired, police come with clubs and guns. Darkness remains a powerful allegorical force in the novel as Cantwell moves the action toward its tragic conclusions.
# # #
Cantwell was born in Little Falls, now called Vader, Washington and raised in the lumber towns of Onalaska and Aberdeen (one critic would later note that Cantwell shared some of the grim outlook of another Aberdeen native, Kurt Cobain). Cantwell went to the University of Washington for a year before returning to Grays Harbor and getting on as a veneer clipper in the Harbor Plywood Company in Hoquiam, where he worked from 1925 to 1929. It isn’t hard to imagine in Cantwell the sorts of ambitions he gave the younger characters in The Land of Plenty.
In 1929, he published his first short story, “Hang by My Thumbs,” in the prestigious New American Caravan, a piece the editor Malcolm Cowley called, “the best in the volume.” The story was also noticed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins that Cantwell had “learned a better lesson from Proust than Thornton Wilder did and has a destiny of no mean star.”
This was a time when a single well-received short story could launch a literary career and Cantwell took off for New York, where he signed a deal to write a novel. Laugh and Lie Down appeared in 1931 to good reviews but small sales. That same year, he married a teacher named Mary Chambers and started a family that would eventually grow to include three daughters.
He wrote a handful of short stories and then, in 1934, The Land of Plenty was published by Farrar and Rinehart. The book received a good deal of attention, burnishing Cantwell’s reputation, especially among other writers. But its critical reception can only be called mixed. A piece in Kirkus Reviews began, “I didn’t like it. But I couldn’t stop reading it.” The review went on to compare the book’s tight prose to James Cain and praising its “hard-boiled realism” and “staccato style,” calling the book “an indictment of our social system.”
The novel appeared five years into the Great Depression, at the height of America’s disillusionment with capitalism, a corresponding shift toward Marxism and the inevitable cultural backlash. An otherwise laudatory review in the April 30, 1934 issue of Time begins: “Hard-shelled old conservatives glare askance at today’s young left-wing novelists, grumble that these youths have sold their birthright of dreams for a mess of revolutionary economics.” The New York Times Book Review suggested, “That none of the characters emerge as human beings is the direct result of Cantwell’s service to the Marxists and their essentially non-literary purpose.”
It’s a strange and unfair characterization. Cantwell was not some East Coast academic writing propaganda, creating Northwest mill workers as mere political pawns. The Land of Plenty hums with the authenticity of someone who has worked in that sort of plant, as Cantwell did, and it neither romanticizes workers nor demonizes managers. If anything, the book is striking for its tough realism and psychological acuity.
By the mid-1950s, critics would recognize the novel as an important work; for some it’s an overlooked classic. According to the American Antiquarian Booksellers Association, The Land of Plenty was “one of the best radical novels from the literary point of view” that sold a respectable 3000 copies before falling out of print.
T.V. Reed, author of Critical Fellow-Traveling: Robert Cantwell, and the Literary Left in Thirties America, writes that “Cantwell was the most gifted young writer in the radical literary movement of the Depression era. His stated goal was to help give the working class 'a sense of their own dignity,' and in that he succeeded as well as any American writer ever has.”
And the writer and editor Bruce Barcott, editor of the literary anthology “Northwest Passages” has called The Land of Plenty “the first modern novel to come out of the Northwest . . . innovative and brutal and gripping at the same time. If it had been set in New York or Chicago it would still be on college reading lists. It’s just a shame that it’s lost in the musty stacks instead.”
# # #
After The Land of Plenty, to support his family, Robert Cantwell began writing for Henry Luce’s magazines, Time, Life, and Fortune. He worked on a biography of Boston entrepreneur and philanthropist E.A. Filene, but the book was never finished. In 1938, he got a job as associate editor at Time.
Then, in 1941, Cantwell suffered a nervous breakdown. Like many writers of the period, he had become increasingly disillusioned by the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and by the brutality of the Stalin regime and he regretted his youthful immersion in Communism. In his growing paranoia, Cantwell became convinced his family was in danger.
According to the literary biographer Per Seyersted, Cantwell “broke with Communism toward the end of the thirties . . . afraid of what radicals who considered him a traitor could do to him and . . . what people might disclose about his past Communist connections.”
He sent his wife and children away for their safety and was committed to two different mental institutions, where he underwent severe shock and insulin treatments.
Then, “one day, he woke up and said he could hear singing and how wonderful that was,” his daughter Mary Nelson wrote me in an email. “He was always calm, always cheerful and very careful after that. He never wrote fiction again. I don’t think he wanted to put himself out there.”
His mental health recovered, Cantwell moved his family back to New York and went to work for Newsweek, where he eventually became literary editor. He also wrote a well-respected biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which was published in 1948.
But that same year, Cantwell’s radical past resurfaced, when Whittacker Chambers, an old friend whom he had gotten a job reviewing books for Time, was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Chambers, who sometimes used the name Cantwell as an alias, testified that he’d been part of a Soviet spy ring that included State Department and United Nations official Alger Hiss.
Chambers wrote later, in his book Witness, that Cantwell was “clearly not a Communist” and he never named him as part of the spy ring. But Cantwell had been tainted as a “fellow traveler” and spent the next decade ghostwriting, freelancing, writing introductions and literary criticism under pen names.
In 1961, with the Red Scare abating, Cantwell got a job as a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, where he’d been writing and editing since the mid-1950s. It was a job “he loved,” according to Mary Nelson. “He brought a lot to that magazine with his incredible curious nature. I think he was one of the first to write about bird watching, the environment, chess.”
When he died in December 1978, at the age of 70, the publisher of Sports Illustrated, Kelso F. Sutton, wrote of Cantwell:
He was a small man, sturdy and vigorous, with a round, gentle face, a quiet humor and an extraordinary intelligence that enabled him to absorb, interpret and translate into graceful prose vast amounts of information about any subject that captured his fancy.
Mary Nelson, too, remembers her father as vibrant, witty and happy. “He made a point of it,” she wrote. “He said . . . it is good for the young to be angry. For older people, anger is like a cancer. It eats them alive.”
Cantwell’s writing for Sports Illustrated led to a book about the Scottish-American naturalist Alexander Wilson in 1961. He also continued to write criticism and to spend time in Western Washington hiking and riding horses. In 1972, he published a book of regional history, reminiscences and environmentalism called The Hidden Northwest. A year earlier, Southern Illinois University Press had reissued The Land of Plenty with an introduction by the scholar Harry T. Moore, who called the book “one of the strongest fictional expressions of that age.” But the book wasn’t widely distributed and quickly fell out of print. Cantwell himself never wrote fiction again.
“He told me, as a young writer, that he had a burning drive to create something,” Mary Nelson wrote. “He did not spell it out. I don’t think it was about money or fame, just to grab something from the ether and make it into something meaningful and important. I think he did expect his work to survive him somehow.”
And Hemingway? After receiving the “best bet” letter from Hemingway in 1950, Cantwell wrote back that he was humbled by Hemingway’s kind letter.
But Cantwell’s real response might have been a piece called “The River that Will Flow Forever,” published in Sports Illustrated in July, 1961. The week that Hemingway committed suicide, Cantwell went to the Big Two Hearted River in Michigan, which Papa had immortalized in a short story. Cantwell wrote a beautifully descriptive piece that shows his own verbal power and dexterity—“the morning sunlight strikes the river too, and the surface changes from a thick, roiling black to a tannic-acid brown, with wild silver patterns where the light coming flat strikes the riffles.”
And, in a line that could describe himself as a young writer and his novel, The Land of Plenty, Cantwell continued:
Hemingway wrote Big Two-Hearted River in Paris in 1924, when he was 25 years old. . . . It is no disparagement of Hemingway's later work to say that he never wrote so well again: no one ever wrote better in this particular field.
Jess Walter