Refuting a Single Sentence.

I’ve been wrestling with the ending of my new story for perhaps the last four or five weeks.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I have in my head this image I want to get to. The image has been hanging around out there since I started the story, even as the intent of the story has changed. The problem is that it continues to stay at a certain distance even as I have begun to feel that the story has reached the last lunge to the finish. Perhaps the image is something I simply need to let go, throw out, or destroy.

Struggling like this used to make me panic. I would figure the whole story was junk, or that it had reached a dead end, and so I would throw it out. Of course, a lot of the time I had only written a few pages, maybe a hundred or so and would simply give up. Now I have somewhere around 450 pages. If it was going to dead end, it would have done so a long time ago. No, what I’ve got here is a case of bad story-time management.

It has proven tough to cram a decade worth of a character’s life into a 500 page novel: especially when that decade is the 1930’s. There was so much that happened in America between 1929 and 1940. So much that, to me, it has the cast of epic mythology to it, and yet, it seems to be completely overshadowed by the grandly epic event our country seems preternaturally obsessed with: WW II.

On one level, World War II is easy to grasp for us Americans. We get to cast ourselves as the good guys, fighting the good fight against the evil Nazis and the imperialistic Japanese. There’s a bright, clear line to be drawn between what is right and what is wrong and what should be done about it. It’s the Nazis or the Japanese who kill people for not being Christian, or launch unprovoked wars. Americans don’t do those things.

The Great Depression doesn’t seem to offer that kind of clear separation between an evil other and a good us. We are both in that story. Looking at the Great Depression we have to confront the fact that we, ourselves, are one day the homeless, out-of-work person with his hat in his hand, standing at the back porch asking for a little something to eat, and the next day the scoundrel who punches the destitute for blocking our way, and yet, on another day, we are the kindly person who places a sandwich in the outstretched hand at our back door, or invites the person in to share our own meal for the day.

In my research I read stories of tremendous charity and generosity - of lonely, desperate people being aided by shop owners or grocery store owners, or more often by someone who was only a little less lonely and desperate. I also read stories of incredible meanness and cruelty, of farm owners promising transients looking for work a meal in exchange for a day’s labor only to give the already hungry and now exhausted transients rotten, or maggot infested food. I read of entire towns turning their backs on sick men and, instead of taking them to a hospital, driving these men outside of town and dropping them by the side of the road to make their own ways.

It seems at times that we are, still today, fighting the ideological wars of the American Depression. On one side, Hoover’s and the Republican’s belief that personal industry, personal charity and volunteerism would carry America through the hard times. On the other, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the safety net of social security, unemployment insurance, and direct government intervention. Neither is entirely wrong, even though it seems that in or current age we are required to pick just one.

Personal industry and personal charity is admirable, but it has its limitations. Before the 1932 election there were several cities, most notably Philadelphia, where the city’s wealthy banded together to fund a private relief organization to aide those who’d been put out of work and couldn’t find jobs. If I remember correctly, it lasted about a year before the demand grew so great that the wealthy funders all backed out, leaving those in need completely destitute. In those days, there was no safety net: no unemployment insurance, no food stamps, no medicare. So, when the man of the house lost his job it was only a matter of time before the entire family was reduced to begging on the street. Kick a worker to the curb, leave that worker unable to pay for even the basics of food and shelter, and as the Great Depression showed, the whole economy crashes.

It wasn’t until Roosevelt was elected that there started to be some improvement. But not everything Roosevelt and the New Dealers tried worked. The National Recovery Administration didn’t last long, and was, in fact, had major parts of its functions deemed unconstitutional. Roosevelt, for all his popularity, was decidedly weak in his support of labor unions, in effect allowing a farm workers union in the south to be killed so effectively that it has never resurfaced. Roosevelt’s agencies also destroyed rancher’s and farmer’s herds and crops in order to stabilize market prices and, in some cases, forcing those ranchers and farmers onto to government dole. But things like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration were tremendously beneficial to people and society (the access and services to our National Parks was increased, rural electrification was started, dams, flood control projects, and countless other public works were built by agencies like the CCC, the TVA, and so on. The Federal Writers Project not only gave us the fabulous WPA state guides, but along with the other Arts project created a deep, vibrant historical record of our country as it was before the mass homogenization project that TV culture has proven to be. Moreover, these organizations gave people jobs, got them out of the soup kitchens and bread lines, off the trains and highways, put some money in their pockets so they could buy their meals rather than beg for them. And there is, I believe, nothing that compares to the basic human dignity of not having to beg.

All of that, somehow, has to fit into this 500 page story in some fashion and then, gracefully, slip itself into this image I’m writing towards - an image that is oddly personal, mythic, and prophetic all at once.

Once I get that done it’s time to revise.