10
Literature of the 1918–39 years depicts the last moments of extreme poverty among the working class of industrialized countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. World War I was followed by economic upheaval, inflation, and unemployment both in the cities of industrialized countries and in rural areas. This chapter explores the abysmal circumstances of the peasantry in early 20th-century southern Italy, in Ignazio Silone’s novel, Fontamara (written 1930) and Carlo Levi’s memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli (written 1943–4); and in Steinbeck’s powerful novel of the plight of uprooted farmers in Dust-Bowl America during the Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Poverty in these societies was at this stage no respecter of political systems. To many, democracy seemed no better a protector of the poor than fascism or socialism. Steinbeck and Levi depict life in a democratic and fascist country respectively, both in the conviction that their countries have failed the poor; both being committed socialists (as was Silone) – unaware of the far greater failings of the Soviet Union – while remaining fervent individualists.
Fascism and the Italian peasantry in Silone and Carlo Levi
Italy, seat of the Catholic Church, was in its religious ideology on the side of the poor, while in practice neglectful in legislative policy and social reform. United by 1860, Italy south of Rome had one of the poorest and most illiterate populations in Europe. Church charity, government welfare, business enterprise, medical advances, were slow to penetrate the rural south. The post-World War I fascist government at first roused hope, quickly disappointed, that inequality in Italian society would be overcome. Silone and Levi are both enemies of fascism, writing in hiding;1 both are outraged at the injustices done to the peasants, their heroes outlaws who fought the government; both see the Italian poor living in a modern Dantesque Hell (una bolga infernale) and, from different perspectives, join in the attack on fascism for depriving the poor of their rights, for exploiting or neglecting them, practically as if they were a sub-species.2 Silone and Levi describe a world in which capital, industry, savings, and schools hardly exist. Both give a voice to the peasants’ anguish: aren’t we human too (non siamo cristiani anche noi)?3 To both writers, too, the Church is complicit in government corruption and the local priests are figures of contempt. Both writers ask: che fare?
Mussolini aimed not to improve the lives of the Italian peasants but to regain for Italy its ancient imperial grandeur. Fascist economic policies were ‘geared to political propaganda rather than to real achievement’; the period described by Silone and Levi was economically ‘perhaps the worst in recent Southern history’.4 The economy was subservient to the military, to the greater glory of Italy under Mussolini. The Duce did not care for the south, nor did the south care for him. National prestige mattered more to him than reform of the latifondi (large estates), mostly run inefficiently by absentee landlords whose main concern was rent and profit and were indifferent to the sufferings of their tenants.5 The fascist government restricted the rights of the peasantry, in access to water, in farming, and the use of land for grazing; and its agricultural policies were ecologically unwise.6 Mussolini dealt with the problem of poverty in the south by declaring that poverty in Italy no longer existed.7 For peasants, whether they stayed on the land or left for the cities, social services were inadequate. While the economy of northern Italian cities was advanced, the peasantry, especially in the south, was largely ignored, and remained in almost medieval conditions. In its so-called ‘Battle for Grain’, the fascist government increased wheat production at the expense of crops and products more suited to the hot, dry climate of the south – citrus fruits, wine, and olive oil. Naples was the capital of poverty. According to the International Labour Organization in Geneva, in the 1930s the diet of Italians generally was in some respects the worst in Europe, lacking in meat, eggs, butter, and sugar; but the Italian peasants were far worse off. Illiteracy was high, especially among women: in 1936 in the south 21% of brides could not sign the marriage register.8
Without effective government aiming to improve health, education, welfare, agriculture, and employment, the peasants were given an ideology of mission and sacrifice which they did not want or understand. The fascist government in Rome gave the peasants little apart from tax collectors and radio speeches. The peasants knew little of Mussolini’s aims, and the pageantry and color of fascist rallies did not reach them. Many families were broken up by poverty. The peasants in the south were subjected to vile propaganda in the north, examples of which are given by the economist Antonio Gramsci in 1926:
that the South is the ball and chain that is holding up the social development of Italy; that Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or complete barbarians by natural destiny; that if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or any other historical cause, but with Nature, which made Southerners lazy, inept, criminal and barbaric – only tempering this cruel fate with the purely individual explosion of a few geniuses, who stand like solitary palm-trees in an arid, barren desert.9
Silone’s Fontamara
Fontamara, written in Switzerland in 1930 and set in the fictional village of Fontamara in southern Italy in 1929, exposes the poverty, injustice, and degradation in a typical Italian village under Mussolini:
About one hundred ragged, shapeless, one-floor hovels, blackened by time, worn by wind and rain, imperfectly roofed with tiles and slates of every kind, surround a dilapidated church on a stony hill-top. Most of these unpaved hovels have but one opening for door, window and chimney. Inside them men, women and children, donkeys, goats and hens live, sleep, eat, and procreate their kind.10
The peasants live with their animals in ‘animal-like lethargy’ and are themselves treated like animals – of a lower order than dogs.11 Fontamara, based on oral testimony from peasants, is told by three unnamed narrators, a man, his wife, and their son. The great underlying irony of the novel is the alienation of precisely those Italians who are closest to the soil, who have worked it for centuries, and suffered for it. They are estranged from the cities, the government, the wealthy landowners and professions, especially the legal profession, all exploiters and swindlers. Even the Italian language and culture are foreign and dead to them. Fontamara is a town so poor it cannot afford a priest and has little use of the Church. The Church is complicit with the government (the Lateran Pact of 1929 is mentioned in the book), which pays it vast sums of taxpayers’ money while many are hungry. Though like the peasants in Tsarist Russia the Italian peasants have claim to the land they and their ancestors have worked since ancient times, it is owned mostly by absentee landlords. Their landlord is a Prince Torlonia, who has 10,000 peasants working for him. The land has been deforested and the song of birds has gone. The peasants, deeply in debt, work for starvation wages. To get to work, at least 5–10 miles from home, they must get up at 3 a.m. The yield of their mortgaged land hardly pays the interest. The peasants, too desperate for work to negotiate for better wages and conditions, cannot escape exploitation: ‘The peasants ploughed the land and levelled it and sowed and dug and reaped and threshed, and when it was all done the Contractor came in and took the profits. The bank came in and took the profits.’ Then there is tax, ‘a house tax, and a vineyard tax, and a donkey tax, and a dog tax, and a pasture tax, and a wagon tax, and a wine tax.’12
In its neglect of the peasants, the fascist government is no worse than previous governments: ‘Has there ever been a Government in Italy which has known the peasants?’13 Young peasants with no chance in life are drawn to fascism: ‘Too weak and servile to rebel against the authorities and the rich, they preferred cringing to them in return for the privilege of robbing and oppressing other poor folk – peasants and the poorer landowners and tenant-farmers.’14 Fascism offers not good governance but careers for thugs: ‘Peasants still went hungry, though they tilled the soil from dawn to sunset, while in town you could make a rapid fortune by beating people up in the streets.’15 In one scene, a fascist militia invades Fontamara, looting and raping with full protection of ‘the law’. Government propaganda insists that it is helping the peasants; in fact, it uses specious legal authority to exploit the peasants’ ignorance and rob them.
The peasants are cursed with almost biblical harshness: they have good soil but little benefit; they cultivate beet (and are obliged to, by law, as it is a cash crop) but hardly know the taste of sugar; they grow corn but do not eat it; they have water but it is diverted by the rich; they have common land but it is taken from them.16 The peasants tell the story of St. Berardo who miraculously distributed white bread in time of famine. On arrival at the Judgement Seat in Heaven, the saint is told he can ask for anything he liked: ‘O Lord, give me a piece of white bread.’17 The peasants suffer constant abuse by the rich and powerful who behave as if they do not know that the poor are poor, but merely a resource to be exploited. The peasants are vulnerable because of their ignorance, disunity, and lack of effective representation. They are still medieval in outlook, dominated by superstition and the evil eye, and the use of charms against disease. They know little of politics and international affairs. They were conscripted in the war in 1915–18 without knowing why they were fighting: ‘a war is such a complicated thing that a peasant can never hope to understand it’.18
American restriction of emigration in 1924 and the fascist government’s own curbs on ‘internal immigration’ mean that the peasants are trapped where they live. To them, government, politics, and law side with the rich, mainly in cities. The rich control elections. Local government from the podesta (mayor) down is useless. Some peasants, frustrated by incomprehensible, fruitless negotiations, resort to vandalism. Illiterate, they are taught to vote for candidates, knowing nothing of their policies. The law system as they experience it is corrupt and worsens their poverty: ‘The more laws there are the more poverty there is. The more poverty there is the more laws they make.’19 Hunger is the peasants’ law. The government, fearful that their desperation might drive them to violence, provides them with ‘fear soup’ and ‘fear meat’ in churches and convents.20 To defraud the peasants is legal, but it is illegal for them to protest or to engage in ‘political discussion’. Lawyers stir up conflict among the peasants to increase business, and their disunity impoverishes them further. Law is made, applied, and interpreted by townspeople, not peasants: ‘How can a peasant ever expect justice?’21 Lawyers get rich off peasants. In a description of a sumptuous meal reminiscent of Germinal,22 lawyers wear three rows of buttons on their trousers, for the entrée, the roast, and the dessert. The hungry and thirsty peasants, desperate for help, are witnesses to the moral corruption of their exploiters: a kitchen full of food, and the drunken revelry of men and women who are in effect living off the peasantry, obscenely, finishing their banquet by staggering into the bushes, to collapse in their own urine and vomit.
Fontamara starts to change when the peasants, hungry and thirsty, robbed and raped, their bills unpaid, their water diverted, their electricity cut off, acknowledge the truth of their condition and start to act in their own interests. They start their own newspaper, entitled ‘What are we to do?’23 and find a leader, murdered by the police, who leaves them with a legacy of devotion to their cause, ‘For the unity of the peasants’ (Per l’unita dei cafoni).24 Silone’s attack on the Italian state for its maltreatment of the peasants led to Fontamara being banned in Italy until 1949.25
Christ Stopped at Eboli
Whereas Fontamara highlights the heartlessness and semi-comic bureaucratic incompetence of the fascist government, largely from the peasants’ own viewpoint, Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli is more the observation by an educated outsider of the often-harrowing poverty of the peasants in southern Italy in the 1930s. Levi wrote the book in grim conditions: as a hunted Jew in 1943–4, in Florence under Nazi rule. Levi, a graduate in medicine from Turin University, a painter, 41 years old, hid in a room across the street from the Pitti Palace. There he recorded how he, an opponent of fascism, had been exiled in 1935 to the remote village of Aliano (which he calls Gagliano) in the province of Lucania (now Basilicata) in southern Italy.26 As a Jew trapped by History, Levi thought his way back in time, southward, to a pagan world bypassed by History and Christian civilization (hence the title, Eboli being mid-way from Naples southward to the heart of Lucania), yet equally comfortless and shadowed by the continual presence of death. The peasants, though seemingly subhuman and less than beasts, have blessedly never accepted the disastrous ‘deification of the State’. Levi describes the claustrophobia in Florence from which he escapes in his imagination:
Closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort and solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.
(ch. 1)27
Yet Levi prefers the paganism and ‘stubborn poverty’ of this isolated land to the murderous Christian civilization which has destroyed his life. In a scene of pandemonium in church on Christmas Eve, a priest, apparently drunk, attacks the peasants from the pulpit, accusing them – much as Jews were throughout the history of the Church – of sinful indifference to Christianity. To Levi, however, the peasants’ resistance to Christianity is a sign of their humanity. He believed that revolution was necessary.
The book ends with the place and dates of writing: Florence, December 1943 to July 1944, i.e. the last months of Nazi rule before liberation in August 1944. In his 1963 Introduction, Levi recalled that as he wrote the book he was aware that each moment might be his last:
A house in Florence was my refuge then from the savage death roaming the streets of a city that had reverted to a primitive jungle of shadows and wild beasts [rifugio alla morte feroce che percorreva le strade della città tornata primitiva foresta do ombre e di belve] … the book was an act of defence that routed death.
It asserts freedom, love, and the unity of mankind. Italian anti-Jewish racial laws were in force, and over 25,000 Italian Jews were rounded up by fellow Italians and sent to their deaths. What if the manuscript fell into the hands of pro-Nazi Italians? Levi is careful never to mention his surname or the fact that he was Jewish.28 Instead, he recalls his exile nearly a decade earlier, with his paints and his leonine dog, Barone, as an ironic freedom, the villages of Lucania like miniature Jerusalems on the desert hilltops, the land ‘spread out and almost welcoming’. In a rare hint at his circumstances in 1943–4, Levi writes that both his father (who inherited Barone) and Barone were buried in Liguria,
that land of mine where I can no longer set foot, because those in power, in their fear of all that is sacred, seem to have discovered that I too have a dual nature and am like my dog, half baron and half lion.
(ch. 12)
His housekeeper, Julia, a treasure-trove of superstition, reveals to Levi ‘the awesome spells whose mere pronouncement ravages a man in his vitals and gradually dries him up until he is ready for the grave’; whereupon Levi, moving back to 1944, asks if he should reveal these fearful exorcisms, ‘which might be so useful to my readers in the times in which we are living?’ (ch. 20). With Julia, he imagines that he might possess ‘all the powers of Rofé, the Oriental medicine man’ (ch. 23). Rofé is Hebrew for ‘doctor’. Levi’s medical knowledge and his status as a political exile made him rapidly acceptable to the peasants in Gagliano.
As an exile, Levi was lucky: he was free to move about and paint, and was housed in ‘the only civilized house in the village’, the only one with a toilet (though without running water): ‘probably there was not another one within a radius of fifty miles’ (ch. 11). Yet his place of exile was, intentionally, mired in poverty, a suitable degradation for an enemy of the state: the unpaved road, the air black with flies, the houses ramshackle and precarious, subject to landslides among the precipitous hills, many with just one room and no windows, pigs grubbing in garbage in the streets, the poor health of the locals, many children barefoot, in rags, yellow from malaria. This place of exile, between Italy’s heel and toe, had an infernal climate, its earth a mass of clay and rocks, its harvests poor, its people like animals harnessed to a wagon, coarse bread their staple diet. Crops were so poor that an olive press, whose millstone was turned by a blindfolded donkey, had work for only two or three days in the year (ch. 21).29 Government decrees made things worse: for example, the tax on goats which the peasants were unable to pay, forcing them to slaughter their goats, ensuring their further malnutrition (ch. 6); or the government order in Grassano to grow wheat alone on land more suited to almond and olive trees or, better, forests and pastures (ch. 18). Wheat, a cash crop, was profitable to the Mussolini government, but the peasants, working in malaria-infested fields, were poorly paid.
From the moment of his arrival, Levi, who had never practiced as a doctor, was besieged by villagers in urgent need of medical attention as the two doctors working there were little better than quacks. On his first day he was swept up to see a man dying of malaria. Rapidly accepted as the village doctor, to the fury of the other ‘doctors’, Levi got used to seeing his patients in their homes, pigs and chickens living under the beds, scuttling about his feet, babies swinging in hammocks above his head. Infant mortality was very high: Levi’s housekeeper reportedly had 17 pregnancies: two survived.30 As Levi was a political prisoner his contacts were monitored, yet the local peasants were free to see him for medical help, ‘because they were not considered human beings’ (ch. 21).
Though Levi felt close to the peasants as creatures cut off from History, they are in fact much affected by History – by World War I, conscription, emigration, and government policies. Radio and motorized transport reach them, and their relatives in America send many useful products in the post. Unwillingly, too, they are caught up in the Abyssinian war (1935–6). Shadows of the Holocaust overtake Levi in his efforts to escape History. In the Abyssinian war, the Italians used poison gas; and in parts of southern Italy, peasant conditions foreshadowed the concentration camps. Levi’s sister, Louisa, also a doctor, visited him from Turin. Louisa confronts the full horror of peasant life in a supposedly modern state. Her journey through the south echoes Dante’s Inferno. In the village of Matera, the people live with their animals in dark caves as though stricken by plague.31 As she walks down the dirt track along the caves, a crowd of children follow, begging for quinine. Louisa’s description of the children, everywhere in rags or naked, is applicable word for word to the children in Auschwitz.
I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty. My profession has brought me in daily contact with dozens of poor, sick, ill-kempt children, but I never even dreamed of seeing a sight like this’; many had trachoma, with flies swarming on their eyes, malaria, or dysentery; and some had ‘the wizened bodies of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons [coi visini grinzosi come dei vecchi, e scheletriti per la fame], their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous, dilated stomachs, and faces yellow and worn with malaria.
(ch. 10)
This portrait of criminal neglect is an implicit indictment of a government that squandered vast sums on a futile war of expansion while neglecting its own people.
Even with American immigration restrictions, about a half-million Italians left in the 1920s and 1930s. About 2,000 in Levi’s village alone were driven to emigrate: only about 1,200 remained. Even fewer would have been there if not for fascist propagandists in New York during the crash of 1929, who persuaded many gullible Italians to return to their homes.
Levi, in hiding from the Nazis in 1943–4, was inspired by his memories of the peasantry, who knew about survival in a hostile state. He admired their stoicism, their robust humanity, their capacity for endurance. Treated by the state as subhuman, exploited and abandoned, they are in a sense free of the state, and of political allegiances. By implication, unlike the fascists they have not compromised their fundamental humanity, their ‘feeling for the common fate of mankind’ – including that of the Jews. Italians, Levi writes, had no tradition of obedience to the central government – the peasants regarded the government as ‘a strictly unlawful power’ (ch. 22). Orders from Rome were often ignored or subverted. Himself in hiding from the state, Levi, formerly a reserve officer in the Italian army, respects the peasants’ lack of patriotic attachment to the state, though many of them, or members of their families, served in the Great War, and about 50 villagers were killed. They take no pride in their service, which they regard as a misfortune, and do not even commemorate their sacrifice: money spent on war would be better spent on projects for the public good, such as reforestation.32 The peasants have no feeling for the colors of the Italian flag; their own color is in the sorrow of their eyes, the darkness of earth and death. In 1944, Levi could not but share the peasants’ feeling of siege by an enemy civilization, and identify with their ‘elementary desire for justice [una volontà elementare di giustizia]’ (ch. 14).
Levi, enemy of the Italian state and its racial laws, confined to a room, in hiding, found consolation and understanding in his memories of these peasants, a shared humanity with the impoverished and downtrodden: ‘You, too, are subject to fate’, the peasants console him. ‘You, too, are here because of the power of ill will, because of an evil star; you are tossed hither and yon by the hostile workings of magic. And you, too, are a man; you are one of us’ (ch. 21). Repulsed by the state, the peasants greatly admire the brigands of generations past who fought the state destructively, suicidally, burning for justice, with the tools of their daily work in the fields, scythes, axes, and knives.33 The peasants’ resignation to death, to the mortality of all, became a source of strength to Levi in hiding, hunted like an animal. In the most powerful experience in the book, he visits a dying man several hours from the village. Though the man is beyond help, Levi feels the greatest joy of his life, a love of the common man, an oceanic communion with the universe, protected ‘beyond the reach of man’, an eternal bond of mortality with the grieving peasants. This memory comforted Levi in his room in Florence in 1944, and inspired a sense of protected creative germination in hiding.34 The example of the peasants strengthened him to survive and become, after the war, a distinguished writer, painter, and politician. When he died in 1975, he was returned to Aliano to be buried among the peasants he loved.
Steinbeck’s ‘Okies’ and American capitalism in the 1930s
At the start of the Great Depression, in 1930, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then governor of New York State, warned that as a result of the economic collapse one-third of the American population was malnourished. John Steinbeck (1902–68) in his novel of America in the 1930s Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), asks: should inequality exist in 20th-century America, with its vast resources and potential for the generation of wealth? Should America, too, have to accept the inevitability of poverty in its midst, on biblical authority: ‘the poor shall never cease from the land’ (Deuteronomy 15: 11)? Why do local and federal government fail the poor? How can banks dispossess large numbers of landowners, leaving them without support, exiles in their own land?
In raising these and other disturbing questions about America’s unequally distributed wealth, Steinbeck indicts capitalism and capitalist government and institutions for their heartless avarice.
Yet this is not Steinbeck’s main purpose. The impoverished uprooted American farmers in The Grapes of Wrath are defined not by their poverty and its causes but by their refusal to give in; their rugged individualism is tested by the vicissitudes of the frontier, accepting hardship and tragedy, with no expectation of help outside the family, certainly not from businesses and institutions hungry for profit. The book affirms the biblical valuation of the poor, their instinct for collective self-help, their reliance on one another. Steinbeck stresses Jefferson’s belief in individuals, not institutions, as the basis of democracy: men are ‘a law unto themselves’, the democratic experiment could not be carried through by social organizations – political parties, trade unions, churches, etc. – but only by individuals. The Self is above all things, as Whitman puts it, ‘nothing, not God, is greater to me than one’s self is’ (Song of Myself 48).
In its conception of poverty as a challenge to human resourcefulness and courage amid adversity, The Grapes of Wrath recalls Robinson Crusoe; but in moral outrage The Grapes of Wrath is close to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1886), both stories of the poorest in society: a Black slave and a White abused orphan escaping to freedom on a raft down Nature’s own Highway 66, the Mississippi. Both condemn capitalist America, Huckleberry Finn for the brutality of slavery, The Grapes of Wrath for a failed banking system and government unfit for crisis. In both novels, society and ‘civilization’ are corrupt, instinctive morality is fettered, human beings are made crooked by the lust for wealth. Those with power and money try to control the less fortunate. In Huckleberry Finn, it is not the poor who are the fakers and swindlers but the ‘aristocrats’, who persuade people, to their harm, that they are royal. Yet, human foibles are democratic: Huck’s father is a violent alcoholic, the Widow Douglas makes Huck’s life unbearable, and her sister, Miss Watson, is prepared to sell her slave, Jim, to a slave trader for $800. The best and healthiest in human nature is achieved away from towns, on the river or on the road, where the poor often protect one another: slaves reach freedom, and the destitute find work and try to build a new life. In both novels, the moral instinct and individual spirit are everything; the essence of America is ‘love thy neighbor’.35
In The Grapes of Wrath, the Midwest is an environmental disaster, created by poor planning and greed.36 As in southern Italy under Mussolini, land exploited for wheat cash crops has been made infertile. Muley is the image of the dispossessed farmer still clinging to his land, though his wife and children have left for California; animal-like he hides among the withered crops, emerging half-crazed at night, dodging the police, refusing to be driven away, rooted to his land by memory, ‘a damn ol’ graveyard ghos’.
When Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, American poverty was at its worst, particularly in the Midwest where drought, poor soil, and crop failure compounded the economic woes of the age. Many farmers lost their land to the banks and monster-like companies: ‘they breathe profits; they eat the interest on money’ (ch. 5).37 About 500,000 Americans migrated westward, mainly to California. Steinbeck tells their story as an exposé of the crisis of capitalism. The Eden which might be re-created by modern science is corrupted by lust for profit. In the 1930s, it was possible to see rival systems of government, including communism and even fascism, as preferable to the reality of American democracy. Steinbeck had put the poor California workers at the heart of much of his previous fiction, including Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, and Of Mice and Men, but in The Grapes of Wrath he describes a level of inequality associated not with America but with industrially undeveloped countries.
The novel’s germination began mostly in 1936, when the San Francisco News asked Steinbeck, a native Californian, to write a series on migrant farmworkers. Steinbeck visited several so-called ‘sanitary camps’ set up by the Federal Government.38 Though impressed by the camps, he found they could not deal with the shocking scale of the disaster. The migrants were not American Blacks accustomed to discrimination, or Mexicans who had crossed the border illegally, or European foreigners who knew little of America. They were respectable white native American farmers from the Bible Belt, rooted in America for many generations, whose ancestors had fought in the Indian wars, the Civil War, even in the American Revolution. Oklahoma, where many of them were born – hence the derogative ‘Okie’ – was part of the last American frontier, site of the last land rush, in 1889; and Oklahoma then was ironically the ‘promised land’.39 Denied proper aid in California, the Okies were suspected of ‘bolshevisky’ sympathies and feared for their potential unionization. The ‘Red scare’ was extended to the Okies as they sought a living wage. Steinbeck’s newspaper reports were the factual kernel of his novel, particularly chapter 20, on ‘Hooverville’. The local authorities forcibly prevented Okies from settling down, keeping them on the run, disorganized, segregated and penned in, off the voting rolls and off relief, a huge reserve of cheap labor.
As in Zola’s Germinal, the Californian companies in The Grapes of Wrath run their own stores, exploiting and cheating the workers. Surrounded by plenty, many are undernourished and diseased; they live in substandard housing, even in cardboard boxes, tin shacks, or disused pipes; they have little education and few work prospects, and are vulnerable to hostility and abuse; the Church is silent, and the law is used to harass and evict them, as though they were criminals. Though Blacks were the main targets for racism in America, the Okies too suffered racist abuse, stereotyped as being ignorant, dirty, thieving, sexually degenerate, inhuman. One border official says to another: ‘they ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas’ (ch. 19). Vulnerable to contagious diseases – measles, mumps, influenza, typhoid, pneumonia, tuberculosis were widespread among them – they have inadequate medicine and medical care. Flooding in winter increases their exposure to the elements and starvation. Steinbeck, observing this, was outraged by the anomaly of hunger amid plenty, and the sin, as he saw it, of destroying food to keep prices up at a time when people were hungry. Economic ‘law’ brought moral corruption and the curse of the ‘grapes of wrath’ growing heavy for the final vintage of justice (ch. 25). Echoes of biblical denunciations of the wicked (Isaiah 63), of Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War song, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, are combined with Marx’s Capital, in the warning that with the increase of poverty and exploitation, the wrath of the oppressed would grow to the breaking point.40
Like other chroniclers of the poor, including Zola in Germinal and Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, Steinbeck immersed himself in the lives of the poor and identified with them, but retained distance and the ability to escape. Steinbeck lived briefly among the migrants as a volunteer and was particularly impressed by the manager of one of the federal camps, Tom Collins, who worked heroically and selflessly to help these poor people. Collins gave Steinbeck valuable documentation which he used in the novel: he acknowledged his debt to Collins by dedicating the first edition of the book to him. While writing the novel, Steinbeck frequently visited the migrants. He was outraged by local hostility toward them, which continually obstructed efforts to help, and by the needless suffering and deaths: ‘The death of children in our valleys is simply staggering.’41 In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck records the fact that American children were dying of hunger:
‘I can’t tell ya about them little fellas layin’ in the tent with their bellies puffed out an’ jus’ skin on their bones, an’ shiverin’ an’ whinin’ like pups, an’ me runnin’ aroun’ tryin’ to get work – not for money, not for wages!’ he shouted. ‘Jesus Christ, jus’ for a cup a flour an’ a spoon a lard. An’ then the coroner came. “Them children died a heart failure,” he said. Put in on his paper. Shiverin’ they was, an’ their bellies stuck out like a pig’s bladder’.
(ch. 16)
Steinbeck, nevertheless, found in the poor remarkable communal resilience and solidarity. As in Germinal, people are treated worse than animals, but at the heart of The Grapes of Wrath, too, is the affirmation of their human dignity. The dream of a better life, out of slavery, poverty, and adversity, is the central driving force in American history. The story of one family, the Joads, becomes the story of America, drawing on traditional biblical themes of chosenness, the injustice of slavery – to creditors and banks – the emergence from bondage on a parched, ungiving land; and after many trials the crossing of the desert into the Promised Land, even as the older generation dies out.
The wrath in the novel links it with other proletarian literature, particularly Germinal, where violence is a necessary, positive force in bringing social improvement.42 Even Ma Joad will kill if she has to to keep her family together. Tom Joad does not hesitate to kill in self-defense. Casy fights and gives his life for the migrants’ cause. Steinbeck sees as an essential quality of human nature the wrath at injustice and Christ-like willingness to be martyred for a higher cause: ‘fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe’ (ch. 14).
At the heart of the novel is Tom Joad and all he represents: youth, stoicism, resourcefulness, empathy with the people and loyalty to them, openness to spiritual values, rough and effective power of expression, a moral code, and controlled violence. Paroled from jail (he has killed a man in self-defense), he returns to his family on the eve of their departure for California. He meets Casy, a lapsed preacher (perhaps a relation of Steinbeck’s missionary ancestors) who joins the family on their journey. To Casy, humankind consists of ‘one soul’ united in holiness, but unholy in division (ch. 4).43 Tom becomes Casy’s disciple, a latter-day Paul to Casy’s Jesus. Casy’s life is a sermon dedicated to the people, based on a passage from Ecclesiastes (4: 9–12) which he teaches Tom:
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up … if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him, and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.
(ch. 28)44
Casy’s teaching is the novel’s theme. Poverty strips people bare of pretence and forces the poor to band together; in doing so, they affirm their common humanity: ‘I lost my land’ becomes ‘We lost our land’ (ch. 14); the family becomes something greater than itself, ‘We’re the people – we go on’ (ch. 20); and the poor masses huddled under the open skies feel new kinship with each other and with the universe: ‘the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything’s holy – everything, even me’ (ch. 23). The rich landowners, distant and indifferent to suffering, exclude themselves from this brotherhood. Land to them is income, and they ignore the human suffering caused by crop failure, drought, and flood, reducing these disasters to ‘simple loss of money’ (ch. 19).45 Their agents are the police who sadistically enforce the laws against the poor. The banks are inhuman monsters subject to economic vagaries, consuming their clients. The tractor-drivers who destroy homes confiscated by banks are unfeeling as their machines.
Casy’s former religious passion becomes a passion for social change, through socialism and unionization. He becomes ‘Reverend’ again, not in church but when he fights back against the police and is arrested (ch. 20). Steinbeck repeatedly stresses the value of collective identity and of strikes as a form of protest, to preserve the human spirit. Casy is martyred, murdered in cold blood by the police. In his Christ-like death – his last words, ‘You don’t know what you’re a-doin’, echo the words of Jesus on the cross – Casy gives Tom his calling in life. By the novel’s end, Tom’s gift as a leader (somewhat like that of other nonviolent leaders such as Gandhi and King) is clear: to exemplify the dignity and moral superiority of downtrodden masses, to use the violence against them to unite and strengthen them, to represent authentic American values, rooted in the Bible, in American politics.46 By the end of the novel, Tom recognizes himself as Casy’s disciple, as the embodiment of the ‘great soul’ of humankind: ‘I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up’ a guy, I’ll be there’ (ch. 28).
Tom’s mother, Ma Joad, senses his calling as a leader – Tom is ‘more’n you’, married to his cause, ‘You’re spoke for’ (ch. 26) – and she understands his need to achieve self-mastery. Ma single-mindedly holds her family together in all adversity, amid shortages, breakdowns, and defections, the deaths of the grandparents on the way, and of her daughter Rosasharn’s baby, for lack of medical care. Yet in the course of the novel she comes to understands that she, too, is more than herself, she is mother of all; the neediest, not the family, must come first; she is the Ma of all hungry children. All belong to one human family. The bond of the poor is all the stronger for their common privations and suffering, their proximity to sickness and death: ‘Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It aint so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do’ (ch. 30). The novel ends with a powerful symbol: Rosasharn, who has lost her baby, gives a starving man her breast.47
The Joad family affirms the altruistic response to need which humanizes and unifies the poor, and gives them spiritual strength and purpose. Battered and depleted, they preserve respect for life and the fighting will to survive to the end.
Among the poorest of the American poor, the family is distinguished by their dignity, decency, and resilience. In need themselves, they share with others: the novel, harsh as it is, is full of small acts of kindness. Hardship fuses the Joads with humanity, a microcosm of America, a nation of impoverished migrants, unbroken individualists.
Notes
1 The names of both writers proclaimed their opposition to the government. Silone was the pseudonym of Secondino Tranquilli, chosen in memory of Quintus Silo, a leader in the so-called Social War against Rome (91–88 bce), who aimed to rectify injustices in land distribution and wealth – injustices which Silone saw repeated in modern Italy. After the Italian racial laws of 1938, Levi as a Jew no longer had a secure place in Italian society, and when he wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli, in 1943–4, his life was in danger. These circumstances are alluded to in the book. See p. 205.
2 A precursor to the works of Silone and Levi is Manzoni’s justly loved novel, The Betrothed (I promessi sposi, 1827/1840), set among the peasantry in early 17th-century northern Italy in a time of famine and plague, with a remarkable account of a bread riot in Milan, flour powdering the cobblestones and streets littered with loaves of bread (ch. 12).
3 Silone and Levi use ‘cristiani’ in the sense of ‘human’ (Fontamara, ch. 4; Christ Stopped at Eboli, ch. 1).
4 Clark (1996: 263, 273). Levi also describes the waste of resources: for example, the erection of an expensive public toilet that no one used; and an extravagant annual fireworks display.
5 Similarly unjust survivals of feudalism in Russia are described by Turgenev. See p. 130ff.
6 On comparable ecological blunders, in England, France, Russia, and America, see Chapter 9, this volume.
7 In Christ Stopped at Eboli, Levi relates that when his sister, a doctor, visited him in exile in the south of Italy in 1935 and asked local officials about malaria in the region, she was given the official line that there was no malaria.
8 On the educational and economic difficulties of the Italian peasantry under Mussolini, see Corner (1997: 278) and Clark (1996: 278).
9 Gramsci (1994: 316–17). Gramsci’s Letters from Prison (1947) is also notable for its sympathetic depiction of the Italian poor in the Mussolini era.
10 In Silone (1934: 1). The translation of the original version of Fontamara is cited here. Silone revised Fontamara, but the descriptions of poverty remained the same.
11 Ibid., 6, 30. As in Zola (see pp. 144, 191), the Italian peasants, slaving like animals, are depicted in animal imagery. The local priest in Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli describes the peasants as ‘donkeys, not Christians’ (ch. 6); elsewhere they are ‘like animals harnessed to a wagon’ (ch. 13). In 1936, many peasants were unwillingly conscripted to fight in the Abyssinian war, feeling that life as a soldier could hardly be worse than civilian life: ‘To live like dogs here or to die like dogs there is just the same’ (ch. 14). When Italian officials banned Levi from practicing medicine in Gagliano, the peasants reacted without surprise: ‘We’re dogs [siamo dei cani], and in Rome they want us to die like dogs’ (ch. 22).
12 For examples of exploitation of the peasants, including their high taxation, see Silone (1934: 21, 65, 165–6). The difficulty of establishing a fair contract between landowners in need of workers and workers in desperate need of work to feed their families is repeatedly described by Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath. In The Grapes of Wrath, as in Fontamara, banks and bankers are among the villains. Levi, too, refers to the chronic indebtedness of the peasants, in Christ Stopped at Eboli: one of the richest landowners in the province, a baron, speeds around on his motorcycle mercilessly pursuing peasants for debts of as little as a few lire (ch. 5). Agents torment even remote impoverished villages with repeated visits, they ‘press the peasants for the payment of their debts, debts which they contracted in order to get through the year, but which amounted to far more than their yearly earnings, and which piled up until no season was favourable enough to liquidate them’; while the tax collector, heedless of the peasants’ poverty and indebtedness, insists that he is only doing his job (noi dobbiamo fare il nostro dovere), and seizes their oil and flour (ibid.).
13 Ibid., 234.
14 Ibid., 121.
15 Ibid., 159.
16 The name, Fontamara, can be translated as ‘Bitter Spring’, with a possible allusion to the biblical Mara, the place of bitter water (Exodus 15: 23).
17 Silone (1934: 176). This story recalls French children’s stories, in one of which an ex-soldier, asked to choose what he would most like after helping a fellow beggar who turns out to be St. Peter, asks for no more than the plat du jour (Darnton 1984: 33). It is also remarkably similar to the conclusion of Peretz’s classic Yiddish story, ‘Bontshe the Silent’. The modern Berardo, who emerges as a leader of the Fontamara peasants and is later murdered by the police (as is Casy in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), begins his protest by stating apropos the biblical passage, ‘Thou shalt earn thy daily bread in the sweat of thy brow’ (Genesis 3: 19), that he earns the daily bread of those who do not work (ch. 6). The same source, and with similar point, appears in Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848: ch. 1). See p. 14.
18 Silone (1934: 78–9). In Christ Stopped at Eboli, Levi is struck by the peasants’ indifference to the 1914–18 war, in which practically no family in his village was spared: ‘None boasted of his prowess, told his children about mighty battles, displayed his wounds, or complained of what he had been through’ (ch. 14).
19 Unjust laws against the peasantry are a continuous theme running through Fontamara. See Silone (1934: 84, 153–4, 166, 180, 194–5); compare Oliver Goldsmith: ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law’ (The Traveller [1764] I 386).
20 Silone (1934: 35, 156).
21 Ibid., 68.
22 Ibid., 56f. For a similarly lavish meal in a time of hunger in Zola’s Germinal, see p. 143. There are many other examples. See pp. 134, 152 note 121.
23 Ibid., 244. ‘What are we to do?’ recalls both the Bible (II Chronicles 20:12; Luke 3:10) and similar titles of works by Tolstoy and Lenin.
24 Ibid., 240. This passage is omitted in later editions of Fontamara. A similar martyrdom, of Casy the preacher, appears in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Both novels attack the powerful for suppressing the freedom of speech of the poor. On The Grapes of Wrath, see pp. 195–7. The peasant-leader, Berardo, named after the saint who distributed bread to the poor in famine (Silone 1934: 176; see pp. 204, 214 note 17), breaks out of the self-centred peasant mode of thinking – ognuno far i fatti suoi – to become a genuine leader, a fighter against injustice. Somewhat similar processes occur in Germinal and The Grapes of Wrath, in the case of Étienne and Tom Joad, respectively.
25 Another novel of the impoverished peasantry written under a dictatorship and banned during the same period as Fontamara was Platonov’s novel Soul (1935), set in the deserts of Soviet Turkmenistan. The censors showed sharp critical acumen in recognizing in Platonov’s professions of loyalty to Stalin in this work an underlying mockery.
26 On Levi’s political background, see Ward (1996: ch. 6).
27 A similar state of being thankfully cut off from History in time of war is described by J.M. Coetzee in The Life and Times of Michael K. See pp. 223–4.
28 When the peasants describe Levi as a ‘Christian soul’ (ch. 2), he does not disabuse them, nor does he point to the incongruity of the village children serenading him, a Jew, at Christmas (ch. 20). To an educated local, he is entirely at home in discussing Christian texts such as the Gospels and St. Augustine. When the village priest invites Levi to become church organist in the absence of anyone else locally who knows how to play, Levi at first refuses not because he is a Jew but because although he has studied piano he has not played in years (ch. 25).
29 The primitive tools and farming methods of the Italian peasants in the mid-1930s were matched by those of the Spanish peasants at the same time, described by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (1938). In the Italian villages, however, the American connection was sometimes apparent in modern tools.
30 Basilicata (then known by its Roman name, Lucania) had the highest infant mortality in the country, 14.9% in 1938, the average being 10.9% (Clark 1996: 275). On economic differences between landowners and peasants in Italy, see Tannenbaum (1972: ch. 4). The resentment of the local ‘doctors’ towards Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli recalls a similar dilemma of Dr. Lydgate’s in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: in both works change rouses resistance, even when change can save lives.
31 It is estimated that in Italy in the 1930s 300,000–400,000 Italians lived in hovels or caves, or crowded up to ten in a room (Smith 1959: 405). Fellini’s celebrated film, The Nights of Cabiria (1957), has a documentary scene filmed on location showing some of these people living in pits and caves on the outskirts of Rome.
32 The criticism that there is money for war but not for the poor is made by Cobbett of the British government, in Rural Rides (1830); a similar criticism is made by Hugo in Les Misérables. See p. 141. In general, military spending even in peacetime tends to be far more than spending on health, welfare, or education.
33 Brigands amid impoverished conditions were nothing new in Italian territories. Manzoni’s The Betrothed starts with an historical survey of brigandage in northern Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Peasant uprisings in the south in 1848 and in Sicily in 1860 were remembered with pride, as were those elsewhere in Europe, in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Galicia, the Balkans, among others. An Italian parliamentary commission reported in 1863 that ‘brigandage becomes a savage protest against centuries of injustice by men reduced to the utmost poverty’ (Smith 1959: 74). On bandits, see Hobsbawm (2000), who also discusses literary depictions, among others in the Robin Hood stories, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Schiller, and Walter Scott. In the popular imagination, bandits are on the side of the poor, ‘they prove that justice is possible, that poor men need not be humble, helpless and meek’; they aim to establish or restore justice, or ‘the old ways’: ‘the naked I’ve clothed and the hungry I’ve fed,/ And the rich I’ve sent empty away’ (ibid., 61, 62). In connection with the bandits, Levi recalls a satiric play put on annually at the beginning of Lent by the Gagliano locals, and giving forceful expression to their grievances against a dragon-like state (end ch. 22). This was a relatively late survival of an art form immensely popular in medieval Europe. Levi believed that a ‘peasant revolution’ was necessary (ch. 24). Similarly in England, public performances of stories of Robin Hood, though not overtly subversive, expressed grievances of the poor against the civil and religious authorities (see Knight and Ohlgren 1997). See pp. 55 note 18, 56 note 31.
34 Levi’s repeated image of the buried shoot, in the 1963 foreword and chapter 22 of Christ Stopped at Eboli (nascolto come un germoglio sotto la scorza dell’albero), recalls the imagery of germination of the formerly oppressed at the end of Zola’s Germinal. See pp. 191–2.
35 Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) presents a moral outlook on capitalism not unlike that in Huckleberry Finn: the millionaire Jay Gatsby, for all the sumptuous glitter of his jazz age lifestyle, in effect has nothing if he has not love, and his American dream of capitalist success is meaningless without love.
36 On environmental damage and the poor in The Grapes of Wrath and other works, see Chapter 9, this volume.
37 In Democracy in America, De Tocqueville warned, correctly, that democracy could itself fuel inequality, creating a business aristocracy.
38 On the background to The Grapes of Wrath, see Parini (1994).
39 Reynolds (2009: 287).
40 Marx, in writing of the wrath of the workers leading (as he saw it) to inevitable revolution (1930: 846), recalls Engels in The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 (1845), written before the two met. Elizabeth Gaskell, similarly, writes in Mary Barton (ch. 8) of the ‘rising fury’ of the downtrodden workers; and Émile Zola, in Germinal (1885), depicts the results of this fury in outbreaks of violence and destruction on the part of workers against their masters.
41 Steinbeck and Wallsten (1975: 159).
42 On The Grapes of Wrath in the context of proletarian culture of the 1930s, see Denning (1996: ch. 7).
43 On the sense of union with the universe brought about through identification with the poor, see Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (cited p. 208).
44 The concluding moment in The Grapes of Wrath is a literal example of the teaching of Ecclesiastes, adapted to the desperate conditions of the modern poor. See p. 213. For the citing of biblical texts in support of a socialist doctrine, see Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
45 See p. 198 note 14. For similar criticisms of capitalism, in Dickens’ Hard Times and Zola’s Germinal, see pp. 143–4, 188–9.
46 On the Joads’ reverence for the Bible, see p. 39.
47 On the origin of this story, see Benson (1984: 47).