Probably the first book I read that I understood to have a
political perspective as well as a story was Bones of Plenty, by Lois Phillips Hudson. Based on her childhood on
a North Dakota farm that was lost to the Depression and the Dust Bowl, it was
published in 1962, and I must have read it soon after. Nearly 60 years later
I'm hazy about the plot, but I can still bring up the emotions I felt. At 12 I
probably hadn't read, or at least understood, many books without happy endings,
where hard work and stubborn independence went unrewarded. Decades later when I
read Tim Egan's chronicle of the Dust Bowl, The
Worst Hard Time, I recalled the world that Lois had described.
I had met Lois Hudson a year or two earlier when she visited
our cabin on Harstene Island. She was familiar with the area, having taught school in Shelton a few years before. I was struck even as a child by her intensity and
responsiveness in conversation. I think she came to represent a kind of
intellectual glamour for me.
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| Lois Phillips Hudson |
Three weeks after her visit, she wrote to my mom -- four
single spaced pages of follow-up musings, starting out:
It is more difficult than I had imagined to resume a
conversation on paper three weeks after it has been begun on a beach. I begin
to realize that the things I was saying will look pretty shallow and
irresponsible written down. That's always the case--that's why when I want to
communicate at all precisely I write.
She went on to sort through her ideas on the raising of
children (hers were preschoolers at that time), the role of women, and the
meaning and value of creativity.
... Everybody is so worried about being CREATIVE these days.
(Of course that's part of what's wrong with our kid-raising. If we aren't so
foolish as to think we'll stop all their creative impulses by forcing them to
stop crayoning on the wall, we are all guilty of that worry in more subtle
ways, whereas, probably if the truth were known, a genuine creative ability is
just about impossible to stifle, if we can infer anything from the lives of
artists.) Randy [Randolph Phillips, her then husband] noticed a card in a
birthday section of "avant-garde" greeting cards that read "I'm
not creative, but Happy Birthday," with an appropriate illustration. Why?
Why this obsession with being creative? Is it the fear of conformity we all
suffer from? The fear of automation? Just the fear of having too many people in
the world? The fear of too much leisure? The fear of having machines do so many
things that nothing human beings will do will have any significance any more?
We've worked so hard to have time to enjoy life and now nobody can enjoy life.
...
To me one answer is not that we must all be creative but
that we must all listen to one another. Too many offenses have already been
committed in the name of creativity, and too many people who are blessed with
brilliance, perception, judgement, education, and sensitivity have not been
listened to, and indeed, have felt too humble to speak out. It is the
responsibility of these people to support what they think is good, and frankly
and fearlessly denounce what they think is bad. And that is not at all a
passive role I wouldn't think. Again, I know no social history, but I think
that's what the aristocrats once did, and they certainly did not feel inferior
to the artists. American women of our class are in a position to take over that
function once served by the aristocracy, and that fact that no element in
American society seems to be doing that seriously and strongly at the moment
may explain why so many uncreative hacks like Jerome Weidman can get to
reviews for stuff that obviously hasn't been rewritten once. (He has sentences
in his latest book that I'm quite positive even he cannot untangle now that the
ink is dry. This is an inexcusable state of affairs.) Also, American women of
our class can have a huge effect on politics, if we will become more active.
Men are all too busy making money and laughing at their wives for writing letters,
but after the last couple of weeks, perhaps they won't laugh so much. Randy
hasn't made any more cracks! There ARE things to be done, and I admit that the
human condition requires that gifted people must be DOING or go mad. My thesis,
to make a needed repetition, is that we don't necessarily have to have some
kind of formal job--it's the pressures of this particular society that make us
feel that way.
Reading the letter now, it strikes me how much of what she
says presents issues and ideas that Betty Friedan brought to national attention
a few years later in The Feminine
Mystique. I'm not entirely sure what she meant by "women of our
class," but she and Rosa both were educated and talented women from
working-class backgrounds.
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