The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression
Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious
daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a
mother who was only 16 when she gave birth to her and an abusive father who
spent his days playing semi-pro baseball and gambling. From the age she could
walk, she was running errands for her parents’ bakery and,
later, helping them raise crops until drought put their mortgaged farm out of
business. She rarely had time for school (or even enjoyed easy access to one)
and learned to read from pages of The Denver Post that were pasted to
the crude walls of their dugout home in East Colorado. (Her father described
the place as looking “like a grave.”)Babb’s observations of rural poverty, particularly during
the Depression and the Dust Bowl, would filter through the imaginations of
millions of Americans in years to come—though indirectly and often without
credit. Babb knew intimately of what she wrote. Even when her parents started
making better money, and she worked hard enough to earn a rare scholarship to
the University of Kansas, her first teaching job depressed her so deeply that
she couldn’t keep it for long. She was often required to do
janitorial work as well as run classes, and couldn’t bear to see children come
to school as poorly clothed and fed as she had been at their age. By the time
she moved to Los Angeles and found work as a radio and print journalist and
screenwriter in the late 1920s, the Depression hit and she spent several
months sleeping rough in Lafayette Park with other out-of-work writers.The first few decades of her life were an endless round of
desperate exigencies. When she finally started making a decent living, her
passion for political causes took up even more of her time.
She joined the John Reed Club, traveled throughout Europe and
postrevolutionary Russia, and attended one of the first League of American
Writers Congresses in New York City in the mid-1930s, driving there cross-country with Tillie Olsen and driving back again with Nelson Algren. In her
twenties, she became the primary carer for her younger sister, who suffered
from mental illness; and in later years, from 1971 to ’76, she cared for her
husband, the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, after he suffered a major
stroke. Whatever the decade, and whatever
the year, it was rare for Babb to scrape up more than a few hours here and
there to focus on the great stories, novels, and poems she had in her.And yet she managed to wrestle several hard-won achievements
into the world: She wrote probably the greatest novel ever written about the
Dust Bowl, Whose Names Are Unknown, only published many decades after
she sold the first chapters and outline in 1938; she excelled in several
different literary forms—from journalism (she co-edited a radical newspaper
with Claud Cockburn in London in the 1930s) and field notes from California
migrant camps to memoir, lyric poetry, short stories, and even screenwriting; and
despite her tendency to be more openly supportive of other writers than they
ever seemed to be of her, her life was so rich with good work that almost all
of it eventually achieved publication. The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life
was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions. Although she took
the cautious upward route of many self-taught young writers, she never caught
the decisive break she needed.The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life
was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions.Just when her carefully composed early
short stories and essays began attracting the attention of New York editors,
she signed a contract for a novel about the Dust Bowl, based on her youthful
experience in Red Rock, Oklahoma; and in order to further research the westward
migration of her fellow Oklahomans, she took a volunteer job with the Farm
Security Administration in Southern California, helping to move refugees into
state-funded, self-governing resettlement camps. Initially, Babb only intended
to gather information; but as in everything she did, she soon developed a
passionate concern for the people she met and the stories she heard, hurling
herself into the project with the fierce intensity of a woman who always seemed
to be working twice as hard as everyone around her.Her supervisor, Tom Collins, summed up her achievement in a letter
he wrote to Babb at the conclusion of her work:1.
You visited tents, shacks, cabins and hovels. 472 families or 2175 men, women,
and children.2.
You interviewed and signed up 309 families or 1465 men, women and children.3.
Total families you met and know 781.4.
Total individuals you met and know 3640.5.
You, therefore, spread happiness and hope to all these—and we thank you with
all our hearts.Her work for the FSA
yielded hundreds of pages of notes and photographs, many of which were
posthumously gathered in On the Dirty Plate
Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps
(2007). These laboriously accumulated pages would testify to two overriding
aspects of Babb’s character: that she wasn’t afraid of work and that she
possessed an almost bottomless compassion for everybody she met who led a
tougher life than she had. When a friend of her supervisor arrived at the camps to
research his own novel, Collins convinced Babb to turn over a copy of her
extensive field notes. The writer’s name was John
Steinbeck; he had plenty of talent and compassion of his own; and he knew how
to make quick use of good material when he saw it. Much of Babb’s work went
straight into Steinbeck’s next draft—especially the portions set in a
California refugee camp. And after The Grapes of Wrath became a
bestseller, Babb turned in the final draft of her own Dust Bowl novel to Bennet
Cerf, only to be told that the bookstores weren’t big enough for two novels on
the subject. And so Babb’s novel, titled Whose Names Are Unknown, lay
unpublished—despite continuous revisions and submissions to alternate
publishers—for nearly half a century.Which is not to say that Steinbeck didn’t
acknowledge how much he was aided by Babb’s field notes. In fact, he dedicated Grapes
to the individual who he felt had most helped him secure those valuable pages:
Sanora Babb’s supervisor, Tom Collins.Even if Names
had been allowed to compete with Grapes of Wrath in the literary
marketplace, it would almost certainly have failed to outsell or outshine it.
Babb’s work was largely antithetical to that of Steinbeck, and its “message”
was a lot more complicated. While Steinbeck focused on the road trip carrying
the Joads away from their already collapsed farmland, the entire first half of
Babb’s novel describes several years of the travails of the Dunne family, who struggle
to grow broomcorn and wheat while their land grows increasingly parched,
dust-storm-ridden and uninhabitable. In the second half of Babb’s novel, the
Dunnes don’t simply submit to the California farm growers, or lose their
temper, like Tom Joad, and flee, but bear down and become increasingly involved
with labor organizers and strike actions.Steinbeck dedicated The Grapes of Wrath to the individual who he felt had most helped him:
Sanora Babb’s supervisor.Steinbeck’s prose infused
the landscape with almost heavenly ambience, seeming to argue that the world
was bountiful enough for everybody, if wealthy landowners could be forced to
stop hoarding its riches. Babb’s prose, however, doesn’t exude the same
effulgence; and while Steinbeck’s characters never really surpass their
essential nature (whether they’re the drunken, well-meaning paisanos of Tortilla
Flat or the always-striving Joad family who can never outstrive an
exhausting world), Babb expects more from her principal characters than to die,
lose hope, relapse into natural weaknesses, or wither away. Her characters are
never beaten down so hard they don’t find a way to climb up out of their
failures and give life another chance.The conclusions of Grapes of Wrath
and Names couldn’t make this distinction more clear. Steinbeck’s Joads
are ultimately beaten down to little more than their barely pulsing biologies—huddling
together for warmth while the bereaved mother, Rose of Sharon, breastfeeds a
starving man. Babb’s characters struggle to their last narrative breath to
envision a future that will have them. In the concluding paragraph of Names,
confronted by corporate forces that own “guns and clubs and tear gas and vomit
gas and them vigilantes paid to fire the guns,” Babb’s Julia Dunne sees one
thing “as clear and perfect as a drop of rain. They would rise and fall and, in
their falling, rise again.”It’s hard to recall a writer who writes more
vividly and affectionately about American landscape than Babb; her characters
journey across its vastness with an almost invulnerable affection for what
surrounds them, whatever cataclysms erupt. Early in the novel, when Julia and
her daughters are pushed out of a neighbor’s home into an oncoming dust storm,
the true violence isn’t that of nature but of the neighbors, who have ejected
them from their home so they can take care of themselves. And nature is always beautiful, even when it’s at its most threatening:They
were almost a mile way, walking in the hollow, when the rain began in large
slow drops, and the far horizon quivered with sheet lightning. Fork lightning
snapped suddenly, splitting the moving clouds, flashing close to the wires. The
whole flat world under an angry churning sky was miraculously lighted for a
moment. A strange liquid clarity extended to the ends of the earth. Julia saw
the trees along the creek and animals grazing far away. The bleak farmyards
with their stern buildings, scattered sparsely on the plains, stood out in
naked lonely desolation. A sly delicate wind was rising. Their dresses moved
ever so little. Thunder clapped and boomed. They were afraid of the electricity
that speared into the ground with a terrifying crash after. Julia stopped for a
moment to get her breath and look at the approaching storm. Then she took
Lonnie from the bumping cart and pulled her along by the hand, while Myra
pulled the cart and clung to the pail of milk. They moved off the road away
from the wires, going through the open hollow.There is no Steinbeckian pantheistic force in Babb’s
landscapes that joins human beings into a continuous environmental oneness;
there is only nature’s vast beautiful indifference across which people live,
love, struggle, and yearn. When her daughter asks if a cyclone might be forming,
Julia consoles her: “It’s only an electric storm.… Rain won’t hurt us. It’s just
scary.” Nature is neither malign nor consolatory; it’s implicitly nothing more
or less than itself.
And fear doesn’t arise from the world; it arises from individuals
when they are bereft of one another.The failure of Names
wasn’t the only event in Babb’s long event-filled life that was difficult to
distinguish from legend. Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s compassionate and
respectful biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (largely based on stories recounted by Babb and her family, as well as passages
from Babb’s work), is filled with tales of a life that was lived to almost
tall-tale proportions. At the age of 5, Babb earned the nickname “Cheyenne—Riding
like the Wind” from an Otoe chief after the pony he gave her went galloping
wildly out of town while unyielding young Babb held on tightly, bareback. And
though she was unable to start school full time until age 10, she worked hard
enough to be named class valedictorian—only to have her graduation speech cut
at the last minute when the school authorities decided not to honor the
daughter of a notorious local gambler.As a young woman in Los
Angeles, she went out to MGM looking for screenwriting work, where she caught
the always-roving eye of Irving Thalberg, who invited her back to his office to
sign up for a different career entirely—one that probably required spending at
least some time on the casting couch. She turned down both offers and, when
later asked if she was an actress, replied, “No. I’ve just had a narrow
escape.” At one point, when she was out on a date with her eventual husband, James
Wong Howe, a “finely dressed” woman drove up behind them in her car and,
angered by the sight of a white woman with an Asian man, shouted abuse. In
reply, Babb engaged in a street altercation that, by the end, left the woman
shouting “My hat! My $100 hat!” This absorbing biography, written with both
affection and admiration, shows Babb as one of the most indefatigable
characters in American literary history. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet
who most inspired her, Babb “wasn’t someone who believed in monogamy,” and she
happily shared her passions with many notable men—such as William Saroyan and
Ralph Ellison. (In fact, her second novel, The Lost Traveler, is one of
the few naturalistic novels in which the sexually adventurous young woman isn’t
punished for moral failure, as Theodore Dreiser’s antiheroine is in Sister Carrie
or Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier is in The Awakening.) She traveled
extensively, often hitchhiking alone across country and through Mexico; she wrote
the lyrics for a popular song, which were then “swiped” by someone who
published them under their own name; and she organized a walnut growers’ strike in
Modesto, California, which caused her to spend at least one night in jail. It was only when Babb began
suffering bouts of ill health—partly the result of an impoverished childhood
diet and partly from a nervous breakdown set off by learning that her former
lover Ralph Ellison had remarried—that she finally settled down exclusively
with Howe. But even then, she always seemed to be doing the work of three or
four women. She helped him buy and manage a Chinatown restaurant and took
charge of long visits from his family while he was working on movie sets. They
surreptitiously bought a house together in the Hollywood Hills, and after California’s ban on interracial marriage was found unconstitutional, they married in 1949. But even then, it
wasn’t easy to find a judge who would perform the service. She was clearly as passionate in her political activism as
she was in her personal relationships. After many challenging years of marriage,
when her relationship with Howe had not been entirely monogamous, she
eventually settled down, and the two would often write “small sweet love notes”
and leave them around the house for each other to find. One of her best short
stories, “Reconciliation”—about a married couple coming
together again after a separation to tend their neglected garden—reads like an
homage to their long, often difficult, and just as often devoted, relationship. While Babb endured more than her share of bad luck in
publishing, she developed many devoted friends and fans who saw
her through decades of darkness into a late middle-aged period that approached
modest fame. Her short stories were regularly published in various significant
journals and reprinted in “best of the year” volumes; she found an agent, and
eventually sold and published her second novel, The Lost Traveler, based
on childhood memories of growing up with a sometimes brutal, errant father. Her
1970 memoir, An Owl on Every Post, earned a brief time on bestseller
lists, adorned with quotes from her longtime friends and admirers Ralph Ellison
and Ray Bradbury.Dunkle’s biography likewise relies on the work of Babb’s
friends, scholars, and especially her late-life agent, Joanna Dearcrop, who
helped Babb finally get Whose Names Are Unknown published after a
half-century delay in 2004, while Babb was lying in bed with an exhausted body
that couldn’t carry her much further. And eventually, her remarkable field
notes, cited by Ken Burns in his Dust Bowl documentary on PBS, led to new
editions of her poetry and prose.The major question about Babb’s remarkable work
is not “Why did she write so little?” but rather: “How did she find the time to
write anything at all?”While she is best known for
a novel that wasn’t published until she was almost dead, her gifts are
beautifully displayed in numerous short stories and poems that carry readers
through regions of memory, landscape, and experience. On one journey through
Mexico and South America, Babb gathered material for “The Larger Cage,” about
an orphan who finds a home (of sorts) with a family that sells wild local birds
to tourists; they teach him to “train” the birds by filling their bellies with
buckshot, which inevitably kills them. But human cruelty is never the subject
of Babb’s fiction—rather it’s the human ability to bring kindness into the
world, and the protagonist of “The Larger Cage” learns that there are better
ways to train beautiful birds than by tormenting them. It is perhaps the most
remarkable (and unsatisfactory) fact of Babb’s life that while she failed to
produce big novels at times that were acceptable to the publishing industry,
she spent her life succeeding in far less commercial forms—such as the short
story, the lyric, and the memoir. Many writers are recalled for the great things they
achieved in life apart from their living of it; but Babb’s
greatest genius may have been her ability to produce lasting work without
leaving anyone in her life behind.
Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious
daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a
mother who was only 16 when she gave birth to her and an abusive father who
spent his days playing semi-pro baseball and gambling. From the age she could
walk, she was running errands for her parents’ bakery and,
later, helping them raise crops until drought put their mortgaged farm out of
business. She rarely had time for school (or even enjoyed easy access to one)
and learned to read from pages of The Denver Post that were pasted to
the crude walls of their dugout home in East Colorado. (Her father described
the place as looking “like a grave.”)Babb’s observations of rural poverty, particularly during
the Depression and the Dust Bowl, would filter through the imaginations of
millions of Americans in years to come—though indirectly and often without
credit. Babb knew intimately of what she wrote. Even when her parents started
making better money, and she worked hard enough to earn a rare scholarship to
the University of Kansas, her first teaching job depressed her so deeply that
she couldn’t keep it for long. She was often required to do
janitorial work as well as run classes, and couldn’t bear to see children come
to school as poorly clothed and fed as she had been at their age. By the time
she moved to Los Angeles and found work as a radio and print journalist and
screenwriter in the late 1920s, the Depression hit and she spent several
months sleeping rough in Lafayette Park with other out-of-work writers.The first few decades of her life were an endless round of
desperate exigencies. When she finally started making a decent living, her
passion for political causes took up even more of her time.
She joined the John Reed Club, traveled throughout Europe and
postrevolutionary Russia, and attended one of the first League of American
Writers Congresses in New York City in the mid-1930s, driving there cross-country with Tillie Olsen and driving back again with Nelson Algren. In her
twenties, she became the primary carer for her younger sister, who suffered
from mental illness; and in later years, from 1971 to ’76, she cared for her
husband, the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, after he suffered a major
stroke. Whatever the decade, and whatever
the year, it was rare for Babb to scrape up more than a few hours here and
there to focus on the great stories, novels, and poems she had in her.And yet she managed to wrestle several hard-won achievements
into the world: She wrote probably the greatest novel ever written about the
Dust Bowl, Whose Names Are Unknown, only published many decades after
she sold the first chapters and outline in 1938; she excelled in several
different literary forms—from journalism (she co-edited a radical newspaper
with Claud Cockburn in London in the 1930s) and field notes from California
migrant camps to memoir, lyric poetry, short stories, and even screenwriting; and
despite her tendency to be more openly supportive of other writers than they
ever seemed to be of her, her life was so rich with good work that almost all
of it eventually achieved publication. The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life
was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions. Although she took
the cautious upward route of many self-taught young writers, she never caught
the decisive break she needed.The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life
was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions.Just when her carefully composed early
short stories and essays began attracting the attention of New York editors,
she signed a contract for a novel about the Dust Bowl, based on her youthful
experience in Red Rock, Oklahoma; and in order to further research the westward
migration of her fellow Oklahomans, she took a volunteer job with the Farm
Security Administration in Southern California, helping to move refugees into
state-funded, self-governing resettlement camps. Initially, Babb only intended
to gather information; but as in everything she did, she soon developed a
passionate concern for the people she met and the stories she heard, hurling
herself into the project with the fierce intensity of a woman who always seemed
to be working twice as hard as everyone around her.Her supervisor, Tom Collins, summed up her achievement in a letter
he wrote to Babb at the conclusion of her work:1.
You visited tents, shacks, cabins and hovels. 472 families or 2175 men, women,
and children.2.
You interviewed and signed up 309 families or 1465 men, women and children.3.
Total families you met and know 781.4.
Total individuals you met and know 3640.5.
You, therefore, spread happiness and hope to all these—and we thank you with
all our hearts.Her work for the FSA
yielded hundreds of pages of notes and photographs, many of which were
posthumously gathered in On the Dirty Plate
Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps
(2007). These laboriously accumulated pages would testify to two overriding
aspects of Babb’s character: that she wasn’t afraid of work and that she
possessed an almost bottomless compassion for everybody she met who led a
tougher life than she had. When a friend of her supervisor arrived at the camps to
research his own novel, Collins convinced Babb to turn over a copy of her
extensive field notes. The writer’s name was John
Steinbeck; he had plenty of talent and compassion of his own; and he knew how
to make quick use of good material when he saw it. Much of Babb’s work went
straight into Steinbeck’s next draft—especially the portions set in a
California refugee camp. And after The Grapes of Wrath became a
bestseller, Babb turned in the final draft of her own Dust Bowl novel to Bennet
Cerf, only to be told that the bookstores weren’t big enough for two novels on
the subject. And so Babb’s novel, titled Whose Names Are Unknown, lay
unpublished—despite continuous revisions and submissions to alternate
publishers—for nearly half a century.Which is not to say that Steinbeck didn’t
acknowledge how much he was aided by Babb’s field notes. In fact, he dedicated Grapes
to the individual who he felt had most helped him secure those valuable pages:
Sanora Babb’s supervisor, Tom Collins.Even if Names
had been allowed to compete with Grapes of Wrath in the literary
marketplace, it would almost certainly have failed to outsell or outshine it.
Babb’s work was largely antithetical to that of Steinbeck, and its “message”
was a lot more complicated. While Steinbeck focused on the road trip carrying
the Joads away from their already collapsed farmland, the entire first half of
Babb’s novel describes several years of the travails of the Dunne family, who struggle
to grow broomcorn and wheat while their land grows increasingly parched,
dust-storm-ridden and uninhabitable. In the second half of Babb’s novel, the
Dunnes don’t simply submit to the California farm growers, or lose their
temper, like Tom Joad, and flee, but bear down and become increasingly involved
with labor organizers and strike actions.Steinbeck dedicated The Grapes of Wrath to the individual who he felt had most helped him:
Sanora Babb’s supervisor.Steinbeck’s prose infused
the landscape with almost heavenly ambience, seeming to argue that the world
was bountiful enough for everybody, if wealthy landowners could be forced to
stop hoarding its riches. Babb’s prose, however, doesn’t exude the same
effulgence; and while Steinbeck’s characters never really surpass their
essential nature (whether they’re the drunken, well-meaning paisanos of Tortilla
Flat or the always-striving Joad family who can never outstrive an
exhausting world), Babb expects more from her principal characters than to die,
lose hope, relapse into natural weaknesses, or wither away. Her characters are
never beaten down so hard they don’t find a way to climb up out of their
failures and give life another chance.The conclusions of Grapes of Wrath
and Names couldn’t make this distinction more clear. Steinbeck’s Joads
are ultimately beaten down to little more than their barely pulsing biologies—huddling
together for warmth while the bereaved mother, Rose of Sharon, breastfeeds a
starving man. Babb’s characters struggle to their last narrative breath to
envision a future that will have them. In the concluding paragraph of Names,
confronted by corporate forces that own “guns and clubs and tear gas and vomit
gas and them vigilantes paid to fire the guns,” Babb’s Julia Dunne sees one
thing “as clear and perfect as a drop of rain. They would rise and fall and, in
their falling, rise again.”It’s hard to recall a writer who writes more
vividly and affectionately about American landscape than Babb; her characters
journey across its vastness with an almost invulnerable affection for what
surrounds them, whatever cataclysms erupt. Early in the novel, when Julia and
her daughters are pushed out of a neighbor’s home into an oncoming dust storm,
the true violence isn’t that of nature but of the neighbors, who have ejected
them from their home so they can take care of themselves. And nature is always beautiful, even when it’s at its most threatening:They
were almost a mile way, walking in the hollow, when the rain began in large
slow drops, and the far horizon quivered with sheet lightning. Fork lightning
snapped suddenly, splitting the moving clouds, flashing close to the wires. The
whole flat world under an angry churning sky was miraculously lighted for a
moment. A strange liquid clarity extended to the ends of the earth. Julia saw
the trees along the creek and animals grazing far away. The bleak farmyards
with their stern buildings, scattered sparsely on the plains, stood out in
naked lonely desolation. A sly delicate wind was rising. Their dresses moved
ever so little. Thunder clapped and boomed. They were afraid of the electricity
that speared into the ground with a terrifying crash after. Julia stopped for a
moment to get her breath and look at the approaching storm. Then she took
Lonnie from the bumping cart and pulled her along by the hand, while Myra
pulled the cart and clung to the pail of milk. They moved off the road away
from the wires, going through the open hollow.There is no Steinbeckian pantheistic force in Babb’s
landscapes that joins human beings into a continuous environmental oneness;
there is only nature’s vast beautiful indifference across which people live,
love, struggle, and yearn. When her daughter asks if a cyclone might be forming,
Julia consoles her: “It’s only an electric storm.… Rain won’t hurt us. It’s just
scary.” Nature is neither malign nor consolatory; it’s implicitly nothing more
or less than itself.
And fear doesn’t arise from the world; it arises from individuals
when they are bereft of one another.The failure of Names
wasn’t the only event in Babb’s long event-filled life that was difficult to
distinguish from legend. Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s compassionate and
respectful biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (largely based on stories recounted by Babb and her family, as well as passages
from Babb’s work), is filled with tales of a life that was lived to almost
tall-tale proportions. At the age of 5, Babb earned the nickname “Cheyenne—Riding
like the Wind” from an Otoe chief after the pony he gave her went galloping
wildly out of town while unyielding young Babb held on tightly, bareback. And
though she was unable to start school full time until age 10, she worked hard
enough to be named class valedictorian—only to have her graduation speech cut
at the last minute when the school authorities decided not to honor the
daughter of a notorious local gambler.As a young woman in Los
Angeles, she went out to MGM looking for screenwriting work, where she caught
the always-roving eye of Irving Thalberg, who invited her back to his office to
sign up for a different career entirely—one that probably required spending at
least some time on the casting couch. She turned down both offers and, when
later asked if she was an actress, replied, “No. I’ve just had a narrow
escape.” At one point, when she was out on a date with her eventual husband, James
Wong Howe, a “finely dressed” woman drove up behind them in her car and,
angered by the sight of a white woman with an Asian man, shouted abuse. In
reply, Babb engaged in a street altercation that, by the end, left the woman
shouting “My hat! My $100 hat!” This absorbing biography, written with both
affection and admiration, shows Babb as one of the most indefatigable
characters in American literary history. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet
who most inspired her, Babb “wasn’t someone who believed in monogamy,” and she
happily shared her passions with many notable men—such as William Saroyan and
Ralph Ellison. (In fact, her second novel, The Lost Traveler, is one of
the few naturalistic novels in which the sexually adventurous young woman isn’t
punished for moral failure, as Theodore Dreiser’s antiheroine is in Sister Carrie
or Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier is in The Awakening.) She traveled
extensively, often hitchhiking alone across country and through Mexico; she wrote
the lyrics for a popular song, which were then “swiped” by someone who
published them under their own name; and she organized a walnut growers’ strike in
Modesto, California, which caused her to spend at least one night in jail. It was only when Babb began
suffering bouts of ill health—partly the result of an impoverished childhood
diet and partly from a nervous breakdown set off by learning that her former
lover Ralph Ellison had remarried—that she finally settled down exclusively
with Howe. But even then, she always seemed to be doing the work of three or
four women. She helped him buy and manage a Chinatown restaurant and took
charge of long visits from his family while he was working on movie sets. They
surreptitiously bought a house together in the Hollywood Hills, and after California’s ban on interracial marriage was found unconstitutional, they married in 1949. But even then, it
wasn’t easy to find a judge who would perform the service. She was clearly as passionate in her political activism as
she was in her personal relationships. After many challenging years of marriage,
when her relationship with Howe had not been entirely monogamous, she
eventually settled down, and the two would often write “small sweet love notes”
and leave them around the house for each other to find. One of her best short
stories, “Reconciliation”—about a married couple coming
together again after a separation to tend their neglected garden—reads like an
homage to their long, often difficult, and just as often devoted, relationship. While Babb endured more than her share of bad luck in
publishing, she developed many devoted friends and fans who saw
her through decades of darkness into a late middle-aged period that approached
modest fame. Her short stories were regularly published in various significant
journals and reprinted in “best of the year” volumes; she found an agent, and
eventually sold and published her second novel, The Lost Traveler, based
on childhood memories of growing up with a sometimes brutal, errant father. Her
1970 memoir, An Owl on Every Post, earned a brief time on bestseller
lists, adorned with quotes from her longtime friends and admirers Ralph Ellison
and Ray Bradbury.Dunkle’s biography likewise relies on the work of Babb’s
friends, scholars, and especially her late-life agent, Joanna Dearcrop, who
helped Babb finally get Whose Names Are Unknown published after a
half-century delay in 2004, while Babb was lying in bed with an exhausted body
that couldn’t carry her much further. And eventually, her remarkable field
notes, cited by Ken Burns in his Dust Bowl documentary on PBS, led to new
editions of her poetry and prose.The major question about Babb’s remarkable work
is not “Why did she write so little?” but rather: “How did she find the time to
write anything at all?”While she is best known for
a novel that wasn’t published until she was almost dead, her gifts are
beautifully displayed in numerous short stories and poems that carry readers
through regions of memory, landscape, and experience. On one journey through
Mexico and South America, Babb gathered material for “The Larger Cage,” about
an orphan who finds a home (of sorts) with a family that sells wild local birds
to tourists; they teach him to “train” the birds by filling their bellies with
buckshot, which inevitably kills them. But human cruelty is never the subject
of Babb’s fiction—rather it’s the human ability to bring kindness into the
world, and the protagonist of “The Larger Cage” learns that there are better
ways to train beautiful birds than by tormenting them. It is perhaps the most
remarkable (and unsatisfactory) fact of Babb’s life that while she failed to
produce big novels at times that were acceptable to the publishing industry,
she spent her life succeeding in far less commercial forms—such as the short
story, the lyric, and the memoir. Many writers are recalled for the great things they
achieved in life apart from their living of it; but Babb’s
greatest genius may have been her ability to produce lasting work without
leaving anyone in her life behind.
