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Friday, December 12, 2008
OK, this is swiftly becoming the Dead Writers blog, owing mainly to my slow pace. So far this autumn I've posted new bits at roughly the same rate as major American authors have passed away. But I feel compelled to write a little about Studs Terkel, who died earlier this month. He's credited with inventing, or at least popularizing, the genre of oral history with his books like Working, The Good War, and Hard Times. I would be dishonest to go on and on praising him like long-time admirer since I've only read one of his books, but the one book of his that I have read has been sticking with me for a variety of reasons.
About a year and a half ago I read Hard Times, his oral history of the Great Depression, as research for my second novel (which is like 99.99999% finished, I swear). My novel is set during the Depression, and I'd read some histories of the Depression itself as well as some more specific works focusing on particular issues or figures of that time. But Hard Times opened up that world for me in a way nothing else had. Terkel rarely writes with his own voice and instead lets his many interview subjects speak for themselves. Not only do you benefit from the fact that he gets so many completely different people to chime in (stockbrokers who lost everything, CEOs who emerged unscathed and never understood what all the fuss was about, union workers who fought with cops, cops who had to help evict people from their homes, career criminals, priests, social workers, society wives, Pullman porters, Latino fruit pickers, etc), you get to hear it in their own words. As a fiction writer, that is priceless -- to hear the pacing and rhythm of their sentences, the slang they used or didn't used, the things they talked about and the things they talked around... you just can't get that from reading straight history, or old novels, or old newspapers, or even from watching old films. You need to hear the way people really spoke, and Terkel's book is like a giant microphone hanging over the heads of legions of people who lived through that time.
The other benefit of reading oral history is that it reminds you that, no matter the era or place, viewpoints are as varied as people themselves. When you think historically, it's tempting to put certain time periods into one box or another, to categorize them. So in the Twenties, everyone was drunk and prosperous; in the Thirties, everyone was hardscrabble and threadbare; in the Forties, it was all about fighting the war with dignity and courage. Partly this is how we're taught in high school, partly it's the result of the shortcuts and sifting that any historian not writing a 1,000-page book has to make. But when you read Hard Times you see just how fractured and complicated and messy every time period is. There are people in the book who tell Terkel that one of the oddly nice things about the Depression was how it brought people together, how the fact that everyone was poor meant that people were more willing to pitch in and help out, to get through this together. But then there are people who tell him the opposite, that folks in the Thirties were under such pressure that they fought each other for every scrap, that they were too afraid to help the less fortunate because more poor saps would ask for their help, that during the Depression they saw the depths of human meanness. There are people who tell him that FDR saved the nation, and some who say that he destroyed it. Some blame the banks, some blame the government. (Sound familiar??) Some say that survivors of the Depression lived on to become extremely thrifty for the rest of their lives, so terrified that everything could be taken away again that they let nothing go to waste. Some say that the survivors could only expunge their awful memories by living exorbitantly for the rest of their lives, working to acquire all the luxuries they'd been deprived of during those awful years.
This is what I love about reading histories, and why I've wound up writing two historical novels even though it's not a genre I feel wedded to. Looking closely at a past time allows us to see through the easy categorizations and labels, to see all the layers and contradictions and madness in the human heart. We live with this day by day, yet sometimes we assume that "times were simpler back then." They weren't. We have always been this complicated, this divisive, this confused.
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About a year and a half ago I read Hard Times, his oral history of the Great Depression, as research for my second novel (which is like 99.99999% finished, I swear). My novel is set during the Depression, and I'd read some histories of the Depression itself as well as some more specific works focusing on particular issues or figures of that time. But Hard Times opened up that world for me in a way nothing else had. Terkel rarely writes with his own voice and instead lets his many interview subjects speak for themselves. Not only do you benefit from the fact that he gets so many completely different people to chime in (stockbrokers who lost everything, CEOs who emerged unscathed and never understood what all the fuss was about, union workers who fought with cops, cops who had to help evict people from their homes, career criminals, priests, social workers, society wives, Pullman porters, Latino fruit pickers, etc), you get to hear it in their own words. As a fiction writer, that is priceless -- to hear the pacing and rhythm of their sentences, the slang they used or didn't used, the things they talked about and the things they talked around... you just can't get that from reading straight history, or old novels, or old newspapers, or even from watching old films. You need to hear the way people really spoke, and Terkel's book is like a giant microphone hanging over the heads of legions of people who lived through that time.
The other benefit of reading oral history is that it reminds you that, no matter the era or place, viewpoints are as varied as people themselves. When you think historically, it's tempting to put certain time periods into one box or another, to categorize them. So in the Twenties, everyone was drunk and prosperous; in the Thirties, everyone was hardscrabble and threadbare; in the Forties, it was all about fighting the war with dignity and courage. Partly this is how we're taught in high school, partly it's the result of the shortcuts and sifting that any historian not writing a 1,000-page book has to make. But when you read Hard Times you see just how fractured and complicated and messy every time period is. There are people in the book who tell Terkel that one of the oddly nice things about the Depression was how it brought people together, how the fact that everyone was poor meant that people were more willing to pitch in and help out, to get through this together. But then there are people who tell him the opposite, that folks in the Thirties were under such pressure that they fought each other for every scrap, that they were too afraid to help the less fortunate because more poor saps would ask for their help, that during the Depression they saw the depths of human meanness. There are people who tell him that FDR saved the nation, and some who say that he destroyed it. Some blame the banks, some blame the government. (Sound familiar??) Some say that survivors of the Depression lived on to become extremely thrifty for the rest of their lives, so terrified that everything could be taken away again that they let nothing go to waste. Some say that the survivors could only expunge their awful memories by living exorbitantly for the rest of their lives, working to acquire all the luxuries they'd been deprived of during those awful years.
This is what I love about reading histories, and why I've wound up writing two historical novels even though it's not a genre I feel wedded to. Looking closely at a past time allows us to see through the easy categorizations and labels, to see all the layers and contradictions and madness in the human heart. We live with this day by day, yet sometimes we assume that "times were simpler back then." They weren't. We have always been this complicated, this divisive, this confused.
link to this | File: