MEN WORKING—John Faulkner—Harcourf, Brace ($2.50).
A remarkable first novel came out of the South this week, and the Jeeter Lesters, Ty Waldens, Snopes and Joads moved over to make room for a new family of U.S. literary Kallikaks — the Taylors. Its author: John Faulkner, younger brother of William Faulkner (Sanctuary and eleven other novels). The story: how the Taylors and their neighbors exchanged the certain poverty of sharecropping in Mississippi for the uncertainties of city life on the WPA.
Author Faulkner, a former WPA official, tells this shabby and pathetic tale with great literary tact, balancing against the slapstick ignorance and innate apathy of his unheroic characters, their deep sense of their own personal dignity, natural courtesy, terrible patience, thwarted honesty. No idealization, Men Working is the most human book that has been written about WPA workers, the saddest and the funniest.
There are twelve Taylors. Paw is "a stoop-shouldered man in faded and patched overalls and jumper," whose "whole attitude [was] one of vague indecision and innate bewilderment." Maw "was heavy and cumbersome with un attended childbearing and her feet were flat and encased in low tennis shoes . . . with the laces carelessly flapping around her bare dirt-stained ankles. . . ." The children were Hub, Virginia ("Virginia ain't what you'd call a godly girl," said Paw), Gwendolin and Eugenia (who had "ferret-like eyes"), Harold and McKinley, Jutland, Buddy (who had a withered leg and a knack for drawing) and Reno (pro nounced Rinno). To Reno, their first born, Paw & Maw proudly referred as their "monstous curosity." He was 20 years old, six feet two inches tall, weighed less than 50 pounds, and drooled into a sparse beard.
Jubilo. It had been a good year. "The good land lay beneath the sun. And the mules with sleek sides . . . slid the flashing plows through the good land and laid it wide for planting. . . . The owners of the pale green striped fields pushed their feet deep into the pulverized ground. . . . Best stand we've had since Nineteen Twenty. We'll make a whopper of a crop this year."
Then the WPA came to Mississippi. The WP & A, the Taylors and their neighbors called it. It looked like the year of jubilo to them. "Lots of the folks is moving to town," said one of them, "I seen Steve Joe today and he told me the Social Worker had done notified him to come to town next Tuesday to have a intercourse with her so I guess he will be on the WP & A soon." The Taylors decided to go too. They had not bothered to tell their landlord they were leaving his crop in the fields.
"Why, God damn it," said Mr. Young, "you can't just go off and leave a man's crop like that. . . . And so far you've got the best stand you've had in twenty years." "I don't aim to just leave no man," said Paw, "seems like you ought to be able to git enough hands to finish just this one crop."
"One crop, hell," said Mr. Young, "this makes seven families I've lost this week. This God damned WPA is ruining the country."