But unlike Ford, Lang cannot find an equivalent poetry for his more functional scenes; the movie stiffens when aiming for the topical feel of social drama. It is up to Fonda to inject the necessary sense of pain and failure. His Eddie has the incipient ghostliness of a man under a death sentence, but Fonda grounds his life and death in prosaic agony. Observe the scene in which Eddie, who has been driving a truck, is fired for making a late delivery. Eddie begs the boss for a second chance. The scene is as pathetic as life, because Fonda doesn’t stint: He squirms as a man must sometimes squirm. He martyrs himself to the dumb humiliation of the scene, the wretched office, the dead-eyed man behind the desk.
Most stars avoid portraying this kind of pain—the unglamorous, unviolent pain inflicted by power. How does it redound to a star’s glory to remind us too much of ourselves, especially ourselves as we squirm? Fonda’s offering is not to mime this scene, but to squirm it. And though we resent the absence of glamour, we can’t fail to accept that offering as a gift of the soul.
Later, Eddie is on death row. To set up an escape, he cuts his wrists. They are hidden behind his back as he bends a tin cup and cuts himself on the crease. Lang shoots it as a staring match between caged man and jailer. The guard leans back, smugly smoking a pipe; Eddie faces him, sweating and trembling. A vein rises in his forehead; his jaw grinds; his eyes fix on those of the guard as if he were cutting the man’s throat. And what is he doing with his hands? Fonda has found the look of murder, and it is all about presence as absence: the power of what is not seen.
The bravery and bitter clarity of this performance are striking next to its descendant of thirty years later, Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde. The bank robbers of the 1967 Arthur Penn film are, in the bodies of Beatty and Faye Dunaway, pure creatures of pop, and when they are shot up at the end, the styling of the mayhem has enormous glamour. But Eddie’s end is only the release of a miserable creature from the curse of life. He is a loser, whereas Beatty’s Clyde is a winner, right down to his blazing exit: Clyde dies the kind of explosive death children imagine themselves dying.
But no child ever imagined dying like Eddie, nor any adult: sobbing, holding his dead lover, seeking an angel in the trees. Eddie dies quietly, pathetically. No one will remember him.
* * *
Fonda is a watcher, a skeptic; he loves America and often hates what it does to people, or what people do in its name. His ascension in the late 1930s as angry man and antihero suggests a through-line to the audience, an understanding of subtleties and of the swelling waves of bad feeling in the land. His performances of these years do not come from nothing.
Asked how the Great Depression affected him, Henry said, “I was barely aware of it. We were in a depression as actors all the time.” But he would have been in New York on October 29, 1929, near enough to the epicenter to hear the howls of alarm thrown up from the Financial District as the stock market crashed on Black Tuesday. Most likely, he was in glum rehearsal for his nonspeaking Broadway debut in The Game of Love and Death, which would open on November 25 to an audience with suddenly weightier preoccupations.
The crash is not the cause of the Depression, only the harbinger of an impending collision—namely, the collapse of the enduring American myth that anyone with sufficient nerve can be a millionaire overnight. That collapse results in the anger of the 1930s, and in new forms of unity and awareness. People now have to figure out what they owe one another, what they are owed by their government, and how the present system will or will not allow them to live justly. The thirties are extraordinary in modern American history for being a time of sustained debate about capitalism, and of daily doubt about the assumptions and goals of the republic.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is a response to this. Within months of taking office in 1932, Roosevelt initiates a broad battery of social programs and agencies—from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Soil Conservation Service, from the Social Security Administration to the Farm Security Administration—with short-term goals and long-term aspirations. There are successes and failures in the execution, inequities and flaws built into the New Deal, but it is a reformation in ideas of how American government can and should influence citizens’ lives. It tries to do what the government of a republic is meant to do—use the mechanisms and resources of bureaucracy to extend the democratic promise to those most in need of it.
Those most in need number in the millions. Miserable and disquieted, forced onto the open road of a doubtful future, they are searching, listening, asking, thinking—and meeting each other. In the mid- and late 1930s, a phantom allegiance of the dispossessed grows from the enforced proximity of divergent lives. As James Baldwin puts it, “In a way, we were all niggers in the thirties.… [I]t was harder then, and riskier, to attempt a separate peace, and benign neglect was not among our possibilities.”
Many Americans are recognizing themselves for the first time as part of a larger body, a mass of desperation and displacement. “And because they were lonely and perplexed,” John Steinbeck writes, “because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country.”
* * *
But there have always been those Americans who decline to pose for the family portrait, or march in the patriotic pageant. These are the “Don’t tread on me” Americans, the loners whose lives are none of your business. Their desire is to live outside the apple-pie order—in a sense, to vanish—and the civil right they prize above all is the one Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis called “the right to be left alone.” They’re found on the margins of eccentric artworks arising from the dust of the 1930s: Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory; Edward Hopper’s paintings; the novels of James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Nathanael West, and Tom Kromer; the music of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta—all of them drawn again and again to murder, flight, homelessness, the open road as romantic dream or dangerous reality.
The best prewar performances of Henry Fonda belong in that class. The loner represents his darker aspect, as it does that of the American character—as, in Edmund Wilson’s words, “the America of the murders and rapes that fill the Los Angeles papers is only the obverse side of the America of the inanities of the movies.” Fonda offers two truths, sometimes at once: the grudging recognitions of souls on the open road, and the social revulsion of the born outsider. He alternates between self-reliant American and cooperative American, between forsaking the community and taking his place within it. Doing either, he embodies a critique of a foundering system, a new sense of what is absent in the public life of the nation.
* * *
As Depression deprivation gives the wage earner a thirst for economic alternatives, it gives the American moviegoer (often, of course, they are the same person) a desire for aesthetic alternatives—for escapist spectacle on the one hand and, on the other, for a granular simplicity and attention to something resembling ordinary working life.
Slim (1937) is a drama about the new breed of electrical linemen engaged by the New Deal to rig live wires across the country. Though it’s not a hit, its attitudes are of the moment, and it exploits the associations an audience brings to Fonda: Evoking Dan Harrow, he appears, in the first scene, as a farmer with a horse team and plow. But Slim’s ambition is to get off the plow and scale the pole, hang wires and jolt America into its new age. Fonda goes electric! The choreography of man and technology incarnates the mechanical romanticism of the thirties: There is less feeling in Slim’s saccharine romance than in the single hair-raising shot of two WPA daredevils climbing poles in symmetry as a train shrieks across the limitless landscape behind them.
The 1938 Henry Hathaway actioner Spawn of the North, about salmon fishermen, likewise belongs to the now-dormant tradition of films about men engaged in dangerous, important work in out-of-the-way areas. Second-billed to George Raft, Fonda is
convincing when throwing ropes and pulling nets; his body is made for controlled, efficient action. He is less adept at macho boisterousness: Shouting is unnatural to his fine voice, and his roaring laughter sounds false. But Spawn of the North, while not political, is prole-sympathetic by virtue of being work-centered; it’s a stage in Fonda’s movement from laborer to labor organizer, working man to union man.
Out of the apolitical worker develops, in due course, the radical. Blockade (1938) begins as a collaboration between playwright Clifford Odets and director Lewis Milestone. It’s a drama of the Spanish Civil War—a war begun in 1936 between Republican Loyalists on the left and the Falangist forces of the dictatorial Francisco Franco on the right. There is significant Franco support in the United States, most of it Catholic; meanwhile, the Loyalist cause has become a preoccupation of engagé artists and intellectuals like Ernest Hemingway, Jean Renoir, and Blockade’s producer, Walter Wanger—still a social-climbing liberal crusader, and still Henry Fonda’s putative owner.
Worried about offending the Catholic moviegoer and the spirit of U.S. neutrality, the Hays Office, which administers the Motion Picture Production Code, instructs Wanger to remove any direct references to the Spanish war. Milestone and Odets drop out, to be replaced by William Dieterle, a director with more passion in his heart than in his eye, and screenwriter John Howard Lawson. Identifying detail is expunged, until the screenplay is as potted and inert as the dwarf palm in an executive’s office. “The story does not attempt to favor any cause in the present conflict,” a studio disclaimer assures the public.
As it happens, the message comes through plainly enough—but no one cares. Fonda, cast as a Spanish farmer who becomes a guerilla leader, makes a peculiarly stringy revolutionary hero, lacking virility in movement or nobility in speech. “We’re a part of something, something greater than we are,” runs his closing exhortation. “Those people out there—we’ve given them hope again—you and I.” Then a pompous cymbal crash, and Fonda’s cry: “Where’s the conscience of the world?”
That speech is not so different from the parting words of Tom Joad. Yet we regard the one blankly and are held rapt by the other. The Grapes of Wrath will be an infinitely better film than Blockade, largely because it has men like John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Gregg Toland behind it, but also because everything strong and true in it—its socialism, humanism, and skepticism—will come to us through Fonda. As Tom Joad, he can express that part of himself that wishes to be an engaged American, a part of the big soul, as well as that other part, the one that would like to vanish.
* * *
No American novel quite like The Grapes of Wrath had been written before, its style freighting newspaper headlines with the grandeur of eternal odysseys. Its protagonists, the Joads—a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers displaced by exhausted soil and bank foreclosure, driven west to California—were a clan of homeless hicks; they were also the Israelites. Tom Joad, oldest son and defiant soul of the family, freshly paroled on a manslaughter charge, was a mythic avenger, purified by hunger and politicized by the raw deal. There was color, poetry, and panorama to the Joads’ long story, and that sense common to all ambitious popular fictions that an entire society had been put in orbit around a set of recognizable but remarkable figures.
The dust bowl resulted from western soil that had been parched and depleted over decades by a market demanding overcultivation of cash crops, particularly cotton. Croppers went so deep in debt to banks that they became tenants on land they’d once owned. When the Depression came, the banks sold the land, tractors flattened homes, and the exodus began: Approximately one million people headed west, drawn by handbills claiming a shortage of fruit pickers in the California valleys. At journey’s end, most of the Okies—the migrants’ collective name, no matter where they came from—were greeted only with the usurious practices of migrant camp operators, deputized thugs, and the resentments of pickers already in place.
The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939, when the Depression was already considered, prematurely, to be over and rumors of war in Europe were the new focus of mass worry. But the book rang chords of controversy. Some dismissed it as Soviet propaganda, while others were convinced the nation had its great novel at last. The book’s impact reached the highest level of American influence. “I have read a book,” President Roosevelt told a White House conference in January 1940. “It is called The Grapes of Wrath and there are five hundred thousand Americans that live in the covers of that book.” It became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was sold, days after publication, to Twentieth Century–Fox for $100,000.
Steinbeck’s novel helped a significant number of Americans feel conscious of the life of their country: It showed what that country looked like to other Americans, bringing them into new awareness, and even a bit closer to consensus. In so doing, it joined the short list of American books that had drawn lines and forced eyes open—that seemed to have turned the country inside out and left it revealed before itself.
* * *
Grandpa Joad lies dying in a tent pitched at the roadside. Bodies pass in and out, folks tending the old man in his last hours. Then, in the flow of coming and going: “The shadow of someone walking between the tent and the sun crossed the canvas.”
The author inserts the random detail as stealthily as a concealed blade. Only a second later do we realize, with the suddenness of blood, that the shadow of Death is circling the tent, moving among the destitute, here in a desert off Route 66.
Steinbeck’s novel is an organism, based on a conception of life as the interplay of organisms—a large and unitary vision of existence wherein all substances and things are connected in a spiritual and biological flow. Things die throughout the book, and every death is answered by a suggestion of regeneration.
People, animals, earth, even machines—all share a oneness. Shades of the dead and the living dead are all around, and the abandoned shacks are haunted houses. The dust is the fine grain of this ghost world, its repository of blood, money, and dung, both earthly and unearthly: It precedes people when they arrive, and lingers after they depart. The theme of oneness is extended to the novel’s politics, which argue a middle ground between New Deal liberalism and Communist collectivism. The story’s conscience, Casy—an ex-preacher, half-cracked wanderer, and budding socialist prophet—makes the theme of oneness explicit: “Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.”
More mystical yet is Steinbeck’s supposition that the migrant mass constitutes a shifting community of understanding and human sympathies—“an organization of the unconscious.” He makes the mystical practical by applying it to the movements that are occurring all over the country, but particularly between the plains and the western states: “They’s stuff goin’ on and they’s folks doin’ things,” Casy tells Tom Joad. “Them people layin’ one foot down in front of the other, like you says, they ain’t thinkin’ where they’re goin’, like you says—but they’re all layin’ ’em down the same direction, jus’ the same. An’ if ya listen, you’ll hear a movin’, an’ a sneakin’, an’ a rustlin’, an’—an’ a res’lessness.”
The Joads never stop moving, malevolent strangers and temporary allies never stop crossing their path, and the dust never ceases to twist around them all. It’s the story of people whose determination is to stay alive, to resist becoming ghosts. These are “people in flight from the terror behind”—from death, that shadow on the tent flap. The Okies take their flight on Route 66, the Oregon Trail of the automotive century, turned by the dust bowl into an infinite strip of mechanical graveyard, dead cars marking the miles as white crosses once marked the graves of pioneers.
Oneness, unending flow. A farm wife’s infant is eaten by a pig. A dog is crushed by a car. A dead tractor is likened to a corpse. Rosasharn, Tom’s pregnant sister, makes love to her husband in the Joad truck as her grandmother lies dying inches away. Rosasharn produces a dead baby, and ends the story by offering the milk in her breast to
a starving old man in a barn as a rainstorm rages. It is the final transfusion of life into death, organism into organism, and anyone who would claim Steinbeck was not possessed of a poet’s instinct for the inexplicable should look again.
The novel, like its characters, is half-starved yet broad with life, delirious yet gravid with the necessity of following an impossible journey to its unknown end. Clearly, it was written by an author whose feeling of oneness with his time demanded that he either write exactly the book he wrote or die from having failed to do so.
* * *
The popular fatalism of the 1930s—the “hard-boiled” sensibility—comes from World War I; the Depression; Hollywood’s celebration of gangsters; the terse, brutal prose of Hemingway and Hammett; and perhaps the fear drifting over from Europe, where large numbers of people are beginning to vanish. Doom consciousness tends to be a by-product of times when life makes no sense.
The Grapes of Wrath expresses this, but Steinbeck straddles two worlds—the dry wastes of the doom school and the socialist hypothesis of WPA liberalism. So he places his hero in a situation that tests his desire to remain cynical and self-serving; puts him squarely in the press of family, the necessities of a society and a point in history. We look at these divides, these tendencies and transformations personified in a single figure, and we see Henry Fonda. He understands Tom Joad’s conflict, and we understand the need in Fonda to express this phenomenon of solitude softened by community, self-interest remade as common purpose.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 9
