Works in Philadelphia

I look forward to the free event at the Free Library in Philly next week, June 29 at 7:30 pm. Philadelphia Speaks reminded me of the WPA art in that city. And here's a City Paper piece on Philadelphian Ennis Carter's look at the bold WPA posters. See you there.

WPA Guides and Cities of the Imagination - Part 2

Across the country, WPA guides were coming out to a publicity blitz. The guide to California was considered strong enough to become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. A young artist and poet emigré from Chicago, Kenneth Rexroth, worked an editor for the California guide in its San Francisco office, and typed up hiking routes for the guide on the Sierras. (More on this in the book.)

    Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Martin Dies, a Texas congressman, led the first House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of the WPA and branded several WPA guides as enemy propaganda for what he considered leftist commentary on labor and race issues. The political tide was turning against the WPA as the federal budget tightened for war. In time, FDR repositioned the WPA guides as patriotic; by 1942 when troops were shipping out for Europe and the Pacific, each G.I. received a copy of the WPA guide to his home state to remind him of the home he was fighting for.
    By that point, Vincent McHugh, who had led the WPA guide work in New York,  shipped out to the Pacific with the merchant marines.
    The WPA experience created a bond among its survivors in later years, although often tinged with bitterness. By the 1960s McHugh was on the West Coast, scraping out a living as a freelancer and occasional teacher. He told fellow WPA survivor Jerre Mangione, “The whole WPA experience seems to have gone uselessly down the drain.”
    Yet its creative imprint on McHugh’s work received a revival. His novel inspired by the WPA experience, I Am Thinking of My Darling, got its Hollywood moment in 1968 when a veteran of Marx Brothers films adapted it as What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? The film opens with an aerial over lower Manhattan, descending for closer views of jackhammer operators, traffic, shoppers and businessmen in bars, to the harbor and a freighter from Greece. Instead of the novel’s city planner, George Peppard plays an ad executive-turned-beatnik involved with Mary Tyler Moore, a disenchanted radical.
    Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to know McHugh in San Francisco, when McHugh would gather with others at Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore along with the Beats’ mentor... Kenneth Rexroth.
    McHugh, working with Ferlinghetti and a young Chinese poet named C.H. Kwock, set out to translate classical Chinese poems in a series of chapbooks. They enlisted a former spy and nightclub singer who had done translations for the American consulate in Hong Kong. McHugh and Kwock would visit Mr. Yao, the singer-translator, in a decrepit boardinghouse on the city’s former Barbary Coast, yelling up from an alley to get entry. Yao helped them produce an anthology that a Berkeley professor said had “an architectural beauty that no other translations of Chinese poetry ever did have.”
    City Lights distributed the first in the series, Why I Live on the Mountain. In that 1958 collection (reprinted in 1980), McHugh brought one poem from the T’ang dynasty into English with the title, “To Someone Far Away.” The poet recalls a lover he addresses as “pretty darling” and whose fragrance still lingers in his bed. “Pretty darling,” he ends wistfully, “never came back.”
    It’s as if McHugh were uniting his Pacific-facing life with the Manhattan he had immortalized in the WPA guide and in his own Darling, a kiss blown to his first-loved city from across the continent, from his last.

WPA Guides and Cities of the Imagination - Part 1

The WPA guides track fine-grained details of 1930s America, from the call signals of long lost radio stations to stories of tenement families. But what does that have to do with creativity? The main purpose of WPA work was a paycheck for the unemployed, after all. Yet Margaret Walker later wrote that the WPA fostered "what nobody believed was possible at that time -- a renaissance of the arts and American culture, and some of the most valued friendships in the literary history of the period."
    For years after Congress shut down the WPA writers’ budget in 1939, the only signs of any creative legacy rested on a few bestsellers, mainly Richard Wright’s Native Son, Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning, and a mostly-forgotten novel by Vincent McHugh, I Am Thinking of My Darling, which made the New York Times bestseller list and was optioned by RKO with Cary Grant. (You could argue for Zora Neale Hurston’s books Moses, Man of the Mountain and Dust Tracks on a Road, but neither got big sales, and Walker’s For My People -- poetry a bestseller?)
    Henry Alsberg, the national director of the Writers’ Project, did want to do more than put people to work. He wanted to gather up mid-century America and its cultures in mini encyclopedias for each state before it was all swept away. And he wanted people working on those guides to be creatively enriched. Eventually, you could say, the results bear him out: Looking down the roster of his staff in New York City alone is like reading a fortune cookie for American letters in the 20^th century: John Cheever, Wright, and Ralph Ellison (his first writing job), along with poet May Swenson. Nationally the project rolls included Hurston, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Kenneth Rexroth, Meridel LeSueur, pulp writer Jim Thompson, western novelist Louis L’Amour, Arna Bontemps, Harry Partch, choreographer Katherine Dunham, and poet and painter Weldon Kees. Maybe more important are writers who gave voice to their regions, including Juanita Brooks and Vardis Fisher in the West, and Lorin Brown in the Southwest.
    But could you say in the mid-1940s that the Writers’ Project opened up the imaginations of even its successful writers? Here we look at the answer in terms of Vincent McHugh. He grew up in blue-collar Rhode Island in the 1920s, moved to New York, and wrote several novels and pieces for The New Yorker. Then in late 1936 the WPA called. The WPA guide to New York City had stalled under about eight million words of hodgepodge, a polarized staff, sit-in strikes, and a director who had to be sacked after an affair with an employee. Alsberg asked McHugh to take the job – a dubious personnel choice. Novelist as manager? McHugh accepted the challenge. He visited Washington for guidance but left quickly.
    "I never wanted to move to Washington," McHugh said later. "HQ was middle class and since I came from a working-class family I felt much more comfortable with the New York crowd."
    Back in New York, McHugh retrieved the only copy of the guidebook manuscript from the mayor’s office, where it was being held hostage. Mayor La Guardia was so worried by the warts-and-all portrait of the city that he threatened to pulp the manuscript. McHugh managed to pry the draft free but within a day it was stolen by one of the staff, who were bitterly divided between Trotskyites and Stalinists. After recovering the draft again, McHugh set about improving it. Eventually he got it on track toward publication as two volumes.
    As New York director, McHugh subverted Alsberg’s more arcane encyclopedic tendencies and refocused on the human details his staff found at the neighborhood level. In his 1943 novel, he would embrace the city through a science-fiction conceit: a pandemic of happiness and promiscuity breaks over everyone in New York. In a world consumed by fear and war, Manhattan becomes a beachhead of desire. Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls I Am Thinking of My Darling "one of those key forgotten novels that so acutely articulates a certain pre-World War II sensibility."
    McHugh himself got caught up in the hunt for the city’s stories and hit the pavement for fact-checking. Darling shows an intimacy with nooks and crannies of the city’s inner mechanisms, including the Weather Bureau on top of the Whitehall Building (see page 66 of the WPA guide). Against the sleepy, bureaucratic desks (“rather like the offices of an old-line shipping firm in the 1890s”) the windows reveal a thrilling seascape:
I looked out the high windows … There was no land in sight under us. Like the view from a clipper’s main truck. Governors Island in its eighteenth-century neatness of a fortified place, the Brooklyn shore, the hump of Staten Island in the blue. A quarter mile off the Battery, a middle-sized liner was being pushed in circles by three merry tugs, her siren going like a wounded bull.

McHugh helmed a staff of 500, including a young John Cheever. A high-school dropout from Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever grumbled about his re-write work but was absorbing everything from waitresses’ conversation to Russian novels to the hyperreal world of European surrealists who had sought asylum in New York. Cheever’s stories later show those currents: “The Enormous Radio” channels the unkempt desires and frustrations of an apartment building’s residents through the frequencies of an errant home console, a “powerful and ugly instrument, with its mistaken sensibility to discord.”
    After McHugh left the WPA job in 1938, Cheever and a few others worked the guide into final shape for the printer. Cheever wrote several section introductions, including one for Manhattan. Michael Chabon, a fan of the guide, also found Cheever’s fingerprints in the guide’s description of a day at Coney Island.
    The late Grace Paley, who grew up in the East Bronx, saw how the WPA connected writers to the city. The Writers’ Project, Paley said, was “marvelous at helping people to find their own ears by getting them talking about what their lives were really like.”
    The WPA Guide to New York City came out in June 1939. McHugh had helped infuse it with what Chabon calls “the democratic, all-encompassing impulse that people have been using to look at New York City at least since the time of Walt Whitman.” In turn McHugh, notes Mark Singer, had become “enthralled by the whole business: tunnels, bridges, subways, public utilities, emergency services, harbor management, health care delivery…” and threw it into his next novel along with a highball of sex.
    Before starting his novel, though, McHugh proposed a nonfiction book called New York Underground, devoted to the subterranean labyrinth of entrails and subway lines. Publishers nixed the proposal because by then, wartime security concerns put the project off limits -- too much potential as a map for terrorists.

High School Student Digs into the FWP, Comes up with Gold

The History Day competition spurred an Iowa high school student to delve into her great-grandfather's work on the Federal Writers' Project, and come out fascinated. Yashila Permeswaran gained recognition in her Le Mars middle school for the depth of the research she did in writing, "The WPA: Innovatively Providing Relief to Unemployed Writers Through the Federal Writers' Project." The theme of this year's contest is "Innovation in History: Impact and Change."
    "I love learning about the 1930s because I think it is such an interesting time period," Permeswaran told the Daily Sentinel. "I think it's amazing all the people who were helped because the WPA gave them jobs. I also find it amazing all the history and culture that was recorded and preserved by the FWP."
    She interviewed her great-grandfather for the paper about his work with the WPA. Good luck, Yashila!

Opening Doors to Expression

This week the FDR Library's blog noted the anniversary of WPA opening its doors and sending Americans back to work, less than a month after Congress passed the bill authorizing the relief agency. It also has great reading recommendations.

    In a couple weeks join us at LitArtlantic, a free festival of four storytelling arts at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD (May 20-22) when we will open doors to creative expression, exploring the intersections of music, film, theatre and literature. I'll be there for a panel talk about "The Writer's Life: A Report from the Field," on Saturday, May 22 at noon. I'll be mixing it up with fellow writers C.M. Mayo (whose novel just appeared in paperback), Alan Elsner, Kevin Quirk and Jessie Seigel. Learn more here.

Retracing Architecture in the Magnolia State

Interesting post today on a blog about historic preservation in Mississippi, on the evolving understanding of the state's architectural roots. The WPA guide held one of the first attempts to wrestle that history onto the page; this annotated discussion and the back-and-forth that follows it takes it forward.

Spring in Arizona

With spring comes a blooming of books: this week marks the anniversaries of the WPA guides to Arizona (70 years ago) and Washington, DC (73 years).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Arizona guidebook includes the work of the peripatetic Harry Partch, who's recalled now mainly for his music and his invention of new instruments for playing it. (The song “Harry Partch” by Beck uses Partch’s 43-tone scale. Thanks, Wikipedia.) But Partch flirted with becoming a writer before he settled on music, and his wide sense of the world informs his compositions from U.S. Highball to “Daphne of the Dunes.” It’s not clear if Partch is responsible, but the Arizona guide’s essay on the arts notes that the state’s landscapes inspired compositions ranging from Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite and Victor Young’s Arizona Sketches to Cadman’s Land of the Sky Blue Water. And the guidebook's section on folklore lovingly describes musical instruments brought by immigrant groups, including the gusle: “something like a mandolin, with goatskin across the sounding box and strands of horsehair for string”; played with a bow, it made the perfect accompaniment to a song like “Underground in America,” Lazar Jurich’s lament of a Serbian miner.