Novel view of Woody Guthrie
Singer’s Dust Bowl story discovered in vast archive of his work
Conventional wisdom might have it that Woody Guthrie was only a troubadour of the Great Depression, singing anthems about the hardships facing the working man such as This Land Is Your Land. But that would not be a fair reflection of his oeuvre.
Guthrie, who died in 1967, did not stop writing when the Dust Bowl ended. In fact his output was immense — far beyond what many people, including some so-called experts, might have thought.
We know this because of the tireless work — devotion, really — of Guthrie’s daughter Nora, who is in the process of sifting through a massive archive (woodyguthrie.org) of her father’s work.
In the collection, which is supported by royalties and by family funds, are letters, some 50 pages long; lyrics, more than 3,000 on every topic imaginable from baseball to flying saucers; and drawings and paintings done with a deft hand by a man who was apparently a non-stop creating machine.
There are many boxes still to explore, and in one was a novel started during the Depression and finished by her father in 1947. In fact, the book’s existence was almost mythic. Some people had heard there was a Depression-era novel, but until the respected historian Douglas Brinkley dug it out from the collection of a Hollywood producer, no one had seen it, let alone read it. Brinkley is the literary executor for Hunter S. Thompson. He is also the authorized biographer for Beat generation author Jack Kerouac, among many accomplishments.
Nora was not aware of the existence of the novel until it surfaced. She has been, she says, focused on cataloguing the lyrics she found and making recordings of this hidden music.
“There are so many things in the archive that we haven’t explored yet. There are (tens of thousands of) things in there. My job in a way has been, for the last 20 years, to bring them to light.
“The archives started, the way most profound things do, through chance and accident. My mom passed away in the 1980s and all the boxes were stored in an office in New York. And one day, (20 years ago) I happened to be there and I just started to go through them. And my main reaction was that there wasn’t one thing that I picked out of those boxes that I knew anything about.
“I just happened to be the one that opened the box, and one of the first things I found was a letter from John Lennon to my father. The next thing I picked up was a lyric I had never read before. It was soon abundantly clear that 95 per cent of the material had never been seen before.
“The other thing that struck me was that the amount of material was crazy.”
The novel House of Earth is the first title published under the Infinitum Nihil (Nothing is forever) imprint that the actor Johnny Depp, who is a great supporter of the printed word, has created with the publisher HarperCollins. Infinitum Nihil is also the name of Depp’s own film production company.
The story is centred almost exclusively on the lives of two young people living in West Texas at the height of the 1930s Dust Bowl that drowned the U.S. plains in clouds of dirt. It is frank in its description of the lives of Tike and Ella May Hamlin, in all aspects. There is a remarkably explicit sexual encounter between the couple, for example. It is also written in the vernacular of the people of West Texas.
Brinkley and Depp have written an extensive and frankly fascinating introduction that details the history of Guthrie and the novel. It’s worth the price of admission itself.
For example: “Scholars who devote themselves to Woody Guthrie are continually amazed by how much unpublished work the Oklahoma troubadour left behind. ... During his 55 years of life, he wrote scores of journals, diaries and letters ... Then there are the memoirs and his more than 3,000 song lyrics. ... But House of Earth ... Guthrie’s only accomplished novel. The book is a call to arms in the same vein as the best ballads in his Dust Bowl catalogue.”
The cover art for House of Earth is one of two oil paintings by Guthrie. It features the kind of adobe (mud brick) home that Guthrie idealized in the novel. It’s only one of two oil paintings done by Guthrie to survive. It is in private hands. The other painting, a portrait of Lincoln, is in the Smithsonian Institution.
Brinkley contacted the Guthrie archives and they dug into the archives and found a photocopied copy of the novel.
So, just past 100 years since his birth July 14, 1912, the book is being published.
For Nora Guthrie, meeting Brinkley was a godsend, as she was busy with centennial projects about her father. Brinkley was a historian she could trust. So she signed off on the project. She did direct the publishers to the painting that is being used on the cover.
“I think the book is really interesting. It’s really different. Anything that exposes new information about Woody is significant. So I’m really happy to have it published.”
She’s not completely sure that the book would work without Brinkley and Depp’s introduction, which provides context.
Nor is she surprised by the sex in the book.
“He was the least self-censored artist that I’ve run into in the world. Everything was art to him. The whole idea of writing a novel that is just about two people and what they say to each other ... I kinda felt I had never read anything like it. ... It’s very minimalist.”
Nora says her father originally wanted to be an artist. As a young man, he was a sign painter in his hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, and in Texas. He would later decorate his recording and other writings.
The time seems right for a renewed interest in Woody Guthrie, Nora says.
“Woody is a constant presence, whether people want to look at him or not. There is today a sense of a window of opportunity opening and I try to walk through.”
The messages in Guthrie’s songs still resonate today, she says, because he wrote in the language of the people about the people. This is why the book works.
“I think that’s why they have endured because they are the language of the people. He really believed in saying what you mean and not showing off. I remember hearing around the house ‘ Don’t be a phoney, be yourself.’ ”
Life may be painful but there is always a sliver of hope in Woody Guthrie’s writing, she says.
‘He was the least self-censored artist that I’ve run into in the world. Everything was art to him.’ NORA GUTHRIE