Out of work, out of luck: Edward Anderson's Hungry Men

...You are sweet...

...His work, like Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing, published by Knopf the same year, conveys the unique flavor of being down and out during the depression...

...As Lincoln Kirstein wrote in 1932 about Cagney's role in The Public Enemy, the film that made him a star: "Cagney may be a dirty little low-life rat, a hoodlum, a small-time racketeer, but when his riddled body is propped up against his mother's door, mummied in bandages and flecked with blood, we catch our throats and realize that this is a hero's death...

...Yet Acel Stecker is not really a bum, he isn't even a proletarian...

...Anderson's rival as the laureate of the lower depths, Tom Kromer, protested that he had softened the picture, not shown how bad it could get.* *Kromer, whose own novel, Waiting for Nothing, was beyond grim, complained in his review that Anderson had not shown how dreadful it could get to be down and out in depression America...

...In a rare moment of political discussion, he says, "They can call it what they want, Communism or Bolshevism or Socialism, but there is going to be a change...

...But he hopes his way of talking will rescue him: "The judge will know I am no ordinary bum when I address him...

...Some had begun their careers as journalists, as Hemingway did, and they respected a fact when they saw one...

...I'll bet you got a kick out of me choking up the way I did when I asked you if you ever had any experience...

...Louis...

...Copyright 2009 by Morris Dickstein...

...This is what has been the matter with me...

...It was a period when many were dancing in the dark heading nowhere, or pushing hard just to keep going...

...This became the subject of an impressive 1933 film by William Wellman, Wild Boys of the Road...

...RECONSIDERATIONS Out of work, out of luck EDWARD ANDERSON'S HUNGRY MEN MORRIS DICKSTEIN As the unemployment numbers rise in the current economic troubles, it's hard not to think of the flotsam of the Great Depression years, the men and boys and whole families who went on the road or lost their homes...

...We can distinguish between the hard-boiled crime novel, with its atmosphere of double-dealing and corruption, and the gangster movie of the same period, where the criminal often emerged as an ambiguously heroic and tragic figure...

...Burnett to write lean, tough, suggestive dialogue, other stories like "The Battler," in which Nick Adams is menaced by a punch-drunk old prizefighter-turned-hobo, gave lessons in laconic writing to lower-depths novelists like Edward Anderson...

...The same imperative that made Thomas Wolfe the right model for Kerouac made Hemingway the necessary example for Anderson and other proletarian authors...

...In Denver and St...

...If I could just have shaved this morning I wouldn't look so much like a tramp...

...It created a bleak picture of contemporary America that radicals could live with...

...Good as he is on the will-o'-the-wisp of landing a job, he is even better on the challenge of finding a woman...

...Only time will tell where the present recession will lead or how it might be reflected in books and films in the next few years...

...it is not a function of his own need for excitement...

...It's psychological...

...Born in Texas in 1906, Anderson cut his teeth as a small-town reporter, a boxer, an itinerant hobo, and a pulp writer channeling stories directly from the police blotter...

...All hunger is, is your belly muscles drawing up...

...Better than most depression writers, Anderson shows us how social problems translate into psychological problems: loss of confidence...

...The critic Yvor Winters once wrote an attack on Robert Frost called "The Spiritual Drifter as Poet...

...The problem with Stecker's "psychology," from our point of view, is that it's entirely a social psychology, not a personal one...

...Kerouac began as a direct imitator of Thomas Wolfe...

...The reforms set in motion by the New Deal were meant to keep this from happening again...

...But now I know there isn't much to it...

...and throttled, helpless anger...

...The adult equivalent of Wild Boys of the Road was a crisply written novel by Edward Anderson, Hungry Men, which won a prize from its publisher, Doubleday, Doran, in 1935...

...We have yet to experience anything on this scale, yet depression novels and films, focused on people who have lost their moorings, their confidence, their position on the social ladder, allow us precious insight into a world coming apart, a whole society in free fall...

...A man can't get a job looking like a bum or feeling like one...

...They Made Me a Criminal was the title of one late-thirties movie...

...Incessant, aimless movement was at once a key metaphor of the 1930s and a pervasive social reality...

...In Frisco and Minneapolis...

...Even today there is something distinctly modern about the nihilism and disillusionment of the hard-boiled novel of that period...

...Later, on some money from his friend Boats, they set up house together, simulating middle-class marital respectability...

...With a hundred bucks I could get a new suit and new shoes and have fifty bucks in my pocket...

...Such works give us glimpses of the human reality behind the facts and figures, behind the government programs meant to relieve this widespread suffering...

...The book's strength is in the wonderfully authentic atmosphere and details, not its characters...

...Reading Kerouac's On the Road, like hearing the rhythms of Michael Gold's Jews without Money in Ginsberg's poetry, reminds us of how much the Beat writers, in their recoil from what they took to be the respectability of postwar writing and the conformity of postwar society, modeled themselves on the writers of the thirties...

...Promptly forgotten, it was reprinted by Penguin fifty years later, after the success of William Kennedy's Ironweed, a modern tale of a depression bum...

...But there's a million men in this country on the road, and if these men were organized, or prepared to follow some organization, it'd be something...

...Men are not going to keep bumming or work in flop houses for ninety cents a week forever...

...Unlike the proletarian novel, however, it was well suited to the violent and melodramatic formulas of popular culture...

...There's a good deal of talk about hunger itself that convinces us that Anderson is speaking from firsthand knowledge: "You know when I was a kid," Acel said, "I used to think hunger was something like a toothache, only worse...

...The Beats reached back to the myths and rhythms of the 1930s to act out a criticism of postwar America, which had either forgotten the depression or remembered it all too well...

...Acel Stecker, on the other hand, is only trying to get by, and the flat, hard-boiled style of Anderson's novel reflects his pinched horizons...

...But this particular surprise, which could have come from tongue-in-cheek novels like Nathanael West's A Cool Million or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man-books built on endless ironic reversals-hardly belongs in a book as straight and as somber as Hungry Men, which has nary a shred of a plot and whose real strength comes in showing how life feels among the bottom dogs...

...Historian William E. Leuchtenburg has written that "as the depression years wore on, the jobless adjusted to a kind of purposeless motion, like the music in the favorite song of the day that went `round and around, like the marathon dancers who shuffled listlessly around the dance floor barely able to keep their bodies moving, like the six-day bike riders who spun endlessly around an oval track, anesthetizing spectators by the relentless monotony of the circular grind...

...Out of some fear of reading like a novel, Hungry Men doesn't allow itself the indulgence of a plot, as if the mechanics of narrative closure would undermine the authenticity of its social observation...

...I mean when you went a long time...

...Their cause was themselves, not politics or revolution, yet they served as a focus of rebellious energy at a time when so many felt helpless before larger forces...

...No such claim can be made for the dozens of criminals who kill each other off in Hammett's Red Harvest or even of the private dick who maneuvers them into doing it...

...The characters played by Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney, George Raft, Paul Muni, and later Humphrey Bogart were embattled outsiders clawing their way to the top, never white-collar criminals who ruled impersonal organizations...

...Just keep moving and something will turn up-a flop, a handout, a ride, a cigarette, a piece of change...

...Their motto is, "Just keep moving and you will always run into something...

...In a word, you find no Hungry Men...

...Like so many of the depression's victims, Stecker's selfconfidence has been badly bruised, and he expresses his insecurity by taunting her and imagining how many other men she's had...

...Throughout the early years of the depression, many men and boys took to the road, including perhaps a quarter of a million kids whose families could not feed them...

...Far from being a Communist Party novel, or even a political novel, Hungry Men is a book about hunger and about the road, both of which Anderson had studied firsthand between 1931 and 1934...

...Anderson himself failed as a screenwriter in Hollywood and went back to journalism...

...When Stecker gets to New York, he falls for a girl named Corinne, but after they take a cheap hotel room he drives her away by being suspicious and surly...

...Though Boats fits the part as the communist martyr, Acel takes on only a fragmentary, inarticulate version of his faith...

...I'm falling for you, honey...

...If you call it an educated man's nostalgie de la boue, you must add that the depression gave it a timely meaning...

...Kromer's own novel deals with such conditions, as Jacob Riis did half a century earlier in How the Other Half Lives...

...They're like girls...

...they made a mark on their world before they went under...

...One cardinal rule that few of them can follow is that "a man should keep up a good front," for he can't even think of landing a job or shacking up with a woman unless he has a clean shave and a decent suit...

...Anderson's characters are not the hopelessly derelict-those who have fallen through the bottom of society-but those just surviving on the margin, always looking for a break, blaming their hard luck, wondering where they'll find the next meal, the next place to sleep...

...they plan to get together, but this time she turns skeptical and disappears...

...I have kind of liked them all and sort of hated to leave them...

...He thought emotional confusion could be toxic to a writer...

...Anderson was one of the promising young writers of the late 1930s, but he faded soon after the 1937 publication of his second and final novel, Thieves like Us, a Bonnie and Clyde story that has survived in numerous film versions, such as Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949) and Robert Altman's Thieves like Us (1974...

...You certainly are different...

...Though the book, like so many standard depression novels, does contain an older worker (a veteran sailor named Boats) who spouts revolutionary phrases, and is killed for his pains, and a younger protagonist (Acel Stecker) who takes over a few of his ideas, the proletarian conversion formula, along with politics in general, remains peripheral, taking up barely a handful of pages...

...Anderson not only gets the feel of things right...

...There's something numb yet also numbing about these short sentences with their repetitions and conjunctions, the way they avoid long words and metaphors or subordinate clauses...

...That was what that old bum in Omaha said...

...With a new suit and everything and money in my pocket I'd feel different...

...We can see the overlap between these two kinds of Hemingway-induced fiction especially in the handling of women, in the following passage: Acel pulled out cigarettes, and Corinne took one...

...After he had eaten, Acel got up and stood at the edge of the highway...

...This self-contained little sketch is so full of the understated poetry of missed connections and unlived lives that it could easily pass for a short story by Sherwood Anderson or Hemingway...

...he gets these feelings too...

...So were the screenwriters who would later adapt their books into the film noirs of the 1940s...

...Just as crime movies led directors toward social problem movies, crime fiction was an apolitical version of the lowerdepths novel, especially because the criminal was frequently seen as the product of the society that spawned him...

...You'll see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson's Hungry Men, no working stiffs dying of malnutrition on liceinfested blankets of three-decker bunks in the missions, no soup-lines that stretch for blocks in the city streets and never start moving...

...In a notorious passage in On the Road, Sal Paradise, Kerouac's alter ego, writes, "At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night...

...He died in obscurity in Brownsville, Texas, in 1969, where he edited a local newspaper...

...Thus, as a road novel, the book imitates the structure of its characters' shapeless, distended lives...

...I didn't know but what you taught a Sunday school somewhere...

...As the depression loosened the social bonds of family life and ties to the workplace, the road and the drifter became metaphors for a community in disintegration...

...As social rejects, his characters don't have the luxury to be individuals, but they usually react to their plight in fresh and unexpected ways...

...But a page later he wonders whether the Lumpenproletariat make any kind of material for a radical upheaval: "A revolution never will start among a bunch of bums...

...I'm gettin' fogbound over you, if you want to know...

...Though Anderson may be simplifying himself when he gets into Stecker's mind, he is being true to his own experience of living and writing this novel...

...The match he held for her trembled...

...The judge will know by the language I use that I am no ordinary bum in court for fighting on the street...

...Sometimes I wonder if it's worth your time to talk to them about it at all...

...In a short chapter set in New Orleans he meets another woman...

...When Stecker is arrested, he worries about his appearance...

...The rudimentary growth of their radical ideas has been stunted into class betrayal...

...Each new town makes me forget the other...

...self-accusation...

...Though rooted in the effect of World War I on the Hemingway generation, this mood has worn better than the sodden pieties of the Popular Front or the revolutionary Left...

...There are even passages that make us think of Jack Kerouac: I have walked down a lot of streets, just moseying around like this...

...Until recently, Hungry Men was not mentioned in any standard account of the proletarian novel, for it exploded the narrow parameters that critics laid down for such fiction...

...it subjects him to the harangues that the respectable world aims at his captive ear, usually a dose of the bootstraps philosophy that has little relevance to a man in Stecker's position...

...I'll bet you got a kick out of that...

...That's what you are doing to me," he said...

...as an unemployed musician and a "college man" he is a declassed member of the middle class, as was Anderson himself when he hoboed around the country, as is any middle-class author who writes this kind of plebeian novel...

...But Stecker eventually drifts away to look for work, and he writes Corinne out of his mind by assuming she has slipped into prostitution...

...Even writers who did not write road novels became spiritual drifters, emotional vagabonds like William Saroyan, moral expatriates like Henry Miller-two other thirties prototypes for the Beat writers...

...Stecker has already remarked to himself that stories of hoboes riding freight trains and getting run in by the police don't really interest many people...

...Your honor, my companions are here in the courtroom now, and they will testify that we were just walking along there, minding our own business, and this man steps out and starts trouble...

...By taking us aimlessly from scene to scene across the country, Anderson is trying to paint the whole picture of the hungry man's world...

...A. O. Scott has already detected a shift toward downbeat, small-scale realism in recent independent films like Kelly Reichardt's moving Wendy and Lucy, shot before the recession began, which centers on a woman whose life has bottomed out, who has taken to the road with her dog, someone with nothing to fall back on but her own will to go on...

...These pages are among the weakest in the book...

...With its generic title (like Michael Gold's Jews without Money), it could easily be mistaken for a piece of sociology or depression journalism, which it partly is...

...they project a political consciousness onto rudimentary characters in a fake, condescending way...

...Along with the proletarian novelists, many of the hard-boiled writers were leftists...

...When he takes food and shelter from the Salvation Army, Stecker is in the same vulnerable situation, bending his knees and listening to sermons as the price for a bowl of soup and perhaps a pair of shoes...

...they knew the moves, inventing themselves as they went along...

...This slightly absurd exchange, with its dated slang and choked (or doomed) romanticism, already belongs to the fatalistic crime world of Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon that Anderson would soon try out in Thieves like Us...

...In the violent way they amassed wealth and power despite their humble origins, they were perfect fantasy figures for people suffering through hard times...

...The growth of pulp fiction, especially crime fiction, in the 1930s created an alternate image of American life that was relatively free of the censorship of moralists of both Left and Right, at a time when the "serious" novel assumed a heavy burden of social responsibility...

...Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center...

...This seems to be the case even when Stecker is presumably telling us what he feels: I'd like to get a hundred dollars...

...Where Hemingway is taciturn, keeping emotion under fierce control, the prose of Hungry Men simply feels uninflected, perhaps emotionally wounded, more like later minimalist writers than like Hemingway himself...

...To Anderson the small-town depression newspaperman, the world out there really exists...

...One chapter of Hungry Men is called "On the Road," but that phrase could apply to much else in the novel...

...I heard a girl say one time that a down-and-out man became a bum and a woman turned whore...

...Instead, in an ironic twist that ends the novel, Stecker and his friends get credit for their patriotism, having refused to play The International with their little street band...

...In little towns like Paducah and Ranger and St...

...The Beats, who found themselves not in a society coming apart but in one that seemed too tightly held together, transformed the privations, the desperate marginality of the 1930s, into a willed and voluntary poverty, just as they turned life on the road from an economic necessity into a spiritual adventure...

...In the end, however, Hungry Men has an entirely different feeling from a book like On the Road...

...Like Algren's first novel, Somebody in Boots, the book is rooted in what the author found while he was bumming around...

...At its best it combined the plebeian tradition of Jack London, Maxim Gorky, and Knut Hamsun with the stylistic restraint of Hemingway to give us an important image of depression life, something that strongly resonates with economic dilemmas today...

...Yeah, a man could starve to death and not know it...

...It's meant to account for a whole class of men trapped in a general crisis, not for the wrinkles of any individual mind...

...They had style, panache...

...He will know that by the language I use...

...Augustine...

...Yet the audience was also made to identify with the criminal, as the wise guardians of public morals so often complained in the first years of the decade...

...In a period filled with collectivist solutions that seemed to go against the American grain, writers like Saroyan and Miller relished an anarchic individualism that gave a different accent to the idea of the common man...

...Yet the lower-depths novel, with its indelible portrait of hunger, poverty, rootlessness, and psychological malaise, gave an important though little-recognized flavor to proletarian fiction...

...According to a 1935 book by Kingsley Davis called Youth in the Depression, instead of forming communities of their own, as in the movie, they usually traveled in twos and threes and attached themselves to the hobo jungles of older men...

...These stories had to have surprises at the end...

...This essay is adapted from his new book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, to be published in September by W. W. Norton...

...Though Sal himself is a somewhat dim figure, with a strong sense of his own fear and dependency, his dream is to become expansive and spontaneous like Dean Moriarty, and this wish is embodied in the streaming narrative flow of the novel...

...Yet hitchhiking is humiliating to him...

...Just as Hemingway's story "The Killers" taught thirties crime novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and W.R...

...It is written with the mannered simplicity of so many proletarian novels, a style that suggests the influence of Hemingway yet lacks the deeper resonance, the suggestiveness that makes Hemingway seem more like a prose poet than a fiction writer in his short pieces...

...Buried in Hungry Men is a mild revolutionary anger, but the book itself is so pared down and subdued that it flares only at a few points, and then quite ambiguously...

...He felt strength in the breadth of his chest and the slope of his shoulders, in the steadiness of his legs and the firmness of his stomach...

...All you had to do was keep moving...

...Unable to sell his stories, he had taken to the road, as Nelson Algren had done, to learn something about life in depression America...

...The final pages of the book shift into a political cartoon as the group, now safely anticommunist, promises to prosper as The Three Americans, playing war songs at veterans' smokers...