The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
it over highways obligingly subsidized by all of us captives of the supermarket, who can either buy the plastic tomatoes bred to withstand these long hauls or go without. I submit that the time is ripe for a novel examining all the human problems involved in getting an edible tomato from the field to the table of an urban apartment dweller. And I cannot believe that such a subject is not “large” enough for a “major” book. All that is necessary is the imagination of the right author and an intelligent reception by what the late Vardis Fisher called “the Eastern literary establishment.”
Twenty-two years ago this book was launched into a social and literary climate of apathy and nihilism. In 1960 Mary McCarthy delivered a lecture in a number of European cities asking, “Is it still possible to write novels?” She replied to herself, “The answer, it seems to me, is certainly not yes and perhaps, tentatively, no.” Two years later, with this novel scarcely off the press, I was being asked to participate in panel after panel which discussed the dismal question “Is the novel dead?” Part of the problem was that for three decades the critics had been praising—and sometimes writing—the books that seemed increasingly irrelevant to many readers of novels. Harvard professor Warner Berthoff summed up the situation in a Yale Review essay (Winter, 1979) entitled “A Literature without Qualities: American Writing Since 1945.” He wondered who could find that literature significant, “apart from a bureaucratized elite holding on for dear life to illusions of cultural primacy and the prerogatives and satisfactions of commodity-market ‘excellence’.” In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech William Faulkner had described the problem somewhat more poetically: “The young man or woman writing today … writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”
We had departed drastically from the views generally held by western culture since Aristotle first enunciated them—namely, that writers have an obligation to examine genuinely significant aspects of the human condition, and society has an obligation to listen to those writers for the sake of its own health. But in the last few years such questioning as Berthoff’s has signalled a greening of the literary world. In 1977 came John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. In July 1983 Winona State University in Minnesota sponsored a writer’s conference which set itself to study, for two weeks, “The Writer’s Moral Responsibility.” Today we don’t seem nearly so far away as we were twenty years ago from that day in 1863 when President Lincoln looked down at the tiny woman standing before him and said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little lady who made this big war!”
I am not alone in feeling that stories about such fundamentals as the food we eat and the way it is produced may once again command serious attention. William Kittredge and Steven M. Krauzer, introducing a special issue of TriQuarterly dedicated to “Writers of the New West” (Spring, 1980), conclude their essay:
Well, the other day some wiseass asked us to name a great writer who dealt with agriculture. How about Tolstoy? Sure, this fellow said, but that was a long time ago and in another country. This made us so impatient we had to shoot him down.
Perhaps we have good reasons to hope that many readers are waiting for books that explore the way we feel about the earth. Today, many of the people who cultivate and harvest our wheat never even look at the fields they work. Instead, they steer their gigantic tractors and combines by viewing those fields on closed-circuit television screens mounted in their cabs. Do they, can they feel the same way Rose and Will and Rachel and George and Lucy felt? Can we, with impunity, turn our eyes away from the earth and stare instead day after day into a cathode ray tube?
This seems a good time for The Bones of Plenty to come forth in a new edition, and I am grateful to Jean A. Brookins, head of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, and to Ann Regan, editor of the Borealis series, for this second launching. Faulkner ended his Nobel speech with these words: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” I am glad this book once more has a chance to contribute its record, its props and pillars to our current struggle to endure.
Lois Phillips Hudson
Unemployed purchasing power means unemployed labor and unemployed labor means human want in the midst of plenty. This is the most challenging paradox of modern times.
Henry A. Wallace
Secretary of Agriculture
1934
Friday, February 17, 1933
For nine years George Custer had picked rocks out of the three hundred and twenty acres he rented from James T. Vick, but still the wheat fields were not clear enough to suit him. Nothing made him madder than to hook into a big rock with a freshly sharpened plowshare or mower sickle. This late in the winter he had finished all the odd jobs that he saved for cold weather, and on a morning like this, with no special chores at hand, he hitched the team to the stoneboat and hauled rocks down the hill to the pile he was accumulating at the edge of the south grove. Every rock he took out of the best soil in the world made that soil even better. If it weren’t for drought and rust, this half section would be producing sixteen bushels to the acre. He was only a year older than the century, but he could remember when North Dakota soil yielded twenty or more.
An early thaw the first of the week had finished most of the snow, but a hard freeze last night had turned the earth back into iron. He had to use a crowbar to get the big ones loose. With rocks, a man couldn’t win for losing. During the times of the year when the ground wasn’t frozen, he was too busy doing other things with it to be taking rocks out of it.
He intended to make something with the rocks—a cool little well house, maybe, or a creamery. A man could build almost anything with rocks if he had the time. George had always wanted a house of stone. He wouldn’t build it, though, till he could buy the farm from Vick. He had already sunk so much cash and labor in this place that if Vick ever tried to push him off without making a decent settlement with him, he would be obliged to take a few thousand dollars out of the old man’s hide.
Crossing the field toward the small gray building that Vick called a house, he could see how it would look if it was his own house of stone, with the smoke from the two stoves drifting up from the broad stone chimney, and the white of fresh paint gleaming from the deep-set window casings.
He halted the team in front of the house and went in. “Man! It’s colder than a banker’s eye out there,” he told his wife. He scooped half a dipperful from the pail of drinking water and poured it into a cup. “That ground is so hard you couldn’t drive a spike into it with a sledge hammer. One of these days we’re gonna have enough rocks to build a house with, though. Warm in winter, cool in summer. How’d you like that?”
“I’d like it if we could just get the money to make a down payment on this place,” said Rachel.
“Well so would I! But just because we haven’t is no reason why we shouldn’t think ahead a little, is it?”
He shut the door harder than he really meant to and stomped back to the team. They were matched sorrels, a gelding and a mare, both young horses. The mare would drop her first foal in another three months, and he was working her this morning instead of one of his other two geldings because the weather had kept her from getting sufficient exercise lately. In spite of the outrageous fee, George had bred her to Otto Wilkes’s champion Percheron stallion, because with a dam like Kate it was silly not to use the best sire around. Besides, he wanted a colt that would grow to be considerably bigger than Kate, but still be possesed of her intelligence and fine disposition.
Between the horses he could glimpse the distant rock pile, and his eyes focused themselves on the spot, seeing how solid and eternal a stone house would look there, set beneath the thin black crisscrossing limbs of the grove. He was barely