“Life’s lonely enough and isolated enough without the thick
wall of kind to make it go even darker.”
For at least twenty years now, scholarship on women—particularly in anthropology—has struggled to make sense of the question of women’s place in the continuum of nature and culture. Sherry Ortner’s now classic 1974 article, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” posed the question and modified the usual opposition that identified women with nature and men with culture. Ortner suggested that women are seen “merely as being closer to nature than men, and that culture recognizes that women are active participants in its special processes.”8 In this formulation, while women have a greater affinity for nature—they bear children, live within the domestic circle, and are socialized to the female experience—they are also, for example, the civilizing force that “tames” the wildness in children and makes them fit to live in the world of men. They are mediators between nature and culture. Ortner and others are interested in this question because in it lies one explanation of female subordination. If mastery or transcendence over nature, the production of artificial “constructs” rather than reproduction of human beings, is “higher” in value than continuity with nature, then either women must change or we must change our valuing of women’s position. While I put this program of change too simply, indeed, in the last twenty years both kinds of changes have been put in practice. Women are living more in the public world of men, and there is a significant movement—called variously ecological feminism and cultural feminism—to enhance the value of women’s closeness to nature, to insist that male dominance of nature is responsible for dehumanization of our living communities and destruction of our environment. While Johnson was, of course, too early for ecological feminism, she would perhaps have found it attractive. Prescient for her times, Johnson sees humans’ relation to nature in gendered terms and accentuates gender difference along with poverty as the most compelling forces shaping identity and the circumstances of daily existence. Indeed, Johnson’s women are sustained in their closeness to nature, and male transcendence over nature, while treated with sympathy, appears a regrettable evil.
The men in the novel—the father, Max, Grant, Rathman, and Ramsey—have a relation to nature born of economic necessity. They hold the overwhelming responsibility for the family’s ability to eat and sleep sheltered, yet nature has the unpredictable power to prevent them from fulfilling that responsibility. The father’s life is defined as a “fierce crawling to rid us of debt” (p. 35), and the land represents his only resource. He must tame or civilize it, make it yield on his own terms. And for this work, a dogged resistance to “the natural” is required. Woods must be turned into field, wildflowers into forage. Grant, the gentler, more yielding of the two men, also fights with the land—it is an antagonist not a friend—and things made by men he chooses over nature. He cannot tell time by the sun, and, off in the fields one day, searching for his lost watch with Marget’s help, he says, “Don’t trust anything natural . . . Only the little wheels” (p. 103). The adult women are too worn down from a life spent serving men and preserving the household to hear or see nature for themselves. Mrs. Rathman lived “between table and stove” (p. 18) and Mother “lived in the lives of other people as though they were her own” (p. 16). Indeed, the mother is a shadowy figure in this book, an actor only when mediating between Kerrin and the father. While her husband plows and tends the livestock, she cooks, preserves, bakes, cleans, and is sustained by a faith her daughter envies.
Yet, there is evidence here and in Johnson’s later work and life that Johnson would place women in a closer relation to nature than men. But consistent with her philosophical stance, neither in these works nor in her short stories or later novels is there evidence that she would judge this separation as anything but a radical and natural separation of the spheres. The male figures are treated with deep sympathy—their layer of hardness, their blindness to what lies in the dark a functional adaptation born of circumstance. Given the family responsibility they face, Johnson’s men would prefer the clear light at noon to the deep mysteriousness of dark, the conventional, social world with its predictable rules to the strange and terrible beauty of nature. “Father,” Marget says, “couldn’t see the masterpiece of a maggot,” and “we could not see the heaviness of his responsibility” (p. 36). There is a sympathy too in Johnson’s early work toward men who must live with women, and, at the same time, are separated from them by “the thick wall of kind.” In Now in November, the narrator describes women as she imagines a man would see them. Marget surmises that her father is irritated at “women-voices,” the girls’ “cackling and squawking . . . picking and pecking at lives of other people” (p. 36) and unsettled by his sense that women “moved around and did things . . . a long way off—a place from which they might step across [a] gulf to marry a man, but anytime might go back again” (p. 63).
Despite the portrait of Kerrin, who embodies the terrible tension inside young women who yearn for the freedom and dignity offered only to men, and despite the adult women’s roles carried out “in other people’s lives” and “between stove and table,” Johnson would see as a privilege of womanhood the closeness to and continuity with nature that comes with birthing, childrearing, and other aspects of traditional woman’s work in the home. In her writing, this private work in the family, even with its dark and emotionally fraught side, is more attractive than work in the public world that requires the skills of domination and control rather than of letting be, observing, and enabling. In what appears to have been a deeply companionable marriage, Johnson looked to her husband as protector and caretaker; it was he who went out to make something of himself and for others in the world while she reveled in the birth of a third child in April. “An April baby is surrounded by images of itself in all the various half opened flowers and tree buds, wet emerging butterflies and moist wriggling tadpoles in the shallow water” (Seven Houses, p. 97). In her autobiographical Seven Houses, written after her husband’s death, she praises Grant’s prodigious generosity, ambition, and embracing of the world—he was a “citizen of the community with roots in the social, financial, philanthropic, arts and business circles” (p. 101)—then adds with a kind of loving tolerance, “he was not always aware of what lies under what lies under” (p. 98). “I drove him wild,” she adds, “with my vision of beginning again . . . save only the land and our own souls” (p. 100).
“a world all wrong, confused, and
shouting at itself”
I have been talking about Now in November as a pastoral novel, and have thus far defined pastoral largely as a literary form taking nature as the organizing and meaning-making structure and force. But there is a second aspect of the pastoral tradition that is helpful in placing Now in November. In many pastorals, a sophisticated speaker takes the country world as a retreat from the busy world of government, commerce, and political conflict. There are two important aspects to the notion of “retreat.” First, there is the sophisticated speaker’s economic analysis of retreat that rests, in part, on historical reality. In periods of civil unrest particularly, the family who farms their land is safer than the city dweller, the courtier, or the merchant. When government institutions fail, when shopkeepers close their doors, by the force of their own labor, farmers can still feed their families. Second, and derived from the sophisticated person’s notion of safety in the farmer’s life, is the notion that no matter how harsh, there is something more genuine, more real in the struggles nature sets out than in those made by men. In nature, humans can know themselves. In fact, if one thinks anthropocentrically, nature’s “purpose” in these pastorals is to tell humans who they are.
A common variant of the city/country contrast, and one that gives some versions of pastoral their particular complexity and interest is characterized by the corruption of the political world of the city impinging on and disrupting the country world. Intruders enter the garden with values, knowledge, and needs differe
nt from the farmer’s, complicating the struggle to live from the land and to know oneself in nature. The archetypal pastorals—Biblical Eden, Virgil’s landscapes of the Eclogues, Shakespeare’s As You Like It—hold out different images of the garden. In the idealized pastoral of Eden, the garden is in its wild state; food falls from the trees and is simply gathered, but the snake slithers in and the apple is bitten. In the domesticated shepherds’ world of the Eclogues, land is cultivated, sheep tended, and wooden flutes piped, but dispossessed farmers pass by at the peripheries of the protected place, threatening its tranquility. In As You Like It, the attractive wisdom and the simple generosity associated with the country are undercut by the intrusion of city-like economic reality. When Rosalind begs entertainment, rest, and food, Corin replies, “I am shepherd to another man / And do not shear the fleeces that I graze” (II, iv, 73). Arden too is mortgaged to forces that are neither natural nor of the shepherd’s making. Money is the currency of the pastoral world too, and one cannot simply share nature’s bounty with those in need.
These various versions of pastoral—idealized, domesticated, and real—exist in Now in November too and each is undercut by a successively harsher layer of reality. Marget has her vision of Eden, but can do nothing when her father pulls up acres of wild phlox, cuts down pin oaks and sycamores to turn land to corn fields (p. 38). The father struggles to produce milk and corn, but the force driving his work is a mortgage to some unseen agent who can take the land “from under your feet by a cipher scratch” (p. 76). Indeed, when the tax assessor finally arrives to collect money the family does not have, Father is reduced to silent helplessness, “sunk so deep in himself that it would have been a relief to hear him roar out or swear” (p. 222). Intruded on by the market economy, the farm world loses its capacity to tell you who you are. Rather it tells you that without money, you are nothing at all. Against the sustaining nature of beauty then, Johnson poses the economic pressure felt so desperately by farmers. And in this unusual book there is room for both. I have talked about the natural world, but it is also helpful to understand the economic world in which the natural world endures.
Johnson understood and reflected accurately the situation of farmers in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the towns around the Haldemarne farm, there are labor unrest and talk of strikes. Farm wages are so low that Max, the first hired man, goes off to work on the road, provoking Arnold Haldemarne to exclaim, as he affirmed values of an era gone by, that a farm “ought to pay as good as a road. No road’s going to feed a man!” (p. 50). The disagreement between Father and Grant derives from the neighboring farmers’ decision to hold back milk from the dairy in order to protest low prices. Why surplus milk should be dumped in the streets and given to the pigs, Father cannot understand. And then there is the mortgage that is the object of both the family’s deepest anxieties and the father’s perpetual fear and anger because he must first produce for “it” and only after for his family.
This particular situation, compressed as it is and taking place at the peripheries of the novel’s emotional world, exemplifies both the problems of American agriculture in this period and the mind set of individual farmers. As the nation industrialized in the decades following the Civil War, farmers slowly became part of the market economy. Producing fewer and fewer goods at home, by the end of the century most farmers had one or two cash crops, a kitchen garden, and could buy an increasing variety of goods in neighboring towns. They had become small businessmen although the country and they themselves maintained the myth of the independent farmer, free and self-sufficient on his land. In becoming part of the national economy, however, farmers came into broader competition with each other, and with access to rail transportation for distributing their goods, were subject to the whims of the national economy.9 Furthermore, improved farming methods caused farmers to produce more goods than the market could absorb (Degler, p. 359). Indeed, agricultural overproduction during and after the First World War paved the way for “the prolonged farm depression of the twenties and thirties” (Degler, p. 362). The Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933, 1936, and 1938 created the policy we adhere to today: farmers are paid not to grow certain crops, and the government buys and stores certain surpluses (Degler, p. 418), rather than devising a system to distribute food to those in need.
Johnson gets these facts accurately. What Arnold Haldemarne cannot understand, the author sees clearly. The day of the independent farmer is done. The world “all wrong, and shouting at itself” is continuous with the rural world; the retreat to the land no matter how hard a man works provides only illusory safety. These are felt realities in the novel. The mortgage debt like a stone in the family’s hearts, Ramsey thrown off his land, the beggar who comes to the gate, the assessor who comes to collect back property taxes—these are signs that the snake has entered the garden.
“I can see our years as a whole.”
Prior to the publication of Now in November, Johnson had published short stories and poems collected respectively in the volumes Winter Orchard (1935) and Year’s End (1937). These slight pieces were greeted with praise. Their themes correspond to those developed in Now in November: adolescent sexual awakening (“I Was Sixteen”) with its special variants; fear of vulnerability in love (“The Unposted Letter”); and embracing love and denying it simultaneously (“Safe” and the poem “Prescription” in Year’s End). There are also early meditations on nature, sketches about Jim Crow and breadlines, and the exploration of a theme central to Now in November: the degree to which human preoccupation with little things “prevents us from being really alive.” In the poem “. . . And no bell rings,” published in Year’s End, the speaking voice asserts, “some day, when all the little bills are paid, /And all the letters answered . . . / We will rise and kneel by the window, / And observe the mountains where the eagles nest.” These works, though interesting, were tentative, but in Now in November, the young woman summoned an economy, clarity, and intensity that are nothing short of a miracle. One can only guess how this miracle came about: that Johnson’s particular stage of emotional and intellectual development, the state of relations with her sisters and others within her family, and the social realities of the Depression came together at a propitious moment. Out of the complex of personal, familial, and political forces, a privileged young woman wrested a coherent vision that fused successfully three usually distinct literary traditions: the autobiographical narrative of coming of age, the meditation on nature, and the novel of social protest.
The work that follows does not again explore this conjunction of traditions and themes. Johnson tries and fails at an overtly political novel, Jordanstown (1937), that takes as its theme class and political conflict in a small town. Its protagonist, a journalist and editor of the local paper, has a political message and a program to put in place, but he is thwarted by the small-time capitalists who live on the hill. While Johnson’s politics are clearly set out in the novel, they overtake it to such a degree that the struggles become both predictable and formulaic. In her subsequent work, however, the two successful themes of Now in November—nature and family relations—are dramatically separated and transmuted. The short stories (anthologized in Wildwood and The Sorcerer’s Son) and novel (The Dark Traveler) of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s are largely about family issues. Often a troubled youthful outsider is taken in by a warm and joyful family. Sometimes there is only longing for communion and for a lost family. In a number of stories, although the gender roles are traditional, the men share family work and love, and participate in the family’s economy of emotions.
In the sixties, the naturalist in Johnson reappears in print. She has become caught up in issues of ecology, and links the destruction of nature to attitudes in the Pentagon. She shares with her son, Terry, pacifism and membership in the antiwar movement—he is a conscientious objector. At the end of her writing career, in The Inland Island, she draws sustenance from nature untamed; and from a great distance, across the same kind of gulf that Johnson
once characterized as separating men and women, she looks out at a world she feels has gone mad beyond understanding.
What do we know of Johnson’s early years, the youth and adolescence that led to the writing of the gem, Now in November? What life did Johnson live after it? The facts of Johnson’s early years are not startling, the daily life lived routinely, the unavoidable turmoil internalized and transformed into prose. Born in 1910, Johnson came of age with the Depression. Her father was a wealthy businessman and Josephine, the second of four girls, grew up on a farm in Kirkwood, Missouri just outside of St. Louis. Surrounded by relatives and close family friends, the childhood memories of the autobiographical Seven Houses (1973) are full of the scent of gardens, of primitive baseball games, of colds and coughs and rubber boots, of pony rides and fireworks, of private school, of dark hideways in the family manse. Johnson portrays herself as a slow, shy child, tolerant of her own dark side, accepting even of an unemotional and distant father whom she and her sisters feared.
In 1930, Johnson, an art student, dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis to return to write at her family home. Her parents had moved from Kirkwood when she was an early adolescent to a two-hundred-acre farm; here her widowed mother lived with Josephine’s three sisters. Despite her elite education and privileged upbringing, Johnson seems to have developed a deep commitment to social justice for the poor and oppressed. Perhaps she followed after her mother, Ethel, who was a strong pacifist during World War I, an active member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and a Quaker. Perhaps her politics grew from her experience as a college student at Washington University just as the Crash came. In the years after the publication of Now in November, Johnson’s sympathies with farm struggles remained sufficiently strong to have led her to write for The New Masses and to engage in pro-union activism on behalf of rural laborers. The New York Times of September 6, 1936 tells of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s arrest in Arkansas “under suspicion of encouraging cotton field workers to strike.”
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