Reapers of the Dust / Edition 1

by Lois Phillips Hudson

Overview

First published in 1965, her childhood recollections of living in North Dakota are what Lois Phillips Hudson used to spin these unusual, moving stories of simple, joyful days and of continuing battles with the hostile elements on the Great Plains during the 1930s. Lois Hudson is recognized as a major chronicler of America's agricultural heartland during the grim years of the Great Depression.

Lois Phillips Hudson is recognized as a major chronicler of America's agricultural heartland during the grim years of the Great Depression. Reapers of the Dust, now reprinted for a new generation of readers, vividly evokes that difficult time. From Hudson's childhood in North Dakota spring these unusual, moving stories of simple, joyful days, of continuing battles with hostile elements, and of a family's new life as migrant workers on the West Coast.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780873511773
Publisher:	Minnesota Historical Society Press
Publication date:	03/15/1984
Series:	Borealis Bks.
Edition description:	Reprint ed
Pages:	189
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lois Phillips Hudson was born in 1927 in Jamestown, North Dakota. Since 1969 she has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her published works include numerous short stories and The Bones of Plenty, a novel, also available from the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction by David Guterson

Reapers of the Dust is memoir to the extent that it was received that way, and fiction to the extent that its author, Lois Hudson, declaimed. It is a work of literary collage in an era before literary collage had a name, a predecessor to it that has gone unrecognized for reasons bearing on its author’s life, even today, with tragic force.
Readers with biographical data about Hudson—who was born in North Dakota in 1927 and moved to Western Washington as a child of the Dustbowl—will likely see Reapers of the Dust as a memoir. For those without biographical touchstones, much, still, will point toward the “real,” as in this from “When the Fields Are Fresh and Green”:

My first hazy memories of myself were set nearly two thousand miles from the place where my second, verifiable memories of myself began. My father’s business failed in 1931, and my family moved from Seattle back to a desolate half-section in North Dakota just before I was four years old.

One needn’t have a biography of Hudson at hand to discern this as memoir, or—working from negation—as non-fiction of some sort. Such first person exposition, shorn of fiction’s dress, defies a fiction reader’s expectations. Hudson also wielded in Reapers of the Dust a conspicuous formality—an essayist’s tone—at loggerheads with fiction. “It is where there are the fewest distinctions between men and women that there can be the most bitterness between them,” she wrote to begin “Gopher Hunting.” That, tentatively, might signal a coming fiction—in the manner of the happy and unhappy families at Anna Karenina’s outset—but it’s followed by:

If a woman’s major function in life is to contribute additional muscles and energy to her husband’s physical battle for survival, then her usefulness will be judged by the same criteria that determine the usefulness of males. Such habits of thinking result in constant comparisons, usually to the disadvantage of females, so that women are seldom allotted any niche to dominate.

Compare this to what follows the Tolstoyan abstraction:

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky household. The wife had found out that the husband had had an affair with the French governess and had told him that she could not go on living in the same house with him.
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Reapers of the Dust debuted in 1965, three years after Hudson’s The Bones of Plenty, which is unambiguously a work of fiction, recognizably a novel in form, and, despite its obscurity, a consummate work of American Realism. Set in North Dakota in 1933 and ‘34, in a farm milieu of Dustbowl decline, Hudson’s novel appeared just before Pynchon’s V, Hawkes’ Second Skin, and Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle—in other words, late, though not just in literary terms. The Dustbowl, by the early Sixties, had dropped out of view. Distress about it had been subsumed by intervening events on an apocalyptic scale. More, Steinbeck had long before sucked the air out of that particular room. The imprimatur had been placed on The Grapes of Wrath (1939) as the definitive Dustbowl novel. Did we need another? In 1962? In the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Hudson suffered loosely the fate of Sanora Babb, whose copious notes on migrant workers fell, with painful irony, to Steinbeck. (Babb’s Whose Names are Unknown—a Dustbowl novel slated for 1939 publication—was quashed when Steinbeck’s novel beat it to the marketplace, and didn’t appear in print until 2004. By then, Babb was 97.) Hudson, who in 1964 might already have felt disappointed by the modest reception The Bones of Plenty garnered—and who would later feel keenly disappointed by it—gathered her periodical pieces, added three as yet unpublished, and sold them to Little, Brown, and Company as Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle. Kirkus, in a pre-publication review, characterized it as capturing “moments in Miss Hudson’s childhood when she acquired new awareness and could feel herself growing up.” There was no mention of fiction.
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Hudson, later, took scathing umbrage when Reapers of the Dust was identified as memoir, which I know because I was her student in the late 1970s at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Memoir” was, for her, an aspersion, one tangled up with the arresting of her career at the rank of associate professor and with the general underestimating that had marginalized her in literary and academic spheres. She knew, as she’d long known, that gender, class, and geography were against her, that if, both literally and metaphorically speaking, she’d been in the right fraternity at Yale, things would be different. I heard about such matters during meetings in her office, from a writer who was bitter, defiant, and estranged. Hudson was only 50 when we met, but spoke of herself, already, as a curmudgeon, albeit in a tone meant to mock detractors and bemoan, wistfully, the rise of post-modern fiction. All told, it’s likely she saw a chance for redemption when, in 1984, the Minnesota Historical Society Press reprinted Reapers of the Dust with an author’s preface that, in tones of forthright vigor, asked what constitutes, or qualifies as, fiction. In the act of throwing down this gauntlet, Hudson produced her manifesto.
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Eight of the twelve narratives in Reapers of the Dust had previously appeared in The Reporter, a leftist, or at least liberal, newsmagazine eventually absorbed by Harper’s. The first, “The Dust Storm,” appeared in 1957 under the subheading “a reminiscence of farming in North Dakota.” “The Cold Wave,” “Children of the Harvest,” and “The Water Witch,” in ‘58 and ‘59, were also identified by The Reporter as reminiscence, but then it published “The King’s Birthday” as a short story, and thereafter interwove the two categories. It may be that Hudson was always candid with her editor about the nature of the material she submitted, or it may be that her editor acted unilaterally. Either way, the twelve narratives constituting Reapers of the Dust still defy, more than half a century later, categorization.
In her preface to the 1984 edition, Hudson wrote:

After publishing several stories which did draw a large proportion of their events and characters . . . from my own experience, I had learned enough about how to use that experience. When I wrote “The King’s Birthday” I was able to stretch my “fictional” wings farther than I had before, and fly a goodly distance into “the peculiar province of fiction.”

“The peculiar province of fiction” was a phrase she’d acquired from Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, two bellwethers of American new criticism. It was a metaphor they’d used in Understanding Fiction (a primer that figured in Hudson’s pedagogy) to promote “coherence” as fiction’s distinguishing characteristic. Brooks and Warren, wrote Hudson in her preface:
do not concern themselves with what percentage of details in a story may have been plucked from an author’s own life; rather, it is what the author intends to do with these details that determines a story’s genre. History, biography, and journalism must present details that exactly correspond to the frequently chaotic world they describe; fiction must concern itself with “the coherent relating of action, character, and meaning.”

Right there lies the crux of the matter.

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Hudson endured, at times openly, moral torment. As she indicated at the close of her ‘84 preface, she struggled “to find sense and beauty in ‘the wild variety of human experience.” Her early years had a Methodist cast. In childhood she might have recited, weekly, in unison with the congregation of the Eldredge Community Methodist Church (Eldrege is now abandoned, a ghost town), this from John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer:
“Christ has many services to be done. Some are easy, others are difficult. Some bring honor, others bring reproach. Some are suitable to our natural inclinations and temporal interests, others are contrary to both.”

The prairie incited Hudson to existential brooding. An earth so large, under such a vast sky, could be none other than distressing and divine. “A prairie child,” she wrote in “The Dust Storm,” “walking in the loneliness of great spaces, absorbs familiarity with eternity.” To this recognition she added an acknowledgment of childhood’s unfailing and poignant determinism, rendered with close prosodic attention at the end of “When The Fields Are Fresh and Green”:

. . . in a way none of us ever really leaves those fields that made us. It is from those lost fields that we go on shyly, silently calling to each other. It is from those fields, forever sealed against the trespasses of our grownup selves, forever splendid with light falling like trumpets salutes through the old heavy boughs of the world, that each of us keeps his long watch on the people who come to assume his face.

The trespasses of the grownup self—original sin realized in the exercise of free will—made Hudson an idealist. She was passionate and outspoken about the injustices of class, having suffered them as a Dustbowl transient. Her marginalization as the daughter of impoverished migrants spurred her to nuanced and piercing depictions of the inward, and damaging, impact of class oppression in “Children of the Harvest” and “Room at the Bottom.” Hudson was also an early environmentalist whose essay in The Reporter, “Four-Lane Menace to California’s Redwoods,” appeared three years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and a feminist who asked, in “Why Aren’t There More Creative Women?” :

. . . what if you are told, in a thousand ways, from the time that you are born, that you can and will be raped? What if you are told that whether you want sex or not, whether you want to cater to another person’s ego or not, this is what you were put on earth to do? What rights do you have then? How do you dare to have your own feelings? What great artist does not express his or her own feelings?

As a writer and teacher, Hudson advocated fiercely for the utility of art in human affairs. Much of her preface to the ‘84 edition of Reapers of the Dust is given over to this theme, and to tying it to the “truth of coherence” promulgated by Brooks and Warren in Understanding Fiction. Hudson saw the moral wherever she turned, which may be why she protested so durably regarding truth in fiction. It’s probably not coincidental that she generated nearly all of her published work during her fifteen year marriage, as she followed her husband to academic posts and smoldered in the shadows of his triumphs. Living falsely allowed her truths; repression allowed her expression.
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Brooks and Warren, in their aforementioned primer, juxtaposed their “truth of coherence” against a “truth of correspondence,” the former ascendant in fiction, the latter in life. To make fiction meant, for them, to select from the unexpurgated variety of living certain elements that cohere to make meaning. Non-fiction, conversely, depicted life’s chaos; its requirement was to correspond to “reality,” however inexplicable or incomprehensible, however much stranger, or messier, than fiction. Life’s meaningless miasma was the province of history, biography, and journalism, while in the land of fiction reigned clarity by omission. A fiction writer chiseled at an amorphous stone; a nonfiction writer, without prejudice, described it.
This contrast is nonsensical, but only partly because it’s false. (Historians, biographers, or journalists all select, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be human.) It furthermore leaves no room for the imagined. Worse, its dichotomous rigidity makes it difficult for us to see the possibility of a very fertile nexus. Hudson the artist worked at just such an intersection; Hudson the moralist paid obeisance to rules. The synergy produced her best work.
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It’s ironic that Hudson did collage so well but was never lauded for it. The Bones of Plenty, having engendered and then solidified her reputation as a convention-bound realist, made the inventiveness of Reapers of the Dust inaccessible to readers. Few recognized that what they held in their hands was more than memoir, more than fiction, and some of both. Hudson abetted this widespread misreading by failing to acknowledge her work as collage, opting instead to cast her lot with fiction. This adamant and categorical denial