The WP & A

MEN WORKING--John Faulkner--Harcourf, Brace ($2.50).

A remarkable first novel came out of the South this week, and the Jeeter Lesters, Ty Waldens, Snopes and Joads moved over to make room for a new family of U.S. literary Kallikaks -- the Taylors. Its author: John Faulkner, younger brother of William Faulkner (Sanctuary and eleven other novels). The story: how the Taylors and their neighbors exchanged the certain poverty of sharecropping in Mississippi for the uncertainties of city life on the WPA.

Author Faulkner, a former WPA official, tells this shabby and pathetic tale with great literary tact, balancing against the slapstick ignorance and innate apathy of his unheroic characters, their deep sense of their own personal dignity, natural courtesy, terrible patience, thwarted honesty. No idealization, Men Working is the most human book that has been written about WPA workers, the saddest and the funniest.

There are twelve Taylors. Paw is "a stoop-shouldered man in faded and patched overalls and jumper," whose "whole attitude [was] one of vague indecision and innate bewilderment." Maw "was heavy and cumbersome with un attended childbearing and her feet were flat and encased in low tennis shoes . . . with the laces carelessly flapping around her bare dirt-stained ankles. . . ." The children were Hub, Virginia ("Virginia ain't what you'd call a godly girl," said Paw), Gwendolin and Eugenia (who had "ferret-like eyes"), Harold and McKinley, Jutland, Buddy (who had a withered leg and a knack for drawing) and Reno (pro nounced Rinno). To Reno, their first born, Paw & Maw proudly referred as their "monstous curosity." He was 20 years old, six feet two inches tall, weighed less than 50 pounds, and drooled into a sparse beard.

Jubilo. It had been a good year. "The good land lay beneath the sun. And the mules with sleek sides . . . slid the flashing plows through the good land and laid it wide for planting. . . . The owners of the pale green striped fields pushed their feet deep into the pulverized ground. . . . Best stand we've had since Nineteen Twenty. We'll make a whopper of a crop this year."

Then the WPA came to Mississippi. The WP & A, the Taylors and their neighbors called it. It looked like the year of jubilo to them. "Lots of the folks is moving to town," said one of them, "I seen Steve Joe today and he told me the Social Worker had done notified him to come to town next Tuesday to have a intercourse with her so I guess he will be on the WP & A soon." The Taylors decided to go too. They had not bothered to tell their landlord they were leaving his crop in the fields.

"Why, God damn it," said Mr. Young, "you can't just go off and leave a man's crop like that. . . . And so far you've got the best stand you've had in twenty years." "I don't aim to just leave no man," said Paw, "seems like you ought to be able to git enough hands to finish just this one crop."

"One crop, hell," said Mr. Young, "this makes seven families I've lost this week. This God damned WPA is ruining the country."

"Well, Mr. Young," said Paw, "hit don't seem just right fer you to stand in the way of a man's bettering hisself."

In town, the migrants took over one of the huge vacant mansions in the town's ex-residential section. The WPA workers said: "Out of twenty-six dollars [a month] I can't afford to pay more than five dollars rent, so if I can get seven other families to move in with me we can take this big house to live in. ... Eight and nine and ten families in six and eight rooms. ..."

"Well, Maw, how do you like this?" said Paw. "Hit's right crowded," said Maw, "but . . . hit's right narce having neighbors so handy."

The merchants liked it too: "Hell, yes. Charge the stuff to 'em. They get one of them blue government checks every two weeks. All they got to do to get it is to get in a bunch and stand around leaning on a shovel for sixty-five hours. . . . Charge it to 'em. Add about half again onto everything they buy. ..."

"They were pretty nice about it," said Hub to Maw. "First place I went to fixed us up a credit. . . . They knowed we was on the WP & A. . . . Right nice folks."

"Well," said Maw, "it makes a body feel right good for folks to be friendly."

Virginia liked town too. After one long absence she returned with a slicked-up husband. He "followed along behind her, grinning sheepishly, fatuously, and she clicked across the floor on her high spike heels and flung herself on the bed and burst into tears." "We're married," said her husband. "Well, now," said Paw, his face clearing, "come right in." "I hate him," said Virginia, "I hate him. I'm going to have a b-b-ba-baby."

"Why," said Paw, "he done the handsome thing by you just like I did by your maw when Rinno was born. What are you so wrought up about? You'll make him feel he ain't welcome. You work on the WP & A?" Paw asked the boy. "Well this is like meeting an old friend. We're all just WP & A folks here. . . . You and Virginia kin have the bed in the corner all to yourselves. ..."

Virginia's husband looked the room over, paused when he got to Reno. "What's that?" he asked. "Why, that's your wife's oldest brother." "Good God," said Virginia's husband.

Town life raised the Taylors' standard of living. "I've got to git me a raddio," said Paw excitedly one day. "Here Congress has done passed a law to give us WP & A men a raise and I never knowed nothing about it till this morning and they done it yestiddy. Ever'body else on the job knowed it but me." So the radio dealers got out their oldest sets, the second-hand-car dealers got out their oldest junk. All jacked up the prices.

403. This felicity was brief. One day the 403'ing (18-month layoffs) began. WPA headquarters was "filled with the men in patched and faded overalls before seven each morning. The farmers who had come to town to get on the WPA stood in a knot in front of the Social Worker's door and the farmers who already lived in town and had already been on the WPA sat on the one seat and squatted against the wall with their 18-month Four Oh Three's in their pockets and their form letters saying they were not eligible for recertification for thirty days in their hands."

To the storekeepers they said, "Well, now, you see, we ain't got just all that little account right now. We're on a vacashun right now. It ain't like gitting fired. It's just kind of a little rest fer us. . . . Mr. Will [a WPA supervisor] he's taking care of us. Said he was going to Tupelo to git our cards tomorrow." They were told: "Why that lying Will can't get you a card in Tupelo. Or in Jackson or Washington or anywhere else. The only way you can get a card is through that Social Worker down at the City Hall and she can't give you one until the government tells her to." It was easier to believe Mr. Will.

They were offered jobs: "How about some of you men going over to the Delta to pick cotton? . . . Got a bumper crop this year. Plenty for everybody. . . ." "Well, now," they said, "we cain't rightly leave here just now. We're liable to git back on the WP & A most any time now. . . . Mr. Will's taking care of us." To eat, they got on the commodity list (relief), lived on the scanty apples, celery, grapefruit, oatmeal the Government fed them. Said Maw: "Them 'moddities don't help much." "No, sir, they don't," said Paw. "A man cain't do no work on apples and celery and such. A man needs bread and molasses. . . ."

The city cut off the light, then the water. "Now the women and children trekked back and forth with buckets to the fountain in the goldfish pool in front of the City Hall and brought water. . . . The commode was now useless, and the tub was used for a bin to store coal in, of which they bought a dollar's worth at a time." Complained the man next door, "The whole end of town smells like a privy."

"Lord, the WPA," said the town that winter, "they make those old men go out on that ditch bank and stand around a great big fire eight hours a day and they have burned up every tree and piece of loose wood on that side of town . . . they have done burned up old man Jones's barn and all them little privies behind them nigger houses . . . that the Board of Health made Mr. Brown build, and they even pulled one of them down with a nigger setting in it."

Hunger, cold, stench, raw temper sometimes made the atmosphere of the big house as bleak as a Neanderthal cave. "What is that I smell?" asked Virginia's husband. "Hit's McKinley," said Maw, "he's sick." "He smells like he's dead." The weakest began to die off. Buddy died first, then Reno. They buried Buddy, kept Reno in a box under Maw's bed.

Said Maw one day: "That lady downstairs was a-talking to me this morning, Paw, and she mentioned something about the smell." "I had noticed that Rinno was gitting to kind of smell," said Paw, "I intended to make 'rangements with that feller that hauled us around here . . . to take Rinno out to London Hill but somehow hit slipped my mind." "Hit disturbs ever'body," said Jutland, "even us out in the hall. Cain't we put him out in the yard just at nights?" "Well, now," said Paw, "hit wouldn't be treating Rinno just right to put him out like that." "No, it wouldn't," said Maw, "Rinno wouldn't want nothing like that."

Soon they were being put out of one house after another. Paw, as the man who had kept his WPA job longest, had drifted into leadership. He had a kind of mild dignity and guileless cunning. His job was to inveigle landlords who had not yet heard of the WPA horde into renting them houses for which they could not pay. Paw never felt he was swindling the landlords because he always knew that some day he would get back on WPA. And he never troubled to tell the landlords that he was renting for six families besides his own because the landlords might be needlessly upset. Sooner or later trie neighbors always complained, the landlord always discovered what was up, the Board of Health always stepped in.

Author Faulkner leaves his farmers squatting on their hunkers, outside the WPA office door, "patient to resignation, diffident, self-contained, pleased with small considerations as children upon being noticed, wanting little and getting less . . . shy of every man yet believing in them all, not immoral but unmoraled, trained through generations to unambition and canny greed, open-handed yet subversive, different in shape and form and fashion, yet with identical expressions and summations of vagueness and bewilderment and despair . . . incongruous and incomplete away from their ill-tended fields and the poverty of their disreputable shacks . . . bringing disaster on themselves with eager hands, tragic in their ignorance, and the ultimate tragedy was that they were unaware of the tragedy that they were."

The Author. John Faulkner, 39, thinks Brother William, 43, "has no superior today" as a writer, does not believe that anyone has excelled him "since the beginning of the printed word." The brothers look so much alike that Oxford, Miss, neighbors have a hard time telling them apart. "They average seeing each other about once a month," usually in front of the post office.

John and his wife, Dolly, Sons Jimmy, 18, and "Chooky" (to whom Men Working is dedicated), 13, live with Mrs. Faulkner's father, J. 0. ("Pete") Ramey, "within hollering distance" of Brother William's palatial colonial house. They moved in about a year ago to take care of widowed Mr. Ramey, but, says John, "Mr. Ramey contends he's taking care of us."

John has had a career like a character in one of his brother's novels. In 1918 he ran away from home, enlisted (under age) in the army. Later he was arrested on his father's orders, had his new uniform taken away. In 1926 he began to study engineering at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. In 1931 he took up flying, got a job plane-dusting boll weevils in the Delta. One night he crashed his plane and his job in Georgia. He came back to manage his brother's plantation near Oxford, where he "raised niggers and mules." John Faulkner admits he is still not much of a farmer, says "it would take a man a lifetime to learn how to plough a straight furrow."

Faulkner went to WPA as a "project engineer" in 1939, finished Men Working while laying sidewalks and digging sewers. He also finished another novel, Dollar Cotton, now with his publishers. The WPA is the best place in the world, he says, to write a book. But, he adds, if he can make $150 a month writing (he is sure he can), he will never do any kind of work again in his life.

Some weeks ago John Faulkner wrote his publishers that he had lost his WPA job, needed some money. "You have nothing to worry about," they replied, "you would have been fired anyway with publication of this book."

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