‘Now in November’ by Josephine Johnson is an extraordinary first novel. With it she won the pulitzer prize of 1935 and at the age of 25 she is the youngest ever winner and a very worthy one. It is really quite excellent, deft, precise, impassioned and yet detached, holding back the overarching fear of losing everything again. Father, mother and the 3 girls have fallen back on the feeble security of a mortgaged farm that was in the family but now neglected and overgrown.
The house was old even then, not log, but boards up and down as barns are made. It was overgrown with the trumpet and wild red ivy-vines, twisted and heavy on the porch. Wild grapes were black across the well in autumn and there was an arbor of tame ones over the pump. Father found an old thrush’s nest hunched up in the leafless vines and took it down so that Merle wouldn’t mistake it for a new nest in spring and keep waiting for birds that never came. She filled it full of round stones and kept it up on the mantelpiece, maybe because she thought that the fire would hatch stone birds,—I didn’t know. She was full of queer notions and things that never existed on earth. She seemed older sometimes than even Kerrin who was born five years ahead.
It is Marget who is the narrator, 14 when the novel opens, and writing in retrospect 10 years later. Merle is 10 and Kerin is 15. Time is of the seasons and the years weave about the regular tasks of a mixed farm. Dad who is 57 when he comes back to the farm tries to do a lot, possibly not quite realistically though the girls Merle and Marget help. Internal evidence seems to indicate corn, sheep, cows, vegetable garden, fruit. No profit in any of it merely hard Scrabble survival at a time in America when markets had collapsed. If it was just a matter of feeding yourself you could stick it out but the incubus of mortgage lying heavy on you. The glimpses of beauty and ease are there overlain with crushing fear. Kerin though, intelligent and beautiful, is wild and wrought by an anger which she has taken from her father, an impatient, wrathful man ready to criticize waste or dawdling. She wants his love but they being like one another repel. Her birthday present to him goes awry:
She held it out toward him but kept her fingers still on it, and we could see that it was a folded knife tipped with silver on the end. “This is supposed to be your present, Dad.” She sounded excited and full of pride. “Watch what I’ve learned to do—taught myself how to do it!” She opened the knife and aimed at a brown spot on the wall, a little spot hardly big enough to see and high up across the room. “Look out!” Dad shouted. “Stop!” He shoved back his chair and tried to snatch the knife, but jerked at her arm instead. Merle and I screamed out, and the knife went wild, straight at old Cale’s blind head, and slashed across his nose. “God damn you!” Father shouted. He grabbed at Kerrin and knocked her back against the wall. Merle started to cry and Kerrin screamed out some horrible things.
Kerin’s instability increases. The great drought comes along to put the final kibosh on things. On and on it goes. Long established oaks die, the land becomes utterly parched:
The fifth month of the drouth began with nothing but clouds and the taunt of an hour’s drizzle. Nothing to soak the ground below an inch deep. September now and the fields more barren than in winter. The pastures where mules and hogs had been not even covered with dying grass. They were eaten to earth and looked like the hide of a mangy hound. Even the ironweed was withered. For a mile around there was nothing but ragweed in the fields, dust-green and heavy-pollened. Locust trees in the south woods died together. Small gold leaves sifted down and were covered with dust. A weird sick acre full of the dying twisted trees, and underneath them the dying ironweed-stalks. The dead elm leaves hung like folded bats.
The girls roam the land away from Kerin's unsettling energy which increasingly begins to haunt the family. Add to that the need to meet the mortgage.
I used to think of it sometimes when the orchards started to bloom and changed from a greyness into white fur along the plum branches, and a rose light came in the peaches. And I used to think of it when the apricots began to redden, and you could look down from the hog-lot’s edge into a valley full of white smoke, more like a gulf full of white spray, where the giant pear trees were. I’d scratch my nail along the post and I’d think—when somebody does like this on a scrap of paper, then all these things are gone, and a little scrawl is bigger than trees or valley.
Grim indeed that the scratch of a signature can eliminate a terrain. Is it a misery chronicle? Objectively yes but at our distance as readers we see the indomitable spirit refined by suffering. The writing is beautiful, rolling along with gentle cadence as quiet and self-effacing and noble as its narrator.
A neglected classic, her most achieved work, the social justice activism seems to have exchanged the creative spirit of primary immediacy for the world of slogans. I’m reading it again.
