The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1933-01-04
A Contribution to the
American Pr0Ietarian Novel
A Review by V. J. JEROME
TO MAKE MY BREAD, by Grace
LumplSin, The Macaulay Co. $3.50

N
"A flowing into the broad stream Of
revolutionary literature, there is
one that is central, that is always
distingishable for its strong,
straight onrush, that never loses
itself in the merging with the
literature of the fellow travellers.
1t is the literature of the prolet-
ariat. It may be but a doggerel
wobbly song of Joe Hill, a rhe-
torical mass recitation. crude
sketch by a worker correspondent
yet it is the weapon with which the
working class is dealing decisive
blows at the literary arsenal of the
enemy; it is the literature that will
arise on the literary ruins of the
enemy.
To this current in literature
belongs Grace Lumpkin's recently
published novel ITO Make My
Bread"
The subject matter of To Make
My Bread is drawn from the life
and struggle of the newly formed
mill proletarians of the Southern
mountains. In the textile region of
the South where the elements of
an early industrialism have mani
tested themselves, there is being re-
peated, in some of its essential
characteristics, that grim and brutal
chapter in modern history known
as the primitive accumulation of
capital" AS in England, where the
foundation of the capitalist mode
of production had its classic form,
we have here the sudden and for
chile transformation of the rural
population into factory workers;
we have here, by direct and indi-
rect methods, by explosions, by CO.
ercions, by cajolings, the expro-
priation Of the agricultural hill
people from their land-strips and
their homes, the divorce of the
town artisans from their simple
tools and workshops, and their i'm
pressment into the industrial pro-
letariat, into the reserve army of
unemployed. The intense eXploita-
ton, the capitalist naturalization
of industry, have resulted in mass
unemployment and misery, in body
and mind wrecking child labor, in
restitution, EQUALIZATION, apathy,
bewilderment, painful hankeringS
for the past in the mountains. And
along with these--the first unclear
murmurings of the wage-slaves,
the self-recognition Of the class, the
enlightenment to struggle, the COM
ing to grips in the life-and-death
conflict of the mill workers against
the mill owners.
GRACE LUNIPKIN comes to the
u village life on the Smoky Noun
tains with the memories of a native.
Her scenes of the drab rural exist
ence with its privations and painful
insecurity are intimate and auth
entic. The dialect of the noun
tain-people is simple, idyllic, re-
minding you, in its quality, of the
warm folk -rhythms of the Irish
countryside in the one-act plays of
Synge. We get a feeling of intimate
Unlocking when the dapper young
man, stranger to the hills, APP
pears before the. simple farmers
with talk of the town-life down
below, with glowing promises of
houses, mansions, of fine clothing,
Of high earnings for the women
folk as well as for the men, of a
grand education for the little ones.
We feel the intensity of the drama
tic irony when Emma exclaims:
Hits like the ISraelites a-going to
the Promised Land" We vince at
the unconscious foreshadowing in
the words Granpap adds: only, 1
hope the Lord don't leave us in
the wilderness for forty years" At
the very moment when these ten
derfoot proletarians set out on their
historic trek down to the mills, we
realize their vast blindness to their
irrevocable course, when Granpap,
voicing the feelings of so many of
the others, assures himself: I'm
aiming to stay from the hills no
longer than need be-"
Yet, one has the feeling that the
full momentousness of this class
drama is not given adequate pre-
sentation in To Make My Bread.
The description of the broad out
lines Of an epoch in transformation
is far too miniature; the mighty
reverberations of proletariat in
birth, in awakening, in first battles,
reach us far too family. In mat
ter, the novel is epical; IN treat
ment it thins into an idyll The
very presentation of the mountain
life, the long, drawn-out, particul-
artistic descriptions, the lingering
attachment to the mountains scene,
the great sloWness with which the
drama develops, give evidence of a
certain fetishism of local color, a
fetishisln having its root, per-
hapS, in photographed I'M
foldment, but which m q y
be politically interpreted as a
nostalgia, a home sickness for the
rural mountain scene. This un-
doubleday explains why bourgeois
critics like Soskin of the New York
Evening Post find SO much to
praise in the first half of the book,
although they find SO much to
decry in the second half, in which
there occur the transition to urban
proletarian life and the open class
conflict.
BECAUSE it is among our initial
y American working class novels,
in a sense a guide for those still
b.