Originally published at Disability Studies Community Blog
Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life
Gustavus Stadler
Beacon Press, 2020
Indeed,
this book is an intimate biography and a biography of the intimate. More than
Guthrie’s strident politics or ideological journey, Stadler focuses on the
private correspondences, diary writings, and personal friendships that reveal
Guthrie as a deeply sensual human being. Rather than conjuring the image of a
man violently strumming a guitar amidst the throes of revolutionary
fervor, An Intimate Life elicits the sensation of a man
delicately rolling a pencil between his fingers as he prepares to put innermost
thoughts to paper. It is more Walt Whitman than Karl Marx, who is put into
communion with Guthrie in this book. In describing the import of Guthrie’s
semi-autobiographical novel, Bound for Glory, published in 1943,
Stadler writes that it tells “the story of his [Guthrie’s] interest in troubled
people and damaged bodies that needed intimate attention.” This includes scenes
of “men improvising relations of care, of quasi-domesticity” while riding in
train boxcars across the Midwest. It also significantly includes Guthrie’s
“haunted” relationship with his mother, Nora, “through his deeply traumatized
depiction of [her] decline,” due to Huntington’s disease.
Nora
Guthrie began expressing increasingly acute symptoms of Huntington’s, viz.
physiological and psychological loss of control, when Woody was still young.
The people of the small Oklahoma town in which the Guthrie family lived began
to comment derisively upon and shun Nora for being “crazy.” In 1927, Woody’s
father had Nora committed to a state institution for the “insane,” where she
died shortly thereafter. The young Woody, ignorant at the time of both the
diagnosis and the heritability of Huntington’s disease, would have been shocked
to know that a similar fate awaited him in his elder years. In fact, the adult
Woody Guthrie of the 1950s was resistant to the Huntington’s diagnosis given to
him by doctors; he instead attributed his advancing physiological and
psychological impairments – and his increasingly frequent and extended stays in
various state institutions and psychiatric hospitals around New York City – to
alcoholism.
There
are other often-overlooked elements of Guthrie’s story that Stadler gives
extensive treatment to, such as the importance of his relationship with his
long-time partner and wife, Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia; Guthrie’s fascination
and complicated relationship with sex, sexuality, and homosexuality; and the
abstract artistic expressionism of his later years, after he began exhibiting
symptoms of Huntington’s, which focused on questions of racism, whiteness, and
white supremacy in the U.S. Additionally, Stadler presents an even-handed, if
not sympathetic, interpretation of Guthrie’s lifelong commitment to
working-class revolutionary politics and the American communist movement, which
enjoyed something of a surge in popularity in the New Deal 1930s.
From
a disability and madness studies vantage the most interesting sections of An
Intimate Life are to be found in the latter chapters of the book,
which examine Guthrie’s experience with and reflections upon being
institutionalized. Between 1956 and 1967, when he died at the age of
fifty-five, Guthrie cycled between a number of state institutions, sometimes
voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily. The conversations and observations he
obtained from others in these institutions profoundly impacted him.
‘Shell-shocked’ war veterans, old leftists, ‘deviant’ victims of the 1950s
persecution of homosexuality – such people furthered Guthrie’s awareness of the
social effects of stigma, marginalization, and shame. Mediated by a callous and
cruel capitalist social system and an imperious medical establishment, Guthrie
saw in his fellow ‘patients’ not people who were primarily victims of their
various diagnosed pathologies – many of whom Guthrie maintained were “sick in
[their] own healthy [emphasis added] way” – but victims of a
“crazy mixed up” society.
In
a fascinating stroke of comparative insight, Stadler contextualizes Guthrie’s
experience by making recourse to the apt poetry of Allen Ginsberg. In 1956, the
same year that Guthrie entered the Greystone Psychiatric Hospital near New York
City, Ginsberg published the famous poem, “Howl,” which references Greystone
and other New York institutions, inhabited by “twenty-five thousand mad
comrades.” When Ginsberg writes in the opening line of the poem, “I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he may well have had
numerous specific names in mind, as Ginsberg witnessed many friends,
contemporaries, and family members committed to institutions over the years,
many of whom identified as communist, queer, or otherwise non-normative.
An
Intimate Life has a lot to offer those interested in a diverse array
of subjects. It is a story of the shifting ideological climate of the United
States between the 1900s and 1950s, as working-class politics went from milieux
of itinerant syndicalist organizing, to New Deal and Popular Front socialism,
to revanchist and repressive Cold War anti-communism. It is a story of sexual
politics, gender variance, and the socially-constructed deviance corresponding
thereto. It is a story of American racism, lynch mobs, white supremacy, and
critical self-reflective whiteness. It is a story of disability, illness,
normativity, stigma, and institutionalization. And it is a story of love,
romanticism, the beauty and bane of family intimacy, poetry, music, the sublime,
and the sublimated.
