Reading this updated edition of Joe Klein’s assiduously researched, elegantly written bio, I can’t help but think there’s one flaw: He got the title wrong.
First released in 1980 and now updated to include last year’s Billy Bragg/Wilco collaboration Mermaid Avenue, the book could more appropriately be called Woody Guthrie: The Lives. Let us count the lives he lived.
There’s Dickensian Woody, born into an indigent Artful Dodger childhood, and Dysfunctional Woody, whose kin were as lamentable as anything you’d see on Jerry Springer. There’s Horatio Alger Woody, who transfigures his lot in life, from street-corner entertainer to faith healer, soda jerk, commercial sign painter, political cartoonist, merchant mariner, cowboy singer, dishwasher, songwriter, radio star and national icon.
We meet Communist Woody, who didn’t learn about class conflict from Das Kapital but did stomach hobo jungles and police billy clubs. And we also get to know Troubled Woody, who, behind the wayfaring legend, often didn’t let his concern for the brotherhood of man extend to his own front door. All this, and of course Troubadour Woody, whose legacy of song rightly lives on, and Tragic Woody, who played out his final years suffering from Huntington’s chorea just as the new folk movement was paying him delayed props.
Any one of these lives would provide enough drama for a whole bio, so credit Klein, best-known as the “Anonymous” pen behind the Clinton Administration parable Primary Colors, for shoe-horning it all into 500 pages. Of course, Guthrie embellished his own story in Bound For Glory, a book that, as Klein writes, was more novel than autobiography, “with few of the creative advantages of the former and all of the self-indulgent disadvantages of the latter.”
Klein renders Guthrie’s story in often glorious widescreen language. The Dust Bowl migration was “a human convulsion…the countryside seemed to heave and groan.” Guthrie’s voice was “bitter but exhilarating, like biting into a lemon,” and Woody’s Communist colleagues “could stuff envelopes with the passion and intensity that most other people reserved for sex and family arguments.”
Passion and intensity infect every page, and Klein has turned the tidy trick of exposing Guthrie’s squalid side while illuminating his triumphs. If I had Woody’s faith in people, I’d believe this bio would be enough to endow Guthrie with the status he merits. Of course, there’s also the music.
Reading this updated edition of Joe Klein’s assiduously researched, elegantly written bio, I can’t help but think there’s one flaw: He got the title wrong.
First released in 1980 and now updated to include last year’s Billy Bragg/Wilco collaboration Mermaid Avenue, the book could more appropriately be called Woody Guthrie: The Lives. Let us count the lives he lived.
There’s Dickensian Woody, born into an indigent Artful Dodger childhood, and Dysfunctional Woody, whose kin were as lamentable as anything you’d see on Jerry Springer. There’s Horatio Alger Woody, who transfigures his lot in life, from street-corner entertainer to faith healer, soda jerk, commercial sign painter, political cartoonist, merchant mariner, cowboy singer, dishwasher, songwriter, radio star and national icon.
We meet Communist Woody, who didn’t learn about class conflict from Das Kapital but did stomach hobo jungles and police billy clubs. And we also get to know Troubled Woody, who, behind the wayfaring legend, often didn’t let his concern for the brotherhood of man extend to his own front door. All this, and of course Troubadour Woody, whose legacy of song rightly lives on, and Tragic Woody, who played out his final years suffering from Huntington’s chorea just as the new folk movement was paying him delayed props.
Any one of these lives would provide enough drama for a whole bio, so credit Klein, best-known as the “Anonymous” pen behind the Clinton Administration parable Primary Colors, for shoe-horning it all into 500 pages. Of course, Guthrie embellished his own story in Bound For Glory, a book that, as Klein writes, was more novel than autobiography, “with few of the creative advantages of the former and all of the self-indulgent disadvantages of the latter.”
Klein renders Guthrie’s story in often glorious widescreen language. The Dust Bowl migration was “a human convulsion…the countryside seemed to heave and groan.” Guthrie’s voice was “bitter but exhilarating, like biting into a lemon,” and Woody’s Communist colleagues “could stuff envelopes with the passion and intensity that most other people reserved for sex and family arguments.”
Passion and intensity infect every page, and Klein has turned the tidy trick of exposing Guthrie’s squalid side while illuminating his triumphs. If I had Woody’s faith in people, I’d believe this bio would be enough to endow Guthrie with the status he merits. Of course, there’s also the music.
