Riding like the wind, p.30
Riding Like the Wind, page 30
Dearcopp couldn’t believe the serendipity. Here she had just bought a turquoise pin, and Babb was wearing a wealth of her own turquoise jewelry. When Joanne shared her newly purchased pin with Babb, Babb immediately admired it, and Dearcopp knew the two of them would be good friends. As they walked around the farmers’ market, Babb told Dearcopp the story of each of the pieces of jewelry she wore. Later that evening, they went to dinner with Howe at their favorite Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. The next night was a Tuesday, so Babb brought Dearcopp with her to Bradbury’s home for their writers’ group. As Dearcopp, who was starstruck being in the same room with Bradbury, remembered, “The group was friendly and Ray quite charming and fun. Their critiquing of each other’s work was serious but with the tone of camaraderie they’d forged over decades.”37
By February 2, 1971, however, Cohen, Dearcopp, and many of the other people who had worked on the production of Babb’s book were suddenly fired from McCall’s as it went through a major restructuring just after the release of An Owl on Every Post. Babb was given a new editor, Susan Stanwood. Due to the restructuring, the remaining staff was left completely overwhelmed. Marketing efforts were redirected toward more commercial books, such as the socialite Princess Pignatelli’s book on beauty, The Beautiful People’s Book: A Straightforward Approach to Narcissism.
Despite this turmoil, An Owl on Every Post easily paid off its advance and continued to sell extremely well. In its first weeks, thousands of copies were sold, and sales continued to reach nearly a thousand copies each month for the first few months of the year. By the end of 1971, the McCall’s edition of Owl had sold over 5,000 copies.38 In April 1971, Babb received an offer from Peter Davies Limited in England, which hoped to publish An Owl on Every Post in an English edition in late October 1971. Then, in May 1972, Owl was chosen to be part of the County Book Club and was reprinted for the club’s 5,000 members in England. Babb was thrilled that her book was chosen for the club; she had been disappointed that this had not happened in the U.S. due to Cohen losing his job at a crucial time during the promotion of her book.39 Later, in November 1972, An Owl on Every Post was released in paperback by American Library Editions and went on to sell over 65,000 copies.40 And yet, even though Babb’s work was finally achieving the success it deserved, she had little time to enjoy it before tragedy struck her life again.
In the fall of 1971, the morning sun was filtering in through the large picture window of the living room when Howe suddenly collapsed “as if dead” right in front Babb. Babb fell to her knees next to her motionless husband. She shook his body, trying to wake him. Unable to get him to respond, she began crying uncontrollably. In a fortuitous coincidence, just a month prior, Babb had read an article about “mouth to mouth breathing.” which gave detailed instructions on how to perform the life-saving technique. As soon as she could stop crying and had called an ambulance, she calmed herself enough to catch her breath and begin administering deep breaths into Howe’s mouth, pumping her palms against his ribcage and bringing her husband back to life almost, as she remembered, “at once.”41
Soon she heard the ambulance sirens as they wove up the steep hill to their home. When they arrived, the paramedics strapped Howe, who was still unconscious but breathing, to a gurney and rushed him to Mount Sinai Hospital. Howe remained in intensive care for eight days, with Babb by his side, comforting him as he went in and out of consciousness. When they arrived and Howe was assessed, the doctor on call had taken Babb aside and told her “to brace herself” for his death. Babb was furious. She had no intention of “bracing herself” or of giving up on Howe. As she recalled to Ross, “One simply cannot!”42 Instead, when Howe was physically able to leave the hospital four months later, Babb brought him home and “began doing everything” possible to nurse him back to health. Howe refused to hire a nurse and insisted that only Babb care for him. This meant that any and all time Babb once had to herself was now completely gone. Every minute of her day was spent taking care of Howe until the day he died, in her arms, on the deck off of their bedroom, on July 12, 1976.
For years after Howe’s death, Babb continued to be his caretaker. Even though his physical body was gone, his legacy remained, and she felt it was her duty to secure that legacy. Babb focused almost all of her energy on organizing Howe’s papers for the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures and attending all of the awards and celebrations that were organized for Howe posthumously.43 She attended a few literary events, including the B. Traven seminar held at the University of Southern California on November 12, 1977, where she spoke on a panel about her friendship with Traven: how he’d come to her apartment in Mexico City several times a week, and how, when she brought him to a party (without revealing his identity of course), her friend Waldeen took her aside and asked her, “Who is this droll man you brought to the party?”44
At a star-studded party celebrating director Martin Ritt’s fiftieth anniversary in Hollywood, Babb was quoted in The Hollywood Reporter as saying that Ritt’s work “represents the truth about life, even in its rough beauty.” However, as was so often the case regarding the work she did to keep Howe’s memory alive, her name was misremembered and her profession wasn’t mentioned at all. Her quote was attributed to “Sonora Wong,” who was identified as “the wife of James Wong Howe.” She began to wonder who would secure her legacy when she was gone. And what legacy did she have to leave?
1. Sanora Babb’s mother, Jennie Parks, at age fourteen, roughly a year before her marriage to Walter Babb.
2. Babb as an infant, wearing a custom-made uniform of her father’s Red Rock baseball team. She was considered the team mascot.
3. The Red Rock baseball team, ca. 1905. Walter Babb is standing second from right.
4. The beaded moccasins given to Babb by Otoe-Missoria Chief Black Hawk when she was a young girl.
5. Babb at age two, Waynoka, Oklahoma, 1909.
6. Babb’s paternal grandfather Alonzo “Konkie” Babb, ca. 1930.
7. Konkie in a wagon beside his harvest of broomcorn in front of his dugout in Baca County, Colorado.
8. Babb’s high school graduation photo, Forgan High School, Forgan, Oklahoma, 1924.
9. Babb with sister Dorothy in Forgan, ca. 1920s.
10. A headshot of Babb from her MGM screen test, 1930s.
11. Babb and fellow writer Tillie Lerner Olsen in Des Moines, Iowa, on their way to the First American Writers’ Congress in New York in 1935.
12. Walter Babb in San Diego, California.
13. Babb in Paris, 1935.
14. Babb’s photograph of two teenage Nazi soldiers in Berlin, 1935.
15. Babb with two women on a collective farm near Kiev, 1935.
16. Babb (seated in center) at an FSA migrant camp, 1938.
17. FSA administrator Tom Collins and Babb hanging laundry at a migrant camp, 1938.
18. Babb with the writers’ group started by Ray Bradbury and Dolph Sharp. From left to right: Jack Gross, Ray Morrison, Dolph Sharp, unidentified man, Ray Bradbury, and Babb. The photo was taken at Jack Gross’s home.
19. Cover of a menu from Ching How, the restaurant owned and run by Babb and her husband, cinematographer James Wong Howe.
20. Babb at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, 1959.
21. Babb (wearing her trademark squash-blossom necklace) in Palm Springs after finally getting a publishing contract for The Lost Traveler, 1957.
22. Babb in front of a window display featuring her first published book, The Lost Traveler, at Pickwick Books in Los Angeles, 1958.
23. Babb and Howe at the 39th Academy Awards ceremony in 1966. Credit: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy Awards Show Photographs.
24. Babb, Howe, and their dog Chico at home on Queens Road in the Hollywood Hills.
25. Babb in the 1990s. Credit: © Joanne Dearcopp.
19
The Recovery of Whose Names Are Unknown
Even in the late 1930s, when she was finishing writing Whose Names Are Unknown, Babb knew her approach to documenting the Dust Bowl and its impacts on the people affected by it was different from the approach taken by John Steinbeck, and for the next several de-cades, she continued to fight to bring her version of the past into the light. But over and over again the publishing industry would remain closed to her version of the story, claiming first that her version was too much like Steinbeck’s, then that a story set in the Dust Bowl era wasn’t relevant to modern readers. This second and more significant erasure of Sanora Babb happened when her book wasn’t published for decades and her confidence as a writer was stripped from her. This erasure of is still happening today. But it wasn’t only Babb’s writing that we lost; we also lost the varied perspective she added to our understanding of a catastrophic event, an omission that would leave a hole in the story of the Dust Bowl that is only beginning to be remedied.
Understandably, given the incredible success of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, later in her life Babb would often downplay what Steinbeck and Collins had done to her and her work. She would minimize the severity of the impact the use of her notes in Steinbeck’s novel had on her ability to publish her first novel and the deep and troubling impact it had on her subsequent career as a writer. The Grapes of Wrath would not only become an international best seller and receive the 1940 Pulitzer Prize but would reach an even wider audience that same year, when it would be made into an Academy Award–winning film starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford. Eventually, The Grapes of Wrath would become required reading in high schools across the country (in fact, in many classrooms the book is still read today), and its narrative would solidify the single story about the Dust Bowl era that everyone—except those who lived through it—would accept as the definitive account.
It’s understandable that as the years passed and The Grapes of Wrath became more and more famous, more and more synonymous with the Dust Bowl, Babb would try to play down what had happened to her and her book. At some point she likely assumed that there was no use in fighting back. Why would anyone listen to her version of the story when the world had chosen one story to represent the myriad experiences that made up this tragic event? However, letters and documents from this time tell a different story, one that it is important for us to remember. They remind us that truth is often not the single story that is remembered. The truth is something we have to fight to unearth.
· • ·
It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when Babb was nearing eighty years old, that she began to slow her work of preserving Howe’s legacy and again focus on her own writing career. However, as a final gesture toward her husband’s legacy, Babb sat down with Daniel Mann—the director with whom Howe had made the films Come Back, Little Sheba, The Rose Tattoo, and The Last Angry Man—for several extensive interviews that he hoped to turn into a documentary about Howe. In these interviews Babb not only talks about Howe, but she also talks about the important role she played in his life, a perspective that few who have written about Howe’s career include.
Through this period, she stayed in touch with her writing group. On April 23, 1983, Babb attended the screening of her friend Ray Bradbury’s film Something Wicked This Way Comes at the Main Theater in Walt Disney Studios, along with her friend Esther McCoy.
In April 1985, Babb was invited by her old friend Ann Stanford to attend the Associated Writing Programs Conference to present on a panel on “Celebration: Literature and the Land” with Peter Matthiessen, Patricia Clark Smith, and Barry Lopez.1 In her speech, Babb recounted her early life living close to the land in Eastern Colorado, reflecting on how “day to day life must have intensified my awareness of nature. It gave me a mystical sense of relatedness to the natural world. No dogma, no organization, but a pure, deep perception I have never lost.”2
In the spring of 1987, her short story collection The Dark Earth and Other Stories from the Great Depression, was published by Noel Young at Capra Press in one of Capra’s back-to-back editions. (The second half of her edition was devoted to Lew Amster’s The Killer Instinct and Other Stories from the Great Depression.) In the preface to the collection, Babb states, “My life began in drama and has continued so ever since. I can never live long enough to recreate the varied stories, dark and light, but I relish them all.”3 Indeed, in the last de-cades of her life, thanks to the help of friends and scholars, much of Babb’s work that had fallen out of print would finally be resuscitated. What had once felt like a dead end now became a path out of obscurity, one where readers would become increasingly aware of her work.
Over the years after Howe’s death, a few editors reached out to Babb showing interest in Whose Names Are Unknown, but by the time this interest arrived, Babb had lost almost all of her confidence in her first novel, and she couldn’t make herself read over what she was now calling a very rough draft in order to make the changes she thought would be necessary to make it readable to a modern audience.
Then, in the midsummer of 1989, Alan Wald, who was a professor of English literature and American culture at the University of Michigan and was researching a series of books about leftist writers from the 1930s, reached out to Babb for an interview. In their correspondence leading up to Wald’s visit, Babb mentioned her unpublished manuscript. She told him that “Random House had bought it” but it was never published, and that “rather recently a western publisher who had heard of it wanted to see it, but it is still in first draft and I had no time then to consider what to do.”4
When Wald visited Babb to interview her, he asked if he could share her work with Larry Goldstein, editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. As Wald explained, “I was on the editorial board of the journal and one of my tasks was to locate unpublished material by authors for the journal to bring out, with Goldstein making the final decision.” Babb agreed, and later Larry Goldstein visited her to review the manuscript himself. After a few edits back and forth, an excerpt from Whose Names Are Unknown was published in Michigan Quarterly Review in the summer of 1990.5
A few weeks later, Joanne Dearcopp, who’d not only kept in contact with Babb since they first met while she was working with her on An Owl on Every Post but had become a close friend, flew back to Los Angeles to visit Babb, and while they were out to dinner at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, sipping glasses of wine, Babb brought up the fact that she was devastated that all of her books had gone out of print. There in the busy restaurant, she wondered aloud to herself how one could get one’s books back into print. Dearcopp, who’d grown incredibly fond of Babb over the decades they’d been friends, remembers speaking before even thinking: “No problem, Sanora. We can do that.”6 Babb just looked at her across the table. “Really?” she asked. And despite having no prior experience, Dearcopp looked back at her friend across the table and exclaimed, “I’ll be your agent!”
After their dinner, Dearcopp kept her promise and took on the role of being Babb’s informal agent. She began with the plan of sending Babb’s work out to university presses, a plan that almost immediately worked. In 1994, An Owl on Every Post was republished by the University of New Mexico Press. Babb was so grateful that she inscribed the copy of her book to Dearcopp, “whose efforts and enthusiasm created this second-time around for Owl, this makes me a very happy writer.”7 The next year, the University of New Mexico Press republished Babb’s novel The Lost Traveler, with an introduction by scholar Doug Wixson. Wixson had gotten to know Babb’s work as he researched and wrote his dense literary work Worker-Writer in America, about Babb’s former literary friend Jack Conroy. Conroy had been an integral player in changing the fortunes of many midwestern literary radicals. Over the next decade, Wixson interviewed Babb extensively in hopes of taking on a larger book project about her.8
Then, in January 1996, Babb’s sister Dorothy died. Eighteen years ago, Babb had found her sister a beautiful place to live, under a doctor’s care, in Hemet, California. Dorothy lived there for eighteen years. Babb was of course saddened to lose her sister, but theirs had been a complicated relationship at best. When she was finally freed from the burden of taking care of her sister, Babb revealed in a letter to Dearcopp, “Dorothy, my sister, and I were always close. We shared the same tastes or love of literature, art, music. Aside from that, she was too dependent on me, not living her own life well and was seldom happy. I hope, if there’s an afterlife, she’s happier. She never felt at home in this world.”9
