I first encountered the literary genre of the oral history at the same time I caught sight of probably its most masterful exponent, Studs Terkel. I was leafing around a book shop on the upper east side of NYC in Jaunary 2008, on my way to Obama’s Inauguration. I was leafing around some forgotten section of the store when the staff began to clear the room to ready it for a talk by the curiously named author of dozens of volumes of oral history, Studs Terkel. An energetic and diverse crowd flooded in, elated at the chance to meet someone they evidently held in highest regard. And then there was the man himself, seemingly 90 years old, wiry, alert and with a gaze of the most strikingly generous curiosity. I’d never heard of Studs Terkel, and, lacking a ticket I couldn’t stay, but I did pick up a copy of one of his books ‘Working” on my way out.
I’ve regretted not having had the chance to see his talk ever since (he would die 8 months later) and on the subway returning home as I began to read the book, I walked into a way of perceiving and reporting on the world of such generosity and richness of colour and anecdote that it made most novels and all non-fiction seem grey by comparison.
In Working, (subtitle: ‘People talk about what they do all, and how they feel about what they do’) Terkel recounts the stories of people in almost every imaginable profession of the time – pizza delivery guys, judges, programmers, lawn-mowers, prostitutes, politicians, doctors… and the accounts are so intimate and rich in detail that one almost feels as if one has worked in these professions oneself for a year or two. One feels them in one’s bones, from the interior subjective view. It’s really a very amazing piece of literature, whose power is that the author is a skilful conduit of every day lived experience. The charmingness of the book is deepened by the amazing similarity along certain dimensions of all of these accounts: every person, it turns out, has their dreams, sources of pride, rivalries,
I’ve been mulling a lot on reading and writing and its very non-linear benefits to the imagination and soul, and a couple days ago I picked up another of his books “Hard Times” – oral histories of people who lived through the Great Depression. Again, on almost every page one is delighted by a detail of life and given a fresh perspective on human lives, resilience, and meaning.
I’ll share some details from just on of the hundreds of oral histories in the volume. It’s the Terkel’s account of a worker in a Cuban cigar factory in the south, their strikes, lifestyle and so on. This four-page account is replete with wonderful detail: of how the workers, arrayed around tables hand-assembling cigars for 10 hours a day, would hire young people to read for them from a book all day long; choice of book was hotly debated, the readers (paid a minute fee) really hot into acting the books out, and how these illiterate depression-era workers had great knowledge of the great works of literature from Tolstoy, Stendhal, Goethe, Dostoyevsky and so on. The cigar make remarked that ever since he’d detested the phrase ‘working class’, for how condescending and misleading it was, in that these were some of the most educated people he would ever meet.
Another illuminating detail: workers would routinely give 10% of their minimal earnings to “the Spanish cause” such was the feeling of allegiance between this community and the Spanish. They’d sing Italian revolutionary songs together with Spanish words, not realising the origin, dreaming of communist revolution.
And another: On pay day, if anyone in the community needed help a hat would go round and everyone would chip in (‘such-and-such’s dad is ill, needs surgery… “the good thing was you never needed to ask yourself, someone else would have an eye out and make sure to suggest it”.
There are a few other details that stayed with me.
It took me 10 minutes to read the account, less time than it has taken me to write this. Yet this whole collection of fun anecdotes has followed me round these last days and animated my perception of the world in perhaps half a dozen moments. The funniest was when I visited the annual festival of the local eco-commune and witnessed a moment where they were singing a revolutionary song in Spanish. The romance of such song persists!
And the snakes and ladders of cultural progress really came through to me thinking about those young readers employed by . Today, we go to book clubs to create shared context for discussion; we generally listen to our audio books solo and rarely have a chance to digest them in conversation with others; everything feels free, and that diminishes the intentionality of our attention; the voice we might listen to is an actor’s or the author’s, and the personal connection and opportunity for learning provided for the reader are gone. I’d love a life where I could listen to the novels of Tolstoy with my community from a young person whose confidence and connection and literary skill were enhanced by the experience.
And all of this is of course an advert for the joys of reading: and how always unexpectedly it makes our minds richer and conjures useful connections and sensibilities in our souls.