U. S. in a Bus

THE ROAD: IN SEARCH OF AMERICA--Nathan Asch--Norton ($2.75).

Since Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road many a U. S. writer has attempted a modern sequel to that ringing inventory of the U. S. scene. Bravest of these attempts have come from such contemporary novelists as John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe. To the lesser footnotes Novelist Nathan Asch (The Office, Pay Day) this week added his own modestly tentative, well-written account of what the U. S. means after a four-month bus trip.

Like Dos Passos, Author Asch believes the way to go about anatomizing the U. S. is to examine the private histories of the people who are not news. "What I wanted to see was what was so typical that to the natives it was almost banal." He took a bus because it was cheapest, because train travel is stilted and because in an automobile "the only ones you get to talk to are filling station men and traffic cops." In a bus the atmosphere is unaffected, intimate. "Under the murderous vibration . . . you've got to relax . . . everybody sings and everybody visits and a couple of romances are started."

His main difficulties were getting the right people to talk (the wrong ones talked too much), getting permission to visit such points of interest as Southern coal mines, Butte copper mines. Artist and writer acquaintances talked freely but about two most vital subjects, Southern history and Negroes, they seemed "inhuman, almost mad." When he asked permission to go down in a coal mine the owner said: "We are only one company, and we don't wish to monopolize this gentleman's time. Why don't you go to another company and ask them to show you their mines?" Impeding his investigation of sharecroppers were the wary answers to his questions, the outspoken disapproval of the vigilantes (voiced by shooting at him and his companions of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union), his own gooseflesh-reaction to the incredible poverty of sharecroppers' homes.

In Texas he noted that most citizens seemed satisfied to stay there in spite of one who declaimed: "If they gave me hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." Oklahoma was one long dust storm. He felt he could not improve on the seventh-grade essayist who wrote: "Dust, that terrible word dust, when we hear the word our mind turns to thinking of coughing, choking particles that come from somewhere to make our days unpleasant. . . . One thing we can be proud of United States dust storms are the latest thing."

By the time Asch reached Salt Lake City, after imbibing with oil drillers in a hotel room and looking over the Colorado sugar beet fields, his insides felt jolted loose and he was beginning to have nightmares in which he saw himself being mangled in a nation-wide traffic smashup.

His only close-up view of U. S. industry was in a Pacific Northwest logging camp, where he stayed long enough to be genuinely impressed by the complicated, dangerous methods of big-scale logging. He was relieved (as he was everywhere else along the way) that he did not have to make his living in the line. A tough-looking customer in a saloon at Grand Coulee threatened to cut his heart out until he learned that Asch was a writer, then took him outside and confessed shyly that he was a poet. He rounded off with stops at farms, a state prison, jitney dance halls, Detroit, Chicago, tried unsuccessfully to find a coherent pattern in what he had seen. The best he could do was to decide the motif had something to do with Americans' common hopefulness, in contrast to "the knowledge so many people have abroad, that what they were born for is to die some day: It's what makes it possible to see much want and hear of many troubles, and still feel there is hope, there is a chance, there is a future. It's what makes it possible to be happy while traveling in America."

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