George Oppen's "'I've Seen America' Book": Discrete Series and the Thirties Road Narrative

In the late twenties, George and Mary Oppen left George's well-to-do San Francisco family for two long journeys through the United States by car, boat, and train. Mary's autobiography, Meaning a Life (1978), recounts the circumstances that led the young couple to the road: their withdrawal from college in Oregon, their desire to see the country, and their tense relationship with George's parents, who, anxious to keep George at home, alternated between threats to annul the marriage and promises of fancy clothes, elegant apartments, and financial security. Fittingly, George and Mary saw their departure from George's family as an act of class traversal, in which they turned the conventional American dream on its head and went off in pursuit of downward class mobility:

We were searching for a way to avoid the trap that our class backgrounds held for us if we relented in our attempts to escape from them. We understood from our experiences at hitchhiking that in the United States we were not required to remain in the class into which we were born. We wanted to see a great deal of the world, and the education of which we talked for ourselves was to leave our class and learn our life by throwing ourselves into it.¹

Moreover, since "George's outspoken desire to be a poet and writer was taken lightly as a youthful aberration from which he would recover with maturity," the couple believed that their flight from the family was vital to their nascent artistic identities: "We were in search of an aesthetic in which to live, and we were looking for it in our own American roots, in our own country" (ML, 75, 68). In Mary's recollection, America is out on the road, where its promise of freedom, discovery, and self-fulfillment contrasts with the stifling Oppen home. Fifty years after her travels, Mary warmly remembers the camaraderie among those who shared the roads, rails, and rivers with the Oppens: "It was a friendly world we found from the first step we took together. Generous describes the world we found when we stepped out into it together" (ML, 68).

"Throwing" themselves into America in pursuit of the kinds of knowledge and experience they believed their class privilege obscured, George and Mary Oppen wandered the nation with countless other Americans, many of whom similarly documented their journeys for readers. Whether the work of artists, journalists, and social scientists immersed in field research or the oral and published tales of the itinerant homeless unmoored by the Depression, the story of the road (which William Stott calls a distinct "genre—the ‘I've seen America' book") was common literary fare in the thirties.² Mary's version of the Oppens' travels shares much with these works in their assertion of the isolation of privilege, the humanity of the common man, and the vivifying effects travel could have on both the political and the artistic consciousness. And the profound influence of the road on George's poetic development is evident in Discrete Series (1934), his first published book. While Oppen's dense, fragmented poetry sequence may appear to share little with the road stories told in contemporaneous sociological tracts, first person journalism, and potboiler novels, Discrete Series in fact finds Oppen engaged with many of the same questions as other road writers, a majority of whom, like himself, were sympathetic to the political left: How does one's class status mediate the ability to see clearly? How does one represent such a vastness as American society? And how does one illuminate a political perspective without falling into tendentiousness? In response to these questions, Oppen and other road writers explored a variety of artistic strategies that enabled them to minimize the mediating influence of their class privilege; to render people, places, and things with concreteness and clarity; and to...