Cut from the same cloth--- a review of Ruth Suckow's Country People

It's hard to say what's undeniably true here, but, honestly, this garish image--Grant Wood's American Gothic--may be the most universally recognized portrait in all of American art. It's been demeaned for years by thousands of attempts to play it as goofy, pasting heads of state, Hollywood stars, or your and my own faces over its stoic characters. No matter. American Gothic is what it is, and its stardom is acknowledged far and wide.

Iowans especially can't help but giggle, but the fact is that this odd couple could be standing in rural American settings throughout the Midwest. Wherever the two of them make an appearance, we can't help but smile at the stern faces, at that pitchfork weapon and the goofy cathedral window in the kind of house most all rural folks lived in throughout the region once the ardor of homesteading was behind them.

American Gothic is much more than a cartoon. It's important to at least consider what Grant Wood claimed he wanted to illustrate. Here's what he said: “These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.”

What's there won't allow us simply to giggle. Are these two figures real or are cartoons? If we believe the artist, they're not at all silly because this odd couple somehow carries the truth of universal figures who live (or lived) here--and elsewhere too. The man with the pitchfork is, in fact, Wood's dentist, the woman Wood's own daughter. That he's imbuing them with something more than they are seems very clear. But then what are they? 

Talk amongst yourselves. 

A century ago, a respected but largely unknown Iowa writer named Ruth Suckow published her first novel, Country People, which, no matter how it's read, might well be a companion piece to American Gothic. In the novel, Suckow's first, she seems to dispense with conventions, as if plot is of no consequence in her mission. What she creates in Country People is a fictional, rural, German-American family's album, a scrapbook. 

And the family is not hers. If Ruth Suckow ever milked a cow or chased chickens, it would have been on a dare. That she knows the odor of manure is sure--from the date of her birth, she lived most of her life in Iowa, where the smell of manure is the smell of money. But Suckow was the daughter of a rural clergyman and therefore reared in one manse after another throughout the state. Suffice it to say she never had to serve a table full of bibbed threshers. The family she watches so very closely is certainly not her own. 

Still, like the famous painting, Country People features characters we seem to know, hard-working people--men and women--who put every ounce of sweat they shed into creating a better life by hard work and the determination to continue on the mission immigrant parents carried, of having their own place and keeping it theirs by making sure their groves were clean and their rows straight. These people hold steadfastly to family roles sometimes crudely handed down. 

My mother-in-law used to shake her head when she remembered threshing crews, when men came from adjacent farms to help in a task that no man, even if he had a half-dozen boys, could do alone. Morning coffee meant more than a cookie. Lunch wasn't simply some warmed-up chicken broth. Afternoon coffee was just as demanding, and dinner--or supper--meant the whole works--meat-and-potatoes and pie. It's hard to measure who worked harder, she might have said, the men or the women, who made their own cloths and mended everything. All of that is admirably portrayed in the stern faces of the couple in American Gothic, as well as the dedication to work so clearly and painfully presented in Country People. Both Grant and Suckow make it difficult to determine whether that old hard life is to be loved or hated. 

Country People is a wonderful little novel, even without a plot. Like the famous painting, it demands our participation. It's not that you love the characters or hate them; they demand both love and, yes, hate. Suckow was an early feminist writer. Her attention is almost always on the "woman of the house." In Country People, she can generate downright anger at the way Emma, August's wife, who everyone knew to be a "giggler" when she was a kid, loses her sense of humor at the hands of  a grim workaholic, a man who doesn't abuse her in any 21st century way, but treats her as if she's nothing more than a sturdy kitchen table or chair. Only when August dies does Emma regain her giggling.

But Emma's seeming powerlessness is something she never really questions because her role in the home is so culturally driven. If it ever once dawned on her to question the way of life her husband expects from a good wife, we don't hear of it. 

What Ruth Suckow's first novel suggests is what is suggested in American Gothic: these are the people and these were their ways, and it does us no harm to remember that they gifted us with the myriad choices, with the freedoms we have today. They broke ground for our world. 

Both Grant Wood and Ruth Suckow say we need to remember these folks as our own; and, despite their flaws, we need to honor them for what they've given us. We're cut from the same cloth.

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In commemoration of the publication of Ruth Suckow's first novel, Country People, A Centenary Edition, is available at Final Thursday Press, 815 State St. Cedar Falls, IA 50613.