Song of Occupations

THE PEOPLE TALK--Benjamin Appel--Dutton ($3).

Benjamin Appel (Brain Guy, The Power-House) is a young man with an honest if unextraordinary eye, a careful ear for dialect, a quiet talent for quickly gaining the confidence of strangers. With this equipment, during 1939 and 1940, he covered the U. S., north & south, coast to coast. Everywhere he went he talked to people, listened to them, watched the work they did, the streets and country around them. His book is made of what he heard and saw, chiefly of what they said.

Mainly they were poor people, mainly interested in talking not about the war, nor politics, but about themselves: where they came from, what work they had done and were doing, what they got for it, whether that was enough to live on, what they thought about it. They include a Wisconsin farmer, a textile worker in Lawrence, Mass., an Indian storekeeper in New Mexico, the proprietor of a curio store in Seattle, a model in Provincetown, an out-of-luck research scientist running a sound mixer in Hollywood, a Polish iron miner in the Mesabi, a whitewing on Manhattan's West End Avenue, cane cutters in Louisiana, cotton farmers in Mississippi, a salmon fisherman in Oregon, a steel-worker in Birmingham.

Because Benjamin Appel is not a great artist, The People Talk is in a sense disappointing. But the talk is set down in patience and detail, and it is good talk. The talkers have great variety, almost invariable dignity. Their occupations are described with skill and immediacy. In the quiet course of this long book, it achieves a grandeur founded not on rhetoric but on existence: an image of the intricate texture, the massiveness, the simultaneity of a continent and its people.

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