The Dread Road as Re‑read Road

The Dread Road by Meridel Le Sueur, 1991, West End, Press, $11.95, PO Box 27334, Albuquerque, NM 87125, ISBN 0‑931122‑63‑5

          Today, makes Yesterday mean ‑‑ Emily Dickinson

          A great writer creates his (sic) predecessors.‑‑ T.S. Eliot

          Meridel Le Sueur's new novel, over fifty years after her last one (The Girl, written in 1939, revised in 1977) represents a formal breakthrough while continuing the themes expressed throughout her long career as poet, short story writer, and social activist: the resurrection of the real stories hidden by the culture of oppression, telling the collective story of women still alive to the natural world, and reclaiming a writing intimately connected through a body of work in a supportive community to the tribal voice of the people whose collective struggle makes all culture possible.

          What so distinguishes this novel from her recent poetry and the reissuing of her earlier stories, reportage, novels, and books written for children (the works that mark her rediscovery by feminists and political radicals) is that The Dread Road forces a re‑reading of her work through the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, an author we hardly would think of as supporting the themes that mark Le Sueur's life work.

          For always, in fair weather and foul, she had but one topic

          of conversation, but one theme, one song, one opus; and that

          was concerning the dead child. ‑‑"The Miracle" (1932)

The Dread Road is formally experimental in that it contains on each page three stories: excerpts from Poe's stories, the narrative of a woman taking a bus ride from the American Southwest up to Denver, and this woman's subjective voice (or is it a collective voice?) dealing with her struggles with her coming to grips with the challenge to her personal history posed by a woman she befriends on the trip, a woman carrying, wrapped in a bag she holds tightly to her at all times, a dead child.

          "...to feed the corpse they had already buried for her."

                      ‑‑"Fudge" (1933)

Le Sueur continues her broad theme of presenting not opposition based on gender, but the opposition of characters based on their ability or lack of ability to rise above the social class conditioning of a culture detached from natural productive forces and alienated because of ignorance of a history that could, if fully felt, redeem that culture.  In The Dread Road the conflict is portrayed by the narrator and a woman social worker who betrays her class and other women, who voluntarily accepts her role as victim and oppressor.

          Though this story is, as the editor states in the afterward, "a radical departure" it was prefigured as early as 1935 in a short story, "Fudge".  The narrator of that story states,

I lowered my head, remembering what I had heard men saying, women saying, seeing then in my mind's eye three things: what had been said about it, what it had become ..., fusing together, lapping over, and then there was a terrific thing stood up beside me ...  ‑‑ what had really happened?

It takes the collective voice ‑‑of the culture and of the individual‑‑ to tell the real story.

          The book is an impressive achievement in design and collaborative production.  It is laid out to take advantage of the writing technique, contains beautiful color photos and art work, pictures of the author, a brief biography, history of the Ludlow, Colorado coal wars that form the basis for the narrative (for the real story is the story that is hidden from our national, collective, consciousness), and essays that establish the context for our understanding of the several narratives of the story.

          Not murder, rape, violence, horror of act and deed but these are the horrors, of being walled in and living still." ‑‑

                      "Psyche" (1935).

It is difficult, any longer, to question the author's thesis that the real living history of our country lies buried, and that that constitutes a genuine horror.  I don't question it.  After watching the president and the media lead the nation into the Gulf War and the cover up of the resulting horrors, who can?  And I did find one small confirmation of how the horror of the Rockerfeller sanctioned murders of miners and families during the Ludlow coal strike of 1914 has been further erased from our collective memory: when I was searching for historical material for this review I looked under the heading I once used ‑‑ "Ludlow Massacre"; now the Library of Congress Subject Headings listing has been changed to the innocuous and inaccurate "Coal Strike, Colo."

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