The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (13 page)

Steinbeck’s novel helped a significant number of Americans feel conscious of the life of their country: It showed what that country looked like to other Americans, bringing them into new awareness, and even a bit closer to consensus. In so doing, it joined the short list of American books that had drawn lines and forced eyes open—that seemed to have turned the country inside out and left it revealed before itself.

*   *   *

Grandpa Joad lies dying in a tent pitched at the roadside. Bodies pass in and out, folks tending the old man in his last hours. Then, in the flow of coming and going: “The shadow of someone walking between the tent and the sun crossed the canvas.”

The author inserts the random detail as stealthily as a concealed blade. Only a second later do we realize, with the suddenness of blood, that the shadow of Death is circling the tent, moving among the destitute, here in a desert off Route 66.

Steinbeck’s novel is an organism, based on a conception of life as the interplay of organisms—a large and unitary vision of existence wherein all substances and things are connected in a spiritual and biological flow. Things die throughout the book, and every death is answered by a suggestion of regeneration.

People, animals, earth, even machines—all share a oneness. Shades of the dead and the living dead are all around, and the abandoned shacks are haunted houses. The dust is the fine grain of this ghost world, its repository of blood, money, and dung, both earthly and unearthly: It precedes people when they arrive, and lingers after they depart. The theme of oneness is extended to the novel’s politics, which argue a middle ground between New Deal liberalism and Communist collectivism. The story’s conscience, Casy—an ex-preacher, half-cracked wanderer, and budding socialist prophet—makes the theme of oneness explicit: “Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.”

More mystical yet is Steinbeck’s supposition that the migrant mass constitutes a shifting community of understanding and human sympathies—“an organization of the unconscious.” He makes the mystical practical by applying it to the movements that are occurring all over the country, but particularly between the plains and the western states: “They’s stuff goin’ on and they’s folks doin’ things,” Casy tells Tom Joad. “Them people layin’ one foot down in front of the other, like you says, they ain’t thinkin’ where they’re goin’, like you says—but they’re all layin’ ’em down the same direction, jus’ the same. An’ if ya listen, you’ll hear a movin’, an’ a sneakin’, an’ a rustlin’, an’—an’ a res’lessness.”

The Joads never stop moving, malevolent strangers and temporary allies never stop crossing their path, and the dust never ceases to twist around them all. It’s the story of people whose determination is to stay alive, to resist becoming ghosts. These are “people in flight from the terror behind”—from death, that shadow on the tent flap. The Okies take their flight on Route 66, the Oregon Trail of the automotive century, turned by the dust bowl into an infinite strip of mechanical graveyard, dead cars marking the miles as white crosses once marked the graves of pioneers.

Oneness, unending flow. A farm wife’s infant is eaten by a pig. A dog is crushed by a car. A dead tractor is likened to a corpse. Rosasharn, Tom’s pregnant sister, makes love to her husband in the Joad truck as her grandmother lies dying inches away. Rosasharn produces a dead baby, and ends the story by offering the milk in her breast to a starving old man in a barn as a rainstorm rages. It is the final transfusion of life into death, organism into organism, and anyone who would claim Steinbeck was not possessed of a poet’s instinct for the inexplicable should look again.

The novel, like its characters, is half-starved yet broad with life, delirious yet gravid with the necessity of following an impossible journey to its unknown end. Clearly, it was written by an author whose feeling of oneness with his time demanded that he either write exactly the book he wrote or die from having failed to do so.

*   *   *

The popular fatalism of the 1930s—the “hard-boiled” sensibility—comes from World War I; the Depression; Hollywood’s celebration of gangsters; the terse, brutal prose of Hemingway and Hammett; and perhaps the fear drifting over from Europe, where large numbers of people are beginning to vanish. Doom consciousness tends to be a by-product of times when life makes no sense.

The Grapes of Wrath
expresses this, but Steinbeck straddles two worlds—the dry wastes of the doom school and the socialist hypothesis of WPA liberalism. So he places his hero in a situation that tests his desire to remain cynical and self-serving; puts him squarely in the press of family, the necessities of a society and a point in history. We look at these divides, these tendencies and transformations personified in a single figure, and we see Henry Fonda. He understands Tom Joad’s conflict, and we understand the need in Fonda to express this phenomenon of solitude softened by community, self-interest remade as common purpose.

In the film, Tom Joad approaches from the sunbaked vortex of a highway crossroads—a narrow body off center in a proscenium of telephone poles, wearing an ill-fitting suit and walking sideways. He hitches a ride with a gabby trucker; warding off the man’s idle curiosities, Tom shows no need to be liked. But then, alighting from the cab, Fonda grins at the trucker, taunting him with a conciliation that is actually a threat—and the smile radiates charisma, charm, sexiness. This man could be in movies. This man could strike you dead.

From the start, Fonda’s body stance is nervous but composed, tense and ready. Skinny body in its black suit with high-water cuffs, arms angled outward to stick hands in pockets, pelvis jutting slightly; lots of sunlight between the bony elbows and narrow hips. Watchful eyes in a rectangular head, topped by a huge cloth cap shadowing the eyes throughout the story.

Fonda’s acting is close to the bone, and John Ford is in complete command of the early scenes. Tom leaves the highway for the overland trail and—walking uphill and away, like Lincoln—heads for the Joad place, along the way meeting Casy (John Carradine). Ford catches the novel’s drawing of dust-bowl country as a spirit-ridden flatland, its dust thick with the matter of vanished things and people. He shoots in high-contrast light and rough-hewn settings, pruning Steinbeck’s flowers of prose to leave only stalk and stem. Fonda and Carradine walk a darkening road; their voices echo against the landscape. The echo is an effect of the soundstage upon which the scene plays, but under the darkness and the wind, it sounds more like a reverberation in a corridor of time.

The image is active, the performing excitingly terse, director and star in tight sync. We feel we’re watching a great movie. The confrontation with Muley may be its best passage—it is certainly its high point of horror, just from John Qualen’s bug-eyed ferocity, and Fonda’s and Carradine’s awed regard of it. Muley materializes from shadows, and cinematographer Gregg Toland gives the illusion of lighting the pitch-dark cabin with a single blazing candle, floating Muley’s ghost face in a flat black depth.

These are brilliant scenes, brilliant in the framing, lighting, and acting, with raw emotion enflaming pious dialogue. Their intensity has to do with movement, less of the camera than of the image itself—the willow branches that undulate as Tom and Casy talk in the foreground, the clothes waving on a line as the Graves family is evicted. The frame is vibrant with shifting darkness, scuttling bodies, sinister weather. In the committed deliveries of Fonda, Carradine, and Qualen, the talk sounds timeless, and the interactions have the gravity of encounters in ancient plays.

When Ford pulls out of Muley’s first flashback, the camera is on Tom’s watching, listening face; as significant as Muley’s defeat is Joad’s role as witness to it. Something like the enormity of what has been happening during his imprisonment begins to dawn on our hero. Muley asks Tom where his people are. “They’re all gone ’r dead,” Tom says, as if it were not a guess, but a decision.

But Ford shoots Fonda’s back, not his face, as he says the line. Joad will witness others’ devastations, but his own will stay hidden.

*   *   *

The picture’s first movement ends with Tom spitting into the weeds as government agents search the Joad place. The next begins when we jump from Tom to his family, as it prepares to leave for California. And here, the film slackens—becomes too much a conventional John Ford celebration of the clan. The old men are too cantankerous, the postadolescents too pretty, the children too manic. Jane Darwell hauls into view as Ma Joad, mother of mothers, ladling the thin soup of homily, and we feel the sag into compromise.

The movie has peaked too soon. John Ford will need Fonda, as he needed him in
Young Mr. Lincoln
, to hold things together—to put flesh on metaphors, to give scale to the overacting of other performers. It is a huge act of Fonda’s will to be this encompassing presence, because
The Grapes of Wrath
doesn’t always seem to have been shot with the same eyes, or felt with the same nervous system. It goes from nighttime Gothic to daylight realism, easing into studio-bound New Deal idyll before compelling itself toward an optimistic ending that imparts the illusion of unity to what has actually been a very mixed bag.

Yet the movie pulls through. Like the Joad jalopy, it threatens to break down when overheated by bad acting or false framing. Then it will be steadied by a scene of direct and heartrending sentiment, an image of perfect composition and absolute subtlety: Ma burning her mementos, holding earrings to her reflection in a smoky mirror; gusts of wind sweeping Uncle John’s shack after the Joads drive away.

If
The Grapes of Wrath
is the story of one family’s struggle and survival, it is equally the story of Henry Fonda’s face and the changes it goes through. His look goes from hostility as he hitches with the trucker to shock and mystification at hearing Muley’s tale. Riding west, the face is baked by sun, labor, and relentlessness into an attitude of hunger—dry eyes squinting, chapped face craning forward on skinny neck. In the dark scenes, the face is repeatedly caught in lamplight, flashlight, moonlight, Ford fascinated by the emotional secrets exposed by illumination and shadow.

The family takes refuge in a government encampment over the California border. In Ford’s New Deal view, the place is a utopia, with clean cabins and sanitary toilets; you can smell the fresh lumber. It is an outpost of hope, and Fonda’s face honors hope as it honors Joad’s other grudging shows of warm feeling. Passing a communal well, Fonda lets water course through his fingers and, per the posted sign, turns off the tap. Then he smiles, his face slightly away from the camera. It is Tom’s first smile in ages, and so small that we wonder whether it registers hope of an equitable social system, or only shows us a man sharing a joke with himself—smiling to think that a stream of water could represent anything so large and impossible as life.

The government camp sponsors a community dance. The dance is Ford’s delight, his happy obverse to the war scene or gunfight, an expression of cooperation; it’s also a place for tensions to be expressed, or dispersed in the air. In this dance sequence, we see not only the migrants stifling an attempt by fruit-company thugs to incite a riot and bring martial law down on the camp but also Tom’s sole moment of lightheartedness—waltzing with Ma while singing “Red River Valley.” It is nothing much: a boxy, vertical back-and-forth movement, a rasping, tuneless voice. Yet there is beauty in the rasp, grace in these awkward bodies. Ma looks up with speechless joy; Tom beams down. His look is suddenly clear and content, and we realize that this is a man in whom love exists. The movie has realized a moment of perfect escape, a moment to defer farewells, a moment to stop time.

*   *   *

In fact, two strands of time, of progress, have been brought together. As the story has progressed from dust bowl to peach valley, devastation to exile, it has taken Tom Joad back—back to what he was before prison, or perhaps never was at all: an innocent man.

Tom’s final scene with Ma is prefaced with a lovely shot of Fonda rising in silhouette before the low-lit canvas of the tent flap and looking down at Ma with a cigarette in his mouth. Tom whispers to go outside. He leans to kiss sleeping Pa on the forehead. Then follows Tom’s farewell, a speech that not so many years ago was shared culture and common language. The speech exists in Steinbeck’s novel, but not as summation or climax, only as one significant leave-taking among many. Here, it is the capstone of the story: Tom Joad’s acceptance of a destiny.

Watch, and realize that Ford does little to prime the speech—does not wreathe the actors in filtered light, or cue violins from behind. Even less does Fonda act out an actor’s big moment. He edges up to the words, feels forward into the frame of mind that produces them. He delivers not a speech, but a string of thoughts and impressions leading to a natural climax.

He’s been thinking about Casy, Tom says, “about what he said, what he done, about how he died … I remember all of it.” Fonda’s poise, sitting at the edge of the dance floor with Ma, is to hold in his elbows and knees like a small boy, cold and nervous, cradling his tramp bag. Tom tells Ma he must leave so he can “find out somethin’ … scrounge around.” He can’t say what it might be, but he has a feeling Casy was right: “A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul. The one big soul that belongs to everybody.”

“What’ll happen to you then?” Ma asks, and Tom replies:

I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere … Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. And when people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build, I’ll be there, too.

Fonda creates the suggestion of stress around the eyes, as of tears that won’t surface. He conjures the openness of a face that despite its scar and stubble, its years of hurt and humiliation, suddenly looks youthful. We remember the hard, hooded face we first saw, and realize that, by stages, the face has spread open before us and grown younger, been reborn into something like innocence, something like terror.