EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF

Pastures of Plenty

A Self-Portrait

by Woody Guthrie, edited by Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal; HarperCollins; 259 pages; $29.95.

“I hope you never do call me another Walt Whitman or another Will Rogers. I ain’t neither one,” Woody Guthrie wrote in his 1946 datebook. This collection of his unpublished writings shows how true Guthrie’s statement was. The folk singer was sui generis, an unmistakable voice that was equally passionate and irreverent.

During his short career—it began in the mid-1930s, when he left the Dust Bowl of Texas for California, and ended in the early 1950s, when his energies became consumed by his long struggle with Huntington’s chorea— he consciously made himself the voice of an entire generation of small-town people knocked loose from their homes and farms by hard times, heading west through the dust storms. He did this so effectively that his ballads have become as much a document of the Depression years as Dorothea Lange’s photographs, and we still see that great, desperate migration largely through his eyes. It is a considerable accomplishment on Guthrie’s part, and in the process he turned out a tremendous amount of material: journals, letters, songs, poems, and sketches. From it all Marsh and Leventhal have constructed what they call a selfportrait.

Scrapbook might be a more apt description. The manuscript for “This Land Is Your Land” is here, its original title, “God Blessed America,” scratched out. Candid pictures of Guthrie decorate the margins: skinnydipping, building sand castles at Coney Island, posing in a dime-store photo booth.

His politics run throughout, of course, his writings addressing issues both large (lampooning the 1938 Munich Conference in a “Frankie and Johnny” takeoff called “Adolph and Neville”) and small (denouncing the juke box as a laborsaving device that had “throwed lots of musicians out on their ass and I don’t mean perhaps”).

Through it all, Guthrie maintains his curious characteristic mix of humor and bitterness. When the Library of Congress obtains his songbook, in 1942, he writes a letter asking that it be made available to members of Congress. “They’re awfully easy to sing, and you can sing them drunk or sober, it don’t matter, just a matter of personal choice,” he explained. “I tried them both ways. The senators, too.”

On Broadway

A Journey Uptown Over Time

by David W. Dunlap; Rizzoli; 327 pages; $65.00.

This big, handsome book walks the reader along New York City’s famous boulevard, past and present, slighting almost no building from Bowling Green to 230th Street. It is an elegant cataloguing of Broadway—and, by extension, American urban architecture- since the time of the Dutch. The six hundred photographs in On Broadway are arranged sequentially as the avenue winds its way uptown. The only way to squeeze in so many facades is to fill the margins with small likenesses of the buildings, as in a good travel guide, but lush pages are set aside for picture profiles of the Woolworth or Flatiron or City Hall buildings. Dunlap, a New York Times writer on real estate, has been chronicling Broadway’s changes with his camera for more than a dozen years. Out of respect for the older pictures, he has shot his newer photographs in matching black-and-white.

Many of the great observers of Broadway are here, from Walt Whitman—"Thou, like the parti-colored word itself—like infinite teeming, mocking life!"—to a more subdued V. S. Pritchett, who supposed he liked Broadway because of its “unmathematical name.” The chapters take their titles from Broadway’s own geography: “Financial District,” “SoHo,” “Ladies’ Mile,” “Theater District.” The one slip seems to be “NoHo,” a moribund 1980s real estate term.

This is a history from the second floor up. Except for a silhouetted worker setting the hands of the New York Life Building’s clock, human beings make only incidental appearances in 327 pages. But the noisy, frantic Broadway best belongs in another book. Dunlap’s is a classical look at the avenue, with only the text suggesting the verve and the menace. Broadway has traditionally veered farther into shabbiness, glitz, and venery than its statelier rival avenues to the east, but there are no pornographic bookstores or head shops in this treatise. Dunlap’s view seems to be that these things don’t last, and he’s probably right. On Broadway deals exhaustively and beautifully with the things that do.