Farmers and Forgotten Radicals: Susan Glaspell's "Pollen," with Cat Baab

Everything old is new again! Join us and special guest Cat Baab (https://poecansaveyourlife.substack.com/) as we explore the quiet radicalism in the life and works of Susan Glaspell, starting with her classic short story, "Pollen."

As always, we are: 
-Asking with all the love in our hearts that you leave us a review or tell a friend about the show <3
-Accepting friends @didntreadit on Instagram 
-Accepting nemesis applications at didntreaditpod@gmail.com
-Thankful to Black Iris Social Club for use of their beautiful space
-Thankful to William Albritton for our incredible theme song, "Books 2.0"
-Thankful to Rêves Français for our closing music, "Pont Marie."

Transcript

>> Grace Todd: 0:00

I've never met anyone like that. I never dated anybody like that either. No, I did not hang out with anyone like that constantly from the age of 17 to 20. Now. Books, books, books, books, books, books. Hello and welcome to Didn't Read it, the podcast that is grasping on the slightest pretext for optimism. I am your host, Grace Todd, and with me today is new friend of the pod, Kat Babb. Hi, Kat. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for joining us today. How you doing? Yeah, hanging in. We were just talking about how it's felt like a week full of Mondays. So there's that, the Mondays that never end, the administration of endless Mondays and also somehow endless Fridays because you remember when they used to do a thing or when they were gonna do something really controversial, they would wait until Friday. Friday, news dump. yeah, they don't do that anymore. They've given. It's just all day, every day. Every day is Monday at

8:00am and also Friday at 5: 1:17

00pm Forever.

>> Grace Todd: 1:22

Oh, God. Get to the optimism. Oh, God, I'm sorry, you're right. Kat, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. so I'm a writer and a journalist. I written for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Lithub, et cetera. And then I had a book come out a couple of years ago called Poe for your problems. And, yeah, you can find me on Substack. I really like your Substack. And I also very much enjoyed Poe for your problems. Thanks so much. I don't think I needed someone to tell me to seethe more, but I always enjoy hearing it. Right. It's just nice to be validated. I agree. Like, looking on the dark side has brought me more, I think, than, any other attempt, that's for sure. Especially in the current societal moment of toxic enforced optimism. Yeah, yeah, there's lots of puns throughout the book now that you'll like. The power of positive thinking and so on, where I try to take on that sort of thing directly. Yeah, and you did a great job. I liked it very much. Thank you. And hopefully like the moment for it being appropriate. Just keeps going on and on. Here we are. Yeah. God. Well, you know, we'll be doing more Poe on the podcast at some point and, we, we can, we'll reflect more when we come around to it on whether or not we should all be embracing positive thinking, a purpose driven life. I mean, I did a couple of weeks ago wall up my nemesis in a cellar. Smart. That's the way to do it. Right? I found the people who were running a podcast I didn't like, and I just walled them up in the basement of Blackiris. Good for you. Thank you. I felt very accomplished, and I really honed my masonry skills. It is hard to get a wall level while someone is screaming. For sure. Yeah, it was a challenge. Good thing to just consume a lot of wine beforehand. and very quick, I hate to be slightly mercenary, but before we launch into the topic of the week, I have promised Maddie, our social media maven and producer extraordinaire, that I would, wave my little hat at all of you. So I am telling everyone that just in time for Valentine's Day, we are launching not just new merch, but a new store. We are going to have T shirts and hoodies and beanies, and you can buy them all directly on didn't readitpod.com and we are gonna do some new designs just for Valentine's Day. So come be our literary valentine, you, y'all, so that I can stop begging you for things and so that I can buy more weird, out of print books. That is my psa. Thank you all very much. Ah. and now, Cat, what do you know, if anything, about Susan Glaspell? Nothing. And I feel terrible about this. I feel like I should know the name, should know a work. But I know nothing. Not a year, not a. Any sense. Well, that is not your fault. She is one of those authors who was very popular and very famous in her era and then vanished for decades and was really only remembered for a long time as, quote, the woman who discovered Eugene O'Neill. Okay, now, Eugene O'Neill. Do you. Playwright. Iceman. Come in. Yes. Very, very famous playwright. And depressive. right. It's like terrible family scenes, just one after the other, the entire play. Yeah, yeah, yeah. very sad, alcoholic, very talented writer. Kind of a dick in his personal life. Shocks, shocks. I know. A woman writer lost to history. An alcoholic mail writer. What? I've never heard of such a thing. So, Susan Glaspole, outside of being the discoverer of Eugene O'Neill, was a Midwestern writer. She wrote several novels, many short stories, and many plays, and during her lifetime was primarily famous for her plays and for the theater company that she founded with her husband called the Provincetown Players, which was where Eugene O'Neill got his start. so he kind of wound up in their orbit, and they scooped him up, and he and Susan were kind of the main playwrights of this theater group, and they were founded in Provincetown as An explicitly radical theater group. So to set the scene, we are in the kind of forgotten period of like bohemian radicals in and around Provincetown and Greenwich Village in New York in like 19 teens. Okay. just prior to World War I, which is a time period that I feel like we all forget, had its own vibe, like big radical movement. And obviously, you know, these women were. A lot of them were suffragettes. But they were not just suffragettes. I think a lot of us, when we think suffragette, we think like Mary Poppins. Like, although we love men as a group, they're rather stupid. nothing's changed. Yeah, well, exactly. But these women were socialists. They were advocating for free love. They were advocating for women's rights beyond just the vote. I mean, they, they were dirty Reds. I like them already. Unfortunately, the biggest reason that we forget about them is that they ran sort of smack into World War I. And a lot of them were pacifists, a lot of them were conscientious objectors. And the post, especially the post World War I first red scare, which is another thing I think a lot of us forget about. Really effectively kind of stamped them out of existence, this whole scene. Interesting. They had a bunch of very influential, like, leftist newspapers. There was one called the Masses, and the Masses was closed down by the government using the Espionage Act. Wow. Okay. I'm totally unfamiliar with this. It's a wild time. And Susan was like, right in the thick of all of this. She was friends with Emma, Goldman. Anarchists, socialists. They were all circulating around. They were getting drunk together. They were talking through the way the world could be and should be. And one of the things that I find really interesting is that Susan herself and several of her close friends were the breadwinners of their respective households. Oh, interesting. So she was married to a man named Jig Cook, who is also like fairly famous or infamous or was in the day, another charismatic alcoholic. What? We've already come across two in as many minutes. All of the men in this like, social group were charismatic alcoholics with big ideas. And all of the women were just like getting things done. Actually, also a shocker is the vibe. Yes, well, it's really reassuring how much has changed. Yeah, absolutely. So I, I went on a deep dive through all of Susan's short fiction. And one of the things that kind of recurs is these characters who are very, very smart. They're very inspired, they're good men, they're not bad men. But they are more preoccupied with talking and thinking and drinking than with Doing anything with all of those thoughts. I've never met anyone like that. I never dated anybody like that either. No, I did not hang out with anyone like that constantly from the age of 17 to 20. Now. I'm glad they're out of circulation. That's all I can say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a great story that she did called the Busy Duck, which is sort of a character sketch of one of those men. And then like the woman who falls in love with him for his thoughts. Like she's from a kind of sheltered upper class background and for the first time ever, she's encountering like radical thinking. And she's constantly going around being like, I have to make up for so much lost time. I've never met this girl either. No, definitely not. And it's actually a very sweet story because they wind up together and it actually kind of works out better for both of them. Okay. And I think that is a little bit how Susan saw herself not in servitude to these men. I don't think any of these women saw themselves as being lesser than their husbands, although they were certainly frustrated by their husbands and partners. But they saw themselves very much as a team. And the men, for their part, like Jig Cook, were not great at the quieter, more grinding life of being writers. But what they were great at was rallying people together and doing things like launching a theater company with almost no money. To put together radical plays. Right. So it. I could see how that would complement the other side. Yeah. Everyone was playing to their strengths. It worked out pretty well. And like I said, we got Eugene O'Neill, but more importantly to me, we got Susan Glaspel. So she was born in 1876 in Davenport, Iowa. And she very luckily came from a family of sort of strong women who encouraged each other to be strong women. She went to college. She right out of college, got a job at a newspaper and was like a little bit of a prodigy because she somehow got them to let her cover like, murders. Wow. Which was not something that women were generally called on to do. She reading her biography, you're like, this woman must have been very charismatic. Like she was very good at convincing people to let her do stuff. And she covered a high profile murder where a woman maybe probably murdered her husband. It's unclear. This was when Susan was in her like twenties. Okay. It's hard to tell. You kind of have to read between the lines. Cause there's not a ton of extant stuff from her from this period of her, like, reflecting on this, but it feels a little bit like the way that she was expected to cover this murder and the way that society covered this murder, because it's very. Like, if you read the headlines and stories from the time, it feels very much like, Chicago. Even though that's a solid, like, 30 years later, it's got that vibe of, like, ooh, a woman did a murder. Like, and it kind of seems like it put her off because she just, like, she finished covering the story, and then she dropped everything, and she went home, and she was like, mama, I'm gonna be a writer. So it was like, you got inspired by this woman murdering her husband. You're like, no, I'm gonna. Yeah, pretty much. And her mom, luckily for us, was like, yeah, you are, baby girl. Let's do it. I like them all. It's a great. I love all of them. This, the murderer, like, the. It's just fun. All the way down. This man was murdered with an axe, by the way. It was gross. Okay. I thought this was more of, like, a caper. No, it was. It was pretty horrific. And she was like, wow, I can do, I'm gonna go write fiction now. It's like, sure, Susan. I mean, you got to top that somehow. Covering an axe murder. Get your inspiration while you can. That murder wound up being the inspiration for what is probably her most famous play, which was also turned into a short story. The play is called Trifles, and the story is called A Jury of Her Peers. In the play, two women are investigating a murder committed by a third woman, and they discover in the play that she has killed her husband because of domestic violence. And the two women make the decision together to conceal a key piece of evidence so that the wife will not be convicted. Excellent. Which is pretty radical for 1912. Hell, yeah. Yeah. So that definitely stuck with her. It took her a surprisingly long time to actually write the play after the incident, but it was clearly, like, percolating. It was in the back of her head somewhere. So, yeah, she went back home. She decided to become a writer. She joined a socialist society, where she met Jig Cook, and then they went to Greenwich Village to go hang out with all the other radicals. And she spent the rest of her life writing and was very successful. Like, where is she publishing? Is this in radical newspapers, or is she writing for mainstream, too? So she was writing her short fiction, was appearing in all the standard magazines. McCall's and Harper's Weekly, and I think, the New Yorker. You know, the usual. And then the plays were just being put on by the Provincetown Players. Okay. And she was licensing them after the fact. She also wrote like four novels, and I cannot remember which publishing house put them out, but she was. One of the things that she was very good at is her plays are very radical and her short stories are a lot less radical. Actually in Poe, for your problems, you write about needing to understand what sells. Mm, very much so. And Susan very clearly understood exactly how much she could get away with, and she would get away with that much and nothing more. She. All of her short fiction, you really have to read between the lines to find the fiddly bits, the controversial stuff. I can totally believe that. And that is the case in the story I've chosen for today, which comes across at first blush as just being a little, like, cutesy and is actually essentially a quiet socialist parable. Okay, I'm into this already. I cannot recommend. It was hard for me to find this biography. But if you're interested, the book is just called Susan Glaspel and it is by Linda Ben Zvi B E N Hyphen Zvi. Linda Benz V or Zvi. Fantastic biography. And to make you feel a little bit better about never having heard of her, the introduction of this book, Linda talks about how she had been teaching theater for years, like a decade, and always told the anecdote about the woman who discovered Eugene O'Neill and, oh, says that she, like, to her own embarrassment after like 10 years, was like, wait, who? Like, who was this woman? What year did the. What year did the autobiography come out? Or, sorry, the biography. This was Originally published in 2005. Okay. But as I have learned to my chagrin, making this podcast, author biographies appear to drop out of print very quickly. Yes, this is a problem. They appear and then they're very flashy for a couple of years and then they're gone. Very much so. So word to the wise, my beloved listeners. If an author biography comes out and you're like, oh, that looks interesting, buy it. Buy it right now or it will go away forever. And then you will wind up being like me, desperately trawling thrift books so that you can get the quote unquote, definitive biography on Vernon Leigh because it's gone out of print and the author has just died. I mean, I have paid $75 on eBay for something that's out of print, like a biography that you're trying to track down. Like, what was The Vogue view 15 years ago or 15 years before this one superseded it? Or whatever. It is so frustrating. I actually paid a local printing press. I like downloaded a PDF of an out of print biography and had to pay them $75 to print it for me. Who was the wait? Who was being biographied? That was actually Vernon Leigh. I hit a wall. Fair enough. What's your favorite author biography? I have strong opinions about this, because I really love literary biography. I'm a big fan of Richard Holmes, who's one of the great romantic biographers of our age. he's an old man now, but his breakthrough was, his biography of Shelley, the Pursuit, which I think was the late 60s or maybe early 70s. And then I love Fiona McCarthy's 700 page doorstopper on William Morris, which is one of the best I've ever read. And he's the one I've had to track down sometimes like that because the views keep getting sort of superseded by each other. And then I'm also a big fan of Brian Boyd, who wrote Nabokov's biography or the good one. Yeah, I have a lot of opinions on this. I can be boring about this. No, I love it. It's nice to have someone else in the room who's like, I have strong opinions about author biographies. We have a two parter episode coming out soon on Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the only two decent biographies of him are both awful. Mm And it was, a chore. I can believe that. It was a real process. Wasn't Martin Amos like flirting with the idea doing that for a bit? Am m I wrong? No, that sounds right. I think so. Maybe he was just threatening to. Anyway, this is a very good biography of Susan Glaspel and I highly recommend it. It was very fun to read and we are not going to have the time to like really get into the nitty gritty of her life. But it was a fascinating one. And the one last anecdote I'll throw out before we get into the story is that her husband sculpted her in the nude in three different poses and made it into a sundial for their garden. And I just find that very. It's a sexy detail. I like it. right. Especially in like 1915. Right. Just like, yeah, I'm gonna put my nude self in my backyard. Check it out. I am a hottie. All right, so today's story is from 1919. And this is, you know, I was saying there was kind of the height of the revolutionary crowd. All of these artists, all of these writers that sort of started to taper off because of World War I and because of the actual oppression that they faced in the censorship. This is, you know, coming out of the war a bit starting to look forward. It's a period in which Glaspel is kind of, it feels like starting to assess what their legacy might be and kind of what's coming. And less so in this story. But one of the things I found really interesting, and I do want to touch on at some point, maybe in a different story, is I had never really understood that there was a big backlash to the feminist movement after, women got the vote. This is unsurprising, but I'm not familiar with it either. And I was reading about it and it felt uncannily similar to kind of where we are right now, where women had pushed and pushed and pushed and fought and fought and fought and made all of these strides. And. And the younger women who were coming up underneath them were kind of like, well, I mean, we got the vote. Like, what do you. What more do you want? Like, calm down. Yes, Granny. That's a very specific phenomenon where someone has existed with the rights for a while and so. Or the history's been lost or. Anyway. Yes. And then the only other thing I will say before we get into the story, is that there was. It feels like Glaspel was observing a similar phenomenon among the young men who had been raised again by this generation of revolutionaries, a lot of whom were first generation immigrants who had come with an idea of, like, America as this great land of equality and who had fought really hard for that. And their children were kind of coming to them being like, actually, I'm going to sell out and go make a lot of money, because that feels good. And I. I think that you fought your whole life to accomplish nothing. And I don't wanna live like that. I wanna go get rich. It's like an 80s sitcom with Michael J. Fox. Yes, exactly that. And there's a short story called His America that is about exactly that. And so that just. I'm, bringing all of that up as kind of set dressing. Gotcha for this story, because there's hidden depth here. But this story is called Pollen. Ira will do it in his own way, Mrs. Mead used to say. And people believed her. They believed her because they knew Ira. You have to let Ira alone. And people did let him alone again, because they knew Ira. He had a way of not looking straight at you. Not a sneaky way, but merely that through some choice of his own, he didn't come into direct Communication with you, probably. A man doesn't have to be communicated with if he does not want to be. And as most of the people Ira knew were farmers with a lean to the taciturn and a feeling that it would be better if other folks minded their own business more than they did, Ira was not as much disliked as it would seem he would be, or as indeed he would have been in another walk of life. He was, in fact, not a little respected for being so well able to get along without other people. So Ira is a farmer, as we have learned. And it's not overtly stated, but this is probably set loosely in Iowa, which is where Glaspel was from. So we're back in the Midwest. And Ira, it says, always seemed too preoccupied with what he was doing to pay much attention to what you were doing. Which, again, it's like, this is a type. Uh-huh. Yep. I recognize this person. It says that even as a child, you know, the boys would be doing something over there, and he would kind of go and do his own thing. And his mother, it is noted, does not discourage this. In fact, she encourages it. And it says that she found it more impressive to regard him as unfathomable. Everyone more or less picked this up from her, including Ira. So he's very much off on his own wavelength, even as a young man. And Glaspel says, when you are apart from others, what you do has to be superior to the works of others, or else why are you apart from m. Them? And it basically goes on to explain that he sort of naturally or unnaturally had a way of gravitating towards things he was naturally good at and giving off the impression that he just wasn't interested in things he wasn't naturally good at. Which, again. Right. I recognize this person. Well. And it's a. It's an understandable instinct. Right. Like, who hasn't tried to play off, like, oh, like, I didn't want to do that anyway. I did that from age eight till yesterday. I mean, with everything like sports and so on, that I have no natural ability in. Yeah, you're like, I didn't want to be good at baseball. I wasn't interested. Yeah. and unfortunately for Ira, this also extends to girls. Okay. He's never had the knack for socializing. And Glaspool makes a comment basically saying, like, well, you're not gonna get far with girls if you only speak when spoken to. And Ira really only speaks when spoken to. Okay. I'm intrigued by where this is going. Unfortunately, the one time that Ira has a little bit of a soft spot for a girl named Bertha, he fumbles it. They're young. They're at the fair. There's another man also flirting with her named Joe Dietz. And Jo makes some comment, and Bertha makes a clever little comment. And we're told that Ira has the chance to kind of. He has the opening where he could swoop in and be like, oh, Bertha, you could ride home from the fair with me. And he doesn't do it. Yeah, it doesn't pan out. And so Bertha marries Jo Dietz, and Ira misses out. Poor Ira. But the good news for Ira is that Joe Dietz isn't much of a farmer. Because, again, this is a farming community. Right. All of these families have farms that abut each other. And it's about the time that Bertha and Joe get married. Okay. That, It says Iramed became more of a farmer than he had been before. He took to spraying his trees and trying rotation of crops and doing things to the soil that had never been done to Mead soil before. He throws himself into it. Right in this same pattern. He didn't work out with the girl, but he's got a knack for this. And so he's just going to immerse himself in it. Okay. Things progress in the community. Everyone's getting older. What we wind up with are kind of three farms. There's Iris Farm. South of it is the Balches. B A L C H E S. I'm saying Balch. Who knows? And north of it is the Dietzes. Okay. And Ira and his mother are in the middle. And it's just Ira and his mother. This is a little bleak already, but let's see where it goes. And Ira's mother hasn't lost the weird sort of pride that she has in her sons. Complete inability to socialize with other people. And the Balches who are south of them are partiers. They're fun people. And they're constantly sending someone over to invite Ira to their parties. And Ira's mom is always like, well, I'll tell him. And I. Then she does, and Ira isn't gonna go because he's awkward. And it. And it specifically notes that she always says with satisfaction, I. I knew you wouldn't go. What's she getting out of this? I, think she is proud of him for being the sort of rugged individualist I see. Right. Like, that is what she has been raised to aspire to. Okay. And I think there's probably no small amount of kind of American Puritanism being implied, too. Okay. You know, she likes that her son is this hard worker who's so focused on the science of the farm that he doesn't have time to go socialize. It says, when you don't have anything to do with the people around you, there grows in your mind the idea that there is something the matter with those people. It'll just bring them down on us. Was the way that Ira and his mother disposed of every suggestion that entailed taking any matter up with the Balches. They even gave up the new fence because it might bring them down on us. More than likely, what the Balchas would have come down with would have been an invitation to supper. But the Medes had this growing distrust of all things outside themselves. So they've become. They're a little unit, right? Yeah. Yeah. and everything outside of them is suspect. And in the face of this, it says that Ira once again keeps doubling down on his farm, and the farm is very successful. One day he is out looking at his potato patch, and Bertha Dietz is standing there at the fence between his potato patch and her potato patch. Because Joe Deets isn't much of a farmer. Okay. And she compliments his potatoes like, that's a. That's a fine. That's a fine potato patch. You got Ira a wistful sort of way, complimenting his potatoes. Well, it says that. She just says it in a friendly way. She doesn't seem, to have a problem with the fact that his farm is so much more successful than hers. But it says that he doesn't speak ill of other people's crops. So he just doesn't say anything. Nothing at all. He just kind of goes, You know? And it says, it was five years now since Bertha Paxton had married Joe Dietz. And today she stood at the fence and saw that Ira's potatoes were better than Joe's. Ira wasn't one to look an idea in the face any straighter than he looked at a person. He didn't consider that for five years he had worked for some such satisfaction as this, and so didn't have to consider just how satisfying the moment was. To make his own thing perfect seemed a way of showing he needed nothing from without. So Glaspel is outlining for us as emphatically as she can in McCall's magazine. These are you potatoes? Yeah. These are. How dare you marry that man instead of me, even though I never got the courage up to actually talk to you. Potatoes. Yeah. These are incel. Potatoes. They've been posting on Reddit late at night. These potatoes are on a discord and they are saying unspeakable things to each other. And Aira specifically, outside of the insult, potatoes has really taken to corn. He is loving his corn. He is like up on the latest science about corn. And the reason he likes corn so much, it is his favorite crop is it says that corn was a thing to make a special appeal to a man who wanted to make his own thing perfect. It thanked you for what you did for recorded your proficiency. The corn is a signal. He's corn signaling. Well known move. And I'm not gonna lie, from this point in the story forward, I could not stop thinking about children of the corn. but what a fascinating thing to say about a crop. It records your proficiency. So he's gravitated towards this thing because it allows him to prove without having to prove, mm how good he is at all of this. And so his corn, his corn is amazing. He's growing the best goddamn corn that this town has ever seen. And there's one really interesting note that Glaspel makes, which is that he, in his quiet moments, despite not being a man who discusses politics, sometimes Ira likes to sit quietly and listen to his corn. And it says that as he sits and listens, you know, to the wind whispering through, it says he would think with a queer satisfaction that corn was American. It was here before we were. It was of the very soil of America, something bequeathed to us, which we carried along. He would think of all that corn did, things that could go on because of it. And then he would wonder with a superiority in which there was a queer tinge of affection, what those Indians who had perhaps tended maize in this very field would say if they could see one of his ears of corn. Perhaps it was because he would like to have them see his corn that he sometimes had a feeling they were there. And so he's. And again, this story was written in 1919, so there's a bit, of a romanticization thing there with, the indigenous people of the United States. But the idea is like in his quiet moments, he's having these sort of big thoughts of lineage, of carrying things forward and they're sort of half formed and he hasn't, he hasn't quite worked them out yet, but they're there. There's an instinct. And later in the story, she refers to this as the instinct in which fatherhood is rooted. Oh, interesting. Yeah. But despite this, he still is, very self satisfied. And Very much likes to look down, especially on the balches, those no good fun loving balches. Even though they have a daughter named Mary Balch who it is implied is about his age. He's now like 30. He's not old. Poor Ira. And she has a way of saying his name that he really likes. Okay. I'm glad he's moved on from Bertha since she has been married five years now. Yeah, I was really worried that there was going to be some kind of weird hang up on like that we were never going to let go of Bertha. But it seems like we're letting go of Bertha because it says the way that she says his name, she says his name in a way that didn't get right out of your mind. And it was because he didn't get it right out of his mind that he became the more preoccupied with the things he was doing by himself. Just as he used to be all taken up with some other thing when leapfrog was going on. He excelled in social graces as little as he had excelled in hurdling other boys backs. And there was this thing in him which kept him from appearing to want to do what he couldn't do. Well, I feel like we all have these like kind of little social strategies. I'm curious what it's. I feel like it's standing in for something else. And I'm not necessarily getting the, or the double meaning that she's intending. I don't know. I think to an extent it's meant to really just be a sort of human connection writ large. And this is her way of explaining it. Like he is a person for whom connecting with other people takes more work than average. It's not something he can do lightly. Yeah. And so he's just not doing it. Which I know a lot of people like that. I do. I mean I have some of those tendencies. And in the meantime, as all of this has gone on, Aira has become something that other people threaten their children with. Like be good or Mr. We'll send you to Mr. Mead's house. Oh my gosh. and it says that all the children are terrified of him because he just doesn't acknowledge them at all. Like he just pretends like they're not there. And Glaspel, points out that that is a thing children respond very poorly to. It's like in Home Alone, like the guy with the shovel and the salt who doesn't acknowledge. Yes. Yeah, so that's Ira. Me just. It's a 30 year old version Of. I see. Yes. Uh-huh. And this is where it's pointed out that everyone would be shocked at the idea that Ira Mead had that sense of what has been and what may be, in which is rooted the instinct of fatherhood. So he's got these urges toward sort of humanity and continuity. Right. He's got a little bit of a thing for Mary Balch. He's got this idea, but it's just not working. And so he's doubling down even harder on the corn to the point where he is breeding his own corn. And he creates Mead's corn and takes it to the state fair. And it's a big deal. Everyone's like, oh, my God, this is the best, Ira. You've made the best corn. And he wins an award. And that night he's, like, walking around his farm, admiring the corn. Admiring his land. And he's up by the fence and he hears Mary Balch laughing from the porch of her farm, not too far away. And then he hears a man laughing. Oh. And he makes a sharp turn toward home. And it says, he was thankful he didn't have to have anything to do with slack folks like the Balches. He should think they'd be ashamed of such corn. His rancor at them mounted, and on the way back, the whispering corn did not seem to be taking in so many things. He didn't need neighbors, and he was glad he didn't, being such neighbors as they were. On the way back, he had not that open, affectionate way of regarding his corn. The love for the thing he had created narrowed into the shrewd determination to make this thing do something more for him. Before he went into the house, he looked over towards the Dietzes. It would be a long day before Joe Dietz created a new variety of corn. Created a new variety. Why, he didn't even know what to do with the varieties that had been created for him. They said the Deets place was mortgaged. Ira didn't have a mortgage on his farm. Just love those, like, bitchy voice about corn. It's just so like, you can hear it. Yeah. He went to bed that night, shut in with the resolve to make this corn do something for him. He'd bring it along and show what a man could do when he minded his own business and didn't fritter his time and his mind away on this and that, on nothing. So Ira is dug in. He's f ing pissed about this corn. It's been going well so far, so we should double down on this strategy. Uh-huh. Yeah. And the next day, one of the belches is like. Comes along and is like, I, you know, I'd love to buy some seed corn off of you. This seems like good corn. And Ira refuses. It's like, this is my corn. Yeah. And he's not letting. He. He's basically. He refuses to let anyone have any of his seed corn because they couldn't grow it the way that he can grow it, and they don't deserve it. I mean, I see the rationalization of that choice. They're too busy having fun, like losers. And it says iramed was now 30 years old. He seemed older than that. He himself was like an ear of corn that had fertilized itself too long and needs the golden dust from other corn to bring new life. She's just shut in. He's not, you know, he's. He himself is becoming a deformed ear of corn. In his closet, there's a deformed ear of corn. And the deformed ear of corn is aging, and he's not aging. Wait, wrong book. and so it's, you know, the next year, he doubles down. He's breeding even. He's doing all of these little experiments, and he's got, you know, he's growing his special mead corn, and he's got an experimental patch, like an acre set aside for his breeding experiments, but it keeps getting tainted by his neighbor's corn. And so he moves it even further to, like, closer to his house, and it's just not working. And it says corn was not at all like Ira Mead. It associated with other corn. You could fairly see it doing it. He stood one afternoon and watched the golden dust go through the air on a day of sunshine and wind. Pollen from his standardized mead corn. That's the special corn he won prize for blowing over and fertilizing his experiment. Corn whose cross fertilization he himself wanted to direct. There it came. Procreate golden dust, the male flower that was in the tassel, blowing over to the female flower hidden in the ear from the depth of a bitter isolation. Iramed hated this golden dust. Hated it and hated it impotently. For what could he do about it? Winds blew and carried seed. Winds blew and brought the life that changed other life. Damn sociable stuff, he said with anger that a little astonished him. It's like he has issues or something. It's almost like the corn is a metaphor. It's almost like the corn is a symptom, Ira, of some, problems Your. Feelings are outsized in proportion to what. And he spends another year trying not to notice that his corn, where his fields abut the neighbor's fields, is not as good because it's being cross pollinated with their shittier corn. And it says that he tries not to know it because if he has to know it, it will drive him mad. He's furious. But finally one day, as he's impotently raging at this cross pollination problem, he's over by the Dietz's fence line and he hears Bertha Dietz call out to her husband that their corn on that end of the field is great. She's like, jo, come look at this. Look how good the corn is down on this end of the field. Right, Right. There's some farm knowledge in all of this. Susan was listening to those corn farmers when she was hanging out, and I. Don'T think she was. And then it says, truth came as if borne by wind. Ira stood quite still, as if knowing now there was nothing he could do. And into his sterile mind it came. It came as if it were the golden dust that brought new life. It came. It was Bertha Dietz who cried down at this end, the corn's fine. Bertha Paxton, who had married Joe Dietz. He had wanted to make this thing perfect, that he might have what she couldn't have. And now, because he had it, she had it too. And he couldn't help this. And there's a little bit more of an explanation. We kind of reiterate the pollen and how it all works. And then it concludes, for a second time with. And he couldn't help this. And then we are almost at the end. Okay, Says he stood there within his corn, corn which was changed by the corn around it, corn which impressed itself upon the corn around it. And suddenly, not knowing he was going to do it, he had twisted a stalk of corn until it snapped without knowing it was coming. There was suddenly that anger which makes men kill. He wanted to be let alone. He wanted to keep to himself. Hadn't a man a right to do that? He dug his boot into the ground where the corn was rooted, wanting to hurt. Hurt. The corn, the earth, those things that wouldn't let him be what he wanted to be. His closed in years fought for what closed in years had made him as only a trapped thing will fight. That's a hell of a line. Yeah, Say it. What do you say again? The last one? Yeah. His closed in years fought for what closed in years had made him, as only a trapped thing will Fight. That's, a stunner. Yeah. But the wind moved the corn, and the corn responded. Swayed, spoke. The torn stalk he clenched, dropped from his hand. When you fight things larger than you, you only know that you are small. Because they were so much larger than he, he could let himself go with them. Only a fool will fight the winds that blow m, he thought for the first time in his whole life. Without trying to limit his thinking, he thought the corn men, nations. And he couldn't help this. It was that released him as wind releases life for life. And he goes back to the house, and he puts some seed corn in a basket. And he puts his hat on. And his mom is like, where the f are you going? And he's like, I'm going over to the Balch's farm. And she's like, why? And he says, because, isolationist policy is bad. He says to take them seed and tell them what I know about raising corn. And she asks him why again. And he says, because I can't have good corn while their corn's poor. It was not, after all, easy to go to the belches. His whole life made it hard for him to go. And tried to turn him back. But what he had last said to his mother was saying itself to him. I can't have good corn while their corn's poor. He found himself stepping to the swing of it. And that somehow kept him from turning back. He moved to this now as he used to move to the old verses his father had taught him. About planting a new rhythm, his own creation. It took him right up to the door. He knocked, the door opened and took him into a circle of light. And after her first astonished moment. Mary, Balch was saying in her voice, like, sunshine and wind, why, hello, Ira. The end. That's what delight. And Glasspool is really good. She's a fantastic writer. And this story, every time I reread the story, I'm like, surely I'm not gonna have big feelings about Ira and his corn again. And every time I have big feelings about Ira and his f Ck his corn. I don't know. I find something really touching about, like, stories where the drama is, like, whether someone's going to be able to come out of their shell enough to, like, make some kind of human connection, you know? But also, I think my favorite moment in any bit of literature. Is, like, when literal and figurative meanings are both, like, popping. Yeah. So I think the fact that she's working on two levels like that in a commercial medium. I just really admire and it's a tight little story. Like, there is. It's. It's very compact. Funny, too. Like, it's very funny in moments. Yeah. She. So one of her great talent. Like, she's. She was a satirist. Like, a lot of her stuff is very funny. And even the really dark stuff is very funny. The extremely grim story that I almost subjected you to is, despite its grimness, very funny. She loves an unreliable narrator. M. she loves a narrator that you, the reader especially, are, like, making fun of in your head. But. Yeah, I mean, I would venture to say that this is probably about as resounding a refutation of, like, rugged American individualism as you could get published in 1919. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's very successful. Oh, I really admire it. And I. The last. Since I read it the first time, the last line just keeps clumping through my head, like, I can't have good corn while they're like, corn is poor. Yeah. The fact that she's getting away with saying that. Right. Especially in, like, we were not feeling cheerful about other people in 1919. Like. Yes. And one of the things. And I actually meant to mention this earlier, but one of the things that happened during the big crackdown during World War I was they were doing mass deportations of people who were suspected of having radical politics, which ultimately, like, people were being deported who were American born. Oh, my God. they were getting rounded up and because they had. And what's interesting is then it was actually like they were after, like, Russians and Germans and Eastern Europeans. And there's like, some anti Semitic stuff in there too, right? Yeah. Anti Semitism, anti socialism. They were terrified of, like, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. And so, like, American born people with Russian last names got deported to Russia in the middle of a civil war. I was gonna say, not a great place to be on a cruise to necessarily that year. Yeah. I would guess this was not a popular message for the time, and it's certainly not a popular message now. And one of the things I find really interesting about it is I feel like. And I know this is a thing I say on this podcast semi frequently, but, like, you could change some of the details of the story and set it right now. Yeah. You know, you couldn't make him a corn farmer necessarily, mostly because of Monsanto. yeah, well, the more things change. But. Yeah. What do you think? What are your thoughts? I mean, I like her. I think she's doing it inside of, like, what is a compelling character study. Because I'm Getting frustrated with him. But I also sympathize because we're all at war with our own instincts that way, I think. And also the, She doesn't. It's not some miracle transformation. It's in his self interest. Yeah. Which is, generally speaking, also true. Unless, you know, you're in a complete corporate oligarchy a hundred years later. Well, and I mean, that's. That is one of the things that I think we are watching activists try to do right now is to explain to some of these people like, this isn't even in your own self interest. Like you. You, too, cannot have good corn while their corn is poor. Everyone's corn has to be good together. Yes. I mean, yeah. I'm not sure if this is depressing ultimately or, I don't know, some kind of hopeful message, just that her work's being rediscovered and discussed on podcasts and such. Well, I think that she thought that the world's AIRAs are not inherently a lost cause. I mean, Aira reaches a point of homicidal rage. Sure. And again, because this was published in. I keep saying, Harper, 1919. Yep. In Harper's Monthly. I think I said McCall's before. Forgive me, please, those of you who I know are just poised to rage at me because I mixed up my turn of the century magazines. I think it was a very interesting choice for her to let him reach a point of homicidal rage, but for there not to be any real violence in this story. But I don't think it's any less effective because of that. Like, he lashes out at something that he cares about deeply. I mean, when do any of us ever change without reaching some kind of point like that? Right. Whether it's directed inward or outward. I mean, I think that's. Like that. I don't know. Well, and I do think that there is not to overburden the story, but I do think that there is a, deeper metaphor to Aira lashing out at the only thing he really cares about. I think the corn being inanimate makes the story easier to swallow. But I think with a lot of real or Aira's, the corn is not the corn. Yes. It's wives and children and co workers at the post office. Uh-huh. But she thought then that men like Ira could, you know, be reeled back, that their dreams of what could be could outweigh their anger toward what is. And I'd like to think that that's still the case. Maybe not for everyone, but for some. People, I mean, I think the way she does it and that it's like she's talking about one person and that is plausible to me. I think one person can change. I don't, I can't say anything beyond like at a. These huge mass levels, who can say that anything is predictable at all. That is true. But yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's hopeful that someone could just eventually see reason even if they've got no alternative. Yeah. Not to get preachy or too preachy, but I feel like all of us, a lot of us have airas in our vicinity that we could try and make some overtures with, you know, people who aren't like insane ideologues. People who are just, you know, really focused on their corn. I think they exist. And I mean I have like, I have some of these tendencies in myself, like just rigidity and sticking to attitudes I've had and that side of things. I mean there's like, there's space for all of us to move along. I'm sure, m speaking to myself, certainly. But yeah, I mean, if there's a way to be hopeful about this and not dilute it, I think it might be on this kind of individual level. And it's a cute story too. I mean, the rage, the corn, the like melodious voice of the neighbor, the potatoes that are signaling the you potatoes. The you potatoes. Yeah. I'm glad. I was really happy when another girl came around in the community or like turned out to be there. Just because I thought it might just be pining for someone you can't have for 30, 40 years or something. Yeah. Even having read other stories sort of, you know, from her body of work, her oeuvre, at the first, like the quarter point and the half point of reading the story for the first time, I was like, I don't. I'm worried exactly. Someone's gonn die. I don't know. Yeah, I thought it was like, is this gonna be bleak? Like the dog dies, the corn dies. I had read like there. I had also read like four other stories of hers that ended in suicides. And I was like, all right, Susan sue, cut me some slack. And to contrast it with some of her other work, like it's not all Ira's. There's a, there's another story that she wrote around the same time called Beloved Husband, which is about a man who is like genuinely one of those very rare sort of self made men who like starts out working in a fish market and then manages to like buy the fish market. And it was really interesting because it actually reminded me a lot of the billionaires who are ruining our lives right now, because she writes really well about this man's sort of terror of losing money and uncontrollable impulse to gamble with his money and how the two of them are at war with him at all times. Oh, yeah. It's a great story, and I can't recommend it enough. I will warn everyone that her work is shockingly hard to find, even online. Ultimately, finally, he comes apart at the seams because he's too far removed from the work that got him there. And his family are starting to scold him about not being, like, not behaving appropriately in the way that he's supposed to, to be part of the upper crust. And it all ends very poorly. It all spins out. And he has a really rough time because he can't square no longer being part of the working world. Like, the work has ruined him, and he can't leave it behind. I mean, Warren Buffett, lives in the same house he bought 40 years ago, even after his wife left him, because he would just read 10Ks all night, and he's eating the same, like, $10 steakhouse. And he married the waitress there, like. Yeah. So, I mean, we sometimes give these things like this, aw, shucks, good old Uncle Buffett thing. And I say this, like, admiring his skill and what he does. But another part of me is like, are these pathologies? Right? And, I mean, they've been with us a very long time. I'm just pointing at him, but he's just an example, you know what I mean? Like, I think clearly these things, these patterns were around in 1919 or wherever. Yeah. And they're alienating. I mean, I think one of her big concerns throughout a lot of her work is how alienated a lot of these people are from each other and from the communities that should be supporting them. I mean, that was one of the big concerns of these. These socialists, these anarchists, these activists in the 19 teens and especially in and around Greenwich Village, was. They were worried about solidarity. They were worried about community. They were worried about trying to convince people to band together and support one another in the face of the increasing, you know, depredations of capitalism and increasing political censorship and oppression. I mean, one of the first times that Susan and her husband, like, worked together on something was actually in a library censorship scandal. The Davenport Library tried to ban a book that was deemed to be essentially heretical because a, Catholic priest objected to it. And she and her and the other socialists of Davenport, you know, all 15 of them got together and made it a big deal, and they ultimately won. And so I think, like a lot of us, she. She came up at a point when a lot of this seemed really, really hopeful. And then she watched World War I kind of. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting place to be in spiritually, and, like, just keeping your eyes open is kind of a triumph. You know what I mean? And I say that having been on a news black for several months now. Understandably, anyway, I just. I don't know, I feel them like, I like their vibe, and it's interesting to think that they face so much of the same sort of scenarios that we're facing. Yeah. It is an era that I am really looking forward to reading more about, and we will. Glasspole's gonna come back on the podcast. We are not done with her yet, not by a mile. But I, thought that this would be a nice place to start with her. I'm into her. Me too. So is it. There's not, You're saying there's not a whole lot published, even online? No, I had to. I found one collection of short stories through an academic library. It's an academic book. It's personal. Out by like, University of Iowa Press or something. I found another collection of her short stories on, like, Project Gutenberg. Uh-huh. but no, there's really very, very little of hers in print, and a lot of it is academic texts. And so they're really expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Fair. I wonder why specifically. I mean. So the way her biographer puts it, or sort of frames it, is that. So the peak. She died in 1948. The peak of her success was from sort of World War I up through sort of the beginnings of World War II. That was like when she was most famous and she was quite famous. I mean, she, again, she was the breadwinner. She was a working author for her entire life. But in the Post World War II anti feminist backlash, she was the wrong kind of lady author. The reading public was completely disinterested in the kind of stories she was telling and in the kind of women that she was portraying, I can believe this because they weren't femme enough. And if you. If you look at the women's literature and the sort of feminist literature that managed to survive that, like, post war 50s backlash, it tends to be women who are either interesting because they're super f ed up, or women who are daring but undeniably still pretty femme. Uh-huh. You know, they were. Culturally. We allowed a little bit of feminist literature to slip through, but only so long as it was like distinctly feminine. M. And a socialist from the 19 teens was not on the list. You win some. At least she. It sounds like maybe she enjoyed her success during the time that she was alive. I would hope she did. Yeah. I mean, she. It seems like she. And, unfortunately her husband died fairly young, back to that alcoholism thing. But she had a pretty good life and she had a long term lover. After her husband died, she didn't stay single, but she did not get married again. And I mean, Pashima's fame is too much to hope for. For 99.9999. That is very true. We can keep going. Yeah. So, yeah. Any other thoughts on Susan or Pollen? I think the story's brilliant. I want to hang out with her. Me too. I don't know. I'm intrigued by this period and want to learn more about it. I really am. Like, I'm, not on firm ground with most of it. We'll do some more of the nineteen teens radicals on the podcast soon. Cause, it's a fun period that I think a lot of people forget about. Yeah. I mean, I've been loosely researching, like, the 1890s for a while, and it's interesting as, like, a response to. I'm trailing off here. We can cut this back. Oh, you're fine. Yeah, my thoughts are totally half formed on this one. I don't know. I'm into it. I like it. Yeah. It's like, I feel like a lot of people sort of intuitively, if they aren't nudged, jump straight from the Gilded Age into World War I. Like, there was no intervening bit. Like it's all just period dramas that skipped every 20 years. Yeah. Someone needs to make a period drama about the turn of the century labor movement and all of the anarchists who were getting drunk together in Greenwich Village. And wife swapping or whatever it was. And husband swapping. Let's be, you know, good. We're swapping everybody. I mean, I would watch this HBO drama. I would love to. Hbo, are you listening? Make a Susan Glaspel bio series. Doesn't sound like you're gonna have to pay much for the rights. She did so much. Cool shit. All right, well, I think that about wraps us up for today. Kat, thank you again for joining us. Thank you for introducing me to Susan Glaspole. I'm into her. And, once again, if people would like to have more of you. Where should they find you? Sure. I'm mostly on substack. my substack is called Poke and Save youe Life and it's free, so I'm not plugging up paid product here. and I hang out on the notes function. That's social media wise, mostly where I am these days. All right, go find Cat. Go read Poe for your problems. It's very charming. I enjoyed it very much. And it's a good. It's cute. It's like a good size. Make a good gift for the manic, depressive literature lover in your life. Goth book nerds everywhere. There are so many of us. We are legion. And just a reminder that if you would like to be our Valentine, we are relaunching our merch store and you can find it at didn't, readitpod.com we have some good little Valentine's things for you. And I almost forgot to say that the first 25 orders will get a little handwritten thank you card and some stickers and some bookmarks from me. So go buy a beanie for someone you love. Go buy a beanie for someone who's never listened to the show and be like, haha, now you own a piece of their merch. You have to listen to them. do that and more just for me because I need all of you to be my Valentine. And next weekend, we will be coming at you with a very horny, didn't read it. Valentine's Day special. So keep, an eye out for that. It's going to be smutty. Thank, all of you for being here. Kat, thank you again for being here. Thanks for having me. And as always, if you can this week, this month, this pay period, consider supporting a living author because they could really use the love. Bye. Didn't, read. It was created, written, researched and recorded by me, Grace Todd. Maddie Wood is our co producer and social media maven. Editing by Tally, a true podcasting professional. And Grace Todd, our theme song is books 2.0. Written, performed and recorded by William Albritton. Special thanks to blackiris Social Club in Richmond, Virginia. Reach out to us with questions, concerns or academic scrutiny at, didn't. Readititpodmail.com.