John Lennon, the son of working class parents in Liverpool, recorded an answer. Dig out your copy of the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album from 1970 and listen to “Working Class Hero” on it. It’s a devastating track—spare, intense, chorally yet unpushily sarcastic—with just Lennon singing over an acoustic guitar. But there’s also an empathetic ache pulsing through his performance. Lennon had been caught in that life, the one he was raised in and learned with, the one he could never shake off or, perhaps, want to.
If you’re a Green Day fan, as I am, also listen to their compelling rendition of Lennon’s song on Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur, a CD from 2007. Or just locate John Lennon’s and Green Day’s uncensored performances on YouTube.
Here are the song lyrics, slightly expurgated in two spots to keep the propriety beasts at bay:
As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
’Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool,
’Till you’re so f—king crazy you can’t follow their rules.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still f—king peasants as far as I can see.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
There’s room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill.
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,
If you want to be a hero well just follow me.
Even if Philip Levine, currently the Poet Laureate of the United States, never heard Lennon’s un-anthem about working class existence, he lived it. Born in Detroit in 1928, Levine saw his initially middle-class life slip into lower-class travail after his businessman father died with too little financial security set aside for his family. In his “short view” of Levine in Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, published in 2004, poet-critic Dana Gioia, who was raised in a tough working class neighborhood of Hawthorne, California, cites “the middle-class terror of becoming poor” as both pall and prod for Levine, who “took bad luck and made it inspiration.” That’s what artists do, including Herman Melville. (Read my second blog of Oct. 24.)
At such auto plants and factories as Detroit Transmission and Chevrolet Gear and Axle, Philip Levine worked dead-end, deadening, but still above-average-paying blue-collar jobs, and they became material for his poetry. But if you’re thinking noble savage here, get your head out of the crankcase. “I found the places hateful, and the work was exhausting,” Levine told National Public Radio’s David Greene. “Even in my imagination I didn’t want to spend time where I was working. I didn’t want to talk shop.” Why do some scholars want to skim or candy over the truth? It’s almost as if they wished it otherwise, thereby making it so. Enlarging a myth to ennoble the man or his work is dangerous. Levine deserves better than that.
Still, I wonder why, in “A Note About the Author” or unheadlined bio at the back of Levine’s books, these six words, “after a succession of industrial jobs,” replaced these six words, “after a succession of stupid jobs.” The latter phrase appears in my secondhand hardback copy of Ashes: Poems New and Old, published by Atheneum in 1979, but the former phrase appears in my copies of What Work Is (1991), The Simple Truth (1994), and Breath (2004). “Stupid” is more accurate, evocative, gripping, and, damn it, poetic than the bland, place-holding “industrial.” Stifling “stupid” is, well, stupid. Or have we been thrust back by publicity flacks into the la-la land of the assembly line’s noble savage?
Realizing he had to strengthen his craft to match his material, Levine pursued formal education. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Wayne State University and, more significantly, an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. There, at the fabled graduate writer’s workshop, he studied under John Berryman (“the most brilliant, intense, articulate man I’ve ever met,” Levine acknowledged) and with classmates W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Jane Cooper, and Henri Coulette. “If there ever was a time to enlist in a graduate writing program, it was at Iowa in 1953,” Gioia noted about Levine.
What I admire about Philip Levine and his poetry is the lack of pretension in both. I also respect his willingness to trade punches and unwillingness to pull them. In Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets, edited by Alexander Neubauer, you can sense Levine’s backbone restiffening as he described his struggles with publishers over his 1972 book, They Feed They Lion:
“They asked me to drop the title poem. And I refused and they refused to publish the book, which went unpublished for about five years, rejected by a dozen publishers. My next book, 1933, got very bad reviews, because it isn’t like the previous books. It’s a book of personal remembrances and tenderness, and some people think I’m much better when I’m in my work clothes breaking roads or other things of that nature. They don’t like to see me, for example, in the synagogue mourning my father or crying or yearning for lost love. After all, wasn’t I a kind of fierce guy in my other books? Pissed off, angry at America because of its variety of ugly careers that our nation has embarked on?”
Later in the same Poetry in Person interview, Levine takes an almost elegiac tone toward the men he labored with in the Motor City:
“Detroit is not a nightmare landscape to me. The nightmare is the lives that many people have to live because they have no other choice. And it is a very wounding experience to go back and to discover that men of my own age are old. I mean really old. And I look at them and they look at me across an extraordinary chasm of wonderment. ‘What happened to you?’ ‘What happened to you?’”
During summers as a college student and a few other times, I worked my share of crummy, soul-depleting jobs to scrounge together a few bucks. I cleaned toilets as a nighttime janitor in a middle school, removed rusty, headless nails from heavy, thick, splintery pallets and then stacked them twenty high in rows outside a warehouse, and lugged tall boxes of frozen fish to a conveyor belt in a factory, where I saw a man lose a finger while pushing a block of cod into a bandsaw. I even had to sweep the factory’s large macadam parking lot one sultry day in mid-July.
Did all those menial experiences forge my present-day character and make me grateful for the cushier white-collar world of work? Maybe. Philip Levine moved into that other world of work as well, although his memory, like mine, of what preceded it remains doggedly vivid.
With several honors (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, two National Book Awards) already in his quiver, Levine saw a huge sales spike for his books of verse a day after Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate. It must have been quietly gratifying for Levine to watch his poetry suddenly backordered for up to three weeks.
Perhaps part of the impetus to name Philip Levine, often dubbed the “Proletariat Poet,” to the highly prestigious post of U.S. Poet Laureate was to send a signal to a calcified Congress and a dejected public that work mattered and must become a priority again—if not the priority. I have this fantasy film running in my mind of the elder Billington delivering the news with a lone middle finger at upright salute to a Congress now “enjoying” a public-approval rating of nine percent.
Philip Levine, age 83, has earned the U.S. Poet Laureateship. Quite literally, he worked for it but without ever seeking it. No wonder he was surprised. How can you not admire a man who recounted to NPR’s David Greene this phone exchange with Billington: “I thought he was probably going to ask my advice as to who should be the next Poet Laureate, and then he said, ‘We would like you to be the next Poet Laureate,’ and asked me if I would accept the position. And I said, ‘Sure.’”?
I’ll finish with a poem exemplifying Philip Levine’s best work about work, aptly called “What Work Is,” from his book of the same title. The paradox in the poem is that it brings to fresh life the corrosive death of standing in a lengthy queue in a drizzle in the equally damp hope of getting a job. Sound familiar? It’s a pity we can’t ask John Lennon, but then, we know how he’d reply.
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.
