Paul Greenberg’s Alaska
The Federal Writer’s Project was instated in America during the Great Depression in order to provide employment for struggling writers and to boost the economy. The Federal Writer’s Project was part of the Works Project Administration, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and their collective magnum opus was the set of WPA State Guides known as the American Guide Series. John Steinbeck “would have packed the WPA States Guides – all 48 of them” had he had the room on his travels with his dog Charley. The American Guide Series gave detailed information: historical, geographical, cultural, and otherwise, on each individual city and town in America. The writers of this era also tried to capture the zeitgeist of the country at the time by taking into account the people and their traumatic experiences throughout the Great Depression. The American Guide Series was a series created by and for the people of America.
The collection State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited and compiled by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, is an attempt at modernizing the American Guide Series. Wilsey, in the introduction of State by State, talks about his travel through America to refresh his mind. His trip is comparable to Steinbeck’s in Travels with Charley, a story about the Nobel Prize winning author’s own 1960 trip through America to reacquaint himself with the country. Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley that he could not fit the massive guide series in his camping truck. It’s a shame, since, as Wilsey writes, “Steinbeck could have spent a lot less time getting lost, then depressed, then drunk.” While this is a seemingly light-hearted joke, it gets to the true purpose of the original Guide Series – to be, as its name suggests, an informative and thorough guide for the reader. Weiland writes in his preface that he hopes “the great curiosity of America and American lives those magnificent [original] guides evince is evident in [these] essays.” He admitted that State by State would not be the “great storehouse of facts” that the original series was, simply because so much information could not be contained in a single book. Regrettably, the author for the state of Alaska does not achieve the factual substance or the American curiosity of some of the other essays in this collection. South Carolina’s essay shows the city of Charleston’s resilience and gives a clear view of its people and its development, as well as how its past has affected its present and future. Missouri, even with a format similar to Alaska’s (an essay framed by the author’s trip and his interaction with a native of the state), showcases a cultural pride and heritage in St. Louis. Jacki Lyden, the author for Missouri, says that “St. Louis is growing again,” but more importantly, shows in her essay the factors: the people, the environment, and the ethic that is reviving the once great city. In the essays for Missouri and for South Carolina, the personal connection by the author enhances the reader’s understanding of the state, and is relevant and cogent.
The author for the state of Alaska is Paul Greenberg, a critic and editorialist for the New York Times. As he travels through Alaska, Greenberg provides his story and goes into fine detail to describe to the reader what he sees. At times, the story seems promising. When Greenberg lands in Alaska, he encounters a Grand Aviation dispatcher who tells him, “If you’re here to write an article, you’ve got a lot of material.” The reader is filled with hope. What will they learn about the largest state in the United States … what does “a lot of material” refer to? Unfortunately, Greenberg does not pursue Alaska’s scope and variety any further; instead, he chooses to focus on the two friends that he meets in Alaska. Greenberg goes simply through his journey in Alaska: his conversation with Jac upon arrival, his meditations on Alaska’s Yu’pik Eskimos and nature, his fishing journey with Jac’s friend Ray’s family, his conversation with Jac after his return, and his departure from Alaska. This essay seems like a casual run-down of events relayed by Greenberg to the reader – in fact, it seems more like Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty than an informative essay.
Greenberg includes such minute details as the outline of his friend Jac Goodwill’s face when they meet, and Ray Waska’s expression of excitement as he catches a king salmon: “Just as things start to seem commonplace, Ray tenses. He pushes his son out of the way, makes one last haul, and thwap! A much bigger, more beautiful salmon lies on the deck.” He also sneaks in some sparse facts about Alaska, but these facts are all through a very limited lens, and are only those that pertain to his journey. The reader learns about Alaska’s landscape and bureaucracy, as well as its natural bounty – while some of these facts do give the reader an idea of Alaska as a whole, others have a tendency to be catered to Greenberg’s purpose only. Greenberg describes how the Fish and Game Bureau is extremely protective of Alaska, as the Bureau allows Jac to purchase fish “only if the amount of salmon in the river exceeds both the escapement and subsistence goals.” Greenberg is native of New York, and Greenberg’s opinion of Alaska is influenced by this prior experience with New York throughout the whole story, since he fixates on Alaska’s seclusion and proximity to nature, as well as its relaxed but spontaneously inspired mindset. The character of Alaska is encapsulated by a quote by Jac:
In the Lower 48, people are sort of arranged. You know when they get out of school what they’re gonna do, what they’re gonna achieve. In Alaska it’s all mixed up. It’s like everybody’s running even along a mud track. But then all of a sudden someone throws sand under one guy’s feet and zoom! Off he goes. And you’re like ‘how’d he do that?’
He tries to capture the emotions and perspectives of Jac and Ray, but not the sensation of Alaska as a whole. Instead of telling the reader that Jac was disappointed at the limits that Fish and Game placed on his fishery, Greenberg shows: “Jac slumped in his chair. He took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled with a smoky cough.” He focuses especially on the interactions within Ray’s family. The family is the only one in a long way, it is located “on a hill overlooking a football sized clearing that is the Waska family fish camp.” When Ray talks to Greenberg, “Roberta [Ray’s daughter], bored by the conversation she’s heard too many times, turns to [him].” Greenberg shows here the familiarity that this lonely part of Alaska breeds and embeds a sentimental feeling in his descriptions of the Eskimo families. Using a quote from Jac, Greenberg does capture the volatility (and opportunity) of Alaska pretty well:
I tell ya, I made a million dollars in a day once. Other times, I say I came to Alaska with $600 in my pocket and it’s taken me twenty years to make back my $600.
This is New Journalism, a style pioneered by the likes of novelists Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer that focuses on the storytelling aspects of journalism – description and narration – rather than the expository or argumentative ones. New Journalism’s authors seemed to fixate on certain individual characters – Wolfe and Mailer’s most famous pieces were twenty-plus page articles on Junior Johnson and John F. Kennedy, respectively. And while this focused approach may be appropriate to inform the reader about an individual, it does not quite work as the guide to a state, a much broader entity. Greenberg’s personal bent is apparent in his tangent about the death of the high school girls. He opens with “Crises are shared in the Yup’ik Nation.” Are they not shared everywhere else in the world? This paragraph offers nothing distinctly Alaskan, as death occurs everywhere, and is irrelevant to the paragraphs immediately preceding and succeeding it – Greenberg simply includes it because it is what he saw and heard while in Alaska. In fact, Greenberg himself even comes off as insensitive due to this lack of organization: it seems as if he just jammed this tragic occurence in his story, when the paragraphs before and after are lighthearted Alaskan jokes about bootlegging alcohol and a faulty GPS. All in all, Greenberg does not truly try to capture the essence of the state for the reader; instead he captures for the reader his experience, an experience that may or may not be representative of Alaska.
Even setting the old America Guide Series aside, Greenberg’s essay is not quite efficacious in the way that the editors wanted it to be. Although he writes about one of the most natural and least industrialized states, Greenberg does not achieve the goal that Wilsey sets out to achieve in his drive across America, that is, “to see America slowly, a way almost nobody gets [it].” Greenberg’s essay has “velocity and ease,” two attributes that Wilsey wrote in his introduction that he did not want to have. The essay reads like a story, and the reader feels as if Greenberg had a fully zoomed-in camera and took pictures of his own journey. For all of the minute details that Greenberg gave us, he forgot to zoom out and let the readers see Alaska. In the end, there was little insight given into Alaska, the state.