A forgotten sojourner

The last novel Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published in her lifetime, The Sojourner (1953), differs from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) in almost every respect: Rawlings's novel follows the long, dull life of a character who clings to the slow pace of farm life, loves soil and people more than money, and never ventures beyond his county seat until his 80th year, while Miller's Pulitzer-Prize-winner play focuses on the frenetic last days of Willie Loman, the success-seeking traveling salesman who is most himself when he's on the move.

However, the two works are similar in one important way: both feature a wandering character named Ben who lights out for the territories to make his fortune and then, in his absence, takes on undue importance among those he has left behind. Willie Loman's dead Uncle Ben appears only to scoff at Willie's insignificance, holding out the promise of glittering success beyond the far horizon. The absent Ben plays a similar role in the Rawlings novel, heading west to seek success in gold, timber, or gambling and by his absence serving as a reproach to his brother Asahel, who stays home to tend the farm he can never own because it belongs to his absent brother.

Ben, then, seems to be the sojourner for whom the novel was named, but in the end Rawlings makes it clear that the more rooted brother, Asahel, has sojourned farther into understanding of the human spirit than has his rootless brother. Ase remains on the land initially not because he loves the farm but because he loves Ben and always expects him to return home to claim his rightful ownership. Ase sees himself as a mere steward of his brother's riches:

Why, any man had only temporary rights to the earth. His mother's talk of control, of ownership. Tim's talk of legal rights and papers, these were nonsense. No man owned the land....He asked himself now what he expected of the land....It was not what he expected of it, but what it required of him. He felt himself on firm ground. The land asked to be worked, to be taken care of properly, and in return it would nourish all men, as long as they were indeed its brothers.

The Sojourner follows the seasons of farm life and proceeds with the slow pace of the meager events the punctuate those seasons: the birth of a calf, the hailstorm that destroys a crop of wheat, the birth of a child and then another and then, sometimes, a death. His closest friend calls Ase "the most wordless man ever," but he proves a loyal and valuable friend, both to a rag-tag group of social outcasts and to the reader. He joys are subtle, his sorrows deep, and his final flight well worth the 300 pages it takes to get there.

Yes, it's a long novel and not without its flaws, but Rawlings writes with tremendous tenderness toward the man whose life appears narrow but whose inner landscape stretches deep into unknown territory that rewards exploration. When he finally manages to travel west, Ase discovers that a man's travels are not defined by his movements but by his mind; when the porter comments that "You could ride the train a hundred years and you'd always think it was the earth moving and not you," Ase replies, "I expect we're all moving all the time, all together, only we don't know where or which way."

Wherever we're going, Asahel Linden makes an excellent traveling companion.