SOURCE: "The Art of Ruth Suckow's 'A Start in Life'," in Western American Literature, Vol. XV, No. 3, November, 1980, pp. 177-86.

[In the following essay, Oehlschlaeger examines the first story in Iowa Interiors, "A Start in Life, " which, he says, demonstrates "the meanness, repression, and degradation that occur when economic relations between people supplant human ones. "]

When Ruth Suckow's first volume of short stories, Iowa Interiors, appeared in 1926, no less a critic than H. L. Mencken hailed the book with unqualified enthusiasm:

Who ... has ever published a better first book of short stories than this one? Of the sixteen stories, not one is bad—and among the best there are at least five masterpieces. I mean by masterpiece a story that could not imaginably be improved—one in which the people are overwhelmingly real and not a word can be spared. All of these people are simple Iowa peasants. In other hands they would slide inevitably into stock types, ludicrous and artificial. But Miss Suckow differentiates them sharply, and into every one she breathes something of the eternal tragedy of man. Her talent is not unlike Sherwood Anderson's, but her mind is more orderly than his. She gropes and guesses less and is hence more convincing.

[American Mercury IX, November 1926]

Despite Mencken's praise, however, Miss Suckow's reputation has been modest at best. She is generally mentioned, with varying degrees of favor, in the standard works on American regionalism and local color fiction. .. . All of these works are unquestionably sympathetic, but none has done enough to illuminate the particular quality of Suckow's short fiction that Mencken praised—her fine artistic command of language and detail. Indeed, in Suckow's best stories, "not a word can be spared."

In his review of Iowa Interiors, Mencken did not identify specifically the five stories he deemed masterpieces. But I feel sure that one of these must have been the volume's opening story, "A Start in Life." In no story is Miss Suckow's sure command of the significant surface—her ability to make every detail count—more apparent. What I propose, then, is to look carefully at the art of this deceptively simple tale of a hired girl's first day of work. My purpose is dual: to reveal the thematic and artistic preoccupations of a remarkable short story, and, by exposing the story's artistry, to assert the value of Ruth Suckow's fiction.

As its title suggests, "A Start in Life" is a story of initiation, in this case the initiation of a young girl into a life of grinding economic necessity and subservience. The story's outward action can be very simply told. Suckow focuses on Daisy Switzer's first day of work as a hired girl in a rural community of Iowa. The opening scenes of the story take place at the Switzer's house, as Daisy's harried mother, herself a hired domestic, works frantically to get her daughter ready to go to her new position. Daisy is then picked up by her employer, an up-and-coming young farmer named Elmer Kruse, and driven to the Kruse farm, where she spends the day learning her duties. When she arrives at the farm, Daisy overhears Mrs. Kruse's mentioning to her husband that she would like to go for a drive to her mother's late in the afternoon: a drive that Daisy looks forward to throughout the day. The story's crisis occurs, then, when the Kruses decide not to ask Daisy to go driving with them. Being excluded brings Daisy her first awareness of her status. Mrs. Switzer had told Daisy that going to work for the Kruses would not be like "visiting." By the end of the story, Daisy has begun to understand her mother's meaning.

Although the two most thorough studies of Suckow's fiction [Leedice McAnelly Kissane, Ruth Suckow, 1969, and Margaret Stewart Omrcanin, Ruth Suckow: A Critical Study of Her Fiction, 1972] tend to underplay her interest in sociological and economic issues, it seems to me that "A Start in Life" is best read as social criticism. What Daisy Switzer begins to understand at the end of the story is what it means to be regarded simply as a commodity. What Ruth Suckow dramatizes is the dehumanization that occurs when the labor of one person is owned by another. Moreover, Miss Suckow directly attributes Daisy's degradation to her lack of economic power; we are carefully told that Daisy has inherited neither property nor status from her dead father. Thus the story is an implicit criticism of the American dream: in a community where land above all is power, the landless remain poor and subservient from generation to generation.

What Daisy does inherit from her father is brilliantly suggested by the opening scene, which takes place in the bedroom of the Switzer home. Throughout that scene, Suckow focuses on a central symbol, a "battered telescope" which is the only luggage available to carry Daisy's belongings to the Kruse farm. As she attempts to pack Daisy's clothes into the old telescope bag, Mrs. Switzer looks at it with a "helpless, anxious fatalism that it would have to do somehow." This line later reverberates with striking irony when we are told that the telescope "was an old thing, hadn't been used since her husband, Mert, had 'left off canvassing' before he died. And he had worn it all to pieces." Thus Daisy's legacy—and burden—is the very symbol of her father's landlessness, the telescope that he had carried as a traveling salesman—one who in a rural community is without land, power, and the accompanying status. Mrs. Switzer's knowing "fatalism" surfaces again when she says to Daisy of the telescope, '"Well, you'll have to take it the way it is'." This statement applies with fine irony to all of Daisy's legacy. In the telescope that Daisy carries out the door, Suckow has found an appropriate symbol of the girl's inheritance from a father who was "battered" and "worn all to pieces" by work in a world where he had no place.

The powerlessness that results from the Switzers' economic condition is also carefully suggested by Suckow's opening description. The Switzers' lack of control over their own lives extends even to the most trivial of life's details:

Daisy's things were scattered over the dark brown quilt and the rumpled sheet that were dingy and clammy in this damp weather. So was the whole bedroom, with its sloping ceiling and old-fashioned square-paned windows, the commode that they used for a dresser, littered with pin tray, curlers, broken comb, ribbons, smoky lamp, all mixed up together; the door of the closet open, showing the confusion of clothes and shabby shoes.

Yet Daisy seems quite undisturbed by her chaotic surroundings and blissfully unaware of the reality of her economic condition. Bound by the egoism of the child, she looks forward eagerly to beginning work and feels "important in her small world." Her mother of course understands the reality of working for other people and tries delicately to prepare Daisy for the blows her ego is about to receive. The result is some finely understated moments that gain additional irony as the story unfolds. When Daisy realizes, for instance, that she will not be able to take all of her clothes, she suggests that she will pick them up some week when she rides into town with the Kruses. To this her mother cautions, in a line that directly anticipates the story's climax, '"Yes, but maybe they won't always be bringing you in'." Or, as Daisy stands in front of the mirror adjusting her ribbons, Mrs. Switzer says, '"You needn't be so anxious to fix yourself up. This ain't like going visiting'." Such is the understatement of a parent who wants to prepare the child's ego for the shocks and changes of experience without destroying it altogether.

The first step in Daisy's coming to self-awareness occurs at the end of the story's first section as the car in which she is riding pulls away from the Switzer house. Suddenly she has "a startled view of home": its shabbiness, the litter in the yard and the unkempt grass, the solemn faces of her brother and sister, the drawn face of her mother. As she sees the "playthings they had used yesterday," Daisy is seized by a sharp sense of separation and begins to wave frantically, both to her mother and to the life of protection she is leaving behind. For a moment Daisy's mother seems to share this brief epiphany; she waves back to Daisy and then stands for "a little while" in the yard, as if in recognition of the moment's significance. The reader is poised for a revelation from Mrs. Switzer, but Suckow denies us this revelation and closes the section instead with two lines of cutting ironic force: "Then came the harsh rasp of the old black iron pump that stood out under the box-elder tree. She was pumping water to leave for the children before she went off to work." The utterly impersonal working of the pump here is a revelation in itself; Suckow seems almost to suggest that work has literally obliterated Mrs. Switzer's personality. And in the final sentence Suckow manages an irony that any feminist will appreciate when she implicitly attacks the distinction between Mrs. Switzer's pumping water for the children and the domestic "work" for pay that she goes off to do.

As she leaves her mother's home, Daisy begins to seek emotional identification with the Kruses, who subtly but determinedly insist that she learn her place as the hired girl. Indeed much of the emotional force of the story's later sections derives from Suckow's juxtaposing Daisy's need for inclusion in the Kruse family with the Kruses' insistence on her exclusion. Daisy's identification with the Kruses begins on the ride to the farm. She feels "the grandeur of having a ride" and is "proud . . . of going out with Elmer and Edna." She wants to know the names and ages of the Kruse children, though she does not ask these, and she hopes that the Kruses will take her to the movies on Saturday nights. She even begins to feel a pride in the Kruses' power and status in the community: "Elmer and Edna were just young folks; but Mrs. Metzinger said that they had more to start with than most young farmers did, and that they were hustlers. Daisy felt that the pride of this belonged to her too, now."

But there are subtle suggestions, even in section two of the story, that Daisy's attempts to identify with the Kruses will prove to be futile. When Daisy gets into the car, for instance, Mr. Kruse puts her in the back seat next to a bag of groceries, an obvious act of distancing that even Daisy seems instinctively to recognize: "She wished she were in the front seat with Elmer. She didn't see why he hadn't put her there." Moreover, the distancing largely accomplishes its purpose, as very little conversation passes between Kruse and Daisy on the way to the farm. He offers nothing about his family or about the people whose farms they pass on the way. When Daisy finally breaks the silence, "calling out" from her distance, "'Say, how much farther is your place?'," Kruse blurts out, "'What's that?'," obviously taken aback by her familiarity. Later, when Daisy arrives at the farm, she is left to stand forlornly on the porch while the Kruses enter the house, their attention taken up with their own children. Elmer Kruse also neglects to bring in Daisy's telescope until reminded by his wife to get "'Her valise—or whatever it is—out in the car.'" Finally, when Daisy tries to share something of her own life with Mrs. Kruse, she is quickly reminded of her status. Remarking on the Kruse children, Daisy says to Edna, "'I didn't know both of your children was boys. I thought one of 'em was a girl. That's what there is at home now—one boy and one girl'." Clearly Daisy is trying here to elicit some emotional response, some evidence of interest, from Edna. But Edna barely acknowledges Daisy's remark about her family; instead she seeks immediately to establish the proper distance between herself and this too familiar little girl: '"You know we got you to help me,' she reminded."

The tension between Daisy and Edna Kruse becomes the major focus of the story's third section. With a few deft strokes, Suckow characterizes Edna as a cool, efficient, and capable woman. As she did earlier in drawing Mrs. Switzer, Suckow uses details of setting to suggest the personality and condition of Edna Kruse. A vision of order and cleanliness, the Kruse house stands in stark contrast to the Switzer household. When Daisy arrives at the Kruses' she is led up "bright new stairs" into a hall where "two strips of very clean rag rug were laid over the shining yellow of the floor." The floor of Daisy's room also has the look of bright varnish, a look that dominates the Kruse household. But for all its cleanliness and enforced order—or perhaps because of them—the Kruse house seems cold to Daisy: she is "chilly" as she stands in "the bright little kitchen . . . with the white oilcloth on the table, the baby's varnished high chair and his little fat, mottled hands." The chill flows from Edna Kruse herself, a severe young woman whose concern for propriety makes her suppress every generous impulse toward Daisy.

Edna's behavior toward Daisy also reflects her habit of control. At this point we should remember what Daisy's friend Mrs. Metzinger said of the Kruses: they "had more to start with than most young farmers did, and . . . they were hustlers." What the Kruses have is land, and with it, power, the ability to control their own lives. That ability is suggested by Suckow's descriptions of their almost obsessively ordered house, just as the chaos of Mrs. Switzer's house functions to suggest her basic lack of power. The ability and desire to exercise power dictate Edna's treatment of Daisy as well. In the process Daisy is dehumanized, reduced from person to commodity. Edna does this without malice, and that is what makes it even more terrifying. She simply insists that her relationship to Daisy be a purely economic one, the relationship between employer and labor. But what Suckow reveals, in a subtly understated way, is the brutal insensitivity that such a fundamentally dehumanized relationship necessitates.

Edna's degradation of Daisy manifests itself in her language. Despite her apparently kind intentions, Edna speaks to Daisy only in commands or sarcasm. Edna's concern for propriety appears in several statements to Daisy of the following kind: '"You must help, you know. That's what you are supposed to do.'" When she is not directly insisting that Daisy learn the duties of her place, Edna employs sarcastic rebukes. When Daisy's efficiency fails to meet Edna's expectations, for instance, she is met with, '"You might bring me a dish, Daisy'" or '"Now you might take Billy into the kitchen out of my way, Daisy, and amuse him'." Each of these statements may seem inoffensive in itself, but Suckow builds them up carefully and unobtrusively until they unmistakably suggest Edna's subtle degradation of Daisy.

Even more effective is Suckow's emphasis on the difference between Edna's treatment of her own children and her treatment of Daisy. When Daisy first arrives at the farmhouse, she is left to stand on the porch while the Kruses carry their own two children inside. Later, when she first picks up the baby Billy and he breaks into tears, Daisy is rebuked while Edna comforts her son and even Elmer fusses over him. Edna's way of comforting her son is very revealing: '"Don't cry, Billy. The girl didn't mean anything.'" Here Daisy is only the girl, stripped of identity and self-worth. Edna is telling her son implicitly that this is no one he will ever have to worry about, only "the girl," the hired girl (there may even be a frightening play of words on Daisy's not "meaning anything"). In a later scene, Daisy seeks comfort from Edna by complaining of a toothache. Again Suckow stresses the difference in Edna's responses to Daisy and to her own children. Edna answers only '"That's too bad'" to Daisy's complaint while at the same time giving "a secret little smile at the baby asleep on a blanket and a pillow in one corner of the shiny leather davenport."

Still another scene pits Daisy directly against one of the Kruse children in a conflict that is filled with symbolic suggestion about Daisy's condition and ultimate hopes. Edna asks Daisy to entertain Billy by playing with his building blocks. Daisy is delighted by this request, undoubtedly because she sees it as a gesture on Edna's part toward including her in the family. Indeed Daisy feels "a thrill of comfort" as she leads Billy to the kitchen, where she previously had felt only chilled. As she had earlier in the car, Daisy feels a sense of pride in what belongs to the Kruses, these marvellous blocks out of which "she could make something really wonderful." Daisy's pathetic longing for inclusion in some human community manifests itself in what she begins to make of the blocks: "She put the blocks together with great interest. She knew what she was going to make—it was going to be a new house; no, a new church." But the new church is never completed; Billy knocks it down, sweeping the blocks across the floor of the kitchen. Daisy's immediate response is to pull him away to a far corner of the room, where he sobs until Edna arrives to comfort him and again rebuke Daisy: "'Never mind, lover .. . Of course he can play with his blocks. They're Billy's blocks, Daisy . . . He doesn't like to sit and see you put up buildings'." Edna's logic is brutally clear: what Daisy wants, what she aspires to, simply does not matter. Only Billy matters, because he owns the blocks. Power and worth lie in possession, in property; those like Daisy who are without it can only hope to serve those who have it.

The story's climatic moment occurs just after Daisy's confrontation with Edna over the blocks. It is a climax that confirms Daisy's status as commodity. Earlier in the day Edna had indicated to her husband that she would like to go for a late afternoon drive to her mother's. Daisy overheard this, assumed she would be included in the ride, and looked forward to it throughout the day. But Edna has resolved otherwise. When it is time for them to leave, Edna confers with her husband, a conversation that Daisy partially overhears:

'Kind of hate to go off... I know, but if we once start . . . not a thing all day . . . what we got her for .. . ' [ellipses Suckow's].

The scene provides an apt metaphor for Daisy's relationship to all the forces, economic and social, that control her life. Her fate is determined in another room, by voices that she can hardly hear and whose meaning she does not comprehend. Daisy is merely a commodity, to be used and manipulated by those with greater power than she has. She is not fully human to the Kruses, a fact that Suckow suggests unequivocally in this climatic scene. After the Kruses have obviously decided not to take Daisy with them, Elmer Kruse hurries outside to busy himself with warming up the car. He apparently feels guilty at excluding Daisy, but he feels neither sufficiently obligated to Daisy nor sufficiently courageous to offer her an explanation. He simply avoids her. Edna Kruse similarly treats Daisy as a non-person. She says only, "'We're going for a little ride, Daisy'" and then rattles off a series of chores to keep Daisy busy while they are away. And at this point Suckow includes one telling detail that says everything about the relationship between the Kruses and Daisy; while Edna is assigning these duties, "she did not look at Daisy."

All of this is not lost on Daisy. She comes to a clear recognition of her status as an "outsider" in the Kruse house, and she begins to sense the full meaning of "starting in to earn." She has learned, in short, a crucial lesson in survival. But such survival comes only with great cost, as Suckow implies in the story's richly suggestive final paragraph:

Her ugly little mouth contorted into a grimace of weeping. But silent weeping, without any tears; because she already had the cold knowledge that no one would notice or comfort it.

Daisy has already begun to learn that survival as a hired girl, as labor, requires emotional repression—requires her to be less fully and responsively human than she might otherwise be. In short, Daisy must accept the definition of herself forced upon her by the Kruses: she must become a commodity in order to avoid further hurt and pain to herself. Such is a "cold knowledge" indeed.

Alfred Kazin once argued that there was "more significant terror of a kind" in the fiction of Sinclair Lewis "than in a writer like Faulkner or the hard-boiled novelists, for it is the terror immanent in the commonplace." I think much the same might be said of Ruth Suckow's "A Start in Life," as well as of several other stories in Iowa Interiors. Certainly the story creates a kind of terror, the terror of Daisy's isolation and progressive dehumanization by the Kruses. And it is a terror skillfully created by Suckow out of the most ordinary of situations, the most commonplace of life's details. Indeed what happens to Daisy is terrifying precisely because it is so commonplace: Suckow's achievement lies in exposing to us the meanness, repression, and degradation that occur when economic relations between people supplant human ones. That achievement is a considerable one, more than enough to earn Miss Suckow Mencken's praise and our continued attention and respect.