“…He met her in the lane and he laid her on a board
And he played her up a tune called Sugar in the Gourd,
Sugar in the gourd, honey in the horn,
Balance to your partners, honey in the horn…”
-traditional square dancing song
During the depths of the Great Depression the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University had a tendency to honor novels that reminded readers of even harsher times in days gone by, particularly stories of struggling American pioneers. As a result, the 1930s often feels like a grueling mountain that must be summited on this pilgrimage through the Pulitzer Prize winners and H.L. Davis’s Honey In The Horn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1936, is no exception. Despite having every intention of penning an ironic, satirical, anti-romantic work to hail a new literary regionalism for the Pacific Northwest, H.L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn is a tedious, dreary read about rural Oregon homesteaders settling along the west coast during the early 20th century. It has not aged particularly well. Published in 1935, it was the debut novel by H.L. Davis and he remains the only novelist from Oregon to win the Pulitzer Prize.
At the outset, Davis offers a brief preface in which he claims that all the characters in this book are fictitious, none are autobiographical, and he expresses no intention of offering social criticism nor social reform, even though many critics accepted his picaresque bildungsroman was actually a covert work of blistering satire. Literary critic W.J. Stuckey claims, “Honey in the Horn is derived from the debunking tradition of Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Mencken. It is self-consciously naughty and unconventional… All in all, Honey in the Horn is little more than an extended joke, a compendium of tall-tales, outrageous comments in a huffing-puffing, chest-thumping style, the main point of which is mildly to shock and titillate the reader.” In his introductory note, Davis originally intended to write a sprawling panorama including “a representative from every calling” that existed in Oregon’s homesteading period (1906-1908) but that idea was quickly abandoned for the sake of brevity, and instead he transformed his notes into a novel.
We begin with a survey of the pioneering families residing in Southern Oregon, especially Uncle Preston Shiveley, an eccentric “scholar of the community” who runs a tollbridge and an apple orchard with a couple of ne’er-do-well sons whom he once kicked off his own property. His innumerable Aristotelian studies of nature amount to little more than “a mule’s heel worth of hay” (4). He busies himself writing a history of the Oregon pioneers while adopting children, especially a sixteen-year-old orphan named Clay Calvert who works as a sheep rancher until he stumbles into trouble. He is somewhat accidentally entangled in a scheme to release his relative, Wade Shiveley, from jail by slipping a gun into the cell. The act forces Clay to flee the town. The rest of the novel concerns Clay’s journey via wagon throughout the state of Oregon as he dodges capture. His travels take him from the eastern wheat fields and the Cascade mountain towns, to the Columbia River and the tree-lined coasts.
Along the way, he encounters an array of characters, especially a native Tunne Indian boy and a girl named Luce with whom he falls in love –“Her name, she told him, was not Lucy, as he had thought, but Luz, which is the Mexican word for light. The Mexicans and the Vascos in the sheep country across the mountains called it Luce” (119). But sadly, all the people Clay meets are ancillary background figures in service of the author’s true purpose, offering various regional descriptions of the Oregonian landscape, people, and ecology (in addition to lampooning the second and third generation Oregonian homesteaders who are portrayed as bored and lazy). The characters are all little more than wooden hollow figures who engage in barely superficial interactions. While striving for the more grand premonitions of Mark Twain’s regionalism (a comparison Mr. Davis would later reject), Honey In The Horn is the epitome of a contrived novel in my view. As in Caroline Miller’s Lamb In His Bosom, a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner from a few years prior (feel free to read my reflections on Lamb In His Bosom here), Honey In The Horn would have been much better served as an anthropological study rather than a novel.
As the narrative wanders along toward a conclusion, Wade Shiveley is eventually hanged for his crimes and Clay tracks down the Tunne boy before he is killed, and finally he locates Luce after an extended period of separation. The novel ends abruptly as Clay and Luce discuss their future (despite being a less-than-romantic reunion). It is clear that Honey In The Horn had every intention of being a picaresque, panoramic glimpse of the various pioneering groups that settled the Oregon territory, as well as a descriptive depiction of the unique climate and topography of the region, but I have no idea how or why the top American literary critic of the time, H.L. Mencken, would have dubbed Honey In The Horn the finest debut American novel ever written (he also said it was the best novel since Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt). Amazingly, Davis’s novels were also praised by the likes Robert Penn Warren and Carl Sandburg, though today he remains a mostly unread and forgotten writer.
Should we regard Honey in the Horn as an enduring work of great American literature? Or rather a minor regional work whose time in the sun has long since passed? Personally, I accept the latter view, but there are still scholars today who praise Davis’s work. In an introduction to Honey in the Horn, Dr. Richard W. Etulain (now professor emeritus at the University of Oregon) offered the following praise of the novel: “Many observers correctly cite H.L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn as the epitome of regional literature in the Pacific Northwest. In that first novel Davis provided a model of what a front-rank regional fiction could be: a provocative combination of one’s personal experiences and knowledge of a region’s past that avoided he straightjacket formulas of the popular Western. After nearly eighty years, Honey in the Horn stands as the first nationally important novel published in the Oregon Country.”
Perhaps I should give this Pulitzer Prize-winner a re-read and reconsideration in the future.
Notable Quotations
“There was a run-down old tollbridge station in the Shoestring Valley of of Southern Oregon where Uncle Preston Shiveley had lived for fifty years, outlasting his wife, two sons, several plagues of grasshoppers, wheat rusts and caterpillars, a couple of three invasions of land-hunting settlers and real-estate speculators, and everybody else except the scattering of old pioneers who had cockleburred themselves onto the country at about the same time he did” (1 -opening passage).
“He tied a cord firmly around the gun from the inside of the trigger-guard to the face of the hammer. He wedged the gun into the leg of Clay’s right boot and strung the cord up through a hole in the right-hand trousers pocket. Pulling lifted the pistol free of the boot. Paying out lowered it to the floor, where the folds of extra trousers leg concealed it” (69).
“He had cut himself off from society to be independent of rules and restrictions, and the only thing he could think of to do with his freedom was to get up other rules and restrictions of his own which weren’t a lick more sensible than the ones he had escaped from” (113).
“The country through which they traveled grew nothing that could be observed from the road except six weeks’ grass, a scrubby species of sagebrush, a few blue-green dwarf junipers so crooked that there wasn’t a straight piece on them long enough to clean a pistol…” (298 -an example of many scenes in the novel).
“Over the water was one single, big cottonwood tree, with initials and comments cut in its bark, most of them dating from the period of the Civil War and expressing sentiments disrespectful to the Union, the President of the United States, and every body who held a job under him. It was along this line that a part of the western Confederate armies had gone to pieces and deserted after the Union troops broke their hold on Missouri” (301 -a fascinating glimpse at the lingering remnants of the western edge of the Civil War.)
“Nobody can discuss agriculture so learnedly as a farmer who hasn’t paid the interest on his mortgage for eight years, nobody can describe a military campaign with so deep an understanding of principles controlling the art of war as the commander who got the worst of it” (316).
“Nothing counts except whats goin’ on around you” (379).
On The 1936 Pulitzer Prize Decision:
The 1936 Pulitzer Prize Novel Jury was once again composed of returning Jurors: Jefferson B. Fletcher (Chair), Robert M. Lovett, and Albert B. Paine –the trio of Jurors who dominated the 1930s. The Jury recommended Honey In The Horn for the prize, but they apparently also considered several other novels including This Body the Earth by Paul Green, Time Out of Mind by Rachel Field, Silas Crocket by Ellen Chase, Ollie Miss by George Wylie Henderson, Deep Dark River by Robert Ryles, and Blessed is the Man by Louis Zara. Among the 99 books submitted for the Pulitzer Prize were Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory, John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, and Ellen Glasgow’s Vein of Iron.
- Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
- Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
- Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was born in Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up throughout the Midwest. He worked as a photographer and became a full-time writer living in New York and abroad in Europe. He became friends with Mark Twain and served as Twain’s biographer and also wrote travel books, novels, and children’s stories. In France, he wrote two books abut Joan of Arc which earned him the title of Chevalier from the Legion of Honour.
Interestingly enough, H.L. Davis elected not to attend the Pulitzer Prize ceremony in New York in 1936 because he did not want to become “a subject for exhibit.” He was known to have a somewhat stubborn, opinionated, and stand-offish personality. Ironically, Honey in the Horn had been was delayed publication for a few months so that it could be entered into prize competitions.
In his book The Pulitzer Prize Novels, W.J. Stuckey claims that Sinclair Lewis actually served on the Novel Jury in 1936 but I could not corroborate this claim. Upon pursuing this question a bit further, John Hohenberg notes that The New York Times mentioned Lewis as a Pulitzer judge who described Honey in the Horn as “full of raciness, of adventure, of color… It is one of those uncommon books that really express a land and an age and, by expressing them, really create them.” Hohenberg notes that there is no record of Sinclair Lewis being involved with the Pulitzer Prizes in 1936, and apparently Sinclair lewis’s biographer, Mark Schorer, dismissed this little episode as Lewis’s “kind of joke” and called his jury membership “improbable.”
Who is H.L. Davis?
Harold Lenoir “H.L.” Davis (1894-1960) was born in 1894 at Rone’s Mill, adjacent to Nonpareil, a rural community situated near Roseburg, in western Oregon’s Umpqua Valley. He grew up throughout various regions of Oregon, from the Umpqua and Willamette Valleys to Antelope and the Dalles, working various odd-jobs like his strong-willed, opinionated father, James Alexander Davis (who apparently lost his leg in a youthful accident and later worked as a schoolteacher and principal). His parents were from east Tennessee, his paternal grandfather lost his life at the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863, and his maternal grandfather was a hardened baptist (his archetype appears in many of Davis’s writings). Davis followed in his father’s footsteps in some respects, becoming a voracious reader and writer, while also moving around for work as a cowpuncher, sheepherder, packer, surveyor, timekeeper for a railroad, assessor, and even a deputy sheriff (tax collector) for Wasco County. He was also drafted and briefly served in the U.S. Army in 1918. Despite having no formal education beyond high school, Davis was nevertheless a self-taught intellectual who was widely read in both the classics and contemporary literature, he spoke and read several languages, and was also an accomplished guitarist and folklorist –however, he still liked to portray himself as a rugged working-class stiff. He also mirrored the tendency of southwestern humorists by spinning embellished tall-tales when publicizing his own autobiographical statements –he claimed to have been born in 1896, not 1894, to have edited the Old West newspaper Antelope Herald (even though he likely only set type and perhaps submitted a story or two), and to have attended Stanford University to study engineering (though he did not have the funds to do so).
In the late 1920s, he married Marion Lay and moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington, but their union soon proved to be an unhappy marriage, mired in financial troubles. They later divorced. Davis pursued a writing career as a poet. He quickly received the Levinson Prize at age twenty-five (The Levinson Prize is distributed through Poetry Magazine, whose editor was Harriet Monroe; it has been awarded annually since 1914 thanks to a bequest late Salmon O. Levinson and his family). Some of Davis’s poems were purchased by H.L. Mencken (Davis published in Mencken’s iconoclastic literary magazine The American Mercury) and with Mencken’s encouragement, Davis turned to fiction, publishing five novels and many short stories and essays during the course of his career. In 1927, he and fellow writer of the Northwest, James Stevens, published a scathing pamphlet “Status Rerum: A Manifesto, Upon the Present Condition of Northwest Literature, Containing Several Near-Libelous Utterances, Upon Persons In The Public Eye” which lambasted the region’s literary establishment and earned Davis many enemies. The pamphlet accused “posers, parasites, and pismires” of publishing an “interminable avalanche of tripe.” Despite the excoriations, the pamphlet would ultimately hail a new literary regional voice for the Pacific Northwest. He then left Oregon, moving to Seattle, Washington and Napa, California (settling on a ranch with a vineyard) as well as a brief period living in Mexico, where he penned an epic poem, after winning a Guggenheim Fellowship. He soon abandoned this epic poem and began the multi-year struggle to write Honey In The Horn during this unhappy stint in Mexico. Along with a Pulitzer Prize, Honey In The Horn also won the $10,000 Harper Prize, a now discontinued award issued by the Harper Brothers publishing house from 1922-1965.
His writings were published in many notable publications including magazines like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, however none of his later novels achieved the acclaim of Honey In The Horn. Interestingly enough, Davis’s follow-up novel to Honey in the Horn, Harp of a Thousand Strings (1947), was delayed for more than a decade amidst ongoing disputes with his publisher. For a while, he was able to use his royalties and Harper’s prize money to purchase a ranch in northern California but when the money eventually dissipated, he was forced to take work as a researcher and part-time Hollywood script-writer. Davis eventually switched his publisher from Harper and Brothers to William Morrow and he began releasing books again. His later novels included: Beulah Land (1949), Winds of Morning (1952), and The Distant Music (1957) –of these, many critics regard Winds of Morning as his best. His short stories were also gathered in two collections: Team Bells Woke Me (1953) and Kettle of Fire (1959).
His later years were met with tragedy, divorce, disputes with his publishers over royalty rights, declining readership, and an artery condition that led to the amputation of his left leg. He remarried in 1953 to Elizabeth Tonkin Martin del Campo of San Antonio, but Davis’s health continued to decline. He eventually died of a heart attack in 1960 in San Antonio, Texas. The bulk of his personal writings are housed the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Film Adaptation:
- None.
Literary Context in 1935-1936:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1935): Not awarded.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in the U.S. in 1935 was Green Light by Lloyd C. Douglas. Other notable bestsellers that year included: Vein of Iron by Ellen Glasgow, Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe, Good-bye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton, Heaven’s My Destination by Thornton Wilder, Lost Horizon by James Hilton, and Come and Get It by Edna Ferber.
- T. E. Lawrence had an accident with his Brough Superior motorcycle while returning to his cottage at Clouds Hill, England. He died six days later. His book Seven Pillars of Wisdom was first published in an edition for general circulation.
- British poet W. H. Auden contracted a marriage of convenience with exiled German anti-Nazi actress and writer Erika Mann (she was a homosexual like he was).
- T. S. Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral premiered at Canterbury Cathedral.
- Allen Lane founded Penguin Books, as the first mass-market paperbacks in Britain.
- The library journal Die Bucherei in Nazi Germany published guidelines for books to be removed from library shelves and destroyed –all of those by Jewish authors, Marxist and pacifist literature, and anything critical of the state.
- A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges was published.
- A House Divided by Pearl S. Buck was published.
- Three Act Tragedy and Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie were published.
- Taps at Reveille (short story collection) by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published.
- It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis was published.
- Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck was published.
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven was published in English (after previously having been published in German in 1927.
Did The Right Book Win?
Honey in the Horn was another fairly bland Pulitzer Prize-winner from the 1930s in my view. I might have preferred that Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck had won the prize this year, or else the English publication of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by the mysterious B. Traven had it been eligible.
Davis, H.L. Honey In The Horn. New York, Grosset & Dunlap Publishers of Harper & Brothers, 1935.
Once again for this novel I had the extraordinary privilege of reading a first edition copy.