The Loneliest Job in the World
by Tony Hoagland

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.


Tony Hoagland, “The Loneliest Job in the World” from Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. Copyright © 2010 by Tony Hoagland. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org. (buy now)

On this day in 1930, a Swedish newspaper reporter telephoned Sinclair Lewis (books by this author) to tell him that he had won the Nobel Prize in literature. Lewis thought it was a practical joke and began to imitate the man's accent. But it was not a joke: Lewis was, in fact, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. He wasn't sure he deserved it and told a friend at the time, "This is the end of me ... I cannot live up to it." He used his Nobel lecture to talk about all the other writers that might have been chosen: Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, and Willa Cather; and he ended the lecture by mentioning the younger writers he considered the future of American literature, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, each of whom had just published his first few books. Lewis said, "Young Americans ... are doing such passionate and authentic work that it makes me sick to see that I am a little too old to be one of them."

It's the birthday of one of the original muckrakers, Ida Tarbell (books by this author), born in Hatch Hallow, Pennsylvania (1857), who was working for McClure's Magazine when she was assigned to write an exposé about John D. Rockefeller's company Standard Oil. It just so happened that Ida Tarbell's father had owned an oil refinery, and he'd nearly been driven out of business by Standard Oil — Ida had grown up listening to her father complain about Standard Oil. So she spent the next two years investigating, and her friend Mark Twain put her in touch with a company insider named Henry Rogers, who gave her evidence that Standard Oil was colluding with railroad companies to drive smaller refineries out of business. After her articles were collected into the book The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), the federal government began an antitrust prosecution, and the breakup of the company was finally decided by the Supreme Court on May 15, 1911. It was the first time that a journalist had ever brought down a major American corporation.

Today is the birthday of the man who said: “While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal class, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” That’s the speaker and labor organizer Eugene Debs, born to poor Alsatian immigrants in Terre Haute, Indiana (1855). At the age of 14, Debs left high school to work as a paint scraper on the railroad. He soon joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, became an influential member of the union, and went on to become editor of their national magazine. He first went to prison for support of the Pullman Strike of 1894. He emerged six months later a committed socialist, a charismatic speaker, and in 1900, ran for president on the Socialist ticket. He also co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) alongside Bill Haywood and Mother Jones.

A tall lanky man with piercing blue eyes, Debs was an animated speaker, often bending far over the podium to look into the faces of the crowd. He disliked the label of leader, saying: “Too long have the workers [...] waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves.”

In 1912, Debs campaigned for president on “The Red Special” locomotive, traveling to the farthest corners of the country. He lost yet again, but this time he received more than a million votes. Five years later, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a speech in which he said, “The rich start the wars; the poor fight them.” The Espionage Act had recently passed, making it a crime to publicly oppose the American involvement in World War I. Debs represented himself, called no witnesses, and his statement before the court is regarded as a masterpiece of American oratory.

He continued to speak out from an Atlanta penitentiary on labor issues, and ran yet another popular presidential campaign from behind bars. Now in his early 60s, he refused any special treatment in jail and won over his fellow inmates by constantly fighting on their behalf. When he was pardoned on Christmas Day in 1921, the warden opened every cellblock and allowed more than 2,000 inmates to gather at the gates and bid farewell to Debs. As he turned the corner and began to walk the gauntlet of prisoners, Debs opened his arms to the men and began to weep as the crowd roared. Some 50,000 people greeted him upon his return to Terre Haute.

His book on the prison industry, Walls and Bars, was published after his death from heart failure in 1926.

Eugene Debs, who said, “When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other’s throats; when we’ve stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends.”

It’s the birthday of poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (books by this author), born in Johnstown, Wisconsin (1850). She said, “I do not remember when I did not expect to be a writer,” and by age 14, she was publishing in magazines. She published a handful of stories, although she estimated that she received nine rejections for every story that was printed. As a young woman, she published two little-known books of religious and sentimental poetry — many of the poems were in support of the temperance movement.

Then she wrote a manuscript of sentimental love poems; many were poetic retellings of famous love stories, and some weren’t love poems at all, but meditations on values like Courage and Progress. All of the poems in her manuscript had already been published in various magazines, without much notice. However, a famous Chicago publishing house refused to publish the manuscript, citing its “immorality.” Of particular concern was “The Farewell of Clarimonde,” based on a story by French writer Théophile Gautier, about a priest who falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a vampire.

Wilcox complained to a friend about her rejected poems, and that friend told a Milwaukee newspaper, which published the sensational headline the next day: “TOO LOUD FOR CHICAGO. The Scarlet City by the Lake Shocked by a Badger Girl, whose Verses out-Swinburne Swinburne and out-Whitman Whitman.” She was shocked by the turn of events; she wrote: “I was advised to burn my offensive manuscript and assured that in time I might live down the shame I had brought on myself.” Another publisher saw an excellent marketing opportunity and offered to publish her book with the title Poems of Passion (1883), and so despite its relatively tame subject matter, it became a huge best-seller and Wilcox became famous.

In “Solitude” in Poems of Passion, she wrote: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone. / For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth / But has trouble enough of its own.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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