The Heart of Midwestern Literature

Ben Miller

 

Not so long ago I reread Country People, a short lyric novel by Ruth Suckow, issued in 1924. The story concerns a large farming family in central Iowa during a period of increasing mechanization, and the hale efforts of successive generations to achieve happiness, often at the expense of their heritage. This familiar tale was made new again by the telling—an almost cryptic musicality milled from the startling conjunctions of stark observations—and when done reading I immediately thought of another poetic ephemeral work about the Midwest published nearly seventy years later: Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. This collection of stories portrays the desultory existence of an ambulance driver residing in 1970s Iowa City, a pseudo-urban netherworld of drugs, violence, off-ramps, and university dorms. The subject matter of these two beautifully written books couldn’t be more different. But both are fraught with dissonance of identity and social unrest epitomizing the American quest—Suckow detailing those confusions fostered by the quavering compass of domestic order, Johnson depicting the fog arising from the absence of family and a surfeit of desire. Between the exacting first sentence of Country People (“Some of the best land in the country, people said, was right here in Richland Township”) and the disassembled start of Jesus’ Son (“A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping. . . A Cherokee filled with bourbon. . . A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student. . .”) is a rigorous tradition of literature that explores the Midwest without being in any way regional in scope, the biggest themes and imposing structures churned from locality, addressing isolation (its sublimities and scarred contours) in deft styles that defy convention and engender an understanding critical to the parsing of American character.

 

There are so many approaches. The sharp prismatic poetry of Lorine Niedecker and resonant mythic chatter of Thomas McGrath’s epic poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend. The far-thinking feminist plays of Zona Gale and Susan Glaspell as well as the elegiac monologues of Edgar Lee Masters. The sky-widened prairie novels of Wright Morris, satire of J. F. Powers, and unclassifiable virtuoso opera that is Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young. The earnest hum of William Maxwell’s short stories and mean hymns of Mark Costello, whose “Murphy” stories are fertile with disjunctive disappearances of plot and scenery, the mangle of relationships set against a suburban backdrop distilled to one shag rug. This is the wealth I attempt to contact and call on. This is the loam I stand on. Art that looks back, brings alive old things that secretly inform all that is perceived as “new.” In the stretch from 1960 to 1990, much was lost—and something great learned—by everyone I knew in Iowa and Illinois, people enduring the seemingly endless recessions that were as much spiritual as economic, and all the more frightening for being cast in relief against the secret richness of the inner self—its humanizing yearnings and improbably priceless currency of insights.

 

Things are different now in that territory, for certain. It has gone on adding to its story, as I have gone on adding to mine. Yet behind any new brightness from the casino boat—as behind the brightness of my 2012 New York City—exists a dark contrary epoch that has yet to be fully explicated, the late twentieth century cramped by narrow infinities. Ghosts of ruralness amid strip mall grids. The national Bread Basket where kids ate dinner out of boxes and adults experienced malaise of every consumer variety, brand name and generic, tin and plastic. Communities oppressed by a silence that was actually an erasing compaction of voices. Often I think of gone faces, those who will never have a Web page to clot with self-promotion, and of events undocumented, recalled only by those who lived them—years when not much was practically possible, while dreaming and hoping rarely ceased.