Notes on Indiana Literature
I have been thinking about Midwestern literature lately, and re-reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson had no sense of plot, and he was careless with his characters, mooning over their inner lives while simultaneously taking inordinate pleasure in their lack of communicative skills. He immerses his characters in the most pathetic spiritual conditions, yet each of them has a greater story than any of them will ever be able to tell. Anderson is the quintessential literary liberal. He treats everyone the same, but only because he treats everyone as his cultural inferior and presumes that only the artist can give voice to the ostensibly mediocre lives produced by the modern world. Only in Russian literature do we have stories that can equal the viciousness of Anderson’s attack on rural life.
Having said all of that, there are stories in Winesburg that speak directly to the heart of the human condition, and no writer that I know can compare to Anderson’s mastery of the mood of unspoken sadness. But that is not what I want to talk about. What I want to say is that these stories could not have been set in Indiana. They are Ohio stories, as the title of the book announces, and they could not have been set anywhere else. Ohio went through industrialization sooner and quicker than Indiana, and its small towns were hit harder by the growth of its big cities. Small town life stayed strong through much of the twentieth century in Indiana, so no Indiana writer could have been this disparaging of the simple life.
Ohio is a state defined by its proximity to the east coast. It is and is not the Midwest, and therein lies its distinctiveness. Most of the characters in Anderson’s book came from the East, and they were looking to build new lives in a small town. In other words, they were unhappy to begin with, yet, stuck in a small Ohio town and bereft of the culture they had left behind, they were unable to make sense of their unhappiness. Most of the early settlers of Indiana came up from the South, more particularly, Appalachia. They were people who trusted their own instincts, but they also had a deep trust in God, which Anderson’s characters do not. They combined self-reliance and reliance on God in a way that kept them optimistic in even the hardest of times. In many cases, the early settlers of Indiana were leaving the South because they wanted to leave slavery behind. Slavery offended their egalitarian sensibilities. Hoosiers embraced small town life, perhaps because everyone in Indiana was from a small town, since even Indianapolis was little more than a very large small town. Anderson could not have set his stories in Indiana, and he would not have written them if he had been from Indiana.
I can imagine someone reading this and asking about The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington’s 1918 best seller that won the Pulitzer Prize. This book is indeed a vicious attack on small mindedness, just as it is also set in the era of the first tremors of industrialization. On the surface, it seems to be very similar to Anderson’s book. However, the differences are fundamental. Tarkington attacks not small town life but the presumptions of inherited wealth. George Minafer, the main character, is an aristocrat who has no grasp of the dynamic nature of capitalism. He is a European nobleman in a Hoosier setting, which makes him more ridiculous than tragic. Tarkington is thus defending small town values in this book. Minafer, in fact, thinks of himself as a gentleman, an aesthete, that is, a keeper of cultural standards. Tarkington is attacking the very idea of artistic privilege that Amberson advances, and he did this because he was a born and bred Hoosier.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not a fan of the message of The Magnificent Ambersons. It has an almost socialistic aversion the cultural consequences of inherited wealth, and it is also one of the most vicious attacks of the idea of gentleman ever written. George Minafer’s entire downfall, in fact, is rooted in his sense of honor, and no novel has ever been more single minded in dismantling the connection between masculinity and honor. Tarkington’s novel is thus much more radical than Anderson’s. He takes Hoosier humility and egalitarianism to an extreme, whereas Anderson’s book is, in the end, just another justification for the lonely artist who must flee his roots in order to find his voice, etc. Attacking privilege from the perspective of small town values is much more devastating than attacking small town values from the perspective of privilege.
Speaking of Indiana novels, without a doubt the great Hoosier novel is Raintree County, written by Ross Lockridge Jr. It is much neglected today because it is so long and the sappy movie version did it no favors, but also because its author committed suicide shortly after its publication, which left it orphaned in the world of literary self-promotion. Raintree County was postmodern before postmodernity was invented. Lockridge uses a variety of styles, and even incorporates social documents from a myriad of genres, in order to convey a vivid sense of the simple and settled quality of Hoosier life. Far from being an exercise in nostalgia, though, the book is brimming over with sexual energy and looks backward (the story is told in recollection) only in order to get a clear view of how different the future will prove to be. There is in this book a wonderful statement of what Indiana means. “Meanwhile, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy had begun to hate this earth that made him suffer so much. He was a man from the flat country, and he now perceived a new beauty in the level of Raintree County. It tranquilized the spirit, it was the image of space, it suggested civilization and good roads. It meant peace and plenty and contentment.”
The only other writer I know of who has been this penetrating about the Hoosier landscape is Michael Martone, who recently visited Indiana. From an essay called “The Flatness,” he compares the land to abstract art. It is all surface, pure material and canvas. But “those who live here begin to sense a slight unevenness.” When you live on flat land, you become very sensitive to the most subtle of disturbances. And here is a beautiful image from this fine essay: “And way off in the distance, the land almost met the paralleling sky, and the flat-bottomed clouds, and there, between the land and clouds, hung a strip of air without color that the sun set through.” I feel sorry for people who did not grow up in Indiana but live here now, because I wonder if they will ever have that experience that Martone describes.
To get a sense of the particular form that wonder takes in Indiana you ahve to read Oliver Johnson’s A Home in the Woods: Pioneer Life in Indiana. Indiana was thick forest, and the trees were cleared one at a time. Think about that when you wonder about the plain spoken patience that is bred into the Indiana bone. And one last recommendation is a much neglected classic, Graham Hutton’s Midwest at Noon. The chapter entitled “The Cult of the Average” should be required reading for every Hoosier, though Hoosiers are much too polite to force such a thing on anyone.
Related posts:
