My friend Chris Schons asked me to post a poem I published in Minnesota Monthly back in the mid-nineties. It was kind of him to remember it, and I include it below.

Reading it again is bittersweet - sweet because I enjoyed reading it again, bitter because I have not been a good husband of the poetry muse. That is, I haven’t been writing poetry lately.

The poem is one of only a handful that I managed to publish. It was written when I was living on Grand Avenue in St. Paul and teaching as an adjunct in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. It wrote it after a frosty night caused a tree outside my apartment window to lose its leaves, which were still green, in a single day. The ground around the tree was littered with these strangely green leaves. I could not resist the image and its metaphors.

Green and Falling

Night’s frost sank deep into the tree,
Plunged headlong with the mercury.
In morning each leaf fell, spiraling
Down - one, two, four, one - raining
Down green on a black, cold ground.
By afternoon it was through. I found
The bare branches stark, surprising.
Strange to be still green and falling.

I was listening to the radio while cleaning up the house this morning and heard an interview with poets Galway Kinnell and Josephine Dickinson. Hearing them speak brought back memories of the important place poetry once took in my life. When I was in academia, I read and taught a great deal of poetry, and I wrote quite a bit as well. When I left academia, I continued to read and write poetry, but for a number of years now it’s been a much smaller part of my life. The choice was a conscious one, and I don’t want to sound morose or whining about it. Simply put, I chose to focus on other things.

However, hearing Josephine Dickinson, a British poet, talk and read made me think I’ve let poetry recede too far into the background of my life. She caught my attention when she mentioned that she had lived for some time near Alston, England. Alston is a place I became familiar with through the work of the poet W.H. Auden, who loved and wrote about the area around that remote village in the northern Pennines. I also visited the town and surrounding countryside for several days about 10 years ago and greatly enjoyed its natural beauty and its connections to Auden and his work.

Dickinson, who became deaf at the age of six, spoke of her new book of poems, Silence Fell. The word “fell” here has a double meaning; besides its meaning as a verb, in Britain it also means, according to my dictionary, “a high barren hill or moor.” (I wouldn’t say “barren,” however; “treeless” would be better. The word fell comes from the Old Norse word for mountain; the Norwegian word for mountain is fjell.) Thus the title is also a place-name.

I hope to read the book and walk the fells again in my mind. Until then, I’ll dip into Auden. “Alston Moor” is a piece of romantic juvenilia by the teenaged Auden, but its opening lines are worth quoting, particularly given the time of year:

April, fair maid, is come with laughter in her eyes
And everywhere she weaves her lovely spells
On plain and hill; I know that now the South Wind cries
Her name upon the long slow curvings of the fells.

(Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928, p. 32)

Over the weekend I saw some old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.

One was a friend from my freshman year of college, when I attended the University of Chicago (I subsequently transferred to the University of Minnesota). He was in town for a job interview and earlier had located me via the Internet and this blog. We hadn’t talked in more than 20 years! My family and I went up to St. Paul and met with him on Saturday. It was wonderful to catch up and find that we had more in common than ever, including marriage and children within the last five years. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a great fan of Philip Larkin ever since I first read his work in a twentieth-century British poetry class in college twenty years ago. His work has been of lasting importance to me, and I’ve long thought he ranked among the best poets in the English language.

My high opinion of Larkin has been confirmed from time to time, as when I met Seamus Heaney following one of his poetry readings and asked him what he thought of Larkin’s poetry. “Pure music,” he replied simply.

Richard Bradford’s recent biography of Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (Peter Owen, 2005), also provides reinforcement for those who hold Larkin’s verse in great esteem. Larkin created “the twentieth century’s most outstanding body of English verse,” Bradford writes in the concluding sentence of his book. In the introduction he calls Larkin “a Dutch Master of modern verse and life” (p. 19) and later writes that his “poetic repertoire…is one of the finest of the twentieth century” (115). Bradford’s accomplished record as a scholar and critic - he has published a diverse array of books on topics ranging from John Milton to literary theory - make his praise that much more persuasive. Read the rest of this entry »

Our family has suffered from nasty colds the last few weeks. We’ve been coughing, sneezing, and honking our way through the last few weeks. First it was our daughter with a runny nose and then a persistent cough. Then it was my wife and I.

As a result of this cold virus, my sensory systems have been under attack. For the last week I haven’t been able to smell anything - a sorry state of affairs over Thanksgiving. How I long for the simple enjoyment of smelling the aroma of tea or the perfume of shampoo!

My ears are plugged up too. I’m listening to a non-stop tinnitus soundtrack. When I eat cereal it sounds like a thousand jackbooted stormtroopers marching on cobblestones. Sit on my right side, please - that’s my better ear. Read the rest of this entry »

Martin Amis has been one of my favorite writers for almost twenty years now. This brilliant British writer and sympathetic observer of America has published an engaging story about September 11 terrorist leader Muhammad Atta in the April 24 edition of the The New Yorker. It’s an unsparing fictional portrait of Atta, but one that nevertheless attempt to understand his state of mind. Here is one important passage:

The core reason was of course all the killing–all the putting to death….He was thinking of the war, the wars, the war cycles that would flow from this day. He didn’t believe in the Devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, lumbering run.

For part of the two years that I taught as a lecturer in the University of Minnesota English Department, I shared an office with Shannon Olson, who at the time was completing an M.F.A. and working for the department chair. Little did I know that within a few years Shannon would publish two novels with major publishers, Welcome to My Planet (Penguin, 2000) and Children of God Go Bowling (Viking, 2004).

I finally read Welcome to My Planet. The book’s narrator—who shares the author’s name—is an outspoken young woman who is nevertheless held back by self-doubt. As the story opens, Shannon feels stuck in her life: she has just turned thirty and feels dissatisfied with her annoying boyfriend and boring job. In therapy from the book’s opening, she manages to build up the nerve to make a decisive break, dumping both boyfriend and job, moving back in with her parents, and enrolling in the graduate English program at the University of Minnesota. The rest of the story concerns her expanding new life.

The voices of two other women also figure prominently in the book: Shannon’s therapist and her mother, Flo. Shannon’s journey is as much about discovering her mother—what to emulate and admire in her, and what to avoid—as it is about discovering herself. And her therapy provides an important vehicle for her new self-understanding.

Olson’s writing is best when dealing with her narrator’s family history and romantic relationships. She paints a vivid portrait of family life and the mother-daughter bond.

The book’s form is another of its strengths. Olson keeps this confessional story light in part by her choice of form: chapters broken into sections that alternate between a narrative of events in the present and a running general commentary, including rumination on past events, family history, and regional character.

On that issue of region, Shannon has a hard time imagining herself living anywhere other than Minnesota—a fact that she attributes to her fear of “the possibility of infinite possibility.” She envisions that fear and its limitations this way:

I picture myself in a hot air balloon just floating off somewhere, higher and higher in the cold, dark air. Eventually that balloon is going to pop. My family, and this place—Minnesota, this silly place with its terribly cold winters and emotionally repressed Scandinavians—are like sandbags that weigh the balloon down, the stakes and ropes that tether it to the ground. Without them I’d be frightened to death of where I might wind up.

Despite those possibilities that exist elsewhere, Shannon stays near home to explore the different possibilities presented by a deeper knowledge of family and place. And there is no indication that she is any poorer for doing so.

A good prophet–what today we tend to call a social critic–speaks harshly but accurately about a flawed social order. In Main Street Sinclair Lewis speaks with a prophetic voice that still rings true for our own culture. In many ways the new modern culture that Lewis describes in the early twentieth century–with its automobiles and telephones, its dominant commercial class and its American imperial hubris–is like our own, and we can apply his comments to our own time as well.

There is, for example, the confident swagger of this young region, sure in its faith that its outlook will dominate the world. From the very introduction of the book, Lewis informs us that Gopher Prairie represents the future for the entire world:

“Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea….”

Here is a look at the beginnings of the American empire that exists today, when the United States is the sole superpower. The Main Streets of America are the product of a long western tradition and are seen by their residents as its highest achievement. As Lewis saw early on, those same residents were beginning to make their power felt around the world, beginning to influence and even dictate the conditions of life elsewhere.

Even more telling is this long quotation from the book, which both describes the ills of the small town and represents the United States Empire as successor to the British Empire:

Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation.

But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius.

Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors.

And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall.

Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oilcloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace.

If all the provincials were…kindly…there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is the…small busy men crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy. (266-7)

The wartime setting of Main Street is also relevant for our present moment, with the Iraq War occurring as a continuation of the vague, shadowy War on Terrorism. Much of the novel takes place during World War I, and it criticizes the prejudice masked as patriotism that surfaces during wartime. When the United States enters the Great War and opposes Germany, German immigrants in and around Gopher Prairie are treated with suspicion, and “citizens’ committees” force them to buy war bonds or risk arrest.

One of the few dissenting voices in the town is Miles Bjornstam, the Swedish handyman who becomes a farmer and family man. An agnostic who accepts the theory of evolution, he questions the town’s hierarchy and its religious and civic faiths. When war starts, he denies the propaganda that most residents of Gopher Prairie believe. As a result he is treated coldly by everyone but Carol, even after he settles down by marrying and becoming a dairy farmer. When fate treats him cruelly, the town offers feeble help too late. He rebuffs the advances and moves away.

Lewis does not write without affection for the people, culture, and natural environment of Gopher Prairie, but that affection does not blind him to the town’s shortcomings. He punctures the myth of the small town as the fount of all virtue, showing how its conformist orthodoxy smothers the nonconformist, how its culture hinders the freedom that it sees itself championing. If towns like Gopher Prairie were not so cruel to people like Miles Bjornstam, Lewis may have written a very different book.

I wonder now whether life in today’s small towns would be different. Surely things have improved some. Modern transportation, telecommunications, and media–radio, television, planes, cheap long distance phone service, the Internet–have reduced the isolation that Lewis saw as the source for the stultifying qualities of Gopher Prairie. But such media cannot completely erode the divides of distance and other forms of segregation–natural and artificial–that mark our society, and they can also be the means for dispensing narrow ideologies. Such divides will always cause communities to turn inwards, demonizing those who are different–the Other, the alien–including those who are so because they have strayed from the official and unofficial faiths of the community.

Source: Main Street. 1920. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1922. Thirty-first printing.

It’s difficult to know where to begin a brief discussion of Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott. The book is at once a study of a region and of the emergence of an entire modern American culture–a culture that in many ways has not changed much since the book was published in 1920. It touches on more issues than can be analyzed here, issues such as provincialism and small town life, marriage, class, politics, and the changing role of women. Given the regional focus of this column, I’ll first examine the book’s view of “the Northern Middlewest,” “the newest empire of the world” as Carol Kennicott thinks of it.

The heroine of the story is born Carol Milford in Mankato, Minnesota. Her father, originally from Massachusetts, is a judge and something of an intellectual. Carol reads Balzac and Rabelais in his library, and she acquires “a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people.” While in college Carol becomes interested in sociology and for a time fantasizes vaguely about a career in “village-improvement”–the reform and beautification of a “prairie village.” She quickly drops her fantasy for the more pragmatic profession of librarian. She spends a year training in Chicago, then works in St. Paul. But when she meets Dr. Will Kennicott, from the small town of Gopher Prairie, her vision of village improvement returns and the two eventually get married, despite some misgivings Carol has about the doctor.

The story then follows Carol’s continuous cycle of romantic, idealistic endeavor followed by disappointing reality as she vainly tries to make an impact on the stolid town. She finds a wide variety of people in Gopher Prairie, but their lives are dominated by gossip and a conformity that narrowly restricts behavior and thought. She becomes subject to what another intellectual resident, Guy Pollock, calls the “Village Virus.” As he describes it, this is “the germ which…infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You’ll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants–all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp.” Such people think they can keep their cosmopolitan interests up to date, but distance and isolation prove to be too powerful, and the virus claims them as victims.

Carol also finds that the town is simply ugly, in a way that the beauty of the surrounding countryside cannot quite redeem. She has traveled and seen the Twin Cities and Chicago, later California and the East Coast, and her more traveled eyes sees the lack of beauty that the residents of Gopher Prairie cannot make out. See, for example, Carol’s first impression of the house that she will share with Dr. Will Kennicott:

“A concrete sidewalk with a ‘parking’ of grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cottonwoods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible.”

Carol concludes that the town’s ugliness, and many of its other aspects, result from its pioneer rawness, the very newness of its region. Making her way to Gopher Prairie after marrying Dr. Kennicott, Carol looks at her fellow train travelers and thinks, “They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land.” And as a pioneer land, she concludes, its future is still to be determined.

The novel describes the class structure of the town, which consists of a largely Yankee upper-class–people such as Sam Clark and Ezra Stowbody and the Kennicotts–and a lower class made up mostly of Scandinavian and German immigrants who work as farmers and servants–people such as Miles Bjornstam and Bea Sorenson. The upper class, a business class, rules over the town with the “sedate pomposity of the commercialist.” This coming together of new and old Americans, native and immigrant communities, is one of the interesting dimensions of the book. The Yankee families look on the new immigrants with some suspicion and condescension, and there is occasionally some ugliness, particularly when the arrival of World War I leads to the dominance of a bullying patriotism, but for the most part the different groups manage to coexist peacefully.

The novel is fascinating also for its realistic details of life in the early twentieth century. We see, for example, how the residents of Gopher Prairie ready their houses for the onset of the harsh winter. “Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest,” the narrator tells us, “it is an industry.” Residents put up “storm sheds” outside their doors and hang storm windows, while “the poorer houses of Gopher Prairie” are “banked to the windows with earth and manure”–all efforts to keep houses warm during the winter.

Next week: More on the social criticism of Main Street.

When I was in graduate school studying British and American literature, I accumulated books–lots of books, mainly consisting of literature, literary criticism, and history, and including a small collection of books by Midwestern writers. I remember in particular having a lot of Booth Tarkington and Sinclair Lewis novels in hardcover. They were not hard to come by at book sales and used bookstores.

As time went on and I moved nearly every year, and as a career in academia failed to materialize, I gradually unburdened myself of many books. I sold off lots of literary theory books without remorse. I got rid of many of my Midwestern books with not much more regret, because I hadn’t read the vast majority of them. I did, however, keep two of Lewis’s novels, Main Street and Babbitt, feeling that they were important. I had read Babbitt when in high school and was not extremely taken with it. Of Minnesota authors, I preferred Scott Fitzgerald.

Over the years I continued to come across references to Main Street as an important American novel, and I was nagged by the sense that I needed to read it. Finally, I picked it up off a bookshelf at home and started reading.

I don’t remember where I got my copy of the book, but it was probably in Minnesota. Just inside the cover it’s stamped “Joseph K. Kidder, Lacrosse, Wis.”; the typography of the stamp is in the Art Deco style of the 1920’s. The copyright page indicates the novel was first published in 1920 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, but my copy of the book was published by Grosset and Dunlap of New York in 1922–the thirty-first printing, not too bad for two years, and just one indication of the book’s success. The book nearly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921; a jury voted to give the award to Main Street, but the Columbia University trustees overruled it to grant the prize to Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. Angered, Lewis would later refuse the Pulitzer in 1926 for his novel Arrowsmith. By 1922 the book had also been made into a silent film. My edition comes complete with illustrations from “the photoplay,” “a Warner Brothers screen classic.” (The novel was made into a movie again in 1936, titled I Married a Doctor.)

I finished the book not long ago, and I found it to be an eloquent novel of sharp social observation that is still relevant today. It doesn’t surprise me that it was so successful in its day, nor that Sinclair Lewis–a native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota–would receive the Nobel Prize for literature only ten years later, after publishing four more novels in the 1920’s that, with Main Street, are generally considered to be among his best work: Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929).

In the next week or more I’ll look in detail at Lewis’s novel about life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and its relevance for us today.