Small Town Life

 What is a small town? I live in a city of about fifty-five thousand, I spent most of my life in another city of similar size; both were once crown jewels in the crown of General Motors. People still wait for the return of the factories with union wages, employing a wide swath of the population. That is not going to happen.

I do not think we think of ourselves as living in small towns. For Indiana, we are still large. Yet, we know we are not New York, or Chicago, or Atlanta, or L.A., or even Indianapolis.

When I saw in The Hedgehodge Review's link to Phil Christman's Small-Town USA The mythical place that stifles and nourishes., I had to read the essay.

Although, I am far older than Christman, I do recognize the dichotomy he describes in the following:

This bias is not only literary; it has become a part of how those of us who grew up in such places make sense of our experiences. When we talk about the place where we were raised, my sister and I unconsciously illustrate this split. Her memories are pastoral and nostalgic. People worked hard; there was optimism in the air, a sense of community. I remember feeling this way in my earliest childhood; after about age ten, what I mostly remember about the place is how angry people were. I remember a vast peevishness and spitefulness, people swerving their cars “jokingly” at pedestrians and forcing joggers (me) into ditches and throwing their trash at you through the window, conversations that consisted mostly of epithets. I remember—as observer, participant, and victim—a culture of bullying, hazing, and sexual harassment so pervasive that you could not precisely demarcate these activities from normal behavior. And I remember the bizarre, asymmetric rage, the kind of rage that, if you wanted to dignify it, you could compare to the epic snits of Greek mythology. But I don’t want to dignify it. One night, a coworker casually threatened to kill my father over some meaningless workplace dispute—my father was, if I remember correctly, the night janitor at the time, not an authority figure of any kind, nor particularly disliked. Well, that is arbitrary enough to be something Zeus might do, but let’s not call it epic.

While he traces the cause to NAFTA, in my own experience it was the implosion of the auto industry in 1979 - 80. Very similar in that the jobs went south, some in the United States and others to Mexico. I still hear people saying that Mexico stole our jobs. No mention of General Motors's management being negligent in their operations, of it having no allegiance to its employees, having any influence on its decision to move jobs to Mexico. I wonder how much of our anger towards immigrants on our southern border can e traced back to the creation of the Rust Belt.

He has me considering what I have been scribbling about these past 12 years:

Along with everything else we ask them to make, we ask small towns to make meaning. The small town is the place where we still number the generations, where (as Grace Olmstead describes in her recent memoir Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind) a person might still be known mostly as so-and-so’s grandchild. It’s the place that moralizes the all-powerful alien Kal-El into the kind, humble Superman, a dichotomy that recent iterations of the Superman story have only sharpened. Kal-El is raw capacity; Superman is processed power, power that has been given a name, a meaning, a story, a relationship to other beings. The town is the place where you learn the value of a dollar, the meaning of a hard day’s work, before you find your true life in the city. Its continuance after you leave, in turn, symbolizes the unchanging reality of these moral verities: Superman never goes mad with power because Smallville is still there, steadying him at a distance. This mythic role perhaps accounts for the difficulty of writing about the small town in the realistic, rather than the eulogistic or satirical, mode. We use the first one when we feel that our particular small town lived up to these impossible promises; we use the second when it didn’t.

Perhaps the smallness is the point: as if only at a particular scale can we see human relations in their fullness. Only in a small community, according to this line of thinking, can we really know what we are doing. In the city, meanings and connections are multiplied until we can’t see them at all. In the country or the wilderness, we may feel that our actions take place outside the grid of human meaning entirely. Aristotle argued that the ideal polis would be small enough that each citizen (who for him would not constitute anything near the entire population) could know “what sort of man” every other citizen was. He considered Athens far too big. Modern estimates vary, but one common calculation suggests that it boasted a population of about 300,000 people, about a tenth of whom were citizens. Ten thousand was a better population for a Greek polis—to us, that’s a small town. Just as, from Aristotle’s perspective, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex was the ideal play because it portrayed a single action, in a single day, and thus allowed the spectator to see the action whole, a polis the size of a modern small town afforded a full view of social relations, a stage on which life was depicted A to Z. This may be the primary mythic role that small towns play in our politics: the stage that is just the right size.

My Jackson stories are set in a town I think has about 15,000 people, but is based on larger cities. Cities having far fewer than 300,000.  

I am still chewing hard on these paragraphs:

At the same time, as literary scholar Jason Stacy points out, nineteenth-century Americans had already drafted the New England small town into a mythopoeic role. Such places served for nineteenth-century readers as “a founding community that exhibited a natural morality unmoored from the encrusted and pretentious rituals of the European past.”² Thus, the New England village, in literary depictions, can have some of the wildness, the unpredictability, of country life. It can be strange, not simply flat. Think of Hawthorne’s haunted towns, or, much later, of H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham. A person could say many critical things about Arkham, but the “stifling small town” story doesn’t easily apply to it, unless it is the reader’s last breath that is stifled, by a tentacular appendage of indescribable horror.

But the midwestern town, Stacy contends, was depicted somewhat differently. It was an “inheritor of values of a mythological founding generation” and a “battleground for the characteristics and actualization of those values,” with the result that it “became the center of a conflict about the future of the country itself.”³ Colonized within living memory, unlike, say, Concord (already two centuries old when Emerson moved there), these new places saw themselves as exemplary of America’s entire short life. For early midwesterners, the small town offered an epitome of the country itself, from settler to settee.

Exemplarity can be a curse. If the children of pioneers come to distrust the thing their parents built, then the places that each stand as synecdoches for that thing will in turn invite a more critical look. Thus the stage is set for another myth. The early 1920s saw a “revolt from the village” among serious American writers. Or at least, it saw the popularization of that idea, via an essay by Carl Van Doren.⁴ He pointed to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), a collection of unusually blunt poetic epitaphs for the residents of a fictional Illinois town, as well as Sherwood Anderson’s collection of linked stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). According to Van Doren, these books exposed the deep frustrations and hypocrisies that wriggled under the wholesome surface of small-town life. As Jon Lauck shows in From Warm Center to Ragged Edge (2017), these writers did not necessarily think of themselves as having rejected the prairie towns they wrote about.⁵ Still, the paradigm Van Doren seemed to establish remained influential—it may have affected how subsequent midwestern authors saw themselves, and it certainly affected how they were read. Today, too, it’s often the splashy but misleading bits of journalism that get debated the longest. People still use the term “hysterical realism” when far better James Wood coinages have fallen into disuse. Or, to take an example that pertains to the issue of small towns: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016), a book that is smug and off-putting at every moment when Vance is describing anyone other than his grandmother, has been turned into a movie, while Sarah Smarsh’s far more interesting and nuanced Heartland (2018) has not. And the writers Van Doren considered are all arguably purveyors of escape-from-the-village stories. Anderson’s George Willard leaves Winesburg; Lewis’s Carol Kennicott leaves Gopher Prairie, though not permanently. As for Masters’s characters, they judge their own and others’ lives with the freedom of the dead, and they occasionally make the afterworld sound like a city, referring to their visits with the ghosts of the great and the famous.

Thereafter, it’s easier to list small towns in American art that serve as sites for the examination of pathology, hypocrisy, or the ways a soul is stifled, than towns that serve simply as neutral settings. Faulkner’s towns, as much as he loves them, as rich as he finds them to be, are still interesting to him partly because they are the places where the warped history of America must constantly be faced, and where it often crushes the protagonists (poor Quentin Compson, jumping in the river). Towns in westerns are still half wild, and therefore full of possibility, but particularly in the revisionist westerns of the later twentieth century, they are often places where we see the prefiguring of an American tropism toward violence or greed. In Toni Morrison’s novels, we often encounter small, mostly black towns or black neighborhoods whose relative insularity and independence allow black characters the dignity of moral choice somewhat unconstrained by interference from white people, even when this means depicting these characters doing the sorts of crimes that groups of white Americans commit with such numbing historical frequency. When the hard-pressed, intolerant citizens of Ruby, Oklahoma, in Morrison’s underrated Paradise (1998), destroy the Convent, a place on the edge of the town that has come to serve as a home for wandering and castoff women, it’s an illustration of a human obsession with hierarchy, which we can see operating in its fullness—again, because the smallness of the place allows us to see the origins and effects of the crime from beginning to end.

I refer to Hawthorne in "Best of Intentions" because he is the first to look at American history, but also for how he deals with the follies of people trapped by their history. Of what I have written, I am tracing through them for the pathologies mentioned above. In small towns, the one I have in mind was three thousand people, I have run across nastiness that I did know about in larger Indiana cities. Versailles had a lynching back in 1898, its population was less than 3,000. What can be hidden in the larger cities cannot be hidden in the smaller towns. I would say that whatever pathologies are on show, are the pathologies of human nature. But then I am a devotee of Faulkner and have read The Spoon River Anthology (as well as The New Spoon River) and Winesburg, Ohio and Main Street and Hillbilly Elegy. I also have my in my head my Aunt Mary Ellen telling me Indiana is a good place to be from, and Kurt Vonnegut writing the same thing in Cat's Cradle. What I have lived through are people trying to match what they think their lives should be against changes enforced beyond their towns by forces beyond their control. Then there are people trying to find meaning in what they have available to them - that can be Donald J. Trump, or alcohol, or drugs. They need a rush as a reminder they are still alive. But, still, I have the best and brightest leaving for places out of state. That also comes down to what I saw going on around me.

Against the trope of people leaving small towns, especially the Midwest, is the reality of outsiders buying up the Midwest, controlling the lives of small town citizens. For example, consider Bobbs-Merrill.

Against Christman's literary examples, examples, I also have Raintree County, and Willa Cather. I have had trouble digesting Cather. I think she blends the sentimental and the realist; she feels, but she also sees. Unlike Booth Tarkington, she does engage in wishful thinking. I re-read Alice Adams while in prison, and I have trouble with its ending as being too benign a solution for Alice. Against myself, I will admit to reading too much Theodore Dreiser (another Hoosier).

 I have probably waited too long to mention Christman is from the Midwest. The following could, I suppose, have been written by someone from somewhere else, but it seems Midwestern to me:

The problem runs a great deal deeper than feeling stifled, of course. What people are is scared. If a beginning writer is tempted by the prospect of writing for some sub-Netflix show in Los Angeles or turning out clickbait in the Big Apple, it’s a sign of a culture that does not know how to funnel people into meaningful work, or how to pay them a decent wage while they do it.

I want my stories to work by showing the humanity of all the people, even those I may find distasteful. I do not know anyone not wanting a meaningful life, which has always seemed to translate into meaningful work. Which may be why I agree with Christman when in his essay he upholds Sherwood Anderson over Sinclair Lewis. Anderson seemed to like the people of Winesburg, Ohio as people better than Lewis liked his characters. I took too long in reading Sherwood Anderson.

sch 1/2/23