The Midwest
Introduction
The Midwest
Introduction
The American mind will be brought to maturity along the chain of the great lakes, the banks of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and their tributaries in the far northwest. There on the rolling plains will be formed a republic of letters which, not governed like that on our seaboard by the great literary powers of Europe, shall be free indeed.
J. Milton Mackie in Putnam's Monthly
Magazine in 1854 1
A CONFUSED ENGLISHMAN once reported after a tour of the
United States that "nobody quite knows what the Middle West is."
Even geographers differ on which states should be designated
as part of the region. To some, Ohio is in
the Midwest; to others it is in the East. One problem is the
lack of distinctive topographical boundaries. Another is demographic
change. At one time the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains were
considered the eastern and western limits of the central states,
but as the heartland became settled its outline shrank so that
western Pennsylvania and eastern Colorado could no longer be
considered part of the Midwest. Of course ultimately the northern
and western boundaries of the Midwest could be fixed with some
ease, by the Canadian border and the 98th meridian, the point
at which aridity increases markedly and the floor of the prairie
changes from long to short grass. But even today the eastern
and southern boundaries must be fixed arbitrarily.
For purposes of this literary history, most of the emphasis will
be on writings about Nebraska, Kansas, North and South Dakota,
Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Though there is topographical
variety within them, these states share the most prominent feature
of the inland empire: the broad, rolling plains, which before
the coming of the white man were a vast, almost treeless grassland
two million square miles in extent. This remarkable physical
feature, "the most eloquent symbol of space and unity in
America"
Determining which authors properly can be called "midwestern"
is a formidable task. An impressive number of distinguished twentieth-century
writers were born in the region but not all of them stayed nor
did they write, to any important degree, about their native region.
Representative examples are F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway,
who wrote a few things about childhood experiences in Minnesota
and Michigan, but the bulk of whose work is set elsewhere and
deals with themes apart from the West. Similarly, the work of
Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, authors sometimes
associated with the "Midwest," as a whole looks away from
such distinctive themes as the coming of the pioneer and farm
life. And then there are writers like John Dos Passos and T.
S. Eliot, born in the Midwest, but with even less claim than
Fitzgerald and Hemingway to the title midwestern. They are not
dealt with here. Nor does this study include any discussion of
Chicago as an important literary center. The so-called literary
renaissance that took place in the midwestern metropolis in the
late nineteenth century is certainly germane to the development
of American literature in general, but not necessarily to that
of the West.
Though the editors did not consciously do so, they might well
have followed the criteria used by John T. Flanagan in preparing
his anthology of midwestern literature.
The ideal middlewestern
writer is either born in the north central section of the continent
and by virtue of environment and education imbued with its spirit,
or one who by long residence, especially in his formative years,
has become an integral part of the land of his adoption and is
particularly fitted to describe its people and voice its point
of view. 3
For all of the authors treated
in the following chapters were either born or raised in the region,
and all were born just before or just after the closing of the
frontier in 1890. All experienced either farm or small town life,
and thus were well equipped to deal with the premier themes of
the literature of the region. And all have made contributions
to the most recent, and richest, period of midwest literature.
Most especially these are writers who have been sensitive to
two fundamental physical aspects of the Midwest: the land and
the climate. Soil and weather have ever been the forces that
have most powerfully shaped the culture and imaginations of the
people of the region, and whether or not the writers here have
been "imbued with the spirit of the region," they at least
have all responded to what Willa Cather describes as "the
old pull of the earth . . . the solemn magic of the fields."
4
The development of the literature
of the American Midwest divides conveniently into three periods:
An early period from the time of the first explorers and missionaries
in the sixteenth century up to 1783, the year of the Peace of
Versailles which officially established the independence of the
United States. A middle period, the first century of the literature
of the new nation, which extends to 1882. And finally the recent
period, the century from 1883 to the present. The date 1883 is
significant as the year of the publication of Edgar Watson Howe's
The Story of a Country Town, a work which signaled a new
era in midwest letters. From that time to the present, midwest
literature has continued to flourish as works about the central
states have increased in both quantity and quality. It is to
this last period, a kind of Golden Century, that the most important
midwest writers belong and to it most of the discussion of the
following section is given.
The first significant written descriptions
of the interior of America were travel accounts of Spanish explorers
in the sixteenth century. One, published in 1542, was by Álvar
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, probably the first white
man to see and write about the Mississippi River, bison, and
the southern plains. Although Cabeza de Vaca did not get north
of what is now Texas, his work had the distinction of inspiring
Coronado's search for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. This
journey, which reached as far as northcentral Kansas, enabled
Pedro de Castañeda to describe bison, the prairie, and
Plains Indians in a narrative that was copied out at least as
early as 1596. Though some of the early Spanish observers noted
their admiration for the beauty of the land and the noble appearance
of the Indians, most of their accounts were fanciful ones, motivated
by dreams of incalculable riches. Soon after the Spanish began
their explorations of the southern part of the Mississippi valley,
the French began establishing outposts in Canada; from there
their emissaries-mostly, but not exclusively, Jesuit priests–began
to push down around the Great Lakes and the Old Northwest. Their
observations, since compiled in the massive Jesuit Relations
and Allied Documents (edited by Reuben Thwaites), were made
in the middle and late seventeenth century, and are distinguished
for precision and objectivity. At first their knowledge of the
Middle West was secondhand, passed on to them by Indians, but
it was not long until their zealous travels brought them in direct
contact with the tribes and landscape of the upper Mississippi
Valley. A list of these writers reads like a Pantheon of exploration:
Marquette, Hennepin, La Salle, Nicolet. Of these, Jacques Marquette
is worthy of special note. He descended the Mississippi as far
as the present Arkansas City, Arkansas, and wrote excellent accounts
of Indian customs, of bison, and of the prairies, which stretched
"further than the eye can see."
5
Father Louis
Hennepin, too, is significant, for he was the
first to describe in a published report the falls of St. Anthony,
the site of present day St. Paul, Minnesota. Though Hennepin
was a terrible braggart, given to exaggeration, prevarication,
and plagiarism, he does seem to have been sincerely impressed
by the land and its potential for agriculture, a feature the
Spanish usually ignored. As he noted in A Description of Louisiana,
the mid-country's "soil is capable of producing all
kinds of fruits, herbs, and grain, and in greater abundance than
the best lands in Europe."
As for the Mississippi, it could produce every year, 20,000 ecus' worth of peltries, an abundance of land, and
wood for shipbuilding; a silk trade might be established there,
and a port for the protection of vessels and the maintenance
of a communication with the Gulf of Mexico. Pearls might be found
there.
7
The priests, of course, were primarily concerned with the conversion of the heathen, and thus a number of the early accounts of the Midwest gave detailed, and fairly accurate, descriptions of Indians and their ways. Unlike many early observers, the French were almost never condescending but conveyed a sympathy toward the Native American that was to be repaid when, in the eighteenth century, the French badly needed allies as they sought to keep and expand their North American holdings.
A second period of midwest literature
began with the establishment of the autonomy of the United States
and the subsequent flow of immigration to the lands beyond the
Alleghenies. The nation's independence took on a new dimension,
especially after the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787,
for those who lacked economic opportunity on the crowded eastern
seaboard. There was a great outpouring of promotional literature
portraying the interior of the nation as a place where humble
folk could own land and become self-sufficient. Typical of this
kind of tract was Manasseh Cutler's An Explanation of the
Map of Federal Lands (1787), whose glowing language and optimistic
tone would be repeated in thousands of similar pamphlets,
books, and posters as the country moved westward:
To the philosopher and the politician, on viewing
this delightful part of the federal territory, under the prospect
of an immediate and systematic settlement, the following observations
will occur. First. The tils of agriculture will here be rewarded
with a greater variety of valuable productions, than in any part
of America. The advantages of almost every climate are here
blended together; every considerable commodity, that is cultivated
in any part of the United States, is here produced in the greatest
plenty and perfection.
8
Shortly after Cutler's work two
books appeared, both by Gilbert Imlay and both representative
of the many publications that dwelt on the fascinating possibilities
of the interior country for settlement. One is a book of description,
the other one of the very first novels published in America.
A Topographical Description of the Western Territory (1792)
gives a detailed and enthusiastic account of the western country.
Transatlantic readers especially were impressed by Imlay's prophecy
that the Mississippi Valley would be completely settled by the
end of the next century, a prediction based on the widely held
eighteenth-century assurance that the destiny of a democratic,
and essentially good, people was to fill up the free land to
the West. Imlay's novel The Emigrants (1793), which marks
the beginning in American fiction of the immigration theme, is
the story of an English family brought to ruin by the American
Revolution and their resolve to mend their fortunes by heading
West. Filled with paeans of praise for the pristine beauty of
the frontier, the narrative presents the Ohio River basin and
Illinois as perfect places to build an ideal society.
The most important nonfictional writings of the early nineteenth
century which pictured the interior as a habitable region were
the Journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Though these
monumental records of what has been aptly called "our national
epic of exploration" are treated elsewhere in this volume, it
should be noted here that the Journals are of considerable significance,
not only because of what they contributed to geography but of
what they did for the imagination as well. Not a few early writers
about the American Midwest got their notions of what the landscape
was like from the Journals. One writer especially who no doubt
got some of his ideas about the trans-Mississippi region from
Lewis and Clark was James Fenimore Cooper, whose classic The
Prairie (1827) is one of the most durable of the early immigration
novels which use the Midwest for their locale.
The setting for this novel from the Leatherstocking Series is
Iowa and Nebraska, an environment where Cooper's ubiquitous aristocrats
are out of place; and even Natty Bumppo, though he has voluntarily
sought the freedom of the prairie, can find no beauty or potential
for productivity there. Though the novel relies heavily on many
of the stock ingredients of the romantic adventure tale, it establishes
some of the most enduring of the images and motifs of western
and midwestem literature. Moreover, Cooper perceived something
that few of his contemporaries were able to see, that
the settlement of the West was not wholly an
heroic enterprise. For when one civilization collided with another–or
with the wilderness–the result was likely to be tragic,
and thus the white men's encroachment on the frontier was and
would continue to be a dirty, treacherous business. An illustration
of this is to be found in the opening scene of The Prairie,
which shows settlers wantonly destroying a grove of trees
just to make shelter for the night.
Cooper also knew something about social economics and class,
and in The Prairie he makes use of a new type of individual,
a type that would ultimately dominate the fiction of the Midwest.
Paul Hover and Ellen Wade are not especially colorful, but they
are decent and hardworking members of the middle class. Also
representative of this new breed is the Bush family. "Squatters"
or would-be settlers, they are dull, somewhat lawless, yet possessed
of a strength and religious righteousness that Cooper seems to
admire, in spite of his notions about the "lower orders."
These realistic characters are early examples in fiction of the
native-born immigrants who would move into and help shape the
destiny of the Midwest. Still, in spite of Cooper's vivid evocation
of a haunting prairie landscape and his prescient portrayal of
the drama to be enacted there, the idea of an agricultural West
was too remote for him to grasp. There is no permanent settling
in the novel, and, at the end, all of the major characters, except
for the Indians and Leatherstocking, who stays to die, backtrail
to the East.
Two other early nineteenth-century writers who made notable contributions
to the development of midwest literature are Timothy Flint and
James Hall, both of whom had much more direct experience than
did Cooper with the lands west of the Alleghenies.
Timothy Flint (1780–1840), a minister as well as novelist,
established in Cincinnati the Western Monthly Review, one
of the first truly regional periodicals dedicated to promoting
the literature of the West. Two of Flint's novels make significant,
though not extensive, use of the Midwest as setting. Francis
Berrian or the Mexican Patriot (1826) tells the story of
Francis Berrian, a New Englander and Harvard graduate, who seeks
adventure in the West. Though the main and most exciting part
of the book takes place in the Southwest, there is extensive
description of the plains region of the Mississippi Basin, as
Berrian's travels take him down the Ohio and Mississippi. The
hero, like so many in early novels about the West, is totally
out of place in such wild surroundings. His New England (and
Harvard) bookish background leads him to "quote Virgil and
contemplate Byron" as he moves through the West. But in spite
of such incongruities Flint does provide some quite vivid details
of prairie life and landscape.
The Life and Adventures of Arthur Clenning (1828) is another
Flint novel in which the hero travels widely but eventually settles
in Illinois at
the Morris Birbeck settlement where his son
and heir can have the utmost freedom and opportunity and thus
develop into a true man of the West–or "Buckeye" as
the novel puts it.
James Hall (1793–1868), who had more direct contact with
the area than most of the early writers of midwest fiction, lived
about fifty years in the West, mainly in Ohio and Illinois. He
wrote no novels but his work as a writer, collector, and publisher
of short fiction and verse about the West has led to his being
considered "the central figure in a kind of school of experimenters
in the materials of frontier life."'Hall first authored
Letters from the West (1828), The Soldier's Bride &
Other Tales (1833), and Tales of the Border
(1835). In his treatment of frontier themes Hall is inclined
to be somewhat sentimental, but he had seen too much of what
the country was really like not to provide some realistic detail
of pioneer life, particularly as he depicts the widespread resentment
of the English and hatred of the Indian. Because of this he was
considered something of a rebel in his time and was censured
by some of his contemporaries for using "vulgar backwoods
expressions" and for pointing out the less than idyllic living
conditions of the pioneer west.
Another novelist of this period who depicted midwestern community
life in its embryonic stage was Caroline M. Kirkland, who was
far from just another chronicler of frontier romance and adventure.
Her portrayal of the new villages in Michigan in A New Home–Who'll
Follow? (1839) is blunt, direct, even satirical. This work,
a remarkable amalgam of journal-like sketches, commentary, and
narrative, takes a close and objective look at the unpolished
manners of pioneers. Though some humor and sentiment is present,
much of the book is a kind of catalog of the inconveniences of
the environment and the crudeness of people in the settlements.
Seldom heroic or noble, the villagers are ignorant, unclean,
and impolite. The claim that Kirkland's satirical approach destroyed
the romantic conception of frontier life
Enthusiasm for the western country and the prospects for settlers
was not confined to fiction, of course. The established poets
of the "American Renaissance" took their turn at the subject
of the central plains. William Cullen Bryant in "The Prairies,"
inspired no doubt by a visit to Illinois, tells of gazing at
the broad, open landscape and reflecting with nostalgia on the
colorful past when the redman and the bison roamed the plains.
His musings are shattered by the imagined sound of the advancing
white settlers filling up the open spaces. John Greenleaf Whittier
used the prairie as a setting for several poems, and one of them,
"The Kansas Emigrants," became a popular marching song of
the pioneers. Even a Boston Brahmin not noted for his interest
in the West, James Russell Lowell, wrote "The Pioneer,"
in which the limitless-seeming space of the prairie is lauded
as being the ideal home for those who would be free.
Walt Whitman, the great poetic spokesman for democracy, wrote
admiringly of the pioneer inhabitants of the Middle West as especially
well qualified to achieve and enjoy freedom. They were the ones
who would most likely put the past behind and produce a great
"central inland race . . . with the continental blood intervein'd,"
as Whitman put it in "Pioneers! O Pioneers!", a poem that
would provide a later writer with the title for her first novel
about the midlands. Unlike some of the romantic writers of the
time Whitman had no qualms about what the settlement of the middle
states would produce. In his six-line verse "The Prairie
States" he images a crowded and industrialized society, a "crown
and teeming paradise" that justifies all the events leading up
to it.
In 1902 the Harvard philosopher
Josiah Royce gave a lecture in Iowa City, Iowa, in which he called
for a new movement in letters. "The higher provincialism,"
as he termed it, would serve to counter the demoralizing effects
of cultural homogenization, a byproduct of the rapid growth of
industrial monopolies. Convinced that such regionalism would
be salutary for American society, Royce encouraged areas with
distinctive cultural patterns to preserve and promote their individualities
through literature and the arts. Actually such a movement was
already underway in the Midwest, and in the decades that followed
many more writers of the central states would follow Royce's
dictum: "Serve faithfully your community that the nation
may be served."
12
Though the several isms and movements
that marked the overall growth of American literature were present
to an extent in the literary development of the Midwest, the
major writers of the region were sufficiently independent that
it is not convenient to classify them as members of particular
schools or groups, including the ubiquitous and not very helpful
designation of "regionalists." Moreover, most of the important
twentieth-century midwestern writers were so nearly contemporaneous
with one another that it is difficult to discuss them in a chronological
framework. Thus in order to avoid overlapping, the best way to
trace the development of midwest literature since 1883 is to
examine how various writers have
dealt with certain recurring themes, or, more
correctly, with variations of a single theme. The single theme
is the land itself, and the variations reflect changes that have
come to the land itself and to the drama of human life in the
heartland.
More than any other region the Midwest has seemingly been affected–
cursed or blessed–by rapid change. In other regions, the
South and New England, for example, there has always been a greater
aura of permanence. In those sections of the country, traditions
are older, change has taken place more slowly, and there have
been concerted efforts to preserve certain features of the past.
But in the midwestem states culture like local architecture has
always been temporary and disposable. And because at the outset
the Midlands consisted of so much empty space, with few outstanding
landmarks, the transformation of the region has been dramatic;
it has undergone a greater change of landscape in a shorter space
of time, perhaps, than any area of comparable size. To have gone,
in little more than a hundred years, from open prairie with only
a few hundred thousand primitive inhabitants to a burgeoning
inland empire crowded with farms and cities, crisscrossed with
railroads and interstate highways and jet trails, bustling with
millions of people working in factories, mines, schools, stockyards,
colleges, theaters, and libraries–such change is epical.
It is also the stuff of tragedy,
for change inevitably assumes destruction, and the Midwest has
been the scene, along with construction, of much destruction:
white power replacing red power, the farmer replacing the free
hunter and trapper, the town replacing the farm, and the city
replacing the town. Thus around the end of the nineteenth century
writers began to consider the radical cultural and environmental
changes taking place in the Midwest, and a new awareness of the
literary possibilities of the region began to emerge in a flood
of fiction and poetry, starting with the surprisingly realistic
treatment of rural life by Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin Garland.
The resulting activity, eventually termed the New Regionalism,
was marked by renewed interest in folklore, new and sophisticated
use of local material, and the founding of periodicals like Midland:
A Magazine of the Middle West in Iowa City in 1915 and the
Prairie Schooner in Lincoln in 1927. The fertility of
the central states was thus established once and for all, artistically
as well as agriculturally.
For the most part, the writers of the recent period of midwest
literature have been concerned with four main themes, each a
variation of the basic one of land and change. Each of the four
represents a stage in the development of the Midwest: first,
the pre-settlement Midwest; second, settling and farm life; third,
small town life; and fourth, life in the urban, industrialized
Midwest. Not surprisingly, these stages closely resemble the
ones delineated by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous
essay on the significance of the frontier.
Prior to the twentieth century
most belletristic writing about the original inhabitants of the
Midwest was at odds with reality. Longfellow's Hiawatha, for
example, which gave several generations of readers their principal
notion of what Native American life was like in the Midlands,
was the result of no direct contact with the Indians or even
of very extensive research. Instead, the long poem is an amalgam
of the many legends found in the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
Longfellow's treatment of the Indians is like that of Cooper
and many other nineteenth-century white writers; he either exaggerated
their cruelty and savagery or overstated their glamour and nobility.
Seldom did a writer present a balanced view showing the unique
richness of Indian culture and the pitiful results of its near-extermination.
A needed corrective to this situation came in the twentieth century
in the works of several Midwest authors who wrote of the pre-settlement
period: Hamlin Garland, John G. Neihardt, Frederick Manfred,
and Mari Sandoz. Each of these writers was born in the Midwest;
each had direct contact with Indians or with Indian country.
Each was meticulous in researching the early days of the Midwest,
and each developed a comprehensive view of the evolution of the
region.
Although he did not write extensively on the subject, Hamlin
Garland deserves mention as one of the early writers who perceived
the Indian in a new way. His The Book of the Indian (1932)
with its fourteen short stories plus a brief fictionalized biography
of Sitting Bull has an element of authenticity absent from the
narratives of eastern writers. There are flaws of course. His
use of an Indian narrator in "The Silent Eaters"–the
life of Sitting Bull–is not very convincing, and Garlands
position is still the old chauvinistic one which stressed the
need for conversion to white men's ways. But he does convey the
terrible contempt with which the Indians were regarded by the
conquering whites and the brutal treatment they received at their
hands. Thus Garland was one of the first to open the way for
a more realistic and sympathetic treatment of plains Indians.
The work of John G. Neihardt, much of it in verse, is almost
exclusively devoted to the theme of the Native American and the
trappers and explorers of the pre-settlement West.
Neihardt had the advantage of being able to use authentic pioneer
experiences in his writing, having been born on a farm in Illinois
in 1881 and raised and educated in Nebraska in the late nineteenth
century. Moreover, as an employee of the Indian Bureau, he talked
to many Indians who had participated in the very events he found
so important and about which he
wished to write. Convinced that the most colorful
events in his country's history had taken place on the interior
plains between 1822 and 1890, Neihardt set out to celebrate what
he considered the heroic past of the West in a number of works.
The most important of these is The Cycle of the West,
which, with its five "Songs," amounts to an epic overview
of all the heroic phases of the West: conquest, courage, friendship,
faith. Perhaps the most monumental poem ever written by an American,
the Cycle of the West covers the key events in the Missouri
River Valley region from 1822 to 1890, from the Ashley-Henry
expedition to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek.
Though Neihardt has not escaped criticism for his poetic style,
which was much influenced by classical forms, there has been
almost universal acclaim for his most popular book Black Elk
Speaks (1932). The work, which recounts in prose the vision
of a Sioux holy man who told it to Neihardt, is a tour de
force, mixing mysticism and historical event. As a dramatic
portrayal of Indian psyche, myth, and legend, as well as of the
white man's destruction of the red man's culture, it is widely
regarded as not only a powerful but an accurate contribution
to literature about the Native American.
Another work on this same subject is Neihardt's last novel, When
the Tree Flowered (1951). It too traces the life of a protagonist,
Eagle Voice, and the decline of the Sioux nation from its days
of glory to ignominious defeat. Here, as in all of Neihardt's
work, the midwestern landscape, sacred in the eyes of its original
inhabitants, is carefully drawn and occupies an integral place
in the narrative.
The remarkable feature of Neihardt's achievement is that he manages
to dramatize the heroic qualities of red and white alike. Still,
overall it is the spiritual dimension of the Indian that conquers,
even though his material culture is destroyed. For the emphasis
in the Cycle moves from the physical strength and daring
exploits of the white trappers to the spiritual heroism of the
Indians. Thus, the ultimate hero of the cycle is Crazy Horse,
who embodies all of the finest aspects, both physical and spiritual,
of Native American culture. In this way Neihardt depicts the
"truth" of the red man's spiritual visions as more lasting
than the "truth' of the white man's conquest, and thus the victory is reversed.
Neihardt's work, which has been
the subject of increasing analysis in recent years as a result
of renewed interest in western literature in general and Native
American literature in particular, has done much to help Anglo
America understand the importance of symbolism and ceremony in
presettlement culture. More than anyone else, Neihardt has made
the world aware of another side to the settlement story of the
Midwest, the lamentable destruction and loss incurred in the
epic conquest. In view of this, it is safe
to say that the longtime Poet Laureate of Nebraska
is the premier writer of the Midwest on the Native American theme.
Though younger than Neihardt by fifteen years, Mari Sandoz had
close contact with the life and lore of plains Indians, some
of whom came and camped on her family homestead in northwest
Nebraska. She played with their children and learned legends
and history from elders like Old Cheyenne Woman. Using these
resources along with vast amounts of research, Sandoz produced
several significant volumes dealing with Indians, the Great Plains,
and the early trappers. Her principal work is a six-volume nonfiction
series entitled The Great Plains Series, consisting of
Old Jules, Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, The Buffalo Hunters,
The Cattlemen and The Beaver Men, in which she traces
life on the plains from the stone age to her own time.
Of this series, the outstanding parts are Crazy Horse and
Cheyenne Autumn. One is about the life and death of the
mystical and courageous Sioux war chief. The other tells of the
sad exodus of a band of Cheyenne Indians who were determined
to leave the Oklahoma reservation they despised and return to
their home in Montana. Sandoz's scholarship is thorough, and
she demonstrates a sensitive understanding of the history of
the red man. She, like Neihardt before her and Manfred after,
is sympathetic to the values and mind-set of the Indian and thus
her stories are told as much as possible "from the inside,"
with Indian "voices" and consequent use of appropriate metaphor
and imagery.
Through a similar series of books, Frederick Manfred, a native
of Iowa, provides unique insights into the lives of those who
lived in Siouxland (Manfred's name for the upper Midwest) before
it was permanently settled by whites. In the novels which make
up his five-volume Buckskin Man series he does this by carefully
recreating Indian customs and thought patterns, and by vivifying their mystical relationship with nature.
Manfred's best Indian books are unique in that they are not primarily concerned with the struggle between whites and Indians. Conquering Horse and Manly-Hearted Woman, in fact, are set in a time before the coming of the white man has made any impact upon prairie life. Conquering Horse (1965) is the tale of a young Sioux brave, No Name, and his search for personal identity. By blending epic and realistic elements (the father-son rivalry, for example) Manfred avoids the kind of superficial romance that for so long trivialized the Indian in fiction. He gives a clear picture, not only of the social structure and religious beliefs of Native American community life, but of the psychology of its individual members. In part, Manfred's success in doing this is due to his use of a rhythmical speech pattern that is a refreshing corrective to the stilted speech of many fictional Indian narratives. Deservedly, Conquering Horse and its "companion piece" Manly Hearted Woman, which also deals with the theme of the "outsider" or loner seeking identity, have been called "a kind of bible explaining the mystical religion practiced by the Plains Indians." 13
Manfred deals with the violent white-Indian struggle in Silver
Plume (1964). Based on an historical incident in Minnesota
in which thirty-eight Indians were hanged by whites as punishment
for an uprising, the novel develops another element also as Manfred
recounts the story of love between a Sioux brave and a white
woman. Thus the narrative dramatizes significant differences
between the two cultures.
The story of white men in the pre-settlement Midwest is the subject
of Manfred's novel Lord Grizzly (1964). His account of
the legendary Hugh Glass's epic struggle for survival and pursuit
of revenge is widely considered the finest fictional telling
of the story and a classic of western American literature. Here,
as in much of his fiction, Manfred makes use of historical records,
legends, and Greek and Judaic myth as well, thus developing themes
that are clearly universal, not just western.
In spite of the literary possibilities of the westward movement, few significant works on the overland trek itself have been written by midwesterners. The two best-known novels on the theme are The Covered Wagon by Emerson Hough and The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, but neither of these books properly belongs in a discussion of the midwest and they are treated elsewhere in this volume. The life of those who settled and cultivated the land, however, has been a fruitful topic for writers from the central states: novels about homesteading and farming began to proliferate early and continued to do so well into the middle of the twentieth century. The subject continued to be an attractive one partly because the drama of living close to the elements and trying to wrest a living from the soil was not seriously diminished even by modern mechanized farming. Moreover, the theme of farming has always been popular because of America's devotion to the agrarian ideal, an ideal that for three centuries has helped to shape American attitudes and public policy and history. Briefly this concept holds that by working and owning land an individual will attain economic independence, social status, and personal dignity. Thus, it was assumed, the noble occupation of farming will almost certainly lead to virtue and happiness. 14
For years agrarianism served as a kind of bench mark accepted
by some writers of farm life and rejected by others. And since
the modern farm novel had its greatest growth during the years
when the important literary argument was between the proponents
of romanticism and those of realism, it was inevitable that those
who were inclined toward romanticism accepted the agrarian ideal
and those who embraced realism rejected it. The former tended
to view the rural experience in a favorable light, omitting or
downplaying the less pleasant aspects of rural
life, thus producing a modern version of the pastoral tradition.
In contrast were those writers who felt it obligatory to represent
farm life as they did all of life "in all its various shadings
of good and bad, pleasant and painful, beautiful and ugly."
15
This stance in its extreme form,
of course, was that of the literary naturalists.
In no section of the country has the agrarian ideal had a more
powerful claim on the values of people and the imagination of
artists than in the Midwest. For over a hundred years the lives
of settlers and farmers in the interior region have been depicted
in fiction in a variety of ways, resulting in social history
as well as psychological drama. And because midwestern authors
have recorded personal struggles so well–struggles with
the land and weather, with new and strange mores, and with the
shock of change–farm literature constitutes a significant
contribution to world literature.
One of the first to write realistically about farm life was Hamlin
Garland, whose Main-Travelled Roads (1891) gives a vivid
portrayal of the Midwest during the homesteading years. In his
writing Garland strove to do what he did in politics as a crusading
Populist: to tell the truth about rural life, or as he declared
"to put in all there is in the scene, on the surface and
beneath, . . .[For] golden butter and sunshine do not make up
the whole of farm life."
On a more panoramic scale some of the finest writing about early
farming experiences is that of Ole Rølvaag and Willa Cather,
both of whom were particularly sensitive to the plight of immigrants,
having themselves come to the Midwest from older and more settled
cultures. Both viewed the settlement of the West as an epic episode
in history.
Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927), which has
been described as "the greatest farm novel produced thus
far,"
Although she does not completely overlook the tragic aspect of
settling new land, Willa Cather's view of the pioneer experience
is more positive than many. She portrays the pioneer experience
as formidable but ennobling, leading to spiritual and quite possibly
material enrichment. In O Pioneers! and My Ántonia,
her protagonists are strong pioneer women from Europe who
help settle the Nebraska prairies and live productive lives there.
They make sacrifices, of course. Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!
loses a brother and postpones marriage for years. But with
faith and love of the land, she perseveres and ends up a successful
farmer, a legendary agrarian hero, who even in death will enrich
the earth. Similarly in My Ántonia, Ántonia
Schimerda endures severe blows of fortune. Her father takes his
own life. Her fiancé abandons her, pregnant. But she is
made of stern stuff, never retreating from adversity and remaining
close to the land. Because of her steadfast loyalty to the soil
and the elemental things of life, Ántonia comes to symbolize
the ideal pioneer woman, "like the founders of early races."
Frederick Manfred relied on his own and his family's farm experiences
in Siouxland to give a not always pretty picture of Midwest life
in the first half of the twentieth century. In four of his novels
in particular–The Golden Bowl, This Is the Year, Green
Earth, and Eden Prairie–the elements of nature
of the Midwest are the major forces to be reckoned with. But
his works are not just novels of the soil; they are also novels
of self and society. Each contains a central character struggling
to come to terms with forces inside as well as outside himself.
The Golden Bowl is a Depression story filled with the
dryness and dust of the Thirties. Its protagonist, Maury Grant,
has come to distrust the land for its barrenness and apparent
hostility, and thus
leaves the farm for the rootless life of the
gold mines. But the homelessness of the hoboes and miners with
whom he mingles is no substitute for the stability the land offers
and he returns to it. Manfred's lesson is plain: closeness to
the land is necessary for peace within.
Another willful protagonist struggling to be independent from
his parents and their European heritage is Pier Frixen of Manfred's
exceedingly harsh farm novel This Is the Year. In it the
problem of assimilation for Frisian immigrants is paramount,
a theme accentuated by the author's use of Frisian folklore and
language. But it is the stubborn Pier's inner struggle played
out against a backdrop of erratic economic conditions that gives
the novel its main force. Though he is an unlikely agrarian hero,
Pier does possess some pioneer virtues, energy in particular.
Other novelists who, like Manfred, approach the immigrant farming
theme in a realistic manner are Herbert Quick, Herbert Krause,
Sophus Keith Winther, and Mari Sandoz, each of whom produced
a series of books that focused on a particular rural region of
their home state.
Herbert Quick's best known work, Vandemark's Folly (1922),
traces the career of a young Dutchman who moves to Iowa from
New York state and develops an apparently worthless marsh into
productive farm land. In spite of some melodramatic features,
the book contains an abundance of realistic detail demonstrating
the perseverance and ingenuity of the pioneers in overcoming
obstacles. If for no other reason, Quick's novel should be remembered
for its moving description of the pristine Iowa prairie and Jacobus
Vandemark's insightful response to the first cultivation of it:
Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the
most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in
one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one
of the loveliest things ever created began to come to its predestined
end.
20
The farming country of western
Minnesota ("Pockerbrush country") is the setting for Herbert
Krause's two principal novels, Wind Without Rain (1939)
and The Thresher ( 1946). Krause's view of the experience
of German immigrants is not a cheery one, in spite of his sometimes
poetical style. Not only is the daily toil of farming itself
deadening, but the family of Johann Vildvogel is brutalized by
their despotic father. In addition, the strict and lugubrious
Lutheranism of the immigrants is repressive, especially for the
younger generation. Economic conditions compound the obstacles
to success: higher land prices, mortgages, and low crop prices.
Thus, Wind Without Rain provides an explanation of why
so many children of immigrants found little romance in farm life
and frequently escaped to the city at the first opportunity.
Yet another novelist who deals
with the obstacles foreign-born settlers encountered in the new
land is Sophus Keith Winther, who recorded the plight of the
Danes who came to Nebraska at the turn of the century. His Grimsen
trilogy, Take All to Nebraska, Mortgage Your Heart, and
This Passion Never Dies, chronicles the settlement years
from 1898 to 1922 by stressing the contrast between the hopes
and dreams of the emigrants and realities of life as they found
it in the promised land. Lacking capital and unable to speak
English, the Danes suffer poverty and ridicule. Winther's essentially
naturalistic treatment of the settlement theme is utterly devoid
of sentiment, as his characters are felled by fatalistic forces beyond
their control.
Winther once commented that to
tell the immigrants' story is to add to our understanding of
American culture." Fortunately the story has been told often
and in a variety of ways. One of the many tellings of the settlement
story is Mari Sandoz's Old Jules. In it the author describes
the life of her father, a Swiss immigrant trained in medicine,
who came to the Niobrara Valley of northwest Nebraska in 1884.
A brutal egocentric whose behavior at times bordered on the sadistic,
Jules was nevertheless something of a pioneer hero. Intelligent
and articulate, he promoted land for settlement and, as an early
horticulturist, urged the pioneers to follow sound conservation
practices. Old Jules and Sandoz's other book set in the
sandhill country, the fictional Slogum House, are blunt,
"tough," books that show the role of powerful personalities
engaged in the business of building up a country.
Not all of the numerous prairie authors who wrote about the settlement
of the West and later farm life there, however, take such a harsh
view of the subject. One who does not is Ruth Suckow who, as
one of her advocates put it, always presented the Midwest "with
essential fairness."
Two novelists who depict rural life in a rather cheerful vein
are Bess Streeter Aldrich and Phil Duffield Stong. Aldrich's
A Lantern in Her Hand and Song of Years are fairly
sentimental accounts of the settlement and growth of farming
areas in Nebraska and Iowa before and after the Civil War. The
use of historical detail adds an element of realism to the narratives,
but in the main the lack of serious conflict makes the stories
less than dramatic. One of the most famous of all novels about
American farm
life is Phil Stong's State Fair, a book
made into at least two Hollywood films. The midwest ritual of
the state fair is celebrated as the novel follows a farm family
who take their prize hog to the fair in Des Moines. The Iowa
depicted is a bucolic place, healthy, clean,and peaceful–the
reverse image of the hostile prairie environment depicted in
much other fiction.
The literature of the small town
is the most fecund of all the subjects of midwest writers. In
part, this is because there have been relatively few large cities
in the Midwest. But there are other reasons behind the village's
popularity. From the beginning Americans seem to have been intrigued
by their villages, an image central to the American Dream. For,
though the city was the destination of upward-moving Americans,
the stereotypical origin of future writers, artists, industrialists,
and presidents was the small town. Primarily this was so because
such a locale was considered the ideal place for developing good
health, intelligence, decency, and talent. Moreover, the village
atmosphere was supposed to be the epitome of democratic community
life. In fact, as one critic has stated, "The myth of the
small town was based on a set of ideal antitheses to the city."
23
The small town was assumed by Americans
to have the virtues of the farm but with the added advantage
of business and professional "community" life plus small
but well-intentioned "cultural" elements. These features
along with the celebrated "folksiness" led many villagers
to feel smug about their superior environment–and pity for
the city dweller who had to endure the discomfort and malevolence
of the metropolis. But whereas a great many Americans accepted
this rosy picture of the midwest small town, the literary response
to it has been, though varied, largely a rejection of the picture
as essentially a myth, at odds with reality. And it is significant
that the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature
was from a small midwestern town and was awarded the honor largely
because of his startling portrayal of a small town in Minnesota.
The first important modern novel to treat the small town theme
was printed, just a century ago, on the author's own press in
Atchison, Kansas. The book, The Story of a Country Town (1883)
by Edgar Watson Howe, in spite of its flawed structure and lack
of unity, has long been recognized as one of the opening guns
in the war against the sentimental treatment of village life.
In it the citizens of Twin Mounds, the country town of the title,
are exposed as "futile, argumentative, boastful, discontented,
envious, and mean,"
Hamlin Garland did not devote any entire work to a small town,
but occasionally in several of his early works villages appear.
His attitude toward them is not very negative, certainly it is
less ruthless than that of E. W. Howe. Two stories in Main-Travelled
Roads in fact give an almost sentimental view of the town.
It is in Belleplain in "A Day's Pleasure" that the simple
act of kindness occurs that gives the weary farm wife some brief
pleasure. And the people of Bluff Siding, denounced at first
by the protagonist in "God's Ravens" as caricatures who
warp everything they touch, befriend him during a serious illness
and enable him to see their essential goodness. Similar views
of town "characters" appear in works like Prairie Folks
and A Son of the Middle Border, where the village
comes across as a rather pleasant place. In contrast to the "rigorous,
filthy drudgery of the farm yard," the newly transplanted Garland
found town an exciting place for play and carefree companionship.
He once explained that his view of small town life tended to
be favorable because the villager even when he suffers at least
suffers with others. Also there is more apt to be love in town
because, as he put it, "youth and love are able to transform
a bleak prairie town into a
poem, and to make of a barbed wire lane a highway of romance."
It was through poetry rather than
fiction that Americans first became aware of the movement eventually
known as the Revolt from the Village. Edgar Lee Masters's The
Spoon River Anthology (1915) depicts the life of the village
of the title through the posthumous confessions of 242 of the
town's citizens. Although there are a few noble souls and idealists
among them, the overall picture of Spoon River is one of terrible
spiritual isolation. Most of the characters, destroyed by a suffocating
conformity, are victims of the prevailing values of the town,
what Waldo Frank called the "cruelty of the driven herd."
27
Masters's bold method of presenting
the truth behind the surface of people's lives influenced a number
of Midwest writers who were to endeavor the same thing.
Though Sherwood Anderson falls outside the limits of this history,
no discussion of the literature of the midwest village would
be complete without some mention of his Winesburg, Ohio (1919).
Anderson's treatment of the town is mainly tender, as he dramatizes
the pathetic attempts of a number of townspeople, "grotesques,"
to articulate their deepest feelings. But the town itself is
clearly a major obstacle to self-expression and fulfillment;
it, too, is struggling to find self-esteem and understanding
in a time when the once dominant agrarian culture is declining.
As in a number of village novels, one character distinguishes
himself by intelligence and sensitivity,
which enables him to see his plight somewhat
clearly and to escape the town. Thus, George Willard, the newspaper
reporter for the Winesburg Eagle and confidant of many
of the grotesques, matures and leaves town with the possibility
of future fulfillment, an accomplishment to be attained in the
city–not in the village.
Willa Cather's treatment of the midwest village is somewhat ambiguous.
Sometimes the small town for her is a place of terrible smugness
and hypocrisy, as, for example, in the short story "The
Sculptor's Funeral,' where the nobility of the sculptor is contrasted
with the narrowness of the townspeople. Similarly, in My Ántonia,
the prairie town of Black Hawk has already developed a rigid
caste system which segregates the foreign-born hired girls from
the "American" children of local businessmen. But rarely
does Cather denounce the small town with anything like the bitterness
of Lewis or Masters. It would be inaccurate to place Cather in
the "revolt from the village" movement; nevertheless in
none of her works does she portray the small town as a place
of beauty or joy.
The most celebrated of all the books about small towns in America
and the one by which all others are measured is Sinclair Lewis's
Main Street. Published in 1920, it was a stunning success
and put the world on notice that midwest writers were not simply
apologists for the village. In spite of Lewis's disclaimer in
the foreword to the book that the sins of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota,
are not confined to towns in the Midwest, the novel, because
of its setting and the author's origins, has always encouraged
stereotypes of "hick towns" in the Midwest. Lewis made this
easy to do by cataloging the depressing personalities of some
small town types and by drawing vivid and detailed pictures,
not only of social dullness, but of the banal architecture, furnishings,
and daily customs of the village as well.
To illustrate the power of what the local philosopher cynically
terms the "village virus" Lewis created an idealistic young
rebel, Carol Milford, who, appalled by the ugliness and provinciality
of the town, determines to transform it into "Village Beautiful,"
and to enlighten its citizens. An essential part of Lewis's realistic
treatment of this revolutionary is that Carol is not much better
than the people she wishes to improve and her attempts at reform
are ineffectual. In the end she returns from a trial escape to
an uneasy compromise with the values of husband and town.
To modern readers Lewis's attack on the standardization of American
life as seen in a midwestern small town may seem heavy-handed.
But Main Street so effectively evokes the ambience of
cramped lives, spiritual deadness, and environmental ugliness
that the book remains, and no doubt shall
remain, a classic indictment.
In contrast to Lewis was his contemporary, Zona Gale, a prolific Wisconsin writer, who in a series of eighty-three saccharine stories and several novels about "Friendship Village" portrays the small town as a peaceful place inhabited by happy, sharing, loving "folks." Gale was enough of a booster herself to have written a booklet which set forth a number of ways that citizens could improve the quality of the life in their communities. Eventually, however, Gale too joined the ranks of those who were in revolt against the village. With Birth (1918) and Miss Lulu Bett (1920), Gale's treatment of the village became considerably more harsh. The town of Boarger in Birth is as desolate and ugly as Friendship Village was attractive. Warbleton in Miss Lulu Bett is a provincial place filled with tension, gossip, and meanness. The smug brother-in-law of the title character runs his household with meanness and intolerance. Here the picture drawn of the unemancipated life of the main character and the petty villagers is another subtle yet effective attack on small town mores. Interestingly, Gale was widely recognized in the '20s and '30s as both an advocate and a critic of village life.
The fourth and final midwestern
theme is that of the prairie urbanized and industrialized. Almost
all of the major midwest writers who lived into the middle of
the twentieth century, or who, like Wright Morris and Frederick
Manfred, are still living, have examined this stage of the region's
development. Some, in fact, like Morris, have dealt almost exclusively
with the contemporary scene. The general mood of such works is
somber. Though there may be some celebration of earlier times,
they are increasingly in the background like a bench mark against
which modern values and actions are measured. However, the looking
back is seldom with nostalgia but with a somewhat mordant doubt.
Therefore a recurring motif in literature about the later post-frontier
era is that of diminishment. Some midwest authors seem to be
asking, like Frost's oven bird, what to make of a diminished
thing. For, in spite of physical conditions that seem superior
to those of the pioneers, there is considerable concern about
what is lacking. Particularly evident is emphasis on the decline
of pioneer values.
One of the early and eloquent expressions of this sense of loss
is to be found in Cather's short novel A Lost Lady (1923),
in which the real hero is Captain Forrester, the old railroad
builder, who represents the pioneer virtues of courage, rectitude,
and vision. Cather contrasts him with his wife, the Lost Lady,
who, more concerned with style than substance, moves away from
the foursquare values of the builders. She even consorts with
Ivy Peters, a repulsive symbol of a corrupt new age which lacks
respect for the past. The sensitive observer of this change,
Neil Herbert, laments the end of the old days, the vestiges of
which Cather admirably sums up in an image of "the embers
of the hunter's fire on the prairie after the hunter was
gone."
Frederick Manfred has written extensively of the impact modern
industrialized society has on sensitive individuals. A fictional
trilogy–The Primitive (1945), The Brother (1950),
and The Giant (1951) (published under one title in 1962
as Wanderlust)–traces the development of a
Sioux-land orphan as he gets an education, seeks an occupation,
becomes involved in politics, searches for a father, and, finally,
becomes a composer. Along the way Thurs Wraldson encounters,
in cities, a wide variety of human types and experiences. The
fundamentalist beliefs of his college, the evil of New York City,
the harshness of factory work, and the repressiveness of Communism
all seem to violate the naturalness of life, and lead to disillusion.
A significant symbol for the author's perception of the way things
have changed is the wounded woodpecker Thurs finds in New York.
Totally out of its proper environment and with its wings broken,
the woodpecker appears to represent the plight of modern man,
far from his roots, overwhelmed by a complex and hostile urban
society. Thus, Manfred's account of this search for self seems
to conclude that ultimate value is to be found in such things
as creativity, rootedness, closeness to nature, and the peacefulness
of rural life–though these are qualities increasingly difficult
to find.
Similarly, Morning Red (1956) and Milk of Wolves (1976)
emphasize the blunting effect of political and financial corruption,
in the life of the city. The former work, in particular, dramatizes
the problem of trying to live with integrity in a perplexing
world. Its two protagonists, Kurt Faver and Jack Nagel, struggle
to complete themselves, a struggle made more difficult because
of the corrupt environment. Of the two men, the country-bred
one appears to be more adaptable to life. Like Conquering Horse
and Hugh Glass Kurt relies more on instinct than on intellect
as he fights to survive.
Another contemporary midwest writer who continues to explore
the connection between the pioneer past and the contemporary
scene is Wright Morris. Morris moved away from his native Nebraska
and uses other settings for his fiction; frequently, however,
his characters have inner conflicts
which are the result of early years spent in
the Midwest. His recurring use of the West as a theme would seem
to indicate that he accepts the Turnerian idea that the frontier
was the major determinant of the American character. Thus Morris's
work as a whole comprises a serious attempt to define what it
means to be an American. Like so many writers, Morris seeks to
discover his own personal relationship to the past, especially
the mythical pioneer past.
Three novels illustrate this well: Inhabitants (1946),
The Home Place (1948), and The World in the Attic (1949).
In them, contemporary life is pictured as unpleasant, the modern
West in particular containing much cheapness and violence. Morris
appears to suggest, ironically, that the life of the pioneers,
or at least the mythical version of it, was the cause of this
modern wasteland. Moreover, these books point up Morris's determination
to search for and use new and appropriate aesthetic techniques.
This is necessary, he states in his book of criticism The
Territory Ahead (1958), in order to properly capture and
understand the pioneer past which by now has been overprocessed.
Another significant device Morris employs is his own photography.
His stark photographs are usually of things with personal and
cultural significance, mostly old and wornout objects comprising
a kind of commentary or silent narrative. The Inhabitants
contains a series of such pictures, a visual account of Nebraska
farms associated with the author's life. The Home Place uses
photographs to illustrate the lives of those who lived on the
farms; and The World in the Attic is a novel about a man's
return to his home place in Nebraska. The character, who is the
narrator, responds to old scenes with the conflicting emotions
that Morris often juxtaposes when considering the midwestem experience:
joy and horror, nostalgia and nausea.
Thus Morris, like Cooper and Cather before him, deals with America
in moments of transition. Indeed one critic has suggested that
in order to understand twentieth-century America one should read
two books, Cather's My Ántonia and Morris's Ceremony
at One Tree, for the two do nothing less than "embody
in symbolic fashion the national experience."
Another approach to the modern Midwest comes from an expatriate
who, like others of that ilk, attempted to exorcise his pioneer
ancestry. To do so, Glenway Wescott wrote The Grandmothers
(1927), a looking-back novel in which the main character
searches through memories of family history hoping to locate
some meaning. The Towers, prototypical westwardmoving pioneers,
went from England to New York to Wisconsin, where
they settled in a place called, significantly,
Hope's Corners. The central figure, Alwyn Tower, while living
in Austria and Monte Carlo, tries to sort out the mythical from
the real in a past that continues to haunt him, even though its
conditions no longer exist.
That wilderness of history and hearsay,
that distorted landscape of a dream which had come true before
it had been dreamed, was there where it had been, but buried,
buried under the plowed land, the feet of modern men, and the ripening crops.
31
As he muses on his own memories,
bits of gossip, tales, and imaginings of his family, he begins
to understand that the pioneers' lives were filled with frustration
and failure as they repeatedly did not attain their hearts' desire
and thus had to seek fulfillment "in heaven, as it had been
in Europe, as it had always been."
32
Nevertheless the picture Tower
draws of his ancestors, including all their weaknesses and failures,
points up as well their great strengths such as imagination and
vitality. Thus The Grandmothers, like so many novels which
are intended to debunk the achievement of the pioneer, ends up
more elegy than exorcism, a celebration of the "regional
ghost dominating the present from the darkness of the past."
33
As the twentieth century draws to a close, writers of the Midwest
continue to express their feelings about the spirit of the region,
its past and its present. They persist in celebrating its physical
attributes while at the same time criticizing its moral climate,
a process that sometimes leads to political analysis of the world
beyond its borders. Two authors who represent this tendency are
Thomas McGrath and Robert Bly, both poets and activists, who
live in and write about their native region.
McGrath's major work is a long autobiographical poem-in-progress,
Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Parts I and II published
in 1962 and 1970). Part of the poem is a recapitulation of the
author's childhood experiences in rural North Dakota, during
the "last years of the Agrarian City" as he describes the
period. It was a time of much cooperative effort: plowing, chopping,
threshing, all part of the "warm circle of work." But it
was a hard and disheartening existence, too, as farmers struggled
with grasshoppers, dust storms, mortgages and foreclosures. Any
possible nostalgia for agrarian life is tempered by McGrath's
vivid awareness of injustice. An early friendship with a radical
hired hand who proposed a strike during harvest and was beaten
by the poet's uncle is one of several incidents in the poem which
account for the lifelong sympathy McGrath has had for radical
causes, including, at one time, Communism.
In viewing the past of the heartland,
McGrath laments the corruptive element in Manifest Destiny, which,
though it enabled white Americans to gain land and freedom, did
so by depriving Native Americans of theirs, thus
causing "a part of our souls [to be] scabbed
over." But genocide was only one aspect of the dark side of settlement.
Breaking land that should have been left to grass was another.
The result, as McGrath depicts it, is a wasteland of abandoned
farmhouses, roads leading nowhere, and the old neighborliness
gone. The Midwest, here intended as a synecdoche for the whole
of modern civilization, suffers not only from financial but moral
bankruptcy, and the optimistic, though doomed, old farmer's refrain
of "We'll make her yet" is replaced by the picture of the
modern wheat farmer, who lives away from the land and winters
in Acapulco.
Robert Bly is another poet from the northern plains who makes
powerful use of local material, but who is also known as a critic
of national policy. Bly lives in the country in Minnesota, a
state which figures prominently in a number of his poems. Silence
in the Snowy Fields (1962) in particular contains sharp images
of the most elemental features of prairie landscape: barns, farmhouses,
telegraph poles, and small towns. References to specific places
abound as well as do the seasons, particularly winter. The images,
though usually conveying a feeling of dryness or bleakness, are
treated with awe and affection, indicating that the private universe
of the poet finds joy, order, and peace in the outer world. Rarely
is there an explicit reference to the frontier past of the region,
but sometimes there are telling suggestions of its presence.
An example appears in the poem "Afternoon Sleep," when the
poet, intrigued by a farm which an old bachelor sold, drove out
to the place and found it deserted and
Much of Bly's work after Silence in the Snowy Fields is
political in nature and goes beyond the Midwest for its settings.
But even when the poet is diagnosing the ills of society as a
whole, he alludes to evil consequences of the westward movement.
Bly links the tragedy of Vietnam and that of Wounded Knee because
behind both was America's obsessive hatred of nonwhite races.
Thus his poem "Hatred of Men with Black Hair" tells of the
perfidy of those who skinned Little Crow and overthrew Chief
Joseph.
In addition to his reputation as a poet Bly
is known as an editor (as founder and editor of the periodical
The Fifties and its sequels) as well as a translator of
European and South American verse.
Both McGrath and Bly represent one dimension of a new and sophisticated literary regionalism. They, and many others including
Meridel LeSueur, William Gass, Larry Woiwode, and the still active
Frederick Manfred, continue to dramatize the psychological trauma
that marks the industrialized post-pioneer era. For, in the mid-1980s,
the character of the midwest seems to be swiftly changing. The
rural population, already low, is dwindling; fewer and fewer
farmers are capable of making an independent living on "family-sized"
farms. Foreign and corporate ownership of the land is increasingly
common. The big cities, once the pride of the region, have been
transformed from centers that processed and distributed farm
products to places that process money and real estate.
But change is nothing new to the Midwest. For over a century
the region has been the scene of what has been aptly described
as "one of the world's great revolutions, a vast reordering
of what men felt they knew about land, a discarding of old traditions
and methods, and a painful learning process in which men adapted
to a new system."
Inside were old abandoned books
And instructions to Norwegian immigrants.
Underneath all the cement of the Pentagon
There is a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow:
Preserved from a trail of blood that once led away
From the stockade, over the snow the trail now lost.
From the outset writers have viewed the setting of this revolution from a number of sharply contrasting perspectives. Some have treated it as a Garden or Valley of Democracy. Others have considered it a "bewildered empire." 35 And the need to describe and explain the bewilderment has always been of disproportionate concern. A large number of poets and novelists have pointed to the failure of the pioneers, as well as their successors, to respect and love the land as did the original inhabitants as a major cause of the spiritual confusion of the region. Similarly they have charged midwesterners as mistakenly regarding nature as the enemy, instead of seeing that, as Robert Scholes has suggested, the true enemy was "man's power over nature, his ability to transform it and tear the heart out of it in the process." 36
Perhaps as the process of revolution continues, the next major theme of Royce's "higher provincialism" will be the spiritual sickness that has resulted from technological progress and demographic change in the region. Future writers may concentrate on the conflict between separateness and oneness. Though the image of the lone individual confronting Indians and the elements has been at the heart of the myth of the West, the consequences of that confrontation have not been entirely happy. Hence it will be necessary to examine the role of the single self and its relationship to the universal whole. The result may be a new literary emphasis on the spiritual oneness of man and humanity, of man and the land.
G EORGE F. D AY, University of Northern Iowa
Notes 1. J. Milton Mackie, "Forty Days in a Western Hotel," Putnam's Monthly Magazine 4 (1854): 630, quoted in Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 11n.
2. Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, American Regionalism (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), p. 463.
3. John T. Flanagan, America Is West (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1945), pp. iv–v.
4. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 322.
5. Quoted in Dorothy Anne Dondore, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press, 1926), p. 11.
6. Dondore, p. 16.
7. Dondore, p. 21.
8. Manasseh Cutler, An Explanation of the Map of Federal Lands (1787) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966), p. 14.
9. Ralph Leslie Rusk, The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 275.
10. Rusk, p. 282.
11. Rusk, p. 286.
12. Charles Allen, "The Midland," American Prefaces 3, No. 9 (June 1938): 136.
13. Robert C. Wright, Frederick Manfred (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), p. 93.
14. Chester E. Eisinger, quoted and paraphrased in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 126.
15. Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton R. Patrick, Realism and Romanticism in Fiction: An Approach to the Novel (Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1962), p. 7.
16. Hamlin Garland, quoted in Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garland's Early Work and Career (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 164.
17. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1962) p. 353.
18. Roy W. Meyer, The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 229.
19. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), p. 309.
20. Herbert Quick, Vandemark's Folly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922), p. 228.
21. Sophus Keith Winther, "The Immigrant Theme," Arizona Quarterly 34 (Spring 1978): 36.
22. John T. Frederick, "Ruth Suckow and the Middle West Literary Movement," College English 20 (January 1931): 5.
23. Anthony Channell Hilfer, Revolt from the Village, 1915–1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 5.
24. Carl Van Doren, Many Minds (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), p. 37.
25. E. W. Howe, Plain People (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929), p. 184.
26. Hamlin Garland, Other Main-Travelled Roads (New York: Harper and Bros., 1910), pp. v, viii.
27. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1949), p. 128.
28. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), p. 168.
29. Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), p.9
30. James E. Miller, Jr., "The Nebraska Encounter: Willa Cather and Wright Morris," Prairie Schooner 41 (Summer 1967): 166.
31. Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950), p.30
32. Wescott, p. 29.
33. Dayton Kohler, "Glenway Wescott: Legend-Maker," The Bookman 63 (April 1931): 145.
34. John Madson, Where the Sky Began (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 203.
35. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), p. 1.
36. Robert Scholes, "The Fictional Heart of the Country: From Rolvaag to Gass," in Ole Rolvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, ed. Gerald Thorson (Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf College Press, 1975, p. 13.
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