Searching for sense in the heartland

Michael Martone, editor. A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest.
Sixteen photographs by David Plowden. Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press
for the Iowa Humanities Board, 1988. Pp. 144. $17.50 (cloth); $8.50 (paper).

In search of the Midwest, eight very different writers have combined the region's elements — its flatness and farmsteads, courthouses, cafes and characters — in such personal, yet similar webs of memory and association that any reader would conclude there is a midwestern turn of mind.

In the title essay, Michael Martone suggests that story and reminiscence are the only responses to a landscape that "is more like the materials of art itself — the stretched canvas and paper," a topography that reflects feeling but "can never take us emotionally in the way smokey crags or crawling oceans can." The Midwest is not a heart, Martone continues, but a tissue, a membrane, "an organ of sense."

Louise Erdrich, whose novels Love Medicine and The Beet Queen make her perhaps the best known of all the contributors, would not be surprised at the attention her region has attracted from these writers, for "the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, products, paranoias, dialects, and failures" is critical to any writer, she argues. "Location, whether it is to abandon it or draw it sharply, is where we start."

Writers may use stories to make a place come alive, but Jane Staw and Mary Swander find in "If You Can Talk to a Guy" that people in south-central Minnesota, like tribal storytellers, locate themselves in time and space through memory: "Each time Harold Golly steps out of his house and looks across his land, east to his son Tom's, west to Mary and Duane's, all of those people assemble there, on the crest where he stands. . . their pasts and presents coming together on a piece of land and at a time that transcended last year's winter blizzards, the spring floods, the

. . . Janet Kauffman sees 'tyranny rather than bliss' in the Midwest's postcard landscape of cultivated fields, a sign that our culture looks at land only as real estate

summer's oats ripening next to Harold's garden, to create an eternal moment. . . .

In "The Way the Country Lies," Douglas Bauer concludes that the writing life he has pursued can be linked to the farming he has chosen not to do because both vocations share "isolation, independence, the planting of a crop with no assurance of harvest." Bauer left rural Iowa, yet he returns periodically: "I've come to realize that what I'll lose if Prairie City dies is my most uncompromising mirror. . . . If it dies, I'll have nothing more accurately reflecting than the dubious specter of memory, literally no way of life to have left."

"Under the Sign of Wonder Bread and Belmont Caskets" by Michael J. Rosen chronicles his departure from Columbus, Ohio, for medical school in Grenada and his return to the suburban Midwest as a writer. Hundreds of miles away from home, he began to locate himself in a personal Midwest, understanding finally that the actual destination for the Sunday drives of his childhood "had been the opportunity to be together, as though family were, itself, a place."

In "American Gothic," David Hamilton takes the reader on a loopy remembrance of girlfriends to be and not to be, walks to school under shade trees, coaches and star athletes, teenage outlaws, untimely deaths — the only way for those who leave after high school to comprehend the town they knew. And yet he discovers years later how immiscible layers of memory are for people only two high school generations away from each other: "Barbara's memories and fixations must interlock as thickly as my own, yet are all but entirely different."

The Midwest has what Gary Comstock calls in "Grandma's Backbone, Dougie's Ankles" "places of little sense," like south-central Minnesota and Prairie City, "where stories are more economical than analysis," as well as "places of big sense," like his alma mater, The University of Chicago, a celebrated institution of higher learning. "How do you hold together a Chicago Ph.D. and a Mason City farm in one story?" Comstock asks, utterly aware of the practical contradiction in his work as a professor of religious studies contemplating the plight of the family farmer. His essay explores this familiar paradox through family stories (little sense), tempered by an ambivalence about the power of narrative (big sense).

"Letting Go: The Virtue of Vacant Ground" could have been the most elegiac of all the essays, since here Janet Kauffman sees "tyranny rather than bliss" in the Midwest's postcard landscape of cultivated fields, a sign that our culture looks at land only as real estate. However, she makes the reader think more about the future than the past as she cautions regional residents: "We have an arsenal of ideas about land use possibly as dangerous to human life on the planet as the use of nuclear arms."

These writers reflect a region "not often painted or photographed," but one that "teaches you a soft touch," according to Martone. They say flat out, "This is where I come from" and "Luckily, this is still a part of me." They offer us both a coherent view of the Midwest and a welcome manifesto. □

Kristina Valaitis is editor and publications director at the Illinois Humanities Council. She contributed the text of Illinois, with photographs by Gary Irving (published in 1988 by Graphic Arts in Portland, Ore.).

August & September 1989 | Illinois Issues | 49