The Beiderbecke Affair

‘This is glory enough for one day’

I’ve told you before about the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi River, connecting Davenport, Iowa, with Rock Island, Illinois. (Read about how Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, and Abe Lincoln all had their hands in the project.) But you’ve got to read the Chicago Press report of the first crossing, on April 22, 1856, to get a sense of how a big a deal this was. For instance, the paper begins its coverage with, of all people, Julius Caesar (excuse, if you can, the garbled syntax):

When Caesar with his legions crossed the Rubicon, which divides Cissalpine Gaul from Italy, he was well aware of the greatness of the work he was engaged in; and although many attempted to dissuade him from such an undertaking, yet nothing daunted he landed his array on the plains of Italy, astonished the world by his deeds—and left mankind an instance of bravery and enterprise worthy of record.

Et tu, Davenport?

We, too, however, have crossed the “Rubicon”—the great “Father of Waters”—which for centuries has rolled on into the bosom of the mighty ocean without a pier to mar its progress. To-day has the mighty deed been accomplished at which the world has so often smiled in derision. Yes, the Mississippi is practically no more. It is spanned by the mighty artery of commerce and enterprise—the railroad. Science has stretched its arms across the ever-flowing Mississippi—and along its fine-knit muscles has the “iron horse” bounded with a heavy snort as it scent from afar the sluggish waters of the Missouri. The mission of Caesar of old was to conquer; so that of the Caesar of the nineteenth century; but the latter is one of peace and plenty. The “war horse” of civilization may have fiery nostrils, but it has an olive branch, the seeds from which it scatters as it flies.

The New York Daily Times, which ran a story on April 28, was not given to such melodrama. It lopped off those two grafs from the Press’s coverage and began here:

That such an event should have occurred without an assemblage of spectators from all quarters of the globe to witness it, is only another instance of the mighty progress which has been made within the last fifty years in the science of bridge building. As we approached Rock Island there were rumors afloat that we would cross to Iowa on the bridge. “Cross the Mississippi on a bridge!” cried an intelligent looking gentleman. “On a bridge?” simpered a feminine voice from a young lady to her parents, bound for Council Bluffs; “why, Pa, I thought the Mississippi was a great river, larger than the Hudson.”

The Times went on to provide specs of the bridge, blah blah blah, but cut the big moment—when train meets bridge! So back to the Press:

Swiftly we sped along the iron track—Rock Island appeared in sight—the whistle sounded and the conductor cried out, “Passengers for Iowa keep their seats!” There was a pause—a hush, as it were, preparatory to the fierceness of a tornado. Tho cars roared on—the bridge was reached—“We’re on the bridge—see the mighty Mississippi rolling on beneath”—and all eyes were fastened on the mighty parapets of the magnificent bridge, over which we glided in solemn silence. A few minutes and the suspended breath was let loose. “We’re over!” was the cry, “we have crossed the Mississippi in a railroad car.” “This is glory enough for one day,” said a passenger, as he hustled his carpetbag and himself out of the cars.

IMAGE: A rare photograph of the bridge, from Arsenal Island, dated around 1860

VQR: Iowans Still Have Essential Dignity

I was checking out the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review online earlier today and ran across a short review of a new collection of black-and-white photographs: Driftless: Photographs from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier. According to VQR, the subjects of Frazier’s work—migrants, slaughterhouse and factory types, people who live in trailers—“haven’t been defeated”; rather, they get their pleasure “in the form of deer hunting and pool halls, cigarettes, beer, and”—wait for it—“love.”

In the end, the magazine assures us, these poor Iowans manage to hold on to their “essential dignity.”

Christ Almighty. How much more condescending and clichéd can a review get?

Still, the photos are gorgeous. And bleak. And make me miss home. Find a whole slideshow here and another exhibit here.

IMAGE: Dirt Road, Near Lone Tree, 2003 by Danny Wilcox Frazier

That Bridge Again

Another great photo of “That Old Ugly Beauty,” the Government Bridge that connects Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, across the Mississippi River. February 1940; Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. (Via Shorpy)

On the Midwest, Murder, and Minnesota Nice

A reader responds to an earlier inventory of Midwestern stereotypes:

Okay, so usually when I read your blog I’m too intimidated by the discussion of things I don’t know enough about to actually have an opinion. Other than nodding my head and cursing you for probably actually finishing Ulysses, too.

But I am intrigued by the Midwesterners discussion because, having lived in Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota, I didn’t consider Fargo to be a commentary on the Midwestern psyche, habits, or idiosyncrasies. Maybe it’s a situation of not being able to see the forest for the trees . . . but it’s really a satire of a very distinctly Minnesotan emotional avoidance.

I went and read the blog that your excerpt came from and learned she was talking about a book written by a St. Paul native. Which isn’t anything on which to base one’s opinion of Midwesterners as a whole. What I’m about to say falls under the category of broad, sweeping generalizations, of course. But it’s backed up by evidence, even if it is anecdotal.

Iowans are genuine and genuinely nice. Minnesotans are nice on the surface but very passive aggressive. One of the little slogans of the state is “Minnesota Nice.” The non-natives who live there amend that to say “Minnesota Nice (to your face).” It’s not a very demonstrative way of life; the people in general tend to be overtly private and covertly judgmental. Actually, I found that you get the “feel” of Minnesota even in the music. If you listen to The Jayhawks or The Replacements, there’s almost a dirgelike, restrained quality that’s there underneath lots of yearning and pretty melodies. Like a train being held back. Minnesota is all about holding back. Very out of touch, at least on the surface, and always waiting for the snow to melt. Lots of repression. What’s under the surface is often beautiful but can be menacing—just like the landscape and the weather.

That’s why Fargo is so subversive, because the entire movie is about inappropriate behavior and the absolute worst instincts of humanity. But even that is botched and done badly. If it was done right the first time, there goes the plot. If the Coen brothers weren’t from Minnesota, I would admit that maybe I’m talking outta my ass. But they are, so I don’t think I am. Lots of people I knew from Fargo hated that movie. Their main complaint? “We don’t really sound like that!” They completely missed the irony. Of course they missed it.

I don’t think anything I’ve said about Minnesota applies to Iowa. They’re very different places. Iowa lives up to the wide-open and simple stereotypes, in many respects. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

As I said, all broad strokes, I know. But it was my experience. I love both places but they are very different.

QUICK RESPONSE: No way could I finish Ulysses.

Who Knew There Was a Downside?

Danielle Trussoni on Midwesterners:

For a quick tutorial in stereotypes about Midwesterners, take a look at the Coen brothers’ film Fargo. In it, you will see that Midwesterners are pleasant and patriotic and plump. You will understand that we are wholesome, hardworking folks with oversized cars and undersized vocabularies who wear white tennis shoes to church. We love all-you-can-eat buffets. Our houses are clean. (I’ll never forget a story that Francine Prose told while visiting the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2001 about her Iowan landlady, who suggested that she clean the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush. Being native to the Midwest, I was mortified. At the same time, I thought: There’s no place like (a clean) home! ) Of course, Fargo also reminds us of the Midwestern tendency toward violence. Ed Gein, whose career inspired the movie Psycho, was born in my hometown of La Crosse, WI. Jeffery Dahmer, murderer of at least seventeen men, was from Milwaukee. The list goes on and on. Everyplace has a downside. Ours happens to be serial murder. And Jello salad.

MEANWHILE: My hometown’s famous murderer now works at a taco stand.

PREVIOUSLY: The pathetic, puttering creatures known as retired Iowa farmers, or retired Iowa anything

On Iowa & Iowans

“You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa.” – Gertrude Stein

“Seldom has a people been less interested in spiritual self-expression and more concerned with hog nutrition.” – Johan J. Smertenko 

M & I visited the lovely Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton, Virginia, on Sunday, and happened into a bookstore where I found These United States: Portraits of America from the 1920s. It’s a collection of 49 essays—one for each state plus New York City—which appeared in The Nation magazine beginning in April of 1922. The essay on Iowa, penned by Johan J. Smertenko, is so crude, so mean-spirited, so comically malevolent and harrumphingly elitist, that, well, I purchased the book straight away. I guess I enjoy that sort of thing.

Iowa has always been backward in the popular imagination. One of my favorite examples can be found on the opening pages of the first full-length biography of Davenport, Iowa-native Bix Beiderbecke. “Although the majority of its citizens might falter if taxed for the reason,” the authors wrote back in 1958, “Davenport does, in fact, claim a modest degree of fame.” The writers were Brits, it should be noted, and pipe-smokingly stuck up, too. They had never actually set foot in the United States, let alone Davenport.

Not much has changed over the years. Check out Ted Gioia’s otherwise fine History of Jazz, published in 1997: “If New Orleans was a city immersed in music, Davenport was a community steeped in—what else?—corn fields.” Or, for a slightly more political twist on Iowa, check out a recent Washington Post headline or Sarah Vowell in The New York Times. (I ask you to take for granted that Iowa is not, was not, this hick caricature. That may be a lot to ask . . .)

Back, then, to Smertenko, who wrote that “Iowa appealed more than any other State to the cautious, prosaic, industrious, and mediocre.” The optimistic among us might get hung up on “industrious,” but then we read on:

He who has met the pathetic, puttering creatures known as retired Iowa farmers, or retired Iowa anything, with their tool sheds and truck gardens, their bees and their Fords, their incompleted real-estate deals and their worthless auction bargains, will thereafter find cosmic disturbance in the flutter of a leaf and universal significance in the movements of an ant. Yet this is all the leisure they know in ‘Ioway,’ and even this is reserved by public opinion for those who are on the grayer side of sixty.

The result has been justly called a dull, gray monotone. With the exception of a thinly disguised immorality and a spiritless church affiliation, rural Iowa—more than a million souls—has no interests beyond bread and butter.

At this point even Smertenko anticipates a spluttering & indignant objection. What about our high literacy rate? What about our public schools?

I give you Smertenko:

[Iowans] confuse literacy with education—witness their extensive primary-school system and their privately endowed, undernourished, and mendicant academies styled colleges. They mistake the social activities of a few liberated housewives for the cultural expression of a people—thus they visualize art as a half-dozen much-mispronounced, expensive, and authenticated masters; they understand poetry in terms of syndicated “people’s bards” and leather-bound sets of undying and uncomprehended “classics”; they make the acquaintance of music in an annual enthusiastic meeting with an operatic banality. Their best theater is a child of the drama league of Chicago; their folk-songs are creations of Broadway; their epic theme is a misguided cyclone.

The next time anyone finds ignorance in one of my book reviews, I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that it’s not me so much as it is Iowa. Meanwhile, as an aside, Smertenko blames “the South . . . and all the backwardness that the word connotes . . . for the Iowaness of Iowa.”

And then, in one final blinding flash of irony, he scoffs that “Iowans manifest an unmistakable inferiority complex.”

I wonder why.

PREVIOUSLY: Way Down in Eye-Oh-Way

IMAGE: Map of Iowa, 1895

Autocartography (Part 3)

From my essay “Lost in Clinton County”:

“Saying a place is flat,” writes Patricia Hampl, “is another way of pretending it’s simpler than it is.” But what does simple mean? Simple is having no investment, no memory. There’s no pretending involved at all. People who say that Iowa is flat are people just driving through or just visiting, people whose attention is focused on spotting I-80 speed traps or maybe getting a Ph.D. For them, it is flat in the way that maps are flat, or myths: static and one-dimensional, outside of history, until we add all the stuff of our experience: our questions, our desires, our fears. With only a map, they aren’t in a position to see the hills like I do. They aren’t in a position to notice the exaggerated way in which they bubble up from the earth like the Indian mounds I visited as a kid, the ones Northeast of here in McGregor, or like the ancient tumuli which pimple the Irish countryside: “The mound like a round / of earth pregnant / with fragments, bones,” writes the Welsh poet Mike Jenkins. They are round because—like the web-like interlacing popular in Celtic art—they contain within themselves the beginning and the end, the womb and the coffin, even while both are impossible to locate. I strain to hear my ancestors speak to me from beneath these hills. I want to hear them, to feel their voices resonate in the crevices of my own memory. The beginning and the end. The whole mythic journey is contained within this landscape, in its blues, greens, yellows, and blacks. In the way its colors run together. And people just driving through forget how you can climb the hills, slide down, and climb up again, driving forever, and seeming to get nowhere.

PREVIOUSLY: Part 1 and Part 2

IMAGE: Yin Yang Iowa Fields by Sally Stevens

Headline of the Day

This one courtesy the Washington Post:

Iowans Feel Snubbed, But Will It Matter?

As if you needed to ask . . .

IMAGE: American Gothic (watercolor) by Jennifer Wiggs

On Being Nowhere

Here’s a photograph of my great-grandfather Maurice Wolfe and his wife, Sarah McAndrew. (My grandfather Ray is the one directly behind his mother.) Maurice was the first in his family of Irishmen to have been born in Iowa, and he claimed to have left the state for awhile to ride with the Texas Rangers. Was Maurice full of shit? If Sarah were still alive, I’d ask her. I doubt he could have gotten much past her.

It has never struck me as particularly important, though, whether his story is true. It is told. It is part of the family, and so part of an essay I wrote a few years ago:

This is what I’m thinking about: that day of leaving, over a hundred years ago, when my great-grandfather saddled up and left behind the open and fertile fields of his Iowa farm and traveled south for the even more vast and barren expanses of Texas. I imagine there must have been butterflies in his stomach, like I’ve felt now and again. The sort that come with nervousness, dissatisfaction, the sudden need to escape. They might have been the same butterflies his father had felt when he left Kerry for another life, in many respects a harder life, in Iowa.

And I admit that sometimes I’m forced to remind myself it’s all just a story: one of Uncle Dan’s stories, one of my own stories—and Maurice Wolfe probably never rode with the Texas Rangers or even so much as roped a cow. It’s a grudging admission on my part because there’s something that feels perfectly natural about hoping for a cowboy in my past. Cowboys are a way of double-checking my credentials, my manhood, my red, white, and blue. Claiming cowboy in my pedigree is like being descended from one of the Pilgrims. It means that more than you, I’m from here. My papers are in order. I can ride tall and spit with pride, wear my blue jeans, listen to Hank Williams, and watch football on TV. What’s ironic, though, is that the myth of the cowboy is really about being nowhere. About being from nowhere.

The cowboy started out herding steer along the Western trails shortly after the end of the Civil War. His job description was as simple as this: move the animals from here to there. “For me, a cowboy is a man who tends cows,” driver R. J. Poteet tells his pokes in James Michener’s Centennial. “All day, every day. Those cows yonder are the reason you’re here. And gettin’ up north in one piece is your only responsibility.” Somewhere in the choke-dust of the trail, though, the cowboy seemed to get lost and enter the open plain of myth. He became the nameless drifter in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian: the “slim young giant more beautiful than pictures” who, in his soft hat and dull-scarlet handkerchief, had traveled “many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon.” He lost not just his name, his purpose, his individuality, but his destination, what before had defined his very existence. He had come from the horizon and that’s where he was headed.

Joseph Campbell wrote that the narrative of the classic hero myth adheres to the cycle of departure, fulfillment, and return. This is the basic story outline followed by Prometheus, Odysseus, and Don Quixote, Western culture’s blue-ribbon exemplars of spiritual transformation. In each of their tales, they quest for a new place; but the place to find, the reader understands, is not in the world, but within yourself. This is the American cowboy: like John Wayne in the final frames of The Searchers, he is a solitary figure walking away from the camera into the desert. He is always roaming, always dreaming, always looking for the borderline. Fulfillment, according to this story, only comes with departure, and yet never really comes with arrival. It is somehow gained in the searching.

PREVIOUSLY: Lost Among the Wolfes

On Leaving Iowa

I wrote an essay a few years ago called “Lost in Clinton County.” It’s about a trip my family and I once took back to the farmland where my dad and his sisters were born. We got lost looking for a priest’s house—Irish Catholics that we are—and ended up at a Casey’s convenience store. “My aunt and uncle and two cars full of cousins had happened to pull in at the same time, retreating from the opposite direction. We hadn’t planned it, but we became a caravan and now we are all lost together and we are wondering why even the locals can’t figure their way through these roads.”

Or, for that matter, people who grew up there.

It’s been awhile since we were at the Casey’s. since we’ve seen another car, even. Will we ever be able to get back to John and Jo Lynn, sitting by the side of the road having a beer? How will we ever find County Road E63? There are no signs out here and even if there were, they would be hidden in the dust. We are here and apparently that is supposed to be enough. But for whom? Here I am going back to something that I don’t know and hardly claim to comprehend, those sweaty afternoons in the cornfields aside, while my dad, on the other hand, literally becomes depressed when he sees how much things have changed. It’s as if every board on every front porch is forever etched in his memory and to see one come unnailed is to similarly unnail a cherished but fragile understanding he has constructed over the years.

The essay is about what most essays are about on some level: coming, going, remembering, forgetting. But I hadn’t read it in a long time; a friend of mine encouraged me to retrieve it from the mothballs. Now it seems especially relevant as I prepare to leave Iowa again (and for the last time?).

The understanding, I think, is that when you leave, what changes is you, not what you left. Isn’t that what Joseph Campbell wrote? In fact, Campbell argued that is precisely the reason we leave—to search for some kind of spiritual nourishment—and we do so according to the tattered and marked-up stories we tell ourselves, stories of cowboys and immigrants and all the other various prototypes and archetypes we fashion ourselves after. It makes me wonder sometimes which comes first, the story or the experience. Are we called to follow those stray cows or do they in fact follow us? Which is to also ask, can we separate Clinton County from the stories? In the end, does it even matter? All that remains are those stories. All that’s left is the leaving. This landscape, these blue-green hills and fields, where my dad and his dad and his dad before him were born and raised, disappears slowly across the horizon. And for my dad, this place and his memories of this place are the same. It’s no wonder that we’re lost.

PREVIOUSLY: On Leaving Iowa City; “Maine is a lot like Iowa,” he said, “but without the self-loathing”; mine is a family of storytellers; I think we are haunted by the ghosts of tongues lost

IMAGE: Iowa Field by Greg Newbold; © 2005 Greg Newbold, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of the artist.

ADDITIONALLY: See more of Newbold’s paintings & illustrations here. His work has been commissioned by Simon & Schuster, Random House, Harper Collins, and Sony Pictures. He has also illustrated children’s books, including The Touch of the Master’s Hand (Gold Leaf, 1996).