Lost Among the Wolfes

My wife K— knows my family better than I do. On Saturday we were sipping beers on our friends’ patio when the neighbor waved hello and got into her car. I remember looking at the woman closely. She had glamorously frizzy hair & designer shades.

“That’s your cousin Mary,” K— pointed out after she had driven away.

“Really?”

I come from a big Irish-Catholic family, and Mary, my second cousin, is the eldest of eight. I can’t keep track of them all, I guess. For some reason this reminds me of how my dad, on visits back to the farmland where he grew up in Clinton County, Iowa, never fails to get lost. How appropriate, then, that 150 years ago his immigrant family settled in a town called Lost Nation.

Various efforts have been undertaken over the years to make sense of our sprawling family. In 1911, for instance, my great-great uncle published two thick, solemn-looking volumes called Wolfe’s History of Clinton County. They were self-congratulatory and, despite the fact that my uncle was a state judge, light on the verifiable.

No matter. Mine is a family of storytellers.

Sixty-four years later, my dad revived the tradition with his essay, “Origin of the Species, or Whatever Happened to Old What’s-His-Name?” In it, he introduced the reader to his grandfather Maurice, probably the first Wolfe to be born in Lost Nation and the only one who claimed to have been a Texas Ranger. “The writer knows little about him,” my dad confessed,

but it can be assumed he became a Catholic and a Democrat at approximately the same time. It is possible, however, that he inherited some of his father’s Marxist revolutionary ideas, although there is no record of political insurrection in Lost Nation or Toronto during his lifetime. It is well known in Lost Nation, though, that Grandfather Maurice attended his agrarian pursuits in spurts which he called “five year plans.” His favorite tools were the hammer and sickle.

Ironically, my dad didn’t know much more about his own father, Ray.

He joined the Navy in World War I. He caught no Germans, but he did catch the flu. In 1925 he caught Gladys McGinn of Petersville. (She was only twenty-two at the time, but that didn’t stop her from continually telling her own children that no one with a grain of sense marries under thirty. To gently remind her of her own age in 1925 only brought about a foot stomping and the response, “That was different.”)

That’s Gladys & Ray (above) with her parents and her many, many, many siblings. Gladys is the young & skinny one to the right of her mother (she’s got a severe part in her hair and a V-neck dress; click on the photo to see a larger version). Ray, though, is mostly hidden. He’s behind and to the right, his face round, his head mostly bald. I can see just enough of him to see my father. (Any more, I think, and the resemblance would be lost.) This photograph was taken five or six years before my dad was born. As it turns out, he and his father never knew each other; Ray died of cancer in 1941, when my dad was less than a year old.

Instead, my dad grew up in a county crowded with first and second cousins. He knew them all and still does.

Which reminds me of a story: When I was an undergraduate, a fellow student turned to me a bit abruptly at the beginning of class. She was older than the rest of us, more mature, and more assertive. She said to me, “You’re a Wolfe, aren’t you? I can tell just by looking at you.”

Turns out she is married to Mary’s younger brother John. Like K—, she knows our family better than we do.

[June 5, 2006]

On Being Nowhere

Here’s a photograph of my great-grandfather Maurice Wolfe and his wife, Sarah McAndrews. (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.

[August 12, 2007]

Way Down in Eye-Oh-Way (I'm Going to Hide Away)

My sister lives in Hawaii, and yesterday it was raining. It has rained there, she said, for forty days and forty nights. Yesterday in our little slice of Iowa, it only threatened rain. The sky turned gray and green and purple and yellow. The wind howled, setting off a neighborhood full of porch chimes, and then went dangerously still. In a field across from our house, a pair of giant hawks rode the currents, circling around and around, low to the ground, like kites. They were clearly agitated. Just south of us was a tornado; to the north, golf ball-sized hail. We were in the eye of the storm.

The weather—all buildup, no catharsis—reminded me of the Dar Williams song, “Iowa (Traveling III)”:

We don't like to make our passions other people's concern,
And we walk in the world of safe people,
And at night we walk into our houses and burn.

Really, an all-and-out storm would have been rude. Terry Teachout made the point the other day in a post about negative reactions to his criticism: “Alas, I’ve found over the years that many people (especially Midwesterners, who are trained to say ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ and be polite to strangers) become uncomfortable whenever they’re confronted with strongly expressed opinions on any subject whatsoever—even positive ones.”

This is undoubtedly true, but why? In the most recent Colorado Review, Trevor Jackson writes eloquently on the Midwest’s “religion of Courtesy,” “a light suppression of one’s own thoughts, emotions, or desires.” He then wondered “whether this peculiar Midwest religion springs from the large physical spaces between people.”

I had never thought of this before, but it immediately made me think of a comic book called Korea Unmasked by Rhie Won-bok, in which the author attempts to explain the Japanese tradition of rigidly enforced courtesy.

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Which means you had no choice but to be nice. So how does it work for a place with room to spare? The recurring image of Iowa is a place of unsettled emotions, restless spirits. Here’s Dar Williams again:

For tonight I went running through the screen doors of discretion,
For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see,
You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa and you were not thinking of me.

Courtesy, of course, is a kind of evasion, in which case Iowa is the perfect place to hide (prime example here). That’s the idea behind the song “Way Down in Iowa,” recorded way back in 1917 by Billy Murray:

I'm going to hide away
On a little farm in Eye-oh-way
I'm going to ride away
On the road that leads to yesterday

(By the way, if you haven’t checked out UC Santa Barbara’s restoration of acoustic cylinder recordings, do so now. It’s easy to browse & search, and Mp3’s can be downloaded for free.)

Everybody being so goddamned nice all the time means conflicts never get resolved, which inevitably leads to a kind of stasis. Time stops or, as in “Way Down in Iowa,” actually moves backwards. That’s another common image of Iowa, as witnessed in this excruciatingly condescending passage from last year’s Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town by Dale Maharidge:

The town was a poem, a ballad in brick and mortar and slate and concrete and faded paint. But it was an anonymous poem to me, no different from a hundred other Midwest burgs I'd passed through that were monuments to a time gone, the cinematic reel stopped and held freeze-frame at the moment of my visit, then released in a march of continuing rot and crumble and failed aspirations.

The town, of course, isn’t a poem. Poems move. They have rhythm. And anyway, it takes me back to Trevor’s piece, in which he notes “that this Midwest characteristic is usually more overlooked in fiction.” Which is true. In fact, for all the writers in Iowa, who really writes about the place?

[April 3, 2006]

images: Young Corn by Grant Wood (1931); a page from Korea Unmasked by Rhie Won-bok

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

A few years ago, Molly & I visited the lovely Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton, Virginia, 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 this 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.

[October 2, 2007]