Bagombo Snuff Box (37 page)

Some of these stories have been edited for this book, with minor
and major glitches repaired, which editors and I should have repaired before
they were printed the first time. Rereading three of them so upset me, because
the premise and the characters of each were so promising, and the denouement so
asinine, that I virtually rewrote the denouement before I could stop myself.
Some “editing”! They are “The Powder-Blue Dragon,”

“The Boy Who Hated Girls,” and “Hal Irvin’s Magic Lamp.” As
fossils, they are fakes on the order of Piltdown Man, half human being, half
the orangutan I used to be.

No matter how clumsily I wrote when I was starting out,
there were magazines that would publish such orangutans. And there were others
that, to their credit, would not touch my stuff with rubber gloves. I wasn’t
offended or ashamed. I understood. I was nothing if not modest. I remember a
cartoon I saw long ago, in which a psychiatrist was saying to a patient, “You
don’t have an inferiority complex. You are inferior.” If the patient could
afford a psychiatrist, he was earning a living somehow, despite his genuine
inferiority. That was my case, too, and the evidence seems to be that I got
better.

Thanks to popular magazines, I learned on the job to be a fiction
writer. Such paid literary apprenticeships, with standards of performance so
low, don’t exist anymore. Mine was an opportunity to get to know myself. Those
who wrote for self-consciously literary publications had this advantage, their
talent and sophistication aside: They already knew what they could do and who
they were.

There may be more Americans than ever now embarking on
voyages of self-discovery like mine, by writing stories, come hell or high
water, as well as they can. I lecture at eight colleges and universities each
year, and have been doing so for two decades. Half of those one hundred sixty
institutions have a writer-in-residence and a course in creative writing. When
I quit General Electric to become a writer, there were only two such courses,
one at the University of Iowa, the other at Stanford, which my President’s
daughter now attends.

Given that it is no longer possible to make a living writing
short stories, and that the odds against a novel’s being successful are a
thousand to one, creative-writing courses could be perceived as frauds, as
would pharmacy courses if there were no drugstores. Be that as it may, students
themselves demanded creative writing courses while they were demanding so many
other things, passionately and chaotically, during the Vietnam War.

What students wanted and got, and what so many of their children
are getting, was a cheap way to externalize what was inside them, to see in
black-and-white who they were and what they might become. I italicize cheap
because it takes a ton of money to make a movie or a TV show. Never mind that
you have to deal with the scum of the earth if you try to make one.

There are on many campuses, moreover, local papers, weeklies
or monthlies, that publish short stories but cannot pay for them. What the
heck, practicing an art isn’t a way to earn money. It’s a way to make one’s
soul grow.

Bon voyage.

I still write for periodicals from time to time, but never
fiction, and only when somebody asks me to. I am not the dynamic self-starter I
used to be. An excellent alternative weekly in Indianapolis, XUVQ, asked me
only a month ago to write an essay for no pay on the subject of what it is like
to be a native Middle Westerner. I have replied as follows:

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, who never to himself
has said, this is my own, my native land!”

This famous celebration of no-brainer patriotism by the Scotsman
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), when stripped of jingoistic romance, amounts only
to this: Human beings come into this world, for their own good, as instinctively
territorial as timber wolves or honeybees. Not long ago, human beings who
strayed too far from their birthplace and relatives, like all other animals,
would be committing suicide.

This dread of not crossing well-understood geographical
boundaries still makes sense in many parts of the world, in what used to be
Yugoslavia in Europe, for example, or Rwanda in Africa. It is, however, now
excess instinctual baggage in most of North America, thank God, thank God. It
lives on in this country, as obsolescent survival instincts often do, as
feelings and manners that are by and large harmless, that can even be comical.

Thus do I and millions like me tell strangers that we are
Middle Westerners, as though we deserved some kind of a medal for being that.
All I can say in our defense is that natives of Texas and Brooklyn are even
more preposterous in their territorial vanity.

Nearly countless movies about Texans and Brooklynites are
lessons for such people in how to behave ever more stereotypically. Why have
there been no movies about supposedly typical Middle Western heroes, models to
which we, too, might then conform?

All I’ve got now is an aggressively nasal accent.

About that accent: When I was in the Army during the Second
World War, a white Southerner said to me, “Do you have to talk that way?”

I might have replied, “Oh, yeah? At least my ancestors never
owned slaves,” but the training session at the rifle range at Fort Bragg in
North Carolina seemed neither the time nor the place to settle his hash.

I might have added that some of the greatest words ever
spoken in American history were uttered with just such a Jew’s-harp twang,
including the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and these by
Eugene V. Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana: “While there is a lower class I am in
it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in
prison, I am not free.”

I would have kept to myself that the borders of Indiana,
when I was a boy, cradled not only the birthplace of Eugene V. Debs, but the
national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.

Illinois had Carl Sandburg and Al Capone.

Yes, and the thing on top of the house to keep the weather
out is the ruff, and the stream in back of the house is the crick.

Every race and subrace and blend thereof is native to the Middle
West. I myself am a purebred Kraut. Our accents are by no means uniform. My
twang is only fairly typical of European-Americans raised some distance north
of the former Confederate States of America. It appeared to me when I began
this essay that I was on a fool’s errand, that we could be described en masse
only as what we weren’t. We weren’t Texans or Brooklynites or Californians or
Southerners, and so on.

To demonstrate to myself the folly of distinguishing us, one
by one, from Americans born anywhere else, I imagined a crowd on Fifth Avenue
in New York City, where I am living now, and another crowd on State Street in
Chicago, where I went to a university and worked as a reporter half a century
ago. I was not mistaken about the sameness of the faces and clothing and
apparent moods.

But the more I pondered the people of Chicago, the more
aware I became of an enormous presence there. It was almost like music, music
unheard in New York or Boston or San Francisco or New Orleans.

It was Lake Michigan, an ocean of pure water, the most precious
substance in all this world.

Nowhere else in the Northern Hemisphere are there tremendous
bodies of pure water like our Great Lakes, save for Asia, where there is only
Lake Baikal. So there is something distinctive about native Middle Westerners,
after all. Get this: When we were born, there had to have been incredible
quantities of fresh water all around us, in lakes and streams and rivers and
raindrops and snowdrifts, and no undrinkable salt water anywhere!

Even my taste buds are Middle Western on that account. When
I swim in the Atlantic or the Pacific, the water tastes all wrong to me, even though
it is in fact no more nauseating, as long as you don’t swallow it, than chicken
soup.

There were also millions and millions of acres of topsoil
around us and our mothers when we were born, as flat as pool tables and as rich
as chocolate cake. The Middle West is not a desert.

When I was born, in 1922, barely a hundred years after
Indiana became the nineteenth state in the Union, the Middle West already
boasted a constellation of cities with symphony orchestras and museums and
libraries, and institutions of higher learning, and schools of music and art,
reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. One
could almost say that Chicago was our Vienna, Indianapolis our Prague,
Cincinnati our Budapest, and Cleveland our Bucharest.

To grow up in such a city, as I did, was to find such
cultural institutions as ordinary as police stations or firehouses. So it was
reasonable for a young person to daydream of becoming some sort of artist or
intellectual, if not a policeman or fireman. So I did. So did many like me.

Such provincial capitals, which is what they would have been
called in sometimes had the director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to
supper, or writers and painters, or architects like my father, of local renown.

I studied clarinet under the first-chair clarinetist of our
symphony orchestra. I remember the orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture, in which the cannons’ roars were supplied by a policeman firing
blank cartridges into an empty garbage can. I knew the policeman. He sometimes
guarded street crossings used by students on their way to or from School 43, my
school, the James Whitcomb Riley School.

It is unsurprising, then, that the Middle West has produced
so many artists of such different sorts, from world-class to merely competent,
as provincial cities and towns in Europe used to do.

I see no reason this satisfactory state of affairs should
not go on and on, unless funding for instruction in and celebration of the
arts, and especially in public school systems, is withdrawn.

Participation in an art is not simply one of many possible
ways to make a living, an obsolescent trade as we approach the year 2000.
Participation in an art, at bottom, has nothing to do with earning money.
Participation in an art, although unrewarded by wealth or fame, and as the
Middle West has encouraged so many of its young to discover for themselves so
far, is a way to make one’s soul grow.

No artist from anywhere, however, not even Shakespeare, not
even Beethoven, not even James Whitcomb Riley, has changed the course of so
many lives all over the planet as have four hayseeds in Ohio, two in Dayton and
two in Akron. How I wish Dayton and Akron were in Indiana! Ohio could have
Kokomo and Gary.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were in Dayton in 1903 when they
invented the airplane.

Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson were
in Akron in 1935 when they devised the Twelve Steps to sobriety of Alcoholics
Anonymous. By comparison with Smith and Wilson, Sigmund Freud was a piker when
it came to healing dysfunctional minds and lives.

Beat that! Let the rest of the world put that in their pipes
and smoke it, not to mention Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Lloyd Wright,
and Louis Sullivan, Twyla Tharp and Bob Fosse, Ernest Hemingway and Saul
Bellow, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Toni Morrison!

Larry Bird!

New York and Boston and other ports on the Atlantic have
Europe for an influential, often importunate neighbor. Middle Westerners do
not. Many of us of European ancestry are on that account ignorant of our families’
past in the Old World and the culture there. Our only heritage is American.
When Germans captured me during the Second World War, one asked me, “Why are
you making war against your brothers?” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking
about.

Anglo-Americans and African-Americans whose ancestors came
to the Middle West from the South commonly have a much more compelling
awareness of a homeland elsewhere in the past than do I—in Dixie, of course,
not the British Isles or Africa.

What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with
the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for a fertile continent
stretching forever in all directions.

Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.