This is a guest post by Barry Alfonso, author of A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen
To someone who grew up in California, a place like Wisconsin seems both drab and exotic, the sort of bland nowhere you would never want to visit deliberately. This may be the prevailing view, but that’s not how I thought of the Badger State when I lived in San Diego. I remember discovering Michael Lesy’s classic book Wisconsin Death Trip in the early ‘70s. Its grim prose and even grimmer photos from the 1890s captured a world as darkly fascinating as H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham for me. The Wisconsin countryside seemed like a vast empty plain where human affairs — quiet tragedies punctuated with loud explosions of insanity — could play out. Living in a supposed paradise at the far end of the continent, Californians tend to think of the Midwest as irredeemably dull, filled with the sort of stunted people who don’t have the gumption to move West. To me, though, books like Lesy’s made the case that places like Wisconsin were filled with mystery, shadowy secrets, old houses harboring old people possessed by twisted dreams.
A lingering association of the Badger State with things stark and spooky led me to pick up a paperback copy of Good-Bye Wisconsin (Signet edition, 1964) at a San Diego used books store in the 1990s. The author of this short story collection was Glenway Wescott, a writer completely unknown to me. Reading it, I was struck by his lyrical prose and the empathetic treatment he gave to his damaged and morally confused characters. Years later, I ran across Wescott’s novel The Grandmothers at a library sale in the Pittsburgh area. This 1927 novel — apparently a best-seller that went through at least 24 printings — was a much deeper dive into the moody Midwestern landscapes and tormented characters that Good-Bye Wisconsin dealt with. I recently re-read it and found it an even richer experience the second time around.
On the surface, The Grandmothers treads the same ground covered by Sherwood Anderson: commonplace scenes rendered with a poetic touch, filled with repressed, thwarted men and women who turn into grotesque exaggerations of themselves when their hurts and grievances remain buried too long. Anderson generally dealt with Midwestern small town life rather than more isolated rural folk, but the same sense of rigid Protestant proprieties draped over chronic regret and moldering obligation is present in Wescott’s novel as well. Both Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Grandmothers feature an adolescent boy with artistic inclinations who strongly resembles the author at a similar age. That said, Wescott seems to accept and embrace the failings and cruelties of the society he grew up in with a greater sense of forgiveness than Anderson does. And while Westcott is more literal and less parable-like in his accounts of his characters’ lives, his poetic language is even more mystically evocative than Anderson’s. The Grandmothers doesn’t mythologize its gruff, semi-articulate men and wounded yet indominable women so much as surround them with a visionary glow. Its prose heightens the normal world and makes you see it with renewed color and vibrancy:
“They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were whisperings of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it advanced through regular ripples that were like a wedding veil…”
“The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer.”
“As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, even her good health.”
The arc of The Grandmothers is simple and reminiscent of similar narratives. A group of families move to frontier Wisconsin before the Civil War and intermarry, establishing lines of descendants who prosper or succumb to ill fortune (mostly the latter) as the world enters the 20th Century. Wescott treats nearly everyone with respect and at least a modicum of sympathy — there are no real villains in the book. He doesn’t shy away from bringing out the more unpleasant and downright bizarre qualities of his characters, though. One of the grandmothers of Alwyn (the stand-in for a young Glenway Wescott) suffers from excessive prudery and takes to hiding small household objects to torment her husband. The couple’s poisoned but enduring marriage is summed up in a bitter vision: “During their last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed — the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.” (I read this and thought of certain photographs in Wisconsin Death Trip and shuddered a little.)
At times, the slow-seeping toxicity within these family relationships gets a tad claustrophobic. Those who wander away from the ancestral homesteads generally come to no good, though their travels do add some excitement. Black sheep Evan Tower runs off to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, deserts the army and hops a freighter for London, marries an Italian woman and ends up living with his wife and children under an assumed name in New Mexico. These adventures provide contrast to the severe monotony of rural Wisconsin life, throwing its grinding routines and unyielding moral codes into starker relief.
Wescott parses the subtle shadings within old-fashioned Protestantism without displaying disdain or boredom. (Unlike Sherwood Anderson, he doesn’t flaunt his pagan instincts.) The lives of the most publicly religious are portrayed in the least flattering terms — the “stringless harp wrapped up like a mummy in the music room” found in a minister’s home suggests his overall stuffiness. It is the women in the book — most of them thwarted or broken by love — who seem to possess the most life-affirming faith. Believe in a forgiving God and the promise of heaven makes the sorrows of the everyday world easier to accept. Yet that isn’t the whole story – as the book nears its conclusion, Wescott makes clear that hard-shell Methodism, habitual labor and flattened expectations still allow for nobility and satisfaction if not joy. The “dignity of citizenship” and “the perfect and tender monotony of an uneventful married life” deserve celebration, something Anderson (let alone fellow Midwestern chronicler Sinclair Lewis) might not concede.
The final chapters of the novel lay the older generation to rest as Alwyn’s growing awareness of his family heritage comes into focus. Wescott notes that Alwyn spied upon his family, “studied to convict them,” even as he watched his grandmothers slowly die. He compares his desire to write to the art of taxidermy, an attempt to simulate life out of selected pieces of the dead past. As she wastes away, his maternal grandmother mistakes Alwyn for her son and tells him, “You know, you are my only sweetheart.” Whether this parting benediction is given to the wrong person is irrelevant. Wescott finds an all-embracing love in the resolute endurance and collective heartbreak of his ancestors.
In its sometimes bleak, sometimes tender depiction of a vanished world, The Grandmothers anticipates Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels. There’s a quietly compelling drama to the stories that both writers tell about the Midwest, as well as an attempt to describe ordinary men and women with as much perceptiveness and nuance as possible. They share a deep empathy for the overlooked and undervalued. I haven’t seen Wescott’s name invoked in reviews of Robinson’s fiction. Those who admire her work would find The Grandmothers worthy of discovery.
I have visited Wisconsin many times over the past two decades. I’ve seen the sorts of places Wescott described in The Grandmothers and maybe even met the descendants of the people he wrote about. The mysteries of the Badger State still haven’t been dispelled for me. I hope they never are. If I need to revisit them, I will return to The Grandmothers one more time.