Flyover Lives Read online

  Also by Diane Johnson

  Lulu in Marrakech

  Into a Paris Quartier: Reine Margot’s Chapel and Other Haunts of St.-Germain

  L’Affaire

  Le Mariage

  Le Divorce

  Natural Opium: Some Travel Takes

  Health and Happiness

  Persian Nights

  Dashiell Hammett: A Life

  Terrorists and Novelists: Essays

  Lying Low

  The Shadow Knows

  Burning

  Loving Hands at Home

  Fair Game

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Diane Johnson

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Portions of this book appeared in different form as “The Generals” in National Post (Toronto), “The Writing Life” in The Washington Post, “Stanley Kubrick: 1928–1999” in The New York Review of Books, and “A Passion for Cars—Just Don’t Make Her Drive Them” in The New York Times.

  Photograph credits

  Pages ix, 123, 140: © Lucy Gray 2013

  Page 179: Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, Archiv Landshoff

  Other photographs courtesy of the author

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Johnson, Diane, 1934–

  Flyover lives : a memoir / Diane Johnson.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-698-13748-6

  1. Johnson, Diane, 1934– —Family. 2. Moline (Ill.)—Biography. 3. Pioneers—Middle West—Biography. 4. Home—Middle West. 5. Middle West—Biography. 6. Middle West—Social life and customs. 7. Novelists, American—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3560.O3746Z46 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  [B] 2013036808

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  To my husband, John,

  to James, Douglas, Kevin, Darcy, Liz, Amanda, and Simon,

  and in loving memory of all the ghosts in this book

  Portrait of Catharine A. Martin

  Chenoa, Illinois, 1876

  Knowing how little time (during youth and middle life when people are busy with the cares of life and raising a family) they have to think of their forefathers or to tell their children, I, in my old age will write what I know of my dear husband’s family and of my own. And hope no one will destroy or throw away this Book, for I hope some of my grandchildren or grandchildren’s children will think enough of their parentage to read what their old grandmother writes when she is . . . 76 years old, and probably will be laid in the dust long before this is looked at.

  —Catharine A. Martin

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY DIANE JOHNSON

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  FOREWORD

  I. In France

  1. A Weekend with Generals

  II. Flyover Country

  2. Moline, Pop. 34,000

  3. My Moline

  4. Myopia

  5. Pastimes

  6. Economies

  7. Books

  III. Eighteenth-Century Beginnings

  8. How We All Descend from Greatness

  9. Ranna

  10. Anne and God

  11. Huts

  12. 1800

  13. John Perkins Too Sees God

  14. Some Stories from the Life of Catharine Perkins

  15. The Story of Catharine Continued

  16. The Inappropriate Letter

  17. Catharine’s Romance

  18. The Affair of the Locket

  19. Rascals

  20. The Elusive Eleazer

  21. Wedding Journey

  22. Bloomingburg

  23. Women’s Work: Quilts

  24. Eleazer the Doctor

  25. Sorrow

  26. Depression

  27. Wars

  IV. Modern Days

  28. Watseka, Chenoa

  29. Rich in Uncles

  30. Summer

  31. In God We Trusted . . .

  32. The Dark Shadow

  33. Flyover

  34. Mademoiselle

  35. California

  36. Writer

  37. Silver Screen

  38. Uncle Bill

  39. Divorce

  40. London

  41. Emancipation Proclamation

  42. Defeat

  43. Yellow Morgan

  44. Chagrin

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD

  I had always wondered how the first settlers in Illinois, in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, survived the ruthless climate and isolation, how they managed to clear the tough woodlands to make their farms, how they taught their kids something about Shakespeare and Mozart, and eventually pitched in for a war like the Civil War though they’d barely seen a black person or encountered a slave. No one writes much about the center part of our country, sometimes called the Flyover, or about the modest pioneers who cleared and peopled this region. Yet their midwestern stories tell us a lot about American history. Migration patterns, wars, the larger movements, are after all made up of individual human beings experiencing and sometimes recording their lives.

  Now that circumstance has taken me to live abroad much of the time, or “overseas,” as I’ve learned to say for its hardship military ring, I have wondered more than ever about how the first travelers managed to keep with them some of the qualities of sweetness, stolidity, and common sense they’ve become reputed for—qualities that are hard to see now in certain politicians who speak for this region.

  I became especially interested in some testimonies by long-departed great-grandmothers, simple stories but all the rarer because the lives of prairie women have usually been lost. Perhaps prairie women at the end of the eighteenth century didn’t have the leisure to pick up their pens, or maybe they didn’t think their lives were of interest. I came to think of the people whose stories I finally uncovered as kin to the Indian ghosts that so fascinated me as a child: wispy but material, brought forth from the dust of old attic trunks, in the voices of unsung and unknown people speaking out now and then about their lives two hundred years ago, people whose thoughts and ways somehow account for much about this country, at least in the flat region of cornfields and bonfires along what used to be called the Illinois Bottom—sometimes French Bottom—or, back in the seventeenth century when people began to move that way, “Louisiane.” A millennium before that, in lower Illinois, there was a
city of native peoples called Cahokia that was bigger than the London of the time, and now is only a series of excavated mounds.

  Maybe, as at the beginning of a Russian novel, I should list the names of some of the people who have spoken out from their jottings and letters on their way to Illinois. The earliest was a Frenchman, René Cossé, who left France in 1711; then his grandson, a judge in Vermont, Ambrose Cossitt, who was born in 1749 and lived through the Revolutionary War. Ambrose’s daughter Anne, born in 1779, left an account of giving birth in an icy cabin up on the border with Canada—and of her religious obsessions during the Second Great Awakening of fervid piety that swept America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Her husband, John Perkins, tells about seeing angels and devils—those iconic New England figures that did not seem to follow people to Illinois (though my mother’s hometown of Watseka was noted for having a well-documented case of possession, when Lurancy Vennum was inhabited by the ghost of Mary Roff).

  I’m afraid I found a couple of unreliable characters: Dr. Eleazer Martin and Dr. Charles Stewart Elder both strike me in their letters as a little dodgy in matters of the heart. But we can’t choose our relatives, or which of them we take after; we can only try to capture a few traces of them. As Tolstoy tells us, individual stories are what add up to “history.” Catharine Martin left a longer memoir of her life with her abolitionist husband, Eleazer, in the newly settled territories of Ohio and Illinois, where they went as newlyweds in 1826. Their son-in-law Charles Elder writes from his encampment during the Civil War. Dolph Lain (my brother’s and my father) wrote down his memories of life on an Iowa farm at the end of the nineteenth century, and about going off to the First World War in the early twentieth.

  My aunts Martha, Henrietta, and Grace conserved manuscripts and letters that their forebears in the little town of Watseka had been saving since the end of the eighteenth century. One of these is a typescript of an 1879 memoir transcribed by an unknown hand from handwritten pages. Some pages are missing, and I’m not sure where the handwritten manuscript is; cousins are scattered, and all my aunts are dead. Someone who must be a sort of cousin (her name is Susan Lindsay Church) posted a bit of it on a genealogy Web site recently that differs from my longer manuscript. Maybe she has the handwritten manuscript—I wrote to her, but the e-mail came back.

  It’s certain that its author was my (and maybe the unknown Susan’s) great-great-grandmother Catharine Martin (born 1800), who was living in Chenoa, Illinois, when she wrote a hundred pages in 1876, the centenary of the nation, looking back to her own girlhood, telling some stories that give us a glimpse of what a young woman’s life was like in the 1820s, newly arrived in the strange new territory. This would have been nearly the same time that in England, Jane Austen was writing her stories about similar young women in a much different, more settled world, and Napoleon had recently sold us Louisiana. My brother, Mike Lain, turned out to have a packet of letters sent to him by Aunt Martha Silliman, a trove of documents and deeds, the earliest of which is from 1796. She must have felt him to be the more reliable of the two Lain kids, Mike and me.

  The lives of all these departed people were mostly unremarkable, mostly plain, their cares and anxieties of little interest to anyone but themselves. Other people’s aunts and grandfathers have doubtless also left drawers full of things just as revealing of the faded other days, from other attics—mild-mannered testimonies from folks whose voices have long been abashed into silence, aware, perhaps, of their eclipse by more vibrant and clamorous newcomers.

  In the interest of completeness I have added some contemporary stories, especially my own story of leaving and going back to have another look at the scenes I had not always remembered exactly. Some of what follows I have written about already—about my yellow Morgan car, for example, and about our summer house, and about becoming a writer, and have borrowed back some of my own words from the New York Times, New York Review of Books, and Washington Post.

  I

  IN FRANCE

  1

  A Weekend with Generals

  This book of histories about small-town people in the Midwest, including me, begins not in Illinois, where much of it takes place, but in France a few years ago, at a house party in Provence, with something a French friend said about Americans—something I acknowledged to be true and felt sorry about: that we Americans are naïve and indifferent to history. Certainly I was.

  The discussion began with her saying, “It’s funny the way all Americans believe they are descended from royalty.”

  We—my husband, John, and I—denied this with some indignation. We were visiting the French friend, Simone Ward, and her American husband, Stuart, a retired army colonel, whom we’d met a few years before on the ski slopes of Courchevel; they ordinarily lived in Virginia, and we saw one another only when we were all in France because our American lives were geographically too far apart. The winter before we had discussed a summer plan: we would be traveling to Italy in August, and Simone and Stuart had invited us to stay a day or two on our way.

  Together with American friends of theirs, they were renting a beautiful, big house from a cousin of Simone’s—an expensive house, but they were dividing the rent among four couples. We had been interested when Simone told us who these other tenants were—retired military men, old classmates or companions-in-arms of her husband, Stuart. So that’s how we had found ourselves surprisingly flung among a gaggle of American army generals in the south of France.

  It isn’t every day you meet generals—after all, they inhabit another world, inside their bases or stationed overseas. Our own stations in life (doctor, writer) had not brought us into contact with many generals, and never in their military capacity, though we had known a few in the social world: There was Davis B., the husband of my friend Marjorie, whom we met during his retirement, when he opened an antiques business. And my old friend C. is the daughter of a Marine Corps general—an old, senile gentleman when I last saw him, though in his vigorous younger days a fierce Korean War leader.

  I also had some childhood memories, on account of having grown up near a minor army post, the Rock Island Arsenal, on a clump of land right in the middle of the Mississippi River, the site of the golf course where my parents played (and an emplacement of slot machines, which were illegal on either shore of the river, that is, in both Illinois and Iowa), an armory, a museum, and neat lines of the graves of Confederate men imprisoned here by the Union army during the Civil War.

  John and I live in France now a lot of the time, in Paris, along with thousands of other Americans. He is a professor of medicine with a role in the control of worldwide tuberculosis and other lung diseases, in an organization whose seat is in Paris. Of course we’re delighted to live in a pleasant place like Paris, but explaining why you live abroad is always tricky. The one thing you, we, Americans, are not allowed to say is that there is somewhere better than America to live. This is an unspeakable apostasy, even though anyone who has lived in one of the better places knows it’s true.

  Our hardship post in Paris

  I’m not speaking of morally better, not speaking about virtue, but about livability in the sense that American magazines track the best places, from the points of view of public transport, crime, museums and hospitals and schools and so on. We mustn’t say it, but I have noticed that more and more Americans like us are living Elsewhere if they have a good excuse, and this was something inconceivable only a few years ago. Then, you got hardship pay for living Elsewhere.

  In my case, living abroad was by accident, John’s job. Yet I became aware that he and I were inadvertently part of a historical trend: Americans didn’t stop moving once they got to the West Coast, but have moved on, sometimes up to Alaska, sometimes back to roots in the Old World, recapturing the vanished days. More than fifty thousand Americans live in Paris alone.

  * * * * *

  We’d arrived in Saint-Pantaléon in September. We were in the
south of France—was this called the Lot? The Luberon? The region everyone was said to love that to us looked too much like California to be exotic. Even the fire-blighted fields were familiar.

  The driveway was long, lined with stiff narrow trees like the Corot painting I remembered on the cover of my second-grade reader. With Venus de Milo on the crayon box, our distant European connections were always before American children, no invocations of Mexico or Cairo back then, except on the packages of Camel cigarettes our mothers smoked.

  At the end of the driveway was a gravel turnaround, and beyond that, open gates into a courtyard. At the opposite side of the courtyard, a large house, in what in California we would call the Spanish style, with a tile roof and a vine-covered stucco wall. Several cars were parked at the edges of the turnaround, and a man stood at the gate, hands in his pockets, smiling at us in a welcoming way, then strolling toward us. It was easy to guess he was one of the generals Simone and Stuart were sharing the house with. He was not wearing a uniform, but his close haircut, the compact fitness of his erect though rather short figure, and the starched perfection of his shirt, as if he traveled with a batman, revealed his identity all the same.

  “You must be Simone’s visitors,” he said to us, opening the car door for me. “Bill Baum.” His charm was palpable even in these few words, a handsome, smiling man whose air of authority left no doubt that I would be getting out of the car as his gesture required.

  We introduced ourselves to General Baum, and embraced Simone, who came flying out of the house. The two men carried into the kitchen two cases of wine we had brought, and I followed with a flat of vegetables from a roadside stand that had remained somehow unburned in a swath of singed shrubbery. In the kitchen we met Mrs. Baum, Cynthia, wearing a scarf over her hair, cooking something that smelled delicious. She waved her wooden spoon at us with a conspiratorial, welcoming grin, the complicity and sociability of cooks. The aroma of beef and carrots proclaimed some sort of Provençale triumph for dinner. The impression of complete domestic perfection was heightened by meeting Sally Rolfe, the other general’s wife, coming in from the market with her arms full of gladioli and daylilies.