Flyover Lives
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
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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Diane Johnson
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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.