Goodbye, Wisconsin
by Glenway Wescott,
with an Introduction by Jerry Roscoe
Borderland Books. 202 pages, $28.
“THE MIDDLE WEST is nowhere; an abstract no-where. However earnestly writers proud of being natives of it may endeavor to give it form and character, it remains out of focus, amorphous, and a mystery,” wrote Glenway Wescott in the introductory essay to his collection of stories Goodbye, Wisconsin, originally published in 1928 and recently reissued in a beautiful edition by Borderland Books. Through this “nowhere”—with its echoing paradox of “now here”—wandered Wescott’s characters in his short stories. These stories are both haunting and tragic. Wescott’s finely crafted prose is sparse and precise, offering a poignant portrayal of the frail and insular lives of country folk in the 1920’s and 30’s.
Wescott wrote many of these stories while living with his lover, Monroe Wheeler, among the American and British expatriates who lived in the small harbor town of Villefranche-sur-Mer in the south of France. As its title suggests, Goodbye, Wisconsin is a farewell for Wescott from the material that so richly shaped his early writings. He won much acclaim in the 20’s with two novels, The Apple of the Eye (1924) and The Grandmothers (1927), which tells the story of Alwyn Tower, a young, modern man who leaves Wisconsin to live in Europe, only to be haunted by family stories of the men and women whose lives were shattered by the Civil War. The novel won the prestigious Harper Prize and established Wescott among the best writers of his day.
In contrast to his two better known contemporaries, Fitzgerald and Hemingway (themselves refugees from their Midwestern childhoods), Wescott is often a footnote to that era’s considerable literary output. His writings in the 1920’s don’t offer us the fantastical aura of excess and tragedy of the young and beautiful in the post-war years. Rather, much like Dorothy Allison’s tales of the dispossessed in our own time, Wescott’s stories are a landscape of people on the margins who long to leave the burdens of social respectability, with their heavy hand of Protestantism, that encircle the farms and small towns. With few exceptions—a sailor who recounts stories of drinking and orgies while stationed in Villefranche-sur-Mer; a young pianist who’s forced to return to Wisconsin when his patron ends his support—these folks never made it to Montmartre or Harlem or Greenwich Village.
Perhaps because they are not marked by the aura of jazz-age romanticism, these characters feel quite familiar to us in their failures and anxieties—in wanting to get beyond their place in the world, in imagining something greater than life’s routine, or in hoping, as so many of them do (in vain!), that past mistakes can be buried in the backyard next to the cabbage patch. In “The Runaways,” Amelia—having stated, “I never went nowhere, never saw nuthin’—had to work”—burns down the family farm after her father’s death, and, with her husband, finds a fragile “paradise” in the circus, traveling up and down the Mississippi with a band of social freaks and “theatrical ladies.” In “Prohibition,” the Riley farm family celebrates when its drunkard and abusive patriarch suffers a calamity that requires his hands and feet to be cut off. Underneath these precisely carved stories is a claustrophobia that makes even the most expansive pasture seem like a prison.
The sexual undertones of these stories are more apparent today than in Wescott’s time. In “A Guilty Woman,” Evelyn Crowe, after years in prison for killing her abusive lover, is befriended by a spinster named Martha, who wears “mannish dresses” and keeps an archive of newspaper clippings about Evelyn’s crime and trial. As the story ends, we can’t ignore the possibility that the fight between the two women over Evelyn’s impending engagement is really about Martha’s jealousy and regret over losing Evelyn’s intimacy. In “Adolescence,” we encounter two friends, Carl and Phillip, who attend a Halloween party for which Carl, the younger of the two, dresses as a girl and passes as Phillip’s cousin from Milwaukee. Carl is all but ignored at the party except by one shy boy who tries to kiss him with awkward success. But it is Carl’s attraction to Phillip that simmers just beneath the surface in this sadly funny story.
In “The Whistling Swan,” the young pianist Hubert Redd returns from Paris after his wealthy patron, a married man who, the story insinuates, was intimately involved with Hubert, abruptly ends his financial support. Of course the money had to end, since Hubert had been indiscreet and since gossip about his socializing with “men and women with morbid minds … degenerates with too much time on their hands” had made it all the way back to Wisconsin and his patron’s wife. The final scene has Hubert walking through the woods near a small pond, rifle in hand and an unsuspecting swan just around the bush. While we may be expecting Hubert to kill himself, it’s the swan who dies, leaving Hubert to live his life as best he can. While Wescott was not one to kill off his homosexual characters, the ending haunts with the image of young Hubert’s creative and sexual life abroad cut short by the moral demands and Protestant proprieties of small-town Wisconsin.
As I was reading these stories, I felt as if I was walking into an Edward Hopper painting, one of those sparse landscapes that at first seem broad and open, but on further contemplation appear to close in upon a stark psychological scenario. That mystery is the haunting pleasure of those houses, perched on hills and alongside empty roads leading somewhere and nowhere, visibly absent of people. But then we see those window shades and realize that people are alive in there, anchored to chairs and tables and their daily routines, suggesting a deeper, interior reality. It’s the details of the Wisconsin woods, pastures, and small towns that dominate these stories, and Wescott turns this geography into an uncertain mental and sexual landscape that’s difficult to forget.
James Polchin teaches writing at New York University. He is completing a book on the life of George PLatt Lynes.
