Nostalgia in American Literature and Politics

Anne Tyler writes about Baltimore, Maryland. So have Nora Roberts and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Agreed, an odd couple; Roberts is one of the most prolific romance writers and Scott Fitzgerald lived in Baltimore for five years before his ill-fated move to Hollywood. There, he wrote the short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. In the period genre of tricking nature by ageing in reverse, Benjamin Button was born with a geriatric mind, growing younger as he physically ages. Yikes, imagine the earnest conversations of the kindergarten teachers; “Mrs Button, could I have a word?”

Baltimore is a constant in Tyler’s catalogue. She rose to critical note with her 1985 book The Accidental Tourist, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1989 Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize. She writes fondly about her people—not too rich, not too poor. They put up storm screens in fall and take them down in spring. They go to the same place for their summer holidays, on the Delaware coast. They discuss staying longer every year but decide one week’s holiday is sufficient. Some of the older women show signs of forgetfulness. Most of the women cook meals that read as though they are taken from Quaker recipe books. They wash the dishes. Tyler’s people are decent, hard-working neighbourly types. I don’t recognise them at all.

So why has it been assumed that Tyler’s novel A Spool of Blue Thread, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, is her last? It could be that her people are disappearing. Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute has been studying five decades of decline in income of white men in their thirties and forties. Men who were traditionally employed in manufacturing and construction trades with no more than high school diplomas are adrift. They are not getting married. In 1970, 85 per cent of men of that age were married; last year it was 52 per cent. It is not only the effects of the global financial crisis. Employment rose in this cohort to 85 per cent in 2010, albeit as a result of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package. Murray argues that in the half-century US corporations exported manufacturing jobs to China and immigration has placed downward pressure on the wages of the remainder.

Tyler records these changes. Her family’s patriarch runs a building construction company specialising in cabinetry. His father lovingly built a crafted house for a client. With debt and some sleight of hand, he bought the house for his family. The house and the cabinetry business become a metaphor for Murray’s data. Elizabeth Drew, writing for the New York Review of Books (“A Country Breaking Down”, February 2016) reviewed four recent publications on the decline of infrastructure—roads, bridges and ports—in the United States. She looks at the same period as Murray. The nation’s highway system is funded by bills passed by Congress and a gasoline tax. In short, there is little support for future spending by politicians, with attendant loss of jobs in the construction industry. Up the highway from Baltimore is a mothballed rusted train in Buffalo, New York, closed since 1979. It is an opulent relic of a powerful mercantile rail and road system planned by Roosevelt in the 1930s and completed by Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Two writers with a nostalgia for a society spanning the years of Tyler’s three-generational family are John Cheever and Marilynne Robinson. Cheever was first published in the New Yorker in 1935; his short story “Farewell my Brother” appeared in August 1951. In this ripper of a yarn, Cheever wrote about an upper-middle-class family on a very extended summer holiday on an eastern seaboard island. Except for the drinking, the story bears little resemblance to Cheever’s own life.

Beyond this, [Mother] is deeply concerned with the propriety of her house, and anything irregular by her standards, like drinking straight rum or bringing a beer can to the dinner table, excites in her a conflict that she cannot, even with her capacious sense of humor, surmount.

As the summer collapses Mother goes on a bender of gin cocktails. Her sense of humour gets lost along the way.

Robinson’s Lila, the third instalment of her Gilead trilogy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014. Sited in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, the narrative reaches from the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century. In this final volume, Robinson discusses moral and theological uncertainties while exploring the effects of the Depression on itinerant workers. President Obama is a fan. He visited Dr Robinson in Des Moines, Iowa. The conversation extended over two issues of the New York Review of Books. Nothing much of seeming importance was discussed; Robinson said, “Exactly,” frequently. The two continued to make parallel-universe comments until the President said:

And the only thing that right now is holding us back is Washington dysfunction. We could knock off another percentage point on the unemployment rate if we started rebuilding roads and bridges and airports. You travel—it’s embarrassing when you go to other airports in other countries. Ours used to be the nicest ones.

Cheever might have written the last sentence.

Norman Rockwell has had two important travelling exhibitions in recent years: “Pictures for the American People”, closing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2002, and “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell”, from 2007 to 2016. Another exhibition, “Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine” opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in November 2013 and ran until January 2014. In the same year that Robinson won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Rockwell’s famous Freedom from Want (1943) was exhibited. It was the third of Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear—painted as companion pieces to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” State of the Union Address in 1941. The first has a pictorial fit with Tyler’s and Robinson’s characters—a strong young man in a plaid workman’s shirt. The third is far and away the favourite with Americans; central to the family tableau is a colossal roasted turkey.

In contrast, Edward Hopper finished his Man­hattan picture Nighthawks a year earlier. It is a forbidding work: three customers in a brightly lit chromed diner slashed by “a brilliant streak of jade green tile” (from Josephine Hopper’s notes on her husband’s painting). The work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was included in the “Art and Appetite” exhibition, perhaps alongside Rockwell’s turkey. Anne Tyler’s Quaker recipe book may have been there too. The catalogue tells us that “along with a selection of period cookbooks, menus, trade cards, and posters” the exhibition intends to explore “the art and culture of food and examine the many meanings and interpretations of eating in America”. Hopper’s sandwich-eating girl rubbed shoulders with Rockwell’s carving patriarch.

Charles Murray’s interest group has been linked to the avid backing of the Republican candidate Donald Trump in the US primaries. The East Coast literary journals are appalled at Trump’s language and behaviour. Charles Murray’s group is angry, they say, otherwise how could they consider him as President? Not quite, writes Tom Switzer from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He argues that they are anxious, unable to work out the demands of the quotidian. They want clear direction from their leaders and calm reassurances from writers like Robinson. The state of affairs proposed by Switzer also explains the support for Bernie Sanders’s socialism. The Iowan Democratic primaries results were neck-and-neck for Hillary Clinton and Sanders. Des Moines’s city fathers are keen on co-operative politics and take pride in their 1990s grand urban renewal project devised by Mario Gandelsonas.

Tyler’s Maryland, one of the original colonies, will almost certainly vote Democrat in the presidential elections. Baltimore has also seen generous downtown regeneration schemes around its inner harbour. Johns Hopkins hospital and university are the single largest industry in Baltimore; either Murray’s cohorts are swabbing corridors or they have moved interstate. And Des Moines? The city is attracting creative Richard Florida types from the east coast. It is the new cool mid-western city.

In his second term President Obama selected two paintings to hang in the Oval Office: Hopper’s Cobb’s Barns, South Truro and Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro, both 1930–33, on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Depicting American farm buildings that could be plopped down in Gilead, they are poorly hung—the larger above the smaller and without the urban gimlet-eyed grit of Nighthawks. Obama has been photographed viewing them with a hand to the chin. What is needed is less nostalgia.