The Ohio River runs through James Wright’s oeuvre, a throughline leading back to the hardscrabble community of his youth. It’s a region ravaged by strip mining, extractive industry and labor practices, and dead-end factory jobs resulting in generational poverty. Yet despite his professed hatred of and determination to escape his native Martins Ferry in the Appalachian foothills, Wright returns again and again in his poems to the banks of the river he grew up exploring. This boundary between Ohio and West Virginia, between water and land, is haunted by the ghosts of drowned childhood friends, miners “dead with us” in the gorges, and memories of violence witnessed—and perpetrated—in his youth. But the sacred and profane river—with its “bare-ass beach” that is “supposed to be some holiness”—is also his “Muse of black sand.” “How can I live without you?” he writes. “Come up to me, love, / Out of the river, or I will / Come down to you.”
Betsy K. Brown: Today, we will be hearing from poet, novelist, and doctor Amit Majmudar. Majmudar is the author of seventeen books, with three more forthcoming this year. He also served as the first poet laureate of Ohio.
As a fellow Ohioan and poet, I’m particularly curious about how Ohio has influenced your writing.
Throughout my 20s, when romances have fizzled or my career trajectory has felt unmappable, my deep passion for my home of New York City and my belief that I will always live here has been an emotional anchor. But in reading poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing about his home state of Ohio, I’ve reconsidered what a hometown is and how we can relate to these places.
It wasn’t until I had to move from Iowa to Columbus that I finally sat down to read Sherwood Anderson. When my father’s father downsized his book collection for the move to the retirement home, he took with him thirteen copies of Winesburg, Ohio, the most famous title of this now less-than-famous author. Thirteen doesn’t count the twenty-one volume complete Anderson published in Kyoto, Japan, or the scholarly publications devoted to Anderson’s novel-in-stories. It doesn’t include the 1962 issue of Shenandoah, wherein my grandfather argues that, while Anderson’s “hard, plain, concrete diction” paints superficial impressions of Ohio, what truly interested the author was the “dark, unrevealed parts of the personality like the complex mass of roots that, below the surface of the ground, feeds the common grass above in the light.”
One of my all-time, hands-down, desert-island favorite short stories begins like this: “We lived then in Cleveland, in the middle of everything.” The narrator does not mean the middle of the action. “One of the beauties of living in Cleveland,” he later explains, “is that any direction feels like progress.” We’re in the middle of the country and also the middle of the Twentieth century, just after Woodstock but “before the city of Cleveland went broke, before its river caught fire.” We’re four sentences in and Cleveland’s not looking too good. It’s looking like a placeholder for either midwestern boredom or rustbelt squalor.
David Foster Wallace is often discussed as a regional writer; critics have focused on the ways his fiction and nonfiction depict both the northeast (in Infinite Jest) and the midwest, primarily his sometime-home of Illinois. But what is often overlooked is that his first novel, The Broom of the System, is an Ohio novel. Although Wallace didn’t have any concrete ties to the state (he grew up in Illinois, and was living in Massachusetts when he first drafted the novel), he chose to set the book in the Cleveland area, for the same reason that so many writers use Ohio as a setting—because it serves as a synecdoche for America itself. Shortly after the novel’s release, he told an interviewer that he had never actually been to Cleveland, but as “a middle-westerner. . . he wanted a heartland city that he could imagine instead of describe.” In Wallace’s imaginative vision of the “heartland,” Ohio is, as one character describes it, “both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity.” He goes on to claim that “we feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn’t know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually.” This is a division that Wallace explores in much more depth and detail in many of his nonfiction pieces, such as “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,” and “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” all of which use the midwestern locale to interrogate what it means to be a true American.
In Broom, Wallace uses the heartland setting to explore many of the thematic elements that are central to his later writing (some more successfully than others—it is very much an apprentice work). The central plot, such as it is, revolves around 24-year-old Lenore Beadsman, who must negotiate being surrounded by a variety of hideous men (including her boyfriend/boss, her landlord, and her therapist), while searching for her great-grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein, who has escaped from her Shaker Heights nursing home. The novel also interrogates the idea of what constitutes reality; Lenore in particular is worried that she is just a construct of language, and that “she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were . . . not really under her control.” Wallace later distanced himself from the novel, calling it “a sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman” written when he was “a young 22.” Michiko Kakutani accurately described Broom as “an unwieldy, uneven work—by turns, hilarious and stultifying, daring and derivative.” She notes how Wallace takes on “serious philosophical and literary discussions” while also getting sidetracked by “repetitious digressions, and nonsensical babbling that reads like out-takes from a stoned, late-night dormitory exchange.” This is a fair critique, but as with many a late-night stoner conversation, there are certain elements that can hold up to closer scrutiny in the sober light of day.
New Ohio Review 