Midwestern Flight

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The Midwest is a place that you leave. This idea is so readily accepted that it’s almost a tautology to write it. And now that it’s been swept up in the aesthetic churn of Wes Anderson movies and Netflix original series, it seems that this trope has reached a fever pitch of popular legibility. It achieved cliché status long before one Emily Cooper, a human Instagram algorithm, exchanges her Chicago Cubs paraphernalia for a beret and rechristens her digital self “Emily in Paris,” thus beginning her popular comedy of Parisian cultural encounters. Or when we are told in the opening lines of The French Dispatch that Arthur Howitzer, Jr., played by Bill Murray, escapes a bright future on the Great Plains in a fit of eagerness to begin the fictional magazine that organizes the film’s plot. It already felt stale in 2015, when audiences followed Ellie Kemper’s deliriously chipper Kimmy Schmidt from the subterranean bunker of a doomsday cult in Durnsville, Indiana, to New York in a bid to start her life anew. This incessant, near compulsory recycling of the Midwestern flight narrative makes one thing clear: the story, the real story, begins upon departure. Provincial origins are something to be escaped, sloughed off like an old skin in a process of personal evolution. 

It is fitting that The French Dispatch should be a film loosely based on the expat journalists of the New Yorker, for it is that august publication which best captured this imaginary cultural geography of Midwestern irrelevance in illustrated form. When Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue graced the magazine’s cover in 1976, it communicated a cultural perspective of the nation from the elevated vantage of Manhattan’s west side. The vibrancy of New York life animates the foreground before an over-generously blue streak representing the Hudson heads it off. Just beyond, a thin strip of orange stands in for New Jersey. Further still, the nation’s vast interior is turned into a geographical caricature—an undifferentiated patch of yellow stippled by buttes lacking any sign of human life—then opening onto the Pacific’s oceanic horizon. 

Saul Steinberg’s illustration not only issues a critique of Manhattanites—their myopic cultural perspectives bounded by the edge of their narrow island—but also divulges that extensive emptiness thought to characterize the country’s vast midsection. It is the Midwest as what French anthropologist Marc Augé calls a non-place, characterized not so much by its contents as by its absences. Steinberg’s cartoon provides visual backing to Sofia Samatar’s observation that the Midwest is always defined “in contrast to the coasts, where things move with frantic energy: people, ideas, fashion, money.” Midwestern emptiness is construed relative to urban coastal populousness; its lethargy negatively defined by reference to the latter’s brisk rhythms. 

Clichés form around a pearl of truth, and, to be sure, narratives of Midwestern flight can claim some vestigial fact harboring at the core. Plenty have left—continue to leave—for the purported coastal seats of culture and influence. In a certain way, then, I don’t blame the secondhand use of this narrative trope, because it draws from the deep well of history. There is historical precedent, in other words, for viewing flight from the Midwest as a rite of passage in the personal journey of acculturation. But what the usual stories tend to excise entirely are the deep complexities, the enduring interlinkages that persist across both authorial biography and literary canon. The rich history of exchange and conversation between the coasts and the Midwest is shorn of all detail. This trope, the one that describes the Midwest as an empty cultural geography of departure, represents only a partial truth. To see it whole, one must give up the near-sighted view from Ninth Avenue. 

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In his earliest surviving letters, Samuel Longhorn Clemens (better known as Sam Clemens and better yet as Mark Twain), son of the sleepy town of Hannibal, Missouri, recounts his sudden decision to flee coastward at the age of seventeen, much to the surprise of his worried mother. Twain, lustful for some picture of the wider world and just beginning his famed trampish wanderings, lied to his family that he was making for St. Louis and continued on from there until he landed in New York. The existing record is scarce—little survives in written form from his early years—although we can already see the outline of later clichés emerging from Twain’s New York sojourn. Twain, excited and uninitiated, found lodgings in a mechanics boarding house downtown. (Later in his life Twain would return to New York on slightly more respectable terms, despite his persistent financial troubles, taking up residence in several Greenwich Village townhouses.) It was from these humble quarters that Twain ventured outward: to the city’s theaters, for example, where he enjoyed a rendition of Gladiator by the American hero-thespian Edwin Forrest, whose feud with his British rival, William Charles Macready, sparked the Astor Place Riot that killed as many as 31 participants in 1849. Or to the 4,000 volume printers’ library a quarter mile away, where he spent most of his evenings. He, like the city, hardly stopped to sleep, his rhythms matching those of his new surroundings. “It has just struck 2 A.M. and I always get up at 6, and am at work at 7,” he noted in one letter. 

Twain stayed only a short time in New York, but already we can feel the cultural gravity of the city affecting its pull on the young Midwesterner. He must have felt himself at the cultural center of the world in that city, for as it happens, the world had come to New York in the year of Twain’s arrival. Our oldest surviving Twain letter is a fragment, written to his sister Pamela, recounting his visit to the 1853 World’s Fair in Bryant Park. Although the fair was an economic failure (losing more than $300,000 by the time it closed in 1854), it emphatically announced the United States as a leading industrial nation and New York more specifically as a cultural rival to European metropoles. It awed the Missourian just as it did his literary contemporaries, among them Walt Whitman, who relayed an eloquent rhapsody for the fair’s specially-built crystal palace, “Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath thy banner, Freedom.” Twain could not help but compare this new world to the one he had recently left. “The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily,” he told his sister, “double the population of Hannibal.” Beyond this, there was no further comparison for Twain. “I have taken a liking to the abominable place,” he wrote home in 1853. “It is as hard on my conscience to leave New York, as it was easy to leave Hannibal.”

We pause here on Twain because what he laid down in 1853 was a migratory trajectory that would be repeatedly retraced over the next century and a half. While Midwestern flight has occurred via multitudinous arteries of escape, the most popular, the one most thoroughly inscribed in the literary canon, is certainly that well-trodden path to New York. Twain’s was an early and notable departure, one that, in some of its more banal details, foreshadows many of the stories to come. He stands here as a sort of reverse pioneer, headed east rather than west, helping to write Midwestern flight into the cultural script. 

Yet Twain’s story is also notable because it represents the pioneering emergence of Midwestern flight avant la lettre—that is, Twain laid down in biography something that had not yet taken shape as a cliché within American literature. Indeed, despite Twain’s disdain for Hannibal, the literary milieu of the nineteenth century had so far been overwhelmingly rural and Midwestern. As the westward march turned to settlement, the Midwest took shape around cities like Chicago and Cleveland, and around industries like agriculture, all the while literature helped make the region legible to a wider audience, one that saw the Midwest as the cultural bastion of the budding nation. As Midwestern historian Jon Lauck notes, the regional enthusiasm of the latter half of the nineteenth century found utterance through figures like the Wisconsinite historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, better known for his infamous Frontier Thesis but simultaneously convinced that the Midwest represented the “heart of the Republic.” Notable figures in the national literary pantheon, meanwhile, were similarly bullish on the region. In 1914, Sherwood Anderson remarked that the area around the Mississippi River would one day host “the seat of the culture of the universe.”   

It took a younger generation of authors, one more uniquely concerned with the color and chaos of coastal life, to reorient the literary focus—inscribing along the way some of their own biographical details of flight within the American literary canon. As Lauck notes, this new outpouring of urban literature has resulted in the misunderstanding of the 1920s as a period of “revolt” against the pastoral village life that regionalism assumed to be the home of moral integrity and egalitarianism. What this interpretation gets right is its identification of a new interest in the excesses, pleasures, and violence of city life. By 1930, the nation had been spatially reorganized around cities, a development reflected in the literature of the period. Literary attention fixated on what Nathanael West described as “the city and its teeming millions” in Miss Lonelyhearts, his novella on loneliness and alienation set in Depression-era New York. However, the revolt interpretation also mistakes this urban interest for a repudiation of the Midwest. There were, no doubt, excoriations of the Midwest (Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, a takedown of the conservatism of small-town middle America, narrowly lost out on the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Edith Warton’s The Age of Innocence in 1921). But for many New York writers, places like New York existed not in outright opposition to the Midwest, but in a sort of dyadic tension. That is, the Midwest exists in this literary milieu more as a rejoinder to city life—a reminder of the world beyond the blinkered self-importance that comes with living in New York.

Certainly, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work comes to mind in this regard. His most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, is known both for its enchantment with the dalliances of a coastal sect of socialites and its romantic musings about the far simpler Midwest. His protagonist and narrator, Nick Carraway, recreates Fitzgerald’s own flight from St. Paul, Minnesota, first for Yale (though Fitzgerald was a Princeton man) and thereafter to New York. There, he bears witness to the excess and conspicuous consumption—a term devised by another Midwesterner, the Wisconsin-born sociologist Thorstein Veblen—of the nouveau riche and its prime exemplar, Jay Gatsby, whose character stands in for the moral corruption at the heart of the American Dream. 

Others joined Fitzgerald in transmuting biography into literature. Dawn Powell, for one, owes much of her source material to her own experiences of flight and embroilment in the New York literary scene. Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, Powell wasted no time after graduating from Lake Erie College before leaving for the City, where she set up shop in Greenwich Village after her marriage in 1920. 

Like Nick Carraway, Powell’s protagonists often reenact her own midwestern departure. They, too, leave small-town origins in favor of the glimmering city to the east, where they stumble and scrabble amidst “the glorious dirt and uproar which are the vitamins of New York.” These Midwesterner-turned-urbanites share an enraptured and mildly accosted sensibility, a posture one assumes they inherited from their author. They obsess over dress and behavior, over habituating themselves to the mores and mannerisms of city folk, whom they view to be a harsh and separate breed. Jonathan Jaimison, protagonist of Powell’s The Golden Spur, arrives in New York primarily concerned with locating aging literary star Alvine Harshaw, whom Jaimison presumes to be his true father. Not far behind these filial objectives, however, come Jaimison’s desire to gain entry into the hallowed order of New Yorkers. He frets when they correctly identify his provincial provenance; is happy when they assume him to be of a certain New York type. In the opening pages of the novel, Jaimison’s quest for his father occupies his mind but only briefly before he wanders to issues of dress, speech, and comportment. Meanwhile, Jaimison is treated to all the eccentricities of Greenwich Village, into which he is quickly absorbed. 

Powell is the quintessential writer for the period—someone who, like Fitzgerald, ostensibly embodies the revolt narrative of midwestern departure. Yet a fuller accounting of their work reveals something quite different. For both, the Midwest is a point of departure, but also a site for return. In Scott’s work, the region retains a certain moral integrity lost amidst the social climbing of the coasts—a welcoming bucolic foil to New York’s dizzying gyre. By its end, The Great Gatsby begins to read like a Rousseauian vindication of rural life. After his embroilment in Gatsby’s gambit to woo Daisy away from Tom Buchanan, Carraway decides to turn back to the Midwest, whereupon Fitzgerald delivers one of the novel’s famous passages. “That’s my Middle West,” Fitzgerald writes, “not the wheat or the the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the trilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.” “I see now that this has been a story of the West,” he concludes, turning the preceding story into one of urban corruption. “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” 

Powell’s Midwest is similarly redeemable, though for different reasons. Where Fitzgerald lapses into regional romanticism, Powell’s Midwestern novels, particularly the later ones, are interested in depicting the region as itself implicated in the perpetual metamorphism that authors usually reserved for urban settings. “One important key in this new novel,” she wrote in her journal in 1932, is that “the new Ohio must be the keynote—the dizziness of speed through broad auto highways, hot dog stations, not the tranquil hayfields of my recollection.” If Fitzgerald found refuge in a familiar Midwest, Powell contends with the region’s transformations; for Powell, someone who regularly shuttled back and forth between New York and her birthplace, the Midwest represented change, not the “arrested background” that so many others made it out to be. Her later interest in the Midwest is not in flattening it into a non-place, but in capturing its rapid evolution and kaleidoscopic character. “Decided reason for Ohio novel is propaganda,” she wrote of another project in 1943, “duty—to show there was another America, not just the present one of war and woe. Also to show the things possible to learn—that in a small radius of 100 square miles in Northern Ohio there are a half-dozen different types of civilization.” In contrast to the depictions of virtual vacancy that triumphs in Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue, Powell’s Midwest is alive and teeming.  

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As Lauck notes, Powell and Fitzgerald wrote against prevailing cultural forces. During the interwar period, a deluge of urban-centric literature solidified the one-sided narrative of village revolt. By the postwar period, the decline of industrialization begat a bicoastal economic reorganization of the nation that only exacerbated the coastward consolidation of the culture industry. This context more fully cemented the Midwest’s reputation that persists today. Yet, for those who care to look, a countervailing literature of New York flight has since developed, one that, at times, points toward a potential cultural resuscitation of the Midwest as a cultural geography. 

To the extent that any literature of New York flight exists, it does so in the wake of Joan Didion’s famous essay “Goodbye to All That,” which recounts her disenchantment with the city that hosted her for eight years after her arrival at the age of twenty-three. Didion’s self-diagnosis of New York fatigue has enjoyed a wide resonance. I revisit it now after my own departure from the city that I called home on-and-off for most of the past decade, in a moment when Didion’s vague pronouncement that “at some point the golden rhythm was broken” resounds among the more commonly cited reasons of affordability and space. 

But then, Didion came from the West, and it was to the West that she returned. Her departure for California—then in the throes of the cowboy capitalism that has since morphed into the psychedelic libertarianism of Silicon Valley—represents postwar cultural bicoastalism more than anything else. She offers an indictment of New York—of the cyclic repetition of familiar names and faces, of a certain déjà vu quality of social life. But Didion’s seminal essay only swaps New York for Los Angeles, which is, simply put, one of the most New York things one can do. Perhaps less so for Didion’s generation, but today, the two cities seem paired in the cultural imagination, New York the “fun hell” to L.A.’s “shitty heaven,” as one viral tweet put it. Swapping one for the other feels less like leaving than it does moving to New York’s unofficial sister city. 

We find a more apt representative of New York flight and Midwestern return in William S. Burroughs, scion of a St. Louis family that grew the Burroughs Adding Machine Company into a dominant manufacturer of business equipment. He, like many others, left young, first for Harvard in 1932 and later for Europe, Mexico, and the other international settings that saturate his oeuvre’s vast geography. It wasn’t until 1981, aged sixty-seven years, that Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, pulled there by his then boyfriend. Once there, he managed to turn his new home into the site of artistic pilgrimage for the likes of Kurt Cobain, Patti Smith, and his old friend Allen Ginsburg, who Burroughs hosted for four days in 1992, five years before Ginsburg’s death. Burroughs never penned a Didionesque farewell to his old haunts, nor a manifesto in defense of his relocation, but the personal writing and letters of his later years show a Burroughs convinced that the old days of clustered cultural caché were over—an opinion that he expressed to his friend Brion Gysin in 1981 shortly after moving to Kansas. “We could set you up here for half the price of NYC,” he told Gysin. “I know you think of Kansas as nowheresville and think I am caught up in nostalgia. Really it is the other way around. The whole concept of place is dead and it’s nostalgia to cling to it. Time was every creative person had to be in Paris, London, New York, etc. That’s all over and done with. Went out when the jets came in.” For Didion, the old place had grown stale, repetitive, so she sought out a new place. For Burroughs, it was something different. It wasn’t that the right place was somewhere else, it was that place itself was dead. What this permitted for Burroughs was, as one of his biographers described, a “return to roots”—a return to the village against which he had revolted.  

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In the end, it feels like maybe Burroughs was right. Place is dead–or rather, maybe a paraphrasing of Gramsci’s oft-cited quote on the interregnum is more apt: the old places are dying, while the new cannot be born. For now, New York remains the cultural center of the nation. But nobody seems to be happy about it, and it feels like maybe the forces that pushed Burroughs out, which is to say the rent prices, might soon swallow the city entirely. If that does come to pass, it won’t be the jets that did it, but New York’s internal hostility to the material conditions of creativity. Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, seems hell-bent on recreating the city’s Gilded Age reputation of economic inequality—a comparison that enjoyed traction after the “Gilded Glamour” Met Gala, which Adams attended in 2022. And even before Adams’ inept term as New York’s first swagful mayor, city stalwarts seemed skeptical of New York’s enduring place as the center of cultural creativity. Back in 2010, Patti Smith  had a blunt response when asked about her advice for the new crop of youth trying to make it in the city: leave. “New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling,” she told a Cooper Union crowd. “But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.” And it looks like people are. Reports of New York’s death are always greatly exaggerated. But it feels like there is a new opportunity—created by the pandemic, by the crushingly oppressive cost of living, by the realization that another perspective is possible—to fill in some of the empty spaces on Steinberg’s map.