The nearby Cuyahoga Valley is beautiful in its autumnal blaze. But the city itself so often Midwestern gothic. Strange sightings. The woman wandering into the Radio Shack with a half-eaten hot-dog in one hand, fingering the merchandise with the ketchup- and mustard-stained other. Another woman padding down the emptied-out Main Street with duct-tape over her face, clutching a Big Gulp (John observes: the kidnapped on her lunch break). We bond more intensely in our mutual dystopic vision. (Our favorite shared writer of the moment is Thomas Bernhard, when we first met it was Beckett.) A different sort of alienation than when we lived in London, or moved back to Chicago.
I am an alien here. My short cropped hair and my black Joan of Arc jacket, shiny from years of wear, the interior all torn out and replaced, a remnant from our splurges on his student loans in London department stores. I feel myself stared at in the grocery store, on campus. I’m also going through a butch phase, all tight men’s jeans, perhaps a sartorial revolt from my new, more feminine role. John is stared at too with his longish hair and darling dandy vests. He does not care. Although most days I don’t even leave the house, and lounge around in what I’ve been sleeping in for days, in the blink and the glare of the outside world I do not often wear my faded and cherished articles of clothing. Except when we make regular trips to Chicago to visit my father or occasional ones to New York. I feel they would be wasted here. This wasteland.
I have become used to wearing, it seems, the constant pose of the foreigner.
Chicago now our pilgrimage, which we once wanted so desperately to escape. In Chicago, New York was our Moscow, like in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It is our pattern: we forget so soon what made us want to flee, we cover it over with nostalgia, Zelda writing her novelist-husband wistfully of their honeymoon days while in the asylum. This shrine we build to our own shared origins. Viv’s shrine to Tom, once he had abandoned her, next to her framed picture of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. (Does every woman, really, love a fascist?)
I’ve tried to block out the local uproar dealing with Akron native LeBron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers. I’ve always found it pernicious, how those in the Midwest criminalize those who leave, as though it were some rejection of their own lives. Unlike the ambivalence towards their now-prodigal son, rock musician Chrissie Hynde of the 80s group The Pretenders is a much loved celebrity here. “Chrissie” this. “Chrissie” that. The vegan Italian comfort food restaurant she owns in town has become our culinary sanctuary.
As a girl I remember reading an interview with Chrissie Hynde in Rolling Stone about how she left this city in Ohio when she was young and moved to London. I remember thinking of her as this example of what I could do myself one day. That I could leave Chicago, leave the family, leave the Midwest. And I did. For a little bit. But now I am back here. The eternal return. (To write, perhaps, is to always return.)
So many of the gods of modernism hailed from the Midwest. Scott Fitzgerald from St. Paul. Ezra Pound fired from the college in Indiana. Tom Eliot of the lofty Eliots of St. Louis. And they all escaped, to Europe — they became expatriate, cosmopolitan. They managed to shed their origins, their Midwestern skin. Hemingway years earlier attended the same high school in Oak Park, Illinois as my father and his siblings. God, I idolized Hemingway when I was in journalism school. Now I hate his guts because of how he demonized Zelda in his memoir A Moveable Feast. And for how he treated his wife Hadley. She, summarily dismissed.
(I am now in another union. It is a union of forgotten or erased wives. I pay my dues daily.)
In Cleveland the local bibliophilic society explicitly prohibits women from joining. John attended a meeting at the invitation of his colleague at Oberlin. (I was not happy.) One of those quasi-secret societies of rich white men with bizarre rituals, held in some grand Victorian home. The series of tableaux that begin Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, her treatise on the material conditions that could allow a woman to write, to write well. Her scenes illuminating women banned from the grounds and libraries and luncheons of the fictional college Oxbridge, to show that a woman of her time would be banned from all the public spaces of reflection and socialization and higher learning that Woolf argues are important in order to begin to have the interior space to roam about in, to think the lucid thoughts that foster Great Texts.
This sort of segregation is familiar to literary modernism, with their cliques and societies. The most famous one being Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Stein would hang out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald while Alice B. Toklas in the next room would make small talk with the wives. Gertrude Stein ventriloquizing Alice in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (with any sense of irony to the inequality? I don’t know): She speaks to the greats, while I talked to the wives and mistresses.
Oh, but the stories they have to tell.
Of course since we’ve moved here I’ve been rereading Madame Bovary. I am Madame Bovary as I read Madame Bovary. Ennui, excess of emotions. C’est moi. I am Zelda, I am Vivien(ne).
Zelda and Vivien(ne) both bored in their new lives as women married to the literary prophets of their generations. Both suffering from Madame Bovary’s disease until other, more ominous ones were diagnosed and even more ominously treated. “Vivien was still in poor health, and suffered from nervous headaches and sleeplessness — no doubt aggravated by the fact that, while her husband was actively and continually engaged in work of some kind, she had very little to do and was becoming bored.”
God, it’s boring here. Stuck in the provinces. The novelist Jean Rhys’ bungalow in Cornwall where she spent her exile, for years and years in poverty and obscurity writing her heroine in Wide Sargasso Sea, rewriting the madwoman Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. “All the dullest books ever written have ended their lives here,” she wrote in a letter to her daughter.
I must get as far away as possible. Must escape stagnancy, miserabilism. Yet I am here, frozen. I am afflicted with Eliot’s aboulie. I know I want to leave this stale town as soon as possible. I am sure if I do not I will die.
I think of Madame Bovary. “She longed to travel, or to go back and live in the convent. She wanted both to die and to live in Paris.”
I begin rereading the journals of Anaïs Nin, both the abbreviated ones that she published during her lifetime, and then the ones with all of the fucking (which I prefer of course). In the narrative Anaïs weaves over countless journals, she is a liberated woman who finally escapes the oppression of her provincial environment. In her version she leaves out Hugo, her banker-husband who supports her. Apparently, according to Nin’s biographer, all the American housewives who first read Nin’s journals felt they were given permission to leave their marriages, but then felt betrayed when they learned the truth.
I suppose I could take John out of this accounting entirely — but then who would believe that I was in Akron by choice?
Living here I develop a desire to be analyzed, probably because of all the Anaïs Nin I’ve been reading, Nin who had an affair with her analyst, Otto Rank, who wrote a book on the artist. Perhaps this is a desire to be interpreted like a literary character. I leave a message for the Cleveland Center of Psychoanalysis. I begin to toy with the idea of training to be a psychoanalyst, and I will become a feminist analyst to tortured, eccentric artists. Like Julia Kristeva. Sylvia Plath who considered a Ph.D. in psychology.