Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction

4. The Deflowering of New England: Russell Banks and the Wages of Cosmopolitanism

FOURFOUR Extra vagance! it depends on how you are yarded. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden There is a moment of equipoise, a widespread flowering of the imagination in which the thoughts and feelings of the people, with all their faiths and hopes, find expression. . . . Then gradually the mind, detached from the soil, grows more and more self-conscious. Contradictions arise within it, and worldlier arts supplant the large, free, ingenuous forms through which the poetic mind has taken shape. What formerly grew from the soil begins to be planned. . . . What has once been vital becomes provincial; and the sense that one belongs to a dying race dominates and poisons the creative mind . . . is not this the story of New England? —Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England FOUR The Deflowering of New England Russell Banks and the Wages of Cosmopolitanism Van Wyck Brooks concludes his landmark study of New England litera­ ture, The Flowering of New England (1936), with a series of vignettes about the deaths of the region’s literary giants (Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Emerson). These deaths mark a shift in the creative imagination of New England, a shift away from the extravagant force of nature under whose influence Hawthorne rummaged through the Salem Custom House and Thoreau built his cabin in the Concord woods. In the place of this raw, masculine productivity comes a “self-conscious” mode of literary production , an imitation of the “worldlier arts” of Europe. Brooks bottom-lines the shift like this: “The Hawthornes yield to the Henry Jameses” (Flowering , 527). There is a grain of truth to this literary-historical shorthand. Self-consciousness does become a distinguishing feature of New England fiction. Starting with Edith Wharton’s novella about the doomed love 90 deflowering of new england affair between Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver, New England fiction becomes home to characters who know full well that they belong to a “dying race.” To recent New England writers, this provincial self-knowledge provides either a late twentieth-century version of the cultural elegy cache of first-wave regionalism or a means to imagine a version of cosmopolitan detachment that might also revitalize the region. Despite reports of the region’s death, or perhaps—thinking of Brodhead and Foote’s explanations of late nineteenth-century regionalism’s popularity—because of these reports, regional fiction has lately started to matter to literary culture.1 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the regional works to win Pulitzer Prizes—Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2001), Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004), Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), and Paul Harding’s Tinkers (2009)—all feature small-town socio­ economic histories and reflections on aging among the debris of past vitality. However, this fiction does not signal a return to nostalgia. In fact, these books are prime examples of a regional cosmopolitanism that is back in vogue. In this chapter, I will argue that this kind of fiction deserves to be rewarded. Its accomplishments at the level of plot and voice are enhanced by a sophistication that represents the cosmopolitan hues of a region whose spirit is reported to have died sometime back in the nineteenth century. I will examine Banks’s answer to the question of what it means to be a “New England writer” at the turn of the millennium. The short answer is that it means that the writer has his work cut out for him. The New England writer has to squeeze global significance out of a region whose vitality has been buried for over a century. The reflexively provincial sensibility of Banks’s fiction, which both owns up to and rages against limitations that accompany regionalism, creates a reconciliatory alternative to the reductive regional imagination of those who have decided that New England is over. In Empire Falls, Richard Russo reminds us that cosmopolitan fantasies are native to the minds of New England men. Like such yearning seafarers as Sarah Orne Jewett’s Captain Littlepage and Elijah Tilley, Russo’s old men want to lift anchor and leave.2 Max Roby dreams of being a “conch” in Key West; Max’s son Miles dreams of owning a bookstore in Martha’s Vineyard. EveryoneelseinEmpireFallsdreamsofthedaytheEmpireShirt Factory, closed for thirty years, finds a new investor and reopens. Horace, the town newspaperman, describes the collective dream this way: Banks and the Wages of Cosmopolitanism 91 They came to invest millions. For a while they were...