We are experts on polluted cities.
We learned from living in cities plagued by air and water pollution, the smoke from the factory stacks, the chemicals lobbed into the river, the destruction of inner-city neighborhoods, and flight to the suburbs and exurbs.
Suburban life is complicated. There were no trains or buses from the far suburbs and exurbs. One person per car: those tens of thousands of cars crawling in on the highways emitting carbon dioxide. In this particular city, bicycling was not encouraged, and there were no bike lanes. One driver left the scene after hitting a bicyclist. She flipped over the handlebars and broke her collarbone and three ribs when she hit the asphalt. But not all drivers are monsters: someone stopped and helped her.
Commuting can even be psychologically damaging. A colleague who commuted 100 miles a day seemed depressed and not all there, but who could blame her? “It’s okay,” she said with that depressed look. I brought her cups of tea, because she seemed completely broken, and, indeed, she lost her job after a few months. She took anti-depressants, but that didn’t seem enough, and I wondered: do commuters need more psychotropic drugs than other people? According to the National Health Institute, “Geographic region was significantly associated with use of psychotropic medications. Psychotropic medication use was higher in less urban areas (19.7%) relative to more urban areas (14.2%).” I am sort of right.
One of the greatest writers on air pollution and urban sprawl is the novelist Booth Tarkington, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Magnificent Ambersons (1918). His best, though little-known, novel is The Midlander (1923), the third in the Growth trilogy. Tarkington chronicles the rise and fall of a midwestern city, which is wrecked by pollution from factories and automobiles. The black smoke from factories and the automobile exhaust casts a fog over the city. People can’t breathe; their clothes are always dirty; and developers are tearing down houses to build more smoky factories.
As I read, I was astonished to realize that urban sprawl was a concern in the first quarter of the 20th century. And then I remembered E. M. Forster’s Howards End, which is, in a way, about the difficulty of finding housing in London, and a country house that is rapidly becoming suburban. Marriage temporarily solves the housing problem, but the real solution may lie at Howards End, in a kind of pre-suburban fugue.
In The Midlander, the protagonist, Dan Oliphant, Is not seeking housing, but planning and building a suburb. He’s a bit of a fool who marries a shallow New York beauty who despises the midwest (which she calls the Far West) and verbally abuses him. Fortunately Dan leaves her at home with his parents (she is nice to them) almost all day and night, while he tries to find investors and digs and lays out the neighborhoods on his land. He foresees that the population will expand in 10 years and move to the suburbs; he even builds a car factory because the suburbanites will need transportation. What he doesn’t know is that air pollution from factories and cars will drive people out of the city.
I may not share Dan’s vision – the other characters do not, either, though his parents and next-door neighbor are supportive – but he is fascinating and fanatical about sharing it. We ourselves aren’t really suburban types, but there are old suburbs with beautiful trees, and then the the treeless burbs with ticky-tacky houses. But what we’re looking at in both cases is a place for people to call home.
It’s more convenient and energy-efficient to live in a city if you can, but not possible for everyone, I realize. That’s the end of my rant.
And, may I add, that my unhappiest years were spent in a suburb. All I can say is: I was never so bored in my life.
You have everything in the city!
But Dan Oliphant in The Midlander would not agree.
The so-called “mediocre artists” propped up by the canon are, of course, authors of the classics. (Yes, I’m annoyed.) Douglas smugly insists that students would benefit more from The Lord of the Rings (I read it when I was 10!) and a Y.A. author named Rainbow Rowell (whom doubtless the students read when they are 10). His background seems not to be in literature or education: he has no interest in style or structure, and is unfamiliar with the concept of reading outside his comfort zone. I recommend that he read the critic Maureen Corrigan’s excellent book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
Mediocrity can be dangerous, as we know from literature. I recently read Pulitzer Prize winner Booth Tarkington’s The Midlander, the third in his Growth trilogy of environmental novels. (He won the Pulitzer for the second, The Magnificent Ambersons). In The Midlander, set in Indiana in the early 20th century, Tarkington tells the story of two brothers in a wealthy family, Harlan and Dan Oliphant, who dislike each other from boyhood. Brilliant, snobbish Harlan graduates from Harvard with honors, while sweet, stupid Dan barely graduates.
The middle doesn’t always mean mediocrity. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the mythic engineer Daedalus devises wings of feathers and wax to escape from King Minos’s prison. He tells his son Icarus before they fly across the sea, “Fly in the middle of the path, because if you go too low, the water will weigh down your feathers, and if you go too high, fire will burn your wings.”