Phil Christman on the Poetics of Place

Excerpted from Best of the Rust Belt (Belt Publishing, 2024). This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

I think nothing has shadowed my development as a writer more than my failure to have an interesting childhood. Most of it I spent watching TV. My family was kind of poor, but our poverty was more of a chronic than acute condition. It was the kind of working-poor experience that leaves you with a pervasive sense of limitedness and an instinctive terror of bank tellers, but not the kind that, once survived, makes you sound badass and inspiring. As for adolescence, my main memory of it is a pervasive boredom and a sense that interesting things only happened elsewhere and to other people, that I was doomed forever to be entering rooms moments after someone had said something funny or cool, learning about a party on the following Monday, befriending a group of people only long after its best anecdotes—“Remember when we climbed on top of the middle school and the cops chased us?” “Remember when we tricked those freshmen into smoking parsley?”—were already long established.

I felt about my hometown the way a person with only one book comes to feel about that book. Maybe it’s a very large book. Maybe it’s an almanac! Still, sooner or later, its familiarity becomes more alarming than reassuring. You feel sick of knowing every paragraph, oppressed by the possibility that the world is actually small enough to fit within your head. The sense of an unchanging everydayness was so strong that it became like a kind of depression.

Looking back, I can assign many causes to these feelings of everydayness and belatedness. I can chalk them up to economics or to family trauma—the abuse my father experienced and the smallness of the world he built himself in response. I can talk about undiagnosed depression. I can cite the limitations of my family’s worldview, the kind of Christian fundamentalism that, by answering every question with a Bible verse, extinguishes the sense that there can be any mystery or undecidedness in things, a case of religion as, actually, the death of religious feeling. But I didn’t have any of these explanations at the time, and, as will be seen, I probably don’t fully believe them even now that they’re available. All I felt was the heaviness.

In adolescence, to relieve this heaviness, I ran. When I ran, it was as if the map of the place that existed in my head got rearranged, reordered. I knew where every road ended and every intersection happened, but when I ran, I felt as though I didn’t know these things anymore. Every square on the map was somehow heightened, every familiar house strangely lit up or shadowed. I would run long, till that map was obliterated, and then I’d run back, like a dog with one of those electronic collars.

When I think of what the Midwest gave to my imagination, I think first of the way this landscape suddenly shifted in those moments, the way I suddenly felt that I didn’t know it. It’s not only the flatness that writers like Michael Martone and Marilynne Robinson have described so well—how it makes the world into a kind of showcase or theater of the glory of God or of humankind or of the inexplicable—but a duality. You’re looking at a flat field, a thing that just lies there, that has nothing to do but be patently itself, and you suddenly realize that this flat square is also more things than you can possibly fully see at once. By laying itself out for you, it also exhausts your seeing and forces you to confront that exhaustion. It reminds you how little you see of what you see. And this estrangement doubles back on oneself. You know the truth of Willa Cather’s famous sentence, “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.” What even are you, anyway?

It’s the sense of a sudden toggling between a picture that is indescribable in its banality and one that is indescribable because it is too strange and complex to fully absorb—this is probably the single thing that is most important to me as a writer. The idea that mystery doesn’t have to be sought, just noticed. That we are not terminally disenchanted beings roaming a landscape of atomization and anomie. That everything, as my hero Marilynne Robinson has also said, always bears looking into. That we “know” our landscapes or our jobs or our selves as we know our family members—that is, in a way that absolutely does not preclude those destabilizing but also beautiful moments in which we sigh and say, “Did I ever really know her?” My favorite writers—and a lot of them tend to be midwesterners—are people who can make a reader not so much doubt as forget the map of the world that they carry in their heads. These writers take it that the obvious description is the wrong one.

I believe in that with religious intensity, and it makes writing hard. It also makes living hard. I fear the obvious so much that my evasions of it have sometimes made me ridiculous, so determined was I to find the complex secret meaning behind my own or someone else’s feelings or behavior. As an example, I once had a roommate who drank alcohol constantly, insisted he wasn’t an alcoholic, and stole a twenty off my dresser to buy alcohol. So naturally I agreed with him that he wasn’t an alcoholic. It would be reductive and limiting to reduce someone to such a loaded term, to put the species ahead of the variation once again. He was not an alcoholic. He was, like all beings, a one-off, a miracle, an unrepeatable microtone in an infinite harmonic scale. Indeed. But he was also an alcoholic, and I needed that twenty.

You could almost call it the counter-satirical impulse, insofar as classical satire consists of reducing everything to the most ridiculous possible version of itself and then smashing these stock figures into each other at high speeds so that when the dust clears, nothing is left but the status quo ante. I recently read, for the first time, a novel that I had always heard described as a kind of satirical vision of the Midwest, Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. It is set in Kansas City between World War I and World War II and is written in tiny vignettes, between a paragraph and a few pages long, each of which has an ironic or sardonic or merely neutral title. This is a description of the titular character running into a well-known acquaintance:

On a downtown street just outside a department store a man said something to her. She ignored him. But at that moment the crowd closed them in together.

“How do you do?” he said, smiling and touching his hat.

She saw that he was a man of about fifty with silvery hair and rather satanic ears.

His face became red and he laughed awkwardly. “I’m Gladys Schmidt’s husband.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” Mrs. Bridge exclaimed. “I didn’t recognize you.”

The title tells us why this is funny: NEVER SPEAK TO STRANGE MEN. The point, of course, is that all men are strange; only context makes us think otherwise.

Now, this is a comic passage in a book that is frequently very funny, but the comedy is in unknowing: the fact that Mrs. Bridge can’t recognize someone she has known for decades. That is the joke at the heart of the novel as well: that everybody is strange to Mrs. Bridge, and she, in turn, is a stranger to everybody. Nobody, not her children, not her husband, nor even herself, knows her. As the book’s first sentence tells us, she is “never able to get used to” the sound of her own first name. The comedy of the book is precisely not satirical in the sense of reducing Mrs. Bridge or Mr. Bridge or the other characters to types at whom we are invited to laugh. The comedy is in the gap between their characters on the one hand and the strategies they use to understand each other on the other. Mrs. Bridge is often described as a middle-class housewife, and when you put down the book, you want never again to hear the words “middle-class” or “housewife.” You want words that open up rather than words that settle.

Such as it is, this is my poetics. It’s nothing too fancy—a person in a satirical mood might say it’s just a little Russian Formalist defamiliarization with a bit of mainline Protestant uplift thrown in. It’s also my politics and my ethics, such as those are. I try not to understand my students too quickly; I try not to thrust limiting assumptions on other people; I try to let people surprise me. I mostly fail at these things, and sometimes they feel irrelevant in a historical moment when so much of the evil around us is unsubtle and simple. But by that same token, if there is any hope for those who live in such a moment, it is precisely where, to my mind, literature and beauty have always resided: in the part that isn’t obvious, in the part you can’t see though it is right in front of you, in the calm mystery of what is.

Cover Image: “Landscape with Shepherd” by Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872), via The Met Collection

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Excerpted with permission from Best of the Rust Belt, Belt Publishing, 2024