`The Great Lonely Land'

I spent four days in Cleveland and found myself trapped in the lyrics of a whiny albeit catchy rant written in 1983 by Chrissie Hynde, founder of The Pretenders and a native of Akron:

“I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride.
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls.”

I sympathize with the elegiac sentiment if not the self-righteousness expressed in “My City Was Gone.” It hit me last Thursday as my brother, my oldest son and I walked out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I.M. Pei’s hideous glass spectacle. A wall of black clouds moved east over Lake Erie. Captain Frank’s, a seafood restaurant we loved as kids, had stood at the end of the East Ninth Street pier, and now was long gone. So was the Terminal Tower – for a moment. Until 1967 it had been the tallest building in the world outside New York City. From where we stood on the lakefront, it was dwarfed by Key Tower, the BP Building, the Tower at Erieview and One Cleveland Center, among others, and briefly I lost sight of it in the looming architectural clutter. Pere Ubu, the great punk band from Cleveland, had named a 1985 album Terminal Tower. Consider some of its song titles: “Heart of Darkness,” “Final Solution,” “My Dark Ages,” “Not Happy.”

In The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus quotes a resonant passage from Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope:

“…street by street, block by block, step by step, door by door, all that’s left of the old America is under siege. I catch sight of it from time to time: a fleeting glimpse at the top of the stairs, or outside rustling in the bushes. This is the old America of legend and distant memory, that invested no faith in the wisdom of history and no hope in the sham of the future, the old America that invented itself all over from the ground up every single day….the America where no precaution is sufficient and nothing will protect you, no passport or traveling papers, no opportune crucifix or gas soaked torch, no sunglasses or decoder box or cyanide capsule, nor ejector seat or live wire or secret identity or reconstructed tissues or unmarked grave or faked death. It’s the America that was originally made for those who believed in nothing else, not because they believed there was nothing else but because for them, without America, nothing else was worth believing.”

This sad, wounded sentiment is nothing new. If you listen with care you’ll hear it in Melville and Philip Roth, in Dylan and The Band (“Maybe it was all in fun,/they didn't mean to ruin no one”), in the photographs of Walker Evans and Wright Morris, and in the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher. The tone may be nostalgic or savage but always rooted in a sense of dreams betrayed, hopes squandered, promises broken. Henry James articulates this elusive sense of loss repeatedly in The American Scene, as in this passage set in Florida, though it might as well be Cleveland or Houston:

“It is of the nature of many American impressions, accepted at the time as a whole of the particular story, simply to cease to be, as soon as your back is turned — to fade, to pass away, to leave not a wreck behind. This happens not least when the image, whatever it may have been, has exacted the tribute of wonder or pleasure: it has displayed every virtue but the virtue of being able to remain with you.”

At the end of the book, heading north from Florida by train, James addresses the rhythmic rumble of his Pullman car:

“You touch the great lonely land – as one feels it still to be -- only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own. You convert the large and noble sanities that I see around me, you convert them one after another to crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed…”