'Charming Places, Charming Objects, Languish'

“And that was doubtless, for the story seeker, absolutely the story: the constituted blankness was the whole business, and one’s opportunity was all, thereby, for a study of exquisite emptiness.” 

My brother and nephew, friends I’ve known for half a century, former classmates at my high-school reunion and an unexpectedly good bookstore – all made my recent visit to Cleveland memorably pleasant. Less pleasant was the physical state of the city itself. For complicated economic reasons I don’t pretend to understand, entire neighborhoods on the West Side, once home to working-class Poles, Slovaks and Ukrainians, are indistinguishable from slums. This has all occurred in my lifetime. Too many empty lots and vacant houses accumulate weeds and trash. In Houston, a shuttered storefront is an ambivalent sight: a business has closed but another will almost certainly open soon. Not so in Cleveland. Whole blocks embody “exquisite emptiness.” Dollar stores, clothing consignment shops, check-cashing outlets, hemp-and-vape businesses and fast-food joints proliferate. My brother and I drove past a raging fire in a trash Dumpster spreading to the adjoining apartment building.

 

The passage at the top is drawn from the first chapter of Henry James’ The American Scene (1907), based on his 1904-05 visit to the United States, his first in twenty years. Much of what I saw in Cleveland was “constituted blankness.” The city wears the flat affect of a depressive. I haven’t lived in Cleveland since 1977 and last visited more than five years ago. I understand that some of my reactions are the inevitable result of old memories violated. Cleveland was a booming, prosperous place when I was a kid, and I’m resisting, with some difficulty, the temptation to indulge in nostalgia. In the same chapter, James writes:

 

“Charming places, charming objects, languish, all round him, under designations that seem to leave on them the smudge of a great vulgar thumb--which is precisely a part of what the pleading land appears to hint to you when it murmurs, in autumn, its intelligent refrain. If it feels itself better than so many of the phases of its fate, so there are spots where you see it turn up at you, under some familiar tasteless infliction of this order, the plaintive eye of a creature wounded with a poisoned arrow.”

 

One afternoon I was lost on the West Side, trying to get back to my brother’s place. At the corner of West 73^rd Street and Elton Avenue I stopped to admire Julio’s Bar. It’s a small tavern in a largely residential neighborhood, built long ago as the extension of a house. See a photo of it here, though the brick front has since been repainted a shining fire-engine red. The door was closed and the windows were dark, and I saw no one around. My brother said it went out of business a long time ago, another charming place languishing.