'Home is Somewhere Else'

The only book by the late Terry Teachout I hadn’t read was his first, City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy (1991). Terry grew up in Sikeston, in southeastern Missouri. Only when reading the book did I realize how close I had come to Sikeston with a friend in June 1990. The day before we had been in Lexington, Ky., where I visited Guy Davenport. 

We drove west and crossed the Mississippi River somewhere near Sikeston, probably at Cairo, Ill., and headed north in Missouri on I-55, past St. Louis to Hannibal, where we spent the afternoon and visited the Twain landmarks. Much of our serendipitous road trip, with no itinerary or destination, developed a literary theme. On our way back east we visited Lewiston, Ill., where Edgar Lee Masters grew up, saw Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, and eventually visited Clyde, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s model for Winesburg.

 

Terry was four years younger than me. I was born and raised in a suburb on the West Side of Cleveland, Ohio. We were both Midwestern boys but from different worlds. Small towns and country living were exotic to me, part of the reason I was attracted early to writers like Twain and Anderson. The Midwest is a big anomalous place. What did Cleveland and small-town Missouri have in common? At the time, what Terry elsewhere called “the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time documentaries and read the Book of the Month.” Thanks to the Book of the Month Club, I read Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy, Brian Moore’s I Am Mary Dunne and Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt. We both watched Ed Sullivan’s variety show on Sunday evenings with our families (followed by Bonanza in our case). The only people I knew who had gone to college were teachers and doctors. My brother played clarinet and amassed an enormous collection of classical music albums.

 

We were hicks by East Coast standards and some of us hungered after culture without quite knowing what that meant. We sometimes couldn’t tell snobbery from sophistication. When my mother sensed someone was putting on airs she’d say, “Smell him.” Terry opens his book by recounting his first visit to New York City, his future home, while a student at a Southern Baptist college. On his own he went to the Café Carlyle:

 

“. . . Bobby Short, formerly of Danville, Illinois, spotted me for an out-of-towner the moment he walked through the door and came straight to my table to say hello, an act of kindness for which I am still grateful.”

 

I’m reminded of an event from my freshman year in college. I attended a talk by Ralph Ellison. I remember him saying that all of us in the room, culturally speaking, regardless of color, were African Americans. That made perfect sense. Afterwards, I waited in line to meet him. While he signed my Signet paperback copy of Invisible Man, which I had read for the first time just a year earlier, I told him how important the novel was to me, how deeply it had touched me, that I planned to read it again. No doubt he had been hearing such gushes for twenty years from readers black and white, but he smiled, looked me in the eye, shook my hand and thanked me. This hick from Cleveland was floored. Terry writes on his final page:

 

“More and more, I think I am not so very far from the small-town boy I once was, not much further than a plane ride and a three-hour drive. And since he lives on in memory, as unchanged by passing time as a painting hanging in a museum or a fleeting image preserved in a home movie, I suppose that I am still that boy, too, even though I now live in exile in New York, pleased to write books and go to the ballet but constantly aware that home is somewhere else.”