Introduction

I came to Indiana for the first time with my wife Leslie and my three year old son Ben in the second week of March 1991 to buy a house, after Leslie had accepted a job to teach French at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. Subsequently, I wrote a poem that is both an elaboration of a journal entry I made at the time and an expression of an almost permanent state of mind. The sentence in the journal -- “America is wholly given over to Mars” -- was prompted by the triumphalism which prevailed immediately after the Gulf War of that year. The first two and a half lines record the trajectory of my life since leaving my native land, England, in 1984. The rest of the poem finds me in one of my habitual roles, that of outsider.

Detour

We drive twelve hundred miles to find a house.
Each mile beyond New England puts the old
Further out of reach. We cut through streets
Of yellow-fisted threats. White crosses slice
The clouds and glisten in the neon rain;
The wayside pulpits glorify the Lord
Of Hosts who smote the Butcher of Baghdad.
Camaros, mustangs leap the lights, race
Down the ramps like Heston’s chariots.
The legionaries have heard their Caesar speak
The words of victory. The boys are wearing
Desert brown; the girls, red, white and blue.

It’s night; along the strip the signs
Blink and scrawl in unilluminating light.

Indiana

The move from New England to the heartland was not the first major displacement in my life. That had occurred in 1984 with the leaving of England in unhappy circumstances and going to live and work in Spain. There, in July, a month after my arrival, I met Leslie Roberts of Boston, Massachusetts, in the crowded cathedral square of Santiago just after the midnight fireworks of the fiesta of Spain’s national saint. A year later, after teaching in Seville and a wedding ceremony in England, I took an even bigger leap out of my natural environment and came to live and work in the United States.

As I have traveled so far from the cottage in the Essex countryside that I still consider home, it is not surprising that the ancient metaphor of life as a journey is more than a hackneyed phrase for me. Furthermore, I am inclined to think that each stage of my journey, certainly since leaving England, is a detour, even if this present stay in Indiana is a lengthy one. Given this, it is inevitable that I constantly re-orientate myself by evoking memories of former things: calling on time to experience continuity in place. This habit of mind enables me to sense the commonalty of human experience beneath the surface variation of language and customs, and to be conscious of the often striking differences that separate me from my surroundings. I am at home in the humanist culture of the university and among the pacifist voices of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and uncomfortable in the constant presence of Bible Belt fundamentalism that manifests itself in bumper slogans declaring God’s gift to America, metal fishes affixed to the rear ends of cars, the multiplicity of churches, and chance occurrences, such as Ben’s distress at being told by one of his peers that his mother would burn in hell if she were not a Christian, or the sight of a Wayside Pulpit proclaiming WORK IS THE YEAST THAT MAKES THE DOUGH RISE.

The sense of continuity that comes from the creative use of memory and the oscillation between comfort and discomfort are aspects of my life that go beyond my stay in Indiana. My revulsion at unthinking, gung-ho patriotism that I record in ‘Detour’, for example, is of a piece with my disgust at the anti-Argentine opinions I heard in English pubs and saw in the headlines of British tabloids in the early eighties. Contrariwise, the quiet contentment that I feel in the roofless church in New Harmony is similar to the tranquility I experienced in Cottingham’s medieval church when I was an undergraduate fifty years ago.

New Harmony was the first place we visited outside Evansville. I first heard its name in history classes in high school when we were learning about Robert Owen and his settlements in Scotland and America, but I had forgotten, if I had ever known, that New Harmony is situated on the banks of the Wabash. During that first visit, I found much to delight in. In the roofless church, my wife and I were in accord with the sentiments that we translated from the inscription of the sculpture that is the focal point of the church: “Jacob Lipschitz, a Jew loyal to the faith of his ancestors, has made this Virgin for the peaceful accord of men on earth so that the spirit may reign.”

This ecumenical spirit of peace seemed to pervade the town and nowhere more so than in the grove that is as full of spiritual significance as the roofless church and the Lipschitz statue. During my forties, I had read half a dozen or so books by religious thinkers. Among these was one that has contributed to my understanding of the human predicament, Paul Tillich’s Courage To Be. Engraved in stone along the grove’s winding paths are sentences from Tillich’s works. These words lead to the sculpted leonine head over the grave of the master himself. It was a rare discovery to find Tillich in New Harmony and it is rare that I visit the town without paying homage to him.

Similarly, it is rare for me to go to New Harmony without calling in at the Golden Raintree Bookstore -- intellectual stimulus supplementing the spirituality of the roofless church and the theologian’s grove. For the first years of my life in Indiana, Bob Brooks and his wife ran the bookstore. I soon found out that Bob was a scholarly bibliophile who loved nothing better than to chat to his customers about their interests and to search the trade periodicals and internet for books for them. In my case, he found out of print novels and poems from the First World War that enabled me to develop a course at U.S.I. on the significance of that conflict. On one occasion he impressed me by immediately producing a book on American cemeteries for a visiting American studies professor.

Since early adolescence, when the medieval walls and arcades of Chester stimulated my historical imagination, I have responded to place. The early nineteenth century brick buildings of the Rappites and the log cabins and the split rail fences worked on my mind in much the same way. Even though the ventures of idealists like Robert Owen may disintegrate with the clash of personalities, his vision of communities based on co-operation rather than competition are to be lauded rather than mocked.

At a simpler level, the road to New Harmony illustrates a commonplace of my experience, namely, the finding of patterns by calling upon memories of former things. For me, this is especially true of places. While driving along the road to New Harmony, I inevitably find myself recalling the road between Market Rasen and Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. To begin with, the undulating fields and woods resemble the arable country between the Lincolnshire Wolds and the Lincoln Heights, but the sight of the oil pumps nodding away reminded me so strongly of the first time I had seen such engines in the fields of Lincolnshire that I half expected to see the Lancaster bomber at the gates of the Second World War R.A.F. airfield at Hemswell, just off Roman Ermine Street.

Even before my first drive to New Harmony, I had already played the landscape association game as we turned into I-164, the seventeen mile spur of highway that leads into Evansville from Interstate 64. For most of the way the land is level, lacking any field divisions other than straight drainage ditches. It was those dykes that evoked the Lincolnshire fenland between Boston and Horncastle, one of my frequent routes some years before. However, the illusion was broken by the sight of the huge mechanical excavating shovel, a reminder that strip-mining is not part of the economic life of the fens.

An even more dramatic disruption of my dream landscape came with our first visit to Newburgh, where the descent down State Street gave us our first glimpse of the Ohio. When I first came to the United States, I was struck by the sense of space that I felt in New England, suburban houses much farther apart than in my own crowded island. But Massachusetts cannot compare with the mid-west in space and scale. This was dramatically obvious when I saw the great expanse of a river so wide that you might mistake the curving farther shore for a bay leading to the open sea round the bend.

As you can see from these last two examples, even superficial similarities sharpen the disjunctions in my life, for Indiana is different from anywhere else I have lived, both geographically and culturally. I have mentioned the signs that do not allow one to forget that southern Indiana is part of the Bible belt – the prolific fish symbols, the ubiquitous churches. It is not that I am unused to churches, but it is the astonishing variety of American religion that is remarkable. In England, if I tried to list the different Christian denominations, I would think of five or six at the most – Church of England, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Congregational, Society of Friends, and, as a laggardly afterthought, Baptist. I know there are more, but these were the denominations whose churches and meeting houses I saw in my corner of England.

In New England as well, churches were Catholic and mainstream Protestant. Not so in Indiana. As we drove round Evansville and Newburgh during our first visit, I was bewildered by the various names attached to the churches on almost corner: First This and Second That; this species of Baptist and that form of Christian (till now I had assumed that church implied Christian), not to mention those strangely named edifices founded by some local prophetic worthy in the doldrums of the twentieth century, proclaiming the preaching of the true gospel. Variety there may be, but there is an underlying religious conservatism that unites many of these denominations. This was brought home to us a year or two after Ben began attending Newburgh Elementary School when an educational controversy in erupted in the Warrick County.

Before that, the cultural difference between Indiana and England stood out in two minor incidents. The first of these occurred when we were enrolling Ben. Amongst the papers provided for parents of children about to enter the school system was a document that told us to obtain a waiver from the school if we did not wish our child to be subject to corporal punishment. When I duly asked the school secretary for the relevant form, she could not find it. It was obvious that we were the first parents to exercise our rights in living memory.

The second occasion happened when Ben came home with a library book about dinosaurs that turned out to be a creationist text for children masquerading as science. Leslie felt strongly enough to point this out to the librarian and as a result the principal asked her to join a committee of teachers and parents to read and select books for the school’s reading program. Serving on that committee revealed to her first-hand experience of the linguistic authoritarianism of some fundamentalists. Objections were made to the use of the words “hell” and “damn” in any context of that classic of patriotic American children’s fiction, Johnny Tremayne. Such language was sufficient to damn the book.

Shortly after this, the controversy over the state’s Reading for Real project broke. The state education board had drawn up a list of books for young readers, including fiction that addressed contemporary problems. Local school boards, including Warrick, had been invited to take part in a pilot scheme. Immediately the fundamentalist lobby mobilized. For the first time since coming to the United States, I was moved to take part in public controversy. I went to the meeting called by the school corporation and spoke briefly in a liberal vein. I left the meeting, glad that I had spoken but depressed by the passion and irrationality of the opposing camp. The fundamentalists triumphed and Warrick teachers had to stop their participation in the “Reading for Real” project.

In my naiveté I had expected that the puritan legacy would be stronger in Massachusetts than in German America. Not so, as we would find out in our first summer when we went to a bierfest in Haubstadt a few miles away. We were at something of a loose end, as just about everybody we had met in March was out of town, so the prospect of loosening up with steins of foaming ale was to me at any rate enticing. Alas, my expectations were not to be realized. Downtown Haubstadt resembled not so much a place of merriment as a temporary detention center such as one might have found in Pinochet’s Chile. A twelve foot wire mesh fence cordoned off the main square, behind which, not beer, but Budweiser and Millers were for sale. Undaunted, we made our way to the entrance of the compound, only to be greeted by a burly policeman demanding to see ID and forbidding entry to the family as a whole, since our four year old was not of legal drinking age. After a hasty family council, we decided that I should go for my beer, while Leslie and Ben consumed their sodas. So there we were, Leslie and Ben exiled to one side of the wire while I hastily downed my watery potation at a table within finger tip distance on the other. I could not help making the contrast with the previous summer when we had gone to a festival on the water meadows in Sudbury, England, where the beer tent, dispensing Greene King ale, was the central feature and where uncorrupted children ran in and out of the legs of their parents, clamoring for a drink of pop and a hot dog.

I had an even stranger experience of puritanism a year or so later when I was checking out my purchases at a local Keymart. The last items that I laid on the conveyor belt were two bottles of wine. The teenage girl at the till stopped as the tainted bottles teetered towards her. “Would you pass these through for me?” I was bemused and asked why. “I’m not twenty one, so I’m not allowed to touch any alcohol.” It was the first time that it occurred to me that a hand might imbibe through the dark glass of the prohibited bottle.

Teaching rhetoric and composition, English literature, and survey courses in the humanities is a sure way to experience the cultural climate of a region. Even the phraseology of an assignment, though it was not deliberately designed to unsettle students, could do so. After the students had read extracts from the Gilgamesh Epic, the Old Testament, and the Iliad, I gave this assignment: “Consider the interaction of the divine and the human in these three texts.” Some students were perturbed by the implication of the word “texts”: the implication that the Bible could be subject to the same analytical procedures that are applied to any discourse.

Two students I taught in my early years illustrate the point that Indiana, like any other place, is by no means homogeneous. One student gave me a glimpse of a way of life that I had no previous experience of; the other reinforced something I already knew, that while most people accept the culture they are born into, some question it and may even reject it. I met Dave on the first morning of my teaching for the university. I had been assigned to teach an introduction to literature course in an off-campus site that had formerly been a parochial grade school. I drove onto the school’s forecourt and parked our little Corolla next to a pick-up truck whose chassis, mounted some two or three feet above its wheels, towered intimidatingly above me. The owner of the truck turned out to be Dave, who attended class wearing the biggest stetson imaginable. The band of this remarkable hat bore the legend: ONE HELLUVA REBEL. Naturally, he sat at the back of the room. During that first week, I noticed that that he had developed a swelling in one of his cheeks; a little later I saw that the swelling had migrated to the other cheek, but, absorbed as I was in the exposition of the importance of place in some narratives, I thought no more about it. At the end of one of those first classes, Dave approached me in a confidential manner and told me that if I saw him half close his eyes, I should not attribute it to any failing on my part to command his attention, but that he was working the third shift and sometimes felt tired. Then, as if to cement what he obviously perceived to be a special relationship, he remarked that I was lucky to be English, as I had lived among castles and knights. He was, he told me, an aficionado of the board game Knights and Dragons. A week or so after this exchange, I discovered the reason for the migrating lump when I observed him expectorating a wad of exhausted tobacco into an empty Coke can. Being green in the ways of Indiana, I was uncertain as to whether I should forbid his masticatory practice on the grounds of risk to public health, or whether I should refrain from comment on the grounds of local custom. In the event, the problem was resolved when a delegation of young women who sat in front of him came to tell me that they were nauseated by his chewing and spitting and asked me to make him stop. I discreetly called him aside at the end of the next class. To my relief, he did not demur, nor did he bear any grudge against his fellow classmates or me. In fact he signed up for another course with me.

When I first began to teach at USI, the majority of the students lived locally. Most of them, belonging to extended families, had lived all their lives in the area and many had never been out of Indiana except to cross the river into Kentucky. In talking with such students I was reminded of my early teaching days in rural Lincolnshire. Living all one’s life in one place does not in itself produce a closed mind, though why one person should develop a receptive mind and another not remains a mystery. For the first three years of my work at USI, I taught a night class at Castle High in Newburgh. Such classes attract non-traditional students, and in one of those classes I met Mary, a coal miner who had been laid off. She had a son at IU and drove sixty miles to attend the class. When I read her first piece of written work, I knew I had a born writer as a student, though she did not know it herself. She told me that she had never before received an A for an essay. I reassured her that I was doing her no favors and that she fully merited the grade. She rewarded me with a semester’s interesting writing. Apart from what she had to say about the difficulties of being a woman in the traditionally men’s world of mining, her musings about living in – as she saw it – a prejudiced, narrow-minded German-American community, her narrative about the family’s racist attitudes, and her discovery of a half-Jewish grandmother, made compelling reading and was a fine testimony to a woman’s ability to transcend the limitations of place and upbringing.

Both my wife and I put great store on music, so we were pleased to learn that Evansville has a lively musical tradition. The town boasts a symphony orchestra, a German Männechor among its many choirs, and a flourishing music program in its schools. I joined the Evansville Philharmonic Choir in my first year and enjoyed singing in several concerts before I strayed into other musical pastures, while Leslie acquired a reputation for herself by giving concerts of French songs. Shortly after coming to live in Newburgh, we heard about Kindermusik, a program for pre-schoolers and kindergarteners. Ben was duly enrolled. So began his musical education, which finds him at fifteen singing bass in a church choir and playing the French horn and, inevitably for a contemporary teenager, the electric guitar.

Ben’s Kindermusik teacher was so impressed with his singing ability that she recommended that we send him to the choir school of the First Presbyterian Church. How a Presbyterian church comes to be affiliated to the Anglican/Episcopalian organization of the Royal School of Church Music is one of the minor mysteries of Evansville. Even stranger is that the present director of music at the church is a former choral scholar of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and was himself a boy chorister at Westminster Abbey. Throughout my English life I had sung in choirs and, although as an agnostic I had misgivings about attending church, I would eventually be persuaded by the prospect of singing English church music, to join my son and my ecumenical Jewish wife in the choir of the First Presbyterian Church.

I began by noting my circuitous life journey and the ambivalence of being a resident alien in Indiana. I will end by recounting an occasion that connected to my English past and brought together the similarities and dissimilarities of my life here. In our week of house-hunting I had been told by one of the deans of Liberal Arts that Eugene Debs, the leader of the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) and failed socialist presidential candidate, was a native of Indiana. On Labor Day of my second year here, I would find that some people still remembered him. During the 1960s and 70s, I had been a Labor Party activist. In my role as a parliamentary candidate I had addressed many political meetings and attended many more. When I heard that the leader of the United Mineworkers Union was to address a Labor Day rally at the Four-H Fairground north of Evansville, I looked forward to going. I was not disappointed. I browsed the union and assorted left wing pamphlets, feeling completely at ease. The speech, with its invocation of the classic socialist values of solidarity and equality, might have been declaimed by an English trade unionist in the days of Harold Wilson, except that the speaker substituted “corporate America” for “capitalism” as the enemy of the toiling classes. I applauded enthusiastically, even as I reflected that the political spectrum, both here and in England has shifted so far to the right that solidarity and equality are out of sight.

“America is given over to Mars,” my self-quotation avers at the beginning of this piece and I fear that is still so. But, even here, in the southwestern corner of Indiana, quiet, alternative voices can be heard behind the war propaganda. During our first summer here we were drawn to a group of long-time members of the Christian pacifist group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Although my attendance at their small gatherings has been sporadic, I am heartened by their witness. Their presence, along with the music and the historic communal tradition from New Harmony, helps to make Indiana a place where I find, increasingly, a congenial home for my difference.