You Can Take The Boy Out Of Iowa But You Can'T Take Iowa Out Of The Boy

I have been reading Jane Smiley's three volume epic history of Iowa people, one extended family through the twentieth century.  When I encountered the first volume I glowed with a kind of enthusiasm, since I was born in Iowa City in 1930, and I was to discover, a principal character grows up and leaves the farm and in 1954 comes the State University of Iowa, and is even described as taking medieval English courses with a Professor John McCalliard.  Here was a moment when reality came into the fiction.  I, Charles Beye, flesh and blood creature, took that very course, had to be a few years earlier, because I graduated in '52and went on to Harvard.  I was the son of citified persons from Oak Park Illinois, my father was a surgeon, professor of surgery, really, a far cry from these hardy farming people, descendants of the laconic direct Scandinavian immigrant men and women.  Still I read on.  I recognized many types from my high school classes, my university classes, people I delivered papers to.  They were all pretty much bland and good, and none seemed to be going through the tortured life of an early teenaged boy wanting a scandalous promiscuous life of sex with my male classmates who were at an age where instant arousal trumped the gender of the sexual partner.  But I read on enjoying a kind of sentimental deja vu of the rocks and rills, the fields of corn, the horses, those mild people.  But now I am reading the second volume, the next generation is spreading out; still they do not lose their unflappability, and in this portion I discovered why it was that I had to get out of Iowa, as did the majority of my siblings:  the people had no affect. Too much time with them and you would die of boredom.  My youngest sister who never left, raised three daughters, in a fundamentally loveless marriage, made the pies, wrapped the christmas packages, brought covered dishes to church suppers, grew to be immensely obese, had to have canes to get around, and in a moment of mournful candor confessed to me out on a visit that she guessed it was boredom that kept her hand in the cookie jar.  I went back to all my high school reunions and everyone was so nice, even when trying to express strong opposition to some national policy.  It was scary, Smiley's book is scary.  But what is even more disturbing is here in Sarasota there are the retirees from the Middle West, my age cohorts, come to maturity in the Eisenhower years, all of them nice, careful with their language, evidently so easily disturbed that the directors of the Asolo Repertory Theater have to advertise in this day and age--get that image in your mind--warning of "mature themes, mature language."  This is a major American professional repertory theater and it thinks Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness" is daring!  God forbid they try Tennessee Williams.Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Albee, or a host of others who have prodded Americans to rethink the simpleminded pieties they learned on the farm.  So Smiley's trilogy is affording me a wonderful look back, but also a closer inspection of the backstories of the people I meet  down here at the theater wine receptions where we exchange the blandest of platitudes in lieu of thinking about the plays.  I cannot imagine what they might have to say about Hillary and the Donald, and don't intend to inquire.