Vivienne Eliot
Extract from Kate Zambreno, Heroines:
Chicago now our pilgrimage, which we once wanted to desperately escape. In Chicago, New York was our Moscow, like in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
It is our pattern: we forget so soon what made us want to flee, we
cover it over with nostalgia, Zelda writing her novelist-husband
wistfully of their honeymoon days while in the asylum. This shrine we
build to our own shared origins. Viv’s shrine to Tom, once he had
abandoned her, next to her framed picture of Sir Oswald Mosely, head of
the British Union of Fascists. (Does every woman, really, love a
fascist?)
I’ve tried to block out the local uproar dealing with Akron
native LeBron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers. I’ve always found
it pernicious, how those in the Midwest criminalize those who leave,
like it is some rejection of their own lives. Unlike the ambivalence
towards their now-prodigal son, rock musician Chrissie Hynde of the 80s
group The Pretenders is a much loved celebrity here. “Chrissie” this.
“Chrissie” that. The vegan Italian comfort food restaurant she owns in
town has become our culinary sanctuary.
As a girl I remember reading an interview with Chrissie Hynde in Rolling Stone
about how she left this city in Ohio when she was young and moved to
London. I remember thinking of her as this example of what I could do
myself one day. That I could leave Chicago, leave the family, leave the
Midwest. And I did. For a little bit. But now I am back here. The
eternal return. (To write, perhaps, is to always return.)
So many of the gods of modernism hailed from the Midwest.
Scott Fitzgerald from St. Paul. Ezra Pound fired from the college in
Indiana. Tom Eliot of the lofty Eliots of St. Louis. And they all
escaped, to Europe—they became expatriate, cosmopolitan. They managed to
shed their origins, their Midwestern skin. Hemingway years earlier
attended the same high school in Oak Park, Illinois as my father and his
siblings. God, I idolized Hemingway when I was in journalism school.
Now I hate his guts because of how he demonized Zelda in his memoir A Moveable Feast. And for how he treated his wife Hadley. She, summarily dismissed.
(I am now in another union. It is a union of forgotten or erased wives. I pay my dues daily.)
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