One other bit of testimony on the Midwestern question has come to mind. I recollect a passage from Bellow’s “Herzog” in which the distraught protagonist, wandering about Hyde Park in the full fury of his personal dilemmas and ruminations, pauses to contemplate an inelegant slightly shabby house of the sort we ex-Hyde Parkers are all familiar with, probably somewhere east of Dorchester near the (then) Illinois Central tracks. This house seems to him to express the life of its occupants in all their touching bookish awkwardness, unworldly but well-meaning and idealistic about the human condition. It seems to him distinctly Midwestern, set down in the middle of bruising brawling Chicago. In fact, it strikes him as specific to the culture of the University of Chicago.
Bellow was well-placed to make such observations and comparisons, growing up in rough working-class Chicago, spending lots of time in New York but living during his most creative years in Hyde Park and teaching at the University. He said somewhere that he always went to New York in a sprit of anthropological research, but that the place with all its glitz and glamor was not conducive to the hard work of writing. For that he always returned to Hyde Park and his buddies at the University.
Whenever I’m back in HP and go for a stroll I think of a tormented Moses Herzog contemplating with envy his mild-mannered Midwestern neighbors. I suppose it could have happened anywhere.