William Gass
Parkview
St. Louis, Missouri
By Devin Thomas O’Shea
The epigraph of The Tunnel reads, “The descent to hell is the same from every place,” but William Gass chose to set his magnum opus in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, called Parkview.
Parkview is one of the first White Flight subdivisions ever constructed. It was a planned neighborhood, a prototype that would use winding lanes and a single outlet to discourage “traffic.” In the basement of one of these darling mansions, based on William Gass’ real house, Gass imagined a history professor at an upscale *cough* Wash U *cough* Midwestern university. Professor Koehler sits to write the introduction to his career-defining work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. But he faces a block and pens The Tunnel instead — a messy, dark, lyrical portrayal of Koehler himself.
Instead of the neat, well-researched book dissecting the Nazis, Koehler describes the fascism in his own heart. In his basement, digging down in the soil of his soul, he also literally tunnels in the dirt floor of his Parkview cellar.
According to Gass, “[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness.” We learn Koehler threw a brick on Kristallnacht. He kills his wife’s cat when it gets in the way of his digging. He runs out of space for all his soil, but luckily the history professor’s wife is an antiques shop owner. Their second floor is lined with Martha’s restored bureaus, and though Koehler fears Martha’s gaze — and wants to hide the tunnel (and The Tunnel) from her — he loads soil from his basement dig into her furniture, where she’ll surely find it one day. At the end, Martha finds Koehler’s filth and confronts him in the basement. She tips a drawer onto his manuscript, and the dirt goes everywhere: in his lap and all over his pages. Martha orders him to clean her cabinets, and Koehler wonders if she understood his pun about soiling her drawers.
Gass and Koehler both lived in secluded Parkview, a neighborhood built upon the philosophy that rich people shouldn’t have to share the sidewalks with poor people. In the 1900s, downtown St. Louis was busy and dirty. The rich built Parkview far away, just across the city limit, literally on the edge of the county. The Tunnel — written and set in the center of this planned community — is a deeply moral book about filth hiding below the surface of respectability. Like Gass, Koehler is an esteemed American intellectual with a wife, a house, and tenure. His research aims to find what was so unusually nasty about the villains of history, but long before he starts digging in the St. Louis mud, Koehler concludes that the Germans were just like you and me. Fascism is not aberrant. It has always been down in our subconscious basement; it lives in everyday hatreds.
Parkview’s wealth has been resilient in the face of St. Louis’s century-long economic decline, but just down the street, the city’s racial segregation has made poverty in the Black community worse every day. The so-called “Delmar Divide” represents one of the largest economic cliffs in the country. On the south side, White professors raise families in leafy, historic neighborhoods with old-timey gas lamps. Just up the street from Koehler’s basement, the redlining starts. Black suburbs like Mill Creek were destroyed to ghettoize Black St. Louisans in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. The city defunded Pruitt-Igoe soon after it was completed in 1956, then condemned and demolished it in the 1970s. Now, even the North County homes are falling down or being deconstructed because the bricks are worth more than the walls. Beauty is everywhere in North St. Louis — but people go hungry, police violence runs rampant, schools are pipelines to the prisons, and poverty abounds. And you don’t have to dig to find it.
Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing is in Boulevard, Paterson Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The St. Louis Anthology, and elsewhere. Chapter one of his manuscript, Veiled Prophet, is published in Embark Literary Journal. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018. Find him on Twitter.
