North Meridian Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

By Wesley R. Bishop

Booth Tarkington would still recognize his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, which he described in The Turmoil as “a midland city in the heart of fair open country, a dirty and wonderful city nestling dingily in the fog of its own smoke.” Although the city has undergone significant changes since he grew up there more than a century before, the spirit of the city, a spirit he often strove to capture in prose, is still very present. The Turmoil, first published in 1915, is not Tarkington’s most well-known work, but it makes a strong case to be the novel that best understands the sprawl of Indianapolis. Even in the twenty-first century, the city feels less like a compact entity and more a conglomeration of different parts haphazardly tied together by long avenues that serve as borders for racial, geographic, and socioeconomic divisions.

Often these expansive streets — 38th Street, Keystone Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, Meridian Street — feel less like connections within the city and more like corridors racing somewhere else, kicking up smog from endless exhaust. Again, Tarkington’s words feel familiar:

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches. He gets them and pants fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: ‘Wealth! I will get Wealth I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean — but I will get Wealth!’ . . . And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.

I read The Turmoil this past year, a year of considerable unrest. COVID, the George Floyd protests, and the fallout from the final year of Trump’s presidency swirled together, clogging the air, suffocating all in its path. It felt like monumental, terrifying, history was being recorded on an hourly basis.

Yet the thing that most stood out to me as I read Tarkington from my apartment in Indianapolis was the almost audible cries of the American nation’s demands for continued growth. Not just businesspeople, but school administrators and customers and politicians, all demanding quick reopenings, defying mask mandates, and adding another level of grime to an already perilous situation. These calls for “wealth” — much like we see in The Turmoil — happened while we all could see the impacts of COVID. Air quality, smog or virus laced, be damned. Things needed to be open. To stop economic activity — shopping, working, selling — was to die even if going forward meant actual death.

Tarkington’s acknowledgement of social issues often earned him notice from contemporary readers and some critics. The Turmoil was followed by two other novels — The Magnificent Ambersons and The Midlander — that dealt with the issue of America’s transition into a new industrial age. These novels all take place in a fictionalized Indianapolis, and ultimately, The Turmoil’s major characters conclude that despite the hurried rush of growth and development, the United States could (and probably would) continue to move forward culturally. Today it reads as incredibly optimistic, but as I drive through the city over a hundred years later, I think Tarkington was essentially correct. It is not an admission I expected to make.

Indianapolis and the United States have been violently remade in the process of industrialization, and as Tarkington saw the rise of the industrial belt, residents of the Midwest’s rust belt are watching the tail end of that process. From rise to fall, to remaking again, again, again. Yet despite that, we still make art, we still think, we still strive for beauty and dignity.

As Tarkington notes, though, this is not a smooth process. The social classes that Tarkington discusses are still very much present in the city. The Indianapolis police department, a frequent subject of protests and calls for change, patrols the vast spread of the city. Even more sprawling than in Tarkington’s lifetime, Indianapolis often feels like a city held together by nothing more than geography.

At the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, marchers crossed 38th Street, a de facto border within the city that separates the city’s working class from its wealthiest residents. Marchers transgressed that border, going so far as to stand outside the governor’s mansion on North Meridian Street. I remember that night as my phone dinged with messages from friends and colleagues. Many in the city understood that a reckoning may be about to begin, where the wealthy and sheltered were being forced to see the cost of this inequality. Yet the protesters after chanting turned away from the mansion and began the long trek back to the center of Indianapolis.

What lies in store for us, the subjects of a tumultuous age? It’s impossible to say. Yet, like Tarkington’s novel, I remain largely optimistic that despite whatever dirt- or pandemic-congested state waits for us we will have (and must have) our ability to create meaningful representations of our lives — that, after all, is culture. We must do it, even as the giants pant violently for wealth.

Wesley R. Bishop is a historian, poet, and editor living in northern Indianapolis. He is an assistant professor of American history at Marian University Indianapolis and is the founding and managing editor of The North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship.

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The Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library
Indianapolis, IN

By Laura Beadling

Like many, I found and loved Kurt Vonnegut somewhere in my miserable teenage years. Slaughterhouse-Five is now one of my favorite novels to teach, whether in Great American Books or Science Fiction Literature, and at least some of my students have had similar reactions. When the Kurt Vonnegut Library and Museum moved to its new location in downtown Indy, I knew I had to go, and, late in December 2019, my husband and I packed up the dogs and headed west from Youngstown.

Slaughterhouse-Five showcases Vonnegut’s finely tuned eye for evocative juxtapositions. Structurally, the book strings together short vignettes from across protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s life, which is fitting given his assertion that he’s “come unstuck in time,” as the first page tells us. The narrative ping pongs between Billy’s sad youth, his hellish experiences in World War II, his humdrum breakdowns in Illium, NY, and his domestic contentment as an exhibit in a Tralfamadorian zoo with porn star and fellow captive Montana Wildhack.

The trip from Youngstown to downtown Indy is also filled with jarring incongruities. After several hours of flat sameness on I-70 West, suddenly you’re in the city. As we drove through downtown, we passed the gigantic blue curved-glass Marriott Hotel and a minute later a small homeless encampment under an overpass. Less than five minutes later, we pulled into a spot just off Indiana Avenue, right outside the museum.

The most striking artifact inside the museum was the icebox from Vonnegut’s childhood home. Such an incongruous object to include in a museum dedicated to a writer, especially a writer of science fiction and satire. It can’t have been easy to install either. The giant thing, made of painted wood and a number of serious-looking metal fasteners, looked murderously heavy and was, also incongruously, topped by a jaunty toy Tralfamadorian. My eyes went back to it again and again.

The museum building itself is lovely, brick with a second floor patio and plenty of windows situated in a lively neighborhood. I noticed that the Madame C.J. Walker Building was across the street, so we took a walk around the area, one of Indy’s six Cultural Districts. Although the Walker Building is closed on the weekends, we appreciated the beautiful detail on the flatiron-shaped brick structure. On it, a number of intricate, Art Deco-esque terra cotta ornaments depict African art motifs. Both buildings sit quite near to Indy’s Canal Walk, which is a pretty promenade alongside an old industrial canal that cuts through downtown.

The visit made me think about structures and organization. Given the lack of a chronologically coherent narrative, Slaughterhouse-Five relies on purposeful juxtapositions between the vignettes to create meaning. Museums are similar, deliberately placing objects to illuminate connections and disjunctions. City blocks can sometimes do the same, although not always intentionally. The placement of the museum on Indiana Avenue, once a thriving residential and commercial African American neighborhood, is an example. Although few of Vonnegut’s characters were African American, he was an outspoken lover of jazz, and Indiana Avenue boasted over 33 jazz clubs at its height. Furthermore, each building offers different but important programming throughout the year. The Walker Legacy Center offers a wide variety of African American art, history, and cultural programs. Alongside its usual focus on banned books and freedom of speech, the Vonnegut Museum’s particular focus this year is on civic engagement.

Whether inside the museum or throughout the city, these juxtapositions can, like jazz, be improvisational and surprising and beautiful. I’m sure Vonnegut would approve.

Laura Beadling was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio where she now teaches literature, film, and screenwriting at Youngstown State University. She realizes now that she should have bought the plush toy Trafalmadorian on offer at the Vonnegut Museum’s gift shop as it would be a good addition to her office collection of tchotchkes.

Photo by Neil Teixeira, courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library.

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